Abstaining from blogging

Hi blogosphere, I missed you. I finally submitted the thesis (Electoral Reform in PEI: A case study in deliberative democracy, a future classic) last month. Now that I'm looking for honest employment, I suppose I could blog on a more regular basis, but I'm really enjoying the laziness lately.

Just had to come back to hype up this brilliant idea. In that spirit, I may have to abstain from washing the rest of the dishes piling up near the kitchen sink ;)

I've got some thoughts on the Irish referendum, so I'll probably be back with those sometime next week. Over the weekend, I'll be going to this event at Queen's. I understand there still might be spots, so if your in the area and a political dork, maybe I'll see you there!

Confidential to IP, congrats, I think you'll do a stellar job. Let me know if you need any help!

Liberal blogfather: "how dare you disparage the family"

Just had to comment on Liblog founder and charter member of the Dionistas Jason Cherniak's blog post from earlier today where he begs Liberal bloggers to not take out their well-justified frustration over their party's parliamentary caucuses decision to give Stephen Harper the majority he wants so badly.

Other bloggers have chimed in on the absurdity of this far better than I, like my friend Idealistic Pragmatist who points out that Jason is the progressive blogsophere's top partisan bloggers.

Even prominent Libloggers seem taken aback by Jason's call to just shut up and smallow Dion's bitter abstention medicine silently. My friend Scott Tribe has a great post talking about the role of bloggers in the US Democratic Pary and how they should be seen by parties as windows on what the grassroots thinks. Dion seems to be deaf to their pleas, so I'll simplify it for him, your blogging supporters think you need to grow a pair.


All Politics is Local has a good post where he talks about the yawning gap between Liberal rhetoric and action:

If the government is destroying our country, then we need an election. If M. Dion doesn't want an election, fine. Then let's work with the Tories on the budget to try to find some middle ground. Let's drop the fire and brimstone rhetoric. If this government is terrible, M. Dion should be able as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada to convince the Canadian people of this fact and win an election. If the government is bad but workable, let's make it work. M. Dion could demonstrate leadership by working for a better compromise.

.

But really, after telling Liberal supporters hysterically for years that a Conservative government would be the end of Canada as we know it, is anyone surprised that their activists are upset that the party leadership is now propping up Harper?

Liberal leadership are now choking on the bitter fruit of what their rhetoric has produced. Who wants to bet that's it's not so easy to recruit Liberal volunteers when Dion finally decides to face voters?

Still entitled to their entitlements ... 26 months later

I just couldn't resist blogging about this one - the latest Liberal opposition motion, a clearly desperate attempt to distract voters from the Dion-Harper coalition. And it's not just this Dipper saying that, Canada's foremost blogger-from-France Paul Wells agrees.

After a budget amendment that decried the Tory government's "NDP-like lack of fiscal prudence" (which of course ignores the evidence from the Finance department that shows that NDP goverments in Canada have had the BEST record of fiscal surpluses of any party), now the Liberals are bringing forward a motion that "condemn[s] the irresponsible and self-serving actions on Nov. 25, 2005, by the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Quebecois which led to the installation of a government that is hostile to the rights and needs of vulnerable Canadians."

I've got to agree with the unnamed NDP strategist, this motion is laughable!

Funny, I could've sworn it was CANADIAN VOTERS that put the Harper government in office.

Have the adults left the Official Opposition offices? Do they really think that this sort of whining does anything to bring the Liberals closer to power? Methinks it was precisely this sort of sense of entitlement that led voters to want to turf the Martin government out of office in the first place.

As this blogger notes, "don't expect that the average Canadian is still seething over that last election... they aren't. They've moved on. So should [Liberals]."

And Stephane if you keep this kind of whining up, you'll never get to see the inside of 24 Sussex. The smart Liberal bloggers realize this as well.

Eye weekly says "vote for real democracy in Ontario - Vote for MMP"

I was just getting ready to get to bed after a long day of changing the system and I saw a link to this editorial in Eye Weekly on the campaign site . Makes a hard day of work completely worth it!

So far, this seems to have the prize for best editorial about MMP. Other media outlets in Ontario, try and beat them though, please :)

Seriously, it's really good. It's a well-written analysis of MMP and comes down on the side of democracy. Enjoy some selections:

"For the first time many of us can remember, we're actually excited to get out and vote in a provincial election. Well, all right, we'll admit that it isn't any of the prospective governments that has us whistling to the polls. Once again, we're underwhelmed in that department."

It goes on to describe the election. I've got nothing to say on that for a good while:

... "this time we have the power to change the electoral system; to fix it.

