Having fulfilled my civic duty for another election, I am now indulging in some neapolitan frozen soy ("Soy Delicious frozen soy dessert" to be exact). I'm too busy to go to the gym and yet somehow have plenty of time for sitting on mny ass, eating junk food and blogging.

Rock the Vote was...well, it was kind of a bust. To my knowledge no media showed up, there was a decent number of people there but half of them talked through the candidates' speeches, and the two Conservative candidates didn't even get up to give speeches. And most of the candidates left pretty early. Blarg.

However, I did talk to Elizabeth Perry, a wonderfully energetic Green Party candidate from Dartmouth, whose speech was along the lines of "Our platform is about everything your parents told you about the world when you were a kid, before you found out that the world isn't really like that." I thought it was a really neat spin on things that you don't usually hear coming out of the mouths of political candidates.

I'm an NDP supporter, and of course there is a widepread perception that the Green Party is taking votes away from the NDP - which i imagine has some truth to it, although in my experience those who vote for the Greens are already pretty sure that the conclusion in their riding is forgone and they can support the Greens without jeopardizing the results. Under a proportional electoral system they would have won about 12 seats or more in the last election (I think - they got something like 4% of the vote, didn't they?) but their support is currently too diffuse to win a seat under the system we have.

Anyway, I think that running a full slate of candidates and making a fuss about being shut out of the debates and most of the election brouhaha is a way of making a powerful statement about the issues that SHOULD have a prominent place in politics but are consistently sidelined. I mean, what have we heard about the environment this campaign? Canada just hosted the 11th Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol and the federal election campaign, at least on the part of the major parties, completely ignored the issue of our failure to make progress on our Kyoto commitments - we've got what, 6 years left to achieve them and our emissions are still going up, up, up.

I also really appreciated how NDP candidate for Halifax West (the Mount's riding!) Alan Hill reminded everybody that they could vote either in their home ridings or in Halifax. I think that for students, voting is extra complicated because not only do they have to fit learning about the parties, candidates and issues into their busy schedules, their transitive lifestyles make it difficult to know where they belong in electoral terms. And this contributes to the monstrous proportion of young people who don't vote. And this mass abstention doesn't go unnoticed by those who write the party platforms - they focus on the concerns of the people wo do vote and we're left with dysfunctional post-secondary funding schemes and student loan repayment conditions, not to mention ballooning tuition rates. So to all those in the 18-30 age group who don't vote: thanks a lot. I hope you all get splinters in your hands and then they get infected and then it's painful to wash your hair so you get all greasy and nobody invites you out anywhere so you have to stay home every night watching annoying movies like Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.