October 9, 2011
Rick Mercer on the War of 1812 Bicentennial
Matt Gurney: Even the media were bored by the Ontario election
Did you find the recent Ontario election a big snore-fest? You’re not alone. So did the journalists covering the “festivities”:
Ontario politics is a bit dull at the best of times, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a large, populous province, with the economy to match. It’s troubled now, battered and bruised from years of mismanagement and the global economic crisis, but it’s still the centre of Canada’s economic gravity. Ontario needs to do well.
And yet, even by the usual standards for snooze-inducing Ontario partisanship, last week’s election was lame. The Liberals, under Dalton McGuinty, essentially breezed through it, never saying much. Whenever a punch was thrown — and not many were — they seemed to just bounce off the inexplicable forcefield that somehow protects Mr. McGuinty from consequences for his electoral missteps. The Tim Hudak-led PCs made the mistake of thinking that Ontarians were eager to vote them into power, and then ran a tone-deaf campaign that was only notable for its costly mistakes. The proof of that is found in the exit polling data: The Tories focused obsessively on Dalton McGuinty’s record of tax hikes, branding him “the Tax Man.” But only 15% of Ontario’s voters identified that as their main worry, meaning that the PCs’ biggest ad buy missed 85% of the electorate. And the NDP, under Andrew Horwath, mainly offered ridiculous suggestions like protectionist Buy Ontario legislation and arbitrarily freezing some consumer prices for purely political purposes. Outside of northern Ontario, not a lot of people think that’ll do much good.
The voter turnout reflected that: It’s estimated right now to have been roughly 49%, less than half of eligible voters. There’s cause to fret about that, and wonder what’s to be done, but for now, let’s just accept that rather than a sign that our democracy is broken, or doomed, it’s really what Rex Murphy said it was in his Saturday column — a deliberate rebuke of all the parties by a frustrated, insulted electorate. A pox on all their houses, as it were. If so, there was some early warning that that would be the case — even the journalists whose job it is to muster up excitement for politics had a hard time concealing their displeasure during this campaign.
I found it interesting that one of the most popular posts I’ve put up in the last several months was the one about how to refuse your ballot under Ontario’s election law. That’s certainly an indication of the relative level of voter disenchantment with the candidates and parties.
October 7, 2011
Matt Gurney: Caledonia, the election issue that wasn’t
After a quick run-down of why the Tories blew the election (their bucket of snot campaign offerings that differed only in slight degree from the Liberals) Matt Gurney explains why McGuinty’s win is tragic:
It’s because of one word, a word that was barely spoken during the campaign: Caledonia.
The story is familiar, but warrants recapping: In 2006, sections of that small town were occupied by Six Nations native “protestors” (read: thugs) who were protesting the development of a new subdivision that the thugs believed encroached on their land. The native thugs terrorized local residents, driving some from their homes. Citizens, and police officers, were assaulted. Public property was destroyed.
The Ontario Provincial Police did nothing, despite the palpable shame of many of the officers who were clearly humiliated at standing by and doing nothing while the law was flagrantly broken before their eyes. It was clear to any observer that they had been ordered to simply keep the sides separated and not worry too much about such trivialities such as arresting criminals and detaining them until the Crown could lay charges. They were, as Dalton McGuinty told our editorial board last month, peacekeepers. As he said then, he wished he could give them all a blue helmet.
Nice, fluffy sentiment. Premier Dad at his best. But there’s a problem with it: The police are not peacekeepers. That’s the military’s job. The job of the police is to enforce the law. And it’s not a small difference. Our entire civilization hinges upon the public trusting the government to maintain the lawful peace and at least a rough approximation of justice. In Caledonia, the Liberals didn’t even try.
Expect to hear a lot of “analysis” from the Voter Turnout Nerds
Colby Cosh gets in a pre-emptive strike against the folks for whom 100% voter participation is the only worthy result:
Get ready for the Voter Turnout Nerds: you’ll be hearing from them today. Oh yes. It would not be like them to stay silent after an Ontario election in which fewer than half of technically eligible voters appear to have cast a ballot. The Turnout Nerds don’t care who won or who lost: they care about the mathematical purity of the electoral exercise. They’ll be everywhere you look in the media, ready with their diagnoses and their nostrums and, most of all, their disapproval.
