Walter wrote:
Canadian voters have proven time and again that you really can't fix stupid.
No doubt some aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, and some are downright tools. But even the best of the lot work with what they're given. Just like the rest of us in whatever we do. Look around you - at your colleagues up and down the ladder. At people you deal with, especially in positions of authority or power. There's very good, mediocre, and downright ugly. Think how brutal it was when you didn't get the resources or managerial will to do what you needed to do on-air to make your station rock. Well, the political system is highly complicated - societal issues are incredibly complex. Decisions get watered down from what was originally intended to address a situation or problem because compromise is necessary to get anything passed. Elephants in the room get ignored because even the smartest politicians need to line their ducks up in order to get support when needed. Decision-making happens in four-year cycles because an entirely new gang will quite possibly assume office with the next election, and promptly undo or derail what the previous regime has accomplished. And so planned infrastructure gets rerouted and kaiboshed. Ministers get shuffled so often that they never have time to learn their portfolios. And then there's varying degrees of unscrupulous activity and incompetence at all levels of management, from civil service through elected (a higher-echelon form of stealing office supplies). Laws passed are rarely or inadequately enforced. Toronto Counc. Diane Saxe recently pointed out, for instance, that not a single charge has been laid under the city's longstanding anti-idling bylaw. I could go on. And while a lot of things are working -- our standard of living and other indicators and markers are way better in Canada than in many other countries. But look at the U.S. right now to see how so utterly vulnerable supposed checks and balances such as the Supreme Court, agencies such as the EPA, journalism, et al, are to mayhem and near-complete destruction. And for so many reasons (job and life disatisfaction, lack of education, inability to cope with online social networks, fake and biased news, paid and foreign influencers, high-tech, etc) we've got a population that can muster up little more than Fuck Trudeau the Drama Teacher or Fuck Trump the Nazi. We're media people, former/retired media people, or very close media watchers. Can we up the ante?