Earlier this week, I stumbled across the third episode of a new podcast called The 100 that was all about issues local to Waterloo Region, politics included. One of the primary issues that was discussed in the episode was the state of public transit here in Waterloo Region, which naturally led into a discussion about the proposed Light Rail Transit system (LRT). Listening to the piece, I realized just how uninformed I am about the proposal. Since the LRT has been a divisive issue since its introduction, and since there are so many misconceptions surrounding the project, I decided to try and learn as much about it as I could. In the process, I will try to dispel some of the myths surrounding the proposal.
A little bit of background
The proposed route of the LRT (Click to Enlarge)
According to the Region of Waterloo’s Rapid Transit website, the LRT will be a system of public transportation that forms a backbone for attractive, inexpensive public transit that runs through our city centre. It will be constructed in two phases: in the first, a light rail system will be built between Conestoga Mall in Waterloo and the Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener, with a bus route running from Fairview Park mall to the Ainslie Street terminal in Cambridge. In the second phase, the bus line to Cambridge will be replaced with a continuation of the light rail transit line.
The entire project will cost the region an estimated $790 million to build, with an additional $1 million per year set aside to help build transit ridership in Cambridge for the first ten years of the project. The operating cost overhead added to our existing public transit system will result in a property tax increase of about $40 per year per household. The region is currently seeking funding for the project from the federal and provincial governments, who have promised up to 2/3 of the required monies in past budgets and announcements. Construction of the first phase of the LRT is expected to begin in 2012, with the line slated to open in late 2014.
Why the focus on the city centre? When many people hear about the plans for the LRT, their first reaction is that we shouldn’t pour such a massive amount of money into a transit system that will ‘really only benefit those who live or work near the city centre.’ The planned line runs north to south along King Street for the majority of its distance, and many see it as a system that will benefit only a minority of our population. So why the focus on the city centre?
Basically, the region is landlocked. According to the regulations of the province of Ontario’s Places to Grow initiative, by 2015, at least 40% of all annual residential development within the urban areas of Waterloo Region must take place in the urban centres of our existing cities. The regulations further stipulate that we must intensify these core areas so that our cities demonstrate a minimum of 200 people and jobs per hectare of land. This means an end to the sprawling suburbs that we’ve been building to accommodate our expanding population for the past 50 years. The new focus is on building upward instead of outward.
The Region estimates that when our census data is combined with these new provincial stipulations, we can expect an influx of around 100,000 people to our city centre over the course of the next two decades; likely more once the LRT and other urban renewal projects are completed. This growth will exacerbate the traffic problem that is already present in the area, and we will need to come up with some way to relieve that congestion, lest the city grind to a halt.
So what about building more roads or increasing the number of buses? Unfortunately, due to the less than ideal urban planning of years past, there really isn’t any more room for roads in the downtown areas of Kitchener and Waterloo, unless we demolish existing commercial and residential buildings in order to accommodate road widening. While this alone is an undesirable solution, wider roads also tend to reduce the desirability of a neighbourhood, as they increase noise and traffic, and present a physical barrier to pedestrian travel. Since the overall goal of this project is to increase the density of our downtown core, more or wider roads are not the answer. Another consideration is parking availability. Many people currently avoid our downtown areas because parking is at a premium. A fast, cost-effective transit system would allow both consumers and employees to reach downtown shops and workplaces without having to bring their cars with them.
A GRT Bus
All right, so we need public transit for the downtown core. How about buses? According to Grand River Transit, bus service alone cannot continue to provide enough capacity for the projected increases in regional population and transit ridership. The existing iXpress system runs a route very similar to that of the proposed LRT system, and is already running at near capacity. Simply increasing the number of buses on the road will lead only to further congestion of our busy roadways, as buses share a lane with other traffic, and are constantly stopping and starting. Traffic congestion already makes our bus system unreliable, and thus undesirable to the vast majority of our population. A transit system like the LRT that travels within a dedicated lane can avoid this problem.