It’s not the people who have let us down, they’ll tell us; it’s the government that has let the people down, fostering apathy (most heinous of all political sins) by failing to implement Brilliant Idea X or Salutary Scheme Y. But at what point do the people, apparently so deaf to the allure of electoral reforms and renovations, stop believing the Turnout Nerd’s comforting assurances of goodwill? Nothing seems to raise the holy quantity of Turnout very effectively. Any momentary rise seems to be followed by a more precipitate plunge. Are the electorate and the Turnout Nerds headed toward a frightful mutual collision with terrible truths about democracy?
October 6, 2011
Hugh MacIntyre vainly tries to tell libertarians how to vote
Herding cats is easy compared to getting libertarians to agree to do anything as a group. He tries, nonetheless:
Deciding how to vote in today’s provincial election in Ontario has been very difficult for me. For the first time, I have been given the opportunity to vote for one of two political parties that both have important things to say and are both offering platforms that will bring true prosperity to the province of Ontario. I have had to take a serious look at both political parties and decide which one truly deserves my vote. I speak of the Freedom Party and the Libertarian Party.
I am fortunate that both political parties are running a candidate in my riding (St. Paul’s) and so I don’t have to pick between vomiting and not voting.
Both parties offer a vision of a more modest state that does not unnecessarily interfere with the lives of individuals and recognizes the free market as the primary driver of prosperity. There are some nuanced policy differences between the parties, but they are so small, that it was not enough to base my decision upon. I’m confident that Ontarians would be better off with either party in power.
I don’t have a libertarian to vote for, but we have a Freedom Party candidate. As I can’t bring myself to vote for either of the evil-twin centre-left parties (Progressive Conservatives or Liberals), or the real left (the NDP), or the enviro-fascists (the Green party), I have the choice of declining my ballot or voting for Douglas Thom (Freedom Party).
Britain suffered higher proportional casualties than the US in Afghanistan
A brief item from Strategy Page on the relative casualties suffered by the major allied combatants over the course of the Afghanistan campaign:
In ten years of combat in Afghanistan, some 2,700 foreign troops have died. Most (67 percent) were American. The next two nations in terms of combat losses were Britain (14.1 percent) and Canada (5.8 percent). Adjusted for population size, Britain suffered five percent more combat deaths than the United States. On the same basis, Canada suffered about 80 percent as many deaths as the United States.
All three of these nations had their troops in the south (Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where most of the heroin came from) or along the southeast border (mainly Pakistan’s North Waziristan area, long a sanctuary for Islamic terror groups). There were a few other NATO nations, plus Australia, that had small contingents in the south, but most NATO nations put their troops in more peaceful north, with orders to stay out of trouble and avoid casualties.
Why the LCBO isn’t like Foodland Ontario
Michael Pinkus tries to decide who to vote for in today’s Ontario election on the basis of who’d be the most likely to put Ontario’s wineries on an equal footing with foreign wineries in their own province:
It’s election day, and I don’t want to take up a lot of your time on a day when you should be concentrating on who to vote for. Over the past few months I have given you food for thought from Tim Hudak’s vision of the wine industry in Ontario to Andrea Horwath’s working with the LCBO option, and I heard or received nothing about the reigning Liberal party’s platform on the subject of the wine industry, I guess for them it will remain status quo. So I guess it’s up to you to decided where your loyalties lie and who you chose to believe as to what difference they’ll make, if any.
[. . .]
Part of an email I received about election promises …
“David Peterson campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1985 and he won — twice!
Mike Harris campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1995 and he won — twice!
Where are those promises in this campaign [I need to know who to vote for].”
– John[. . .]
The LCBO affects all wineries in Ontario, but truthfully it is not the sole fault of the liquor board, they are just following their mandate to make money for the government. Two days before the election, the Grape Growers of Ontario released this plea:
“Consumer access to the wines made from Ontario grapes is a keystone issue for the future success of the industry, and unless Queen’s Park is willing to make substantive changes to the way it promotes and sells Ontario wines, the industry will continue to tread water … The domestic market share of Ontario wines is stagnant at around 39% while other winemaking regions are flourishing in their own backyard, some with market shares in excess of 90% … By making changes in the way the LCBO presents Ontario VQA wines on its shelves, how many Ontario VQA labels are available and how those wines get onto the LCBO list, accompanied by an increased, year-round promotional effort within the LCBO, the sales of Ontario’s wines will grow.”
