The Angus Reid Salt Lick

It's always useful to take polls with a grain of salt - and in particular you might want to steal a salt lick from your nearest cow to get through this one. After all, what does Angus Reid have to lose? They know it's years till the next election, by which time any information contained in this reports will be the quaintest of relics. They could use a sample size of precisely 'everyone who was in the men's room at the time', and it will withstand scrutiny, because... well, because who's going to scrutinise it, really?

Yet it's a nice document to look at if you happen to like the NDP. The overall numbers show no change whatsoever in any of the five party's numbers, which is strange as other pollsters are recording jumps and drops of as much as four percent. But it's what's going on at the provincial (or in fact 'regional' level) that intrigues. TO start, their punchline-worthy Alberta numbers show the Conservatives at 75% and the Liberals at 1% (meaning that there are 7400% more Conservatives in Alberta than Liberals), and Ontario has the Tories 18 points ahead of their neck-in-neck rivals. But after that? Well... if you believe Angus Reid, outside of Alberta and Ontario, the NDP are leading everywhere else in the country.

Leading?

Again, give that salt lick a slurp or two. But yes. Their Québec numbers show a drop from astronomical to merely sky-high (35%), which allows bumps most everywhere else to get masked. But they somehow outperform the Conservatives in BC and in the four Atlantic provinces by a remarkable one percent each (38% to 37% in BC, and 35% to 34% in the Atlantic), and have a not-insignificant four percent lead over the Tories in the Prairie provinces (44% to 40%).

It's tough to know quite what to think of this. After all, you don't figure that 'former Bloc ties' would really fly in the Prairies, for example - especially where seemingly little has been able to. Certainly there's an aspect of Jack-sympathy in the numbers, though who'd have thought that someone who resisted the 'orange wave' in May would subsequently be won over by a health scare. Unless, of course, it's fear for the health of the Liberal Party, a rather undocumented phenomenon that's bound to be happening in certain parts of the country (like hey! Alberta). I can't see 'the NDP are leading in 8 in 10 provinces' as actually being a realistic sentence, largely given that I can't see them leading in PEI or Newfoundland... but then again, perhaps it took stark election results to finally convince those two provinces that one votes NDP to oppose the Conservatives in 2011 (give them a break; they're islands). And also, sadly, I can't see Saskatchewan actually putting the NDP above the Tories - which suggests that NDP numbers must be pretty-damn-good in Manitoba.

Most of these numbers are well within the bounds of statistical error. Swing them a percent or two the other way and magically you've got 'Conservatives leading in every province except Québec!' - a sentence likely to be equally fallacious.

What the numbers currently mean, in all probability, is that no one can really be bothered at the moment to state on a telephone who they presently endorse. And why would they? After all, didn't Harper promise us that a majority would rid us of the pestilence of politics?

Some of My Top-Rated Reddit Comments, Without Context

The headline's explained it. There's not much I can add... Without context, some are still perfectly comprehensible. Others, well, aren't.

