Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Why the spike in anti-Elizabeth May rantings? Is there something in the air? Profanity laced rants are easy to find today.

And what’s of greater interest to Canadians? That the Greens spent $4M of their money on advertising for an increase in votes, and no seats, or that Harper has increased his cabinet seats in a way that costs Canadians $4M more?

May isn’t the perfect leader. She chose already to run in the wrong riding again, and will lose most likely against MacKay, barring a major shift in the next year. She did break through to the televised debates, however. And she got an almost fair level of coverage from the MSM, which will translate to bigger gains next election. Yes, she needs to promote the Green team better, but that will come with a more educated media too — it’s not all her (or her staff’s fault) that the media will only respond to name they are familiar with. Carr, Genest, Grice, Shasko, are all names that the media need to become familiar with, so that the party can get press releases covered if they drop those names. Other parties have a huge advantage in having MPs on TV shows weekly, and I don’t fault May for having an unfair number of seats in the House. Close to 1 million voting Canadians already want to hear from the Greens when they listen to political discussion, and so the media should honour that (instead of the Sun gloating that they don’t have to listen to May *picture finger in ears*).

It’s been viewed well over a million times, in many different languages. Severn Suzuki, just 12 in 1992, speaks with more force and honesty than many government representatives combined. I hope you show this to your friends, and family because it’s important for every human to realize that if you can’t fix it, don’t break it.

Yesterday I got to hear the grown up Severn speak to a crowd at the UofR. While she was no where near as angry or urgent in her delivery last night, she’s still working on getting humans to us systems that don’t rob children of the luxuries we enjoy. Another speaker last night put it so well when she quoted a Mi’kmaq elder as saying that we have inherited the earth, and also borrowed it from our children. Like the credit crisis going on now, I don’t think we’ll manage to pay our children back, and we’ll leave it to them to bail themselves out. History will not be kind to my generation.

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When Severn had given her lecture last night, she took questions, and also asked one. I was one in the crowd to answer why the sometimes “radical” and “left leaning” population of Saskatchewan had gone Conservative in the last elections. (I took her question to mean the Sask Party victory, and not the Conservative victory, so my answer was tailored to last year’s election.) I explained that there was a rural population backlash at having been ignored by government, and that with First Past The Post, a slight shift had tipped the scales in favour of conservatism. Daniel in the audience mentioned that the ridings were possibly gerrymandered in a way that favoured the Conservatives (the seats includes both a rural and urban population). An older gentleman opined that apathy was the key factor, and that it affected urban and rural voters.

Larissa Shasko was in the audience, and said that as a candidate for the Green Party in the last two elections, she’d spoken with a large number of people in Palliser, and the overriding cause of low voter turnout was due to most people being totally disengaged in the political process. Elections and politics is not on their personal priority list, and they don’t see it as relevant. She said the Saskatchewan chapter of Fair Vote Canada will be active in bringing Proportional Representation (PR) to the province, which should restore some of the willingness people have in casting votes. This was met with applause from the crowd.

And another interesting point raised by an older woman was that First Nations traditionally don’t cast votes. She said elders had told them that voting legitimized the system that did not make them citizens of Canada until “1962″, and had them managed under the department of “Immigration” (to which the crowd chuckled at, due to the absurdity of treating Aboriginal people as immigrants to their own country). She said she’s changed her mind about voting over the years, because the overriding concern of her community has been to protect treaty rights (as small as they seem, she said), and the best way is to vote. She was critical of the Conservatives, who she said want to take treaty rights away.

So there you have many explanations of why Saskatchewan votes Conservative MPs and Sask Party MLAs into power, and why voter turnout is so low.

Election winners: Conservatives, Bloc.
Election losers: Liberals, NDP, Greens.

Who got the most votes, the winners or losers? The “losers” did. What’s wrong with this picture?

Demand electoral reform!

This makes the biggest loser (drum roll please…) the Canadian taxpayer. They put up with an election call that broke the very spirit of Harper’s previously touted “Fixed Election dates” law, and have no change in power, or mandate, to show for their patience. It’s also possible to classify the Green Party as a “loser” in this election, but the campaign didn’t feel that way. They picked up an increase in their popular vote of over 2%, despite about 2% fewer voters overall showing up to the polls.

The Canadian democracy is just 8% away from being obviously illegitimate. When fewer than 50% of eligible people cast ballots, we can declare democracy a sham in this nation. With 58%, we can certainly say it’s gravely wounded and on its deathbed.

