Election will show leaders who are self-serving with promises

In every election it seems each leader tries to outdo the other in promising things that they think will maybe get you to vote for them.

Some promises are within their power to keep if they get elected, but there are others they can't, and they know they can’t.

For instance, child care spaces. Childcare spaces are a provincial responsibility and if the feds give the provinces the money, they can spend it however, they please. The only province that took advantage of the money and used it for childcare spaces, was Quebec and they have the cheapest and best child care in Canada.

So, if childcare is your thing wait for a provincial election. Education and health are provincial jurisdiction and the feds can promise, but they can't deliver. My usual way of writing a column is to write a bit each day then think about it overnight. Last night I heard Jagmeet Singh say if he was elected to be prime minister, he would give every province a veto over the federal government in things like pipelines. He went further and said he would do this even if the project was in the public interest.

My first reaction was, how dare he. He is willing to abdicate a right the federal government has to protect his country.

My second thought is he cannot do that. The power he is proposing to give away is written in our constitution and no prime minister can give it away. My opinion this leader is not fit to lead this country, for not only what he is proposing to give up, for a few more votes, but because he doesn't know enough about our constitution that he could offer it.

I then looked at the leaders of the two parties that have a chance to form the next government, the Conservatives and the Liberals.

We have a project on the books that has been declared in the national interest and it has been going nowhere for eight years. Both of these governments have had a majority over these eight years. Neither has used that majority to move this pipeline to tidewater.

In my opinion, these two leaders are not fit to govern either. They are more interested in votes and their party than they are in the health of this country.

If our founding fathers had acted this way, we would not have had an intercontinental railway. Sir Charles Tupper pushed it through against protest, or a Rideau canal, or many of our major projects that needed the federal government to act. I will vote, but not for our incompetent self-serving leaders, but for the candidate in my riding that I think might actually work in the countries interest.

Walter Jones is an Amherst resident. His column appears weekly in the Amherst News.