Bleed Red, Not Orange

There's a lot of talk these days about a possible Liberal-NDP coalition. Mr. Rae has given new life to the talk by waxing poetic about his days propping up David Peterson in the 80's. I remain staunchly opposed to any sort of coalition deal with the NDP. It isn't treason as some Tories would have you believe, but it would be a grave error in judgment. 1985 provides few instructive lessons for us. The Tory dynasty in Ontario was coming to an end in 85 and Rae's decision to back Peterson only expedited that process. One could argue that they were merely making up for the inertia which had allowed Frank Miller to retain power in that election. Mr. Rae as future events indicate was always a bit of right wing NDPer to begin with. The current federal scene has none of these characteristics.

Jack Layton remains a fringe voice in Canadian politics. The NDP is a party stuck in the past supporting policies that would violate Canada's commitments to the WTO (check out #5), reopen NAFTA, institute massive corporate tax hikes in the midst of a fragile recovery and put the brakes on the burgeoning oil sands. These are not modern Liberal principles. The NDP is a party of ideology completely inconsistent with a successful Liberal Party of Canada. Honestly, in an era where many of the major social fights (abortion, same-sex marriage etc.) are behind us, there is a lot more similarity between the Liberals and Tories than there is between the NDP and the Liberals. I don't really believe Michael Ignatieff would ever pursue a deal with the socialists and it is some consolation as the Grits remain trapped in the 20's in the polls.

We must remember that the UK coalition is between the Lib-Dems and the Tories not the Lib-Dems and Labour. In fact, many European countries find themselves governed by centre-right coalitions. The key difference is that in Europe, Liberal parties are weak also-rans not prime contenders for power. It is always easier for the leading party to find a deal with the third or fourth party than it is for the two largest parties to get into bed together. The reason we don't have coalition governments in Canada is because our third and fourth parties are not serious coalition partners.

Local Power Outage

Pundit's Guide has found the news hiding in plain sight (okay, slightly wonky Elections Canada tables). It seems a whole bunch of riding associations have failed to keep up with their paperwork and have been deregistered. In reality none of these riding associations were all that likely to elect anybody anyway. Only the Grits in Timmins -- James Bay could even be called competitive. Still, there's definitely some egg on some faces. Here are the guilty associations with their projected vote share as of May 13th:

Timmins -- James Bay (LIB) 25.84%
Esquimalt -- Juan de Fuca (GRN) 12.57%
Alfred Pellan (CON) 12.25%
St Catharine's (GRN) 9.9%
Don Valley East (GRN) 9.84
Chatham - Kent -- Essex (GRN) 9.68%
Windsor Tecumseh (GRN) 9.43%
Charlottetown (GRN) 8.26%
Crowfoot (LIB) 7.97%
Vegreville -- Wainwright (LIB) 7.45%

One of the reasons that we can't have local control over candidates is that local riding associations do stuff (or more accurately don't do stuff) like this. I wonder what Andrew Coyne and the protectors of the local voice would say should be done in ridings where there is no local riding association to nominate a candidate. Pundit's Guide has the overall number of registered EDA's with the NDP missing just one riding (Nunavut), the Grits short just the three above, the Tories short a shocking (for a governing party) 27, and the Greens missing 74 including all of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Projection Update: What Scandal Edition

While the Guergis melodrama captivates everyone within a 5cm radius of Parliament Hill, the rest of the country could care less. At least, that's the conclusion I have to draw from my latest seat projections. The numbers:

National Picture:

CPC 129
LPC 89
BQ 55
NDP 35

Province-by-Province

BC: CPC 19, NDP 11, LPC 6
AB: CPC 28
SK: CPC 13, LPC 1
MB: CPC 7, LPC 4, NDP 3
North: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1
ON: CPC 55, LPC 45, NDP 16
QC: BQ 55, LPC 14, CPC 6
NB: CPC 5, LPC 4, NDP 1
PE: LPC 4
NS: LPC 5, CPC 4, NDP 2
NL: LPC 5, CPC 1, NDP 1

It's Not The Economy, Stupid?

