Welcome to the Political Agitation Page of Paul Conway, Voyageur Storytelling mail@voyageurstorytelling.ca This Campaign: for Polite, Intelligent Political Campaigning Premise: That something is rotten in the state of political campaigning. That responsibility rests with the current crop of politicians and parties. That responsibility rests with the voters. That it's time to push back.

This campaign was attached to the Canadian Federal Election held on May 2nd, 2011. The following, somewhat disjointed account is based on several postings during the campaign. These letters were all addressed to the candidates in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, with copies to their respective headquarters and various members of the media.

The material, in its original form, is rambling and much too long. When I have time I will break it up into separate pages addressing each of the issues I have raised and discussing them more thoroughly. Much of what appears in my Manifesto was first articulated by me in these letters.

In case you are wondering, I do not claim originality for any of these ideas. I collected them diversely, from things I have read and heard, and from my own experience.

The Principal Ideas of this Campaign are:
(1) I am advocating for intelligent, polite, well-informed, positive political debate. There is plenty of room for spirited disagreement in debate of that kind. The right kind of debate is a matter of courtesy, and of recognition that all the most important political issues and ideas are complex, with many differing quite legitimate practical solutions.
(2) I would like Canadians to elect a government, and Members of Parliament, who will lead this country to be the best it can be, to represent the best that is in us, that is, what is most humane, creative, inventive, resourceful, compassionate, and responsible in our people. Government is an expression of our sense of community, and to the extent that we encourage fractious, adversarial governments, we are marking ourselves as fractious and adversarial at heart, which is the converse of community.
(3) I believe that the essence of democratic politics lies not in the exercise of power, but in respectful negotiation, with due regard for the complexity of issues and the diversity of interests. Our candidates, parties and their leaders are competing for the right to coordinate the process and the responsibility to make it work, not for the right to impose their point of view, excluding and overriding everyone else.
(4) This approach is consistent with the approach being advocated by Dr. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, who emphasizes "Balance" in society among private, public and "plural" interests. It is also valid, I believe, to frame this ideal as a balance between individual and collective interests.

Letter I: Friday, March 25, 2011 (before the non-confidence vote took place)

Good morning All,
So we're going to have an election. Or perhaps not. We'll see this afternoon, I suppose.
I am looking forward to voting, because I consider it my job as an employer of my MP. I take my responsibilities very seriously, and believe in regular performance reviews for all employees, in whatever context. For that reason alone I welcome this election. Also, when hiring a new employee, or considering replacement, I believe in conducting careful interviews and being as fair and unprejudiced as I possibly can.
The Prime Minister says this election is "unnecessary", and that the economic recovery demands we keep him in office. Balderdash. It's time for his performance review too.
I won't pretend to have the data necessary to give a complete review of MP Larry's performance, but I do have a few observations that I would feed into any discussion of that issue. First, I notice that when I send him my views, if they are more or less in line with Conservative thinking, he replies. If they are not, he does not. This suggests a certain close-mindedness, which bothers me. Second, I notice in his newsletters and correspondence that he represents the Conservative Party to me most energetically. Whether he is representing me to the Conservative Party is another matter. My views are not particularly eccentric, and I wish he would give me some reason to believe that he does more than represent Conservative ideology. Third, I notice that when he asks for my views in one of his questionnaires, the questions are always loaded. This bothers me too.
Unfortunately, about the only thing I can come up with on the positive side is that he is personally likeable. He's a nice guy, but I wish I could come up with something stronger to say in his favour, something to do with how well he does his job. But he hasn't given me much.
I have real problems with his leader, and have told him so, several times.
I could support a Conservative candidate of the old Progressive Conservative kind. I do not agree some parts of the present Conservative approach, particularly the "crime agenda", the "military hardware agenda", the "corporate tax cut agenda", and the "nuts to Parliament" agenda.
More than issues, however, I do not agree with the "partisan attack dog agenda", under which the rankest forms of insult and discourtesy to opponents are considered legitimate political discussion. I personally will not work or vote for anybody who engages in this kind of negative political rhetoric, and I hope that the Canadian public will not either.
I would like to hear intelligent, polite, well-informed, positive political debate in the coming weeks. There is plenty of room for spirited disagreement in debate of that kind. It's a matter of courtesy, and of recognition that all the most important political issues and ideas are complex, with many differing quite legitimate practical solutions.
I am going to attend political meetings during this campaign, as often as I can. If the candidates are rude to each other, I am going to challenge them to the chair. I know the rules of order, and I am going to use them. I am going to insist on clean, courteous political debate. That will be my contribution to this election.
As the campaign starts I am absolutely undecided. There is much that I support in the ideas of all four parties, and some ideas I do not support. I am going to base my decision on the quality of the discussion and the courtesy with which the candidates treat each other.
I would like a government, and a Member of Parliament, who will lead this country to be the best that it can be, to represent the best that is in us: our most humane, inventive, resourceful, compassionate, responsible side. That's what I will be looking for, and what I will vote for.
In that spirit, I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Letter II: Saturday, March 26th, 2011 (Day 1 of the campaign)

