I knew something dire would happen. I went to a water park in a bathing suit and parliament crashed. That was no accident. I made it happen.
Imagine my surprise when I got home to learn my nation was entering the mud-slinging excitement of an election campaign. How I love an election. Spin stories and poll predictions, fancy tour buses and streets littered with coloured signs, carefully selected neckties for cleverly crafted speeches. It’s like porn for writers, watching the way a word or a tagline from an underpaid writer in the backroom can make or break a campaign. There is pageantry in orchestrated use of language, even if the politician in front of the cameras takes all the credit for it. Elections make me high on the power of slanted free speech.
It is rare Mommy confiscates the flat-screen television, but as the Prime Minister entered the Governor General’s residence, I hid the remote. I was glued to news coverage.
My 8-year-old stood watching me, wondering what could possibly be more important than Teletoon? He was perplexed as I sat mesmerized. There was no action, no clever animation, just a bunch of people talking. He asked me why I was watching such boring television. “Boring?” I exclaimed. “This isn’t boring. This is history in the making. Ten years from now, in university you will be studying this very day and the fallout to come. This is Canadian politics in action.” His eyes widened. He blinked hard. Nope. Still boring adults talking about boring stuff.
“What’s an election?” he asked. I prayed this day would come, when my child would ask me, a Mom with a Canadian politics degree, about my favorite topic.
I used the school yard. I asked my son to imagine classmates divided into three groups; two really big groups and one smaller, with a few other clusters too. The three biggest groups ran the student council, making all the decisions for the whole school by voting. The Prime Minister would be that boy in the class that always has a posse of kids around him, most because they are afraid of his power but want to be cool like him. His group runs the council. At the last meeting, they decided to change the rules about the school budget. They cancelled school trips, cancelled pizza and hot dog days, and rewrote the policy of shared playground time for the kindergarteners.
The smallest group, headed by the rebellious girl clique, joined forces with the second largest group, headed by my son and his pack of hockey pals, to challenge these new rules. Together they stood up at the council meeting and said, “We’re not going to let you change the rules.”
And thus, an election was called. All the students would get a choice to vote for the group they liked best.
“Who is Jack Layton?” he asked. I explained the NDP would be the small, feisty group. He did the math. He quickly figured out that the kid he didn’t like represented the Prime Minister, the smaller group was the NDP and that left him a Liberal. His face fell.
“Mom, I don’t want to be Michael Ignatieff.” I know son, I know.