1. Yes thank you Québec. You are the future of our country.
2. She is ^NOT Parliament's most ethical MP.
3. The article makes no mention of the obvious fact that the Greens suffered at the NDP's expense - that a Green vote is in many ways 'a vote against the status quo', and this time out, the 'orange tide' seemed to encapsulate that a lot. In fact, now that we've got a Green Party comprised mostly of environmentalists, a BQ comprised mostly of separatists, and a Liberal Party comprised mostly of centrists, these parties can get back to their 'core principles' and figure out where to build from here. That's no bad thing. ¶ Anyway, I've seen interviews with several other GPC members that indicate that they were aware that this time out they were entirely sacrificial lambs for the May personal campaign, and that they felt that in the long-term best interests of the party, it was the right thing to do. ¶ I'm not a Green supporter but I tend to agree with that analysis, though it increases the problem that every Canadian party except the Liberals now has, and that's how indistinguishable their brand identities have become from their leaders'.
4. I don't tend to scream "YES!" at the best of times, but you're right. Positive electoral reform is worth celebrating, whoever it comes from. ¶ Obviously I'm not happy about just how Conservative the areas that stand to benefit currently are, but democracy is a virtue, even when it favours your opponents.
5. Ya know when you talk with Canadians you have to use Celsius, eh?
6. True. With Conservatives, instead of unknowns who might be incompetent, you get people who have proven their incompetence - and yet people continue to vote for them anyway.
7. We've got the best political theatre since Bush/Gore due to happen tomorrow night. Who else is going to be tired as hell Tuesday morning?
8. There's a balance required here that I'm not sure how to strike. Rep by pop is a good thing and all, but we're a federation for a reason, and it's not entirely fair to let smaller provinces be completely swamped by larger ones. ¶ I mean when it comes to northern ridings, their populations are smaller. But you could argue that that allows them to represent their divergent interests better. The city of Toronto might warrant 23 MPs (or more, I suppose), but you'd have a hard time arguing that the interests of, say, Don Valley West are very different from, say, Don Valley East - but Labrador or Nunavut clearly have distinct voices and as such need to be represented distinctly.
9. A taste of what the next four years will be like: the MSM makes a Really Big Deal about the NDP's stance on the Clarity Act, while the Conservatives are to debate about whether or not to be completely batshit or only partly batshit, and nobody bats an eyelid. ¶ If Harper can actually stand up and say 'vote for me - don't worry; I won't reopen the gay marriage debate' then it means either (a) he's lying or (b) his party de facto accepts gay marriage. If the latter is the case, then the language of the party needs to acknowledge that. Otherwise, we must conclude that it's the former.
10. Well, there's still the 'court of public opinion'. Private member bills will presumably still be open votes. But yes, if a bill is whipped, the outcome will be predetermined.
11. I've never really understood why the idea of keeping the LCBO but letting it compete with private interests is never discussed. I mean it worked for years with Petro Canada (until politics determined that it shouldn't). The LCBO should remain a licensing and controlling board for all alcohol sales in the province wherever they occur, and in addition to that should also operate retail outlets that sell liquor, and also wine and beer if they want.
12. Chantal Hébert has, obviously, a rather vested interest in one side of the sovereignty debate over the other. But the lacklustre performance of both Liberal parties in the province (that the PLQ is winning doesn't really mean anything; that 40% are willing to abandon both parties for a party that doesn't even exist yet says more) indicates that federalism is on life support too. I think what's really happening, and why Layton and Legault are sneaking down the middle, is that people in Quebec are just sick of identity politics - or rather identity politics obscuring the actual politics beneath them. They must be sick - they have every right to be - of every federal and provincial campaign being waged on the topic of 'the national question' and then leading to governments behaving in unpredictable ways on the 99.9% of matters of state that have nothing whatsoever to do with identity politics. ¶ The implication prevalent in RoC media that 40% of Quebeckers voted for the NDP because of Layton's infectious smile and charming Joual is highly insulting - the NDP led, and continue to lead, amongst all demographics in Québec - Francos, Anglos, Allos, Montréal, Québec City and the rest of the province. If such a poll were carried out, you'd probably find the NDP leading among federalists, seperatists and sovereignty-associationists too. Québec is speaking with one voice at the moment, united in a way its traditional politics would never allow it to be, and while it's satisfying to see traditional seperatist parties humbled, federalists shouldn't declare victory just yet, because they're in no better condition.
13. I'm happy to defend her - not because she's the best person for the job but because she's currently a sacrificial lamb for a media eager to make the NDP, and the people of Québec, look like fools. ¶ Your comment brings it back to what this is really about - class. The issue is that she's an 'assistant bar manager'. How dare she try to take a seat in parliament alongside her betters, right?
14. Yes but there are two things to note: (1) an increase of 2% (two percent!) takes the Conservatives from can't-get-anything-passed to can-do-whatever-they-want. It is certainly a strange system that walks on such razor-sharp tightropes, isn't it? and (2) a vote for the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc or (arguably) the Greens was to a much larger degree an 'anti-Harper' vote this time out. You can't really argue with that: Harper himself was drawing the 'us and them' lines just as deeply into the sand as anyone else. Harper lost by the terms of the election defined by him, that a vote for anyone but the Conservatives was a vote for instability. Since he's walking around right now talking about how Canadians have rewarded him with a majority for his stable helmsmanship, it is certainly worth noting that 60% of Canadians disagreed with the dichotomy as he presented it. ¶ Harper's majority is predicated upon quirks in our democratic system, not the democratic will of Canadians. I don't begrudge him success at exploiting the system to its fullest extent, but to call it 'insipid' to point that out is, well, insipid itself.
15. For those who are critical of the G&M or the Star for making any kind of endorsement at all... here's a growing list of 2011 newspaper endorsements. ¶ Notice that the vast majority of newspapers, who have over the past month been gated behind steel bars, fed false information, drowned out, ignored and humiliated by Stephen Harper and his Conservatives, still are throwing their weight behind Harper and his party - something which hardly bodes well for journalistic access in the future. The Hamilton Spectator, a TorStar paper in an overwhelmingly NDP city, is stumping for the Tories. The Montreal Gazette, in a city where the Tories are perhaps polling at 10%, wants a Tory majority. The Economist, which is not even Canadian, endorses the Tories.
16. I'm 36 and have a one-year-old daughter, and I think I'm actually moving further to the left as a result. Having a child makes me realise more clearly the importance of having a viable safety net to protect all of us, and the importance of fighting manmade environmental destruction. Perhaps having a child just accentuates a belief system you already have.
17. If he ever gets a chance to rise up in the HoC and scream at Harper, 'you will pay... for your BARBARISM!', I'll pay him $5.
18. In the past you have voted for a party with a proud tradition of honourable public servants. Hopefully you have shown the current leaders of the party that they can't take people's votes for granted. Have faith that after Harper and his yes-men have been cleared from the ranks, you will get your party back, and Canada will be the better for it.
19. Ironically one reason people tend to get more conservative as they get older, at least socially, is because of the success of progressives - as the years go by the entire paradigm shifts. Somebody who in the 1960s was progressive on, say, race relations is now merely 'in the mainstream' on race relations but has since found that, for example, his position on homosexuality that in the 1960s was 'mainstream' is now 'conservative'. To a degree, his opinions haven't shifted, merely the bar has. ¶ But it's really weird to consider it a success for progressivism that the more we succeed, the more conservatives we produce.

