High Expectations and Vote Splitting

In 2013 there was an election in British Columbia. The BC NDP got 39.7% of the vote, resulting in a very unexpected crushing defeat.

In 2015 there was an election in Alberta. The Alberta NDP got 40.6% of the vote, resulting in a very unexpected resounding victory.

The narrative that has emerged from the Alberta election is that of a province taking a hard turn to the left, turning its back on the past 80 years of conservative rule. There is a little truth to this… the Alberta NDP didn’t get nearly as many votes the last time around, coming in at 9.8%. So their popular support has grown tremendously.

But that’s not the whole story. It’s worth considering why the 40.6% brought victory when 39.7% fell so far short in BC. The truth is, more Albertans voted conservative, 52%. They just didn’t do it in an effective way. 27.8% voted for the Progressive Conservatives, and 24.2% voted for Wildrose - the Regressive Conservatives. Because of the terrible gerrymandering, Wildrose walked away with twice as many seats as the PCs, but neither was enough to make a big impact on their own.

There’s a lesson here, about strategy, and about complacency. Alberta was safe for the conservatives, so they didn’t need to coalesce around either party. It was not safe for the left, so the NDP and the Greens made moves to avoid splitting the vote.

The Alberta victory is very similar to the Federal situation in the 1990s. The Progressive Conservatives had a crushing defeat, in large part due to the regressive conservatives (variously called Reform, Canadian Alliance, and CRAP) splitting the right-wing vote.

It will be months before I can guess what is likely to happen in the Federal election this fall. It’s tougher than usual because the party positions are not so neatly binary… the Liberals are there in the middle and it’s hard to tell which way they’ll fall. It will be interesting to see whether the Liberals do a better job of splitting the left wing vote or splitting the right wing vote.

As for Alberta, well, it will be far more than a few months before I can guess how that will shake out. Perhaps the right-wing unites in time for the next election. Perhaps the process drags out for several. For now though, Albertans might be willing to give the NDP a chance.

Seymour Hersh and the Bin Laden Raid

Four days ago Seymour Hersh published an article an article questioning the official story on the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. Here’s the story. And a rebuttal, from government officials. And a deconstruction of the rebuttal and a defense of the original story.

I can’t really comment on the substance of Hersh’s allegations, because there’s absolutely no evidence to support or refute them. Actually, the intriguing thing about the Bin Laden raid is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the official story either, which makes it a very convenient target for both investigative journalism and conspiracy theories, whichever this turns out to be.

I do find it funny that the rebuttal includes the statement “If you believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Mike Morell were all lying to you.” It’s brings me no end of amusement to think that this official, a former CIA spokesman, is befuddled by the very concept of lying coming from politicians and spies. Isn’t that what they’re for?

There is one section of Hersh’s account that I’d like to examine more, though. The official story is that the CIA was watching Bin Laden’s courier, got suspicious, and used a fake vaccine program to confirm their suspicions. Hersh’s story is that the CIA was approached by a high-level ISI official and confirmed the report using undisclosed means. The vaccine doctor was given up as a scapegoat because he was already an ISI prisoner for other reasons, and it wouldn’t affect him much.

So my question is why give up the doctor at all? Whether it was releasing a true detail or inventing a false detail, it wasn’t at all necessary. And it has had catastrophic consequences. Vaccination teams have been torn apart by angry mobs. Polio is back, leaving hundreds of children dead or injured. Would it have been so hard to simply not release that detail? Easy enough to simply say there was a DNA test postmortem instead of premortem.

I look forward to finding out more about this in the future. Hersh has a habit of writing things that turn out to be true once they are declassified decades later. With any luck I’m still alive when the truth of this tale gets out.

Recovery Day

I was just offered some work for tomorrow, which means I ought to get to sleep soon, which in turn means I’d better write today’s blog post really quick. The trouble is, I don’t have a topic yet. I’d been kind of putting that off. Usually if I haven’t done something worth putting up a picture of, I’ll at least have read something worth commenting on… today that didn’t happen either.

This probably counts as a day where I merely existed rather than lived. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.

Confidential

It’s 1AM, which means today’s blog post (or yesterday’s) will necessarily be much shorter than Monday’s. Good thing I keep a stash of news articles that I can shout about without requiring much in the way of original thought…

“Diamond royalties a closely guarded subject in Ontario”. The royalties DeBeers pays to the government of Ontario for its Victor mine are confidential. They accidently released the figures for 2014. The grand total was $226. DeBeers was apparently shocked that any royalty was charged at all.

The corresponding royalties for Lucara’s diamond mine in Botswana? $26.6 million. Six orders of magnitude higher.

The Victor mine is next to Attawapiskat, which as you may recall is destitute and doesn’t get a share of resource revenue… not that a share of $226 would go very far.

OK, that’s about all the outrageous things I can come up with from this story.

Goodnight.

Zero Tolerance

I missed this news story a few months ago… I guess I can’t read anything. The Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, told the UN General Assembly that Canada would have zero tolerance for any attempts to delegitimize Israel, including the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement.

Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with the BDS movement, but I’m tempted to sign on now out of spite.

