Tagged: Conservative Party of Canada
Pundits’ Guide begs the question
Last Thursday, Contrarian got into a bit of a Twitter dustup with Alice Funke, whose blog, Pundits’ Guide, features statistical analysis of Canadian election results.
In a post titled, “Mommy, They Split My Vote,” Funke purported to show that few if any of the 27 Liberal seats lost to Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the May 2 election had been lost due to vote-splitting. Her complicated argument defies succinct exegesis, but you can read it here.
In response, I tweeted:
This unleashed a torrent of counter-tweets that, for the time being at least, you can find here and here (by scrolling back to May 12). Funke followed up with an email buttressing her position (which I quote with her permission):
Of course in a multi-party, first-past-the-post electoral system, there are seats won by less than 50%. But the people currently arguing that “vote-splitting amongst ‘the left’ is allowing the Conservatives to win”, honestly do not know their election result data.
Outside of the very few core urban seats in Canada, where the Liberal vote falls off, it largely falls off to the Conservatives’ benefit, or stays home to their benefit. So, there are vote splits alright, but on the right-hand side of the spectrum. But this is not what was being argued as the cause of those Liberal seats falling…
[Y]ou can’t simply add the Liberal and NDP votes in any given election together, because for the “vote-splitting” argument to work you need to prove that any voters who stayed home in 2008 but showed up to vote this time, would have also showed up to vote in the case where there was a single, let’s say Liberal, choice on the ballot.
In the suburban Toronto and 905 seats I presented in detail, either:
* the Conservative vote hikes came from Liberals, and the NDP gains came from previous non-voters and previous Greens, or
* the Conservative vote hikes came from previous non-voters and previous Greens, and the NDP gains came from Liberals
Mathematically, there are no other generalized possibilities.
If there were a preferential ballot in Canada, and there were no more “vote splits” by your definition, it is not at all clear that it would have the outcome everywhere that you believe. In core urban seats, yes. But they are not the majority of ridings in Canada, though everyone who spouts the current version of the vote-splitting argument seems to come from one and believes that voting pattern to be universal. It’s not.
I do not quarrel with Funke’s arithmetic. My problem is that she begs the question.* That is to say, her definition of vote-splitting is so narrow as to all but guarantee the result she found. To certify a loss as one due to vote-splitting, Funke requires two conditions:
- The party gaining the seat does so by gaining fewer votes than the party losing the seat loses, and that
- Some third party gains more votes than the losing party loses
When we encounter a definition this odd and this technical in a blogpost with the churlish title “Mommy, They Split My Vote,” we may be forgiven for wondering if it was devised to be unmeetable (at least in a transformative election).
Many Canadians would define vote-splitting as any seat where a Harper candidate beat a Liberal or NDP incumbent but took less than 50 percent of the vote. I am inclined to accept Funke’s point that such outcomes are inevitable in a first-past-the-post election with three or more parties.
In the context of the election just past however, vote-spitting could be reasonably defined as any seat where a Harper candidate beat a Liberal incumbent by a margin smaller than the increase in that riding’s NDP vote. A tally of ridings fitting this definition would be illuminating, as would knowing whether Harper would have a majority without them.
By election day, everyone could predict that the Liberals and the Greens would shed votes, the NDP would gain, and the Harperists would either hold or gain. Given those assumptions, it was all but certain the Liberals would lose seats. In some cases, it seemed likely they would lose seats to the Conservatives because too many previously Liberal or Liberal-inclined voters would defect to the NDP.
Such shifts are, to a large extent, hypothetical. The electorate in each riding has changed in the two and a half years since the last vote. Some voters have died, others have come of age, moved in, moved out, attained citizenship, etc. In both elections, many voters stayed home for a multitude of reasons. Those who voted Liberal in 2008 but deserted the party this year may have moved to the NDP, the Harperists, or the Greens—or they may have stayed home altogether. Attempts to parse these shifts without detailed exit surveys are a mug’s game, and given voters’ notoriously faulty reporting, they are problematic even with exit surveys in hand.
But in a highly polarized electorate, where the defunct centre right party has been taken over by the hard right, and where the centrist party in steep decline, it’s legitimate for progressive voters to worry that a shift of anti-Harper votes from Liberal incumbents to NDP also-rans could have the unintended effect of letting Harper candidates slip up the middle to victory.
