Double Blind

Here are the interim results for the BC Referendum 2005. As of this writing, 59 out of 79 electoral districts have reported interim results.

It looks like that BC-STV will have FAILED with a 57% YES, 43% NO vote, with about 75 districts having voted 50% or more for it. The 57/43 split is probably the only thing that I called correctly this election.

I have to wait for all the electoral districts to report before coming to more conclusions. Obviously I am quite saddened by this result, as it means that the various political groups are going to use this result as an excuse to use mixed-member proportional representation, which is a horrible form of proportional representation. No politician or political party would ever implement BC-STV themselves, it just gives up too much of their power.

Carole James, Adriane Carr both believe in this form of proportional representation. The reason is because it allows the political parties to create lists, whereby the people on the top of the list get elected first to the Legislature. This gives political party executives incredible power to decide who they want to end up in the Legislature, and it gives the people the smallest amount of choice, as they don’t even know which person on the party list their vote will count for on the party list.

Campbell is publicly refusing to say how he voted for BC-STV, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s keeping his mouth quiet since he voted YES for it, but his party insiders all voted NO. On the issue of BC-STV, Campbell seemingly has more principles than the other party leaders it seems.

Here is a link to the interim results from Elections BC. I will cover the referendum in a second post.

Assuming that the final result is BC Liberals 46, NDP 33 (note a few ridings are very close and this may shift when they count the absentee ballots):

1. My original predictions for seat count were quite off. I’m disappointed at myself. I’ll give an exact count later today or tomorrow.
2. The Green party did much worse than I thought they would. Specifically I thought they would have gotten at least 30% of the vote in Powell River-Sunshine Coast. They got nowhere close, with about 26% of the vote in that riding, but more significantly, only 9% of the popular vote province-wide.
3. As a result, the NDP did above and beyond what I expected them to. Not only did they fulfill their mission of getting 25 seats, but they also crushed the crap out of the Green party.
4. Fourth parties (DRBC, Marijuana, etc.) did far worse this election than the previous one. A demonstration on how the present voting system is geared towards either two main parties (e.g. Liberal-NDP, Liberal-Conservative, Democratic-Republican), or parties with strong regional representation (e.g. Bloc Quebecois). As I don’t see a “BC Interior party” or “Vancouver Island Party” coming into the provincial scene anytime soon, we will be stuck with two main parties winning all the seats as long as the first past the post system is in place.

The BC Liberals still have a significant majority in the present legislature, but they will have to be very careful with the timing of their politics to make sure that none of the backlash runs into 2009. Presumably Campbell will get the politically sensitive legislation out of the way early (specifically TAX CUTS for the entire province, something never discussed during this campaign) and then do the “feel good” legislation in the second half of his term.

Will Gordon Campbell survive the next four years as leader of the BC Liberal party? My guess is yes. If his majority was 43-36, then he would be in more trouble. But those extra three seats should be enough to keep him securely in office. Obviously not as much as before, but enough so that if a group of people in his party wished to defect, there would have be 7 of them or more for it to cost him the majority.

Will Carole James survive the next four years as leader of the NDP? Something I’ll try to think about and answer later.

Here are my BC-STV referendum predictions:

Percentage voting YES: 57% (required: 60%)
Ridings of which 50% or more vote YES: 61 out of 79 (required: 48)
Ultimate result: Fails

If I were to assign a ‘plus or minus’ factor to that number, I would say 3% and two seats.

This will be a close one. It’s also saddening that there will not be another opportunity for electoral reform in this province for a long, long time. If the vote is as close to 60% as I think it will be, we’ll most likely see the next breed of politicians endorse some form of mixed-member proportional system, which is the last thing our party-centric parliamentary systems need. Implementing MMP will concentrate even more power to the party executive than it does currently.

How did I come to my conclusions about the numbers? I won’t dish out the model that I used to crunch together my solution, but I’ll run through a thought process I had over the issue.

