Refuting the Canadian Press story on Edmonton-Strathcona

Over here.

My two cents on strategic voting

I sympathize with everything JimBobby says about why he won't vote strategically. I wouldn't be able to do it, either. I grew up in a place where there were no choices I could believe in, and I would never voluntarily give up my hard-won ability to support a candidate I can truly get behind. I'm fortunate enough to live in a riding where I don't have to even consider it, but I wouldn't do it even if the circumstances were different.

On the other hand, I also have a lot of sympathy for the arguments being put forward in favour of strategic voting, as well. If it's more important to you to try to combat the Conservatives than it is to vote your conscience, then you should do that. Because of the voting system we're stuck with, progressives sometimes have to evaluate the situations in our individual ridings and make a choice between casting our single vote for something, and casting it against something. The "choice" part is key, though. Initiatives that propose to reduce the amount of choice are not the answer. Only when each Canadian gets to make a choice from our entire colourful spectrum can we really talk about living in a democracy.

I also agree with James Bow that there's no sense in getting angry at the various party leaders for asking people to vote for them. They're not "putting their selfish interests ahead of the country" or whatever people are denouncing it as these days, they're doing their jobs. A party leader's job is to try to convince us their choice is the best choice, and we as individual voters get to decide whether they're right or not. Strategic voting initiatives are fine, but they have to come from the grassroots, not from political parties.

The most important thing is this: if you do vote strategically, do it in an informed way. It only has a chance of working in a small number of ridings, and everybody who's not living in one of those ridings should feel completely comfortable voting with their hearts. So how do you find out whether your riding is one of the ridings where strategic voting might help? Well, you're in luck--while we used to have to do our own research, these days there are websites that do it for you. Find a site that's promoting strategic voting in this election, make sure its recommendations are completely non-partisan and truly data-driven (the democraticspace.com strategic voting guide should be out on Monday, but in the meantime the Vote For Environment folks seem like your best bet), and look up your riding. The site should tell you how to best vote strategically, why that choice makes the most sense, and how they came up with that pick.

And of course, once you're done voting, swallow down that icky taste in your mouth and come join in the fight for the only real fix for the pickle we're in, which is proportional representation.

More Edmonton-Strathcona blogging

Three new posts over at democraticspace.com:

Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals

More Edmonton-Strathcona events

Harper's "bubble" and the competitive Edmonton races

I'm imagining. It ain't pretty.

One of the things that disappointed me most about the culture I grew up in was the ideology that demanded that the only way to have unity was for people to be the same. Ethnic diversity? Well, fine, people can't help that, but everybody had durn well better make the effort to speak and dress like real Americans. Linguistic diversity? A threat to the supremacy of the English language, and it needs to be fought--or at the very least, viewed with great suspicion. Political diversity? You can't even dream of that in a country where a party whose policies are somewhere to the right of the Canadian Conservatives is as far left as things go.

In Canada, things are different. It's simply understood that immigrants and their descendants will of course maintain aspects of their cultures of origin. In my own fair city of Edmonton, you can send your kids to be schooled not just in English, and not just in English or in French, but in other languages like German, Mandarin, and Ukrainian as well, all within the public school system. And on the political diversity front, well, nearly every Canadian has the choice among candidates from all across a very colourful political spectrum.

I've been here going on twelve years, but I don't take any of this for granted. Being surrounded by that kind of diversity was hard-won for me, and I'll never forget what it's like not to have it. So there's very little that will get my back up more than people trying to rob me of it. In the U.S., racism and ethnocentrism used to make me feel defeated, but here it just makes me angry. People who want to do away with the multilingual education programs in my city turn me into an instant enemy. And bloggers who insist that the only way forward for Canada is the sort of two-party system I grew up in make me feel exactly the same way.

"Just imagine," Steve says. "Just imagine if all the Greens and NDP party members collectively joined the Liberal Party." Well, I've got news for you, my friend: I can't share your petty little fantasy because I am different from you. Just like the policies you prefer aren't the same as Stephen Harper's, the policies I prefer aren't the same as Stéphane Dion's. The "we" you speak of in your post when you say "divided we fall" doesn't actually exist, any more than that monolingual, monocultural singular "American people" exists in my country of birth. And when you tell me that those differences don't really matter, you've got the same basic message as the Americans who tell immigrants to conform or go home.