The Economist thinks were cool again. Okay, no cover story with a sunglasses-toting moose but still the Economist praises Canada for its economic resiliency. The Economist is right. The Canadian economy appears, pending more debt-crises in Europe, to be recovering well. This is unreservedly good news for our country. The recovery is not just occurring on corporate balance sheets as the economy unexpectedly added 109,000 jobs in April. While a lot of that work was part-time, it's better than a kick in the teeth. To put it in perspective, the Americans were positively giddy about adding 290,000 jobs in a country ten times our size. All this good news presents a challenge to Michael Ignatieff and the Liberal Party of Canada.

You can criticize me for making such a cynical statement but it is true. For the past eighteen months it has been fairly obvious what the major issue would be for the LPC should another election occur. The YouTube clips that appeared last year demonstrated the fodder the LPC would have in going after the Tories on financial and fiscal mismanagement. A picture of a government being on the one hand disconnected from economic reality and on the other hand squandering hard earned Liberal surpluses would have made for a great narrative. The question now, is what is the new narrative the LPC is going to craft between now and the time of the next election (at most 30 months away). Fiscal mismanagement is still an issue. The Tories ran a deficit prior to the economic meltdown of 2008 and their plans to get out of the whole they've dug is laughable. However, if this kind of job growth is sustained, the government coffers will have more money in them than would have been previously anticipated. More importantly, in order to criticize the Tory deficit plan, we would need our own real deficit plan. A real plan would involve either tax hikes (GST anyone?) or spending cuts neither of which the Liberals would want to run an election on.

Mr. Ignatieff faces the Afghan detainee document question this week in the House of Commons. It probably isn't the kind of thing you go to the polls on. It just isn't a coffee table issue. Going back to social issues is, as was infamously pointed out, good political ground for the LPC but it isn't without hazards. Many of the issues which break the LPC's way (abortion, gay marriage etc.) are, in the mind of most Canadians, settled questions. There's no currency to it. Harper's justice legislation is poor policy but once again mostly poor political fodder. Although I could see "Stephen Harper wants to put your child behind bars" coming out in a late campaign attack ad. None of these issues have really grabbed the Canadian public even if they have angered some people in the chattering classes. In general, the Tory government is not all that enthused about passing controversial legislation or really any legislation, which even in a majority government, presents some challenges to the opposition.

Ignatieff has piecemeal policy proposals which are supposed to be close to being a platform. That may be an even tougher road to hoe as Canadian opposition parties are rarely elected because they are merely preferable. Usually, the case has to be made that the other guys are incompetent, corrupt or both AND that the opposition is preferable. If the economic recovery continues, Michael Ignatieff is left with the unenviable task of making that case to the Canadian public without his economic trump card. Maybe that's why the Prince of Darkness decided he'd be better off helping defend Dalton McGuinty.

Clegg Looks For Coalition With Socialists and Separatists

The resignation this afternoon of Gordon Brown as Labour leader has fueled speculation that a deal may be possible which would see the Labour Party remain in government in coalition with Nick Clegg and the support of presumably one or more nationalist parties. Of course it is possible that Clegg is opening up negotiations with Labour in the hopes of winning concessions on what appear to be shockingly small stumbling blocks in a deal with the Tories. How exactly a Lib-Con coalition would vote on any sort of EU-related question is completely unimaginable.

UK Votes: The Last Shall Be First

Nick Clegg had an absolutely abysmal night last night as Lib-Dem support evaporated into thin air. The Tories of David Cameron are likely to form a government with their large plurality. However, that is dependent on Clegg agreeing to support the Tories at least in the near term. So, through the magic of minority government Mr. Clegg gets a considerable amount of power today. Unsurprisingly, the Lib-Dems want more minority governments - or as the Brits call them hung parliaments - like this one so they can continue to be the kingmaker. So, the question is what would parliament look like under PR? I decided to run a quick and dirty PR projection. Two assumptions: 1. Each nation (England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland) is administered separately. 2. The minimum threshold is a fairly average 5% of the vote in the given nation. Here we go:

Conservatives: 251
Labour: 203
Liberal-Democrats: 161
SNP: 12
Plaid Cymru: 5
DUP: 5
Sinn Fein: 5
SDLP: 3
UCU: 3
Alliance: 2

Interesting to note that the Green Party which won a seat in Brighton last night would be shut out of a PR based parliament for getting only 1% of the vote. Likewise, the independent winner in Northern Ireland would be out. If you lowered the threshold to 3% UKIP would have won seats in England. While this parliament would give Gordon Brown a better shot of staying on, it isn't all that much more functional than the one that was actually elected.