One is that ’safe’ ridings that have guaranteed BC Liberal or NDP MLA’s are more likely to have their party supporters vote against BC-STV, simply because BC-STV will threaten the safety of their choice. It depends on how large the majority is – specifically if one party is always getting voted in with a 50/45/5 vote, you will have a higher percentage of that 50% voting against BC-STV, while more in the minority would be voting for BC-STV.

That in mind, there are a LOT of swing ridings out there, and typically such ridings will be in favour of BC-STV.

I think the issue about rural ridings having less representation (due to their increased size) will not be seen by most people in the rural areas as a valid argument – I suspect that the rural areas of BC will vote significantly more for BC-STV than the urban areas, which trumps the “safe seat” parameter.

Another argument pumped by the “no” side is that BC-STV is too difficult to learn. This argument will sell to a minority of people, but not as much as the anti-BC-STV people would like to believe. To the people that have enough self-confidence in their abilities, this is almost akin to voting against the people that tell you that you’re too stupid to vote yes to an issue. Assuming that intelligence and income levels are correlated, I would expect to see an inverse correlation between income level and whether you’d vote for BC-STV or not. In other words, the more money you make, the more likely you are to vote against BC-STV. I believe this is true and the referendum should be a fairly good testbed.

I will put these theories to the test with the following hypothesis: My guess for the lowest BC-STV vote will be in West Vancouver-Capilano (rich riding, urban, safe seat). The guess for the highest BC-STV vote will be Prince George-North (poor riding, rural, not safe seat).

I’ll give a couple other predictions. Vancouver-Hastings will vote more than 60% for BC-STV, despite being an easy seat for the NDP. My home riding of Richmond Centre will vote 50%, plus or minus 2% for BC-STV.

Polling and the general perspective of my talks with certain people have lead me to believe, however, that the result will be above 50%. Just how much above 50% becomes an art and not a science. I really hope I’m wrong with my prediction and that BC-STV passes.

Summary of seats:

BC Liberals – 52
NDP – 25
Green – 1
Independent – 1

After numerous attempts to try to format the text to fit onto this page, I have given up and will just attach an HTML file here giving the seat-by-seat predictions. I’ll eventually re-import it into this article when I have time.

There are a few things working for the BC Liberals. One is that the economy in the province has taken off. Whether it’s because of commodity prices or government policies, it’ll get people in the interior to vote for the Premier. The second thing is that the Green party is really going to split the vote of the NDP in some key ridings. One of the earlier strategies I mentioned for the BC Liberals is not only to promote themselves, but stay away from attacking the Green party in the hopes that they can stick around in 2009.

The results of a recent Angus Reid Survey on the referendum for electoral reform. We can see that in April, the YES side said 27% to 15% on the NO side, which if extrapolated to 100% amongst undecided voters would result in a 64%/36% victory for the YES side.

In May 9-11, the poll counted 36% YES to 21% NO, which extrapolated turns into 63%/37%, which is in the statistical margin of error of the April poll, with the notable difference that 17% more people had an opinion on the issue. There were 800 people sampled, which lead to a 3.1% statistical margin of error (but of course doesn’t account for systemtic errors in how the ‘random’ sample was obtained).

These numbers are quite encouraging to the “yes” side, providing that the opinion extrapolates. The referendum is going to be the closest race in the province since I let you all in on a secret I told you on July 14, 2004 that the BC Liberals will form a majority government. It’s too bad nobody took my ’sucker bet’ back then and it’s also too bad that the ESM wasn’t open that far in advance since I would have made a lot more money than I will currently from the market.

As for BC-STV, coming up with the correct parameters to model the outcome is quite difficult. I’ll try to give you a result that is accurate to within 3% and I’ll also try to give whether the electoral districts voted 50% or better to an accuracy of 74/79.

If you are tired of having elected dictators for four years at a time, if you are tired of parachute nominations, if you are tired of the Premier’s office and the BC Liberal or NDP party executive having 99% of the power in government when elected, if you are tired of the toxic rhetoric we see in the Legislature, if you are tired of voting for parties instead of people, if you are tired of having a voting system designed by politicians, then vote YES for BC-STV.