The referendum on electoral reform allows us a clear choice between the warped current system and a more democratic system called Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) ...

MMP is a vastly superior system. Under MMP, voters cast two votes: one for a local representative, one for a party. The first vote elects members to the legislature under the same first-past-the-post system, and then the remaining one third of seats are alotted to ensure the seat distribution mirrors the popular vote for each party ...

Last week we used this space to outline some lingering concerns about MMP. Much conversation and further research have convinced us that those concerns were unfounded. The system is not as complicated as it is made out to be. Rather than producing legislative gridlock, the minority governments produced under MMP in other countries using the system have been highly functional coalitions. Wing-nut fringe parties are shut out by a 3 per cent threshold. And the “list candidates,” selected by the party, are preferable or no worse than the existing system that allows parties to appoint candidates and even sometimes premiers without consulting the electorate. Under MMP there will be no more false majorities. The legislature will represent the will of the electorate. That's democracy.

On Oct. 10, vote for real democracy in Ontario. Vote for MMP.

The conservative case for MMP

I'm very pleased that one of my favorite Canadians political columnists is voting for MMP - National Post columnist Andrew Coyne.

In a great piece, he sets out a strong case for why conservatives should be voting for MMP. Here are some highlights:

In the broad strokes, the government of Ontario would look much the same under Mr. Tory as under Dalton McGuinty. It would do much the same things, at much the same cost, with much the same results ... Whoever wins, the forecast is for McGuintory governments, as far as the eye can see.

I’m not blaming either man. Both are simply responding to the incentives in our political system -- notably the method of voting. Sometimes known as “first past the post,” sometimes called “plurality” voting, it should really be called the “winner take all” system, since that captures its most essential dynamic.

He continues to describe how the current system often gives voters less salient choices come election time:

In such a system, as we have seen, victory or defeat can turn on the swing of one or two percentage points.

Living on a knife-edge does strange things to people. On the one hand, it leaves the parties in a perpetual fever of anticipation, convinced they have only to gain a few points in the polls to destroy their opponents. That is one reason the two federal conservative parties, Progressive Conservative and Reform, were so reluctant to merge. It is also the reason why minority governments tend, under our system, to be so unstable.

On the other hand, the consequences of losing a few points makes them excessively, almost neurotically cautious, unwilling to take the slightest risk or advocate the mildest change, but each hugging as close as it can to the median voter, the status quo and each other. Hence the dominance of the two brokerage parties, indistinguishable in philosophy -- alike, that is, in the lack of it.

Put the two together, and you have much of Canadian politics -- viciously partisan, yet unspeakably trivial; much ado about nothing much. McGuintoryism, in short.

Then, the kicker, he argues (cogently, IMHO) that despite progressives' enthusiasm for MMP, it is actually rock-ribbed conservatives who are most hurt by how the current system shapes our politics:

So the case for electoral reform, it seems to me, is one that conservatives, if not Conservatives, should find appealing. It is a cause that has tended, historically, to be identified with the left, not least in the current referendum debate; many conservatives have accordingly rejected it. Yet it is not the left that has suffered most under the current system. It’s the right ...

The spectrum of acceptable ideas for debate would noticeably broaden.

Moreover, because the “winner take all” dynamic would have been broken -- parties get roughly the share of the seats their proportion of the vote would suggest, rather than the highly leveraged payoffs observed under FPTP -- all parties would have less fear of taking risks. True, there would also be less upside: progress would only come by sustained advocacy over many years. Conservatives grouse that a Mike Harris revolution would be unlikely, but so would the NDP disaster that preceded it.

So conservatives, genuine conservatives, have a choice. Hold onto the current system, and hope for a Harris-style change of government every fifty years or so. Or take a chance on something new, and start changing minds today.

Another Coyne masterpiece and one that will hopefully increase the number of thinking conservatives like these three bloggers that support MMP.

Finally, I saw another piece today from a prominent Ontario conservative leader, Family Coalition Party leader Giuseppe Gori. It's much longer but is a good - and detailed - discussion of how accountability to voters is different - and, we would both ,improved under MMP

MMP and truthiness

I've been planning a blog series for the rest of the campaign. I've sketched out a bunch of ideas but was looking for a way to tie them all together.

Then today, on the train to Toronto, as I was taking a break watching an episode of my favorite satirical news program - it dawned on me!

I'll have to do the series exposing the "truthiness" of the arguments against MMP.