She Don't Speak English

Good ol' Stompin' Tom Connors... in his lifelong quest to write a song about every aspect of Canadian life, no matter how mundane, he's taken on subjects as lofty as k.d. lang, hockey and Tillsonburg. Of course he would have a say on Canada's 'two solitudes', the linguistic divide. So we have the charming 'She Don't Speak English', a song about a love between two people who have no common language (unless they both happen to speak fluent Korean, a possibility not ruled out in the lyrics). Demonstrating his mastery of the language that she don't speak, Connors rhymes 'French' with the following words:

• flinch
• cinch
• inch
• fence

The more eagle-eyed among us might note that precisely zero of those words actually rhyme with 'French'. Should Stompin' Tom ever decide to make a sequel to the song, I humbly offer a few words that actually do rhyme:

• wench
• stench
• monkey wrench
• Dame Judi Dench

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Non-Voting

Frank Graves, the head honcho at EKOS, has gone from a meticulous analyst of Canadians' opinions to a meticulous analyst of the meticulous analysis of Canadians' opinions in little more than a single month. Good for him - if nothing else, he's a very thoughtful, intelligent person.

He's come to the conclusion that the main reason pollsters were so far off on their election predictions this year is that they could not accurately predict who, among people who said they were going to vote, actually would vote.

And past that there's nothing very surprising: the young vote way less than the old, the undereducated vote less than the educated, NDP supporters vote less than Conservatives.

That is to say, a larger percentage of people who told EKOS or other pollsters before May 2 that they would vote NDP didn't actually bother to go vote on May 2 itself. Larger than the percentage of people who said they were going to vote Conservative.

So someone who supports the Conservatives is more likely to actually vote than someone who supports the NDP.

How much so? Well, if you trust Graves's numbers, among the 40% of voting-age Canadians who didn't vote, but whose voting intentions can be extrapolated by comparing EKOS's polling numbers ot the election day results, fully 32.1% would have voted NDP. Now, that's not far off the 30.6% the NDP really did get (which explains why while EKOS's numbers overall were a disaster, their NDP numbers weren't half bad), but the yawning gap between what could have happened on May 2 and what really did is best illustrated by looking at the Conservatives' numbers:

Merely 24.8% of Canadians who registered an opinion on party preference but didn't actually go and vote on election day preferred the Conservatives. In an inverse election where those who voted found their opinions ignored and only those who didn't vote were able to choose the government, the NDP would have come in first by almost eight percent over the now neck-and-neck Conservatives and Liberals. And combining those numbers (meaning that every voting age Canadian actually voted) would have brought about the seat count Graves predicted on May 1: a Conservative minority with ample legroom for an NDP-led majority coalition with the Liberals, had they been able to work that out.

The Conservatives didn't win this election: we lost it. Or rather, both are true, because the Conservatives are blessed to have a voting bloc who realises that you get the people you want elected elected by electing them - by going out and voting for them. And congratuations to the Conservative voting bloc for having the energy to go out there and vote in numbers great enough to secure a majority government for your party.

After all, this is what ensured that; not any real shift in the overall support that the nation feels oward the Conservative Party. Throughout April and up to voting day, our country experienced a distinct leftward shift on an almost unprecedented level: the Conservatives showed only the most minimal of an increase in support while the NDP went through the roof. What was the result of this? A distinctly rightward shift in our House of Commons.