For millions of Canadians, fear of giving an unchecked majority to a hard right party led by an uncompromising authoritarian trumps their loyalty to either the Liberals or the NDP. Their concerns are legitimate. Pundits’ Guide would perform a service by quantifying them, rather than simply pooh-poohing them.
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* Please note rare quasi-correct use of this figure of speech.
Self-indulgent lefties let Harper off the hook – updated & corrected
Pinto Pony Productions, a small Toronto video production house specializing in non-invasive filming techniques, took to the streets of Toronto this weekend and shot the best roundup of demonstrator-vs.-police violence I could find on YouTube. The protesters did not impress the filmmakers.
The Harper Government made a serious miscalculation with its absurd expenditure on security for the G8/G20. Halifax did a G8 nine years ago for $27 million, and Pittsburg did a G20 last year for $95 million [see correction below]. Harper spent ten times that amount: $12 million an hour over the three days; three times what security for any international leaders’ gathering has ever cost before.
This plays to the nagging doubts middle-of-the-road Canadians have about Harper. It hints at the proto-fascism we suspect lurks in the old Reform core of the so-called Conservative Party. It shows contempt for civil liberties. It bespeaks a brand of hypocrisy that pitches fiscal conservatism out the window whenever the police or the military want more goodies. A week ago, I thought Harper had fatally damaged his chances of getting a majority with this jingoism.
Not now. By making common cause with masked blackshirts bent on smashing windows, burning police cars, and throwing rocks, peaceful protesters have stupidly squandered that advantage. Public opinion, firmly on our side week ago, is now firmly on Harper’s. Spare us any whining about police over-reaction. I just watched all the YouTube videos I could find of the Toronto events, most of them taken by protest sympathizers, and saw little that could be termed seriously out of line in the police response (and I write as someone who witnessed truly vicious police actions in Chicago, Ill., in 1968 and 1970, and in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963). This time, the left was both self-indulgent and self-defeating. (See Update below.)
There was one protest moment that Pinto Pony videographer Bill Stoppard did like, however:
[Update] After I posted this, a video by Meghann Millard surfaced, showing a police attack on apparently peaceful demonstrators who were singing, O Canada! Not exactly Birmingham or Chicago scale police violence, but utterly stupid nonetheless.
Imagine how Harper would look today if this is the only kind of protest police faced in Toronto. Instead, the moronic blackshirts gave him all the excuses he needed.
[Correction] The Halifax G7 was in 1995, not 2001, so 15 years ago, not nine. The federal budget for that summit was $28 million; the provincial budget, $5 million. Lots more info here. Thanks to David Rodenhiser, one of Contrarian’s crack researchers, er, readers, for the correct info.
Are the Harper forces backpedaling on torture?
The Star’s Tonda McCharles reports that the Conservatives are changing tack in the torture scandal.
“It is our understanding that other current and former DFAIT employees will be testifying before the Parliamentary Committee. Their testimony will provide important context and information about this issue.”
…The comments came hours after Defence Minister Peter MacKay insisted in Halifax Friday that the government’s attacks on Colvin’s credibility weren’t “personal.”
The federal government changed tack late Friday in response to allegations made by Richard Colvin, shifting to a wait-and-see approach and downplaying efforts to discredit the foreign service officer who says he warned Canada was violating its international obligations to avoid handing Afghan detainees over to certain torture.
Jamie Christoff, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs, released a statement cautioning that the full story has not yet been heard, despite Colvin’s bombshell testimony to a parliamentary committee, and the government would willingly participate in the parliamentary inquiry.
“It is important to let the Parliamentary Committee process unfold and to consider and weigh the testimony of subsequent witnesses before drawing any conclusions about how events in Afghanistan may have unfolded in 2006 and 2007,” Christoff said.
If it is the start of a big backdown, not everyone is on message:
Yet again Friday, Transport Minister John Baird said Colvin’s allegations “are nothing short of hearsay, sometimes second- or even third-hand information, or worse yet, information that came directly from the Taliban.”
They’re not “Tories,” dammit – updated x 2
Tories knock off Bloc in eastern Quebec – Gazette
Tories, NDP make gains in by-elections – Star
Tories retake former Nova Scotia stronghold – Globe and Mail
Byelection win will boost Tories in Quebec: MP – CBC
This is likely a losing battle, but could the national press corp please stop calling the Harper Conservatives “Tories?” The Conservative Party of Canada is not simply a renamed Progressive Conservative Party. It was borne of a hostile takeover by the Reform Party, thinly disguised as a merry merger.
