Going all over the map

I have no political party affiliation. I once did, in university, but I became very quickly disenchanted with it. What is funny is why - you'll laugh when you hear what my problem was with campus politics - it was the politics. I had no idea that a campus political club would be so full of ambitious people, so many of whom desperately wanted to be elected to the club's leadership. It was then that I realized I had great distaste for a sizeable portion of the political process.

At this point in my life, I vote situationally, and I do not typically vote by party affiliation. In the last election, the New Democrats offered up a star candidate in my riding, Monia Mazigh, a woman who became famous for doggedly pursuing the release of her husband from a Syrian jail, and then aggressively pursuing an investigation into Canada's involvement in how he got there in the first place. Members of Parliament are the ones who will go to bat for their constituents and help them get out of the mire of red tape. I asked myself, can I think of anyone better to represent me if I had a problem? So I voted for a candidate representing the far left.

This time, I'm leaning towards Alan Cutler, the former public servant who blew the whistle on the Sponsorship scandal. Although the Liberal MP, David McGuinty, seems to be a good man whose family has a long record of service, we voters sometimes have the privilege of picking the best of several good choices. As with Ms. Mazigh, Alan Cutler strikes me as an MP who would be a fantastic champion for any constituent who has to take on red tape, and his experience in the bureaucracy would give him an edge in taking the bureaucracy on. The Conservative party, a relatively new party formed as a merger between the extreme and moderate right wing parties, is further to the right than any mainstream party before it.

So it seems like I've gone from the far left to the far right. But I never vote for political parties, all of whom tend to overpromise and underdeliver anyways. I vote for people. I just kind of have to ignore my apparent ideological contradictions.