No small blame for this must lie with NDP supporters nationwide, who got out the vote in numbers significantly smaller than did the Conservatives. I know NDP doesn't exactly correlate with youth doesn't exactly correlate with disenfranchised doesn't exactly correlate with 'didn't vote'. But there are overlaps here too great to ignore. Disefranchisement, especially among the young, is a vicious circle, and it is a very real phenomenon. Young Canadians don't feel Ottawa represents them, so they ignore it. In feeling that the governmnet is out of touch, they effectively ensure it remains out of touch. It's frustrating as hell to think we could have had the government that Canadians want to have if only we had gone out and made it happen. To think that a certain percentage of Canadians - a measurable number and probably a number large enough to determine the state of Canadian politics for the next four years - said, effectively, 'not enough people vote for my party for them to win, so I won't vote either'.

Which is not only patently ridiculous but is also self-defeating. We're having the rug pulled out from beneath us as a party with the support of a distinct minority of Canadians gains more and more control in this country. Our getting frustrated enough by the process to tune it out is exactly what they want. Just think of how well it's worked for them so far.

The Atlantic Provinces in Toronto

The reality we have in Canada is that our population is really not at all evenly distributed. To say nothing of the fact that the whole northern half of the country is sparsely distributed, we have an excessive amount of our population hold up in just a few cities, really.

Most of the rest of the country has a perception that Torontonians see their city as the 'centre of the world'. Surely that's not true, but there is good reason why Toronto seems to show up in discussions or in news as often as it does: by Canadian standards, it really is huge. How huge? Well, when you consider the monoliths of Ontario and Québec to be 'central Canada', there are then four provinces to the west of them and four to the east. Four to the east, but you can fit the entire populations of the four Atlantic provinces into the city of Toronto. Not the GTA, mind you, but the city of Toronto itself. And still have room to spare.

What does it look like? Well, here's a map:

New Brunswick, which is in reality 71,450 km², fits in the 416 into an area 231 km² in size: this relatively roomy size is due to the lower population concentration of Etobicoke, which is entirely encompassed by this transplanted New Brunswick population.

Comparing the numbers on the City of Toronto's own toronto.ca map with the population estimates for provinces on Wikipedia, I get that my 'new New Brunswick', which extends as far east as Bathurst in the north of the city but then follows the 401 all the way back west to the CNR line running near Keele and then follows train lines all the way down to the Gardiner, has a population of 749,525 - close to New Brunswick's actual population of 751,273. There's still plenty of room in Rexdale for the remaining 2000 people.

Nova Scotia, the most populous Atlantic province, squeezes into a mere 199 km², since much of 'the old city' of Toronto lies within the area I've transplanted it to. Still, since the actual province is smaller than New Brunswick at 53,338 km², they might not notice the difference.

The 'new' Nova Scotia starts at Morningside, extending as far north as the 401. When it hits Victoria Park, though, the border suddenly swerves way south, going below even Eglinton. At Yonge, though, the border goes all the way back to the 401, until it meets New Brunswick at the CNR line. It then moves a little back east at Eglinton, though, following Dufferin and Winona, then Christie and Bathurst down to the Lakeshore. The very 'heart' of the City, the downtown core, is in this New Nova Scotia - let's call it 'New Halifax'? This area has a population of 956,965 - quite a bit more than the 940,482 who actually call Nouvelle-Écosse home.

The northern parts of the city belong to Newnewfoundland. Whereas the actual Newfoundland and Labrador is a mammoth 373,872 km², I've shrunk the province to a mere 128 km² - which is, what? One three-thousandth the size?

My new Newfoundland, which I would not require to set its clocks half an hour apart from the rest of the city, would only go as far west as Markham Road. Its northern boundary would be Steeles and Steeles alone, all the way to Bathurst, and the rest of its borders are explained above with Nova Scotia, really - that dip south to roundabouts-Eglinton between Yonge and Victoria Park, etc.

Most remarkably, though, if you happened to be in Toronto and woke up early one morning, you could take a quick stroll from Lakeshore to Bloor up Bathurst, before zigzagging your way northwest to Eglinton and Caledonia, before following the train tracks (which is perhaps illegal) all the way down to Dovercourt. Google Maps suggest you could get it down in about three and a half hours - call it four to factor in an ice cream break at one point. But amazingly, you'd have bounded the entire area sufficient, in Toronto, to hold a population the same size as Prince Edward Island. PEI is a baby at 5,660 km², but my New PEI is a mere 19 km² - that's right, the population of an entire province of Canada fits into a mere 19 km² in Toronto.

Less, in fact. The area I've bounded is home to 146,295 people, whereas the Land of Green Gables houses 141,551 people. But they got that cool Confederation Bridge, whereas all I can offer is some five subway stops.

There's another 65 km², and another 132,310 people, in Toronto that I didn't need: Toronto has a larger population than those four provinces. That`s the eastern third of Scarborough, where the Toronto Zoo (among other things) can be found. Let's... er, let's stick Vermont in there or something.

