Worth Fighting For

As a tepid Conservative supporter in the last election and a former Liberal party member, I can call each as I see it and this week I'm disappointed in both.
The Tories, staying true to their Reform roots, want to do away with the $1.75 the parties get for each vote they receive in elections. Beyond their ideological motives, Harper is doing this to kick his opponents while they are down. The Conservatives do a better job raising funds from private citizens, so they need the public funding less. Clearly, their strategic calcualtions lead them to conclude that cutting out this per-vote funding will only hurt them while it decimates the other parties. So much for Harper's claim that he wanted a better relationship with Parliament. He has a duty to earn the confidence of the House, and if he's not even going to try, what is he there for?
The Conservatives have been misrepresenting this issue. First, it is not a "subsidy." It is a grant to parties based on vote share. Nobody who voted Conservative is seeing their money go to the Bloq or the NDP or the Liberals and vice versa. And if you do not vote, you send no money anywhere. So it is essentially a donation to a party of your choice. Secondly, it is not the only source of public financing the parties receive. Nor is it the biggest. Parties that get more than 2% of the national vote get 50% of their election expenses reimbursed. And candidates that get 10% or more of the vote in their riding get up to 60% back from the government. This amounts to more than the per-vote money. Why aren't the Conservatives cutting this? Considering that they spend more than any other party during elections, they benefit the most from this.
Public funding of parties may sound distasteful, but it is integral to our political process. We have banned unions and corporations from donating and have severly restricted private donations in an effort to ensure that our politicians aren't bought. Undoing this would be a terrible idea. Most democracies follow this path and we have done it for years. If you want to debate the merits of this, fine, but do not sneak it into a fiscal update and make it a confidence motion as the Conservatives have done. By doing this, they deserve the backlash of the parties. And if voters were more educated on this matter, they'd have to deal with backlash from them too.
I'm disappointed that the Liberals have been unable to find an MP who can communicate this to voters. They have pretended that they are angry with the economic update. And while that does leave much to be desired, the real reason for all the coalition talk is the cuts to party funding. The Liberals should not be afraid to say so. If they could manage to communcate their ideas to voters, perhaps they wouldn't be in the dire situation they are in now. They allowed their leader, Dion, to be defined for a year before they bothered to communicate what he was all about. They let the Green Shift get bad mouthed for a year without ever explaining it to Canadians. If they can't explain why election financing is good, then they don't deserve to form government in a coalition. A fight for election financing is worth bringing down the government for, especially since it was snuck in to an economic bill that it had no place being. Don Martin wrote in the National Post that "while the merits of political funding might be worth a debate during calm prosperous times, it has no place on an agenda that should now be devoted to important decisions." The NDP and Liberals should not be afraid to tell Canadians what they are standing up for. If they don't, then there's no way Canadians will stand with them.

Old is the new Black

With the election of Barack Obama, America proved a few things to the world. It showed that it has moved beyond its divisive racial past and showed that it was both ready and willing to elect a black President. This is despite the endless lecturing we all had to endure about the resilience of the racist, white American. During the presidential campaign, Obama insisted that John McCain would play the race card, and try to tell voters to stay away because he didn’t look like the other Presidents on American money and in American history books, even though the honourable McCain never did. Pundits insisted that Obama’s race was an obstacle in his way to the White House. CNN spent many nights probing the effects of “race in the race” and how it may impact Obama’s electability. And voters had to watch news clip after news clip where reporters would dig up some idiot who said they can’t vote for Obama because of his middle name, and then insinuate that this is indicative of a larger trend. In the end, all of this worrying, hand-wringing and race-baiting was for naught. On Election Day, Obama’s race helped him. The exit polls show that only 9% of voters said race was an important factor to them. Not exactly a huge racial barrier for Obama to have to overcome. But of those people for whom race was important, 53% of them actually voted for Obama. Obama benefitted from being black! So much for racist America, eh? Unfortunately, the candidate who actually had the societal handicap was not the black candidate, but the old one. While nearly absent from the discussion during the campaign, age turned out to be a much greater factor in this election. A whole 15% of voters said it was an important factor to them and 77% of those people voted for Obama. Whereas Barack Obama’s race actually helped him, John McCain suffered greatly because people didn’t want to vote for a person of his age. But where were the nightly specials on age discrimination? Where were the advocates for the aged? Our society was so preoccupied with the potential for racism to hold Obama back that it missed ageism completely. Yes, with the election of Barack Obama, America proved to the world a few things. Sadly, first among them was that while America won’t judge you on the colour of your skin, it will judge you on the number of wrinkles in it.

