What is the point of this story?

2007-10-18T00:49:00.001-06:00

All good things must come to an end. So too must many mediocre things, like this blog.

It's time to declare this space deceased. In an effort to return to being serious about blogging, I'm taking up residence at http://noticeofmotion.blogspot.com. It's been fun, mostly.

2007-05-17T15:02:00.000-06:00

Has it occurred to anybody else...

...that if there's a team in the NHL today that's both good enough to make it to the Conference Finals and bad enough to be the third team in history to squander a 3-0 series lead, it's the Ottawa Senators?

2007-05-16T15:31:00.000-06:00

I've long been receiving e-mails from the Conservative Party

To say nothing of e-mails from groups who find the Conservatives too moderate, like Focus on the Family (Hi Chuck!) and Engaging Christians in the Public-square. These e-mails, I presume, are as a result of my brief membership in the late Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

As regular readers (shouldn't you have dwindled away to zero by now?) of this space are aware, I donated a hundred dollars to Stéphane Dion's leadership campaign (technically, this makes me a donor to the Liberal Party, although a condition of my donation was that it only be used to fight other Liberals, so it doesn't really count). When I did so, I provided an e-mail address, and now I've started receiving Liberal e-mails as well. Here's one I received today from John McCallum (emphasis mine):

Dear Liberal Friend,

It’s been seven months since Stephen Harper reneged on his promise not to tax income trusts.

The immediate effect of his deceit sent shockwaves through the markets, and eliminated $25 billion from peoples’ hard-earned savings. Retirement funds, post-secondary education savings, and many other forms of investments evaporated in less than one business day.

But the effects on investments are not the only casualty of the Conservatives’ ill‑conceived plan. As a country, we are experiencing an accelerated rate of foreign takeovers in the income trust sector. In the first six months after the income trust announcement, there were 16 take over attempts of Canadian Trusts, mostly by large U.S. private equity firms and pension funds that will deprive average Canadian investors of the ability to own those trust units.

Worse, these private equity firms will pay little or no tax to the Government of Canada. A recent study by KPMG Canada found that the first 13 takeovers will result in the federal government losing roughly $130 million dollars per year in tax revenue.

And this is what the Conservatives call tax fairness. A $25 billion hit on the savings of Canadian investors, the wholesale sell off of income trusts to foreign interests and less tax revenue for the government which of course other Canadians will have to make up for.

The decision Stephen Harper and Jim Flaherty made to tax income trusts is appalling and entirely unnecessary.

Stéphane Dion’s Liberals have a plan to reverse the damage done by the minority Conservative government. According to experts, the Liberal plan will return at least 2/3 of investors’ money by replacing the 31.5% tax with a modest 10% tax paid by companies that would be refundable to Canadians. This plan will work: It will protect Canadian investors and Canadian companies.

But we need to be able to communicate this message to Canadians. As the Official Opposition in the House of Commons, it is the Liberal Party of Canada’s duty to expose the damage done by this minority Conservative Government.

A donation from you today will help us shed more light on this issue. The powerful combination of your financial support and my voice will ensure that all Canadians know the truth about this massive Conservative blunder.

Please consider a donation of $100 or even $400 today to help the Liberal team. Your donation will go directly towards getting our progressive message out to all Canadians.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,

Hon. John McCallum, MP
Liberal Finance Critic

Apparently, where John McCallum lives, attacking the decision to tax income trusts is a winning issue even if what you're promising if elected is to, uh, tax income trusts.

2007-05-13T20:28:00.000-06:00

Things to Watch for in the Next Election

The latest polls (with which, as a former Prime Minister would remind us were he still with us, dogs know what to do) are showing the Liberals with a decent shot of getting back into government. All evidence suggests that this is on the strength of the green issue (which is hardly a surprise, given that Stéphane Dion was elected on the most one trick pony-esque platform of any leader of a national party for as long as I can remember).

These same polls show the Green Party at high levels of support (ten percent-ish). This is hardly unprecedented during inter-election periods, and there's no reason to believe that the Green (note capital G) vote won't collapse this time around as well, but that's still a hefty chunk of Canadian voters who claim that they plan to vote Green.

So here's the thing: given that the apparent best strategy for the Liberals, as it so often is, is to convince voters who are to their left that they represent the lesser evil, what's to become of the relationship between Dion and his BFF Elizabeth May?

(And yes, I'm suitably ashamed to be familiar with the acronym "BFF".)

2007-05-10T16:36:00.000-06:00

Questions that may be less pertinent than they are amusing

Why would an anarchist want to work for the government?

2007-05-04T17:15:00.000-06:00

The NDP is at it again

Sigh.

My thoughts on this announcement can be found a year and a half in advance here.

(Oh, and while I'm claiming something of a reputation for soothsaying, it would really help if you'd stop reading the above post before you get to the part about how Stephen Harper "probably won't even win a minority [government]." Thanks.)

2007-05-04T01:49:00.000-06:00

Steve the Contrarian Strike Again!

Or, more accurately, doesn't. Do you know what Conventional Wisdom has exactly right? This Shane Doan thing.

Just sayin'. And writin'.

2007-04-30T20:43:00.000-06:00

Not that I have more than one reader at the moment...

...but could somebody enlighten me on the difference between a carbon tax (with the equivalent of a universal credit) and fines for failing to reach greenhouse gas reduction targets?

2007-04-28T12:28:00.000-06:00

Who are you planning to nuke, Barack?

A couple of weeks ago, Roman asked me who I wanted to be elected U.S. President in 2008. Like most people of my approximate political stripe, I'm hoping for an Al Gore candidacy - as Catrin put it, he might have needed some time out of office to rediscover his idealism, and I think his star is now so tied to the global warming issue that he couldn't possibly serve in office again without taking real action on it, as opposed to the Clinton administration's weak record.

But in answer to Roman's question, I threw out a different name: Mike Gravel.

Roman responded that it was just like me to support a candidate he'd never even heard of, which I took as a compliment. But after his performance at the South Carolina debates, I think more people will be hearing of him soon.

2007-01-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

Obligatory Cabinet Shuffle Post

1. Well, at least Harper's signalled his willingness to work across party lines on the environment issue.
2. He must really have something against Diane Ablonczy.
3. Jason Kenney? Geez.

UPDATE: And now Marjory LeBreton, an unelected politician, is taking on the cabinet-level role of Secretary of State for Seniors. I'm sure we'll hear outrage from the predictable sources shortly. Actually, I'm not at all sure, because I don't think said sources pay enough attention to Canadian politics to have noticed this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, okay, a Secretary of State isn't a full cabinet-level position. But (1) it's still bound by cabinet solidarity, (2) it attends cabinet meetings where issues relevant to its portfolio are being discussed, and (3) I'm not so much making a point as I am ridiculing stupid people. Accordingly, I see no reason to backtrack on any of this.

2006-12-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

The Gomery Recommendations: Harper Nails It

I'm impressed.

When I'm opposed to recommendations designed to empower the legislative branch, that's a pretty good indicator that those recommendations are badly flawed. Deputy Ministers are already quite politicized enough - the last thing we need is to increase this politicization by requiring them to account to the Public Accounts Committee, which is properly concerned with political accountability - you know, like the accountability of Ministers to Parliament. The sort of accountability that is enforced, in part, by having Ministers account to the Public Accounts Committee.

Beyond that, there's already going to be huge inertia in an organization the size of the federal government. Making Deputy Ministers accountable to anybody but their political masters would only increase this inertia. If there's a tradeoff here to be made between good governance and empowerment of elected officials - and I'm not at all convinced that there is - we need to err on the side of empowerment of elected officials, or democracy ceases to have any meaning (this sounds like histrionics, but it's no exagerration).

The one area where I'm somewhat undecided is on the question of division of the role of the Clerk of the Privy Council. There's no question the current structure of the civil service, where Deputy Ministers report both to their Ministers (who report to the Prime Minister) and to the Clerk (who reports to the Prime Minister) is a little odd. Gomery hadn't proposed making it any less odd, however - he just proposed dividing their reporting structure between their Ministers and some unspecified member of the Civil Service who wouldn't be the de facto Deputy Minister to the PM (as distinct, confusingly, from Deputy PM), but would still report to the PM.

Frankly, this episode is increasing my conviction that the Conservatives are the strongest party on governance issues, Senate reform notwithstanding. Now if only they weren't such an egregiously bad match for my economic (and, to a lesser extent, social) views...

2006-12-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

Dept. of Stupid Ledes

From this story:

A 24-year-old Hamilton man faces charges in what may be the first case of police using the Internet as an investigative tool.

If this is true, I officially resent paying whatever portion of my rent goes towards property taxes.

2006-12-18T18:46:00.000-07:00

Questions The Occur to Me While Reading Right Side Up: Part 1 in a series of at least one part

Yeah, whatever did happen to that office of public prosecutions we were promised?

2006-12-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

Itemized List

Item: Bob Rae to help write Liberal election platform.

Item: Liberal slogan during 2007 election to be "You're electing a Parliament, not a set of policies."

2006-12-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

Ambivalence!

Well then.

This would make the Senate better-equipped to fulfill its purpose, which puts those (like me) who don't believe that it has any legitimate purpose in something of a bind. Is it worth making an undemocratic body slightly less undemocratic if doing so has the effect of making it more aggressive in its undemocratic behaviour? Right now, the Senate doesn't qualify as much more than a waste of money and a theoretical blight on Canada's democratic landscape - if this bill passed, it would still be a waste of money, will be less of a theoretical blight, and likely more of a practical blight.

I honestly have no idea where I sit on this.

2006-12-12T01:35:00.000-07:00

And Pete Townshend agrees!

I've never seen an episode of CSI: Miami. This fully justifies that decision.

2006-12-11T23:58:00.000-07:00

Belated Post on Dion and Citizenship

I'm not entirely decided on this, though I'm leaning strongly in the direction that he shouldn't have to give up his French citizenship, if only on the basis of precedent.

You can help me think this through, though: what do you consider the obligations of citizenship? I understand the legal obligations, but what are the moral ones? Besides the legal effects, none of which preclude a French citizen from serving as Prime Minister of Canada, what is the difference between my relationship with Canada and my German girlfriend's (said girlfriend being a Permanent Resident of Canada)? For that matter, besides the legal effects, what's the difference between my relationship to Germany (which is essentially nonexistent) and hers?

Honestly, the more I think about it citizenship in any country strikes me as being basically a passport and the right to vote. Is there more that I'm missing (preferably something that has some effect on the dual citizenship debate)?

2006-12-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

Whither the NDP?

Chantal Hébert's column suggests that the NDP has lost all ownership over the environment issue, and that, as a result of this and other factors, the party's very existence is in jeopardy next election.

If Hebert's right - and she hasn't been right about much else lately - this is a shame. I'm often pretty hard on the NDP, mostly because it pains me to see what ought to a party of principles - my principles, for the most part - sell out, where I basically expect it from the other parties, but they've a history of stronger environmental policy than any of the other parties. This includes the Greens - just ask the Sierra Club, which endorsed the NDP over the Greens at a time when its President was a lady named Elizabeth something.

I don't think the NDP's in jeopardy; it emerged from much direr straights after the e1993 election. But if it is, it's not the end of anything but a label. There will still be aggressively pro-environment MPs in the House, be they Greens, Blocquistes, independents, or even Liberals. In fact, given the direction that federal politics seem to be going, there will probably be more than ever. Getting attached to a specific party and elevating its importance to a higher plane than the issues for which it stands goes against most of what I advocate.

Let the chips fall where they may.

2006-12-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

My Three Hundred and Ninety-Fifth Post

Elizabeth May does realize that discrediting Stéphane Dion on the environment is going to have to be a critical part of her party's campaign in the 2007 election, right?

I mean, it's refreshing to see a politician who doesn't feel compelled to automatically attack a colleague on the basis of party affiliation, but there's also a point at which you have to wonder why she's leading a party that is, presumably, opposed to the Liberals. Is she really suggesting that she and Dion are that close on what is, for both of them, their flagship issue?

It does raise a fun hypothetical, though - suppose the Liberals win a minority government (more likely than they're being given credit for) and May wins Cape Breton-Canso (unlikely right now - made all the more unlikely, ironically, by Dion's win - though it's been one of the most bizarrely unpredictable ridings in the country since 2000), what are the odds she makes it into a Dion cabinet? Probably slim, but amusing to think about.

2006-12-05T01:56:00.000-07:00

A bad start

Stéphane Dion has wasted no time dragging out the tired (and utterly disingenuous) old Paul Martin "why do the Conservatives want to override the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?" line.

Once the federal government has unsuccessfully defended the position that marriage can be legally defined as the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others before the Supreme Court of Canada, it will be fair to say that the Charter requires the legalization of gay marriage. Once the Conservatives advocate the use of Section 33 to preserve this definition, it will be sort of fair to accuse them of trying to override the Charter (I say "sort of" because Section 33 is, of course, *part* of the Charter).

Of course, ideally we won't reach this point, because the House of Commons will decide that, irrespective of whether or not the right of people to marry members of their own sex is protected by the Charter, allowing same-sex marriage is the right policy decision. But I'd really like to see a Liberal leader come out and say that gay people *should* be allowed to marry, instead of just that the Supreme Court will probably leave the government no choice on the matter in the purely hypothetical event that such a question is argued before it. I was hoping Stéphane Dion would be that leader. I am disappointed.

2006-12-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Dion, Stelmach: Reaction from Adversaries

The Conservatives, who it has been suggested were caught unprepared for a Dion victory, were quick to post a reaction on their site. Interestingly enough, it gives most prominence not to his record as environment minister (where he is extremely open to attack) but to the fact that he was a member of cabinet during the sponsorship and HRDC scandals. I am intrigued - if this heralds a strategy of attacking Dion's integrity, I will be very curious to see how it works. My guess would be not well.

They do eventually get to his record on the environment, however, noting that "Dion’s record was so bad, he earned a sharp rebuke from the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development". But no sooner do they make this point than they move on to attacking is alleged lack of respect for provincial jurisdictions. I am very curious as to what they're basing this decision on - perhaps the Clarity Act, brainchild of, in part, Stephen Harper? They close with an irrelevant cheap shot at his rebuke to Michael Ignatieff during one of the debates - "Do you think it's easy to make priorities?", trying to paint him as directionless.

Frankly, I find it odd that the Conservatives would choose these areas to attack him on. I would be very surprised if they manage to paint Dion as either lacking integrity or as being a ditherer, both of which are very much at odds with his public image. I would also be surprised if the completely inaccurate image of Dion as an arch-centralizer takes root. There is certainly traction to be gained in attacking his record as environment minister, but you have to doubt that that traction is the Conservatives' to gain, given their own dismal record on the file.

The New Democrats do a little better. They attack Dion for his record as environment minister, which is exactly what they should be doing - to the extent that Dion poses a threat to the NDP, it's through his ability to convince New Democrat voters that a vote for him is, on the environment file, just as principled as one for the NDP and substantially more pragmatic. They also quote him as supporting the mission to Afghanistan, which is half-way there - but for some reason they avoid accusing him of flip-flopping through his later (quasi-) opposition to the mission.

Before they get to either of these, however, they point to three of his supporters in his leadership bid - Bryon Wilfret and Charles Hubbard, who oppose same-sex marriage, and Paul Steckle, who opposes abortion. If they are trying to imply that Stéphane Dion opposes same-sex marriage or supports the criminalization of abortion, this is scant evidence (it's also about the only evidence that exists, since he is guilty of neither offense). If this is not the NDP's intention, I confess that I am curious about what they *are* trying to establish.

Subsequently, they highlight his opposition to a number of private member's bills - NDP motions to prohibit replacement workers in federal workplaces, a motion on mandating more stringent fuel efficiency in cars produced for use in Canada, and a Peter Stoffer special on improved benefits for the families of fallen firefighters. Besides the fuel efficiency motion, which works to detract from his credibility on the environment, I don't see any of these doing much harm. Doing even less harm do I see the fact that, as pointed out from the New Democrats, Dion missed votes on the Kyoto protocol and the Kelowna Accord while campaigning for leader.

(If you were wondering, the NDP hasn't taken down the speech in which Jack Layton says that Dion is "distinct from his principal opponents in being a committed Canadian and a man of principle and conviction.")

The Greens are still too busy celebrating their second place showing in the recent by-election in London to have any comment on Dion, but Elizabeth May was quoted yesterday as saying "I was hoping Stephane would win from the start. He's a wonderful, sincere person of integrity and commitment to issues that matter to me. How can you argue with that? He shouldn't change, he is what he is, and we shouldn't want our politicians to be massaged into something they aren't. We worked well together in the past -- this is totally cool."

The most interesting reaction, as far as I'm concerned, is that of the BQ, which took the high road, with Gilles Duceppe quoted as saying "Dion started well-back in this race, but he new how to rally the support necessary to win it. Such qualities will make him an impressive adversary during the next federal election in Québec." This is unlikely indicative of much of anything, but I found it interesting that the party that is actually supposed to loathe Dion is pulling the most punches.

Provincially, none of the Liberals, New Democrats, or Alberta Alliance have much to say about Premier Ed, which isn't all that surprising - they probably don't know anything about him either. In a departure from the federal scene, it's the Greens who have a comment, even if they don't know how to pluralize.

2006-12-03T03:06:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a creeping sense of inadequacy

Not because I totally miscalled this race. That's what bloggers do - we make sweeping predictions, we imply that everybody who doesn't immediately see their wisdom is either partisan or braindead, and then, when said predictions turn out to have been pulled from somewhere in the colon (where our heads were when we came up with them), we move on. The system works.

No, I'm feeling this inadequacy because I'd always considered myself as among this province's elite where political education is concerned - certainly in the top 1%, to use a number that I found right next to my prediction - and yet I don't know a goddamned thing about our new Premier.

Um, go Dion?

2006-12-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

Hey Liberals: way to do something to make me not hate you. Jerks.

Other thoughts:

- Both Dion's supporters and Ignatieff's favoured comparisons between their candidates and Pierre Trudeau. All of them were a stretch, but here's one basis on which Dion is Trudeau-esque: hey marks the first Liberal leader since Pierre Trudeau not to spend basically his entire adult life plotting to become Prime Minister. Stephen Harper, not coincidentally (hopefully) is the first Prime Minister since Trudeau not to spend his entire adult life in pursuit of that goal. (UPDATE: Kim Campbell doesn't count). It's a bad era for professional politicians.

- This also marks the first time since I don't know when (seriously, I'm not aware of the dynamics leading to Wildred Laurier winning the Liberal leadership) that the federal Liberal Party staged an upset. Certainly all of Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, John Turner, Pierre Trudeau, Lester Pearson, Louis St.-Laurent, and William Lyon MacKenzie King went in as favourites.

- I backed Dion largely because I thought he was most committed to environmental protection. I liked what Ignatieff had to say on the subject as well, but I sensed that Dion, with his fabled intellectual integrity and his obvious emotional attachment to the file, was the one who'd follow through. I'll be watching.

- On October 2, I predicted the first ballot results. Compare my predictions to the actual results:

Prediction
Michael Ignatieff - 30.7%
Bob Rae - 20.4%
Gerard Kennedy - 17.7%
Stéphane Dion - 17.3%
Ken Dryden - 4.8%
Joe Volpe - 4.7%
Scott Brison - 4.0%
Martha Hall Findlay - 1.0%

Actual
29.3% Michael Ignatieff
20.3% Bob Rae
17.8% Stéphane Dion
17.7% Gerard Kennedy
4.9% Ken Dryden
4.0% Scott Brison
3.2% Joe Volpe
2.7% Martha Hall Findlay

You'll note that I predicted four of the results within 0.1%. My most serious errors were in failing to anticipate the massive no-show of Volpe's delegates and the way that undeclared ex-officios migrated to Hall Findlay. I also overestimated Ignatieff by a little, but given that this was a time when Liberal insiders were saying that 35% for him was a slam-dunk, I'm pretty pleased with myself. But then, I'm always pretty pleased with myself.

- The combined intellects of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are now as high as they've been since Confederation.

- Going into the last ballot, Ignatieff supporters were trumpeting his comparative electability. Nonsense. Michael Ignatieff could not have won a federal election as a party leader. That's not to say that Dion could - I'm inclined to agree with the pollsters who thought that Rae was the most electable - but it's certainly no strike against him when compared to Iggy.

- The most depressing element of the campaign for me was watching how well Stéphane Dion had learned politics. When I initially supported him, it was because I thought he wasn't much of a politician, and that he was stubborn enough to continue not being much of a politician. Instead, he's learned his new craft well. I just hope it wasn't too well.

2006-11-30T17:31:00.000-07:00

Want to know the best way to convince Canadians that you take democracy seriously?

I'm not precisely sure what it is, but I know what it isn't.

2006-11-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

The curious case of Keith Martin

There is a certain portion of the punditry that considers all floor-crossings to be betrayals. These people do not distinguish between principled floor-crossings - such as John Herron, who went to the Liberals after his P.C. Party was swept out from under him, or David Kilgour (twice) - and those that are clearly power grabs, such as Belinda Stronach's, Scott Brison's, and David Emerson's. I am curious as to how such pundits explain Keith Martin, who voted against distinct society (as a Reform Party MP) in 1995. Contrast this with the records of his fellow No voters, all Liberals except Garth Turner: of the sixteen votes cast against the Harper government's motion, ten of them besides Martin's came from MPs who had been MPs in 1995, when Raymond Chan, Hedy Fry, Jim Karygiannis, Diane Marleau, Dan McTeague, Paul Steckle, and Andrew Telegdi supported the Chrétien government's distinct society motion - absent in 1995 but voting nay in 2006 were Joe Comuzzi, Maria Minna, and Joe Volpe (incidentally, for all the hullabaloo when Gerard Kennedy and Ken Dryden announced their opposition to the Harper motion, did anybody even realize that Volpe was also against it?).

