POLITICS/HUMOUR: WHERE THE BALLOT “COUNTS”
Continue readingTag: Voting
Progressive Proselytizing: Why I voted as I did in the Ontario Election
While I wrote quite a few blog posts on the 2011 Ontario Election, both generally and specifically with regards to my riding of Parkdale-Highpark, I never actually indicated precisely who I was voting for. I thus explain my reasoning here, belatedly, p…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The sensitivity of the Ontario election results to the Green Party vote
One of the interesting results of the Ontario general election was the collapse of the Green Party from its 2007 peak of 8% down to just over 3% in 2011. In this post I run the math on various counterfactual scenarios to see what would have happe…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Ontario Election 2011: Why the left should hope for a Liberal Minority with NDP support
I suspect that many people, perhaps most, have a favorite party that they would prefer to win a majority. Somewhat incorrectly, I think, it has become the conventional wisdom that we should always hope to have a majority government. I have even heard i…
Continue readingPolitics, Re-Spun: Encouraging Early Political Engagement: CitizenNext.ca
It is not an accident that I am a political junkie. Even as a toddler, I was fed a steady diet of left-of-centre ideology, pro-union sentiments and anti-monarchist dogma. My mother, who was not overtly political, ensured I could recognize political leaders from around the world by sight before I could read, that I understood […]
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: My deflating optimism about the NDP leadership race
For a while, I was feeling very energized about the NDP leadership race. We on the left were going to get six months or so to have a real and refreshing discussion of values and policies about where to go from here. With a relatively new One Member One…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: 2011 Ontario Election: Parkdale-Highpark All Candidates Forum Response
The following is my observations and reflections from attending an All Candidates Forum for the riding of Parkdale-Highpark. Click here for an overview on the candidates for this riding. While this post will obviously be specific to this particular On…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: NDP vs Liberal Leadership Election Procedures
We are at a unique position not seen in a long time when both the NDP and the Liberals are set to elect new leadership and are currently led by interim leaders. Following Jack Layton’s death, the NDP will hold its leadership vote in January of 2012 and…
Continue readingWhy we should not hold a referendum on proportional representation
It seems that every time the subject of changing the voting system comes up, we automatically assume that a change must be sanctioned by a referendum. I increasingly feel this is a mistake.We have experienced three referendums on the voting system in t…
Continue readingScott'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 […]
Continue readingOn governance (2): Parliament
This one’s going to be a little disconnected. The overarching thread, as said yesterday, is figuring out how to adjust our governing institutions to suit the importance of the principle of autonomy — that is, the idea that legitimate government author…
Continue readingCrunching the numbers, who Canadians voted for in the 2011 federal election
As previously stated by many liberal bloggers the Conservatives now dominate the rich west, where most of their votes, that put them in a majority government, came from, the NDP are mainly Quebecers and the Liberals are mostly represente…
Continue readingDon’t mess with my vote, Jack
With 59 of their 103 seats in Quebec, we could expect the NDP to pay close attention to Quebec’s concerns. That would, of course, be appropriate. But what I wouldn’t have expected them to do is propose eroding the democratic rights of the rest of us in…
Continue readingOn election 41.
It really is amazing how difficult it is to drag oneself back into longer writing after a significant time away.Anyway, I just want to run with an idea regarding the recent Canadian federal election that’s not being well-discussed (or discussed at all,…
Continue readingArt Threat: Know Your Lines – Center for Urban Pedagogy’s latest poster tackles redistricting
The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s latest issue of Making Policy Public takes you behind the scenes of the largely invisible redistricting process in which politicians often get to choose their voters, instead of the other way around.
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: After an election about personalities, not policies, we can and must do better
We have just witness an election which while historic in many ways was not one of any significance in terms of a discussion of actual issues or policies. The political choices of all four major leaders – and we the audience who responds to them – focus…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: Electoral math II: vote splitting in the Liberal ridings the Conservatives won
While there was an enormous transfer of seats towards the NDP from the Bloc and to a lesser extent the Liberals, the Conservatives managed to move from a minority to a majority largely due to 26 seats they picked up from the Liberals. Three weeks ago, …
Continue readingTHE FIFTH COLUMN: <font color=#FF8040>REMEMBER</font>
It’s Time To Vote
Continue readingPop The Stack: Canadian Election: Fringe Edition
Warning: This post will only make sense to you if you follow the recurring adventures of the characters discussed in it as they try to save our nation and the world as we know it from imminent destruction…it will also help if you watch Fringe. I’m watching Fringe tonight and we
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: The NDP surge and its consequences
The largest political story of the week has nothing to do about policies, it is about the fact that after months of poll numbers that stubbornly refused to budge the NDP has actually experienced a considerable surge in popularity confirmed by a half do…
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