If political hacks (Dave Barrett, David Schreck, Bud Smith, etc.) are so much against BC-STV, do you really think BC-STV is a bad proposition? Hell no.

In my previous writings, I identified very early on (back in the beginning of January 2005) that the referendum is the most pivotal issue for British Columbia since confederation. I wrote more articles outlining how BC-STV would be attacked by the establishment and how they use misleading arguments to try to convince you to vote no. I stand convinced that reducing the power of political parties is ideal, and instead giving those powers back to the individuals within the party will promote better people to government.

When you vote, it doesn’t matter what party you vote for, but the referendum is a vote for your ability to directly choose who you want representing your area in future elections. A vote for BC-STV is a vote for more choice. Vote YES.

So for the past couple days, the Conservatives and Bloc have effectively shut down business in the House of Commons. They say that because the current government (Paul Martin and his cabinet) does not have confidence (i.e. more MPs voting for them than against them) that they should call an election. The Liberals and NDP are saying that the Conservatives and Bloc are playing ‘games’ and they should “work to make government work”.

All of the parties’ arguments are full of hypocritical crap. The NDP have sold out to the Liberals – a mistake that will inevitably split the vote with Liberals in the next election causing the Conservatives to win more seats in Ontario. The Liberals’ corruption over the past 10 years has been visibly exposed and Paul Martin’s promises in the 2004 election turned out to be complete smoke – listening to him a year ago talk about “respecting parliament” is an utter joke when you see him today. The Conservatives are rightfully opportunistic – they voted yes to the budget in late February (and could have brought down the government otherwise), but when some damaging testimony from the Gomery inquiry they suddenly had a change of heart… does the Gomery inquiry suddenly make the budget all that worse? In fact, the only party with a consistent position on things is the Bloc Quebecois – putting myself in their shoes, they have the easiest arguments to make. Considering they’re going to get an extra 10 seats after the Federal election, it’s no wonder they want one. Duceppe over the past few campaigns has turned into a genius.

You have people like Declan and Matt that are highly critical of the Conservatives. In response to Declan’s article, the Conservatives know that they will lose the same sex marriage issue, but they want to claim to their voters that “they went down fighting”. Addressing Matt’s article, parliament (and the BC Legislature for that matter) has degraded in the toxic cesspool that we see today – ideally constituencies would represent their people, but party discipline has rendered this notion as useful as the senate. Harper has no choice to play this game, just like how Paul Martin is doing exactly the same thing by stonewalling. If either leader suddenly decides to “relax” the discipline, then they’re screwed. They both have no choice but to fight with each other.

Incidentally, the gamble that Paul Martin should have made is to enter into a temporary ‘unholy alliance’ with the Conservatives and pass an amended Conservative-friendlier budget (the tradeoffs would essentially be tax cuts for Kyoto support). Since Martin has another year for his party’s leadership convention, coupled with the 99 Conservative seats, he could have been able to secure power until at least the fall session. Then the Liberals could take advantage of time and find a way to backstab the Conservatives and call an election. That opportunity has long since passed. Now Martin has allied up with the NDP, but the NDP’s 19 seats isn’t enough to pass votes in the house.

I see things right now being at a perfect balance – the Liberal government can’t pass legislation, while the opposition can’t readily bring down the government since the Liberals are using every procedural trick to stall a vote of confidence. If the Conservatives and the Bloc passed a motion in the House of Commons to close house business for the next 4 years, I see this as the perfect situation for the rest of Canada. The government won’t be able to increase or reduce taxes, or spend money (since no bills involving money can be passed since they would be considered confidence votes), and the government can’t manipulate existing legislation. In other words, people will be able to get on with their business without worrying that the government will be screwing around with them. If something is really obvious and needs to get done, such as raising salaries for the now-vacationing MPs, the house will approve all three readings in a day and you’ll see royal assent in less than a week.

