all about a canadian guy living in canada

Happy Canada Election Day!

Today Canadians go to the polls to elect a new Prime Minister. Or, more to the point, they go to the polls to elect the same Prime Minister they had before, but hopefully not to give him more power than he had before.

In 2006 the Conservatives, under the leadership of Stephen Harper, gained power in a minority government. Two years later, and contrary to fixed election date legislation that they brought in, Harper asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. Today is election day. Here are the major players, moving from right to left:

  • Conservative Party of Canada – Led by Stephen Harper, the Conservatives held 127 seats at dissolution and were the ruling party.
  • Liberal Party of Canada – Led by Stéphane Dion, the Liberals held 95 seats at dissolution.
  • Bloc Québécois – Led by Gilles Duceppe, the BQ held 48 seats at dissolution. The BQ runs entirely in Quebec and fields no candidates outside La Belle Province.
  • New Democratic Party – Led by Jack Layton, the NDP held 30 seats at dissolution.
  • Green Party of Canada – Led by Elizabeth May, the Greens held one seat at dissolution.

At points during the campaign, the Conservatives looked like they were going to get a majority government. Recent polling suggests that this trend is reversed, and they will form a minority government again. 308 seats are up for grabs, so the magic number is 155.

There is some sense that the NDP will pick up more seats than they had before, mostly at the Liberals’ expense. Whether or not the Green party splits the left vote and lets the Liberals in in larger numbers is up for debate, but the Greens have had a greater presence in this election campaign than in previous ones.

The first polls close at 8:30pm in Newfoundland, which is 7pm EDT. Polls close at varying times across the country, but results won’t be made public until the polls close in British Columbia at 7pm PDT.

[tags]canada election, canada, canada election 2008, conservative party of canada, liberal party of canada, bloc quebecois, new democratic party, green party of canada, conservatives, liberals, bq, ndp, green[/tags]

§679 · October 14, 2008 · Canada · Comments Off ·

CTV fails in basic graphing

Take a look at this graph:

That graph is from this CTV story about poll numbers in Quebec slipping for the Conservatives.

Now many ways does this poll fail? Let’s count them.

One: what do the different colours mean? Being astute followers of Canadian politics we all know that Conservatives are blue and Liberals are red. But which red are the Liberals? Dark red or light red? Follow-up question for the non-Canadians: which party is orange?

Two: What happened to September 11?

Three: If you count up the days in the last two labels (“Sept 4-10″ and “Sept 12-18″) you get 14 days. Why are there only eleven points on the graph?

Four: Sure, we know that these are polling numbers and the numbers up the y-axis are probably percentages of voters who say they’ll vote for a given party, but do we know that for sure? Maybe that’s the number of ridings in Quebec going to each party! (Never mind that there are 75 ridings in Quebec and the first two data points add up to more than that)

CTV, hire someone who knows how to chart some numbers on a graph. It’s not that hard.

[tags]ctv, canadian election, quebec, graph[/tags]

§656 · September 18, 2008 · Canada, Television · 1 comment ·

Fewer seals to kill, fewer seals to hunt. Thanks global warming!

For the longest time animal rights activists have been trying to get the Canadian government to shut down or greatly diminish the yearly seal hunt off the east coast of Canada. The seal hunt used to be a marvel of brutality, with hunters skinning seals alive or killing them before they were weaned from their mothers. It’s recently become a little less brutal, with regulations and guidelines about when seals can be killed. There’s also a yearly quota set by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

It looks like animal rights activists might be getting their wish, as the DFO reduced 2007′s quota by 65000 to 270000, a drop of nearly 20%. Why?

Not because of anything the animal rights activists did, but because of something we all contributed to: global warming.

Baby seals can’t swim very well. They’re essentially tubes of blubber for the first two to three weeks of their life. If they fall off the ice and into the ocean, they drown.

In 2002 the ice was so thin that about three-quarters of the seal pups drowned. This year’s ice coverage is even worse. In fact, this is the fifth bad year of ice in the past seven.

There aren’t any winners here. Animal rights activists must be saying that this is the wrong way to stop the seal hunt. Seal hunters lose their income and jobs. And worse of all, hundreds of thousands of baby seals drown.

Further information: National Geographic, Washington Post, DFO press release

[tags]seal hunt, canada, global warming[/tags]

§403 · May 2, 2007 · Canada, Environment · 4 comments ·

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