Blessed by the Potato

My political idealogies lean to the left, as I’m sure you all can tell. I believe in strong, effective social programs such as health care, subsidized education, etc. Most of all though, I believe in taking a long-term view, working towards goals that extend beyond the next 4/5-year election cycle. With that mindset, I’m supporting the Green Party in the upcoming London North-Centre by-election.

One thing that has hurt the Greens in the past is “strategic voting”: people see a large threat, namely the conservatives, and feel that they have to vote for the candidate who has the best chance of blocking that greater threat, even if that candidate doesn’t best represent their interests. It’s all about perception: people believe that the Green party is too new or doesn’t have enough support to win outright, so they back the next-best party, which drives more people to valiantly throw their votes out to stop the party they least want from gaining power.

It’s a concept that isn’t entirely without merit in our first-past-the-post system. However, this is not a general federal election: it’s a by-election with only one seat in Ontario at stake. Strategic voting doesn’t apply at all since the Conservatives already have control of the government. Electing a second-choice candidate to “stop” them here will do nothing to change that. Likewise, in the “worst-case” scenario — a Conservative win — the federal government won’t have any more real power. At best it would be a short-term moral victory, but a weak one: every party is running new candidates, and the Liberals (the incumbent party) are in chaos as they’re in the midst of their own leadership race.

Even that pale threat is mostly illusory: the Conservative candidate in this riding only got 30% of the vote in the last election (the NDP were close in 3rd place with 24%). Since that time, the minority government has not pleased the voters, and a broken election promise is fresh in everyone’s minds (the income trust tax). Plus, the new tory candidate is hiding from the local media which can’t be a good omen for them.

Conversely, a Green win here could have larger ramifications later. It would show people in other ridings for the next election that yes, the Green party can take a seat, making them a more reasonable choice when considering “strategic voting”. It would also clue the other parties into paying more attention to some of the issues and positions that matter to us, and perhaps to alter their stances to overlap the position of the Greens a little more.

The by-election also presents the perfect opportunity for those who are worried about the opposite “strategic” issue; namely those people who believe in at least some of the points in the Green party platform, but didn’t want to risk voting them into power when they are largely inexperienced legislators. A single seat is the perfect starting place.

Those larger party issues are somewhat abstract, however, and don’t mean as much to me personally. At the end of the day, our vote in the by-election is to send a person to Ottawa to represent London North-Centre, and in that regard I have to say that Elizabeth May seems like a perfect candidate. True, she’s not a full-time resident of the area, but her situation is certainly not unheard-of. What seems more important is that she has a very impressive resume, including her status as an Officer of the Order of Canada, no small honour in this country. In her interviews she comes off as very personable, coherent, and energetic; I had the opportunity to meet her in person and was impressed.

Whatever your views, do a bit of research, get involved, and be sure to hit the polls and vote.

Most of the time, I try to avoid politics since it’s a very cynical area of expertise, and I’m already plenty cynical as it is. However, I can’t help but think that a group of people making laws and budgetary decisions that affect all of us is, in some strange way, important, so I do tune into it from time to time.

There has been some noise made for quite some time now that Canada needs a new copyright act, and two sucessive heritage ministers have been pretty weasely about it: taking money from (largely American) companies in dubious fundraising events. First Sam Bulte lost her riding for lashing out against “pro-user zealots” who just wanted to prevent her from being so deep in the RIAA’s pocket that she couldn’t breathe. [in all honesty, it’s difficult to pin an election loss on any one item; it could be that the opponent was just that much better — but this really felt like the big issue in that riding]. Now Bev Oda has been caught at the trough.

I absolutely love the response from the NDP heritage critic. These guys are so on the ball sometimes:

I have done what I could to have a three point plan to maintain the ethical sobriety of the heritage minister: first, reveal the list of those she is putting the tap for money on so we know which lobbyists are rewriting government policy on copyright and deregulation; second, institute a remedial plan so she can learn how to listen to the groups and artists that she is supposed to be representing; and third, ask the House of Commons carpentry staff to head over to the heritage minister’s office and paint over the big for sale sign on her door.

