Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Just six weeks after the last federal election, our brand new government has already failed. This week, Finance Minister Flaherty gave an economic update to the House of Commons that was belittled and scorned by members of the opposition for not including a stimulus package for the ailing economy. While not a full budget, the update also tweaked federal spending, most notably by proposing the cessation of public funding for federal parties. This so called ‘vote-tax’ awards $1.93 per vote per year to each of our political parties, and if cut, will eliminate roughly half of the funding for all opposition parties.

In response, the Liberal and NDP parties have made news by threatening to topple the current administration and replace it with a coalition government, possibly lead by Stephan Dion. Enter partisan politics, as over-the-aisle bickering ensues, and government grinds to a standstill in the midst of the worst economic situation faced by Canadians in over a decade. Early yesterday morning, Harpers’ office issued marching orders to their Ministers across Canada that urged them to go into campaign mode over the weekend, rallying support for the Conservative minority with the following key talking points:

• We’re not even two months removed from the last election, and a group of backroom politicians are going to pick who the Prime Minister is. Canadians didn’t vote for this person. We don’t even know who this person will be.
• Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition. Certainly not a single voter voted for the Liberals to form a coalition with the separatists in the Bloc.
• This is what bothers me the most. The Conservatives won the election. The Opposition keeps saying that the Conservatives have to respect the will of the voters that this is a minority and so on.
• …how about Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”.
• And what’s this going to do to the economy. I’m sorry, I don’t care how desperate the Liberals are — giving socialists (Jack Layton) and separatists (Gilles Duceppe) a veto over every decision in government — that is a recipe for total economic disaster.
• But how more phony could these guys be?
• I mean, I follow the news, virtually every single day you have Harper or Flaherty out there telegraphing exactly what they plan to do with the economy. And not once did you hear the Liberals, NDP or separatists talking about toppling the government in response.
• No — do you know what set this off. When Flaherty said he was going to take taxpayer-funded subsidies away from the opposition. Now there is a reason to try and overturn an election— because the Conservatives the audacity to say “Hey, it’s a recession, maybe you should take your nose out of the trough.”
• And I wish the media would be more clear on this point — the opposition aren’t being singled out by this fact the Conservatives stand to lose the most money of all. The only difference is that Canadians are voluntarily giving money the Conservatives, so they don’t need taxpayer handouts. The only reason the opposition would be hurt more is because nobody wants to donate to them. They should be putting their efforts towards fixing that problem.
• I don’t want another election. But what I want even less is a surprise backroom Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy

This kind of trash belongs in the No Spin Zone on Fox News, not in Canadian news media. “Not a single voter voted for a Liberal-NDP coalition”? Give me a break; that wasn’t an option on the ballot! That said, while only 36% of Canadians voted for a Conservative minority, some 64% of Canadians voted for either the NDP or the Liberals, so a coalition would certainly represent a larger slice of the population than the current government.

“…how about the Liberals, NDP and Bloc respecting the will of the voters when they said “YOU LOSE”"? The very idea of a minority government is that nobody won or lost the election. No one party was popular enough to garner the majority of voter support. Thus, there are no winners and no losers, only a loose collection of Ministers charged with working together to best represent the views of all Canadians.

“…[I don't want a] Prime Minister whom I never even had the opportunity to vote for or against. What an insult to democracy.” This is a particularly distressing point that puts forth the notion that in forming a coalition government, the opposition will in some way be forfeiting the rights of Canadians and the ideals of democracy. In fact, by forming a coalition, the opposition parties are saying to the current government that they (and thus the citizens that they represent) no longer have any confidence in the Conservative party to responsibly govern our country. If the Governor General agrees with them, she will then appoint a new Government that will act in the interests of all Canadians. This is not in any way a sneaky, underhanded, or backroom move; it is a precedented function of our democratic system. Winston Churchill was the leader of a coalition government that ousted Neville Chamberlain when his appeasement techniques failed to prevent Germany from invading Poland in 1939. For his leadership throughout the Second World War, Churchill is widely regarded as one of the best Prime Ministers ever to hold office in Britain.

While there is no doubt in my mind that the oppositions’ outrage stems mostly from the proposed cuts to their public funding, and not from the lack of a stimulus package as they continually insist, I can’t help but think that the opposition in the right. Public funding puts niche parties like the Greens and the NDP in a position to repeatedly run against the big boys, ensuring that the voices of millions of Canadians that do not otherwise identify with either the Conservatives or the Liberals are heard. A strong multi-party system that allows the opinions of all Canadians to be heard in the house is essential to our ideals of democracy. To add to the debacle, the vote tax costs taxpayers an estimated $27 million per year. Considering the size of the yearly budget, this is a decidedly puny expense to pick on. I for one, do not believe that saving every man, woman, and child in Canada less than $1 per year will help us out of a recession. To that end, I feel that this cut is a purely political move by Harpers’ Conservatives in an effort to undermine the ability of the opposition to challenge his hopes for a majority when the next election rolls around.