Now, this doesn't necessarily constitute a flip-flop on the part of the above-named MPs. After all, though neither "nation" nor "distinct society" means anything, the former certainly means a lot *more* nothing than does the latter; there's really no obstacle to an MP believing that Québec is every bit a distinct society while somehow falling short of nationhood.

It's somewhat harder to understand where the MPs who were unprepared to acknowledge the distinct society thing while being very happy to call it a nation. Among these are a few noteworthy ones, such as (to pick an example at random) Stephen Harper, who as a Reform MP in 1995 voted against calling Québec a distinct society. Also voting this way were Reform cum Conservative MPs Gary Breitkreuz, Diane Ablonczy, Ken Epp, Monte Solberg, Bob Mills, John Williams, Leon Benoit, Myron Thompson, Jim Abbott, and Jay Hill. Art Hanger and John Cummins, also members of Reform's Class of '93, were not in the House when the division took place, while Chuck Strahl and Dick Harris were both absent when the distinct society motion was voted on in 1995. Finally, the Bloc Québécois caucus opposed the 1995 motion but supported the 2006 motion.

Now, it's not absolutely certain that these MPs were betraying their former beliefs, either. Perhaps they felt the distinction between Québec and Québécois was somehow important (though this strikes me as especially unlikely in the case of the Bloc MPs). Perhaps they somehow felt that "nation" was more palatable than "distinct society". Perhaps their views had genuinely evolved, though it's my experience that most politicians will go through the most tortuous and unbelievable explanation available before admitting that their beliefs have changed over the course of their time in office.

The point, though, is this: Keith Martin is being at least as true to his principles on this matter as his more partisanly consistent colleagues, and likely even more so.

2006-11-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

Who do you want? Who do you need? Who do you like? Who's gonna make a stand?

(Hey, come on - a lot of bloggers base their post titles on lyrics from their favourite songs.)

Regular readers, if the drugs have worn off, have probably noticed my conspicuous silence on the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race. This silence wasn't intentional - I fully intended to post something just as soon as some element of the race engaged me. And now I find that the first round of voting is past without my single criterion having been met.

Do you know who's either stupid or lying to you? Anybody who tells you what a surprise Saturday's results were. Elements of the results surprised me. I was surprised that Ed Stelmach won the position of second round sacrificial lamb, a title that I had anticipated going to Lyle Oberg. I was surprised that Dave Hancock beat Mark Norris. If I really tried, I could probably muster up some surprise that Victor Doerkson finished ahead of Gary McPherson. More surprise than interest, anyway.

But what happened on Saturday? Jim Dinning came in with a substantial lead. Ted Morton came in second, close enough to appear to be within striking distance of first, but really isn't because most people who are going to support Ted Morton are already supporting him (Will's posts would suggest otherwise, but Will is probably also the partisan blogger who is, among those I know who pretend not to be slavish followers of a party line, the worst at hiding it).

What did come as a bit of a surprise was Dave Hancock's immediate endorsement of Stelmach. Oberg's endorsement a little later was less surprising. I don't see either making much difference, less because those candidates lack the capacity to lead their first round supporters to another candidate and more because the electorate in the second round is going to be so different from the first. Teachers who joined to back Hancock will discover that none of the remaining candidates are to their liking. Unionists and busloads of recent Vietnamese immigrants who joined to back Oberg will behave similarly. And plenty more people will join. And then, Dinning will win, just as everybody's been predicting all along.

For that reason, you probably shouldn't expect to see much provincial politics coverage on here in the next little while (though evidence is beginning to suggest that the surest way to see what my blog won't look like is to read what I say it's going to look like). If provincial politics are your bag, check out The Alberta Report, an anonymous muckraker of a blog that strives to hate everybody equally among other things it's recently claimed, Liberal MLAs Bruce Miller and David Swann are allegedly unhappy with Kevin Taft's leadership. What do these two have in common? Both were considered better fits for the NDP, and at least one of them (Miller) was reportedly a member of the NDP up until just before the election.

In my next post, I might go a little into the irony of the damage the recent focus on Canadian unity doing so much to hurt the Liberal leadership candidate best qualified to talk about national unity, Stéphane Dion. I might talk a little about the results of the federal by-elections. I might go into the staggering, incomprehensible incoherence of the National Post editorial board (anybody wondering what I'm talking about should read this and then peruse the comments sections of some of my recent posts). Or I might vanish for four months or more.

2006-11-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

Masterstroke or just Masturbation?

When I heard about the Prime Minister's motion to name Québécois (not, as is being reported fairly consistently, Québec) as a nation, my reaction was immediate: "Meh," I remarked. The truth is that this debate over what constitutes a nation is academic jiggery-pokery of the most banal variety. It is possible to make a perfectly accurate (if not all together compelling case) that Québec is a nation and Canada isn't (I think I actually made such a case a few years ago in the St. Albert Gazette, before I realized how little it mattered). It's possible to make an equally accurate case that Québec isn't a nation and Canada is, or that both are, or that there's no such thing as a nation, and vive le pays des pommes frites. Accordingly, Stephen Harper's move must be evaluated on exclusively pragmatic grounds. Frankly, I don't see many such grounds on which to base an evaluation. The separatists are still separatists, the federalists are still federalists, Michael Ignatieff's position is still barely coherent on a good day, and life goes on.

Much more interesting than the issue itself has been the coverage it's received. Paul Wells takes momentary leave of his senses to imply that Harper's move constitutes treason against some unspecified cause, Andrew Coyne does much the same, and Garth Turner, incredibly, calls the vote on the motion "the most important vote [he will] cast as MP".

Another amusing thread running through this is this sense from a number of media outlets that they have somehow caught Harper in some sort of lie. For example, apparently legal experts question the motion, claiming that it will have no legal effect! And what's this? Thanks to this fine investigative journalism, the Tories have admitted that, indeed, the motion will have no legal effect. That's right: admitted. Not "acknowledged", not "accepted the obvious fact that", not "when confronted with the comments of legal experts, pointed out that no Tory had ever stated or even implied that". Tories: backed into a corner!

2006-11-19T05:40:00.000-07:00

File under "strange bedfellows"

My letter to the National Post on its "Why We Need Political Parties" editorial doesn't seem to have been published, but Rick Anderson's was, and it's pretty good. More polite than mine, too.

2006-11-16T22:24:00.000-07:00

Because being added to other people's link lists is basically the highlight of my life

I've made it on to this fellow's blogroll, where I am listed under "Partisan Political Drivel" as being "centre-left". Political drivel? Sure. Centre-left? Debatable - I've been identified as being anywhere from the extreme left to the extreme right (the latter, admittedly, mostly by one Anand Sharma in his surlier states). But partisan? That strikes me as a little bit odd, especially given my all-consuming hatred of and near obsession with the undermining of political parties.

The important thing, though, is that I'm apparently important.

2006-11-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

Presenting: C.U.R.D.

I have an idea.

As readers of my blog will be aware, I hold a certain set of views with regard to the role of voters, Members of Parliament, cabinet, and political parties in Canadian government. In brief, and in no particular order, this belief set could be summarized as follows:
1. The link between voter and MP is the foundation of Canadian representative democracy.
2. Each MP is free to vote as he/she chooses, and is accountable only to his/her conscience and his/her constituents in how he/she exercises that freedom.
3. Accordingly, no MP should vote other than how he/she would otherwise have voted by reason of partisan affiliation.
4. During elections, Canadians are not electing a government, but a Parliament.
5. Accordingly, voters should vote only on the basis of who they want representing them in Parliament, and not on the basis of who they want as Prime Minister.
6. Government (cabinet) serves at the pleasure of Parliament and, in this capacity, is subordinate to Parliament (though it has powers that Parliament does not have the right to exercise directly).
7. This system - in which the head of government is not popularily elected, but named by an unelected head of state - is not the ideal system, but it is the system in place in Canada, and attempts to "quasi-elect" the head of government are not compatible with Westminster-stlye Parliamentary democracy.

I think that the time is ripe for advancing these viewpoints, especially as they apply to independent MPs. Chuck Cadman was likely to the most respected member of the last Parliament, the balance of power in a confidence vote was recently held by four independent MPs, and, of course, Garth Turner is getting ready to take names, kick ass, and introduce private members bills. Moreover, the threat of proportional representation (the kind in which MPs are selected from party lists, as opposed to the kind recommended by the B.C. citizens' assembly, which I quite like) is looming on the horizon, with no lobby organizations of which I am aware fighting it and no politicians of whom I am aware willing to pay the political cost of coming out firmly against it.

I propose to fill that vacuum through the creation of a new group: Canadians United for Representative Democracy. As I envision it, here are a few of the activities in which C.U.R.D. could engage:
1. Issuing media statements every time some element of representative democracy is in the media - for example, during the Garth Turner saga or once the Ontario citizens' assembly reports.
2. Releasing an annual report card of MPs, compiled on the basis of such objective critera as whether they respond to e-mails from constituents, whether their websites feature any interactive component, whether they schedule and advertise forums in their ridings, and whether their websites include content about their work as distinct from their party's.
3. Engaging in letter-writing campaigns and such-like on any relevant legislation to come before the House of Commons.

Since I had this idea last night, I've become rather excited about it and have arguably gone overboard. I conducted a NUANS name search, registered a domain, and written a draft set of bylaws. Some things that I still need, and which any interested people would be welcome to help me with:

1. In order to incorporate, I will need three people (including me) and $200. I have the latter, (though anybody willing to contribute to this cause would be warmly embraced - I've already shelled out for the name search and the domain registration) but I still need the former.
2. I need web hosting - preferably cheap web hosting.
3. I need somebody to design a website - nothing elaborate, but something more elaborate than what's there now.
4. I need somebody whose French has eroded less than mine has to provide a French version of the name - the best I've come up with is Canadiens Soutenants la Démocratie Représentative, but I'm really not sure of my choice of verb, and I also have the distinct impression that that S shouldn't be there (though intellectually is appears to me that it should).

If anybody wants to help with any of this, please send me an e-mail.

2006-11-14T13:38:00.000-07:00

"More importantly, though, I have realized that party politics - not just this party - is the problem."

In keeping with my recent (but not *that* recent - sorry about the prolonged absence) role as head of the Edmonton chapter of the Garth Turner Fan Club, I have to say that his announcement today is significant, for the following reasons:

1. It marks the first time at least in my lifetime that an independent MP has committed to exploiting his/her role to the maximum of his/her ability. Chuck Cadman, admirable character though he was, only ever wanted to continue as an Alliance/Conservative MP, a privelege of which he was robbed by a meeting hall full of insta-Conservatives. Carolyn Parrish continued to behave as a Liberal (that's capital L) even after being kicked out of caucus. Pat O'Brien's move to independent status represented nothing more than a protest against the Martin government's policy (if a policy it can be called) on gay marriage. John Nunziata searched around quietly for a new home after leaving the Liberals. David Kilgour was close, but he only took up life as an independent once he'd already decided to retire from public life. And I'm still not clear on what, exactly, André Arthur hopes to accomplish in Ottawa. But Garth Turner's aiming to show that, contrary to popular opinion, independent MPs can matter every bit as much as partisan backbenchers (this is known as "damnation by faint praise").

2. It marks the first time in recent memory that an MP has taken it upon himself to make a serious attempt to strengthen the role of MPs vis-à-vis the party, by moving a private members bill to give independents places on Parliamentary committees and to broaden their capacity to fund raise. The mini-revolt staged by Liberal MPs during the waning days of the Chrétien era (when Parliament voted to have committee chairs elected by secret ballot, effectively breaking party leadership's control over such matters) was nice, but this is far more substantial.

3. It is, so far as I can tell, the first time I've seen an MP argue that democratic reform is not exactly synonymous with proportional representation. By suggesting that what matters are individual MPs and their relationships with their constituents, Garth Turner is implicitly arguing (correctly) that PR as generally conceived would be hurtful to democracy. I'm forced to believe that many of his colleagues agree with him, or we'd have seen some sort of movement towards PR, but this is the most seriously PR has been challenged on the federal scene for as long as I can remember. I may yet live to see the day that a candidate saying nasty things about PR can expect the same sort of cheering section at election forums as those saying nice things about it now receive.

After Turner was kicked out of caucus, I found myself quietly speculating that he might wind up as this decade's most important backbench MP. If he pushes this as hard as he can, I think that title will be assured (especially if his private member's bill's number is drawn - I'd like to hear the parties' arguments against it).

Garth Turner's still wrong on tax reform, on the environment (though not *as* wrong as his former colleagues are), and on a host of other issues. But it's about damned time that at least one of our democratically-elected representatives was right about democracy.

Give 'em grief, Garth.

2006-10-27T19:18:00.000-06:00

Swoon

And now, as each day passes, it becomes more apparent that I will actually be a better MP for being an Indie. Huge amounts of time are spent by party MPs each week sitting in party meetings devoid of policy debate. Countless more hours are devoted to filling chairs in committee rooms, where the outcome of almost every meeting has been pre-determined by the government. And the rest of Ottawa time is largely spent sitting in QP where Tory MPs are expected to clap, but dare not ask tough questions, if any.

- Garth Turner, October 27 blog post

I'm pretty sure that Garth Turner is now closer to my ideal of an MP (in the way he does his job moreso than in the substantial positions he takes) than any other MP of my lifetime. The knock on him is that he's a bit of an attention-seeking showoff, which he is. But not only do I not object to this, I think it's absolutely essential - if the point of accountability is going to move away from party leaders to MPs, where it belongs, then MPs need to be visible, so that voters can judge their records. Voters can sure as hell judge Garth Turner's record (though, based on the comments section of Turner's blog, they're not doing a very good job).

2006-10-25T08:34:00.000-06:00

Grand Master, Think Faster

With due respect (i.e. very little) to the NDP, this is downright loony. But then, what do you expect from the NDP?

(That last bit, of course, was just an excuse to link to Uncyclopedia, an excellent site of whose existence I was somehow, until very recently, unaware.)

2006-10-23T19:40:00.000-06:00

By Popular Request

Where by "popular request", I mean "request of a single person who is no doubt unrepresentative of the population at large". In an e-mail with the subject line "I never want to hear the words "Quebec" and "nation" in the same sentence again.", Anonymotron (whose blog is an excellent read if you can spare the five minutes per month required to read the whole thing) writes the following:

Unless the sentence is "Who the fuck cares whether Quebec is a nation?" Although it would be kind of funny to watch Ignatieff try to "solve" the National Unity Thing.

(Oddly, considering the title of this email, this is actually a request for a blog post on this topic.)

Conveniently, this was on my list of five or six topics I've been meaning to blog about (another of which - we're just rife with irony here at WitPotS - was a promise not to say anything more about the Liberal leadership contest until at least the middle of November).

Actually, the subject about which I was actually planning on blogging was my growing disillusionment with Michael Ignatieff, for whom my feelings, as regular readers (those ever-decreasing hordes) will know, were pretty mixed to begin with. The problem is that he seems dedicated to taking everything that was on the positive side of the mixed feelings and couter-act it, not only with a negative, but with a directly contradictory negative.

For example, one thing I liked about Ignatieff is that his mind appeared to be a really great one. The he comes out and starts blithering like an idiot about Qana. I'm no expert on Qana, the Middle East, or what constitutes a war crime, but his statement that it was Hezbollah, and not Israel, that he was accusing of war crimes, coupled with his statement that he respected Susan Kadis' decision to resign from his campaign team over her objections to his accusations that Israel had committed war crimes, appear to be, I don't know, completely fucking incoherent.

And then there's Iraq - I obviously didn't support the invasion of Iraq. I knew Michael Ignatieff did. I'd read his rationale, and I didn't agree with it, but I admired his guts. Basically, he was willing to deviate from the viewpoints of almost all of his hitherto like-minded colleagues because he believed it was the right thing to do. He admitted that it could wind up making him look really stupid, and called it the "risk of his life". Unfortunately, what *actually* wound up making him look really stupid was his statement to the Globe that Bush was a disaster largely on the basis that he invaded Iraq. Not looking quite so principled and courageous anymore.

Which brings us to the post that Anonymotron requested, though it almost doesn't merit a post by virtue of having been discussed more or less continuously for the last three decades or longer.

The problem isn't that Michael Ignatieff thinks Québec is a nation - Stéphane Dion thinks so too, and so did Pierre Trudeau. The problem is not even that he wants to entrench this in the Canadian constitution (well, actually that is a problem, but it's not the biggest one). The problem is that, like Brian Mulroney, Ignatieff won't say what effect he expects constitutional entrenchment to have. And, absent any statement of what legal effect he would like to see a two-or-more-nations clause to have, we can only conclude that it is calculated primarily to bring so-called soft nationalists over to the cause of federalism.

This brings us to the greatest problem of all: Michael Ignatieff apparently believes that it is possible to please all parties with a constitutional amendment - he believes that it's possible, the lessons of history notwithstanding, to *increase* the state of Canadian unity by opening up the constitution.

The problem, apparently, is that Michael Ignatieff is an idiot.

2006-10-23T14:27:00.000-06:00

By-Elections!

Her Majesty has called two of them - one in Repentigny, which will be easily won by the Bloc Québécois, and one in London North-Centre, which is where the real action is.

I was a little surprised to learn that Stephen Harper was taking a "huge risk" by calling by-elections in ridings that his party didn't win last election and had little or no chance of winning next election, but I guess that's why Paul Nesbitt-Larking is a political expert and I'm not.

The only real question in this riding is whether the Liberals will keep is (incumbent Joe Fontana resigned to go into London municipal politics) or whether Green Leader Elizabeth May will become the Party's first MP (Garth Turner won't be, because he has virtually no positions in common with the party's policy).

Last time around, Fontana captured 40.1% of the vote, with his closest opponent, Conservative John Mazzilli, receiving 29.9%. Green candidate Stuart Smith won 5.5 percent, finishing fourth (question: has there ever been an electoral position occupied so consistently by one party across the whole country as fourth place has been by the Green Party during these last two elections? I'm too lazy to check, but I'd be surprised if they finished fourth in fewer than half of the country's ridings last time around).

At first glance, it seems unlikely that May can win. On the other hand, this will be the first time since the Greens burst forward as a national party (i.e. since they started running candidates in every riding) that a Green leader will run in a riding not contested by another party's leader. Moreover, the Turner Affair has given the Greens and Elizabeth May a fair amount of publicity, and the Liberals are struggling to find a candidate. They haven't selected a leader yet (thought the publicity of their leadership race could benefit them). In short, it's hard to imagine a more favourable set of circumstances for a Green by-election victory.

My prediction? She'll still come up short, but I have trouble seeing her finish worse than second (a position which faithful readers will recall only one Green candidate occupied during the last election - Wild Rose's Sean Maw).

In any event, it should provide some interesting political theatre - I'm personally curious as to how much of an issue May's opponents will make out of the fact that she'd only be representing the region until the next election, at which time she's committed to running in Nova Scotia.

2006-10-18T23:47:00.000-06:00

John Ibbitson, You're on Notice

Sigh.

But the demands of a political party are absolute. Certainly, caucuses can accommodate large egos. (When was the last time you stood at the front of a room grinning and waving your arms while hundreds of people cheered and chanted your name?) But those egos must ultimately submit to party discipline.

Especially when in government, whether you are a junior backbencher or a senior cabinet minister, you are entitled to make your views known to the leadership. But once the caucus, the cabinet or the prime minister has decided, then you must support that decision, or leave.

Mr. Turner has a much more American conception of the role of MP. In his view, parliamentarians associate with one party or another but should pass independent judgment on each issue, voting according to their conscience or the will of their constituents.

While there is merit in that approach, it is not our Westminster approach. There's a reason why we say that parliamentary votes are whipped.

Yes? And that reason is...?

I searched the rest of the article in vain for the answer to that question. It's almost as though Roman never left.

Sigh.

2006-10-18T12:35:00.000-06:00

Here are the rules

1. You may vote freely as a Conservative backbencher, even if doing so causes you to vote against government policy (except on confidence votes).
2. Criticizing any element of government policy - even criticizing what you fear might be found in government policy and publicly urging the government in a direction that it does not appear to wish to go - is grounds for suspension.

As for allegations about violating caucus confidentiality, I read his blog. If there was anything there that violated caucus confidentiality (which is a concept for which I have little to no respect in the first place), then caucus confidentiality was too strict.

Hopefully this will expose the lie that genuine Parliamentary democracy is reconcilable with partisan politics as they now exist in Canada.

(Errors in the CTV story, incidentally:
1. Rahim Jaffer isn't government House Leader. Rob Nicholson is. Jaffer's caucus char, for reasons that elude me.
2. Turner is alleged to have been disappointed to have been left out of cabinet. From reading his blog, I never got the impression that he thought there was any possibility of his inclusion, even though he was the only member of the newly-elected Conservative caucus with prior federal cabinet experience.
3. Turner is called a "small-C conservative", which is certainly debatable. I suppose in absolute terms, being a Conservative, he is a conservative, but he's also on the left flank of his caucus.)

UPDATE: Now there's speculation that Turner might join the Green Party, which would be hilarious. I confess that it was among my first thoughts as well - he's had some kind words lately for Elizabeth May, and used to work for the Sierra Legal Defense Fund - but his policies wouldn't be a good fit at all for the party, especially after its recent leftward shift.

UPDATE #2: According to Turner, the subject of caucus confidentiality did not come up in this morning's Ontario caucus meeting.

2006-10-17T01:38:00.000-06:00

I have taken clear positions on difficult issues, and I have taken difficult positions on clear issues.

(This is funny.)

(So is this.)

