Why I trust Jody Wilson-Reybould, and never again Justin Trudeau

A few ideas are in my head.

Jody Wilson-Raybould is also known as Puglaas, a title she explains in the speech I link to below.  I knew she had written a second book in the spring when it was announced, a process that had already been underway for quite some time.

For those confused about the timing of this book that coincided with the election, it is important to recognize that books are not written and published in a few weeks, and the timing was decided months ago. Even the timing of his election to coincide with the planned launch of this book is Justin Trudeau's personal mistake.

When her first book came out, I didn't notice as I had not yet started my anti-racism journey, and had not leaned about Indigenous Canada or become engaged in leaning about, thinking about, and helping in any way I can to fight for Indigenous Rights.

The attention this election is on the second book, which is focused on her time as an MP, joining cabinet, and being forced because of Justin Trudeau's lack of ethics felt forced to resign from cabinet.

I feel like much of the partisan talk is missing the context that she can offer, and that is more visible in her first book which was organized as a collection of speaking notes.

I want to highlight and suggest everyone read the speech she ended her first book with: Each of Us, In Our Own Way, is a Hiligax̲te. - Wilson-Raybould, Jody, 1971-. (2019, June 6). Feminists Deliver “Standing in Your Power, Using Your Voice” [O]. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0380803

 

This speech resonates the most with me as it summarizes what went wrong in cabinet.  She was trained from an extremely early age for a critical female role in her culture and nation, the Hiligax̲te, which is one that "correct the Chief's path".

Unlike in Western European culture and worldviews where women weren't granted political rights and responsibilities (and only recently partially gained), Puglaas is from a much more mature culture where women have specifically allocated political roles (which colonialism attempted to strip).

What happened with her relationship with Justin Trudeau was that Puglas did her job: as an MP, as a member of cabinet, as Attorney General, as Hiligax̲te, and as an Indigenous woman.

When I met Justin Trudeau in 2010 at his constituency office, I was also optimistic. He said all the right things, and as a technical person I thought it was amazing that a politician had a signed XKCD cartoon on his wall.

I think for much of the decade Canadians were enamored with Justin Trudeau.  He said all the right things.

Except, one by one, I think we all started to notice that his actions didn't match those words.

My previous article highlighted books by Arthur Manuel, which spoke about Justin Trudeau as well as his father.  What I read there about the Trudeau Prime Ministers has been confirmed from so many other sources.  While they speak progressive, including on Indigenous Rights, their actions are actually the opposite.


I have come to believe that, adjusted for the time period, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was more racist than Sir John Alexander Macdonald (I discuss why I believe that in the earlier article). Statues of John A are being removed, and I expect we will want to revisit a more honest version of the historical record of P.E. Trudeau.


Justin came into power in 2015 with an extremely large amount of political capital. Demonstrating what I have now come to believe is his extreme sense of entitlement and privilege, he burned through that political capital as if he thought it was infinite.

But.. the real world the rest of us live in has limits, and now Trudeau exist as an anchor pulling the Liberal party under. Much of the problems with the centralization of power into the leaders offices, including the Prime Ministers Office (PMO), is fallout of policy initiated by and deliberately not fixed by the Trudeau family.

• Lets work to fix parliamentary flaws which block holding a Premier or Prime Minister accountable.
• What did Justin Trudeau and the 2015 Liberal platform team do wrong on electoral reform

While there are people talking about other types of strategic voting, such as trying to avoid vote splitting which is caused by the lack of ranked ballots, I consider all of this to be short term thinking.

Canada has some serious problems to deal with, and on all counts: whether it is Women's Rights (he is a fake feminist), Indigenous Rights (he is a fake ally), or Democratic Rights (he is a fake progressive) -- Justin Trudeau is in the way and must be removed.

Letter to Hill Times Re: Are political parties undermining democratic practices?

The following is the unedited version of the letter to the Hill Times editor that became: Canada’s electoral system needs to truly modernize, democratize: McOrmond

It was in reply to: Are political parties undermining democratic practices? which referenced a letter that Elizabeth May wrote.

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I read Ms. May's letter, and I found it odd that while acknowledging what Ms. Wilson-Raybould had written, Ms. May decided to double-down on the problem.

Referencing her preference for an electoral system that optimizes for "party popular vote", she is promoting the very thinking that creates the hierarchy of unelected power.

Peoples of this homeland have had systems of democratic governance for longer than Europeans and their colonies have, and we should be looking more closely at those.

Party Representation, mislabeled Proportional Representation, is the opposite to what most Indigenous nations use.  In the diversity of Indigenous systems the leadership are spokespersons, and never treated as the CEO of a corporation (or Feudal Lords or Monarchies, to reference the relatively recent colonial history), or allowed to treat elected members of parliament as employees.  Granting seats in parliament merely based on party affiliation will only make these problems worse.

While there are electoral systems to move us away from the divisive system of First Past The Post, optimizing for "party popular vote" moves us in the opposite direction.

As an early start, we should be removing party names from ballots, disallowing party executives to manipulate the local nomination processes, and ensuring party leaders are elected by (and always accountable to) fellow caucus members.

While still based on a colonial constitutional monarchy, the governance systems used in Nunavut and Northwest Territories are far more advanced than used in the provinces or federal government.

Is Canada a democracy?

One of the articles assigned for NS 115 students this week is an essay by Jessica Kolopenuk titled Provoking Bad Biocitizenship. (https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1152)

I do not have a background in biology or the medical sciences: that is the domain of my wife who teaches high-school biology to possible future doctors and scientists.

I have spent decades involved in democratic reform, starting in the 1990's. I am inspired by the essay to think about how I might slide it into a domain that I am more actively engaged in.

What is Democracy?

Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but lets copy a dictionary definition to have a common start.

a : government by the people especially : rule of the majority

b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

Provocation 1: Canadian Confederation was not an example of a democracy

Prior to contact, Indigenous governance wasn't patriarchal. It wasn't narrowly about equality, but special roles granted to various genders. The genders were not binary or defined only by biology.

In most nations or tribes, land was the responsibility of women.   This caused no end of confusion to the patriarchal subjects of Christian Monarchs from Europe who thought of women more as property, and never who they should be negotiating with for use of land.

After disenfranchising Indigenous peoples and denying any women the right to vote, a small group of white males in a set of minority white regions decided they wanted their colonies to be united in a federation.

They asked the foreign country that they were actually citizens of to pass a law to make these colonies into a federation. The first British North America Act was passed on July 1, 1867.  Canadians celebrate the anniversary of the passage of this act of British Parliament yearly, often believing this is the anniversary of the date a democratic country was "created".

Given there were already established nations on Turtle Island (what many of the peoples from the regions I've lived call this contininent), Canada was never an example of nation building, but of often violent nation replacing.

This act created a subsidiary of the British government, incorporating all the laws and systems that were built up over thousand of years of British history. While this minority-controlled confederation was created in 1867, the systems which it imported represent thousands of years of foreign history.

Until the Statute of Westminster 1931 was passed in the UK parliament, Canada was only considered a colony of the British empire and thus had no foreign policy. It is technically false to suggest "Canada" fought in the first world war. Britain entered that war, and thus subjects of the British Empire living on this homeland were sent to war.

