Tag Archives: Politics

Low energy 2012 reflection

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「「私、気になります！」」/「Mirunai」

You can see my 12 Days posts as sort of the most interesting things I’ve seen or read over the year. And so you can probably infer the following.

The best anime of 2012 was Hyouka.

Why? There’s a lot of reasons, but basically, it was the show I was most sad to see end. Oh and I guess there’s this too:

More generally, I think the highlights of my 2012 have been meeting up with people, something that I’ve begun to look forward to after being exiled in London. Of course, there’s the good old meetups with old university friends, some of which involved riichi mahjong. But this was the year that I got to meet some of the Toronto-area cartoon heads that I’ve been talking to on twitter for a while and it was great. And even the non-cartoon head Toronto council watchers were cool too, which is unsurprising, since Toronto City Council is the secret best anime.

Hopefully 2013 gives me some more chances to ruin your impressions of me IRL.

Love, Elections, and Chocolate: Campaign School

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「無題」/「みなせゆう」

Some observations on the serious business of anime high school student council elections.

Primaries

Generally, when I think of primaries, I think of partisan primaries, like those in the States. The idea is to have an internal fight to see which candidate your party will be picking to fight for real. The candidate gets tested and gets a chance to build support and a machine within the party. In Canadian terms (and probably in Australia and the UK too), this resembles nomination battles, but these are typically much less intense than primary elections (and they would matter more if it weren’t for leader veto).

In KoiChoco, we have nonpartisan primaries, since there appear to be no parties. However, there do appear to be formal factions of the student council, each of which are putting up candidates. This means that the primary is largely for sifting through the candidates and allowing only serious candidates through. At first, I thought this would basically look like France’s two-round presidential elections, where only the top two candidates go on, but then they mentioned a 10% vote cutoff, which means that it wouldn’t be a head-to-head fight. I’m sure we can all think of a few situations where a three-way (or more) race led to some electoral shenanigans.

Inside Baseball

I heard that KoiChoco is supposed to be about Japanese politics, which seemed kinda weird, since Japan’s government is a parliamentary system, not a presidential one. Coincidentally, someone made a Japanese politics thread on SA a few weeks ago and I’d started reading it and now KoiChoco’s setup makes a bit more sense in that context. That’s because the way the elections are set up resembles an internal leadership race more than a general election.

In a parliamentary system, governments are formed by members of the legislature if they’re able to hold the confidence of the legislature. Typically, this is the party with the most representatives in the legislature. There are no direct elections for the head of the government, which is why Japan can keep swapping out prime ministers like they do. So a direct election of the student council president doesn’t quite translate very well into Japanese electoral politics.

If we shift focus into internal party politics, things are a bit different. Conservatives in Canada lament how the Liberals pretty much ruled Canada with an iron fist for the last century. When parties stay in power for that long, they become big-tent parties and end up containing a number of different factions vying for control of the party. Essentially, political skirmishes happen internally, rather than externally. In the case of the Liberals, this took the form of two main rival factions constantly undermining the other since all the way back when Pearson was prime minister.

This is essentially the case for the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. The LDP literally ruled Japan from the end of the Second World War up until 2009. The result is that Japanese politics largely stems from the various internal factions battling with each other. From the main Wikipedia page for the LDP, there are three main factions listed. Of course, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that the LDP means business when it comes to factional infighting.

This is where the student council factions come into play. There are three factions in the student council: finance, general affairs, and security. Each faction has their own candidate and has a political machine backing them, except for the incumbent security affairs department, who have been barred from putting up a candidate. Obviously, they can’t just sit back while other factions are making a power play, so they move all of their support to Yuuki, the dark horse candidate.

This is the kind of thing that happens more with internal races than in general elections. There’s no reason for parties to support each other in a general election, but internally, the expectation is that you’ll get favours out of it. So people move delegates to support another candidate or they’ll drop out and give them their staff or something. And of course, there is the trying to undermine the other factions as much as possible aspect too.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect analogy. Based on my authoritative source, the Wikipedia page for the LDP, the leadership selection rests in the hands of the caucus, and, by extension, various powerful figures in the party. The KoiChoco system seems to be more analogous to a one member, one vote system, where party leadership is determined by the membership of the party, which in this case are the regular students.