From 2007 on The Canadian Dollar

Another piece from 2007, talking about the Canadian dollar reaching parity with the American dollar for the first time in several hundred years, give or take. It's actually higher than the American dollar at the moment, so let's look at it again:

So I don't remember exactly where and I don't remember exactly when... Clearly my raconteur skills leave a lot to be desired. In any case, it was some time in the eighties and somewhere in the Northeastern United States. I was a kid, a pre-teen, somewhere in the States. Probably on holiday with my parents. I was in a shop buying something. Something small like a chocolate bar or a bag of chips. I'm fumbling through the change in my hands and find I don't have enough American money. "Would you take a Canadian nickel," I timidly ask.

The shopkeeper takes it from my hands and looks down at it, turning it in her fingers, looking at the beaver on the one side and the fossil on the other. "All right, I'll take it," she suddenly declares in a gruff voice, "but five cents is all I'll take of that shit."

It wasn't the obscenity that shocked me; it was the bizarre hostility. What a way to react to a kid buying a chocolate bar, I thought. I'd heard stories - mostly apocryphal, surely - about Americans sneering at Canadian money, calling it "Monopoly money" etc. But even though I'd heard the stories, I was still truly amazed to see it really happen.

Canadians tend to view themselves in relation to the USA. It's this strangely passive-aggressive form of entertainment where we love to belittle the USA in whatever area - no matter how small - we can claim some form of superiority, all the while beating our chests at the things that make us inferior. It's a superiority-inferiority complex. And it's really silly too.

In any case, even though I'm no economist, it did seem like a regular humiliation in some vague and indefinable way that the Canadian dollar always appeared to drag its heels behind the American dollar. I don't really know why - there's something like 100 yen to the American dollar, but that hardly makes Japan an economic dwarf. Yet it was true. Our bills had prettier colours yet still seemed more drab. And taking your pretty brown mustache-guy hundred-dollar Canadian bill to the exchange office and receiving, like, sixty 'dead presidents' in return actually was a particular humiliation. It seemed like you were being penalised for being Canadian.

Now, of course, there are plenty of people who panic when a currency gains strength quickly. They talk about not being able to export, about tourists not coming, etc. I'm sure there's some truth to all of those things. But economists also send out warning lights when a currency is low too, so frankly it seems like there's just no way to make an economist smile. Still, maybe they're right. Maybe Canada's going to hell in a hand-basket now and Bush's efforts to make the USD more worthless will make the USA richer by making them the world's sweatshop... Maybe. Maybe one day we'll all be wistful about the day when one Canadian dollar was 60 American cents.

But at least for now... just for a few days, let's just smile. Let's forget that it's a silly and meaningless statistic. Let's forget that gloating is a kind of ugly jingoism that doesn't look good on Canadians. Let's forget that all it really means is that Bush has found yet another way to screw up his country. Let's forget that gas, beer and books are still, like, twice as expensive up here. Let's forget that there are still a million other ways that Canada remains statistically inferior to the United States.

Let's just all smile at the idea of CAD-USD parity and the fact that our multi-coloured Monopoly money presently has exactly the same value as the US dollar.

And let's just plug our ears and shout "I'm not listening" whenever an economist comes within 100 metres of us...

Microwaveable Canada

Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X, was once asked to summarise Canadian cuisine. After thinking about it, he said, 'It has to come from a box.'

The unfortunate reality is that that really is an accurate summary. It would be silly to suggest that there's anything authentically or even particularly Canadian about pre-packaged food, but 'instant', 'ready-made' and 'microwaveable' foods seem to define Canada more than any other country, as far as my limited experience can tell me. A trip to a local supermarket reveals that almost any kind of dish that can be bought in a restaurant can also be bought in a cardboard box, frozen and easy to microwave. Things like flour and ground beef seem to be relegated to increasingly smaller sections of the supermarket. To paraphrase my wife's rather blunt commentary, 'if they weren't too ashamed, they'd offer a service to spoon-feed it directly into peoples' mouths'.

What I'm having trouble coming to terms with, though, is the sentence that 'busy families just don't have the time'. In comparison with traditional working-husband-and-housewife families, certainly the modern Canadian (i.e. 'Western') family has much less time to look after the house. There's no denying that. But double-income families are very, very common in large swaths of the world too, and yet they seem to get by without too much in the way of microwaveable entrées. What exactly is the difference?

Well, I guess one thing is that there is a certain inevitability to convenience, in that it's meaningless to resist it. If the shop has 'instant' moussaka, sooner or later you'll try it. If the shop doesn't have it, you'll never think that you'd want it. Ice cream, for example, is something that can be made at home - but because everybody knows it as a 'ready-made' product, nobody thinks about it. And there's no point in being stubborn and making your ice cream at home if it's available 'readymade' in shops. I guess moussaka, for example, is essentially the same thing.

