Suuuureee…..ask away. Doesn’t mean you’ll get answers but feel free to ask. Sort of like how you can question a lump of rock on the ground.
I’m wondering if Jack is feeling a bit like Bob Rae did when he got elected as Premier of Ontario in 1990. Rae was absolutely dumbfounded that they had won. They didn’t have as many experienced candidates as would have been wanted for a government. Effective ministers were something difficult to come by. Jack must be really happy but wondering whether they’ve got all the right people on the team should they pull off a big win.
I am really worried about a big vote split with the Tories running up the middle to a big win. I’m usually not a big fan of it, but to keep the Tories out I’m going to have to support people voting for the best person to beat the Tories.
People with Liberal signs on their lawn in Toronto had their cars vandalized. The City Councillor has told them to all park on the street so as to not let people know which house the car belongs to.
Harper managed to avoid questions about a BC candidate’s knowledge about a man charged with helping with the Air India bombing when his staff and many of the crowd starting cheering for a whole minute to drown out the reporter. This is frustrating, nuts and infuriating.
They’ll cover all of Canada outside Quebec. At the same time, he’ll be on Tout le monde en parle, a really popular French-language talk show. There’s just over a week left until the election, and the Liberals are going all-out to stay competitive.
Section 329 of the Elections Act states that “no person shall transmit the results” from one riding to another before the polls are closed. The fine for breaking this can be up to $25,000 – and Elections Canada has a history of prosecuting people under this section. After the 2000 election it raided the home of a man who had posted the early results on his website, fined him and seized his computer.
So posting results on a website is taboo, but Elections Canada says it is ok to share them by email, phone call or even a Facebook message. Still sounds like transmitting to me. But it is forbidden to post the results to your Facebook profile or on your Twitter feed.
My question for Elections Canada is: What if your Facebook profile settings are private, or your Twitter account is locked, and only your chosen friends can see your updates? How is that really any different from email, where you self-select recipients of your message? What if you only have 10 Facebook friends? Does that really still count as transmitting according to Elections Canada? How many Twitter followers or Facebook friends do you need to have in order for it to count? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? What if you email the results to 1,000 people, does that count? Not only does this law date from the early days of radio, but the way Elections Canada applies it makes no sense.
Preach.
“
Layton appeared as a guest during the first week that conservative-leaning Sun News Network was on the air.
And twice this week, the Sun newspaper chain splashed an orange banner across the front page of its Ottawa edition, featuring photos of the NDP leader smiling and waving.
”
The Sun media conglomerate is trying their hardest to split off as many Liberal voters to the NDP as possible. Mighty sneaky.
Source thechronicleherald.ca
Until now, these gaffes have harmed her little with her constituents, and arguably may even have reinforced their support for their beleaguered representative.
That, too, could be starting to change. Gallant made national headlines in February when she suggested that Newfoundlanders who venture out on the sea should take more responsibility for their own lives rather than relying on the Coast Guard to rescue them if they run into trouble.
[…]
There have been other recent missteps. Gallant posted an apology to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff on Twitter after calling him “Igaffi” — likening him to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi — in a late-March tweet. She has not tweeted since.
This article is mostly worth reading for the enthusiastic roundup of every totally-divorced-from-reality action Cheryl Gallant has ever taken - she’s kind of like a mean-spirited backbench Maxime Bernier. The buried punchline of the article? Former Liberal MP Hec Clouthier is running against her as an independent, and looks competitive as he has a markedly lower tendency to blurt out whatever unpleasant thing is on his mind.
We’re pretty skeptical of newspapers reassuring us that independent candidates are still in the running, since it sounds mostly like the newspaper is trying to make a race seem more exciting. But in light of her inexplicably abrasive campaign, we’ll be watching this riding really closely on election night.
Vancouver South MP Ujjal Dosanjh filed a complaint with Elections Canada on Friday, alleging the publicly funded Khalsa School held a parents’ meeting April 6 urging attendees to vote against the Liberal incumbent.