Having been a member during the New Democratic Party’s recent leadership race, I can say that while OMOV races aren’t quite as drama-filled as delegated races (like the Liberals’ 2006 race), there were still plenty of shenanigans going on to make it interesting. And this was for a party that didn’t have many factional divisions at all.

Caucus and Council

So with all of this talk about support, I’m curious to find out how exactly this student council works. In a lot of different systems, it doesn’t matter if you’re the top dog if your council or whatever is going to ignore you. See Kevin Rudd for an example of a caucus dumping a prime minister. Or see Rob Ford for an example of a city council that can completely ignore a mayor. Yuuki’s running as an independent and he’s supported at the moment by a faction, but then what? How powerful is the student council president, exactly?

Typically, a leader is powerful because they can reward their supporters through various means to keep them happy. Usually, this is through stuff like appointments to cabinet or supporting friendly projects or something and the faction itself will have plenty of resources to access as well. But in Yuuki’s case, it’s the other way around. The current student council president says he has no intention of setting up Yuuki as a puppet, but without any real support, I don’t see how he won’t just fall into that role.

The Honourable Minister of Finance

This has nothing to do with anything, but I found it funny that the frontrunner to be president was the finance commissioner. Where have we seen finance ministers belonging to rival factions being frontrunners in a race to replace an outgoing prime minister before? Was it Canada? Or the UK? That doesn’t bode particularly well for Shinonome’s presidency, does it?

REFOOOOOOOOOOORM

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Last post about politics for a while, I swear.

So it appears we’ve replaced short-term instability and long-term predictability with short-term stability and long-term unpredictability. Everyone who won, won big. Everyone who lost, lost big.

A big problem I can identify is that people don’t care about what goes on in Parliament. For most people, politics begins when the writs are dropped and ends when a winner is declared. What goes on in between? No one knows, which is why things like confidence or contempt don’t matter. It doesn’t seem like it matters immediately, but it does set a dangerous precedent, especially in a system that largely relies on the players not being dicks to one another.

Which leads me to the constitutional issues which have been sidestepped as a result of the majority. I’ve already mentioned my displeasure with the way the prime minister of all people was trying to thwart the concept of responsible government for political expedience. We’ve been spared that negotiation phase which would’ve been even worse than whatever the UK went through in the days following the 2010 election because of the two years of misinformation the Conservative party has been broadcasting about forming governments. But now’s probably a good time to hammer some of that stuff out now that we know that it’s possible to reach those previously impossible scenarios.

The other interesting revelation that I’ve been thinking about is how Canadians think about politics. Anyone who pays any attention at all to politics can see that the Conservatives have largely lifted Republican political tactics. I know we love to believe that we’re sharper than Americans and that we’d never fall for the same tricks, but this election clearly proves that we’re just as dumb as we think they are, because Canadians lapped up those pre-writ ads about Ignatieff at face value. My guess is that we’ve just never had any party that was enough of a dick to smear a rival outside of a campaign all the time.

But the big news is how electoral politics in Canada has changed. Quebec remains diametrically opposed to whatever is going on in the rest of the country. The governing coalition is now made up of the West and Ontario. Social democracy has replaced neoliberalism as the dissenting voice against neoconservatism. Are we seeing polarization between the left and right or is the prospect of power drawing the Conservatives and NDP closer together?

One thing is certain and it’s that 2015 is going to be a very different campaign from 2006, 2008, and 2011. The immense number of flips that occurred this time means that the fight could be wide open in a lot of places around the country. Pretty much anywhere that isn’t Alberta and the West are going to see a lot of pandering to over the next few years.

Members of Parliament

You may recall that I had a bunch of ridings that I was interested in. When I was watching the results come in on election night, I think by the time a good number of Ontario results had gotten back, I pretty much tossed out my list and spent the rest of the night watching Southwestern Ontario and the GTA.

I was hoping for a Conservative minority with close to 100 NDP seats. I was definitely not expecting Toronto Liberals to get decimated. I think I knew the Liberals were done when my riding, Scarborough—Rouge River, where the previous Liberal MP won with something close to 60% of the vote, had the NDP candidate in first, well ahead of the Conservative. Definitely my surprise of the night.

