MayDay 2011: The Conservative Coalition (repost)

Stephen Harper has dropped the word ‘coalition’ of late, possibly because he and his handlers have decided to focus on backpeddling following scathing reviews from Canada’s Auditor General insinuating that they broke the law with spending for the G8/G20 summit.

However, Canadians shouldn’t let him drop the word ‘coalition’ because he lives and breathes by it.

His power depends on a coalition.

At the outset of the campaign, Stephen Harper had us believe that the word ‘coalition’ – especially when the opposition is concerned – may as well be the spawn of the Devil or something … gasp … worse: a Canada without him at the helm.

Of course, this is OK because every time Stephen Harper speaks about the evils of coalitions, he is painting himself into a corner and he won’t be able to get himself out … or blame a low-level staffer for his mistakes.

This is because he represents and leads one of Canada’s most successful coalitions: the CRAP coalition.

I know this term is used as a derogatory remark about the existing Conservative party and platform, but let’s take a brief look at the history of what is now the Conservative Party of Canada:

Progressive Conservatives dominate the scene from Confederation to the end of the Mulroney years
Albertans get all snippy about how we Canadians treat ‘their’ oil and form the Reform Party of Canada, a thinly veiled gang of libertarians, Gordon Gecko fanatics and Ayn Rand junkies
Other conservative folks decide that there isn’t enough religion in the halls of Canadian government and form the Alliance Party, a thinly-veiled ‘whites only’ group
These three parties split the small-c conservative vote and keep the Liberals in power from 1993 (the year Kim Campbell was defeated) to 2006, when Stephen Harper used a coalition to defeat Paul Martin
The tables are turned in 2003: Stephen Harper eventually crams all three parties into one box, forms a coalition of conservative and right-leaning parties and declares that ‘progressive’ isn’t fashionable anymore
Voila: The Conservative Party of Canada is born!

As you can see, ‘coalition’ is the life-blood of the Conservative Party of Canada, but a more important word might be ‘suppression‘.

It’s inevitable that folks from all walks of life – be they Libertarians, Pro-Life, religious fanatics, anti-gay, anti-feminist – will be busting to have a voice in a room where they cannot speak or have an opinion, lest they fragment the voting public that puts Stephen Harper in power.

They’ll also get more and more irritated as ‘socialists’ like Jack Layton get a seat at Stephen Harper’s table while they’re left out in the cold because Jack (and/or Ignatieff) represent Stephen Harper’s SECOND ongoing coalition: the vacillating support from either the Liberals, NDP or even the Bloc that keeps this very sick patient alive and provides new blood when the Conservative minority is about to go into cardiac arrest because of its own largesse.

I pity the people who are in these and other groups that want to be heard, but who will never be listened to as long as the Conservative Party of Canada has Stephen Harper at the helm swearing that ‘coalitions’ in Canada are an unacceptable form of government.

The real truth to the situation is that a coalition of progressives and centre/left would represent more than 2 out of 3 votes in Canada. This would push Stephen Harper and his corrupt crew into oblivion.

Today, the left and centre parties will not talk of a coalition, but can we at least try to convince them to create a plan to push the Conservative Party of Canada out of power and avoid damaging their own prospects in the process?

Is that too much to ask? Maybe Jack Layton and Elizabeth May can take the lead on this since Michael Ignatieff has ruled it out?

MayDay 2011: Would Harper Use Canadian Funds to Privatize Prisons?

We all agree that Stephen Harper and the Conservaclones are just copies of the more staunch and obvious Republicans in the United States, so this story should be considered fair warning for Canadians that are concerned about prison plans in this country.

First, we still don’t know what they will cost.

Second, we don’t know why they’re needed since crime is going down.

Finally, the prospect of using taxpayer funds to eventually privatize prisons is simply a disgusting waste of money.

We all know that this might happen, however. The Ontario Conservatives used public funds to build a toll-road across the GTA and eventually sold it for a song to a private consortium, effectively relinquishing taxation powers to a private group.

This is a classic case of how conservatives (the CPC in Canada or Republicans in the US) create government waste and deficit and ultimately cry poor based on unreasonable expectations set by corporate-controlled organizations like the IMF and World Bank. They then liquidate public assets at fire-sale prices in order to ‘balance the books’, literally giving these assets away to private companies.

Don’t let it happen in Canada. Vote on May 2, 2011.

MayDay 2011: Reposts

As the clock winds down, I’ll be re-posting a few of the more popular articles that I’ve written over the last few weeks. Site traffic, links and comments will be the main gauge, but I may also add in a few that I feel are important reminders of why this election is so important.

