I find this a depressing time. It’s the last days of an election campaign and once again, it’s all about spin-doctoring, polling and TV ads; while many of the big issues go unmentioned, a signal that our electoral politics (not to mention our media) are somehow inadequate to the task.

People e-mail me urging me to speak up, and I point out that I usually do, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. At any rate, one has to slog on; so once again, here goes.

The most spectacular unmentionable is the environment. As during the 2004 American election campaign, when the U.S. South was being hammered by hurricane after massive hurricane and nobody ever uttered the words “climate change,” here we seem to have the same speech impediment.

We’ve had four national debates in which the words “environment” and “Kyoto” got tossed out once or twice at random, but that’s it. It’s not just the leaders and their parties — the journalistic machinery that prepared the questions didn’t see this as a politically worthy subject.

The most peculiar aspect of it all is that an entire party, the Greens, now national in scope, has emerged to deal with this one overwhelming issue and is slowly gaining some traction, but still the major parties can’t or won’t engage it.

Within the environmental question is the matter of the oceans. As happens several times a year, yet another report — this one out of Memorial University in St. John’s — has come out, giving more details on the devastation. This one deals with slow-reproducing deep water species like grenadiers, and certain hakes, eels and skates, which the researchers say are on the verge of extinction.

At the same time, Canada is opposing a UN resolution which would ban dragging in international waters, and which would protect these species — on grounds that a ban in international waters would raise questions about dragging inside the 200-mile limit. This is an appalling cop-out. If we were really serious in this election campaign, it would be a hot political issue.

One of my correspondents adds to this the removal of requirements for full environmental assessments on offshore drilling, continuing questions about the impact of seismic testing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and casts doubt on whether Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan should be re-elected here in Nova Scotia. It might, indeed, shake things up if he were not.

On another front, there’s the unexamined question of how we should comport ourselves in the world. The Liberals throw Iraq at Stephen Harper like a rag doll, and that’s the extent of the debate. We didn’t go to Iraq, but as another of my correspondents points out, we did go to Haiti to help the U.S. overthrow a democratically elected government and we’re now there trying to impose our own version of democracy, the effect of which is apparently to buck up the local elite, in a situation that’s going from bad to worse.

There are concerned groups throughout Canada (as throughout the U.S. and Latin America) trying to make the point. But we don’t talk about such things in election campaigns, so that’s that. Nevertheless, I hope to return to Haiti in some future column — even if the subject can’t compete with the wonders of Stephen Harper’s new makeover.

Let me add one more. Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe touched an interesting point in last week’s English debate when he asked why there are 10,000 civil servants in the federal Health Department when health is a provincial jurisdiction. The next night, in the French debate, Paul Martin had an answer at the ready: There are drug testing, epidemic preparation, and this-and-that, that account for 6,000. What about the other 4,000? Duceppe wondered whether they were mostly churning out public relations.

Good question. If so, why are they doing mostly unproductive work while the short staffed Immigration Department, for example, despite all that ballyhoo about needing more immigrants, takes up to five years — and more in some cases — to process an application?

Should we not have at least a general idea what goes on in that humongous civil service, and whether the manpower corresponds to the job to be done — and to have the question asked in a practical, not an ideological way, in order to have what we once had — a motivated public service? It seems to me that one of the first imperatives of any democratic government anywhere is to know itself. That’s not the case now.

And I’m sure that’s only a partial list of unspoken issues which, if they were spoken, would be far more to the point than the present entertainment.