The biggest disappointment of the night was Glen Pearson’s loss in London North Centre. I’d been reading his blog for a while now and from what I’ve read about him, he seemed like an amazing MP. Since I’ll be moving to London in September, this was a huge disappointment. The other big disappointment was Andrew Telegdi’s loss in Kitchener—Waterloo. Even with people being made aware of the vote split, the gap widened even more.

But I think with a lot of Toronto ridings in Scarborough and Etobicoke going blue, I pretty much gave up on the 905 ridings. That said, everything in the GTA was extremely close, with a good number of them being three way races. And while there were a bunch of good Liberal MPs that fell, there were also a bunch that I wasn’t too fond of. The one I was glad to see go was CRIA shill Dan McTeague in Pickering—Scarborough East.

And now, on to what the next four years holds for each party.

Conservative Party of Canada/Parti conservateur du Canada

This is Harper’s dream come true, being able to simultaneously gain a majority and crush the Liberal Party of Canada. The question now is how he’ll govern. I have no doubt that he’ll avoid any major controversies. Those social conservatives expecting him to repeal same-sex marriage and abortion will be disappointed. Hardcore neoliberals will be disappointed that he won’t be ripping the Canada Health Act apart.

Harper isn’t dumb. He knows that his coalition of Western and Ontario voters is fragile and suddenly going hard right is going to unsettle those Ontario pickups. However, he has plenty of sneaky ways of destabilizing and slowly reforming things. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him continue governing as he did with a minority, appearing to be moderate, but slowly undermining various institutions (remember StatsCan?) in ways that are invisible to the average Canadian.

At the same time, he’ll have to somehow keep his base happy. If he continues to pander too hard to the GTA and Ontario, he could risk pissing off the West. The idea that the Conservatives could lose the West seems ridiculous, but that’s exactly what Mulroney ended up doing in the early 90s by pandering too hard to Quebec. The result? Gotta love that word REFOOOOOOOOOOORM.

The other question is whether he’ll be on better behaviour. Are we going to see complete message control and muzzling of his caucus and Cabinet? Are we going to continue to see watchdogs gutted and bureaucrats who disagree offed? Are we still going to see ads vilifying the Leader of the Opposition? Some people might claim that it was necessary to act like a dick in a minority government, but it clearly works, so I wonder if they’ll really be able to give that up.

And it’ll be interesting to see whether he’s willing to implement those things that he’s always wished he could but didn’t have a majority to do. The thing that comes to mind is Senate reform. In this category of stuff, he can’t really blame the opposition or the Senate now that he has a majority in both houses.

Finally, there is that ticking time bomb in Quebec. That the province of Quebec has, once again, largely rejected the Conservatives is fairly significant. While they’ve chosen a federalist party in the NDP, they’re almost certain to elect a sovereigntist government before 2015. That means it’ll be up to Harper, an anglo from the West and by far the most unpopular federalist leader in Quebec, to fight for federalism. It’ll be a huge challenge, not just for Conservatives, but for federalists as well.

Liberal Party of Canada/Parti libéral du Canada

It appears the brand that the Liberal party has cultivated over the last century has finally lost its power.

I alluded before to the fact that the Liberals had been largely reduced to the major urban centres and Atlantic Canada. It’s been argued by some that the Liberals have had this structural problem pretty much since 1993. The party has never won much outside of Vancouver in the West since Trudeau and they were still able to do decently in Quebec even with the Bloc, while riding the Reform/PC vote splitting in Ontario. Once the Bloc took Quebec and the splitting on the right was resolved, those structural problems became a lot more obvious.

The problem for the Liberals since 2006 has been not resolving this problem. Dion and Ignatieff largely stayed the course in terms of the voters they were trying to court. Dion tried to appeal to progressives with his ambitious environmental plan at the expense of Alberta. Unfortunately, Canadians didn’t care about the environment that much. Ignatieff tried a very safe, low-ball appeal to centrists. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for either right-leaning or left-leaning voters.

They’ve always assumed that they could just win by default if they reminded Canadians that the Liberals were Canada’s natural governing party. Obviously, people eventually stopped listening and since the Liberals have largely been stuck with the same electoral base they’ve had since 2006, they eventually got squeezed out. Both the Conservatives and NDP have been trying to grow their parties and the result is that all of the Liberal strongholds have been shattered. There’s nothing left. And in 2015, it’ll be even harder because that incumbency advantage will be gone.

