You basically concoct a sales pitch and crank up a show to put it across. There are variations on themes, but the scenarios are for the most part set pieces. Flim-flam is inherent to the genre. You then cross fingers and hope the exercise was persuasive enough to get you elected to govern.
This is where the hard part comes in. Governing. Doing what you led people to believe you would if granted power. And this is where we are after what turned out to be the most stirring Canadian election campaign in too many years.
It was an engaging campaign, at least in the latter stages. The result was historic, with the NDP rising to official-opposition status for the first time since its founding and the Liberals dropping to third-party standing for the first time since Confederation.
And the Bloc Québécois meltdown? It marked the end of an era, and put a wicked damper on sovereignist expectations of a decisive resurgence. Quebecers still opted en masse to remain in opposition, but at least they came out strongly for a federalist alternative. It looks like at least the start of a reconciliation with the rest of Canada and should have made for a sleepless night for Pauline Marois as well as Gilles Duceppe, whose political life has apparently come to an abrupt and bitter end.
But while it got exciting in the end, it was in many respects an ugly campaign, born of a rancorous dissolution of Parliament amid a run of middling scandals. It was punctuated more by fearmongering about the intents of opponents and blunt-force attack ads that were mostly insulting to the intelligence than it was by enlightening discourse on how the challenges facing the country should be dealt with.
An election can be a vehicle for change, if that's how voters choose to make use of it. But what an election can't change in itself, even if it brings about a change in government, are the challenges the elected government must engage in, both in the short and in the long term. In this country these remain unchanged from the day the election was called, and the campaign itself provided fairly scant elucidation as to how the challenges will be met.
The state of the national economy is good, better actually than most, but our manufacturing industries are vulnerable to foreign pressures and our general productivity is in need of concerted upgrade to keep up with the global competition. We are running a $30-billion budgetary deficit and carrying a $560-billion national debt, close to an all-time high.
These must be eliminated, in the former case, and paid down, in the latter. Substantially increased taxation, however, is not a ready option. The average Canadian family is already paying roughly 40 per cent of its income on some form of tax or levy. Making "fat corporations pay big-time" is easy to say but also inadvisable; it hurts our capacity to attract job-creating investment, and the corporations pass the burden on to consumers in any case.
The health-care system is sorely in need of revitalization. Simply throwing more money at it will not be enough. It also needs reform in the way it is structured and managed, in ways the politicians in this campaign were reluctant to discuss in any relevant detail. Nor was there much enlightenment on how to meet the looming and expensive challenge of how to manage the impending mass retirement of the boomer generation.
As such the re-election of a Conservative majority government was the optimal result under the circumstances. The Conservatives under Stephen Harper's often heavy-handed leadership have shown failings during their five years in minority office, but what the country badly needed was a durable government with the breathing room of a full mandate and the stability to make the tough governing choices looming on the Canadian horizon.
A good place to start on the task ahead would be for our newly elected parliamentarians, and particularly those on the government side, to encourage and practice greater civility in House of Commons proceedings and introduce greater transparency to the conduct of public business. Both were sorely lacking in the run-up to this election and greatly contributed to widespread cynicism toward the political process and distrust of its practitioners.
Taken in the right spirit, this would be the easiest of challenges the new government faces.