Until the Canada Act 1982 was passed in the UK parliament, there was no mechanism for a governing body on this side of the Atlantic to change the Canadian Constitution. While the Canadian Federal Government could change Federal law, and Canadian Provincial Governments could change Provincial law, the UK parliament could change any Canadian law. This was clearly not an example of a democracy given the citizens in the UK (with more than  twice the population of Canada in 1982) each had more control over the laws and systems that governed Canadians than Canadian citizens did.

 

Part of the myth of Canada is that it has always been here, has always existed in this form, and will always be here. I read George Orwell's book 1984 in 1984, and when thinking about this myth of Canada I always think of the line:
 

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

I was born in 1968. There are many other people alive today that were born before the British subsidiary government of Canada was solely responsible for passing its own laws. It was only after 1982 that Canada was finally potentially eligible for being considered a democracy, and I'm not convinced the changes made to this point are sufficient.

 

Whether Canada is less than 3 times my age, 37 years older, 14 years younger, or not yet independently born depends entirely on what you think is required for a country to be considered separate from the foreign nation that created and maintained it through Acts passed by that foreign nation's parliament.

Newfoundland and Labrador weren't part of Canada when my parents were born (in what was then and currently called Ontario). Take note of the separate references to Newfoundland in the Statute of Westminster 1931.

There were 11 "British North America Acts", which the British used to maintain Canada.

Note: Since the 1980's Canada has been returning to its European monarchist roots, allowing power to flow to a few individuals. See: Lets work to fix parliamentary flaws which block holding a Premier or Prime Minister accountable.

Provocation 2: Biased immigration policy and genocide are more offensive versions of gerrymandering

I am not going to describe here how many Canadian Government policies, not limited to the Indian Act and residential schools, represent a genocide against Indigenous peoples. Please do a bit of homework if this is news to you. The TRC final report and the Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls offer a good start.

 

There have also been hundreds of policies which represented "Affirmative Action for Whites" and encouragement for foreign settlers, not limited to the Canadian Homestead Act which gave "free" land (stolen from Indigenous peoples) to males who would "cultivate" the land and build a permanent dwelling.  This form of government incentivized squatting was then used by the Canadian government to justify forced relocation of Indigenous populations and claims of land cession under clearly White Supremacist policies.

Canada is alleged to have "purchased" Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), even though HBC didn't have legitimate title to any land on Turtle Island. What HBC had was a charter from the British Crown granting them a monopoly over trade between Indigenous nations and Europeans in a specific region, without that pesky possibility of competition. It was named by the British as "Rupert's Land" after Prince Rupert, the first governor of HBC appointed by King Charles II.

Indigenous individuals who swore allegiance to the British crown could become Canadian citizens and be stripped of their Indian status and face full assimilation into the foreign Canadian system. (Official "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" policy).

Over time these combined policies ensured that foreign peoples who were loyal to the British subsidiary greatly outnumbered the Indigenous population.

• Newfoundland and Labrador join Canada in 1949.
• Innuit gained the right to vote in 1950.
• Status Indians gain the federal vote in 1960.
  

Voter suppression, genocide, and biased immigration policy represent the worst possible forms of gerrymandering, not democracy.

Pretending that this is all in the past and suggesting that votes should now be counted "equally" is only an excuse to inherit benefit from genocide and voter suppression.  The foreign systems that Canada represent were never democratically decided upon, and should never be treated as if they were. The notion that people should inherit benefits, but never obligations, is a very narrow and problematic western worldview.

Provocation 3: If Canada was never intended to be a democracy, pro-democracy advocacy should be seeking to replace the systems called Canada

The claim that democracy (some comically even claim "civilization") was brought to Turtle Island, and that we need to take inspiration from Europe for any democratic systems, is part of the colonial propaganda.  It is a White Supremacist belief that I simply do not subscribe to.


The Europeans who traveled to Turtle Island to set up and join European colonies were subjects of Christian European Monarchs. These European nations were not democracies until quite recently, depending on whether you believe monarchies (constitutional or literal) can ever truly be considered democracies.

While something like the European Union didn't form until 1993 and with Brexit didn't survive a full 30 years before losing a member, the participatory democratic Haudenosaunee Confederacy became 6 nations in 1722, and was a confederacy of 5 nations possibly since 1142 or earlier.

I believe the British call this era the High Middle Ages, no longer being a province of the Roman Empire, but not remotely close to having a democracy.

If what we want is healthy democratic systems, we should start from Indigenous Turtle Island nations which have far more experience than Europeans. The goal should be, piece by piece, to replace the systems of Canada with something built upon domestic Indigenous Turtle Island worldviews and experience.

I know that this change will not happen overnight, and it might not be completed in my lifetime, but this is the direction I will be facing.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy example

I regularly write about how Canada sent in the RCMP to depose the democratic Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and impose a "band council" that is only responsible to the Canadian Crown. The confederacy continued to operate in secret, but has made its continued presence known more recently. (See also: The Meaning of Elections for Six Nations by Alicia Elliott )


Let me be clear: Not only do I not believe Canada is legitimately thought of as a  democracy, but I recognize that Canada has send in the RCMP to forcibly depose centuries old democratic governments. The RCMP was formally called the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), and was modeled after the Royal Irish Constabulary which the British used to enforce colonial rule against Ireland. (Listen to more via the Secret Life of Canada)

A first step towards responsible democratic government on this northern part of Turtle Island is for Canada to fully respect the confederacy as the only democratic government that represents the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in nation-to-nation dealings. Canada must also fold the Six Nations "band council" to avoid further confusion that it can represent the nation (especially in anything dealing with land).

After recognizing democracy, Canada should move quickly toward compliance with the Haldimand Proclamation, return misappropriated trust funds, etc.

 

I use the Six Nations of the Grand River as an example because it is the largest reserve by population on land claimed by "Canada" (See Google map). It badly needs room to expand in order to not force their citizens into more risky assimilation/genocide scenarios within lands more heavily occupied by settlers.

While Canada doesn't recognize the democratic confederacy government, it remains intact and ready to take over full governance. The land situation is also more clear given the proclamation, and all that it requires is for Canada to become the least bit an honorable law abiding nation.  The history of misappropriation of funds and land by the Canadian government is also better documented.  Journalists being arrested by the OPP for daring to report on Six Nations land defenders at "1492 Land Back Lane" trying to stop unlawful settler development on land the confederacy has title to is also well documented.

The Six Nations land defenders at "1492 Land Back Lane" must be properly recognized as pro-democracy Freedom Fighters against a repressive regime, not as protesters in what some consider a democracy.  I know it is uncomfortable for Canadians to use terms like this, as well as genocide, in the context of Canada -- but this is the truth of this system.

The process which lead to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) also started in 1923 when Deskaheh, Chief of the Iroquois League, representing the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, left Canada to go on a mission to Geneva (Switzerland). The need for this declaration itself provides proof of the ongoing human rights violations committed by Canada.


What is wrong with what Canada is currently doing, and what to do next, is far more cut-and-dry with Six Nations of the Grand River. Things get more complex in other parts of Turtle Island, with areas such as Quebec and British Columbia having no treaties and thus no claimed legitimacy for foreign settlements and their British created provincial governments to exist at all.


I discuss some more of the "What's Next" in: Evening with Desmond Cole. Time to put "Canada" to rest?

BTW: Coming into compliance with the Haldimand Proclamation doesn't mean settlers/squatters will be booted out of their homes.

Let's work to fix parliamentary flaws which block holding a Premier or Prime Minister accountable.