One of the problems with governments is that when they get into power, they have a tendency to legislate a thousand bills for the sake of legislating them, opposed to whether the legislation is actually correct. The problem with proposing so much legislation is that you end up with rules of society getting more and more complex that people (including governments themselves) don’t have a clear idea what’s going on. For example, all the rules starting with the letter “A” can be found here. The perfect example of overwhelming complexity is the legal history of the Income Tax act. You can probably appreciate how income tax lawyers get paid vast sums of money to dissect this document, currently standing at six megabytes of text.

Yes, it’s kind of bad that we’re paying 307 MPs about $250M in salaries and expenses each year to effectively sit on their asses or grandstand in theatresports parliament, but if they’re paralyzed and can’t legislate anything, is that really so bad?

Either that, or call the next election and get it over with.

Because my advance voting station is very close to where I live, I walked there and voted. The walk was nice – the weather is perfect for an evening walk. I’ve voted many times before, but I’ve never written about the process before. Also, I have never done advance voting – every time I have voted in the past was on the actual election day.

Once arriving at the election room, you hand the elections BC person your voter registration card. One person makes sure that you are on the list of voters and crosses your name off. Then another person writes your name, address and date on a piece of paper and gets you to sign it. You take this paper and hand it to a third person who gives you two numbered ballots. One of the ballots is for the candidate party you wish to vote for. The other is on the referendum for electoral reform. You walk behind a tall piece of cardboard, and mark an “X” next to your two choices and then fold the ballots. You give the ballots to the elections person and they rip off the numbers from the ballots. Then they give you your ballots back and you can stuff them in the ballot box.

I don’t wish to discuss which candidate party I voted for, but I will say on the referendum ballot that I voted YES to BC-STV. I want the ability to vote for people and not parties in the future. I urge you to do the same, as the referendum passing will provide more benefit to the province than voting in the BC Liberals or NDP.

Late one night I drove into the local strip mall in order to pick up something from Shopper’s Drug Mart. On the way back when I returned to my car, I noticed in the parking stall two spots to my right that somebody left a bag of McDonalds and some food packages (burger and fries) that had their contents consumed. This really pisses me off since they can just take their trash to a garbage can instead of leaving it on the parking lot. Since the parking lot was nearly empty, the litter struck out at me as really obvious.

Upon further thought, there are some systematic problems in place here. I will outline my flow of thoughts.

First of all, there is a reward for the person to leave trash outside his car – he doesn’t have to spend the effort to clean it up himself. There is an incredibly high probability that this person has done so before in the past, and will continue to do it in the future. From this, it is surprising that more people don’t do this, although you can equally say it may be the start of a trend of litterbugs. Time will tell.

How do we solve such problems?

One solution is for the strip mall management to hire people to clean up the parking lot every night. What effectively happens is that the patrons of the malls will have to pay more for the products and services they purchase since the landlord has to incorporate the additional costs of cleaning fees in the rents. Is this acceptable? In some places it is – for example, I recall at the Del Mar Racetrack (or any racetrack for that matter), after the last race the cleaning staff really earn their wages. However, in less isolated places such as shopping mall parking lots, this behaviour is unacceptable. There is no reason why customers should have to pay for litterbugs.

Another way is to target the companies selling the products that people litter. For example, McDonalds has made great strides in the past 20 years to move product packaging into forms that will biodegrade over time. I remember when I was young they put burgers into styrofoam, the kind of stuff that would degrade and eat away at the ozone layer. Now nearly everything is in biodegradable cardboards. Still, one can potentially argue that they aren’t going far enough – an extreme act would be to ban all forms of drive-through service and force people to eat within the restaurant boundary. One can obviously see that this is an absurd proposition, but one also can see that it would work if enacted. You would get all the people complaining about litter suddenly cry about the ‘nanny state government’, but those parking lots would sure be clean!

