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Prime Minister Layton and Proportional Representation

Since during the federal election campaign over the last 3 months I’ve talked with friends about the outside chance of Jack Layton becoming prime minister. It’s still an outside chance, but it improved when Flaherty said an unsurprising bunch of nothing useful last night.

I’ve been impressed with the social movement that swept Obama to the presidency and spilled into Canada to send the federal NDP to a place where they raised more money from more people than the Liberal party.

Now with renewed talk of crashing the arrogant Harper government, Layton has a chance to become prime minister. Here’s how.

Election Financing as the Trigger

Harper is on record as wanting to destroy the Liberal party, not just defeat them. So one of the first things he does in this new parliament, while not seriously addressing meaningful interventions on behalf of working Canadians in this economic meltdown, is to remove the per-vote funding for political parties. His is well funded, the Liberals are always 8 minutes from bankruptcy and the NDP and Bloc are populist parties with solid and growing funding machinery.

So changing the financing rules to push the Liberals into financial purgatory seemed like a solid Harper bully move. The Liberals have been a party of corporate entitlement, so they do not have a populist funding regime. Maybe now after a few failed elections in this decade they will seriously work on building one.

Harper’s incorrectly stated today in the House foyer, typically without taking questions, that Dion [or anyone] cannot become prime minister without electoral support. Nice campaign rhetoric, but really, no one was elected to a majority so anyone who can come up with 155 votes has a legal shot at governing.

Coalition Dynamics

Judy Rebick wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago on a 3 party coalition that can orbit a few key policy similarities and box out Harper. Canadians for a Progressive Coalition are working well coordinating the advocacy for an anti-Harper, progressive alternative and email campaigns to all opposition MPs from people all across the country returned a few emails from Liberal lackeys condemning the move as bad policy. Typical Liberal birthright arrogance about not wanting to share.

So today we learned that Ed Broadbent and Jean Chretien have been trying to broker a coalition with Bloc voting support to keep Harper from ramping up his attacks on all things not radically right wing.

Prime Minister Layton

So who gets to be prime minister in a limited coalition? Dion is a lame duck as he announced to step down at a convention. Some kind of new leader for the Liberals established over the next few days is unlikely and potentially illegitimate to party members or caucus.

The Bloc can quite easily stay out of a formal coalition with just a pledge to support votes. So Duceppe will not be prime minister. But there is something else to the Bloc. Plenty of people who are not separatists have been voting Bloc for some time now. Why? Because the Bloc gets things done for the province and the party’s social and economic policies are on the whole enviable, especially to progressives. And people vote Bloc to keep majority governments from the Conservatives or the Liberals because they are bad for Quebec since a majority federal government shifts the power too centrally and blocks provinces relative power.

So that leaves Prime Minister Layton, and not because his campaign rhetoric was that he wanted Harper’s job. With the lame duck Dion or fresh new Liberal leader being questionable prime ministers, and Duceppe being a separatist, the only compromise that isn’t a deal breaker could be Layton.

Proportional Representation

My agenda all decade has been to advocate for the end to majority governments in Canada and our 19th century electoral system which best serves a two party system, which Canada is far from today. Each minority government that gets elected puts a larger spotlight on the elephant in the room: that the electorate is too split or regionalized for simply two national motherhood parties. This means majority governments will become mathematically unlikely.

So if the opposition can crash Harper’s bully government, we will have a system more like proportional representation than first-past-the-post, but with the Conservatives on the outs. This event can be a springboard to electoral reform.

Changing to a PR system will ensure entrenched Quebec advocacy for the Bloc without need for referendum threats. It will mean millions more votes for the NDP as so many won’t need to vote strategically anymore. It will also mean the Green Party getting dozens of seats to support a green agenda, except to the extent that their platform isn’t progressive enough to address hyper-consumerism that is aggravating the climate crisis.

And the Liberal party, though they will bleed votes to the NDP, Greens and Bloc, will have a chance to survive. And the Conservatives? Who cares. Let their solid base do its work and elect the dozens of MPs that reflect their crazy right wing ideals.

So at least the three non-Conservative parties may leap towards PR to improve their future access to parliament, and the Conservatives may have to join in just to keep from being wildly marginalized for ever because they too are no longer a national party that can get things done.

