I'm changing.

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

--widely (and falsely) attributed to Winston Churchill; origin unknown

There's no way Winston Churchill ever said such a thing: he was a conservative at 15 and a liberal at 35. But I find myself meditating on those waggish words as I inch closer to my 35th birthday.

In my teens and early twenties, I was the most ardent of Conservatives. I first became politically aware in Mulroney's second mandate, and sometimes thought I was the only guy in Canada who didn't want him dead. To this day, the vitriol directed at the former PM amazes me. As far as I can tell, the hatred stems from two things: the GST and a too-chummy relationship with the United States.

You can blame Mulroney's regime for the institution of the Goods and Services Tax, but you'd need to reserve a share of blame for Chretien, who repeatedly promised to scrap it and didn't. Besides, the GST is simply a visible repackaging of the old Manufacturers' Sales Tax.
As for 'cozying up' to the U.S., it by and large served Canada very well. We had a voice at the table. Even the collection of unions who were so against NAFTA when it was implemented have admitted they were wrong. Softwood lumber aside, the Mulroney-negotiated free trade agreements have been very good for this country. Hate Mulroney if you will, but don't deny he did things, unlike Chretien, who governed by inaction, and Martin, who governs by dithering.

Anyway, I had all the 'Reformist' tendencies ingrained in my psyche from adolescence, both the good and the bad. I believed (and still do) that political parties should be formed from the ground up rather than the top down. I shared (and still do) large parts of the Conservative vision for the country: taxes should be no higher than necessary; we need a justice system to replace the national joke we have now; most notably that government should stop meddling in the lives of private citizens.
The mainstream media in Canada still love to trot out the bigoted cowboy that supposedly epitomizes the Conservative brand. At one time, I shared a lot of that cowboy's belief system when it came to social issues. I was once a homophobic racist who believed that immigrants should only be welcomed to Canada if (a) they had a job waiting which (b) for some reason couldn't be given to a Canadian.
As I get older, reactionary views grate on me more and more. My homophobia has entirely abated: all that took was the realization that gays are people too. Meeting a few of them helped.
My thoughts on immigration have changed as well: I have recognized that immigration is a huge net contributor to the Canadian economy. While I still balk at our Swiss-cheese refugee claim system, I strongly believe in sharing our wealth with those less fortunate.
My thoughts on religion have undergone several deep-sea changes since I was in my teens. I now have no use for it, and think it has no place in politics. Too many people cling to narrow, limiting visions of what God is and what He (it's always He) wants. As if an omnipotent God could be said to 'want' for anything.

The antagonism in politics disgusts me. It seems to me that too many people on both sides of any issue in this country are unwilling to even look at each other's point of view, let alone acknowledge the merit that might be in it. The people we elect to Parliament should be working on the daunting problems that face this country, not bickering with each other over every little point.

As I age, I find myself becoming more and more liberal (although NOT Liberal). Whereas in my teens I still believed in our dominion over the Earth (hey, it's in the Bible!), I've almost reversed my thinking now. It's hard work to support the delusion you're the most important thing on the planet when the planet keeps throwing hurricanes and moonsoons and droughts and viruses at you.

It has been said that liberals support government, while conservatives support business. I'm not naive enough to want to discourage business--I know where the jobs come from, after all--but the behaviour of various corporations worldwide has angered and dismayed me. It seems to me that there is more to this world (or should be) than rampant profiteering at others' expense.

One of my favourite authors, Spider Robinson, has written an epistle called The Crazy Years that has the curious effect, upon reading it, of raising your IQ level about three dozen points. In one entry, he details out a number of platform planks for something he calls The Sentient Party. I agree with nearly all of them and will reproduce one I feel very strongly about below:

--MSR. This is the RADICAL plank: Make Stockholders Responsible. At present, any fool may buy stock in any company and unload it five minutes later. The directors must court his good will and seek to fulfill his wishes--but since he could well be gone in five minutes, they must assume that his primary (indeed, his sole) wish is to maximize immediate short-term profit at any cost. Often enough that is his wish: we have all heard of companies purchased for the express purpose of dismantling them. Net effect: no major business on this continent is presently being run intelligently. Control is in the hands of strangers who happened to pass by, and will leave when they are finished looting.
Solution: a single law. Henceforth, no one may sell stock that he or she has not owned for at least one year. You want to buy a piece of control of a business, you gotta commit to stick with it for awhile. People's livelihoods are not game pieces. When the screaming finally begins to die down from that one, hike it up to two years...and keep hiking it. Presently the outraged stockholders will start to notice that they're making more money. And that it's sounder money, since it exists in a healthier economy. And that fewer people want to mug them for it. Even the rich can be made rational, with patience and a big stick.

See? Ideas like that. That's what we need: ideas for making the world a better place, not tired old platitudes that didn't work last century and won't work now.

I wonder what that person we all thought was Winston Churchill would say to me, a conservative at 20 who has all but abandoned politics entirely at 33. Do I lack a heart? Or a brain?