The decentralized nature of the protests has led to some confusion over what people are so angry about and what they hope to accomplish. One of the main themes is the growing gap in wealth between the richest in our society, the top 1%, and everyone else, the 99%.  One way to look at this gap is simply through compensation paid for work. In these difficult economic times of job cuts and spending cut-backs many people are asking themselves: When someone is paid a salary, what is it for? What is a reasonable amount of compensation for a job? Does society have any ability or right to demand that compensation needs to be, in some way, fair?

Here’s a little perspective. Consider two different organizations: a large Canadian Bank and the Canadian Armed Forces. Both have highly paid executives making terribly important decisions which affect the lives and livelihoods of their thousands of employees as well as society at large.

The current Chief of Defence Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces is Walt Natynczyk. In 2007 his predecessor Rick Hillier was paid $234,900 a year.  The pension comes out to about $150,000 a year.  Meanwhile, Rick Waugh, the CEO of Scotiabank makes $10 million a year. I don’t know his pension deal but bank CEO pensions are usually counted in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, let’s consider the entry level workers in those organizations: a bank teller and a private in the Armed Forces. The entry requirements for these jobs are similar: high school education, trustworthyness and passing a security test. A no-hook private in the regular forces starts off making $31,956 a year. The average hourly rate for bank tellers in Vancouver is $17.88/hr. With a generous 5% bonus in a good year let’s say that comes out to around $50,000 a year.

In the armed forces, the ratio of the pay between a bottom and the top is 7.35. The Chief of Defence Staff, who meets with the Prime Minister to decide how many troops to leave in Afghanistan and what risks to our troops are acceptable, makes just 7.35 times more than the 17 year old private learning to shine his boots properly.

Meanwhile, in the bank, the CEO is making a whopping 200 times more than the entry level teller. To be sure, the CEO’s job is hard and stressful and a lot of responsibility is on their shoulders. But the bank teller doesn’t have an easy job either being on their feet all day, dealing with demanding customers and even having to deal with bank robberies from time to time. If General Walt Natynczyk only makes 7 times as much as a private, then what is it that a CEO does that is 200 times harder or more essential than what a teller does?

This is is just one of the many things that the people on the streets of New York, and soon a banking district near you, are angry about.  Doesn’t that make you angry?  If so, then it’s most likely you still won’t be protesting on October 15, and that’s fine of course.  Protesting isn’t for everyone, and it’s really not clear these Occupy Everywhere protests will achieve anything other than letting off some steam.  But then again, maybe they can lead to change. Maybe all this discussion about the basic assumptions underlying the social contract between citizens, government and corporations is a good thing in itself.

Political and business leaders don’t like taking risks on big changes unless they know they will be rewarded for it.  All this protesting shows that people sure are angry about something. Maybe the most important affect of occupy wall street will be a new political atmosphere that allows those in power to actually make some improvements to society. That should be something all of us would welcome, even if we’re not out on the streets this Saturday.

Note: This article is crossposted at the Huffington Post.

HuffingtonPost is asking Canadians why they vote (or don’t), so I thought I’d give my answer. I’ve written in the past about why many Canadians don’t vote:  it might be they can’t find a party or candidate they agree with, they think the entire system is biased or unfair, or they worry that their one vote has very little impact. Voting can be very disheartening in our winner-take-all system where the candidate with the most votes wins regardless of what proportion of the total vote they receive.

There are many reasons why I vote: I see it as duty as a citizen akin to jury duty, paying taxes and serving to defend our country if needed. Voting is probably the easiest of these to do. It’s also important to participate in the system that runs our society. You pay taxes into anyways so you might as well try to influence things to be run the way you’d prefer.

Sometimes these arguments aren’t enough to convince a skeptical non-voter, but until today there was still one final desperate argument that democratic optimists like myself could use to try to cajole our cynical friends to vote: it was the per-vote party subsidy.

Every party that met the threshold of 5% support everywhere they ran was given $2 per vote they received each year after the election. This policy guaranteed that at the very least, when you voted for a party, they would get some support for later campaigning, even if they didn’t win the seat. It was the only proportional part of our voting system where every vote counted and counted equally. This was great because it was a relatively cheap system but it was concrete, it equalized parties somewhat and it meant you literally could not say your vote didn’t count.

I’m using the past tense because soon the per-vote subsidy will be no more. Inside the huge crime bill introduced by the Conservative government on Tuesday is a single paragraph that does away with the per-vote subsidy. This is a particularly offensive way to get rid of if since it caused a crisis in 2008 when the minority government tried to get rid of public financing during a minority parliament.  In order to avoid a snap election or, gasp!, a coalition, the Prime Minister needed to take the unprecedented step of proroguing parliament to avoid defeat.

Some people think it’s a great move. Take Tim Powers at the Globe and Mail, for example:

If what you are selling is worth buying the money will come.

Of course, that assumes the people you are ‘selling’ to, the voters, have money to spare. Many families work multiple jobs and struggle to find money to pay the bills, let alone to support a party that might look out for their interests.  Do these kinds of parties not matter? Do these voters not matter? The levers of power are already biased towards those with money, education and influence. Why in the world would we take away one of the only equalizing parts of our system?

Democracy shouldn’t be about money (no, seriously), it should be about people, policy and ideas. That’s why public financing is (was) a good thing, that’s why limits on donations are a good thing.

It was always clear once the Conservative’s won a majority that they were going to slash the per-vote subsidy. The way they have chosen to achieve this indicates they aren’t even willing to stand up and treat it as its own issue. They aren’t willing to put it forward as a separate bill, debate it publicly and force it through with their majority. What does this say? It doesn’t seem to say the Conservatives are proud to do kill it. It seem to say they are hope no one will notice that they are changing the rules to favour themselves in future elections.

May the party with the richest supporters in the most strategically focussed regions win.

Ah…democracy.

This post can also be seen on The Huffington Post Canada.

Parties can state any policy conditions they would demand to work with other parties. However, there is no reason to make a false proclamation such as that the party with the most seats must form government or that a coalition with this or that party is impossible. Just stick to your issues and wait for the vote to be finished.

That’s how democracy works. Wait to hear what the voters decide then figure out who can represent that decision best in the legislature.

Continue the discussion on google plus

City hall is led by a mayor, Rob Ford, who was elected by a minority (47%) of the population. The House of Commons is led by a Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who’s party was also elected by a minority (39%) of the population. Both elections were described at the time as decisive victories. Both elections were expected to bring in a wave of conservative lawmaking by the new leader and his group of like minded elected members.

This week, Toronto city council reached a compromise on the contentious issue of how to clean up and develop Toronto’s Portlands. The compromise conforms with existing plans the mayor had expressed extreme disagreement with. This week also saw a progressive plan for managing and approving graffiti that conflicts with previous goals of the mayor.  New city councillors that were expected to remain in lock step with mayor Ford were not so willing to continue when faced with a huge public outcry over this and several other issues.

In contrast,  the Conservative government in Ottawa is planning soon to introduce significant changes to the criminal code which were rejected in previous parliaments and no opposition parties realistically expect to be able to stop them. This is despite the fact that some pollsters are finding that a majority are against these changes. So we have the odd situation one leader having more trouble achieving his goals than another leader with much lower support. It’s a case of a unified and vocal minority getting it’s way over a majority who disagrees but is divided. Unfortunately, this is likely to become a running theme for the next years in Ottawa.

The difference between these two chambers shows how the structure of a democratic system can influence how policy and compromise happen, or fail to happen. In Toronto, 44 councillors run on their own funding, to win the support of people in their own riding. Councillors may owe some loyalty to the mayor or other councillors but nothing institutional and nothing that has any lasting affect. So when public opinion sways against some policy: like cutting funding to daycare, selling the zoo, painting over all graffiti or building a ridiculous ferris wheel; those councillors needs to think about their future independent of the mayor or anyone else. In city politics, each councillor needs to convince everyone that they are the right person for the job.

Meanwhile in parliament, parties dominate and individual MPs do not have nearly as much freedom or desire to deviate from their leader or their party on specific issues. They have no freedom because the party whip requires voting in line with the party on most votes. They have no desire because public pressure is largely useless on them. With up to five plausible candidates in each riding, federal MPs only need to win a small portion of the vote in their riding to win. Furthermore, candidates rely very heavily on the campaign of the national party for funding, to build brand, get voter recognition and acquire volunteers. So, the Federal MP representing you in Ottawa has little incentive to worry about broad public opinions and the kind of rebellion Rob Ford is dealing with in Toronto is much less likely to happen in Ottawa. This is to the detriment of our democracy, regardless of the policies involved.

Now, I’m not saying all the problems in our democracy are caused by political parties or that all representatives should be independents. Parties can have their place, they help to simplify the national conversation and voting process. At their most basic, political parties are tribes we associate with in the national conversation about what our country should be. However, it’s time we realized the importance of empowering individual MPs to speak their voice and do their real job, which is to represent all their constituents, not just their party.

Wait, what? That’s not even…huh?

That’s right, Sept. 15 is the International Day of Democracy. The fourth annual! Apparently. I know, I hadn’t heard of it either.

I only heard about it because Fair Vote Canada is holding events all week discussing democracy. So, for my first post on HuffPost Canada I was planning on pointing out how Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s claims to a strong mandate for his government’s legislative agenda are misplaced given that his party only received 39 per cent of the popular vote.  However, in doing the research for it I found something even more depressing.

The Conservative Party did only get 39.6 per cent of the popular vote and this is historically quite low for majority governments.  Unfortunately, Canadians almost never get a government that more than half the country voted for! Take a look at this depressing summary of all the elections from 1867 up to 2008. Sigh. I say, sigh.

This of course doesn’t mean Harper is right about his ‘strong mandate’, it just means all our leaders should be humble about representing everyone when most people voted against them. (Except for John Diefenbaker and Robert Borden, they can crow all they want.)

So how should Canadians celebrate Democracy Day? Obviously, relative to the rest of the world we don’t have much cause to complain. People are dying in the streets of Libya and Syria right this moment to secure greater freedom from tyranny and maybe, just maybe, to one day to live in a truly democratic society. There are as many types of democracies in the world as there are nations but by any measure Canada is one of the fairest and most democratic countries in the world. And yet…

And yet, we could do so much better.

There are so many issues that are important for our society that involve the machinery of our democracy rather than particular social or economic beliefs. Whether it’s Senate reform/abolition, the place of the monarchy, electoral reform and proportional representation, public campaign financing, local elections, town halls, voter turnout, the youth vote, prorogation, primacy of parliament, televised debates, taxes, the census, etc. Everyone has an opinion about these issues, whether they are Conservatives, Liberals, NDPers, Greens or anyone else who refuses one of these labels (hand’s up!). So, discussions about the workings of democracy should be non-partisan but most importantly they should be ongoing.

Right now is a perfect time to have this discussion. Canada is in the midst of its second major political realignment in 20 years. The centre-left is now splitting its vote the same way the right did after the PC party collapsed.  The Bloc, a literal blockage in the normal parliamentary process has apparently vanished; and for the first time in our history, a completely new, official (and loyal) opposition has risen that isn’t simply a rebirth of a previous party. How will the NDP be affected by the tragic loss of Jack Layton just at their moment of ascendancy and his inspiring last call to action? There are many unknowns right now. But right now we have an interlude while parties find themselves, pick new leaders and while the Conservatives enact some of the projects they have longed for.

For all the storminess we’ve had over the past 20 years with party restructuring and minority parliaments, I don’t think the storm has passed yet. More likely, we are now in the calm in the center of the storm. When the next federal election approaches, the storm will return and all we know for sure is that it will be different than before: with the Bloc reduced, the Liberals rethinking their purpose, the NDP trying to prove themselves and the Greens having a better case of not being ignored. Before all that starts in earnest, now is the perfect time to discuss what it is we, the voters, want our democracy to be in the 21st century.

Some of this discussion is already happening online (on blogs, on twitter, …) and sometimes on tv and radio, but is it enough? Are we having a national discussion about our democracy? Shouldn’t we always be having that discussion?

So maybe the best way celebrate democracy day, in this moment of calm in the eye of the storm, is to start that discussion in some way, even if it’s just sitting down with a friend over coffee and fixing one cog in the machine.

This post is cross-posted here on The Huffington Post Canada.

I’m tired of cynicism. I’m tire of it from the latest federal election, the Toronto election and the insanity that is the current American political ‘discourse’.  I’m tired of people tut-tutting that this or that is impossible. Look at the world, the impossible is happening right now. Dictatorships are falling left and right, just because the people have decided it is time. Unshakable assumptions about our world economy are falling around us.  Pragmatism is needed, it always is; but pragmatism isn’t equal to cynicism. If something is really important to us as a society, then we can make choices that reflect those values.

I think Jack’s kind of pragmatism are what the world needs and it is absolutely clear that his honesty is what Canadians yearn for.  As others have pointed out, if some aspiring politician wants to know how they can cause a seismic shift in the politics of this country, they need look no further than the enormous outpouring of genuine grief at Jack’s death. The death of a politician.

Even Pierre Trudeau’s death didn’t cause this kind of spontaneous expression of sadness. Certainly, part of it is the shock. We all assumed, agree with him or not, that Jack Layton was a key part of the fabric of our country and would be here for a while to come. But part of it, surely, was his sheer decency. He had principles and he had a party, but he was always willing to talk to the other side to see if compromise was possible.  His response was always thoughtful and it was always honest.  Those qualities should be a requirement for holding public office, as it stands, it has made him into someone to be admired.  If someone with Jack’s decency can survive and thrive in politics then maybe there is hope for our country to reach it’s potential. People just have to take courage from Jack’s example and step forward.

I’ll let Stephen Lewis and Jack himself finish it off:

But it obviously goes much deeper than that. Jack, I think, tapped into a yearning, sometimes ephemeral, rarely articulated, a yearning that politics be conducted in a different way, and from that difference would emerge a better Canada.

That difference was by no means an end to rancor, an end to the abusive, vituperative practice of the political arts. The difference was also, and critically, one of policy – a fundamentally different way of viewing the future of Canada.

His remarkable letter made it absolutely clear. This was a testament written in the very throes of death that set out what Jack wanted for his caucus, for his party, for young people, for all Canadians.

Inevitably, we fastened on those last memorable lines about hope, optimism and love. But the letter was, at its heart, a manifesto for social democracy. And if there was one word that might sum up Jack Layton’s unabashed social democratic message, it would be generosity. He wanted, in the simplest and most visceral terms, a more generous Canada.

- Stephen Lewis

If we want to honour Jack Layton’s memory and all his hope and promise we should commit ourself to making his final message the new definition of the Canadian dream. The dream of an unapologetic, capitalist yet social democratic country:

My friends, love is better than anger.
Hope is better than fear.
Optimism is better than despair.
So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.

And we’ll change the world.

- Jack Layton

Rest In Peace Jack

No, Google hasn’t declared an extrajudicial assassination a victory or undermined democracy in favour of the Military-Industrial complex. Chomsky is a very famous in linguistics and a founding father of some of the concepts of computer science and artificial intelligence. Peter Norvig on the other hand wrote the book on modern AI and Google is the epitome of modern AI research which treats intelligence as advanced pattern recognition and  statistical analysis of huge amounts of data under uncertainty. It seems that some people disagree that this is the way to building a full artificial intelligence. And the dust is still flying.

Read the full article on CompThink with updates on the ongoing discussion across …

Please forgive a humble Hobbit for bothering you  but I just wanted to write about an urgent matter of democracy. Here in Hobbiton we have just had a Shire-wide election. Let’s just say that I’m fairly miffed about the results. In fact everyone I know if quite perplexed by the outcome. You see, we use an ancient method of voting, some say it came from Mordor itself, called First-Past-The-Post (FPTP). I know you are familiar with it as I am told it is the same system you use yourselves. It is as simple as can be, the candidate with the most votes wins, no matter how much or how little of the vote they received. This simplicity seems to hide many problems.

In yesterday’s election, for example, one Stepper Harphentwizzle was elected Mayor of All-The-Shire. The problem is Harphentwizzle has some quite extreme ideas about how Hobbits should live and only 39% of Hobbits actually agree with his clan’s view.  The problem is, you see, that because of FPTP the other main clans, the Proudfeet, led by Ignatius, and the Headstrongs, led by Jackleberry, split their vote in many of the Shire’s 308 ridings. (yes, that seems like a lot but the Shire is bigger than it seems)

To be sure, Ignatius didn’t inspire people with his talk of long ages past and the great war of the Ring as the Proudfeet expected. And truly Jackleberry surprised everyone with his energy and charisma, for a time many thought he might become Mayor himself. But in the end much of their vote was split even though many would have chosen the other had they known. But Hobbits are not so good at working all that out ahead of time. Perhaps you other grand races are better at it. Although I could not fathom how.

But it is what it is. The reason I’m writing you is because I have heard that across the pond in your part of Middle Earth you are using the same horrible Mordor based system and are considering a switch. I have heard that the two strong and wise races of Dwarves and Elves both support fixing the system but that they vehemently disagree about what system to switch to.

I must say, given our recent outcome here in the Shire I simply can’t fathom why you would keep FPTP. It is true I am no Dwarf or Elf, but both of your systems seem plain to be an improvement over FPTP. The Elven system is more elegant surely, and probably best if I had to choose.  Yet I hear that it is the system of the Dwarves that is on offer. And it is not really so bad a system as it gives people a choice by ranking. I know many who would have swapped their Proudfoot and Headstrong votes if they had known how to.  The Dwarf system makes this easy even for a Hobbit. The Elven system is truly magical and will let all voices be heard…but it is not on offer. And once the Men of Gondor see that the Dwarf system has lost they will never again offer another choice since they need neither when all else are divided.

With all due respect, only an Elf would make the perfect the enemy of the good. It is the only flaw of that great race. From a Hobbit’s point of view the answer seems simple. Modest gains are the joys of a life lived well. One should be ready to strike out and grab for perfection if it presents itself, but if somebody offer you to simply improve your lot, you should take perhaps be happy.

So I urge all the wise people of the United Kingdom of Middle Earth, our mother country in a way, to take some advice from a humble Hobbit. Be you a Dwarf or an Elf or whatever else, vote like a Hobbit on May 5. Vote yes to AV.

Sincerely,

Warning: This post will only make sense to you if you follow the recurring adventures of the characters discussed in it as they try to save our nation and the world as we know it from imminent destruction…it will also help if you watch Fringe.

I’m watching Fringe tonight and we all know Fringe is filmed in Vancouver but what if the characters were all voting in the Canadian Federal election on Monday? I thought about this and then I just couldn’t unthink about it. So I thought I’d share. I think the characters cover a pretty wide range of views and voting strategies.

Walter: Marijuana Party – obviously. He’s probably a founding member and major donor.

Broyles: He’s a party man, he always vote Liberal, “No question.”

Astrid: Green party – she likes their outlook, knows her vote may not actually elect anyone but she’s willing to let the world figure it out and go with the flow.

Peter: Vigorously non-partisan, leans libertarian. Switches between NDP/Liberal/Progressive Conservative based on conditions. Note to parties: DO NOT put him on your robocall list, it will not end well for you.

Nina: Legally restricted from voting for reasons that are above your pay grade.

William Bell: Natural Law party – come on, soul magnets? Who else would he vote for?

Walternate: Conservative Party – although he wishes Harper would stop dallying about get really tough on crime, lock up all those other scientists, they’re dangerous.

Fauxlivia: She used to vote Progressive Conservative, probably leaning conservative this time, although she’s starting to have her doubts. She’d really like that national daycare program right about now.

AstridX: Non-partisan, she performs a rigorous cost-benefit and statistical analysis of all the relevant socio-economic-environmental factors and computes the vote which allows her to maximally influence the outcome of her local riding election to increase the probability of a positive outcome for the largest number of citizens.

Olivia: She is an average voter, indecisive about Liberal or NDP, she liked Chretien, finds Ignatieff a bit cold and she really likes Jack. he’ll decide in the voting booth. She just wants to do what’s best.

As do we all.

So, turn on the machine on Monday May 2, go out and vote…and may God have mercy on our souls.

Well, not exactly. Iggy…I believe you have a large bucket of ice world water for me?

I’ve said during the campaign on electoral reform, it would be good to have a national conversation provided we know what the heck we’re replacing ‘first past the post’ with, that’s number one.

Actually Michael, no, just, no. “Figuring out what the heck we are replacing FPTP with” is exactly what the National Conversation™ needs to be about. But the Liberal approach to electoral reform seems to be that they need to get a handle first on which system is best and then get us to talk about switching to that.

You know what we need to have a National Conversation about? We need to discuss what kind of country we want, who’s voices should be heard and how important equality and fairness are to us.  We need to discuss what the options are for fixing our system and what each of them means. Then the people need to make some choices about what they want and tell you, the politicians, to implement them for us.  That’s how this democracy works you see. And that is what we’re going to do whether the Liberal party is there or not.

So, it sounds like I have my answer from the Ignatieff Liberals about my dream of electoral reform. But the radio also then played a clip from one the Liberal townhalls where Ignatieff was answering a passionate person who dreams of changing the system:

But you hold onto that dream, that is a very important dream that will make this country better.

Well, that actually helps a lot Michael, thank you.  That actually clarifies everything, not just about the Liberal party, but about this entire election. If you think about it, dreams are a beautiful way to wrap up the national campaign because it gives us a moment of clarity about the chocies before us all.

It’s all about dreams.

Harper: Your dreams are a reckless fantasy that will destroy the fabric of this country. Vote for us instead, so we can crush your dreams as they deserve to be crushed.

Iggy: Hold onto those dreams.  Vote for us and we’ll look into the viability of your dreams and get back to you.

Jack: We can do this! Follow your dreams! Make them a reality! Vote for us and we’ll help you achieve them, together.

That’s it isn’t it? Now it all makes sense. The campaign strategies, the tv ads, the poll numbers, the orange wave … it’s all clear when you view things through the lense of dreams.

So, thank you Michael Ignatieff for this moment of clarity.  I will be voting for someone from your party because I like your candidate in my riding (Quadra: Joyce Murray) and because the NDP can’t win here. But now I know what you’re party stands for: “taking all dreams under consideration and initiating a national conversation to validate the Liberal party’s position on said dream.”

Well, all I can say is…Go Jack Go.

Sing it with me…

…that her face, at first just ghostly…

I think Harper understands fully, which makes it worse. He is purposely setting up a constitutional crisis down the road where he has told his supporters that the only valid measure is winning the most seats. If any other party ever follows the rules and tries to do this they will cry holy murder and further divide this country. Its a reckless and destructive strategy worthy of the Bloc or PQ.

Yes, you heard me right.  Harper’s claims about how a party should treat elections and confidence in parliament is as destructive to our democracy as attempts to separate a province from the federation.

He is doing this because he assumes he will have the most seats after the election. So he’ll get his chance. Then when the opposition is thinking about defeating him or not he’ll have this argument out in the ether already as a hammer over them. He will claim that the only real options are support his budget or go straight to another election. Even though there are other options, he will say we wouldn’t follow those because that’s not ‘what Canadians would expect’.

I’m sorry but the constitution and centuries of precedent are precisely not about ‘what people expect’, that’s why we have them, sometimes people expect dumb things and over the centuries we’ve developed this system that works pretty well. Just because some people aren’t aware of it doesn’t mean its not there. And I think Harper is exaggerating how many people aren’t aware of it, I think Canadians understand their system pretty well. Most of the people against a coalition support a party which is itself a coalition of the old Reform/Alliance and PC party.  They don’t like a coalition because of who they expect it to be.

Harper knows all about parliamentary legitimacy, but he’s playing this as a strategy to set up later choices. Since he doesn’t actually expect to be in those situations at all he doesn’t need to worry about them. He’s doubling down his bet on what seems like a sure thing, it can only help him later, even if it does damage the nation.
Just like Jack talking about what he’d do if he were prime minister…oh wait, hmmm.

It shall be an exciting/heart wrenching election. I am looking forward to and dreading it in equal measure.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this but…there are a LOT of old people around. By young people I’ll be very broad here and say everyone who is young at heart and/or under 35 (I’m in there somewhere…ahem).

Basically, the people in the 1950′s were so happy after the war that they had a lot of babies and now those babies and reaching retirement in mass numbers.

And you know what? Old people vote like crazy.

So it’s no wonder that politicians who want to get elected talk about things old people worry about (like pensions, healthcare, taxes, pensions, prescription drug plans. Those  are all…you know great. Just, great.). But if you are young and want politicians to talk about things that interest you (like say: education, jobs, democracy, equality, the environment, drug enforcement, education, addiction treatment, jobs, transportation, mental health, the environment …) then you need to vote. Like these crazy people at UBC have promised to:

Wow, go UBC! Your move UofT. Your. Move.

But frankly, if you’re reading this blog, the chances are you are already going to vote anyways.

So, why am I even talking? Shouldn’t I be working on my thesis? Yes, getting back to it any minute now.

But apparently it isn’t university graduates or students or the politically active who are dragging the youth vote stats down. So if you’re in university or college you are as likely to vote as the rest of the population. The problem is everyone else. So what we all need to do now is share videos like this and these on facebook so our old high school friends can see them. We need to talk to people we know who are less interested in politics and convince them that no matter who they vote for, the politicians are never going to start talking about the things young people care about until we start voting for and against them.

So you know, let’s do this thing. The election is May 2, so you have less than two weeks to convince a couple of your cynical, apathetic, no-one-person-can-make-a-difference friends to drag up enough belief to actually mark that piece of paper. You can do it, you’re super-persuasive. I believe in you.

To prove that, here’s a gift…sorry.

Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Are we really saying that anyone who hasn’t stayed in Canada their whole lives need not apply for the job of trying to run this country? Frankly, I’d like my leaders to have travelled a bit, lived in other parts of the world, compared societies.  Whenever I have been away from Canada for an extended period I find my understanding and love of my country only grows. You can learn a lot through being forced to consider an outside perspective on your homeland.

We need outside the box thinking to move Canada forward through some of the challenges facing it. The best way to come up with those ideas or become open to them is to actually be out of the box for a while. And no, two weeks in Turks and Caicos every year doesn’t cut it. I’m not saying Michael Ignatieff has shown a lot of ability for a lot of out the box of thinking, but he has a better chance of being open to it than Stephen Harper. Harper has spent his entire life in Canada working for a partisan cause focussed on altering the nature of political debate in this country so that his minority beliefs can become mainstream political discourse. That’s necessarily a bad thing in case you can’t tell.

Like a wise man once said, the people who want power the most and go to any means in order to seek it, should be disqualified from attaining it.  Its refreshing and proper for someone to come to the decision to serve their society through politics after a successful career elsewhere rather than to work towards politics as a focus of everything they’ve done in their entire lives.  Do we really want career politicians or do we want the best people with diverse backgrounds and experiences contributing to run our country?

Carpetbaggers? I say lets find more of them.

This prompted me to suggest that UBC has got to do one of these. But really, students in every university and college in Canada could easily throw together a fun video of young people dancing, singing and committing to vote.

I mean, they could…they won’t, but they could.  If only they had some kind of incentive….

