Our ballots were cast and counted, the trees had wept their leaves, and Tony Clement envisioned his successor chained to a desk in the House of Commons.

On what premise had the parting MP conjured so improbable a scenario for Parry Sound-Muskoka’s new representative in Ottawa? Why, the election of a minority Liberal government.

“In a minority Parliament practically every vote is a confidence vote,” explained veteran Clement to this newspaper’s reporter Sarah Bissonette. “All of the MPs are going to be spending a lot of time together voting in Parliament. You can’t miss a vote.” Scott Aitcheson wouldn’t be in the riding as much as he’d intended. “He will, at times, be chained to his desk in Ottawa. Everyone is going to assume there’s going to be an election soon.”

Well, not everyone.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau heads a strong minority government. Having 157 Liberal MPs means his future is not balancing on a razor’s edge. Plus nobody in Opposition is priming to trigger an early election.

Eva Olsson was born in eastern Hungary 95 years ago this month. When forcibly removed to one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps in 1943, she was 19 but had never been in school because education was prohibited to Jews. Auschwitz was a three-in-one operation – prison camp, slave-labour facility, and extermination centre – with death their common denominator.

“If the Germans win the war they will kill you all afterwards,” a guard taunted Eva. “If they’re going to lose the war, they will kill you all now.”

“That will never happen.”

“Why”

“Because you cannot kill a tribe,” she said. “As long as there is air, there will be a Jew.”

When war ended, resolute Eva Olsson had managed to stay alive.

A century ago, in July 1919, women of Canada for the first time became eligible to run for election to Parliament. Two years before, when Ontario women won voting rights for 1917’s provincial election, nurses serving in the war and direct relatives of men in uniform also got the vote in 1917’s federal election. By 1922, the federal franchise had been extended to most (though not all) resident female voters who were over 21 and British subjects.

Regardless of what the law permitted, however, public attitudes and cultural values thwarted women’s advance in public life. Women themselves were even divided, some pushing for political equality with men, others upholding a long prevailing belief that politics was too sordid for females. To that, suffragettes agreed that politics was dirty alright, but the remedy was sending in women to clean it up. As in most things, resolute individuals had to break the barriers.

We’ve learned that a “chair”—four wooden legs, seat, and back—can sometimes have three legs or a swivel base, be made instead of metal or plastic, have arms, come with no back or a full-tilt recliner, plus padding and upholstery.

We witness how a “debate”—formal discussion of a specific topic in a public venue with opposing arguments being advocated—can likewise depart from its core meaning. Whether it’s this campaign’s record number of all-candidate debates in Parry Sound-Muskoka, or the televised leaders’ debates, these election events stretch “debate” almost beyond recognition.

Debates help voters learn, evaluate, and make their best individual choice electing representatives to Parliament. In the long yawn between elections, it’s a campaign’s rare moment of intense voter focus.

We still mark an X beside an individual person’s name alright. But elected representatives arriving in Ottawa nowadays find themselves more human automatons than freely functioning MPs.

Already there’s been a high turnout of advance voters at the Returning Officer’s quarters in Huntsville, but whether early ballot-caster or Election Day Voter, we already place our four excellent candidates through a matrix which depersonalizes them: (1) you like the local candidate, but not their national leader; (2) you adore the leader, but find the candidate weak; (3) you evaluate the party/candidate’s past performance and either like it or are dismayed; (4) you are attracted to a party/candidate’s promises for the future, but wonder if they’ll deliver. This 4-way decision-making often renders the local candidate incidental.

Second, folks hold different ideas about what an MP should even be. At one end of the spectrum, some citizens prefer a rather independent person; at the other end, the representative should be a delegate, going to Ottawa to vote the constituency’s wishes. Edmond Burke, long ago, said he owed his electors the benefit of his experience and judgement, tending to the first model. Today, the party line is imposed on representatives and the “whip” for each caucus keeps partisan MPs in line.

Last week publicity about Canada Post’s aggressive invasion of the “flyer” business, which financially underpins community newspapers, was not a self-interested tempest. This parasitic practice by a monopoly postal service is just one more float in a long parade of short-sighted decisions, misdirected leadership, and commercial subversion of national interests.

Constitutionally, postal service has been sole responsibility of our federal government because a monopoly facilitates a single integrated system for collecting and delivering letters with a common low rate for postage. From colonial times, communication by mail was an essential public service, not a profit-making business. Once, prices were reduced to 1c so “Penny Postage” carried a letter anywhere in the British Empire. By 1914, the Post Office Department introduced parcel post. And, with far-flung subscribers getting newspapers by mail, Ottawa subsidized mailing rates because news reporting and readership focused identity and raised awareness, beneficial for Canada and democracy alike. A low postal rate for newspapers was the same policy as public subsidies to the CBC’s budget, Canada Council funding of the arts, and government grants for book publishers and movie makers.

Because September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, let’s start with the fact ovarian cancer is not the most common tumor afflicting Canadian women, but it is the deadliest. Each year 2,800 are diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Every second woman diagnosed won’t live another five years. Every day, five succumb. For half a century, this pattern hasn’t changed.

As with other tumors, early detection offers best hope for overpowering the cancer. Among long-term survivors, early detection at “stage-one,” rather than at the tumor’s three more advanced stages, was instrumental, because the more advanced the cancer, the less effective the treatments. Yet unlike for most tumor types, no screening test is available. So discovering ovarian cancer is often serendipitous, perhaps during surgery when dealing with something else.

Worsening the chance of detection was the myth that ovarian cancer is “a silent killer,” the self-exculpatory tag line given the disease by a male dominated medical profession. “How could we have saved her life,” was the institutionalized shrug, a side-exit from professional accountability, “when there are no symptoms?”