What might the October election mean to us seniors?
We could get all riled up (a term no longer applied to teenagers or twenty-somethings; only seniors become riled up) over a perceived threat to our Canada Pension or Old Age Security. Or, I don’t know, just about anything that’s not like it used to be – cars with back-up cameras, teenagers sexting or what the heck happened to newspapers?
Rather than go there, let’s go here …
According to a 338canada.com poll, the majority in the Elgin Middlesex London riding are going to vote for the incumbent Karen Vecchio. As of this writing, the EML riding is one of two in Ontario that 338canada considers safe for the Conservatives.
Therefore, my recommendation for a few of you would be to exercise your senior contrariness (contrariness being another word reserved for seniors) and vote for somebody else, not because I think Karen has done a poor job, but because it would be a tragedy if she won by a landslide and the win went to her head. I’m not claiming to be Karen’s bff, but her office is in the CASO Station, as is the Community Foundation where I “work”, and we see Karen and her staff from time to time, and so far, she seems like the same person she was when first elected, but a better speaker, although if the average person speaks at 150 words a minute, I swear she must hit gusts of 200. That last sentence, read in one breath, could be a Karen sentence, and if you go by her popularity, it appears we like her that way.
So what’s the problem if the job did go to her head? The term “humble politician” seems like an oxymoron anyway, and if you think I just called a politician a moron with an Oxy problem, that’s on you.
It’s important in a democracy to try to elect people who (a) don’t have an Oxy problem and (b) stay somewhat the same throughout their term in office, assuming they don’t start off as jerks.
Here’s why. In a book called Confessions of a Corporate Headhunter, the author makes the case for something I’ll now steal, paraphrase, and call Carroll’s Law: “The larger the organization, the more likely it is that people will begin to do things to look good in front of their peers, rather than for the good of the organization”.
Since the federal government is about as big as it gets, you can see how easy it must be for a politician to fall under Carroll’s Law. In fact, when our current Prime Minister was elected four years ago, I emailed some leftie friends with the news that I was pretty sure our new PM was a prime example of this. Tragically, I was prophetically accurate for once in my life.
It’s okay to get off your keester (another word unique to seniors) and vote for Karen if you want to. But let’s sprinkle in a few votes for the Liberals, NDP, Greens or PPC. Do it for Karen’s own good and thereby the good of the organization we call Canada.