Double Blind

Listening to Thomas Mulcair, there is an opposition party leader that is very well spoken, bilingual, and is going to be a very effective leader of the opposition. He even seems to present better than Jack Layton.

Canada is best governed when you have a strong governing party and an equally strong opposition party and it bodes well for our country. The free ride that the Conservatives have been receiving since election day will soon be over.

Stephen Harper is very intelligent and will not be rolling over and playing dead – you can be sure they will be firing back with both barrels.

The big losers in the selection of Mulcair are the Liberals, and the Bloc Quebecois. I believe the 2015 election is mostly going to be a two-party race, which will be that the extrapolation of historical calculations using 2011 and 2008 results will have to be adjusted significantly to account for this polarization of Canadian politics. The last real two-party election was back in 1917 when conscription was the ballot issue.

If Bob Rae becomes Liberal Party leader, they will be facing a situation similar to Joe Clark when he inherited the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party back in 1998 – they will have to bitterly cling into their last remaining bastions in order to keep official party status. If they choose anybody else with less experience (and there are few people with more political experience than Rae) then the chance of them fading into obscurity increases. Looking at the list of potentials, the competition seems less ideal.

In order for the NDP to form government in the 2015 election, they need to expand their seat count in Quebec (which should be easier to do with Mulcair as leader and a collapsed Bloc and Liberal party), and take half the seats in Ontario, plus winning some more in BC and actually winning some in Saskatchewan (where they got 32% of the popular vote for no seats).

Thomas Mulcair should win it.

The real question is how many people will vote for Martin Singh. Also, Nathan Cullen should do better than expected.

The federal opposition are getting rather desperate to put a story up in the media – you would think they would be discussing something like the economy (employment, jobs, old age security, pension security, etc.), or crime, or healthcare, or defence, or the upcoming budget. Rather, the topic of the day appears to be about idiot campaign workers that used automated phone dialing systems to send fraudlent messages.

The following newspaper article has a good summary of the matter.

My opinion of the matter is the following:

1. People claiming that Stephen Harper had anything to do with it are crazy and can summarily be dismissed. For that matter, I would be 99% convinced that this is isolated down to local campaign teams rather than anything nationally or regionally instigated.
2. The people actually that did the recording and hit the “send” button with the message claiming to be from Elections Canada should be charged with fraud.
3. I wouldn’t be surprised if all parties had staffers that actually engaged in this sort of business, just that selective bias is only dredging up anti-Conservative sentiment, and it is usually more effective if you didn’t say you were from Elections Canada.
4. Engaging in so-called “voter suppression” using this technique is, at best, weak and hence, expensive way of doing so. Any campaign manager doing this should be relieved from doing this duty ever again not just because of the gross lapse in ethics, but rather gross negligence in mismanaging campaign resources. True, doing 10,000 calls only costs you about $250, but that money is probably better spent on pizza for campaign volunteers actually doing real work for the campaign than any “voter suppression” campaign. Saying that any of this would have resulted in the Conservative majority government not being elected is completely crazy.
5. My guess how this happened is that you had some young staffers in a campaign in the heat of the moment, do up a 1am phone recording and then fire it off the next day without thinking it through. Although robocalling is one tool in the campaign manager’s toolkit, just like any tool, it has its uses.
6. Yes, it is amazingly easy to use robo-dialling software. If you give me the appropriate database of phone numbers to dial out and the money to waste, I could create a robo-dialling scandal in a day. A high school student could do the same.
7. We had scattered reports from the local campaign I managed that our competitors were dialing at late hours of the night (typically 10-11:30pm) and saying they were from the Conservative Party, and will you support XYZ – obviously they were not from our campaign team and we put out a press release stating that we did not dial past 9pm. Interestingly enough, these reports stopped despite me trying to track the source of these late night pranksters. People that engage in these shenanigans are, to be blunt, stupid.

The media is trying to employ the iceberg theory – there is a tip of the iceberg visible, and they are trying to convert it into the perception that there is a huge mass underneath waiting to be revealed. My guess is that this iceberg is an ice cube.

I am happy to report I have been re-elected to another term to the park board:

PARK COMMISSIONER
* Five (5) to be elected 11 of 11 Polls Reporting
1 * SKONBERG, Owen 3,156
2 * McCREA, Bob 2,764
3 * TOEWS, Carlton 2,735
4 * PETER, Sacha 2,261
5 * SHANKS, Malcolm 2,065
6 ALLINOTT, Scott 1,950
7 ROSS, Austin 1,861

Thanks again to the voters of Chilliwack. It is one thing doing the analysis of elections that others are involved in – it is another being involved in your own election.

Bill C-20 will bring a significant addition of seats to the House of Commons, with the net impact that BC will receive 6 more seats, Alberta will receive 6, Ontario will receive 15 and Quebec will receive 3.

If you live in a province that is not on this short-list then your relative power in Ottawa will decline accordingly.

The interesting part of the new formula is that provinces can not lose seats beyond what they have currently, but they can lose seats in the subsequent redistribution in 2021 and beyond if their population fraction declines accordingly.

That said, the legislation will bring the provinces that have higher population percentages relative to seat count closer in line to the average.

One large complaint is that this will cost more in terms of paying MPs and their budgets, and also the cost to hold an election. This indeed is true. I believe the costing will be about $15M/year more for the 30 MPs and their budgets, and about $12M for an election.