Luckily it didn’t escape the attention of CBC columnist Neil Macdonald, who has been asking what exactly zero tolerance means in this case, what sort of actions the government is planning to take against this movement. On May 7 he got a reply from Josee Sirois, a spokesperson for the Public Safety department. The reply didn’t list specific actions, but did quote the Criminal Code sections on hate crimes and hate speech.

Full disclosure: I dislike Neal Macdonald but don’t remember why. I probably disagreed with him about something petty… this is why I need to cite sources on my enemies list. I’m tempted to sign on as a fan now. Out of spite.

So, the sections of the Criminal Code relating to hate crimes don’t apply here, since they only deal with motive once a crime has been committed. For example, vandalizing a mosque would probably be considered a hate crime, but only because vandalizing any building is already illegal.

The sections on hate speech, though, that’s a little more concerning. They make it illegal to incite genocide, incite hatred, and willfully promote hatred.

I doubt the spokesperson meant to imply that advocating boycotts is inciting genocide. But what about the other sections? Willfully promoting hatred? That’s awfully vague. I mean, I’ve promoted hate before, and I’ll do it again.

Go ahead and hate this guy. It’ll be fun, I promise.

At least this one spokesperson thought that these sections were somehow relevant to the question of what zero tolerance actually means. The department as a whole has walked it back… stating that the laws have been on the books for years and haven’t changed in any relevant way.

Laws not changing isn’t all that reassuring, given how easy it is to vary the interpretation of those laws, and the level of enforcement. But let’s accept that for now.

So then, has anything changed, despite the denial? The article where the department walked it back referred to the new cyberbullying law from December, which among other things modified the hate speech law to add national origin as a protected class, in with things like race, gender, and religion.

But perhaps there’s another change in the law that could be relevant. Five days ago, one day before that email from the spokesperson, Parliament passed the new anti-terrorism law, Bill C-51. One of the many changes it made was including as terrorism any actions threatening economic or financial well being.

Which brings us back to my easy dismissal of those hate crimes laws. They don’t apply in this case, because they only come into play when doing something that’s already a crime. But what if boycotts can be considered a crime? When the new provisions were discussed, I only really predicted them being used against pipeline protesters, or First Nations blocking highways, which would be bad enough. Once you make it a crime to do anything threatening economic interests… well, it has me a little worried.

What Exactly Are War Crimes, Anyway?

It has been a little tricky finding material to write about for a few days. News has been kind of slow. Really, really slow. There were two separate news articles about a cat in a tree.

So. Time to branch out well beyond my expertise into an ill-informed rant, I think.

Omar Khadr is out on bail, pending appeal of his war crimes conviction in the US. The Canadian Government, and the US State Department, have been pulling out all the stops to prevent his release, but last week they weren’t able to prevent it.

It’s interesting to consider because there really isn’t a lot of precedent for this sort of War Crimes convictions. I mean, Nazis, sure. But people weren’t tried at Nuremberg for throwing grenades. This doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that counts as a war crime. War, sure. Or a crime. But not both.

If it was treated as a crime, he’d be out by now. A kid? Yeah, he would have got 10 years. Probably paroled after 5. If it was war? He would have been released soon after the cessation of hostilities. Which depending on your definition would be either 2002 or 2014.

What if it was considered treason? That certainly seems like a reasonable charge, and I have no idea why it wasn’t attempted. Perhaps because he attacked Americans rather than Canadians? Perhaps because they wanted to use similar charges against all the Taliban involved in that fight, regardless of nationality?

In any case, he wasn’t charged with treason. He was charged with War Crimes… acts which don’t really seem to be defined. In fact, up until 2001, you would probably have broad agreement that War Crimes didn’t include ordinary us-vs-them battles but were reserved for other things, like genocide or torture.

Oh, yeah, I shouldn’t leave that out. Khadr was tortured in prison.

So what does all this add up to? I doubt he’ll win his appeal in the US. But it might not matter. He’s due to be released in three more years. It took 8 years for his original trial. I’m sure someone will find a way to bog down the appeal long enough for it to become moot.

But for now, he’s out.

The Cost of Safety

I‘ve said before that that every safety improvement is the reaction to deaths, probably lots of deaths. Why does that air intake need to be farther from the gas lines? Lots of people died. Why does that door need a crash bar? Lots of people died. The cost of safety is paid in blood, and paid in advance.

Never is this more clear than when it’s strictly a local improvement, and we have a wonderful example today. Last year there was an engineering assessment on a local highway, Highway 97, that recommended putting barriers between the north and south lanes. On the north section the barriers went up right away. On the south section, it was delayed. I’m not really sure why… there’s a gap already, so it’s a mere matter of trucking the barriers in and setting them down. My guess is it’s because they ran out of money.

There were at least five fatalities on that highway last year due to crossing into oncoming traffic following that assessment. I’m not don’t know how many there have been this year… but we came awfully close to some more today. Three people seriously injured, just hours before the official announcement of the new barriers.

The news article called this ironic. I think the bigger irony is that although the barriers are the best thing to do, they might not have helped in this case… the crash was between two northbound vehicles when one tried to make a u-turn. If barriers kept that driver from turning right there he would just have tried to turn at the next gap.

I’ve been lucky enough to not see any fatalities on that stretch of road yet. Hopefully the barriers get placed fast enough that I never will.