In my New Years note yesterday, the last paragraph was about Ontario Finance Minister Rod Phillips, and why I felt he should be fired from his position. What he did was not a mistake, but a well prepared dishonesty that made him unworthy of being a cabinet minister. He was appropriately asked to resign.

I feel the same way about Justin Trudeau.  We could discuss the SNC Lavalin scandal, his treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould, the WE scandal, Blackface/brownface, and his general flaunting of his lifelong privilege and belief in his own entitlement. Why I think Justin Trudeau is a bad Prime Minister and should be replaced isn't really my point.

 

My point is that with decades of manipulation by political parties and the media, there is no mechanism to hold Justin Trudeau accountable the same way that Rod Phillips was held accountable.  A bad cabinet minister was turfed from the cabinet for their individual incompetence, and parliament and the government moves forward without some alleged crisis. The same should be possible with any cabinet minister, including a Premier or Prime Minister.

 

Here are some of the barriers to holding Justin Trudeau to account.

 

• During a general election there are 338 separate electoral district elections, and some subset during a by-election. The question posed on the ballot in each electoral district is different. The media and political parties falsely claim and aggressively promote the notion that we have a national election with a common question on a common national ballot.
• Contrary to popular misconception, Canada doesn't elect the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is the current leader of the party that has the confidence of the elected House of Commons to form government. There is no direct way for Canadian citizens to elect or un-elect a Prime Minister.
• It is an extreme corruption of our political system to suggest that I should treat my one vote for a representative in the House of Commons as merely a US-style electoral college vote for some concept of a "President of Canada". The USA should be abandoning its electoral college if it wishes, but Canadians should never be pretending we have one.
• Parties can change leaders (including Primiers and Prime Ministers) between elections, and this is considered normal. The current problem is that it is unelected party executives that make these decisions, not elected parliamentarians holding that cabinet minister to account.
  
• Due to gradual internal party changes (not law), a party leader is currently decided by political tourists (anyone willing to pay $5 to temporarily become a member) outside of parliament, rather than the leader being accountable to elected party caucus members.  While some claim allowing the general public to elect leaders is more democratic, it is actually far less democratic as it makes the leadership position unaccountable.
• Justin's daddy put party names on the federal ballot, and changed the law to allow party leaders to directly manipulate the electoral district nomination processes. This has granted the executives of parties extreme power, and over many parliaments has reduced the power of elected members of parliament and passed power to the unelected leaders offices (PMO, OLO, etc) and party executive. Each successive parliament since has become less democratic.
  
• The mainstream corporate media reports federal elections as a horse race between party leaders.
• They constantly repeat the false concept of "party popular vote" which incorrectly assumes that everyone votes strictly along party lines, greatly diminishing the actual meaning and value of every vote.  This misunderstanding has benefit unaccountable party executives at the expense of elected MPs and their constituents, and has created a block for electoral reform in Canada.
• While there is no "national" election, the media is allowed to report nonsensical time-zone based "national races" as if votes cast in the east have more impact than votes cast in the west.  This generates national unity issues, with some people in the west falsely believing their votes have less of an influence.
• Generally, rather than the media making parliament more accountable, they actively promote myths about Canada's democracy that make it less accountable.

 

 

I believe there are a number of changes that need to be made to make all of parliament more accountable.

• Remove party names from the ballot
• Elections Canada and other official reports from government must stop reporting the false notion of "party popular vote"
  
• Remove the ability of party leaders or other party executives to manipulate electoral district nomination processes.  While the party can approve riding associations, they should not have the ability to centrally control the democratic process.
• Stop having party leadership "primaries", and return to a party leader being the elected MP that has the current confidence of the party caucus. The current process for electing the speaker, including use of preferential voting, would be appropriate to also use for party leaders within caucus membership.
• Provide for appropriate ceremonies for the election of party leaders within the house of commons, and the official vote to decide which party will form government. It must be made clear that these decisions are not made during a general election, but by the parliamentarians who are elected to parliament.
  
• Impose some accountability for party and media misinformation related to democratic institutions, possibly administered by elections Canada.  The role of the media should be to educate the public and hold parliamentarians to account, and not to corrupt democratic processes through misinformation.

 

The Samara Center for Democracy discusses many of these issues, and has many suggestions to improve the functioning of parliament and the empowerment of its elected membership.  This includes a series of books which I strongly recommend reading.

 

I will, however, not be holding my breath on any of these as the "opposition" parties have thus far been advocating for one or more of these problems.

• All parties now have primaries where leadership is decided outside of parliament
• The Conservatives fight for the PM being the leader from the party with a plurality of seats, and falsely claiming that a coalition government is less democratic
• The NDP have suggested multiple times that a by-election should be held if an elected MP wants to change party affiliation.
• The NDP and Greens have been strongly pushing for granting seats based on "party popular vote", increasing the influence of party executives and thus reducing voices in parliament.  They want a special party question on the ballot, and thus are clearly opposed to removing party names from the ballot.  We could have used Ranked Choice Voting (Instant Runoff Voting, or Single Transferable Vote) in the 2019 election if the NDP/Greens were not narrowly focused on "party popular vote".
  

 

It is convenient for people to believe that the lack of accountability that Justin Trudeau enjoys is entirely because of the Liberal party of Canada, but this is not the case.  If the opposition parties really want to hold Justin Trudeau to account then they must stop blocking measures to increase the accountability of party leaders in general, and Premiers and Prime Ministers specifically.  If you are a member of a political party, please work within that party to convince them to work toward rather than against parliamentary and cabinet accountability.

 

"Party popular vote" vs Indigenous self-government and sovereignty

While I've been thinking about electoral reform since the 1990's, I learned quite a bit since that time and thus changed my opinion with new knowledge. I wrote an article discussing one of the major changes since 1997 and 2017 when Canada was having consultations and had an active committee on electoral reform.

This year I have been learning about Canada as part of my antiracism training. Learning about pre-contact Turtle Island and the First Nation, Métis and Inuit civilizations that exist in parallel with Canada and the USA on Turtle Island is critical to knowing what Canada is.

As with electoral reform, I can remember what I thought prior to my learning.  I can recognize missing knowledge in other people that I also lacked, and want to share with them what I have learned.  What I can't do is unlearn and go back to what I thought in the past.  Please share with me any new information, but please don't expect me to go backwards to my lesser informed self.

 

During the One Dish, One Mic talk radio show (archives available as podcasts) they enable listener interaction via text messages. While they were talking about a specific provincial government minister, they said they didn't have the right to do that "with only 41% of the vote".  I sent in the following text:

41%? Ontario doesn't have a king. We currently have 124 seats in a parliament which should be elected by ranked ballots. Talking about the concept of "party popular vote" puts executives of parties in control, which is bad for democracy.

I posted a followup message to the One Dish, One Mic forum. It is an example of something I've been interested in for decades mixing in with something I've only recently started to learn.


I threw that comment in about party popular vote.  I've spent decades studying governance and voting systems (as a volunteer - it is not part of my job). I'd like to see that discussed on the radio show at some point.



I've looked into the participatory democracy of Six Nations, and I'd put that as an ideal.  Properly trained people act as facilitators to come to consensus, and there are spokespersons rather than top-down people dictating.

I know that other nations use other systems, and I'd like to hear more about those other systems.

Whenever there is a ballot question that has more than two possible answers (Yes/No), then voters should be able to rank.  Otherwise it is not the answer that the most people support that "wins", but the answer that is the most different from everything else (where votes aren't "split" between choices that more people approve of, even if it wasn't their first choice).  This isn't remotely a fair system to have a single X when there is often 5 or more possible answers.

