Upcoming Canadian Election

Politicians are a strange bunch.

It's everything but official.
Stephen Harper says we have to have an election. It's because Parliament is dysfunctional. Hard to argue with him on that.
But if dysfunctional is the test - they'd drop the writ every single day after Question Period and twice a day during any session of the superbly entertaining Ethics Committee hearings.
I think what dysfunctional really means here, in Prime Minister Harper's private dictionary, is: "I don't think our chances are going to get any better going on, so we may as well get this thing over with now." Dysfunctional then, is less a hot psychological state than a response to a cold reading of the polls.
But before we get to the actual election there is one burden Mr. Harper and his Conservatives have to clear. It's this matter of a law, put on the books by the Prime Minister, fixing, in statute, the date of the election for October 19th -- next year.
The Prime Minster, early in his term - when, we presume, Parliament was roaringly functional - changed was he regarded as one of the most retrograde features of Canadian politics: the power of a Prime Minister to call snap elections when the opposition was most off guard. His own words: "Fixed election dates would prevent governments from calling snap elections for short-term political advantage."
And he knew what he was doing. Jean Chretien, most wily of partisans, used that power to devastating effect, on Stockwell Day. Stockwell, as I recall, was hardly off the Okanagan lake, wet suit glistening in the afternoon sun, when Chretien pulled the plug. Opportunistic? You bet. Unfair to the then opposition - absolutely.
So Mr. Harper when he promised in his last campaign to fix this 'weighting of the scales' wasn't operating blindly. And when after, as Prime Minister, he did something that politicians so often fail to do - translate a promise into a law - he was setting a golden example. He changed the system, and he transmuted a campaign pledge into a statutory obligation.
But here we are and suddenly, all that doesn't count. The fixed election date collapses in a partisan breeze. The statute has no more force than an ad lib wish in some town hall candidates' free for all.
What are we to make of this? If statutes can disappear on a whim, what hope can we have for mere campaign promises? If the fixed date law came into existence on the back of a pledge to take opportunism out of the electoral process, what can we say of the opportunism that kills the very law that was to rid us of …. opportunism?
It's one thing to take politicians promises with a grain of salt. Mr. Harper is proposing a much sturdier challenge: how to believe them when they take a promise and make it the law of the land, and then ignore it, nullify it, bury that law, just because it suits them.

Canadian politics. I'd call it dysfunctional - but that word is already taken.

My thanks to Rex