Canadians are going to the polls — maybe this spring, maybe not until the fall. When we go, we’ll have to give some serious thought as to how we’re going to vote. Most pundits seem to feel that now that the Conservatives have chosen a leader, there is a clear choice for Canadians — and just one choice: Liberal or Conservative. Okay, here are 10 reasons why you should vote Liberal or Conservative — it doesn’t matter which one.

I. It is what the corporations would like you to do.

2. Support Canada signing on to the American missile defence scheme, and help legitimize the policy of putting nuclear weapons in space with the American public, the only people in the world that can stop it.

3. Aid Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) and the other hundreds of Canadian corporations headquartered in Barbados for tax purposes maintain their two per cent corporate tax rates through keeping open the loopholes put in place by a former Minister of Finance (ahem) while his holdings of CSL were safe in a “venetian blind” trust.

4. Help Air Canada conceal the theft of workers’ pensions when the right buyer comes along.

5. Continue to participate without our knowledge or consent in the joint experiment being conducted on us by American agribusiness and Health Canada: consumption of genetically modified food does not endanger our health, or that of our children and grandchildren to come.

6. Continue to sell, as fast as possible, all the non-renewable oil and gas we can find to the Americans, so as to test the hypothesis that scientific evidence is wrong about global warming.

7. In addition to providing monopoly rights to pharmaceutical firms under free trade deals, which have increased the cost of medicare exponentially, see what further advantages for corporations can be wrung out of the poorest countries in upcoming world trade talks.

8. Tell Canadians how bad the deficit is in 1995, then give away $100 billion in tax cuts to wealthy corporations and their executives in 2000. Rather than make it up to the poor, the sick, students, mothers without child care, the young, artists, athletes, scientists, and those who thought public services were part of democracy, and who were penalized by the spending cuts made in 1995 so as to give away the $100 billion five years later, offer to pay down debt (Liberals) or make further tax cuts (Conservatives).

9. Let’s find out how little money people earning the minimum wage can live on, how many homeless people can survive winter life on the streets, how much debt university graduates can carry, and how long people can wait before someone in Ottawa reads the Romanow report, or acknowledges that once upon a time the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Issues called on government to begin the healing process.

10. Show pride in a government that puts your money to work for its friends in the Quebec advertising industry, while it steals from the unemployment insurance fund, betrays unemployed Quebec workers, then asks them to vote yes to Canada in the referendum, and when the result is close, hands out maple leaf pins and flags as a way of making everybody feel better.