Helena Guergis and Canadian Nominations

Andrew Coyne has weighed in on the fight brewing in Simcoe-Grey over the CPC's ousting of Helena Guergis as the nominated candidate for the next election. Mr. Coyne, as is so often the case, has decided to stand on principle in the face of reality. The principle is that local constituents should decide who is their next candidate for election. There's nothing wrong with that idea in theory. In fact, it becomes an absolute mess. Political parties are very strange entities in Canada. While heavily regulated, they remain at their core private clubs working in the public spheres. Mr. Coyne points to the requirement of candidates to receive the written endorsement of a party leader in order to stand for election as an affront to local democracy. It's not. The regulation doesn't come from any of the political parties but rather from Elections Canada. The reason is pretty simple: during a federal election, Elections Canada doesn't have the time to monitor the nomination process of the local Marijuana Party. Thus, they ask any candidate who claims to be the Marijuana Party candidate to receive the endorsement of his or her leader proving that they are the real candidate and not just trying to use the party's name to advance their cause or confuse voters. That way they know the candidate is actually nominated.

Now, this rule can be used by party leaders to veto unwanted candidates. It's not why the rule exists, but it can be used that way. While I agree that local members should have the power in nominating candidates, there has to be a limit. Political parties need to be able to remove candidates who have ceased to represent the best interest of the party. In the course of a federal election, speed is crucial. If a candidate is embarrassing the party, they need to be removed in short order. It may not be possible to schedule, announce and hold a new nomination meeting in order to get that candidate approved. When Sir John A. was the Conservative Party candidate (in numerous ridings at once), the media in Halifax wasn't reporting what his candidate in Vancouver said at a community meeting that morning. There wasn't video on the internet showing his candidate in Windsor making a fool of himself (or Sir John A. debating drunk off his rear-end). The media cannot expect perfect discipline from political parties and expect free-for-all nomination processes. They are mutually exclusive. Likewise, in a system with short election periods which may occur at any time, you cannot have an American style open nomination process.

Canadian political parties are very small clubs and they operate as such. However, our system allows for the election of independent candidates. If people in Simcoe-Grey want Helena Guergis to continue to serve as their MP after the next election, I wholeheartedly encourage them to start working on an independent campaign. Bill Casey and Chuck Cadman have both done it successfully after falling out with the Tories. Our first-past-the-post system allows independent candidates to win election and serve their constituents in the House of Commons. The party leader only controls his or her caucus members if they don't feel they can be elected without the party banner at their back.

Projection Update: May Edition

It's been a significant amount of time since I've done a projection update. They take longer when I haven't been keeping my polling aggregate up to date with the latest polls and that tends to put a bit of inertia in the works when I haven't put one out in a while. At any rate, I finally bit the bullet and got it done. This is based on 9 national polls taken in the last 30 days. Significant changes from my last update a couple months ago see the Tories re-open a wide margin with most of the gains coming in Ontario. The numbers follow:

National Picture

CPC 128
LPC 89
BQ 55
NDP 36

Province-by-Province

British Columbia: CPC 19, NDP 11, LPC 6
Alberta: CPC 28
Saskatchewan: CPC 13, LPC 1
Manitoba: CPC 7, LPC 4, NDP 3
North: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1
Ontario: CPC 45, LPC 44, NDP 17
Québec: BQ 55, LPC 14, CPC 6
New Brunswick: CPC 5, LPC 4, NDP 1
PEI: LPC 4
Nova Scotia: LPC 5, CPC 4, NDP 2
Newfoundland and Labrador: LPC 6, NDP 1

