Your daily (sorry about the 3 day break) source of Canadiana punditry. I disappear for three days and a good number of pundits call for insanity!
Mindelle Jacobs trots the Conservative party line and agrees that 14 year olds should be thrown in jail at your expense for the rests of their lives. Yes, we really have to protect society from these little ankle biting brats for the next 80 years of their lives. That is totally the way to deal with this problem. Note: Remember the last time you heard someone say “Bring it on”? How did that work out?
Pat MacAdam discusses the history of Canadian electoral debates.
The Edmonton Journal seems determined to hate on Dion. Last week, it was Dion being too specific about his programs. Now, he’s trying too hard to make everyone happy.
Paula Simons points out the Alberta Conservatives’ own weird sponsorship oddities.
Earl McRae and his interesting discussions with the have-nots of our society.
Barbara Yaffe is excited about the potential of this election for the Greens.
Did we mention that Greg Weston hates Dion and anything that might even remotely hurt Alberta?
Mr. Mayrand says Elections Canada is pursuing the idea of using new technology to help voters, and young ones in particular, exercise their franchise.
“We’re looking at testing some online-voting options,” he said. Because Canadian ballots are comparatively simple compared to the U.S., there is no real benefit to moving to electronic voting machines in polling stations, as some jurisdictions in the U.S. have done.
A good first step would be allowing voters to register online but, one day, electors could cast their votes online, he says.
“In a few years from now, the technology will be there that is easier to use and more and more secure.”
Young people who now do almost everything on the Internet will come to expect an online-voting option, he says, but it could also help older voters participate as the population ages.
“We have more and more electors that are less mobile. These are people who have voted all their lives. We need to find ways to keep the voting process accessible.”
My generation and those that come after it may think that they can do everything online without leaving their home, but reality calls once in a while, and democracy is one such reality. If we want to keep it as reality, we have to get out of our homes and hit the streets now and then, and certainly put our ballot into the ballot box, and even scrutineer the count once in a while.
The potential for making electronic voting secure enough to put the fate of democracy into it, is simply not here, and will never be here. This is because it’s not about improving the security of online transactions. It’s because online transactions by their very nature are remote and not verifiable by the voter as being accurate, that we cannot allow electronic voting to decide our Parliament.
If you put your vote into a black box where a computer programmer can change it without you knowing, you deserve the leaders you’ll get. Not that I’m going to do anything illegal, but I’d rather be a computer programmer (which I technically am) than you, if you are an advocate for electronic voting.
I’m not a technical Luddite (even though I only got a cell phone 2 years ago and have never texted from it). I see the benefits to registering voters online to save money and trouble. But the line must be drawn when technology starts to give demonstrable advantages to crooks and cheaters who could literally steal our democracy away from us and ruin a $280M election process (on top of possibly installing a dictator in power). Is all that risk worth sitting on your butt on election day?
Have you ever moved? Probably at least once, even within the same city.
It sucks. It’s a lot of work, a lot of physical strain, and at the end of it you have a wonderful new home full of boxes to be unpacked and stuff to be put away in furniture that has to be rebuilt. At the wonderful new home 1h and I have landed in, we also lack both phone and Internet for the time being.
Due to the severe lack of Liberal advertising, my last election ad review mostly consisted of my frustration at, well, the lack of Liberal advertising.
In the two days since that review, the Liberals have released two new advertisements. One of which I quite like, and encourage more of, and the other of which I enjoy, but feel it may come across as too intellectual for a lot of people.
Without further ado, here we go.
“Liberal Leadership”
Now, when I first saw this commercial and saw Dion go “since you are blocking such an important decision,” I was excited, expecting a real smack down. For example, Dion to take off his jacket and be like, we are going to fight this out fist-to-fist right here on the floor of this summit.
But his second statement — “You should express your case to the world, please” — just didn’t have the punch I was hoping for. I understand that diplomatically what he did was incredible and quite powerful. However, the politeness of it just made me shrug.
Note though, that the more I see it, the more I understand what they are going for, and the more I like it. However, the punch that I believe they are going for is missing somewhat. Even though the “decided!” thing at the end is always a nice shot of Dion.
The final statement “With Canada’s Liberals, Canada leads,” is another punchy solid line, and they kept the “Let’s get started” theme.
Overall Score
3/5 It’s an okay commercial overall.
“The Real Harper”
Yes, yes yes yes yes! I actually had to delete a blog posting that I had scheduled for this morning about how the Liberals (and the NDP as well, but they have at least one attack ad against Harper) need to go on the offensive. This is especially important now that Harper is clearly on the defensive over the myriad gaffes over the last few weeks.