It’s been fun!

I thank all of those who read what I’ve dribbled on about and hope that I’ve helped ‘the greater good’ in understanding what’s at stake for Canadians on May 2, 2011.

I’ll also repeat this message with this and every post over the next 72 hours or so: VOTE. TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE.

We need it.

MayDay 2011: The Globe Fails Canadians

The Globe and Mail is just one cog in a massive media engine known as BCE Inc.

A few days back, the Globe did the predictable and recommended that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are the ones to be trusted and voted for on May 2.

Unfortunately, it seems the Globe has not done ANY homework on the man and his party.

Does the Globe not realize that the Auditor General has effectively accused the Conservatives of stealing from Canadians?

Does the Globe not realize that Canadians have had enough of criminals running their Parliament, pretending that they represent a majority of this country’s voters?

Does the Globe not realize that hundreds of millions have been spent on media by the Conservatives on the Economic (Distr)Action Plan, profiting all of their journalists, writers, sales people and other staff as a result, tainting their opinion and effectively making it moot?

Does the Globe not realize that there are at least a dozen SERIOUS investigations pending into the wrongdoings of the 40th Parliament?

Does the Globe not realize that Stephen Harper is lying to Canadians when he blames the opposition parties for dissolution of government, when in fact it was the Speaker of the House that declared that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives were in contempt of Parliament for not coming clean with expenses and costs for their programs?

Does the Globe not realize that the Conservatives are the poorest managers of money that we’ve had in this country since the previous winners of such a dubious achievement, the Mulroney government?

Does the Globe not realize that the Harper government has out-spent the Mulroney government?

Does the Globe not realize that Canada is an international embarrassment and that Canadians are ashamed of their government and our rapidly declining status as a respectable nation?

Does the Globe not realize that its time has come as well?

Too much is riding on this election for this complete show of ignorance.

If you subscribe to the Globe, cancel your subscription.

MayDay 2011: Is Stephen Harper A Zombie or Vampire?

This is the most vital question vexing all Canadians as we approach Election Day on May 2.

Is Stephen Harper a Zombie or is he a Vampire?

(OK … maybe just some).

Let’s consider the two possibilities.

The Case for Zombie

Zombies are defined as fictional undead monster or a person in an entranced state believed to be controlled by a bokor or wizard.

Here’s more from Wikipedia:

Zombie fiction … usually describes a breakdown of civilization occurring when most of the population become flesh-eating zombies – a zombie apocalypse. The monsters are usually hungry for human flesh, often specifically brains. Sometimes they are victims of a fictional pandemic illness causing the dead to reanimate or the living to behave this way, but often no cause is given in the story

One might think Stephen Harper is a zombie given the monotonous repetition of the ‘stable economy’, ‘lower taxes’, ‘must give corporate giveaways’, ‘fear the coalition’ memes that he constantly repeats, but the reality is that this is because the Conservatives don’t actually have a platform. They use catch phrases like ‘tough on crime’ because it’s good marketing, not because it will translate to millions of Canadian captives ripe for the picking (of brains) in newly minted prison cells.

We typically see zombies roaming the streets in a post-apocalypse seeking food (brains). The G20 summit might be a close second to this environment, but Stephen Harper was nowhere to be seen.

One might argue that Stephen Harper is under the influence of a number of ‘wizards’, including Lockheed-Martin lobbyists, Charles McVety, Tom Flanagan or others, but he still seems to exert some level of control over his own thoughts.

When you think of the potential cause for the state of delirium that he seems to be under, one might argue that he is a victim of his own massive inoculation program a few years back sponsored by Glaxo-Smith Kline, where Canadian taxpayers paid hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine to cure a seemingly fake virus (H1N1) that was all the rage with the media at the time. This vaccine could have gone awry and disturbed whatever valuable chemical balance might have remained in the man’s system.

Finally, one could make a very convincing argument that he would love nothing more than chowing down on Michael Ignatieff’s big juicy, Harvard-trained brains. Unfortunately, Michael Ignatieff has also exhibited zombie-like threats with his ‘Rise up’ performance. Was he too trying to tap into the armies of undead to bring his party back to life?

I sit in the ‘no’ side of whether or not Stephen Harper is a zombie mainly because zombies were born out of post-modern opposition to ‘going along with the masses’. Symbolically, they represent consumers and out-of-control followers that have no mind of their own, but Stephen Harper does seem to possess a light of awareness.

