Tag: Green Party

Ontario election or voter suppression

Well, I voted, and it was really easy. Just needed some basic ID and some time to wait in the line I was, I admit, rather surprised to have encountered. Nobody tried to intimidate me or influence my vote. I went on just one of the several days that voting was possible. I didn’t have to register in advance. My vote was private. I saw it go into the machine and be counted.

And yet…

Holding a snap election in February in Ontario seems very much designed to ensure low voter turnout.

  • Weather: February’s always kind of miserable, but this year the province has been hammered with record amounts of snow. Some people literally cannot get out of their homes to vote, because they need clear sidewalks, and those are hard to come by. It’s also tough to get campaign signs in snow-covered lawns, or volunteers willing to stay out very long knocking on doors.
  • Condensed time frame: The election was announced one day, started the next day, and runs for only four weeks. It’s very little time to even let people know it’s happening, let alone any campaigns to gain steam and make an impression. No party started with a full slate of candidates! A lot of people won’t receive voter cards in time. (They can vote without it, but not everyone knows that. Or even realizes an election is happening.) Those who want to vote by mail are hard-pressed to get that completed by deadline.
  • There’s a lot else going on. The US keeps talking about annexing our country, along with doing various appalling things daily. The Federal Liberal party is having a leadership race, the winner of which will be Prime Minister. Shortly afterward, a general federal election is expected. Lots of competition for Ontario politicians trying to let people even know there is a provincial election, let alone who all the leaders, candidates, and positions are.

There’s nothing illegal about all this; but it kind of feels like it should be? Because this is not truly a free and fair election. Especially if you consider:

  • The governing Conservatives have been found to have inappropriate used taxpayer money to advertise themselves, before the election, and party money to advertise the Premier’s trip to Washington, which is also not allowed. The penalty? Bupkus! More votes for them, even though they’ve cheated!
  • The Conservatives have told their candidates to not attend any local debates, something they have followed, with few exceptions.
  • The Conservatives have not bothered to release a platform. (Today they did release one…)
  • Conservative leader Doug Ford has mostly avoided the media.

So the governing party, the one with by far and away the most funds, is doing its level best to ensure that voters are uninformed about anything.

They clearly hope that hardly any people will vote, since low voter turnout tends to favor incumbents and conservative parties. And polls have consistently shown them to be in majority territory.

Do the Conservatives deserve re-election?

I would argue no—and not only because of their “keep the voters ignorant” campaign style. Fortunately, I don’t have to personally write up all the reasons why, as many others have. One of my favourite examples is Please: Anyone but Doug Ford by Justin Ling. A few excerpts:

His years in office have been defined by shortages — a lack of homes, doctors, teachers, jobs, skilled workers, subways, buses, and bike lanes. Worse yet, his plan for a third term is ambitious only in its plan to build a massive new white elephant.

Let’s start with housing, inarguably the priority for any incoming government. But, somehow, Ford remains indifferent. Ontario is, in the full swing of a housing crisis, breaking ground on fewer units of new housing today than it was in 2012. It’s a stunning failure.

…

There are few problems in Ontario which don’t flow out of this acute housing shortage. Tent encampments, rising crime, the opioid crisis, sluggish growth, a stagnant culture, and declining productivity: All things that could be ameliorated by cheaper, abundant housing. 

…

Ford is addicted to giving private companies public money, often for no benefit to the province.

…

He has had nearly seven years to fix the province, and he hasn’t. What is he proposing for the next four years?

Ford’s healthcare plan is absolutely anemic, little more than a vague hand-wave at the crisis. If he has actual new plans to boost housing construction, he’s certainly been holding out on us. Does he have a real plan to improve education, reduce homelessness, hire more doctors, provide care for people struggling with addiction, or get real economic growth started again? No.

What Doug Ford has is a big dumb tunnel.

The opposition problem

If not Doug’s PCs, then who? And therein lies the problem. Both Liberals and NDP have new leaders that aren’t well known. Neither has managed to bust out a fantastic campaign to make them the clear alternative. The Green Party has a appealing leader and great platform, but are strong only in a limited number of ridings. The voter who wants “not Conservative” has to do the frustrating dance of whom exactly to pick instead.

