The election is upon us — let the mudslinging begin!

By Laura Bohnert

The 2015 federal election is scheduled for this October and, with only a few months left to persuade the Canadian vote, we should all be fully aware of the campaigns that are being led by each party — but are we? Or, are we far more predominantly familiar with the mud that’s being slung from party leader to party leader?

These are arguably the most critical moments leading up to the polls. The pre-polling has been done, and we already know our parties are sitting neck and neck when it comes to votes. As a result, our party leaders should be pushing their campaign advertising to ensure we know which leader is running the best platform for Canada — but are they?

It’s hard to turn on the TV, listen to the radio, or surf the web without running into yet another ad put forth by our party leaders; only these ads aren’t promoting the benefits of their campaigns — they are undermining the credibility of their opposition.

Political attack ads, otherwise known as mudslinging, have been around in politics for a while. The purpose of the campaign is for political leaders to convince voters not only that their campaign is the best option, but also that all the other parties are particularly inferior. A bit of mudslinging, then, is to be expected — but what does it say about our country’s politics when the positive ads promoting the party’s actual campaign values are dropped almost entirely in favour of instead providing a continuous barrage of attack ads against the oppositional parties?

Unfortunately, what this suggests might reflect more on how much politicians know about the preferences of their voters.

Politics has become more about popularity than it is about policy, and this is frighteningly problematic. This isn’t Canadian Idol, after all; we’re choosing the leader who will best carry our country out of the economic slump it’s been stuck in. But, still, Canadians are more concerned about the image of its political leaders than the policies on which they are basing their platforms. It can take years for a political leader to build up a reputation and image that is intricately connected to values, policies, and promises, and it only takes one 30-second attack ad to tear it apart — and once that happens, policies don’t matter anymore, no matter how important or beneficial they would have been.

Of course, this poses another problem for the political leaders who are trying to keep afloat in the slaughter: attack ads are expensive. Ultimately, the party with the most funding (read, the party that is deepest into the pockets of the wealthy) is the party that can pull out the win simply by throwing the most slander at its opposition.

If this is the case then I think we, at least, need to level the playing field a bit. Instead of running all these expensive campaigns and attack ads and putting so much effort into basing a platform on policies no one pays attention to anyway, why not turn our election process into the popularity demonstration everyone wants? Let’s turn it into a reality TV series. We can call it ‘Who’s Going to Run Canada Anyway?’ Maybe then all the publicity-seeking and mudslinging could exploit and ridicule itself enough to turn an entertainment profit that could boost the Canadian economy. We wouldn’t be choosing our leaders based on very good principles but, at least, we’d be being honest about it.