Quotulatiousness

May 1, 2011

Don’t vote?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:32

As the old joke has it, “Don’t vote: it only encourages them“:

“Why should youth vote in the upcoming federal election?” asks a series of Go Vote! actors. “I’m voting because I want to address bullying in schools and communities across the country,” answers one youth, as if school bullying is a ballot question this year, or as if it obviously should be, given that in Canada schools and communities more properly fall under provincial responsibility. Other answers, by other Go Vote! youths, do fall under federal jurisdiction, and also within Public Policy Forum’s bigger-government mindset. The video has one youth wanting government support for the arts. Another for sports. Another for youth entrepreneurs.

None of the Go Vote! actors said “I’m voting to stop the high taxes that cause youth unemployment to soar,” or “I’m voting to stop unfunded pensions and other government giveaways to the older generation that are stealing the future from us youths.” The Go Vote! video exhorts youth to vote without exhorting them to become informed, as if the right choice of candidate is too obvious to name. Little wonder that the current fads on campus are termed mob voting. Mob voting, and the mob rule it promotes, can only delegitimize the authority of democratically elected leaders. The higher the vote turnout, in other words, the less legitimate the government.

Go Vote! claims “Everyone needs to vote.” In fact, no one who cares about Canada should vote if their vote isn’t well informed. Voting is a small part of being a good citizen, and a relatively unimportant part, especially if the goal is to keep government leaders accountable. Joining a lobby organization or writing letters to the editor or to elected representatives can be far more effective in putting politicians on the spot, if that’s your sort of thing.

Whether or not you’re informed, don’t vote if you don’t want to. You don’t become unworthy if you don’t obey the election scolds, just as you don’t become worthy by casting a mindless vote at the behest of others.

I’m voting tomorrow, as I’ve voted in every federal and provincial election since I became old enough to cast a vote. And, as usual, I’ll be “wasting my vote” on a candidate who almost certainly won’t win (Josh Insang, Libertarian Party of Canada). I’m encouraging others to vote, even if they’re going to “waste” their votes for candidates who won’t win. But I’m totally opposed to the idea that voting should be mandatory (as Australian law requires). If there’s no party or candidate that you feel deserves your vote, then you should have the right not to vote.

Final pre-election poll numbers

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:17

Tomorrow looks like an interesting day:

Click thumbnail to view full size table

Update: To further emphasize how interesting tomorrow’s vote may be, Colby Cosh points out that nobody is confident in their predictions:

Are you ready to stay up late May 2? Do you have good coffee and plenty of snacks laid in? This may be the election with the highest quantity of uncertainty in my adult experience. The NDP’s dazzling polling gains simply have no obvious recent precedent. I’m not sure a national party has ever made strides of this magnitude and nature in such a bewilderingly short time.

Think about the questions you have to ask to estimate the impact, in terms of Commons representation, of a shift like this; you have to form ideas about the sincerity of the polling subjects’ intentions, the efficiency of the resulting gains in various regions, and the pure logistical power of the party to get out its vote, all while taking into account the activity and the relative positions of three or four other parties.

And then, as if all that weren’t enough, some old flatfoot comes along and tells some TV guys about Jack Layton getting naked in a place he ought not to have been naking around in. Nobody knows what will happen on May 2 — and I don’t mean that in the usual perfunctory way. This time, really, nobody has any idea. Having messed around with election models, I could tell you plausible stories that involve the NDP winning 120 seats; I could tell you stories of roughly equal plausibility that put them at 55.

Of course, there are limits. I am just about ready to rule out a Diefenbaker-like cross-country rampage by the Conservatives. I am just about ready to promise that Michael Ignatieff will not look happy on Monday evening. (Though even then: how stupefyingly low are expectations for him at this point?) What I can tell you is what how I would bet, if I had to bet. I believe, halfway through the weekend, that the Conservative push for a majority will come down to the wire. And I think they are a little more likely to get there than not.

April 30, 2011

The Toronto Sun goes full gonzo on Jack Layton

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

In an earlier post, I was wondering if the mainstream media was going to give Jack Layton and the NDP the same kind of coverage that they had been devoting to the Liberal and Conservative campaigns. Instead of doing the same thing, one of Toronto’s newspapers decided to channel their British tabloid counterparts:

Jack Layton was found laying naked on a bed by Toronto Police at a suspected Chinatown bawdy house in 1996, a retired Toronto police officer told the Toronto Sun.

The stunning revelation about the current leader of the New Democratic Party comes days before the federal election at a time when his popularity is soaring.

When the policeman and his partner walked into a second-floor room at the Toronto massage parlour, they saw an attractive 5-foot-10 Asian woman who was in her mid-20s and the married, then-Metro councillor, lying on his back in bed.