Now, they have a ridiculous amount of work to do if they ever want to be in government again. What that would be, I have no idea. Presumably, some of it will have to do with presenting an authoritative voice in the various important issues that will be coming up, like health negotiations with the provinces or that Quebec sovereignty hullabaloo. And you know, actually say something meaningful about it, unlike Ignatieff’s surface level explorations of the subject on the campaign trail.

New Democratic Party/Nouveau Parti démocratique

It turns out the ground game wasn’t that important in Quebec. Unfortunately, that means that it’s all the easier for the NDP to lose their flash of support in four years. The example that everyone brings up is Mario Dumont’s ADQ in 2007.

The challenge for the NDP now is to become seen as a viable alternative government in four years. There’s two sides to this. The biggest problem is the perception that the NDP are disastrous for the economy. Whether they are or aren’t doesn’t really matter if people just pass over them because that one time in the past their provincial cousins governed poorly. Obviously, they’ve overcome their other huge problem, which was the perception they couldn’t win.

A lot has been made of the relative inexperience of the new Quebec MPs, but I think that’s been overstated. Yeah, there are some McGill students and that one lady, but there were plenty of other excellent candidates too. I don’t think the NDP will have a hard time filling up committee and shadow cabinet posts.

The main issue with Quebec will be how they respond to the sovereignty movement and whether they’ll be able to represent Quebec to Quebec’s satisfaction. Remember that a lot of the NDP’s support is coming from people who were voting Bloc and likely have some degree of nationalist thought in them.

Outside of Quebec, they’ve made a few gains in Atlantic Canada (although not as much as polling would’ve indicated) and surprisingly in Toronto. In addition to legitimacy, the NDP will probably have to work a lot harder to keep their seats. History has shown that people are perilously unkind to the NDP when they screw up even once.

Of course, much of the NDP’s success is because of Jack Layton. But his health is not the greatest and it was expected that he might’ve stepped down after this election if it weren’t for, you know, doing really well. This could be a problem by the time 2015 rolls around. Of course, they do have Mulcair hanging around, so he should be able to handle Quebec. I guess this would go along with building the NDP brand.

Bloc Québecois

It’s hard to say whether the collapse of the BQ was more or less surprising than that of the Liberals, but it is amazing that it only took a week or two for the BQ to just disintegrate. And it wasn’t just an unfortunate vote split like it was for the Liberals. Nope, Quebec was done with the Bloc this time around.

Is this the death of the sovereignty movement? Probably not. After all, the main vehicle for separatism has always been the Parti Québecois, not the Bloc. It was PQ premiers that held referenda and were the strongest voices for sovereignty. With another PQ government likely before 2015, it’ll be interesting to see whether Gilles Duceppe remains as popular a figure then, especially if Harper will be the one having to defend Canada.

Even though Quebec went with the NDP, it’s important to note that their choice is largely at odds with the rest of Canada, who generally went Conservative. It’s another fairly stark display of the contrast in values that Quebec has compared to the rest of Canada. And if you consider that gulf, it’s a possibility that Quebecers could decide that a Conservative Canada isn’t something that they really want to be a part of.

The question now is what the Bloc are going to do with their party. Just because they were wiped out this time doesn’t mean that sovereigntist sentiment has dissipated or that they’re never going to win again. If things go well for the Bloc and things go poorly for the NDP, we could just as easily see another dramatic swing back. Just ask Mario Dumont.

Green Party of Canada/Parti vert du Canada

They gambled and they won. Elizabeth May gets to go on to be the first elected Green MP in Canada. I’m sure she’ll be a better MP than that Conservative cabinet minister they had. What this means for the future of the party, I’m not entirely sure. They can’t just replicate what they did for May, so it’ll be interesting to see whether the increased profile of their leader will be enough to tip the scales.

See you in 2015 (unless Harper breaks his own fixed-date election law again lolololol).

The unnecessary, opportunistic post about the 41st Canadian general federal election

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Canada’s having an election! How exciting! I was actually ready to write a post about this back when the government was defeated at the end of March, but decided I should probably study or something instead.