For those of you who haven't been following the mid-term elections in the States, you should really start checking this daily. The story so far, as far as the Senate goes:

1. At dissolution, the standings were fifty-five Republicans, forty-four Democrats, and one independent (former Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who was among the Senate's more liberal Senators and voted with Democrats on procedural questions).
2. Seats up for grabs include fifteen currently held by Republicans, sixteen currently held by Democrats, and Jeffords'.
3. Of the Republican seats, only Bill Frist of Tennessee is not seeking re-election. Of the fourteen Republicans up for re-election, only eight - Olympia Snowe of Maine, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Trent Lott of Mississippi, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Craig Thomas of Wyoming, Orrin Hatch of Utah, John Ensign of Nevada, and John Kyl of Arizona - are expected to be re-elected without appreciable difficulty.
4. Of the sixteen Democratic seats, all incumbents except Minnesota's Mark Dayton and Maryland's Paul Sarbanes are seeking re-election. In addition, Joe Liberman of Connecticut is running as an independent after being defeated in the state's Democratic primary by Ned Lamont. Of the thirteen Democratic Senators running for re-election as Democrats, only New Jersey's Robert Menendez is facing a credible threat.
5. Of the five "open" seats (Tennessee, Minnesota, Maryland, Connecticut, and Vermont), Minnesota (Amy Klobuchar) and Maryland (Ben Cardin) are expected to go Democratic. Additionally, the retiring Jim Jeffords will be replaced by Bernie Saunders, also an independent, but one who is expected to vote with the Democrats on procedural issues (his voting record in the House of Representatives is actually to the left of almost all Democrats').
6. This means that there will be at least forty-eight Republicans in the Senate after the election, at least forty-two Democrats, and at least one indepentent. This leaves nine seats that have a reasonable chance of changing hands: Montana, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. None of these races is sewn up by any one candidate at this point. All of them could be won by either party, except for Connecticut which is a race between Lieberman and Lamont. Republican incumbents in danger of losing their seats are Conrad Burns of Montana (first seated 1989), George Allen of Virginia (first seated 2001), Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania (first seated 1995), Jim Talent of Missouri (first seated 2002), Mike Dewine of Ohio (first seated 1995), and Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island (first seated 1999).
7. Treating Saunders as a Democrat, in order to gain control of the Senate the Democrats need to win at least eight of the nine contested seats. The X-factor is Connecticut, where even a Democratic loss could help the Democrats, if Lieberman continues to vote as a Democrat procedurally (and, all propoganda to the contrary, Lieberman would be a very peculiar fit for the Republican Party), which would reduce the number of seats that the Democrats actually need to win to seven.

Over the next few days, I will be providing some more in-depth coverage of several of these nine key races. As usual, I make no guarantee about how few days, how in-depth the coverage will be, or how many of the races will be covered.

WitPotS: Because reliability is for large, corporate-controlled media.

2006-10-16T03:13:00.000-06:00

In summary, I'm awesome

Smart chap, the Idealist Pragmatist.

2006-10-16T02:27:00.000-06:00

Obligatory Post Debate Commentary

That was mildly entertaining, but in no way decisive. Any Liberal who had his/her mind appreciable changed by what happened in Toronto yesterday probably wasn't paying much attention to begin with. Overall, the best performers were the four who have no chance of winning, which isn't hard now that they're released from the pressure of, you know, *really* running for the leadership. Ken Dryden was excellent. Scott Brison, though still a shithead, was excellent (but how come nobody, especially Volpe, pointed out that Brison was a former opponent of gay marriage?). Martha Hall Findlay was pretty good. Joe Volpe was as good as he could have been given that he is absolutely without credibility at this point - I mean, he almost made me feel like a big meanie for kicking him around so much.

As for the front-runners, maybe it's just my continued inability to understand why anybody supports him, but I thought Gerard Kennedy performed the worst. The challenge he faced was to demonstrate that he wasn't some vacuous twit who loves sound bytes so much that he wants to have sex with them right there on stage, and I don't think he did it. His closing statement was reasonably good but he was the most invisible of the front-runners in the debate portions. The one place he did shine was in the "debate" on same-sex marriage, though he only did so by completely misrepresenting the issue and Charter's role in it (so did Brison and Volpe).

The other three each had their strengths and weaknesses. Bob Rae got good lines in against Ignatieff (especially the oft-quoted "this from a guy who's changed his mind three times over the last week," which is sort of unfair since Ignatieff hasn't changed his mind at all). His defense against Stéphane Dion's attack against his economic record as Premier of Ontario was solid (and, uncharacteristically, I found myself siding with Bob fucking Rae over Dion on the question). On the other hand, it's still extremely difficult to tell what Rae would do as Prime Minister - he's good at criticizing other candidates' positions and defending his own record, but not much for giving anybody a compelling reason to vote for him. Likely because no such compelling reason exists.

Michael Ignatieff, as has been repeated over and over, did what he had to do - he rose above the fray and basically refrained from attacking anybody else. He seemed like one of the smartest guys on stage, which he was, and advocated his positions well. He and Dion engaged in the closest thing to a substantive policy discussion on the need for new legislation on the environment. In my opinion, Ignatieff looked like a guy who was ready to be Prime Minister, while Rae looked like a guy who was ready to be opposition leader. Gerard Kennedy looked like a guy who'd be in over his head as Ontario's education minister.

And Dion? I have mixed feelings here. He attacked well, and looked like a guy who was better-versed on the issues than anybody else (which he probably was). His attack on Rae's economic record bothered me - for a guy who wants to see fewer resources consumed, her sure seems big on economic growth - and his claim that he was around when the tough fiscal decisions had to be made is a little disingenuous, since he missed the toughest three years of deficit cutting. Besides that, his constant defense of the Chrétien-Martin years wore on me, since I'm not particularily a fan of those years, but would likely play better to the partisan crowd he was addressing. On the upside, he did a better job than either Rae or Kennedy at portraying himself as the guy who could take on Ignatieff (not that I buy into the existence of this alleged "anybody-but-Iggy" movement - I see very little reason that a supporter of Dion would be more inclined to back Rae than Ignatieff on a final ballot).

Insofar as Ignatieff is the front-runner, the failure by all other candidates to gain appreciable ground against him made Ignatieff the winner and his three closest challengers all losers. Insofar as the challenge for each of these three was to position himself as the best last-ballot opponent for Ignatieff (though I suspect there will be three left on the final ballot, barring early quitters), Dion won and Kennedy lost.

2006-10-02T18:13:00.000-06:00

Steve and Microsoft Excel Team Up to Bring You the First Ballot Results

So, as we're all aware by now, 409 of the Liberals' 469 delegate selection meetings have reported their results. As we're also all aware, the delegates chosen by these meetings do not make up the totality of the delegates who will pick the party's next leader - there are also ex-officio delegates, as well as the delegates from the 60 delegate selection meetings yet to report. Besides that, 115 of the delegates who were selected on the weekend have yet to declare their intentions.

I've done a little bit of number-crunching to predict what the results will wind up being on the first ballot. I won't go too far into my methodology, because doing so will probably expose me to accusations of "ignoring biases inherent in the available data" or "being totally incompetent" - if anybody wants a copy of the spreadsheet, my e-mail address is in my profile and I'd be happy to send it to you.

In brief, the way I treated the uncommitted delegates was to assume that they'd break exactly the same way as the other delegates in their provinces. From there, we get the following first ballot results:

Michael Ignatieff - 30.7%
Bob Rae - 20.4%
Gerard Kennedy - 17.7%
StÃ©phane Dion - 17.3%
Ken Dryden - 4.8%
Joe Volpe - 4.7%
Scott Brison - 4.0%
Martha Hall Findlay - 1.0%

These results are similar, but not identical, to the ones being published as Super Weekend's "results" (the difference comes from the fact that I've allocated the uncommitted delegates by province rather than assuming that they'll break according to the national totals).

Next, I factored in the delegates from the 60 missing meetings. This was tough, because all I knew about these meetings was their provinces - I had no idea how many delegates were to be elected at each one (with a few exceptions, such as Nunavit's missing meeting which was surely for the 14 delegates allocated to the riding). I calculated the total number of delegates who were supposed to be elected this weekend as being 4865 (source: the Hill Times), and assumed that the missing 671 delegates were evenly-divided between the 60 seats (in fact, this isn't the case - besides the fact that the missing meetings are of different types, it's likely that some meetings failed to elect their full allotment of delegates - but it's the best assumption available under the circumstances). This means that each of the 60 missing meetings will elect 11.2 delegates. I then apportioned these, too, by province, to come up with a total elected delegate count:

Michael Ingatieff - 30.2%
Bob Rae - 20.8%
Gerard Kennedy - 17.7%
StÃ©phane Dion - 17.1%
Joe Volpe - 4.8%
Ken Dryden - 4.8%
Scott Brison - 3.7%
Martha Hall Findlay - 1.0%

Basically, this means that Ignatieff and Dion should slip slightly, Rae should gain a little, Volpe should pass Dryden (by all of 3 delegates - assuredly within this simulation's margin of error, which I estimate to be approximately a billion delegates), and Brison should do even worse than he already appears to be doing (which makes sense, since Nova Scotia's meetings have all reported). The only thing that is totally outlandish about my model's predictions here is that it gives Kennedy all 14 of Nunavit's delegates, on the basis that the only one we've yet seen is a Kennedy guy.

Of course, there are also the much ballyhooed ex-officio delegates - MPs, Senators, defeated/nominated candidates, riding association presidents, members of various Liberal boards, privy councillors, etc. According to Wikipedia, there should be about 867 such delegates, of whom 445 have gone on record as backing a specific candidate. At this point, all I did was project the intentions of these 445 across the whole 867, which gives the following results among ex-officios only:

Michael Ignatieff - 34.6%
StÃ©phane Dion - 18.2%
Gerard Kennedy - 15.5%
Bob Rae - 12.8%
Ken Dryden - 9.2%
Scott Brison - 7.2%
Joe Volpe - 1.6%
Martha Hall Findlay - 0.9%

It might be interesting to further divide/project the ex-officios on the basis of such things as geographic location and type of ex-officio (MP, Senator, etc.), but for the time being this is what I've got, and I saw little reason that the 445 who have declared should be seriously unrepresentative of the whole crop.

Combining the two categories (elected and ex-officio), we get the following results:

Michael Ignatieff - 30.9%
Bob Rae - 19.6%
Gerard Kennedy - 17.3%
StÃ©phane Dion - 17.2%
Ken Dryden - 5.4%
Joe Volpe - 4.3%
Scott Brison - 4.2%
Martha Hall Findlay - 1.0%

The ex-officios will allow Dryden to save a little face, but won't help Brison pull past anybody.

Is this an accurate prediction of what the first ballot will look like? I'm inclined to say yes, despite some factors suggesting the opposite, such as
1. the various sources of uncertainty in my model,
2. the fact that a high proportion of delegates won't actually show up to the convention, and the fact that the question of which delegates fail to show is not geographically neutral, and
3. the fact that those delegates who aren't committed one way or another on the first ballot may decide to back a perceived winner, or vote to stop Ignatieff, or what have you.

Predictions by such (cough) luminaries as Warren Kinsella and Jeffrey Simpson that Michael Ignatieff will hit 35% support on the first ballot seem unsupported by the data.

What does this mean about who will wind up winning the leadership race? I'll save those thoughts for a later post, but I'm no longer nearly as confident as I was in my Rae prediction.

2006-10-01T15:34:00.000-06:00

Bah

Well, Gerard Kennedy has overtaken Stéphane Dion. On the downside, this means that Dion certainly won't become the compromise candidate on later ballots. On the upside, it means that I don't need to go through the trouble of altering the amount of esteem in which I hold Liberals.

2006-09-30T15:18:00.000-06:00

Nerd!

So I've been glued to this all day.

Preliminary thoughts, at a time when Igantieff is leading Rae, Dion, and GerardKennedy with delegate counts of 314, 185, 184, and 135 respectively with 107 meetings reporting:

1. I'm gratified that Dion is so close behind Rae (until the hundredth meeting or so, he was actually slightly ahead), but the ex-officio delegates will swing to Rae over Dion by a margin of at least 2:1. Of course, it seems probably that a lot of the delegate elected this weekend won't make it to the convention anyway, by reason of cost, so who knows what's going to happen? This is the most exciting piece of political theatre since the federal election, but it shouldn't be mistaken for democracy.
2. Dryden's hurting. Badly.
3. Joe Volpe has 41 delegates. I'm trying to imagine the kind of person who could say, with a straight face, that Joe Volpe would make a good Prime Minister of Canada, but my imagination's failing me.
4. Exhaustive list of provinces where Rae is ahead of Dion: B.C., Newfoundland.
5. Rae's doing so badly (fourth place) in Ontario not because he's unelectable in Ontario, but because Ontario *Liberals* learned to dislike him back when they were, you know, opposing his government.

I suppose now's as good a time as any to reveal what my preferential ballot would look like in this race, if I was allowed to cast one:
1. Stéphane Dion
2. Ken Dryden
3. Martha Hall Findlay
4. Micahel Ignatieff
5. Gerard Kennedy
6. None of the Above
7. Bob Rae
8. Scott Brison
9. Joe Volpe

2006-09-29T18:29:00.000-06:00

Steve Goes Cheerleading

Why I am supporting Stéphane Dion

I promise that once this race is over I'll go back to being uniformly snarky on non-partisan. But for the time being, having someone of Dion's calibre at the head of Canada's Natural Governing Party (TM) is an opportunity that ought not to be passed up.

Some highlights from the above links:

On the environment

"So we had these laid out on a matrix about six items down here and we had them from worst, to not so bad, to acceptable but weak, to really strong. And when we started the negotiations on November 28th, and we met as a group we didn't have a single country as supporting the global climate groups' positions, down the line on "very strong." Not one. And by the time the conference adjourned, we had every single decision in the best contemplated possible result strongest decision category. Every single one. And that was thanks to Stephane Dion." - Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada

"One of the questions at the Surrey debate was about soaring gasoline prices. It was, in effect, an invitation to pander to Liberals on a consumer issue. Dion refused to play. "I have bad news," he announced cheerfully. "It will only get worse." With China putting millions of new cars on the road every month, he said, Canada had better use less fuel if Canadians want lower fuel bills." - Paul Wells, Maclean's

"Dion is the only candidate who has made climate change a central priority. His 53-page plan for cutting Canada's output of greenhouse gases includes international carbon trading, burial of carbon dioxide and more public transit. He said yesterday he would rule out federal funding of infrastructure that spawned sprawl." - Henry Aubin, Montreal Gazette

National Unity

"Dion is in a class by himself. His effectiveness in the past dwarfs Rae's. The trenchant logic of his written ripostes to sovereignist leaders in the late 1990s elevated the national-unity debate and left opponents sputtering for words. The Clarity Act, of which he was the guiding spirit, gave Canada an overdue self-defence mechanism. In debates, he is quick on his feet and uses facts rather than hyperbole or personal attack. He might lack charisma, but he radiates intellectual integrity. It's hard, then, to think of anyone in Canada who inspires more confidence on the national-unity file." - Henry Aubin, Montreal Gazette

"Plucked out of academia by Jean Chretien shortly after the referendum, he got elected in St.-Laurent-Cartierville riding, jumping over the boards into the game. There he started throwing body checks at the sovereignists, deploying his limpid logic and academic rigour until separatists grew red in the face. His Clarity Act and his open letters deflated unreasonable Yes-side assertions and assumptions. If another referendum must be fought, Dion would be the man to fight it; no matter who is in power federally, the referendum No committee should co-opt Dion for a major role." - Montreal Gazette

Social Programs

"He shows signs of being an old-fashioned tax-and-spend Liberal; alarmingly, he suggested to our editorial board that "more social programs" are the only way to social justice." - Montreal Gazette

Intellect

"Dion offers only confidence, encyclopedic interests, and a decade at the centre of the nation's most gruelling debates, a trial by fire that he endured, we can say now in hindsight, with extraordinary good grace." - Paul Wells, Maclean's

"In recent debates, he earned kudos for being able to answer questions on just about any theme. "In the debates, I felt I was not surfing as the other candidates were," he told The Gazette's editorial board this week. "I enjoyed it."" - Philip Authier, Montreal Gazette

"When Paul Martin became Liberal leader, he told Dion it was time for new faces with new ideas. "Then I'll send you new ideas," Dion said. Within two days a discussion paper with new policies for the economy, environment and the mechanics of federalism was on Martin's desk. He shuffled Dion to the backbenches anyway. Dion became such a star at weekly caucus meetings -- and then, during the 2004 election, such a key player in the Liberals' late-inning recovery from complete collapse in Quebec -- that he was back in cabinet immediately after the election." - Paul Wells, Maclean's

Political Skills

"Today, after a campaign that allowed him to pump out policy ideas on almost every subject that matters, Dion is sitting pretty, either with a shot at the Liberal crown or in the starting gate of a future cabinet job." - Philip Authier

"Some say Dion is too dry and academic to win an election, a criticism we do not share. People said that about Stephen Harper, too, but he's PM today. Having both major parties led by individuals of undeniable intelligence is not such a bad fate for a country, after all." - Montreal Gazette

"Suddenly Russia wouldn't agree to the language on Article 3.9, which was our key protocol section about negotiating post-2012. At 6 o'clock we broke for dinner, we were supposed to resume at 8pm - didn't happen, midnight - didn't happen. 2:16 AM. Now they're all off in meeting rooms, and we're all working the corridors. At 2:16 AM Dion gaveled us back in and the word was out, he's going to try to bluff the Russians. He knows they won't agree, he's going to smoke ‘em out and make them do it in a room in public and see if we can get them to just let it go through. Dion put forward the good language, and all you have to do in a UN meeting, any one country can block. You just put your flag up. This is like a little nameplate. The Russians flipped their flag up, and they objected. And it was quite an extraordinary moment, the head of Russian delegation said "We never saw this language before, it is new to us, it's not….we are object on behalf of the Russian Federation to this language and we are more than prepared to explain our reasons." And Stephane Dion said, "as you are now blocking important progress for the fate of the world, I suggest you explain your reasons to the world." At 2:16 AM that's pretty good." - Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada

"Metcalfe was meeting every potential candidate, asking them what they would want their legacy to be if they survived a decade as prime minister. Almost none had a persuasive answer. (Belinda Stronach said, "Let me get back to you.") But Dion was ready to describe a legacy. His reply was short and, to Metcalfe's ears, sweet: "A united Canada that offers a better standard of living and uses fewer resources." Metcalfe, too, signed on to the Dion campaign." - Paul Wells, Maclean's

P.S.

Gerard Kennedy

2006-09-27T16:56:00.000-06:00

This post has nothing to do with Gerard Kennedy

It's early to judge, but from where I'm sitting Stephen Harper looks like the best Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau.

I'll just let that observation sink in for a few minutes, breaking my silence only to assure you - repeatedly, if necessary - that you read that first sentence right.

I base my assessment on the following criteria:
1. sense of purpose
2. intellectual integrity
3. political courage
4. progressive measures
5. respect for democracy
6. administrative competence.

Stephen Harper's government has shown great sense of purpose, a quality which Canadians have been unable to witness in their federal governments since the days of Brian Mulroney (except for, arguably, a brief period at the end of Jean Chrétien's career). Since taking office mere months ago, it has advanced a number of its constituency's traditional priorities: taxes have been lowered, spending has been cut, and packages have been introduced to improve government accountability and to begin the processes of electoral and Senate reform. Measures to stiffen criminal penalties are apparently on the way during this Parliamentary session. Meanwhile, the government has taken a strong and unequivacal position on Canada's presence in the world, especially on the mission in Afghanistan. If you were to compress the entire agenda of the Chrétien-Martin years into six months, you'd be hard-pressed to find as much purpose there besides the elimination of the deficit.

Brian Mulroney's government showed a comparable sense of purpose, but it was marred by a lack of intellectual integrity. Flip-flops were rampant, and it was very difficult to infer a coherent intellectual foundation from the administration's actions. This is not true of Stephen Harper's government. All of the above-named actions look like those of a fiscally conservative government, interventionist in foreign affairs, and concerned with the state of Canadian democracy. I deduct points for the GST cut, which is viewed by nearly every economist as being a worse way of achieving the Conservatives' stated aim of increased economic growth than the income tax cuts it replaced, but to an extent this is splitting hairs: a tax cut's a tax cut.

You want political courage? Stephen Harper's taken a page out of Joe Clark's book when it comes to governing as if you have a majority. The things is, Harper's doing it right, daring the Bloc to vote against a budget that addressed issues core to its existence (he also benefits from the fact that the 2006 Liberals are hardly going to bring back Paul Martin to lead them into a snap election as the 1980 Liberals did with Pierre Trudeau). Besides that, this government implemented a major spending cut in a minority government. Besides that, it did so with a surplus, and with the apparent support of none of the opposition parties. The traditional rule of minority governments is that you throw money around like a drunken sailor (especially if the money's there, which it now is) and let the next majority worry about the consequences. Instead, this government, which purports to believe in smaller government, is making government smaller.

And the measures are, for the most part, progressive (in the sense of "moving the country forward", rather in the sense of "leftist"). It's paying down the debt (again, instead of engaging in pre-election tax cuts and spending) which obviously puts public finances on a stabler footing. It's addressing the so-called democratic deficit with a vigour that Paul Martin could never even talk about, and which Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney never even cared to pay lip service to. I have a hard time taking serious issue with any of the recent spending cuts, with the likely exception of the court access program. Kyoto? I'll take a government that outright refuses to meet the targets over one that pays lip service to pretending to any day. I deduct points for its regressive attitudes on crime (which are very similar to the New Democrats'), but even looking at this from my ideologically-slanted perspective, I am convinced that Canada will be better off after two (or whatever) years of Stephen Harper than it would have been under another two years of Paul Martin, or Jean Chrétien.

This government gives every indication that it respects democracy, though, as a minority, it sort of has to. Its proposal for fixed election dates empowers the people in the face of government. More importantly, the agenda it's delivered bears a great resemblance to the agenda it promised to deliver during the election campaign, which has the effect of making elections somewhat more meaningful. I deduct points for Harper's feud with the Parliamentary Press Gallery (which is, I'm certain, guilty of every charge he's pressed upon it, though such guilt does not excuse his actions), but not for the David Emerson defection or the Michael Fortier Senate appointment, neither of which, in my opinion, damages democracy in the country.

