At the cusp of the Canadian Federal Election, I told people to vote for who they wanted to vote for, and not to vote for the lesser of two evils. Interestingly, I noticed that very few people that I talked to on that day knew very much about what the parties stood for at an ideological level – where they stood on the political spectrum. In an effort to help educate people about politics, let us talk about said spectrum.
Essentially, the political spectrum runs on two axies: One is economic (left-right: highly controlled-no controls), and the other is social (up-down: authoritarian/collectivist-individualist). In North American Politics (this applies to both the U.S. as well as Canada), these axies merge to become the Left (highly-controlled economics, individualism) and the Right (fewer economic controls, authoritarian in matters of morals, social mores). This changes slightly per party, but that’s generally what people mean when they reference the political Right and Left.
As a citizen of a free and democratic society, it is our duty to decide on which part of the scale do we reside, and then to discover which political party best represents our views. It is at this point we should then look at individual issues that might change our vote, (e.g. abortion rights). Then it is simply to see if we can get on board with the party. Luckily, due to the Canadian party system, it is a lot easier to vote party over leader, which is not the case in American Politics. I don’t have enough (re: any) experience with that, so I’m not going to touch it.
In Canada, the party that best represents my views (at this time) is the Green Party, due to their stances on Economic controls (high) and their individualistic views on the socio-political axis. They are also a party that is predominantly pro-life (re: not anti-choice, but that’s another debate), which is important to me as a Christian. It took me a lot of thinking about my own views and some solid research to get to this point, but I think it is imperative that voting citizens do this much.
Luckily, you have at least 6 months before another Canadian Federal Election.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on November 4, 2008 at 3:27 pm, filed under Politics and tagged Political Spectrum, Politics, Voting. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.