Canadian Politics 2020

[dubsartur]

The Premier of BC has broken the Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Greens and called an election for 24 October.  Presumably, he hopes to win a majority for his own party rather than the "majority of one" which his NDP plus the Greens have.  Neither of the two opposition parties in the legislature (the BC Liberal party of capital and the BC Greens) are happy, the next election was supposed to be in October 2021 according to a fixed election date law and the Confidence and Supply Agreement

With the pandemic and ongoing revelations of the prospects of the Site C dam project, we live in interesting times.

Edit: Oh, and a Canadian citizen with extensive ties to the USA has been arrested at a Cdn-US border crossing on charges of mailing ricin-laced letters to the President of the United States.  I am not sure which direction she was crossing in, but Can to USA seems more plausible.

Edit: Oh, and the mass shooting in Nova Scotia seems to have been triggered by anxiety about the pandemic and possible government responses.  So that is 23 more dead because of the pandemic, like all the older people who are dying because of stress or strain on the medical system.  The RCMP have a public explanation of how the shooter was able to withdraw half a million dollars in $100 bills from his bank shortly before the shooting, but they are not always the most truthful witnesses.

[dubsartur]

So I am in covid jail (house quarantine in Canada after entering the country from an infected region), and the GPC has a new leader, Annamie Paul.  She is an Ontarian lawyer who is black, I know nothing about her, but I respect that she called the Liberals and Conservatives intellectually bankrupt from spending too long watching polls.

/sarcasm Someone in BC has founded an Ecosocialist Party, because obviously what we need at the moment that the old corrupt two-party system is finally cracking is even more vote splitting on the left.

[dubsartur]

The Green Party of British Columbia has released its platform on 14 October, 30 days after Sonia Furstenau became leader.  Because of the mail-in voting, with suggested deadline 17 October, many voters won't be able to flip through it before they cast their ballot.

I wish I had something else to report to amuse Jubal, but its been a cut-and-paste election.  The BC Liberals tacked socialist but without much effect on the polls, and there will probably be a significant amount of strategic voting from the Greens to the NDP (reminder: party of the public-sector and resource industry unions) because people are worried about the Liberals (reminder: party of capital) getting back in or because of the disarray within the Green Party of BC.  The events are mostly outdoors and socially distanced.

In another year this might have been the election where the Greens burst from 3 to more MLAs and broke the two-party system for good, because the NDP are ahead in the polls, but it does not look like that will work out.

The social and legacy media have gotten excited about the usual examples of people saying things when they did not realize there was a microphone, and with Anglo culture's problems working out rules for how sexuality should fit into different areas of life.

[dubsartur]

Some people think that an unusual number of candidates this provincial election have been forced to withdraw or expelled from their party.  The reasons have often been comic-opera ones: a (federal or provincial?) Green party election and leadership candidate tweeted in support of a BC Ecosocialist candidate in another riding and was thrown out until he pointed out that former federal party leader Elizabeth May had endorsed Jody Wilson-Raybould over the local green candidate in a federal election, a BC Liberal candidate asked whether a proposal to provide free contraception was a plan to reduce the numbers of the poor.  That's not an uncommon conspiratorial take on programs to encourage family planning in poor hot countries, but someone thought it was a bridge too far in provincial politics.

A murder victim was found in a blue recycling bin in the waters off English Bay in Vancouver, because Vancouver gangs are British Columbians goddam it!

In federal politics, a mob of settlers burned a loaded van and poisoned lobsters belonging to Mi'kmaq lobster fishers exercising their treaty right to take a moderate number of lobsters out of season.  Police were present but did not intervene, which might theoretically have an acceptable explanation but looks very bad until they can provide one.

[dubsartur]

I guess it might also be of interest that this is the first BC election in my lifetime fought without corporate, union, or foreign donations to campaigns or parties.  The new government banned them in 2017 and introduced a per-vote subsidy like federal parties used to get.  A lot of commentators don't seem to be noting that one reason why the BC Liberal Party is struggling could be that they are operating on 20% as much money as in previous elections while the Greens and NDP still have about half.

There have also been some attacks by the BC Liberals on BC Conservative candidates, who often get 5-10% of the vote in some ridings which might be safe Liberal seats if there was only one corporatist candidate from a big party.  But that is just paint-by-numbers personal politics, and an example of the principle that infighting between factions competing for the same people is usually nastier than infighting between 'self and other.'

[Jubal]

Hm, yes, that sort of campaign finance stuff does make a difference. I do wonder if parts of the last decade might've been different if the Conservatives hadn't regularly been able to outspend everyone else combined. That said, the Lib Dems actually had a pretty solidly funded election last year due to attracting a lot of anti-Brexit cash, and still lost seat total thanks to appalling targeting, a bad message strategy, and relentlessly effective negative campaigning from Labour which peeled off much of the left flank of the party's potential support by polling day.

[dubsartur]

Yes, I don't think funding is ever decisive in elections, but when you lose the opportunities to communicate your message that come from being the government in the Westminister system, and lose more of your funding sources than other campaigns lose, its another hill to climb.  (Less people are paying attention and criticizing your every action, and you can talk about the wonderful things you would do without awkward questions about the less wonderful things you have been doing, but I think on the whole being the government gives advantages in spreading your message).