You want to rob me of the very political diversity I came to this country to be a part of because, what the heck, we're all just the same inside anyway? When there's already a perfectly reasonable solution to this predicament that doesn't rob leftists of their political identities--a solution that your party has rejected because the idea of sharing power is so foreign to them? I've never heard anything so arrogant.

I'm hardly a Liberal-hater, all right? I've said many good things about Dion, and I've meant them. I'm even on record as saying that the idea of the NDP trying to replace the Liberals is a terrible one. But posts like that piss me off enough that I won't be able to help a certain amount of glee on election night when I watch your party get taken down.

Orphan voters, and Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats

Two links today:

Have you ever cast a vote on election day only to realize when the results were in that your vote hadn't made any difference--i.e., that the outcome would have been no different at all if you'd just stayed home? Well, you, too, were one of Canada's seven million Orphan Voters. And now, in the Democracy Disaster contest, you can guess how many orphan voters there will be in a) your riding, and b) the country. If you come closer than everybody else who enters, you'll win $1000 cash!

My new EdmontonStrathconablogging post "Edmonton-Strathcona: the New Democrats" is up over at democraticspace.com.

Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives

Today's democraticspace.com post is called "Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives" and deals with the sitting Conservative MP, Rahim Jaffer.

Elizabeth May on electoral reform

I have an electoral reformer's fondness for the Green Party. Although I disagree with many of their stances, the thought appeals to me that a group of Canadians can perceive a lack among all of the current parties, start an entirely new one, and grow that party into a mainstream force that regularly polls between eight and ten percent across the country. It reminds me that no matter how broken our current system is, it's still better than the system I was born into. Even under first-past-the-post, a Canadian's options really do span the spectrum, and that's incredibly exciting to someone who grew up in the land of the bad choice and the worse choice and that's all she wrote.

The fondness I have for the party, however, does not tend to extend to its current leader. More inter-party cooperation is absolutely necessary in this political climate, but only after the voters in every riding across the country have had a chance to vote for whichever party's policies they feel most aligned with. Any "non-aggression pact" that deprives voters of that full spectrum of choice flies in the face of democracy, and that's something I can't condone.

So keep that in mind when I tell you that Ms. May was just plain terrific on Rex Murphy's "Cross-Country Checkup" yesterday. Again, I couldn't agree with a lot of what she said about other topics, but when she talks about electoral reform, she's definitely worth listening to. I probably won't have much chance to say this again, but today, Elizabeth, I salute you.

Edmonton-Strathcona blogging at democraticspace.com

I'm not going to be crossposting everything here from my democraticspace.com blog during this election, in part because I don't want IP to become all Edmonton-Strathcona, all the time, and in part so as to concentrate discussion over there.

But I did want to give folks a heads-up that although the site doesn't officially go live until today, my introductions post and my Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot post are already visible over there. (For data junkies, the latter has some of my infamous charts and maps.)

"Verkiezingsmoe", and the view from down south

There's a terrific word in the Dutch language: verkiezingsmoe. It means, essentially, "sick and tired of elections."

Do I really need to elaborate on that?

Anyway, you can take it as an excuse for why I haven't been blogging more. Although as of tomorrow, I'll be blogging my local Edmonton-Strathcona race in particular and the Edmonton races in general for democraticspace.com, so while you're not terribly likely to hear much federal-level commentary from me this year, those who have been missing me will be able to follow my local-level commentary over there. (There's a real race this year, people! Yes, a real race, in Edmonton! And arguably even two!)

#

There's not a lot of coverage of Canadian politics in the U.S. news, and what there is usually gets my back up because it tends to range from horribly unnuanced to just plain false. But this Slate piece is a great and surprisingly in-depth look (for a piece that short) at what the heck is so wrong with our political system that we're having our third federal election in four years. Nearly every bit of it is true. Sadly.

[And I only say "nearly" because of the line about "Italians and Israelis may have learned how to function under minority governments, but Canadians are still working on it." I have two quibbles with that. A factual quibble: Italians and Israelis actually don't tend to have minority governments, they tend to have often non-functional majority coalition governments. An ideological quibble: the reference to Italy and Israel in a discussion of coalition governments is annoyingly typical and tiresome when you consider the fact that most of the democratic world has perfectly functional majority coalition governments. But the rest of the piece is great, really.]

The NDP strategy 2008

Jack Layton is letting his strategy hang out.

