One of my wittier, more clever friends emailed me a few weeks ago with a new term she thought she was coining: ineptocracy. She did her due diligence though, and was mildly devastated to learn that someone had beaten her to the punch and already invented the term. You can even order ‘ineptocracy’ t-shirts on line.
According to The Urban Dictionary (in case your eyes are 46 years old like mine and don’t like the font on that t-shirt), the definition is as follows:
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy) – a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
I’ll give you one guess as to which organization springs to the front of my mind when I contemplate this much-needed addition to the English language. Government and bureaucratic organizations are, to many, a necessary evil of society. Is Equine Canada a necessary evil? I’m not so sure about necessary. The funny thing is, in its mission to become indispensable to every horse owner in this country who wisely joins a provincial federation in order to obtain a third-party liability insurance plan, EC has – to use yet another overused expression – shot itself in the foot. What am I talking about, you ask? See if you can follow this:
1. Over the past several years EC has campaigned – successfully, at least for 2012 – to compel the provincial federations to collect a direct EC membership fee from all their members, including those who are recreational riders and will never want passports for their horses, never mind sport licenses.
2. As members, all those recreational riders now have a vote with EC, which includes a vote on the EC bylaw changes – you know, the bylaws that recently crashed into the ground like a 21st century Icarus. The federations in BC and AB used email blasts to encourage their members not only to vote, but to vote ‘no’.
3. According to the voting demographics that Mike Gallagher kindly forwarded me when I had heard second hand that it was BC and AB who double handedly brought the bylaw changes down, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that all those reluctant new members of EC from the two westernmost provinces were solely responsible for the defeat.Out of 872 online votes, 47% were from BC and 34% were from AB, for a total of 81% of the total national vote. Just 5% of the votes came from the biggest province, ON. But wait, there’s more. The break down of votes from BC and AB reveals that the non-sport license holders outnumbered the sport license holders by 50%. That’s one big bite in the butt for EC, don’t you think?
Conclusions:
1. If you want to incite people to vote, present something they hate. People are much more motivated to vote when it’s against something than when it’s for it – which explains why negative campaigning has become the chosen method of presidential candidates.
2. EC got what it wanted, but also got more than it bargained for. By forcing membership to a demographic that has no reason to ‘join up’ as Monty Roberts puts it, it then left itself wide open for those reluctant members to get their revenge.
On an irony scale of one to ten, I give this little cluster an eleven.