The last criterion, administrative competence, cannot be accurate judged at this point. But I have trouble believing that Harper's record on this will be worse than Chrétien's or Mulroney's (or, let's be honest, Trudeau's).

I'm still disinclined to vote Conservative, especially as long as they keep running the utterly useless Rahim Jaffer in my riding. But I was more disinclined still to vote for any other government I've witnessed since I achieved political maturity.

If voters in democracies really get the government they deserve, this one says nicer things about Canadians than have been said in a long time.

2006-09-22T12:46:00.000-06:00

Continuing to rag on Kennedy supporters for no particular reason

Except, of course, that it's so much damned fun. Anyway, whenever I post a blog entry that includes the name Gerard Kennedy I immediately get about twelve hits from various blog-search sites from people who are apparently constantly scanning the blogosphere to make sure nobody's saying anything negative about him. Frankly, it sort of reminds me of the attitude of every Young Liberal I knew to Paul Martin, before 2002 or so.

I'll be in Calgary playing board games this weekend, so no blogging. I'll make a return of some kind Monday and, barring further blog-worthy developments, it won't have anything to do with the Liberal race.

P.S. Gerard Kennedy.

2006-09-21T14:25:00.000-06:00

The bad news is that Stéphane Dion definitely isn't going to win the Liberal leadership

The worse news is that Bob Rae probably will (for anybody who's actually tracking it, this marks a shift in my prediction from Ignatieff to Rae).

The good news, to the extent that it exists, is that this new poll by Strategic Counsel makes for some very interesting reading.

The short version - that Ignatieff is the top choice of Liberals, but has far less growth potential than Rae, their second choice - has already been gurgitated by media outlets more timely than, if not as fascinatingly brilliant as, myself. But by performing some elementary statistical analysis on the full numbers, some other trends emerge.

Before I get there, though, I'd like to follow up on my observation from a couple posts back that Dion isn't a pariah in Québec, just in the Rest of Canada. According to this poll, Dion's actually leading among Liberals in the prairies and B.C., faring better even than he is in Québec, where he's running a close first ballot second to Bob Rae. Where's he down? Ontario, where, at seven percent, he's sitting in fifth place. I think I got me some Western Alienation.

But enough of that - on to the statistical analysis I promised. Let me first acknowledge that the stuff I do here is pretty elementary and, all things considered, a pretty blunt tool. It doesn't come anywhere near the sophistication of the kind of analysis that people perform in more important fields. In short, I'm marking this analysis "for entertainment purposes only". Don't use it as actual safety equipment.

The primary usefulness of the poll, besides the fact that it surveys Liberal members instead of Liberal supporters (remember that distinction?) is that, in addition to asking how Liberals intend to vote, it asks them which candidate they favour in a number of categories. Those categories are: has run the best race, has introduced the most innovative and exciting ideas, is most intelligent, comes closest to representing the respondent's own views, is most honest and ethical, has best personality, is most likely to lead the Liberals to victory, would be most effective at taking on the Harper government, is best communicator, is best-liked by the media, would make the best Prime Minister.

From this, one of the things that we can do is measure each candidate's success in each category against his/her overall support from the Liberals, and then determine what the candidate's assets and liabilities are. For this purpose, I removed undecided respondents from the race in all categories and calculated responses among decided Liberals only. From there, I compared each candidate's support to his/her positive rating in each category and determined whether he/she was punching above or below his/her weight class for each one. For example, thirty-seven percent of decided Liberals consider Michael Ignatieff to be the most intelligent candidate in the race, but only twenty-six percent of decided Liberals intend to support him - in this regard, he is punching well below his intellect, because there are a lot of people who aren't supporting him even though they think he's the smartest guy in the race. On the other hand, only nineteen percent consider him the most honest and ethical, so he's punching well above his weight there.

The final breakdown is as follows, with the candidates ranked in order of their over- or under-performance (the first candidate named is the one who is punching most above his/her weight in the category):

Who has run the best race so far?

Punching over
Brison
Dryden
Volpe
Kennedy
Dion

Punching under
Ignatieff
Rae
Hall-Findlay

Who has brought the best ideas to the race?

Punching over
Dryden
Volpe
Kennedy
Rae

Punching under
Ignatieff
Dion
Hall-Findlay
Brison

Who is the most intelligent?

Punching over
Brison
Kennedy
Volpe
Rae

Punching under
Dion
Hall-Findlay
Ignatieff

Who has the best personality?

Punching over
Ignatieff
Dion
Brison
Dryden

Punching under
Volpe
Kennedy
Rae
Hall-Findlay

Who is best-liked by the media?

Punching over
Dion
Brison
Kennedy
Volpe
Dryden

Punching under
Rae
Hall-Findlay
Ignatieff

Who would be most effective at taking on Stephen Harper's government?

Punching over
Hall-Findlay
Brison
Dryden
Kennedy
Dion

Punching under
Ignatieff
Volpe
Rae

Who is the most honest and has the most integrity?

Punching over
Brison
Volpe
Ignatieff
Rae

Punching under
Kennedy
Dryden
Dion
Hall-Findlay

Who would make the best Prime Minister?

Punching over
Hall-Findlay
Volpe
Brison
Dryden
Kennedy

Punching under
Ignatieff
Rae
Dion

Whose views most closely match your own?

Punching over
Ignatieff
Rae
Dryden

Punching under
Kennedy
Volpe
Hall-Findlay
Brison
Dion

Who is most likely to lead the Liberals to government in the next election?

Punching over
Brison
Volpe
Dryden
Kennedy
Dion

Punching under
Rae
Hall-Findlay
Ignatieff

Who is the best communicator?

Punching over
Volpe
Dryden
Dion
Kennedy
Ignatieff

Punching under
Hall-Findlay
Brison
Rae

Hedy Fry, alas, was excluded from the analysis because her support was listed only as "<1%".

A few points that we can take from all this:

1. Liberals are in love with Martha Hall Findlay, as she punches under in almost every category. In other words, Liberals are much more likely to gush over intelligence, communication skills, ideas, personality, communication skills, etc. than they are to actually vote for her. Tellingly, the only to categories in which she's punching over are her abilities in taking on Harper's government and in being Prime Minister. It appears that Liberals just don't yet think she's ready for the top job, her great qualities notwithstanding.

2. At the other end of things is Ken Dryden: Liberals don't seem to think much of the guy to judge by how rarely they rank him tops in any category at all, but they're still planning on voting for him in reasonably large measure. The single category in which he's punching over is "honesty and integrity", which seems to suggest that they think he's a good (if boring) guy, but ultimately a loser.

3. Then there's Joe Volpe. They think he's got a great personality and would make an effective opposition leader, but find him deficient in almost every other regard. Scott Brison's also perceived as all-around deficient (which means that I perhaps don't give Liberals enough credit) but is admired for the quality of his ideas.

4. I'm no closer, after reading these data, to understanding the mysterious appeal of Gerard Kennedy, who punches over in a majority of categories (most alarmingly in intelligence, where his overperformance is exceeded only by Brison's). They like his personality, think he's honest, and agree with his views, but perceive him as otherwise deficient - even, surprisingly, in the field of the quality of his ideas, which is generally touted as his strong point.

5. In relative terms, Liberals don't trust Bob Rae, don't agree with his views, and don't think he's either very bright or has brought many good ideas to the race. They're still likely to vote for him, though, because they think he'll be effective at all elements of the job if he becomes leader.

6. Dion's the polar opposite of Rae. Liberals think he's smart, admire his ideas, trust him completely, and agree with his views. But they think he's dull, a bad campaigner, not media-friendly, and would be a lousy opposition leader (though they think he'd be a great PM if he ever managed to get the job). I can't truthfully disagree with any portion of this assessment.

7. Michael Ignatieff, surprisingly, isn't viewed as either having a good personality or being a good communicator, but is still perceived as a winner politically (and is also lauded for his intellect and ideas, even though Liberals aren't apt to agree with his views).

In compiling the above analyses, I began to wonder exactly what qualities Liberals are looking for in a leader. To answer that, I correlated each of the positive responses to support. Unsurprisingly, there were reasonably strong positive correlations in each case (though the direction of the causality is not clear, since it's possible that a Liberal who supported Ignatieff primarily for his intellect might also credit him for being, for example, the most honest, simply because he was his/her candidate of choice - this is, in my opinion, especially a danger in the area of electability, since people are likely to perceive individuals they personally support as being more electable, because they assume that others will think the same way as they do). They are ranked in descending order below:

1. Best Prime Minister (.989)
2. Effective in Opposing the Harper Government (.985)
3. Closeness of Fit of Candidate's Views (.975)
4. Electability (.972)
5. Quality of Leadership Campaign (.960)
6. Quality of Ideas (.959)
7. Intelligence (.938)
8. Honesty/Integrity (.934)
9. Best Communicator (.908)
10. Personality (.897)
11. Liked by Media (.860)

It appears that Liberals want a leader who'd be effective both as Prime Minister and as Leader of the Opposition, would be likely to successfully move from the latter position to the former, and who have good ideas with which Liberals agree. Ideally, such a leader would also be intelligent and honest, but those qualities aren't as important as raw political skills. Interestingly, the qualities most associated with electability - communication skills, personality, and media savy - are the lowest-ranked.

2006-09-15T11:58:00.000-06:00

Everything You Need to Know About the Bob Rae Campaign

1. Two candidates have withdrawn from the Liberal leadership race. Both have switched their support to Rae.
2. Bob Rae is backed by more Senators (ten) than any of his opponents.
3. Among Liberal bloggers, Bob Rae is running at 5.8% support, tied with Scott Brison for a distant fourth after Michael Ignatieff (31.4%), Gerard Kennedy (26.4%), and Stéphane Dion (24.8%).

(As for Bennett, she was an intelligent, articulate candidate who deserved better. But since when were leadership races, or elections of any kind, meritocracies?)

2006-09-14T22:18:00.000-06:00

Steve Continues to Harp on Things about which Very Few People Care

Huh.

A few things that leap out of me:

1. Three of the four so-called frontrunners (I still think Dryden's got the same chance as Kennedy of winning this thing; i.e. not much) - Ignatieff, Rae, and Kennedy - poll relatively much better among people who already support the Liberals than among the general public. Meaning, of course, that they're quite good as appealing to the people who are already planning on voting Liberal, but aren't quite so beloved among voters who aren't (such voters being otherwise known as "voters to whom the Liberals need to appeal in order to form government"). Gee, who's the fourth so-called frontrunner, again?

2. I don't want to be too glib about this: Stéphane Dion's polling numbers are disappointingly low and, even once the discrepancy between Liberal-supporters and non-Liberal-supporters is taken into account, he looks much less electable than either Ignatieff or Rae. However, it is interesting (and, to me, not at all surprising) that his electability both in Québec and among francophones nation-wide is by far the highest - and this from a man who's supposedly a pariah in his home province. Instead, the millstone around his neck is the fact that the rest of Canada doesn't seem to want another Prime Minister from Québec, a phenomenon that increases as you move west until you get past Alberta.

3. This has nothing to do with the polling data, but I find it interesting just how perverted many English Canadians' expectations of bilingualism are. Stéphane Dion is approximately as bilingual as either Bob Rae or Michael Ignatieff - that is to say, his English is about as good as their French. He's substantially more bilingual than Stephen Harper (who's French is, in my opinion, entirely satisfactory for a Canadian Prime Minister). However, Dion's English is repeatedly cited as a concern among English Canadians who believe it's important for a Prime Minister to be bilingual. These are some of the same English Canadians who a few years back were touting the likes of Rahim Jaffer and Stockwell Day as being satisfactorily bilingual (I trust we all remember Day's performance on the national French-language debates. As far as Jaffer goes, I once witnessed him at a supposedly French language election forum at the Faculté Saint-Jean: he'd switched to English by the end.) Stephen Harper's the least bilingual Prime Minister since Lester Pearson, but English Canadians seem very much willing to thrust a Prime Minister on French Canada whose French is much weaker than the minimum English they would accept from a francophone Prime Minister.

Enough of that. Back to the polling.

4. I called Gerard Kennedy overrated a few posts ago, and some pro-Kennedy-blogger who had some piece of technology set up to notify him anytime a blogger mentioned Kennedy took me to task in the comments section. These data show part of what I meant. I remain convinced that most Kennedy supporters are in that camp because they want a clean break from anybody previously-involved with the federal Liberals and find Ignatieff either too right-wing or too bandwagon-y for their tastes (Rae, of course, has at least as much baggage as any Liberal MP in the race with the possible exception of Hedy Fry). At least, I assume that's the reason Kennedy's so popular in certain circles - I can't think of an alternate explanation.

5. Lest this whole post turn into an exercise in I-told-you-so-or-at-least-I-would-have-if-I'd-gotten-around-to-it, I was flabbergasted by the Dryden numbers, but not displeased. I like Ken Dryden, and he's my likely second choice. But these numbers ought to convince a lot of Liberals who are concerned chiefly with electoral success (a breed otherwise known as "all Liberals") to take a second look at the guy, especially as a second choice. The trouble is that the likely combined first-ballot support of everybody who will finish behind him may not be enough to push him into the top three.

6. Back to the English/French thing - apparently, at least 23% of Canadians, including at least 26% of Liberals, would be prepared to accept a unilingual anglophone Prime Minister, but not a unilingual francophone Prime Minister. The sheer number of people prepared to subscribe to this double-standard is shocking, all the more so since it's actually *higher* among supporters of the party that brought in official bilingualism.

7. Back to my fixation on Dion: does anybody else find it surprising that he was, along with Scott Brison, relatively the most popular among voters who placed a high priority on managing the economy? It almost gives the impression that people are buying into his whole "three pillars" thing, which even I think is painfully meaningless.

8. Supporters of Ignatieff and Kennedy are likely to explain their candidates' unexpectedly poor showings by the fact that they're relative newcomers, and therefore lack the name recognition of people who have spent years in the federal cabinet or are Hall of Fame goaltenders. On the face of it, this appears reasonable, especially since both do much better among Liberal supporters, who are presumably more likely to have heard of them. However, Ignatieff has been receiving a blitz of media coverage, and I have trouble believing that the Canadian public remains less familiar with him than with a relatively low-key former cabinet minister like Dion. For Kennedy's part, Ontario, where he ought to be reasonably well-known, is something of a wasteland for him: his combined "definite/likely" Liberal votes in the province put him tied for third, ahead of only Dion among the front-runners and behind supposed also-ran Dryden.

9. The reader is cautioned not to confuse "Liberal voters", who are segmented out in this poll but who have, as a group, no priveleged position in the selection of the next Liberal leader, with "Liberal members", who are not segemented out in this poll but who will be indirectly choosing the next leader.

2006-09-11T16:38:00.000-06:00

Obligatory Fifth Anniversary Post

There's colours on the street
Red white and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
But there's a warning sign on the road ahead
There's a lot of people saying we'd be better off dead
Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it any way I can

- Neil Young, "Rocking in the Free World"

2006-09-11T11:57:00.000-06:00

WitPotS: covering the stories that the corporate media doesn't want you to know about

Crikey.

(Thanks to Chris Chan for passing on the link via Catrin.)

2006-09-07T22:38:00.000-06:00

It's not often that I become inspired to write a letter to the editor (ahem)...

But Roy MacGregor's contemptible fluff piece on Scott Brison was too much for me to take. The text of my letter follows.

The problem with Scott Brison is not that he crossed the floor - plenty of politicians have done that, and sometimes for excellent, principled reasons. The problem is that, in the final convention of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, he voted in favour of merging the party with the Canadian Alliance. Then, four days after doing so, he cited this merger as the reason that he had to leave the new party.

He hasn't even been consistent on his reason. Initially, he said that as a gay MP in a conservative party, he would be typecast as a flag bearer for the socially progressive wing when his interests were primarily economic. Now, he seems to be saying that it's because the new Conservative Party was to be hostile to the idea of gay marriage.

(In MacGregor's article, Brison is alleged to have made his decision to cross the floor after meeting with "leader Stephen Harper" - in fact, Harper was not elected leader until several months after Brison left the party.)

How peculiar, especially when we consider that, during the 2003 Progressive Conservative leadership race, Brison joined fellow candidates Peter McKay and David Orchard in opposition to gay marriage (only Jim Prentice supported it).

MacGregor's article was titled "Scott Brison: A different kind of Liberal", but readers who view the defining trait of the Liberal Party as being a lack of commitment to any principle but electoral success would be hard-pressed to spot this difference.

2006-09-06T22:09:00.000-06:00

Sidebar!

Sidebar's been updated. Missing and Presumed Dead Blogs are now in italics, though I confess that the effect's not as striking as I'd hoped. If any of my readers want to tell me how to change the colour of some of my hyperlinks (read: those to blogs that are missing and presumed dead), it'd be appreciated.

I also added a few new blogs, chief among them The Turner Report, the blog of Garth Turner, Conservative MP for Nalton. Readers who stuck with me through my Spring/Summer drought will recall my praise for Mr. Turner on the occasion of his complaints about the appointment of David Emerson and Michael Fortier to cabinet, complaints that by some accounts almost got him thrown out of caucus.

His blog is, to the best of my knowledge, far and away the best of any Canadian MP (a lot of people liked Monte Solberg's blog. I didn't really, because while Solberg wrote with wit, he also consistently toed the party line on pretty much everything). And while Turner's values and mine don't overlap especially (to take but one example, if I were ever an MP my site probably wouldn't be subheaded "Serving Canada's Middle Class Voter Agenda"), I like him because he's independent-minded, willing to do considerably more than mouth platitudes, doesn't buckle to public opinion easily, and yet reaches out to his constituents in a more meaningful fashion than does any other MP of whom I'm aware. He also updates his blog pretty much daily.

Here are some nuggets:

On the environment:

The climate is obviously screwed up, and people notice. Forty degree summers, more freak weather, more prairie drought, punctuated by flooding. The Arctic ice cap is melting and polar bears are drowning. Suddenly the power system is balky and Ontario is building new nukes. We are wallowing in garbage and actually exporting trash to the States. Kyoto is toast, and that worries people who have no idea what Kyoto was. Overall, it seems like there is no cohesive plan – and I haven’t even mentioned Al Gore.

- August 28

On D'arcy Keene, who was being pushed by televangelist and anti-gay marriage crusader Charles McVety to win the Conservative nomination over Turner:

The puppet candidate of a televangelist carpetbagging walking definition of intolerance.

- August 21

On alleged efforts by some Arab Canadian groups to unseat him in the next election for his dispariging comments about "Canadian citizens of convenience" in the Lebanon affair:

And I said, basically, they can go to hell. That applies to any group which threatens to vote against me in the hope that I will say something different in order to win their support. I mean, what are they thinking? Do I value being an MP more than I value doing what’s right? Am I afraid of having my ass tossed out of my lovely green chair in the House of Commons because one community or another ganged up and tipped the vote?

- July 31

On winning friends and influencing people:

So, go ahead and make me a target. Just save a little of the bull’s eye for the last guy to say he’d do the same. Does anyone find it ironic that Israel’s biggest ally, the Righteous Right, and its biggest foe, the Arab community, both have it in for me?

It’s quite amazing how much trouble I get into.

- July 31

On his relationship with McVety:

Reverend McVety and I had a long chat tonight. He says he doesn’t mind me calling him a sanctimonious blowhard, but he definitely does not think kindly of my references to the Taliban.

- May 31

Yeah. If you have any interest in Canadian politics - and if you don't, what the hell are you doing here? - read Garth.

2006-09-06T09:27:00.000-06:00

Hoo Boy

This isn't going to help anyone's credibility, especially among people who can't tell the difference between a motion that is moved and a motion that is carried, of whom there are a great many.

(And for what it's worth, though my misgivings about the Afghanistan mission have been growing in tandem with many other Canadians', I'm quite comfortable in saying that Canadian troops are not using the creation of terror among Afghani civilians as a tool to achieve their political objectives, which is in my view the mark of a terrorist. Sir Arthur Harris, yes. The Canadian military? Nobody's yet presented any evidence to me.)

2006-09-02T18:37:00.000-06:00

The Stupidest Thing Yet Written About Michael Ignatieff

"The thing is, Ignatieff has never been confined to the cloistered world that politicians inhabit. He’s always lived in the spotlight as a public intellectual, an author, a journalist, and a public-affairs broadcaster." (Source)

(The hell of it is that the article, on balance, increased my opinion of Ignatieff slightly. But the above line - the writer's, not the candidate's - is quite palpably ludicrous.)

2006-09-01T01:00:00.000-06:00

Speechless

Wow.

I could poke some holes in a few of the points he makes - about Winston Churchill, about Osama bin Laden, about Donald Rumsfeld - but this is powerful, powerful journalis.

(Thanks to Lonnie at the always excellent Crushed by Inertia for bringing this to my attention.)

EDIT: I'd never actually heard of Keith Olbermann before tonight, and some research (via YouTube) reveals that I have some criticisms: he consistently overstates his case, he chooses only the easiest targets, and he is, like so much of the Left (especially the part that posts on this blog), immensely self-satisfied. But that clip is still amazing.

2006-08-30T21:38:00.000-06:00

News From a Couple of Old Friends

1. My accomplice from Forum for Young Canadians (Session 4, 1998), Richard Diamond, better-known as President of the Young Liberals, has apparently endorsed Scott Brison. Richard, Richard, Richard - *could* you disappoint me any more?

(The same site also reveals that Jenn Pereira, another colleague from Forum, has joined the large but inexplicable Kennedy bandwagon.)

2. Remember Dave Dowling? Of course you do! Well, looks like he's found a new vehicle. Sort of. The good news is you can join for free. The bad news is that in order to get on the Board of Directors, you'll have to lay down a hundred grand deposit, only half of which you get back if you win.