The last few years have taught me that I shouldn’t take for granted that people know how a Westminster Parliament works. That’s pretty unfortunate, because every thread of this election campaign that isn’t about the economy (more on that in a moment) revolves around Parliament and the exploitation of the fact that Canadians don’t know how it works. This has made it very difficult to understand why we’re having an election in the first place and it’ll likely be the case that the campaign doesn’t actually end after all the voting is done.

So why are we having another dumb election again just two and a half years after the last one? Because the government could not retain the confidence of the House of Commons. This was the result of the government being found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to disclose the cost of various programmes. It is not because the opposition didn’t support the budget (although that would likely have been the case were it not for the contempt charge).

The charge of contempt of Parliament is similar to that of contempt of court, in which you’re charged if you’re found to be obstructing Parliament from performing its duties. This is for Parliament to decide and is pretty serious business. In the case of a government, the most severe punishment the Commons has is to withdraw its confidence in it.

The Conservatives have been brushing aside the contempt charge as political shenanigans because Canadians don’t understand the implications. This is why it’s important to examine the leadup to the vote itself. Most notably, it required the Speaker to rule against the government for a breach of privilege before it was handed off to committee to produce a report. This is important, because this isn’t the first time that this government has been ruled against for withholding documents.

Recall the prorogation of Parliament at the beginning of 2010. The prime minister requested that Parliament be prorogued in part to dodge questions surrounding Afghan detainee transfers. After Parliament had resumed, the government refused to provide documents regarding the transfers citing cabinet confidentiality. The Speaker basically said that Parliamentary privilege superceded cabinet confidentiality and that if they didn’t work something out with the opposition, they would be ruled against. That time, the government obliged.

That covers contempt, but I want to talk about confidence, because this is the thing that most people misunderstand about Parliamentary democracy and nothing’s changed since December 2008, when Stephen Harper was on the verge of losing the confidence of the House of Commons, only to stave it off by proroguing Parliament.

This misunderstanding of confidence is rooted in the misunderstanding of just who it is Canadians vote for in elections. You are not voting for a prime minister. You are not voting for a party. You are not even voting for a government. You are voting for a Member of Parliament. This may seem like a silly distinction to make, but it matters when we talk about forming governments. Peter Russell always makes these sorts of things succinct and easy to understand: “We elect the Parliament and the Parliament decides who gets the right to govern.”

Confidence of the House of Commons is all that’s required to become a prime minister and form a government. It’s based on the principle of responsible government, that the government is accountable to Parliament. The party with the least seats could form the government if it had the confidence of the Commons. And it’s just as possible that we could end up electing 308 independents who’d then need to figure out how to form a government.

The interesting thing is that within this framework, there is a way to form a government without having to face another election. This is deliberately allowed so that a government that doesn’t have the confidence of the Commons doesn’t just give up and ask for another election. The assumption here is that, within a reasonable amount of time, Canadians chose that particular Parliament to work with and it’s the duty of Parliament to be able to form a government with the members that it has.

The problem is, of course, that the Conservatives have been telling Canadians that forming a government in that way is unconstitutional. Which is silly, because anyone can just go to Wikipedia and find an example or two. There are plenty of things the Conservatives can attack such an arrangement for, whether it’s warranted or not: relying on the Bloc, the NDP’s governing record, or instability. The one thing they can’t and shouldn’t be attacking is constitutionality, because in doing so, it attacks the basic principles of Parliamentary democracy.

And for me, that’s what this election’s mainly about. A lot of people might criticize Trudeau centralizing power in the PMO or Chrétien for strong-arming Parliament, but I can’t speak to that, because I wasn’t cognizant of how they ran their government at the time. But I do know that Harper runs his government too dictatorially for my tastes and that his party is too obstructionist when dealing with the opposition. It shows in his campaign and contrasting that with Ignatieff or Layton or even Duceppe, I don’t get the sense that any of them would clamp down on their government anywhere near as much as Harper did. An open, transparent, and credible government is far more important to me than our economic recovery.

