It’s don’t-blame-me-I-voted-for time
Rick Howe was interviewing the organizer of an upcoming all-candidates’ debate on poverty issues. Three of the four major parties, the man told the News 95.7 talk show host, would be sending a representative.
“Let me guess which one won’t,” Howe cut in.
He didn’t have to guess.
Neither do you.
An hour before what was supposed to be another all-candidates event in Bridgewater last week, Gerald Keddy, the riding’s Conservative incumbent, gleefully tweeted: “Heading to a special event with Senator MIKE DUFFY!!! It’s going to be a wonderful evening.” The special event was not the one at which he might be grilled publicly on his performance or his party’s views; it was a private hob-knob fundraiser with Tories in Chester Basin.
Is this any way to run an election?
It seems to be.
Parties leading in the polls traditionally run risk-averse campaigns. But Harper’s control-freak control team have taken that calculatingly anti-democratic strategy to new, demagogic heights. No discussion, no debate, no mistakes.
Not that they do it well. The Tory campaign has careened wildly out of control from day one. Consider Bruce Carson. Consider Bruce Carson gain. And again. Throw in leaks about G20 spending and heavy-handed prime ministerial political interference in appointments. Don’t forget all those supposedly vetted Tory candidates who keep popping up to support the Tamil Tigers, or jump out of the Air India bombing closet, or claim credit for cutting funding for Planned Parenthood and boy-just-wait-until-we-get-our-majority…
So why do the polls still say Stephen “Five-questions-time’s-up-on-to-the-next-staged-invitees-only-photo-op” Harper will form the next government—and might actually win a majority?
There are lots of reasons, but let’s pick one. Our electoral system encourages targeting swing ridings rather than campaigning for broad support, which discourages people from voting in ridings where the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, which will then encourage Harper, should he prevail, to claim we’ve given him a mandate to do what he will.
Here’s one small antidote. Vote. Even if you’re in a riding where it won’t change the result, every vote is one more that says I-didn’t-vote-for-this-so-don’t-pretend-I-did.
If nothing else, you’ll have earned your right to sport the sticker: “Don’t blame me, I voted for…” It’s not much but it’s something.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Stephen Harper meets the Facebook election
Is it just me and my Facebook friends or is Stephen Harper in deeper doo doo than we know?
I will acknowledge—before someone else does—that I am of the artsy, progressive-left-when-it-suits-my-personal-interests persuasion, so it’s no surprise many of my friends are fellow travelers. I live in a federal NDP riding in a province governed, for the moment, by the NDP. But I have plenty of Facebook friends—Facebook being Facebook—who are Tories, including a few current federal candidates, and many more of no, or no-known affiliation.
Which is why I find our first full-on Facebook federal election so intriguing.
Many Canadians are using social media to get, share and comment on campaign news. Mainstream news stories, YouTube videos, online petitions, Twitter posts, fan pages all rocket around the social media echo-chamber with dazzling speed.
Much of it is do-good, get-out-the-vote stuff—the clever Rick Mercer rant, the dog’s breakfast of I-pledge-to-vote pages—or partisan postings re-posted by more partisans.
But Facebook—my Facebook, at least—seems dominated by one overweening theme: get rid of Stephen Harper.
Every time I open Facebook, a few more friends have changed their profile pictures to an anti-Harper image.
Stephen Harper is both polarizing and galvanizing, which makes him a perfect Facebook organizing foil.
There are dozens of anti-Harper pages: “Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper,” “Vote No Confidence in Stephen Harper,” “Get Stephen Harper Out of Office,” etc.. There’s even one entitled “Can This Onion Ring Get More Fans Than Stephen Harper?” The answer is yes: it has 158,170 fans compared with 49,952 for the official Stephen Harper page.
There are links to videos like “The Harper Song: ‘Steve, It’s Time to Leave’” and “ShitHarperDid” (which boasts a million views). And strategic voting sites like Project Democracy and Catch-22, whose purpose is to make sure Stephen Harper doesn’t get his majority, or—better—loses power.