As the American Dialect Society definied it when they named it 2005's "Word of the
Year", truthiness:

refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

So I look forward to exposing the truthiness of the arguments against MMP over the next three weeks. It should be educational, as I'll provide references and evidence debunking all the wild accusations made against the Citizens' Assembly's recommendation.

As one of my colleagues notes often, if MMP were a person, they could sue the people organizing for the status quo in the referendum for slander. Their arguments either gloss over, or plainly ignore, the best evidence and research on voting systems and electoral behaviour.

And as one of my favorite bloggers noted last week, I've been proud to be associated with an organization and a campaign that "[more than] any non-academic organization ... argue[s] so much from research findings rather than trying to play on raw emotion". Wish I could say that about our truthy opponents - but then again, if they weren't distorting the facts, they'd have to admit that MMP will work just fine for Ontario.

To paraphrase Colbert, opponents of MMP don't trust books. They're all facts, no heart.

And opponents of MMP won't let facts get in the way of defending the status quo.

MMP and environmentalism

I came across a blog post that I just had to respond to.

Let's file it under ridiculous claims about MMP.

I'll expand my comment on his site a little bit on mine. Apparently, "both sides of the issue have legitimate points, and this blog is not the place to debate them (please)", so I wouldn't flood him with comments, but if you're as confused about his post as me, I'm sure the Ottawa regional director for the NO MMP campaign is a democrat so that he wouldn't mind a little polite discussion on the relationship between environmentalism and electoral reform. (Also, note in his post the smelly red herring of the Scottish "voter confusion" that's now become a favorite of democracy's opponents).

As I point out more succinctly on his blog, the evidence is crystal clear that MMP would be GOOD for the environment.

In Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, the respected political scientist and renowned expert in comparative government, looks into the question of the relationship between political systems and environmental policies.

The book looks at 36 democracies and compares them in multiple ways since the end of World War II. It's really an amazing book - all 310 pages of groundbreaking empirical research. He makes a convincing case that we can break parliamentary government into two broad families that share many characteristics due to the electoral system: majoritarian and consensus democracies.

I think we can all agree that by far the best way to compare outcomes of given political systems is to compare them in broad, extensive cross-national comparisons. Lijphart's book is undoubtedly one of the best and more extensive. The guy didn't get to be President of the American Political Science Association and a professor emeritus for nothing.

His conclusions on environmental policies? Consensus democracies have lower carbon dioxide emissions, fertilizer consumption, deforestation and higher energy efficiency.

Maybe on Mars our outdated voting system is good for the environment, but on Earth if looks like proportional systems like MMP are where it's at.

So if you want environmental policies that deliver results, the choice in the October 10 is clear, you need to vote for MMP.

Seems we can file this claim as another falsehood being propagated by NO MMP.

I look forward to addressing more of them as the campaign unfolds.

Source: Lijphart,Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy, 1-8 and 295-7

PEIs best premier - nominees 5 through 8

After a few days of voting for PEIs best premier, the favorites are starting to separate from the pack. Pat Binns and Joe Ghiz are clearly in the lead, both with enough first preference votes to be elected. My personal choice, Alex Campbell, is in third, while Stewart, Jones, MacLean and Callbeck appear to be the most likely candidates to move on to the final 6.

If you haven't voted yet, please take a second to cast a vote for PEIs best premier.

Thane A. Campbell - wiki/gov.pe.ca

Campbell the elder became Island Premier in 1936, after the death of Premier Walter M. Lea, who had led the Liberals to the first ever legislative sweep in the history of Westminster parliaments just the year earlier. In his seven years as Premier, this lawyer and Rhodes Scholar would pass the first law governing the civil service and establish the national park on the beautiful dunes of the north shore. His son Alex would become premier, making the Campbells the first Liberal family dynasty in the Premier’s Office.

J. Walter Jones - wiki/gov.pe.ca

After succeeding Campbell, Jones would serve for nearly a decade as Premier. An agronomist, Jones was an expert in the once important fox farming industry and credited with making the potato the staple of Island agriculture. Elected to the legislature in the sweep of 1935, he would take the Premier’s Chair in 1943 after Campbell took a seat on the provincial Supreme Court.

Jones became in/famous for his strident defence of Island agriculture. His policies are best summed up by the 1947 Canada Packers strike where he used the legislative power (which was of course overwhelming in the hands of gerrymandered rural districts) to break the strike and ban national and international unions on PEI (of course stronger in urban PEI). Jones justified it as “protecting the farm interest”. He would leave Island politics in 1953 to become a Senator.