They’re not telling you who to vote for, but they are asking you to be mindful of your vote. But I think it’s more to do with what happens after the election that counts, not the foreplay leading up to it. After the euphoria of victory has subsided we have to hold elected officials to what they promise, or pressure them to give us better and help our wineries, who are after all, tax payers themselves, yet work in a very restricted and restrictive environment. As a lover of Ontario wine you have to demand more. As the Grape Growers point out in that same plea: “We want to see provincial politicians who understand that marketing foreign wines in an agency owned by the province is like Foodland Ontario launching a promotion of Georgia peaches. It’s just not right. We can no longer afford to just sit back and watch.” Now that would be a nice change.
October 5, 2011
The police are not subject to the rules they enforce on gun owners
Lorne Gunter itemizes some of the many, many ways that legal gun owners in Canada can be tripped up by vagaries and inconsistencies in the law:
Since Bill C-68 became the law of the land more than 15 years ago, one of the most common charges police have laid against gun owners has been for unsafe storage. The reason for this is that the federal firearms law is very unclear about what constitutes safe and unsafe storage.
Is it enough to have one’s firearms locked away in a gun safe or must they also have trigger locks installed? How secure must the safe’s lock be: strong enough to keep a thief out for two minutes? Five? Fifteen?
Is it OK to store ammunition in the same safes as guns or must bullets and shells be in separate safes from one’s firearms? Must the two safes be in separate rooms?
There are no hard-and-fast rules, so in some provinces, unsafe storage provisions have become catchalls. In Ontario, for instance, most frontline officers have been trained to lay unsafe storage charges against any gun owner whose firearm lacks a trigger lock, even if the owner had just removed the lock so he could use his firearms to defend his home or family against intruders.
These unwritten rules make self-defence next to impossible. You are permitted by law to use a gun to defend yourself and your home against an armed intruder, but you cannot remove the locks on your guns to defend your loved ones, yourself or your property unless you’re willing to be charged with unsafe storage.
Perhaps the unsafe storage rules are should be called a Catch-22 rather than a catchall.
Oddly enough, the police don’t hold themselves to the same standard that they so unevenly enforce on the citizens. According to a recent FOIA result, police forces in Canada have lost more than 400 firearms over the last three years, but no police officers have faced criminal charges or loss of their jobs over these losses. Yet another way that the police have different rules than ordinary citizens.
Ontario election: pick a poll, any poll
Nobody knows what the result of Ontario’s election tomorrow will be . . . and the polls are even less effective than usual because they all report significantly different outcomes:
The latest poll by Angus Reid for the Toronto Star has the Tories ahead of the Liberals by three points, at 36 per cent and 33 per cent, respectively. The NDP has 26 per cent public support.
However, an Abacus survey for the Toronto Sun has the Liberals ahead by the same three-point margin, with the NDP at 24 per cent.
Both these numbers suggest a minority government for either party.
But, the Ipsos poll released Tuesday night show the Liberals heading for a majority, with a 10 point lead at 41 per cent. The Tories are at 31 per cent and NDP at 25 per cent.
Ipsos vice-president John Wright told 680News this poll could mean McGuinty will be heading back to Queen’s Park with a majority of seats.
The only consistent result is showing the NDP peaking at 25-26%, which may indicate the “halo effect” from the last federal election (where the NDP made impressive gains to become the official opposition) and the subsequent death of federal NDP leader Jack Layton.
Update: Kelly McParland offers an explanation for not just the current schizophrenia in the polls, but the entire election narrative:
No wonder voters are confused (or uncaring, which is more likely the case). If the MSM can’t make up its mind, how are mere voters supposed to, especially having paid the campaign no attention at all, other than by turning down the sound when some of the more offensive union-financed-but-not officially-supporting-McGuinty TV ads popped up. Personally I think the fault lies not with the electorate, which has had to vote in so many elections since 2006 that it can barely keep track of which party is breaking its promises any more, but with pundits, and especially with the Official Narrative, which was sent out from Pundit Headquarters in the midst of the summer doldrums, when most of the Ottawa pundits were either dozing in the backyard while pretending to work, or lazing at the cottage, where BlackBerry reception can be spotty. Some Ottawa golf courses also frown on the use of BlackBerries on the premises, which can add to the difficulty. Ottawa in the summer goes into a semi-permanent snooze, unlike Washington, where the war on one another never stops.