Good morning All,
Many thanks for your positive and courteous responses to yesterday's note. Your agreement bodes well for the quality of the campaign to come, at least locally.
Knowing what I do of all of you, I have no hesitation about believing what you say, as it concerns your own conduct towards each other. But what about your campaign workers? Are they well enough trained to ensure that they can resist the temptation to circulate juicy bits of gossip and innuendo?
And even more so, what about your national campaign offices? Do you have any influence with them, if they become unacceptably negative? Would you issue a public rebuke, if they did that?
I know that it's hard to draw the line between criticism of an opponent's ideas or record, and negative campaigning. But there is a difference, as all of you have acknowledged, and the challenge, it seems to me, is to make that understanding stick.
Suppose each of you were to resolve that you would not criticize an opponent's ideas or record without stating how you would act differently? Suppose Mr. Ignatieff, when he is bellowing about Mr. Harper's lack of respect or fondness for hiding the costs, were to tell us how he would behave to Parliament if he were prime minister, and how he would guarantee his government would behave that way? Suppose Mr. Harper, when he is sneering about coalitions, would explain how he proposes to work with Parliament, in the event of another minority? Would that not help?
Please, I do not expect an answer to this e-mail, or any others I might send you during the campaign. I know you will be very busy, and if you take time to read what I say, and think about it, I will be grateful, and not expect you to spend any more time on me.
Warm regards

Letter III: Monday, March 28th, 2011 (Day 3)

Good morning All,
You are gearing up your campaigns, I am sure, and I am gearing up mine. I intend to lobby hard, during the entire campaign, for the kind of political discussion that I consider appropriate in a mature democracy with a well-educated population.
The articulation of my point of view (which I believe to be widely held), will mature as the campaigns--mine and the election's--evolve, but to begin with, the principal ideas are:
(1) I would like to hear intelligent, polite, well-informed, positive political debate in the coming weeks. There is plenty of room for spirited disagreement in debate of that kind. It's a matter of courtesy, and of recognition that all the most important political issues and ideas are complex, with many differing quite legitimate practical solutions.
(2) I would like a government, and a Member of Parliament, who will lead this country to be the best it can be, to represent the best that is in us, that is, what is most humane, creative, inventive, resourceful, compassionate, and responsible in our people.
I am going to address my ideas primarily to my local political candidates, because I believe that we are electing a Member of Parliament from Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound to represent us in Ottawa, and I believe it is my responsibility to tell that representative what I think. I am also going to spray copies around widely, and encourage anyone who so wishes to forward them further. I am also going to post them on our web site, www.voyageurstorytelling.ca.
And I hope people will write to me, because it's hard to have a political discussion when you are surrounded by nothing but trees, as I am.
I am not a member of any political party, and I have no objection, on any grounds, to any of the candidates so far revealed. (I have not yet heard whether the NDP has a candidate.) I would consider any one of them to be, potentially, a worthy representative.
I am afraid that I am not quite as broad-minded when it comes to the leaders. I am favourably impressed, in quite different ways, with Mr. Ignatieff, Mr. Layton, and Miss May, and would gladly see any of them as Prime Minister. I would put Mr. Duceppe on this positive list if he were the leader of a national party. The odd man out, I am afraid, is Mr. Harper. I do not like his style of politicking at all, and I consider that he is having a detrimental effect on the whole tone of the political process. I believe that he thoroughly deserved his defeat in the House of Commons on the grounds of persistent contempt for the institution. I believe that he is contemptuous of Parliament, fundamentally, deep in his political soul, and that bothers me a great deal.
I am not fundamentally at odds with many ideas of the Conservative Party. How could I be, having spent my life largely in small-town and rural Ontario, and in Alberta? I expect that if one were to parse my political beliefs I would line up most comfortably with old-fashioned prairie populism, particularly where it has strong social-justice colouration, with some up-dating to include current environmental concerns. I rather expect that our current MP, Larry Miller, would be comfortable there too, if the Conservative Party apparatchiks would let him, and so would many people in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. But that's a serious qualification, because I think Mr. Harper is and wants to be the King Apparatchik, and there is no room in that party environment for decent, hard-working, rural politicians like Larry Miller.
But more important than any ideology is my belief that the essence of the democratic political process is not the exercise of power, but respectful negotiation, with due regard for the complexity of issues and the diversity of interests.
To win an election, or a majority in Parliament, brings the right the coordinate the process and the responsibility to make it work. It does not bring the right to exclude and override everyone else.
I will build on these foundations in the weeks ahead, but that's enough for today.
Warm regards to all, and good hunting!