But ready-made tuna sandwiches? Pre-cooked bacon? Surely there's a point at which you say, 'well, that's enough'. Or one day will we not even bother having kitchens anymore and just put fridges and microwave ovens in the corner of our living rooms?

YouGov Could Have Asked Canada

So I've been reading so many polls about voter intentions in Canada that I thought I'd take a break from it... and look at voter intentions in the UK.

So I looked at YouGov, the only British pollster I could remember by name. Labour well over Conservatives, LibDems still performing horrible. Business as usual.

But I found something interesting, where they took a few sentences and asked the people they polled which party (or 'none of them') the phrase applied to most. I'd be curious how those would look if asked of Canadians. Here are my speculations:

• It seems rather old and tired. In the UK, Labour still leads regarding this slight. In Canada? Well, it's been clear since the dropping of the writs that within Québec, most people would say that about the Bloc (which remains one of Canada's newest parties). In the RoC, I'd have to guess it'd be the Liberals who would lead in this category.
• Even if I don't always agree with it, at least its heart is in the right place. The NDP was made to score well on this. Green would be a good answer too, if people thought of Green at all, really.
• It seems to have succeeded in moving on and left its past behind it. Well, this doesn't apply to the BQ. It probably doesn't really apply to the NDP either. It applies to the Liberals, but isn't complimentary when it does so. Whether or not Canadians would say it (and they probably would), it's the Conservatives who deserve this accolade - getting over their 90s rift and their early flirtations with populism and Western alienation.
• It seems to appeal to one section of society rather than the whole country. God, where do we start? Perhaps this has always been true in Canada, but it feels probably even more true now, as the Conservatives reach for their majority by poring through demographics with a fine-tooth comb and the Liberals, bizarrely, seem content to let their support atrophy across all but a few key demographics. Live in Toronto or Montréal and the fact that the Tories are leading in the polls seems like science fiction. Live in Calgary or in rural-almost-anywhere and the fact that they don't have a majority seems bizarre. The BQ are a regionalist party, of course, and the NDP's current boost obscures the fact that they're dead in the water in suburbia and were a sub-frings party in Québec until... well, about last week or so, right?

Best-Before Dates

Do you know what drives me crazy? Best-before dates. Wait a minute: let me explain. There are twelve months in a year and thirty-ish days in a month. Most of the world, and among English-speaking countries this includes the UK, write dates from the smallest unit to the largest. So they say, say, 'the ninth of October, 2011' and write this '9 October 2011'. When restricting themselves to mere numbers, they write it as '09/10/11'. Fair enough. The USA, which tends to stubbornly insist on marching to the beat of its own drum, does not. Instead, it writes dates as 'October 9, 2011', which requires a comma but is no big deal. Different, perhaps less logical, but fair enough provided it's done consistently. And it is. Americans are so proud of the consistency with which they write dates that they celebrate it every Fourth of July... er... well, let's call that one an exception. Anyway, if an American writes '09/10/11', they mean September the 10th. So if an American asks a Brit to meet him at the airport on '09/10/11', there might be a sitcom-worthy one month spent listlessly buying cheap scotch at Heathrow. But domestically neither Brits nor Yanks have a problem. What about us? Well, we in Canada who measure our height in feet but our distances in kilometres, buy liquids in litres but solids in pounds, measure the temperatue outside in Celsius but the temperature of our bodies in Fahrenheit... unsurprisingly, we don't have any idea what we're doing. It's true: if a Canadian writes '09/10/11', you have no chance in hell of knowing what he means unless you ask him. Hell, he could mean October 11, 2009. To that end, a lot of places choose to spell the month out, in whole or in short. So you'll see '9 OCT 11' or 'NOV 10 11' or some such. Or even better, they'll use only two letters, in a bizarre system that attempts to bridge the languages, where most of the months are almost exactly the same and all of them ae at least vaguely similar. It creates the rather horrid "MA", which leaves me wondering every time whether it's March/Mart or May/Mai (it's the latter). Which is a small price to pay for consistency. Except this is not consistent. Not everyone does this. And hey - why did I title this 'best before dates'? Because this problem is most annoying when trying to figure out the runic/hierogylphic logic underpinning the best-before dates on many products. If you can (a) find and (b) decipher the best before date, you might think you're off and running. But there's a good chance it will say something like '09/10/11', with no explanation of how to interpret those numbers. And hey... it's just a minor inconvenience, right? It's not like the end result is potentially getting life-threatening food poisoning from off-code food, right?

The Women of Vancouver

Ever heard of Hedy Fry? She's the Liberal incumbent in Vancouver Centre. She's been there ever since 1993, when she had the rare distinction of beating the Prime Minister when she took 31.2% of the vote to Kim Campbell's 25.1%.