Yet another way would be to target the person doing the littering. You could set up security guards to patrol the parking lots, and legislate them some arresting or ticketing authority such that if the passengers inside vehicles littered that they would immediately be subject to a fine or some other punishment. The overall goal would be to increase the risk-reward profile of littering on the street. The disadvantages include the ‘nanny state’ accusations in addition to the fact that somebody has to pay for the extra security. Just like in the first solution, this would be paid for by the shoppers in the strip mall. An unacceptable solution.

All three of these solutions would work, but they have costs – both economic and in terms of freedom.

What is the only solution? The answer is rather unusual – the reason why I don’t litter on the streets isn’t because it is economically the best decision for me, but because I feel that I have a responsibility to take my litter to the trash, where it is supposed to belong. This isn’t based on cost, rather it is based on morals. If most of society has morals where it is irresponsible for them to litter the streets, then ultimately there will be no litter on the streets. However, it just takes a few people that don’t share the same morals to really damage the moral fabric that prevents people from littering all over the place. Preventing this ‘meme’ from taking hold seems to be the only way to fight litterbugs without causing adverse economic effects or losses of freedom.

So there is a theory which I would like to propose here: As the moral fabric of a society decays, society operates increasingly on an economically rational basis.

Right now on CKNW they have two people that did the post-debate dissection: Christy Clark (former BC Liberal hack) and Moe Sihota (former NDP hack), jeez.. can we have any more biased people on the air?

I’ll go over the debate, candidate by candidate:

Campbell – looked like he had six pounds of shiny hair grease on his head, and made his hair more prominent than the lights on the podium. All of that speech training has made him smooth with his delivery in the canned portions of the debate, although during the free-for-all portions he was under attack most of the debate and didn’t stray at all from the party’s canned platform in general. He generally kept his mouth shut and then ‘came back’ with some part about what his government did instead of attacking James. He was on the defensive for most of the debate, and this was probably as per his script – don’t get involved and hope the public will forget the next day (which they probably will). Campbell isn’t a natural debater in this format (he prefers one-on-one much better) and it shows.

Carr – Said “fossil fuels” and “sustainability” too much, although she did an OK job of trying to portray herself as the ‘middle ground’ leader. I don’t think she had a slam dunk moment, and her speech style needs a bit of work – she referred too much to her notes and this detracts from the audience. Also, she was exceptionally weak on the issue of “leadership” – that was probably her only chance to mention electoral reform, because getting STV passed is probably going to be her only way that she’ll get elected this time around. Still, she has a chance in Powell River-Sunshine Coast. She didn’t sabotage her chances, nor did she really improve them.

James – Was perpetually on the attack on Campbell. She never made a slam-dunk (i.e. Gordon Wilson) moment either, which would have been achieved if she just had said “That was the NDP in the 1990’s, and we’re completely different today – we’re the 21st century NDP with new solutions for British Columbia” or some BS like that. She didn’t say that. Otherwise she tore into Campbell like a pitbull with the same rhetoric that we’ve heard all the time, but this time in the debate.

Debate panelists – The questions were horrible, especially the one about “leadership”. One of the goal of the panelists is to ask questions that will yield interesting answers, and all of the questions asked had completely pre-scripted responses from the leaders. Very boring. I was also very disappointed that there was no question about electoral reform, which will have a massive impact on the future of the province!

Debate format – I liked the debate part, but there needs to be a longer debate, or better yet, multiple debates just like in the US Presidential election. I doubt this would have happened since the BC Liberals would just refuse to go to the next one.

Conclusion – This debate may have cost Campbell a couple seats in the election, but it’s not going to be enough for the NDP to win this election – there just wasn’t enough “sticking power” in James’ attacks on Campbell that will appear in the news a night before the election. I’d say it’s status quo for the Green party. As such, this would probably be a tactical victory for Carole James and the NDP, while a strategic win for Campbell (not because he actually performed well in the debate, but because he didn’t self-destruct). I’d like the emphasize that all of the people on the debate floor sucked.