Letter IV: Wednesday, March 30th 2011 (Day 5)

Good morning All,
My campaign is going very well, and I am enjoying it, as I hope you are yours. It should be a great pleasure to get out and talk politics with people, if it's done the right way. That's what my campaign is all about: advocacy for campaigning that is worthy of a mature democracy with a well-educated population. I believe there is a relationship between the kind of campaign we get now, and the kind of government we will get afterwards. I am not talking so much about content, because we all know what sometimes happens to campaign promises, but about style. The medium is the message.
The web page for my campaign is up and running. You can find all the letters at www.voyageurstorytelling.ca/PA00 Political Agitation.html
I have added another Principal Idea to the list for this campaign, making three, which are:
(1) I am advocating for intelligent, polite, well-informed, positive political debate in the coming weeks. There is plenty of room for spirited disagreement in debate of that kind. The right kind of debate is a matter of courtesy, and of recognition that all the most important political issues and ideas are complex, with many differing quite legitimate practical solutions.
(2) I would like Canadians to elect a government, and Members of Parliament, who will lead this country to be the best it can be, to represent the best that is in us, that is, what is most humane, creative, inventive, resourceful, compassionate, and responsible in our people.
(3) I believe that the essence of democratic politics lies not in the exercise of power, but in respectful negotiation, with due regard for the complexity of issues and the diversity of interests. Our candidates, parties and their leaders are competing for the right to coordinate the process and the responsibility to make it work, not for the right to impose their point of view, excluding and overriding everyone else.
I received two pieces of campaign literature on Monday: one from Larry Miller, and one from the NDP nationally. I will comment today on their style, not their content.
Larry Miller's letter was probably sent out at taxpayer expense, immediately before the election. One could object to that abuse of MP's postal privileges, but I suspect they all do it, or would if they had the chance. I suspect the incumbent's advantage in the practice is nothing compared to the advantage given to them by those voters who vote by name recognition instead of more substantial matters.
Because while this campaign may deplore the style of the political process, it also argues that we may be getting the political process we deserve, which is abrasive and mindless at least partly because we let the parties, leaders and candidates get away with such practice. It's time to call a halt, and we are the people who can call it.
The NDP flyer came in the mail, and I presume it was paid for by the party.
Be that as it may, Larry Miller's letter, printed in greyscale on inexpensive paper, is modest and straightforward. Nothing glossy or flashy here. Of course he is bragging about the accomplishments of "our government", and offering goodies (this time to seniors). He does not mention the other parties or candidates, directly or indirectly. In fact, he does not mention the Conservative Party or Mr. Harper either. The content may not be very lively, but does not offend the standards of the Polite Intelligent Political Campaigning Campaign.
The NDP flyer does. One side displays a pure personal attack on Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff, by name, with a bald claim that the man pictured, who is not named, is a better bet. It's Mr. Layton, of course, looking trustworthy, but we are expected to know his face beforehand. The other side is even worse: black-and-white pictures of Mr. Harper and Mr. Ignatieff, with their mouths open, looking combative and thoroughly untrustworthy, against backgrounds of their respective party colours, shaded to make them dirty and angry. Mr. Layton is there again, in colour, still looking trustworthy, the NDP orange clean and bright. The "content" if you can call it that, is called "Important voter information at a glance," and is the worst kind of one-line, over-simplified statement of complex issues, slanted rhetorically to make Mr. Layton look good and his opponents look bad. This flyer is exactly the kind of rude, mindless, manipulative stuff against which this campaign is protesting.
To sum up today's box score: based on style, the Polite Intelligent Political Campaigning Campaign registers an okay nod to Larry Miller, and a shame-on-you raspberry to Jack Layton and the NDP.
Since this Campaign concerns not only the behaviour of parties, leaders and candidates, but also the media and the voting (or not-voting) public, we also register a shame-on-you raspberry to the TV executives who want to exclude Elizabeth May from the leaders' debates. This is a very bad decision, being both bad political theatre and contrary to the public interest, and should be reversed. Considering what we know of the debating style and wit of the other four, I cannot imagine anything more awful than a TV debate that includes only them. Regardless of what one makes of the Green Party, its policies and its prospects, Elizabeth May herself is a breath of fresh air.
Warm regards to all, and here's to Polite, Intelligent campaigning!