CBC and the other media were questioning when not if Dion is done as Liberal leader. I think he should stay on, and the Liberals should rally around him for a stronger second fight whenever that is. To give up on Dion now, is to fall into the Conservative trap they are laying, which is to have the Liberals unable to fight a TV ad war. TV ads motivate the less tuned-in voters to vote with their guts and not as much with their brains. I suspect it is these voters that swung it to a larger Harper minority this time, as the Liberals did not fight back as hard in the TV and radio attack advertising.

At least Peter Mansbridge pointed out with a smirk just how gleeful Harper must be that the media is being tough on Dion, while Harper too failed to achieve the victory of a majority government. Keith Boag has written off Dion. B.C. Liberals were less inclined to throw Dion under a bus, and even went so far to say they’d leave it to the NDP to back up Harper’s government. Could we see another election within scant months? I think it’s likely. Hopefully just not before the electoral system is changed to better reflect popular voting preferences.

In Summary:
Liberals - beware the trap of turfing Dion.

Greens - chins up, it’s going to get even better, and seats will come within the next years.

NDP - not as bad as I expected, and a strong showing in Alberta, and some close Saskatchewan races too. Layton won’t put you over 100 seats, but he’s sure to keep at least 30 for the stretch.

Conservatives - TV ads may buy you thousands of votes, but you’ll have to do more than run ads in Quebec to win them over from the Bloc. Stick to the fixed election law this time, and work with parties who have more seats, so that Canada really does “move forward” as Harper declared the voters wanted tonight. This of course means implementing serious environmental, and economic reforms.

Voters - Keep your ID at the ready, and voting X practiced up. If you want to do this less often, demand proportional representation. You’ll save us hundreds of millions of dollars next decade alone by doing that.

Media - Get a spine in the off-season. Canada is counting on you to play hardball with anyone who gives you B.S. (party talking points designed for TV clips) or tells you to talk to them after the election (as if anyone should listen to them at that point). Stop advancing Conservative smear-spin like “Dion is not a leader”, or “tax on everything“. Give a cost breakdown of the budgets and tell Canadians who will raise taxes, and who won’t, based on platforms. If a party doesn’t have a platform, don’t talk about them, it only makes sense. The Greens were unfairly characterized as a one issue party — well, what kind of coverage should a No Issue party get, hmmm?

That’s it, I’m going to bed. Wake me in 4 years for the next “fixed election”, will you? That is, if there’s still a country left. Otherwise just let me sleep in and remain blissfully ignorant (which is in season).

What fantastic timing this article has? In the same day that the We Campaign notified me that ABC rejected to broadcast this inoffensive and important ad, the Planet S paper let me know that my interview was published.

-Tell ABC to air the ad tonight.

I talked with the paper about media bias, and interaction with bloggers. The article author, Stephen LaRose, notes that most main stream media is owned by large corporations that are profit driven. Providing the public with information is secondary to making a lot of money. If a choice has to be made between providing information that offends, or making more money, money will win the toss up. That leads to a dumber population, and there’s no doubt about that.

Of course, the only people who would find the We Campaign offensive would be companies like Exxon. ABC decided that airing the ad might lose them a continuous stream of oil money, on the less funded and low frequency appearance of the truth. They made a decision to turn down money from an anti-consumerism and energy efficiency organization, and instead take ad money from oil companies.

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On the front page of the Leader Post this morning, they declared Ralph Goodale to have about a 15 point lead over Michelle Hunter of the Conservatives. The NDP and Greens trail with about 11 and 3% respectively. The paper also got George Wooldridge’s name wrong, calling him “Stephen”. Stephen Harper, and Stephen Moore must have been on their brains, but it’s sad that they’d butcher a man’s name so badly when it’s probably his first appearance on the front page of the Regina daily (owned by CanWest Global). I hope they publish a front page correction tomorrow morning.

Ira, please correct your timeline for 2008. The Greens were the first national party to release a platform, not the Liberals as you state.

Is it just me, or is it REALLY BAD to have an obvious factual error in a segment called “Reality Check”?

Sept. 17 Green Party

Sept. 22 Liberals

And I haven’t even gone digging to see if one of the “other” parties released theirs even earlier. Or maybe some have gone the route of the Conservatives and didn’t have a platform ready until the last week of the campaign because they were too busy copying it from the Australians.

Perhaps CBC will claim that they were “right” because the Liberals were the first of the three parties they listed. That’s not good enough for journalists attempting to perform a “reality check”. The reality as most Canadians know is that it’s a different federal landscape with the Green Party often polling above 10% in many parts of the country.