The Case for Vampire

Is Stephen Harper a vampire? Let’s explore the idea.

Vampires are defined loosely as follows:

mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person.

… Bram Stoker’s Dracula drew on earlier mythologies of werewolves and similar legendary demons and “was to voice the anxieties of an age”, and the “fears of late Victorian patriarchy“.

More importantly, they possess a number of traits that are sure indicators of vampirism:

Revulsion to garlic. Has anyone seen Steve eat a shawarma? Those things are LOADED with garlic!
Revulsion to day time / light. I’ve seen him on the campaign trail, but I haven’t seen him outdoors recently.
Paleness of skin. Well, that would be a clincher if we knew the other items were true.
Immortality. We know that Stephen Harper was raised in Toronto before moving to Calgary and we’ve never seen any pictures of him when he was a child. Where did he live before Toronto and why was he never a child? Interesting …

But let’s think seriously about this.

It’s very unlikely that Stephen Harper is a vampire.

Vampires are the anti-thesis of religious bodies and were manifestations brought to life in the 1800s by Bram Stoker as the ultimate anti-religious doctrine and as a backlash to the religious hysteria that was controlling the Victorian Age.

But hold on a second! I’m going to loop back on this part of the debate.

There’s nothing more profound than the proverbial ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. Perhaps Stephen Harper is only pretending to be a religious zealot pretending to be a stand-up normal citizen so that he can convert legions of willing (and blood-filled) Christians because they may have arteries filled with the purest and meekest of blood.

His aversion to actually addressing topics of extreme religious nature including abortion and state-funded colleges for friends may also give us clues as to his ultimate design.

Unfortunately, this may not ring true, as many of the folk who frequent places like Tim Horton’s to load up on carbs, lard and coffee are also potentially poisoning their pure and unadulterated bodies. Pure is not the first word that comes to mind, although ‘tasty’ might.

I’ll suggest ‘maybe’ for vampire and will change my opinion when I see him chow into a big garlic sandwich.

Something Else?

So else could Stephen Harper be if he’s not a Vampire or Zombie?

Perhaps he’s some hideous hybrid of the two or something worse that might have evolved from a Tar Sands tailing pond disaster that spewed from the north and found its way down into the riding of Calgary West? Does the Bow Valley River even mingle with the Assiniboine, one of the most polluted rivers in the world thanks to the Tar Sands?

We also know that Stephen Harper (or at least his writers) is a huge fan of the Emperor from the Star Wars series:

Perhaps we’ve all been mislead by the Dark Side of the Force (in other words, political polls, the media and so-called pundits) and Stephen Harper wants to rule Canada like Emperor Palpatine. It would explain a lot, but the biggest question is ‘why’? Canada represents about 0.5% of the world’s population, so surely this would be seen as folly? It’s like running the minnow farm in an ocean filled with sharks. Ambition of this kind could only be folly. Sheer folly.
Perhaps he’s just a pawn in the game, like Darth Vader:

We all know that the Emperor manipulated Anikin / Darth Vader into believing that his big shiny Death Star would earn him a few planets and sleeping rights with Ewoks. Maybe this explains Steve’s fetish with kittens?

Time will tell, voters. Time will tell.

There are many mysteries that we really don’t want to solve on May 2.

If Stephen Harper gets his true majority on May 2, we’ll quickly discover the real Stephen Harper.

(Let’s not, OK?)

MayDay 2011: The Futility of Trusting Polls

This article on the CBC site is an excellent review of why polls and polling data cannot be trusted.

There are some serious issues raised with this article, but in effect, it comes to the conclusion that polls are useless and bought.

What does this mean for any sense of democracy in Canada when corporations are able to manipulate public opinion into believing the lies that Stephen Harper tells us or that the NDP is ‘surging’ in the polls? What’s the truth behind any of this?

If there are now more cellphones than there are landlines and youth tend to own the former over the latter, and youth tend to lean towards progressive causes, then what does this tell us about the seemingly disproportionate percentage for the Conservatives? It’s a lie that they rely very heavily on, that what it tells me.

It’s why it’s vital that youth vote in this election.

Here are a couple of other issues that I have with polls:

They tend not to differentiate between urban and rural voters, with urban voters having more cell phones than rural voters.
They don’t collect data related to what’s happening on social platforms. The tools exist to monitor discussions – many of which are happening in the tens of thousands – but they don’t and the media is doing a poor job of reporting on this. Why? Because the discussions really don’t favour the Cons.
The questions can be skewed to ensure a specific reaction. Don’t believe me? How about this question that I got some months ago: “Is Jack Layton a bad leader because he supports the Taliban or because he doesn’t support tough on crime policies?”