It’s excellent to see a well scripted, well sourced attack ad from the Liberals. Especially over the vile treatment of the Listeriosis crisis by Harper’s team. In general, I hope to see more of these types of quality attack ads which are relevant and timely (and not the attack ads from the last election which were easily refuted or untimely to the extreme.)
Overall Score
4.5/5 More of this would likely be nice.
Conservative senator Bert Brown seems to be quite confused about the Canadian Senate. He complains that there isn’t a 50/50 split between the Conservatives and the Liberals in the senate regardless that there are more than two parties in government and that even though Liberals have been in power for a majority of the last 50 years they have appointed senators from every party in rough proportion to the number of seats held in the House. He sees that the senate has a job as a sober second thought to the House of Commons, but is upset that it is doing its job as a sober second thought now that the House is Conservative.
The Calgary Herald bemoans the lack of draconian police action in Calgary.
… when one crook shoots dead another crook, the result is one less crook … Not the highest expression of human empathy in any case, but for Calgarians such denial is becoming harder, and the case for draconic action easier to make.
…
No reasonable Canadian aspires to a police state, nor some Minority Report world in which people are convicted upon suspicion. Yet, long before Albertans need grapple with the dilemmas posed by such extremes, they could find a comfortable balance of civil liberties with police powers sufficient to accomplish what most Canadians say they want — safe streets, and the worst criminals set to manufacturing licence plates for long enough to get good at it and perhaps even turn their lives around.
…
It starts at the top. Work the police as hard as one can, but judges must be ready to jail felons, and governments prepared to build penitentiaries. A federal election is a perfect time to hear concrete plans towards these ends. We must demand it.
(Background: Maple Leaf meats released a lot of tainted lunch meat which led to the deaths of at least 17 people. Gerry Ritz, a Conservative, is the current agricultural minister. During a recent teleconference, he referred to the deaths as “death by a thousand cold cuts”, and upon hearing of another death in a Liberal-held riding, he asked if the death was the Liberal MP for that riding, all while laughing.)
Lyn Cockburn somehow finds a way to turn Gerry Ritz’s heartless comments about the Listeriosis deaths into an attack on the Liberals and NDP — All of this propensity for coverage of political gaffes is fundamentally unfair to the Conservatives, none of the other parties gaffe like this. If the other parties show their insensitivity and gaffe more, then the coverage will be fair again.
Tom Brodbeck really hates the NDP and Jack Layton, but mostly Jack Layton. Why? Jack Layton supports the NDP premier of Manitoba, but not the Harper’s Conservatives. He defends this hatred by comparing apples to oranges and claiming they are bananas.
Rick Salutin mourns the slow demise of the cultural community in Canada at the hands of Conservative censorship. He believes that grants for culture are nonpartisan long term endeavours to improve life for all Canadians. Harper believes that art grants should be morally vetted by whomever happens to be in power at the time.
Father Raymond J. De Souza believes that because the OHRC (Ontario Human Rights Commission) believes that doctors shouldn’t be allowed to selectively treat their patients based on their personal prejudices (eg. only treating straight couples who want to conceive.) then obviously all doctors will be forced to do abortions.
(Background: Harper recently stated that he believes Canada is becoming more Conservative over the last 20 years.)
Janet Bagnall takes on Harpers claim that Canada is becoming more Conservative and thoroughly tears it to shreds and also demonstrates out the hypocrisy of Harper claiming to be fiscally Conservative.
Harper recognized in his Fredericton remarks that the Canadian public is not “necessarily as conservative as everyone in our party.” He said the Conservatives would have to move toward Canadians “if they want to continue to govern the country.”
This is a tacit acknowledgment that two in three voters - a large majority, in other words - do not intend to vote Conservative. The fact is that the Conservatives will likely win anyway. But that is emphatically not because Canadians have drifted rightward. The problem is that the non-Conservative vote is divided among four parties in the centre and on the left, the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Green Party.
Susan Martinuk trots out the same old Conservative talking points about the Green Shift — concentrating entirely on the carbon tax and ignoring entirely the massive cuts to income tax.
Jeffrey Simpson searches for what it mean to be Liberal — What is the Liberal brand? — and comes up empty handed.
When I first heard about Palin’s e-mail account used for some of her official government business she wants to keep off the record, I said to my wife, “I bet you it gets hacked within the week.” There is more than one reason government e-mails are kept on the government IT infrastructure. IT not only maintains backups and ensures that the law is followed when it comes to government openness, they also ensure that confidential, and classified information is not revealed.
After reading about Palin’s e-mail account “hack” and the ensuing fall-out from it, I feel it’s important to say a few things about this. From a purely ethical point of view, this was a complete invasion of privacy and ethically wrong. If this was done with a “white-hat” mentality (ie. to let Palin know about the insecurity of using such an account for official business), then the password and private emails/pictures should never have been publicly revealed. If this was done with a mentality of punishing Palin for using a private account, then this is pure vigilantism and also completely inacceptable as well.
