Tag: Canadian Politics

Scott's DiaTribes: Somewhere, Stephen Harper is smiling at this.

Statistics Canada released a survey today on the reasons given by those Canadians as to why they did not vote in the May 2 federal election:

..The most common response for not having voted was that they were “not interested in voting” (28%), which also includes feeling their vote would not have made a difference in the election results. An additional 23% indicated they were “too busy”, which includes having family obligations or having a schedule conflict at work or school.

With regards to the 23% who were “too busy” to vote, they either didn’t see the notices from Elections Canada on where one could do advance voting, or […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: Think about it..

This is a status message seen on Facebook by a family member who normally doesn’t utter political statements:

So let me get this straight…Kelsey Grammer can end a 15yr marriage by phone, Larry King is on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55hr marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with everyone, 53% of Americans get divorced and 30-60% cheat on their spouses. Yet, same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really?

THat would be referring partially to some of the statements coming from New York State opponents of same-sex marriage, which was legalized yesterday.

Just look at Canada. Has the institution […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: Evidence of climate change

Apologies for the extended absence, but there was a death in the family which absorbed my time for the middle and end of last week.. family comes before blogging.

Anyhow, to start off the new (and short) work week, I caught an article from Dr Jeff Masters over at The Weather Underground. In this article, he comments that since 2010, things seems to have gotten very extreme, weather-wise:

Every year extraordinary weather events rock the Earth. Records that have stood centuries are broken. Great floods, droughts, and storms affect millions of people, and truly exceptional weather events unprecedented in human history may occur. But the wild roller-coaster ride of […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: Nothing new here

A new Nanos poll comes out today that shows the Conservatives slightly increasing their standing from the May 2, 2011 election results. This should be no great surprise; Parliament has barely sat since the results and is about to go in its break for the summer til September, and if you thought the electorate was disengaged before the last election, they’re hardly going to be now with summer approaching. What was done during this brief Parliament sitting was a threatened back to work legislation of Air Canada employees and a bill in the making to legislate Canada Post striking workers back to work. I would gander both actions or […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: Weekend thoughts

The Liberal delegates have (unfortunately in my view) voted to extend the wait back to 2013 before choosing a new Liberal leader. I’ve already gone over my objection to that, but it seems from what I was hearing that the LPC brought out the party leaders heavy artillery and urged acceptance of their motion, rather then accept either the 6 month requirement or a middle of the road option as my friend Jeff was putting forward. The LPC brass got their way, it seems. I’d have thought since 2006 that some of our party would learn that the Party bosses and leaders don’t always know best. PERHAPS they will […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: I support the middle path timeline subamendment for the Liberal Party Leadership Vote

I’m away visiting my folks for the weekend (for Father’s Day, the immediate family is getting together), but I decided to interrupt my sojourn and get on here just to say that I think that Jeff Jedras – fellow Liberal blogger and also a delegate at this Liberal Extraordinary Convention this weekend – has put forth an amendment that is worthy of support.

Read more of it at Jeff’s site, but it basically boils down to Jeff arguing that while the current 6 month time line for choosing the new Liberal leader int he LPC constitution may be too short… what the Liberal Leadership executive is offering as the […]

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Scott's DiaTribes: Watching the Ontario election campaign

Yes, that has already started. You know an election campaign has started when political ads attacking other parties or promoting your own come along on the television. In the federal Conservative Party’s case, they were in seemingly permanent campaign mode for years while they had a minority. Here in Ontario though, we have a fixed date election – one that the government actually sticks to. The opening salvo of that appears to have been during Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals back on Wednesday, when Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives let loose an ad on the unsuspecting populace.

It will be interesting to see when the Ontario Liberals […]

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