Vaudevilliany

Dimitri Dogfight Soudas, Aug 25, 2010 : "...as the new, highly capable and technologically-advanced F-35 comes into service. It is the best plane our Government could provide our Forces, and when you are a pilot staring down Russian long range bombers, that's an important fact to remember."

Airshow MacKay : "On the eve of Barack Obama's visit to Ottawa, a Russian jet approached Canada's Arctic air space and had to be turned away by Canadian warplanes... fighter planes and world-class pilots that know their business and send a strong signal that they should back off and stay out of our airspace."

Steve 'Spaceman Spiff', Feb 28, 2009 : “ increasingly aggressive Russian actions around the globe and Russian intrusions into our airspace. This government has responded every time the Russians have done that. We will continue to respond; we will defend our airspace.”

Sheer vaudevilliany, of course, all of it.

Two weeks prior to Soudas showboating about "staring down Russian bombers", Russia and NORAD were wrapping up a 3-day joint exercise that had been three years in the planning.
Pictured are Canadian Forces Col. Todd Balfe, deputy commander Alaska NORAD Region, and Russian Air Force Col. Alexander Vasilyev on board Fencing 1220 for VIGILANT EAGLE :

"a joint 3-day exercise designed to establish clear communication processes that would allow the two forces to work together during a real crisis.

In the scenario presented by the exercise, a B-757 jetliner, simulated by a Gulfstream 4 jet, signaled to authorities on the ground that it has been hijacked. NORAD F-22s and an E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control aircraft scrambled in response and followed the track of interest across the Pacific and handing it off to Russian Federation fighters as it approached Russian territory. On the second day of the exercise, it was done in reverse, with SU-27 fighters making the hand-off to F-22s as the “hijacked” aircraft approached Alaska."

CP, yesterday : "A new Wikileaks cable suggests the U.S. government views Stephen Harper's talk about Canadian Arctic sovereignty as little more than empty chest-thumping designed to win votes.

A January 2010 cable says Harper cautioned NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen that the alliance has no role in the Arctic because "Canada has a good working relationship with Russia with respect to the Arctic" and a NATO presence "could backfire by exacerbating tensions."  
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Canada Census - The dilemma

Do we fill it in nicely to show our solidarity with StatsCan and their important data-gathering, currently under siege by the Cons, or do we fill it in using really big crayons and attached pictures of cluster bomb victims to protest its having been farmed out once again to war profiteer and surveillance/espionage experts Lockheed Martin?


Back during the 2006 census, some of us worried that Homeland Security would wind up with access to our census data via the US Patriot Act. StatsCan was at great pains to alleviate those fears : LM would not get the actual data because LM were only supplying the software; the actual data would remain with StatsCan.

Lockheed Martin : "We never forget who we're working for".

Well of course not. $35.7B in US government contracts alone out of $42.7B worldwide in 2008 is a whole lot of not forgetting.

ML accounts for one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon, amounting to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States.

Besides there's the US government network to maintain : $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009.
NYTimes, secondary source :

"Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and director of the national spy satellite agency.

Lockheed Martin is now positioned to profit from every level of the war on terror from targeting to intervention, and from occupation to interrogation."

Including spying on Quakers and anti-war activists and recruiting interrogators for Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan for the Department of Defense.

Of Lockheed Martin's 57 Federal Contractor Misconduct violations listed at the Project on Government Oversight, nearly a third involve court dispositions and fines for "Government Contract Fraud".
Say, how are our F-35s coming along?

Four months after the 2006 census, Lockheed Martin President of the Americas and Co-Chair of the SPP's North American Competitiveness Council Ron Covais explained to Luiza Ch. Savage how the Security and Prosperity Partnership would be implemented - in incremental changes by each country's executive, bureaucrats and other regulators outside government.

"We've decided not to recommend any things that would require legislative changes because we won't get anywhere."

It may not be entirely rational to fuck with the census form on the grounds that LM profits by it, but sometimes protests are not particularly rational - they are just one of the only means available to us to register our disgust with the creeping militarization inherent in our incremental deep integration with the US.
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My apology to commenters - all comments were lost in Blogger's big fubar today.
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Election 2011 - Vote splitting

Who really benefited from vote splitting this election?