Anyways. As I was thinking about this a song came up on my ipod and blew me away.  Have you ever listened to the lyrics of Arcade Fire’s “Month of May”.  If you think about this election, which will be on May 2, while listening to the song it’s pretty much perfect.  Did Arcade Fire know we would have an election this May? Did they know that we’d have been going “around and around and around” since “2009, 2010″ and that we’d want to  ”cut the wires away” and “start again in the month of may”.  If only we could “shock (them) in the suburbs” and make a “record in the month of may”, a record young voter turnout.

Yah, so I’m just gonna go ahead and assume they knew all that when they wrote it. If only we could stop the “kids standing with their arms folded tight”, because we can’t lift up our democracy without them and really “how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?” Have you got shivers yet?

But you know kids, they won’t do anything unless it makes them famous on the internetz or gets them backstage to a big concert with say….Arcade Fire.

Um…. just wait a sec…

hey @arcadefire would you promise to play a concert at the Uni with best Vote Mob lipdub video? http://wp.me/peHtN-of @leadnowca—
Mark Crowley (@rateldajer) April 10, 2011

Wouldn’t. That. Be. Amazing?

The winning video could be selected by the most views on YouTube plus some added polling from the website wizards at LeadNow.ca (since I’m volunteering other people to do work).  Or you know, whichever one Arcade Fire thinks is the most awesome.

Roll final credits….

Let’s make a record this Month of May.

More young voters than ever before.

Do something they’ll never expect and

send a shock to the suburbs.

On May 2, Vote.

Update McGill: Great votemob video for McGill and I approve of their choice of music.  Be sure to read the signs, see what young people are really interested in. I predict votemobs are going to explode now that the Conservative party has literal grab for taking votes away from young people.  Hopefully they can remain non-partisan events in spite of this but like the man says, some things have a well known liberal (small L there) bias: reality and young people.

Nuclear Option: The Liberal party makes a statement in the last two weeks of the campaign such as

If we form government, our party will put forward legislation to create a commission to look into reform of our democratic institutions to improve inclusivity, representation and fairness. Specifically, this commission will look at the issue of reforming our electoral system to switch to a more fair system which ensures that every vote counts equally.  Voters for every party have difficult choices before them and often do not get their fair influence over the makeup of parliament.

This must change.

We commit to having a referendum within one year of forming government on whether some kind of electoral reform should be investigated. This will provide the mandate for the commission to look at specific options and put forward recommendations to parliament within two years. Thus if we are elected to a majority government these recommendations will come out before the next federal election and we can get on with the work of fixing our democratic deficit as well as our economic deficit.
- Imaginary Michael Ignatieff

This is a specific promise and it would be a call to all voters who feel their votes are being wasted to make a change. If the Liberals renege on this promise they would be decimated in the following election.  But if they make this promise they will get waves of strategic votes from Green, NDP and maybe even old PC style conservative voters (who could see this as a way to get to a state of  choosing between a Blue Liberal and a moderate conservative parties that could work together in parliament).

It won’t lose the Liberals any votes.  The NDP will complain it is a tactic to encourage strategic voting against them but (1) Jack has already hinted he doesn’t mind a bit of that and (2) the NDP can’t legitimately say this is a bad thing since any type of electoral reform would benefit them greatly. The Green’s would have an…well, they’d be excited, let’s say that. Harper would likely attack them of trying to rig the voting system to guarantee they’d win and that they don’t respect our fantastic centuries old voting system that nobody uses and even Britain is considering ditching. But with their record on respect for democracy you don’t need to even worry about that, anyone who is upset at them about the contempt etc. will be onside with you, everyone who isn’t upset has already made up their mind.

I don’t expect this to be an idea Iggy will come up with or go for initially.  But I do expect Bob Rae, Carolyn Bennett and Joyce Murray to bring it up at some strategy meeting and argue that it’s so crazy, it might just work. And you actually haven’t thought of this before then I’m totally ok with you just stealing the idea and pretending you came up with it, just do it!

But this election is very necessary and pivotal. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be very different than the last one we had 2.5 years ago.  I realized over the past week that every time I wanted to say something it turned out I had actually written about the same topic last election.

Just think about it what are the topics this election? Should the Green party be in the debate? Is a coalition a valid option? Who is this Liberal leader and can he really run the country? Does Stephen Harper have a secret agenda? Is vote swapping or strategic voting a valid strategy for overcoming our horrible voting system? Does Jack Layton really think he can be Prime Minister? I mean, hopefully we don’t get the same result as well, that would be embarrassing. Of course, there is the contempt thing which is new, but no one (the Conservatives or the media) are talking about that much so…I guess it isn’t that important….sigh.

So anyways, I’m not going to rewrite them. Reduce, reuse recycle right?  I’ve created a category for last elections posts and some tidbits I did scratch down so far this year. That should cover it for the election. Hopefully there will be a different result in the end so at least I will have to respond to that.

Oh, and one more standard I guess:  Will any leader of a major party have the courage to stand up and promise to fix our democratic system so we can get off this crazy hamster wheel? Sadly I don’t think any update to this question will be necessary.

So, happy election season Canada. It only comes every two years, so enjoy it.

Recommend this post on ProgressiveBloggers.ca

“The way to stop Stephen Harper from getting a majority is to take Conservative seats one by one, and defeat the MPs who are there. That’s how you stop Mr. Harper from getting a majority,”

I agree with the Cat, this is a fantastic development.

I am very happy that the NDP has brought forward the idea of strategic voting rather than parading around talking about Jack Layton becoming Prime Minister.  I argued last election that strategic voting is the only kind of voting that makes any sense, especially given our  flawed first-past-the-post voting system. This is even more true today than it was two and a half years ago.

The Greens won’t like this because while this is a call out by the NDP to Liberal voters in weak Liberal seats in BC and the prairies, it is really dropping the gauntlet on Green voters.  I sincerely hope that Elizabeth May wins her seat this election but otherwise I think everyone who sees the necessity of defeating the Conservatives needs to think strategically and vote smart.  In safe Liberal or NDP seats that means as much as possible to vote Green to help with their funding and popular support but in close seats it unfortunately means biting your tongue and going with the least worst option.

This would all be more depressing however if it results in a narrow Liberal minority win and nothing changes, dooming the Greens to no seats and continuing the travesty of the NDP getting less seats than the Bloc. The second element that is required and that we must vigilantly harangue candidates about is democratic reform and especially electoral reform. Recently Mr. Andrew Coyne to committed to bugging them on just this issue, let’s be sure he lives up to that

@acoyne I hope you are as vigourous in demanding answers on each party's plans for #demreform as you are of Libs on #coalition—
Democracy Reform (@democracyreform) March 27, 2011

@democracyreform Just watch me.—
  (@acoyne) March 27, 2011

To be clear, strategic voting is not a fix to our system, it is a hack, a necessary bandaid for a broken system. A system that is bleeding worse each election as fewer and fewer voters show up cast their vote and see it immediately wasted.  Jack Layton has taken a brave step forward today in admitting that. Hopefully he will take further steps in the campaign by making a clear commitment to requiring an investigation of electoral reform as a requirement for supporting a Liberal or Conservative minority.  Even more importantly, hopefully his brave and reasonable stance will inspire Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals to commit to fixing the democratic deficit that exists in our country which includes such outrages as: unfair elections, dangerous precedents of Senate interference and out of control Prime Ministerial power to name just a few.

Recommend This Post

Today, as the Liberals put forward a motion to find the Conservative government in contempt for withholding information and misleading parliament, House government leader John Baird used the phrase “Tyranny of the Majority” to describe the action. I wrote  last week about another MP using this same outrageous phrase.  It is actually quite surprising for Minister Baird to use the phrase “Tyranny of the Majority” since it raises awareness that they literally do not have a majority of the seats in parliament. Many Canadians assume that whoever forms government won a majority of the seats, this is rarely the case but this simple statement may actually cause some soft supporters of the Conservatives to pay a bit of attention and realize that a fundamental democratic principle, the fundamental democratic principle, is being trampled on.

I find this is incredibly embarrassing. To any international readers or people visiting Canada from other democratic countries or countries that dream of having democracy, I simply don’t know what to say. You see, our current government won the most seats in the last election. This was just 44% of the seats in parliament and only 38% of the actual votes cast nationwide. But it was slightly more seats than any two other parties could put together so forming a coalition to beat them was hard. It was especially hard since they attacked the very idea of having a coalition of parties ruling parliament. I know, coalitions are common in parliamentary systems, to the point where Canada is the only country of its type that does not have a coalition government or hasn’t had one in recent years. This is especially ironic given that the Conservatives essentially toyed the idea of a coalition when they were on the opposition side in a similar situation just 7 years ago. They even signed a letter with opposition parties to the Governor General to that effect; a letter which we will probably get to see  during the upcoming election campaign.

Most of our international friends and immigrants arriving in Canada fleeing horrible, undemocratic regimes around the world would love to have the problem of a Tyranny of the Majority. They would love to have a group of parties that actually represented more than half the population to rule in a united and respectful way.  We are not talking about a majority oppressing a disadvantaged and ostracized minority population here.  That would be bad.  What we are talking about is Tyranny over the ruling government by a a majority of the representatives in the legislature! Just read that sentence again, roll it around in your head for a bit.  Yes, that is what it actually means. It’s nothing less than a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental principle of democracy.  After everything else this government has done: the lying, the witholding information, the gutting of government instituions, the favouring of big business, the wreckless spending without a plan for development, the attempts to sabotage climate action; after all this, House leader John Baird’s single statement of contempt for democracy really says it all.

And I think the opposition parties should sing it to the hilltops. “Tyranny of the Majority”: The Harper Government™ thinks that your right as a voter to have a say, to have the majority voice be heard in parliament is worthy of the word Tyranny. It is abundantly clear that the Conservatives are playing a different game than the rest of us in Canada at the moment. They aren’t actually playing the game called representative democracy. They are playing a game though, and they are playing it on us.

Recommend this post on ProgressiveBloggers.ca

In case you haven’t heard, the UN Security Council just approved a No Fly Zone over Libya.  The wording was stronger than expected allowing “any necessary actions” to protect civilians from being massacred by Gaddafi’s forces. Word has it that Canada has already committed to send six of our estimated 120 CF-18 Hornets to help enforce the No Fly Zone.  This is a good thing if it will save lives and avoid a massacre.  It needs to be targetted and to avoid cilivian areas as much as possible and not be part of any occupation force but rather an enablement of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny.

But this provides a tricky situation for Canadian politicians. In case you aren’t up to date on the latest intricacies of  Canadian politics let me fill you in on some relevant tidbits (it’s ok, most Canadians aren’t up to date either):

• today a committee in parliament just advised finding Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper in  contempt of parliament. If all goes according to plan this motion will be voted in parliament on monday or tuesday and would mark the first time a government has ever been found in contempt in Canadian history.  The complaint concerns the minority government refusing to turn over cost estimates for various ‘tough on crime’ bills despite repeated demands from the majority in parliament.
• on top of that, this tuesday, the government is due to release its budget. Given the various shenanigans the Conservative party has gotten up to in the past five years of its minority rule it is almost certain that the opposition parties will defeat the government and send Canadians to an election.
• One of the contentious actions of the “Harper Government” (as they’ve been officially calling themselves in communiques for the past year, as opposed to the traditional “Government of Canada”… yes, I’m serious) has been the order of 65 new F-35 advanced strike fighters at a continuously ballooning cost of $30 billion dollars without considering any other tenders or spending options.  So using a few of our older fighter jets right now for a high profile (and worthy) mission when the opposition has been criticizing the purchase of  new jets is…a sticky situation.

I’m sure the war rooms of the opposition parties and the government are deep in thought over the optics of various responses at this point.  I would encourage them all to look at the situation in a level headed manner and put the lives of people in Libya ahead of their partisan hatchets and strategies.

If we can help in Libya, we should help. If that requires a vote, vote for it.

But that also doesn’t mean you can’t vote down the government for all the other things it has done. The military can function as it is. The Prime Minister is in charge until he’s not, their is no vacuum of power. This means even through an election he’s in charge and after it until a new government is selected. So there is no reason we can’t have an election and help Libya at the same time.

Fellow Tory Scott Armstrong suggested opposition parties are abusing their dominant position in a minority Parliament, making unreasonable demands for information that would normally be regarded as cabinet confidences and sending officials on “wild goose chases.”

“At what point does the tyranny of majority run roughshod over the ability of parliamentarians from all parties really to do their job that they were sent here to do?” Mr. Armstrong asked.

Lets be clear here. “Tyranny of the Majority” is an important concept that has its place. If a majority of citizens try to remove the rights of a minority group or enslave part of the population then this is Tyranny of the Majority and it should be stopped. The reason we have the Charter of Rights is to avoid the Tyranny of the Majority regarding fundamental rights in our society. Since our voting system highly favours giving majorities in parliament it is a very important precaution.

At the moment of course, parliament is not in a majority situation despite our majority favouring, first-past-the-post voting system.  The Harper Government™ has a minority of seats in parliament.  So the ‘tyranny’ taht Mr. Armstrong is talking about is not the domination by a majority of the population against a challenged ethnic group or gender. He is taking about the ‘tyranny’ of a majority of the duly elected members of parliament trying to get their way against the complaints of the minority who actual control the levers of power.  What he is complaining about is exactly the opposite of Tyranny.  If anything it is whining that the Conservatives are having their Tyranny of the Minority interfered with by the majority of MPs.

This is the most shocking statement I’ve heard from a government official since, well since…

Am I wrong here?

General: Feet up on desk, smoking a pipe, reading the tabloids. Shakes head dismissively at article.

Officer: Walks in hurriedly, grasping a paper. “Sir! …” before he is interrupted

General: Slaps tabloid with his hand. “Tell me Jenkins! How does he get his hair like that? Can you fathom it? Its seems one solid mass, I just can’t imagine it. Why are you so flustered, have you been running again Jenkins? Get me a cup of tea will you? Oh, and those orange biscuits.”

Officer: “…uh, yes sir. But, sir. We’ve got a report from that special forces mission to Libya.”

General: Brightens up, “What’s that? Special forces, oh, yes, trying to take out that Qadabybabi right?”

Officer:  “Ghaffafi sir, its Maumar Ghaffafi. And they weren’t trying to take him out, they were just going to make contact with the rebels.”

General: Puffs, flustered. “Right well, don’t take all day I’ve important things to attend to”, shuffles papers, “Report!”.

Officer: Stands up straight, hands paper to General. “Well, sir, they’ve been captured sir.”

General: “Captured! Our elite special forces taken prisoner by that dictator? Outrageous! If he doesn’t return them immediately he’ll have to deal with…”

Officer: “Uhm, no sir, they were captured….by the rebels. “

General: Goes pale, “Oh. Well. Well that’s, hmm. Captured by the rebels eh?  Maybe they’re not so ramshackle a group after all if they can capture our best men, whatwhat?

Officer: Squirms uncomfortably, “Well actually sir, they were captured by guards…on a wheat farm. Then they were handed over to the rebels.”

General: Stunned silence.

Officer: “They flew in by helicopter you see sir. And no one knew they were coming so they assumed the worst.  They were captured as soon as they landed, were interrogated and are now being treated well apparently. Eggs, sausages and tea, sir. We’ve spoken to them. They’d like to come home now if that’s alright sir.”

General: “Right. Well, I suppose they’re all trained and using weapons we supplied them?”

Officer: “Um, no sir, we’ve heavily supplied Ghadaffi’s army in the past and we haven’t helped the rebels yet.”

General: Picks up pipe. “Fine. Get them home. Tell the Libyans it was all a test, and they passed with flying colours. And get me that damn cup of tea Jenkins.”

Officer: “Right away sir.”

Hello Joyce,

I get a lot of your fliers in the mail and I am a usual Liberal voter though I wouldn’t consider myself a partisan. But I hope you’ll takemy message seriously into account tomorrow.
Tomorrow the NDP motion regarding 1) electoral reform and 2) abolition of the senate will come up for a vote.I know you have been interested in issues of democracy for some time so I’m sure you’re considering this vote seriously.  I’d just like to you let you know that on balance I support this motion and I seriously hope you and your party will as well, with the following caveat.
I think the choice of the NDP to work point 2) as restricted to abolition is an unnecessary and distracting poison pill. It  is not clear at all what should be done about the Senate and though it clearly needs reform abolition in a referendum question is probably the worst and most ill advised way to go about it.  Canadians should have a national discussion about this issue.
I don’t know how these processes work but if it is possible to vote in favour of their motion and then modify (2) to be to discuss Senate reform in committee I would highly encourage that.
Because their point (1) is essential in order to save our democracy from the growing unfairness it is experiencing.  I know many Liberals have their own idea about what electoral reform means but escalating this discussion to a parliamentary committee that would take input from the public would be a fantastic step forward. Don’t let the NDP’s wording about the Senate stop you from making the right choice if there is any way to change it.
Thank you

Mark Crowley

Think back to high school. Lets say there’s this bully who likes the same girl (or guy) as you. They don’t want you to go to the dance because you’ll distract their love interest. But this bully’s not a dummy, he doesn’t threaten to beat you up. Instead he taunts you about dancing.

Bully : “Oh you’re a dancer, why would you want to got to a stupid dance, only losers go to the dance, no one’s gonna dance with you anyways.”

So what do you do? What would you tell your kids to do? The right answer, is to stand up to them, in this case, ignore and go anyways.

The CPC approach to a coalition of the NDP and Liberal party is sort of like that. They don’t want a coalition to happen and be taken seriously by the public because it would be the end of their tenuous minority reign.  They know it’s a legal possibility and the fact the UK is functioning perfectly well with a coalition that was formed after a hard fought election makes it plain on the face of it that there is no problem with a coalition in our parliamentary system.  In fact, citizens of every other parliamentary democracy laugh when they hear Canadians fretting about whether a coalition is legal or illegitimate. “Don’t they even understand their own system?”, they say.

The only thing the Conservatives can do is make you feel stupid for even imagining such an action and raise fear of collusion with ‘separatists and socialists’.  The former is not true since the Bloc would never be part of an official coalition unless they renounced separatism and the cause of separatism is weaker in Quebec than its ever been right now.  Needing their support (if it is needed) to maintain a government would be no different than the current Conservative government’s need to maintain support on issues of confidence from the Bloc, NDP or Liberals. They have been doing this for five years without forming any kind of coalition.  The use of ‘socialists’ as a smear is offensive to any Canadians who actually believe the state has an important part to play in our society. This counts most Canadians since universal healthcare and everything it implies is consistently the number one thing Canadians list with pride as defining Canadian identity.

So my advice to Jack and Iggy is to go to the dance.

Stand up to these bully’s and refute their silly accusations.  Run against each other but with respect so that if the electorate deems both your parties worthy (something you really need to work on convincing us of), you can choose to work together to make parliament work. If you tear each other down the whole time that will be harder.

But if you rule out working together right off the bat then you’re just falling into the bully’s trap and you’ll never get the girl (or guy).

• Tomorrow I will voting in a provincial election with no more than 90,000 other people.
• The votes will be ranked. I can must rank at least two choices and can choose to rank all four candidates.
• The votes will be weighted by riding so that each riding has equal weight, essentially decreasing the power of each vote in large ridings and increasing the relative voice of smaller ridings.
• So unlike normal elections the votes from each riding will be heard. People who live in ridings that did not vote for the governing party will have much more voice than they did in the last election.
• The voting will take place online over a twelve hour period and the results will be ready almost instantly once polls are closed and counted.
• The choice of the election will immediately become premier of British Columbia.
• I had to pay $10 for the right to be one of these 90,000 people.

As for my second choice, we’ll see, might wait until I listen to the House tomorrow morning

• Tyranny of the Majority in Parliament(Mar 2011): MP Scott Armstrong uses the phrase “Tyranny of the Majority” to refer to the majority of MPs asking the minority government to account for its budget estimates. Some say the majority in parliament are final say in the land, some Conservatives seem to think it’s rather whoever is getting briefings from the Prime Minister’s Office instead.
• Never-Ending-Appealathon (Feb 2011) : Immigration Minister Jason Kenny defends the government’s approach of continuosly appealing to the same Federal court to keep two Tamil refugees in prison even though every court has said the government’s suspicions of their terrorists connections are unfounded. A federal judge rebuked the government for using this loophole to essentially keep the refugees in prison forever without conviction.
• Not-gate (Feb 2011): Minister Bev Oda modifies a funding documents after it has been signed by others and then lies about it for weeks and weeks and weeks. Then admits and says she’s done nothing wrong.
• Oshawhat? (Jan 2011): The city council of Oshawa decides to appoint a new member for a full term after an unexpected resignation rather than having a by-election in order to save money.
• Senate Renege (November 2010): The Senate, dominated by Conservatives committed to reforming the appointed chamber for being undemocratic, defeats a bill passed by a majority of elected MPs in the house because it can.
• Censusgate : The government orders Statistics Canada to end the mandatory long form census, against their advising and an overwhelming chorus of scientists, business groups, charities and churches who say it will diminish the ability to run the country and is one of the most effective and respectful census’ in the world.
• Proroguathon (December 2008): Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogues parliament in order to avoid defeat

I know I’m missing at least a few big ones, please remind me of what’s missing.

The party is the BC Liberal party. The issue is weighting a votes by riding.

The current rules say that each party member will get one vote towards the leader.  The new rule would weight the votes from party members in each riding so that each riding has an equal voice.  The reasoning is that in an election each riding gets one choice to pick the liberals or not and so each riding should have an equal say in choosing the leader.

Sounds like it might be reasonable.  The good part is that it will help unify liberals across the province, letting people in rural ridings know their voice matters and preparing the ground for a competitive election.  If each riding has roughly the same number of member who will vote for leader then there is no problem with this.  In fact, in that case it wouldn’t really be that necessary.

The fact people are proposing this change indicates to me that there are a lot more party members in the cities than in the rural parts of the province.  On the face of it what instituting this rule tells urban members is “Your voice matters, but not as much as the rural members. So we’re going to listen to you less.”

From the riding point of view it’s fine.  This means essentially that each riding only gets one vote and all the members from that riding get to have their own mini election to decide who their riding will vote for.  If what happens is that everyone in each riding gets together and agrees on a leader to advise, then those votes go off to the main vote it will be an honest process.

But that’s not what is going to happen as I understand it. By letting each member vote individually online and then weighting urban votes down you are giving the opinions of individual members in rural areas more say over who should be leader.  Rural voters shouldn’t get more say over the winner, they should get equal say.

What I’m worried about is statistical significance.  Like the scrapping of the long-form census, if you use less data you can’t make the same conclusions.  In this case, if some riding up in the Peace has a six times less members than my riding at UBC, then each of the people in that riding, voting online get 6 times more say than I do.  Why even have everyone vote if our votes don’t all count in the same way.  Under this system when I vote I will actually be trying to sway who my riding will put forward as the leader, this is a very different thing.

Let me be clear, it might be a better way to do it. Maybe there are really enough members in each riding to get a good sense of  what people in that riding want, in which case its fine. But if some riding has just a few hundred people and mine has thousands then you could get a very skewed answer from the small riding if you don’t have a really good sample of the population.

This is the reason why during elections we make sure that all ridings have roughly the same number of voters, so that weighting is unnecessary.  Since the party list could vary a lot between ridings you need to take the true population into account.  But simply weighting each vote can cause big problems if some of the ridings have very few members voting.

This is not a criticism of any candidate which are supporting this change.  I only know about this because I am interested in seeing Christy Clark as premier and she’s for this change. The fact that she and others are even thinking about this is great since it shows thinking about the legitimacy of votes and improving our democratic system.

But I would encourage the party to consider the statistical implications of this and make sure that it is implemented in a way that does not give a huge weight to a small number of people just in order to try to reduce a perceive rural/urban divide.  If the riding sizes vary alot and there is no way to correct these errors then it might be better to simply treat each member equally.

… crossposted from Computationally Thinking, read the rest here …

The Oshawa city council just held municipal elections a few months ago just like the rest of Ontario.  Now, just three months after that election one of their councillors has had to step down because of a previously unknown job conflict.  So the council has decided that rather than hold a by-election to fill the seat they’ll just appoint someone to sit out the full term.

Is you’re blood starting to boil yet? No? Are you sure you’re reading the right blog?

Ok, what about this?

But councillor Nester Pidwerbecki insisted the majority of taxpayers don’t support the added expense of another vote.

How’s that even relevant? The majority of voters might not support all kinds of things like taxes, or rights for minorities or the sitting government in parliament… We don’t change the way the system fundamentally works every time a majority of people think so. That’s why we have a constitution which requires a supermajority  to change and centuries of common law that can’t be overridden on a whim. And how do you know a majority doesn’t support it without holding an election?

But alright, maybe you’re still not feeling it? Ok, how about if councillor Nancy Diamond said this:

“We need to get this albatross off the back of council … and get that empty seat filled with the very best person we can find,”

The “very best person we can find”. That’s just fantastic. That’s democracy in action, searching the land for  ”good people” and letting a council of wise men decide who shall have power and who shall not in the best interests of the land.  That’s what all those civil wars in England were for, that’s what all those wars in Europe were fought for, that’s what the suffrage movement and the civil rights movement and others have been fighting for throughout the centuries.  So Oshawa city council can decide they know best and just pick someone to sit out the next four years rather than go through the bother of asking the people.  Oh and it saves some money too, about a $1 a voter.  So you know, you could either keeps centuries of tradition, the foundation of our modern democratic society and the rule of law or you could get a dollar to put towards your double-double tomorrow morning.

Am I overreacting? Yes I’m overreacting. And I think it’s worth overreacting over a decision that seems to have made so offhandedly.  It means people in our city councils don’t actually think of themselves as being selected to serve in a democratic system.  They think they have been anointed, that they are the chosen wise ones who know what is best for those they represent rather than being hired by those people to do a job they don’t want to do.

Oshawa.  I never thought I’d write a post about you, don’t make this the only time. Make me write another one next week where I get to use the sentence “Oshawa quickly came to it’s senses and made the right decision.”

Thanks.

I just spent New Year’s Eve in Vancouver.  It’s the first time in the 7 years I’ve been here that I haven’t gone to Seattle or Toronto or been at a friend’s party.  So we did something different, we went up Seymour Mountain for a bit of night snowshoeing.  A very romantic guided hike through the mountains on a pristine night with chocolate fondue in a little nook and table made of snow. Magical.  And the city below looked magical too.

Then began our search to find some fun on New Year’s Even in no-fun Vancouver without a reservation and standing in line for an hour.

Everything closed up on Seymour at 9:30, I assume so people can get home and to their new year’s parties elsewhere, fair enough.  So off we went back into town in search of some fun.

For the past week we’ve been looking to find a public, free new year’s party in Vancouver.  No go.  There are no fireworks and there are no nice parties that cost less than about $130 and require reservations.  The convention centre is an expensive Gala and the Family Friendly First Night celebration was not happening this year.

So what to do?

Well, after this year’s hugely successful Winter Olympics the answer was clear, go to Robson Square and Granville Street.