Moving away from the participatory democracy ideal, you have "elected councils", "parliaments" or "assemblies" where a smaller number of people get elected by a smaller percentage of the community.  Those "elected" people then get to claim to represent an entire group without any requirement to consult the group or get consensus. This puts more power in the hands of fewer people.   This European representative system, even when it works in an ideal setting, is not perfect if representing the interests of the community on each issue is a goal. It sacrifices accountability for decision making efficiency.

 

I know that SNEC (Six Nations Elected Council) is particularly problematic because it isn't accountable to voters, but to the Federal Government.  Thus voter turnout is around 5%.
 

A better example would be the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut which elects representatives as independent candidates (no parties), who then seek to form consensus within the assembly. Similar advanced governance is used in the Northwest Territories as well as Nunatsiavut. While representative rather than participatory, it is still one of the better options available.  It isn't self-government, as it is still considered subservient to the Dominion of Canada government.

As a voter in Ontario, I'm extremely envious of their system which is far more democratic.  It would be great if Ontario could graduate to that system in the future as it matures!

 

Moving further away from participatory democracy you have political parties, where you have some representatives accountable to voters and some accountable to the party. Too much control within parties puts more power in the hands of even fewer people.
 

Things have been moving further and further away from a more ideal democracy within Canada and its provinces.  It was P.E. Trudeau that put party names on the ballot federally, and put the leader of the party in charge of signing nominations.  Since then parties have moved from the leader being chosen by caucus members (and thus always accountable to caucus in parliament) to being elected outside by "members" (political tourists) making the leaders unaccountable. The mainstream national media has pushed this harmful idea forward (See: Participatory democracy vs corporate media).
 

Every mention of "party popular vote" grants these unaccountable leaders more power, and allows them to push forward policies which most people disagree with.  With no way to hold leaders accountable between elections, they have become periodically "elected" dictatorships.
 

This appears to be a typical European worldview problem, where there seems to be a claim to want strong decisive leadership rather than building consensus.  Makes sense, as much of these worldviews come from a history involving the Roman Empire and the later building of various other European empires (such as the British Empire, which Canada was explicitly created to promote  -- it is all right there in the British North America act that allegedly "created" Canada).
 

I was born here and loyal to this homeland. I don't want to rebuild European Feudalism and want something more democratic.  I don't expect Canada to ever be willing to go to a full participatory democracy as Canadians are generally disengaged from politics, but lets at least always push for a person representative democracy and not a party representation system.

My opposition to party proportionality, and optimizing electoral processes toward a low Gallagher index measured against the notion of "party popular vote", has become even stronger this year with my antiracism training.  We can't fix the flaws in the design and implementation of "Canada" by doubling-down on the harmful European worldviews at the core of those flaws.

Why are social scientists and fellow social liberals allowing Jordan Peterson to win the policy discussion?

Youtube regularly recommends videos of someone attempting to debate Canadian clinical psychologist and UofT psychology professor Jordan Peterson. I've also read articles written by several critics. I cringe when I read/watch these discussions as I feel embarrassed by the arguments used by Mr. Peterson's critics.

While I don't agree with Jordan Peterson's conclusions, the logic behind his arguments in these discussions (debates, articles, etc) are sound while the arguments deployed against him are generally lacking. If all you had to go on were these critics of Jordan Peterson you would be forced to believe he was right, and his critics were wrong.

To clarify: The following isn't a critique of Jordan Peterson's arguments, but a critique used by those who feel they are rebutting his arguments.

Measurements and accuracy matter

I have a background in natural sciences (STEM), which was part of my personal interests as well as training at university for computer science. When we need to measure something we work to be accurate, especially when we then put it into a model and/or formula to then predict some outcome. We can often test our models in the real world and know that our predictions were incorrect.

In the social sciences I often see something quite different. When there are many factors that go into analyzing and/or measuring something, a researcher will try to simplify the number of factors and make claims based on that simplification. To anyone who believes that a different factor would have a larger impact they will dispute those claims. All too often there is no mechanism to make real-world measurements to determine whose predictions are more sound.

 

One of the areas I study is governance systems, including democratic reform around electoral systems. Many people in representative democracies instinctively can tell that the people who sit in representative bodies (such as the House of Commons in Canada) don't represent the population well. Some electoral systems researchers have taken one factor in a multi-factor analysis, declared it to be the only factor, and made policy proposals based on the myth that there was only one factor. This is the case with so-called Proportional Representation, which takes political party affiliation as the only demographic factor that matters for elected representatives. What they promote may optimize some factor-specific formula, but does not make the resulting democracy any more representative unless you blindly agree with the researchers that party affiliation is the only relevant demographic trait.

Hey, we have a number, so it must be accurate science.

Gender pay gap is something people try to critique Jordan Peterson about. The concept of equal pay for equal work may sound simple, but when you look at the concept of equal work you find yourself in a very complex multi-factor analysis.

What some political partisans do is pick one factor, sexism against women, and declare it the only factor. With this factor you can then compare the salaries of some definition of "women" and the salaries of some definition of "men" and declare the difference as "sexism" which can be fixed by quotas to counteract "sexism".

While nobody would argue that sexism doesn't exist, many will appropriately argue that optimizing hiring and promotion based on the assumption that sexism is the only factor will be counterproductive.

Narrow binary gender roles

I have male genitalia. As a person with this anatomy I have had many things that people have assumed and/or attempted to project/impose on me.

I have never had a remote interest in competitive sports, and the closest thing to sports entertainment I enjoy is classical and modern dance. It is unfortunate that people think that I'm being antisocial because I don't want to talk about sports scores at a bar or water cooler, but I'm quite frustrated when people think that makes me less of a man.

Even in today's "modern" society the role of males is to be hunter-gatherers, which now means gathering money. Physical strength and aggression was key to the hunting, and thus considered key to being masculine and key to many people's definition of success. Your masculinity is questioned if you question the methods used to hunt-gather money, whether money is all too often extracted rather than earned, and whether that hunting-gathering is a social good or harm. You are definitely questioned if you don't project physical strength and aggression.

While I work with computers (systems administration and software author), a field that is male dominated, I have primarily applied my technical skills in areas I consider to be a social good. This has meant that I am quite often part of a male minority where I work, and it also means I am not "gathering" as much money as I could if I accepted one of the job offers that is less socially valuable to me.

As a person granted arbitrary privileges based on my anatomy, I am more free to choose my own role in society than if I was born with different anatomy. That choice is still in opposition to many others who attempt to impose binary gender roles and expression on everyone. It is still an act of political and social defiance.

Even before we move entirely away from the antiquated (and on Turtle Island, colonial) concept of there being a gender binary, the problem of treating people based on anatomy should be obvious.

As much as our not-so-modern society wants to claim that a persons anatomy determines how they think, how they want to express themselves, and their role in society, I believe it is inappropriate to create laws which impose that outdated binary gender thinking.

 

Equality of opportunity vs outcome

Equality of outcome is simple: as an example, assume that nothing other than sexism exists, you can measure and then compare pairs of assumed binary demographic statistics. Except, that analysis gets gender grossly wrong and will lead to policies that will be as harmful to society as the harm from sexism and various other harmful isms we are trying to account for.