Having missed or misread the Official Narrative, pundits continued to insist that Tim Hudak was winning the race, when in fact there was no race. To have a race, you have to have voters who care in the slightest, which no one in Ontario did. This misconception arose because pundits continued to receive polls suggesting the Conservative leader was wiping the floor with the Liberals, and treated them seriously. Mr. Hudak was reported to be 10 or 20 points ahead. Big mistake. At the best of times, polls should be held with no more than two fingers at a time, and well away from the body. Polls taken during the summer, weeks before the official campaign has been declared, should be sprayed first with disinfectant, then deleted unread. I suspect Mr. Hudak never really had the lead he was given credit for, which made it inevitable that when the imaginary bulge suddenly disappeared, he would be blamed for frittering it away. Mr. McGuinty is now being hailed as a genius of the hustings, having somehow resurrected his party even as Ontarians continue trying to figure out how he got the job in the first place. This is being called “momentum.”
October 4, 2011
Ottawa Citizen: “The election was Tim Hudak’s to lose and he appears to have done so”
Just a few short months ago, the Progressive Conservatives were so far ahead in the polls that holding an election seemed like a mere formality. How times change. Tim Hudak may still have a mathematical chance to lead his party into government in this week’s Ontario election, but even if he does, it’ll be a bare minority based on current polls. After a series of cringe-inducing announcements before the campaign (chain gangs? really?), the blame lies directly on Hudak and his team who decided that after all this time Ontario really just wanted another Dalton McGuinty.
The Ottawa Citizen suggests that voters should hold their noses and vote Liberal:
When Ontario voters mark their ballots on Thursday, many will be holding their noses with their other hands. There is no clear choice for who should lead this province into what will likely be an economically very difficult four years.
The election was Tim Hudak’s to lose and he appears to have done so. In July, his Progressive Conservatives were polling well in majority territory. Hudak, himself, was a pleasant surprise. He is composed and confident in person. On meeting Hudak in August, this editorial board was convinced McGuinty was in serious trouble. Hudak was clearly able to give voice to the frustration of the electorate with eight years of Liberal rule. But he needed to do more than that. He needed to offer Ontarians an alternative.
In most major policy areas there’s little to distinguish the PC platform from the Liberals’. They would raise health care and education funding by identical amounts and trim public spending in other areas to a similar degree.
For those of you who choose not to hold your noses at the polling station, if you don’t have an acceptable candidate in your riding you can still decline your ballot.
September 30, 2011
“Some things are eternal, like the stars above and the conflicted feelings towards the United States Canadians have in their hearts”
Matt Gurney recommends that the US worry about Boston before the start putting up fences on the US-Canadian border:
Oh, Lord, here we go again: The U.S. is (kind of) considering erecting a fence along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border, as well as various high-tech monitoring systems. This latest variation was floated by the American Customs and Border Protection Agency, but quickly dismissed by that same agency as merely a hypothetical after the report caught the media’s attention.
Whenever the U.S. considers — or hypothetically muses about potentially considering — additional security along the northern border, you can count on Canadians whipping their heads ’round in shock. “Keep out us?” they ask. “But … we’re Canadians. That’s like being American. Why would they want to keep us out?” Many of those same Canadians are the ones who become outraged if the United States does not genuflect in the requisite manner at the holy pillar of Canadian sovereignty and international importance. That’s non-negotiable for Canadians, because we’re not Americans, and Uncle Sam, with his war machines and ghetto scenes, had best not forget it. But as soon as Americans agree that we’re separate countries and try to act like it, much outrage ensues.
It’s a particularly irritating manifestation of the Canadian inferiority complex, but probably can’t be helped. Some things are eternal, like the stars above and the conflicted feelings towards the United States Canadians have in their hearts. At least this time, though, we’re not alone in looking kind of silly: If there’s anything as dumb as the Canadian double-think on whether we’re American enough for America, it’s the bizarre notion among our southern siblings that if they pay enough attention to Canada, they’ll be safe from terrorism.
September 29, 2011
Quebec may create its own gun registry
Matt Gurney examines the Quebec government’s declared intention to create a provincial gun registry:
In July, Quebec’s Public Safety Minister Robert Dutil told reporters that his government was considering a “Plan B” in the (highly probable) event that the federal Tories scrapped the long-gun registry — the creation of a provincial registry. Quebec is particularly sensitive to crimes committed by firearm, and has been more wedded than most provinces to the faulty notion that registration provides public-safety benefits. The Supreme Court has already ruled that firearms registration is a federal responsibility due to the public safety nature of gun control, but Quebec could theoretically try to establish a registry for firearms that treats them as simple property, no different than dogs, cats or boats. It would be a political stunt only … but then again, that’s all the registry has been since the beginning: A costly act of political theatre in which politicians impose burdensome red tape on lawful firearms owners and proclaim society somehow safer as a result.