And this all bodes well for the BC election on May 12, 2009 when we will try again to pass a PR referendum that would have passed last time if the 57% didn’t fall short of the suddenly new 60% threshold for referenda.

So the goal isn’t so much to get Layton in as PM, but to stop Harper from continuing his socially conservative and economically neoliberal anti-social agenda. And out of it we may end up getting a far more fair electoral system.

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Contact Stephen Elliott-Buckley at Vista at dgiVista.org.

Theft: Arbitrary Credit Card Charges

You don’t have to go far to read about insurance companies whose initial reaction to claims is rejection. Out of hand. Many claimants will just go away. Those who don’t have to pursue it to get any blood from the stone.

And I don’t even want to think about what our current economic meltdown is going to do to that dynamic, but try this one on for size.

Recently we received a gift of a Sears gift card. So we go to Sears and buy some things and in the process get a Sears credit card for a 10% discount or something. Since we pay off credit cards monthly, it’s no big deal. In the back of our minds we hear stories of retail outlets whose profit margin is greater on financing than their core business. But whatever.

So at one point we return something and end up with a $30 credit balance on the card. Fast forward several months.

Today we get a bill in the mail that shows a credit balance maintenance fee of $25 sucking out most of the $30 credit balance.

I’m no lawyer or police officer, but that’s our $30 that they just took. Sounds like theft.

So we phone Sears with a wtf. After the typical 7 minutes on hold we complain and get a reversal of this charge if we go into the store and spend the $30.

While stores may set policies to steal credit balances in 1, 15, 30, 180 or 365 days with impunity, it’s still theft.

But the shocking thing is that upon simply complaining to the first person we encounter on the phone, they are authorized to just reverse the charge.

And if that’s the case, it sure doesn’t sound like it’s a policy that Sears cherishes, perhaps much like insurance companies whose policy is to reject all claims.

So, in case you needed another reason to boycott Sears and any other company that makes a practice of stealing your credit balance, here you go.

Why Vancouver’s NPA Lost Badly Today

Because I like to make electoral predictions, I guessed that the NPA would elect 5 people to various councils in Vancouver. It turns out I was generous. They got 4 in, unless more official results in the coming days alter that.

This doesn’t really prove that the NPA is dead. Corporate donations will keep the NPA or some future clone alive forever, regardless of the fact that the 4 NPAs elected will likely never cast a meaningful vote in the next 3 years. This is good because I’m quite tired of Ken Denike. But that’s another story. Ask me over a beer at the Public Lounge some time. Even if Kennedy Stewart were right and they were totally wiped off all councils, they’d still be back, strong as ever with their corporate cash.

Here are some of the stories that made for today’s COPE/Vision/Green win, in their order of significance:

Populism!

North American politics are populist right now. Obama, the rise in the federal NDP, the federal Liberals’ inability to raise more funds from more people than the federal NDP, and the mobilization of people rejecting apathy to join Vision Vancouver–all these show that citizens matter. The NPA is like the federal Conservatives and Liberals: complacent, corporate-friendly parties that have never felt the need to <irony>pander</irony> to human beings for money and volunteer support, while relying on corporate cash to use the media to encourage enough voters to drink their Kool-aid.

The progressive win in Vancouver is a testament to grassroots mobilization. And as much as the Republicans demeaned Obama as being a community organizer, that’s exactly what got him ahead of Hillary Clinton and into the White House, and what got the NPA machine out of Vancouver city hall.

This is also why the BC Liberals’ recent Whistler convention was demonizing the NDP all day, all the time: they’re afraid of being tied in the polls, they’re fiscal neoliberal Milton Friedman worshippers during the biggest global economic crisis in capitalism in a century, they watched Obama get elected and Harper not win a majority [despite calling the election for before the US election, knowing he'll never get a majority after Obama wins], and they know that even with the soft fascist censorship of Bill 42, they are screwed because they are as unable to mobilize human beings to vote them into a third term in May as the NPA was in recent weeks. [Exhale. Sorry for the long sentence!]

The right always loses to mobilized progressives who get out the vote by shedding the apathy we’re lured into by the cynical right wing. And the provincial NDP just successfully ran its third dress rehearsal for the May 2009 election [working on the federal election, the 2 Vancouver by-elections and the munis]. Obama has a database of 3 million contributors. He will not be throwing that away now that he’s elected. He’ll mobilize it. The NPA and the BC and federal Liberals and Conservatives will never have that. But progressives do.

Red States, Blue States

The map of mayoral votes: can you say red states, blue states?

OK, even with no guarantee of data quality and with some oversimplifications, if you know anything about the rich and poor in Vancouver, this map makes perfect sense. Where do the rich and/or conservative live? Yaletown, Point Grey, south of 16th and west of Main, the bedroom community/pseudo-suburb of southeast Vancouver. No surprise, all red for the NPA. Coal Harbour would go NPA if it weren’t largely filled with empty condos owned by thousands foreigners needing a Vancouver home.

Where do the not so rich or conservative, and/or working class and/or immigrants who didn’t buy their citizenship and/or young and/or single live? Everywhere else, where people outnumber the NPA voters and voted Gregor green.

The $100 Million Olympic Village Elephant

Peter Ladner and so many others commenting on the $100 million problem with loaning the Olympic Village development with our cash still don’t get it. It’s not about how certain things happen in-camera. It’s not about whether councilors were fully informed before voting. It’s not about the privacy of businesses. “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Here’s how. Stephen Harper’s sweater vest didn’t save him from demonstrating how out of touch he is with most Canadians when he said the global economic meltdown is a good time to invest in some bargains in the stock market. Heck, even the CanWest toxic waste machine is laying off 560 workers in part because of the global meltdown and their share price dropping 90% this year. They’re sure a bargain, but the better bargain will be in watching them implode so that we can dilute the corporate concentration of media in Vancouver and Canada with more competition and less autocratic control of news…and, frankly, better jobs for the journalists forced to work for the Aspers.

But the $100 million problem is about how the International Olympic Committee and VANOC are not transparent organizations. They are secret, above democracy, and the IOC is even above countries. They’re designed to be unaccountable to us even though they are spending billions of dollars of our tax money while people die in the streets and on surgery waiting lists. Shameful.

Ladner is so out of touch: “It’s completely irresponsible and ridiculous to think that we could do all this in public and still protect the taxpayer….Why would the Olympics be different? The scope is bigger but the framework of the deal is the same. The city does this stuff all the time — it has done this for years.” But when you mix this repulsion with the secrecy of the Olympics oligarchy, you get one pissed off electorate. Whoops.

And he doesn’t even get the irony about how little the taxpayer is being protected in any of this Olympics deal anyway. The solution would have been to explain how in-camera works, then come out and say that when it’s out of in-camera, they’ll explain to people all the details. No, wait. They can’t do that because of all the Olympics secrecy. That’s the bigger whoops. Like it or not, the city is symbiotically embroiled in the grand, global secrecy regime of the Olympics. Watch your wallets, folks.

Plumping

Ellen Woodsworth was elected in a very small part from plumping. Plumping works. Some COPE supporters who were frustrated by the nature of the deal with Vision and Green–and others–voted for only COPE members and not for others on the slate from Vision. Ellen Woodsworth got elected to the last city council spot by 1023 votes over Kashmir Dhaliwal [the only Vision candidate for any council to not get elected] as of 10:24pm Saturday night. I doubt all those votes were from people voting for her and avoiding voting for Vision candidates to keep one or more of them from getting more votes than her. But with not too different arithmetic, the plumpers would have made the difference.

Privatized Police

Korina Houghton didn’t get elected to city council for the NPA even though she had a full-page ad in 24hrs on Friday. Part of her plan was to “combat crime through continued support of the ambassador program” meaning the Downtown Ambassadors, the partially city-funded, private pretend cops designed to criminalize the <irony>unsightly</irony> people from business areas. If 11,300 more voters actually wanted a private police force created by business owners and not transparently accountable to the public despite their public funding, she would have beaten Ellen Woodsworth for the 10th spot on council. Thankfully those 11,300 people don’t exist. And while we’re at it, let’s de-fang the Ambassadors and get them back to helping tourists get from the art gallery back to the cruise ship terminal. And I’ll leave out all that business about Kanman Wong’s campaign literature saying one thing in Chinese and another in English. He’s had his political career maimed enough already…remember David Emerson?