For the most part, I like it. I like the positioning as a future prime minister, because regardless of whether it ends up ever being effective, it will make him look like a stronger leader. I like the ignoring the Liberals as long as they don't do or say anything too ridiculous or misinformative, because Harper is the primary opponent this time, both for government and for seats in a lot of individual ridings.

The part that makes me cringe are the rampant analogies with the U.S. Democratic Party. No, cringe isn't a strong enough term--"horrified" is more like it. I know that they're trying to play off of an completely idealized vision of Obama. I know they're trying to benefit from the way Canadians have been paying more attention to the glitz and glamour of U.S. politics lately than they have to the frustrating gridlock of Canadian politics. And it might just work, and that would be great, of course. But I still hate it. I just hate it.

As long as the analogies stay superficial, I can live with it, but if they actually start trying to emulate the U.S. Democratic Party on policy, they will be hearing from me more than just in my blog. Because Canada's New Democrats are still lightyears away from the U.S.'s Old Democrats on things like health care, crime and punishment, security, and human rights issues. And as a new Canadian who the Democrats frustrated enough to flee that country to the south of us, I'm still very very very happy about that.

"Literally incredible"

All right, stop the presses. Biden is a 'literally' lover? Well, then. I was already rooting for Obama, of course, but this makes me much more enthusiastic.

Please, residents of that little country to the south of us, you must vote for the Obama/Literallyman ticket. My future amusement is at stake.

One day later

Despite references to it as widespread as the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, the AP piece that "accidentally" referred to U.S. (Democratic? Republican? Independent who wishes he were a Republican?) Senator Joe Lieberman as a 'prick' instead of a 'pick' has not been changed.

Hilarious!

Question for the more-informed-than-I

From this CBC piece:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called a fourth federal byelection for Sept. 22 in the Toronto riding of Don Valley West, setting the stage for a possible general election later this fall.

How does calling a byelection for September 22nd "set the stage" for a general election this fall? If the byelection call is at all connected with the possibility of a fall general election, I'd tend to agree with Northern B.C. Dipper and deduce that this implies the opposite. What am I missing?

This could never happen in Canada

The Republican candidate in the upcoming Montana Senate race is an 85-year-old man who wants to replace the U.S.'s "separation of powers" government with a parliamentary democracy. And he won the nomination against several other contenders (who are now outraged and horrified).

Here's his website. I am enchanted.

Trying to make IP jump off a bridge

I actually agree with new NDP star candidate Michael Byers that it'd be a good idea to change the name of the party, though I strongly prefer changing the 'New' to 'Social' rather than deleting it altogether. But this quote made my head explode:

"In many ways, Barack Obama's platform is close to Jack Layton's platform."

Right, because we want to give people the impression that Layton supports non-single-payer health care, capital punishment, and the U.S. Patriot Act. And opposes same-sex marriage. Among other things.

Please, let's just quit the deliberate rhetorical attempts to make the NDP equivalent to the U.S. Democrats. Please. Or I might just have to cry.

Oh, America, strong and free?

I couldn't care less about the whole discussion around changing the Alberta license plate slogan to 'strong and free'. I mean, I don't even own a car. Still, this quote struck me:

"It wouldn't be so much a change in licence plate so much as a change in nationality," observed David Taras, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. "Because those are words that ring in the American national anthem, on American licence plates, in the American Declaration of Independence."

Well, this new Canadian has a reality check for Dr. Taras. These are the lyrics to the U.S. national anthem. Try searching for 'strong and free' on the page. Then try just plain old 'strong'. Now have a look at the lyrics to the Canadian one. Repeat the experiment.

Now repeat it again on the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Now try a google search on "strong and free". Note just how many of those hits are Canadian. Note again how few of them are American. (Here's a hint: I couldn't find a one, and eventually got bored.)

It seems it's David Taras who needs to get his nationalities straight.

It's still not the policy, stupid

For what it's worth, I'm one of the NDP supporters Scott Tribe is giving a shout-out to here, in the sense that if asked whether I support or reject the Liberals' carbon tax, I'd lean more toward 'support' than 'reject'. I don't like some of the specifics of the plan (Cam's concerns about muncipalities are worth mentioning), but I think it would be much, much better than what we have. And as for the "carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade" issue, well, I'm no economist, but I believe Duncan, Mark Thoma, and Environmental Economics when they say that both categories of plan are pretty much equally efficient. It's intellectually dishonest to claim otherwise.