Khalsa School founder Ripudaman Singh Malik, the man acquitted in the Air India bombing, spoke at the meeting, endorsing Dosanjh’s main rival, Conservative candidate Wai Young, the complaint says.
Young said Friday that she went to the private school, but that she was invited by the school’s principal, not Malik.
Later in the article Young expresses some shock and dismay that she was at an event connected with Malik.
But seeing as he runs the school’s board of directors, either she knew exactly what was going on here, or her campaign is so tightly coordinated by the central party office that she drifts from one event to the next unleashing the same speech at a new group of swing voters each time without any thought to whom she’s addressing.
The Globe and Mail has a very cool (but kind of bleak) graphic on campaign microtargeting and how the parties swing ridings by targeting one very small demographic subgroup at a time.
Bonus points if you can figure out which category you fall into and identify how the parties pander to you.
Andrew Heard, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University, has put together this awesome graphic showing the variation in national-level polling results. (The darker the colour, the more polls conducted over a given day returning a given result.)
You can see right away that drawing trendlines is generally pretty meaningless, except maybe for the NDP gains over the last week or so. Most of the variation in poll results has been either random noise or variation due to difference in polling techniques - there hasn’t been a lot of national-level movement in this election.
So when you see a poll that has some really unusual results, it’s probably best to ignore it until you see four or five more polls with the same kind of results, from a bunch of different polling companies.
Source sfu.ca
Source thechronicleherald.ca
We’re now ten days out from the election, and it’s still not clear at all what kind of government we’ll have after May 2. Judging from the polls, though, it looks pretty much inevitable that we’ll have one of three possible outcomes.
1. Conservative majority
This is a situation where the Conservatives get at least 155 seats. They, they could pass any legislation they wanted without relying on any other parties.
What would have to happen: The key here is more Conservative pickups in Quebec. They could stand to pick up a couple seats around urban Vancouver, suburban Toronto, northern Ontario, and Newfoundland, but in most of Canada they’ve pretty much maxed out their gains and all the remaining seats are NDP or Liberal strongholds. Now that the Bloc is looking relatively weak in Quebec (at the expense of the NDP), the Conservatives stand to gain around Bas-Saint-Laurent, Quebec City, northern Quebec, and other regions where the Conservatives are the default non-Bloc choice.
What it would mean: The Conservatives would be able to advance whatever legislative agenda they liked, without having to address any opposition from other parties or anyone else. They’d also be guaranteed a four-year term, meaning that Canada would stand down from nonstop campaigning and also that the Conservatives would be in charge during the renegotiation of provincial transfers in 2013-2014.
What could change things: A backbench revolt, especially if the Conservatives only win a majority by one or two seats. Some Conservative backbenchers are old-school culture warriors, like the Regina MP who recently promised action to prevent tax dollars from funding abortions at an anti-abortion rights forum. If the rank-and-file MPs challenge the party leadership on these issues, a majority Conservative government could see some serious friction in trying to advance its agenda.
2. Status quo
This is a situation where the Conservatives win the most seats, but they don’t win enough for a majority. However, they do win enough seats to pass any legislation as long as they have the support of at least one of the other three parties.
What would have to happen: This is a pretty easy configuration to arise. The Conservatives and Liberals have been basically stagnant in the polls at the national level while the NDP have gained and the Greens and Bloc have lost ground - this might not be enough to move more than a couple dozen seats, and not in any conclusive across-the-board direction. Also, incumbents usually have a strong advantage (partly from name recognition, partly from establishing contacts with influential groups in the community, and partly from misuse of government resources to plan for the next campaign). So an unexciting outcome like this is actually pretty probable.
What it would mean: More of the same near-paralysis that’s been preventing any major policy initiatives from going through for the last few years. Also, more nonstop campaign season. We could expect another election in the next year or two, especially if polling started to move away from the Conservatives and all.