Riding -by- Riding

Seat Projection - May 3

Upcoming By-Election Projections

A full projection update is on its way tomorrow. I thought I'd post my projection for the newly vacated riding of Winnipeg North and the possibly soon to be vacated riding of Vaughan. First the NDP stronghold of Winnipeg North:

Winnipeg North:

NDP 57.19%
LPC 17.26%
CPC 14.44%
GPC 9.79%

Vaughan:

LPC 51.33%
CPC 27.79%
GPC 10.74%
NDP 8.33%

Also, if the Tories are polling in embattled Helena Guergis' riding of Simcoe-Grey, here's what they should have been finding in terms of party preference if it wasn't for the scandal:

CPC 48.68%
LPC 24.18
GPC 13.04
NDP 10.21%

This might move to the near the top of my list if I were the Green Party of Canada trying to find winnable ridings. Southwestern Ontario has been fertile turf for the party and this sort of scandal is the kind of thing which drives people to the Greens.

Document Torture

The question of whether or not the Canadian military handed over prisoners to Afghan-run prisons when they had full knowledge or should have had full knowledge that those prisons engaged in torture is fundamentally not a political question. The whole thing stinks of a bureaucratic snafu not political interference. That's why, in my opinion, the issue has never moved the polls. After all, what exactly does the Harper government have to gain from torturing Afghan prisoners? This isn't the Bush justice department we're talking about. If Harper is covering something up, it is likely an unwillingness to expose the mission to criticism by talking about torture and therefore not changing the status quo. That's more politically motivated stupidity than actual malicious intent. However, for some unknown and unknowable reason Harper refuses to just let the documents be released.

That refusal has forced us to revisit via the right of parliament to sensitive information the issue of growing executive power. The privilege motion brought by Mr. Lee et al. is the sort of thing that Leader of the Opposition Stephen Harper would have championed. He'd be leading the fight on this today, if he didn't happen to be in power. Conversely, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe would likely be trying to cover their rear-ends if they were in power. Outside of the lunacy of Paul Martin's Gomery Inquiry, governments in this country have made a habit of avoiding giving parliament the information it wants. Even during Gomery, the government used the existence of the inquiry as an excuse to avoid answering tough sponsorship scandal questions. What's new here is that Harper failed to get this thing far enough away from parliament to avoid further questions. Apparently, his "prorogue and hope it disappears" strategy failed and the inquiry called as plan B wasn't broad enough in scope to deflect the questions. While it is satisfying to hear the Speaker remind us that the legislative branch of government still has some power, this may be a Pyrrhic victory for fans of parliamentary power. There's no convincing evidence that any political party is interested in unraveling the ever increasing power of the Canadian executive branch, certainly not once they gain power. Forcing the government to unredact some documents won't change the overall trend.

Nothing Like Winnipeg in the Summer

Great weather for a by-election... just ignore the mosquitoes. Yes, Judy Wasylycia-Leis is quitting as MP for Winnipeg North effective May 1st. If Harper decides not to play games with the timing, the by-election could happen as early as this summer. This should really be a walk-over for the NDP. My massively outdated latest projection (I'll get around to a new one at some point), shows the NDP winning Winnipeg North by a whopping 41.5 points. Still, if either the Grits or the Tories are going to make inroads in the riding, now is the time. Of course, I suppose this all could be rendered moot by the government falling over the whole document mess. It would be very Canadian for the government to fall on what is at root a point of procedure.

Speaker Tells Both Sides To Grow Up

Unsurprisingly, Peter Milliken has tried to avoid making a decision on the Afghan detainee document fiasco. Milliken has given the two sides two weeks to figure something that's agreeable to both sides before he rules the government in contempt of parliament. Two weeks for Harper, Ignatieff et al. to find a compromise. If they don't, Ottawa will go into overdrive. The question for Mr. Ignatieff is can a government be in contempt of parliament but still have the confidence of the house? How he answers that question will affect the negotiations in the next couple weeks and potentially the course of Canadian history if the negotiations fail.

