2006: A Look Ahead

I am torn. As this is my first post of 2006, I thought perhaps a review of 2005 would be in order. However the more I think about 2005 the more conflicted I become. It was such a marvelous year for me and my family and friends. So many new lives were brought into the world, and you'll have to forgive me for putting Ginny Grace at the top of the list, but there certainly were others. Yet 2005 was also a year of loss- from Boxing Day of 2004 and the tsunami in the South Pacific, to Boxing Day of 2005 and the brutal shooting in Toronto and all the sadness in between. My country lost more soldiers on the battlefield and thousands in Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. My family lost Grandpa Snyder much, much too soon. So while I revel in the joy of what 2005 brought, I grieve for what it took as well and no retrospective could ever really do either justice. Instead then I'll use this first embrace of the new year to look ahead to what lies before us in 2006. Very shortly Canadians will elect a new government- it will likely be another minority government which inevitably will fail again sooner rather than later, but it will hopefully breath some fresh air into the nation I now call home. For the record if I could vote, and I can't, I'd vote for our Conservative MP, Mike Chong. He represents Halton Hills and does a wonderful job. Do I agree with him on every issue? Of course not, but I believe he is a strong voice for our community at this time and therefore I hope he is re-elected. I have friends across the political spectrum in Canada (as is true in the States as well). I've struggled since I came to Canada to find where my political affiliations lay and it has boiled down to this... At the moment I find fault with all the parties to some extent. I have vast disagreements with a portion of the Conservative social politics. I have vast disagreements with the totality of the NDP fiscal politics. And, sadly, I find the Liberal party to be in the desperate throes of a pandering, anti-America ideology that is dangerous and unseemly. So what's a socially liberal-moderate and fiscally moderate-conservative American New Democrat (which is different from a Canadian New Democrat) boy to do?? Since my firm belief is that the social norms of Canadian society are not likely to change no matter who occupies the Prime Minister's house, I choose then to focus on fiscal and foreign policy as the primary keys to my support- and this puts me under the umbrella of the Conservatives- albeit cautiously. I withhold my right to be wrong and call shenanigans on myself at a later date! There will be an election in the US as well this year, the November mid-term elections and on this point I am as far from conflicted as one can be. The corruption of the Republican Party, the abdication of oversight and the refusal to hold the Bush administration accountable for its hubris on just about every issue demands a change in Congress before more damage is wrought. The elite of the Congressional GOP has been selling the American people to the highest bidder, they have turned their back on their own reform agenda they rode to power upon in 1994, and they have reversed, at every turn the advances of the Clinton administration that had placed the nation's fiscal future in good standing. In short they chose the few over the many time and time again and it must stop. I hope that a chane in Congress will provoke within the Bush administration a REAL self-examination, rather than the poll driven sham in recent weeks. I hope the moderate Republicans in both Houses realize they don't have to be bullied by the extreme right wing agenda hijacking their party and the country, and can join with moderate Democrats to restore some fiscal sanity to the government. Hey I can dream.