That’s not to say that the economy isn’t important. It is, but if a Liberal or NDP government is all it takes to ruin the recovery, then the Conservatives have done an awful job. This is not to mention that the stimulus spending is a direct result of the opposition forcing the government to act in December 2008. Remember in the dying days of the 2008 campaign when Harper flatly denied that Canada would be affected by the economic crisis?

Anyway, what are the prospects for each of our fine participants?

Conservative Party of Canada/Parti conservateur du Canada

The Conservatives ran their campaign with a very unambitious strategy: focus on a handful of swing seats and flail arms wildly about the dangers of a coalition to the rest of the country. And for much of the campaign, it looked like it was going to work. Most of the people they were targeting don’t care about Parliamentary shenanigans and are far more interested in how a Conservative government would benefit them.

The campaign hit a few snags. They were only minor snags from the campaign’s point of view, but it definitely intensified anti-Conservative sentiment, which made it all the more crucial that they pick up those few seats they were targeting. And Harper was able to fend off attacks from the opposition like some sort of giant immovable rock, not really hitting back, but repeating the same wearisome talking points again and again.

The thing that has put a Conservative majority in danger is, surprisingly, the NDP surge. Outside of Ontario, it puts several Conservative seats into play that were thought to be safe and within Ontario, it could affect just enough seats that the hope for a majority fades away. The huge tactical error that made this possible was the focus of attacks on Ignatieff alone.

Post-election prospects are fairly shaky. If the Conservatives lose enough seats, it could be enough for Harper to call it a day or be forced out. If they maintain or gain seats, but still have a minority, he could conceivably hold on, even if he does eventually lose power, since there could be a chance that any arrangement by the Liberals and NDP is as unstable as he says it is. Still, it’s a significant repudiation of the choice that Harper has presented to Canadians.

Liberal Party of Canada/Parti libéral du Canada

Michael Ignatieff’s career as a politician has been pretty unlucky. Remember that back in 2006, he was supposed to be the next Trudeau. He came back to lose the Liberal leadership race (which he probably should have, having spent so little time as an MP) and had to wait through two years of Dion capitulating to the Conservatives. When he finally became the leader, he continued a string of tactical errors and was subjected to good old Conservative character assassination for two years. He finally gets the chance to run a campaign and actually does it well, but ends up getting passed over for the NDP.

It sucks, because while he isn’t as progressive as Dion, he’s certainly a better leader. He’s a much more able speaker and campaigner. He had solid policy proposals and his war room was on the ball. Even if he didn’t win, he probably would have been able to continue and live to fight another election.

Except Quebec started to notice that the NDP existed. And then everyone else noticed that the NDP existed. Even Ontario, who hates the NDP is starting to notice. Even worse is that Jack Layton is a lot more likeable than Michael Ignatieff. Of course, much of that is perceived, since Layton hasn’t been the target of a two-year concerted character assassination effort.

At this point, things are not looking good for Ignatieff post-election. If he loses seats, that’s bad. If he loses Official Opposition status, that’s really bad. His only real hope is that the NDP vote is vastly overestimated in polling and that they’re not able to get the vote out. What’s more interesting to think about is how the Liberals will act in the next Parliament when it comes to supporting or forming a government. It’ll boil down to good old Liberal internal strife, so that’ll be exciting.

And of course, there’s the whole having to rebuild the party again. The Liberals have struggled to grow their base of support outside of Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. Now, they have even less of a hope in Quebec and are in danger of losing Atlantic Canada. And each of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal are seeing red ridings in danger of flipping to orange.

New Democratic Party/Nouveau Parti démocratique

In retrospect, it’s pretty hilarious how Ignatieff and Duceppe kept on calling Layton out for considering his party a viable alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives. A lot of people wonder why he kept on presenting himself as this alternative and the genesis of that messaging comes from the 2004 election, where a large criticism of his campaign was that he wasn’t serious about running to form a government. And so, since 2006, the NDP have been trying to present themselves in that light, as hilarious as it may have seemed at the time.

Well, it looks like it finally paid off. That mindset seems to have pushed the NDP to make some organizational and strategic changes, the most notable of which has been in their push for Quebec. It’s kind of amazing how just having one MP in Quebec, even if he was pretty influential, was able to help their push into the province. The combination of Mulcair’s popularity and Layton’s performance in the debates created the conditions for that first Quebec poll that opened up this feedback loop of support.

