“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”
Winston Churchill
Tomorrow we go to the polls. As of right now, I’m still undecided as to who I will vote for. But I do know a few things for sure.
I’m glad that I live in Ontario. Yesterday, up to 500,000 people were forced to flee Mosul in the wake of sectarian attacks. Here, our political candidates have been trading verbal barbs.
In China, the government has been engaged in a massive exercise to remove all mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre from online discussion. Here, I’ve been able to engage in email and Twitter conversations with several party candidates, and express my political frustrations quite freely on Facebook and on my blog.
In Syria, a civil war has been ongoing for the past three years, destroying homes, infrastructure, lives, and hope. Hear, we experience one of the highest standards of living in the world, excellent healthcare, opportunities for social mobility, vast natural resources, and a peaceful society.
On Friday, we will have a new Provincial government. Some people will be happy. Others will be deeply disappointed. The new government will, certainly, get some things wrong. They will mismanage funds, there will be political scandals, taxes will not be as low as we might like, and there will not be the funding for every social programming that we think is deserving.
But despite all that, we will still have a functional, representative, democratically elected government. My MPP will still be someone who lives in my city, who walks the same streets as I do, who I can actually reach out and speak to. We will still have functioning schools, hospitals, roads, emergency services, and provincial parks.
We have these things because countless ordinary Canadians worked tirelessly for generations to build these institutions. I’m glad for all the people from every party who think that the future of Ontario is worth fighting for, and who have engaged in this round of political discussion. And regardless of who ‘wins’ tomorrow, I hope that every Ontarian wins, and gets a government that will continue to work for the best interests of the entire province.