Who to trust?

This election, he said, will hinge on trust, among other things. He makes a valid point.

Who should we trust among the two main party leaders most likely to become prime minister? On the one hand, we have current PM Stephen Harper. The Alberta MP came to Sussex Drive on promises of no more unelected Senators. He later passed a fixed-election law in Canada.

That's two broken promises so far. It's become a cliché to cite Harper broke his own law by calling the current election, and one of his first moves as PM was to appoint Michael Fortier to the Senate, and make him a Cabinet member. Sure, Fortier is finally running, but that's two and a half years of unelected minister time later.

Meanwhile, Stéphane Dion made a splash over the summer with his Green Shift plan, but the election campaign had not even officially kicked off yet when he already made alterations. If the carbon tax plan was as revenue-neutral as Dion originally claimed, one wonders why he felt the need to add almost $1 billion in subsidies to truck drivers and those in the agricultural and fisheries sectors.

We next arrive to the three smaller parties, the Bloc Québecois, the NDP, and the Green Party.

The Bloc remains suspiciously quiet about its sovereignist agenda, but everybody knows it still lingers somewhere behind their platform. The Green Party used a last-minute tactic, convincing an independent MP to join their ranks in order to argue they have an elected MP, and therefore should be allowed in the televised leader debates.

Of course, the existence of that rule is a testament to the "old boy's club" the television network consortium in charge of the nationally broadcast debates is. It seems they caved in without much of a fight at all from rival party pressures not to include Green Party leader Elizabeth May.

Harper's reasoning for not wanting May in holds no ground at all. His claims that it would be like having another Liberal representative are ridiculous. Anybody who pays more than a cursory glance to the vastly different Liberal and Green Party platforms can attest to that.

Most damning though, is the NDP's own demand May not be included. This mentality, coming from a party that brands itself as an "agent of change" and a force for progressive democracy in the country, suggests Layton is simply afraid May's presence would chip away at his base of young, idealist voters concerned about the environment.

It's barely one week into the campaign, so voters still have time to determine who to trust before they cast their ballots.