Ken Boessenkool and Brian Topp, a Con and an NDP strategist respectively, crunch up the numbers and conclude :

the Liberals did.

"The Conservatives and the NDP won their seats with, on average, large pluralities and considerable margins over the party that finished second – which was usually not the Liberals."

Hence little evidence of vote splitting.

Even in Ontario and the Greater Toronto Area where the Libs claim they were hurt by vote splitting? Yup. Even there.

To be honest I've no idea whether Topp and Boessenkool's method for determining vote splitting - explained at the link above - is sound and I'm hoping Alice will find time to evaluate it, but I rather liked the dramatic graph accompanying it, showing how the party tallies shifted in each province compared to the 2008 election.

Alice has her own graphs here.


Paul Wells on vote splitting :
 On the impertinence of the NDP

"Here’s an article in a Toronto newspaper: How vote-splitting gave the Tories Ontario — and a majority. Apparently the Globe is using its Random Headline Generator again, because the story is about how vote-splitting didn’t give the Tories Ontario or a majority.

The Conservatives won 12 seats in the province in large part due to vote-splitting on the centre-left. Had the NDP surge fizzled on ballot day – and the votes cleaved to the Liberal camp – Stephen Harper’s majority would have been a bare-minimum 155.

         Fun fact: 155 is a majority."

Yes I know we're all bored with election post mortems by now.  But in 4½ years the Liberal strategic voting sites will once again be handing out bucket advice to 'vote Lib so the Cons won't get in' and I figure we're going to need this as a reminder.
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Update : Thank you, Alice!
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"A quick perimeter security deal"

is what an editorial in the Windsor Star is calling for now that Steve has his majority despite "opposition MPs who claimed it would weaken Canadian sovereignty":

"The reality is this: There is no other way to keep goods and services flowing freely across our borders."

Department of Homeland Security, Feb 1:

"DHS believes the risk of terrorist activity across the northern border is higher than across the southern border because there are active Islamist extremist groups in Canada that are not in Mexico, it is easier to cross the northern border because it is twice as long as the southern border, and DHS has a fraction of the law enforcement officers and surveillance assets on the northern border than it has in the south."

Three days later Steve and Obama released their Beyond the Border: A Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness, although news of it had already been leaked back in December.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano five days ago at the May 4 US Senate Committee on Homeland Security, transcript from audio webcast : 

"Our strategy for the northern border is different. It's much more technology-dependant for example so we are adding more systems up there that can detect low-flying aircraft. Also our partnership with Canada has really evolved over the past months so that you had Prime Minister Harper and President Obama themselves announcing a joint vision for a perimeter [here Napolitano makes a big circle in the air with her hands] involving Canada and the United States and greater cooperation with Canadian law enforcement on both sides of the border. That is going extraordinarily well. For example we are looking at being able to integrate their own sensors and radar feeds into our system as well."

Enter thinktanky support from the Wilson Center in Washington DC, who awarded Steve their Public Service Award in 2006 after he had been in office a whole 8 months . Via Luiza Ch. Savage, a link to an upcoming May 11 Wilson Center event :

Northern Border Crime and Terror Networks: Fact or Fiction? : (italics mine)"

How vulnerable is the Canada-U.S. border to crime and terrorism? Americans are concerned that terrorists might infiltrate from the North ...

In an effort to inform a more evidence-based policy approach to Canada-U.S. border integrity, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers has been collecting data on cross-border criminal activity, with surprising results on the nature and extent of cross-border criminal connections on both sides of the border. The findings bolster the argument in favor of shifting from joint enforcement to joint jurisdiction—a model similar to the way Canada and the United States have been collaborating on matters of national defense for decades."

Flashback : David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center, in 2009

"Perimeter is no longer a dirty word. ... The old Toronto nationalists of the 1960s were essential to building the idea of a postmodern Canada, but now they're starting to die off."

as Steve and his various US enablers are no doubt hoping for the same for Canadian sovereignty.

Of the "US and Canadian researchers" speaking at the Wilson Center event, I note that the US researchers and at least one of the three Canadian researchers receive funding from Homeland Security and the US Defense Dept.
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The best democracy money can buy

From Paul Wells' The untold story of the 2011 election :

"In the weeks before the budget, a Liberal strategist said, the Conservatives bought airtime to run 1,600 ads. “We had 131, and the NDP had, like, 25 or something,” the Liberal said. “It was a massacre.”