I have voted. I will say it: I voted NDP. I live in a riding with an NDP incumbent who is excellent. I was happy to support her. I was less happy to support some aspects of the NDP platform. Really, you’re going to make the 407 toll-free to “reduce congestion” (which it won’t). Really, that’s your first announcement? And that whole grocery rebate thing? That sounds… complicated.

But as whole, it’s still a better platform than what the PCs have on offer. The party leader, Marit Stiles, is more appealing than Ford. And their Instagram ad today is one of the funniest political ads I’ve seen in some time (here’s hoping they also post on YouTube or somewhere more accessible than Instagram).

And they know the mission: Focus on the ridings they hold, and the ones they might conceivably take away from the Conservatives. From the Conservatives. Not so much from the Liberals or the Greens.

The Liberals haven’t played too much of a factor in my personal consideration, with the Greens having earned my “heart” vote, and the NDP clearly being the smart vote. But being someone who frankly doesn’t really understand political strategy, it’s been interesting periodically dipping into the writings of Evan Scrimshaw, who lives and breathes this stuff.

This one, pointing out that with Conservatives sitting at 45% support in polling (it’s since dipped a bit, not enough), there is no “rearranging of the deck chairs” possible to prevent them winning a majority, was particularly interesting: Ontario: Progressives’ Absurd Focus.

The idea that if you could magically optimize the Liberal and NDP votes, somehow Ford would be defeated is nonsensical. Not every vote who is voting for one or the other is a vote for the other. Not every Liberal trusts the NDP on fiscal policy or some of their more out there social values ideas (remember safety zones around drag bars?), while plenty of New Democrats are union, working class, blue collar voters who oscillate between the NDP to advocate for more health spending and the Conservatives because they’re mad at progressives, wokeness, and the general fact that the world isn’t how it was in 1995. Only 62% of Liberals and New Democrats think the OLP and ONDP should merge into one party, per a Friday Research Co poll. 

….

The unfortunate truth is that if you were to do head to head polling, Ford would easily beat Crombie’s Liberals, Stiles’ NDP, or some merged entity. He is what Ontario wants. The reason he’s what Ontario wants is in large part because the Opposition have not been good enough.

…

If there was some option of a merger or a deal, the Greens would also be a big impediment to it working. Green voters aren’t idiots who think the Greens can win, they’re about building slowly and adding to the conversation through presence and generally not making the compromises that the NDP and especially the Liberals make. It’s a party that is on some level about being anti-Liberal and anti-NDP more than it is about the environment or ecology or whatever else. It’s a statement of principles, and about one’s self. 

…

What both parties of the left have failed to do is create a coherent narrative for why they need to be elected. The real problem for Ontario progressives isn’t how the opposition splits their votes, it’s the fact that 45% of Ontario is about to vote for Ford, and any person or any organization focused on anything other than driving that down isn’t helping.

Vote anyway

The weather forecast has improved this week. The NDP still looks perky. The Greens are are encouraging you to not feel bad about voting for some other party if you don’t live in one of their favored ridings. The Liberals… Well, I’m not too sure what’s going on there, but they do have some good candidates.

You can vote any day between now and Thursday. Go here: https://voterinformationservice.elections.on.ca/en/election/search?mode=postalCode, enter your postal code, and it will tell you where and what form of ID to bring.

It’s not really a fair election, but it helps nothing to sit it out. Happy voting.

Ontario election dilemma

Ontario’s having an election in a few, and I’d rather Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives not win the most seats. The main reason is that climate change remains our biggest problem, and this party has been and will continue to be terrible on the environmental front. We can’t really afford that for another four years. Not only are they not trying to reduce emissions, they really seem to want to increase them. Their main campaign point is that they more people in more cars on more highways, producing more greenhouse gases on the paved-over wetlands.

But, the PCs also weren’t great on (just off the top of my head):

  • Healthcare—Freezing wages, cutting public health
  • Long-term care—Failing to protect seniors in care (like, seniors died of starvation and neglect, not Covid…)
  • Autism—Cancelling the Liberal autism program because the wait list was too long, and replacing it with nothing but an even longer wait list
  • Opioid addiction—Arbitrarily capping the number of needle exchange centres in the province while overdose deaths soared
  • Open government—Paying lawyers to keep secret information citizens have the right to know, such as ministerial mandate letters and taxpayer-funded reports on municipal amalgamation
  • Municipal government—Cancelling the ranked ballot option (why?), changing the number of Toronto city councillors mid-election (!)