Also, it's interesting to note that Dave's the only member of the Board of Directors identified by first name, with the rest only having an initial. Not that I am by any means suggesting anything.

3. Apparently I'm now a a Liberal blogger. It looks like Stéphane needs the endorsement, though, so I won't bother correcting the misconception for the time being.

2006-08-30T04:15:00.000-06:00

Too soon?

Not to be insensitive, but I'm extremely curious to see whether Elizabeth May will be running to represent the newly unrepresented riding of Repentigny.

Update, moments later: And, for that matter, what about Michael Fortier? It's not far from his stomping grounds of Montreal, and it's a riding in which the Conservatives made some significant gains during the last election (significant gains all the way to 18.08%, granted, but it was still good enough for a second place finish). He assured us that he'd leave the Senate once the next federal election rolled around, but with a riding opening up so close to Montreal...

(I jest, slightly - it clearly won't happen. But I'm not convinced, in order for the spirit of his post-election pledge to be upheld, that it shouldn't.)

2006-08-29T15:09:00.000-06:00

There's Something About Iggy

While my contempt for the Liberal Party remains pretty much intact, there's no denying that its leadership race has attracted the kind of raw intellectual horesepower that the other parties can only dream of (I think Stephen Harper and Tony Clement are both highly intelligent, but any race in which Belinda Stronach makes up one third of the candidates is going to be in direr straights than one in which Joe Volpe makes up one tenth of them). Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, and Stéphane Dion all have successful academic careers behind them, and most of the other candidates - in particular Martha Hall Findlay, Carolyn Bennett, and Ken Dryden - are cerebral enough not to embarass (Gerard Kennedy, while certainly no dunce, is the most inexplicably overrated candidate in any party's leadership race in a long time - maybe since Stronach). Still, there's no doubt that the candidate who's attracting the most attention, the one being compared to the Liberal Party's last Philosopher King, is Ignatieff.

I said earlier that I was "lukewarm" on Iggy. In hindsight, that's not the most apt term, or even the most apt thermal metaphor - a better one would be "hot and cold". There's much to like about the man: his mind is obviously first-rate, and he's a powerful communicator (albeit more in the written word than the spoken). His history (see here for what might, somewhat inaccurately owing to sheer length, be termed a "summary") indicates a defiant unwillingness to pigeonholed - witness the self-designated socialist criticizing striking coalminers in the U.K., or the pink-ish human rights expert supporting the invasion of Iraq - which, the issues which he's used notwithstanding, is an admirable trait that's missing from most Canadian politicians who are not actually in government. He is possessed of a humility that suits a leader (and, uh, helps torpedo comparisons to the Liberal Party's last Philosopher King), admitting that he might well be wrong about Iraq without actually backpedalling. For whatever it's worth, nearly everybody he's ever dealt with in a professional capacity comes away thinking that the guy would make a great PM. Though slightly to my right on a number of issues, he seems like a guy who should at least be a sentimental favourite or mine, à la Joe Lieberman.

But. There is a gulf - a maddeningly wide gulf, as it happens - between the level at which this guy should be performing and the level at which he is. His policy proposals are dull, and never ground-breaking (I expose myself to charges of hypocrisy, here, as a Trudeau admirer - Trudeau himself was notoriously uninnovative and non-specific during both his leadership campaign and the 1968 federal election campaign). His commentary on breaking issues, most notoriously his comments on the Israel-Lebanon affair, tend to be delayed and bring little new to the table (I'm not even talking about his "not losing sleep" comment - I'm far more willing to forgive an ill-considered off-the-cuff remark than than I am the far more prevalent safe platitude). In fact, even his past writings are infuriatingly academic, theorizing copiously about causes and ramifications of the problems facing the Earth without being very useful in terms of solutions (I base this last statement on a smaller sample size than I perhaps should be).

To top it all off, the free four page advertisement that Maclean's gave him this week (as far as I can tell, it's not posted on their website) reads a lot like, well, Paul Martin with its enthusiasm to satisfy everybody. Apparently "The country does not to be administered, it wants to be led" and "it doesn't want to be divided, it wants to be united." Really, Michael? Because I totally thought that Canadians wanted to be divided. Could you get on that?

Environmental policy? "The federal government's environmental plan must work with the provinces to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, take proactive steps to preserve and enhance the quality of air and water, and creat real incentives for good environmental behaviour and innovation." At long last, a leadership candidate coming out in favour of proactivity! "It's time to get touch, before it is too late." And admirable, if largely meaningless, sentiment, but it also follows directly on an assertion that "good environmental policy needs to be implemented in step with the normal rate of new investment", which sounds kind of Stephen Harper.

Aboriginal affairs? "A future Liberal government must return to the original Kelowna agreement and meet it in full. But it must go beyond Kelowna. The federal government must demonstrate leadership in working with Aboriginal communities to close the opportunity gaps that remain." So, you know, just like Paul Martin, only better.

Education? "The federal government should work with the provinces to eliminate all remaining barriers - of income and family circumstance - to post-secondary education." Finally, somebody willing to stand up to the powerful pro-barriers lobby.

It goes on. He favours reaching the 0.7% of GDP level of foreign aid, but declines to set a time table, managing to put him in exactly the same league as both Paul Martin *and* Stephen Harper. He apparently supports a strong federal government, but one that doesn't trample on the jurisdictions of the provinces (as opposed, one presumes, to his opponents, who favour a weak federal government or one that does trample on the jurisdiction of the provinces). For a feature that's advertised on the cover of the magazine as "The most intriguing new face in Canadian policits [revealing] how he'd change the country," it goes well beyond disappointing in failing not only to tell us anything new, but in failing to tell us anything at all.

I'm supporting Stéphane Dion, as this entire blog is aware, but I'm not blind to his faults. For a guy who had a cup of coffee as Foreign Affairs critic, he's surprisingly timid on foreign affairs (witness his non-position on the Afghanistan mission). On democratic renewal, he's awful. And then there's that thorny matter of Meech Lake, where he and I will never agree. But at least Dion's an extremely smart guy who's campaigning like an extremely smart guy instead of like, well, you know, that last highly touted and virtually coronated Liberal leader.

2006-08-28T15:14:00.000-06:00

Tracker-Inspired Post

Who could possibly be reading me daily from the National Institutes of Health?

2006-08-27T17:00:00.000-06:00

Just a hunch

I think this might prove to be bad news for the NDP though, paradoxially, also bad news for the Greens. Instead of pretending, like they did under Jim Harris, that the party was "neither left nor right" (in fact, it was pretty solidly left of centre), Elizabeth May is going to push them to the point that they'll be fighting the NDP for the same pool of voters. Meanwhile, a lot of people who voted Green in that past well be disenfranchised by the turn to conventional environmental activism. Time will tell, though.

Next Day Edit: I've decided that I was wrong, and that this is probably actually good news for the Greens, if only because voters who voted Green because they thought the Green Party was significantly different from the so-called "mainstream" parties probably aren't the kind of voters who pay much attention to these things anyway. Still bad news for the NDP, I suspect.

2006-08-23T03:45:00.000-06:00

Everything Jason Kenney says is really dumb: the first in an occasional, but not nearly occasional enough, series

I'm not really sure how reasonable a comparison the one between Hezbollah and the Nazis is (I suspect not really very reasonable, because it was made by Jason Kenney and because Hezbollah does not actually control the mechanism of a state, which was kind of key to the Nazis' success). What I'm quite sure is unreasonable is using the comparison to justify a prohibition on dialogue between the Canadian government and Hezbollah, which is what Jason Kenney was doing. I mean, can you imagine how completely fucking stupid a policy that stipulated that Canada (or, better yet, England or France) wasn't allowed to talk to the German government in the thirties would have been? Jesus.

I also enjoy how, in response to response to Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj's explicit statement that Hezbollah was a terrorist group preying on Israel, Kenney said that "[Wrzesnewskyj and his ilk's] view of a balanced approach is one where Israel is always wrong."

In conclusion, everything Jason Kenney says is really dumb.

2006-08-22T11:57:00.000-06:00

I'm still a Dion man, and I'm still lukewarm on Iggy...

But the Harvard Professor is suddenly looking more progressive on carbon emissions than the former Environment Minister.

The gauntlet's down, Stéphane - don't disappoint.

Update: Chris over at Blue Tory makes a fairly bizarre comparison between the Ignatieff proposal and the NEP. I call the comparison bizarre because the primary aim of the NEP was to keep energy prices low, while the Ignatieff proposal quite specifically aims to hike energy prices (at least insofar as "energy" = "oil").

Chris also suggests that this proposal is bad for western Canada (at least insofar as "Western Canada" = "Alberta and to a much lesser extent Saskatchewan"). To the extent that this proposal would cut consumption of oil, it is indeed bad for Alberta. But I'd be very curious to see a carbon emission-reduction plan that *didn't* cut consumption of oil, and that wasn't, at least by Chris's definition, bad for the west.

2006-08-21T19:04:00.000-06:00

If a man who's leading by twelve points in polls for Connecticut Senator is "out of step with the people of Connecticut"...

...you sort of wonder what that means for this guy's preferred candidate. Or, for that matter, for defeated Presidential candidates.

I've said it before and I've said it again: all evidence suggests that the people of Connecticut would like, on balance, to retain Joe Lieberman as their Senator. It takes a very special kind of disregard for democracy to suggest that they should be robbed of that option.

2006-08-15T20:15:00.000-06:00

Sidebar Updated!

I've added, sorted, and (temporarily) stopped culling. I'm working on a new system to deal with delinquent posters, for whom I've inexplicably recently acquired some compassion. I've also removed people's names all together on account of enough people apparently not wanting to be Googlable (which I guess isn't something that a guy named "Steve Smith" can really appreciate).

If there are any errors or omissions, let me know.

2006-08-15T03:27:00.000-06:00

Cranky Classic Rock Nerd Bashes Folk Acts Undeservedly

So, owing to sleep depravation (meaning, in my case, that I was averaging less than twelve hours per night), I was in a pretty cranky mood for the weekend's Folk Fest. Accordingly, I'm likely giving short shrift to some pretty talented artists with these selected reviews. It's my sound, man.

Hawksley Workman: Familiar with him only by reputation before hearing his set, everything about this guy irritated me, from his carefully torn jeans to his contrived voal sound to the fact that he was probably the most talented songwriter I'd seen perform live in a long time. Then, just as I was developing a good hate-on for him, he closed with a Paul Simon cover. Fucker.

Feist: Yeah, she's one of Canada's best vocalists. But I'm a Neil Young fan and a Leonard Cohen fan, so it's pretty obvious that vocals aren't my priority, and the more I listen to her the more I realize how little else she has going for her.

Geoff Berner: Familiar with him primarily on account of this (seriously: read it), this is the first time I'd heard any of his songs other than Maginot Line. Falling somewhere between music and comedy without actually qualifying as musical comedy somehow, Geoff Berner is one crazy motherfucker (and also a religious figure, he assures us). I thought his number about the Vancouver Police was trite and too focussed on the cheap laugh, but he's a great entertaininer and a deceptively good accordian player (I assume).

The Waifs: Enjoyable enough, but I'd be lying if I said I could remember a single lyric or a single bit of melody. If I asked you to imagine mostly-female folk quartet, you'd probably imagine the Waifs. Bleah.

Jason Collet: This shithead gives a bad name to all suburban kids who have grown up to reject many of the predominant values of suburbia. He dedicated a song to the families of everybody serving in Afghanistan, which was a nice gesture until he smugly stated that nobody serving in Afghanistan understands the real reason they're there. Nice going, shithead. Also, all of his songs seemed to involve 1. some waiting-related theme, and 2. the main line repeated about fifty times. (Jason: "What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?" Me (not quite as loud as I would have said it if I wasn't such a pussy): "For you to shut up!"). In conclusion: shithead.

Paul Kelly: Advance billings called him Australia's answer to Leonard Cohen, and compared him to Bruce Springsteen. As divergent as these references were, they managed both to be misleading. In his melodic simplicity and starkly political lyrics, he resembled nothing so much as a down under Pete Seeger, one song in particular - a catchy little ditty entitled "From Little Things, Big Things Grow" - reminding me of Seeger's latter works (for those who have heard the Smithsonian Folkaways collection of Seeger, think "We'll All Be a Doubling"). Thumbs up.

Bruce Cockburn: (Pronounced, for the benefit of the uninitiated, "Co-burn") One of the few artists I was excited about seeing in advance, his rendition of "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" provided a welcome respite to the peacenik pablum so predominant in the other performances (and I say this as something of a peacenik, and as one who despised the song the first time I heard it, on the same Air Canada flight that introduced me to "Like a Hurricane"). His other performances, alas, didn't quite measure up - but he is a much better guitarist than he's generally given credit for being.

Sarah Harmer: In advance of the weekend, I had vaguely positive feelings towards her - nice voice, I think I heard her on a Great Big Sea live album once, I hear she cut her first album as a Christmas gift to her parents or something, etc. Unfortunately, her songs were universally schlocky, and she was at her best when harmonizing with Cockburn on the latter's "Waiting for a Miracle". She also had a strange habit of nodding sagely at everything anybody else played, which reached its most ludicrous as she nodded in apparent agreement with Cockburn's "Rocket Launcher" *immediately* after singing a song called, I believe, "Peace = Good". Wacky.

There were other performances, but I slept through most of them.

2006-08-14T16:45:00.000-06:00

How Serious Am I About This Newfound Stéphane Dion Fixation?

I just sent him a hundred bucks. For those who are counting, that makes the first time I've supported financially supported any political party or candidate by any means besides the purchase of Big Rock's fine range of products since I bought a Progressive Conservative Party of Canada membership, circa 2000.

Despite all the fanfare about how the huge number of candidates means that anybody could emerge as a compromise candidate, of the ten remaining contenders the only ones that have *any* chance of winning this thing are Ignatieff, Rae, Dion, Dryden, and Kennedy. And the last two's chances are very small indeed (this isn't the same thing as saying those are the ones who deserve to win - I think Martha Hall Finlay and Carolyn Bennett are both considerably more credible than either Bob Rae or Gerard Kennedy, but so it goes).

My money's still on Ignatieff, and, truth be told, the party could do a lot worse. But that there is even one person who has a legitimate shot at becoming Prime Minister of Canada in the next decade who legitimately excites me is a very pleasant and unfamiliar sensation.

2006-08-08T06:49:00.000-06:00

Connecticut on my mind

Anybody who pays the slightest attention to my political philosophy knows that I like politicians who transcend partisan boundries and who are willing to buck clearly-expressed public opinion to hold firm to their beliefs. Joe Lieberman is unquestionably such a politician. On the other hand, I also like politicians who oppose the Iraq War, who don't support legislative intervention in specific right-to-die cases, who believe it's perfectly patriotic to question the actions of a commander-in-chief in wartime, and who like to keep their religious faiths separate from their politics. Lieberman is not such a politician.

The above paragraph explains in a nutshell why I feel so ambivalent about today's Connecticut Democratic primary, which most polls predict that Lieberman will lose. Compounding my very mixed feelings on Lieberman are my similar feelings on challenger Ned Lamont, who strikes me as something of a crass opportunist, cashing in on Lieberman's support of the Iraq war to buy himself a Senate seat. Moreover, even at this early stage of his career, he is demonstrating a great willingness to rush towards the centre to squeeze out an opponent, which is possibly the single greatest flaw in North American political culture today (people who worry that this alleged tendancy to drive the moderates out of both parties is leading to a dangerously polarized political landscape have it backwards - the real problem is that a mad rush to the centre by the very people accused of doing the polarizing is transforming politics from a true contest of principles to a hair-splitting contest). No matter what the results of today's primary, I'm going to be a little disappointed.

What I feel no ambivalence about at all is my conviction that, if Lieberman loses the primary, he should run as an independent. If he believes that he is a better Senator than Lamont would make - which I assume he does, or he presumably wouldn't be running against him - it's absolutely incoherent for him to decline to challenge him in a democratic election.

UPDATE: Mustafa, now holding the POI fort basically on his own it appears, takes issue with a couple of my accusations against Lieberman, claiming that Lieberman has never suggested that it's unpatriotic to question the C in C in times of war and that Lieberman's faith doesn't guide his politics. I'll briefly deal with each in turn.

On the question of questioning Commanders-in-Chief, Mustafa himself quotes the passage to which I was referring:

It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.

Maybe I'm out to lunch, but that looks an awful lot like a suggestion that domestic debate on the handling of foreign wars isa bad for the country.

(Mustafa closes by saying 'I think this is much more nuanced than "if you criticize the commander-in-chief, you are a terrorist!"'. It's an ironic thing to say in accusing me of failing to appreciate nuance.)

On the other question, Mustafa points out that Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is highly progressive on a number of issues that have traditionally divided Americans along religious/secular lines, such as abortion and gay marriage. I concede this immediately, and note that stem cell research could also be added to the list (though I don't believe Orthodox Judaism has been as silly about this as fundamentalist Christianity). On the other hand, he has supported providing state funding to religious institutions, which blurs the line between church and state. He supported keeping the feeding tube in Terry Schiavo (which Mustafa correctly points out is not proof of allowing religious faith to infringe on secular politics, but must be considered in the context of the rest of his record). He has a Tipper Gore-esque record on censorship of popular media.

2006-08-05T03:16:00.000-06:00

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

So many of you have been urging me, for no apparent reason, to start this sucker back up, and for some reason what it takes to make it happen is for Chris! over at Covered In Oil to tage me with one of these stupid blog surveys. Go figure, huh?

1. Have you ever been in a fantasy league?

I popped that particular cherry last season with my entry into the Gateway Cup, the now legendary Plural of Mongoose. Highlights of the season include my clever decision to take a chance on Sidney Crosby in the fourth round, my thirteenth round steal of Shawn Horcoff, and my late season pickup of Cristobel Huet. Lowlight included my drafting Roman Chechmanek (Paul Owen assured me he was L.A.'s starter going into the season), my trading away Jonathan Cheechoo twice (the guy I traded him to in the first instance dropped him, and I picked him back up), and my screwing up my number one waiver priority and consequently managing not to get Alexander Ovechkin. In the end, I finished second in the sixteen team league during the regular season, but choked in the playoffs for an overall fourth place finish.

2. What was the first jersey you ever owned?

Um, my Family Furniture Fireballs hockey jersey? That's all I can think of. Sorry.

3. Top 5 sports books

Hmm. As a kid, I used to read a lot of Matt Christopher - does that count?

4. 10 favorite athletes

Off the top of my head, in no order, and surely forgetting some who should obviously be on here:

Mark Messier
Steve Yzerman
Todd Marchant
Larry Wruck
Rod Connop
Blake Marshall
Steve Krupey
Brendan Shanahan
Ryan Smyth
Damon Allen

Apparently I'm a huge homer. Also, I was apparently a huge Esks fan in the early nineties. Note that this list omits all of the early twentieth century baseball players to whom I'm growing rather attached through playing Baseball Mogul 2007.

5. Three Athletes I secretly admire but am ashamed to admit it for fear of ridicule

Let's go with five:

Steve Smith (the NHL one - do I really have a choice?)

Ty Conklin (it's funny - I loathe Fernando Pisani for proving me so very wrong in my assessment of his abilities, but I bear Ty Conklin no ill will for doing exactly the same thing, but in reverse)

Theoren Fleury (say what you will about the guy, and most of it will be accurate, but this is once-dominant NHL-er who, when his NHL career and personal life were in shambles, decided to play in a Northern Alberta seniors' league - can you see Alexei Yashin doing the same?)

Darryl Strawberry (oh, the nefarious influence of the Simpsons on a non-baseball fan)

Ricky Williams (it's impossible to pay attention to this man without having it driven home to you just how stupid professional sports really are)

6. The 5 people I tag are:

Not that any of these people are still checking on this place on account of it being dead to the world, but I tag Mike Garlough, Kyle Kawanami, Mike Hudema, Jake "Rainbow" Troughton, and Catrin Berghoff.

I'll post something about politics as soon as I figure out what the hell's been going on the last four months.

2006-04-09T16:24:00.000-06:00

Everytime He Lies, His Chin Gets a Little Longer

I'm a little late on Stephen Harper's Constitutional musings, but it's the type of story that no self-respecting Canadian political blog should let pass without comment. And, even though my blog's relationship with itself has been more sado-masochistic than self-respecting of late, I'm not going to let it pass without comment either.

The easy comparison to make here is the one with Brian Mulroney - Stephen Harper's going to produce a package of constitutional reforms that will blow up in his face and help destroy his Prime Ministership. In fact, I think it's a pretty apt comparison (though I'm far from persuaded of Harper's commitment to following through on his musings). The comparison can't end there, however: if I made no further comment, I'd be opening myself up to questions about why, exactly, it's okay for Pierre Trudeau to roll the dice on constitutional reform, but not for Stephen Harper to do the same.

The answer can be found in another similarity between Harper and Mulroney: motivation. While Trudeau sought to bring Canada formal constitutional independence and, secondarily, to constitutionally entrench fundamental individual rights, Mulroney sought to make everybody happy. Harper's motivations, at first glance, appear to be the same.

Ideologically, I have no problem with this: if a group as a legitimate grievance with the structure of the federation, it's quite correct for the federal government to take the lead on making the necessary alterations. The problem here is that Harper hasn't identified either who has the legitimate grievances or what these grievances might be, let alone how they might be fixed. In that sense, he is taking a very Mulroney-esque approach to constitutional reform; he's creating expectations in advance of making any specific proposals, such that the expectations might later crush him.

Which brings me to a far more pragmatic objection - attempts constitutional reform in Canada have had many effects, but happiness on anybody's part has never been one of them. Bitterness, yes. Separatism, of course. But happiness? I think not. We'll hold up Mulroney as a poster child again.

