Quotulatiousness

May 4, 2011

Alleged forged signatures on NDP nomination papers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:29

This is weird. It may just be a function of how little experience the campaign workers had in that riding — I know the NDP were a skeleton crew in Quebec for this election (which makes their huge haul of seats from the province even more amazing), but forging signatures? It just doesn’t add up at all. Why do I say that? Let me tell you a little story . . .

Oddly enough, I had a discussion with a Returning Officer (not the RO for my riding) a few weeks ago about nomination papers and the requirements for signatures. It was rather illuminating.

Every candidate for parliament has to submit nomination papers to the constituency’s Returning Officer within a set number of days after the writ has dropped. Many would-be candidates for smaller or less well-organized parties have to depend on going door-to-door to gather signatures, as they don’t have enough party members in the riding to meet the requirement internally. I’ve done this for Libertarian candidates, and I’m sure most of the NDP candidates in Quebec this time around had to do the same thing. (Signing the nomination paper does not mean you’re a supporter of that candidate, it merely acknowledges that you have been informed that they are hoping to run in the election.)

So, a few bare minutes before the deadline, each of the candidates has to drop off their nomination papers with all of the required signatures. Elections Canada is not a huge organization (by government standards, they’re tiny). They don’t have the resources to do an instant check of the nomination papers. What they do is to verify that each of the signatories on the list is a registered voter in the riding.

Even this low barrier can be a problem, so Elections Canada recommends that candidates provide more than the minimum 100 signatures, as some of them may not be acceptable. Once all the names have been checked, if there are still not at least 100 acceptable signatures, then the Elections Canada folks do another pass through the list, and accept signatures from people whose addresses had registered voters in the previous election (the hurdle gets even lower).

Did you notice that last little bit? If you live at an address which had one or more registered voters living there in the last election, you are deemed to be a registered voter for the purposes of signing nomination papers. Is that not a low enough hurdle to avoid the need to submit forged signatures?

Update: Here’s the Globe & Mail story.

Update the second, 6 May: Elections Canada has declared the nomination papers to be valid. The other candidates still have the opportunity to challenge the result in court, although there may not much hope for them to succeed.

He comes not to praise Ignatieff

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

Colby Cosh, that is. He has a column up at Maclean’s which he admits “was prepared in a factory that manufactures gloating. Some traces may appear.”

When I argued that Ignatieff’s long absence from the country was a problem — very, very carefully distinguishing my own argument from the content of Conservative attack ads — I was greeted with a chorus of “How dare you?” I was told I had no standing to criticize a man of Ignatieff’s intellectual attainments; by that standard, none of those who have been living Canadian politics for the last quarter-century had any right to speak — so how’d that argument work out? I was told that I was engaging in a “personal attack”; how’d the argument that personalities have nothing to do with election success work out? I was told that love for Canada is all that matters, and you can love it just as much from a distance as you do from the inside; how’d the lovefest turn out? This is not just idle gloating — and even if it is, maybe it is about time for Liberals to stop obsessing over the psychological motives of commentators and start listening. This is about whether the Liberal Party is capable of making use of criticism, even unfriendly or biased criticism, as advice. This is the question, fundamentally the only question, that will determine whether it has a future, if it wants one.

But the point he’s trying to make, other than a quite understandable bit of back-patting for his prescience back at the beginning of Ignatieff’s short run as Liberal leader, is that the back-room handlers set this up:

… this election could have been avoided if Ignatieff hadn’t been allowed to commit to a “Not another second of Conservative government” position on the 2011 budget. I don’t know what story Paul Wells will tell in his sprawling Making Of The Prime Minister 2011 feature, and if he disagrees with me I would strongly encourage you to take his word over mine. My information is that the Liberal high command was playing a calculated gambit by leaving the go/no-go choice on Jack Layton’s desk. They thought that a spring 2011 election was better for them than an autumn one or a 2012 one. And they thought that Layton, in any event, would probably be too ravaged by illness not to support the budget — in which case they were prepared to go out and blame him for every jot and tittle in that document. This makes sympathy for the Liberal braintrust very, very difficult.

The NDP’s rookie class of 2011

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Tamsin McMahon has a story about some of the (many) new NDP Members of Parliament from Quebec, including everyone’s favourite Vegas gambler, Ruth Ellen Brosseau:

At a news conference in Montreal Mr. Mulcair found himself defending the neophyte MP, saying that he would take responsibility for the riding while Ms. Brosseau brushed up on her French and that of all the NDP candidates elected in Quebec, she was the only one not fluent in the language.

Ms. Brosseau wasn’t originally chosen by the party to run in the riding. Elections Canada records show Julie Demers won the party nomination on March 23, but was moved to the riding of Bourassa, where she lost to Liberal Denis Coderre.

It must be odd enough for Ms. Brosseau, winning the seat despite being out of the country for a significant portion of the campaign, but you really have to feel sorry for Julie Demers!

Some of the troubles facing the federal Liberals

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:44

Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif lists the financial issues alone:

Whoever replaces Michael Ignatieff next week will be the Liberals’ fifth leader in five years. And he, or she, won’t be getting much of a prize. Fewer seats, less status and no keys to Stornoway.

The Liberals will also have to rebuild with less funding: fewer votes mean less public subsidy, and the NDP now receives the money allocated to the Official Opposition.

If Stephen Harper indeed eliminates public subsidies for the parties, they will be further pushed to do more with less. The Liberals will have to relearn how to talk to voters to get their money and their support.

