The $0.44 Decision
The Liberals and NDP are now in a dead heat in BC, chasing after the Tories who presently enjoy a six-point lead. Interestingly, the Greens are poised to play spoiler, polling at 10%, and up to 18% on Vancouver Island. I had a conversation with a friend yesterday, who told me that she was more of an NDP supporter, but would be voting Green in order to ‘establish the party’, thanks to the impact of new election financing rules.
Personally, I find the idea of voting just so that a party can get a buck-seventy-five in electoral financing a little strange. Don’t get me wrong, the funding mechanism is a terrific way to help make protest votes matter even in stronghold ridings, and it helps divorce parties from being beholden to the interests of wealthy supporters, unions and large corporations. And I understand wanting to ‘establish’ a party; I wouldn’t count myself as a Green Party supporter, but I think their presence is valuable in terms of keeping the environment on the national agenda.
But voting for a party simply to make sure they get under two bucks in funding? Considering that you get a 75% tax credit on your first $400 in political contributions, your total cost to, say, vote NDP and then directly contribute $1.75 to the Greens, would be roughly 44 cents. It’s a deal at twice the price.
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The Local Effect
COMPAS just published (PDF) a series of polling results yesterday that show the impact of local candidates in key ridings. The pollsters asked respondents who they planned to vote for, then asked the voters a hypothetical question:
“Let’s imagine for a moment that all of the current candidates in your particular riding resigned and pulled out of the election for personal, family or health reasons. Let’s suppose that the … parties all nominated new candidates whom you knew nothing about. In this hypothetical situation, which party would you vote for?”
By subtracting the ‘party share’ of the vote — that is, the percentage who would vote for a party regardless of candidate — from the original intentions, COMPAS comes up with a measure of how much the local candidate matters. Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton both bring what COMPAS calls ‘electability traction’ (that’s “appeal” to the rest of us), and Anne McLellen owes her tiny lead very significantly to her own appeal as a candidate. If her Edmonton Centre voters were given a new slate of unknowns across the board, the Liberals would be trailing the Tories by nine points. By way of contrast, Belinda Stronach is wasted for the Tories in uber-conservative Newmarket, where the CPC would win handily even with an unknown Tory candidate.
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Did Larry Campbell Actually Just Say That?
As a local politician, in the position of potentially having to lobby with a new federal government, it would seem unwise to go on the attack against political figures you might be in the position of asking favours from in less than a month’s time. But Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell didn’t only express trepidation at the idea of a Tory government, he actually slammed the CPC’s electoral gains as “the barbarians at the gate.”
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Survey Fatigue
Angus Reid warns that the tendancy of Canadians to screen calls from pollsters (imagine!) has dire implications for the accuracy of polling data. Interestingly, as this election seems to be one of the most horserace-obsessed in history, the main dailies are spending less than ever on their polling, and their results are more tainted than ever by high refusal rates.
The CBC, Reid notes with horror, isn’t planning on publishing horserace results. I have no problem with this. However, I do have a problem with the fact that the CBC is apparently deadset on replacing substantive analysis of salient political issues with folksy anecdotes and coffee-shop analysis from Joe Everyvoter. Honestly, between the down-home wisdom of yokel know-nothings on a CBC National ‘Road Trip’ segment, and an eternity of horserace polls, I’d probably opt for the latter.
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The Ghost Of Stupidity Past
Kelly Nestruck’s blog captures half of my feelings about the NDP’s Edmonton-Strathcona candidate’s foot-in-mouth disease:
“I think the Internet, alas, has exacerbated [gotcha] journalism. This story did originate on a blog, after all. Politicians’ pasts and present now exist concurrently online. When it comes to youthful indiscretions, the young people entering politics today — Azania is a mere 34 years old now — have a distinct disadvantage: their stupid remarks are archived and easily accessible in cyberspace for the rest of their lives thanks to Google’s cache.
Frankly, what Azania wrote is not half as stupid as some of the tripe I heard in university. But that’s kind of what university is good for: people voicing and debating unorthodox, ground-breaking, politically-incorrect and often idiotic ideas away from the real world where they can hurt actual people. It’s called learning.
The former student radicals of the 1960s who now toil in political parties of all stripes across North America and Europe should thank the lord that they were young in a pre-Internet age, a time where they were allowed to experiment and debate without fear that every stoned conversation they had would be used against them down the road.”
J.Kelly is right; the remarks were stupid, but it also seems somewhat less than fair that we are to be the perpetual victims of the idiotic things we say as university students. One of my readers even suggested that the original Usenet posting wasn’t half as bad as the single quote lept on by the press, out of context, made it sound.
But on to the second half of my feelings: Gotcha journalism exists. Defending those who fall victim to this low form of journalism is a losing battle. Nationally, Cheryl Gallant is a liability for the Tory campaign, and the inevitible rounds of press scrutiny will do inestimable damage to Harper’s run at a minority government. He has to keep her, because she’s an incumbent, she’ll bring him a seat, and ousting her over abortion will split his party. Layton’s man in Alberta won’t bring the Dippers a seat, and won’t trigger a policy revolt in a tenuously bound alliance of incompatible ideologues. Jack Layton’s job is to steer a progressive party into the halls of power. If that means that a candidate in a throwaway riding ends up submitting his resignation over an exaggerated and over-reported gaffe, so be it. Malcolm Azania can join Scott Reid in consoling himself over a couple pints. Hell, I’ll even buy the first round.
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And Bearing In Mind That The Car In Question Is A Broken-Down Trabant…
Paul Wells and I don’t have much in common politically, but the man always makes me laugh. He’s one of the only reasons left to pick up an issue of Maclean’s. From his blog:
“Ignore, for the moment, the delicious news that David Herle is “desperate”, and note instead how the gang that pushed Jean Chrétien under a bus has suddenly discovered the virtues of the Liberal record. Bit late, no?
It’s kind of like a bunch of kids who hotwire an old man’s car, only to discover that none of them knows how to drive.”