However, I’m betting, since it was done by 4chan and Anonymous, it was done for pure lolz. Which would explain the lengths these people went to show that they did it without actually showing any damning emails or such. In fact, it reminded me of some of the hacks before the internet, where people take a trophy from their hack but actively avoid taking anything that could get people in trouble.
Shockingly, nothing classified or confidential was released, at least not yet and the account was fully deleted from what I can tell. So, if Palin was using the account to hide things from the general populous illegally, that will never be found out even if the information was subpeonaed.
Now, on the other side of things, nothing incredibly bad has come of this other than showcasing the stupidity of using public email services for government or classified email business. Hopefully, a lesson many politicians will learn before something really important is publicly revealed. So, a lot of noise and very little substance in exchange for some highly questionable behaviour.
In the end, it was fairly obvious to anyone with the least bit of internet security experience that it was a matter of time before someone hacked her account upon the address being publicly known. Regardless of the ethicality of it, there are enough people with the skill to do such a thing, that it was pretty much a given. Hopefully, the politicians will listen to their IT technicians next time they try something like this.
Paula Simons applauds Ed Stelmach’s (Alberta’s premier) recent move to depoliticize the task of hiring returning officers for Alberta elections by having the Chief Electoral Officer hire them based on merit and not simply having the current ruling party choose them. It’s a small step, but definitely a step in the right direction.
Jeffrey Simpson discusses Harper’s international influences from Australian and American conservatism and how these strategies could end up hurting Canada in the long run — From John Howard’s electoral strategy of tax cuts for targeted demographics to Karl Rove’s politics of lying voraciously about your opponent and their policies at every possible opportunity. Both strategies are generally recognized as being damaging the economy and democracy in general.
Don Martin thinks that bringing out the other big Liberal names, like Bob Rae, will hurt Dion in the long run by emphasizing his weaknesses.
Lawrence Martin believes the exact opposite — the biggest thing the Liberals have to sell during this election is their large number of highly-qualified candidates instead of simply one leader. After all, this is a parliamentary democracy.
Greg Weston points out the tough spot Dippers (For Americans, Dippers are NDP supporters) are in. They may have to play the spoiler this election. The NDP party could end up giving Harper his much desired majority or they could keep Harper in minority territory.
Doug Saunders reveals little known plan for a Canada-EU trade agreement rivalling NAFTA, a plan Harper wasn’t going to reveal until after the election.
The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA by encompassing not only unrestricted trade in goods, services and investment and the removal of tariffs, but also the free movement of skilled people and an open market in government services and procurement – which would require that Canadian governments allow European companies to bid as equals on government contracts for both goods and services and end the favouring of local or national providers of public-sector services.
Dan Gardiner calls famous economist Gregory Mankiw at Harvard and asks him what the thinks of the Liberal’s Green Shift. Mankiw replies that policies similar to the Green Shift are good economic policy, even if you don’t believe in global warming. They increase the available money to citizens by decreasing income taxes and encourage companies to consider externalities when they invest.
The StarPhoenix has a troubling story about how the government treats some of our newest citizens.
Foreign Affairs officials had made a commitment to Mr. Abdelrazik that they would provide him with a temporary passport should he find an airline willing to transport him to Canada despite his presence on the U.S. no-fly list.
Less than 24 hours before Mr. Abdelrazik’s scheduled flight home this week from Khartoum on Etihad Airway via Abu Dhabi to Toronto, the government’s lawyer informed him that the passport wouldn’t be provided.
Charged with ensuring the prime minister’s safety, the RCMP security service has instead been forced to become the Conservative party’s armed public relations agency for the election campaign.
Last week, the Mounties were used to corral a television crew doing their job. Yesterday morning, it was about a dozen angry autoworkers losing their jobs who threatened Harper’s sound bite of the day, and wound up on the wrong end of the Horsemen.
…
All of the federal leaders have RCMP bodyguards for the election, but none we have ever seen has been forced to do political dirty work like the squad assigned to Harper.
The best bodyguards in the business — and always nice to me — they are now being forced to use their authority to protect Conservative photo ops.
(Don’t blame the officers — they’re just following orders, and my bet is most are embarrassed all to hell at having to dirty their hands in political swill.)
Murray Mandryk is tired of Conservatives and the NDP telling him what they don’t like about Dion’s “Green Shift.” He wants them to explain what’s right with their environmental plans and how they compare point-by-point with the Liberal plan. (As background for Americans, the “Green Shift” is a plan to create a carbon tax in Canada and use the taxes raised from it to drastically lower income taxes.)