Federally, there is brinkmanship around confidence motions and the investigations into WE Charity and its relationship to the Trudeau family which were shut down while parliament was prorogued (investigations are run by parlimentary committees, committees only meet while parliament is in session). 

[dubsartur]

42nd provincial election day in BC!  1.1 million ballots were cast in advance or by mail, compared to 1.8 total ballots in the provincial election of 2017.  For reasons I don't understand, it will take several weeks to count these other ballots; the ones cast normally are usually counted by the day after the election. 

Edit: its clauses 127ff. of the Elections Act (BC): final count shall begin no earlier than on the 13th day after the closing of polls, and this final count is the one which includes ballots not cast at the polls on election day.

Canadian provincial elections don't have the money thrown into publicly-available polling that some other elections do (parties do as many riding-level polls as they can, only sometimes providing the results to candidates), but I would bet on a NDP majority.

[dubsartur]

It has come out that newly re-elected premier of Saskatchewan Scott Moe was a chronic unsafe driver in the 1990s (one conviction for drunk driving in 1992, one charge for impaired driving and leaving the scene of the accident in 1994, and killing a woman in an accident at 6 am in 1997 where alcohol was not mentioned but which he says he "does not remember").  He was 18 at the time of the first conviction, but personally I do not think that anyone who gets into accidents in a motor vehicle while impaired should be in charge of anything more important than an ice-cream stand, and the Saskatchewan Party and a province with a million residents is definitely more important.

Its very hard to get around rural Canada without a car, since the settlement pattern on the prairies was isolated farms in Industrial Age sized plots not villages with cotters and yardlanders.

[dubsartur]

If your glands are not burned out yet, tensions between former BC Green party chief Andrew Weaver and his former party reached the point that he appeared in a campaign ad for BC NDP leader John Horgan and said he supported the re-election of a BC NDP candidate in Vancouver.  In a couple of interviews, he strongly hinted that he had irreconcilable disagreements with the BC Green leadership candidate who won.  He presents it as having a more pragmatic approach and Furstenau having a more membership-lead one, but he also says that he threatened to withdraw his vote and bring down the government against the opposition of his party.

But his head is not clear right now due to some kind of medical crisis in his family, everyone else's head is not clear because of the pandemic / American media, and even if my glands were not burned out I have given up trying to understand these things unless I know all the people involved face to face.  I won't be fooled again.

Local environmentalist / active democracy advocacy the Dogwood Initiative thinks that the low turnout was due to the logistics of voting in a pandemic and everyone's general troubles with executive function in the pandemic.

This time around Dogwood volunteers spoke to many people on the phones who thought they couldn’t vote because they were self-isolating, forgot to return mail-in ballots, or were reluctant to vote in person and struggled to navigate the alternatives.

[dubsartur]

Important election results!  Mike Sack has been re-elected chief of the Sipekne'katik band of the Mi’kmaq nation with 72% of the vote in a three-way race.  Sipekne'katik chefs hold their office for two years between elections.  Turnout was about 50% of eligible voters and 35% of members of the band.

He is public in advocating for the Mi’kmaq's treaty rights to fish.

[dubsartur]

The important election results you have been nervously waiting for are here!  After the final count of postal and advance ballots, the result of the 2020 BC provincial election are 57 seats NDP (66% of seats, 48% of votes), two seats Green (2% of seats, 15% of votes), 28 seats Liberal (32% of seats, 34% of votes), and one in Vancouver pending recount since the Liberals are currently ahead of the Greens by 41 votes.  There is a problem: given what we know about how accurate vote counts are, I don't think we can say who really won such a close race.

For the Greens to get a seat on the mainland would have been a first, but its such a close race that they will almost certainly pick one up next election.  My MP is now a nondescript NDP person whom I can't find much about.

Police are asking for members of the public who knew or saw the victims of the Whiskey Creek Massacre and anyone else in the area to come forward.  Northern Vancouver island has a significant biker gang movement and a sizeable population living in the woods in tents, trailers, and home-made camps.  Many of them are dependent on the biker gangs' products.

[Jubal]

Gosh. I don't think I'd realised the Conservatives were that nonexistent in BC.

Also, election results sites with no maps make me sad

One of the few things I think the US does well with its elections that other countries should replicate is ensuring all the results are available to quite a granular ward/local level for all kinds of elections.

[dubsartur]

Maps https://elections.bc.ca/resources/maps/provincial-maps/  The one with results by party is not up yet, but keep in mind that some ridings in BC are the size of Ireland (and covered with boreal forests, fijords, and high mountains) while you can walk across others in an hour.  There is no practical way of mapping that on our earth ("acres don't vote, people do"): I think that a schematic map like a subway map or the Peutinger table would be more useful.

Edit: http://www.election-atlas.ca/bc/ uses Elections BC and Elections Canada data

[Jubal]

Using inset sections can deal with that, or simply a zoomable map with the wonders of the internet - but yes, electoral maps with some sort of population size modifier or hex system can be very helpful for showing the actual political state of affairs.