In Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, it was the Tories who won. That barely got anynotice in all the coverage about the Liberal landslide in Ontario’s recentelection, but it bears some thinking about because this is the riding thetown of Walkerton happens to be in.

Not only was the Tory MPP, Bill Murdoch, re-elected, but his margin ofvictory was pretty much the same as in the last election, before the name Walkertonbecame synonymous with poisoned water. He got 52 per cent of the vote,compared to 54 per cent in 1999, which makes him one of a handful of MPPs toget an absolute majority. The Liberal vote actually declined, the NDP votewas under ten per cent and the Greens, who were expected to be a major factorin the riding because of the water scandal, didn’t even crack a thousandvotes.

You have to wonder: what does it take to lose an election? Seven peopledead, over 2,000 sick, a damning official inquiry — and still the Tory winsin a walk!

The usual explanation is that this is rural southwestern Ontario, which issocially conservative and where voting Tory is a long tradition. Plus,Murdoch has a reputation for being a maverick, allowing him to capitalize onanti-government sentiment. But on the water tragedy, Murdoch was to theright of the government, dismissing the inquiry’s findings with contempt andinsisting that it was all just the Koebel brothers’ fault.

Tradition is a powerful factor, but even that has to have its limits. Whengovernment policy kills and maims, and then the victims march off to thepolls and vote to endorse the very same government, something is wayout of whack about politics itself.

A big part of this stems from the widespread (and justified) belief that itdoesn’t matter much who you vote for. Here in Ontario, we have had a succession of Liberal,NDP and Tory regimes, and whatever the differences between them,the end result is always the same: the divide between rich and poor getswider, life for the majority gets harder. Which has to account for why, evenwith the prospect of turfing out the government, nearly half the electoratechose not to vote.

But there is a deeper problem here. No one talks about socialism anymore.It’s a dirty word even within the mainstream left. Meanwhile capitalism isbreaking down all over the place. It can no longer provide adequate healthcare or schools or housing or even, as Walkerton showed, clean drinkingwater.

And so political discourse becomes increasingly unreal. The only answerbeing offered to the problems created by capitalism is — more capitalism.It’s an agenda driven by the interests of the wealthy, who know what theywant and how to get it. And that is their great advantage.

The rest of us need to figure out the sort of world we want. Until we do, we’re going togo on voting for people who are going to kill us.