Plumping the Municipal Election

There is no grand prevailing wisdom about how people should vote. It’s hard enough to get people to show up at the polls as it is–and for many good reasons. But once people show up, there are competing views about how we should cast our votes: in this case, to plump or not to plump.

This is particularly important with municipal, district and school board elections on Saturday, November 15.

Voter turnout for local elections in BC is traditionally well below 50%. Add to this the recent 20 month US presidential election soap opera, another minority government election in Ottawa last month and for many in Vancouver, two provincial by-elections also last month. More on lessons from these later, though.

When we look at how to vote in local governments, it’s critical to understand how the “at-large” electoral process is different from voting provincially, federally and in the United States. In fact, understanding the at-large nature of local elections motivates a greater number of people to actually vote.

The at-large system is in some ways opposite to the first-past-the-post system in the provincial and federal elections. At-large means there are no ridings or constituencies within the municipality or regional district. Aside from casting one ballot for mayor, voters will vote from a pool of candidates anywhere from one to however many sit on each local council or school board.

This is where plumping comes in. If there are six spots beyond mayor on your city council we can vote for up to six candidates standing for election. But why not vote for one? This is plumping or bullet voting, where we target one or a small number of candidates to focus our vote on without diluting the effect of our vote by voting for other people who could end up beating our preferred candidate(s).

Many object to the spirit of plumping for some good reasons. They argue that it undermines the value of at-large voting where we get to vote for more than one candidate, unlike in provincial and federal elections. It can also undermine one view of the spirit of voting: if we are allowed six votes, we shouldn’t waste any of them.

Fans of plumping argue that most people are not familiar with enough candidates running to be able to cast completely informed votes. So many people want to avoid casting ballots for people who aren’t necessarily deserving of that vote.

Plus, our electoral system is broken, so we should make the best of it when we get that pencil in our hands. This is a tired refrain for many of us, but it is something you should be braced to hear much more of in the future as there are broad movements to fix our electoral process.

I won’t even go into the complications of the US Electoral College, that great 18th century relic that skews the popular vote to elect a president, but the provincial and federal systems are equally irrelevant.

First-past-the-post worked quite well a century ago when there were typically two parties running for government. With only two candidates in a riding, the winner will get more than 50% of the vote and wasted votes were always less than 50% of those cast.

But today, with five viable federal parties (even with the Bloc only in Quebec) and more than two viable parties in most provinces, first-past-the-post ensures millions of votes are wasted across the country.

Dreadfully, in 1988 Brian Mulroney was reelected prime minister and rammed his Free Trade Agreement through government when 43% of Canadians voted for his party, which perversely allowed him to get a majority government. Considering that voter turnout was only 72%, less than one-third of eligible votes actually voted for free trade. Now we need to clean up that illegitimate mess.

The electoral reform referendum almost passed in BC in 2005 and likely will this spring, even though a similar referendum only got around 37% support in Ontario’s election last fall [see the comments below]. But then again, Ontario has often been pivotal in Liberal and Conservative governments for all of Canadian history, so they likely aren’t eager to move to a proportional representation system and lose their inordinate electoral power.

Also, our system typically produces majority governments for parties that earn less than 50% of the popular vote, where federally, voter turnout has declined in almost every election since that disastrous free trade election in 1988.

With five viable federal parties, a voting system designed for a two-party system is obsolete, as are majority governments. So people have responded with coordinated vote swapping systems on the internet, and some rather complicated strategic voting schemes.

All this means that our electoral systems are up for debate.

When it comes to your municipal, district and school board votes on Saturday, ask yourself how many candidates you are capable of effectively evaluating. Search the web, check your municipality’s website. Get informed.

Then ask yourself how many of them you can truly support with integrity. And then vote responsibly. This will likely end up meaning that in Vancouver many COPE, Vision and Green supporters will likely only be voting for their own party’s candidates, despite the electoral agreement. The agreement does not outlaw plumping, after all.

And while you’re fighting off the strain of so many elections, look into BC-STV. That referendum will be on the ballot again on May 12, 2009 during our provincial election. It’s not a perfect proportional representation system, but it makes our current system look like the largely inadequate attempt at democracy we’ve been stuck with for our whole history.

So plump if you want to, but by all means make your vote matter–at least to yourself.