One group that should be oddly in support of this change are the proportional representation fans – the more seats you have in a FPTP system, the more proportional the results become.

I am wondering what the following government model would look like:
1. One MP for every 5,000 people (this would be about 6,900 MPs country-wide);
2. The job of an MP is acknowledged to be a part-time endeavour, with part-time pay, UNLESS if you are in cabinet;
3. MPs vote electronically and do not have to show up to Ottawa every time to vote and are not expected to vote on every proceeding, hence you do not need to be in Ottawa too often;
4. Cabinet cannot vote in the House of Commons.

Obviously this system will have flaws, but it is interesting to see how it would evolve.

There is plenty of garbage out there in the journalistic world, but this piece by Josh D. Scheinert is utterly devoid of logic.

Putting a long story short, a bunch of Conservatives made a video in response to the suicide of a 15-year old (Jamie Hubley) that was bullied because he was homosexual. The video has a bunch of well-known Conservatives saying to the camera “it gets better”.

Scheinert then continues in his article to state that the video is hypocritical because some of the MPs in the video were well known to be against same-sex marriage.

How does one make this quantum leap? Teen suicide is completely different than same-sex marriage. One can vigorously oppose the bullying of homosexual teenagers (or heterosexual or bisexual teenagers) while opposing same-sex marriage. They are not mutually exclusive beliefs.

I’m guessing the media always portray LGBT issues at insanely polar extremes because it helps them sell advertising.

Although I don’t think it will happen, I hope the state of journalism “gets better”. I’m not holding my breath.

An interesting result in the Ontario provincial election:

Liberals – 53 (37.6%)
PCs – 37 (35.4%)
NDP – 17 (22.7%)
Greens – 0 (2.9%)

The PCs and NDP got very, very lucky by virtue of the fact that the Liberals are 1 seat short of a majority government (54 seats required). The clear analysis is that the political winds in Ontario will be very volatile – the Liberals will be gunning for an election when they sense they can get a majority, while the PCs will be gunning for the Liberals if they can get a plurality of seats. I can’t see it lasting longer than 18 months before they have another election. Every resignation and by-election would become quite significant in such a knife-edge situation.

The other option for the Liberals is to catch an NDP or PC floor crosser. I don’t know enough about Ontario provincial politics to know who would be on the likely list to switch sides for a cabinet position (and a subsequent guarantee that their political career will end at the date of the next provincial election).

Minority governments are very tricky – the fact that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was able to navigate through 2006 to 2011 relatively unscathed was the exception to the rule. The two notable minority governments in recent history which had a much more volatile fate was Liberal Paul Martin’s 2004-2006 government (who succumbed to the sponsorship scandal) and Jean Charest’s 2007-2008 minority government in Quebec (who pulled off a near-miracle by getting re-elected in a slim majority while the ADQ imploded).

As a side note, 9 out of 11 of my political predictions that I made in January of 2011 appear to have come true.

According to the popular vote polling (Conservatives 34, Liberal 33, NDP 26) there is bound to be a minority government elected in Ontario. This will be a rather interesting test of the parliamentary-style system with respect to coalition governments, and the so-called “coalition of the losers” that was encountered in hypothetical federal scenarios since if the Liberals come second in seat count, they still have the first chance to form government.

Also, this election is a great opportunity for pollsters to actually put their reputations on the line and with respect to predicting the translation of popular votes into seat counts. There will be quite a few three-way races.

The interesting dynamic here is that while the Liberals have a lock on the 416 area code (Central Toronto, 22 of 107 seats), the PCs have a slightly less diffuse plurality of support in the 905 area (the ring surrounding Central Toronto, 33 of 107 seats). Since the Metro Toronto area is about half the seats in the Ontario legislature, it is an intense battleground.

I haven’t done any professional analysis of the province as of yet and I will not be either – just not enough mental time. A minor consideration is that I also haven’t spent any time in the province other than in Ottawa. Getting an intuitive feel for the geography is an intangible asset with respect to looking at electoral districts but sometimes gives valuable insight.

I really enjoy reading court case verdicts. The level of analysis that goes into case law is something that makes for very interesting reading. Whether it is about the motor vehicle act, criminal cases, civil cases, etc., it is always a fascinating insight on how our judicial system works (and indeed, the judiciary is the most functional branch of the three in government).

A headline is making the news – B.C. judge tosses ecstasy case for rights violations (CBC, CTV, National Post). I spent about 90 minutes reading the case (R. v. Ho, Hou, Huang, Li and Zhou) from end to end – and this should be read before any media summaries.

Essentially the Richmond RCMP that were conducting a 14 month investigation on an ecstasy production/distribution scheme by a bunch of mainland Chinese immigrants badly bungled the search warrant operation on the suspects. The method the RCMP obtained the warrant was flawed (violated the Criminal Code) and the execution of the warrant was flawed (violated the Charter).

It is pretty clear, however, that these people were completely responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of ecstasy, but the RCMP will not have any evidence from this search warrant, which will make prosecution of these individuals much more difficult.

I completely agree with the line of thinking by the justice (P.R. Meyers). The only line of defense people have against improper police action are through the courts. A violation of rules concerning unreasonable search or seizure must not be rewarded, otherwise it will yield further erosion of our fundamental rights.

Some 21-year old parliamentary page managed to stick a “stop Harper” sign up during the Throne Speech in the senate.

Now her name is going to be linked to this event on Google for probably the rest of her life, so you can be assured that this will compromise certain future employment options.