Letter V: Thursday, March 31st 2011

Good morning All,
We are settling in for the long haul in this Campaign, as I am sure are the others. I will try to add something every day, but I make no promises. The inward flow of information is not huge, where we are, and I don't intend to say anything if I don't have anything to say.
I should explain that we live in the woods, with limited broadcast media access, especially since the lightning strike which disabled our TV. Until recently we did not have high-speed internet, and even now our usage is limited by the cost of our plan. We listen to the radio, we check a few news web sites, we receive a weekly newspaper and three magazines with political content, and we read the mail. That is our exposure to this campaign, and the world at large. If anybody organizes any all-candidates meetings in our area, we will attend them if we can, which will depend on the schedule. We do not, however, expect to learn much from them, because we already know two of the major-party candidates personally, and have met the third. (The identity of the NDP candidate has not yet been revealed, nor other candidates if any.) I would expect candidates at such meetings to stick pretty much to the party line, which is fair enough, although it would be nice to hear one who could do that creatively.
To say that nothing new may be learned at an all-candidates meeting, however, is not to say that one should not attend, because attendance, especially if it comes with expectations for the behaviour of the candidates and a willingness to challenge if they offend our standards, is good for the political process. Of course, if we just sit there like bumps on logs and take whatever they choose to tell us, then that benefit is minimal. I am not suggesting that we should be rude (quite the contrary), or that heckling of the bullying kind should be tolerated either. I would prefer to see people use the rules of order to challenge offensive behaviour of any kind.
The P.I.P.C. Campaign is about style, not content. This is not to say that content is unimportant. Far from it. But style is important too. Style is the shaping of the content the method of its presentation. It is the medium chosen by the presenter, and the medium, as we all know by now, is the message, or at least has a huge effect on it.
In fact, if we have reached the stage in the maturity of our democracy where our major political parties are not really all that different in substance, at least on the most important issues, then style may be very important indeed, because it may be all we have to differentiate among candidates. Maybe the weight of practical politics and finance, and the inertia of our institutions, now simply overwhelm ideology and party preferences. Do our governors steer the ship of state, or is the ship steering them?
What happens if we ask ourselves whether any of the other parties, singly or in combination, would really have governed the country much differently in the past, say, 20 years? Were the decisions made by our governments, nationally and internationally, made out of party beliefs and preferences, or because circumstances simply compelled particular kinds of action? What broadly significant measures have been taken in the past generation that were not driven more by circumstances than ideology or party preference?
I don't think we would find any in the economy. I don't think the Conservative Party wanted to become the party of arch-Keynsianism, running up stupendous deficits to get us out of a recession. I would be prepared to believe that they hated having to do it. Of course they hung a fancy label on it, calling it an Economic Action Plan, and took credit for it, but really the credit belongs to Keynesian economics, and the other parties would have done the same thing, although they might not have hated it as much.
What about the environment? Would that have been done differently by anyone else? The rhetoric might have been different, to embrace or not to embrace Kyoto, for example, but would the quantity of emissions or other environmentally destructive forces and practices in fact have been different? I think the environmental issue is so complex, so interwoven with constitutional, international, and market issues, that the real locus of change is not governments, but individual households, consumers and producers. Governments may help educate, however, and provide some incentives. But even there, we see practical politics overwhelming ideology. I think the Conservatives scrapped the energy audit program last year because they did not believe in that approach: ideology at work. And I think they brought it back this year because the voters believe differently, and because it is fundamentally a good idea. So much for ideology.