Finally, unlike widened lanes or increased bus frequency, a permanent LRT installation is a quiet, efficient, and attractive public transit solution that tends to increase property values and standard of living along its route. Should this claim seem incredulous, I urge you to read about an example case study from the City of Portland, Oregon.
Will this thing actually be used? According to the Region, transit models developed in association with the Universities of Waterloo and Toronto show that ridership throughout the downtown core can be expected to nearly triple with an LRT system in place. The same model predicted a ridership of 27,000 passengers per day on opening (about three times as many as the iXpress route currently services), with an expected increase to 56,000 passengers per day by 2031. Although the estimated growth in ridership may seem large, one must keep in mind the estimated population influx of over 100,000 residents to the area over the same period of time.
Those who live outside of the area directly surrounding the installation will also be able to use it. The region has proposed three park and ride facilities, and a number of cross-city bus routes similar to the current iXpress system that will run east to west, ferrying passengers to and from the LRT backbone. Ideally, the combination of high speed bus service and the high speed LRT installation will create exactly the kind of desirable public transit system that solves the congestion problems that we face while urging the inner city growth that is required by provincial law.
However, some people aren’t happy with the plan…
The T4ST is a group opposed to the plan
As is to be expected on any large infrastructure project, some members of our community are unhappy with the proposed plan. Unfortunately, many of the fears on which they are basing their assessment of the plan are simply unfounded, and the dissidents show a lack of willing to educate themselves on the issues at hand before commenting. For instance, a petition organized by the Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST) claims that
“The LRT will turn King Street and other streets into rail corridors. For much of the route, King will be reduced to one lane of car traffic each way. There will be no parallel parking, and left-turns will be impossible. This will reduce accessibility and have a negative impact on many businesses.”
In point of fact, the vast majority of King Street is already one lane of car traffic in each direction, a situation that will not change. While it is true that parallel parking is likely to be removed along much of the route, larger parking structures like the one built across from The Shops at Waterloo Town Square can easily handle the displaced vehicles, and many people will use the LRT to get downtown instead of bringing their cars at all. Left turns will be no harder to make than they are now, as LRT trains will always be given the right of way at intersections, allowing them to move through quickly without disrupting traffic. While the construction process may temporarily reduce accessibility to many businesses along the route, the Region feels that its effects will be more than offset by the increased levels of pedestrian traffic that the LRT system will bring to the downtown core, and the increased population density that the project will encourage along its route.
Although the wording of their petition may be a little bit off base, the Technical Studies page of the T4ST’s website is a little bit better written, and is also worth addressing. In particular, it points out that the estimates of initial ridership and eventual rider growth increased wildly between two studies commissioned by the Region, one from 2005, and the other from 2009. Unfortunately, the claim of the T4ST does not take into account the actual conclusions of the 2005 study (*.pdf), as expressed in the following excerpt:
As points of comparison, the Edmonton LRT system, which is similar in size to the proposed Region of Waterloo system, reports 36,000 daily boardings (track length 12.5 km and 10 stations) with a transit service population of 660,000. By 2041, the Regional transit system and service population assumptions would be similar to Edmonton today. The Portland LRT system (serving a much larger 1.25 M. population) reports 80,000 daily boardings or 1,300 boards per km and 1,500 boards per station. For the Region of Waterloo LRT line, boards per km are estimated at between 900 and 1,900 (2011 to 2041), while boards per station are estimated at between 1,300 and 2,800 (2011 to 2041).
This paragraph rather clearly shows that even with the lower estimates of the 2005 study, the projected ridership of the proposed system was still found to eventually be comparable to similar systems in both Edmonton, Alberta and Portland, Oregon. On the same page, the T4ST also points out that the 2005 study showed that an expanded bus system would cost far less than a light rail system, and thus made much more economic sense for the Region. However, the group discounts the additional benefits of the LRT that the study also revealed. Quoting again from the 2005 study:
The TransDec model is typically used to evaluate traditional transportation projects and is not well suited to evaluate a complex initiative such as the Region’s [rapid public transit] initiative… The results indicate that although costs of LRT are higher than [bus rapid transit systems] BRT, the benefits associated with LRT are also much greater than BRT and that LRT is much more likely to achieve the benefits associated with the Regional Growth Management Strategy than BRT.