Equality of opportunity is hard: it requires detecting a large number of factors, and creating multiple policies to correct a wider ranges of problems which disable equality of opportunity.

If we want a fair and just society that isn't imposing arbitrary policies on people based on incorrect assumptions about demographic traits, we must be willing to do the hard work. I see no evidence that taking shortcuts will solve problems, but see considerable evidence it will make existing problems worse.

 

Reworking success

While I strongly agree with Jordan Peterson's opposition to those who want to create harm by adopting policies based on equality of outcome, it is also obvious to me that I disagree with him when it comes to what qualifies as equality of opportunity.

Mr. Peterson has indicated many times that when counseling women on how to achieve better pay that they should become more aggressive. To make a long analysis short, his advise to individuals (regardless of anatomy) is to adopt more traditional "hunter gather" traits. My immediate question is this: are traits that are appropriate for human warfare and/or killing animals for food or sport the best traits to promote in the workplace, in economic policy, and society in general?

Hiring and promoting more women doesn't change this problematic criteria for success if the only women that are being hired and promoted are those who have already adopted the same traits.

On my bookshelf, along with Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" is Robert Theobald's "reworking success".

Personally I think Adam Smith's ideas are more than a bit past their prime, and if we want to move forward with a modern society we need to put better thought into how we define wealth and success. I'm not suggesting we switch from the ideas of a Scottish economist (Adam Smith, 1723-1790) to the ideas of a German economist (Karl Marx, 1818-1883), as I don't think it is healthy to believe that all useful ideas are confined to a line between these two European males.

I'm convinced it isn't helpful to declare adherence to European ideas as a criteria for success, another thing I am not in agreement with Mr. Peterson on.

Systemic problems

I have spent much of my free (non-work) time in the last few months on my own antiracist training. Probably at the top of the list of thing I've learned is to move away from thinking about individuals (a racist, or a group of racists) to systems (racism).  An individual may prefer one race or the other, and may not even be aware of their biases.

This turns out to be ideal for me as a systems administrator. I've always been more comfortable thinking about systems, and less able (or sometimes interested) in narrowly focusing on individuals within the systems. I've always been a "think global, act local" person.

I grew up in Canada, with Canadian culture all around me. While I didn't consider myself a racist, I still have views I adopted from the culture around me that have racial bias.

The current Canadian system of government was imposed in 1867 by colonialists who had already been occupying this land for a considerable time. When Europeans first traveled to the northern part of North America they established healthy trade relationships, but that relatively quickly moved to eurocentric colonialism. Whether the official colonial government policy to non-europeans (whether indigenous or european approved immigrants) was segregationist or assimilationist, both were and continue to be racism as part of the system of governance. The same is true of other demographic traits, where government and culture continues to try to make impositions on people that don't fit European, male, binary gender, or other narrow (and now many would agree outdated) concepts.

While it would be nice to think I would be alive long enough to request immigration status from a new government in a post-colonial northern North America (some call turtle island), I don't at all believe I live in a post-racism country.

Solving these systemic problems can't be accomplished by looking at individuals and assigning blame to individuals. Demographic trait based blame games seem obvious to me to be a distraction from moving forward with policies to reduce systemic injustice.

Affirmative Action

In the 1990's I was an opponent to affirmative action.  I have come to recognize this was because I am an opponent to policies trying to create equality of outcome, which I don't see as having merit.

I now recognize a lack of equality of opportunity, partly due to failures at defining success and dealing with systemic injustices. I am a strong supporter of adjusting systems to not only correct existing systemic problems, but also for an appropriate level of time to grant an advantage to groups who were previously unfairly put at a disadvantage.

There may be some superficial similarities for some policies around equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, but how these policies are formed and what would be used as a metric of success would be quite different.

Unfortunately, I've rarely seen good arguments being brought forward for affirmative action and similar policies. As long as the discussion is around equality of outcomes, the justified opposition will always win the debate. Policies to address social problems will either not be brought forward or won't last.

Only once convincing arguments that focus on systemic solutions to enable equality of opportunity are brought forward will we see sustainable progress.

The Conservative Party of Canada's US-style primaries is counted today.

I disagree with Canada's adoption of US-style primaries where political tourists decide who will be treated as the leader/dictator of Canadian political parties.

Party leaders in the Canadian House of Commons should be decided by and accountable to caucus members, and never the other way around (caucus members asked to be accountable to party "leaders") if we wish to have a healthy representative democracy.

That said, there are possible outcomes of the CPC primary today that are interesting to different degrees.

Election not decided by "runners", front or otherwise.

The media likes to report on all elections as "races", where the fastest "runner" is the one that will win. There was constant talk about who was and was not a "front runner" during this primary.

The fact is most elections don't work that way, and the media tends to not even correctly identify who is being elected.  For instance, in Canada individual voters do not directly elect a Prime Minister.  We elect MP representatives in our districts who join and potentially change party caucuses. It is the entirety of the elected representatives in the House of Commons that decides who forms government, not individual district voters.

In the case of this primary election they are using a ranked ballot as well as a point system that allocates points equally among electoral districts no matter how many political tourists voted in that district.  This is nothing like a "one person, one vote" system.  The votes can transfer from one candidate to another based on the ranking on the ballot, and the weight of each vote is lower in districts with more ballots cast.

While a small number of journalists accurately reported this election, most did not.  While part of the job of the media in a democracy is to hold politicians to account, I have always wondered whose job it is to hold the media to account.

I wonder if Canadian representative democracy would be damaged by the centralization of decision making in unaccountable "leaders" had it not been for the all too common confusion of "Canadian" reporters who reported on Canadian elections as if they were similar in some way to US elections.  Would the CPC even be having primaries if not for media misreporting over generations?

All 4 candidates are possible

Given the way this election works, as opposed to how it was reported, all 4 candidates are possibilities.  It may not be how many #1 votes were cast that determines the outcome, but who was looked at by those with strong #1 preferences as their #2 choice.  The weight of an individual vote may change during each round, as the ballots of those who didn't rank additional choices are exhausted and no longer part of the count.

Leslyn Lewis

Ms. Lewis is seen by many to be a great #2 choice, for a wide variety of quite different reasons.   For the strong social conservatives her evangelical views, including strong anti-choice views, is seen as a plus.  For some social liberals her gender and race are seen as a plus, a refreshing change from the white maleness that dominates Canadian politics.

While I read interviews about her, as a past party member who voted in the last CPC primary I didn't receive constant campaign newsletters as I did the other 3 candidates.  I don't know if it was part of the plan to stay under the radar, and allow the other 3 candidates to provide ammunition against themselves in a future general election.

All of what I saw of her makes her the most interesting possibility during a general election, as different people can focus on different aspects of what is presented and come to very different conclusions.  I would speculate her influence on district voters in a general election to be more positive than the other 3 candidates, and some primary voters may have voted for her based on this reason.

Peter MacKay

I see Peter MacKay as a moderate compromise choice, much as Andrew Scheer was.  While Mr. MacKay tried to play up his social-conservative bona-fides during this election, that campaigning will hurt the party in a general election similar to how it hurt Andrew Scheer during the most recent general election.

I consider Mr. MacKay to be the least interesting possibility, and the least different from Andrew Scheer.

 

Erin O'Toole

What I found most interesting during the campaign is how much time the other two male candidates spent opposing his climate change plan.  This is because he had one, while Peter and Derek seemed to suggest that even recognizing the need to have a plan was somehow anti-conservative.  How it became Conservative policy to subsidize inefficiency and government debt remains confusing to me.

