Crescent International
Elections in every country should be about policies that public servants are supposed to implement in order to ease the burden on society.
In North America, elections are outright theatrical shows, full of lame slogans like “it’s time for you to get ahead”. What does this even mean?
Campaign slogans of Canadian political parties resemble someone holding a poster at a hockey match stating, great skating, how pathetic would that look?
For the time being the corporate Canadian media is providing shallow coverage of the election campaign that does not discuss policies in depth and instead focuses on drama and sloganeering.
By focusing on symptoms rather than root causes, the Canadian media is simply sustaining the elitist party system of politics where candidates outside of the establishment do not stand a chance of competing against the multimillion-dollar political industry.
It is not surprising that by focusing on side issues no one is asking how come the “Conservative” Party of Canada has no specific policy on jobs and Bloc Québécois has no policy on manufacturing, one of the key factors in job creation?
Apart from the fact that leading political parties are mainly sloganeering, another disturbing aspect of the current elections is the fact that the People’s Party of Canada and its chairman Maxime Bernier are being normalized as legitimate voices.
Bernier’s simplistic alt-right type narrative has been given a platform through his invitation for the two televised debates to be organized by the Leaders’ Debates Commission, which will be hosted by a partnership of dominant media organizations, including the CBC.
While Bernier’s chances of becoming a key political player are slim, his participation in the debate is legitimizing his alt-right type narrative whose primary target are Muslims.
Bernier’s visible electoral participation is a tool to normalize Donald Trump type rhetoric against Muslims.
Anti-Muslim sloganeering has become the main “platform” of many politicians in the West, steering electoral discussion towards the race issue becomes a convenient door of introducing anti-Muslim sentiments, as this discussion now can be passed on as a topic.
If unemployment, wealth-gap and unaffordable housing become the focal point, it becomes difficult to start mentioning Muslims out of the blue.
The current election campaign in Canada that took off with the racism narrative would have been very different if Justin Trudeau’s black face shenanigans were reported not by the US Time magazine, but a Russian newspaper.
When it is a US media outlet that releases damaging reports on Canada’s elections, it is called journalism; when a state opposed to Western policies does the same, it is immediately labeled and advertised as election meddling.
As if Canada did not just recently intervene in the election process in Venezuela where it openly tried to overthrow an elected government.
As the Canadian election campaign continues, Muslims in Canada will be lured into various shallow discussions farmed within the secular and post-modernist parameters.
Entering shallow theatrical debates further legitimizes the intellectual foundations of the anti-Muslim narrative.
Instead, Muslims need to focus on real domestic and foreign policy issues that affect all Canadians. This will allow Muslims to become the voters whose vote matters and who set the narrative on their own terms.
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