What about health care? I think that finances and institutional inertia are driving real policy there, not ideology. We have a mixed public and private health care system. One party or the other can fiddle with the mixture a little, and give that whatever kind of a rhetorical flourish they like. But the finances are so scary, and the institutional inertia so deeply entrenched, that we should not look for much change in policy, unless we are prepared to behave differently ourselves. Then the political parties, all of them, will embrace our new preferences and take credit for having inspired them.
What about internationally? We know that the Liberals and Conservatives think alike there, despite any protestations to the contrary if they bother to make them. Would the NDP really just pull out the troops and walk away from what we have been trying to do in Afghanistan, from those people? The job we are doing there may be distasteful, and laden with imperialistic ambiguities, but what's the choice? What's the choice in Libya? What's the choice in our foreign aid programs, when many of the countries who need it most are governed by brutality and corruption, but some are not, or are struggling to emerge from it? Where are we really going to put our limited funds?
As I scan the political landscape I don't see that our governments have much room to manoeuvre, much as they would like us to think they do, and to take credit for decisions forced upon them by circumstances. On the other hand there may be some where ideology and party preference are having some effect. We might call them "litmus test issues", which may be major or minor, relative to the biggies.
Perhaps the "war on crime" issue is one of them, although perhaps the Conservatives are being coy about the costs of this policy because they don't really intend to pursue it that way, because we can't afford it, and because they know it's a bad idea. They would like us to think they are going to fight crime that way, and are going to win, just as the previous generation of corrections ideologues wanted us to believe they were fighting it with rehabilitation, and were going to win. They weren't, and they didn't. The fact of the matter is that our response to criminals will always be apparently mixed and muddled, although not necessarily that way in individual cases, and will never be risk free. It can cost us more, or it can cost us less; it can be more or less humane or brutal, but will always be some of both, because that is the nature of the problem.
Perhaps policy towards aboriginal people is one of them. That may be a reasonably good ideological litmus test, if you want one, because government policy and leadership can make a difference, although that field too has its share of fundamental complexities and institutional inertia, on all sides.
And I think we may find one in our military policy, I mean that broadly, and not just our foreign entanglements. We have in the past generation been offered four different visions of the military, and perhaps they really are different in practice: the "peacekeeper" vision; the "preservation of sovereignty" vision; the "warrior mentality" vision; and the "joy of hardware" vision.  So maybe that's another reasonably good litmus test.
So maybe we should encourage our candidates to tell us about those issues where there really may be some practical difference, even if they are not the most important ones.
Despite current rhetoric, I am not even sure that the "respect for Parliament" issue is really all that valuable for differentiation among candidates. I believe that trying to manipulate Parliament and its processes comes naturally to a party in minority power. They are simply behaving the way our highly adversarial, "first past the post" system induces them to behave. Mr. Harper may be a bit more blatant and unapologetic than some, but who else has been placed in his situations? Do we really believe that other minority prime ministers would have behaved differently? Mr. Pearson might have, because he was a diplomat at heart, not a politician, and probably took it for granted that negotiation was the essence of politics. Mr. Martin and Mr. Clarke might, but look what happened to them. What would Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Chretien done, in a minority? Would they have treated Parliament any less roughly?
If we want Parliament to be more respected, we have to find a system that makes it more respectable, as a place where decisions really are made by negotiation, not by the force of majority. And that means some kind of proportional representation, and government by coalitions. Is that really such a bad thing? Political parties may believe in their own overwhelming importance, but does that mean we have to believe in it? Can we find for ourselves a little independence of thought? Who is in charge? Who is the employer, and who the employee?
Everybody believes in more jobs, more and better service, a better quality of life, and lower taxes. I encourage our candidates to talk, with courtesy, eloquence and substance, about issues that will really help us decide among them.
Warm regards to all, and here's to Polite, Intelligent campaigning!