Mr. O'Toole is often grouped with Mr. MacKay as far as not being so visibly a social conservative, even though he used a "true blue Conservative" as a campaign slogan.  Like Mr. MacKay the attempt to push his social-conservative  bona-fides during campaign will come to haunt him during a general election.

Note: I have to admit to agreeing with his plan to defund CBC television, hopefully as a start to remove subsidies and special policy treatment from analog-era broadcasting and BDU's entirely.  This is 2020, not 1980...

Derek Sloan

Derek Sloan offers "no apologies" for his highly visible form of social conservatism.  If he somehow became leader it would be a gift to other general election candidates not nominated by the CPC.  What I read from his campaign put him very far outside of mainstream Canadian thought.

Should it be easy to find candidates for a leadership election that probably shouldn't happen?

I've read several articles discussing how hard it is to find good candidates for party leadership races. The federal Green Party and Conservative party, as well as some provincial parties, are looking for replacements for people who stepped down or were unreasonably kicked out.

I wonder if it is finally time to discuss whether we should be having these party-run leadership races at all?

In her chapter in Turning Parliament Inside Out, Elisabeth May reminded us that it wasn't until the 1974 federal election that party affiliations appeared on the ballots. The law also indicated that party leaders authorized candidates to have that party affiliation on the riding ballot. It was only in the latter half of the twentieth century that Canada broke from the tradition of the leader being decided by elected caucus members as is the case in most Commonwealth countries, and adopting a more US style of having party members elect the leaders.

The changes for the 1974 election happened during Pierre Elliott Trudeau's time as PM.  His time is widely seen as the beginning of the centralization of government power within the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), as well as centralization within the Office of the Leader of the Official Opposition (OLO) and other party leaders offices.


I strongly believe these changes have been very unhealthy for Canadian democracy, as the system that Canadians use to govern ourselves is entirely different than the US.

In the United States they have separate ballot questions for the Presidency, members of the House of Representatives, and Senators. They also have ballot questions for many other positions and ballot initiatives.

In Canada, we do not elect the government, our executive branch that is comparable to the US presidency. We rarely have referenda.

What we elect are members of the House of Commons, currently in 338 separate electoral district elections (although we have used multi-member districts in the past). The House of Commons then determines which party leader will become the Prime Minister, and the PM then selects their cabinet and is able to appoint many other positions (including Senators) which are directly elected in the United States.

Treating the position of Prime Minister as if it were remotely similar to the US President, and treating members of the House of Commons as if they were merely participants in the US Electoral College, are extremely dangerous concepts.


The only elected body Canada has is the House of Commons. The job of every parliamentarian who is not in cabinet is to hold the government to account.   This is true whether that member has the same party affiliation as the PM, of a different party affiliation.

This is true of other party leadership as well, and caucus members are unable to hold leadership to account if the leaders believe they have a mandate from other than caucus.


The Samara Centre for Democracy reports on many aspects of our parliament. In a recent report they indicated there was a herd behavior in that. "the average MP voted with their party 99.6% of the time. The most rebellious MP in the 42nd Parliament: 96.6%." This doesn't at all sound like parliamentarians holding the government or their party leadership to account.

The centralization of power in leaders offices that comes with being confused whether this is the Canadian or US system of government leads to an unaccountable government as a majority of the house are unable to do their jobs.

The confusion about whether we are electing a Canadian parliament or a Canadian President has also lead the media and other groups to focus reporting on the leaders and the extremely harmful concept of "party popular vote" during general elections. This further makes members of parliament less accountable as they do not get the scrutiny and perceived mandate they require in order to do their jobs as the only elected part of our system of government.

As we do not elect a President in Canada, and members of parliament are critical to the functioning of accountable government, Canadians must abandon this extremely harmful confusion of thinking that we have a similar system to the United States. What we end up with is a series of party leaders that believe they have a mandate to do anything they want, and that the members of parliament have less of a mandate than the party leadership.


I have a few suggestions to return our system of government to being more accountable.

• Immediately stop entertaining the idea that the general public or party tourists should have a vote in the leadership of political parties.
• Return to leaders being elected by caucus members, from existing caucus members.  Some parties need a spokesperson during elections as they don't have a caucus member willing or able to be that spokesperson, but the leader should be decided by caucus and already be an elected member of caucus.
• Elections Canada must stop reporting on the harmful and inaccurate concept of "party popular vote". It has never been true that every possible vote for a party nominated candidate is an endorsement of the party or its leader. Hopefully the media and various interest groups will follow suite and stop discussing this concept. Hopefully some of these interest groups will stop promoting harmful electoral reform which seeks to optimize parliamentary seats to "party popular vote".
• We should amend the law such that it is not the leader of the party that signs nomination papers. An alternative is for officials within the party to confirm riding associations as being party affiliated, and it be the riding association officials who are able to attach any party label to that riding's ballot.
• We should revert to the pre-1974 ballot which did not include party affiliation.

What did Justin Trudeau and the 2015 Liberal platform team do wrong on electoral reform

While partisans from opposition parties and supportive multi-partisan interest groups have their own take on what went wrong with electoral reform after the 2015 election, I'll offer a non-partisan take on what Justin Trudeau did wrong.

Platforms are increasingly decided by an inner-circle within the bureaucracy of a political party, in close consultation with the party leader and executive. They increasingly even ignore or contradict party policy voted on by members. It is therefore appropriate to focus blame for failures on those few individuals, rather than all candidates or elected members with that party affiliation.

We should start with a reminder of what was included in the 2015 Liberal platform

We will make every vote count.

We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system. 

We will convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting. 

This committee will deliver its recommendations to Parliament. Within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.

Lets parse what Justin Trudeau and his platform team did wrong with each component:

We will make every vote count.

This is a loaded term that means different, and often incompatible, things to different people.  The platform team were either unaware of the complexities of electoral reform, or were trying to deceive people into believing that it was their meaning that the platform was using.

We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system. 

If this commitment was strong, then other steps would not have been carried out in a way that would have predictably lead to failure.

We will convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting.

If the commitment was to have 2015 be the last federal election under FPTP, then why convene a committee that is constituted differently than any other parliamentary committee?  Convening a committee to study a variety of reforms, including a variety of things that a proportional system can be proportional to, should not start by forming a committee that is proportional to alleged support for political parties.

The idea that elections and parliament should be focused only on political parties, with no consideration for any other demographic trait of potential representatives, is itself controversial.  Misunderstandings and misrepresentations about these very different criteria for success is behind why reform is so hard in Canada.

An unbiased study would have found that the three most common things different people are focused on when voting in parliamentary elections are:

1. Those whose focus is on what party forms government. For them the choice is between the top two parties representing two visions, with there being little or no interest in other parties or the individual people who are candidates in the election.
2. Those whose focus is on what parties have seats in parliament. For them the choice is between the likely less than 10 parties who have sufficient support to gain seats, and they also have little or no interest in the specific individuals who are candidates in the election.
3. Those who want the people with the most voter support to act as representatives. For them party affiliation is one demographic trait among many, and want to be able to include other criteria in their decision of which people (plural) they believe could represent them.

