The act of voting always feels good. When given the opportunity to vote against a particular bigot, it's even better.
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If you have a voter registration card, you get a free orange croissant immediately below. Oh what the hell, everybody gets one!
Here in Canada, we are just eight days away from voting day in our national election, on October 19. We do things a bit differently up here. Instead of rigidly scheduled marathon elections every four years, the Prime Minister can call for an election at any point up to five years from the previous election. As head of the current government, Stephen Harper was most recently re-elected to his third term as PM on May 2, 2011. He called this election on August 2, 2015. This election cycle runs 78 days, which historically is considered to be a long election in Canada.
(I'm glossing over a lot of technical details here. Formally, the PM doesn't actually call the election. He or she seeks the permission of the Governor General, on behalf of the Queen, to dissolve Parliament and initiate an election. In reality, neither the GG nor the Queen would object, so it's a rubber stamp of the PM's wishes).
This diary isn't really intended to be a review of the election mechanics, which you could read about here, if so inclined.
Tonight, I'm more focussed in one particular riding (our American friends would call that a district), and one particular candidate.
Five weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Jesse Rau, a bus driver with the Calgary Transit service, who refused to drive a bus that had been painted up for Pride Week, with rainbow colours and the slogan "Ride With Pride". Poor Jesse hadn't actually been asked to drive that particular bus, but he went public, loud and clear, to make sure that he would rather be fired than support ... blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda, yawn.
Two week ago in this space, I updated the situation to note that Jesse had in fact been fired from Calgary Transit. His self-inflicted wound was caused by publicly trashing his employer, and dragging its reputation of tolerance through the muck. The union to which he belonged up until that moment remained conspicuously silent, as far as I could tell. The union certainly was in no rush to defend this nitwit.
As bigots tend to do, Jesse portrayed himself as the victim here. Or rather, the anti-gay preacher and general public nuisance Artur Pawlowski portrayed Jesse as the victim. Again, as bigots tend to do, Jesse hitched his wagon to a hate group led by Pawlowski, and many of Jesse's recent words are in the form of press releases from Powlowski's "Street Church". This self-styled church's website condemns all gay people as minions of Satan. See, this is the sort of thing that Calgary Transit does not want to be associated with.
Jesse decided to run for a seat in Parliament, because you know, oppression and civil rights and being the only person to defend ... blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda, yawn. As I wrote two weeks ago:
Rau will be running under the banner of the Christian Heritage Party. In 2011, CHP fielded 46 candidates, and got less than 1% of the popular votes in the ridings they contested. I suppose my fellow minions of Satan are going to responsible when he loses. Good.
I got the riding boundary wrong in that diary though, my crusty brain having wrongly assured me that Rau was running in the next riding over. In fact, he is running in my home riding. That means I get to vote directly for (fat chance!) or against (go team minions!) him.
Yesterday, Partner and I were out doing some shopping, and on the way home remembered that the local school in our community was open for advance voting. We normally vote on election day, out of habit I suppose. After parking the car at home, we collected our voter information notices that had arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and walked over to the school/polling place.
And so it is that we have already cast our ballots for next Monday's national election. And I can report that, while my choice was driven by party politics and platforms rather than personalities, I am very happy indeed to specifically not vote for Jesse Rau, whose name appears on my ballot.
May the minions carry the day.