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Also problematic is that Jack Layton is identified as being the one to call the Conservatives out for not offering a platform by the time of the debate. Elizabeth May was the leader who first pinned Stephen Harper down for that anti-democratic gaffe.

Denise on CBC’s comments gets it correct:

I would like to point out that it was Elizabeth May who first challenged Stephen Harper to reveal his platform during the English language debate.

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UPDATE: Ira has posted another article supposedly comparing the parties, but leaves off the Bloc and Greens again. The comments are mostly people asking why he didn’t include the Green Party’s platform in his analysis.

The Copyservatives are really without imagination, aren’t they?

On October 14th, don’t vote for a John Howard Copyservative candidate. I mean, don’t vote for a Stephen Harper Conservative candidate.

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And now, a not so modest proposal for progressive parties (that includes no baby eating!):

This morning, after Elizabeth May got more national coverage smacking down Mike Duffy’s biased questions, the NDP and Conservatives are hard at work trying to convince us that May is in 3rd in the riding. Nonsense. She’s got national as well as local news coverage, and the NDP who tout previous election results as a guide, are neglecting to mention that’s with a different (and “star”) candidate who isn’t running this time.

A better, and non-partisan, solution to the pickle the progressive parties find themselves in is to admit that none of them are going to win a majority this time, so they should start playing nice with each other and lay the groundwork for a coalition that wants to achieve certain key objectives like controlling climate change, and Reeforrrrming the electoral system. Once those objectives are met, they are free to tear each others’ eyes out for a majority in a fair system that doesn’t favour the Conservatives’ 35% block of voters.

… Rabble Election Blog has a valid point! Yes, that their point is valid is what is startling; that it isn’t just more Green Party bashing. In this case, the site takes aim at CBC (darn liberal media) for not properly covering the election in Central Nova. Elizabeth May, and Peter MacKay are squaring off there, and the NDP candidate who no one in the country has heard of, didn’t get a fair mention in The National’s story. It was even shot in a way that seemed to imply she wasn’t at the Antigonish candidates debate CBC was reporting on.

Unfortunately, in Rabble’s rush to defend democracy through fair reporting, they neglected to mention the OTHER two candidates in the riding who were also ignored (and didn’t even have their signs shown like the NDP got). Michael Harris MacKay, of the Christian Heritage Party of Canada and Paul Kemp of the Canadian Action Party are probably not so amused either. Since the Green Party was very recently in their boat (of media coverage omission, you know, the policy that Jack Layton supported with Stephen Harper?), I sympathize with their plights in receiving fair media coverage. Will Rabble Election Blog correct their story to mention those candidates as well?

Sure, the CAP and CHP have a much smaller chance of getting elected than May, the NDP, or MacKay (Conservative), but the point is that the media should not play favourites, because every candidate is equal… until election day.

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I would have preferred that the NDP teamed up with May to defeat MacKay in the same manner, and in return I would have expected May to ensure that one or two NDP candidates with good records on environmental policy get elected where they had a shot. As it stands now, the NDP are almost certainly going to lose to Peter MacKay, and will only take down Elizabeth May with them. I’m sure the less clear thinking members of the party will take glee in that, despite it being one more seat Stephen Harper needs to put a nail through any law he can get support from the Liberals and Bloc on. Spilled milk will flow on election day. I have a feeling it might not be pretty. And if it does spill, it will only be a grim reminder that Jack Layton would rather work with Stephen Harper in Parliament, than he would a potential ally like Elizabeth May. That says something pretty negative about him I feel.

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CBC online coverage

The TSX had its biggest drop since October 2000 within 48 hours of Harper saying that.

“At one point [during the debate], the Liberal leader was so desperately begging voters not to believe Stephen Harper I thought he was going to start crying.”

He was pleading for rationality, but you would be too if Stephen Harper’s party ran non stop ads defaming your character and telling constant lies about your platform, while the media tells Canadians that they should take Harper seriously. May summed up Harper best when she said to him, “Your word is law, and that’s no way to be Prime Minister!”

- The RCMP acting against the media to keep them from interviewing Harper
http://www.thestar.com/article/505680

- Conservative candidates not showing up for All Candidates forums
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2008/09/30/debate-challenge.html

- No comprehensive Conservative platform released, despite an election call by a Conservative PM that violated the very spirit of his fixed election law
http://www.illegalelection.ca

It’s AMAZING the media doesn’t laugh Harper out of the room when he talks about the economy and numerous other issues he’s completely discredited on. Are reporters too afraid to report the truth because they are being threatened by Conservatives? What’s really going on? Are they stunned that a plagiarist would lie so boldly to a camera?

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Hat tip to Macleans