Canadian by-elections, 2013

[Linus Van Pelt]

I don't think so, really. A riding with such a large Aboriginal population generally isn't a good guide to national trends.

[Linus Van Pelt]

The Innu are a First Nations group whose traditional European name was Montagnais. They are status Indians and would be thought of as Indian under traditional classification, not Inuit. Their language is Algonquian, like Cree or Micmac, and it's just a coincidence that their name for themselves sounds like "Inuit".

[Linus Van Pelt]

Federally the Conservative vote in the Innu communities in Labrador was also minuscule in 2008.

[Linus Van Pelt]

There is a fracas in the Scarborough-Guildwood NDP, with suggestions that the party may have installed Giambrone over the will of the local members, and the defeated local candidate Chhabra threatening legal action:

http://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2013/07/18/ndp_fights_for_its_soul_in_scarborough_civil_war_cohn.html

[Linus Van Pelt]

Good result for the NDP; not good for the Tories.

And not really a good result for the Liberals, either. We shouldn't judge things just in relation to the short-term expectations set up by polls. London West is not the kind of riding they want to be way back in third in.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I'm pretty sure that the link doesn't say that the candidate is from outside Bourassa, just that they are well-known even outside Bourassa. (A Francophone reader should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Nah, you're right. It was my assumption, not a direct translation there.

Oh OK, fair enough.

[Linus Van Pelt]

LOL, Bran Van 3000. Clearly these are the by-elections for memories of late-90's MuchMusic.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Perpetual candidate John Turmel is running in Toronto Centre and is listed officially on Elections Canada's web site as John "The Engineer" Turmel. Has he officially changed his name (including quotation marks!), or is one allowed to include a nickname like that on the ballot?

[Linus Van Pelt]

How would one know this with polls in Virden presumably still open and votes not yet counted?

[Linus Van Pelt]

When's the last time the Liberals held Brandon--Souris?

1993-7, Chretien's first term.

[Linus Van Pelt]

The one time I went to a local party meeting as a member was when I was a student at U of T and went to the provincial Trinity-Spadina NDP annual meeting. It was towards the end of the Conservative government, like around 2002 or 2003 (but not Marchese's nomination meeting). The meeting was essentially dominated by Barry Weisleder's excessive number of motions on all manner of stereotypical far-left type things. Energy policy and the privatization of the hydro were big issues at the time, and were something of a focus for Howard Hampton, who advocated making the system public again. I just remember participating in a ridiculous discussion where Weisleder opposed this policy on the ground that the system would still be run by civil-service managers, whereas he thought it should be a worker co-op.

I came away thinking that the local riding association was kind of useless and dominated by zealous eccentrics, but in hindsight it probably wasn't a representative sample.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I've heard many stories about divisive battles in the Trinity-Spadina NDP with the riding association pulling out all stops to block Weisleder's platform.

Sounds like the non-Weisleders have become more organized than they were then. That's a good thing. It was kind of a mess in those days. There was an upcoming party convention, and the riding was allotted more delegates than there were people at the meeting, so everyone who wanted to could be a delegate, including both Weisleder and, in fact, me. But then the guy who was supposed to send us our credentials never did and never called me back when I tried to get in touch, so I didn't bother going, since I didn't want to take the GO train to Hamilton only to find out that nobody had the faintest idea who I was.