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Democracy in short supply

Somehow a need has been created within or without the government that we the citizen should buy new fighter aircraft with which we can beat up on small countries without an air force anywhere in the world. If this is done with cash on hand it still is not right considering the many urgent needs the Canadian society can use money for. Borrowing money for this purchase is off the wall.

A weapons industry creates a false economy, of which the U.S. is clearly an example. Buying those aircraft from the U.S. will expand their false economy and therefore eventually our important export market will also suffer.

Bribery is used to obtain orders for military goods, as history and the present has shown. In the ‘30s three high-ranking Turks, one of which was the minister of navy affairs, another a colonel, were caught accepting bribes from an arms dealer. One of them got two years, and two four years in the slammer. We have a former Conservative prime minister who admitted to having accepted bribes from Karl Heinz Schreiber, an arms dealer. By Turkish standards Mulroney should still be in jail.

My vote or anyone’s vote counts in this election, so we are told, but is this so? Are we not, the voters, replaced by the lobbyists of powerful interests for a number of years until the next election?

When MPs are, to put it mildly, “encouraged” to vote the party line instead of their conscience, democracy comes apart.

Proportional representation would suit me, and as it does not exist I will save on expensive Canadian gas that comes out of our Canadian earth, over which we have nothing to say, and stay at home and vote in thought for a better tuned democracy.

Oh yes, if you don’t vote then don’t complain, and if we are not wise then we may follow the unwise.

Luke Kurvers

 

Osoyoos