I used to say when I moved to Vancouver that the city had no centre. Where would you go if the world was about to end? Or if there was something huge to celebrate? There was no Times Square, or Nathan Phillips Square in Vancouver.  During the Olympics that changed, Robson Square and the newly enlightened Granville Strip became the nexus of the city, the place where the pulse of Vancouver, such as it is, beats.  So, I was shocked when the moment the Paralympics were over and the fire show was taken down that the entire block of Robson Square was buried in construction from which is still has not escaped.  The momentum after the Olympics was palpable, the feeling that Vancouver was beginning to have a soul was right there.  And the place it would be seen was Robson Square, but Robson Square has been a pile of construction for 9 months now with no sign of being returned to us anytime soon.

Hiding under the construction the beautiful skating rink until Robson Square was indeed still open tonight. There was no live music like during the Olympics but it was full of people skating and people watching skaters, people waiting for the clock to tick over and people remembering the all the great moments of this great year for Vancouver spent in this very spot.

So when did the rink close? 11pm. There was a children’s festival apparently, it ended at … 9pm, complete with a countdown, for Eastern Standard Time?.  So then what? Surely the party doesn’t end when the ball drops in New York or when Gord Martineau says good night in Toronto.

Well, there was one place left.  The true pulse of the city, the Granville Strip.

The Granville Strip,  where countless thousands crammed the streets after Canada won the gold medal in men’s hockey.  The rowdy, bawdy Granville Strip full of clubs and fast food and officially sanctioned counter culture wares.

It was teeming with people.  At 11pm when we passed it first most people were standing in line for clubs or hurriedly rushing between clubs trying to get in somewhere.  But by 11:45 all the fashionable people in black suits, short dresses and funny hairdos were gone.  The only people left were, well, the normal people.  Wearing whatever they were wearing.  Some had party hats. There were lots of young people.  There quite a few older people watching the spectacle.  There were not people who couldn’t get in to a club, they were people who had no intention of going to one.  They can to Granville to be in the centre of the city. Everyone was taking pictures, of the crowd and of other people taking pictures. Various groups were singing and dancing, trying to start a trend. Others were just standing, taking it all in.  The Epicentre was Granville and Robson.

But we were all waiting for something.  Waiting for the new year.  It was the ultimate flash mob, unplanned, unexpected and without a leader. Thousands of people, just there, waiting.  But there would be no sign.  The clock tower over the Vancouver building was being renovated too behind a shield of scaffolding and dark.  The huge Future Shop screen towered over us all, projected ads for TVs and cellphones, ignoring the moment entirely.  A&W around the corner had a projection of an add on the wall of Sears, no mention of the New Year there either. So we all waited.  The crowd was loud, but there was no real pattern.  Each busker down the street had a crowd around them, forming a little community.  Reporters were there, filming the crowd, and influencing the crowd.  The most dramatic waves of noise were caused by 50 people cheering whenever the CBC pointed their camera at them.  Everyone seemed to be wondering “Is something going to happen?” or would the new year pass us all, unnoticed, while we waited for it.

I had hoped somehow that a magic moment would occur, that we’d all start counting down at the right time and then we’d all break into ‘Auld Lang Syne’, that’s what would happen in the movie.  But in the real world a catalyst is needed and the results can be unpredictable.

I saw a lot of disappointed faces staring at the FutureShop ads waiting for some sign that it was now midnight and we should all scream.  When my phone said midnight I yelled “Happy New Year!” and kissed my wife.  But other people found there moment at different times, screaming  as they decided it was in fact now 2011.

At one point a group of guys near the epicenter at the intersection starting counting backwards from 10,9,8… and everyone joined in.  It was the most closure the crowd was going to get.

The worst part is that it would have taken very little leadership to turn this impromptu gathering into a great moment in the life of the city.  If a clever manager of FutureShop or A&W, both who have large screens visible from the square had thought about it for a moment they could have owned the people’s New Year’s Eve by projecting a clock with a countdown instead of, or beside their ads.  Even better, there could have been a stage on the North side of the intersection facing south along the new pulse of the city, looking down the lit Granville Strip.  There would be music, there would local personalities speaking and maybe even the mayor counting down the last seconds.  That would have been something unifying for the whole city, even for those who were in a club or on a boat, that would be the centre of the celebration.

Oh well, maybe next year.

Update: Other articles on Vancouver’s ‘no-fun’ new years

• From the CBC

I’m dreaming of a drenched Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be dry

I’m dreaming of a drenched Christmas
With each umbrella that I try
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be dry

May your days be merry and bright,
and may all your Christmases be dry.

After three years of Conservative disregard for the institutions of democracy, embarrassing delinquency on climate change and international diplomacy, debasing of rational, science based decision making and the reckless use of the power of government fan the flames of a culture war to keep the country divided; finally we, the voters might have the chance, however flawed, to make our voice heard.   The Liberals seem to be more inspired about corporate tax cuts and fighter planes, but hey, whatever works for you.

An election will be good for the country, but not necessarily because it will actually lead to a different makeup in parliament, because that’s not very likely to happen.

One possibility is that the results of the recent by-elections will be part of  a trend of voters aggressively voting strategically and abandoning the NDP and Greens to defeat (or try to defeat) conservatives.  The election could really turn into more of a two way fight in most of the country.  This could conceivably lead to a Liberal minority government.  Maybe.  Or maybe the NDP will rebound and build on recent gains in Quebec.

But even if that doesn’t happen there could still be a change if Gilles Duceppe jumps for the Premier’s job in Quebec and the Bloc does significantly worse as a result.  Then it might be possible that the Liberals and NDP form a coalition to enable coalition majority rule. But you know, probably not.

If none of that happens and Stephen Harper doesn’t implode by say, trying to branch out with his burgeoning singing career into Lady Gaga tunes, then we’ll likely get similar results to last election.

If the NDP+Libs somehow win more seats than the Cons, a Coalition will be possible, although a very weak one with only informal support from the Bloc.  But hey, that’s better than nothing, which is what 75% have right now in parliament, nothing.

If that isn’t even possible, then Iggy will have had his chance and will be expected to resign forthwith.  Would Jack step aside if the NDP get less seats than last election?  Would the Bloc implode in ‘nobody-wants-to-talk-about-sovereignty-Quebec’ when Gilles leaves to slay the provincial Liberals? Maybe even Harper will get tired of weak mandates and lack of progress and throw a bone to someone more able to rile old Progressive Conservative voters now sitting in the Liberal camp.  Nah, sorry, I’ve gone too far now, don’t know what I was thinking there.

No matter what, after the next election change would at the very least come in the form of new blood  somewhere or a change from weak rule by one party to weak rule by another.  At this point in the extended stalemate that is Canadian politics, that might be the biggest change we can hope for.

Image via CrunchBase

Cross-posted to Computationally Thinking

This is the time of year  when we all make a little effort to send a gift to our family and close friends.  Other friends get maybe card and no gift and that’s fine too, we aren’t all made of money and getting  good gift for people we know really well is hard enough.  But these days we also have a lot of ‘friends’ who may miss out on that card for whatever reason yet still deserve something.

Maybe you haven’t actually met and talked to them in years, or ever. You don’t even have their address but you see them on Facebook from time to time and you even chat once in a while or comment on their status or a link they posted.  They are more than acquaintances, you feel a connection. But they aren’t the friends you hang out with, at least not right now.  Let’s call them ffriends.

What is the proper way to let them know what they mean to you?  A broadcast post on your Facebook  wall is too little. It makes no distinction between family, friends,  ffriends and real acquaintances who you don’t really know but have ‘friended’ for whatever reason.

An individual e-card or Facebook message is too much, maybe you don’t really have enough to say to each ffriend individually and there could be lots of them.  But you do have some kind of connection. You like the occasional news about your ffriend’s lives. You like chatting with them and you maybe you hope that someday they become (or return to being) friends rather than just ffriends.

So here’s the idea. Sometime this holiday season put up a wall post something like the following:

My family and close friends get all the attention. But I just wanted to let you all know, that even though we don’t see each other much in the real world, haven’t met in years or have never met at all, I appreciate the connection that we do have and hope it grows in the future: @bobwhatisname @thatguyfromstarbucks @amyfromhighschool @louthemechanic @ericmythirdcousin @guyfromlastjob

Merry Holidays

Wouldn’t that be nice?  You need to do it right. Think about the wording and think carefully about the people you put on it.  Someone who thinks you are best buds in real life may not appreciate this, but then again, if its done with a positive tone maybe it will clarify a relationship.  You also don’t want to be too restrictive, go through your friend list and add everyone who isn’t an acquaintance and then take off people who you are sending a christmas card.

For me, there are loads of people I’ve got in touch with on Facebook who I haven’t seen in years.  We don’t actually talk that much but I appreciate them and hope to see them in the real world if the stars align properly.  Then there are other people I’ve never even met before. I know them as an issue or idea that we have in common, from a  discussions in a groups or through mutual friends.  These people would be pleasantly surprised to be added to an explicit list of people in this way. It would just be nice to give them all a nudge and say,

‘hey, you know, I notice you and I’m glad we’re having the connection we are having. Even if it is limited right now. Maybe, someday it will become more.  But either way, have a nice holiday. ok?’

Twitter actually has something like this every week.  Every friday tweeters post a #followfriday message, something like:

These are the ones, great tweeps #ff @mrawesome @msawesome @erictheguy @mikethedude @nancythefancy @jillthethrill

I have actually been arguing that follow friday needs to become more selective because many people just post multiple tweets with lists and lists of everyone they feel any connection to whatsoever.  This makes follow friday more of the shout out rather than the original intent of helping people find good tweeps to follow.  On follow friday I always try to limit myself to one person who was extra great that week as advice for anyone who cares to consider following them.  But my suggestion for the First Annual Holiday FFriend Shout Out is pretty much exactly how #followfriday works right now on twitter. But just once a year.

So, you know. Go do that.  If you like.  I think I will, now that I’ve suggested it and everything.

Initially the cables seemed mundane, Diplomatic gossip. Yet they indicated a surprising level of insight by the US diplomatic core into world issues.  It is encouraging because there are many things “everybody knows” about hotspots around the world and relations between nations that politicians never admit. So it’s nice to know they are actually aware of them, they just choose to hide that knowledge.

That swayed me back to being skeptical about the good of WikiLeaks since what they doing is essentially changing the rules in the middle of a poker game. Whether or not you like it, human negotiations usually involve lying and bluffing and you can’t argue that blowing all the bluffs of one side is really fair or productive, at least in the short run.

But then I thought, world politics shouldn’t be treated like a game, it’s far more important than that. So if a bit more transparency helps, in the long run, to lead to a more fair world then bit of embarrassment should be a small price to pay.  The comments about Iran and North Korea seemed potentially damaging to negotiations but not something that would start a war.

But the recent releases have pushed me back to criticism again.  Two sets of cables have come out that list international sites the US thinks are vital to their security and another that describes detailed planning for defending Europe from a Russian attack.  Now, it’s not surprising that these documents exist regardless of what people are trying to imply.  Listing the reasons an ally is strategically important to you is not espionage, but it’s also not something that everyone in the world might be able to figure out easily.  So it’s only useful for the US making its planning decisions about diplomacy, allies trying to strong-arm the US into giving them something in exchange for access to said strategic resource or to people trying to hurt the US by attacking these lightly defended assets.  Why do I need to know about this list? I don’t.

The NATO planning is similar, militaries around the world probably plan for all kinds of scenarios, some crazy and some pretty likely, so that they are prepared for all contingencies.  That’s what the military is there for.  So releasing a document that outlines one of these plans is not really useful for the public, undermines the plan itself if the situation arises and undermines delicate diplomatic relations between, in this case, Russia and NATO.  Russia knows that NATO has plans to defend against an attack by them.  But publishing only benefits Russia in using this as some form of pressure on Europe and the US, and as other WikiLeaks cables have shown us, the US believes that Russia is essentially now little more than a mafia state.  So why are you releasing information that only benefits a Mafia state?

That’s enough rambling, for now.  Pointless rambling too, since it doesn’t matter anymore if the leaks are good or bad, it doesn’t even matter if WikiLeaks is shut down or not.  The cat is out of the bag now, Information cannot be stopped, and Information can change the world. We need to get used to it.

Related Articles

• WikiLeaks: Nato allies have secret plan for defending eastern Europe from Russia (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘No one believes in Afghanistan any more:’ EU leader in WikiLeaks cable (theglobeandmail.com)
• WikiLeaks lists Canadian sites vital to US – CBC.ca (news.google.com)

Anyways, after hearing this news and an interview the other morning on the CBC my brain is saying…hey….Prime Minsiter Danny Williams?…. huh, huh?

He’s pretty cool, abrasive, in your face sure; but a reasonable and honest person when it comes down to it.  If the Liberals fail to win the next election there will be a large job opening that Danny Williams could potentially try to fill.  Locking down Atlantic Canada might be one benefit of this. Of course, then there’s this interview with the Premier about Quebec with the satirical program This Hour Has 22 Minutes

This video, besides being hilarious and a heartening reminder of the difference between how Canadian politicians behave from those in the US, makes one quickly rethink the whole PM Williams thing.  While some of his criticism of Quebec seem fair, it’s over the top and choosing a leader who’s regularly insulted Quebec is not a good way to get a majority (just look at Stephen Harper…bam!).

So, probably not, but as a high profile cabinet minister he would be  an asset to the Liberals regardless. This got me to thinking, I’m pretty sure we’ve never had a PM from Newfoundland, mostly Ontario and Quebec right? Even Harper’s actually from Toronto. But where were all the Canadian Prime Ministers born?

So I looked it up and made a map of the birthplaces of Canadian Primeminsiters because I couldn’t find one.  While its true Upper and Lower Canada get a lot of the PMs, I surpised at the spread up and down the Seaway. And who knew Nova Scotia had so many eh?

Do you find this surprising? For 30 points can you name the BC and Alberta PMs and who was the last PM from the UK, may be more recent than you think.

See the full google map here.

Update: Another crazy thought that occurs to me is that Mr. Danny Williams and Mr. Peter MacKay (who is also rumoured to be jumping ship soon) would both be interestingly placed to lead some kind of resurgence of the the Progressive Conservative party in the Maritimes.  There’s no sign that MacKay wants to betray is new master to resurrect his old one, but regional parties do a lot better in our system than national ones. A Maritime Progressive Conservative party that leaned on the progressive and less on the conservative could potentially lock down all the seats in the Maritimes and become a real coalition power broker in parliament making the Conservatives and Liberals beg you to support them in exchange for all kinds of goodies for the East Coast.

But that’s alternate universe crazy talk, don’t mind me…

Using the word “interregnum” to indicate a period between leaders is fine, it technically means the time between monarchs, but in an informal way it could be any leadership gap.  The reason it’s a disturbing choice of words is that it came after Mr. Hansen was being harangued by Stephen Quinn for several minutes about why they had to reverse it since government was still functioning.  It went something like this:

Stephen: “Did the premier go to the executive council of cabinet before the announcement”
Hansen : “Yes”
Stephen: “Did he go to you, the Finance Minister?”
Hansen: “Of course”
Stephen: “And you agreed it was a good idea?”
Hansen: “Absolutely.”

Absolutely.  It was absolutely a good idea, consistent with their normal decision making practice, but now that they have a leader who won’t be leader in 3 months they need to stop it.  They need to wait until a new leader is chosen by the party to see what that leader wants to do. Because they’re in this kind of “interregnum period” where they are rudderless, lost at sea, which no ability to make decisions.  The fact that he chose that phrase indicates how he thinks of role of the premier of BC.

This is strange because I was under the impression that the provincial legislature was made up of intelligent, free thinking adults empowered by democratic election to make decisions on behalf of the people of British Columbia. Apparently I’m wrong, apparently they’re actually a bunch of courtiers hanging on to the whims of their King, passing his laws, laughing at his jokes.

Is it really impossible for the BC cabinet to make any decisions of significance in the next three months because they don’t have a leader?  Can’t you all talk about things and come to a consensus on the best course of action to take on your own?  Perhaps even, deep breath, in the legislature for the public to see and the opposition to debate with you? Does the premier actually have that much power by definition?

I am pretty certain they do not. His courtiers give the permier that power by allowing them to act like a monarch. But remember that every elected member of a legislature has the same vote in the House and they all have the same amount of democratic legitimacy because they were all duly elected by the a riding of roughly the same size.

Apparently this is not how government actually works, at least not in BC.  Exhibit B is Bill Bennett’s ejection from the BC cabinet today (yes, it was quite a day for politics wasn’t it).  Bill Bennett was the Energy Minister until he dared to say out loud that Gordon Campbell should resign for the good of his party.  He also said some other things like Campbell is abusive, he made an ill advised comparison to spousal abuse and made the CBC broadcast the word “bullshit” on a wednesday afternoon.  It was basically awesome.  Now, according to the rules of cabinet he probably should have been ejected, and he’s very accepting of that But there was a fantastic chance for the BC Liberal cabinet to have their own I Am Sparticus moment here.

Mr. Hansen says the vote to eject Bennett had no dissenters, not that it was unanimous mind you, but that no one voted against it. Bennett, obviously, thinks many abstained and secretly supported him. Perhaps we’ll find out in the coming days, likely not.

But imagine the picture if instead of abstaining, each of those grown adults who are democratically empowered to speak for an average of 50,784 voters (pdf, Elections BC) in their riding instead stood and said:

Bill should shouldn’t have said what he said to the media.
But he’s right. This is bullshit, you should resign, and we should all get down to work rather than spending the next three months doing nothing but sucking up to the next power hungry monarch in waiting.
And if you eject Bill for this and you don’t resign, I’m going to go to the media tomorrow and saying exactly what he said.

But in the movie version it would just be:

I Am Sparticus!

Fin

@stephen_taylor Speaking of unelected… @elizabethmay has an opinion about all of thishttp://bit.ly/a1VIQK #cdnpoli

Of course I have to stand up to defend Elizabeth, so I go and read what she said just to see what Taylor’s yabbering about.  He’s seems concerned about her lack of electoral support but I hope he comes out tomorrow with a more pertinent response to todays news, because it strikes at the core of everything Conservatives hold dear.  And it is a crisis of democracy such as we have not seen since the proroguation of parliament.  And no, I’m not kidding.

Here’s what happened.

The Senate has defeated bill C-311 which was passed by the house.  That’s enough right there, it doesn’t even matter what the bill is about.  The Senate has apparently never defeated a bill passed by the house. Which is why many people, mostly Conservatives!, complain that it is an effectual and pointless body.  Personally, I think there is a place for the Senate, but if they are unelected they shouldn’t be overriding bills with broad support.  If they are elected you need to someone construct it so it is not a hyperpartisan chamber that bogs down government like in the US.  But the thing is that the biggest proponents of fixing the senate are Conservatives who constantly complain about how the previously Liberal dominated senate might override the will of the Canadian people.  Today, just months after the Conservatives finally regained control of the Senate by making enough appointments (which they said they would never do) they take the unprecedented and mindblowingly hypocritical step of using it to defeat a bill supported by parliament.  Something the Liberal senate never actually did!

Anyone? Anyone? Is anyone else angry about this?

Now, to make matters worse, the bill was a climate change bill meant to require government to plan how to meet its own emission reductions targets.  That’s right, not to set draconian targets, but to require that plans be made about how to meet the targets that have already been set.

Canadians support reducing emissions, they value the environment and they are ashamed of Canada’s worsening image on this important issue.  Now we have something else to be ashamed of, we are losing our democracy and are ruled by people with no sense of shame and no principles whatsoever.

Can someone explain this to me? Just yesterday Andrew Coyne wrote a very depressing treatise on his opinion of politics in Ottawa and his disappointment with the Conservatives.  That was written before today’s defeat in the Senate, I don’t know if that’s what he was referring to, but if it wasn’t someone may want to give him a call and keep him away from all sharp implements and sleeping pills.  How can a Triple-E Senate reforming Reformer stand for this? How can an old Progressive Conservative Tory stand for the hypocrisy, the spending and the complete abandonment of all principles in the pursuit of power and ideology?

How does this move even make any sense? Won’t it anger everybody?  I would think even polluting industries would want to appear to be doing something to help the environment.  They certainly don’t want to appear be manipulating unelected, antiquated bodies of government to achieve goals that are against the interests of Canadians and eroding our democracy? What is going on here exactly? And can we have an election about it? Like, now?

Update: So apparently the bill did in fact go beyond the cautious current Conservative policy on climate change. So the Conservatives seem to see this as a simple matter of their people in the Senate taking a chance to defeat something that they couldn’t stop from passing in the House due to their minority.  Technically, this is how the Senate can function in a minority parliament.  This is of course betrays all kinds of principles since the current PM can stack the senate as much as they like whether they have a majority or not.  Further, the senate is supposed to be a more non-partisan place that doesn’t try to overrule the House except in extraordinary circumstances, this is not one of them.

It seems to be causing some soul searching amongst fiscal conservatives.  Taylor pines:

More votes were saved in Saskatchewan this week than were lost on Bay street. Yet as with the stimulus, for Conservatives both in name and in principle, it gave us great pause as to what we’re doing in Ottawa if not acting to advance rational objectives and liberal free-market principles.

He’s right, probably even more than he realizes.  Even if more votes were lost on Bay Street it wouldn’t matter, because zero seats were lost. That’s because Conservative voters in Toronto, or other big cities, have no elected seats in the Conservative party and thus no  influence.  Toronto’s recent election of Rob Ford has many different implications for politics in Toronto but one of them is clear evidence that there is a strong minority of fiscally conservative voters there.  When combined with ‘throw the bums out’ anger and a weak and divided alternative, a conservative actually won.

Now I don’t really want Conservatives to win elections, or even conservatives for that matter.  But I do want people to have the representation in all levels of government that they deserve based on their level of support in the population.  As I argued recently, part of the reason Rob Ford won in Toronto and Naheed Nenshi won in Calgary was that a cohesive minority that usually doesn’t have power finally coalesced around one candidate and defeated a divided pro-status-quo majority.  Stephen Taylor’s frustration with the current Conservative Party is that they focus too much on populist, social conservatism and too little on pure fiscal conservatism.   As you would expect given that all their seats are from regions that respond to populism so strongly.

So to put words in Mr. Taylor’s mouth, what he’s really saying is we need to change the system somehow so that the Conservative party would have to pander to fiscally, urban conservative voters as well.  Well, if that’s what he’s saying, then for once, I would heartily agree with him.

Recommend this post

These are all difficult struggles that require real effort.  But may I suggest we take a step back for a moment and recall that not so long ago there was real war, war that engulfed the world. Recall that in those times, people came forward to fight not with words, but to sacrifice their very lives to defend Canada, it’s allies and the freedom and dignity of individual people.  And they still do so today. Whether you agree with each particular war or mission does not matter.  If you have a quarrel it is with the politician, not with the soldier.  For until human beings really learn to solve all their problems without violence there will be a need for people to stand on guard to defend us and what our country stands for.

We should humbly honour everyone who dons that uniform, the soldiers of the Canadian Armed Forces, for offering to perform the ultimate public service.

This November 11th is Remembrance Day.  Show your support for Canadian soldiers past and present:

• by wearing a poppy on your coat
• by wearing a poppy on your twitter icon with this twibbon
• or by pasting this poppy symbol ✿ as text in all your tweets and facebook updates between now and November 11 (Imagine ✿ as a twitter trend in Canada next week?)
• and by attending a Remembrance ceremony next Thursday and observing two minutes of silence next thursday at 11am

Lest We Forget

update: Darrell Bricker, from Ipsos Reid polling,  has made some comments along with their latest poll of support for the national political parties. As if to prove my point and just in time for Remembrance Day his metaphor is all about war.  But I think he takes it way too far, talking about ‘trench warfare’ and literally comparing the current political climate to the Battle of the Somme where 24,000 Canadian soldiers lost their lives.  Really? Is that really a comparison you want to make?  This is exactly the kind of hyperbolic talk that escalates debate in the media to the point where nothing sensible can be said.  I think the Canadian Legion should ask him to apologize for that.

Politics isn’t War. War is.

I’ve been very frustrated with the media’s story that the Toronto election was a landslide and that it was all downtown vs uptown. Ford won fair and square but keep in mind that more than half the city didn’t vote for him (he got 47% of the city vote). Now the new story is based on a silly map of red and blue wards showing which candidate won the most votes in each ward.  This shows a very divided city.  But its completely misleading since some wards were very close, some had a third voting for someone else and even the strong core wards of each candidate still had 20-30%  for someone else.  That’s a lot of voters being swept under the rug.

So I made my own map, two actually.

I used the election open data from the city of Toronto to colour each ward. Each ward has both blue and red intensity relative to what percentage of the ward voted for Ford or Smitherman.  So if they are almost even as in ward 26 its a mild purple. Etobicoke is quite blue with 65% to 79% (ward 2) support for Ford and downtown is fairly red with some wards showing 61%  (ward 27) support for Smitherman.  So you can clearly see the lack of exciting for Smitherman’s campaign that everyone is commenting on, that is why he lost. You can also see the downtown vs suburbs effect but its not nearly as strong as the media tries to say it is, its a gradual scale and Smitherman lost more because he didn’t have as many strongholds rather than that no one in the outer city voted for him.

The second map also overlays the “Other” vote, Pantalone plus anyone else with yellow lines.  The lines don’t mean anything but their brightness shows you how much of that ward voted for someone other than the two contenders. They range from about 8% (ward 2) to 33% (ward 18) of the ward.

When will the media stop pandering to us and give us the full context rather than always trying to simplify things down to get at some particular framing of the story like “Downtown vs Suburbs”.  The world is never that simple. That is all.

The raw image file with layers is available here to anyone if you want to make it prettier or add other data, its in Gimp format, which is like an open source version of Photoshop.

Pass them around on twitpic:

Ford vs Smitherman : http://twitpic.com/31tll0
With “Other” vote : http://twitpic.com/31tlwf

Update: Thanks everyone for the feedback on the maps! Here’s some extra info

• spreadsheet – this is the mayoral results spreadsheet from the Toronto Open Data site but with some summary calculations worked out on the Ward 1 sheet. Each ward’s summary for votes for each of four categories.
• photoshop image file – this is my gimp program saving its native xcf file format to photoshop psd.  If that doesn’t work for you let me know in the comments, I’ll try something else
• why you might not want to bother – Patrick Cain has made some fantastic, zoomable scrollable maps of the Toronto votes data that make all this photoshop fiddling look pretty basic. So you should go over there first and she if he’s showing the data you want to surface.

But this comment is about the vigorous debate around strategic voting this election created. During the campaign I very vocally argued in favour of strategic voting. That is, I argued supporters of Joe Pantalone needed to consider the impact of Ford being mayor and really make their voting decision as one about who should win rather than just who they like as a person.  I still think that was the right advice. Technically, I was correct. If all of Pantalone’s supporters had voted for Smitherman he would have won by a hair,  1813 votes. Since Joe himself and his team would not jump ship it would be even closer. Now that’s not very compelling, no one is saying we should never have third candidates, that wouldn’t be democracy. Once a candidate is running and doing well, with a successful organization, you’d expect at least all of their family and supporting team will vote for them.  So strategic voting isn’t the long term answer at all, even though, it can technically change the results. And I would argue results should be what we care about in elections.

No, the real solution would have been to let everyone vote their heart AND provide information on what they thought of Smitherman vs Ford.  If we had been using a fair voting system we could easily have had this information  from all of the Pantalone supporters as well as the other 5.56% of Torontonians who voted for someone else.  If we had a even a simple system such as RaBIT then every single one of the voters who came out would have listed a number beside any number of candidates. You can be sure that almost all of them would have put either Ford or Smitherman somewhere on their ballot.

