on last night’s debate. “What a bunch of braying jackasses. What a pathetic embarrassment, the lot of them.” Bingo.

I watched the Canadian Leaders’ Debates in English last night and was thoroughly depressed by the whole thing. Reuters Canada says that Paul Martin came under fierce sustained attack from opposition party leaders, which is only partially true. The attacks were there, certainly, but they really missed the mark, and don’t seem to have been very impactful.

More interesting was the overall confusion that reigns at the moment. Gilles Duceppe, my MP and the leader of the separatist BQ, was actually pretty good in the debate. The problem is he has one clear ally on one prop of his party (provincial rights) and another ally that corresponds to the BQ’s other concerns (social welfare). The two are anathema to one another, however.

Meanwhile, the NDP has managed to convince itself that they stand a chance to win the most seats in Parliament and so last night the leader, Jack Layton, was railing at both Liberal and Conservative leaders to quit being so arrogant – all the while coming off as the most arrogant, personally, of all of them.

Harper, for his part, is clearly a bald-faced, homophobic, gynophobic, prostrate-before-America liar.

Paul Martin? Poor Paul Martin. Clearly he has been and continues to be very poorly advised. But I’m not going to cry a river for a super-rich second-generation politician who, above all, has allowed bad advice to plague his camp due to an overarching sense of entitlement he has to the office of Prime Minister.

Screw them all, I’m voting Green.

pointed to this article tonight: Millions mismanaged in Laval metro project: auditor general. And in a few weeks, people will be wondering why voter turnout rates are so low. Well, this is why. In Canada, in 2004 (and for years this has been true, but it’s getting worse, not better), all levels of politics and the senior bureaucracy, in all departments, are completely and utterly compromised by incompetence. The current administration in the mayor’s office of Montreal is clearly incompetent, changing with the wind, shedding members along the way. Both this and the previous provincial governments are rotten through with disinterested politicians who don’t even know the beginning elements of what “governing” entails. As far as I can tell the entire bureaucracy in Quebec is made up of patronage-hired, public-service-union-coddled people who aren’t adequately trained to do their jobs, but anyhow aren’t particularly interested in doing them. Even worse are the “arms-length” crown corporations, or whatever they call them provincially. And we all know how corrupt the ruling Liberal party is on the federal scene. Does anyone believe for a second that the Conservatives or even the NDP would be any better?

did a survey of the accessibility of Canadian political websites related to the ongoing election here and released their findings a few days ago: Canadian election Web sites flunk standards test. Note (as readers here will likely know already) that it is Joe Clark the accessibility expert and gadfly, not Joe Clark the former Prime Minister, who did this work, as they humourously note several times.

As always, it’s tempting to give them a pass on this, but it’s well past time that we cease to do so. It’s 2004 and the use of the web for political and basic informational needs is hardly new – it is incumbent on people who are trying to communicate to give some thought to the quality of their work. A politician would never release a TV ad that was full of video artifacts or anything – they demand a basic level of quality from the craftspeople who produce such material. Likewise, the state of the art in Canadian politics should be a great deal better than it is right now.