And then there's the best democracy media concentration can buy.

Dwayne Winseck tracked 62 daily newspapers from the ten main newspaper groups in Canada comprising 97.5% of the industry. QMI Sun Media has 18 papers while Post Media is the largest publisher of English-language daily newspapers in Canada at 12, plus another 8 weeklies. Together these two account for just over 50% of the market share.

He found that 21 out of 22 editorial endorsements that advocated for a specific candidate for Prime Minister - including 10 from Post Media and 6 from Sun Media - plumped for Harper. As noted by Winseck, that's 95%.
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WikiLeaks : A New North American Union Initiative

I guess everyone has their favorite US Ambassador to Canada.
Mine has always been Paul Cellucci, who once suggested building huge aqueducts to carry Canadian water to the US and worried in 2008 that the election of Obama would "imperil the future economic integration of the continent".

Last month WikiLeaks released one of Cellucci's 2005 cables from the US Embassy in Ottawa.  In it he suggests that "Canadian policy makers" support a "security perimeter" via an "incremental and pragmatic package of tasks" emphasizing "security" and "prosperity" to pave the way for a future North American "single market and/or single currency".

He also advises that "our governments may always want to keep some kind of land border in place" as it's useful for "data gathering". Excerpted :

A NEW NORTH AMERICAN INITIATIVE 

An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers. Our research leads us to conclude that such a package should tackle both "security" and "prosperity" goals. This fits the recommendations of Canadian economists who have assessed the options for continental integration. While in principle many of them support more ambitious integration goals, like a customs union/single market and/or single currency, most believe the incremental approach is most appropriate at this time and all agree that it helps pave the way to these goals if and when North Americans choose to pursue them."

"We believe that, given growing Canadian concern about "border risk" and its effects on investment, a focus on the "security" side could also produce the most substantial economic/trade benefits."

"At this time, an "incremental" approach to integration is probably better than a "big deal" approach."

How's that incremental approach going, by the way?


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Unlike Steve who is tasked with selling us on this deal, Cellucci was less sanguine on that whole "jobs, jobs, jobs" angle :

"Some international economic initiatives (such as FTAs) produce across-the-board measures that generate broad benefits for a country's industries and consumers on a known time-line. This was true of NAFTA but it is less likely to be true of the economic aspects of the NAI."

and

"There is little basis on which to estimate the size of the "upside" gains from an integration initiative concentrating on non-tariff barriers of the kind contained in NAI. For this reason, we cannot make claims about how large the benefits might be on a national or continental scale. When advocating NAI, it would be better to highlight specific gains to individual firms, industries or travelers, and especially consumers."

Steve - Here For Canada.
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Canada Votes 2011 - Margin of Victory

Updated Feb 23, 2012 - Steve's majority holds by 14 12 seats, or  5184 votes


Below are the 12 margins of victory for the Cons in the 2011 Election

There's been some recent interest in this post due to the Con robocall election fraud / vote suppression story so I've updated the post to include the final corrected vote tallies long since adjusted by Elections Canada since I first posted these figures three days after the 2011 election. 

New version directly below, with the corrected figures in the original post blue.
Data source : Elections Canada -Official Voting Results of the 41st General Election, Table 12 

I've included the Line # from the EC Tables so you can verify the numbers for yourself.

Corrected Con Margin of Victory : 5184 votes

EC Line # / District Name/ Candidate/Votes Obtained/ % of Votes Obtained /
Majority votes & Percentage


1)Line 855 - Nipissing-Timiskaming/ Jay Aspin CPC :15495 votes / 36.7% of vote /
 majority of 18 votes or 0%

2)Line 677 - Etobicoke Centre/ Ted Opitz CPC : 21644 votes / 41.2% of vote /
 majority of 26 votes or 0%

3)Line 16 - Labrador/ Peter Penashue CPC : 4256 votes / 39.8 % of vote /
 majority of 79 votes or .7%

4)Line 1576 - Yukon / Ryan Leef CPC : 5422 votes/ 33.8% of vote /
majority of 132 votes or .8%