Letter VI: Monday, April 4th 2011

Good morning All,
Well, here we are, at the start of a fresh week, rarin' to go. I hope that the same may be said of you, and that you all have a good, polite, intelligent week campaigning.
Quite frankly, I think the campaign is off to a reasonably good start, and that the tone is not bad, for the most part. But why should I have to make that qualification? Why should polite, intelligent campaigning not be consistent? There is lots of room to be appropriately assertive and competitive within that ideal. 
Any positive statement of a platform or idea or promise fits, and so does criticism of an opponent's platform, idea or promise, as long as it is done respectfully and professionally. After all, opponents or adversaries in all kinds of situations can respect each other: lawyers in court; athletes; musicians in competitive festivals; business rivals, to name but a few examples. Why should politics not model itself accordingly? How can politicians expect the public to respect them if they treat each other with blatant and mindless disrespect? How does gutter rhetoric improve the health of the body politic?
So what does not fit?
At the top of my list would be any prediction of an opponent's future behaviour or policies that is outside the opponent's stated intentions. For example, any kind of "hidden agenda" prediction would be illegitimate, by this standard. We had that in the previous campaign directed against Mr. Harper, and now we have it from the Conservatives, against Mr. Ignatieff. Another example: If the Conservatives have in fact stated that the Liberals will bring an Ipod tax when the Liberals have advanced no such idea, then that would be an illegitimate prediction.
Of course there is a huge grey area around this standard, and it concerns discussion of the implications of an opponent's announced policy. Thus for example, if one party were to suggest that another's spending program would not be affordable without raising taxes, or another were to suggest that a party's tax-cutting program must lead to cuts in service, or that a party's environmental program must lead to higher prices, then that would be fair comment. Parties on all sides are sometimes coy about the possible negative effects of their pet ideas, and other parties should not be overly inhibited in their objections.
The great majority of Canadians are educated people, in varying degrees to be sure, but certainly well enough educated to understand that any policy, however admirable in principle or intention, may have some unpleasant implications. We can handle a complex discussion. Why don't we get it? Why this persistent one-sidedness in the presentation of complex ideas?
I would submit that part of the reason lies in the reactions of voters, often reinforced by the media, who place more weight on negative ideas than on positive ones. It's possible that we are getting the political discussion we deserve, because of the perverse ways in which we respond. And that kind of response, which I believe may be called "reductionism", or a form of reductionism, may be the real political disease. And we all have it, not just the parties and candidates.
The campaign for Polite, Intelligent Campaigning is speaking directly to candidates, because I believe that the candidates can show leadership in this respect. But I am also speaking to the media, and the voters, because if we clean up our act, then the politicians are far more likely to clean up theirs.
Warm regards to all, and Down with Reductionism!

