Two women are sitting on a bench. After a while the first woman says, “Oy!”

The second woman replies, “Oy!”

The first woman says, “All right, enough about the children.”

Kind of like how Canadians think of their political choices these days, seems like.

For many months now, we have been treated to a steady stream of articles and television reports about political polls, breathlessly over-thinking variations that fall within the margin of error. Analysts embarrass themselves trying to think of things to say about gross swings in regional numbers, which are then contradicted by other polls and then by the same poll, taken a week or two later.

But if you look at all the public domain polls over a couple of years — as you should — the story is pretty clear. And that is that voting preferences in Canada haven’t fundamentally changed since the last federal election.

But that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. Consider this report in the Vancouver Sun, for example.

What this report tells us — confirmed in many other public domain polls — is that Canadians do find a lot to like in some of the choices that lie before them for prime minister.

To be specific, one of the many gifts to Canada provided by the steady hollowing-out of the federal Liberal Party under its unbroken string of weak, uninspired and uninspiring leaders since prime minister Jean Chrétien was ousted in a thuggish coup a decade ago is that an enormous amount of political space has been created for Canadians to discover leaders and priorities they can support among Canada’s other mainstream national political parties.

Whatever your political persuasion, that has to be a good thing.

Italy was poorly served by the long unbroken reign of the Christian Democrats; Japan was equally poorly served by the even longer reign of the Japanese Liberal Democrats; Mexico by the stranglehold of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Post-war patronage/brokerage parties have had their day as monopolies in most of the democratic world — including in Canada. That makes for healthier democracies, which require real choices to really function.

If Stephen Harper is defeated in the next election or replaced in the first days of the next Parliament, that will probably stand as his principal achievement — the final breaking of one-party rule in Canada, to the benefit of all citizens.

And as that Vancouver Sun report suggests, credible, mainstream choices are now available on the opposition bench that don’t require us to hold our noses, close our eyes, and return to the past.