But wait, you say. Aren't I being too harsh on Mulroney? Wasn't his aim not to make everybody happy, but rather to bring Québec, which had hitherto been left out of the constitutional fold, on board as a full partner in confederation? Nonsense and/or hogwash and/or poppycock and/or bullshit. That Québec was the only province not to endorse the 1982 accord no more leaves Québec out than does gay marriage leave Albertans (outside of Edmonton Centre and Calgary Centre-North) out. There was a vote. Québec voted no. The required majority voted yes. The Constitution was adopted, and it applies equally to everybody, and everybody has equal ownership over it.

Of course, Harper does not want only to placate Québec. He wants "also to accommodate demands we have from the West and from other parts of the country." And he wants to do it with a minority government, which makes him look perhaps a little more like Joe Clark than like Brian Mulroney. And not in a good way.

If Stephen Harper came out and said "I'm going to open up the Constitution to pursue a Triple-E Senate. I'm going to be prepared to consider various compromises along the way in order to gain the necessary support, but the focus will remain on the Triple-E Senate, because that's what I believe would be best for this country," that would be a worthy constitutional position. Aiming to replicate the errors of his predecessors does not meet that standard.

2006-04-08T15:31:00.000-06:00

We interrupt this bout of extended blog silence. . .

. . . to advise you of an impending month-long blog silence. In May, when I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month. Those wishing to participate should contact me, while those wishing to track my progress over the course of the month should check out our home page for the month.

I'll try to get a post together about Harper's constitutional musings and/or the Liberal leadership race and/or Preston Manning within the next couple of days or so.

2006-03-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Democratic Senators are a Bunch of Pussies

And yes, I mean that in the prejorative sense. Feel free to call me a sexist ass-wipe later.

Wisconsin's Russ Feingold - he of casting the only vote against the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act fame - moves one little resolution to censure George Bush for authorizing wiretaps without any legislative authority to do so, and the Hill-Donkeys lose any will to fight. Well, that's not true - they're happy criticizing the deficits that the President's adventures are created, but when it comes time to do something as distasteful as defending their constituents' freedoms, they duck and cover. Or, if you prefer, cut and run - that bunch of cut-and-runners.

What says Barak Obama, a man highly-touted as a 2008 (or maybe 2012) Presidential candidate despite a relative dearth of accomplishments other than mildly inspirational speeches?

"I haven't read it."

John Kerry, often maligned as the United States' most liberal senator, refuses to say how he'd vote (but does grant that the proposal is "interesting").

Hillary Clinton won't even comment. Ted Kennedy? Nowhere to be found.

Feingold's motion may well be the dumb politics that his incensed critics withing his own party claim. Maybe going after Bush for illegal wiretapping is unwise at a time when much of the public is congregated firmly on the security end of the security-liberty axis. But I somehow don't think so. The Democrats are going to need a candidate in 2008 who, unlike John Kerry, will actually challenge George Bush's core contentions, not dissect them for some nuance based on which he can claim to represent a different vision.

Russ Feingold - who, unlike John Kerry, opposed the invasion of Iraq and who, unlike John Kerry, voted in favour of hearing evidence against Bill Clinton when the former President was impeached - has taken one more of many steps towards being this candidate.

2006-02-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

The Bowells of the Internet

Since I started this blog, more than twenty people have found their way here seeking information about Sir MacKenzie Bowell, Canada's (politically) short-lived fifth Prime Minister, and widely considered its worst (though definitely the one with the best facial hair). Ignoring the question of why this many people *want* to know about MacKenzie Bowell, I say to them: Welcome, friends. You won't fine what you seek here.

(Actually, if you have any questions about MacKenzie Bowell that you urgently need answered, feel free to e-mail me at sarcasticidealist@gmail.com. Chances are I'll be able to get the answer for you.)

2006-02-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

On Professional Self-Regulation

So the execution of convicted rapist/murderer Michael Morales in California has been delayed because the prison responsible for conducting the execution was unable to comply with a court order requiring an anaesthesiologist to be present. The reason? Apparently, doctors feel that assisting in an execution would be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath, which, among other things, require its swearers to "prescribe regimens for the good of [their] patients according to [their] ability and [their] judgment and never do harm to anyone".

Now, it should come as a surprise to nobody that I view this as good news. The death penalty is barbaric, and ineffective in any case (there is little evidence that it serves any real purpose as a deterrant, it does no more to protect society than life imprisonment does, and it obviously does nothing to rehabilitate offenders; I do not accept the existence of any other role for the criminal justice system). However, an element of this bothers me: specifically, the ability of professional associations to effectively circumvent judgments of the state.

Because a majority of my readership seems to fall on approximately the same side of the political spectrum as I do, let me turn the tables for a moment: it would certainly appear that the above clause prohibits euthanasia as well. A different clause of the Oath quite explicitly prohibits abortion. This means that, we the various medical professional associations to actually enforce the Hippocratic Oath on their members, abortion would be effectively outlawed. . . notwithstanding what the state might have to say. It would also render the debate over euthanasia moot since, even if the state were to decide (as it should) that doctor-assisted suicide is okay, any doctor who participated in one would cease in very short order to be a doctor.

This is the disconnect that can result when an entity other than the state regulates professions - something that the broader society views as acceptable can continue to be blocked by an elite professional association.

I believe that doctors should be permitted to decide for themselves whether their morals permit their participation in abortions or euthanasia - just as, so long as it remains legal, a doctor who supports capital punishment should be permitted to participate in it without fear of losing his/her license.

2006-02-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

The World According to Garth

Garth Turner is a loose cannon and a man with whom I disagree on most issues (including, to an extent, democratic reform). That said, the greatest scandal of this young Conservative government is that there aren't any other Conservative MPs behaving as he is.

(Also, check out his his website - there are probably 307 or so other MPs who could learn a thing or two from his web designers.)

UPDATE: I just tried to send him an e-mail, but his mailbox is full. Apparently "garth@garth.ca" is just a forwarding address to his real one: garthturnr@aol.com. Come on, Garth, get a real address. Surely such a thing could come out of your Parliamentarian budget somewhere.

2006-02-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Musings on the Cabinet

I'll compile the results of the pool sometime in the next couple of days, when my cold is kicking my ass less than it is right now. For now, some scattered observations:

1. David Emerson. Wow. I'm not sure about this, but this might be the first time in modern Canadian parliamentary history that a candidate has crossed the floor before the new Parliament even sat (crossing the floor before setting foot on the floor, really). But yeah: wow.

2. I don't know all that much about Michael Fortier, so I'm not sure what I'll think of his performance as International Trade Minister. People who are familiar my political philosophy, though, will be unsurprised to learn that I at least give Harper marks for being willing to look outside of his caucus for cabinet ministers.

3. As of right now, Fortier's bio on the Government of Canada page states "He was president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada in the 1990s, and ran for the leadership of the Party in 1988." This must have come as a great shock to Brian Mulroney, who was busy leading the party into one of the most pivotal elections in Canadian history at the time.

4. If anybody's counting, Cannon's the second consecutive Transport Minister to double as Québec lieutenant. At least Cannon's a federalist, though.

5. Of all the positions that were speculated to be going to Rona Ambrose, I'm not sure I heard environment mentioned even once.

6. There's much commotion being heard about the omission of a Deputy PM, but a far more striking omission seems to me to be an Intergovernmental Affairs Minister. I'm extremely curious to see how this will play out - presumably, Harper will be taking the lead on these things personally.

7. I still don't like the concept of a Minister of Democratic Reform. At least Harper only named one such minister, though.

8. If anybody's counting, Conservatives + New Democrats + Independents now make up exactly half the House of Commons. This is unlikely to matter, but I thought it was kind of cool.

9. Chuck Strahl strikes me as an odd choice for Agriculture. But his appointment to cabinet at least means that the speculation for Speaker can start now.

AMUSING QUOTE UPDATE: "I'm going to be Stephen Harper's worst enemy."
- David Emerson, January 24 2006

I'M AN IDIOT UPDATE: Apparently intervgovernmental affairs went to a chap named Michael Chong, who's also President of the Queen's Privy Council and Minister for Sport. Huh.

AND I CAN'T ADD EITHER UPDATE: Conservatives + NDP make up half the House. Conservatives + New Democrats + André Arthur make up a majority. Not that this matters, since M. Arthur appears to plan on abstaining on everything except constituency specific issues (of which precious few come up before the House) and on issues on which he purports to know how his constituents want him to vote.

I BASICALLY JUST FORGOT TO MENTION THIS THE FIRST TIME AROUND UPDATE: You know, I figured that if any cabinet position got cut, it would be the Minister for International Co-operation. I could be missing out on some subtle nuance, but it seems to me that if we have such a minister, all that's left for the Foreign Affairs Minister is war and isolationism.

2006-02-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

I hope there's still room on the bandwagon

There's been a bit of a draft Stephane Dion movement in the Canadian blogosphere of late. If I had the contrarian cred that I like to think I do, I'd use this post to explain why that's a terrible idea. Unfortunately, I'm forced to agree: Stephane Dion would make the best Liberal Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau. And that's not intended as damnation with faint praise.

2006-01-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

On Hamas. . .

Frankly, there are a lot of people more qualified than I am to comment on this. The thing is, not many of them seem to be doing so, and I think there are a few general rules of politics that apply here:

1. Almost all groups are scarier in opposition than they are in government. There are exceptions (Hello, Adolf Hitler), but not really all that many.

2. We almost always view foreign elections as being about that country's foreign policy (the same is true elsewhere, which is why Stephen Harper's election was widely perceived in the States as being the result of a desire on Canadians' part for more cordial Canada-U.S. relations). They almost never are.

3. It is never good - for the country or, ultimately, for the world - for any one party to perpetually govern any one country. I'm not saying that it's good that Hamas was the group ready to step in when people got tired of the corrupt Fatah regime, but neither would it have been good for Fatah to govern perpetually.

2006-01-26T19:25:00.000-07:00

Cabinet Pool

Kyle has suggested that I create a cabinet pool, and, in the absence of much of anything better to do with my life, I've agreed to do so. Rules are as follows:

1. You must predict who will fill each of the below-listed positions in Stephen Harper's first cabinet.
2. You will receive four points for each accurate guess and one additional point for each individual you correctly identify as being in cabinet (for example, if you decide that Member X is going to be Industry and he winds up being Labour, you get a point).
3. You can name the same person for multiple positions, which could result in getting multiple points (for example, if you predict that Member X will be named Deputy Prime Minister and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister) or single points if you're partially correct (for example, if you're certain that Member X will be given either Industry or Foreign Affairs, and want to hedge your bets by predicting him for both even though you know he won't be given both).
4. In the likely event of ambiguity in the results, I will be the sole arbiter of who gets what points (I'm not entering this pool). In general, I will award points quite liberally (if, for example, a given portfolio were to be split in two, I would likely award points to anybody who predicted either of the resulting ministers).
5. Points are only awarded for senior ministers (i.e. none of this Minister of State/Secretary of State nonsense).
6. Entries should be e-mailed to me before the end of January.

The portfolios in question are as follows:

Deputy Prime Minister
Finance
Transport
Intergovernmental Affairs
Environment
Foreign Affairs
Indian Affairs
Agriculture
National Defence
Veterans Affairs
Fisheries
Justice
Natural Resources
Heritage
Citizenship and Immigration
Labour
Public Works
Health
Industry
National Revenue
Treasury Board President
Leader of the Government in the House of Commons
Leader of the Government in the Senate

2006-01-26T00:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, Fine: Here's the Post You All Expect of Me

Look what's back!

2006-01-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

Election 2006: A Tragedy in Two Parts and 1300 Words

There are two tragedies surrounding the results of Monday’s election, and, contrary to the beliefs of thousands of New Democratic supporters who voted Liberal, Stephen Harper’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministry isn’t either one of them.

The first tragedy is in the corruption of the Conservative Party, which as recently as the 2004 election stood for something more than electoral success. Now, I’m no fan of the Conservative Party, which I continue to believe was born of deception and opportunism, but it had some things going for it. The Progressive Conservative Party, when it achieved electoral success, had what was commonly called a “big tent” strategy, but could be more accurately likened to a series of little tents encompassing anybody unhappy with the Liberal establishment. Québec nationalist? Park yourself with the P.C.s. Think taxes and social spending are stifling economic growth? The P.C.s’ll show those big government Liberal bastards. Think Ottawa ignores the Alberta? With the P.C.s, the West already is in.

Brian Mulroney was the best the old Tories ever had at this. He solidified Progressive Conservative support among all of the above-mentioned groups and more, which led him to win the largest majority in Canadian history in 1984. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t last: Québec nationalists found that Mulroney failed to lead his fellow English Canadians to accept their aspirations, and many of them went on to found the Bloc Québecois. But another, very different, group had a different set of objections entirely.

Members of this group saw a lot of the things that they hated about Liberal governments embodied in Mulroney’s nominally conservative government. They didn’t like the way that such attempts as it made to control the deficit involved raising taxes instead of just cutting excess spending. They didn’t like the way that it was unwilling to take serious action on crime by stiffening sentences and possibly re-introducing the death penalty. They didn’t like the way that it was abandoning the Judeo-Christian principles on which Canada had been founded and with which it had existed for more than a century. And, most of all, they didn’t like how the Mulroney government did politics: favouring one region over another for political purposes, engaging in rampant patronage, and continuing to see to it that politicians lived, in general, better than the people they represented. This group became the Reform Party.

The Reform Party took clear, unambiguous positions on bringing in substantial change. It made no attempt to moderate its policies to make them more palatable to the electorate. And it tapped into a sentiment, especially in Alberta, that, to the extent that it was represented in Parliament, was relegated to Mulroney’s backbenches. The Reform Party achieved electoral success unparalleled among any non-brokerage party in Canadian history. And, once in Parliament, it raised hell – or as much hell as could be raised by the third party in a majority Parliament.

Over the course of the Reform Party’s time in Parliament, its MPs began slowly to sell out: Preston Manning moved in to Stornoway, and most of them decided to accept the MP pension. The policies that distinguished it – the so-called “socially conservative” policies – began to occupy less and less prominence, as its questions in question period began to be focused almost exclusively on government waste and corruption. But even at the time that it became, for no apparent reason, the Canadian Alliance, it distinguished itself by its positions on issues more than did any other federalist party.

Stockwell Day began to undo this. His beliefs were perceived to be so much of a liability, that he had to suppress many of them. From suppressing beliefs, it’s a short step to substituting non-beliefs for them. Additionally, he had won the leadership largely on the strength of being more charismatic than Manning, and he felt he had to deliver. Instead of Preston Manning’s complex, if nasally-expressed, positions, Day acquiesced with publicity stunts combined with sound bytes. Canadians, on the whole, were unimpressed, and a partial caucus mutiny eventually led to the Harper years.

It bears repeating at this point that the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance was founded out of disgust with the failure of the Progressive Conservative Party to fulfill the aspirations of people holding certain sets of beliefs and, more generally, of Westerners. As such, what could be more logical than to merge the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservative Party? This is exactly what Stephen Harper proceeded to do (in fairness, Preston Manning and Stockwell Day had long advocated exactly the same thing, but were stymied by a succession of P.C. leaders who had never sexually contracted Belinda Stronach’s adherence to principle). Stephen Harper then spent most of the 2004 election campaign adamantly denying that he held many of the beliefs on which the Reform Party had been founded – he assured Canadians that he had no intention of bringing in the death penalty or abolishing parole, of recriminalizing abortion, or of scaling back gay rights. But, at least on questions of federal structure, of public finances, and of honesty in government, he remained true to his, and the party’s roots.

In 2005-2006, most of this went out the window. Instead of the income tax cut favoured most of the economists on whose writings the party’s earlier positions were based, Harper promised a gimmicky 2% cut in the GST. Decentralization was heavily de-emphasized. He publicly mused about a Meech-esque constitutional arrangement which, the last time it was attempted, let to the creation of the Reform Party in the first place. As if to drive the point home, he recently named Mulroney’s former chief of staff as his transition manager. It is now scarcely an exaggeration to say that the difference between the Harper Conservatives and the Martin Liberals is thirteen years in power.

(The semi-irony is that it was precisely the abandonment of its earlier beliefs, most of which I found repugnant, that led me to prefer a Conservative government to a Liberal one. It’s still sad.)

It’s a truism that power corrupts, but the adage is often misunderstood: it’s not merely having too much power that has the effect, but wanting it too much when you lack it. Stephen Harper has become as much a personification of the slogan as Paul Martin.

Which leads us to the second tragedy of the 2006 election. Paul Martin’s political career is over, No, I haven’t taken leave of my senses and decided that that’s a tragedy; what is a tragedy is that he is going to go to his death believing that this was the result of a sponsorship scandal that was not of his own making. He might even buy into the opinion of some scribes (Hello, Warren Kinsella) that his real mistake was ordering the commission in the first place, and that if he’d buried it his remaining time as Prime Minister would number in the years rather than the days. In fact, he was defeated because he was corrupted, in the same way that Harper was corrupted. Canadians sensed (it wasn’t hard) that he adhered to the principle that he should be Prime Minister more than he adhered to any other, and they opted for the devil they didn’t know. If Paul Martin had been able to come into office with a clear agenda, and if he had managed to make progress on that agenda when he had a majority (or even when he had a minority – that Parliament was not nearly as unworkable as Martin made it look), I am confident that he would still by Prime Minister today.

It wasn’t the financial corruption of the Jean Chrétien Liberal Party that did Paul Martin in, it was the intellectual corruption of Paul Martin.

2006-01-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

The Results

Assuming the current results stand, here are the standings in the WitPotS 2006 Federal Election Pool

1. Dane Bullerwell, 18 points
2. Alex Abboud, 20 points
2. Chris Henderson, 20 points
4. Anand Sharma, 22 points
4. Steve Smith, 22 points
6. Sean Tisdall, 26 points
7. Guillaume Laroche, 30 points
8. Sharon Ohayon, 34 points
9. Dave Cournoyer, 48 points
9. Adam Demaniuk, 48 points
9. Don Iveson, 48 points
9. J. Ross Prusakowski, 48 points
13. Colin Robertson, 50 points
14. Mike Walesiak, 56 points
15. Neil Carey, 58 points
16. M. Mustafa Hirji, 64 points
17. Rachel Woynorowski, 82 points

If Clement loses his seat, everybody gains two points except for Sean Tisdall, who loses two points, and Alex Abboud and Dane Bullerwell, who hold steady. Placings are affected only insofar as Alex Abboud would move into sole possession of second place (with Chris Henderson moving into sole possession of third) and Sean Tisdall would move into a three-way tie with Anand Sharma and Steve Smith for fourth.

I would now like to take this opportunity to make a player by player examination of secondary predictions:

Alex Abboud

"Belinda Stronach will lose her seat, and it won't even be that close. I see a 5-10% margin for the CPC."

Unfortunately for all that is right and just, Belinda retained her seat, winning 42.6% compared to Conservative Lois Brown's 38.0%.

"Paul Martin's concession speech will be eerily reminiscent of Howard Dean's post-Iowa speech. The only difference is that Martin's speech will be drowned out by the sound of hundreds of Liberals in the room typing up their resumes."

Well, I didn't really think so, but the Plant was pretty noisy.

"Anne McLellan will go down to defeat (by about 1500 votes). . ."

3590, actually. But basically accurate.

". . . but Nicole Martel will emerge victorious tomorrow night in Edmonton-East, pending a recount."

Well, the margin's currently at 11,994 in Peter Goldring's favour, but maybe the recount Alex promised us will change that.

"In Quebec, the CPC will win 3 seats - Maxime Bernier, Josee Verner, and the dude whose Liberal opponent endorsed him (I don't remember his name)."

Well, he was off in his prediction by seven, but he was correct on all three of the ones that he did call.

"Lawrence Cannon will come in second to the Bloc candidate."

In fact, Cannon beat the Blocquiste by 2277 votes.

"Paul Martin will be trailing in the early returns, but will eventually win his riding by about 2500 votes."

He was winning from the outself, and went on to win by a margin of 9244 votes.

"The leaders of the other three parties with representation in Parliament will each achieve of a majority of votes cast in their riding."

Harper got 72.0% and Duceppe got 54.6%, but Layton only managed 48.5%.

"Svend Robinson will win two distinctions on Monday night: Member of Parliament for Vancouver-Centre, and Member of Parliament who most resembles former Ag/For Councilor Paul Reikie."

Wrong on both counts - Robinson lost to Liberal Hedy Fry by 8641 votes.

"Anand's predictions will call for about 50 NDP seats."

Ha! Sadly, no. But I had to talk him down from close to forty.

Neil Carey

"The Conservative minority will lead to either a complete abandonment of principle (by the Conservatives) in order to prevent an election, or be even shorter lived than the latest Liberal minority."

Define "lead to". . .

Adam Demaniuk

"B.C.: CON 22; NDP 8; LIB 6 (Greater Vancouver: LIB 5; NDP 3; CON 2)"

In fact: CON 17; NDP 10; LIB 9, for a score of 10.

"Alberta: CON 28"

Spot on.

"Saskatchewan: CON 12; LIB 1; NDP 1"

In fact: CON 12; LIB 2, for a score of 2.

"Manitoba: CON 7; NDP 4; LIB 3"

In fact: CON 8; NDP 3; LIB 3, for a score of 2.

"Ontario: CON 57; LIB 39; NDP 10 (Greater Toronto: LIB 31; CON 7; NDP 2)"

In fact: CON 54, LIB 40, NDP 12, for a score of 6. Quite good, really.

"Quebec: BQ 59; LIB 11; CON 5 (Greater Montreal: BQ: 14; LIB 8)"

In fact: BQ 51; LIB 14; CON 10, for a score of 16.

"Newfoundland and Labrador: LIB 4; CON 3"

Spot on again.

"P.E.I.: LIB 4"

And again.

"Nova Scotia: CON 3; LIB 5; NDP 3"

In fact: CON 3; LIB 6; NDP 2, for a score of 2.

