i keep thinking i need to buy shampoo, and then I think I keep remembering that I have four or five things of it in a drawer. so the other day when i went to pull one out, nope, all conditioner. i’ll do the same thing with toothpaste, forget I have a bunch and go buy another one only to discover three other tubes of it when i go to put the new one away.

the front page item on cbc today when i checked was Stepher Harper masturbating his ego for “unifying” the country for the last five years.

you know, it’s one of those feel good for the Tories rah rah, we’re so awesome because we say so things. like this:

Although Harper has headed a minority government for the past five years, he said back in 2006, Canadians gave the Conservatives “the mandate to shake up Ottawa.”

“We have been faithful, we kept that trust and we have delivered,” he said.

wanker says what? two things to consider here. 1) what consists of a mandate, and 2) how does one define trust and delivery on their part?

let’s examine the first point. let’s use the numbers from the 2008 election cause why not, essentially shows the same thing as 2006. The population of Canada in 2008 was around 33,560,000. voter turnout for 2008 was 13,686.146. that’s 40.8% of eligible voters. the Tories received 5,209,069 votes, representing 38% of the vote share. the tories did not receive a further 62% of the vote. that’s 8,477,077 eligible voters who did not see fit to give the Tories a mandate for something. in terms of total population, the tories were voted for by 15.5% of Canadians. 84.5% of the total population did not. personally, either way you look at it, neither of those numbers signifies a clear mandate given by the Canadian people. Harper loves to espouse the fact that Canadians as a unified group gave his government a mandate. We as a unified country handed him the reins and said “we think you could do a much better job of this!” Obviously, people in the Tory camp are poor at math.

the second point deals with trust and delivering on promises. g’head. google ‘stephen harper broken promises’. it’s not hard to find several lists that do not show this trust, faith and delivery that we’re being instructed exists.

the shitty thing is that if you were to ask a random person on the street if they really cared about this, they’d probably say no. neither would they have an idea of how we should be holding our government responsible for negligence and failures.  i feel sad for the next election this country faces. I’m betting even lower turnout and yet another minority that keeps telling us they have this magical and wonderful mandate from Canadians to act like they have a majority and think they’re the greatest thing since microwavable dinners.