Well, this election has turned into quite the roller-coaster ride, hasn’t it? Depending on your pollster of choice, we’re either headed for an historic NDP breakthrough or a Conservative majority. Confused? Me too. As in past years, I’m participati…
Continue readingTag: 2011 election
Blevkog: Sam Pazzano: Whore! Future senator?
Wow. The Conservatives are scared, and have no shame. Warning: If you click this, you might throw up a little in your mouth. I did. On the bright side, maybe this ridiculously transparent smear job will have the same effect for Layton’s campaign …
Continue readingBlevkog: Prediction time!
Hey all, I’ve been playing with my spreadsheet. It’s silly, fun, and a waste of time. That aside, I’ve taken the shift between polling numbers in 2011 (allowing for the current trends to continue until Monday) and voting numbers from …
Continue readingPample the Moose: NDP in Quebec: Who are these prospective MPs?
With all the excitement/panic/drama surrounding the apparent NDP wave in Quebec, it’s fair to wonder who might suddenly become the new crop of MPs from Quebec if polling data translates into seats in the House of Commons. I, for one, am very curious. Here in Guelph, the NDP ran fourth in the 2008 election, and even today, a week before the election, there is still no candidate bio on the website for the local candidate, Bobbi Stewart. I have no idea from the website who she is, other than the election preparedness chair for the local riding association.If that’s the case in Ontario, it’s no surprise that speculation is rampant about the Quebec crop of candidates for the party. The Globe and Mail has started digging, and has turned up at least a handful of university students. I’m not surprised at all. When I volunteered for the local NDP candidate in Outremont in the 2004 election, I was rather surprised to discover that the entire provincial campaign was being run out of a single office on St. Laurent Blvd, and that most of the candidates for the province were in fact the campaign management team, based almost entirely out of Montreal, many of them university students, and most of them under thirty years of age. A quick glance through the list of candidates seems to indicate that this is again the case in at least a sizeable number of ridings.As a person who genuinely would love to see the NDP replace the Bloc as the choice of Quebec voters, I’m hoping that some of the blue seats in that province will turn orange, and that the newly elected MPs will do a good job. It’s just that nagging memory of the ADQ surge to become the official opposition in Quebec in 2007 that has me a little concerned of what could happen when a series of placeholder candidates suddenly become MPs. Let’s just say that I’m hopeful, yet concerned…
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Green Party Canada: Advance Polls and the Youth Vote.
The Green Party of Canada has been surprisingly effective in this election, in some respects anyway. I have been a vocal critic of the Leadership of the Party, but given the bad choices made, they are doing the right things to win Elizabeth her Seat in SGI
Continue readingPample the Moose: An Orange Revolution in Quebec: The NDP in la belle province
I’m somewhat surprised by the latest CROP and Ekos polls coming out of Quebec, showing the NDP cruising into first place, and the Bloc vote steadily falling. But as I’ll get to later in this post, there are good historical reasons to explain this tren…
Continue readingPample the Moose: Election 2011: Thoughts on "Truthiness" and Evidence-Based Policy
Just a quick post today to link to a blogpost I was invited to contribute to canada.com’s Decision Canada election website. In it, I reflect on recent Conservative changes to programs such as the long-form census and the court challenges program which…
Continue readingPample the Moose: James Moore: How far back is going too far back?
In the interests of a bit of non-partisanship, I’m going to call out the Liberals today for a tactic I find distasteful that was used in BC. Liberals in the riding of heritage minister James Moore have released a column that he wrote in a student nesp…
Continue readingPample the Moose: U of Guelph votes will count!
Elections Canada has released a Solomonesque public statement on the University of Guelph voting controversy. Of greatest interest is the fact that the student votes will be counted, and are considered to have been cast in a manner that respects the C…
Continue readingPample the Moose: Guelph Conservatives continue to try to exclude youth voters
It’s really quite mind-boggling to think what must be going through the thinking processes of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke’s campaign team. First, they make a point of keeping members of the U of Guelph vote mob away from Harper’s rally. …
Continue readingPample the Moose: Post-debate musings
One of the nice perks of being bilingual is that you can watch Canada’s political leaders debate in both languages without having to listen to their interpreters. I watched both Tuesday’s English-language debate and Wednesday’s French-language debate….
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Green Party Canada: Week 2 of the 2011 Election
Not a terribly impressive week for the Green Party of Canada. The debate about the debate has mostly run it’s course, is there anything there to replace it?
Continue readingPample the Moose: Voter engagement. (or Week 2 wrap-up)
Last week, just before the beginning of my second- and third-year Canadian history courses, I played the following Rick Mercer clip: Youth voting has plummetted over the past couple of decades, and falls well below the national average. Indeed, Canadi…
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Green Party Starts to capitalise on Debate on Debates?
Green Party of Canada is starting to leverage the debate about the debate, and relate it back to policy, and electoral obectives.
Continue readingJacked Up: Keon Responds to Vandals
It’s nice to see that so many people across the nation were as disgusted as I was by the vandalism of Ryan Keon’s campaign signs in Nepean-Carleton. Apparently there’s been an out-pouring of support from people of all different political stripes, from just about every corner of the country. As
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Green Party Canada: Week 1 of the 2011 Election Campaign
The Green Party is getting great publicity from their exclusion from the televised debate. They should have been ready to turn that into something electorally significant, instead of simply crowing over a bunch of free publicity. Here is how they can really benefit from this almost an election issue.
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Green Party Moment: Is it Time for Real debate on Nuclear Power?
Elizabeth May is hosting a joint news conference with Linda Keen, the Nuclear watchdog dismissed by the Conservatives for watching. Might be interesting, might actually be worthy of news coverage
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Canadian Broadcast Media Consortium deliberately influencing a Federal Election?
Once again, CTV, oops, I mean the Broadcast Consortium has denied the Green Party admission to the Nationally televised Leaders debate. While it comes as no surprise whatsoever, it still begs the imagination. What is going on in the broadcast consortium’s collective heads? The criteria by which they exclude the GPC seems to change from […]
Continue readingPample the Moose: Debates, Debates, Let’s Have More Debates!
Most of my current students are too young to remember the now infamous election debate clashes between Brian Mulroney and John Turner. So I like to show them the Free Trade Clash from 1988 or the patronage kerfuffle of 1984. Both debates were widely …
Continue readingNot an Official Green Party Canada Site: Election Objectives for Green Party of Canada
Well, it has certainly been awhile since I blogged about the Green Party. When last I posted, the GPC was in the throes of a particularly convoluted internal conflict, complete with plots, counterplots, and counter -counter, etc. in the runup to the Leadership contest that never happened. So a quick recapitulation is in order, as […]
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