What this result shows us very clearly and is that under such a system the two viable candidates were essentially tied with about a 5% spread between them rather than the 13% decisive victory for Ford we now see.  (This is assuming all Pantalone supporters ranked Smitherman above Ford which I think is pretty safe.)  We can never know how all the other voters would have voted for sure because we didn’t collect that information. But the fact is that if Pantalone were gone those people who voted for minor candidates who they knew would not win, would have decided the election entirely!  The election would have come down to a photo finish, with perhaps only a few thousands votes separating the winner from the loser.  And we’ll never know who it would have been.

In such a world, Toronto might still be waking up today to Mayor Ford on the tv screen.  But think of the different tone such a result would have. There would be no notion that Ford had “won the support of Torontonians”.  There would be no shame for botched campaigning by Smitherman. There would be no guilt and stress for voters who really did want to show support for progressive candidates and other passionate people they believe in.  There would have been a city, clearly divided. With two halves choosing different directions, and one of them had to win.

Imagine if our elections worked that way? Would there be apathy about voting then, when every vote really does count? Would there be anger by unrepresented conservatives in a liberal city (or vice-versa) when there choices makes a difference?  Wouldn’t a message about support be more clear when its about the winner and the runner up rather than the third or 5th place loser?

This isn’t some dream, it’s not at all impossible, its actually quite easy. Voters just have to demand it. Luckily all the leading candidates for Mayor said they supported change to something like RaBIT, so lets hold them to it.

#XOTO

Now I’m not happy about this, at all. But I can deal with it.  I’ll have to, 47% of Torontonians liked Ford’s populist message enough to make him mayor.  In our democracy 47% is a lot of support.  You can usually win with anything over 45%, that’s how our system works and he won fair and square within that system.

Some people are twitter are saying they’ll leave town, move to Vancouver, or Calgary!, because Ford will be ruining our beautiful city. That’s just nonsense and it needs to stop. And so do the fat jokes for that matter. Ford can only achieve all his crazy goals if we let him.  He will get to pass some of his most important promises, involving money and car license fees… (seriously? that’s an issue? ok….whatever you say…) but he can’t single-handedly destroy Toronto, he can’t just cancel the marathon or the World Pride Celebration that will land right after his term ends.  This is especially true since a lot of the councillors getting elected are actually quick progressive. So….headline says “Conservative wave in liberal Hogtown!” yet all the progressive councillors won? What’s going on here Mark?

Glad you asked.  It actually makes perfect sense if you think about it.

Part of the reason Ford won is that there are a lot of conservative leaning people in Toronto, not a majority, but a lot, and they are perennially frustrated. Think about what it would be like to be even a right leaning centrist, a supporter of the old Progressive Conservative Party.  The ridings downtown are diverse and progressive and there are lots of them.  Whether it’s city, provincial or federal politics, they all go to progressive (l)Liberal or NDP-like or even green-style candidates.  If you’re more conservative you never get what you want at the ballot box. That’s unfair, it is, even though I don’t want Harper’s Conservatives getting a seat in Toronto, they do deserve one, maybe even a few.  But our voting system, at every level, only rewards those who are the majority in each voting district. So Toronto’s concentrated progressive neighbourhoods beat out the diluted, spread out conservatives in town every time.

However, for the mayoral election that flaw is removed. Everyone in the city votes for mayor in one riding.  So even if your support is spread thin and can’t win any particular riding, it might be enough to gain the largest number of votes across the whole city if you opponents are divided.

It’s kind of surprising it hasn’t happened before actually (does Mel count?) but Ford’s campaign had a simple message, that pushed all the buttons for fiscal and even social conservatives and they all finally got behind a single candidate.  And it turns out, there really are quite a few of them.  This was combined with a number of factors to give Ford the win:  apathy amongst progressive voters unexcited about voting for Smitherman; the significant showing of a third candidate Pantalone; the protests votes for also-ran candidates leaked support; even protest votes for Ford by people who aren’t even necessarily that conservative.  So that’s why we now have a fairly progressive council and a very conservative mayor, winner take all voting is unfair in both cases, and produced different results at different scales.

The same reasoning explains Naheed Nenshi’s victory in Calgary last week.  Progressives and centrists in Calgary must feel just like conservatives in Toronto. They found a candidate they could all get behind and low and behold, with the status-quo/conservative vote split he won the Whole Cowboy Hat.

So what we’ve seen this week is two very different cities, with very different political cultures.  But one story, the underrepresented,  political minority wins out over the expected side through a combination of splitting the ‘usual winners’ vote between status-quo and change.  In both cases this was combined with underestimating the outsider because they don’t fit the stereotype of the city which let them sneak up and gain an unstoppable momentum.  It seems surprising, but only because we like to oversimply complex, beautiful places like cities.

Democracy functioned this week in Toronto and Calgary, it functioned passably.  But these are not a victories for democracy, they are yet another wakeup call that our votes are not really respected, our voice is not really heard.

And for the record, I still love Toronto, no matter who’s in charge.  If you love it too, get on twitter and say “I #XOTO no matter who is mayor.”  Its like giving the city a big warm hug.  And tonight, for a little over half of Toronto at least, could really use that.

So here’s what I believe about Toronto. I think Toronto’s rampant cosmopolitan diversity is one of its greatest assets.  I think Toronto’s green initiatives, transit system and increased bike lanes are great and I love all the parades and festivals that ‘clog’ the cities streets. They remind us that cities are built for people, not for cars. I believe you get what you pay for. That means, to get all that Toronto offers you need to pay taxes.  If the city is short on money we need to cut waste and raise taxes, not simply fire everyone and sell off the city for scrap.

I don’t believe all politicians are crooks and that government is nothing but a constant flow of kickbacks and corruption.  Some corruption is inevitable, but it can be tracked and rooted out, most people go into politics to change things for the better.  So we need to support the right people going into government, not make politics so partisan and painful that only the most arrogant and greedy will put up with it.

So it’s probably not surprising that if I lived in the T-dot right now, I would not be voting for Rob Ford since he disagrees with all of the above.  Would Mayor Ford destroy Toronto? No.  Toronto is bigger than that.  He sure wouldn’t make it better, he sure wouldn’t improve the level of discourse in local politics but Toronto would survive no matter who wins on Monday.  Toronto has always been about hope, about dreaming big and following that dream. That’s why people go there, dreams can be made reality in Toronto if you are willing to work for it.  Ford doesn’t believe in dreams, he only believes in himself and anger.

BUT…Toronto is also about sanity and pragmatism.  It may not be as exciting as Montreal or as laid back as Vancouver, but Toronto does what it has to do to get the job done. Sometimes, that means you don’t get everything you want, but life is about tradeoffs and choices.  Toronto is faced with such a tradeoff right now.  Does it support Joe Pantalone, the heir of David Miller, and his progressive agenda.  Or does it support Smitherman’s vague centrist l(L)iberal approach, safe but not exciting.  Or does it go with fear and anger and irrationality.  Tough choice.

Luckily or unluckily, our horrendously unfair winner take all voting system makes the whole process simple, if a bit unappetizing.  If you are truly progressive you need to vote for Smitherman to avoid having Ford win.

Joe Panatlone’s supporters say:

“I say to my progressive friends, ‘Vote for what you believe in,’ “ said New Democrat MPP Rosario Marchese. “Because you’ll be unhappy the next day to have voted for someone that you think is the least-worst of the alternatives.”

So here’s the thing, you’re right, it will leave a bad taste in your mouth the next morning.

Its kinda like drinking medicine that tastes horrible but will stop you from getting really sick for a week.  After you’ve drink it, you feel disgusted and vile.  You wish you’d just drank that chocolate milk that you actually wanted.  Sure it wouldn’t make you better, and you’d be sick as a dog for a week, but at least you wouldn’t have this awful taste in your mouth for what, like, 10 whole minutes.

So I understand. You have something you want, someone you believe in and he’s not going to win.  He’s not Naheed Nenshi, there is no purple revolution for Joe Pantalone. Maybe there could have been if there’d been three candidates all along and he was more charismatic, but it’s just not there. People are telling you to vote for someone you dislike to avoid electing someone you really dislike. It sucks, it’s unfair and it’s the democracy we have right now, such as it is.

I know how you feel because every federal election I feel the exact same way about voting for the Green party in my tight Conservative/Liberal riding.  I want to vote with my heart. But I choose to look at it rationally, to accept the system we have, as bad as it is, and work within it.  The system does not reward honesty or voting with your heart.  It rewards the candidate with the most votes. Even if they don’t get very many votes, he with the most wins and all others are losers. Its unfair, its stupid, it has to change. But it’s not  going to change before monday, so you’re stuck with it for now.

So when you vote, think about what you want. Do you want to send a message? A message that will be heard briefly and then forgotten, a message that this losing candidate had your support.  Or do you want to actually influence who will be the mayor of your city?  If you really don’t care at all which of them wins if it’s not Joe, then it doesn’t matter, vote for Joe.  BUT, if you have any preference for Smitherman over Ford and if you agree that Joe can’t win (which he can’t), then the only rational choice is to vote strategically.  You don’t have to choose to be rational of course, it’s a free country, and proclaiming you prefer to make irrational decisions with your gut seems to be quite the in-thing these days.

Just ask Rob Ford.

First we have Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the UN.  What should have been a sure thing, Canada being chosen to fill the rotating two-year seat on the security council, became a huge disappointment.  Why did this happen? The reason seems to be that the world doesn’t agree with Canada’s approach on a range of issues such as climate change, aid for the third world, peacekeeping and the middle east peace process.  Harper’s leadership style is that of a bulldozer, sticking to his principles that no one agrees with, even if it hurts our country.  He claims these are Canadian principles but there are Conservative Reform principles. Canada’s principles stand up for the environment, for the downtrodden, for democracy for peace and for balance.  Stephen Harper is a leader that does not listening to the majority who disagrees with him and tries to impose new principles on his country.

In contrast Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has always been the opposite of Harper.  An overthinking, noncommittal kind of leader waiting to see what is popular before he speaks. But recently he really does seem to be starting to learn how to use his strengths.  He’s an intelligent, clear speaker who can confidently answer questions on the spot in a thoughtful manner. So how to best present him to the Canadian public? Highly scripted and triangulating talking points of course!  Well, that has seemed to the be the Liberal strategy until this summer before the Bus Tour of Infamy.  Now Iggy is doing town halls around the country with online discussion.  And he’s coming across great.  I don’t agree with him on everything but at least he’s talking about issues in a reasonable manner and telling us what he actually thinks which is something the Conservatives are incapable of.

I guess that’s what happened  earlier in the summer when Iggy implied that Canada doesn’t deserve a UN Security Council seat.  He was saying what he thought, what a lot of people are thinking, we don’t really deserve it.  Unfortunately the rest of the world seems to agree. But that doesn’t mean you should say that out loud. A UNSC seat would be useful for Canada to exert influence and stretching the truth a bit and looking like we’re all one happy family (even though we’re soooo not) would be worth it to get that influence.  So, his comments were ill advised, he should have said what Bob Rae said, which was gracious, polite and true. In fact, that’s a good rule in general for Iggy, ask Bob first. But I digress.
But even given that, anything Iggy said was also irrelevant to the decision process at the UN.  I’m sure most UN delegates don’t pay any attention to internal Canadian politics.  They may know we have a minority government but that’s all.  Why do you think the world is so baffled at our conservative shift over the past five years? They don’t see what’s happening inside unless they meticulously read that one article a month in th Economist about us.

Finally, a comment on leader of the Bloc Quebecios Gilles Duceppe, usually the most reasonable person in the room until he starts talking about Quebec seperation.  Today he tried to explain to Americans why a sovereign Quebec would be good for everyone in North America.  I’m sure all investors will hear is “Don’t invest in Quebec, we’re not done throwing tantrums yet, we like to keep it interesting.” That should be Quebec’s new slogan “Stability Schmability. Quebec. Keeping it Interesting”.   Talk like this makes it even harder for the other parties to talk about working with the Bloc in any way which is a shame because the current polls show that the Bloc are stronger than ever and everyone else is weaker than ever.  We’d still end up with a minority but unless some other party can make inroads into Quebec there is no clear path to a government which represents much more of the population the current pitiful 35% supported Conservative government.

In celebration of 42 day this Sunday here is an entry I offer from Pop The Stack for inclusion in that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The subject is an introduction to some democratic systems in use around the galaxy.  This should be especially interesting to Earthlings who famously don’t pay enough attention to galactic governance to even bother to find out that their own planet was being scheduled for demolition to make way for a hyper-space bypass.

Sure, democratic reform in the different nations on Earth is an important cause, one I support wholeheartedly.  But what does it really matter how such a (mostly) harmless planet chooses their leaders?  How about a race that actually has had an impact on the galactic scale?

For example, the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax weren’t very fond of democracy in general, since it usually got in the way of having wars, so they had an emperor, at least until he was assassinated by someone else wanting to be emperor.  However, they did have a Senate to pass what laws were necessary and carry out paperwork.  Incidentally, Senators were also the important renewable source of people attempting to assassinate the Emperor.  Senators themselves were actually elected using a fully proportional voting system with a reasonable cut-off of 5%.   Each candidate for a Senate seat received votes from citizens in his/her/it’s region and then all the candidates were thrown into a pit to fight each other to the death.  The proportional part came from the number of weapons they received to fight with, each candidate getting an amount of firepower, knives, swords etc. in proportion to their votes.  The cut-off part was that if you didn’t get 5% of the vote they cut off your head.  The last  Armorfiend standing was the elected Senator. Thus they had a proportional system that allowed for a kind of transferable vote between candidates in a post election…debate, if you will.

The Vogons, as the administrators of all bureaucracy in the the galactic government, are another very influential civilization in the galaxy.  As one would expect if they ever have had the misfortune of meeting a Vogon, their democratic system is exhaustingly complex and tedious.  Many people here on Earth often complain that this or that electoral system is too complicated for people to use. This is despite the fact that all voting systems in common usage are equally complex if voters truly consider the potential of their vote to impact the makeup of the legislature.  But the Vogon’s scoff at such complaining, just one more excuse for them to scoff at humans. Scoffing, it should be noted, being an action that a Vogon they never actually need a excuse to partake in.

Vogons are very proud of the fact that their electoral process is actually more complex than is necessary to achieve a fair result.  Voters fill out 250 separate forms, in triplicate, implementing each of the voting systems approved by the bureaucracy for democratic bureaucracy. More are added each election cycle.  They then combine these results from all the systems using a complex weighting scheme that is devised by the standing committee on gerrymandering.  The system in use currently include FPTP, STV, MMP, BordaMMP, A*STV{x}, M38*@&!kmop and Citarancian feather reading.

The sentient mattresses of Squornshellous Zeta even have democracy, of a sort. Each year they need to select their chief negotiator for the next year’s mattress culling.  The matresses have an enlightened system of tiered primary elections to select candidates.  Each stage allows multiple rounds of voting and losing matresses can throw their support to other candidates for the next round.  Finally a single, planetwide election is held with multiple runoffs between all the local candidates. In theory, this can lead to the second longest and most complex election process in the galaxy, after the Vogons.  This is in theory only because in reality the sentient matresses of Squornshellous Zeta are all named Zem so any electoral system would be sure to elect Zem. Thus they sidestep actual elections entirely and declare the nearest mattress, Zem,  as their representative whenever one is needed.  The theoretical democracy researchers at the Ursa Minor Mega-University, who only study theoretical democracies, not real democracies, spend an inordinate amount of time exploring the complexities of the democratic system that the mattresses would have if all of them weren’t all named Zem.

Finally, we end our tour with  one of the most vexing questions of galactic democracy, what kind of voting system allowed Zaphod Beeblebrox to become president of the galaxy?  The system used for selecting the, largely ceremonial, galactic president is actually a ranked pairs Condorcet method where voters are presented with each combination of two candidates, with their pictures side by side on a computer screen and asked which they prefer of the two.  Using all the ranked pairs a full ordering can be selected that voters prefer and the most preferred candidate wins.  As with all Condorcet methods there is a small theoretical chance of a loop but in reality with trillions of votes this never occurs.  However, the pairwise selection process using photographs does have one unexpected bias, people with two heads, such as Zaphod Beeblebrox, tend to beat those with one head.  This perhaps was the reason Zaphod was advised by his campaign team to end all answers with the phrase “and remember, two heads are better than one” during the campaign.  This, as well as mobilizing the froody vote by promising everyone who voted for him would be invited to the greatest inauguration party the galaxy had ever seen, were large factors in his landslide election to President of the Galaxy.

So now you hopefully now you’ll see that we’re actually being quite conservative down here on Earth with how we vote.

Happy 42 Day.

Anyways.  The point is, this sunday is Pan-Galactic 42 Day.  So how should we bloggers celebrate or mark this occasion?  I have a proposal, and don’t worry this one doesn’t have anything to do with political parties making bold and visionary (thus highly unlikely) agreements like most of my proposals.

This proposal is simple. This sunday, on your blog, release a post to be added to that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  The post should be on the topic your blog normally discusses with the aim of opening the eyes of the shortsighted humans on Earth who usually have no interest in galactic matters.  I will, of course, be writing a summary of the many different, and surprisingly progressive, democratic systems used by other planets in the galaxy and beyond.  How do the Silastic Armorfiends choose their Senators?  How do the sentient matresses of Squornshellous Zeta select their chief negotiator for the next year’s mattress culling?  What kind of voting system allowed Zaphod Beeblebrox to become president of the galaxy? And how many sub-triplicate forms do the Vogons needs to fill out to exercise their franchise?  All this and more will be revealed on Sunday.  And you should get writing your own poignant H2G2 entry for 42 Day as well,  this might help .

On the surprising chance that anyone reads this and actually does it I’d be happy to add links to your 42 day blog on this page, but you probably stopped reading this when I got to the Armour Fiends.  Stupid humans.

42 Day Blogs

• Democracy Around the Galaxy: A Hitchhiker’s Guide

True statement.

A true statement in the present tense, because there isn’t one, right now.  Even if Mr. Ignatieff is being coy, this is a good thing because he should not, cannot, say that there will never be a coalition.  If the voters deem to give the Liberals and NDP in the next election enough seats to form a plurality, then a coalition must be considered as one of the options.  If Iggy wants to make a categorical, unswervable statement that isn’t open to interpretation or attack he could try this:

There is no coalition at this time.  And there will never be a coalition which includes the Bloc as a member until they renounce their stance on separatism.

– alternate universe Iggy

Oh, yes … I  said it.

You and I know the Bloc won’t go for that. Of course, they also probably don’t expect to be in an official coalition.  That doesn’t mean other parties can’t work with the Bloc, it just means they won’t sign a legal document with the them. During parliament, if the Bloc don’t support the policies of the NDP+Lib governing coalition then the coalition would just try to scrape through without having an election.

Note, this is exactly like the Conservatives have been doing for 5 years.  They get to avoid elections even though they haven’t made an agreement with anyone.  This is because enough other members either support them or abstain because they aren’t ready to go to the polls.  So the Bloc would have no greater power in a NDP+Lib government than they do now.

That is to say, they’d have a fair bit of power for a regional separatist party. But it would be absolutely no different than today.  This whole state of affairs won’t change until either Quebeckers start believing in one of the federalist parties again or they just decide they’d like to have some representation in cabinet.

Alternate-universe Iggy has an interesting idea though. Its risky, gutsy, but it might just work.  I’ve talked before about trying to make a deal with the Bloc about their stance on separatism.  But this is different, this is using an ultimatum, an ultimatum that you know will not be accepted, as a message for the rest of Canada.  A Federalist party could gain a lot of traction in Ontario and the West by being simultaneously open to finding a solution to the democratic logjam we are in while simultaneously being tough on separatists.

The Liberals and/or NDP could turn this coalition argument on its head by defending the possibility of an NDP+Liberal coalition, if warrant. Meanwhile declaring it impossible that the Bloc will be a part of such a coalition unless they denounce separation.  This appeals to the soft conservative voters who get angry about Quebec but don’t necessarily want social conservatives running the country either. It may even play alright in Quebec if its done with respect in an open way, appealing to Bloc voters who aren’t set on sovereignty but want a strong voice for Quebec.  You can be sure that a stronger NDP/Lib coalition with Quebec MPs would have several of them in key positions.   Stealing votes from the Bloc isn’t as efficient as stealing votes from the Conservatives in terms of getting power.  But being seem to try to steal votes from the Bloc is actually a plus in the mind of Conservative voters so you may get some of them at the same time.

I don’t know, I’ll add this to my crazy ideas category, its becoming quite a list, I really should create one.  But, something needs to change to get our democracy moving again and this is as clear an option as any. What do you think?

As our new GG undoubtedly knows, he now has some reserve powers for extraordinary circumstances.  It seems that when our previous GG had cause to exercise these powers on that long morning at Rideau Hall that the Conservatives may have considered some back up options ready if she didn’t make the ‘right’ choice.

One of these options was to ask the Queen to override the GG.  I would hope that everyone in parliament would realize how impossible this is. The Queen does not make decisions about Canada, end of story.

Someone on twitter asked if Harper going to ask the Queen to prorogue if Jean had refused would be like “a child going to their mom if their dad said no”.  Actually it would be worse.  It would be as if a child asked their parents if they could go on a school trip, their parents said no and then the child went to their teacher at school to try to go ‘over their heads’. It doesn’t make sense. The teacher seems to have authority but in reality they don’t.  That’s what we have.  The Queen appoints the GG on the advice of the PM. Then the GG is in charge with what little discretionary power they have.  Going to the sovereign of another nation to approve decisions on internal matters is so 1981. It would be offensive if this was even be considered.  So we need to find out how extensive these discussions were.

But I couldn’t let today go by without a comment. Today is the day that the progressive/centrist/reasonablist voice of Canadians was heard and the gun registry was saved from the chopping block.  Congratulations to the opposition parties for saving it even though it was a hard thing to do for many of your members.  And thank you.

Now, since you appear to still be reading Pop The Stack closely evidenced by being in line with step one of my Simple Solution to the Gun Registry you should have no problem proceeding to step two.  As you’ll no doubt recall I proposed that the Liberals and NDP make a solemn or even legal pact that you’d both save the registry as long as legislation was put forward and passed forthwith to remedy most of the problems people have with it.  Get rid of registration fees, make not being registered a ticketing offense with no criminal record and get the level of registration up so that it’s actually comprehensive. It does not seem the NDP actually got such a public contract from the Liberals in order to swing their vote.  So today’s result is all the more impressive since Jack Layton will no doubt be soon tabling his motion to remedy the registry as stated above with the additional icing of allowing cities to choose to completely ban handguns is they so wish.  Capital idea I say.

I expect the Liberals will have no trouble passing such a bill and ferrying it through parliament with all possible speed.  There will be none of this silly talk about how the Liberal party will introduce their own fix when and if the Canadian people come to their senses and give them a majority government (small giggle).  There won’t even be drawn out counter proposals and recriminations against the NDP for this or that detail which isn’t absolutely perfect about their proposal.  I expect you’ve all got the trade offs worked out already and will show as united a front as is decent when the bill comes forward.

Both your parties are fully aware, I needn’t tell you, that a decisive, clear fix to the problems with the registry is absolutely vital to resist the wall to wall marketing that the Conservative party will present, as they already are, to the public about how horrible your insane-crypto-communist-socialist-separatist coalition will be for the country.  You realize, of course, that the only way to battle this is with action, with showing that the NDP and the Liberal party can work together to provide reasonable solutions to Canada’s problems.  That you don’t need to sign deals with the Bloc to do so and whether those solutions pass is up to the Bloc and in a later election Quebeckers would have their say about whether they are happy with constantly being a non player in parliament or would rather have someone else representing them who actually can participate fully in a governing coalition.

Only by demonstrating this soon in parliament will Canadians see that there actually is a progressive, reasonable alternative to Conservative minority rule.  If the NDP and Liberals together can be given more seats than the Conservatives, then there will be a clear path forward to rule by a minority coalition that represents more Canadians (but I repeat myself).  It will be a more stable minority government because the Bloc will agree with it more than it does with the Conservatives and it will be no more beholden to the Bloc to avoid elections than the Conservative minority has been beholden to the Liberals and Bloc for the past five years.  That is, reasonable concessions will be made, but lines will be drawn in the sand and to go past them will require an election.

This is the only way forward for our democracy in the short term and today the two federalist opposition parties have a chance to begin this new chapter in our history.  The day politicians in Ottawa admitted, openly, that in order to do the work of Canadians they would have to actually work together towards a common purpose.

This my new bumper sticker (ok its a bit nerdy, but its twitterable):

(NDP + Lib > CPC) –> Canada Wins

Sing it to the hills.

stack.close()

It is completely redundant to say “You can tweet us on Twitter at  …”.  Well that’s nice, exactly where else could I tweet you?  Either people know what Twitter is and can tweet you, or they don’t know what Twitter is and now you’re just confusing them.  Depending on which of these people you care about more you should say one of the following:

• “You can tweet us at …”
• OR “You can contact us via Twitter at …”

You see? This isn’t confusing or redundant and the second one has the advantage of letting people know that Twitter is a communication system rather than a “tweeting system”, whatever the hell that is.

Think about how silly this redundancy is in terms of other communication media, it’s exactly like saying:

• “You can email us using you email program at …”
• “You can call us with a telephone at …”
• “You can write us a letter and mail it to us through the postal system (or a private courier is you desire) at this address…”
• “I spoke to Bob Smith today in our Toronto studio via modulated air vibrations.”

There are words like speak, write, call, email, tweet that tell us what the communication medium is.  If you are worried that not that many people know how to use said medium you can just say “You can also contact through UnfathomableNewTechnology at ….”.

Is that clear? Or do I need to come down and tell you in person via translating my body to your location in physical space?

He says the “minority experiment” is almost over:

“We’ve had six years of minority government. Perhaps Canadians are going to be ready for a majority because they’re looking at what’s happening in the House of Commons and they’re not seeing a lot of progress on things.”

Mr. Nanos as well as the big media seem to have a block about this minority parliament being temporary.  How exactly is the fragmented Canadian electorate going to suddenly decide who to vote for to produce a majority?  Just because we’re fed up doesn’t mean we’re going to start voting for parties we dislike in order to get rid of a minority.  Its not even clear how that would happen.  There are many more ways that voters can switch their voting patterns and still produce a minority Liberal or Conservative government rather than shifting towards one party to produce a majority.

The questions in the poll ask about gut response questions like would it be better if MPs could vote against their leaders and if MPs were more polite in parliament; sure it would, that’d be great.  But are those really the most pressing issues out there right now about our democracy?  Why not ask people if they’d like it if the people they voted for actually got into parliament?  Why not ask them if it would be better if the Conservatives had MPs from the big cities, or if the Liberals had more MPs from the praries? Would Quebec voters like to have more than one or two token government MPs in Ottawa? Would the 1 in 10 voters who prefer the Green party like to have some representation? Wouldn’t that be good?

Or how about this question, would it be better if some of the parties worked together in parliament rather than fought against each other?  Hmm, maybe.