Interesting, I noted - this long-standing female MP displaced another female MP. Turns out Kim Campbell replaced a woman too - a fellow Progressive Conservative who had been appointed to the Senate. Vancouver Centre has been in female hands constantly since 1980.

Already impressive, but here's more: now that the nomination deadline has passed, we can see from Election Canada's website how many candidates this time out are female.

Half. Four in eight. Well, that's a bit impressive, I suppose. Except that the four male candidates are from the Libertarian Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party, the Progressive Canadian Party and the Pirate Party. Powerhouses all that can expect a total combined vote of, what, two percent?

The other 98 percent will go to women. The Conservative, the Liberal, the New Democrat, the Green: all female. To call this remarkable is to understate it.

So how female-friendly is Vancouver as a whole? Well, let's look at the eleven seats that Wikipedia calls "Greater Vancouver and the Sunshine Coast". I'm only looking at the four major parties, and in each case I'll list them in the order Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green. I'll put the incumbent in bold, and I'll number the independents and 'others' in parentheses after.

• Vancouver Centre: C:F, L:F, N:F, G:F (oth: 0/4): 100% Female (7,731)
• Vancouver East: C:F, L:F, N:F, G:M (oth: 1/1): 75% Female (5,087)
• Vancouver Kingsway: C:F, L:F, N:M, G:F (oth: 1/3): 75% Female (5,706)
• Vancouver Quadra: C:F, L:F, N:M, G:F (oth: 0/0): 75% Female (2,441)
• New Westminster-Coquitlam: C:F, L:M, N:M, G:F (oth: 0/1): 50% Female (2,022)
• Vancouver South: C:F, L:M, N:F, G:M (oth: 0/1): 50% Female (4,455)
• Burnaby-Douglas: C:M, L:M, N:M, G:F (oth: 0/3): 25% Female (2,761)
• Burnaby-New Westminster: C:M, L:M, N:M, G:F (oth: 0/2): 25% Female (1,933)
• West Vancouver-Blah Blah Blah: C:M, L:M, N:F, G:M (oth: 2/5): 25% Female (9.7)
• North Vancouver: C:M, L:M, N:M, G:M (oth: 0/1): 0% Female (282.6)
• Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam: C:M, L:M, N:M, G:M (oth: 0/1): 0% Female (162.8)

Some interesting things to note here. First of all, I've put the population density in parentheses at the end of each line. I've never been to Vancouver and don't know much about it, so this is a good measure of 'urban' vs. 'rural'. And here, we see a huge distinction:

• In the most rural three ridings, there are 11 male candidates and 1 female.
• In the middle four (1000-4000 people per square kilometre), there are 9 male and 7 female candidates.
• In the most urban four ridings (all of which are named Vancouver Something), there are 4 male candidates and 12 females.

In other words, the more urban a riding is, the more likely it is to have female candidates (to a remarkable degree).

Party by party, there are interesting differences.

• The Greens have more female candidates than males, 6:5.
• Interestingly, so do the Conservatives. Though all three of their incumbents are rural and male, they're running six females.
• Oddly, then, the NDP lag behind, with 7 males and 4 females. And of their five incumbents, only one is female.
• The Liberals are tied with the NDP, with their four female candidates all within the city proper. Two of their three incumbents are female.

Of a total of 44 candidates in 11 ridings, then, 20 are female to 24 males - slightly off half. Though that's due to how 'Greater Vancouver' is defined.

Looking at those incumbency numbers, though, note that only 3 in 11 are female: that's far from half-and-half. That means that among non-incumbents, slightly more than half are female: 17 to 16.

Another thing to note: Women perform terribly outside of the four main parties. There are 22 'other' candidates in the Vancouver area, and the numbers are an embarrassing 4 females to 18 males.

All useless stats, maybe, but interesting. I'd like to do this again for other parts of the country if I get a chance.

Sooner or Later, Canadians Will Have to Make Up Their Minds

"Sooner or later, Canadians have to make up their minds."

This is Harper on why Canadians should give him a majority. It's another of those annoying comments that are out there everywhere that either intentionally or through sheer ignorance misrepresent the voting intentions of Canadians. The talk around town is that 'this election won't change anything', that we'll return another Conservative minority with much the same seats as before। I mean, after all, look at the current polling stats (I've taken them from threehundredeight because the amalgamated numbers presented there seem a useful 'average' of current trends and I don't want to cherry-pick polls).