Unfortunately, careful reading of both the T4ST’s website and the studies in question reveal the formers’ tendency towards misinformation. Because the Region’s 2005 study addresses most of the concerns raised by the T4ST, those who agree with their concerns are urged to read it for themselves. The Tri-Cities Transit Action Group (triTAG) also runs an excellent page dedicated to dispelling the myths around the proposed light rail system.
Well, I’m Convinced Everything that I’ve been able to find about the proposed system makes it seem like a great idea, and one that will finally make our public transportation system attractive to the vast majority of our citizens. It’s no secret that urban sprawl of the kind that we’ve witnessed throughout south-western Ontario increases living costs, raises health concerns, and leads to more time spent commuting than with family. It’s also no secret that while Grand River Transit tries its best to provide timely and reliable bus service, it falls short at times. By avoiding congestion and helping to construct dense communities centred around the service, the light rail transit line will allow us to conform to the demands of the province’s Places to Grow initiative, and will ultimately result in a community that is more attractive and easier to navigate for all of our citizens.
Our spineless excuse for a government has publicly presented the results of the Copenhagen Accord on Climate Change negotiations. Once again, our Conservative government lead by the Right Honourable Stephen Harper has proven that it just doesn’t give a shit.
According to the Globe and Mail, Canada has officially agreed to reduce it’s carbon emissions by 17% from 2005 levels over the next 10 years. Unfortunately, our government still hasn’t managed to meet their 2006 goal of reducing our emissions to 3% lower than 1990 levels.
Dave Martin, a spokesman with the Greenpeace foundation has pointed out that this new target will actually increase our emissions levels by 2.5% over the levels that the Conservative government’s as of yet unaccomplished 2006 goal would have yielded.
We’re heading in exactly the opposite direction that we need to head,” Mr. Martin said. “Not only have they reneged on the target that they adopted a couple of years ago, they have also failed to put in place the regulations that they promised last year – Dave Martin, Greanpeace
While the shockingly nonsensical stance that Greenpeace takes on nuclear technology gives me very little reason to trust anything that the group publishes, Mr. Martin has written some excellent pieces covering the Harper government’s lack of commitment to the Copenhagen process.
But perhaps more worrying than the alleged role that the United State’s own climate policy has played in crafting our targets is the lack of hindsight in the following statement from Conservative Environment Minister Jim Prentice:
Mr. Prentice pointed out the major emitters such as China, Brazil, India and the United States didn’t have obligations to cut emissions under the Kyoto accord. He hopes this time it’s different, and that there will soon be news of emission cuts from countries that haven’t yet announced their own targets. – Bill Graveland, The Globe and Mail
Jim – I hate to have to be the one to break it to you, but your government didn’t cut emissions either. In fact, during the last election, it crippled the Liberal Party’s attempt to put a real plan for cutting our emissions in place. Way to set an example, buddy.
Lately, the big political news in Canada has been Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s third prorogation of parliament in as many years. The opposition parties were quick to accuse him of using the move to delay inquiry into the Afghan detainee abuse scandal, while various Canadian pundits have spent the last week putting in their two cents regarding the issue. Those who read into the situation will find many opinions; very few of them are in favour of the Prime Minister, and many of them call his use of prorogation abusive, using his response to last year’s coalition dispute as evidence. For those who need a refresher, The Globe and Mail’s Rex Murphy paints an excellent picture of the effect of that catastrophe on the make-up of Canadian Parliament in this piece.
