Tonight is the Yorkton-Melville federal election all candidates meeting at the Gallagher Centre.
As electors, this is our one, and only, opportunity to see the parliamentary hopefuls in the same room at the same time.
And, it is a reminder of time gone by. At one time, this would have been a seminal event in the election calendar. The whole town would have come out and we would have learned what these individuals were all about.
After all, that is how our system was designed. Voters in the ridings elected a representative to air the views of the constituency in Ottawa. Unlike our cousins south of the border, we do not directly elect the head of our government.
But elections have changed. A lot of this has to do with technology. TV brought the party leaders, the potential prime ministers, into our homes. Airplanes allowed the leaders the unprecedented freedom to be in Halifax in the morning, Toronto in the afternoon and Vancouver in the evening.
In the current election, the cult of the leader is perhaps greater than it has been at any time in history. the current prime minister, Stephen Harper, is an extremely divisive character. Despite all of his warts, his base is as solid as it gets. His opponents hate him to an equal degree that his supporters love him.
Thus, this campaign has become all about who will be the next prime minister.
That is a shame, because there are 338 seats in the House of Commons that have to be filled. One of them will be taken by one of the four people who will be on stage tonight at Gallagher
There are plenty of reasons why one might expect the turnout to be, shall we say, less than great. Locally, there is a feeling that Cathay Wagantall, the Conservative, is going to waltz to an easy victory, that Yorkton-Melville is as strong a stronghold as strongholds get.
We are also unlikely to hear anything tonight that we have not already heard from Stephen Harper, Tom Mulcair or Justin Trudeau. For better or worse, all of the parties, with the possible exception of the Green Party, are exercising pretty tight message control.
And finally, voter apathy is simply high and has been for some time.
That is an appalling reality because this event this evening is about no less than our democracy. We do have a choice to make and that choice is not for prime minister. It is for effective representation of Yorkton-Melville.
Four people have put their names forward and that is nothing to take for granted. Cathay Wagantall, Doug Ottenbreit, Brooke Malinoski and Elaine Hughes have, at great personal sacrifice,
They deserve to have an audience. They deserve to have an opportunity to make their case for why they should be headed to Ottawa October 20.
We do have a choice. Our democracy depends on it.