Hungary Votes 2010

There are a ton of elections going on in the EU this year. Poland, the UK, Sweden and Hungary are among the countries holding elections this year. While most of the focus has been on the UK, Hungary has just elected a new government. The last government was pretty much doomed from day 1 after the Prime Minister was caught on tape saying he lied to the public about the state of the public purse to get elected. I happened to be in Budapest during the ensuing protests in the fall of 2006 and can't say I'm surprised that the ruling socialist party was reduced to 15% of the vote. Hungary is in dire straits and has been for a while. The country was bailed out by the IMF in 2008. That loan is technically due back in the fall. Greece's problems are probably a larger concern for Europe but the EU never really dealt with the collapses in Hungary and the Baltics in 2008. The amount of help being offered Greece undoubtedly receives a poor response in the streets of Budapest and Riga.

Perhaps most concerning about this election result is the significant showing by the far-right Jobbik party which earned 12% of the vote. That's good for 47 seats and third place in Hungary's parliament. It is chilling to see a party affiliated with racist thugs with that level of support in Europe. When Jobbik received similar support during EU parliamentary elections it was dismissed by some because it was an almost irrelevant election and they would form a tiny part of the parliament. This is harder to dismiss. The spectre of the far right in Europe is real and needs to be confronted.

UK Votes 2010: The Lib-Dems Strike Back

The United Kingdom is less than two weeks away from a national election and there are strange things afoot in the motherland. The consensus going into this election is that David Cameron and the Conservatives were going to sweep Gordon Brown out of office. Then something strange happened: the Liberal Democrats under leader Nick Clegg started to gain momentum. The momentum has picked up in the wake of Clegg being declared the winner in the first two leadership debates. Now Clegg's party is sitting second in the BBC's poll of polls.

I tend to like Liberal-Democratic parties in Europe for a whole bunch of ideological similarity reasons. I do have one major beef with the Lib-Dems and that is their strong support for the EU. In the context of the crisis in Greece, it is surprising to me that the Lib-Dems pro-EU stance isn't coming under more scrutiny. My guess is the Lib-Dem support is as much a "none of the above" thing as anything else and therefore people don't care that he'd give all their tax dollars to the delinquents in Athens.

Hudak Attacks Harris Legacy

History can be really annoying in politics. Particularly, if you forget it exists. See, back when Mike Harris was the premier of Ontario, he introduced the entirely sensible idea of tying the size of the Ontario legislature to the size of Ontario's delegation in the House of Commons. Now, admittedly one of the reasons Harris did this to reduce the number of MPP's at Queen's Park. Another key reason was that it allowed Elections Ontario to avoid the time consuming and expensive work of drawing electoral boundaries that would end up being virtually identical to what Elections Canada had done. In other words, eliminate redundant government work. This was all part of the Common Sense Revolution Tim Hudak and the current crop of PC's at Queen's Park claim to love so much. Now the PC's are up in arms because McGuinty is talking about going back to the principle established by Harris and adding 18 new seats for the 2015 election to match the anticipated move in Ottawa. Damn that Mike Harris and his Liberal ways!

Side Note: The NDP probably haven't looked at population estimates lately or aren't very good at math. It is extraordinarily unlikely that any new seats would be added in Northern Ontario to "divide up some of the huge northern ridings in Ontario" as the article says.

Future Ridings by Party

As requested here is the party-by-party breakdown for the regions getting new seats under the Tory redistribution plan. What I've done is worked out what percentage of the extra voters in each region went to each party in the last election. This is different from the regional results as the smaller ridings have basically no impact. You only get credit for votes in ridings with over 108,000 residents because it is these people that will be moved into the new ridings. Elections Canada tends to prefer to keep existing ridings as is whenever possible. I will list the region following by the percentage of votes anticipated for each party in the new ridings, followed finally by my estimate of what those percentages mean in seats.