The current system has worked well for the Liberals, allowing them to reduce their dependence on individual donations to the party. Changing that system now will be a double burden for them, as they will have to ramp up their fundraising efforts from a much-reduced base (and still facing the costs of the most recent election campaign).

May 3, 2011

Conservatives win majority, NDP break through to official opposition

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:26

A political earthquake in Canada, as the Liberal party vote collapses across the country and the separatist Bloc Quebecois vote collapses even further in Quebec. The result of division on the left is a majority for Stephen Harper’s Conservative party.

As I’m writing this post, the current numbers are:

  • Conservatives — 167 seats
  • New Democratic Party — 103 seats (historic high)
  • Liberals — 34 seats (with leader Michael Ignatieff losing his own seat)
  • Bloc Quebecois — 3 seats (below “official party status”, with leader Gilles Duceppe losing his own seat)
  • Greens — 1 seat (historic high, as party leader Elizabeth May wins the first Green seat in parliament)

As I posted in a Twitter update a few hours back, this is the same situation that allowed Liberal leader Jean Chretien to win three straight majorities: a divided opposition. This time, instead of the Progressive Conservatives fighting the Reform Party on the right, it’s the Liberal Party fighting the NDP on the left.

The test facing Jack Layton is how to manage his hugely inflated caucus in the new parliament (with new Quebec MP’s in the majority) and perhaps finding ways to keep the rump of the Liberal party willing to work with his new official opposition.

It must be a great day to be an NDP supporter, with historic gains for the party and new respect for leader Jack Layton.

May 2, 2011

Exit poll in Whitby-Oshawa shows Libertarian surge

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 16:48

A random sample of two three voters in the GTA riding of Whitby-Oshawa today showed a surge for Libertarian candidate Josh Insang. Although his numbers may not hold up over the rest of the day, he had 100% support of the voters we polled.

May 1, 2011

Repost: Ballot Box Irregularities

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

I first posted this article in 2004. I repost it every election:

Ballot Box Irregularities, Canadian Style

This article in Reason Hit and Run talks about the recent decision to allow partisan ballot-challengers to monitor the voting in Ohio. In Canada, these people are called “scrutineers” and they have a vital job.

No, I’m not kidding about the vital part. Each candidate has the right to appoint a scrutineer for every poll in the riding (usually only the Liberal, NDP, and Conservative parties can manage to field that much manpower). I was a scrutineer during a federal byelection in the mid-1980’s in a Toronto-area riding, but I had five polls to monitor (all were in the same school gymnasium). This was my first real experience of how dirty the political system can be.

The scrutineers have the right to challenge voters — although I don’t remember any challenges being issued at any of my polls — similar to the Ohio situation, I believe. They also have the right to be present during the vote count and to challenge the validity of individual ballots. Their job is to maximize the vote for their candidate and minimize the vote for their opponents.

Canadian ballots are pretty straightforward items: they are small, folded slips of paper with each candidate’s name listed alphabetically and a circle to indicate a vote for that candidate. A valid vote will have only one mark inside one of the circles (an X is the preferred mark). An invalid vote might have:

  • No markings at all (a blank ballot)
  • More than one circle marked (a spoiled ballot)
  • Some mark other than an X (this is where the scrutineers become important).

After the polls close, the poll clerk and the Deputy Returning Officer (DRO) secure the unused ballots and then open the ballot box in the presence of any accredited scrutineers. The clerk and DRO then count all the ballots, indicating valid votes for candidates and invalid ballots. The scrutineers can challenge any ballot and it must be set aside and reconsidered after the rest of the ballots are counted.

A challenged ballot must be defended by one of the scrutineers or it is considered to be invalid and the vote is not counted. The clerk and DRO have the power to make the decision, but in practice a noisy scrutineer can usually bully the DRO into accepting all their challenges. I didn’t realize just how easy it was to screw with the system until I’d been a scrutineer and watched it happen over and over again.

This is the key reason why minor party candidates poll so badly in Canadian elections: they don’t have enough (or, in many cases, any) scrutineers to defend their votes. In my experience in that Toronto-area byelection, I personally saved nearly 4% of the total vote my candidate received (in the entire riding) by counter-challenging challenged ballots. We totalled just over 400 votes in the riding (in just about 100 polls) — 21 of them in my polls. I got 15 of those votes allowed, when they would otherwise have been disallowed by the DRO.

There was no legal reason to disallow those votes: they were clearly marked with an X and had no other marks on them; they were challenged because they were votes for a minor candidate. As it was, I had a heck of a time running from poll to poll in order to get my counter-challenges in (I probably missed a few votes by not being able to get back to a poll in time).

The Libertarians only had six or seven scrutineers, covering less than a third of the polls in this riding. If the challenge rate was typical in my poll, then instead of the 400-odd votes, we actually received nearly 2000 votes — but most of them were not counted.

Yes, even 2000 votes would not have swung the election, but 2000 people willing to vote for a “fringe” party would be a good argument against those “throwing away your vote” criticisms. Voters are weird creatures in some ways: they like to feel that their votes actually matter. Voting for someone who espouses views you like, then discovering that only a few others feel the same way will discourage most voters from voting that way again in future.

Another reason that minor party votes matter (that I neglected to mention in the original post) is that parties receive funding based on their vote totals in the previous election. Disallowing minor party votes also deprives those parties of the funding they would otherwise be entitled to next time around. For the bigger parties, this is trivial, but for minor parties, this may be critical to them being able to stay active — and visible to voters — between elections.

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.

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

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:


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