And here’s the big question: are Canadians being manipulated into thinking that the NDP is doing much better than they are in order to confuse voters and ensure a Conservative majority? I don’t want to take the steam out of Jack’s train, but I’m very concerned about the manipulation that might be behind all of this.

We’ll know for sure on Monday, but in the interim: DON’T TRUST POLLS. The only real poll is the result that we have on Monday, May 2.

Here’s a sample of data from the same day (April 20):

BQ  CON GRN LIB NDP ERROR± FIRM
6   36  6   23   25   2.2 Forum Research
6   43  4   21   24   3.1 Ipsos Reid
6.5 34  7.8 24.7 24.7 2.1 EKOS Research
7.5 39  3.4 26.7 22.1 3.1 Nanos Research

Here’s the text from the CBC article (with bold/italics mine):

How can there be an almost nine-point difference in the Conservative vote between Ipsos Reid and Ekos?Or more than four points for the Greens between Ekos and Nanos, and more than five for the Liberals between Ipsos and Nanos?

If the pollsters are so far apart, how can we rely on their interpretation of what is happening “out there” in the Canadian electorate?

The question is important because we have reached the stage of the campaign where polls have become the story. The platforms have been released, the promises rolled out, the debates are a fading memory.

This campaign needed a new story line to carry it to election day, and it has found that in the so-called NDP surge.

Campaign coverage is now focused almost exclusively on the horse race and the strategic decisions each party is making to come to grips with the new reality that the pollsters assure us we are now confronting.

But what if they’re wrong?

Dirty little secret

It’s a question pollsters themselves have been asking lately.

In recent months, several prominent Canadian pollsters have been raising some pretty fundamental questions about their industry.

The most provocative critic has been Allan Gregg, chairman of Harris-Decima, which provides political polling for the Canadian Press. He is also a regular member of The National’s At Issue panel on CBC TV.

Gregg has been doing political polling since the 1970s and in an interview with the Canadian Press he said that “there’s broad consensus among pollsters that proliferating political polls suffer from a combination of methodological problems, commercial pressures and an unhealthy relationship with the media.

“The dirty little secret of the polling business,” he went on, “is that our ability to yield results accurately from samples that reflect the total population has probably never been worse in the 30 to 35 years that the discipline has been active in Canada.”

Methodological problems

Amongst the methodological problems that Gregg and others identify is the incredible shrinking response rate for polls conducted by telephone.

Thirty years ago, about 70-80 per cent of people called by pollsters agreed to be surveyed. Today, that rate is under 15 per cent and Gregg believes those people tend to be older, less well-educated and more rural than the general population.

But for the purposes of their polling, researchers are obliged to assume that the 15 per cent of callers who agree to spend 20 minutes talking to them are representative of the 85 per cent who are too busy or whatever to participate or who never pick up at all because they can identify a pollster through Caller ID.

The growing number of households without landlines also poses significant challenges.

There are now more cellphones than wired phones in Canada (25 million vs. 17.5 million), and those cellphone numbers are harder for pollsters to get. That leaves a large number of people, many of them younger, whose views may never be surveyed.

In both these cases, researchers have developed “models” that they hope can compensate for these and other instances where polls are conducted on an unrepresentative sample. But the accuracy of these models remains in question.

The basic methodological assumption of the polling industry has always revolved around random probability sampling, meaning that everyone has an equal chance of being interviewed. That is now clearly no longer the case.

Commercial pressures

Firms like Nanos, Decima, Ipsos-Reid and Ekos have become household names in Canada because of their high-profile political polling.

But political polling is a loss leader for these companies. They offer their services to media outlets at a deeply discounted rate, or sometimes even for free, because the profile they develop at election time helps them in their core business, which is traditional market research.

They make their money asking people what margarine they spread on their toast, not who they are likely to vote for.

In fact, that voter preference question is often buried inside a longer survey about some completely unrelated subjects.

Over the years, researchers have discovered that where the political question is placed in the survey, and what else is being asked of the respondent, can affect how a person answers the question.

But these placement concerns are rarely factored in to the results.

Many industry veterans now think that too much poorly executed and poorly resourced polling is causing significant harm to the industry.

“I believe the quality overall has been driven to unacceptably low levels by the fact that there’s this competitive auction to the bottom, with most of this stuff being paid for by insufficient or no resources by the media,” Frank Graves of Ekos told the Canadian Press in February.

