"Another thing I've noticed is that some voters sometimes do not even know the name of teh candidate they're voting for, just voting blindly for the party."

If people don't care about local candidates and just want to vote for a party - that is their right. The fact is that in Canadian politics with our iron-clad party discipline, in about 99% of cases the local candidate IS irrelevant and you are really just voting for a trained seal who will vote with his or her party 100% of the time anyways.

I happen to think very highly of my NDP MP. But if I lived in an NDP dead zone like rural soutehrn Alberta, I would not bat an eyelid before voting for whoever the local NDP candidate was - and I couldn't care less about their personal qualities because in my mind I'm not voting for that person. I'm voting for Jack Layton, the NDP platform and the values that the NDP represents.