It must be polling release day or something. Strategic Council released another poll this AM which shows a still sizable Conservative lead - one that as Christine pointed out, caused even CTV to issue a disclaimer that SC’s poll have been showing higher Conservative support then other polling companies.

As if to verify that, Decima releases a poll on the same day that shows a virtual tie “with little sign of momentum”:

The latest Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey had support for both the major federal parties flatlining at 32 per cent. The NDP was at 17 per cent, the Bloc Quebecois nine and the Green party was at eight. The telephone survey was conducted March 13 to 16, concluding the day before Monday’s four federal byelections.

The bad piece of news in this poll for the Cons. however - support is falling in Ontario and Quebec. The news-release is brief, so one can’t see the kind of drop the Decima president is talking about, but that isn’t good news for the Conservative party in wanting to get a majority, or retain power.

So, Mr Flaherty and Mr. Harper, by all means, keep bashing and crapping all over Ontario.

UPDATE@7:22pm: Steve V has the specific regional polling at his site, which shows substantial leads for the Grits in both Ontario and Quebec over the Cons.

…well then, apparently all you have to do is vote for the “OYL Beyond” slate of candidates at the Hamilton AGM, as detailed by Jamie Callingham over at his blog. Heck, you don’t even have to be an Ontario Young Liberal to go: as long as you’re friends of any OYL’ers who go to this party, you get to go too -as long as you vote for their slate.

Background Info: What Jamie is showing is the invite he got in his email making him aware of a Facebook group that got put up. I should make it clear that Jamie has endorsed the OYL Roots candidates slate - the rival candidate slate of that wishes to reform some of the OYL’s processes, as well as make it less subordinate to the Ontario Liberal Party.

This Facebook group was put up a couple of days ago. It was public for a few hours, and then it got changed to “hidden” so only invited people would see it. However, before it was hidden, and alerted to the fact of its existence, screen captures were taken of this group at Facebook, and someone involved in OYL politics was kind enough to send them to me. I thought I’d post some of what was found here (you’ll need to click on the screenshot images twice to get the full screen view):

A real drunkfest by the looks of it. The interesting thing about this is that one Shawn Kerr is an invited guest and that according to these captures, he’s confirmed his attendance at this event. I’m told that Shawn Kerr is the current OYL Policy Director. I’ve also been told he’s a supporter of the “OYL Beyond” slate of candidates. He did not make this Facebook group, but he not only is aware of it, and confirmed he’s attending it, he’s listed as the contact person with his email address being listed for further details. That would mean to me he was not only condoning this event, but helping with its organization. You’ll note that at least 100 people were invited to this “event” at the time of the screen capture, and before it was hidden from public view. Who knows how many more have been invited since.

And what is the actual event we’re talking here? Why, its the Hamilton AGM, where the voting on these candidates will take place. Further to that, I was a bit puzzled by the “bring your friends” part of this thing. I mean, I could understand why the organizers of this would want to entice OYL’ers to this shindig - they’d be crucial votes at the AGM, but why invite “friends”?

Well, I asked around to my Liberal acquaintances who are knowledgeable about the workings of the OYL, and I’m told anyone under the age of 26 can sign up to be an OYL member and go vote at the AGM as long as they take out a federal or provincial Liberal membership before March 3rd and find a friendly riding President willing to appoint them as a delegate. The jist of all this is that each riding President gets a certain # of delegates, and if they go unfilled after a certain meeting, the riding presidents can fill the vacancies with whoever they want as long as they are a Liberal member in good standing; the members don’t even have to be from their own riding.

So basically, this appears to be asking OYL members who are “OYL Beyond” supporters to bring out their friends, and with the incentive of free booze and hotel rooms, get them signed up as “instant Liberals”, put them in as delegates, and tell them to vote for the slate that the organizers want them to - which is in this instance the OYL Beyond slate.

In essence, what these folks are saying is this:

“I know you don’t care about politics. Shawn’s candidate team that he supports is in a bit of trouble though. Come out for a free weekend. We’ll pay for your hotel and delegate fees and booze. All you have to do is vote for who we tell you to.”

Lovely. I thought that vote-buying (and vote-buying with liquor) had vanished from Canada with the advent of the secret ballot here, but apparently not. I’m also curious about where exactly is the money coming from to pay for all this free booze and free hotel rooms. I am told that delegate fees alone for the AGM are $60 per person. If all 100 people who were “invited’ in this Facebook group went, you’re looking at around $6,000, not including the free hotel rooms or the liquor. I’m not up on how the OYL apportions money or finances for this type of thing, or if this money the OYL Beyond slate has, or what. If someone would like to clear that up, I’m all ears.

Does the OYL current leadership and/or the OYL Beyond candidate slate support this type of activity? Will they disavow and condemn this blatant vote-buying with free booze?

In Crashing The Gate, a book written by Marcos Moulitisias of the very popular American liberal blog Daily Kos, and Jerome Armstrong of MYDD.com, It details how “ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated the Democratic Party establishment has become, and how it has failed to adapt and respond to new realities and challenges.” It talks about how the grassroots/netroots can challenge the politics-as-usual crowd. I’d suggest to all who read this that it sounds like from what I’ve seen that the OYL could use a crashing of their gates and a changing of how things are usually done.

UPDATE: Apparently the screen caps weren’t expanding for some people. That should be fixed now.

Let me just add a little codicil to my previous post and suggest that this phenomenon of what can only be described as a sneering contempt for one’s own party and the vast majority of people who likewise support it (or at least vote for it from time to time) seems to be unique to ideologues and partisans of the Conservative variety. I’m unaware of a similarly conflicted animus of contemptuous self-loathing within the ranks of diehard Liberal or NDP partisans, although I have to confess that I don’t generally mix with such people, so I could be well be wrong about that.