Personally, I am of the opinion that the leaders of all four major parties are clowns, and that we ought to consider starting over again. Perhaps if we try really hard, we might be able to elect some people who work for more than just sound bites and care about the future of our country beyond the next four years. Since that’s unlikely to happen, I console myself with the writings of comedian Rick Mercer and musician Matthew Good. Together, they pretty much sum up my thoughts on the matter. It is funny though, that while the Liberal Party’s website sports several videos and pressreleases commenting on the closure of Parliament, the Conservative Party’s site is just the opposite. There isn’t a comment to be found on the matter. Perhaps it’s better that Harper just keep his mouth shut on the issue. He’s already got everything exactly the way that he wants it.
The following is a handy list of a few of the things that I’ve been keeping an eye on lately.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement:
If you haven’t been reading slashdot lately, you might not know that representatives from the governments of most of the developed world have recently been participating in some top-secret meetings aimed at establishing something called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA for short. Now, according to Michael Geist, the proposed agreement actually has very little to do with counterfeiting, and an awful lot to do with copyright protections for big content – the same guys who influenced the USA’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Based on leaked information, Geist has pieced together a very good explanation of the proposed agreement as an online slide show that I snagged from TVO’s Search Engine blog:
Now as you might expect, quite a few people got uppity when they found out that the government was participating in secret meetings with the aim of establishing a global copyright treaty that would bypass the house of commons and fly in the face of last summer’s copyright consultations. So many people in fact, that NDP MP Charlie Angus questioned Industry Minister Tony Clement about it during yesterday’s question period. Thanks to the work of Fair Copyright for Canada, a video of their exchange is available on YouTube:
I too am pretty incensed at the government for keeping this all as hush-hush as they have. As I understand, copyright isn’t even a law in Canada – it is in fact a right, and one that must be exercised by the right holder. In my opinion, it is not the business of the government or of the Internet at large to take care of exercising this right for the holder. Further, much of the leaked information about this law points to it having a clause that bans internet access to any person who has been accused (read: not convicted) of breaking copyright three times. If implemented, this clause would be open to abuse, and far too wide-ranging for my comfort.
Can Software Be Patented?
On a related note, the Supreme Court in the United States is apparently deciding something or other about the legitimacy of software patents this week. While I admit that I haven’t really kept up with the issue enough to appreciate its gravity, the resulting press has lead me to this incredible article on Groklaw that provides a beautiful explanation of Computation Theory and its implications on Patent law.
Of course, I learned all of the stuff in the article in school, but have never seen it explained as simply or applied as practically as the author does in the article. For those who are looking for a printed copy that will persist link rot, a PDF of the article is available here on my server. It’s a lengthy read, but most certainly worth your time if you are at all interested in computers, their history, and its implications on modern law.
Praise is a Strange Thing:
Another lengthy read, this article from New York magazine really got me thinking. It deals with the types of praise that parents give their children, and the implications of that praise throughout their lives. Essentially, there are two kinds of praise: Telling your child that he accomplished his goals because he is smart, and telling your child that she accomplished her goals because she worked hard at doing so. The former gives a false sense of achievement that doesn’t provide a framework for what to do in cases of failure. As a result, children praised in this manner tend to avoid things that they do not naturally do well at, even though they may be accomplished in other areas of life. A related article that I found over on Pixel Poppers considers the implications of this kind of research on video games. Specifically, the author discusses the ‘fake achievement’ that RPGs provide players when their characters level up in lieu of actual skills, and asks if this alone could be responsible for problems encountered in other areas of life.
Back to Studying:
Well, that’s about it for me. I’m back to procrastinating studying for finals.
This week, Arstechnica ran a piece detailing the history of copyright reform in Canada, and providing coverage on the government’s current efforts to revive the program. It seems that after the blowoutsurroundingBill C-61, the government has decided to at least pretend to listen to citizens this time instead of simply bowing to the interests of foreign industry groups. To that end, the government has launched a website where Canadians can follow the process, and submit their own thoughts on the issues at hand. The new website is open until September 13, 2009, and puts five questions to participants:
How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?