5)Line 1127- Elmwood-Transcona / Lawrence Toet CPC :15298 votes / 46.4% of vote /
majority of 300 votes or .9%

6)Line 1215 - Saskatoon-Rosetown-Biggar/ Kelly Block Con: 14652 votes / 48.7% of vote /
majority of 538 votes or 1.8%

7)Line 593 - Bramalea-Gore-Malton / Bal Gosal CPC: 19907 votes / 34.4% of vote /
majority of 539 votes or .9%

8)Line 647 - Don Valley West/ John Carmichael CPC : 22962 votes / 42.9% of vote /
majority of  611 votes or 1.1%

9)Line 811 - Mississauga East-Cooksville/ Wladyslaw Lizon CPC:  18796 votes / 40% of vote/
 majority of 676 votes or 1.4%

10)Line 1170 - Winnipeg South Centre/ Joyce Bateman CPC : 15506 votes / 38.8% of vote /
majority of 722 votes or 1.8%

11)Line 1192 -Palliser  Ray Boughen CPC : 15850 votes / 47% of vote /
majority of 766 votes or 2.3%

12)Line 354 - Lotbini�re-Chutes-de-la-Chaudi/ Jacques Gourde CPC : 22460 votes / 39.9% of vote /
majority of 777 votes or 1.4%

~ ~ ~ End of Feb 23, 2012 corrected post ~ ~ ~ 

Steve's majority holds by just 14 12 seats

Below Matt Peters and Ryan Boldt look at 14 12 of the most closely contested Conservative ridings where the margin of victory was less than 800 votes- and in one case in Ontario - just 14 18 votes.
In that riding the combined opposition vote was 11,357 11,299 and the Cons took it by just 14 18 votes, while 27,887 registered voters didn't vote at all.

Nipissing-Timiskaming (Ontario) Line 855
Cons                 Liberals        Margin of Victory         NDP/Green Combined
15,495              15,477                      18                               11,299
15,507              15,493                      14                               11,357


Labrador (Newfoundland & Labrador) Line 16
Cons                Liberals         Margin of Victory         NDP/Green Combined
4,256                 4,177                        79                               2,259
4,234                 4,003                       231                              2,235


Bramalea-Gore-Malton (Ontario) Line 593
Cons                 NDP            Margin of Victory         Lib/Green Combined
19,907              19,368                    539                              18,150
19,907              19,369                    538                              18,149


Etobicoke Centre (Ontario) Line 677
Cons                Liberals          Margin of Victory         NDP/Green Combined
21,644              21,618                                                         9,112
21,661              21,635                     26                                9,185


Saskatoon Rosetown Biggar (Saskatchewan) Line 1215
Cons                 NDP             Margin of Victory        Lib/Green Combined

14,652              14,114                     538                                1,323


Elmwood-Transcona (Manitoba) Line 1127
Cons                 NDP             Margin of Victory        Lib/Green Combined
15,298            14,998                       300                                 2,677
15,280            14,996                       284                                 2,678


Montmagny-L'islet-Kamouraska-Riveire-du-Loup (Quebec)
Cons                 NDP              Margin of Victory        Lib/Green/Bloc Combined
17,220            17,110                       110                                14,861


Lotbiniere-Chutes-de-la-Chaudiere (Quebec) Line 354
Cons                 NDP              Margin of Victory        Lib/Green/Bloc Combined

22,460            21,683                        777                                12,183


Don Valley West (Ontario) Line 647
Cons              Liberals            Margin of Victory         NDP/Green Combined
22,962            22,351                       611                                  7,983
22,992            22,353                       639                                  7,983


Mississauga East-Cooksville (Ontario) Line 811
Cons              Liberals             Margin of Victory        NDP/Green Combined
18,796            18,120                       676                                  9,868   
18,782            18,121                       661                                  9,989


Winnipeg South Centre (Manitoba) Line1170
Cons              Liberals             Margin of Victory        NDP/Green Combined
15,506           14,784                        722                                  9,328 
15,468           14,772                        696                                  9,332


Yukon Line - Line 1576
Cons              Liberals             Margin of Victory        NDP/Green Combined

5,422              5,290                         132                                  5,345


Desenthe-Missinippi-Churchill River (Saskatchewan)
Cons              NDP                 Margin of Victory         Lib/Green Combined
10,509            9,715                         794                                  1,704 
10,504            9,715                         789                                  1,706


Palliser (Saskatchewan) Line 1192
Cons              NDP                 Margin of Victory         Lib/Green Combined

15,850         15,084                          766                                  2,892

Total numbers for the 14 12 ridings

Cons             2nd place            Margin of Victory          Rest of the left*
217,196        210,348                      6,848                             105,188
219,939        213,738                      6,201                             103,873

*Rest of left only includes NDP, Lib, Bloc or Green parties. Other parties not counted.