However, on the other side of the argument, I cannot understand the incessant push by the opposition for the government to immeidately roll out a stimulus package for our economy. As of yet, the world has no idea what, if anything, a multi-billion dollar injection of borrowed funds will do for the economy in the long term. Our currently projected defecit is a manageable one, and the two major industries in Canada that are in the most need at the moment – the auto and forestry industries – are almost wholly dependent on the economic situation of the United States, one that an injection of cash into our economy would have little effect on. Just because the rest of the G7 have opted to go hundreds of billions of dollars into debt doesn’t mean that Canada needs to follow suit. If we instead attempt to ride out the crisis and make cuts where necessary to minimize our defecit in the intermittent years, our position will be a rosy one in comparison to others when the world economy finally rebounds.

Under threat of the opposition toppling his party, Stephan Harper decided this morning to drop the cuts to the vote-tax from the budget update. Of course, this will not stop the threat of a coalition government, as the opposition cannot back down now, lest they admit that their threat was a response to the vote-tax cuts in the first place. The threat still stands, with the opposition parties demanding economic stimulus immediately, the Conservatives promising it in their full budget due shortly after the new year, and the next vote that could topple the current government scheduled for Monday, December 8. Meanwhile, Conservative MP’s continue to thrash the opposition’s demands, claiming that “the Liberals, the separatists and the socialists, all of whom were resoundingly rejected in the last election, want to overturn that election and impose a coalition that they promised they would never entertain.” Transport Minister John Baird echoed these sentiments, saying that “We’re tremendously disappointed that the opposition parties didn’t share our view that you lead by example. This is all about trying to overturn the results of the last election campaign.”

While I am whole-heartedly dissapointed in all parties of our Government, who instead of pointing fingers and laying blame should be working on solving this problem, I have to put most of my ill feelings on the Tories for their incessant use of partisan scare tactics to rally Canadians to their side of the argument. I would like to think that in this day and age, our Government could be above this kind of crap and instead present real, compelling arguments in favour of their election.

Further Reading:
Use Every Tool at Your Disposal – The Globe and Mail, November 29, 2008

Harper Moves to Avoid Political Showdown – CBC News, November 28, 2009

Won’t Change Economic Update: Flaherty – CBC News, November 28, 2009

Conservatives Drop Party-Funding Cuts from Key Motion – CBC News, November 28, 2009

Tories Blink on Party Funding – Canwest News Service, November 30, 2008

Conservatives Scrap Plan to Cut Party Subsidies – CBC News, November 30, 2008

Windows Backup Doesn’t Play Nicely with TrueCrypt

I keep both my PC and laptop hard drives protected with full disk AES encryption using free software from the TrueCrypt Foundation. Not because I have anything to hide, or have done anything overwhelmingly illegal, or am planning a government coup; I protect my equipment because I’m a big nerd. Cryptography has always been an interest of mine, and a couple courses on the subject along with some reading have fuelled that interest to the point where I like to experiment with cryptography in my spare time.

As a responsible computer user, I also like to keep backups of my important files, namely my schoolwork, my code library, and my digital music collection. The easiest way that I have found to run timely, dependable backups on a Windows system is to use the built in backup tool (often only installed by default on the more expensive distributions of Windows). It uses a handy shadow-copy technique that allows it to backup a file even if it is currently in use, and supports some excellent compression and incremental backup techniques that reduce the space required for full system backups. Short of installing a RAID array in my personal machine, I feel that this is the easiest and most secure way of creating full machine backups in a timely and non-intrusive manner.

Unfortunately, as I have found in the last couple of days, Windows Backup doesn’t play nicely with a disk that has been encrypted by TrueCrypt. I recently purchased a portable 250GB harddrive to save my backups to. It came with some backup software already installed, but frankly, the included app was slow as sin and crashed twice before I even started backing my drive up. So i reformatted the drive and decided on Windows Backup instead.

The drive sits on my desk, plugged into my machine, silently protecting my data. Now, given my full-disk encryption security policy, it would be illogical to have unencrypted backups of my machine. That pretty much negates any security provided by the disk encryption scheme, so I’d like to have this drive encrypted. TrueCrypt works by encrypting the entire hard drive, including the file tree, which means that Windows (or any other operating system for that manner) cannot see any of its contents until it is ‘mounted’ by the TrueCrypt software. Once mounted, the drive appears as a virtual drive, and for all intents and purposes, works exactly like a standard physical disk. Except when using Windows Backup.

When setting up a backup, Windows asks you where it should put the backup, and allows you to scan for appropriate physical or network locations to save data to. This scan refuses to recognize the mounted external drive as a legitimate disk, even though the rest of Windows is ok with it. The scan also prevents you from saving a backup to the disk being backed up, which is a pain because it would provide an easily scripted work around to the problem. Windows help gives no further information, except by saying that Windows Backup does not support removable thumb drives, which is an outright lie, because I can choose my 8GB thumbstick with no problems, but it doesnt have the capacity that I require.

Now, as TrueCrypt acts as a software layer between Windows’ I/O functions and the physically encrypted drive, encrypting and decrypting all traffic that passes through it, I would imagine that their software simply hasn’t enabled some obscure API call that Windows relies on to determine if a drive is an appropriate backup location. So the issue is probably with TrueCrypt and not with Windows, but in my mind, Windows should allow users who know what they’re doing to put their backups wherever they please, because frankly, there’s no excuse for this tomfoolery.