My answers to the survey went something like this:
Copyright laws effect every person with a desire to utilize physical or digital media in this country. While current laws are reasonably fair, they tend to be applicable primarily to physical medium, and lack use cases that address digital distribution, storage, and usage schemes. The changing landscape of media consumption calls for a modernization of copyright law that should be centered on preserving relics of our culture and society for future generations to freely enjoy.
The primary purpose of copyright law is to ensure that artists’ contributions to society stand the test of time, while allowing the artist to make a living from their works for a reasonable period of time. To that end, any media that has ceased to be distributed by rights holders should be released into the public domain. This includes music, television, video, and written word that is no longer producing a profit for it’s owners and may otherwise be lost to future generations. How bankrupt would our society be without access to the works of classical playwrights, composers, and painters? At the same time, rights holders should be prevented from charging exceptionally high fees for back-catalogue media, as the digital age ensures that the storage and distribution costs of aging content are minimal.
Innovation and creativity are largely driven by exposure to and inspiration from the works of others. To that end, Canadian copyright law should call for explicit bans on Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes, which serve only to hinder the availability of media and to frustrate honest users of such. It would be beneficial for lawmakers to remember that any lock can be broken given enough resources and time; and that the only purpose of a lock, be it on your front door or on your digital media, is to keep honest people honest. Those who want through the locks will accomplish as much in short order, while those who are unnecessarily prevented from using their media by poorly designed or no longer supported DRM systems are left frustrated and are given incentive to hang up their honesty all together.
It is unfortunate that most industry groups consider the fostering of innovation and creativity to be at odds with the increase of competition and investment in the marketplace when in truth, a healthy marketplace with reasonably short copyright durations can serve to directly increase the former. Current copyright schemes assign rights to their holders for a duration of life plus 50 years. In an age when immortal corporations own the majority of such rights, these laws actually serve to reduce competition in the marketplace. If companies knew that their works were to enter the public domain within a reasonable period of 10 to 20 years, they would be forced to continually develop better products to stay relevant in the marketplace. This would create an atmosphere of nimble companies that are forced to release new products on a regular basis that are not simply incremental updates to existing properties.
With a global digital economy in mind, changes to copyright law need to consider the vast power of the internet as a medium for communication and distribution. Current licensing laws prevent many internet properties that distribute media from working to their full potential over international borders. Many sites that stream video or audio, or allow visitors to purchase media, are vastly limited in countries other than that where the site is based. To this end, copyright reforms should concentrate on breaking down international boundaries and utilizing the internet to its full potential. Furthermore, reforms should focus on doing away with laws based on digital media, and look constantly toward the future with digital distribution schemes in mind.
I would urge any Canadians who stumble upon this to check out the survey and to submit their opinions to the government. We as citizens should encourage this kind of mass public consultation whenever applicable in an effort to force our politicians to represent our interests over those of foreign lobbyist groups.
It’s no secret that the Detroit Big Three auto manufacturers are in serious trouble. GM and Chrysler in particular have admitted to being in danger of running out of liquidity within the next few months. Now I’m no economist, nor do I have a business degree, and frankly, I’m not really qualified to talk on the issue at all. However, while researching the issue for myself, I found a few interesting points that I think need considering before anybody forms an opinion about the proposed loans.
When the bailout bill failed to pass a vote in the United States Congress yesterday evening, a lot of people blamed the failure on the refusal of the Democrats to mandate a salary cut for UAW workers as a condition of the bailout. Republicans were particularily insistent on this condtion, and news outlets ran a story comparing an alleged $71 hourly wage for big three workers to the $49 hourly wage of Japanese auto workers. The true breakdown of the $71/hour figure can be seen in this chart from the New York Times:
NY Times Breakdown of Auto Manufacturers Wages
As we can see from the ‘Legacy Costs’ section of the chart, supporting an aging retiree base accounts for much of the difference between domestic and foreign auto manufacturer wages. This is essentially a fixed cost that isn’t going away unless the Big Three forfeit on their pension promises to retired workers and their spouses.
This article by author Malcolm Gladwell explains the concept of the ‘dependence ratio;’ that is, the number of dependent members of a set of people to the number of active and working members of that same set. The concept is generally applied to countries as a function of birth rate: Simply put, when a country experiences a massive downturn in birthrate, everybody benefits in the short term because the same number of people in the work force have to support fewer dependents with their tax dollars. It works in the other way as well – right now in Canada, we have an aging baby boomer workforce that will soon retire to be replaced by my generation. When that happens, we will have a massive number of dependents in a system with far fewer workers, raising our dependence ratio and by and large, making my generation far less liquid than my parents.
The concept of a dependence ratio explains a lot in economies and societies, but can also be applied to large companies in a pension crunch like the Big Three auto makers. Basically, the pensions for all of the domestic auto maker’s retirees are a linear function. More retirees means more in yearly pension payments, and these companies have a lot of retirees because they’ve been around for a long time. Foreign auto makers have far fewer retirees to support by a long shot, which explains the ‘Legacy Costs’ section of the above chart. Take that out, and domestic auto workers cost about the same as foreign ones do.
But that isn’t the end of the problem. Free market economics state that to stay competitive, and thus profitable, a company must continually increase the quality of the product that it produces while decreasing the cost of production in order to raise profit margins. Manufacturing companies decrease the cost of production by automating processes so that it takes fewer man hours to assemble the same product. The domestic auto makers have done a great job of this, and now employ far fewer people than they used to, and have increased the profit margins on their vehicles significantly since ye olden days.
However, when a company is responsible for the pensions of all of its retirees, this process of improvement actually works against the company – they decrease the number of employees, whose working hours have to pay for the pensions of all of the retirees, thus increasing their dependence ratio by a massive amount. If a company sells cars, it can express the profit made on a sale in terms of the number of man hours that went into creating that car. If fewer man hours went into making that car each year by improving the process, but more retirees had to be paid from those man hours, the ‘wage’ of every worker is artificially increased every year by the overhead of pensions, even though the worker never sees an extra dime.
The only way to offset this artificial wage inflation is to increase the profit margin of your cars proportionally to the rising dependence ratio. Enter the credit crisis: A catastrophe in no way the fault of the auto makers has decreased public demand for new cars. Sales are at their lowest point across the board since the early 80′s. Yes, even Toyota and Honda and all of those other car companies are experiencing decreased sales – however, they’re more prepared to handle it, because they don’t support a fleet of retirees nearly the size of the domestic manufacturers. While the market share of the Big Three is lower than ever (47% this year), I would argue that this number has been falling for some time now, and that these companies have been taking steps to deal with that fact. Only the rise of this credit crisis has been able to push the numbers so far south that there is no recovering from the implications.
So the question arises: even if we do bail these companies out, can they turn things around and become profitable again, or will we be throwing money at a hopeless situation? The market share situation certainly doesn’t look promising:
Big Three Market Share
If nobody wants to buy the product that Detroit is making, then how can they ever overcome their liquidity problems? In all liklihood, without a massive restructuring program that cuts costs by billions a year, they cannot. Remember that even if employee wages stay the same (and they don’t in the real world), the cost of supporting all of those retirees is linear – it will only go up barring some ridiculous epidemic that kills off all of those retired auto workers and their spouses. Even with an immediate cash injection, there would have to be a massive program in place to immediately cut costs before the companies simply burn through the provided money.
Unlike most of the ‘blogosphere,’ I don’t pretend to have the answers. Sure, we could let them sink, but then we’d have thousands out of jobs, and the effect on the economies of both Canada and the USA would be disasterous. On the other hand, if these bailout packages go through, are we just pissing away hard-earned taxpayer money? What I do know is this: When corporations are made responsible for the well being of their employees post-retirement, they reach a point at which they can no longer be competitive in the free marketplace. This is what governments are for, and why a social safety net should be in place that provides health care and pensions to every worker from an account that every company in the country pays into yearly as a part of their corporate taxes. That kind of nationalised pension system would remove the pressure on successful companies to support their retired workforce and let them get on with the business of being profitable, the core purpose of every corporation ever established.