Headline writers need short substitutes for party names — Grits, NDP, Bloc, etc. — but that’s no excuse for enshrining Reform spin into every story about national politics.
The Harper Conservatives are trying mightily to convince Canadians that they’ve moved to the center. They’ve done a pretty good job of this, except when the curtain slips (as it did in the Fall 2008 Economic Update) and exposes their plans for the country, should we ever give them a majority.
Aiding and abetting a national party’s branding strategy is not in the press gallery’s job description.
I’m curious to know how Tories — real ones, adherents of the Progressive Conservative Party that still exists provincially though not federally — feel about this.
Suggestions for a proper Conservative Party nickname welcome.
[UPDATE] Real Tory, loyal foot soldier, and premier-to-be-maybe Rob Batherson is ready with a smackdown:
Parker, Parker, Parker…
Throughout Canada’s history, Canada’s Conservative Party has taken on many different labels – Liberal Conservative, Conservative, Unionist, National Government, Progressive Conservative and Conservative. Part of that Conservative tradition has also manifested itself in parties such as Social Credit, Reform and Canadian Alliance (particularly in Western Canada). I recommend Bob Plamondon’s book Blue Thunder for anyone interested in a more detailed history of Canada’s Conservatives.
In 2003, both the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative parties voluntarily and democratically voted in favour of merging the two parties into the Conservative Party of Canada. The leadership selection process for the Conservative Party of Canada was inherited from the Progressive Conservative Party, as were the vast majority of the party’s aims and principles as contained in the Constitution. [*cough* *cough* - Ed.]
As a Progressive Conservative, I feel it is perfectly reasonably and legitimate for the media to describe the federal Conservatives as Tories.
You’re a Tory, Rob, no question. Those guys up there? Not so much.
[UPDATE 2] A Contrarian reader with the nom de post Educhatter disagrees with Rob:
Your post on Party names is contrarianism at its best. Yes, George Grant is rolling in his grave, not to mention old Dief. Might I suggest a 21st century variation for headline writers?
- Cons
- Libs
- ADP (Aging Democratic Party)
- Bloc(heads)
Former Guantanamo detainees speak
The American Civil Liberties Union has released a video in which five former detainees talk about their treatment at the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. All were eventually released without charge.
As you watch this troubling video, consider the Harper Government’s refusal to request the release of the last citizen of a western democracy still held in Guantanamo: Canadian Omar Khadr, who has been subjected to similar treatment for seven years, since he was 15. The Conservative Government is appealing a Federal Court decision ordering it to request Khadr’s release, as every other western democracy did for its citizens in Guantanamo years ago.
A crat’s a crat for a’ that
In his game effort to wish away the cheque-writing scandal, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor posts a telling email from an anonymous Harper MP:
When we formed govt the crats stopped bringing cheques to announcements & we were FORCED to cough up the $ to buy our own. Specifically, at [a government department I was involved with] the crats used to like to be in the photo ops giving out chqs, as though it was coming from them. They detested Conservatives being photographed handing out chqs, so they stopped bringing the chqs – when they even bothered to show up for announcements. They’ve screwed up dates for announcements so badly (trying to schedule announcements while the House is in session) that we don’t even bother to include them, thereby saving taxpayers thousands of $s in travel claims from the crats.
Two things leap out at me from this screed: (1) The seething rage of the unreconstructed Reformer who wrote it; (2) How sharply it deviates from my own experience with federal bureaucrats and political announcements, both Liberal and Conservative.
For six years, I directed communications for the Sydney Tar Ponds cleanup, a $400-million, joint federal-provincial project. Over that time, we endured many federal-provincial announcements. These were invariably ordeals, mainly because of heavy-handed micromanagement from Ottawa. Not once did I see a “crat” elbow his way into a photo-op. On the contrary, unelected officials were exquisitely deferential to their elected bosses, whether Liberal or Conservative.
We never produced mega-cheques for photo ops under either party’s guidance. Doesn’t everyone regard these as cheesy relics, whatever logo they bear?
The one salient difference after Harper took office was that decisions concentrated obsessively in the PMO. Officials of the many federal departments with a role in the cleanup had to clear the minutest detail not just with their departmental head office but with Harper’s—a process that often produced less than optimal outcomes.