“You know what? You get what you pay for.”

Unhealthy relationship with the media

Still, no one expects the media’s love affair with opinion polls to end any time soon. Polls are the best news that money can buy.

They keep the campaign story moving along, even when everything else has been thoroughly talked out.

In this campaign, there were 19 days between the English-language leaders’ debate and election day. In 2008, there were only 12.

Also, in 2008, the last platform was dropped just six days before voters went to the polls. This year, it was more than three weeks before. These kinds of gaps require new story lines.

But the problem with using polls here is that, too often, the reporting of them is based on creating drama where none exists.

In the process, non-trivial issues like margin of error, problems with samples and methodologies tend to get pushed aside.

Is that what’s happening with the story of the NDP surge? That will be the subject of the next post.

MayDay 2011: Alice Klein of NOW Toronto Encourages Us to Shake Off Cliches

Alice Klein wrote a piece in NOW Toronto this past week encouraging all of us to accept the fact that in this election, the stakes are extremely high and that the game has definitely changed.

She reminds us that it’s not about voting your passion, but voting for that party that will unseat the Conservative government and push them out of as many ridings as possible.

She’s behind Project Democracy, but there are other projects as well (copied from the Project Democracy site):

Avaaz The campaigning community bringing people-powered politics to decision-making worldwide
Lead Now Brings generations of Canadians together to take action for our future and hold politicians accountable.
Swing 33 Donate strategically in 33 ridings to defeat Harper.
Pair Vote – Vote Swapping Support your preferred party while also stopping Harper
Catch 22 Campaign A grassroots effort to help defeat the Conservative government in 22 key ridings.
The Environment is my Voting Issue Facebook Group An action-oriented Facebook group aimed at holding politicians accountable for their votes on environment issues.
Department of Culture A community of Canadian artists, arts professionals and cultural workers concerned about ensuring the social and cultural health and prosperity of our nation in the face of a Federal Government that is aggressively undermining Canadian values.
Fair Vote Canada – On August 1, 2000, a group of concerned citizens formed Fair Vote Canada (FVC) with the aim of building a nationwide campaign for voting system reform. We envisioned FVC as a multi-partisan, citizen-based campaign bringing together people from all parts of the country, all walks of life and all points on the political spectrum. Today FVC has members in all provinces and approximately 20 local and regional chapters.

Project Democracy is exciting because it focuses on helping voters get up to date polling data related to their riding. In many ‘strategic voting’ ridings, the past favours the Liberals, but since the Liberals are sliding in the polls, should we really be electing someone from the past or someone from the future? I’ve signed up for their email to get riding updates, so I’ll post more information as it comes to my in-basket.

Finally, I can’t repeat this often enough: you can contact pretty much any riding and help them with calls, even if you’re not from that area. Human voices are substantially more valuable to campaigners as opposed to those awful ‘robo-calls’ and they remind voters that this is an election about the future of all people in Canada. Of course, consider your riding and the ridings that are immediately around you as opposed to those that are across the continent!

MayDay 2011: Robo-Calls and Fraud

Robo-calls – the incessant automated calls that you get during an election – are annoying.

They lack personality and warmth and just piss you off. At least, that’s the response I have.

Everybody knows this. Including the Liberals.

It’s because of this that there’s growing suspicion about who might be behind the robo-calls that are coming from somewhere in the United States pretending to be calls from Liberal candidates.

The CBC covered the story yesterday, and Canadians must realize that there’s more to this that must be investigated. As one commentor noted on the CBC site, just call the FBI and have the numbers traced.

But is it that simple?

Will we ever know who’s really behind these calls? Put your bets down.

Canadians probably won’t know who’s to blame, but whoever is behind this has committed an extremely serious breach of ethics and fraud with this election. It’s proof once again that we’re all victims of a very different ball game.

I think you can guess who my money is on when it comes to who’s behind this.

MayDay 2011: MUST Read on the Conservative Record

Thanks to someone for posting “So What Did I Miss?”, a fantastic attempt to chronicle just a FEW of the Conservative breaches of rules, regulations, parliamentary etiquette and general process while they have been in charge of the federal government of Canada.

If you know of anyone who has the least bit of leaning towards the Conservatives, please point them to this site, as it’s important for them to educate themselves on just how crooked the Conservatives really are.

Project Censored Top 25 List of 2010

I would add unprecedented G20 arrests in Canada as one of the biggest stories.

That said, here are the 25 stories from Project Censored: