Canadian Election

When I first moved north and experienced a Canadian election, I was bowled over. Short, focused, not breaking the bank, they were an exercise in concision and execution. This one, however, has me rethinking.

I’m not claiming the interminable election cycle of the States is the right model, but there must be some option we could imagine between the two extremes, where candidates aren’t forever campaigning on the one hand or candidates forced, on the other hand, to get their message out in a short six weeks that doesn’t adequately reveal what their made of.

Canada’s election isn’t long enough to smoke out the pretense, to unwind the spin, and give people a chance to understand the implications of what’s being said. The country has no time to catch its breath before voting. Ready, set, go vote. Like in a basketball game (oops, wrong sport), the winning team is the one who has the momentum.

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I started this blog originally because I was so shocked that Canadians didn’t understand their own system of government. The Prime Minister, who was pro-roguing Parliament to prevent a coalition, had somehow advanced the notion that he’d been directly elected Prime Minister by the people, as if he were a President. Well, now the chickens have come home to roost.

With everyone thinking they are electing a Prime Minister, people are voting for whom they like best, and that seems to be Jack Layton, the avuncular head of the New Democratic Party. The quality of the local candidates hardly seems to matter.

And yet, there’s something to love about this development. For those who see Harper as evil incarnate, he’s now reaping what he’s sown. Having planted the idea that the Prime Minister is really a President and doesn’t serve at the will of Parliament, Harper is discovering that Canadians are now voting that way, and he is suffering for it. Ah yes, what goes around comes around. Act like a President, and maybe you’ll be defeated like one.

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Meanwhile south of the border where its always morning in America, Democracy is on the skids. This from the editorial in the NY Times of April 27:

Less than a year before the 2012 presidential voting begins, Republican legislatures and governors across the country are rewriting voting laws to make it much harder for the young, the poor and African-Americans - groups that typically vote Democratic - to cast a ballot.

Spreading fear of a nonexistent flood of voter fraud, they are demanding that citizens be required to show a government-issued identification before they are allowed to vote. Republicans have been pushing these changes for years, but now more than two-thirds of the states have adopted or are considering such laws.

The ongoing problem for Democracy continues to be that it is difficult to find democrats. After all, once you’re in power, who really wants the headaches of democracy?

Belief in Climate Change

Could it be that our previous blog entry—about Canadian regulators rejecting efforts to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news—explains the discrepancy between how citizens in the U.S. and Canada view climate change? A poll was recently released (Feb 23) comparing the two countries.

Is there solid evidence that the earth is getting warmer? 80% of Canadians think so. Americans? 58%. Now I’m not saying that the other 42% of Americans are watching too much Fox News (that wasn’t one of the polling questions) but I’m also not willing to say they’re reading the New York Times.

What causal factors determine one’s views on the existence of climate change? In the States, a slew of factors—age, gender, education—all seem to play some part in one’s belief in climate change. In Canada, the belief stays consistent across these variables; young or old, male or female, college educated or not, belief in climate change remains remarkably steady. In fact, a higher percentage of non-college educated Canadians (78%) believe in the existence of climate change compared to college educated Americans(64)%.

However, there IS one causal factor that reveals the most significant difference in one’s belief in climate change: political ideology. Conservatives in Canada and Republicans in the States are far less likely to believe in the existence of climate change compared to Liberals and Democrats.

Now we have come full-circle back to my opening question. Could lax broadcasting standards and a lower belief in climate change be related? Canada’s Prime Minister, an Alberta boy who wants to use the Tar Sands to turn Canada into an energy superpower, apparently thinks so. Who, after all, wants to lower the standards of Canadian news broadcasting? The conservative Prime Minister. On the right end of the political spectrum, it would seem that citizen ignorance is bliss; perhaps it’s even a political strategy.

To read the full report on the poll, go here: http://www.ppforum.ca/sites/default/files/Climate%202011_Report.pdf