So, clearly I would like people to… well…. do what exactly?

Vote for a member of another party, of course. But that’s the issue: which one? This ain’t a two-party system. And none of the other main alternatives—NDP, Liberal, or Green—are clearly the best choice. At least to me, anyway. But I think to a lot of other people, also.

Which is why we have this split. A chunk who will vote PC, because you always have a minimum 30% or so who will, with the remaining majority of voters dividing up support in such a way that the PCs are well on track to win more seats than anyone. Quite likely a majority of seats overall, which will allow them to govern and do whatever the heck they want.

PCs at 36% vs Liberal at 28%, NDP at 24%, and Green at 5%.

The other parties should combine and stop this from happening

I keep hearing this, even now, from people whom, I guess, don’t really know how our political system works?

The election has started. The ballots are printed. Heck, people have already voted! It’s too late for the Liberals and NDP to collaborate and agree to split the ridings and govern as a coalition—which is not really how our system works anyway…?

In the end, after the vote, if the non-PC parties have, combined, more seats than the PCs, they could look to eventually defeat that government and indeed, offer to govern in some sort of partnership as an alternative to making everyone go to the polls again. But not before the vote.

(Also, you know, you can’t just assume that people who like the Liberals like the NDP second best and vice versa. If those parties were to collaborate ahead of time, it could well annoy loyalists into voting for some other party entirely…)

Strategic voting

Is the other big idea, and is at least is in realm of possibility (unlike the fantasy of an NDP-Liberal coalition forming mid-election campaign). But it’s not as easy as it seems, even despite all the tools and movements to help, such as https://votewell.ca/ and (for Toronto) https://www.notoneseat.ca/

The idea is that you vote for whichever party your riding is most likely to defeat the PC candidate.

The problem is that it’s largely based on polling at the local riding level, which is simply not accurate, mainly because it isn’t done! At least not on any mass scale. Polling is mostly done provincially, and then they try to extrapolate to the local level to estimate how the seat count will work out (considering historical data for that riding, etc.). It gives you an idea, but that’s it. It’s not really solid data.

Squaring my own circle

All I can 100% control is my own vote, so what are the considerations?

Party leader

My favourite for sure is Mike Shreiner of the Green Party. He’s smart, he’s likeable, he’s been a constructive presence in the Legislature the last four years, and in my opinion, he was the best at the Northern Ontario leaders debate (one of the better debates I’ve seen a while, actually).

Steven Del Duca (Liberal) and Andrea Horwath (NDP) also seem smart and reasonably likeable, but do somewhat lack in charisma. Del Duca was somewhat better in the debate, in my opinion, for what that’s worth.

Platform

If you look at my Vote Compass:

Liberal 73%, Green Pasrty 64%, NDP 63%, PC 43%

The Liberals have it.

But, I feel like each of these parties has some promises I really like, some that I’m meh about, and a few I’m not quite on board with but, overall, any one would be an improvement over the PCs.

Local candidate

The only local candidates I know anything about are incumbent Catherine Fife of the NDP, and Shefaza Esmail of the Green Party, whom I talked to briefly on the phone. I’ll have to nerd out and watch a local debate to see how the others are, but Catherine has been a good MPP: smart, engaged, well-spoken. At this point, she certainly seems like the best local option.

In sum

I have my own three-way tie: Green, Liberal, NDP.

If the election were held today…

I’d likely vote NDP, to support Catherine Fife, and because, despite my serious doubts about strategic voting… She still seems like the smart choice if you’re going to consider it at all.

(For what it’s worth, VoteWell has Waterloo pegged as more of a Liberal / NDP battleground, and says you can therefore vote for “the candidate you prefer”. I dunno. Last time the PCs did come in second, but that was also the Great Liberal Collapse election, so… Who knows. Strategic voting is a mug’s game.)

Anyway. Making up my own mind isn’t really the problem.

