CTV news is currently running a web poll with the question “There are protests this weekend demanding an end to the military mission in Afghanistan. What do you think should happen next?” - my question is, why?

I’ve received a dozen emails today urging me to (a) run over and vote for “Withdraw Completely”, and/or (b) link the poll on stageleft and encourage people to go vote to “Withdraw Completely”.

– as you can see, there’s no link to the web poll and if I was going to encourage anyone to do anything about the Canadian military roll in Afghanistan it would be to apply pressure directly on their MP’s to have Canada revert to a reconstruction role.

Web polls like this are useless other than as entertainment and/or the weakest of propaganda tools. The Canadian government has made the decision to extend the mission into 2011 and unless the government decides otherwise, something that is not going to happen based on a CTV web poll, that’s what’s going to happen.

Personally I believe that our role in Afghanistan should be one of support and reconstruction, and the federal MP for this riding has an email [hopefully] on file from me containing with my real name and my real address stating exactly that, and stating why I believe that to be our best course of action.

For all those who think that voting in this (or any other) anonymous web poll is “doing something” quit kidding yourself, it is less than “action”, it is a pointless waste of time and bandwidth - if you want to do something take part in one of the demonstrations and/or send that email.