Vote, Ontario, #voteON

My sister came home from work one day to find a Liberal Lawn Sign had magically appeared there.

There has been mud slinging, and dirty pool. Defacing signs. Stealing signs. Putting up signs on private property without permission.

One of my neighbors has home-made signs that says “Vote anything But Hudak.”

For the first time in forever the Sun declined to endorse the OPC party.

The National Post did. Then apologized for the homophobic Progressive Conservative attack ad that it ran.

My humour blogger brother, Larry Russwurm, departed from tradition and tagged today’s election post #humourlessness, as he considers whether the Hudak campaign’s “scandals” were deliberate.

Both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star endorsed McGuinty.

They all want to go to Queens Park.

I dislike political parties. The only sane option open to us is to vote for the human being we think will best represent our interests in the legislature. This is supposed to be a representative democracy; that is how it is supposed to work.

Yet the “news media” is pushing very hard to retain the Liberal Incumbent. This bothers me. Interestingly, newspapers used to publish news. You know, facts? Not predictions based on their own agendas. It used to be considered bad form to insert a reporter into a straight news story. But now, the news media is falling all over itself to tell citizens how to vote.

It makes the articles they write suspect.

If a newspaper like the Globe and Mail publishes a ringing endorsement of Dalton McGuinty as premier, then follows it up with an opinion piece selling predictions as facts, it certainly looks a lot more like propaganda than news. It also makes me think that The Globe and Mail has come to the same conclusion I have: the NDP is the one McGuinty has to beat.

The Progressive Conservatives have fallen on their sword. Or maybe they haven’t. We’ll have to see what kind of an Ontario we have. Or rather, what kind of an Ontario our seriously flawed electoral system gives us. Predictions, whether made by people or polls are really just guesses. We have to wait for the results.

We have to wait for citizens to vote. I hope Ontario goes out to the polls in droves tomorrow. Because the only real way to deal with a broken electoral system is to make sure that we vote. We need to make every scrap of democracy count.