The problem is how to you chip away at the soft part of the 37% currently planning to vote PC, and try to get them to vote some other way?

… When you can’t even quite tell them what that other way should be…?

I do still love this ad…

See? This is why you shouldn’t have voted Conservative!

Well, that didn’t take long.

I actually cannot believe that Parliament has just opened, and Stephen Harper already has me in a blind rage.

Step 1: Economic statement focus

Earlier in the week, I heard that the government’s economic statement was to focus on preserving a small surplus, plus some initial cuts.

I thought that was a very strange approach in a time when most economists, including conservative (small “c”) ones, seemed to be saying that spending and stimulus were the most important priorities at this time.

Still, I was only mildly irritated at this point. Sure, it suggested the Conservatives were bad economic managers. But I already knew that, and there is some comfort in being right. Plus, I still have a job, for the time being at least, and it’s Christmas. So why fuss about politics now?

Step 2: Cutting federal funding for political parties

This, I was not happy about, even before all kerfuffle arose.

Bully for the Conservatives that they’re so great at fund-raising they don’t need any help from the taxpayer. That’s what happens your party is the one that attracts most of the rich people.

But parties who attract more lower-income people who can’t afford to donate (NDP, Greens), or are currently in some disarray (hello, Liberals), still have the right to exist. No, more than the right; they must exist, or we don’t have a democracy. We have a Conservative dictatorship.

Step 3: The opposition rises

That is some hubris that caused Harper to think the other parties would actually vote for their own demise.

Now, it may well be politically wise for the other parties to say it’s the economic statement itself, and not the cutting of federal funding to political parties, that is the tipping point. I’ll come back to that.

But my opinion is that the party funding alone is enough reason to defeat this bill.

  1. It’s unbalanced. This bill came in to compensate for loss of other ways for political parties to raise money. Previously, corporations and unions could donate; now they cannot. Previously, individuals could give as much they wanted; now they’re capped at $1000. You can’t take the funding away without making other legal changes that allow the parties to compensate for that loss.
  2. It’s undemocratic. Funding is calculated on a per-vote basis (with the exception of parties earning less than 5% of the popular vote). It’s one of the very few ways in our system that (almost) every vote counts. Some people, particularly Green Party supporters, do cast their votes exactly for that reason: to get federal funds to their party of choice. Taking away the funding disenfranchises all who voted for a major party.
  3. It doesn’t help the economy. The amount is too small to matter. Now, there is something to be said for the mostly symbolic gesture. Freezing top-level government salaries and cutting perks also probably doesn’t really help the economy, but it’s just bad optics to be flying all over in first class while people are losing their jobs and savings. But party funding isn’t a luxury; democracies aren’t completely cost-free.

    If the Conservatives don’t want their share of that funding, they can give theirs back and dare the other parties to do the same (knowing that they won’t). That way the Conservatives can get on their high horse, where they like to be, without kneecapping their opposition.

But party funding probably is a dicey thing to defeat a government on, so the opposition is instead focusing on the content of the economic statement. And frankly, there is plenty to be against there, too.

  • Claiming they already stimulated the economy with 2006 tax cuts. Huh? Even ignoring that they selected the most non-stimulative form of tax cut possible—the GST—something you did three years ago is not going to have a new effect now.
  • Claiming a surplus based on bogus number, such as inflated projections for the price of oil.
  • No infrastructure programs at all, though it’s not difficult to find excellent candidates for these across the country.

But even at this point, I wasn’t quite in a blind rage. I was really kind of excited that the opposition was showing some teeth, and acting cooperative, and refusing to roll over for the bully at the helm. Until…

Step 4: Harper claims a coalition government is undemocratic

While we have been working on the economy, the opposition has been working on a backroom deal to overturn the results of the last election without seeking the consent of voters. They want to take power, not earn it.

Stephen Harper

Overturn the results? No consent of voters? Makes me crazy ever time I read or hear it.

Mr. Harper, the majority of Canadians voted against you and your party.

The majority of Canadians voted for four center-left parties who agree on a number of major issues.

Three of these parties won seats. Two are discussing forming a coalition government, with the backing of the third.

This could be the closest Canada has ever had to the makeup of the government reflecting their actual votes.

Step 5: ?

