Dayna Mazzuca
Like a good citizen, I plan to vote. Just don’t ask me for whom.
New to B.C. politics, I was thrilled to learn of CBC’s online voting “compass” as a quick way to learn how my political views and aspirations compared with the platforms of the four main parties. The poll divides the political landscape into four quadrants, based on social values and economic preferences. You’d think four parties would be the perfect number, with one for each quadrant/combination of left and right. Nope.
After spending five minutes taking the poll, I found myself in the only empty quadrant on the graph. It turns out I have conservative (or right-leaning) social and educational values, which means I value supporting families and small classrooms rather than sexual-orientation mandates in schools and free drug-injection sites. At the same time, I hold liberal (or left-leaning) economic and environmental values. This means I value raising the minimum wage, rent controls and the right to strike. I am opposed to pipelines and scrapping carbon taxes.
These views land me in Voter’s Wilderness. There is no party, no candidate, no combination of views that comes close to representing my own. This is disappointing.
Why is there no party that represents a combination of traditional family values and a compassionate stance toward economic distribution and a real concern for the environment? To me, it seems the best of all worlds. And it’s hard to believe I’m in such a small minority that a party shaped along these lines would be untenable.
The B.C. Conservative party, according to this breakdown, has moved too far to the right economically to be a viable voting alternative for anyone who is not also a corporation. The B.C. Liberal party is in the quadrant exactly opposite mine: It is socially liberal and economically conservative, according to this poll. And the New Democratic and Green parties are so close to overlapping (think left on left) on this particular graph as to cancel each other out.
So, here I am in my lonely little quadrant, holding views no party will speak to. Ah well, maybe politics isn’t the best place to look for all the answers, anyway.
I was just hoping to be excited about my vote, enough to encourage others to vote, too. This year, it looks as if I’d do better to encourage whoever might identify with me to continue to raise their own voices in the wilderness, in the remote hope that someone, somewhere, might hear us, the relics of another age.
Because I’d like to think it’s the age we’re longing for, not the one we’ve left behind.
Dayna Mazzuca is a Victoria writer.