Since I cannot seem to coerce Windows into allowing me to use my encrypted drive, the only option I have left that maintains my security policy is to use a Visual Basic app that my roommate wrote for fun. It performs backups of any folder on your machine to any other folder (networked or local), and supports a full suite of encryption and compression methods, based on a couple of open sourced libraries that he has incorporated. The problem with his work around is that it does not (to the best of my knowledge) take advantage of Windows’ shadow copy feature, and thus will not be able to back up files that are in use at the time of the backup.

For the time being, I will continue my experimentation, and should I get it to work, I will most certainly post a copy of his backup utility for all to use. If anybody with a similar setup has found a workaround to Windows’ incessant pickiness when choosing backup locations, or knows of a decent encrypted backup solution that I haven’t covered, I would appreciate the heads up.

Cheers,

Jon

Democracy? Think Again

This evening, a friend linked me to a post on Jason Hanley’s excellent blog. A graduate of both the University of Waterloo and of Wilfrid Laurier University, Hanley wrote this post regarding the results of the Canadian federal election a couple of weeks ago.

As Ontario voters will know, during the last provincial election, we held a referendum to decide whether or not to replace the existing first past the post voting system that exists in Ontario. Unfortunately, the process was poorly advertised, the question was horribly worded, the conditions for the referendum to pass were too strict, and at the time of the election, most people didn’t understand the issues enough to affect a change to our current system.

The following chart, taken from Hanley’s post, clearly shows the need for a new electoral system in Canada:

Canadian Federal Election Results 2008

The implications of these election results are clearly summarized into a number of alarming points:

• Only 58% of Canadians actually voted
• The number of seats received by each party versus the number of seats deserved by each party according to a proportional (fair) voting system is wildly skewed
• In particular, the Green party received no seats at all, while the Bloc Quebecois received a ridiculously disproportionate 16% of all seats.

It seems clear to me that our system is beyond broken. Of all the democratic countries in the world, only Britain, the United States, and Ourselves continue to use this outdated electorate model. Besides the non-proportional results that our system gives, its other problems can be easily summarized:

• In order to get elected, parties have to maintain not only a strong support base, but one with a small geographic distribution. This means that parties like the Greens, who received 21% of popular support cannot get a single seat, because they don’t have enough voters in any single riding to win.
• In theory, the system is designed for a election with only two parties, as in the United States. In that case, the winner of each riding needs 50% +1 popular votes to win, and a clear majority results in every election. However, with 4 parties in a riding, the number to win drops to 25% +1, meaning that the vast number of votes are essentially unrecognized, and minority governments are common.
• Because of their clustered geographic support, the Bloc Quebecois (a separatist party running in a federal election with no representatives outside of the province of Quebec) regularily win the majority of seats in Quebec, and hold a strong presence in the house due to the high population density in that province. This is nothing short of an absurdity, as they do not represent the wishes of any Canadian not born and raised within Quebec.
• Although there are no studies (that I’ve seen) to support this conjecture, I would hazard a guess that the vast number of Canadians didn’t bother to vote because they saw no clear leader in any of the election preceedings. The entire thing was marginally successful power grab by Stephen Harpers’ government, at a time when the Liberal party was perceived to be too weak to prevent an easy majority win by the Conservatives.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this ‘democracy’ that we live in is merely a sham. If you prefer not to look behind the curtain, continue as you were and allow your ‘government’ to dictate to you how they will run your country. But if you’d rather to wag the tail, head over to fairvote.ca to learn more about the possibilities of electoral reform in Canada, and why it is desperately needed.

I leave you with one of the best skits that the members of the Royal Canadian Air Farce have created in many moons.

Enjoy,

Jon.

Post-Midterms Class Roundup

So midterms are finished, and life goes on. As much as I’d love this post to be tech-oriented, showcasing some brilliant new software that I’ve written in my spare time, the truth is, I haven’t had enough spare time lately in which to write any software of value.

The small exception to that claim is this app, a neat little VB and XML oriented program that allows you to read an iTunes playlist file (as exported to XML), and auto-copy all of the songs in that playlist to any folder you wish, preserving the artist/album/song file structure.

I wrote the program to fill my brand new blackberry with a selection of excellent songs, because the built in Roxio media manager is great for pictures, but slow as sin when it comes to larger media files. After writing it, I realized that it could also be a useful piracy tool; but then again, a hammer could be a positively fantastic homicide tool in the wrong hands too. Of all the libraries I’ve ever written, my .NET XML parser has spawned off more crappy little programs, making it possibly the most useful bit of code I’ve created.

Other than that, my coding has lately been limited to some cool graphics stuff in with OpenGL and C++. So far we’ve constructed a classic spinning cube implementation, complete with a custom view pipeline that implements transformations, dynamic shading, and back face culling in software. The next topic that we’re studying is texturing, and eventually, ray tracing and shaders.

While none of my assignments for this course have been interesting enough to warrant posting, I’ll definetly up my final project for the course, which at this point, is probably going to be a 3D terrain generator, similar to that of Sim City 4 fame.