Wafergate redux: the questions pile up – with updates
[UPDATES appended at end]
Contrarian reader SL shares our ink-stained correspondent‘s distaste for the Saint John Telegraph-Journal’s malodorous apology to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. She wonders why departing Harper Communications Director Kory Teneycke included the precise timing of his decision to resign so prominently in his resignation talking points. The second paragraph of the CBC story reads:
Teneycke said he told Harper just after Canada Day and before the G8 meeting in Italy earlier this month that he was going to step down.
That would be, uh, just before the Prime Minister did or did not consume the sacramental Host at Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral. (The timing of Teneckye’s decision appeared in the sixth paragraph of the Toronto Star story.)
If the Irving-owned Telegraph-Journal’s groveling apology was brokered as part of a deal that included Irving-owned Halifax Shipyard’s efforts to woo federal shipbuilding contracts, maybe Teneycke, Harper’s third director of communications in 3-1/2 years, decided the backroom machinations could do permanent damage to his career. Or maybe not.
Another piece of speculation, promoted by CTV and the always impartial National Post, holds that the whole wafergate scandal was a Liberal set-up. As CTV’s Bob Fife put it (at 10:30 into the aforementioned video):
I’m told the Liberals passed the story on to young Jamie Irving, who is the publisher of the paper. He passed it on to the editor who put it into the paper without checking it out, and today the editor has been fired and Jamie’s father has suspended his son for 30 days, and I’m told the Prime Minister is pretty thrilled with that decision.
So T-J editor Shawna Richer is indeed out of a job, but somehow publisher Jamie Irving (that last name has a nice ring) escaped with a 30-day suspension—facts the paper neglected to include when making a clean breast of the matter. (An Irving spokesperson now acknowledges that the pair have been relieved of their duties, but still will not reveal their employment status.)
National Post columnist Seve Janke points the finger at former NB Liberal MP and current Ignatieff staffer Paul Zed based on, well, zero evidence (“I’m not saying Paul Zed had anything to do with this”), except that Zed “is related by marriage to the Irving family, having been married to Judith Irving, the granddaughter of K.C. Irving.”
The operative words there are “having been.” The couple is divorced, so perhaps Paul is no longer whispering sweet nothings into Judy’s ear, or Cousin Jamie’s for that matter. Nevertheless, Janke wants Ignatieff “to direct Paul Zed to uncover the identities of those did the deed and who had knowledge of it.”
Oh my, my, my. Does the Post actually pay for this crap?
For what it’s worth, Maclean’s Magazine’s Kady O’Malley reports that Doug Finlay, the Conservative Party’s National Director of Political Operations, is flogging the same line:
Can Michael Ignatieff assure Canadians that no Liberal staffer, executive or advisor contacted Jamie Irving or Shawna Richer regarding the Prime Minister’s acceptance of communion at Romeo LeBlanc’s funeral?
So O’Malley put the question to Ignatieff’s office. Response:
This is nonsense. We didn’t record the videotape–CPAC did. And as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Canadians need only look at the video on You Tube to see what happened.
Meanwhile, LifeSiteNews.com, a Toronto-based Campaign Life website, suspects Liberal blogger-strategist (and Chretien acolyte) Warren Kinsella‘s hand at work, noting that Kinsella has apparently changed the time-stamp on his blog to make it appear that he posted a refernce to the original T-J story somewhat later in the morning (9:53 am) of July 8 than was actually the case (6:53 am), the implication being that Kinsella is trying to obscure the fact he had advance knowledge of the story. (Pretty bad when you have to turn away from our august papers of record to an anti-abortion website for actual reporting.)
No question, Kinsella has aggressively promoted the alleged scandal, drawing “the faint outlines of a link between the shipbuilding announcement and, hours later, mincing, shit-eating apology,” which he describes as “fundamentally false.”
Meanwhile, what the hell is this?
A copyright claim by Radio-Canada? CBC spokesperson Angus MacKinnon confims to Maclean’s:
Radio-Canada requested that the footage be removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement (something it does on a regular basis). It was deemed that no ‘fair dealing’ exception was applicable in this case… [O]ur policy on fair dealing with regard to YouTube-d material [is] judged on a case-by-case basis.