What could change things: Another attempt for a Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition, like those three parties tried for in 2008. This wouldn’t necessarily be a formal coalition with all three parties collaborating on forming a Cabinet, but it would be some kind of deal wherein they promise to support each others’ policy agenda for, say, twelve or eighteen months. If the NDP makes substantial pickups, expect them to be way more assertive with their agenda than last time around. This sort of agreement would almost certainly mean some rebellion from Liberal MPs, especially in Western Canada.
3. Liberal + NDP majority
This is a situation where the Conservatives win the most seats, but they don’t win enough for a majority - and the Liberals and NDP combined win more than 155 seats. This would mean the Conservatives couldn’t rely on the Bloc on any individual confidence vote, and also would open the possibility of trickier governance scenarios.
What would have to happen: Two things would have to happen at the same time. First, the NDP would have to make some substantial gains in Quebec not at the expense of the Liberals, and also probably some gains in northern BC and Ontario at the expense of the Conservatives. Second, the Liberals would have to do reasonably well in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal not at the expense of the NDP, to the extent that they pick up a few more seats. Based on current polling, this isn’t unthinkable. Pickups for either party at the expense of the Conservatives in Atlantic Canada, Edmonton, or Winnipeg are also possible, and these would help too.
What it would mean: This would represent a big shift in Canadian politics - the Bloc would have seriously lost their dominance in Quebec, and the NDP would probably see their best result ever. Canada would probably be ready for an election at any point, since the NDP and Liberals would likely be way less shy about triggering another election. (Note that the Bloc would have no ability to prevent a non-confidence vote - if the Liberals and NDP wanted one, it would happen.) It’s not unclear how long the Conservatives could govern under this scenario.
What could change things: A Liberal/NDP coalition government. If the Liberals have 95 seats and the NDP have 60, say, then we could possibly see a full-on coalition arrangement with the two parties sharing Cabinet, or at least a situation where the NDP has substantial policy clout. A coalition without the Bloc would probably be more palatable to Western Canada MPs, but this would still be a really delicate balancing act. Not only would both parties have to be happy with basically every action, but the support of all the backbenchers would be key as this would almost certainly be a really narrow majority government. So this would be an unstable but novel experiment for Canadian parliamentary democracy.
A vote mob is simply a silly, feel-good event to put on some music, dress in matching costumes, paint your faces, and make pointless YouTube videos saying you’re going to vote. Having a “surprise party” with fellow university students doesn’t mean you are going to make the effort to learn about the candidates, parties and issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these participants stayed home on May 2.
[…]
At the same time, is it a wise idea to encourage young people to vote who aren’t well informed on politics and current events to begin with? For instance, there is a political radicalism among youth — especially the type of youth who would stay home on election day — that could lead to many fringe parties receiving votes. This is good for democracy, but not necessarily for political stability. While no one is expecting all young people to have PhD-level understanding of the Canadian political system, a decent amount of knowledge would be nice.
Conservative analyst and former Harper speechwriter Michael Taube comes through with a fascinating take on the futility and danger of young voters trying to exercise their democratic rights.
Vote mobs are not the right way to get voters to turn out, people! The secret to good voter turnout is ethnic folklore costumes. If all else fails, you can probably the stop the hazardous youths from voting by trying to get Elections Canada to flat-out invalidate their votes. It’s for the good of the nation!
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the evolution of political thinking in this country than the complete silence on the campaign trail as the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is being reshaped.
A generation ago, a historic trade deal with the U.S. dominated a dramatic campaign.
Ten years ago, when a U.S. ambassador called for a North American security perimeter, this nation convulsed.
But in 2011 Stephen Harper can launch secret negotiations on a security perimeter with the U.S. and no one blinks.
Remember how upset everyone got about this suggestion right after 9/11? Judging by the campaign so far, seems like it’s NBD these days.