Oh, and by the way: If you were hoping to cash in on a pension from one of the Big Three in the next 10 years, I hope you have a savings account, ’cause you’re gonna need it.
Cheers,
Jon
Edit: Fixed images so that they didn’t ruin my tables. Unfortunately, now my text alignment is disgusting. Whatever.
For those who might have missed the action last night on CBC’s The National with Peter Mansbridge, our dear Prime Minister Mr. Stephen Harper dropped by to have a one on one with Mansbridge about the current economic and political crisis in Canada. You can catch the video at the CBC website. In it, Mansbridge gives Harper the beat down as only a bleeding heart liberal journalist can. The fact that he can say what he did to the PM’s face and still have a job the next day makes me proud to be a Canadian.
Of course, that feeling is largely offset by the shame that the majority of Canadians probably didn’t even know or care that the Prime Minister was speaking on national television last night, and didn’t bother to tune in and see what he had to say.
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.
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.
With the Canadian Federal Election less than a week away, I figure it’s important to bring a refreshing view to the campaigns of our various candidates. This video was aired on the Rick Mercer Report a couple weeks ago, and is worth a watch:
Speaking of Elections, the latest Lispop projections (As of October 8th) are giving Stephan Harper’s Conservatives 138/308 seats in the House, which is roughly 45% – A Solid Minority Government, which is great for hippies like me.
To switch elections for just a moment, Rolling Stone Magazine published two excellent articles this month regarding John McCain, and Sarah Palin. Keep in mind that they’re a tad biased, and a definite example of the much rumoured “Liberal Media,” but fantastic reading nonetheless. Biting, entertaining, and unapologetically honest, these are articles that traditional news outlets would be afraid to run.
On this week’s SlightlySauced, Dana, Dave, Jake, Jon, and Kayla discuss crazy cat people and the pets that they’re crazy about. We start off with an article from Slate Magazine that shines a light on animal rescue agencies, followed by a discussion of our own experiences adopting and owning pets. It’s a hilarious show, so check it out! Download:Direct Link L […]
Jon
The primary contributor to and maintainer of the site
Steph
My girlfriend, who sometimes posts her writings
Downloads
Charles Darwin
An essay that I wrote about Charles Darwin’s contributions to Science and Society for a history class at WLU
DRM Essay
An essay that I wrote for an Ethics class I took at Laurier that examines DRM, the USA DMCA, and the failures of both as security against piracy
iTunes Playlist Exporter
Exports all of the songs in any iTunes playlist file to any location on your computer. Originally written to load a blackberry or other mp3 player with music.
MAX 3D Engine
A not quite finished 3D engine written in C++ and OpenGL for my CP411 computer graphics course.
Ted Rogers
A paper that I wrote about Ted Rogers’ personal and business pursuits for a history class at WLU
The Battle of the Atlantic
An essay exploring the lessons learned by both sides during the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. The essay explores the military and industrial capabilities of the combatants, the technology behind the Enigma and Allied code breaking efforts at Bletchley P
Tile-Based Map Editor
Written in VB for my top-down XNA rpg, allows easy creation of 2D tile-based maps, and exports to both a PNG pallete and an XML map description. Use it or modify it as you see fit.
Bus Error
Jake Billo’s excellent weblog, always good for a laugh or some handy info.
Matthew Good Online
The excellent (although sometimes jaded) blog of Canadian musician Matthew Good.
MusikPolice @ Last.fm
My profile over at Last.fm, one of the few social networking sites that I use.
The Linux Experiment
Seven Windows users with varying levels of Linux experience attempt to run it various distributions on their primary computers for four months. Hilarity ensues.
TylerBurton.ca
The blog of fellow computer enthusiast Tyler Burton, who uses it primarily as a showcase of software he’s written.