Layton was cautioned by police and released without being charged.

So no crime was committed, no charges were laid, and it happened in 1996. Perfect time to pull it out at the very end of an election campaign.

“When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Not the finest day in Albertan justice:

Charges have been dropped against three Alberta men accused of shooting dead a pregnant wild horse and tossing its body down a hillside. For more than a year, the RCMP and the Crown were sure they had the right guys. They even charged the then-12-year-old son of Jason Nixon, one of the accused. But then, just as the trial began, the defence produced an important piece of exculpatory evidence: The horse hadn’t been shot.

The Mounties had assumed it had been. They were operating on a tip from a man named Dave Goertz. Mr. Goertz, as everyone involved in the case knew, was a crackhead and a meth addict. He reported the crime after a local group that defends Alberta’s wild horse population posted a $25,000 reward.

[. . .]

Apparently, the word of a drug addict was enough for the guardians of our justice system to arrest three innocent men and run them all the way to trial, costing them their jobs, a small fortune and untold grief.

[. . .]

The horse had been badly decomposed, apparently, by the time police found it, so determining whether it had been shot wasn’t possible. And yet, lacking critical evidence, the province proceeded with its prosecution for wilfully killing and careless use of a firearm. The three men faced a maximum of five years in prison.

This kind of thing, said defence lawyer Willie deWit, “is what happens in our system a lot of times.” When police decide they need to make an arrest, he said, they find a way to make an arrest. They ignore anything that might exculpate the accused, and seize on anything that feeds their assumptions of guilt.

Latest poll numbers

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:25

What looks like a weakening of the NDP surge may just be an artifact of the Nanos three-day polling window. We won’t know until Monday:

Click to see full size
Click image to embiggen (the table is getting too wide to show at full size)

April 29, 2011

Toronto Star: War crimes investigation possible for Canadians in Afghanistan

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:52

The International Criminal Court seems to think that Canadian officials may be complicit in war crimes over the Afghan detainees:

Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo says in a documentary soon to be aired on TVO that Canadian officials are not immune to prosecution if there is evidence that crimes were committed by handing over detainees to face torture.

When Toronto filmmaker Barry Stevens asked Moreno-Ocampo in his film, Prosecutor, if the ICC would pursue a country like Canada over its role in Afghanistan, he replied:

“We’ll check if there are crimes and also we’ll check if a Canadian judge is doing a case or not . . . if they don’t, the court has to intervene. That’s the rule, that’s the system, one standard for everyone.”

Moreno-Ocampo could not be reached for further comment about the case Thursday when attempts were made by the Star.

Update: Adrian MacNair is underwhelmed:

As one who has actually been to Afghanistan and seen how the military cares for and treats detainees, it’s a little difficult to swallow the news that the International Criminal Court could investigate Canada for so-called war crimes. I’m not sure what that would accomplish, but it certainly would do nothing to help with the main problem in the country: the insurgency.

I’m unsure as to how or why anybody believes that Canada’s role in Afghanistan is anything more than a humanitarian mission buttressed by security. We’re in the country to provide stabilization for the democratically elected (though admittedly corrupt and fraudulent) government with whom we have specific agreements and rules we must follow.

In providing security to Afghans we are not allowed to hold Afghan nationals for more than 96 hours in our custody, though at the time of the allegations (pre-2007) this was 72 or 48 hours.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to expect a foreign military with finite resources to ensure absolute humanitarian oversight of detainees after they’ve been handed over to the Afghan government. That’s like expecting a police officer in Canada to ensure proper oversight of a prisoner he has arrested and brought to justice. Is a police officer morally culpable if a prisoner is raped in prison?

Stephen Gordon: Layton needs to avoid disruptive monetary policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:20

It’s almost as if nobody bothered to read what the NDP had in their platform until last week . . . and paying even less attention to what Jack Layton said on the campaign trail. They’re paying attention now:

In my recent post on the prospects of a possible NDP government, I came to the conclusion that not very much would change; their platform had none of the transformational elements that had been a feature of so many NDP campaigns in the past.

But if recent reports are correct, and if Jack Layton seriously thinks that it would be a good idea for a Prime Minister to instruct the Bank of Canada to keep interest rates low, then this benign assessment no longer holds. Such an intervention would be a serious mistake that would seriously endanger the recovery, and could generate another spiral of higher inflation and higher interest rates.

The first thing that would happen after such an order is that Governor Mark Carney would have no choice but to resign. This would be a serious shock to the financial system, and unless his successor could extract a promise that no further orders would be forthcoming, the Bank of Canada’s credibility would simply disappear.