Which means…? I don’t know. Nothing so far seems to have budged Harper’s numbers. But what do poll numbers tell us about real support for a party leader when so few of us willingly talk to pollsters anymore? And even fewer of us bother to vote.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Graham Steele, Paul Martin and the disapproving ghost of Tommy Douglas
Is Nova Scotia Finance Minister Graham Steele former federal finance minister Paul Martin in NDP drag?
Consider. The night before Steele delivered his bad-news budget last week, his boss, Premier Darrell Dexter—as bosses are wont to do; can you say Jean Chrétien?—stole his good-news thunder.
The $222-million deficit Steele had forecast for 2010-11 had magically morphed into a $447-million surplus. The next day, Steele delivered the sobering, morning-after budget projections. In 2011-12, the province will again run up a whopping $389-million deficit.
Uh…
Opposition critics were quick to see it as Martinesque smoke and mirrors: predict the worst, announce the best and claim political credit for the difference.
As a tactic, of course, it worked very well for the Chrétien-Martin Liberals. Intriguingly, Steele also seems to be aping another favourite Martin ploy—solve your fiscal woes by offloading costs to others. See: municipalities, school boards, et al. But I digress.
The NDP prefers to draw its philosophical parallels—as Dexter did during the last provincial election—with the party’s prudent prairie icon, Tommy Douglas, who gave Saskatchewan balanced budgets and Medicare.
The problem for this NDP government, however, is that it offers no big Tommy-Douglas dream at the end of its balanced books rainbow. Are there no more big ideas? Or are our NDPers, in the end, just cost-cutting conservatives in costume?
Last week’s budget-and-mirrors sideshow was equally instructive for the ways in which the opposition responded.
It never ceases to amaze me how un-conservative our supposed fiscal conservatives are. They rail on about deficits and debt walls and the urgency of getting our financial house in order, but the moment they so much as sniff a surplus, the first thing they want to do is cut taxes.
Claw back last summer’s HST increase. Slash the small business tax rate more—and then more again. Debt? What debt?
The NDP, to its credit, slapped its surplus—contrived or not—on the debt, thus lowering the annual cost of servicing that debt and ultimately putting more control of our economic future in our own hands.
Which makes them modestly more prudent fiscal managers than their rivals. But are they more than that?
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Banning developer cash: methinks thou dost protest a bit too much
Well, Brad Johns certainly kicked over a few hornets’ houses.
The Sackville municipal councilor had the temerity last month to suggest “individuals or businesses directly involved with the development industry” be banned from contributing to local candidates’ elections.
Within days, prominent Halifax developer Wadih Fares was demanding an apology. “Who does he think we are? A bunch of Mafia,” he asked allnovascotia.com? Fares, a Progress magazine 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year, owns and manages more than 600 local properties and is currently developing the $30-million Trillium condo project on South Park Street.
Letters of support—“well done!”—flowed into the website, which is popular among the city’s business elite.
Chronicle-Herald columnist Marilla Stephenson punctuated her report on Johns’ motion with an appalled: “Get this.”
Johns’ fellow councilor Debbie Hum had “great concerns. There are a whole lot of implications.”
Uh… why is everyone so knicker-knotted?
By Johns own rough calculations, 30 per cent of council decisions involve development of one sort or another—from home renovations, to suburban subdivisions, to $150-million-plus projects like the whatever-happened-to the Twisted Sisters towers to public-private partnerships like the proposed $500-million convention centre complex. Late last year, Dalhousie’s Planning and Design Centre produced a map showing 23 approved downtown projects. Total cost for the 17 that included price tags: more than $1.4 billion.
That’s a lot of money, a lot of reasons for a developer to try to nudge a bureaucrat’s recommendation or a politician’s vote.
Not to suggest this has ever, ever happened in Halifax, of course.
But in cities with greater transparency and/or a more curious press, such things do sometimes happen.
In Vancouver in 2008, for example, council secretly approved—shades of Concertgate—a $100 million loan to the developer of the Olympic village. In Montreal, Maclean’s reported in 2009 that “the city’s real estate corporation, run by [the mayor’s] former chief of staff, was found to have made a sweetheart land deal to a well-connected developer.”
Although Johns has wisely now expanded his motion to include all corporations and unions, I’m still curious to know why so many people seem to have such difficulty with Johns’ simple desire to “remove the ability to make an accusation.”
Curious.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.