The Great Double Standard

I have been shocked in the last few weeks at the outrageous double standard that is present in the media coverage of the US election. The media has lashed out at everything Sarah Palin and John McCain do while ignoring negative stories about Obama.
The media was quick to report that there was a shout of "kill him" at a Palin rally when she mentioned Obama's name. For sure, this is a disgusting comment. Or, rather, it would have been, had it actually occurred. The Secret Service investigated and found no evidence of it. Secret Service agents were at the Scranton rally and heard no such thing. Agents also investigated claims made about a Florida rally, where "kill him" was indeed yelled, but directed clearly at Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist. This fact was not only unreported, it was distorted so that it appeared the comment was directed at Obama.
The media was quick to pounce on the "kill him" report and it flooded newscasts, websites and magazines. Now that it turns out the two stories that started it all didn't happen, the media has been remarkably absent in setting the record straight. They have also been absent in covering the numerous attacks on Palin, from the Obama supporters' crude tshirts, to the warning by comedian Sandra Bernhard that Palin would get gang raped if she went to New York to the art exhibit where you can grab a gun and pretend to shoot her.
Where is the outrage over these examples? If a conservative comedian or radio host warned that Obama should stay out of Alabama lest he be beaten and hung, would the media be silent? If there was an art exhibit where you could "assassinate" Obama, would the media ignore it? This is outrageous! These are just a few examples of a double standard that is both unfair to the McCain campaign and to the American voters, who deserve a balanced and unbiased news media.

Why this Election was a Game Changer

Although conventional wisdom is that the Canadian federal election was an unnecessary, $300 million exercise in futility, it was in fact a game changer. How so? Because of the October 14 results, Canadians have seen the last of all of the major party leaders. The election of 2008 will go down as the last for Dion, Duceppe, Layton and Harper. The next time Canadians go to the polls, the political scene will look nothing like it does today. Everyone already knew that this election was Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s last, even before he announced his eventual resignation this week. Dion ran a disorganized campaign, allowed himself to be defined by Conservative ads for months, and was unable to connect or convince voters as his party was defeated. There are no consolation prizes in electoral politics, especially when you finish with the lowest number of seats in a generation and the lowest vote share since Confederation. Dion is done and the next election will see a new leader for the Liberals, likely chosen within the next few months. Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Quebecios leader will not run in another election either; he barely ran in this one. Duceppe made it clear in 2007 that he wanted to get out of federal politics and lead the provincial Parti Quebecois in Quebec and only hung around for this federal election after another took the PQ position. Throughout this campaign, and especially during the debates, Duceppe seemed tired and uninterested. After 5 elections, I suspect Duceppe is tired of the political game in Ottawa. He’ll be gone come the next election. The NDP’s Jack Layton is finished too. Despite his best efforts to appear as Canada’s white, mustachioed Barack Obama, Layton was unable to realize the major gains he had foretold, gaining only 8 seats and improving the NDP vote share by less than 1%. The NDP had high hopes for Quebec and BC but was unable to win big in either. This was Layton’s 3rd election and there are rumblings that the lone Quebecois NDP MP, Thomas Mulcair may be itching to replace him. There are others in the party who say Layton has moderated the party too much and has abandoned their ideals. Either way, Layton will have a hard time staying on as leader; he’ll be gone by the next election. Finally, I predict that Conservative leader Stephen Harper will face a challenge to his leadership. Harper has run in 3 elections now, and while each showing has improved upon the last, he was unable to win a majority government when given the dual gifts of a vote split between four left wing parties and the most unappealing, ineffectual Liberal leader in decades. If Harper could not deliver a majority in this election with this political climate, will he ever be able to? You better believe that this question is being asked by conservatives across the country. Harper has done a good job building the party around himself, leaving little room for others to flourish. But he can only run a one-man ship for so long before challengers like Peter McKay, John Baird, or perhaps Peter Van Loan begin questioning his leadership, especially if the Liberals select a dynamic leader to replace Dion and the probability of a Harper-led majority declines. Whether he is forced out by a leadership review or he steps down when the writing on the wall becomes clear, Stephan Harper will be gone by the next election too. Many Canadians were exasperated with this election. Many found it unnecessary, many thought the platforms and campaigns were largely uninspiring and there was little change in regards to the composition of the House of Commons. But Canadians should be thankful for having an election this year! Sure it may have been our fourth election in eight years, and sure it may have been dull compared to the drama of the United States’ election, but because of the 2008 results, our next election is bound to be more interesting: the political landscape will change dramatically and four completely new party leaders will be ready to vie for our votes. And there’s nothing boring about that.