Walter R. Shaw - wiki/gov.pe.ca

Another farmer, Shaw first became noted as a livestock breeder. He served as Deputy Minister before getting into politics and launched the PEI Federation of Agriculture. He won the Tory leadership in 1957 and would defeat the Liberal administration of Alex W. Matheson in 1959 at the ripe old age of 71. Shaw would bring some degree of centralization to secondary schools through a system of regional high schools and develop the food processing industry. He would win another election in 1962 before narrowly losing the 1966 election, by far PEIs most hard fought election.

Alex B. Campbell - wiki/gov.pe.ca

As I mentioned above, Campbell the younger is my choice for the Island's best premier. He took office after a dramatic election in 1966. During the campaign, one of the candidates in the First Kings riding on the eastern tip of the Island passed away, prompting the election administrators to postpone the vote in that riding. After the other 30 seats were split between the PCs and the Liberals, the reins of power came down to the subsequent by-election a dozen days later. In the meantime, Shaw named one of the Conservative candidates (the Island has dual-member districts until 1997) as Transportation Minister and proceeded to pave everything in the district. As this great archived piece from the CBC shows (watch it if you've got 10 minutes to kill,it well done), the voters of First Prince said thank you very much for the road work and elected two Liberal MLAs, making the 33 year-old Campbell one of the youngest premiers in Canadian history.

Campbell quickly staked out a position as a social reformer. His government has a particular focus on economic development, working with the federal government to enact the Comprehensive Development Plan, further professionalizing the Island's civil service. The Campbell government was ahead of its time, concerned with issues like renewable energy before they became fashionable, bringing the ultimately ill-fated Institute of Man and Resources to PEI. He further revamped the educational system by bringing in consolidated schools in rural PEI and established restrictions on absentee ownership of land. As Island historian Wayne MacKinnon argues in a book I really should pick up, Campbell "sought to achieve a balance between two conflicting cultures, and in the process, laid the foundations for the modernization of Prince Edward Island".

After a dozen years in office, making him the Island's longest serving first minister, Campbell left office to take a position on the province's Supreme Court.

I should be back tomorrow or early Sunday with the last four nominees for the Island's best premier. Remember, voting will close Monday afternoon, so get your votes in here.

PEIs Best Premier - the early years

The poll for PEIs best premier is now online at Demochoice.org - go here to vote. The balloting will continue until next Monday afternoon, when I get into Toronto, probably around 2:00 EST.

As CG notes, the first round will be a STV ballot to reduce the list of a dozen premiers down to six. Sounds strange for someone who's working to bring in MMP in Ontario, but I'm an electoral reform advocate above all. I'd support MMP, STV or any other crazy electoral system a representative group of average folks select. Anything other than our outdated, undemocratic first-past-the-post system.

Once the top six are selected, we'll go to a CFL style 6-premier showdown, with the top two vote getters getting byes into the semi-finals. Any ties will be broken by me, because I'm the boss here!

I’ve decided to go through the list of Premiers chronologically. I’ll break down the twelve contenders for the title in groups of four. First, the best of the Island’s premiers from the first part of its history:

James Colledge Pope - wiki/gov.pe.ca

Pope gets the nod for being Premier when PEI entered Confederation, although he had served as Premier twice while the Island was still a British colony. A Conservative, Pope gets bonus points for leading the colonial government that started the ill-fated PEI railway that forced the nearly-bankrupt colony to join Confederation.

Ironically, it was the Liberals who negotiated PEIs way into Confederation, but subsequently lost an election to Pope’s Tories just before that fateful day – July 1, 1973. Subsequently, Pope bolted for the House of Commons three months after PEI became Canada’s seventh province. He bounced back and forth between the House and Province House in Charlottetown, serving as Minister of Fisheries in the former for a period of 4 years.

Louis Henry Davies - wiki/gov.pe.ca

PEIs first post-Confederation Liberal premier, Davies defeated Pope’s successor Lemuel Cambridge Owen (best name for an Island premier by far!) in 1876. His three-year administration, a shaky coalition of with some Tories, managed to bring in a public secular school system and reform the civil service (not very successfully we’ll see) before being defeated in the legislature three years later.

Davies left for Ottawa in 1882 and served as Minister of Fisheries for Laurier (another pattern), until he left for the Supreme Court in 1901 – the first and only Islander to serve on that body. The only Rt. Hon. Among the bunch he became Chief Justice in 1916, holding the position until his death eight years later.