The high agreement levels on the questions in this poll, from all social groups and political stripes, simply shows that people are fed up with the current makeup of parliament. There is nothing there to support the idea that Canadians are “ready for a majority” meaning that the makeup of parliament would change significantly if we had an election right now.

We’re not ready because there is no viable option…yet.  Maybe we’ll never be “ready for a majority” again. If the Bloc or NDP don’t completely implode there is simply no way to return to the “good ol’ days” of one party ruling for a decade unabated.

And maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe you should ask people what they think about that Mr. Nanos.

I don’t know what the solution is, but they need to work out something that is acceptable to both the NDP and Liberals and they need to do it fast.  Their inability to cooperate effectively on the gun registry issue is a clear test case.  They have an issue both parties agree on, that their urban and progressive bases are passionate about and where there are reasonable solutions that can be used to reach out to rural and more conservative voters.  But they seem happy to snipe at each other and blame the other party for the imminent failure.

Well, that’s just not good enough.

Show us leadership, show that you can find compromise that still leads to progress. Show us that you can put real policy and people ahead of party ambitions.  You will be rewarded for it. Even if no kind of formal coalition is made before the next election.  If voters know you can work together because they have seen it happen they will be able to make the strategic voting choices they need to in order to get a minority or majority coalition government.  You may publicly want your party to win a majority government, but privately and as your public second option you must accept a path to power through some kind of coalition arrangement.

The Liberals support the gun registry in principle, but would introduce legislation if they form government to modify to make it more fair and efficient.  So they are whipping the vote to ensure rural MPs don’t support killing the registry before fixes can be made

The NDP, on the other hand, also support the registry in principle, but not more than the democratic principle that each MP should be able to vote their conscience. So they are letting their MPs vote as they wish, 12 will likely vote to kill it, but they will propose a new modified registry that makes the same changes the Liberals would have and would grant the power to municipalities to ban handguns if they chose.

So the Liberals want to save it now, fix it later. The NDP want to let it die now, and fix it or resurrect it later.

Is it just me, or is there a very simple solution here that would make both parties happy, hurt the Conservatives, save gun regulation and respect the advice of police, doctors, women’s right advocates and social workers who are all calling to keep the registry?

The solution is this: The NDP and the Liberal party make a formal deal, sign a contract, that they will introduce and support Jack Layton’s legislation into parliament, as soon as possible, in exchange for the NDP whipping this upcoming vote to avoid killing the registry.  The contract could be fulfilled within a month or two the next time the Liberals or NDP get a moment to introduce legislation, unless Harper prorogues again.

Why would this be untenable? Could the rural NDP members really say they’d lose their seats for getting major improvements to the registry enacted? Is rural opposition so strong to the registry’s very existence in principle or the details of how it is run?

Citing that the registry costs $2 billion dollars to set up isn’t an argument by the way. Being excessively expensive to set up is no argument for scrapping it now when it only costs a few million a year and provides great benefit.

Can the NDP and Liberals really not trust each to follow through on a formal contract?  Are they afraid of being taunted by the Conservatives for working together and practicing for a coalition?  Surely they know Canadians want their MPs to work together.

So what’s the problem?

I agree with FarAndWide completely on this.  The NDP are planning to allow a free vote of all their members on the issue, even though the party advises savng the regsitry. Free votes are nice in principle, and if we had a truly representative parliament where the people in Ottawa actually represented the distribution of opinions in Canada then whatever those MPs decide in a free vote should be what democracy ordered.

However, we do not have a truly representative parliament.  Each NDP member in Ottawa has a much bigger responsibility than just representing their riding.  The NDP are horrendously underrepresented in parliament with 12% of the seats even though they got over 18% of the vote.  They should have around 18 more MPs than they do if our voting system was fair and somewhat proportional.  So each vote those MPs cast is also for all those voters who cast a vote for their party last election and had it wasted because they weren’t in the running in that riding.  Everyone hates controlling parties which whip on every issue but the truth is what people care about are the issues and the results of parliament.  They don’t care whether you stood up for some misguided principle of parliamentary freedom that assumes the people in parliament actually represent a reasonable cross section of the views of voters.

If an efficient, effective tool is going to be removed that the police chiefs all agree is essential, that emergency room doctor’s say is essential, that psychologists worried about suicides agree is esential; and one that members of your own party want to keep because they believe that its a good idea to know where all the weapons are; then you should support keeping that tool.

If some of your members from rural ridings don’t like it, understood, they need to negotiate with their party.  They need to get a concession on some other issue later on.  Because those rural members need to keep in mind that 857,726 NDP voters (13,834,29 total votes x 6.2% total votes wasted on losing NDP candidates) didn’t get what they wanted last time, and you are representing them anyways, whether you like it or not.  Think of those voters as your supporters too.  What do they want? Do they live in rural ridings too?

Do they want the NDP to help the Harper government achieve its greatest advance for “conservative values”, for fear over reason, for emotion over sensible logic?  Does the NDP want to move the country forward, or do they want to prove a point?  They need to put this position in the context of the entire Conservative program and whether this government can be trusted with anything.  The answer, they cannot.  They  disrespect parliament, disrepsect reasone, science and the arts and they disrespect the plight of any Canadians who aren’t their base.  The Conservatives deserve no support from the NDP any longer, regardless of the issue.  If you are going to do something on principle at this point, after all they’ve done, for God’s sakes, oppose them on principle!

Oppose them on everything, every, single, thing.  Don’t give them the cover of seeming like reasonable people you can work with.  You can’t work with them and letting them succeed on one of their greatest desires, something almost all progressives are against, isn’t going to help you in the next election and it isn’t going to help the country by making it more likely a progressive party or coalition forms the next government.

Vote:

Greg makes the point that with all this talk of how the NDP and Liberals should form an alliance or coalition before or after the election one thing has been mostly missing from the discussion.  The best solution would really be for both parties to fervently support electoral reform which would resolve the current deadlock in parliament by actually requiring a majority representation of voters to form a government.  Coalitions would then become a normal process, worked out after elections by parties that have the accurate amount of representation matching their national support.

The Liberal party in particular needs to realize that the days of dominating parliament with majorities are over.  With the West growing and Quebec shrinking in the relative population game its only going to get harder for any one party to appeal to 40-45% of the country and get a ‘majority’.

The current stalemate in parliament.

It is, of course, possible for the Liberals and the NDP to form a coalition after the next election if they get the right numbers and I think they should be open about that possibility rather than cowering in fear of what the Conservatives will say about it being undemocratic.  The Conservative party has provided ample demonstration in the past year that they do not care about or perhaps even understand what a vibrant democracy means.   They want a Canada skewed to support their views and give disproportionate voice to their supporters.  This is perhaps an understandable reaction given that other groups have had disproportionate power  in the past. But a much better solution for everyone would be to remove the inequity altogether rather than shift it to supporting a new group.

Pollster Ian Wright says the proposed addition of new seats in parliament will fix this problem. Extra seats are being added to parliament to account for population growth in Ontario, Alberta and BC. Quebec is not getting any news seats since they already have more than their population percentage warrants.  While this is a good step and a necessary one to adjust for population changes over time it isn’t a real solution.

The real representation problem with Quebec is that they get a voting bonus for the Bloc since they are regionally focussed.  The Bloc adds an extra choice to the ballot not present in other provinces and splits the federalist votes taking a majority of Quebec seats.  The problem isn’t that Quebec gets 75 seats in parliament it’s that 50 of those seats go to one party that doesn’t run anywhere else in the country and will never form government.  Bloc seats are thus wasted seats in any calculation of majority rule.  They are also tricky seats to use for any coalition as long as the Bloc still officially supports Quebec separation.

So the stalemate continues.

Realigning seats will help, but not much, the Ontario seats will be split three ways, the Alberta seats will mostly (or all) go CPC and the BC seats will split two or three ways (depending where they are), no seismic shift here.  If might be enough to allow the NDP and Liberals to comfortably form a coalition after an election if the voters fall just right for them, but that’s not the point.  We are still looking for small, almost random sways in public opinion to shift the entire dynamic of who runs government.  Democracy is supposed to be more robust than that.

The real solution is to introduce some kind of electoral reform, partly proportional representation, ranked voting, lists — I don’t care, anything would be better than this.  Then Quebec would get just as much representation as they do now but as part of a wider spread of parties.  Alberta would get some Liberals and NDP; cities would get some Conservatives; the Green party would get some much deserved representation.  The Greens and Bloc would have small but not insignificant voices in parliament; the NDP would have more voice and the Liberals and Conservatives would likely be equal but could both claim a much broader, inclusive representation of the country.  Coalitions would be formed out of that mix, the NDP-Liberal coalition would not be the only possibility by a long shot.  In other words, the result would be good for everyone from politicians, to voters, event to non-voters who would have a reason to rethink their choice not to participate.

As I’ve said before, getting strongly behind an electoral reform process would distinguish the Liberals and provide plan for getting out of the stalemate we are in right now.   Otherwise we’ll just go through more elections of minority governments until randomly some day someone wins thanks to a small temporary peak in support or a major gaffes of one of their opponents.

For the good of the country and their party, the Liberals need to provide us with a better option.

Even beyond the astounding ignorance of this statement there was a more subtly offensive idea in his point.  He asks us to dismiss any rational attempt to use rigorous methods to analyse the state of our nation.  He implies that somehow, ‘Canadians being nice’ will compensate for the statistical bias they are adding to the census.  Can the Finance Minister quantify how ‘nice’ Canadians are and how willing they are to fill out 40 pages of questions if they don’t have to?  Even if he’s right, the census will be biased towards ‘nice people’ who do something just because they are asked, and who have the time and leisure to do so.

The Damage is Done

This brings up something I haven’t heard anyone mention yet.  The damage is now done.

You see, the original problem with dropping fines for not filling out the census (I never had any problem with dropping jail penalties, since this was never enforced it seems a non-issue issue) was that it would create a huge difference in returns from previous census’ and drop the number of people filling it out in an uneven and unpredictable way.  The new problem we face now, even if the government completely reverses their decision, which seems unlikely, is that the government who is collecting this data has been undermining it and badmouthing the very collection process all summer.  That’s going to influence a lot of people.  I would predict that even if the census were mandatory next year that the number of people not filling it out will actually skyrocket because the government is essentially handing it out to people while winking and whispering ‘nawww, don’t fill it out, it’s all a sham, we have to give it you, but we don’t really want to’.

So Flaherty’s assertion that Canadians will fill out the census if you ask them nicely doesn’t fly, because he’s not asking them at all.  No matter what happens, Statistics Canada is going to need years to rebuild their credibility with any Canadians who have believed the current government’s statements.

Called Out by Nature

In other news (well other census news, ok I’m obsessed) the Conservatives were called out by Nature itself this week.  Not Mother Nature, although I’m sure she’s upset at the Conservatives too, she’s just not very, you know, vocal.  No, the esteemed scientific journal Nature this week put out an unprecedented editorial slamming the Conservative government for scrapping the long form census and undermining statistical data that researchers in Canada and around the world rely on.  This isn’t Maclean’s calling them out, it’s not even some pop science magazine like Scientific American.  This is Nature. This, along with the journal Science, are the big scientific journals for general science.  Every scientist in the world of any stripe will hear about this very soon and shake their heads.  Now, scientists are usually a hard lot to pin down to agree on anything. Look how long it took them to definitively state that human’s were causing global warming. But there are just a few things they ALL will agree on if you ask them (in no particular order)

1. The Earth goes around the Sun
2. Human’s and Apes have common ancestors
3. The entropy of any closed system will inevitably increase over time AND
4. We always need more data, not less; and collecting data without controlling for relevant variables makes that data completely useless

Like asking Canadians, nicely

Please fill out these 40 pages of detailed information, but you know, we wish we didn’t have to, and its kind of intrusive don’t you think? Sorry,  so, try to return it whenever you can, if you feel like it. Thanks

– The New Conservative Government of Canada
– The Government of Canada
– Statistics Canada

A Concession

This week Prime Minister Harper did made a concession on the census but its one that indicates all their arguments are nothing more than diversions.  They added a couple of questions on Quebec language to the still mandatory short census.  This was only hours after a Quebec court agreed to hear a Quebec language group’s complaint that undermining the long-form census would violate laws meant to protect French language rights.  By caving in on this issue the Conservatives are indeed demonstrating that statistical somehow voluntary census collection is fine for most information unless it happens to relate to a voting group that the Conservatives are afraid of or want to get votes out of.

Recommend this Post

For that matter, do they really think being gay is a disease, or a choice? Do they believe that we don’t have common ancestors with chimpanzees in the past few million years? Do they really fail to believe that we are upsetting the delicate balance of life and the energy equilibrium of our planet?

Sometimes I think, there couldn’t possibly be that many people who believe knowledge is a bad thing, that more data is not worth it, that we don’t really get anything for all out tax dollars.  When I’m in this mood, I get to thinking it’s all a trick being used by a minority of people trying to manipulate the rest of us.

Like the Emperor trying to manipulate Luke Skywalker.

No seriously….just stay with me.

He didn’t care what Luke believed, he didn’t try to convince him with reason, facts or statistics. All he wanted was to make Luke angry and for him to give in to that anger. Getting him to let go of his beliefs and let emotion rule him was the goal, if he could achieve that, he would have won without lifting a light saber.

The extremist conservatives who argue for drastically smaller government as a principle, who feel queezy about gays and who think more prisons equals less crime make decisions and arguments mostly based on emotion and gut feelings.  They believe a debate is supposed to be carried out by people shouting back and forth their strongly held, emotionally based beliefs.  They believe that if you know a bunch of people who don’t like doing something (like filling out a census), and it sounds unnecessary or even offensive to you anyways, then that is a good enough argument for scrapping it.  This is in comparison to making your decisions based on an attempt at unbiased analysis and study.  Before you scrap something, perhaps find out if its important and if anyone has evidence that your plan will actually have the effect you assume it will.

From the Emperor’s point of view it would be great if everyone reacted emotionally because negative emotions are strong and you can’t tell me my emotion is wrong, you can’t prove to me that I’m not angry, you can only prove that I’m wrong.  So he wants to make the debate not about being right and wrong but about being angry and being justified.  This is the dark side of political debate, and those who believe in reason and truth must be wary of it.  It is alluring, it is powerful.  Witness the rise of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Witness the power that the NRA wields in the US.  The lingering impact of deep emotional rifts in our own country from Quebec nationalism to western Energy Crisis anger.  Fear and anger and defensiveness are powerful emotions and can be used to manipulate debate and keep discussion at the level of moral and emotional issues.

So I don’t know if this manipulation if all that conscious or if Harper is really “the Emperor” (who’s Vader then, Stockwell? OMG, that means Iggy’s Father is …NOOOOooo). But even if it’s just being done unconsciously there are two Forces of reason vs emotion pulling at political debate right now in Canada (I fear the dark side has mostly won amongst our neighbours to the south).  It worries me that this is a battle at all and that the media and politicians don’t seem to come down firmly enough in favour of emotion. It worries me more that the public seems to think it’s a fair battle and that both approaches are reasonable ways to run government.

As for partisan politics, it is hard to define the antithesis of conservatism today in Canada.  The Conservatives themselves that I’m talking about even have to be distinguished from fiscally conservative, socially progressive types such as the old Progressive Conservative (PC) party who sadly are hard to find these days and lay in hiding in the darkness under the emperor’s throne or guiltily lurk in the Liberal party.  The liberal or progressive majority in Canada is represented by a diversity of parties in the NDP, Green, Liberals and even the Bloc.  This diversity is essential to their identity yet also the source of their political weakness using our currently flawed electoral arithmetic. These parties don’t agree on much, but they do agree generally that government can do good work and that if you have a proposal for how to make it better you need to make a rational argument that isn’t justified solely by  your own emotions or the emotions of others.  Just because your anger or fear tells you to act does not mean that is in the best interest of the country.  Emotions are important, but they often lead us down dark paths.

So my advice to Canada’s centre-left majority and its political leaders — use the Force Luke, listen to reason, and beware of the dark side.

Recommend this post

You have to respect their astounding commitment to making uninformed, irrational decisions.  It must be so tempting to simply listen to the intelligent advisors around them, to the countless experienced public servants with decades of experience, to the media, to academic experts, to the Statistic Society of Canada and their international peers.  All these people are giving them advice but in order to accept it they’d have to sacrifice their principles.  No, the Conservative Party of Canada stands tall and defends the principle that science is simply a liberal tool for manipulating the public, that oil is good, crime is high, the country is under threat and that guns are faannnnntastic.  Oh, and don’t forget the newest addition to the Conservative pantheon of big ideas, Statistics are fundamentally bad; via the globe:

A Justice Department press secretary is contacting reporters telling them Mr. Day is “correct in his assertion that many crimes go unreported in Canada”, arguing, too, that the Liberals use statistics as an “EXCUSE not to get tough on criminals.”

So, to paraphrase.

Stats and analysis and scientific reasoning are ALL just excuses for not doing what your gut tells you is right.  The liberals and all those progressives want things like universal childcare, safe injection clinics, environmental regulation, transit infrastructure spending and don’t want to double the number of jails we have.  They justify all these proposals with the excuse that they conform to rigorous analysis and countless studies.  They argue for keeping the mandatory census based on evidence that people won’t fill it out voluntarily in the US.  They point out facts like the fact that western nations that don’t have a census anymore actually just unilaterally collect all the same data without asking permission by linking all government files, something no one is proposing doing in Canada.  All of these proposals just show you the problem with liberal/progressive thinking.  The ‘thinking’ part is the problem.  Liberals and progressives don’t  make decisions solely on their gut instincts, emotions and fear.  They trust science and statistics and logical thinking to help them make decisions.  Is that really the kind of country we want to live in?  Or do we want to live in a country where we all feel justified for following our gut and then complain about the consequences later?

Its up to you decide. This election, vote dumb.

Recommend this post

So Britons have been spared the leaks and jockeying for position that Israelis – with their extreme form of coalition government – live with constantly. But with the Liberal Democrats sinking in the polls and the agreed date for a referendum on electoral reform threatened by a combination of Labour opposition and disgruntled Conservative backbenchers, don’t be surprised if Israeli-style dysfunction appears before too long – and if the fixed term proves not so fixed.

He’s completely correct that ‘Israeli-style’ parliamentary dysfunction flows from that nation’s pure proportional voting system which uses no local ridings at all and assigns parties seats based purely on the proportion of their national vote with no cutoff on how small the party can be.  Given the complicated nature of their politics this leads to a lot of fringe parties holding sway over power.  While our politics isn’t as extreme such a system would clearly create a lot of small fringe member of parliament who might hold sway in a very close election.  No one who proposes electoral reform in Canada is proposing to move to such a system, not that Mr. Spector suggests they do.

Next he follows on talking about NDP and Liberal coalition options but then he gives a warning and explanation of the possible small parties that could get similar destabilizing influence in our current system:

In Canada, the NDP or the Bloc Québécois would have substantial heft if voters give one or the other the balance of power after the next election. In our system, however, it has been generally understood that the party with the most seats forms the government and has 12 to 18 months to enact part of its program, thanks to the widely shared antipathy for another election. At least that was the understanding until the near crisis of 2008 gave rise to a broad interpretation by some of the reserve powers of the governor-general that would require the transfer of power to a coalition without an election.

Again, not really incorrect, but it contains a value judgement that this is how it should be and that the ‘substantial heft’ of the NDP or Bloc is somehow dangerous in a similar way to the alluded to ‘Israeli-style’ dysfunction mentioned above.  In fact the NDP have much less influence than they should be given a more proportional electoral system and the Bloc have much more than they should.  The ‘generally understood’ idea that Mr. Spector, the media and many politicians seem to enjoy is part of the problem.  Why should a party that wins the most seats, even if it is 40% of the seats or less have the right to form government on their own at all?  Surely its the majority of members that makes the difference.

Spector implies that using the power of the governor-general to properly form a government consisting of the largest number of MPs possible is somehow an improper ‘broad interpretation’.  Yet what could be more fair than allowing MPs to work together to form the largest consensus possible.  If they can make a compromise and agree to govern together, good for them, we shouldn’t stamp it because of an obsession with who ‘won’ a five-way election.

When there are five teams who all get to collect ‘points’ the winner who gets 40% of the points isn’t much of a winner if two other teams (or even three if you include the greens) can collect 50% or 60% of the points.  Elections aren’t about which party wins, they are about sending people to parliament to represent us.  Lets allow our elected officials to do their job the best way they can without second guessing them and accusing them of stealing government without an election.

We had an election, just like they did in the UK, and a majority of seats did not go to any one party.  We ignored this and let the one with the most govern. The UK found a way to compromise and get more representation and did it without accusations of treason and stealing government and shutting down parliament.  That’s what we should learn from them.

• The first collects together a few comments from people who know Harper and his people well about how they hope to use prolonged presence in government to change the public ethic, the culture of Canada towards a Libertarian philosophy.  I don’t think this is always as conscious as they say but I also don’t think its paranoid.  Any minority  ideological group with strong aspirations, such as libertarian conservatives in a liberal  country like Canada, will try to find a way to maximize their influence in the long run.  Harper’s gang have struck upon a strategy to maintain a veneer of reasonableness while ever so slowly trying to undermine and change the institutions and structure that make this country what it is.  You can say Canada is its people and our history and that’s fine too. But what scares me is a small group of ideologues who represent a minority view of perhaps 20% of the country are shifting policies and norms that have held in place for many decades and no one elected them to do this and they haven’t explained what their direction is.  The Liberals and the NDP need to really get serious and do something to break the deadlock, we simply cannot have another 3 years of this government.
• The second at the Globe and Mail, Neil Reynolds explains to us that the census isn’t necessary at all. In fact, European states, where the Conservatives get ALL their good ideas from, are generally ending the practice of collecting a census directly.  Instead, they simply link together other data the government has to get what they need.  He wonders why the Conservatives didn’t use this approach to explaining the census, that its actually progressive?  Well, there’s a simple reason, because they didn’t think of it and don’t believe it.  They actually want to collect less data.  The European approach is not to collect more data, but to collect more, privately, automatically without going through the citizen directly at all.  I’m still not sure this would get at all the information that StatsCan collects right now and that so many organizations and researchers find so useful.  But this automatic data collection approach clearly doesn’t fit with the Conservative argument for collecting less data.  They probably find the whole idea abhorent and it may take them days to take your advice and try it out on the idea merry-go-round of explanations they are currently on.

“All we’re saying is, people shouldn’t be threatened with jail because they don’t want to tell some unknown bureaucrat how many bedrooms they’ve got in their house,” Mr. Day told Calgary radio station QR-77 on Friday.

“And you know, even prisoners of war only have to give their name, rank and serial number.”

and

“We live in an information age where any 12-year-old kid can push any button on the Internet and find out any information he or she wants without threatening a citizen that they’re going to go to jail.”

I mean, that’s real quality off-the-of-your-head-mumbo-jumbo-spattering.  The kind of thing Sarah Palin pulls off in her sleep, but up here in Canada, it’s a bit of a rare thing. Although, Stockwell Day is the go-to guy for such nuggets.

Just think about the difference for a moment, a mere moment, and you’ll see the craziness of it.  A POW is being held by a foreign power, with which their nation is at war, and we have a rule saying they can’t be forced to give arbitrary information.  Right, because that often leads to torture of the poor soldier who’s probably just following orders from his country.  That’s very, very different from the citizen of a country that provides them services.  A country they pay taxes to, vote in, perhaps even fight and give their life to defend.  A citizen of such a country has a social contract with their nation.  This contract has duties on both sides, mostly duties of the state to the citizen, but a few duties for the citizen to the state as well.  You don’t get nothing for nothing.  Filling out the census is like that, paying what is necessary to get the large number of services we get from Canada.  It is NOT like questioning a prisoner of war. Not.

As for kids looking up on the internet how many bedrooms my house is, what my ethnicity is, and how much I make a year.  Sorry Stockwell, most kids aren’t that smart unless they can hack into my bank and Statistics Canada to get the info.  The difference is, I trust Statscan with my information.  It’s the government, if they were misusing the information some investigative reporter would find out eventually and someone would sue and some opposition party would make a fuss.  And most public servants actually care about what the government does and feel they have  duty to uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms so they won’t, in general, misuse the information.

But then, I’m just a pie-eyed rational-person who trusts government functions in an orderly, law-abiding manner.  Unlike you, Minister Day, who seems to think filling out a census amount to telling some bureaucrat how much I make.  And you’re one IN government.  Sigh.

• The Chief Statistician has resigned his position in light of the dispute: Fantastic, good for him. He should have done it sooner but it seems last night’s ‘clarifying’ interview with Minister Clement pushed him over the edge.  The Minister pointed out that some people at StatsCan believe the agency is arms length, but in fact it is merely a tool of their governing minister, ie. himself.  Maybe it should be an arms length agency? How about that for an NDP or Liberal campaign promise?
• Mr. Clement had some real nuggets in that interview, I’ll just mention the one pointed out on Challenging the Commonplace. The Minister tweetith:
  

168,000 felt strongly enough last time about mand long form to refuse on pain of jail. Yet that sample was deemed valid.

That’s an interesting factoid, we’ll need to look into it.  But consider that 168,000 out of the roughly 6.6 million people the survey was given out to (that’s 20% of 33 million people) makes it about 2% of the sample.  Even if it was given out to a lot less people and it was 10% of the sample it would be bad, but not nearly as bad as what they are doing now.  Losing a few percent out of a huge sample set isn’t as damaging to the results as skewing 100% the sample with noise that cannot be controlled for.  We simply can’t know who will choose to fill out the survey and who won’t, so it won’t represent the actual population.  To work it out you’d need extra polls and studies to correct for it, something the US already tried and abandoned because so few people filled out the voluntary census.

So, nice try Mr. Clement, what’s your next idea?

Some questions over Minister Clement’s honesty and  very fun sarcastic response to recent contortions to explain their ‘reasoning’ to drop the census.

It has been pointed out that the US actually experimented on a small scale with a voluntary census and abandoned the plan as it would produce worse data that would cost more to fix than the original mandatory census.  But I guess trying out a major change in government policy with an experiment is a scientific approach which goes against Conservative party principles.  I hope all those old Progressive Conservatives out there call out their new overlords for this abandonment of what used to be a fairly reasonable and scientific conservative consensus in this country. Sadly, I don’t expect much given the silence of conservatives over this government’s continuous disrespect for a logical, scientific approach to decision making. From the environment, to women’s health, to drug addiction to firearms the new Conservative party has no time for evidence, scientific arguments or thorough studies.  Everything is done on gut instinct and emotion.  Not that they aren’t very intelligent people who are thinking very hard about what they are doing.  I think the Conservative party uses a lot of statistics and analysis behind the scenes, but only to determine which emotional buttons will create the right affects to get their party into power.

The Conservatives, of course, say they actually speak for most of us:

“We’re not there to please all special interest groups, we’re there for the silent majority of Canadians,” Conservative MP Maxime Bernier told The Canadian Press on Sunday.

“I’m sure that the big majority of Canadians understand that, and will agree with our decisions.”

Mr. Bernier said he had received 1,000 messages at the time from Canadians upset with the 2006 census. On Monday, he said on his blog that “these messages were obviously not filed for future use by my staff and were deleted.”