You remember all those smug, self-congratulatory pieces about how well Canada had weathered the recession and how well positioned the country was to take advantage of economic growth? Perhaps this is the imp of the perverse coming back for a revision of all that hearty back-patting.

NDP surge extremely taxing for . . . NDP candidates?

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

I’ve worked on political campaigns for minor party candidates (provincial and federal Libertarians) who had to keep their campaigning to the weekend and after-work slots because they still had to earn a living during the election. I find it hard to believe that so many candidates for a “major” party are running part-time candidacies:

There’s a standard-bearer in Quebec who went on a Las Vegas vacation for a week because she didn’t want to lose her deposit. She also reportedly spoke French so poorly that a local radio station had to scotch an interview rather than air the exchange. Another candidate went to the Caribbean and one travelled to France. There’s a Toronto candidate who has not campaigned at all, can’t be reached, and, judging by a Toronto Star report, quite possibly is an apparition. There are all kinds of students who, presumably, did not have the pesky constraints of full-time work that weighed down Mr. Larkin.

None of these things are unusual — third-place parties usually have a fair bit of cannon fodder — but it is unusual for anyone to be asking about them. And that’s what’s happening to the NDP. People are asking about them, and about the party and its platform, far more than they were last month, or even early last week.

It’s what naturally happens when an also-ran finds itself suddenly very much in the running. The key question for the NDP is: Can it manage four days of impromptu scrutiny?

That will depend on how the traditionally Liberal media handles this unexpected surge from the left: they know how to find awkward quotes and disreputable connections for candidates on the right, but generally have treated leftists with a faint air of “isn’t that cute?” rather than as serious campaigners. Can they apply the same standards in a mirror image?

It’s possible that they will give Jack Layton a much rougher ride than they have so far:

Jack Layton himself is also now facing a different sort of question about his own policies from reporters travelling with him. He was asked on Thursday about how his platform, which calls for a price on carbon, would affect gasoline prices. One analysis says the NDP plan would add 10¢ a litre at the pumps. Mr. Layton insisted that an ombudsman would be able to keep oil companies from raising prices for consumers, but he disagreed that he was proposing to regulate gasoline prices. Reporters described the exchange, which included questions about the AWOL candidates, as “testy” and “heated,” which has been rare for the NDP leader thus far. And testy exchanges lead to stories about how a leader is “on the defensive” or “responding to critics.” Eventually they can become “embattled.” (In the case of Mr. Ignatieff, a report on Thursday referred to him as “beleaguered.”)

“Tone matters,” explains Prof. Matthews. “People do respond to the media. Not everyone, of course, not the partisans and not the people who aren’t paying any attention, but there are people who take their cues from the coverage.”

Update: Publius points out that the situation could be at least as good as last season’s CBC offerings:

Everyone has been stunned by the NDP surge. The newly minted Sun News has started calling it an “Orange Crush,” which is a gross insult to a fine fizzy beverage. No one has been more surprised than the NDP. For years the party has run non-entity place holders in most ridings, as they did this time around. One of them is a Quebec barmaid who took a vacation mid-campaign, which says everything you need to know about the NDPs organization in Quebec. Now some of those ridings are competitive. We could have MPs in the next Parliament that were “accidentally” elected. There’s a sitcom in there somewhere.

April 28, 2011

Kevin Milligan: Corporations are not really people

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

The notion that corporations are “legal persons” is useful for legal purposes, but terribly misleading when politicians are trying to formulate tax policies:

Pretending that corporations are people leads to tax policies with perverse consequences; some can even produce the opposite of what the policy is intended to do.

[. . .]

Some people want to tax corporations heavily because the corporations are ‘rich.’ But, if corporations are not people, they can’t be rich. The owners or employees of the corporation can be rich, but not an artificial legal entity. As my Economy Lab colleague Stephen Gordon wrote, “Claiming that ‘wealthy corporations’ pay [corporate taxes] makes about as much sense as claiming that ‘rich buildings’ pay property taxes.”

This is not an obscure debate. The owners of corporations do not all wear top hats and monocles like the fellow from the Monopoly game. In reality, Bay Street IPO-mongers quake in fear of two large stockholders. One is the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan. The other is the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. These two pension plans are the largest holders of corporate equity in Canada, and their stakeholders are broadly middle income. Tax policy that hurts the dividends of Canadian corporations has a direct impact on the vast Canadian middle that hold pensions through these two, and similar, pension entities. Of course, many high-income Canadians also own corporate equities. But, if we desire to change the tax burden on high income individuals, though, it is best to do so directly through the personal income tax rather than taxing things high income people may or may not own.

