Our next PM?

John Ivison: Michael Ignatieff would be PM in a Liberal-led coalition - Full Comment

Michael Ignatieff will become Prime Minister in a Liberal-led coalition government if the opposition parties succeed in bringing down the Conservatives in a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons next week and if the Governor-General deems it to be a viable alternative, sources said late last night.

It is understood that the plan will be presented to the Liberal caucus Monday at 1 p.m.

network.nationalpost.com

It will be interesting to see if this (the presentation to caucus) comes to pass, and whether it will get leaked to the media.

Edit: Guess Ivison was a bit off on this one. The CBC is reporting that Dion will be lead the coalition. So he might not go down in Canadian political history as the only Liberal leader to not be Prime Minister.

Leadership race for the...Conservatives?

Can it get more interesting? Some websites have been popping up:

Conservatives for Prentice, a blog pushing Jim Prentice as leader of the Conservatives. Who started this blog?

Conservatives for Prentice

We are a group of grassroots Conservative Party of Canada members -- the kind of grassroots members on which our party was FOUNDED -- who believe that Jim Prentice should be the next Conservative Leader and Prime Minister of Canada.We will be staying anonymous as we recognize that our position might not be popular right now. But, we think it is still the right thing to do.

...we want to make clear that this site is not in any way endorsed or supported by Jim Prentice or any of his staff.

(First post 11:40am Friday November 28th)

conservativesforprentice.blogspot.com

This site is also up: Draft John Baird. From the site:

We are a rapidly growing group of grassroots Conservatives from across the country; who are aggressively campaigning to have John Baird elected the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Since launching the Draft John Baird campaign site on Sunday afternoon...

Email Stephen Harper and Tell Him to Resign

Copyright © 2009 Conservatives for Change

Is it Liberal scheming? Makes for interesting conspiracy theories anyway. If you see any other sites like this pop up, please let me know.

Coalition formed

Details of proposed Liberal-NDP coalition emerge

Details of proposed Liberal-NDP coalition emerge

Last Updated: Sunday, November 30, 2008 | 11:33 PM ETComments121Recommended1349

CBC News

A Liberal-NDP coalition agreement that would replace the minority Conservative government was being fleshed out Sunday night, the CBC has learned.

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has shown the outline of an agreement between his party and the New Democratic Party to Liberal leadership candidates Michael Ignatieff, Dominic LeBlanc and Bob Rae, the CBC's Keith Boag reported, citing sources.

"They're discussing this tonight in Toronto," he said from Ottawa.

The NDP would hold 25 per cent of cabinet positions, Boag said, adding that the finance minister and the deputy prime minister would be Liberals.

The Bloc Québécois would not officially be a part of the coalition, but the new government's survival would depend on their support, he said.

The Harper government could prorogue Parliament to block the coalition efforts, but "that'd be a very, very dramatic step given the government has taken the position there'll be a budget early in January," Boag said.

"The real obstacle to this deal going through is still within the Liberal party," Boag said, adding the deal is being negotiated by Dion, who believes he has the right to be prime minister.

But it's unclear whether the party wants him to continue, and the leadership candidates were meeting Sunday evening to discuss the matter, Boag said.

Opposition parties say they have lost confidence in the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper after Thursday's economic update by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty failed to provide a stimulus package for Canadians.

Since then, the Liberals have been in negotiations to form a coalition with the NDP, and the concessions made by the Conservatives over the weekend have done nothing to change the parties' view that Harper must go.

On Sunday, Flaherty said the government would deliver the budget on Jan. 27, about a month before one is normally tabled in the House of Commons.

Shortly after his announcement, Transport Minister John Baird said the minority government won't try to eliminate the right to strike for federal civil servants over the next couple of years, as pledged in last week's economic update.

On Saturday, Baird also announced the government had shelved its contentious plan to eliminate political party subsidies that are based on the number of votes received during elections.

Parliament is due to vote on a Liberal no-confidence motion on Dec. 8. If the Conservatives lose, the opposition parties could be invited by the Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean to form a government.