The Edmonton Journal questions the intelligence of using the best farmland in Alberta for more McMansions and urban sprawl.
Carol Goar worries about the gutting of literacy programs in Canada over the last few years and the total lack of any discussion about it during this election.
Regrettably, the federal government is withdrawing from the field. Eight months after taking power, the Conservatives chopped funding for adult literacy by $17.7 million. They replaced the National Literacy Secretariat, set up Brian Mulroney 21 years ago, with their own Office of Literacy and Learning. But it deals only with national organizations. The network of provincial and local literacy organizations that linked thousands of volunteers has withered.
This spring, there was more bad new from Ottawa. The centre of excellence for literacy, anchored at the University of Western Ontario, lost its bid for a renewal of its seven-year mandate. Its funding ran out on March 31.
Thomas Walkom discusses the almost religious economic orthodoxy of the Conservative Party and the current economic troubles in the US. Asking if it is a good idea to maintain such orthodoxy in times of adversity.
The last edition of this went over some of the early commercials released by the NDP campaign; this time it’s the Liberals’ first turn. They’ve only released one commercial (that I am aware of). However, they have been releasing daily video dairies by Dion, so I will review the effectiveness of those as well.
The first commercial:
“Turn the Page.”
Interesting mix of attack ad + positive message. It seems like Dion is saying that not only is he turning the page on these bad economic policies, but he’s also turning the page on exclusively doing attack ads (a common Liberal practice during prior elections). The feel near the end is very similar to Obama ads during the early primaries: positive, green, and full of promises. Especially effective is how he pushes the green shift by concentrating on tax cuts rather than hikes. The “Let’s Get Started” is positive and really drives home that these problems will require everyone to work together. It would be nice if there was a series of commercials with this theme.
Now, on the negative side. Harpernomics? Seriously? It feels forced and hurts the attack of the commercial by making it seem childish. Re: the punishing polluters, I can promise you many Albertans will view the “punishing polluters” as “punishing Albertans” even though I don’t think that is entirely the message Dion intended. Some Hamiltonians (and residents of other manufacturing cities) may also feel the same way.
This commercial courts Green voters and a small thin edge of the Conservatives, which might be Dion’s best opportunities to widen his base. However, it doesn’t do much to encourage regular Quebecers or Ontarians to vote for Dion, and drives away Albertans and possibly blue-collar Canadians.
The biggest negative so far for this commercial and Dion’s campaign isn’t even in the commercial, per se. THIS IS THE ONLY AD I CAN FIND. It’s been over a week into the campaign and this is all they are releasing. Harper is swamping the airwaves with his “I am an ordinary guy who likes ordinary things” during almost every program on the air. Yet, not much from the Liberals. The commercial itself is okay, but this lack of action from the party as a whole is inexcusable. “Let’s Get Started” doesn’t mean much if the Liberals aren’t even getting started on their own campaign.
Overall Rating: 2.5/5 (it’s a nice commercial to see, but not very strong.)
“Dion’s daily campaign diaries”
Personally, I love the idea of getting to know a candidate via the internet. It shows that they are both technologically savvy and willing to step out of character for a bit. It’s cute, and could have the effect of actually making Dion personable at low cost. I especially like the fact that it really seems genuine.
Now, the bad side. The biggest negative is that it is not really accessible. I have watched a bunch of them, and really quite enjoy them. I would love to see other leaders do something similar — Layton? May? Are you willing to go somewhat unscripted? However, it’s just a minor footnote, and isn’t being promoted much, if at all.
Also, he cannot go too negative or too personal, but it would be nice to have something said on the video blogs that is genuinely shocking, surprising or interactive. Perhaps, something powerful enough to make the news. That would get two birds with one stone — make it more visible and contribute something more liberal to the national dialogue (beyond puffin poop).
Overall, I love this type of stuff where it’s at least slightly less scripted than the rest of the campaign. Dion has a strong personal character and it comes out in these diaries but he needs to do more. While these are a good first step in introducing him to Canadians and I love the format, I fear this may be too little too late.
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
The biggest issue I have with the current Liberal advertising strategy is not anything with their commercials, but their seeming lack of advertising. If they want to win more ridings (or even keep all of their current ones), they need to get out their message more clearly and to bigger audiences. One commercial does not a campaign make.
1h
edit: Scott Tribe has alerted me to another Liberal commercial regarding the Green Shift which was released about a week prior to the election writ. I can agree that it’s a election commercial, but I’m trying to concentrate on the commercials released during the election. This commercial is a Green Shift oriented commercial, and lays out some of the preliminaries for the election. I may review it in a later election ad entry.
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