• Today: CPC 38.9%, LPC 28.2%, NDP 16.8%, BQ 8.8%, GPC 6.0%


• 2008: CPC 37.7%, LPC 26.3%, NDP 18.2%, BQ 10.0%, GPC 6.8%


• 2006: CPC 36.3%, LPC 30.2%, NDP 17.5%, BQ 10.5%, GPC 4.5%

I mean wow. That's static, isn't it? Something might happen over the next two weeks to really shift these numbers. And of course it's not the overall numbers that matter so much as the particulars of where they're located - and we can't know yet how much that's shifted.

But wow. People are right when they complain that this election won't change anything. The fact is that voters continue to return the same mandate, and parties in parliament continue to misinterpret that mandate.

Put it differently: Canadians have made up their mind. In huge numbers. The overall lack of change from year to year suggests that the vast majority of Canadians have chosen their horse and are running with it, barring huge fundamental paradigm shifts, none of which we've seen recently.

Harper sees a mass: a single entity that appears unable to commit to any one party. I see fifteen million indiciduals, and then I see very high levels of commitment indeed. This appears to be what Canadians want. Those who have to make up their mind are the MPs. They need to find a way to make this, the mandate they are repeatedly given, work. Clearly it is not working, but you can't blame the people for that. Those who sit in the House of Commons have nobody to blame but themselves.

The Parties Show Their True Colours

So about eighty percent of the world has brown eyes. Obviously the number of Canadians with brown eyes will be slightly lower than that. But what... 60%? The stats just aren't out there. But since a supermajority of humans have brown eyes, it's got to be at least a bare majority of Canadians, right? So anyway, let's look at five eyes:

What do those five eyes have in common? None of them are brown, to be sure - so they belong to humans that belong to a distinct minority of humans, and almost assuredly a minority of Canadians as well.

Yet these eyes belong to the leaders of Canada's five main national parties.

Now, certainly if any position ought to be meritocratic, it's that of Prime Minister - and, by extension, that of 'candidate for Prime Minister'. I'm certainly not condemning any of the five parties for nominating a blue-eyed white person. True meritocracy doesn't disqualify anyone, certainly not those who belong to groups that have held the reins of power since... oh, since confederation.

But even if you raise the percentage of Canadians who have lighter-coloured eyes all the way to the improbable level of 50%, then the odds of all five leaders having lighter-coloured eyes is a paltry 3.1%. And that's if only 50% of Canadians have brown eyes.

I don't really have anything to say. Except, of course, that if Canadians are looking to Ottawa to pay lip service to diversity, they'll be well satiated. But if they're looking to Ottawa to embody diversity... well, they might not find much.

The Great Canadian Morph (The Answers)

So the answers! Yay! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, please click here before scrolling down the screen.

If, on the other hand, you've been following the Great Canadian Morph, then you'll be more than interested in seeing the answers. So here they are.

Not only have I put the names of the people who have made up the morph in question, I've also included thumbnails of the original pictures. Just so you can see.

If you got ten in ten, er... yay. Congrats. No prizes or anything, though.

1.		is an unholy union of Elizabeth May and David Suzuki.
2.		is an unholy union of Gilles Duceppe and Céline Dion.
3.		is an unholy union of Jean Chrétien and Naomi Klein.
4.		is an unholy union of Leona Aglukkaq and Bev Oda.
5.		is an unholy union of Stephen Harper and Rob Ford.
6.		is an unholy union of Justin Trudeau and Justin Bieber.
7.		is an unholy union of John Baird and Rick Mercer.
8.		is an unholy union of Michael Ignatieff and Polkaroo.
9.		is an unholy union of Sandra Oh and Sidney Crosby.
10.		is an unholy union of Jack Layton and K'Naan.

The Great Canadian Morph (Day Two)

So yesterday, I used www.morphthing.com to make ten frightening pictures that merged together two famous Canadians each. Today, I'm giving a bit of a clue. The same ten images are below, but today I'm preceding it with a list of the twenty Canadians whose faces were used for the morphs.

This makes is a pretty sizeable clue, of course, so if you want some fairer gameplay, go back to yesterday's entry and peruse it first, eh?

The names, in alphabetical order:

1. Leona Aglukkaq
2. John Baird
3. Justin Bieber
4. Jean Chrétien
5. Sidney Crosby
6. Céline Dion
7. Gilles Duceppe
8. Rob Ford
9. Stephen Harper
10. Michael Ignatieff 
11. Naomi Klein
12. K'Naan
13. Jack Layton
14. Elizabeth May
15. Rick Mercer
16. Bev Oda
17. Sandra Oh 
18. Polkaroo
19. David Suzuki
20. Justin Trudeau

Tomorrow I'll give you the answers, with thumbnails of the original pictures I used.

1.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
2.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
3.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
4.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
5.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
6.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
7.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
8.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
9.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.
10.		is an unholy union of __________ and __________.

Remember... answers tomorrow!