Excuse me? Since when is it part of a news-gathering organization’s role to block public access to primary research sources, especially when those sources were created with taxpayers’ money? Since Harper became PM, perhaps? How much faith can we now place in Radio-Canada’s coverage of the current copyright debate, where Crown copyright is a key issue? Suckholing to the government of the day has long been endemic within the CBC, but rarely has a Mother Corp flack acknowledged it so brazenly.
Happily, Canadians can still see video evidence of Harper’s nontransubstantiation here, here, and here. The videos show pretty conclusively that, whatever Harper may have done with the Saviour’s virtual Body, he didn’t consume It promptly.
Here’s a novel idea: Could someone in our nation’s Parliamentary Press Gallery separate their puckered lips from Harper’s posterior long enough to do some actual reporting? Or does endlessly opining on the terminal inadequacy of any possible pretender to Harper’s throne keep you too busy for honest work?
UPDATE I:
Scarborough blogger Jeff Jedras parses the T-J apology in meticulous detail, pointing out additional oddities and inconsistencies.
The apology exonerates the reporters whose bylines appeared on the story on grounds that the inaccurate material was added in the editing process without their knowledge. But the story, which appeared five days after the funeral, was all about the wafer issue.
This is a daily newspaper, so they’d covered the funeral story already. So clearly the original, untainted story the two reporters wrote was more than just “there was a state funeral a week ago.” That’s not a story. The story they wrote had to centre around Harper accepting communion, was that right or not, and when did he consume it? Then some things were inserted to beef that up that were apparently troublesome.
So which part of the story is true, and which fabricated? That’s the central problem with the Irvings’ highly selective account of the events: we can’t tell. As Jedras puts it:
[T]he Telegraph Journal’s apology doesn’t really change the original story, whether you think it’s a dumb or newsworthy story or not: Harper accepted communion when he shouldn’t have, and took his sweet time consuming it, when he should have consumed it right away. All they’re retracting is “senior priest wants answers” and “he pocketed it.”
There’s more. It’s worth reading.
UPDATE II
Blogger Stephen Taylor, who bills himself as a scientist and political analyst, and who organized rallies to protest last December’s aborted coalition government, also weighs in. Taylor notes the massive character of the edits that would have been required to sustain the apology’s odd claim that, although the central facts of the story were wrong, the reporters who wrote it bore no responsibility for the erroneous material. Then he adds an intriguing twist:
I’ve learned from a source close to one of the journalists that at least one of them may have gone so far as to seek advice and consider a lawsuit against the newspaper if the paper did not retract the story and absolve (no pun intended) the journalists of fabricating a significant portion the article.
That would be consistent with the highly unusual lengths the apology went to in exonerating the reporters.
Curiouser and curiouser. Too bad that journalism is the only public institution journals and journalists deem off limits.
FEEDBACK I
Contrarian reader Justin Ling wonders:
One wonders why ‘investigating’ this non-issue (a) counts as journalism or (b) matters to anyone but the media. If he pocketed it, he did so because he did not want to offend Catholics by refusing the wafer. Shouldn’t we be focusing on the other host of issues out there surrounding Mr. Harper?
Well, of course the original story wasn’t important. It was amusing and ironic, and treated as such by the media. But then the Prime Minister blew a gasket, and the CBC invoked copyright to bar public access to the video evidence, and the Telegraph-Journal issued this astonishing and hard-to-credit apology (just as its owners queued up for lucrative shipbuilding contracts), and the PM’s director of communications resigned a year into the job. And finally, there’s the Ottawa press corps’s disinclination to look into the inconsistencies.
FEEDBACK II
Contrarian reader WT observes:
Whatever else there is to be said about the TJ wafergate apology, it must rank as one of the great pooh-eaters of all time.
FEEDBACK III
Mervin Hollingsworth of Saskatoon thinks we’re off our trolley:
Do you know how silly your report reads? Who cares what Harper did with the Host. It is between him and his God. Try to move on to something that all Canadians care about. This is pure speculation and garbage and a waste of everybody’s time. It truly must be a slow summer.
To be clear, which I thought I had been, I don’t give a flying fig what SH did with the Host. I care about the fallout, which reeks of dishonesty.
Expunging Liberal phrases
Embassy Magazine outs the Harper government’s effort to strip foreign policy documents of vestigial Liberal language:
DFAIT insiders tell Embassy that since the Conservative government took power in 2006, political staffers have directed rank and file Foreign Affairs bureaucrats to stop using policy language created by the former Liberal government. Read more »