Who knows how this plays out. But if the Conservatives don’t change their statement, they deserve to go down over it. And that better not lead to an election!

In the midst of a global economic slowdown that may plunge Canada into a deep recession and threaten the livelihood of many Canadians, it would helpful if there were some adults in Ottawa. … While there is certainly a crisis, there is no semblance of crisis leadership here, and therefore no chance for national cohesion. The responsibility for that lies squarely on the shoulders of Stephen Harper.

— Globe and Mail editorial, How to compound an economic crisis

Martin Luther King dreamed of the day when men would be judged “by the content of their character.” By that benchmark, Stephen Harper has proved himself to be a nasty little man.

— Peter Blaikie, letter to the Editor, Muzzling the opposition

The miscalculations have been stunning. Mr. Harper’s strategy has accomplished already the near-impossible: to bring the Liberals and NDP together.

He had so many other, less partisan options at a time of economic crisis and grave national concern. That he acted in this fashion, at this time, was enormously revealing. And very sad.

— Jeffrey Simpson, Economist with a tin heart, politician with a tin ear

Whatever the debatable merits of distancing parties from taxpayers, this isn’t the time or way to change payments peripheral to dangers facing Canadians. It won’t save a single job, meaningfully reduce the ruling party’s runaway spending, or somehow make the democratic exercise cost free.

— James Travers, Harper has needlessly provoked this crisis

An environmental take on strategic voting

Generally, I have to say, I hate voting strategically. However stupid it is in our “first past the post” system (and I still haven’t quite forgiven Ontarians for voting against changing it), I prefer to vote for something than against something else.

That said, I’m must admit to being relieved, this election, that the party I really do want to vote for also happens to be the party with by far the best odds of defeating the Conservatives in this riding.

But I come to this topic from an email I received from the environmental group, Just Earth.

What’s an environmentalist to do in the federal election? Even for card-carrying Greens, it is complicated. The party worst on the environment in general, and climate change in particular, is the Conservative party. All four others are better, although they differ on particulars. The Liberals have the excellent Green Shift plan, which the New Democrats reject, but the NDP is better on clean energy.

Strategic voting will be the option for many. A website has been launched that will help voters make a rational choice (www.voteforenvironment.ca). A riding by riding breakdown identifies races where the Conservatives won by a small margin, and are therefore vulnerable, and ridings where they are a close second and a threat. Some 60 ridings will make the difference, argues this (somewhat incognito) website.

With split votes, this would be the result: Conservative 147 seats, Liberal 76, NDP 34, Green 0, Bloc 49, independent 2.

If we “vote smart,” this would be the result: Conservative 97, Liberal 109, NDP 46, Green 1, Bloc 53, independent 2.

Not easy, though. Imagine being a federalist in Quebec faced with the “strategic” choice of with voting Bloc or getting another Conservative elected!

Also interesting was a report from the Sierra Club, which compares and grades the party’s environmental platforms as follows:

  • Green Party: A-
  • Liberals: B+
  • NDP: B
  • Bloc Québecois: B
  • Conservatives: F+

I must say, their assessment of the differences between Green, Liberal, and NDP on this front were smaller than I thought.

(Remember when votes used to get split on the right side of the political spectrum, too? I really miss those days.)

RDtNVC: Increasing energy prices without compensating with tax cuts

There were two letters in the Record yesterday related to the carbon tax plan. One asked how charging for pollution could possibly reduce it — wouldn’t companies just pass the increased cost onto customers as higher prices? The other asked, wouldn’t it be better to just force big polluters to pollute less, via regulation?

Both good questions. Comes down intuitively favoring a regulatory or “cap and trade” approach over a carbon tax, as so well articulated by Jeffery Simpson in the Globe and Mail:

They [the Green Party] bring urgency to the debate that the Conservatives lack, and they’ve got one thing right: that carbon emissions have to be assigned a price, that a tax is a defensible way to do it, and that the revenues from the tax are best recycled into lower personal and corporate income taxes.

There is another way of finding a price, through a cap-and-trade system, as proposed by the Conservatives and NDP. This targets mostly large polluters. Some of the costs are then passed to consumers. Using the tax, a method favoured by many economists, gives carbon a price certainty but doesn’t guarantee a particular emissions result; using the cap-and-trade produces a particular result but at an unknown price.

