Double Blind

The municipal election is over – 5427 people in Richmond voted for me, which was about 3700 votes short of a seat on the School Board. Unfortunately, this is just like the Canucks losing a hockey game by 4 goals and saying they came close! At least I managed to avoid last place by nearly a thousand votes. I’m rather happy that this many people came out and voted for me, especially considering that I came out of relative obscurity 3 months ago.

The Richmond School board has several challenges facing it in the next couple years. Assuming that school boards are not “repurposed” out of existence by the provincial government, they have to set the ball in motion on some long term projects concerning the tracking of student and teacher performance, shifting resources towards skills-based instruction, implementation and execution of a policy concerning their 400 acres of parkland (some of which may be deemed surplus due to reduced enrollment numbers), and a couple other ‘projects’ which are politically practical but I won’t bother mentioning here.

I will have some future comments on what I learned from this election campaign in the coming months, but this has been quite a positive experience. There is no better way to learn about self-marketing than running for public office.

What this means, however, is that I will be able to post here in full force again on other topics. There are quite a few events going on in the world, including the Federal Election. The UBC Election Stock Market opens on December 13 and this means that I of course will be trying to skim a percent off the total capitalizaton of the marketplace. Because the market is opening late, I can give my existing seat projections:

Liberals 121
Conservatives 96
Bloc Quebecois 62
NDP 29

My current belief is that the NDP will gain seats in BC and Ontario (at the expense of the Conservatives and Liberals), while the Bloc will gain 8 seats in Quebec (at the expense of the Liberals). The big winners in this election should be the NDP and the Bloc. Of course, this is all subject to change as the campaign is very long.

With regards to the projection, I am absolutely sure on the Bloc’s performance this election (62 seats) as Gilles Duceppe has done a brilliant job in Quebec hammering the Liberals with the sponsorship scandal. The campaign in Quebec is 100% different than the campaign in the rest of the country – just log into any French media source and you’ll see that it’s literally a different country.

The provincial government has made an effort to allowing public submissions online in their annual budget planning committee. I submitted some comments and they actually print out names of the people that submit responses. Last year they didn’t.

Here’s the link:
Rpt-FIN-37-5-FirstReport-05Nov15.htm

I’m not sure how much time these people have to actually wade through the 3998 responses online they received, but it’s good to see an online receptacle for this input. I just hope that in the future that these mechanisms don’t get bombarded by “form responses” of special interest groups trying to advocate spending for their pet projects. Otherwise, everybody’s voice will get drowned out in the process. Believe me – it will happen. Just like spam, you can invent filtration techniques to select comments with a high signal-to-noise ratio.