Outside of Quebec, my guess is that there are enough people who wouldn’t mind voting NDP but never felt that the NDP would win in their riding or that the NDP would be effective as a third party. Now that they have a real shot at forming the Official Opposition, all of those people who would have liked to vote NDP now have their chance. In addition to these voters, we have people who never voted NDP before because they seemed kind of sketch, but now, they’re polling above the Liberals, so why not.

The challenge for the NDP, as it always has been, is to convert those polling numbers into votes. It’s helped that their polling has been on an upward trend even in the last few days of the campaign. By far the weakest aspect of the Quebec campaign for the NDP is the party organization on the ground, considering that up until pretty recently, there was almost none.

Bloc Québecois

Much like the Conservatives, the Bloc Québecois really only needed to assert that they’re the only viable choice for Quebec. And Duceppe was probably right. There was still deep mistrust of the Liberals, Conservative ideology doesn’t really line up with the province’s, and the NDP was pretty much absent. Of course, it’s that last one that’s easiest to work with and once Layton started going for the province hard, people started to notice.

From my internet forum hangouts, I’ve come to realize that people don’t vote Bloc because they’re sovereigntists. People vote Bloc because they feel that it’s the party that defends their interests the best, regardless of whether how they feel about sovereignty. And it so happens that beyond the sovereignty question, the Bloc and NDP have a lot in common.

Green Party of Canada/Parti vert du Canada

The Greens are all about the environment. Apparently, their economic policies are more laissez-faire than that of the Liberals, but it’s not like it matters. Honestly, I don’t know why people continue to think they can win any seats. Their support is spread across the country and not concentrated enough to get anyone elected. For the Greens, the campaign will largely be about the continuing adventures of Elizabeth May and trying to win her a seat.

Ridings

I’ve got about 20 or so ridings I’m watching.

In BC, there’s Saanich—Gulf Islands, where Green Party leader Elizabeth May is taking on Conservative minister Gary Lunn. If she can’t do it, then the Green Party could be finished, since they appear to have poured in a ton of resources into that riding. The other interesting one is Vancouver South, where, in one of the narrowest victories in the country, Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh won by 20 votes against the Conservative in 2008.

In the rest of Western Canada, there’s Edmonton Strathcona, the Eye of Layton, held by Linda Duncan in a province otherwise painted in blue. In Manitoba, Winnipeg North is held by Liberal Kevin Lamoreaux, who took it in a byelection from the NDP a few months ago.

In Quebec, we’ve got Pontiac, where Conservative minister Lawrence Cannon looks like he could fall to an NDP scrub. While it looked like it would’ve been a tough fight, it looks like NDP Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair is going to hold on to Outremont pretty easily against former Liberal minister Martin Cauchon. And while they might seem safe, I’m a bit worried for Papineau (Justin Trudeau) and Westmount—Ville-Marie (Marc Garneau). There’s also some talk of Gilles Duceppe being on the defensive in his riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie

In Ontario, there are a ton of swing ridings. Guelph is a pretty tough fight with a ton of shenanigans going on. London North Centre is going to be my home in a few months and it could be danger zone for Glen Pearson. Peter Milliken’s departure makes Kingston and the Islands a really close fight. And there’s the super narrow victories in Kitchener Centre and Kitchener—Waterloo that the Conservatives will have a hard time defending. And I’ve heard rumours that Ottawa West—Nepean, home of John Baird, could be in play as well.

In the 905, there’s Ajax—Pickering, where Mark Holland is fighting off Chris Alexander. Ruby Dhalla looks like she’s going to lose Brampton—Springdale. I would really like for the Liberals to be able to retake Vaughan from Julian Fantino. And for a longshot, there’s Bev “not” Oda’s riding of Durham.

In Toronto, we’ve got York Centre, where Ken Dryden is somehow in danger. Joe Volpe is also in danger of losing Eglinton—Lawrence. Trinity—Spadina is usually a pretty tough fight, but the NDP boost is probably enough to keep Olivia Chow safe. Parkdale—High Park makes me sad, because both Gerard Kennedy and Peggy Nash have been excellent MPs. And of course, there’s my unexciting home riding of Scarborough—Rouge River.