In Defense of Bottled Water

This month the issue of banning bottled water has resurfaced in Metro Vancouver. Vancouver city councilor Tim Stevenson has come out in favour of a ban on bottled water at city facilities and is urging city council to pass a bylaw to that effect. And there’s talk at school boards that schools should be free of the bottles as well. Environmentalists and sanctimonious politicians have gotten out their soapboxes and are beginning to lecture us on the virtues of good old tap water. These activists insist that bottled water is evil. Water bottles are littering our cities and filling up our landfills! Producing bottles wastes energy, burns fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming! Then they charge that British Columbians are so shallow that we only drink bottled water because it’s cool. And for a final argument, they have even dragged out the old adage that Evian spelled backwards is naïve. What clever wordplay! Clearly this palindrome proves the necessity of such a ban! This idea is ridiculous and this campaign against bottled water is absurd. Firstly, it isn’t 1998; nobody drinks bottled water because it’s cool anymore. In fact, isn’t being eco-friendly all the rage right now? If so, then drinking bottled water is about as hip as leaving your Hummer idling while you go club a seal. People drink bottled water because it is convenient. Somehow this point escapes the anti-bottle zealots who keep informing us of the quality of our tap water and the necessity of bringing our own bottles from home. But sometimes I get thirsty and don’t have my reusable bottle (a stainless steel one at that) available. If I forget my bottle, all the high quality tap water in the world isn’t going to help. If I want to get some water to take with me to class or on the bus, bottled water is my only option. And some people simply do not like the taste of tap water or prefer their water to have bubbles or minerals or flavours and that’s a choice they should be allowed to make. The environmental arguments for a ban are flimsy too. Are our landfills really filling up with water bottles that should have been recycled? Encorp Pacific, the not-for-profit company that runs our beverage container recycling programs, recently disclosed that 73% of plastic beverage bottles are brought back to their depots and recycled. That’s a very high level of recycling participation by British Columbians and the last 27% could likely be captured by increasing the bottle deposit and adding more recycling depots and bins. Water bottles seem like even less of a problem when you look at the recycling rates of other waste items, such as dead batteries. Batteries can be very harmful to the environment but, according to Statistics Canada, only about 25% of them are disposed of properly. Where’s the outrage over this? Why isn’t Tim Stevenson calling for a battery ban? And as for the fossil fuel argument, I suggest we adjust our priorities. With all the environmental problems in the world, should bottled water be at the top of the list? If we are concerned about excessive burning of fossil fuels, then our governments need to improve transit, increase our hydroelectricity production, and make electric and hybrid cars cheaper and more readily available. These are real solutions to climate change; a bottled water ban is not. The politicians in our city councils and on our school boards should drop this silly idea, move on to tackling the challenges that really matter, and leave us free to drink what we want.