September 28, 2011
Toronto: paradise of the high-profit, cellar-dwelling sports franchise
Last year, I posted a bit of Toronto-baiting, referring to the town as the place “where professional sports go to be embalmed”. In the comment thread to that post, “Lickmuffin” set me straight about just why Toronto teams are so bad — the answer is that Toronto fans expect no more of them, and are happy to pay for mediocrity. Stephen Marche goes a few steps further on that line (largely proving Lickmuffin’s point):
It’s a given that the true fan goes to games not for the necessarily occasional thrill of winning, but for the quotidian experience of losing — a truth articulated originally and beautifully by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Losing in Toronto, however, is an unremitting condition. The CFL team, the Argonauts, is so bad that when I recently found a friend of mine betting on it, I immediately wondered if it was time for an intervention about his gambling addiction. As it stands, the Argonauts are
2 and 63 and 9. The Blue Jays this year aren’t completely terrible, but when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. They may be a rising power in the East, as many claim, but they sure haven’t risen yet. The Raptors are still in their post-Bosh wilderness (not that the Bosh period was a golden age), and Toronto FC currently rests at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven’t made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs’ major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom.And this in Canada’s biggest city, where hockey matters more than baseball in Boston or basketball in Indiana or football in Texas. The only other places where sports dwell so near the most profound and abiding national questions are rugby in New Zealand, which recoups the warrior culture of the Maori, and football in Buenos Aires, where the slumdog Boca Juniors battle the uptown Millonarios in a never-ending class war. Maybe Real Madrid against Barcelona could be added to that list, but nobody else. People who were surprised that Vancouver burned after the Stanley Cup playoffs last year are unaware of the history of the sport in Canada. Of the 10 biggest riots in Canadian history, six began at hockey games.
[. . .]
So who can blame Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, the business that controls the Leafs and the Raptors, for following that oldest and truest of rules: Never give a sucker an even break? The most recently released financial reports, published by the Toronto Star in 2007 and which were neither confirmed nor denied by the privately held MLSE, suggest they run a profit margin of more than 20 percent. Before we start hacking away at the irresponsible evil-capitalist angle, however, we should recognize that the majority shareholder in MLSE is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund (although they are currently looking to sell); the profits of MLSE have paid for the retirement of a lot of hardworking people, so it’s good that they’re good at business. And they are excellent business people.
September 26, 2011
Ontario election mechanics: how to decline your ballot
If you have as uninspiring a selection of candidates running in your riding as I do, you may feel like there’s no point in voting. You do, however, have an alternative: you can effectively vote for “None of the above” if you decline your ballot:
53. An elector who has received a ballot and returns it to the deputy returning officer declining to vote, forfeits the right to vote and the deputy returning officer shall immediately write the word “declined” upon the back of the ballot and preserve it to be returned to the returning officer and shall cause an entry to be made in the poll record that the elector declined to vote. R.S.O. 1990, c. E.6, s. 53.
A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen explains why it may matter to publicize the number of declined ballots rather than just lumping declined ballots in with blank or spoiled ones:
Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer is neglecting to tell voters about a crucial right to choose “none of the above” in the upcoming election, says a third-party watchdog.
The right to decline a ballot is enshrined in Ontario’s election act, says Democracy Watch spokesman Duff Conacher, but is unpublicized by the agency and its head, Greg Essensa.
Whereas spoiled ballots are rejected and considered cast by “stupid” people who “don’t know how to mark an ‘X’ in the box,” says Conacher, declined ballots are interpreted much more clearly.
They are the product of active, but dissatisfied, voters.
“Let’s assume five per cent of voters are not turning up now because they don’t support the current parties and their platform,” Conacher said in an interview. “If they did turn out and that was reported on election night, you’re going to see parties fall over themselves to find out what those five per cent want. Right now they don’t because those people stay at home.”
H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for providing the links.
September 25, 2011
Police “told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours”
A new lawsuit has been filed in the Russell Williams case:
Laurie Massicotte was a neighbour of Williams in Tweed, Ontario, and was bound, stripped and sexually assaulted in September 2009.
The Toronto Star reported, the more than $7-million law suit filed on Friday claims police failed to provide her with any information about the identity of her assailant while he remained her neighbour for five months following the assault.
Massicottee told the Star, it was only after her assault that she heard another woman who lived on the street had been sexually assaulted twelve days before she was attacked.
She also said after she called the police, they told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours.
The police left a rape victim tied up for five hours? No wonder she’s suing the Ontario Provincial Police!
