Taking on the Calgary Grit
I really like Calgary Grit, I consider him one of the best bloggers out there. I have a tremendous respect for his ideas and opinions.
That said I really have to take issue with him about fixed election dates.
Now, he and some others like the idea. I don’t or rather I don’t understand it. (I also understand it could be considered nasty linking him with them)
We actually have fixed election dates now.
When a parliament is sworn in there is a drop-dead date where the house has to be dissolved and go back to the people. This is a fixed election date. We have this endpoint already.
Under a parliamentary system there is no way of stopping a government from going back to the people.
The obvious case in minority governments but there are other times where a renewed mandate could be crucial.
Suppose there is an extremely polarizing issue that splits the governing party, like the Manitoba schools question, or conscription or Bomark missiles or any other of countless issues.
What if a PM dies or retires or is forced out for a good reason. The new leader can’t go back to the people to get their own mandate?
What government would not be able to cook up a reason to go to the polls early by manufacturing a crisis?
When there are so many exceptions to a policy as to make it useless and when the policy already exists anyways why make the change.
To really make it work means ultimately changing our parliamentary system of government, and that is a whole other debate. This kind of tinkering around the edges is just symbolic.
I understand why the Tories like it, as it is some sort of purely symbolic statement that means nothing. I mean really it does not change a thing; it just makes the Tories look like they are doing something when not.
To also be shamelessly partisan, as much as some Liberals feel anything American is bad, (and I try not to be one) some Conservatives think anything American is good.
I do not understand why someone like CG who I really respect is in favour of it.
I fail to see a single thing it adds to our (I believe) superior parliamentary system of government.
The Dirty Race Part II
I have really been thinking about my post about Hedy Fry supporters handing out anti Iggy stuff in downtown Calgary.
It seems weird.
I have the documents and will try to upload them.
The problem is they are just stuff from the stop iggy website with the Banner from Frys website added.
Anyone could do it.
Handing things like this out at Olympic Plaza in Calgary is kinda weird.
Nothing really makes sense here.
Most people were just chucking the things away.
Strange, Strange, Strange.
One has to wonder about this.
Was it a different leadership camp hiding behind Fry?
The Race is getting dirty
So on the weekend some of Hedy Fry's supporters were in downtown Calgary handing out really nasty flyers with stuff taken from the stop iggy website.
Now, I know this sounds bizarre, I mean Hedy Fry having supporters, handing out flyers about the Liberal leadership race in downtown Calgary. Wow.
In any case I am not linking to the stop iggy web site but this stuff is just trash, nasty, nasty trash.
I guess soon iggy will be accused of burning crosses somewhere.
I never saw it coming that
Hedy Fry would do the first mud slinging.
Polls are for Dogs
So I wrote this great post about the newest
Ipsos poll and then I lost it
It was really good it had good analogies; it mentioned one of my favorite books 100 Hundred Monkeys by Robert Mason Lee. It argued about why we lost the last election and why the polls right now do not matter.
I lost it because I tried to check the spelling and I had one word wrong, or so I thought.
I think perhaps it would be better write in Word and then paste to publish.
How do most bloggers do it?
What is the preferred method of writing?
Any advice to a relative newbie would be appreciated.
Oh, yeah and about the great missing post, I might try to recreate it but maybe it is better gone. Then I can fool myself about how well written it really was.
Basically it said.
We screwed up.
We knew it.
Canadians knew it.
We are not ready to come back.
The polls are telling us that Canadians know that too.
When we are the polls will tell us that as well.
In the meantime the higher Harper goes in the polls just means the more the distemper in the press is setting in and Harper is in tough. People do not want an election, they are telling the press that, telling Liberals that.
Hopefully Jack Layton is listening as well.
Trolling Tories
The esteemed Calgary Grit had the good grace to turn his blog over to Liberal leadership candidate Carolyn Bennett for some guest blogging. Carolyn Bennett had the guts to guest blog.
The tory trolls had the weaselyness (is that a word) to destroy any use that may of come out of this by attacking Bennett's entire political career. From Hep C to the vote on Afganistan they ripped into her with vitriol and loathing.
You can read it for yourself
hereI doubt the good Dr Bennett will be inclined to take any further guest blogging offers and I really doubt any other candidates will follow her lead. I do realize that she mostly did it to drive people to her own site but it was an interesting idea, too bad the trolling tories latched onto it.
The question becomes will it be worth it for any other candidates to follow suite. If you want to reach out to the blog world then it is a good idea. Given the ability of the TT's to completly hijack the thread why bother.
The other amazing thing is the real anger and hatred that came spewing out of their mouths, wow.
She is no matter what, a former cabinet minister and the nastyness that came across from these brave titans of the keyboard was amazing. Not one of them will ever stand for public office but they are all willing to ask loaded, stupid questions.
Silly Conservatives, Government is for SMART people
I was thinking about the gun registry.
Why do the police cheifs and the unions tend to support the gun registry?
I think we can all agree as a gross generalization that police officers would tend to be more conservative or even Conservative.
So why do they support the registry?
I heard that under the old system, FAC the Calgary Police department would spend about 3 million a year on checking out people for gun licenses. Under the new system those costs were uploaded to the registry and the local police no longer had to do that job.
The result of the gun registry was to give upwards of 30 million dollars a year back to the local police to be used for boots on the streets rather then being bureaucrats.
I really hope the Conservatives go ahead and go back to the old system. The local police departments will lose millions of dollars in funding, they will have to pay millions of dollars to reestablish the old system and they will have to buy all new software to integrate with the US system (which is where the real cost overuns occured under the registry).
Whithin 1 to 2 years we will be looking at Harpers's first Billion dollar boondoggle. On the backs of local police departments.
How is that for sweet revenge.
Good Line Today
I heard a good line today "Calgary: don't like the weather wait five minutes; Don't like the government wait five decades." Does instability in weather create a craving for stability in other things, like politics?
The Fur Trade
So I was doing some thinking about Calgary and Alberta and how its politics arre so very different from the rest of the country and I started to wonder about how it is interesting that the HBC never had any fur trade posts in southern Alberta. Would the difference go back that far?
Most of the rest of the country had fur trade post in proximity but it seems that southern Alberta was pretty devoid of them. So the first settlers would not have had that comfort of having an HBC post near them nor would they have been people here because of the fur trade. Writers from Northrup Frye to Peter C Newman have written about the affect of both the land and the settlement style on the Canadian psyche. Would the lack of the fur trade have anything to do with the style of politics?
