Tag: Ontario Election 2007

Ontario Election 2007: Harper Loses

Let me be the first to point out that, once again, my votes did not carry the day so I can assert the ability to spot a very bad stretch when I see one. And, just so I can also be among the first to point it out, between the massive win in Newfoundland yesterday for an anti-Harper Tory and today’s ditching of any vestige of a right wing agenda in Ontario, I see the message this week for the Prime Minister is not good.

If there were any chance that a leader – through some miracle, mystery or intrigue – might arise within the Liberal Party of Canada who grasps the responsibility of the demands of the nation as opposed to continuing the recent history of party obsession with in-fighting and pop causes, this might be the beginning of a golden era for them and the beginning of the end of that bit of history started by the splitting of the Tories which will end, as these things do, in ugly dismembered fashion.

But that leader is not there. What strange times.

Make My Vote One For MMP!

First let me say well done Danny. Any Tory who is anti-Tory is my kind of Tory. Maybe he tries for NL independence next.

And it is now clear that I am voting for MMP because no one else is. Most people I know who are intelligent and well-informed are not, through the pure badness of the MMP campaign, aware of the fixed lists that parties would have to submit and so are turned off by the prospect of back-room shuffling. I, on the other hand, see the world as it truly is (am I the only one???) and know that this is no different than the status quo in any case. Plus I never vote for a winner. Not out of principle but due to my principles. Plus-plus it would just be dumb to have MPPs voted in through MMP.

MMP! MMP! MMP! MMP!

My Kind Of Conservative

I likely won’t vote for the man and the characteristics that are pointed out in this Toronto Star article may be exactly the sort of thing that loses him votes on certain sectors of the right but this is the sort of thing that I used to not be surprised to read in an article about a conservative leader in the good old pre-neo-con days:

“I’m just telling you when I see those things, that’s the way I react. How can we possibly live with ourselves when we have that kind of thing going on in a wealthy society like this?” When asked about what he would do to help eliminate poverty in the province, Tory, a former chair of the United Way of Greater Toronto, said: “I want to put forward a plan to reduce poverty overall … but I want to be certain that I can meet the objectives that I set,” he said.

Tory said his party has committed to a $1 billion, 10-year plan to repair social housing across Ontario to improve living conditions for low-income families. He referred to his plan to revitalize neighbourhoods, to his commitment to eliminate the health-care levy that discriminates against the poor and his program to help skilled immigrants.

While it is true that even our rural overlords in Ottawa have come to understand that Canada is a socialist country that works, that resource wealth when shared egalitarianly leaves plenty for the profit incentive, it is good to see that effectively the issue of poverty is a non-issue, though the responses may differ.

Friday Bullet and Chat and Autumn’s Just Around The Corner

OK, so it wasn’t the end of summer last week. It’s this weekend. You wouldn’t know it. as it is going to push 30C later today in some parts of Ontario today. A weekend of actual sunshine, warmth and nothing to really do lays out before me. What to do? What to do? We have been playing a sort of lawn bowling with our boules set nightly. Likely the land will hear more of the click of the steel.

  • Update: Do you have any idea how nice it was to know that the Red Sox could not lose again last night because they were not playing. The New York Times shares my pain.
  • I did not watch the provincial election debate last night. Ontario politics, due to the odd polite role Ontario plays not actually pulling its weight in the national scene, is sort of dull. All three candidates are reasonably polite and reasonably good intentioned people leading a huge government bureaucracy of the scale of a nation within a nation that has seeming difficulties expressing itself as a cultural fact. Though, to be fair, the conservatives use of the phrase “catch and release” justice is getting tedious. And the idea that a broken pledge to not raise taxes is wrong after the promise maker gets in power and finds out, as we all do from time to time, that conservatives (the accusers now) have no idea how to run a finance department without a resource windfall attached to it is simply laughable. I will, however and again, not vote for the winner. If you are interested, the Globe blogged the debate backwards requiring you to read the impressions from bottom to top. The MSM is sooooo bad.
  • Ry has a request:

    Ack. We needs a fun topic, Al. Writing 4 page essay length stuff for John and his commentators is killing me. How about we start a pool for the MLB playoffs. It’s almost Oct after all. Something like March madness would suffice I think. It’s smaller and easier than that, but could still be fun.

    That is reasonable but I am crawling into my shell what with the collapse of the Sox. Did you know that they are in the lead now but not by a huge amount? I mean I should be absolutely shattered because they are in the lead but only by a bit. Any ideas how I can overcome my despair over them being in the lead?

  • I have seen this sort of claim from Western apologists before and it is the oddest falsehood for someone to cling onto. From Ezra Levant in (yawn!) Canadian Lawyer‘s September issue:

    But tens of thousands of Canadians think otherwise. They’re not choosing Saskatchewan, a province with nearly as much oil and gas, more wheat, more potash, and more uranium. Alberta’s wealth is not because of its natural resources but precisely because of its free market is working so well.

    If this shabby thinking is what you need to get you through the night, fine, but it is good for the rest of you to know that as Alberta’s oil reserves are 174.8 billion barrels and its gas reserves are 41 trillion cubic feet, Saskatchewan has only 1,244 million barrels of oil (0.71% of Alberta) and just 3.3 trillion cubic feet of gas (8% of its neighbour). Once again, say it out loud, Alberta is incredibly wealthy because it is sitting on the one resource the world is begging for and it was blessed with that by fluke of geology and late Victorian boundary-making. People move there to make a lot of money just like people move anywhere there is plenty of money to make.

  • Jay is writing longer pieces. I used to write longer pieces. I used to be able to hold that much in my mind. Jay can. Or maybe he writes a bit each day. Yeah, that must be it. So apparently we could be the new Switzerland. Switzerland?

    In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

    Hoo-ray. Melted cheese for dinner, too.

That’s it. The computer just about froze so I better send you on your way.

An Election In Ontario

Ontario suffers from a funny sort of guilt – sorry it is so large and populous and diverse and economically strong and sets the national agenda. It could spin off Toronto, you know…that might work. And, because someone had a whacky idea a few years back, Ontario has fixed provincial elections and I guess one is coming up. The problem with fixed elections without primaries and stuff is that they sort of creep up on you so here we are about five weeks off and no one is listening that much. Well they will today:

There was a real holiday flavour to the unofficial kickoff of the Ontario election campaign yesterday. The Liberal party promised a new statutory holiday in February if it is re-elected on Oct. 10, something that would give Ontarians a long-called-for winter break.

I say the Conservatives go one better and promise to mirror the, what, 37 or so statutory holidays of Newfoundland. Until we get Regatta Day off – are we really free?