Aubin-Edmond Arsenault - wiki/gov.pe.ca

The only Acadian to occupy the Premier’s office and the first to lead a Cabinet in Canadian history, Arsenault succeeded John A. Mathieson as Conservative leader and Premier in 1917, after nine years in the Legislative Assembly. Defeated by the Liberals two years later, he did make on legal reform that would dramatically impact Island culture for years to come – repealing legislation that limited Islanders’ car driving to certain days and roads.

James David Stewart - wiki/gov.pe.ca

Stewart became Premier in 1923 when he defeated John Howatt Bell’s Liberals. He would lose his post in 1927 for being – god forbid! – unwilling to bring in complete prohibition. Tenaciously he stuck around for another term as Leader of the Opposition and became Premier for a second time in 1931. He would press Ottawa for a better deal to help the Island deal with the Depression, but the job took a toll on his health and he would die two years later.

So in the first group, we’ve got two historical firsts, the Island’s only Supreme Court Justice and two-term premier who was killed by the job. Don’t let anyone tell you that being Premier of the Garden in the Gulf is easy!

I think I’m leaning towards the accomplished Davies and Stewart as my favorites in this bunch. If you’ve got an idea on your preferences, go vote here.

Bloggers (of all stripes) 4 MMP

As readers of this blog will know, a favorite topic of mine is electoral and democratic reform, so I wanted to do up a brief post giving a shout out to some bloggers - from all sides of the political spectrum - who have come out to endorse the Ontario Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform's recommendation of a mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting system for Ontario.

Erroneously, opponents of fair and advanced democracy often try to pretend proportional representation is about representing smaller parties. But really, it's about fairly distributing political power and ensuring that all citizens can make effective electoral choices. Supporters of all parties are affected by our antiquated voting system, particularly voters who live in "safe seats" like mine, where the election is often over once the dominant party's candidate is nominated.

MMP will provide voters all across Ontario with more choice, fairer results and stronger representation, but we will return to that over the summer.

It's great to see lots of Liberal bloggers starting to talk about how MMP will improve our democracy. Clear Grit has a long, but very good, discussion of why MMP will work in Ontario. ProgBlog leader Scott Tribe has long been a supporter. And mad props to Queer-Liberal who has a series of really super awesome posts on the issue. In particular, I like his latest post about why Liberals in Ontario would be smart to embrace MMP. After all, it was a fulfilled promise by the McGuinty government that brought us to this historic referendum.

There's even a Liberals4MMP blog that has started. I look forward to seeing the list of pro-MMP Liberal bloggers grow over the summer and into the Fall.

On the complete other end of the spectrum, we find prominent social conservative blogger Suzanne from the Big Blue Wave, who has been following the issue religiously. She has devoted numerous posts to the issue.

Hopefully, we'll see even more right-of-centre bloggers speak out for MMP as the campaign develops. We're still waiting for the first Tory MPP or candidate to come out for MMP, but I can't imagine it'll be too long before a Toronto Tory endorses it, after all, it's clearly in their self-interest.

Finally, to illustrate the broad multi-partisan support for MMP, maybe we should start building a list of bloggers that support MMP ... anyone more tech-saavy than I want to help with that?

I'm a bad blogger

As usual, I haven't been the best blogger. But I have been a pretty busy guy the past month. I've been doing much more travelling than normal.

First, it was a trip to the Fair Vote Canada AGM at Ryerson University at the start of June. It was great to be inn a room with such a diverse group of people concerned about the health of Canadian democracy. I've been at the last four FVC AGMs and this one was by far the best. A good sign for the upcoming Ontario referendum this Fall. In particular, it was great to see a much younger crowd than normal. I think Ontario university and college students can expect to hear about MMP and how it can improve our democracy this Fall.

Then, it was back home for a quick visit to PEI to pop into Fanningbank, the lieutenant governor's beautiful old mansion in Charlottetown and see my Dad get sworn in to the new provincial government, as Minister of Education and Attorney General. Needless to say, I was very proud of my Dad that day. For my entire life, Dad has provided a positive example as someone who uses their talents to contribute to the community. He's got a bit more power and responsibility now, but I know he'll bring the same intelligence, hard work and integrity he's brought to other projects in his life to his new job.

I won't comment on PEI politics too much (being a good son) but maybe I'll find the time this week to discuss the Ghiz government's first smart strategic move.

Then I spent about a week in the greatest city in the world (well at least of the few I've been to before). Well technically, we never left Manhattan, but did get to see the sights, some wicked art and a hilarious Broadway show.

I wish I could have been back for the recent legislature opening in PEI, but have been commuting to Toronto the last couple of weeks for my job. But I'll be back with much more about that over the next three months.