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.

Today I spent my evening at the Poacher’s Arms to meet some of the other Green Party supporters in London. It was a pretty quiet night, and most of the people there were those who had already become members of the party and/or were volunteering with the campaign. It was a fairly last-minute deal and I only heard about it last night myself. It made for a friendly, intimate atmosphere though. I thought it was going to be more like a rally, but instead I got to chat with a lot of supporters for the Green party, many of whom came from all over Canada (well, the GTA for the most part) to help out in this very special by-election.

Elizabeth May was unfortunately delayed because of a fundraising dinner (for non-political charities). Everyone was really dragging and tired after a long day of campaigning, so there was a huge upswing when she finally arrived, and then a quick exodus as everyone trudged off to bed. There were just a few of us left at the end of the night, and we shared a plate of nachos with Elizabeth and chatted. I can tell you that she’s a bright, caring person who’s absolutely full of energy, and I think she’d get my vote no matter her party affiliation. When she arrived the musician played “Paved Paradise (and put up a parking lot)”, the unofficial theme song of the Greens.

Turns out I’m not much of a conversationalist (who would have known?) so I mostly let the other people do the talking. We talked about life out East, what the door-to-door canvassing part of the campaign is like, politics in Ottawa (particularly Garth Turner), and getting out the student vote. There was very little talk about the campaign platform, I think largely because everyone who was there pretty much agreed on the generalities so there wasn’t any call for debate. I know I read through the platform and couldn’t think of any questions to ask even when I tried.

All-in-all a decent night of politicking, and I feel much more comfortable recommending Elizabeth May and the greens after meeting them.

Here’s a link to Garth Turner’s page where he has a video chat with Elizabeth May (this was back in October when he was still a Conservative MP). Look for the October 17th video, about halfway down the page.

Also, apologies for the site outage on Saturday: it was a combination failure with my domain host and the server box under my desk. This was a scheduled maintenance, but I didn’t get the email until it had already started (partly my fault for only checking that account every 2-3 days, and partly theirs for only giving like 20 hours notice of the outage).

I’ve been watching a lot more TV now that it’s fall again, and along with that comes watching more commercials. Recently, I saw one announcing that Saab is introducing an SUV, and I was overcome with complete disbelief.

Disbelief because they’re doing this now, when the SUV market is finally starting to turn back down and honest-to-goodness cars are coming on strong. When climate change and foreign oil dependency are on the minds of many Americans.

Disbelief because I can’t believe how stupid GM is. GM has become essentially a truck company in the last decade or so, since that seems to be the only division capable of turning a profit there. Despite being the largest automaker in the world with the resources to do some good research into efficiency (and actually managing to produce and sell an electric car at one point), they left it to Honda and Toyota to actually produce working, production hybrids (and from the look of their concept cars, fuel cell vehicles as well). With the exception of a few models, most GM cars are not seen in a very good light, and only massive sales promotions have manged to move any. So one would think that when they bought Saab, it was to produce cars, specifically cars designed in a different way than the GM standard (cars designed by people who make jets, or so I’ve heard). Yet when the brand faces sagging sales, rather than trying to keep it as a low-volume identity, or making different (smaller?) cars, GM goes to it’s old stand-by formula: more towing capacity = more sales. It’s so short-sighted and unimaginative that it makes me mad; worse yet is that it might actually work for them. Of course, it also puts GM into even more of an eggs-in-one-basket situation: if SUV backlash gets much worse and sales slump even more (and they could be primed to, as I’ve heard reports that the resale value of SUVs is taking a nose-dive: the people who want to drive SUVs tend not to be the same people who want to save money on used cars) then GM could be in for a whole world of hurt.

Also The Departed and The Return are playing on adjacent screens at the movie theatres here. It really makes them seem like they go together.

Finally, this is an absolute must-see. I first saw it on a clip of the Ellen show that Wayfare taped for me, and it’s so impressive that the dog not only rides the skateboard, but steers it, and stops before crashing into the curb and turns around. On the clip from TV, we also see the dog’s owner introducing the bit while holding the skateboard, and the dog just flips out with excitement waiting for him to put it down so it can ride.

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.

The cost of postage in Canada seems to be going up really quickly: it’s at 51 cents now (as far as I know), but I still have quite a few 49 and 50 cent stamps. I got some penny stamps a while ago to make up the difference and use up my old ones, but I kinda wondered if they would work if I used them as-is. I think they would: after all, that was the cost of postage when they got the money from me, but I couldn’t be sure of that. I know that right after the price hike, I sucessfully got a letter from my mom with just 50 cents on it. In the office today, someone else had the same question: “think they’ll deliver this even though it’s a penny short?” “Heck,” I said “tape a penny on the front and see what happens.”

Turns out I’m not the first one to think of this.