Alberta:

Calgary (2 seats): CPC 62.5%, LPC 15.7%, GPC 10.2%, NDP 8.3%
RESULT: CPC 2
Edmonton (2 seats): CPC 58.9%, LPC 15.1%, NDP 15.1%, GPC 7.5%
RESULT: CPC 2
Rural Alberta (1 seat): CPC 72.2%, NDP 12.7%, GPC 8.9%, LPC 5.1%
RESULT: CPC 1

British Columbia:

Lower Mainland (2 seats): CPC 50.5%, NDP 22.3%, LPC 19.1%, GPC 6.9%
RESULT: CPC 2
Vancouver (3 seats): CPC 39.5%, LPC 27.9%, NDP 21.9%, GPC 10%
RESULT: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1
Vancouver Island (2 seats): CPC 39.7%, NDP 31.8%, LPC 17.9%, GPC 9.9%
RESULT: CPC 1, NDP 1

Ontario:

East (3 seats): CPC 49.2%, LPC 28.6,% NDP 13.1%, GPC 9.1%
RESULT: CPC 2, LPC 1
905/Golden Horseshoe (10 seats): CPC 40.3%, LPC 37.6%, NDP 14.5%, GPC 6.5%
RESULT: CPC 5, LPC 5
Southwest (3 seats): CPC 40%, LPC 26.1%, NDP 20.7%, GPC 9.1%
RESULT: CPC 1, LPC 1, NDP 1
Toronto (2 seats): LPC 49.7%, CPC 29.3%, NDP 13.9, GPC 6.5
RESULT: LPC 2

This gives us national increasese as follows based on the 2008 election:

CPC 17, LPC 10, NDP 3

Future Riding Breakdown

In order to understand what impact the proposed new ridings would have on the parliament of Canada, we need to know where the seats are going to be. A regional breakdown of where the seats are going helps. Thus, I've calculated out which regions (these are the electionprediction.org regions that I've lifted for my projections) have earned new seats. First in Alberta which is expected to jump from 28 to 33:

Calgary:
Current: 8
Proposed: 10

Edmonton:
Current: 8
Proposed: 10

Rural:
Current: 12
Proposed: 13

British Columbia which is proposed to go from 36 to 43 seats breaks down as follows:

Interior:
Current: 10
Proposed: 10

Lower Mainland:
Current: 7
Proposed: 9

Vancouver:
Current: 13
Proposed: 16

Vancouver Island:
Current: 6
Proposed: 8

Ontario is much more complicated because of Northern Ontario. On a pure rep by pop basis Northern Ontario should lose about 3.5 of its current 11 seats (I include Parry Sound-Muskoka in the 11). Obviously, that's unlikely to happen as Northern Ontario has been consistently over represented for years. So if we take Northern Ontario at 11 seats we get the following breakdown for the new 124 seats:

Eastern:
Current: 15
Proposed: 18

Golden Horseshoe/905
Current: 34
Proposed: 44

Northern
Current: 11
Proposed: 11

Southwestern:
Current: 24
Proposed: 27

Toronto:
Current: 22
Proposed: 24

If Northern Ontario were to lose 3 seats, the gainers would be the Golden Horseshoe/905 (2) and Southwestern (1).

The Role of Dr. House Will Be Played by Andrew Coyne

Andrew Coyne has a fascinating piece up at macleans.ca about the future of the Liberal Party. Coyne's diagnosis of the problems facing the LPC is pretty close to spot on, his prescription may kill the patient. Coyne makes a long list of suggestions about policy issues for the party to champion. As a member in good standing of the Liberal Party of Canada, I can't say I agree with most of Coyne's list. In fact, I'd be severely tempted to leave the party if it adopted this kind of agenda. Let's go down the list.

• Democratic Reform: The biggest question on this one is of course, why? While there are certainly Liberal proponents of reform, the issue is not a vote-getter. Electoral reform is a terrible issue to try to run on if you are, as Mr. Coyne accurately points out, trying to differentiate yourself from the NDP and the Greens on the left. Senate reform is a bit of a political white whale in my mind. Finally, while leadership and nomination rules are important I don't believe in dictating to political parties how they run what are fundamentally internal matters.
• Human Rights Commission and Hate Speech: This looks like it's straight out of the Tory playbook. To me the whole human rights commission controversy is all not-so-vaguely anti-Muslim. That's not a direction for any political party, particularly a party as committed to multiculturalism as the LPC. What's the tagline: If you like hate speech, Vote for Ezra Levant and the Liberal Party of Canada?
  