And just to add insult to injury, five of those ridings boast some of the lowest voter turnout in the country :

                                                          Margin of Victory           Voter Turnout   
   
Labrador -                                                       231 79 votes                   52.1%

Bramalea-Gore-Malton (Ont) -                  538 539 votes                  54.3%

Elmwood-Transcona (Manitoba) -            284 300 votes                    56.5%

Mississauga East-Cooksville (Ontario) -    661 676 votes                    56.5%

Desenthe-Miss-Churchill (Sask) -              789 794 votes                    52.2%

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Original source data from interactive tables at SFU.
Updated source data from Elections Canada

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Canada Votes 2011 - FPTP vs PR

Under any of the various versions of proportional representation, Steve would not now be enjoying his majority.

Fair Vote Canada :

"The Conservative party increased their vote percentage by less than two points,” says Fair Vote Canada (FVC) President Bronwen Bruch, “but this allowed them to win 24 more seats than in 2008, when they were already over-represented. Stephen Harper calls this a ‘decisive endorsement’, but we call it a rip-off."

Almost no one tries to claim the first-past-the-post voting system we are currently labouring under is fairer than any of the alternative options any more. No, mostly its proponents just say FPTP is easier for voters to understand.

Really? How did you like figuring out who to vote for this time round? And how did it work out for you?

Under any old prop rep voting system, we could forget about coalitions and party mergers and strategic voting and blaming each other for splitting the vote afterwards. Instead, all voters would be free to 'vote their conscience' and some of that 39% of eligible voters who don't bother to vote now might even feel sufficiently engaged by having, you know, an actual voice in it, to turn up.

As Pogge says : We really ought to fix this. 

Tomorrow voters in the UK are deciding whether to go with Alternative Vote , also known as instant run-off voting. Brebis Noire posted the following funny vid at Bread & Roses that explains how it works. Surprise cameo by Steve as Reform Cat.


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Canada Votes 2011

 

Just a 2% increase in the popular vote took the Cons from 143 seats in 2008 to a 167 seat majority tonight, thanks to our fucked up first-past-the-post system and because of what happened in key ridings in Ontario where presumably the Lib voters moved over to the Cons : ie. in Toronto, the Cons took 31 seats to the Libs 8 and the Dippers 12.

So the Libs and the Dippers change places in seat count compared to 2008, Elizabeth May finally gets a seat while Duceppe and Iggy lose theirs, and the Bloc, the only genuinely social democratic party in the country, is wiped out.

Consider this : Quebec's 59 seats has kept the Cons from an almost total lock on the country this time.

In 2008 the voter turnout was 59%; today it was 61%. So much for Get Out the Vote.

It will be interesting to see how Alice at Pundit's Guide breaks down the efficacy of the various strategic voting guides. In my own riding - West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea-to-Sky - the recommendation from Project Democracy, previously Vote for Environment in 2008, and other strategic voting sites was to vote Liberal. As it turned out, the Dipper came second to the winning Con who would have won anyway.

What hasn't changed since 2008?

60% of the 60% of Canadians who voted still did not vote for Harper, who has been allowed to govern as if he held a majority for five years already now. 

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CBC Interactive Results Map
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Update : Alice is up: “Splits” Decisions: A Closer Look at Vote Shifts in Greater Toronto


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Orange Crush Sunday : Cons-34, NDP-31, Libs-21, Green-6

EKOS poll of 2,690 Canadians April 29-May1. Regionals at link.

Seat Projections

1) CPC 130 to 146 seats

2) NDP 103 to 123 seats

3) LPC 36 to 46 seats

4) BQ 10-20 seats

5) GP 1 seat
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