Politically, the cap-and-trade is a much easier sell, since the eventual effect on the ordinary person is indirect, whereas changes to the tax system are in the faces of consumers. The easier politics of the cap-and-trade explains in large part why Conservatives, New Democrats and U.S. politicians like it.

It’s too bad we can’t have a reasoned debate between these two approaches, instead of the slanging match and attack ads about the “carbon tax” that the Prime Minister calls “insane” and says will “screw” Canadians and “wreck the economy,” something that’s not happened in any of the countries that have thus far introduced one.

Now, I’m think of writing my own letter to the editor on this subject, and I can’t just plagiarize Jeffrey Simpson if I do that. So here’s my draft, which I’ll refine later! [I’m such a technical writer, sometimes. Just can’t resist the bulleted list!]

Something that seems to be missed in all the wild claims about the effects of a carbon tax on the economy and prices is that the regulatory or cap-and-trade system offered as an alternative will also raise energy prices — and without balancing them with an income and corporate tax cuts.

A cap-and-trade system involves only the largest polluters. Total target emission levels are set and are assigned a price. Companies who pollute the most pay the companies who emit the least. But exactly as with a carbon tax, some of those extra costs are likely to be passed on as higher prices for consumers.

The reasons the most economics and environmentalists — groups that don’t typically agree on much — favor a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade system include the following:

  • By involving everyone, not just the largest polluters, the potential reduction in pollution is therefore much greater.
  • With a cap-and-trade system, there’s no benefit to companies that will never reduce their emissions below the overall target, so they won’t. With a tax, the more they reduce, the more they save–and the greater the environment benefits.
  • It rewards companies and individuals who are already doing well, environmentally. They get more back in income and corporate tax cuts than they pay in increased carbon taxes.
  • Corporate and income tax cuts are generally stimulative to the economy, freeing up more money for investment, savings, and spending.

The truth is, the environmental policies of all the political parties–including the Conservatives–are going to increase energy prices. The question is, do you want an income tax cut to help you pay for those inevitable price increases, or not? If you do, then you should vote for one of the two parties planning to implement a carbon tax: the Green Party or the Liberals.

(2023 Postscript: These are the roots of the Conservative war on carbon taxes, but interesting that they supported cap and trade at the time. Also interesting that the Liberal plan was to reduce income taxes as compensation rather than the current “revenue neutral” approach. Finally, so sad that so many years later Canada has accomplished so little on this front.)

Reason of the day to not vote Conservative: The GST tax cut

Update from 2023: Of course, this lower GST rate remains in place to this day, 8 years into a Liberal government, with no suggestion of change from any party, far as I know.

An easy one for today: Cutting the GST, a policy so bad it actually united right and left [link removed as no longer valid] in opposition to it.

I think Jeffrey Simpson’s “A triumph of politics over economics” [link removed as no longer valid] summarizes the issue best:

Personal and corporate income tax cuts, as every economist knows, tend to stimulate savings and investment, which is what an economy needs to become more productive and competitive, thereby raising overall living standards. Lower consumption taxes stimulate more—wait for it—consumption, some of which leaks out of the economy in the form of purchasing imports and taking trips abroad.

The GST cut is the triumph of base politics over sensible economics.

Thus far, the Harper government’s tax and spending policies have been deeply disappointing for the country’s competitive position.

The government will have drilled a $10-billion hole in federal revenues through the two-point GST cut that will do nothing for productivity and competitiveness when compared with every other available tax cut, as the economists interviewed by the ROB illustrated this week.

Both policies represented the triumph of politics over economics, and short-term political considerations over long-term economic thinking.

Instead of this nonsense, tax policy should involve raising the GST, introducing carbon taxes, and then offsetting these new revenues by reductions in personal and corporate taxes to make Canada more efficient, competitive, fair and green.

Jeffrey Simpson, Globe and Mail

(And as an aside, CBC’s Marketplace did an interesting story this year where they showed that, in many cases, the GST cut was just swallowed up by rounding, giving more money to the seller and less to the consumer. Examples included movie and theatre tickets, whose “price includes GST” didn’t change a whit as the GST rate did. The companies just made more profit on each ticket.)

