Yup. Looks like we'll be in the exact same spot as before.
I think this is a clear depiction that nobody actually discusses politics, but instead, just mills along with their 'brand of choice'. Looks like the Toronto Maple Canadians are gonna win the cup again.
Aren't you glad our government is spending so much on attack ads?
It's bizarre, isn't it.
Since 18 I knew to read each party's policy statements each time because, yes Virginia, their policies do change from election to election - *especially* on the provincial level - and I knew to vote for the candidate and note the leader.
But it turned out to be atypical. I was trained to do that by my dad, but I learned that most of the people around me had been trained by their parents to vote for the party their parents voted for, no questions asked, and I learned how in so many cases they were utterly clueless what kind of machinating Wall Street types they were enabling to gut their economy under a facade of a democratic will-of-the-people.
They would even define their voting habit in regional terms. Sometimes I would ask someone at a party who they were going to vote for, and the answer would be, "I'm from Alberta", as if that was supposed to explain it.
In their minds it did. In their minds you couldn't call yourself an Albertan unless you voted for the party your parents told you to, and *none* of them had the foggiest clue what their "Alberta" party actually stood for. All they could do was parrot a few simple platitudes "unions are bad and big business is good", and they'd go postal if you mentioned in the friendliest and most offhand way possible that unions are why we used to have a middle-class until the Plutocrats got the Regan/Bush era rolling.
It was somewhat discombobulating to learn. I grew up as a loner - I didn't start socializing until University - so I really didn't know what others I'd see on the street did and did not know... but I had presumed it was pretty much the same as myself... we'd all gone to the sames schools.
When it started to sink in just how sheep-like the voting habit of my compatriots were, it caused me to develop a theory that if their behavior was typical of most humans, then that could explain why multinational corporations are very okay about pushing for any country they do business with to become a democracy.
If a country is being ruled by a dictator, the multinational corp always runs the risk that it's a benevolent dictator, which is the most efficient and effective form of government, and a benevolent dictator might force the multinational to behave itself.
Further, a dictator, benevolent or not, might decide to seize and nationalize the assets of the multinational.
Therefor, I hypothesized, if an average human votes the way the people I grew up with do, all a multinational has to do is foment a revolution against the dictator and replace it with an amenable democracy, and then move in the Madison Ave. guys to design and implement advertizing campaigns to make the majority of citizens of a country feel like the multinational is there because the people want it there, and if the multinational is discovered to be a crook, then their presence can be blamed back on the people for having voted for policies allowing them in.
I've refined my views since then - I was just a kid - but man oh man, sometimes...