"New Brunswick: LIB 6; CON 3; NDP 1"

Another pefect province.

"Nunavut Territory: LIB 1
Yukon Territory: LIB 1
Northwest Territories: NDP 1"

And three perfect territories.

Guillaume Laroche

"Independents: 1 (André Arthur of Portneuf-Jacques-Cartier)"

Correct.

Sharon Ohayon

"Other: 1 (Andre Arthur) yeah, I know it's not happening, but just for fun."

Right on the first point, wrong on the second, directly contradictory, point.

Steve Smith

"The Liberals will keep both [the Yukon and Nunavit]. I am optimistically predicting that they'll get the Western Arctic, but even that will be close."

I was right about the seat distribution, but the NDP won the Western Arctic by 1158 votes, which is rather too much to qualify as "close" in a riding with only 16166 votes cast.

"[In the maritings] the New Democrats will keep the seats that they have."

Exactly correct.

"The Liberals will lose a few to the Conservatives (Michael Savage's, to name one), but nobody of any note will be defeated here."

Well, the general sentiment was correct, as was the prediction that nobody of any note would be defeated, but Michael Savage kept his seat.

"Final maritime tally: 16 Liberals, 13 Conservatives, 3 New Democrats"

Actually, it was 20, 9, and 3 respectively, for a score of 8.

"[Québec] isn't going to be as dramatic as people think."

Yeah, I'd sort of like that one back.

"[In Québec,] the Bloc will take 58 seats, the Liberals will hang onto 15, and the Conservatives will pick up one, with the balance going to Andre Arthur."

Actual tally: 51, 13, 10, and 1, for a score of 18.

"[In Québec] nobody of any particular note will be defeated, except Marc Garneau, who's noteworthy for reasons totally unrelated to winning elections. Oh, and Pierre Pettigrew: go back to France!"

Marc Garneau and Pierre Pettigrew were defeated, as were Liberal cabinet ministers Jacques Saada and Liza Frulla. In fairness, I'm pretty sure I didn't consider either Saada or Frulla to be particularly prominent when I made that prediction.

"The Progressive Canadians will finish second in Liberal Denis Paradis' riding, which will be won by the Bloc."

Oops. The Bloc did win it with 38.3% of the vote, but Paradis was comfortably in second with 28.0%. Grafftey finished fifth, with 4.0%.

"[The New Democrats]'ll pick up two seats in metro Toronto (Olivia Chow's and what's-her-face's) and a handful around the rest of the province as well."

Correct on all counts ("what's-her-face" is my affectionate nickname for Peggy Nash).

"Belinda Stronach will go down to defeat at the hands of the Conservatives."

Nope.

"[Belinda]'ll be the most noteworthy defeat [in Ontario]."

Hmm. That title probably goes to Tony Valeri.

"[In Ontario:] 55 for the Liberals, 41 for the Conservatives, and 10 for the NDs"

Actual: 54, 40, 12, for a score of four. I'd say that that's damned good.

"Niki Ashton will win. . ."

. . . sadly, no.

". . . and Ed Schreyer (who's old enough to be Ashton's great grandfather) will lose."

Sadly, yes.

"[In Manitoba:] 7 Conservatives, 3 Liberals, 4 New Democrats."

Actuals: 8, 3, and 3 for a score of two.

"[In Saskatchewan:] Exactly the same results as last time. Goodale will no more lose than will Nystron win. Thus, 13 Conservatives and Goodale."

Well, I totally failed to anticipate Liberal Gary Merasty's win, but so did everybody else. And I called Nystrom's defeat (take that, electionprediction.org. But I still wound up with a score of two for the province.

"The Conservatives will finally get their sweep [of Alberta]."

Yep.

"New Democrat gains in Ontario will be partially offset by losses [in B.C.], as incumbents Bill Siksay, Peter Julian, and Nathan Cullen are all defeated."

Yes, well, see, all of those chaps were actually re-elected. Also, the NDs picked up seats in B.C. rather than losing them. Mea culpa.

"Oh, Svend will lose too."

He will indeed.

"On the other hand, the NDs will pick up Chuck Cadman's old riding (partly on the strength of a bizarre endorsement from Cadman's widow), and the Southern Interior (where the Conservatives dropped the Mercedes smuggler)."

Right on both counts.

"The only five [B.C.] Liberals to retain their seats will be Hedy Fry, Stephen Owen, Ujjal Dosanjh, Keith Martin, and David Mulroney (in David Anderson's old riding)."

. . . and Keith Martin and Sukh Dhaliwal and Don Bell and Raymond Chan and David Emerson and Blair Wilson. Oh, and Mulroney lost. Go me.

"The Greens won't do better than third anywhere."

This came very close to being correct, but Sean Maw finished second in the environmentalist hotbed of Wild Rose. Sure, he only got 10.8% of the vote compared to Conservative Myron Thompson's 72.2%, but a second place finish is a second place finish.

"Without Kilgour, the Liberals won't even come close to retaining [Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont] - they'll come closer to capturing Edmonton-Strathcona."

The Liberals came within 12571 votes of capturing Edmonton-Strathcona (even though they placed third) and within 17382 votes of capturing Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont. Depending on how you define "close", this prediction was a pretty good one.

"With the benefit of hindsight, a lot of Conservatives will be bemoaning Stephen Harper's talk of re-opening the Constitution (diluted thought it was) on January 24."

Well, okay, I haven't actually heard anything today. But I still think that this will emerge as one of the more regrettable (to Conservatives) promises to have been made during the campaign.

Sean Tisdall

"The PC's will have the highest finish in any individual riding of any party not currently represented in parliament."

Or maybe the Greens will, with the aforementioned second place finish. And maybe the P.C.s won't place higher than fifth anywhere.

"Olivia Chow will lose Trinity Spadina."

Or maybe she'll win handily; that's also a possibility.

"The Conservatives will win 8 in Quebec, the PCs 1, and the Liberals 15."

The actual numbers, as reiterated over and over, were 10, 0, and 13. Sean does get props for being the closest at predicting the Conservatives' ten Québec seats, though.

"Harper will lose the popular vote in every region but the west. . ."

Correct.

". . .and will not get a majority of the popular vote in any region but Alberta. . ."

Correct.

". . .and even then Edmonton will not give him 50%+1"

Well, we can't really verify this, since of the eight ridings that include part of Edmonton, five also include some surrounding areas (and the three that *are* all in Edmonton did see relatively narrow Conservative victories, with Peter Goldring's 50.1% in Edmonton-East standing up as the only majority), but it seems unlikely given how handily the Conservative wins were in each of these five.

"The Global Decision desk will be the first to call victory if the Conservatives win annd last to call a victory if the Liberals win."

I actually have no idea. Can anybody help me out with this?

"There will be at least one Conservative campaign that will blame the PCs for confusing voters."

As of press time, I've heard nothing.

"Paul Martin will fight another election as Liberal leader."

Well, he says he won't, but his credibility isn't especially high these days, so who knows? Besides that, I believe that Trudeau once said that he wouldn't lead the Liberals into the 1980 campaign.

Mike Walesiak

"Percentage of votes in the Strathcona riding
Rahim Jaffer: 42%
Andy Hladyshevsky: 20%
Linda Duncan: 27%
Other: 11%"

The actuals:
Rahim Jaffer: 41.6%
Andy Hladyshevsky: 17.8%
Linda Duncan: 32.5%
Other: 8.1%

"Alberta will be 100% Conservative."

Yep.

"Population's reaction:
Celebrating the new Conservative government by riding in the back of a 4x4 truck while doing donuts at a wedding reception for a gay couple: 37%
Whining that the press focused too much on adscam: 28%
Whining that the press did not focus on the "third option" for voters: 16%
Whining that their elected representatives do not have enough influence in a House of Commons which they are trying to pull out of: 12%
Whining that the Canadian electoral system does not adequately reflect each vote: 7%"

I took this to mean that Mike was predicting the share of the popular vote. In fact, it broke down as follows:

Conservative: 36%
Liberal: 30%
New Democrat: 17%
Bloc: 10%
Green: 5%

Stay tuned for my cabinet-picking pool. . .

2006-01-23T02:03:00.000-07:00

My Edmonton-Strathcona Endorsitorial

The bad news is that there are no great candidates in Edmonton-Strathcona. The good news is that there are an embarrassing number of good ones. This will be my third time voting in a federal election. I have also voted in two provincial elections. This election has been, by far, the most difficult in which to decide how to cast my ballot. In my attempts to do so, I have submitted a questionnaire to all candidates (the results of which can be seen here), attended two forums, and perused the websites of all candidates who had them (which was all of them except Kevan Hunter) and of their parties. I read the Gateway's excellent coverage of the riding's options. I have also had the chance to talk face-to-face with most of the candidates about some of my foremost concerns. In short, I am as qualified a voter as likely exists in this riding.

Part of the frustration is that I feel politically homeless with the current selection of political parties. Even on a segment of issues as narrow as the question of Parliamentary and electoral reform, there are problems with all parties: the Liberal Party, the Marijuana Party, and the Progressive Canadian Party are silent on the whole question, the New Democrats and Greens advocate proportional representation, and the Conservatives, who otherwise best represent my views on democratic renewal, cling to the absurd concept of an elected Senate. The Marxist-Leninists are in the midst of a commendable multilogue on the issue, but have yet to generate any substantive policy positions. None of this is the primary problem, since I vote on the basis of local candidate, but it does help illustrate what I mean when I talk about the absence of perfect candidates.

Three of my riding's seven candidates fall short of even the "good candidate" label.

First, Dave Dowling takes no positions on any issues at all but the legalization of marijuana (with which I agree), pledging to defer to his constituents on all other questions. If this ugly and unworkable faux-populism is not itself sufficient reason to eliminate Mr. Dowling from contention, his decidedly erratic behaviour during this campaign (pledging on his own website to attend the Myer Horowitz forum and subsequently claiming that he never intended to do so, for example) is.

Rahim Jaffer was the only candidate who I failed to contact, despite numerous attempts. While refusing to make himself available to a constituent during election-time is not an automatic way to lose my vote, it's not far off. On top of this, he has not impressed in the one forum that he deigned to attend or in media coverage. In his Gateway interview, he indicated that there were areas in which his own policies differed from those of his party, he indicated neither to the Gateway interviewer nor to readers of his website what these areas might be (indeed, the "platform" section of his website is simply a link to the Conservative Party's platform). His votes on key issues to come before the last Parliament are a poor fit with my own views: he voted against gay marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana, supported the tax cuts originally found in the Liberal budget, opposed the New Democrat-initiated social spending later tacked on, and opposed tougher sentences only when he felt that they did not go far enough (though I give him credit both for opposing the New Democrat-initiated floor-crossing prohibition and for bucking his party's opposition to the New Democrat-initiated easing of restrictions on declarations of bankruptcy by individuals with student loan debt). At the Horowitz forum, his defense of his opposition to same-sex marriage was weak and relied on the premise that a majority of Edmonton-Strathcona's residents share this opposition (which is certainly questionable, and ought not to be relevant in any case). On balance, Rahim Jaffer is not worthy of my support.

It is not all together inconceivable that I would vote for a Liberal in this election, but such a Liberal would have to both acknowledge the faults of the current Liberal government and advocate a reform agenda separating him/her from his/her moribund party. Andy Hladyshevsky is not that candidate. He declines to acknowledge any problems with the current government, even though no governments in recent memory have been so bereft of innovation or leadership. As for substantive policy proposals, Hladyshevsky talks a great deal without saying much at all. For example, he is opposed to neither an elected Senate nor proportional representation, but also manages to fall somewhat short of support for each. While he seems to be honest and well-intentioned, he still manages to represent many of the worst elements of capital-L Liberalism.

This leaves Linda Duncan, Michael Fedeyko, Kevan Hunter, and Cameron Wakefield. All of them are acceptable candidates, and if I believed that any one of them had a chance of defeating Jaffer, I would vote for that candidate (I'm no fan of strategic voting, but I am willing to use it where the gulf in quality between the candidate I'm trying to stop and the one on whom I'd be relying to do the stopping is large, and/or where the gulf in quality between my real first choice and my strategic first choice is small). However, I think that Jaffer is a lock for re-election.

The choice really wasn't supposed to be this difficult. I went into this campaign expecting that, after I had collected all available evidence, I would make the decision to vote for Ms. Duncan. Unfortunately, her impressive credentials aside, she has been decidedly underwhelming throughout the campaign. In a Q&A after the Knox Metropolitan Church forum, she managed to both incorrectly describe proportional representation (her description was closer to single member STV, though it was slightly-muddled) and identify the patriation of the constitution as the accomplishment of a Liberal-New Democrat coalition government (in fact, there has never been a Liberal-ND coalition in Canadian history, and the patriation took place during a majority Liberal government). In her responses to my questionnaire, she deferred in all cases to ND policy. Where the New Democrats had no policy - as in the case of the raising of the age of consent, for example - she merely provided a breakdown of how NDP MPs in the last Parliament had voted (in this case nine in favour and seven opposed). Perhaps most damningly, Ms. Duncan effectively pledged to be little more than a mouthpiece of the NDP by promising never to vote against the party line. She also appeared to commit to not moving any private member's bills, which is a very poor way of earning my vote. That she earns my "good candidate" stamp is the result only of the fact that, in a majority of cases, the policies that she is parroting from the NDP are policies with which I agree.

Mr. Fedeyko appeals to me because he's the closest thing this race has to an independent - he's running under a party label, but his answers to my questions were demonstrably his own. He earns marks for opposing tax cuts at the present time, but loses some for giving a speech at the Knox Church forum that seemed to indicate contempt for the Canadian social safety net. Besides Dowling, he was the only candidate to outright advocate the legalization of marijuana, which earns him points, and his clear commitment to reaching the 0.7% of GDP foreign aid target (in fact, he was the only candidate to mention this target in a speech without prompting - Ms. Duncan, who I expected to be strong on the foreign aid issue, responded to questions about it by opting instead to talk about child poverty in Canada) does likewise. Unfortunately, all of the private member's bills he suggested that he'd move are money bills, and therefore require a Minister of the Crown to move them. In summary, Mr. Fedeyko said a lot of things I like and a few that I really didn't like. He appeals to my instinctive support for candidates who will finish well back, but lacked a clear, focused agenda. Again, a good candidate, but not a great one.

Kevan Hunter was a revelation to me. His comments (once all references to "fascism" and "workers" are removed) were sane and generally reasonable. Over the short-term, his policy seemed similar to the New Democrats': less business-friendly tax regimes and regulation combined with increased spending for social programs. Unsurprisingly, his message was less watered-down and evasive than the New Democrats', who have made decidedly non-progressive noises about things like regulating gas prices and protecting Ford manufacturing plants in their attempts to, you know, actually win some seats. On the other hand, I am fundamentally a person who believes in the free market, and Kevan Hunter clearly is not. And while I liked that he framed the issue of foreign aid as not only being an issue of giving more, but also one of taking less, it would be nice if his foreign affairs platform extended beyond getting Canada out of Haiti.

Cameron Wakefield is the guy I'd have voted for if I lived in Edmonton-Strathcona during the 2004 election. He's clearly principled, and his principles are generally similar to my own. He did make attempts to respond to my questionnaire by phone, but we never seemed to connect. And, contrary to New Democrat attempts to convince people to the contrary, the Green Party is definitely a left-wing party. Just because Jim Harris is a corporate consultant (and let me just say that after shaking his hand a couple of weeks ago and being satisfied after that I'd retained all of my fingers, I still don't trust the guy), and just because its candidates regularly make this stupid "we're not in favour of right-wing ideas or left-wing ideas, just ideas that make sense" argument, doesn't make a party that proposes stricter regulations on industry than those proposed by any other major party "right-wing". On the environmental issue particularly, the Greens have more moral authority than the New Democrats. They also have an identical schedule for reaching the 0.7% foreign aid target (by the way, the reason that I keep bringing this up is that I decided at the beginning of the campaign that it, environmental protection, and democratic reform were my three big issues) as does the NDP. My major quarrels with Mr. Wakefield are, first of all, that after being active in party politics for at least two elections, he still doesn't convey the level of understanding about issues as does, for example, Mr. Hladyshevsky, and second that, in his Gateway interview he identifies his top three priorities as being the three things whose importance has probably been most over-stressed this campaign. Beyond that, he too supports proportional representation, though he at least doesn't peg himself down to the specific model that the New Democrats have.

So there you have it: four good candidates, but no great ones. Where does this leave me? With a hell of a dilemma.

This is the part of the endorsitorial in which I should lay out some cleverly-conceived and carefully applied criteria to allow me to select which of the four I will vote for. Unfortunately, as I just demonstrated above, any attempt to do so does nothing but lead me in circles. Instead, accept the following:

I'll eliminate Hunter - I believe that candidates transcend parties, but I unfortunately don't know enough about Hunter's viewpoints as a candidate, and his partisan affiliation suggests to me that many of his views could be too extreme for me. Since he never responded to my questionnaire, I can discard him without feeling too much guilt, though I cannot condemn anybody for voting for him.

Most of what Mike Fedeyko has said has met with my approval, but his remarks at the Knox forum in quoting the Fraser Institute's Canadian version of the Grasshopper and the Ant (in which the hard-working ant unjustly has much of his property seized to support the lazy grasshopper) is indicative of an underlying attitude that may be unpalatable to me.

I have become increasingly disillusioned with both the NDP and Linda Duncan over the course of this campaign. As I recently commented to Sean Tisdall they're right about everything except democracy. I'm not sure that that's enough to be right about.

Where does that leave me? This election, I'll be voting for Cameron Wakefield.

2006-01-23T00:43:00.000-07:00

I'm two words away from completing my Edmonton-Strathcona endorsitorial

I'm not sure what those two words will be, but I know that they'll complete the following sentence: "This election, I'm voting for. . ."

In the meantime, here are the picks for the WitPotS Federal Election Pool 2006:

Entrant	CPC	LPC	BQ	NDP	GP	PCP	Ind.
Alex Abboud	122	95	59	31	0	0	1
Dane Bullerwell	120	103	60	25	0	0	0
Neil Carey	140	81	63	23	1	0	0
Dave Cournoyer	139	84	60	24	0	0	1
Adam Demaniuk	140	81	59	28	0	0	0
Chris Henderson	131	96	48	32	0	0	1
M. Mustafa Hirji	143	71	60	33	0	0	1
Don Iveson	138	80	60	30	0	0	0
Guillaume Laroche	134	90	56	27	0	0	1
Sharon Ohayon	132	86	59	30	0	0	1
J. Ross Prusakowski	139	84	60	25	0	0	1
Colin Robertson	139	79	58	32	0	0	0
Anand Sharma	125	92	59	31	0	0	1
Steve Smith	128	97	58	24	0	0	1
Sean Tisdall	113	115	51	28	0	1	0
Mike Walesiak	149	84	54	21	0	0	0
Rachel Woynorowski	149	63	61	35	0	0	0

2006-01-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

WitPotS Federal Election Pool 2006

We're going to keep this one for bragging rights only, I think, since I don't feel like administering money.

The rules are simple:
1. E-mail me how many seats you think each party will win (sarcasticidealist@gmail.com) by midnight on January 22nd (to clarify: this means the midnight separating the 22nd from the 23rd).
2. Independents, even though none will win, are counted as their own party.
3. Any parties that you don't bother to mention will be assumed to win zero seats in your prediction.
4. Your picks *must* add up to 308. There's no reason for this rule, since there is no advantage to be gained by not adding your picks up to 308, but it's still a rule.
5. I will post the predictions here before election results begin to come in.
6. Each player's score will be determined by summing the absolute values of the differences between each party's actual seats obtained and that player's predicted seats for that party.
7. The winner will be the player with the lowest score.
8. Tangential predictions - such as riding-by-riding or province-by-province predictions are welcome, but will have no bearing on the pool. They are useful for additional bragging rights, though (I speak as a guy who made is 1997 predictions riding-by-riding and turned out to be spectacularily wrong, but in a destructive interference sort of way, which allowed me to win the pool anyway).

Go!

EDIT: Speaking of games, anybody interested in playing Great Canadian Pie should e-mail me. Seriously.

2006-01-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

I don't follow CFS politics as closely as I once did. . .

. . . but I'll hazard a guess that the organization's presence on this list is going to lead to a lot of infighting.

Of course, so will our unseasonably mild winter, the acceptance of the word "dice" as a singular as well as a plural, and rumours that Tom Cruise keeps unilaterally postponing his wedding/mind meld to Katie Holmes.

2006-01-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Obligatory "Man, Am I Ever Awesome" Post. Well, Perhaps Not Obligatory. But Still: Man, Am I Ever Awesome.

Antonia Zerbisias, who appears to be a Big Deal of some kind, insults both my last post *and* my musical taste! Fame!

(I was actually holding off posting again because I wanted to leave my debate transcript at the top; I was unconvinced that I'd received sufficient adulation in the comments section. But a link from a Toronto Star columnist's blog is basically the same as adulation, so I guess I can move on now.)

2006-01-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

A Transcript of This Evening's Leaders' Debate

Steve Paikin: Good evening, everybody, and welcome to what promises to be the most degrading evening of my life: the 2006 English language federal leaders' debate. Without further ado, let's skip straight to the exhibits for their opening statements, beginning with Finance Minister Paul Martin.

Paul Martin: Prime Minister.

Paikin: Whatever.

Martin: I believe in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I believe in universal health care. I believe in the Sasquatch. In fact, my belief system exactly matches each of thirty million Canadians' belief systems, no matter how contradictory they might be. Vote Liberal.

Paikin: We now proceed to Stephen Harper, who appears to have the tail of some small reptile sticking out of his mouth.

Stephen Harper: Paul Martin doesn't believe in Ministerial responsibility, God, or Santa Claus. He fritters away millions of taxpayer dollars solely because he has a frittering fetish. It's time for a change: it's time to put an end to this thirteen year tradition of carbon-based Prime Ministers.