Sigh. So more’s the pity that we pretty much stuck with this 5% rate now. Though both the Liberals and the NDP argued against the cut, neither will take the political risk of undoing it (despite Conservative ads claiming the contrary). Only the Greens, bless them, are willing to to pledge to raise the GST back to 6% and use the increase to fund mass transit in cities [link removed as no longer valid].

Canadian federal election: Stepping back to survey the week

The most interesting, and heartening, event this week was the Green Party being admitted to the leader’s debate after public protests of the initial exclusion. I heard leader Elizabeth May interviewed on CBC’s The House, and the woman is a breath of fresh air. She’s smart and articulate, but doesn’t hide behind that political “bull” filter that all the other leaders do.

The Conservatives have campaigned effectively this week, and this point certainly look to be on a victorious path. I’m not sure any of their gaffes—the infantile Dion cartoon (I’m just not linking to it), insulting the father of a slain soldier[had link here, but it’s no longer valid]—will really stick. But it certainly highlights to me just how mean and nasty significant parts of the Conservative crowd can be. Why so angry, folks? You’re winning!

The Liberals really weren’t very prominent, getting attention mostly for defending themselves against Conservative attacks. A good defence is important, but they need way more offence. It’s not as though the Conservatives haven’t left them plenty of targets. Start shooting at them, already.

The NDP, on the other hand, I’ve seen a surprising amount of. They’ve run an ad that I think isn’t too bad, though it’s a bit low on specifics. [Had link to this also; also no longer valid.]

I’ll end with some favourite comments from others this week:

But the mystery is: Why did the Harper-Layton-media juggernaut back down here? I never expected it. Jeffrey Simpson says they “misread public opinion,” which “insisted Ms. May be heard.” So what? The public wants lots of things. Usually it’s just ignored.

Rick Salutin, Globe and Mail

But increasingly, Mr. Harper himself looks like a deer frozen in the headlights of onrushing economic and environmental change. He insists now is not the time to risk a new course. But what does he propose?

It sounds more and more as if he is seeking a mandate to do nothing.

Ian Porter, letter to the editor

On some August nights, my father, a professor of economics and a rather conservative man, would phone me (during the cheap hours) to try to explain Stéphane Dion’s plan.

“It’s brilliant,” he’d say. “The cheapest way to lower greenhouse gases. It’ll lower income taxes, which slow growth …”

My father said Stephen Harper must know that it’s a good plan. “He can’t not know. He’s an economist. He’ll have an election before someone finds a way to explain it to the likes of you and his party goes down.”

Tabatha Southey, Globe and Mail

Environmentalist? Who, me?

Bit of a family weekend, what with it being Canadian Thanksgiving and all. And with an Ontario election on, talk at times naturally turned to that subject.

Both my Dad and my sister expressed surprise that I was not voting for the Green Party.

Dad also commented that he was surprised I didn’t have those cloth shopping bags. Well, in this case I could assure him I did, but still needed to gather some plastic bags to put cat litter in, because nothing else will do.

But the point is… I’ve somehow developed the reputation of being the family environmentalist.

This is a bit alarming, as I was feel sorry for environmentalists. They have an important message to impart, but their opponents can always attack something they did as being “harmful to the environment”. David Suzuki had too many kids. Al Gore drives a big car and lives in a big house. Stéphane Dion flies a lot. Cameron Diaz’ shirt is politically insensitive. Etc.

I do care about the environment. I think it’s the most important issue of our time. I get frustrated the more isn’t being done about it, faster.

But… I’m also conscious that I live in a pretty big house for two people, that we each have a car, that I drive to work even though it’s well within biking distance, and we like to fly places for vacation…

We do all the “easy” stuff, certainly. We have the fluorescent light bulbs, the programmable thermostat (never set to extreme temperatures), the composter, the recycle bins. I do cold water wash when I can. I walk to the store when I’m not getting more than I’ll be able carry back. (My husband says we should get bonus points because we’ve been doing most of this for quite some time, well before it become trendy.)

But all in all, I’m sure the ecological footprint isn’t the greatest.

Maybe it would help if I voted Green…