Letter VII: Tuesday, April 12th

The election campaign rolls on its predictable course, with the party leaders hurling innuendo (and sometimes more) at one another, with wholly unsupported (often unlikely) predictions of their own and their adversaries' behaviour if elected. It is a sorry spectacle for anyone who values thought as an instrument for solving problems, such as, for example, how to vote.
The "Polite" part of this campaign is a lot easier than the "Intelligent".
The most exciting thing that happened to me this week in connection with the campaign was to hear an interview on the CBC with Dr. Henry Mintzberg, of McGill University, who said two things which I have often thought but not expressed nearly as well. First, he is trying to formalize the idea of Balance as a political ideal, specifically Balance among private, public, and what he calls "plural" interests, by which I think he means all the diversities in our society that do not fit neatly into common-sense definitions of "private" and "public". On his web site (www.mintzberg.org/node/1) he promises to develop this idea in a series of five papers, which will not, alas!, be ready in time for the election. (The temporary home page for this site is frankly partisan, which my campaign is not. Second, he points out, quite correctly in my opinion, that we do not have to swallow the idea that the interests of business corporations and their shareholders are the same as the interests of the economy, that corporate tax cuts are a subsidy to shareholders and that is all they are, except that given inelasticity in the size of public expenditures, they are also a nasty charge on all the other taxpayers.
Why don't we cut past the spinning and marketing that constitutes the platforms of all our major parties, and accept that the real platforms of all our political parties are a whole lot more complicated than they are allowed to present in a sound-bite, dumbed-down media and campaigning culture? I like to think that our politicians, for the most part, are bright, conscientious, public-spirited people,  and if we could sit down and talk with them at length we would find that they all, one way or another, believe fundamentally in the kind of Balance that Henry Mintzberg would encourage. The differences among them are relatively minor degrees of tippage, which the pressures of office would soon rub off, leaving them all teetering in the centre to the best of their ability, as we see the Conservatives doing right now, despite all the rhetoric.
To say this is not to downplay the intensity of their competitiveness towards each other. The Conservatives, having rubbed out the Progressive Conservatives, now want to rub out the Liberals. The Liberals want to rub out the NDP, the NDP want to rub out the Greens, and they would all like to rub out the Bloc.  I think we are all entitled to ask whether any of these rubbings-out are in our interest. Continuity of office may look like a political ideal to a party, but I doubt we need to hug it to ourselves. Is coalition government not simply a formalization of the idea of political balance?
If "Balance" is our real political ideal, then why do we encourage those who pour scorn on any political party that displays internal differences of opinion? Should a vibrant internal discussion not be the sign of a healthy political party, not a weak one? When we (and I mean all of us) cultivate a political culture that pours scorn on internal dissent, then are we not encouraging political leader who seek to stifle dissent within the party? And how far is it from stifling dissent within political parties, to stifling it within the larger society? 
As for the campaign culture, what is it John Henry Bagshaw (via Stephen Leacock) says? "Let's fight this thing on graft. Let them say I am crooked, and let me claim that I'm not. Surely that was good enough without dragging in the tariff." (For "the tariff" read: economic policy, trade policy, health care, or any other issue of the day. )" We haven't come far in 100 years in that respect.
Whatever kinds of imbalance we may hear in campaign rhetoric, what ideological flights of fancy, why do we not accept the reality that a balance somewhere around the centre is the only politically viable location in this country, and that our governments will be only as unbalanced as we allow them to be, and we don't normally give them much scope? If I am correct, then, we need to look for the forces of imbalance, not within our political parties and processes, but in "special interests" that lean on the government party, of whatever stripe, and will continue to lean no matter who holds office. If they get away with it, that's our fault.
I would like to suggest, however, that there are three powerful interests in society that are advocating highly unbalanced approaches, and that we, by our neglect and reinforcing behaviour, are encouraging them. Since we so encourage them, we can hardly blame our political parties for doing the same. If we don't want them to have political power, then we will have to put our power against them. And in a democracy our power is ultimately decisive.
The first are large private business corporations, who are powerful advocates for corporate tax cuts (read: subsidies to their shareholders at the expense of other taxpayers), lax environmental controls, benign biased regulation, and related social and economic evils.
The second is what I will call "institutional health care", the unholy alliance of doctors and hospitals which is the single largest impediment to reform of health care and control of its costs. 
And the third is us, in our frenzied consumerism and its obsessive preoccupation with price as the be-all and end-all of goods and services. As long as we reinforce the politics of cheap food, cheap fuel, cheap health care, cheap debt, and cheap amusement, then we play into the hands of these other interests, who do not wish our democracy well, and encourage the kinds of politics that we all deplore in theory but don't confront except by refusal to engage.
(If this were a provincial election campaign I would add "institutional education" to my list of impediments to reform.)
If we want a fairer economic system, we can have it. If we want better health care we can have it. If we want a healthier environment we can have it. And so on through all the major policy areas. We simply have to do two things: make sure our politicians know what we want, and vote accordingly. It would also help if we behaved consistently ourselves, and thus applied some market pressure to support our political preferences. When it comes to politics we are not helpless victims of anything outside ourselves. 
I'm sorry, this morning's letter is a bit rambling. I am thinking out loud, or rather onto the keyboard, and that's another thing we won't let our politicians do. We expect them to leap immediately into their final position, without meaningful discussion beforehand, and that's another flaw in the political process that we can correct.
So here's a question: If we decided that reform of the political culture is what we need, then for whom would we vote? Which party, and which candidate, is most likely to advance that cause? I wonder if tonight's debate will shed any light there.
I could keep rambling, but won't, at least not today. Thanks for reading.

This has gone on long enough, too long actually. I don't think later letters added anything new.