Each group has different features of systems they believe is ideal

1. For this group, First Past The Post is the ideal system, as the single vote plurality encourages people to vote for one of the top two parties - otherwise the vote will split or be quickly exhausted.
2. For this group party lists are seen as ideal (some claim necessary), as the single party vote requires people to vote narrowly along party lines and thus makes any vote for a party count equally.
3. For this group any ballot that forces people to vote narrowly along party lines via party lists, or gives certain voters an unequal vote because they vote along party lines, moves us further away from making every vote count.  This group will reject any system which includes party lists or groups different candidates together along party lines.  They don't want their vote for one person to transfer to another person they didn't vote for. They might feel being forced to make a single choice among 10 options country-wide isn't much different than a choice between 2. This group also doesn't believe that there is only "one right answer" to a question with more than two options, so will want to either rank their choices or mark multiple choices they approve of. They will want their ballot to not be exhausted quickly and have no influence, so will want their ballot to be able to transfer beyond a small number of candidates (for instance via multi-member districts or similar).

This committee will deliver its recommendations to Parliament.

Between June 21, 2016 and November 28, 2016 the Special Committee on Electoral Reform carried out the study.  This was 6 months of study, with a final report being tabled in December which is 13 months after the government was formed.

A proper study would have determined the complexities of the different positions, recognized there was no consensus, and suggested a way to move forward that had a majority of support. Unfortunately by putting the focus on parties this biased the study towards parties and their interests, as can be seen by a number of the recommendations.

• The NDP and Elizabeth May were in group 2, and forced a criteria for success (a low Gallagher index) that group 2 wants, but that group 1 and group 3 both reject as being invalid (or even counterproductive, as it seeks to optimize for what some in group 3 consider harmful hyper-partisanship)
• The Conservative members wanted to embarrass the Liberals at any cost, and ensure that the Liberals couldn't fulfill their campaign promise.  As the opposition was granted a majority of the members on committee, it was trivial to orchestrate this by requiring a referendum.  Any time Canadians have been given a referendum on the Gallagher index it has failed, so these two criteria together guaranteed failure.
• The Liberals on the committee presented a Supplemental Report of the Liberal Members of the Special Committee on Electoral Reform which confirmed the complexity of reform and the invalidity of the Gallagher index as a criteria for success.  In doing so they essentially contradicted the authors of the 2015 Liberal platform as the platform suggested the issue could have a satisfactory resolution before the next election.  The Liberal caucus members admitting in their minority report that the platform team was wrong was the most surprising aspect of the report.

It was not surprising that the government response rejected recommendations 1, 2 and 12 relating to the Gallagher index (noting that testimony did not lead to that recommendation) with 12 also including the referendum.

Within 18 months of forming government, we will introduce legislation to enact electoral reform.

I will repeat where I started: "The platform team were either unaware of the complexities of electoral reform, or were trying to deceive people into believing that it was their meaning that the platform was using."

The ERRE committee work happened at a predictable pace, and left only 5 months to introduce and pass legislation.

As the 10 independent Electoral Boundaries Commissions could not complete a process to change boundaries within 5 months, or even necessarily before the next election, the quickly introduced legislation would need to work with the existing boundaries.   While that would satisfy the first and third group as they don't want districts redrawn, this would have been rejected by the group who want party lists or other systems which propose redrawing electoral boundaries.

As the second group often believe that systems based on ranked ballots in multi-member districts (STV) are "proportional" a compromise was possible. Unfortunately that was never offered by the opposition.  In fact the opposition and interest groups from group 2 continued to promote the idea that ranked ballot systems could be "improved" in the future by adding "top-up" party lists to better meet their Gallagher index criteria for success, making it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about any compromise.

With no compromise offered, and confusion continually generated by one of the groups ignoring the interests of other voters, reform was impossible in such a short time-frame.

The complexity of moving forward with reform should have been understood, and any promise of enacting legislation in a short time period should have started with stating the criteria for success and not falsely claiming that legislation would easily follow from some non-existent consensus on success criteria.

Will the Conservative Party choose to fail like the US Democrats?

As a current Conservative party member I have received fundraising calls from the Conservative party.  The worst so far was from someone who started by talking about the leadership race, and I mentioned I have made a donation to my candidate.  She then spoke about how this increases the donation limit for the year : that I can donate to the candidate and to the party.

She then proceeded to list the party talking points, one of the first was how the Liberal carbon tax was a tax on everything.  To be honest, I didn't hear anything else she said as it was clear that there was no possibility I would be donating to my candidate -- Michael Chong -- and a party that was apparently campaigning against the only candidate that has resonated with me so far.  Michael Chong's revenue neutral green tax shift (from income to carbon) was the policy that made me take notice of the leadership race, and to learn about other policies we agreed on.

As politely as I could I hung up on her.

I also started to get emails from Maxime Bernier's campaign.  I never signed up for anything from his campaign, nor any of the other withdrawn candidates that endorsed him.  So I have to guess that the Conservative party itself added me to Bernier's list, as I opted-in to their list and to Michael Chong's list.

This reminded me of the US Democrats and how the party (staffers, fundraisers, etc) treated Clinton as "their candidate" even though Bernie Sanders was resonating with a whole new group of people who could have won the Democrats the Whitehouse.  Instead the party pushed (in ways some of us thought of as corruption) "their candidate" onto the ballot, and they managed to lose an election against a reality television star with no concrete policy ideas (just the run-of-the-mill angry political noise, what many are characterizing as "populism").

Has the Conservative party decided to give up the next general election and the possibility of their leader becoming the Prime Minister?  Maxime Bernier and I may have libertarian views, but the smaller you make government the more important it becomes what you believe must be left.  I do not recognize myself in what I hear from Maxime Bernier.

That isn't the same thing as saying that I won't be ranking him on my ballot.

The Conservatives will be using an advanced ranked ballot system.  Unlike a minimal-information single-X ballot, leadership voters need to think beyond who we most want to win the contest.  If we want to maximize the effectiveness of the ballot we need to rank all the way to who we would least like to win the contest.

While not focused on a single winner contest, an article by an Australian titled How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System , specifically the question "I've numbered, say, 23 boxes and I don't like any of the other parties/candidates.  Should I stop now?", helps explain how to maximize a high-information ranked ballot.

A lot of voters - especially a lot of idealistic left-wing voters - are a bit silly about this and worry that if they preference a party they dislike they may help it win.  Well yes, but your preference can only ever reach that party if the only other parties left in the contest are the ones you have preferenced behind it or not at all! If that's the case then someone from that list is going to win a seat, whether you decide to help the lesser evils beat the greater evils or not. 

If Michael Chong becomes leader, I will be giving the Conservative candidate in my district a much closer look than I have in more recent elections.  Under our current electoral system it is the local candidate who needs to represent me, and their ability to do so is tied into the environment the party offers.  It is critical whether progressive conservative values (such as a green tax shift) will be embraced, or ignored by people who put blind ideology and slogans ahead of logic and evidence based decision making.

If Maxime Bernier becomes leader I know that no matter how good my local candidate is they won't be able to represent me, as a party that makes Mr. Bernier the leader will spend too much time chanting simplistic slogans and not enough time making evidence based decisions.

There is a line after which I won't be interested in voting for the locally nominated candidate as I will believe the party won't allow them to represent me.  As a progressive conservative (lower case as that party is gone) I can't support any of the social conservative candidates.  I think the party would lose many seats if one of the social conservative candidates won. I believe most Conservatives recognize that, so one of the social conservatives wining is unlikely.