Ok, two thing. First of all, how would they know what the majority wants when their party got less than < 40% support in the last election?  They can only speak for the narrow set of solid supporters they have, no more than 20-30% of the country with the rest of their support coming from weaknesses in their opponents and a lack of choices rather than any ideological agreement with them.

Second thing, those thousands of messages sure would be useful evidence for his argument, but he doesn’t have the data, this is great irony.  But it’s also purposely misleading, most likely those complaints were from the organized campaign in 2006 to protest the use of a US defense contractor for data processing of the Canadian census. These people weren’t protesting the principle of a detailed census, they were protesting this data and money being funneled through Lockheed Martin.  Which you could understand generating thousands of emails.

Call me crazy, call me anal, call me “someone who understands statistical methods” or “someone who believes in a Social Contract between citizen and government” but this guy needs to be put in his place by disapproving, cranky school principal kind of guy.

I’ll try to explain this calmly.  You may recall, that recently the Conservative cabinet unilaterally decided to scrap the long form census which has been an essential data resource for government agencies, businesses, public charities, non-government organizations and scientific researchers for decades.   I commented at the time why this was  a very stupid thing to do and why this is clear to anyone who knows how the data is used or understands statistics at all, which one would assume someone would include people with masters degrees in Economics, whether they are currently Prime Minister of Canada or not.

As an update on this:  it turns out the Privacy commissioner was never consulted by the government about this decision even though one of the arguments given was that many citizens are concerned about an intrusion of privacy, the commissioner says they received  a grand total of two complaints about the last census in 2006.

Well, the Liberal party and all other opposition parties have been quite vocally against the change but it seems not all rank and file Liberals are, well, keeping rank.  Mr. Warren Kinsella, who apparently has lots of sway in Liberal circles, thinks its a grand idea even while he criticizes the Conservatives for creating such a scandal. From the CBC:

“I don’t want the government asking questions about my family,” Mr. Kinsella says. “I am not losing any sleep over [the change]. I don’t think you threaten an election campaign over it either.”

Mr. Kinsella reveals how he once refused to fill out the long-form questionnaire, which asks Canadians more than 50 detailed questions about their home, work life and ethnicity.

Ultimately, he said, the census takers simply gave up trying to make him complete it. “When I got the long form census many years ago, I thought it was very intrusive,” he said.

He said he challenged census staff to punish him. “I said ‘I am not going to change my mind. Put me in jail. I dare you’,” Mr. Kinsella explains. “So they gave me an exemption.”

Can we retroactively charge this guy with not filling in his census?  This is outrageous.  Mr. Kinsella certainly has his right to his opinion.  But he also has  right to be an idiot and to be called out for being someone who advises political parties while simultaneously advising citizens to break the law and disregard one of their essential duties to their nation.

Let me explain how bad this is.  For someone to publicly brag about refusing to fill out the census is just as bad as someone explaining how they got out of jury duty even though they had no valid exemption reason because they didn’t want the hassle.  Or its the same thing as someone explaining in detail how they got out of required military service (if we had conscription during a time of war) because they felt it was just the state asking too much.  OR its the same thing as explaining to the CBC how you generally hide some of your money offshore to avoid taxes, or simply don’t claim some of your income because you think Revenue Canada get enough money as it is.  In other words, its completely unacceptable behaviour for any responsible citizen who claims to speak with authority on issues of the day and improving our society.  MPs and pundits and party advisors don’t go around encouraging people to avoid paying taxes, to skip out jury duty or to avoid voting.  Filling out the census is exactly as official and important as all these other civic duties.  And its absolutely essential data needed for running any form of government that cares about its citizens.

For a lawyer, here’s the kicker:

He predicts Ottawa would have run into problems if a Canadian challenged the mandatory long-form in court as an affront to privacy rights.

Oh really?  He’s saying a court would strike down reasonable information being collected by an official government agency for the purposes of providing services to its citizens?  I think that kind of precedent would start people worrying about the legality of levying taxes on citizens.  If a long form census is too intrusive why is the short form ok?  The right of the government to collect taxes, to collect relevant data about its citizens held in privacy for use in providing services, for requiring its citizens to perform other public duties like serve on a jury or defend the nation from attack; no court would ever strike down these basic rights of government.  If that’s what you want, then you want to dismantle the basic powers of government, the basic point of having a government.  In which case, while I definelty cannot speak for the Liberal party, I don’t think they’re the one you’re looking for.  You’re looking for a Libertarian party or an anarchist party.

This man should not be allowed to say another word on television without being harangued about this endlessly or until he retracts his statements and admits what a fundamentally irresponsible, self-centered person he is.

that is all.

They have some Common Sense changes for how Statistics Canada collects census data every four years: in short, “Don’t worry about it too much, get whatever data you can, but quite being so pushy about it”.  That’s right, the Conservative cabinet has modified the rules for StatsCan so that the long form census, which is sent out to a random 20% of the population and contains much more detailed questions, will no longer be mandatory.  In case you weren’t aware, not filling out your census forms can carry a fine and if you’re really persistent can even get you jail time.  People say fewer Canadians will fill out the long forms if they are not mandatory.

From the Globe and Mail:

Industry Minister Tony Clement calls the fears “overwrought.” His department has decided the long-form survey will now be sent to 30 per cent of the population instead of the current 20, meaning more people may actually fill them out without “coercion of the state,” he said.

“I think you’ll have a much more honest and enthusiastic response than you would under the threat of fines or jail times to elicit a response,” he told The Globe Wednesday night. “I would question the validity of that.”

Well, that’s alright then.  I’m sure there will be no problem if we just increase the number of people getting a voluntary census, we’ll just hope it all works out.  Did you even talk to the Prime Minister about this?  I really want to know.  Because if you ever talk to an economist and say the words “data” and “less” their ears will perk up and they’ll say “well, we’d always like more data of course”.

But it seems Clement’s ‘common sense’ focussed brain doesn’t see that.  He’s more worried about the ‘coercion of the state’ than continuing a very important stream of information that has been unbroken since 1871.  In order to save some people the horror of one hour filling out a form once or twice in their lifetime when they are randomly selected he’s willing to throw all statistical rigour out the window.

So here’s two, specific problems with his ‘logic’:

1. Sampling Bias: If you had passed this idea past the Prime Minister, Mr. Economist would have pointed out that you cannot collect data on a voluntary, self selecting basis. For a collection of data to be valid and useful (what we would call nonbiased) you need to insure that it was collected in a non-biased way.  That means everyone that the data is supposed to cover needs to have an equal number of randomly selected data points.  In this case, we want data about the entire population, so we need to randomly send it out to a large sample of that population and everyone has to fill it out. If some group of people don’t fill it out,  then you can’t just send out more and hope it will work out.  You’ll be undersampling certain groups of people.  Unless you happen to be lucky and the people who don’t fill it out are completely randomly distributed, you’re going to screw up the data.  If there is any common thread amongst people who don’t fill it out (like they work two jobs and have no time; they can’t read well; they don’t speak english well; they’re paranoid conservative whiners who don’t trust government to do anything yet want all of its services…), then you’re screwed.  Statistically, the data will be useless. That’s right, it won’t ’ok’ or ‘slightly not as good as before but with a larger sample’.  It will be completely useless. You are letting the subjects of a study determine whether they want to participate on their own preferences and not controlling for it.  That’s just bad data gathering and I’m sure the people at StatsCan will tell you that.
2. Coercion of the State: I don’t want to be coerced by the state. We have enumerable laws to prevent this and our entire form of government is structured too prevent government from getting to involved in running our lives. But, there are four major things the Canadian government can require you to do as a Canadian citizen beyond just not breaking any laws. Mr. Lawyer Clement should know this, to wit:
   1. Paying your taxes
   2. Defending your country in a time a war
   3. Jury duty
   4. Filling out the national census – no kidding, its that important. The government can’t know how many of us there are, what we’re doing, what we need, if they don’t know anything about us.  And if you make filling out detailed information voluntary they will know exactly nothing about us. Refer back to point 1.

As many have pointed out, census data is actually used a great deal by businesses, charity organizations, government departments, scientific researchers and lots of other people.  No one else can collect data on this scale and at this quality.  The census is the gold standard of what social, statistical data is. Removing that standard will undermine countless other studies that rely on the census to cross validate and provide a ‘sanity check’ that their results are reasonable.

Nations have been collecting census data for thousands of years and in the past centuries collecting ever more detailed data for analysis has heralded the advancement of Western civilization and was one of the primary initial motivations for the development of computers in the 1800′s.  So to turn around and say all that is unimportant, to say that a detailed, statistically sounds census is not a pillar of our civilization is either disingenuous or naive.

This government has demonstrated time and time again that they have no respect for everything our society has achieved, for the tradition of Canadian government. They disrespect the constitution by poisoning political discourse with their parliamentary games, paritsan attacks and attemp to cut party funding. They diminish the role of the Governor General by turning them into a puppet.  They tarnish our international reputation by resisting environmental regulations.  They waste opportunities for our future by their loyalty to the oil industry and not using our economic advantages to build a green technology revolution that will help Canada navigate the economy in the 21st Century.  They hurt families, the poor, drug addicts and minorities with their cutting of funding for social services and charities while they simultanesouly swander our budget surpluses with tax cuts.

In short, the Conservative party does not respect what Canada is and they want to make it into something else.  Now this attempt to change the very data that our society uses to measures how it is doing shows this plainly.  What do you usually think of a store owner that asks everyone pays cash and gives no receipts? I think they’ll trying to avoid paying taxes.  They are avoiding collecting data that could incriminate them.  Removing detailed census data will have the same effect.  The Conservatives are essentially throwing the receipts for society out the window saying ‘trust us, it will all be fine, we don’t need that data’.

Or maybe Mr. Clement simply didn’t pass it by the economist down the hall and it will all be reversed momentarily.  Not likely.

“Mr. Prime Minister, its the University of Calgary on line two…”

Canada is awesome and Vancouver’s not bad at all, at all.

This site went over 8000 reads today due to a post from last year entitled Canadian Traditions.  It shows the big human flag from Victoria’s Canada Day celbrations last year, was in the flag.  Its one of my regularly highest hitting posts when I don’t have anything new out.  If anyone has the photo from this year’s human flag I’d love to see it.

This year I went to the Canada Day celebration downtown in Vancouver at Canada Place. Somehow in the 6 years I’ve been here I’ve never made it down.  It was pretty great.  Lots of music, food and family stuff. The new convention centre was open for everyone to wander through, which was great, people were just hanging out, sitting on the floor with their kids in this massive hall with a stupendous view of the Burrard Inlet.  There was also a large contingent from the Armed Forces giving displays of Lavs and ships (boats?).  Inside Canada Place there was a big display from many emergency and military organizations.  The Army had the big draw though with all their rifles out for people to pick up and get a picture with.  I was pleasantly surprised at how many people were coming over and lining up to site in a truck or get in tent and learn more about all the important stuff the Forces do.  Somehow

I didn’t stay for the fireworks but I did see the Canada Day parade and I’m glad I did.

Canada Day…parade? you say?  What the hell is that?

Ya, I know, but really it was just the best community parade I’ve ever seen.  There were dance troupes, highschool bands, seniors groups, military bands, satirical anti-business floats, gay rights group, a swordfighting school!, Falun Gong, what else…, more dance troupes, some cheerleaders and national community organizations such as Aboriginal, Greek, Portuguese, Italian?, Brazilian.  And there were thousands and thousands of people out to see it.  Much more awesome than the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and I’m Irish so it hurts to say that.  Not sure if it was more awesome than the pride parade, guess I’ll find out sunday.  But it was open and fun and just Canadian.

Its the most fun Vancouver’s been since the olympics.

Switching tracks a bit from celebrating our nation to fixing some of its kinks.

We still don’t have democratic reform in Canada, or even any leaders seriously talking about, but one of the motherlands is going to have a referendum on reform next May, or are they? They seem to be debating the issue as some people don’t even want the mild reform that the AV+ system being proposed would bring.  If that’s the kind of news you are interested in hearing about here’s two useful links

• Google News Section on Democratic Reform – I just found this feature in the newly updated Google news tools. You can create your own custom set of news searches.  This was always possible as alerts but now its integrated into News and you can share it with others.  I’ve added a bunch of different democratic reform keywords, not just PR and electoral reform ones.  If you think some topics are missing let me know and I can tweak it.
• Democratic Reform in Canada Bloggers - This is a hand tailored feed run by a few of us Canadian bloggers who care deeply about all kinds of democratic reform.  There are news links too but its mostly for the blog posts.  If there are bloggers you know that talk about democratic reform that should be up there let me know.

That is all.

Recommend this post

Read the comments of the article for some good rebuttals.  The fact is that a lot of UBC students can’t aford to live in Kits or Point Grey and commute from far away by skytrain and then by the 99 B-line all the way from commercial.  If that bus could be made into a fast rail line of somekind, be it skytrain, subway or streecar, it would be an enormous improvement to the lives of tens of thousands of commuters a day. Not to mention the decrease in traffic along busy broadway by getting rid of the large double length buses.

Another factor to consider is that UBC isn’t just for the kids anymore. Like it or not there is has been and will continue to be unprecedented growth market housing on and near campus. I live on campus, and I have a car, and I use it quite a bit because getting anywhere from campus takes so long by transit.  A fast link between campus and the Cambie and Commercial stations would reduce the need for all those people living on campus to use a car.  I think there should be another link as well connecting UBC to Richmond somehow as the current best route is Marine Drive which is narrow and slow at any reasonable time of day.

But this is a predictable discussion.  I just hope that for a change clear heads reign and Vancouver can move forward with an important improvement to its transit infrastructure without a protracted, never ending debate about costs and noise.  This city needs a lot more transit than it has right now and its a big hassle now only because no one got their act together and built it earlier.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build it.  It won’t get any easier in the future. Grow up Vancouver.

Scott Reid asks that we “Don’t sacrifice the Liberal Party for a coalition of the centre-left”.  He makes some good points that the idea of a formal coalition and combined platform and election strategy before an election, as seems to be suggested by a recent Angus Reid poll, has some serious flaws.  We shouldn’t want to reduce the number of parties just to to change government.  The NDP and Liberals are legitimately separate voices.  If people begin accepting the Conservative view that there are only two voices, the Left and the Right, then we are really losing something.  While I agree with Scott Reid’s rational points I take issue with his emotional argument for why such a coalition is a bad idea.  He claims that there is something Noble and Great about the Liberal party that should be defended for its own sake, as an institution. He claims that political parties encapsulate traditions, that they anchor principles that we must fight to defend in the long term even if we must lose elections in the short term.  Well,  I have a simple response to that notion.

Hogwash.

Political parties are strategic tools.  Tools to organize people, rally like minded voters and frame policy. Parties should be flexible and changeable over time.  They should be democratic and listen to the people who choose to be their members.  Political parties are not people. They are not conscious entities with beliefs and principles. They shouldn’t even be like religions, although that’s the closest analogue.

Political parties are functional components of our democracy.  Why should we be held to some conceptual notion of what the Liberal party “is” if the world is changing?  I vote for one party or another based on my trust that their leaders understand and hold principles similar to mine.  The party ideology has some effect on that but one of the frustrating things about parties, and why I have refrained from becoming too involved in any one, is that party members become defensive of “the party’s position”.

Lets make this clear. Political parties don’t have positions. They don’t exist, they are figments of our collective imagination that serve a useful purpose, like the economy and corporations.  People have ideological positions and they should always be willing to defend to themselves based on their own ideas and reasoning rather than referring to a party as justification.  So no, I will not defend the history and existence of any party just because it has been around a long time or instituted health care.

The Liberal party did not institute health care. The leaders and MPs at the time and thousands of government employees and health care workers across the country instituted health care. People did it, not a party.  If those people did it as members of a party, representing a party, or even, frighteningly, “for the good of the party”, then that is their prerogative. But for present Liberals to claim pride that their party did this is sentimentalist, sloppy thinking. Its understandable, a natural human fallacy we all participate in. But it is still sloppy and it has no place in real discourse about politics or our democracy.

Second link: The Cat provides a thorough analysis of the Angus Reid poll and outlines in detailed a Third Option.  In my opinion this is really the only option for a pre-election coalition that works.  I’m not convinced a pre-election coalition is required, but if it is, the cohesiveness of the parties must be maintained.  Also notable is his culling from the data that puts the lie to the myth that Bob Rae is unelectable in Ontario. Being from Ontario and growing up during Rae’s tenure I have never understood the certainty about this.  I understand there is some anger on the union side about betrayal and some unfortunate pension cases that should have been made exceptions, but Bob Rae is a powerful personality perfectly in line with mainstream Ontario.  If he had been chosen as leader of the Liberal party during that fateful day instead of Stephane Dion who knows where our country would be now. Somewhere different certainly.

But no matter.  We have the cards we are dealt with.  What must happen next is that politicians must be convinced to play an honest game of cards and that does not mean just ‘sticking to the principles and history’ of your party for its own sake.  It means looking pragmatically at the options available, considering all of them, and choosing a strategy that respects democracy. Choosing a strategy that respects the valid options available in our democracy, which the Brits have recently reminded us of (thanks MotherDem). Above all it means choosing a strategy that will bring about a more representative result in our next parliament.  So that we do not once again end up with a party receiving ~35% of the national vote and running government all on their own.  I don’t care who they are, or who they made a deal with, if they’ve over 45% or even, gasp, 50% of the national support collectively. Then they can work out policies in parliament, representing the will of most Canadians. That’s what elections really are, or  should be, all about.

Recommend This Post

As important as the question regarding whether the Liberal Party and NDP would consider being part of a coalition government is whether the Conservative Party would.

Why are virtually all media, journalists, other writers and democratic reformers ignoring this?

Just because Canadians won’t vote in enough MPs to givea single party a majority is no reason why Canada must be stuck with perpetual minorities.

Coalition governments are majority governments.

If the Liberals and Conservatives want a majority government all they need do is be honest with Canadians and negotiate with the third- and/or fourth-place parties after an election.

This gets me to thinking how to solve the Separatist-Conundrum. So I’m going to think out loud, bear that in mind, as I’m not entirely convinced of my own point here, but I think its interesting to discuss.  The Separatist-Conundrum is, how to form a coalition if one of the members is a separatist party. Now in the UK, this was a possibility if they had ended up with a Lab-Lib rather than a Con-Dem coalition. The Lab-Lib’s would have needed more support from a few smaller nationalist parties which often talk about independence  from Scotland, Wales or maybe Northern Ireland.  In their case this wouldn’t have been a huge deal since they all have a small number of seats, the Scottish party, the largest of these, has six seats.

In Canada, the Bloc get 50-ish seats each election.  So if you make a deal with them you need to make sure they aren’t furthering their separatist agenda. But perhaps there is another approach.   How would people react to a coalition that explicitly set requirements on the Bloc to temporarily suspend all activities to bring about an independent Quebec?  This would mean, no referendums, no talking about separating or going it alone.  They can fight for Quebec’s interests of course, they area a regional party after all, but nothing that weakens Quebec’s connection to the rest of Canada.

I’m not sure how this would work, all I’m saying is, it’s possible to see a coalition offer to the Bloc from the Lib-NDP as an opportunity to shift the Bloc from being a regional separatist party to being simply a regional advocacy party.  Such a shift would be good for the entire country. It would help Quebeckers feel they have a clear voice and remove the fears of the rest of Canada that giving them that voice would enable a minority extremists to destroy our country.  But is this feasible?

Well, ok I’ll point out one major reason I can think of why its not feasible. Two words: Democratic Reform. A Lib-NDP coalition should have as one of its primary issues, progress on reforming elections so that the wishes of voters are more fairly represented in parliament.  As 308.com showed the other day (see their fantastic analysis of a what-if election scenario in Canada using proportional representation) all of the parties could potentially benefit from elections run with some form of PR, with the notable exception of the Bloc.  Even the Conservatives could be seen to benefit in that they would be the most broadly spread out party with the best claim to being a truly national party, even though they’d get less seats than they do now and would be hard pressed to stop a Lib-NDP-Green coalition from forming government.  The Bloc are the only party that would not be helped at all by PR, it would decimate their seats and turn them into a largish regional party about the same size as the current NDP. They be the same size as the Greens but with a lot more baggage.

Of course, while the Bloc may not like it, Quebeckers would benefit greatly by having PR since they’d have lots more representation in all of the other parties and thus more MPs in whichever party or coalition forms government, which is really what matters.  The current situation of the Conservatives having to choose between 2 or 3 weak candidates or to appoint someone so they can have someone from Quebec is clearly not in the interest of Quebeckers.  And a Liberal majority wouldn’t be able to do much better.

The Bloc would argue strenuously against electoral reform unless they could get some hardwired guarantee of a fixed proportion for their party, which would defeat the whole point.  So I assume they’d veto electoral reform as part of any deal, and hopefully the NDP would refuse to cooperate under such a veto. Although, given the opportunity to prove themselves in running a ministry I’m not at all confident the NDP would stick to their principles or long term interests in this regard.  But I hope they would.

So you know, its probably a pipe dream. What do you think? Is there any way a coalition government could rely on Bloc support in a reasonable manner?

Recommend this Post

Filed under: Politics Tagged: bloc, coalition, democracy, demreform, elections, electoral reform, fairvote, parliamnet, proportional representation, quebec, seperatist ]]> http://popthestack.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/could-coalition-be-used-to-get-the-bloc-to-stop-being-separatists/feed/ 8 rateldajer http://popthestack.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/call-for-discussion-of-abortion-how-about-a-call-for-data-first/ http://popthestack.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/call-for-discussion-of-abortion-how-about-a-call-for-data-first/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 23:14:41 +0000 Mark Crowley http://popthestack.wordpress.com/?p=923 ]]> Tasha Kheiriddin over at the National Post just posted a generally pretty reasonable call for discussion on abortion in Canada. I don’t disagree with her general conclusions, that a law, crafted properly in a civilized manner, would be better than no law.   But she makes the mistake of assuming one is needed based on hypothetical misuses.   Getting a civilized discussion going on this issue is very difficult, part of the reason it is difficult is comments like the following from her very own  article:

A 30-year-old woman knocked up after a night of unprotected casual sex is placed on the same footing as a 14-year-old girl who is raped by her uncle. A woman who at 20 weeks’ gestation learns that her fetus has a severe birth defect is treated the same as a woman who decides that she wants a late-term abortion because she has split up with the baby’s father.

I don’t think one can really debate the correctness of what she’s saying here.  However, its the implication within it that is the problem. This is the kind of argument raised a lot by people who have moved past the ‘when does life begin’ debate but want reasonable laws governing abortion.  There is an implicit assumption that a fair number,  or even a lot, of abortions are by women casually coming in off the street to compensate for not using contraceptives or to get rid of a baby because it will be awkward or difficult due to health or social issues.  I’ve never seen any numbers on it but I’d bet these cases don’t make up a lot of the actual abortions taking place, if any.  Its a red herring. Women do not use abortion as a contraceptive and the decision to abort a child due to birth defects is incredibly difficult and probably only happens in very severe cases, where the child is nearly certain to live nothing but a short and very painful life.

Making these kinds of claims about the reasons for having an abortion is not the right way to start a rational and mutually respectful discussion of the issue.  It must begin with respecting the decisions made by women and how difficult they are.   To be sure, we can imagine hypothetical reasons for an abortion that we would all disagree with.  But rather than assuming these happen and that they must be restricted, perhaps we should first gather some data on all the reasons we can find that actually do happen.  Then we can talk about how many are objectionable to this or that group of people and whether our unregulated status-quo is a good idea or not.  By not knowing numbers we don’t know if your hypothetical “30-year-old-knocked-up-women” is a real concern or a figment of your imagination.

Friday’s accord on releasing Afghan detainee documents… marks the rise of Parliament as a genuine power within government, which is the best thing that has happened in Ottawa for a very long time. For 24 years, from 1980 to 2004, majority governments ruled at the federal level. Successive prime ministers used those majorities to expand their own powers at the expense of their party caucus and Parliament itself. Cabinet ministers were turned into ciphers; parliamentary committees became rubber stamps; the opposition was demonized or ignored.

Stephen Harper is no less determined than his predecessors to personally control the agenda. But we’ve had six years now of minority government, and during those years Parliament has become an increasingly powerful counterweight to the administration of the day. Parliamentary committees have started exercising their power to compel individuals to appear before them and to explain their actions. Private member’s bills have actually become the law of the land.

Very true, all great stuff.

And in an ultimate test and exercise of power, the opposition parties combined to force the government to show them the uncensored documents relating to the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

I don’t see why ‘ultimate’ is the right word here, the ultimate test would seem to be one that ends up removing the government because they disagree with parliament.  Luckily we didn’t have to go there this time but it’s not clear that the Liberals were really committed to going there even if Harper et al. weren’t going to give in a bit.

There have been mistakes. The attempt in 2008 to force a coalition government on the Canadian people was an adolescent effort by the opposition to wield its newfound power. As coalition negotiations in London this week demonstrated, voters expect the party with the most seats to be part of the government.

This is when I decided a response was needed.  John might want to read a bit more widely, not everyone agrees the British people got what they voted for.  This idea that getting the most seats is justification for forming government is toxic and needs to be slapped down.  The only justification for forming government is representing the largest number of voters.  Our voting system makes this difficult since the horsetrading is done with seats rather than votes which don’t add up to the same thing.  But if a coalition of parties can achieve more seats than any other single party, even if it’s not a majority, that would still be more democratic than a single smaller party ruling.  Now in the UK a coalition with a majority of seat did indeed happen, and I’m hopeful about its results.  But it was possible to cobble together a coalition that represented much more of the popular vote.  Even though a Lib-Dem coalition without any further parties would have been unstable in terms of seats, they would have had commanding support from voters in terms of the national popular vote.  Which should count for something.  Of course, it doesn’t right now, and that’s the problem.

Back to Mr. Ibbitson:

And Mr. Harper, fighting back against this new threat to his hegemony, has used the power of prorogation so cavalierly that Parliament may have to take that power away from him.

Here’s hoping.

But mostly there has been growth. This new combination of a committee of MPs and an adjudicatory panel, charged with deciding what information on detainees can be released without jeopardizing national security, balances competing interests in the public interest.

There may be further growth to come. With the British precedent in mind, voters in the next election will want to know whether the Liberals and NDP would be willing to form a coalition, should the Liberals win the most seats in a hung Parliament. Whether you would approve of such a coalition may be the biggest factor in how you vote.

Here we go…definitely John.  This should be something that is at least aired as a possibility so that insane accusations of stealing the election can’t be leveled later.  But the Libs and NDP don’t need to hammer out a solution or promise to work together, they merely need to admit publicly that coalitions are perfectly valid results of minority elections and whatever happens, happens. They would however, need to address Quebec directly in this and somehow split the discussion on whether the Bloc could be part of a coalition, even in theory, or not.  This is why I’m glad I’m not a politician. I don’t know the right answer.  Well, the right answer would be to say very clearly to Quebeckers that there could a progressive coalition after the election and if Quebec wants to be part of it they need to vote for a federalist party like the NDP, Libs or Green.  But this probably isn’t actually good advice given the way votes work and the actuall behaviour of the Bloc.  The stated principles of the Bloc are separatist but they rarely act in that way these days.  They are simply vociferous champions of their region who are progressive and generally very open to cooperation in parliament.  But ya, its a minefield that one.