• Agricultural Import Tariff Reduction: I'm actually all for this one philosophically. Tariffs on agriculture make food more expensive for Canadians and directly contribute to the starvation of the third world. Having said all that, a party without a whole bunch of rural seats outside of Atlantic Canada would be raked over the coals if it went after farmers. A Tory majority government is probably the only way this could even theoretically happen.
  
• Flat Tax and Guaranteed Income: While this would be consistent with the LPC's history of being simultaneously right wing and left wing, I can't bring these two ideas together philosophically. More importantly, they're both bad ideas. In order to avoid bankrupting the government any flat tax would have to be imposed at a higher level than that of the lowest tax bracket. That means higher taxes for Canada's poor. Guaranteed income would help the poor but it is fundamentally inflationary and doesn't really encourage people to get a job.
• CPP Privatization: Wait, so the LPC is supposed to take policy advice from George W. Bush? CPP is by all accounts in decent shape, especially relative to similar programs in other countries. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
• Carbon Tax: Um. NO! You can go through my archives and find my arguments about why I don't think it's great environmental policy. More importantly, if the point of all this is political revival, we know it's a dud politically.
  

Tories Propose Major Government Expansion

Okay, so maybe that's a little unfair. Still, it's an interesting idea being proposed by the Minister of State for Democratic Reform. I criticized the Tories the last time they tried to change the way the house is distributed because they were essentially going to screw Ontario. They have seen the error of their ways with the new bill and Ontario will get a fair shake. However, the bill will see the House of Commons grow substantially with no end in sight. The major change here is switching out the old formula for determining how many seats a province gets with a new set maximum number of 108,000 people per riding. The difference is that by the time the new census is worked through (probably 2013) the house would add 23 seats more than it would have under the current system. The strange thing is that the arbitrary 108,000 number is significantly higher than the roughly 104,000 people per riding in Québec which was the benchmark of the old Tory bill.

It's still a lot of new seats and it does not bode particularly well for keeping the House in some sort of check going forward. To give you an idea, Ontario has grown at a rate of basically one whole seat per year over the past five years. If current growth rates hold, Québec may be entitled to 76 or 77 seats come the 2021 census. You could theoretically raise the 108,000 ceiling in the future to try to check the growth but that would in essence create the same problem that you had before whereby fast growing provinces are curbed while slower growing provinces hold on to their seats based on the constitutional provision that provinces aren't allowed to lose seats. It would be really nice if we could figure out a way to get rep by pop without having to constantly wedge seats into the House of Commons.

Clinton States Obvious; Canadian Media Loses It

Diplomacy can be a tricky thing. Stephen Harper is learning that the hard way this week after his failed arctic meeting. Hillary Clinton made what would seem to be fairly innocuous comments about theoretically wanting the Canadian military to stay on in Afghanistan. Of course the Americans would like to continue to have forces from a country that has a) been in Afghanistan for almost a decade b) been willing to pay the ultimate price in Afghanistan's most dangerous areas unlike certain NATO partners. From the US perspective, this is common sense. Well, that is unless you read the Canadian media response to Clinton's comments. What is probably fueling the Canadian media firestorm is that the Conservative government has been not so quietly hinting for a while now that they would like to extend the Afghan mission if only Parliament would let them. How much of that sentiment is driven by a desire to look tough and how much is based on the Tories actually wanting to extend the mission isn't entirely clear. The politics of extension are murky at best when you consider Ignatieff's unequivocal love of all things peacekeeping.

The politics are interesting but everyone seems to be forgetting one key part of the story. The Canadian military has already said that it effectively can't continue the mission in Afghanistan beyond 2011. It doesn't have the available personnel or equipment to sustain the mission any longer. It needs a break. Whether or not Canada could sustain a smaller non-combat role is a different question, but we probably shouldn't be envisioning another five years in Kandahar here. Thank God for that. I personally cannot wait for the day when our brave men and women can come home safely. February 2011 cannot come soon enough.