Perhaps in private, some Liberal zealots (almost a contradiction in terms right there) feel that those who vote for the party are somehow insufficiently “big government” or “Statist” and that some might even have dangerous tendencies towards entrepreneurialism and free market economics. Goodness, some of them may even lean too heavily towards fiscal probity and circumspect accounting theories! Some could even be against crime and heretically pro-American!

Similarly, maybe there are some ardent Dippers who feel that the Revolution just isn’t coming along at a fast enough clip, its teaming 17 percent of the electorate simply not working to maximum efficiency as they go about the business of undermining the economy, secularizing everything in sight, creating mountains of stifling government regulations and imposing their rigid materialist dogma on the foundational moral pillars of our society. After all, what with God stubbornly flying in the face of Nietzsche and being not quite dead yet, there’s always a big hill for deterministic heathens to climb in that department!

All kidding aside though, while some Liberals, Dippers, and Greens are unquestionably more passionate about their politics, their ideology (although it’s arguable whether the Liberals actually have one these days, but that’s another discussion) and commitment to their party’s given assortment of “aspirational goals” than the “average” voter is, it’s almost inconceivable to imagine any of their diehards disparaging the majority of those voters from the “mushy middle” who support them from time to time, other than perhaps to deem them as being “soft” in terms of their dependability come election time. And while they might express disappointment (sometimes profoundly so) in their own party, the thought of comparing them to… well, I don’t know what, really seems out of the question. I think it’s fair to say that the three parties of the “Left” (or “progressives” if you prefer) are each, in their own way, reasonably true to their values and beliefs.

The same however it would seem cannot be said of the Conservatives. Their diehards for example have no compunction whatsoever about comparing their largely disinterested, vaguely left-of-centre supporters drawn from the “mushy middle” and even the self-declared Conservative ones in various regions of the country to a party and a group that they
regularly demonize as being the perfidious embodiment of everything that’s wrong with society. Moreover, they apply this same label of scornful derision to their own party establishment!

It’s quite curious really. Is it possible that despite the extensive papering over of various differences within the party and notable ideological rifts that existed up until a very few short years ago, there’s still a roiling identity crisis within the Conservative Party? Is the confident self-assurance of the Big Blue Machine more illusion than reality? Perhaps the only thing holding this rickety contraption together is the bonding glue of power and the “magnetism” of a leader who managed to revive the political fortunes of “conservatives” at a singularly opportune time with a selfishly appealing yet simplistic agenda, but with no real vision. At least not a truly “conservative” one, according to some.

I was asked in the prior thread about someone seeing post that seemed to make a lot of sense how to go about proposing electoral reform federally, or possibly even provincially.  That would be this post by A PG Liberal. I’m not particularly crazy about throwing the added complication of trying to reform the Senate as well - since that will require the Constitution to be amended, and any electoral reforms to the House does not - but it’s a well thought out proposal.

Jason Morris over at Gauntlet.ca has been a bit skeptical of MMP and if it was really the electoral reform Ontario needed (he actually prefers STV, which I didn’t know), and I’ve had a few mild arguments with him on the topic.

So, I’m really pleased to see that he has taken a look at how the Citizen’s Assembly formed their decision, and he has come out and endorsed MMP and hopes Ontario will as well.  Unofficially, as he hasn’t got his  blog on the site yet, that brings to 22 Liberal blogs that have endorsed MMP at the Liberals For MMP blogsite - better then I expected at this point, to be honest.

Either way, all you need to know about Harper’s relationship with the US is stated in this single paragraph this AM in the Star:

Harper now stands virtually alone among U.S. allies in not condemning or even criticizing the Guantanamo prison camp, which even the administration here concedes has become a stain on America’s reputation worldwide.

..wouldn’t want to criticize his American Idol in Bush and get him ticked off at us, now would we.

Some are saying to me that this site takes too long to load. I dont really notice it on my end with high speed access (well.. it sometimes takes a few seconds, but I’m not sure that counts as slow), but I’m going to turn off a few plugins to see if that speeds things up. The most significant one to start with will be the ability for users to edit their own comments within a 5 min time period. Let me know if turning any of these extra plugins off speeds up the load of the site for those experiencing slowdowns.

Mike from Rational Reasons rebuttal in the 159-124 message thread to a conservative poster’s assertion that “These measures were not abused so the clause should have been extended.” is worth repeating:

Why? Not only were they not abused, they were not used. The potential exists for abuse and the police seem to be doing just fine without them, so why have them around. Frankly, the burden of proof is on those who wanted these measures to be extended to make the case. They needed to show, quite forcefully, that these measures must continue. They did not. The best they came up with was “it will scuttle Air India” - which didn’t hold water considering:

- that the RCMP and government’s own reluctance to provide un-redacted evidence to Justice John Major is threatening to scuttle the enquiry.
- that the RCMP, who have been investigating this crime for 22 years, have had access to these provisions for 5 years and never used them.
- that the Conservatives themselves agreed in committee in October that the renewal would only apply to future, new investigations not past one (thus excluding Air India) and as late as yesterday morning, Harper offered to agree to THAT agreement, essentially scuttling the Air India investigation as he implied the Liberals would do.

All of this for measures that are a clear danger to our civil rights, that have never been used - the police have foiled plots since 9-11 using good old fashioned police work (Toronto 17 anyone?). Clamouring to keep these measures to “protect” us from terrorism, despite the fact that we are more likely to die in a car accident, by drowning or by taking prescription drugs that by terrorist acts, seem rather silly. Cowardly almost.

I’m glad they are gone - good riddance to bad, unneeded laws with a huge potential for abuse.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Mike.