Of course, the next election could produce a majority government. If so, Parliament would quickly revert to its former, supine self. Maybe more would get done, legislatively, maybe not. But it would be a loss for democracy.

Wow, its official, John Ibbitson supports continued minority government.  I’ll hold you to that next time the Conservative polls go up.

Yes, we have had too many elections; yes, legislation that should have been passed has died on the order paper; yes, the environment in the House has been toxic at times.

Well, a toxic environment in general is one of the central planks of the Conservative party… And as already pointed out, those bills didn’t have to die since prorogation was used recklessly.

But Canada remains in better fiscal health than any other major developed nation, even after six years of minority government. All the parties in the House deserve credit for that.

I’m not sure they do. They’ve hardly done anything.  They haven’t wrecked the country yet, so that’s good I suppose.  But we’re in good condition partly because the Liberals under Chretien with Paul Martin’s hand on the till put it there  and partly because our stable and hard working bureaucracy and sensible regulation built up over decades have maintained that stability through thick and thin.

Conservative MP Michael Chong has put forward a motion that would reform Question Period, bringing greater civility to that raucous session and encouraging more sensible questions and more forthright answers. All parties should embrace the proposal. It would be another step along the road to truly responsible, truly parliamentary, government.

No, a rule saying MPs should be nice to each other either

• a) isn’t going to make any difference or
• b) will be used to muzzle debate.

In the meantime it will make the Conservatives look like they are doing something constructive for democracy when in fact they are trying to take it apart to cement a permanent Conservative shift to our country.  This solution is like any other proposed by the Conservatives from mandatory sentencing to drug laws to handing out tax rebates to families with children.  It puts a band-aid directly onto a symptom instead of attacking the cause of the problem.  Parliament will be more polite when the government answers questions and stops trying to circumvent parliamentary rule. It will probably me more polite if there is a majority party or majority coalition getting stuff done. But why does it matter fundamentally if they are polite?

Improving the ‘atmosphere’ in parliament is a Conservative smokescreen. It’s an unimportant issue in a time when we have pressing issues about the economy, healthcare, childcare, equality and the legitimacy of our democracy.  The people we send to parliament are adults, they can all handle a bit of rude talk.  What we need to do, as Mr. Ibbitson points out, is let them know that none of them are getting that majority any time soon unless they make real changes and start listening to the voices of voters rather than the sounds of their own.

• The Tories offer a referendum on Alternative Voting, basically the smallest step up from FPTP you could get. Not really proportional but better nothing.
  • Important question (reply in comments if you know the answer): did the Tories say what percentage would be needed for the referendum to pass? The only acceptable answer is 50%. If they are trying to say 60% is needed, just look to Canada for the results, then this offer should be rejected out of hand.
• Meanwhile, Labour offers
  • the resignation of Gordon Brown after a new leader is selected, who would become prime minister
  • a bill to implement Alternative Vote without a referendum
  • further study about better electoral reforms and a referendum on their implementation

From a democratic reform perspective, both these offers are exciting.  The Tory one is safer, doesn’t risk angering conservative voters too much and probably gets the Lib-Dems more influence in government than they’ve ever had before.  I cannot imagine Canada’s own NDP turning down such an offer, assuming there are also cabinet seats involved.  The drawback of this is that the Tory MPs will be allowed to campaign against the referendum and history shows that a population given a choice between a new voting system and the status quo where full negative attacks are allowed and little unbiased public education is done, usually fail.  That is exactly what happened in Ontario and BC and very  different from the successful referendums in New Zealand and elsewhere which were much less partisan and involved many choices.

So, for electoral reform the Labour offer seems better. They get a real improvement for free, possibly angering many people that they weren’t consulted about the change first. And further, they get an ongoing conversation about further improvements.  Perhaps one way to soften critics would be that the eventual referendum, several years hence, on further reforms would also include the option of returning to FPTP.  This would be unlikely to succeed but give people the option to really be heard if enough people really don’t want change.

Of course, another problem with this path, and why I  suspect the Lib-Dems won’t go for it, is that its much less certain.  The Lib-Lab coalition would still not have a majority in the house and so would need to court other, smaller parties.  This could work, especially since electoral reform can only benefit them, not harm them, but it may mean further deals will be needed.  Since the largest voting bloc did vote Tory this time around, that adds up to a lot of unhappy people getting a very progressive, left-leaning government even though the most concentrated voting bloc wanted the opposite direction.  The essential point is however, that this large bloc do not constitute the majority of the electorate and so do not have the right to determine the country’s direction if the varied masses of  a larger number of voters can actually agree to come to a coalition.  That is how democracy should work, and it is exactly the kind of situation that FPTP makes difficult.

When similar situations have faced Canada we have skipped this entire discussion, the PM has resigned and everyone quickly agreed that obviously the party with the most seats should be anointed government even though they cannot be guaranteed to hold the confidence of the house. It is a credit to British politics and the British population that this discussion can happen in a sensible, rational manner without crazed accusations of thwarting democracy being thrown around…at least not immediately.  The Tories do show signs of preparing such an attack of the Lib-Dems have the audacity to take the more risky route, stick to their principles and make a deal with Labour.

The reformer in me sincerely hopes they do just this since the payoff will be so much greater if it all works out.  But if they choose the safer route and go with the Tories I would support them.  And I would encourage all progressives and reformers to support them to get the Tories to call their bluff and have that referendum.  They clearly are making this offer betting that they can convince voters through negative campaigning and fear tactics to say no to what is admittedly not a very good electoral reform option.  But it would be a vast improvement over FPTP and if it won by a large majority it would clear the way to further reforms in future.  I hope that if the Lib-Dems take this path they get all the support they need and the period of hand wriging and what-if dreaming is shortlived.

Hmm, can you imagine in the equivalent Canuck situation, that Jack Layton would turn down a deal and some ministries in exchange for not throwing a fuss?  I can, and it worries me.  The lure of proving yourself in cabinet is strong.  But Clegg and his party must keep in mind the future of their country and what is best in the long run. They can form a short term government with Labour to institute reform and then have another election sooner rather than later.  The results of that election will be beyond repute and the majority or coalition that comes out of will truly represent Britain.

But there is so much to read about it right now.  Go take a look at http://democraticreform.feedcluster.com/ for the opinions of some of Canada’s blogging #demreform stars on the subject.

Update: Apparently a lot of people don’t want Clegg to give up either, over a thousand people out protesting to encourage Clegg to stick to his electoral reform promise.

So the stats are bound to prove interesting for citizens in lobbying their governments to be more open.

Check it out, then go ask your government to be open about what the requests were for:

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

Today I’m going to tell you my vision for creating a national discussion about Democratic Reform.

If you’re a regular reader of PopTheStack you know that one of the things I’m really passionate about is fixing our democracy in Canada.  There are lots of things wrong with the way that voices of Canadians are heard, or rather not heard, by the people and institutions that run our great country.  I’m also very interested how the web and social media can be leveraged to affect change in our society.  So I’ve started a lot of mini campaigns online, some have stuck (Anti-Prorogue Twibbon) and some haven’t (FixVoting Twibbon, #fairvotevendredi tag, Electoral Reform wiki, …, many more).  Alright, most haven’t, but that’s the nature of the beast.

Come Together

One thing that causes some of these things to fail is that it takes a lot of work over time by many people to build momentum.  Unless you have buy-in initially from a significant group of people then these things will fall flat.  The other way to make something successful is to be really famous and spread the word wide, then on simple randomness you’ll quickly get a lot of people trying it out.  The other, other way is to make something lightweight, that doesn’t require a lot of commitment, automatically generates useful content and provides a real value-add to the discussion or promotion of the issue you are working on.  Since I’m not famous, and don’t have an organization to work with, this third approach is the one I am following today.

The new site is called Democratic Reform in Canada, catchy eh?. It’s not a new organization, its not a wiki, it’s just a website, a feed aggregator. The inspiration is the fantastic Progressive Bloggers website which is a go-to source for lots of great, progressive bloggers in Canada.  The goal with DemoReform is to create a similar aggregator, of quality bloggers discussing what’s wrong with our democracy and how to fix it.

I hope the website can fill a gap in the national discussion by providing a place where anyone who blogs about fixing Canadian democracy can be heard. All sites will be approved manually and the broadest possible definition of Democratic Reform will be used when approving sites.  But this won’t be just an aggregation of blogs by people who happen to support some kind of reform, it will be focussed on posts by only including feeds for particular tags or categories on the feeds of included bloggers.  So if you submit your blog, don’t be surprised if I ask you for a feed with a narrower focus.

For the reader, this little bit of upfront work will mean that all articles on the site are on topic. So if anything is happening from Senate reform, to PR referendums, to lack of elected leaders on environmental issues to disenfranchisement of voters in minority communities; you should see it on the site. But what you shouldn’t see are partisan attacks that have nothing to do with the causes or solutions to the problem or issue pieces that have nothing to do with democracy per se.

Why do we need yet another site?

There are several fantastic organizations out there such as Fair Vote Canada and CAPP that organize protests and lobby government for reform. So, why do we need this site? Well, I’ve found that some people feel excluded from these organizations.  Others, claim that they are too focussed narrowly on particular issues or solutions (respectively: Electoral Reform through Proportional Representation and Limits on Prorogation Powers of the PM).

Meanwhile, a continuing string of minority governments and decreasing voter turnout indicate that many Canadian Voters are not happy with their democratic choices.  Canadians are also increasingly realizing that it isn’t just the choices themselves that are the problem. The problem runs deeper than that, into the way we choose our leaders, the way some leaders aren’t chosen at all, the way campaigns are financed and many other structural reasons.

But where does one find people who discuss Senate reform, campaign finance reform or direct democracy?  Rather than yet another organization to champion each cause we need to have all the existing groups, activists and average citizens who yearn for democratic reform to have a place to find the broadest possible discussion.  One thing we all have in common is that we agree that democracy is broken in Canada and there is a lot we can do to fix it.

The real debate seems to be, which reform should come first, rather than which reform is the perfect answer that will fix all our problems.  We all need to work together to overcome the inertia of the status-quo in government, but we can’t work together until we know each other and read what others are saying.

So, it’s time there was a place where everyone who cares, can be heard. Hopefully DemocraticReform can be that place. The only requirements are civil discourse, rational debate and mutual respect for all who want reform. Even if we disagree, and we will disagree,  about which reform is needed most urgently.

So please come take a look, submit your blog for consideration or spread the word.

Recommend this post

You simply have to read it. Its long but its worth it, mostly because of his concluding list (on page 5) of things the Liberals could do to reinvent itself and distinguish itself to the electorate by being relevant again (SPOILER ALERT). Essentially, they can become:

The party of democratic reform. How we nominate candidates, how we choose leaders, how we elect members, how Parliament functions—there’s clearly lots of work to do here. This used to be a Conservative issue. Today, not so much.

The party of individual rights. In 2006, Paul Martin proposed removing the notwithstanding clause from the Constitution. Less ambitiously, Liberals could propose shoring up our national commitment to freedom of expression, by abolishing the ban on hate speech (the “incitement to violence” provision is surely enough) and clipping the human rights commissions’ wings.

The party of consumers. Every economist will tell you: protectionism is a conspiracy against consumers, notably our egregious tariffs on agricultural imports. More competition, domestic or foreign, is the best way to bring prices down, and productivity up.

The party of taxpayers. Former Liberal MP Dennis Mills used to campaign vigorously for the flat tax, complete with postcard-sized tax form. A corollary would be reform of EI and social assistance, along the lines recommended by the impeccably Liberal Macdonald commission: a simplified, streamlined universal income guarantee.

The party of pensioners. The Quebec Caisse de dépôt’s ill-fated plunge into asset-backed commercial paper shows the perils of trusting everyone’s pension savings to one big investment fund. Why wait for some similar misfortune to overtake the CPP? Liberals are talking now of adding a supplementary individual savings plan on top of the CPP, as a way of addressing pension shortfalls. Why not reverse-engineer the CPP on the same lines, breaking it up into individually owned plans?

The party of the environment. Yes, that means a carbon tax. It’s a good idea, the only way Canada is ever going to come close to meeting its carbon emissions targets, and everyone knows it. Was it the carbon tax, as myth holds, that doomed the Liberals in the last election? Or was it because it was poorly designed and poorly presented? A better plan, better presented—a real “tax shift,” as implemented by Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government in B.C.—might be a winner.

If you are a regular reader of PopTheStack you can probably guess which two approach I think the Liberals should follow, yep, 1 and 6.  I like that he lists becoming the party of democratic reform as number one. As I’ve said before (nya and nya), I think it is truly the most bold option open to them and one that could ignite the electorate if done right.  The advantage of this is that its something people in the West and Ontario could get excited about.  I’m glad Andrew agrees. But from discussions I’ve had with Liberal Party members they have a very skewed and flat view of what reform means, they think Senate reform is all about Tripe-E and they think any electoral reform other than Alternative Voting is fatally flawed.  They aren’t at the point where they can propose such a re-imaging of their party and if Ignatieff did, I think many party insiders would rebel against such an idea as treason against Liberal values (which they can’t define).

But you know, I could be wrong, often am. Maybe they’ll all read Coyne’s article and go, oh yeah, THAT’s what we should do! I’m thinking not. Prove me wrong Liberal Party…please.

Recommend This Post

Discuss this post on Google Buzz

I would suggest that the Prime Minister consider, right now, instituting the same process for the selection of the Governor General.  Hold a national election, in due course, perhaps during the summer. It would be more a plebiscite or informal referendum with minimal campaigning, but with a chance for the public to consider the choice.

The PM would commit to putting forward a short list of candidates, selected from amongst notable Canadians, produced in consultation with all opposition parties.  Then the entire country would vote on who they choose to act as the Queen’s Viceroy. The PM would commit to abiding by the choice of the electorate.

The effect of this would be to add a little bit of democracy to one of the most undemocratic institutions in our country while simultaneously giving it more legitimacy.  The new Governor General would be someone vetted and approved of by the Canadian people.  They would be able to wear the mantle of Head of State with a confidence that no Governor General has been able to claim since 1867.  They would make the few constitutional roles allotted to them real, valid powers. Powers to be used with caution, lest this grand experiment ends before it begins, yet powers that would have an effect on the way government is carried out.

No more would the Prime Minister be able to prorogue parliament on a whim, or a weak excuse, for political purposes. No more would the Prime Minister be able to hold democracy hostage, threatening that a loss of confidence by the House of Commons must result in another election, even when a larger minority or majority coalition is ready to rule. Finally, we would have a some  check on Priministerial power.  Such a check exists in most other western democracies.  The President or Congress in the US do not have as much power as our Prime Minister.  Even the PM in Britian might have a slightly better chance of expecting his Queen to speak up, especially in matters of extreme parliamentary manipulation.

If you are to be true to your Reform roots Mr. Harper, you must consider this.  Surely if senate appointments are an anachronism, then appointing our stand-in for Head of State is only more so.

Update: For a far more thorough proposal of pretty much the same thing make a cup of tea and go read this great article over at counterweights.

Oh ya, that’s gonna work out great. I am not against papers trying to implement incremental charges to fund their journalism costs. Nothing comes for free and advertising is not free. But any pay for access system needs to account for how people actually use the internet and how much a single read is worth.

I find articles by searching, linking from aggregator blogs or following links on twitter. So I’m not going to log into a particular newsite, pay $1.50 and then read a whole bunch of articles that day. I might read one article from your site, if its comes to the top in my google news search, or a big blog links to it. But if it asks me to pay I just go back and read an article about the same event from the Guardian or the New York Times. Now maybe they’ll all make me pay, you say. Well, they won’t, if just a few are free they’ll get a lot more readers and their advertising will become profitable.

But lets say a lot of paper do begin to charge in some way. There will be a huge competitive pressure to make that fee small and incremental. The only kind of fee that will work for online news is a per-article fee and it needs to be really small, like one penny small. On top of that it needs to be dead simple to pay, using something everyone already uses, like itunes or amazon. If I could click on a button beside your article that deducts a penny from my itunes account it might stop me from hitting the back button.

I can think of something close to this working for magazines, but not papers. A good magazine, with compelling content could convince me to pay for an entire issue, but it can’t be time limited at all. I’d click a button to get unlimited, nonexpiring access to a single issue of the Economist or New Scientist or Maclean’s, for example. I might even pay $4 or $5 for it. But a newspaper, that’s out of date the next day, and might have one or two articles I want to read? Why in the name of HTTP would I pay $1.50 for that?

Pay for access may be the only to save the credible, professional journalism industry. It can provide a valid add in quality of content for our news over the free blogs that will never go away. So whatever newspapers do to get money for access to their content it must admit they are dealing with fickle (not loyal) readers who have a free alternative that isn’t that much worse just a few clicks away. The amount plus effort you are making people pay must come out less than the effort of finding another source of similar quality. It can be done, but this is not the way to do it.

Discuss this article on Buzz

This is what Canadians need, a clear argument why our democracy is broken. There are some great basic arguments here that anyone interested in fixing our democracy should be repeating over and over to everyone they talk to about politics:

Traditionalists claim the Senate provides strong regional representation and sober second thought.  The appointed upper house does neither. Regional representation is badly skewed and sober thoughts, when they occur, lack democratic legitimacy.

You can see this clearly with the arguments used by the Conservatives against ‘meddling’ by the previously Liberal dominated senate.  Now that the Conservatives have the majority in the Senate I expect we’ll hear how essential the sober second thought of the senate is to the functioning of parliament. If Senators were elected then their legitimacy would be real. But that would be a much bigger change than simply removing the Senate altogether since they only override the House in extraordinary circumstances.

Today’s voting system suppresses the variety of voices in every region. Twenty-seven of Alberta’s 28 seats are occupied by Conservative MPs, even though more than a third of Alberta voters voted for other parties. Meanwhile more than a half-million people in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver voted Conservative, yet not a single MP from those cities sits in the governing party’s caucus. Two-thirds of Quebec voters voted for federalist parties, yet two-thirds of the Quebec’s seats are held by Bloc MPs.

This should be burned into the consciousness of the nation. (I challenge someone to express this concisely as a tweet or with images that could be put on a bumper sticker. I’ll work on it when I get time. There should be a way to do it with party logo’s, provincial flags, + and = signs and numbers. The entire argument for electoral reform in pictogram form. Hmmm. I’ll be thinking about this all day now.) This small set of facts covers at least half of what is wrong with our current system.  Sure, there’s even more, from the under-representation of women and minorities to the inability of nonregional parties to get any traction. I would add the following line as well:

“Considered nationally, the regionally focussed Bloc receive around 10% of the national vote yielding around 50 seats in the House while the regionally dispersed Green party receives roughly the same level of support and has never elected an MP to parliament in its entire history.”

Finally, have you ever had a conversation about reform shutdown with the ‘we can’t change the constitution’ argument? Well…

Best of all the introduction of a new voting system for the House does not require a constitutional amendment. It just requires our political leaders to amend the Canada Elections Act to reflect a widely shared democratic value: equal votes for all.

Anyways, read the article. As always, comments, improvements on my proposal are welcome, as are wholesale (but polite) denouncements of my naivete.  But if I’m wrong, then have you a better answer?

Continue the Conversation on Buzz

Safe because its the one issue that you know the Conservatives won’t try to hijack for themselves because they fundamentally don’t believe in it.  Exciting because it ties in to all the anger about two prorogations in a year, the ambiguity of the Governor General’s office, the anger over the senate, slugging voter turnout, low youth turnout and many other issues.  Its a problem that spans many different areas and even touches on national unity and campaign funding.

The time has come for the Liberals to step up and boldly take the issue of electoral reform as their own to fix a number of  things that are wrong with the democratic machinery of our great country.  Now is the time to do it.  And it might just be the only thing that will work.

I’ve created a central page on Fixing Democracy with all the articles I’ve written on this topic of specific proposals (my own and from others) for parties to think outside the box and acknowledge the democratic deficit in our country through how they campaign and how they govern.

Continue the conversation about this on Buzz

Just a thought that occurred to me today. People are always eager to predict that science will be ‘pretty much done’ in the next 30 years, answering all the hard questions and progressing at a steady pace. It usually falls short of our expectations and take huge right turns we weren’t expecting, recasting the question in a different form, creating new insights but mostly illuminating how little we truly know (dark matter, dark energy, climate change, neurobiology)

Similarly, people are generally very bad at predicting how far technology will advance in the next 30 years, to the point where often the technology that seemed unrealistic becomes merely mundane by the time ‘the future’ has arrived. And we are usually very bad at predicting exactly what technology will be available.  (cellphones, airplane industry, computers, internet, brain scanning)

So technology predictions should be: I don’t know, but probably nothing anyone has thought of and sooner than you’d think.
While scientific predictions should be: We seem close to solving this so you, know who know’s how long it will take, it may turn out we’re asking entirely the wrong question.

Continue the Conversation on Buzz

Under our current system, a quota for nomination of female candidates is the best solution. The quota could apply to the candidate selection process or to the actual candidates put forward, either one would make a huge difference.

Continue the discussion on Buzz

But what really gets me going about this kind of talk is that someone always has to try to compare which game was really the best ever.  Here’s my comments verbatum to a post to this story on the CBC message boards:

dougie b said :
I’m forced to say it again, “Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever compare to the drama and excitement the ’72 Summit Series generated.” Indeed, yesterday’s Olympic Men’s Hockey Gold Medal triumph was something very special, but in terms of how it caught the imagination of an entire nation, sorry, it’s not even close!

Right, dougie, well thats nice and all. And I hear it over and over again from people on tv. I’m happy that you experienced such a life changing event. You see, the thing is, there are people in this country who are under the age of 37.  There are even a larger number who are under the age of say 45.  All of these people either did not see “The Game in 72″ or did not understand why it was a big deal because they were only 8 years old.

So.  I’d like you and everyone else over 45 to show us some respect and just stop trying to say if this game was better than ’72 or not.  Cause you know, half of us, can’t even take part in the argument, and frankly don’t care.  Yesterday’s game was the biggest, best, most monumental hockey game ever in our lifetime.

Thanks.

Another problem is that each party not running a candidate in some riding would lose all of the per-vote funding they receive for votes in that riding.  This would be difficult for the Liberals, horrible for the NDP and fatal for the Greens since they get around 10% of the vote nationally and most of their funding comes from that money.  Any coalition deal along these lines made before the election would need to include a guarantee that per vote funding would be redistributed to the parties that sacrificed by not running a candidate in some riding.  It is questionable whether this kind of transfer of money between parties for essentially not running against each other would be legal.  It probably shouldn’t be legal even though the intent in this case is legitimate.

I have suggested approaches such as this in the past. But I think it is unlikely and perhaps unwise for the parties to get together and turn each riding in the country into two way race.  I think all the parties should run in all ridings except for a small number where the centre-left vote is clearly being split and in the one or two cases where the Greens have a chance of winning based on local results.  This probably amounts to 20 or 30 ridings.  For all the others all parties should run but the message coming from the national campaigns should be one of respect for each other with the explicit promise that if another minority is the will of the Canadian people then these three parties will look into forming a coalition government by defeating the Conservatives in parliament and asking the Governor General to let them rule.

Telling this to voters up front is important because it lets us decide how to vote, to look at our riding and decide whether to vote with our heart or to vote strategically and rely on the coalition to balance out things.  An important component to this would be a comprehensive, unbiased website that ranks how likely each candidate is to win and giving a suggestion of who to choose in order to maximize the chance of a centre-left coalition forming government.  This will pop up on its own as there are several site out there almost like this.

This allows all the parties to run without being seriously accused of rigging the election, it allows the Liberals to form government if they actually win a majority and it deals with fear of the Bloc by declaring very clearly that they will not be part of any coalition.

Custom user images often show up when an internet protest picks up steam. Think "I'm with Coco.".

You gotta love Canada.  We are a humble people but we are also a deeply funny and self-effacing people. The latest political trend involves a deep fried ring of onion, a Prime Minister and the spicy dipping sauce of Facebook protest.

The aforementioned onion ring, a very tasty looking one I must say, recently became a star with its own FaceBook page entitled “Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper“.  In case you aren’t familiar, a FaceBook is webpage on FaceBook meant to represent a person, product, party or any kind of entity that might have ‘fans’.  Instead of joining a page, like you would with a FaceBook group, you become a fan of a page.  The page can still contain discussion forums, links to videos and of course has its own FaceBook wall.  A FaceBook page is almost like a new user in the FaceBook universe.  A user that can message its fans and serve as a meeting point as well as a badge for devotees.  This makes it perfect for the kind of passive protests and trends that wax and wane over the internet.

This kind of protest grabs a lot of interest and can quickly pick up supporters.  It makes a statement in a fun way. And it can be the base for real action.  The Canadians Against Progoguing Parliament protests last month showed that internet protests can get thousands of people out on the streets.  The Onion Ring page is now declaring that it has more supporters than the entire Conservative party received in individual donors last year. They are asking everyone who supports the Onion Ring to donate $10-$15 to their favourite political party in protests.

I agree that if the Democrats capitulate and negotiate again like they did with Lieberman they have essentially ceded their majority power and their mandate.  That doesn’t mean democrats shouldn’t vote for them or stay home during elections by the way.  It means you should demand, I mean demand, your representatives and Obama to rule as they were elected to rule.  Do whatever is needed to get rid of this silly 60 vote ‘rule’.

Canadians recently showed up on the streets in over 60 cities in unprecedented numbers to protest an abuse of parliamentary rules by our Prime Minister (he shut down parliament to avoid an investigation on prisoner torture in Afghanistan). Support for his fragile minority government has dropped because of these actions and election likely looms in our future.  We’re fed up with their political games and making them pay for it. That’s called democracy.  But we’re also forcing the opposition to take a stand for democracy, which they are reluctantly beginning to do.

The media and politicians on all sides were surprised at the level of outrage, the 200,000 member Facebook group (that’s really big for a Canadian facebook group on a political issue, trust me) and the organized, non-partisan, nationwide protests.  No one thought people would care, “no one knows what prorogation even means”.  But we figured it out pretty quick. We knew our apathy was being taken for granted and we didn’t like it.  And keep in mind this whole thing was organized in a about a month and a half through Facebook without involvement from any political parties, unions or national organizations.  Each city set up an event, linked to the main group; did a call out for anyone who wanted to help organize to meet up in a local coffee shop; they staged the events and invited speakers from all parties as well FairVote Canada and other groups.  You don’t need Democratic party to do it for you.

For a country that likes to call itself the ‘Greatest Democracy on Earth™’ you sure don’t like actually talking about the mechanics of your democracy.  Democracy is pretty much all about mechanics, checks and balances are great, but if you have so many that nothing can get done you have a dysfunctional democracy, which is no democracy at all.

Its time for Americans to do the same as Canadians just have to protest this completely undemocratic abuse within their system. The Senate should be able to pass anything with 51 votes.  Can you imagine the impact of  a nationwide protest in hundreds of towns and cities of over 250,000 people demanding the majority be allowed to act like a majority? That’s what our protest scaled up 10x (as your population is) would look like. Make it happen. The Democratic party won’t act unless they know you care and will punish them for it.

