Sounds about right to me, Arnie.

Ontario has never really recovered from what Mike Harris's Conservatives did to it. He was the only Ontario premier I can every recall who inspired graffiti here and there on buildings suggesting that he should be killed. That sort of thing is very unusual in Canada.

Hilo, I think that most citizens do not fully engage themselves in the process because they have lost faith that any of the larger political parties will really represent them once elected.

The past record suggests to me that their loss of faith in that respect is fully justified.

Political parties do not end up serving the public once elected. They end up serving the major financial forces in this country which fund them and get them into power, because the people in charge of those major financial forces are the personal friends and peers of the politicians themselves.

Again, like the $ySStem in the USA, it's a closed loop...one in which the general public, frankly, has little effective input. Their vote is not an exercising of choice, it is a rubber stamp on a foregone conclusion.

People sense this instinctively at a gut level, therefore they are losing interest in participating in what has become mostly an empty charade...a pretence of genuinely representative democracy.