If you exclude those who want to talk about their highly subjective idea of what constitutes "Canadian values" or "barbaric cultural practices", who do we have left?

I haven't made up my mind on all the candidates.  We still have 13 candidates, and only 4 more weeks to go.  I'm just very frustrated to learn that party staffers and volunteers are apparently campaigning against the best chance of the Conservative party leader being the next Canadian Prime Minister.

Why I joined the CPC to vote for Michael Chong

I have to admit that when I first heard that Michael Chong was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) I thought: Oh, cute - a progressive conservative is running -- they'll squash him like a bug.

I had an opportunity to hear Mr. Chong in person on Wednesday February 22 at an event hosted at the offices of OpenConcept (a business owned by long-time friend Michael Gifford).  There was about 30 guests there, and Mr. Chong's meet-and-greeting very quickly turned into a Q&A session.

Most of what I heard I really liked.  Enough to decide to become a member of the party in order to vote in the leadership election in May (March 28 is the final date to become a member if you want to have your say).  I also made a $350 campaign contribution to Mr. Chong.

I'll highlight three areas of policy he spoke about, the first being from that bulk of ideas I agreed with, then one area I am mostly with him but with some reservations, and one area I disagreed.  Two are key elements of his platform: Economic Opportunity, Environmental Opportunity, and Democratic Opportunity.

Green Tax Policy

Mr. Chong is a GreenPAC endorsed candidate, and I was grinning from ear-to-ear when he was talking about his proposal for a revenue neutral shift from income taxes to a carbon tax (one much higher than proposed by the Liberals).  He even used the phrase "taxing things which are bad rather than things which are good", a phrase that has been used by the Green Tax Shift movement for decades.  (The shortform "Tax bads, not goods" confuses people as they think of the wrong meaning of "goods").

I have been a large supporter of the Green Tax Shift since I heard about it in the early 1990's.  Then I was a member of the Green Party, and remember one election where we were setting up a campaign office for the region (we didn't have the funding to have per-district offices).  This was a rental of a building where the previous  tenant was "H&R Block Income Tax".  I wanted us to put up a sign that said "Abolish" over the "H&R Block" part of the sign, but was opposed by some in the party which had more traditional lefty views on these issues (one of the first signs I might have been in the wrong party).


The question came up about why the carbon tax shouldn't be put into general revenue and used to increase fiscal capacity, reduce deficits/debt, etc.   His answer was that he wanted those other issues to be separate, and that this should be a revenue neutral shift so that the average taxpayer wouldn't be opposed to the tax (the average person wouldn't feel a tax increase, while those who pollute more than average would be paying more than those of us who pollute lower than average would be paying less).


The benefits of this policy are greater than he had time to discuss.  When tax-shifting you are taking something that is out of your hands and putting it into your control.  If you want to do something to reduce your taxes you can make better choices for your energy usage and other activities which are carbon emitters.  It becomes both carrot and stick, which is far more efficient than a stick-only approach that will meet with large political opposition from a wide variety of citizens.

Mr. Chong discussed how income tax is an inefficient tax, and that its introduction was only a temporary measure to help pay for Canada's involvement in World War 1.  While the last surviving war veteran from WW1 died in 2010, income tax is unfortunately still here.  To be clear, I'm not personally against taxes or government, but I think taxing income is the wrong way to go.

Electoral Reform

The question came up about where he stood on electoral reform.  He said that most of the proposals to replace our current voting system had some seats granted to political parties, and that we needed to reform political parties first before considering these types of changes.

I understand where he is coming from, but am disappointed with fellow Canadians that this is the answer.  He is correct in that nearly all the proposals that have come from the most vocal activist groups are party functioning, granting "top up" seats based on implied or explicit support for political parties.

A different direction could be taken, which is to take the party-focused features (Like optimizing for Gallagher Index style proportionality) off the table.  Ranked ballots in single and/or multi-member districts without top-up seats or above-the-line voting doesn't privilege party affiliation.  Moving from single-member districts to multi-member districts enables competition between candidates from the same party within a multi-member district, further diminishing the influence of political parties.

Unfortunately I can't fault Mr Chong for his views. If we went forward with a referendum today (maybe a ranked ballot, like was used in PEI and is being used to decide the Conservative Party leader), it is quite likely that some party-privileging system would be brought in and the excessive control over MPs by the party and party leader would only become worse.

We not only need to do as Mr. Chong suggests and reform parties, as well as both the upper and lower houses, we need to help educate fellow Canadians about the features of different voting systems and the risks associated with some of these features.

Merging government departments and agencies

This is one of those areas of policy that a few attendees had a problem with.

Mr Chong acknowledged that government shouldn't be treated like the private sector, and that the PM should not be thought of like the CEO.

He then proceeded to use private sector examples to explain why merging government departments would be a good idea.

There are many differences between the public and private sector, and this is one of those areas where the differences need to be recognized.   In a company, the company will work best when everyone is moving in the same direction.  If some branch thought the company was moving the wrong direction they could split off and form their own company that could compete or cooperate with the original company.

Governments don't work that way.  There are different departments with bureaucracies that have competing mindsets, and that is a good thing.  There is a monopoly on governance, and some branch that thinks another branch is heading the wrong direction can't split off and form their own government.  They need to hash it out within the structure of government, with there being debate between government departments that is not unlike the debate that happens between MPs in parliament.

While I believe there are efficiencies to be had in government, I believe merging dissimilar departments or even branches is harmful.  I still believe it is wrong for consumer affairs to have been added to Industry Canada (Now Innovation, Science and Economic Development) as that creates a conflict of interest within the department that would have been easier to negotiate if it were different departments (and thus different management structure trying to bring forward policy initiatives).

My political context

When I became politically active in the early 1990's I was introduced to the Green Party by someone who was familiar with the center-right German Greens. The Greens resonated more with me when the NDP was doing well (and lefties headed to the NDP), but I felt out-of-place whenever the NDP was doing poorly (and more lefties came to the Green Party).

I joined the Progressive Conservative party in 1998 because I was excited about the leadership campaign.  What David Orchard was saying resonated with me, and the party as a whole was more appealing the more the aspects of the conservative movement that didn't resonate with me moved to the Reform party.  I was called a tourist by Joe Clark during the campaign, and after that race which Joe Clark won I didn't really feel welcome.  Even though Joan Russow was leader, and her ideas didn't resonate with me at all, I returned to the Green Party as I believed at the time I had to be involved in a party to be involved in politics.

Starting in 2002 I started to meet more sitting MPs, and the more MPs I met the less partisan I became.  There were days when I would walk out of the office of an NDP MP and into the office of a Conservative MP, and it did not seem politically jarring at all.

I currently don't consider myself partisan, and find that there are candidates and MPs from every party who I share many ideas with, and well as MPs from each party which I don't share many ideas with.   I have found that political affiliation is a poor indicator of an MPs views on the issues that concern me the most.


While I still believe I'm politically center-right, I don't think I will ever feel at home exclusively with any party.  I suspect instead I'll want to become more involved with the individuals within the parties that I support.

Even from listening to Mr Chong for a very short amount of time on Wednesday evening I believe he is one of those individuals I can support -- and will be supporting as he runs for leadership of one of the two parties whose leader is most likely to become the next Prime Minister.

Whether or not Mr Chong wins, a good sized showing will demonstrate that there is support for the type of conservatism that he represents!  Whoever becomes the next CPC leader will need to listen more closely to these views.