Latest Nanos poll confirms NDP gains

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:20

While not quite as dramatic as some of the headline polls over the last couple of days, the Nanos three-day tracking poll confirms that the NDP surge is real, knocking the Liberals decisively back into third place:


April 27, 2011

Crunching the advance polling data

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:51

David Akin rounds up the information available from the advance polls over the Easter weekend:

Glen McGregor does all political junkies a favour by crunching the numbers on the advance poll turnout. The turnout was way up over 2008 and Glen ranks all 308 ridings based on the difference in advance poll turnout in 2008 compared to 2011.

I sliced Glen’s chart a little differently and attached a party affiliation based on which party held the riding at dissolution and then sorted the same list based simply on the number of ballots cast at advance polls in 2011.

[. . .]

The Conservatives, by most observers’ reckoning, have the best ground game of the major parties, followed by the NDP. A well-organized ground game means you get your supporters to the ballot box at the earliest opportunity. The Conservatives have done that before and appear to be doing that again. Eleven of the 20 highest turnouts are Tory ridings.

I find it notable that Simcoe-Grey, where independent Helena Guergis is trying to hold on has a very high turnout. Her Conservative opponent Kellie Leitch is a long-time Ontario and federal party activist and worker and, presumably, she has inherited a strong GOTV (get out the vote) organization. Or, interestingly enough, did Guergis hold on to some of that GOTV swagger she used to enjoy?

High computer use linked to “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Talk about upsetting the stereotype of basement dwelling, dateless nerds:

The revelations come in research conducted lately in Canada among 10 to 16-year-olds by epidemiology PhD candidate Valerie Carson.

“This research is based on social cognitive theory, which suggests that seeing people engaged in a behaviour is a way of learning that behaviour,” explains Carson. “Since adolescents are exposed to considerable screen time — over 4.5 hours on average each day — they’re constantly seeing images of behaviours they can then potentially adopt.”

Apparently the study found that high computer use was associated with approximately 50 per cent increased engagement with “smoking, drunkenness, non-use of seatbelts, cannabis and illicit drug use, and unprotected sex”. High television use was also associated with a modestly increased engagement in these activities.

According to Ms Carson this is because TV is much more effectively controlled and censored in order to prevent impressionable youths seeing people puffing tabs or jazz cigarettes while indulging in unprotected sex etc. The driving without seatbelts thing seems a bit odd until one reflects that old episodes of the The Professionals, the Rockford Files etc are no doubt torrent favourites.

April 26, 2011

CBC headline: “Layton open to constitutional talks with Quebec”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:32

Oh, crikey. Because that’s exactly what we need to do to continue our recovery from the recession — re-open the constitutional debate all over again:

NDP Leader Jack Layton is willing to reopen talks on the Canadian Constitution in an effort to get Quebec to sign the document once there was a “reasonable chance of success.”

Layton was asked about the issue of constitutional talks on Tuesday in Montreal, where he is trying to capitalize on an apparent sharp increase in support for the NDP in recent public opinion polls.

The NDP leader, however, said he does not think the federal government should enter into constitutional negotiations with the provinces until “there is some reasonable chance of success.”

“It’s not a question of appeasing anybody. We have an historic problem. We have a quarter of our population who have never signed the Constitution. That can’t go on forever,” Layton said.

Less door-to-door canvassing this time around?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:45

It just occurred to me the other night while watching the Joe Volpe story that we’ve been uniquely blessed in this election: not a single canvasser for any candidate has come to our door. The only contact with a candidate I’ve had in this whole election was when I contacted my local Libertarian candidate (Josh Insang). This may be a function of how strongly my particular poll voted Tory last time, but it’s a bit surprising.

April 25, 2011

Majority in reach for Harper, if Ontario numbers hold up

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

The latest Nanos/Globe & Mail poll shows that the Conservatives might just be able to reach majority status if the Ontario numbers stay steady for the final week:

Nationally, the NDP is statistically tied for second place with the Liberals. But another story is emerging out of Ontario, where they are running third; the party’s surge in Quebec and other regions has not given it a similar bump in Ontario.

Pollster Nik Nanos sees this as a boon for the Tories — one that could well provide the Conservatives a route to that coveted majority.

“Talk about Jack Layton in Stornoway has actually helped the Conservatives in Ontario,” Mr. Nanos said Monday. “The Conservatives best chance to win a majority is in Ontario. If their numbers hold or start ramping up in Ontario that could be good news for the Conservatives. One of the scenarios that we could be looking at now is a squeaker of a majority government.”

Of course, the regional numbers are subject to a larger margin of error:

There is a margin of error of plus or minus 64 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, for the provincial sample.

I hope there’s a decimal place somewhere in that MoE.

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