I am very strenuously trying to abstain from adding any of my political observations in my column.

Don’t get me wrong, elections are important. Voting in free elections is a great right and all of that, but the politics surrounding elections, especially the looming federal elections, is like a maelstrom of dull.

You look at the leaders for one; Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper does not have what he has brought to his last two election campaigns - that unfailing smugness suggesting he eats babies and will win anyway.

New Democrat Jack Layton crawls on my every last nerve and I shudder when I think of him at the head of our country.

That brings me to Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal leader. Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that he is going to be remembered as Canada’s response to John Kerry?

Remember U.S. presidential nominee Kerry’s ill-fated campaign?

At least he provided people with the illusion it was possible to prevent someone like former President George W. Bush from adding a few more years to their tyrannical period in office.

Although he doesn’t have the war record to tarnish, if Ignatieff can’t stop Prime Minister Harper from forming a majority government after this federal election, I believe a lot of people across the country will feel a slight sting of remorse and betrayal.

And the Members of Parliament who are running their own campaigns are no better.

Let’s face it; the Conservative candidates are always cookie-cut in a business suit, the NDP candidates looks like soccer parents and the Liberal, you just don’t know enough about them or their platform to take any confidence in voting for them.

It’s all become such a tedious process.

I have always had an appetite for politics and political reporting but this next year’s worth of elections (if we throw in the Alberta provincial election and come to think of it the past municipal elections) enough is enough.

There is no excitement in any of the campaigns. Canada must look to the skies and collectively ask, “Where is our Obama?”

If one of the candidates added a dash of excitement, a scandal or controversy to their campaign, maybe the coming election would be worth the price of having to hear about it for months on end.

I have an idea.

It starts with Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, whom I excluded from previous appraisal of the federal candidates because his party advocates for separating from Canada so, why not just throw you vote in the trash if you live anywhere but Quebec?

Now, if Duceppe were to come out and say in honour of the International Day of Pot (April 20) his party would advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana, we would have something here.

Think about it. He would probably be able to wrap up the whole sovereignty business in one mad dash.

That would be something if the Bloc Quebecois could get enough votes to separate and become a nation of pot-smoking, hippy, expatriates, damning us “other” Canadians from their Brie-eating francophone nation.

I’ve never understood the April 20 tradition of gathering at one of the buildings of Parliament to smoke pot in a crowd of hundreds of people, although in Vancouver the thousands who flock to the art gallery actually fill streets for several city blocks with a creeping cloud and pungent aroma.

I digress.

At the end of the day, the political battle will stay the same in Canada: dull and regretfully free of scandal, and probably coming to a predictable end.