Harper's head pulsates briefly.

Paikin: Next up is Gilles Duceppe, who will not smile at all during this debate except when he has just completed a comment and wishes to indicate that he is incredibly uncomfortable.

Gilles Duceppe: The Liberals have insulted Quebecers by spending their tax dollars on propaganda intended to sway them to one side of the separation debate. If Quebecers are going to have their tax dollars used in such a way, it should be by the government in Québec City.

Paikin: Thank you, Mr. Duceppe. Having now dispensed with the opening statements. . .

Jack Layton: There's a third alternative in this election, Steve, standing for Canadian working families.

Paikin: Didn't you just speak?

Layton: That was Duceppe.

Paikin: I'm sorry, I must have confused the two of you, since at no point during this debate will you ever disagree with each other about anything. As I was saying, we will now get to the questions. Our first section is on accountability and ethics in government. Mr. Layton, you've demanded that Finance Minister Ralph Goodale resign on the basis of the fact that circumstantial evidence suggests that there might have been some kind of wrongdoing on the part of somebody vaguely connected with his department. My question is as follows: what the hell?

Layton: Ed Broadbent is one of our MPs. Ed Broadbent is a good man, widely trusted by Canadians. Ed Broadbent stands for Canadian working families. Are you calling Ed Broadbent a liar? Ed Broadbent doesn't like being called a liar. Ed Broadbent SMASH!

Harper: What I want to know is why Paul Martin, back when he was the CEO of a company with a fiduciary obligation to maximize shareholder profit, flew flags of convenience on his ships.

A slug crawls out of Harper's ear.

Duceppe: I want to know why Stephen Harper has never revealed who gave money to his leadership campaigns.

Harper: I totally have.

Martin: Have not.

Harper: You've seen the list, Mr. Liberian-Flag-Flyer.

Martin: I don't think competitiveness is only about attracting foreign corporations to do business in Canada, but also to get Canadian corporations to expand to other markets, especially war-ravaged western African nations with no discernible economy. That, to me, is a symbol of Canada's greatness.

Duceppe: Where's the list, Stephen?

Harper: Gilles, I released the fucking list. Years ago. I held a press conference.

Harper begins to tip over.

Paikin: That's quite enough of that. Mr. Martin, many campaigns, yours included, have made use of personal attacks this election, with one member of your team going so far as to allege that Stephen Harper killed three nuns. Are such attacks productive?

Martin: I would like to take this opportunity to completely ignore your question, and to focus instead on my favourite platitude, the importance of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You see, the Charter is important. That's why if I get to keep being Prime Minister, I, as a staunch advocate of preserving the strong centre of the Canadian federation, will seek a constitutional amendment that will strip the federal government of a power that the provinces will retain. What do you think of that? Huh?

Harper: Hold on, it doesn't appear to be in my script.

Harper is now leaning at approximately forty-five degrees.

Layton: Personal attacks are totally unproductive. These bottom-feeders need to stop engaging in them, and Canadians, especially those in Canadian working families, need to realize that there's a third option.

Aides scramble over and jack Harper back to a ninety degree angle.

Paikin: Now we're going to move on to the second phase of the debate, which is on social issues. Mr. Harper, would you like to take the bait I offer you by asking you an incredibly tasteless question about whether the deaths of the mounties in Mayerthorpe and of that fifteen year old girl in Toronto were the personal fault of Paul Martin?

Harper: Mmm. . . bait. . .

He licks his lips with a forked tongue.

Martin: We need us some mandatory minimum sentences.

Paikin: Mr. Martin, hasn't your own justice minister argued strongly against mandatory minimum sentences in Parliament? Do you have any idea what the hell your government's policy is anymore?

Martin: Irwin's been talking to his provincial counterparts.

Paikin: and. . .?

Layton: New Democrats, as the third option for Canadian working families, realize that the causes of crime are complex, and that enduring poverty and lack of educational opportunities can cause a lot of people to slip through the cracks. That's why we support taking people who have slipped through those cracks, locking them up, and throwing away the key.

Paikin: Let me get this straight: there is no evidence that mandatory minimum sentences do anything to reduce crime, and they accomplish nothing but substituting the incredibly general judgment of Parliament for the specific understanding of trial judges. And none of you have a thing to say against this train-wreck of a crime-prevention idea?

Crickets chirp. Harper looks up hungrily.

Paikin: Time to sex this debate up a little bit. The Supreme Court recently ruled that swingers clubs ought to be legal, since outlawing them isn't justified by the harm principle. Mr. Harper, have you ever been in a threesome?

Harper: I reproduce asexually, requiring only sunlight and argon.

Layton: The way we see it, if Canadian working families want to engage in some girl-girl-guy action sometimes, that would be really hot.

Martin: In a grade five book report, Stephen Harper once said that there are other good countries in the world. He also held hands with a conservative American girl in grade eight.

Paikin: That has nothing to do with the question at hand.

Martin: I'll be honest: I wasn't listening.

Paikin: In that case, I'll ask a question that is so vague as to be meaningless, in the hopes that it will provoke a flurry of vehement but shallow accusations and proclamations: Mr. Duceppe, would you outlaw Private For-Profit Health Care?

Duceppe wakes up.

Duceppe: Provincial responsibility! Provincial responsibility! Fiscal imbalance!

Duceppe goes back to sleep, satisfied that he's provided the most relevant and coherent answer of any that will be offered tonight.

Paikin: We'll now move on the third phase of the debate, which focuses on the economy. Mr. Harper: Poverty - for or against?

Harper: Poverty is a terrible thing. That's why we're cutting the GST, to allow low income Canadians to save one point nine percent of the ten percent of their budget that they don't spend on GST-exempt essentials.

A ferret struggles to climb out of Harper's shirt collar, but is contained with difficulty.

Layton: What Mr. Harper doesn't tell you is that, at the same time he lowers the GST, he'll be undoing other tax cuts, that will more than cancel out his tax cut.

Paikin: Aren't you supposed to be a socialist?

Martin: We're cutting taxes too. In fact, we believe so strongly in protecting the role of the state that we're promising to forfeit more of the state's revenue than the Conservatives are!

Harper: That's not true. The Liberal tax cut is maybe four inches when fully erect.

Harper moistens his gill slits.

Paikin: I would now like all of you to pretend to care about agriculture for a few minutes.

Layton: In addition to Canadian working families, I also care about farmers. While campaigning, I met a farmer who showed me his balance sheet. Being a New Democrat, I couldn't read it, but that did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm for throwing large sums of money at the problem.

Paikin: Mr. Layton, if your party should hold the balance of power in the next Parliament, what concessions would you attempt to weasel out of the Prime Minister in exchange for support of a budget?

Layton: One thing that's very important is providing opportunities for children, giving them a chance to spread their wings.

Paikin: Given your reputation, especially on WitPotS, for being a little too fond of children, don't you think that "spread their wings" was an exceedingly poor choice of words?

Duceppe: I'll field that one: fiscal imbalance.

Paikin: Since Mr. Duceppe seems to have rejoined us, we'll move on to the fourth phase of the debate: national unity. Mr. Martin, please accuse Mr. Harper of being an enemy of Canada.

Martin: Mr. Harper says that if he owned a shipping company, he'd fly a Canadian flag. What he doesn't tell you is that he once compared Canada unfavourably to a European country. Europeans aren't Canadians, Mr. Harper.

Duceppe: But Quebecers are a nation. Say it, Martin!

Martin: Well, as it happens, I've acknowledged the nationhood of Acadians and Inuit, and I usually use the word "peuple" to describe Quebecois, but I certainly have no hesitation to apply the word that you're talking about in the context that you mean.

Duceppe: Say it!

Martin: Well, I think that it's obvious to all concerned that, by some definitions of certain words, certain groups of people could qualify as certain things. I've always been unequivocal on that point.

Paikin: One last question for Mr. Layton: since you'll never, ever become Prime Minister, which party would you rather see win the election of the Liberals and Conservatives.

Layton: We're running people in 308 ridings, against the Liberals and the Conservatives.

Paikin: Did you just completely fail to answer a direct question from me?

Layton: We support Canadian working families.

Paikin: We'll call that the beginning of our closing statements. Mr. Duceppe?

Duceppe: Fiscal imbalance! Nation!

Martin: Values! Charter! Medicare! I'm not a New Democrat, but I play one during election campaigns!

Harper bursts, releasing a swarm of bats.

Paikin: Thank you all for watching this evening; I'm Steve Paikin, and I wish I was dead.

2006-01-03T01:35:00.000-07:00

If Tommy Salo hears about this, heads will roll.

So it turns out that Belarus doesn't have an Olympic hockey team this year. *Now* who am I supposed to cheer for?

(Switzerland *does* have a team - "There's a team that'll use the neutral zone trap," sez Mike.)

2005-12-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

"Hola from Mexico," he said as part of his attempt to secure the reputation for the tritest post titles ever.

Yes, I'm in Mexico, and yes, it's at one of those all-inclusive places, where "all" means "everything but the internet". Meaning that if my addiction was alcohol instead, I'd be considerably richer.

One thing that *is* included, though, is custard: all of it I can eat which is, as those of you who have ever seen me consume custard are aware, quite a bit. It's getting quite absurd. I'm actually deliberately moderating my intake of included alcohol for fear that over-indulgence would lead to hangovers, which would lead to reduced consumption of custard.

Custard: it's my favourite vegetable.

Election? Haven't been following it much, except to read Paul Wells just about as religiously as ever. My only two observations at this point:

1. From having read most of an article on the subject, I'm quite confident that it is not incumbent on Ralph Goodale to step aside. No, I'm not joking.

2. Gord Stamp appears to be getting Peter Goldring into some trouble. Gord was VP (Internal) of the U of A Students' Union (in 1986-1987, I think, though I could be off by a couple of years), and I dealt with him extensively back when I had a job that included tracking down former S.U. Exec members, because he seems to have kept his network very much intact. He was extremely helpful. Based on what I read about him in old Gateways, though, he was also batshit insane.

Anyway, I'm off to continue putting to the test the hypothesis that man cannot live by custard alone. Probably no more posts until I get home, but I've been known to lie about such things (as well as any number of others) before.

2005-12-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

Merry Agnostifest

I'm leaving the country, to return January 2. No more blogging in 2005.

Steve

P.S. I'm not actually an agnostic, but I like to celebrate Agnostifest anyway; it's a good tradition.

2005-12-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

A Prediction

With the benefit of hindsight, a lot of Conservatives will be bemoaning Stephen Harper's talk of re-opening the Constitution (diluted thought it was) on January 24.

2005-12-19T07:41:00.000-07:00

News Flash: Paul Martin Says Something Logically Incoherent Regarding Gay Marriage!

I have to hand it to Paul Martin. I really do. He's the Prime Minister of a government that introduced legislation expanding the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples. Stephen Harper is the leader of a caucus that voted overwhelmingly against this legislation. I'm a secular humanist who's all about same-sex marriage. And yet, when Martin and Harper square off on the issue, I still find myself more on Harper's side than on Martin's. To lose my support under those conditions takes the kind of talent that only Paul Martin has.

For the latest jaw-droppingly dishonest portrait of the issue from our Prime Minister, check this out. Paul Martin has managed to take an uncertain situation and, in a few short sound bytes, come up with a wide enough variety of statements to ensure that he has a flagrant lie for any eventuality.

Let's examine the uncertainty surrounding the gay marriage issue, and see how spectacularly Martin has managed to misrepresent fact.

Uncertainty #1 Is same-sex marriage a right protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?

See, we still don't have a definite answer on that, in the form of a Supreme Court of Canada ruling on the question. We have a whole pile of provincial court rulings - meaning that, absent a Supreme Court of Canada ruling, prohibiting same-sex marriages is illegal in all provinces except Alberta and Prince Edward Island, where the courts haven't yet spoken. But before you can claim definitely, as Paul Martin keeps doing, that same-sex marriage is a protected right under the Charter, you need rulings in all jurisdictions, or (with apologies to Tolkien) one ruling to rule them all. So when Paul Martin asserts (without acknowledging that he's engaging in legal speculation, rather than stating a fact) that gay marriage is a Charter right, he's lying.

(Incidentally, one reason that we don't have a Supreme Court of Canada ruling on the question is that the Liberal government declined to appeal the ruling that its laws were unconstitutional. Which is fine, and I applauded it for it at the time, but it's a little disingenuous to pass up the opportunity for certainty when you were in a unique position to deliver it, and then proceed to claim that you have it anyway. This is what Paul Martin is doing.)

Uncertainty #2 Would a Conservative-dominated House of Commons invoke the Notwithstanding Clause to "protect" traditional marriage?

Harper says no and, to the extent that he would be in the position to prevent it from happening, I believe him. But we'll treat this as uncertain anyway, for illustrative purposes.

So let's first assume that Harper's telling the truth, and that there would be no invocation of the Notwithstanding Clause. In that event, the question would almost certainly wind up in the Supreme Court, whereupon we'd get Uncertainty #1 resolved. If Uncertainty #1 was resolved the way I'd anticipate it being resolved - with a ruling that the right to marry somebody of either sex is a Charter right - then same-sex marriage would remain legal, and Stephen Harper would have done nothing to undermine the Charter. On the other hand, if Uncertainty #2 was resolved through a Supreme Court ruling declaring that gay marriage is not protected by the Charter, then the Conservatives would actually have accomplished something. Again, though, the Charter wouldn't have been undermined, since all the government would be doing is making legislation that complies utterly with the Charter. Clearly, in this eventuality, Paul Martin's assertion that Stephen Harper would be undermining the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is nonsensical, by which I mean "a lie".

But let's pretend that it's Stephen Harper who's lying and that, when the dust settled and the Supreme Court ruled in favour of same-sex marriage, the Conservatives *do* invoke the Notwithstanding Clause. In that eventuality, Paul Martin's still lying. How so? Well, the Notwithstanding Clause is also known as Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In other words, legislation that declared gay marriage illegal would *still* be completely in accordance with the Charter.

Now, Paul Martin is welcome to argue, as I would, that invoking the Notwithstanding Clause is, absent a totally batshit crazy ruling from the Supreme Court (and I set the threshold for that very high, such that no existing SCC rulings would come close to meeting it), never a good thing. But it's rather a stretch to go from that to saying that because Stephen Harper is probably lying when he says that he wouldn't invoke a specific portion of the Charter, he has no respect for the laws of the country and is unfit for office. In fact, it's downright offensive, among other reasons because it implies that adherence to laws on the part of a Prime Minister is voluntary.

It gets worse. Apparently, even though it's a Prime Minister's responsibility to voluntarily adhere to the highest laws in the land, MPs are not subject to the same burden of stringent voluntary compliance to the Constitution that the Prime Minister is. As such, it's perfectly okay for a quarter to his own caucus to oppose granting what are, according to him, rights that are guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And just to make things even sillier, he's essentially telling the voters in (to take but one example) Scarborough-Southwest that they need to vote for Tom Wappel, who has as anti-gay-rights a voting record as any MP in the House, because otherwise Stephen Harper will take away the right to gay marriage.

So, yes. On balance, I'm on Stephen Harper's side. Politics do indeed make for strange bedfellows.

Tee hee.

2005-12-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

Canadian federalists should find it encouraging. . .

That the leader of a party that was supposed to disband within a decade of its founding owing to the attainment of its sole goal is now confidently predicting that attainment within thirty years.

2005-12-14T23:03:00.001-07:00

An Attack on Jim Harris and a Defense of the Other Party Leaders. Huh.

As a voter who voted for the Green candidate in my riding during the last federal election and who doesn't regret it a bit, I still recognize that the possibly imminent rise of the Green Party in Canadian politics comes with its fair share of both pros and cons. Pro: it will bring environmental issues into sharp focus. Con: it will do so courtesy of a party whose solutions to environmental problems are at best New Democrat-lite and at worst kind of wacky. Pro: it helps weaken the hegemony of the existing parties. Con: it will do by increasing the power of a new party that supports ideas like proportional representation. And so on.

I do, however, have to sympathize with Jim Harris' desire to be included in the leaders' debates. In 1993, Preston Manning was allowed into the damned things, and his party had all of one seat, that it had won in a by-election. Lucien Bouchard's had more, but only one of them (Gilles Duceppe) had been elected as a Blocquiste, also in a by-election. Moreover, the B.Q. ran candidates only in Quebec, and the Reform Party ran candidates only outside of it (and there were many maritime ridings that it was unable to contest). Contrast this with the Green Party, which ran candidates in every riding last election, virtually always placing in the top five and often finishing ahead of candidates from the other "main" parties. While my disregard for political parties translates, at least on an intellectual level, into a distaste for national leaders' debates, as long as we're to have them they should represent the broadest possible cross-section of options available to Canada's voters. In my books, running 308 candidates should alone guarantee inclusion; everything else the Greens have done is just gravy.

Still, though, from a purely opportunistic standpoint, I don't really see why Harris wants in. He's got a pretty good thing going as it is, what with all of these people supporting his party from a standpoint of ignorance.

Consider all of the people voting Green because the environment is the most important issue for them. And then consider that the New Democrats consistently receive higher marks from environmentalists for their environmental platform than do the Greens for theirs. Or consider all of the people who vote Green because they're tired of the so-called "old line" parties. Then consider that Jim Harris is as much an old line politician as either Martin or Layton (and somewhat more of one than either Harper or Duceppe). Consider all of the people voting Green because they see a fiscally-conservative approach combined with progressive social views, and then consider that the Green Party (rightly, in my view, but still) takes a much harder-line approach to rising gas prices than do New Democrats, and is every bit as vociferous in its condemnation of the government's proposed corporate tax cuts.

The Green Party's not unlike William Lyon MacKenzie King, in that it looks more attractive to many people from a distance. Jim Harris should perhaps be leery of removing that distance.

EDIT: I just realized I left out the defense of the other leaders promised in the title. I eventually decided, in the spirit of trying to reduce topics-to-posts ratio of my blog, that that bit will wait until tomorrow, along with a few miscellaneous tidbits.

2005-12-13T17:50:00.000-07:00

Links Today, Green Party Talk Tomorrow

1. I knew there was some reason that I continued to read Dave Cournoyer despite the fact that he's inexplicably started using the first person plural to refer to himself, and tends to pass off reasonably obvious predictions as being sourced, and his link to this reminded me of what it is. Thanks Dave!

2. Over at POI, Mustafa beats me to linking to this article by Paul Wells critical of Paul Martin. In his enthusiasm for slamming Martin, however, Mustafa missed linking to this piece on Stephen Harper, equally as excellent and almost as critical.

2005-12-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Gauntlet Hath Been Thrown

Don Iveson has made a few premature ejaculations on the subject of election predictions and, while I agreed with most of them, I left a snarky comment offering to bet money against his third one, which predicted at least two 2006 elections. Resultingly, we now have a bet in place, and I'm making this post primarily so I remember to collect come New Year's day 2007.

There has not been a double-federal-election year since Confederation. If there ever is one, it will be the result of a Parliament failing to work - not only that, but it will have to fail to work even more spectacularily than this last one did (since more than a year and a half is ellapsing between elections this time). Moreover, there was little public appetite for this election, and there will be even less for a third within two years. The opposition parties, whichever ones they turn out to be, won't risk that level of public hostility. Bear in mind that the Conservatives initially agreed to support the Liberal budget, and that this was disrupted only by the juicier Gomery recommendations (which prompted the Conservatives to indicate that, while they still had no objection to the *budget*, they had to vote against the *government*). There's no reason at all that this couldn't work again or, in an alternative scenario, that the Liberals couldn't veer to the left and get the support of both the New Democrats and the Bloc. There won't be another election until *at least* the latter half of 2007, and I'd venture a guess that we'll be some distance into 2008 before we see one.

The last time Don and I squared off like this, incidentally, was during the August meeting of the Gateway Student Journalism Society Board of Directors, when we argued over whose recollection of some budgeted figures was more accurate. (A dick-measuring contest? Sure, but you've got to look at it proportionally.)

Also: who do I know who keeps checking this from Genuity Capital Markets?

Next time: Why Jim Harris should count himself lucky that he's not allowed to the leader's debate (and why he should be).

2005-12-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

My new e-mail address: mad&angry@littleman.whaaa

So, the questionaire I sent to all Edmonton-Strathcona candidates for the elections site has borne its first fruit. . . sort of.

The hell of it is that I'm really quite sure that I never said anything nasty about him.

The Marijuana Party *does* have a pretty awesome platform, though.

On another note, does anybody know who this is?

2005-12-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

"Steve, you cut your hair! And you got a rubber chicken!"

You know how sometimes in your life you'll get something and then realize retroactively what a huge void the lack of that thing had been in your life? Well, yesterday I acquired a rubber chicken, thanks to Pleasure Motors (of Sad Newspaper and Covered in Oil fame. Fame in some circles, anyway). And I love it. I've named it "Homosex U. L. Chicken", for reasons that likely make sense to an unhealthy majority of my readership.

2005-12-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

Guy Smiley for PM

The first NDP election ads are out, and they're probably the best of the big three's ads. Unsurprisingly, their biggest weakness is the fact that Jack Layton still seems unable to wipe that grin off of his face.

"Well, the Liberals promised to take action to reduce pollution," says Jack, "and yet pollution is up."

He begins to smile.

"They promised to do something about cleaning water and yet we have boil water orders all over the country."

The smile broadens into a grin.

"The fact is they've failed. They've broken their promises, and people's health is suffering as a result."

At this, Jack looks pleased as punch.

I have to say, I'd be more inclined to trust a politician to deal with environmental issues if he didn't look so positively thrilled shitless about current pollution.

I do like the lack of voiceover, though (the one way in which I think the Labour ad to which I linked via Spencer could have been improved), and the "This time" slogan's pretty powerful.