You need to show them you won’t take this anymore.

Tories seek parliamentary extension

This is a non story, by casting it as some kind of tricky dilemma for the Liberals and NDP the Globe is accepting the Conservative game. You can almost hear the writer salivating at the dramatic irony of the opposition voting against more time in parliament when they threw such a fuss about prorogation!

Please, do you think we’re children? Harper apparently does, I expect better from the Globe and Mail.  The problem with prorogation was not that parliament would not be sitting.  It was that parliament was cut off during serious investigations into torture, a time of economic crisis and to deflect opposition attacks on the government.

Of course the opposition parties will agree to cancel their vacations.  But its a moot point, because we should have an election before those vacations would occur anyways.  Once the budget comes up for a vote, it should be voted down.  This government has demonstrated they cannot be trusted with the reigns of power.  This latest little trick is a side show meant to distract voters and the media.  We’re not falling for it. I wish you wouldn’t either.

This morning I have seen for the first time a number one trend that isn’t just an echo of  a us hashtag game. The tag is #followamuseum which asks everyone to follow their favourite museum (some ideas of museums to follow listed here). If you look at the regions where this is trending right now (10:30AM PST Feb 1,2010) its very interesting:

What’s interesting about this list is not where people care about museums or not. Trends come and go all day long and could be because of other local stories.  The interesting part though is that most Canadians are talking about this trend even though the overwhelming majority of Tweeps worldwide are not.  The trend does not show up on the worldwide list or the US list. So that means the Canadians who saw it and made it a trend here by retweeting or commenting must be watching the Canada trend topics (or the UK).  This is very exciting, as now Canadians can trust that our voice can make it through the defining din of Twitter.

Unlike FaceBook, which has around 14 million Canadian users, thats about 42% of the total Canadian population, twitter has a measly 1% pop covereage. This means that everything Canadians say on twitter is bound to be drowned out by their American and even British peers. Canadian Twitter accounts make up about 5% of Twitter. When something shows up as a trend on twitter (which means its one of the top 10 most popular phrases showing up in all current 140 character messages on Twitter) it pretty much means a lot of Americans are talking about that topic.

But if you look at stats at politwitter.ca, which aggregates Canadian political discussion on Twitter, you’ll see that there are tens of thousands of active Canadians tweeting about politics and following national leaders. That’s not nothing.

A Canadian Voice

So what about little ‘ol us? Last week there were huge national protests and everyone I know was tweeting about it with common tags #noprorogue #CAPP and #cdnpoli.
Some part of me hoped, that just for an hour one of those words would show up on the venerated trending topics list. But it was not to be. Then I looked into it a bit and found the stunning 1%. Add to that the fact that many people register for twitter, don’t get it, and never use it again, so 1% is probably high. Twitter is not as easy to ‘get’ as FaceBook. It doesn’t seem useful to jabber on in short bytes with people you don’t know. But sometimes it can be really powerful. FaceBook is much easier for everyone to udnerstand, you link up with freinds from the real world, chat, play games and generally just keep up to date with their life.

So why is this knowledge important for activities in Canada trying to gain awareness for their cause and rally people and media attention? Its important because the media doesn’t know this, or is too enamored of simple stories to use this information properly. If the reporters and pundits see something trending on Twitter, they’ll see a big thing, Twitter is big right? That’s a story. So how does that help? Well…

Twitter just recently, this week, added a new feature to their website that lets you view trending topics by region. Now, if people can choose to view trends from several countries or large cities. Canada is one of the countries although no Canadian cities are present yet. Right now the trends look pretty much the same as the Worldwide trends except for the presence of the word ‘Canadian’ and ‘Tim Hortons’. Since Canada is such a small group of users (hundreds of thousands rather than millions) that means that getting topics to trend in the Canada view should be much easier than in the default Worldwide view. But for this to happen, Canadians need to add location information so that Twitter knows they are in Canada. I suspect the trends are the same now because most Canadians haven’t put their location down, this may even explain the 1% being so low. Well it turns out now that it really is useful to tell Twitter that you at least live in Canada, even if you don’t want to give more info. This way we can all use the Canada trending topics view to find out what Canadians are really talking about rather than continuing to listen in to our neighours to the south. We’ve listend to them long enough, I think we know what they’re talking about by now.

Instructions on Setting your location in Twitter:

1. go to Twitter.com and sign in
2. Click Settings at the top right
3. You will be on the Account tab, go down to Location and enter Canada
4. Go the bottom of the page and click save

That’s it. Now if you click “Change” under the trending header on the right hand side you can pick the country or city you want to view and your tweets should be included.

Can’t wait to see what we’re talkin aboot.

So, how did a little ‘internet protest’ turn into over 25,000 feet on the ground in over 60 locations across the country today? Two reasons. First,  Canadians are awesome!  Second, Facebook is not some silly little internet toy in Canada. Di you know that around 45% of Canadians are on Facebook.  That’s not 45% of Canadians on the Internet…its 45% of all Canadians!  Think about that.  That mean half of Canadians can go look up this strange “Facebook group” thing the media talk about, in fact, they don’t even think its that strange or inconsequential because they’re on Facebook.  Twitter is another matter, apparently only about 1% of Canadians are on Twitter. But Facebook is a particularly effective way to reach out to a large number of Canadians.  Consider that if half the country is on Facebook, then every Canadian is either on Facebook or probably has a spouse, sibling, child  or parent on Facebook.

Look at the graph, its not just young people either. Half the Canadians on Facebook list their age as over 25. And its probably more than that because there are more Canadian 18-24 year-olds on Facebook than there are actual Canadian 18-24 year-olds, so someone is lying about their age, and they’re probably low-balling.  Regardless, statistically, if you are a child and have parents under 45, one of them is on Facebook.  You of course are also on Facebook.  And at least one of your grandparents is on Facebook.  So the reach of this tool in Canada is unparalleled.  There is no other way to reach so many Canadians so easily.

Maybe today, after the largest, decentralized national protests our nation has ever seen, people will wake up to that fact. Hopefully they’ll realize that its not actually that easy to create a Canadian Facebook group that has hundreds of thousands of members.  You have to really appeal to them, people think about what it will look like to their friends when they join a group.

Today we saw the impact of that. 200,000 motivated people, having discussions and sharing their support publicy online can have.  Each city spawned off a separate group and event. A call went out to get organizers. Only motivated people with experience and determination showed up and still many of these meetings had hundreds of people!  Each group independently organized events, sent messages to their followers with advice on clothing, how to behave and where to meet. Maps went up on Google to show the real, stunning extent of the protests. And it all went off without a hitch, no violence, no trouble and minimal partisanship.  It was a wonder to behold and it makes me so proud to be a Canadian.  It gives me hope that reasonableness is not dead in this country and that people are willing to take action to defend it.

Now it is up to us to continue putting the pressure on our ‘leaders’ to listen to us all.   The governing party thinks they only need to represent those who voted for them, a fundamental misunderstanding of representative democracy. One for which they will be punished. The opposition parties have been reluctant to commit too strongly to the cause of fixing what ails our democracy.  They each (sorry Green’s, I know you’re on side) make tame proposals and argue the real solution is that they should govern and they would never do this.  But they are missing the big picture.

At today’s rally in Vancouver there was chanting and applause and jeering for all kinds of reasons.  Anti-Harper, pretty loud jeeers.  Pro NDP? The NDP section of the crowd cheered loudly.  Pro Liberal?  The little official Liberal corner cheered loudly.  We failed the world in Copenhagen?  Good general applause and loud cheering from the Green and environmental section.  But I think the most widespread, consistent applause, where everyone was clapping and cheering and going “Yah!” was reserved for the following kinds of statements:

• “we need to fix our democracy”
• “our MPs got to get back to work”
• “we need proportional representation so the people who go to Ottawa have a real mandate”
• “we need to reform democracy so that the government actually represents the majority of Canadians”

Stuff like that, you know, crazy stuff. Crazy, democracy stuff.

Not at all the kind of thing a largely regional minority governing party with no possible allies wants to hear.  Not something a non-regional party with delusions of being the ‘natural governing party’ want to hear either.  Apparently not even something a pro-labour, pro-social justice party who’s leader thinks he’s “running for Prime Minister” wants to hear.  The NDP want to talk about specific solutions to the specific problem of prorogation.  Fine.  The Liberals want to talk about increasing voter turnout by improving the tone in Ottawa, which of course only they can do. Fine.

But those are not the real issues.

The real issue is that our democracy is broken and none you are listening to the people who hired you because they didn’t really hire you.  You know you only need a solid 40% of the country, spread around the right way to win an all powerful majority, and you just can’t turn down the possibility of absolute power.

Well, the time is past where the only people who can organize a crowd in this country are the political parties and labour unions.  We don’t have to stand for it anymore.

In Canada 2.0 around 45% of Canadians have a very convenient tool for organizing whenever they want to, and now they know it actually works for real world stuff.

So, national opposition parties, you’ve got a little time to work out a real solution that gets to the root of the democratic deficit in this country, before people start organizing new parties and coordinated voting to bring you all down.  A little time.  But remember, Canada 2.0, measures progress in internet time.

So, I figure, you’ve got about 2 months, or until the next election. Which, if you’re smart, will be the same thing.

We march in peaceful protest to send a message to you who claim to lead us, be you blue, red or orange.
The message: This shall not stand.

We raise our voices today to remind you that you serve at our leisure, not your own, nor the Queen’s.
You have been sent forth to uphold our values, the build a just society, to build a vibrant economy and to stand for peace and honour.
You’re power flows from us alone, so listen well to our voices, all of you.
Put aside your petty squabbles.  You have been told to work together, and so you must.

You discard our votes, you ignore our wishes, you play your games with the checks and balances of power.
But you will not discard the traditions of centuries, traditions for which endless blood has been split.
We march today as defenders of the traditions you cast aside, of reason and debate, of parliament, the foundations upon which democracy, Canadian democracy, is built.

Our small but great northern nation has achieved so much through being guided by reason and tradition.
Reason and tradition led us, like almost no other nation, to freedom without war or bloodshed. Let us have these concepts restored to rule our democracy once more.

For be warned, though we grow weary of your games, do not bread apathy amongst us. Do not dare to use our cycniscm and weariness against us or we will cast you aside and wash the slate clean!

vive le Canda!
vive la Démocratie!

Here’s why.

America is going crazy

This can be taken in many different ways, but here’s how I mean it.  The United States is on its way to becoming a failed democracy. Even with the most hopefull and exciting president in a generation the gears of US government cannot be made to move for the perfectly reasonable health care proposals that were put forward last year.  These measures were much less ambitious and universal than almost any other western nation, it was a very conservative step forward towards universal health care as these things go.  The fact that it was pulled apart as some kind of fascist attempt to enforce a socialist agenda on America is evidence that reasonable discussion has completely collapsed in America.  Last night, another setback, Democratic Senate candidate Coakley in Massachusetts lost her bid to win the seat of Ted Kennedy.

A wakeup call for Democrats to not take their voters for granted, sure. But also a wakeup call for anyone who thought the American Voter make their choice based on reason and the big picture. No, democracy in America is about emotion, likability and locally issues.  That’s a bad thing in case I’m confusing you. Democrats seem to be unwilling to use the mandate they have been given to act in the public’s interest even if they take some partisan flack for it.

What is lacking is the ability to have a reasonable discussion between the different sides.  Discussion appear to happen and then Lieberman changes his mind and demands that another line be dropped from the bill.  How can they move forward if they can’t even have the discussion.

Don’t Let It Happen Here

I am a proud Canadian. What am I proud of?

I am proud of my country, and of what the government has achieved over the years in the name of its citizens.  I am proud of the Chart of Rights and Freedoms. I am proud of Universal Health Care, our education system. I am proud that until recently Canadians voted in much higher numbers than our neighbour to the south.  I am proud we put people before profits and regulate some important industries including the banking industry. I am proud we have enough pragmatism about the free market to say, sometimes, it doesn’t work, and support Canadian art and culture instead.  I am proud my tax dollars fund the CBC which does what a publicly funded broadcaster should do, informs and educates the public about the issues of the day. I am proud my country allows gay people to marry and that this came about because our laws said it wouldn’t be fair not to.  I am proud that people accepted that even if they didn’t agree. I am proud that our political discourse is not dominated by religious language and proclamations, religion is a personal, protected right that has no place in politics and Canadians recognize that.

I think all these things and more are what make Canada great.  We are great because we are a nation of good people, of reasonable people.  We understand that not everyone has enough to get by or pay for healthcare so we make it universal. We understand that we are not fully in control, that Nature is always waiting outside, in the cold to take us to our grave. So we remain vigilant and pragmatic. We build a safety net so that others don’t fall, because we would want it there if we fell.

We do what we need to do survive and to keep our community and our country together. We can handle disagreements, even big disagreements remaining unsettled and still work together. We’ve survived for almost 150 years with two languages and cultures fighting for their own place. Yet we continue. What else can we do? I wouldn’t be reasonable not to.

Canada has a parliament, where our elected representatives are meant to sit and debate in a reasonable manner to come to reasonable solutions for our country.  There will be grandstanding, there will be intrigue, there will even be corruption. But all this should be kept to a minimum and not impede the progress of our nation.  Prorogation happens, parliament need not sit 365 days a year, that is not the point.  The point is that reasonableness is giving way to partisan bickering and strategical. The machinery of government is being used not for progress but for hoarding of power and avoidance of oversight.

Where am I going with this? I want Canadians to stand up for reasonableness.  We may all argue about what it means to be Canadian but surely that is one quality we can agree on.  With poor nations around the world needing help and leadership from those of us lucky enough to be able to help, with the environment collapsing, with our great neighbour losing sight of the very values upon which they were founded it is more important than ever to take a deep breath and remember to say “Can’t we all just be reasonable and work this out?”  There are reasonable solutions to all our problems if only we can discuss and work together.

We can do it. We’ve done it before, that’s why this country is so great.

Lets do it again.  Come out this saturday and make sure the discussion doesn’t stop before it gets started.

Will your party commit to working with other opposition parties to address the democratic deficit in Canada? Fair Vote Canada recently sent a letter to your party and the others suggesting some ways to improve democratic representation in Canada.  This is more important now than ever when we have to endure a Conservative minority government that was rejected by 60% of the population and who are willing to reckless abuse the constitutional powers of government to shut down debate and investigations.

So, Mr. Ignatieff, will you commit to working with the other opposition parties to ensure that Canada gets the representation that they actually vote for in Ottawa?

Thank you.

I’ll let you know what he says later…

Update : A Full summary of the event can be found here.

Update II: So as for my question, I didn’t get to even get in the room there were so many people.  I did hand my question to one the organizers to ask on behalf of the “people outside the room” in the lobby.  But I don’t think it got asked because there were a lot of questions and there was a little environmentalist protest in the middle of his speech. Which I get, I just think there’s a  lot going on right now and it would be better to constructively discuss solutions than disrupt discussion. Especially when its someone who can’t actually do anything right now.  The Liberals are very very guilty of not putting the environment first in the past, but you really can’t fault Ignatieff for that, since as his opponents so frequently point out, he wasn’t even here for that.

I did like his speaking style, except that he says “Interesting” about 10 times too much, which might make some people think he’s a bit of an academic, ahem.  But he defended himself well and stood his ground on awkward questions.  He also was able to make a joke or two. So he comes across well in these town hall style things, a bit stiff, but considering his competition that’s ok. He should do more of these. I’m dissapointed that there wasn’t more discussion about democracy and prorogation in the questions.  He mentioned it right off the bat and said the most important thing to restore was public trust and involvement in democracy. So that’s great.  But of course, he’s also very good at saying nice sounding things without being specific. And being Liberals we can’t expect them to make lots of exciting, progressive changes unless we absolutely force them to.

So, lets force them to.

My rating – Ignatieff:

Not as dull as you’d think, mike make a decent Prime Minister someday. Next!

The Globe suggests that the Liberals have yet to capitalize on the crisis to make their fortunes really rise.  They suggest that people need to vote for the Liberals rather than just against the Conservatives.  I agree.

May I suggest that the best way to distinguish the Liberals from the Conservatives, a way that you know they can’t steal from you, a way that addresses the current crisis, would show big thinking on the part of your party and really make a difference for the future welfare of Canadians as a whole?

Its simple.

Democratic reform.

The recent letter sent out by FairVote Canada offers some suggestions to the Liberals and the opposition parties of what needs to be done.  These are good suggestions, but there are many options to improving the democratic deficit in our country.  You don’t need to commit to a particular solution right now, you need to commit to find a solution and implementing it, with the cooperation of your opposition peers.  This would distinguish the Liberals from the Conservatives in a way that Stephen Harper wouldn’t dare to emulate.  The only democratic reform the Conservatives care about is Senate reform, which is only the tip of the iceberg and does not relate to the anger now rising from Canadian citizens about his prorogation of parliament.

This is an issue the Liberal party can stand behind, one that can get them votes and can serve them well into the future.  The only explanation for why they haven’t realized that yet is pure, unadulterated hunger for absolute power and/or self-delusion.  If the Liberals truly realize they have no natural right to majority rule in Canada then they must admit that their best future interest lies in electoral reform that gives them all the votes they deserve and would allow them to usually form either majority governments or minority coalition governments with the NDP and Greens.

The prize of champion of democracy is there for the taking. Look at that Green 12%, for example.  Its  travesty that they have no seats. But how would they vote in the next election if the Liberals promised true reform? They might hold their breath long enough to give the Liberals minority control to implement real change. Then in the new era of real democracy you’d have a party with 10-15 seats to work with (and remember the Bloc has less support than the Greens so they’d have less seats than that, starts to make coalitions look a lot more doable, no?)

Can anyone think of anything else that will really distinguish tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee that Harper can’t usurp as Conservative policy? I don’t.

FVC sends open letters to Harper and opposition leaders: it’s time to fix the problem

Fair Vote Canada sent and issued open letters to the Prime Minister and opposition leaders – now is the time for action on electoral reform.

Letter to the Prime Minister

Prime Minister Stephen Harper
House of Commons
Parliament Buildings
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Re: Prorogation and Re-examination: Cut to the Chase S’il Vous Plait

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

On Wednesday you said you ended the current Parliament (without its approval) to give your government an extended opportunity “to re-examine the overall agenda.”

You have granted yourself and your party two unsupervised months to correct course.

Will elimination of Canada’s democratic deficit be on your government’s new agenda? If not it should be.

Your party represents fewer than 40 per cent of Canadian voters. You can’t square that minority support, and the unilateral shutdown of Parliament, with any reasonable concept of legitimate and representative democratic government.

I do not accuse you of violating democracy itself only because the Canadian political system as it stands is intrinsically undemocratic. If you are leading a party of democrats, then surely it is time for you to abandon the shamocracy and make the House of Commons democratic.

The fix is not difficult. Amend the Canada Elections Act to guarantee every adult Canadian man and woman equal representation of their own choice in the House of Commons. Then establish a swift process to produce the necessary electoral reform. That would make Canada, at last, a democracy — and you for the first time the Prime Minister of a democratic state.

The opposition parties – with the possible exception of the secessionist Bloc Quebecois – would not dare oppose democratic reform of the House of Commons. The opposition leaders understand, as do you, that the great majority of voters yearn for Canada to become a functioning democracy.

Do you, with your Reform Party roots, want Canada to become a democracy? What is your action plan to make it so? I look forward to your unequivocal written reply.

Yours truly,

Bronwen Bruch
President
Fair Vote Canada

Letter to the Opposition Leaders

Michael Ignatieff, Leader, Liberal Party of Canada
Jack Layton, Leader, New Democratic Party of Canada
Gilles Duceppe, Leader, Bloc Quebecois
Elizabeth May, Leader, Green Party of Canada

Re: Prorogation – Seize the Moment

Dear Opposition Leaders:

Last Wednesday Prime Minister Harper said he terminated Parliament (without your approval) to give his government an extended opportunity “to re-examine the overall agenda.”

He has granted himself – and you – two clear months to correct course.

There is no sign that elimination of the democratic deficit in the House of Commons is on Stephen Harper’s agenda. It should be on yours.

The Prime Minister’s party represents fewer than 40 per cent of Canadian voters. Nobody can square that minority support and the unilateral shutdown of Parliament with any reasonable concept of legitimate and representative democratic government.

The Prime Minister and his party are deliberately flouting Parliament. We do not accuse him of flouting democracy, however, because the Canadian political system as it now stands is intrinsically undemocratic. If you lead democratic parties, then surely it’s time for you to unite and abolish the shamocracy.

The fix is not difficult. Amend the Canada Elections Act to guarantee every adult Canadian man and woman equal representation of their own choice in Parliament, and establish a swift process to produce the necessary electoral reform. That would make Canada, at last, a democracy.

At present the House of Commons embodies and projects a series of ridiculous untruths. Judging from the current “representation” most Quebecois want to quit the federation; most Canadians are reluctant to elect women; there are no Conservative supporters in Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto; there are no Liberal supporters in Alberta. There are no New Democrat supporters in Saskatchewan and remarkably few elsewhere, and no Green supporters anywhere in Canada.

Democrats, whether in government or opposition, should do everything in their power to bring an end to this gross misrepresentation of the people of Canada.

If the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper uses the prorogation to develop a plan for swift electoral reform, we trust you will cooperate.

In case that is not his intention, your parties, which together represent a substantial majority of Canadian voters, should use the prorogation to re-examine your various agendas and devise a shared action plan for democratic reform.

* Together you should draft legislation to provide Canadians with a democratic voting system and democratic financing of political parties.

* Together you should devise an electoral saw-off sufficient to give Canadians, after the next election, a Parliament with a clear majority committed to implement the democratic reforms.

Each of you should now be asking: does my party really want democratic representation for all Canadians, and what will my party risk or sacrifice, now, to achieve it?

I look forward to your individual written replies – and to your unequivocal commitments to seize the moment and do what is needed to make the House of Commons democratic.

Yours truly,

Bronwen Bruch
President
Fair Vote Canada

Michael Ignatieff, unseen in Canada until Thursday night, when he arrived on a flight from Europe after an extended vacation, has launched a small-budget ad campaign intended to distract attention from his lengthy absence.

This is a common Conservative refrain.  Granted, Ignatieff has spent a lot of time outside of Canada, but so have most Canadians, in fact most Canadians I know weren’t even born here, so its a silly line of reasoning.  But to attack a Canadian for going away for Christmas!  I’m not sure all the senior citizens who are hanging out in Florida until March to avoid the cold don’t have any problem with that!

The ad campaign renews the Ignatieff Liberals’ claim about a “coverup” of “torture” of Taliban prisoners. Mr. Ignatieff persists in this attack even though the allegation that torture was covered up represents a direct attack on the men and women of Canada’s Armed Forces.

The Ignatieff Liberals like to pretend that their wild allegation bypasses the soldiers who captured and handed over Taliban prisoners — but that’s just not logical.

This really disturbs me.  The Conservatives are not addressing the issue of torture or denying that Canadians handed people over to be tortured.  They are saying we shouldn’t be asking questions about torture because that would mean we are asking questions about the actions of our soldiers… Uh, yes.  Yes, we should be able to ask questions about the actions of our soldiers. “Supporting the troops” is not the same as “the troops can do no wrong”. Do you remember the Canadian Airborne scandal?  But that’s actually beside the point, the real goal of the investigation is not to target troops doing their job as much as to discover if there is an institutional disregard for concerns about torture of prisoners.  This is the kind of policy that would come from higher up commanders and from the government itself.  Surely, they are not suggesting parliament can’t ask legitimate questions about military policy during combat operations. That’s exactly what parliament for is for. Surely.

The rest of Mr. Ignatieff’s ad campaign is more of the same — idle chatter that is out of touch with the real priorities of Canadians — including Canadians’ number one priority, the economy.

Our Government is hard at work and remains hard at work on the things that matter to Canadians, in particular the economy. This includes completing implementation of our Economic Action Plan, returning to balanced budgets once the economy has recovered, and building a strong economy for the future.

The economy is always the number one priority, that doesn’t mean other issues can’t be discussed. How the Conservatives plan to build the economy is not discussed, I’m sure it involves lots of useless tax cuts and cutting of social programs because now we have to reign in this huge deficit that they’ve recklessly created with little to show for it.

Canadians are fed up with politicians (from all parties) playing with our democracy like it was a game to be won.  None of them are respecting the desires of the majority of voters in our democracy.  The Conservatives know they cannot win an outright majority so they play the levers of government to stretch out their minority time as long as possible.  The opposition parties are so obsessed with the idea of absolute rule for themselves that they can’t bring themselves to constructively work together even though an overwhelming majority of Canadians did not vote for the Conservative party.

The only way forward towards a progressive future in Canada is for the two viable, federalist parties to show some humility and change strategy. The Liberals need to admit they are not the natural governing party, that they won in the past largely due to Conservative disorganization or the lucky occurrence of charismatic liberal leadership (neither of which holds now).  The NDP need to admit they will not form government until they have proven themselves, which they can do it they work as part of a government with the Liberals.  Together the two parties can act as two wings of the progressive-centre opposition into the next election and ask Canadians to vote for them to form a strong coalition government.  Then they can change some of the flaws in our democratic system which allow the PM such unassailable power.

Or  we can just let the Conservative spin machine work its way and continue with ineffective minority governments that slowly erode all the progressive elements of our society that Canadians have worked so long for and Canadian soldiers have fought so hard to defend.

One clear indication that this is not just your regular scandal is that pundits, leaders and citizens from many different ideological directions are showing equal outrage at Prime Minister Harper’s disrespect for the insitutions of democracy.  Andrew Coyne is generally regarded as fairly conservative but in the old PC party way, not the Reform Alliance way.  Mr. Coyne has been a reliable advocate for increased democracy from proportional representation so senate reform to simple respect for parliament.  His outrage at the current situation in a recent Macleans article is palpable. Give it a read.

Mr. Coyne proposes discarding parliament altogether in favour of simple party elections and continual prorogation.  I think its clear Mr. Coyne is being satirical in the style of Jonathan Swift but his point is valid.  At present, Canadian parliament is disfunctional, by which I mean, completely non-functional.  The minority governing party uses public money to advertise their initiative and campaign outside of campaign season.  They use any apparent moment of weakness in their opposition to attempt to slip through tremendous steps backwards such as removing per-vote party funding, childcare, education initiatives, arts funding.  Meanwhile the opposition parties spend more time scheming about how to depose each other than how to contribute to or defeat the government.  There is no notion of cooperation between opposition parties for its own sake and when there is (ie. The Coalition) it is implemented in a sloppy and dangerous manner and then abandoned at the first sign of opposition.

In sum, the current parties in Ottawa have no spine and all are playing a game with the political system attempting to jockey themselves into power rather than attempting to represent the interests of the majority of Canadians as they were elected to do.

So perhaps we should do away with parliament.  Frankly I’d prefer doing away with parties, though I don’t think that is actually possible.  The best solution, as I’ve suggested many, many times would be to cooperate and implement real democratic reforms that would ensure future governments represent the majority will of the people and that the role of the Governor General is elected and not something devoid of all power.

Update: In case anyone disagrees with my analysis and does not believe Mr. Coyne is capable of satire…in his own words.