Harper has been in office since February 2006.

www.cbc.ca

So the NDP and Liberals have come to an agreement, according to the CBC:

NDP, Liberals reach deal to topple minority Tory government

Sunday, November 30, 2008 | 9:51 PM ET

"The NDP and Liberals have reached a deal to topple the minority Conservative government and take power themselves in a coalition, CBC News has learned.

A deal has been negotiated between NDP Leader Jack Layton and Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion that would see them form a coalition government for two and a half years, the CBC's Keith Boag reported, citing sources.

The NDP would be invited into cabinet and get 25 per cent of seats, Boag said, adding that the party wouldn't get the position of the finance chair or the deputy prime minister's post.

"That's the big step forward tonight," Boag reported.

The Bloc Québécois wouldn't be a part of the coalition, but would have to support it, he said.

"The most difficult question is who'll be the leader," Boag said, adding that Dion, who negotiated the deal, believes he has the right to be prime minister."

Pretty wild. I still can't help but be sceptical, but part of me is really hopeful, if for nothing else than to see what the shit will happen. The most interesting thing in Canadian politics since the '95 referendum.

Godwin's Law and the Globe* Comments section

Godwin's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"As a Usenet* discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

en.wikipedia.org

Looking for a morning update on the coalition issue, I saw this interesting story on the Globe and Mail's site: ‘Use every tool at your disposal', examining a leaked email instructing Conservative MPs how to discredit the Liberals/NDP/Bloc coalition idea in the media over the next week, using various phrases including "Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition." and "I'm sorry, I don't care how desperate the Liberals are — giving socialists and separatists a veto over every decision in government — that is a recipe for total economic disaster." My favourite, though, is this little gem: "But how more phony could these guys be?" I'm really looking forward to hearing a Conservative MP use that one, word for word.

I posted a couple of comments about how a coalition forming a government is valid and how this email reminds me of the committee handbook incident, in which the Conservatives issued an entire handbook on how to derail and stall the work of parliamentary committees. Reading the other comments, I came across this one:

wayne powers from Saskatoon, writes: Harper reminds me of another countrys leader years ago maybe you can fill in the blanks and guess who was just as power hungry and bloodthirsty H***er

www.theglobeandmail.com

Then I noticed that the comments were closed. It took all of 14 minutes for a Harper-Hitler comparison (from the time of the first comment). The comment has since been removed and the comments are open again. Brutal. I generally hate comments sections on media websites. Partisan bickering of the highest order, horrible pun-nicknames (CONservatives, LIEberals, Taliban Jack), and generally zero discussion. What bothers me most is that people will see a ridiculous comment from the loony left and use it to frame any argument they have. Thanks, wayne powers, for discrediting the rest of us.

* insert media outlet of your choice.

Coalition in Ottawa?

I'm watching CPAC online this morning (a great service). Vic Toews just called England a socialist country. A Liberal back-bencher handed Libby Davies a softball question. Paul Szabo is impressing me with his clarity. The House is nearly empty, I assume because everyone is in meetings.

Interesting times in Ottawa. The Conservatives' economic update hasn't been well-received by anyone that I could see. The left is hopeful that a Liberal-NDP coalition government can be formed if they take down the Conservatives over the economic update. Apparently Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien are talking. Norman Spector doesn't think it can happen. Some jackass at the Post sees through it all, and thinks it's about politics. Well done.

The Globe's editorial accuses Stephen Harper of putting crass partisanship before the economic crisis after claiming this 40th Parliament would be about cooperation. "Through gratuitous partisanship, they have turned an economic crisis into a political one." Taking away public funding of political parties was smart. It made it easy for the opposition parties to oppose the economic update, and will make it difficult for the opposition parties to change their position on the economic update once the government puts it back in.

A coalition government would be a political junky's dream. All the goings-ons, the intrigue, the constant guesswork about what might happen and who might vote which way.

Sni.ps test

Hi everyone. Just testing out a new application some friends developed.

Cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems | eaves.ca

Mary Douglas, an anthropologist studying traditional African religion observed that different societies feared different sorts of threats, and that these differences correlated with differences in their social structure. Later, Douglas argued that social structures differ along two principal axes: “grid” and “group (see graph).”

eaves.ca

Did it work? Seems to have. I'll have to ask the friends what it's all about. Check out www.sni.ps for more info. From their site:

Sni.ps | Know The Source

With sni.ps, content capture and attribution as easy as click and embed. Sni.ps tracks the original source of content, whether that’s a quote, a photo, video or a flash object. You respect your sources while you share content with your readers.

www.sni.ps

History of voter turn-out in Vancouver

This handy-dandy chart* illustrates a simple issue in Vancouver: there is no "normal" voter turn-out. Voter turn-out is down this election, in both absolute and percentage terms, but it's up in some polls, and the overall drop was just under 8000 voters. The numbers aren't great, but they're still higher than by-elections (that bar is set pretty low, I know), and far higher than any election prior to 2005.

Why did the number of registered voters fluctuate so widely before 2005? There were no changes to who was eligible, as near as I can tell. The city adopted the Provincial Voters list, I think, which had far more people on it, but was that really why 30,000 more people voted in 2005? Was it simply a matter of extra voters' cards being mailed out to 120,000 more people?


* Excel doesn't allow for multiple x- or y-axes so I had to cobble this together using the paint function on Appleworks. What a ridiculous restriction.

Civic election - downtown changes

Map 1:
Number of registered voters:
RED - 0-10% loss
GREY - even
PERI - 0-10% gain
ROYAL - 10-20% gain
NAVY - 20-30% gain

Map 2 (with dots) is the mayoral race from 2005; Map 3 is from 2008.

Three things changed downtown from last civic election:

1) A general influx of people (which won't surprise anyone). Registered voters is up from 57,871 to 61,727, for a net gain of 3895.

2) Parts of the West End lost registered voters. While there was only a slight overall loss (around 300) overall, the furthermost western polls (1, 2, 4, 5 and 6) either stayed the same or lost voters. Who's been moving out? Doesn't seem to matter: Vision won these polls by significant margins in 2008 (see vote ratio) and 2005.

3) The NPA lost polls 3, 9, 13 and 15 to Vision; voter turn-out dropped substantially in all of these polls. They held onto poll 17, where voter turn-out dropped enormously. Jim Green did better than Gregor in poll 17, and Peter Ladner managed to pull in as many votes as Sam did in 2005 while voting rates dropped significantly. So did some Vision/Jim Green supporters just not vote in Yaletown? I can't even begin to guess what happened there.

It's interesting to note that voter turn-out dropped in every single poll on the downtown peninsula, and it wasn't high to begin with, resulting in some shockingly low numbers (13.6 - 27%). Poll 15 actually increased by 94 votes but the number of registered voters increased by 1112*, so we see a drop in voter turn-out as a percentage.


* Only two other polls increased so much: poll 17 by 932 and poll 68 (Joyce and Kingsway) by 1008. No other polls were even close.

Civic election vote ratio

This map was really fun to make. It shows the ratio of votes for Gregor to votes for Peter. It's basically a percentage of popular vote, but some of the percentages were so high I thought it would make more sense to present it as a ratio.

I think this map shows why Gregor and Vision won. Peter Ladner dominated a few polls, but even in the strongest NPA areas the ratio was only about 3.5 : 1. Contrast that with some polls in East Van where the ratio of Gregor votes to Peter votes was approaching 7 : 1.

Civic election voter turn-out by poll

So I whipped this up tonight. Not great quality, but it looks okay. A few thoughts on voter turn-out:

1) As could be predicted, southwest and west Vancouver generally had a high turn-out, but so did eastern parts of the city.

2) It will take a bit of doing to figure out how turn-out affected specific polls, but right now there isn't a clear conclusion to be drawn from the numbers. Each candidate won ridings with low and high voter turn-out, including in adjacent polls.

I'm going to put together another few maps tomorrow, one based on voter turn-out by party allegiance.