I did a survey the other day. I still hadn’t received my voter information card for this election, so I went to the Elections Canada website and double-checked that I was registered. (The card ended up coming in the mail that afternoon, so no worries.) After I went through that process, I was prompted to do a survey, so I figured “why not?”
One of the survey questions has stuck with me: What are your priorities for this election?
I’ve found myself thinking about that one a lot in the last few days. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m concerned about… but priorities? How do you choose?
I’m reminded of a job I used to have in IT where one of my co-workers had the habit of flagging every new ticket with “priority.” Eventually I had to explain that if everything is marked as a priority, then effectively nothing is a priority. You have to put some thought into it, and ticking a little box on an internet survey doesn’t really address the nuances.
Tag: election
Anti-Vaxxers and Hate
The election continues, and Liberals are losing ground to the CPC on the right and the NDP on the left. Trudeau’s Liberals are still in minority government territory on the seat count, but between the unpopular election call and the absolute shambles of his handling of the Afghanistan evacuation, they’ve lost a lot of traction on the popular vote. It’s starting to look like Trudeau has made an historic mistake calling this election. (Not that I want a Conservative victory; the last thing we need during a global pandemic is a return to “austerity” economics. But that’s not what I want to write this post about.)
I want to write about the “protesters” screaming obscenities at Justin Trudeau’s campaign stops.
Another Damn Election
It’s 2021 and Canada is having an election. Again. For the third time in six years. In the middle of a global pandemic.
So yeah, I guess I’m writing about that this week.
Never mind that the world is literally on fire. Never mind that fascist terrorists are shooting up American cities and their Canadian wannabes are saying “get us some of that.” The total count of unmarked graves at former Residential schools is approaching 6,000. Never mind that schools are opening in two weeks and the delta variant is going to kill and cripple a lot of kids and as far as I can tell there’s not a single level of government in this country with a better plan than “Meh.”
Yeah, another election only twenty-three months after the last one is exactly the best way for our elected officials to be spending this September.
The Morning After
It’s the 22nd of October and yesterday, of course, was Election Day. And of course, I stayed up until about 02:00 watching the results come in.
Long story short, it was clear very early in the evening that the Liberals would stay the government, but that they would lose their majority. It was a very tight race… and one which seemed to follow regional lines quite closely. For my part, I was mostly interested in how strong the Liberal minority would be, and seeing whether the NDP or the BQ would garner enough seats that they could make a deal propping up Trudeau. Both parties have enough seats that they can individually support the Liberals; it will be interesting to see whether the middle-of-the-road Liberals ally with the centre-left-progressive NDP or the progressive-but-separatist Bloc Quebecois. (My money’s on the NDP: openly allying with the BQ wouldn’t do much for the Lib’s popularity outside of Quebec.)
Continue reading “The Morning After”Election Day
Monday is election day here in Canada. We’re having a federal election (for my American readers, Canada has three tiers of government: Federal, provincial and municipal) and all the polls are showing that it’s a neck-and-neck race between the incumbent Liberal party under Justin Trudeau and the Conservatives under Andrew Scheer. The popular vote projection at 338Canada.com shows the gap between the two parties as less than the margin of statistical error. (For my American readers again, there are three-hundred and thirty-eight seats in the House of Commons, hence the name. In order to have a “majority” government, one party needs to hold at least 169 seats.)
While the outcome is impossible to predict, it’s clear the Liberals are going to lose the majority they’ve enjoyed — and done very little with — over the last four years. Whether we end up with a minority Liberal government or a minority Conservative government is… well, it’s too close to call, really. It’s so close that I haven’t even bothered to have a bet riding on this one, although my personal preferred outcome would be a weak Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the balance of power in either a formal or informal coalition agreement.
Continue reading “Election Day”