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).

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Politics.

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

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Politics.

Twitter managed to make a comeback from the dead with respect to me using the service, but I very much have my doubts about Facebook and others.

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Filed under category Commentary.

I will list the predictions (made on January 4, 2011), and give the actual result:

Politics (7/11 correct)

1. (e) Stephen Harper will be Prime Minister on December 31, 2011.

Correct. With a majority government!

2. (m) Canadians will vote in a general federal election between July 1 to December 31, 2011.

Wrong. The election was on May 2, 2011. I did not think Michael Ignatieff would be silly enough to pull the plug on the budget with the Liberal party still clearly in disarray. Their correct strategy would have been to wait, and wait, and wait, and hope and pray that the Conservatives would do something stupid. They didn’t.

3. (e) The Green Party of Canada will not win a seat in an election.

Wrong! Elizabeth May won with 46% of the vote.

4. (e) No British Columbia general election in 2011.

Correct, although I bet Christy Clark wished she did so.

5. (m) In Ontario’s 2011 general election, a minority government will be voted in.

Correct, albeit by one seat.

6. (e) No “meaningful” Canada senate reform will take place – i.e. no elected senate, no term limits, no redistribution of seats.

Correct.

7. (m) Rampant end-of-year media speculation that Barack Obama will not run for a second term as president. Prediction is also successful if he announces he will not run again.

Incorrect. Obama will likely get the Democratic nomination, and there was no serious or even semi-credible contender – Hillary Clinton is basically hanging up the boxing gloves.

8. (m) California Governor Jerry Brown will be credited in trying to turn around California’s fiscal situation (compared to Schwartzeneggar, who was viewed as unable to do anything about it).

Wrong.

9. (m) The next BC NDP Opposition Leader will be Adrian Dix.

Correct, although it should be pointed out that my prediction closer to the election time was Mike Farnworth, which obviously turned out to be wrong.

10. (e) All recall campaigns will fail in BC.

Correct.

11. (h) The HST or equivalent remains at year-end in BC. To “test” this prediction, if I purchase a coffee at Tim Hortons at year-end, it will have a 12% sales tax applied to it.

Correct, the HST is slated for destruction on March 31, 2013.

Geopolitical (1/4 correct)

1. (m) Julian Assange, creator of Wikileaks, will not be incarcerated at December 31, 2011.

Correct.

2. (m) A security incident at a North American airport will result in more stringent measures to be adopted world-wide. People complain, but still put up with the increasingly stringent security measures.

Wrong. Did not happen.

3. (h) There will be a significant power failure on the transmission grid in North America that will cause an event of a near-equivalent scale of the 2003 Northeast Blackout.

Wrong, did not happen.

4. (m) There will be no “live” or otherwise clear video recording of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. Audio does not count, nor grainy internet images.

Technically correct, but I will judge this prediction as absolutely wrong since Osama got killed on the day of the Canadian federal election.

Financial (1/3 correct)

1. (m) Regular unleaded gas prices will exceed the $1.50/litre that was seen in the Lower Mainland in 2008, creating headlines clearly focused on the price of gasoline, especially around the July 1 carbon tax increase in BC.

Wrong. They came close – around $1.30/litre. You’ll see prices go up to $1.50 in 2012.

2. (m) The Greater Vancouver Real Estate market, as measured by REBGV, will end the year lower for a condominium than at the beginning of the year.

Wrong. A condominium in the GVRE on December 2010 was $360,300, while on December 2011 was $369,900.

3. (m) Food prices, as measured by Statistics Canada (example here), will be at least 3% higher in 2011 than 2010 although it will “feel” more than this.

Correct. Food index on December 2010 was 123.9, while in December 2011 it was 129.3, resulting in a 4.4% increase.

Miscellaneous (6/9 correct, 1 not judged)

1. (e) The Chevrolet Volt will be commercially “insignificant”.

Correct. The key line is “Cumulative sales of the Volt in the U.S. and Canada reached 8,272 units through December 2011″, according to the always-correct Wikipedia.

2. (m) The Nissan Leaf will sell more in 2011 than the Chevrolet Volt.

Correct, but barely. The key Wikipedia line is “Since December 2010 more than 22,000 units have been sold worldwide through February 2012. The top selling markets are the United States, with 10,847 units sold through February 2012, and Japan with more than 8,000 Leafs sold by mid November 2011.” I’ll call this a narrow victory.

3. (m) The Higgs Boson will not be discovered in 2011 even with the Large Hadron Collider being fully operational.

Correct. They’ll find out in 2012 whether it does or does not exist.

4. (h) Vancouver Canucks will win the Stanley Cup. What the heck, have to predict this eventually…

WRONG! They were off by ONE GAME.

5. (m) Facebook will file S-1 and go public.

Wrong. Off by one month and a day – their S-1 went out on February 1, 2012.

6. (h) Twitter will be sold.

Wrong.

7. (m) Mac will not get above 10% penetration in terms of OS usage on the W3Stats index.

Correct. December 2011 shows 8.5%.

8. (m) At least one of Wind Mobile, Mobilicity or Public Mobile will either “sell out” their business or otherwise go out of business.

Correct. Wind Mobile’s parent sold to some Russian telecom company, VimpelCom.

9. (m) The iPad will face a credible competitor. To give an idea of “credible”, it is what Blackberry or Android devices are to the iPhone. It is NOT what Microsoft Zune is to the iPod!

This one is tough to judge. Amazon has a kindle which is designed to compete, Asus has one, Samsung has one… are they credible? I’m not going to judge this one.

10. (e) “Social Networking“, “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” will not reach 2010′s peak value on Google Trends.

Correct, correct, correct!

All in all, not a bad effort in 2011.

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

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.

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Filed under category Politics.

Another single point of failure, although this one was kind of obvious.

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Filed under category Commentary.

So a whole city’s internet infrastructure gets shredded to bits because a building caught on fire – a single point of failure.

I also remember quite a few years ago when I was still a student at UBC that a bus crashed on a power line somewhere in Vancouver and the net result was that it brought down power across the entire university endowment land area.

This leads me to the question of: how many other significant points of failure exist in our infrastructure do we have? I bet the answer to this is much more than we imagine, for power, telecommunications and water/sewage.

A Double Blind post, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Commentary.

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.

A Double Blind post, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Chilliwack, Politics.

What I find interesting is that this is the first time Google actively did something to a product of theirs that I used that would encourage me to no longer use it. Similar products include Office 2007 vs. 2003 (2007 and later has the new “Ribbon” style user interface which is completely unusable), Windows Vista (although I will note that Windows 7 is tolerable) and quite frankly, the whole internet in general.

I’m finding it very interesting how digital technology is seemingly “eroding” into something less usable and less intuitive. Even when working with my cell phone I have to combat a bunch of stupid features that I do not want that gets in the way of what I want it to do.

Maybe this is a sign of my old age.

A Double Blind post, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Filed under category Commentary.

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.

A Double Blind post, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Filed under category Politics.