The thing that the gleeful voices from Canada's political centre don't seem to realize, though, is this: there's a big difference between saying that you don't hate one of the Liberals' policies and saying that you'd be willing to vote for the party. In my case, all it means is that I've regained some of the appreciation I had early on for Dion as a thinker, but I still have no intention of touching his party with a ten-foot pole. In fact, even if I were a swing voter, liking a policy that the Liberals came up with would only bring up the age-old concerns about the fact that their track record on keeping their promises when in government isn't all that stellar. I mean, it's a nice fantasy to think that all Canadians have to do is elect a Liberal government and the planet will be saved, but like I said back in 2006, Liberal policies may well be "good enough" in a pragmatic approach to politics, but those policies are no good to anyone when no one bothers to enact them once the Liberals assume power.

They're kind of like the little kid who, after a whole year of goofing off, finally comes to school with a finished homework assignment and thinks he should be given an A for the whole term for his effort. And I'm a tougher grader than that.

Waterloo-Wellington blogstravaganza reminder!

Psst! If you're happen to be in the Waterloo, Ontario region this weekend, don't forget the annual Waterloo-Wellington blogstravaganza taking place this Saturday, June 14th, at at the Huether Hotel, starting at 5:30 and going until we feel like quitting. I'll be there, as will James Bow, most likely the Gregs (the Sinister one and the recently Apolitical one), and we may even get a visit from the Calgary Grit.

They've got a patio, but the weather says rain, so check indoors first. If you can't find us, just look for a thirtysomething curlyheaded woman sitting at a table with a bunch of guys. *grin* It's always multipartisan, and always friendly. Be there!

Alex* M*cDon*, the Member of Parliament for Halifax

I'm still wading my way through everything that's happened in Canadian politics over the last month, but I did notice the announcement about Halifax MP Alexa McDonough that she plans to retire from politics when the next election is called. After thirty years of public service, this could in no way be called an early retirement, and I'm sure McDonough will be missed both inside the NDP and out.

The Halifax NDP will undoubtedly be looking for a strong candidate to fill her shoes, though, so I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the candidate who came within eight points of beating Peter McKay in a different Nova Scotia riding in the 2006 election. I met her once briefly, and I was very impressed with her--she's young, energetic, a fantastic speaker, and incredibly smart. She's said she doesn't want to run again there, but largely because she's since moved to Halifax. Oh, and did I mention that her name is Alexis MacDonald? Now, there's some name confusion that could really work for you...

Ignorant IP, Waterloo blogstravaganza, and Fair Vote Canada

I'm back! Did you miss me? It'll probably take me at least a week to get back into regular blogging, but here are a few things I wanted to mention right away.

Living under a rock update: I've been almost completely away from the internet for about a month, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to rely on you people to catch me up. What's this about Maxime Bernier resigning? Is it really true that Ian Brodie is gone, too? And is the NDP really opposing a carbon tax now, or is that just the Liberal spin? Recommend some must-read blog posts and news articles to me, okay, because man, things really never are boring 'round these parts. Even with election speculation off the table.

2008 Waterloo Blogstravaganza: I'll be in Waterloo again for work for most of the month of June, and so it's time again for our yearly Waterloo-area Blogstravaganza, this time on Saturday, June 14th. It'll be held, as it was last year and the year before, at the Huether Hotel--although out of deference to some bloggingfolk who need to work during the day on a Saturday, we're doing drinks-and-dinner this year instead of an afternoon event. This means that we'll start at 5:30 and go until we feel like quitting, but don't worry, in addition to being a great little microbrewery in the heart of Waterloo's "uptown" (with truly fine beer), the Huether also offers perfectly decent pub food, so no one will starve. All are welcome to join us: bloggers and blog readers alike, of all political stripes. Oh, and feel free to advertise this on your own blog as well; the more, the merrier.

FVC National Council election results: Just before I dropped off the face of the earth, I mentioned that I was running for Fair Vote Canada National Council. The competition was incredibly stiff, but I am pleased and honoured to announce that I was elected to a three-year term. I am sad that I won't be serving alongside my fellow blogger Mark Greenan, who has done far more to advance the cause in the online world than I have, but I will do my best to be the political blogosphere's voice at FVC. Thank you!