[emphasis mine]

(First seen on Michael Geist’s site; original source)

In other political news, the municipal election for London is on Monday, and I find it really hard to care much at all. I’ve looked into a few candidates and will be voting for those who I think will be at least decent, but I think it’s almost dangerous to be voting with so little research done. I console myself by thinking that many voters don’t do any… What’s really interesting is just how nasty this really insignificant race is. There’s been an “organized campaign” of tearing down certain candidate’s ads, death threats, blackmail, and other such foolishness.

And in a little bit more time, we’ve got a federal by-election coming up to replace our MP (who’s now running for Mayor of London). It’s very interesting, because at the moment the race looks to be between the Green party and the NDP: those are the only street signs I’ve noticed, and I couldn’t even tell you the name of the new Liberal candidate. I like the Green’s new campaigning strategy: the guy came to the door and told Wayfare “don’t worry, there’s no chance of a Conservative getting the seat in this riding, so you can safely vote Green if you like.” At least they’re acknowledging that strategic tactical voting is killing them.

And speaking of strategic voting, I still haven’t written my letter for the Citizen’s Assembly. I wanted to read the other submissions first, and there are a ton of them there. I can tell you that I’m in favour of any system that focuses on electing individual members and not simply throwing your vote towards a party or party list: it’s all too easy in those systems to get party cronies elected who don’t really represent the people. It’s important to have the power to exclude individual members without necessarily rejecting the party outright (cf. Sam Bulte, and the Tories throwing in unelected members for the cabinet). So right now it looks like the type of system I’d like to see is a single transferrable vote type arrangement.

The problem is that some ridings in Ontario (particularly those that are far north) are so big that to merge them or add multi-district “proportional” representatives would be slightly ridiculous. Only slightly, because even though it would make the ridings huge, they would still be somewhat homogeneous since many issues tend to fall along GTA-vs-country type axes. I’ve got a lot more reading to do, but I’ll post a draft of my letter here before I submit anything.

I’ve heard a lot of people rave about “Curb Your Enthusiasm” over the last little while, and most recently had someone strongly recommend it, so I got my hands on season 1 & 2, and I seriously don’t see the appeal at all. In fact, I think I hate it.

It’s sort of like a scripted “reality” show about a TV writer (specifically, Seinfeld co-creator Larry David) while he runs around annoying people and being rude (or yelling at/about rude people). I see that there are a few funny moments in there, but they’re separated by long stretches of random yelling, screaming, bickering people repeating themselves, and awkward pauses. I just can’t get into it and the last few episodes I’ve seen (in season 2) didn’t even have any of those funny moments to make it worth it.

For my birthday, Wayfare picked up a copy of “What Eats Wasps?”, a book by New Scientist magazine basically containing a selection of their last page reader question/answer articles. It was a pretty good choice: I like books full of weird and vaguely useful facts, and wasps are scary so it’s well suited for just before Halloween.

From New Scientist’s point of view, this had to be an incredibly easy book to put together: take a bunch of articles that are already written, and combine them into a book to sell again. However, they didn’t seem to do a very good job with that. Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that the articles were originally published with metric units, and for the book these were converted to units that would be “more familiar to Americans.” It’s mistakes like these that keep costing us Mars probes. The unit conversions seem to have been completely screwy, because I can’t make sense of most of the examples given: one talks about how big a person would have to be in order to have enough fat around their internal organs to stop a bullet before it hit anything vital. “For a man 16 [sic] feet tall…”. About 2/3s of the way through the book, they seem to have given up, and left everything in metric.

It was a bit of an interesting read, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone. Maybe if you can find it in the library and just want to flip through, or if you can just read the articles right out of the magazine…

I really don’t understand what the heck has been up with the Simpsons’ Halloween episodes the last few years. I really expected there to be an episode this sunday (Halloween sunday), especially since the season already started over a month ago (with no notice, no fanfare, and a big stretch of reruns since the first 3 new episodes). November?! Foolish humans, we already have our Christmas decorations up by then!

Anyhow, I found it online, so all is right with the world again.