Canada 2011 Official Thread

[Linus Van Pelt]

Someone's pulling some dirty tricks in Guelph.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Also it's well run enough

Or, maybe it isn't.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Also it's well run enough

Or, maybe it isn't.

Wow. How do Canadian olds typically vote?

A bit more Conservative than average, though probably more Liberal than average in certain parts of Toronto involved in the story.

The "maybe" in my piece above isn't just rhetorical, by the way - the Star hyperventilating like this is perfectly consistent with this being just a few isolated incidents.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Ah, thanks Max/MB.

In other news, Harper broke the law today by making campaign statements on the radio.

That's silly.  If that's the case, so did Ignatieff:
"This election doesn't belong to the politicians, it doesn't belong to me; it belongs to the people of Canada; and I hope everybody will vote today and, of course, I want everybody to vote Liberal."

And probably Layton and Duceppe, too.  

Canada seems to be the king of silly election day laws.

I'm wondering if that law and the one prohibiting broadcast of election results breach the charter's protection of freedom of speech. It would be interesting to see what would happen if those laws were challenged.

Happened, Supreme Court said than no.

I believe the actual ruling was that it was a breach of the Section 2(b) freedom of expression guarantee, but one that was justified under the reasonable limits clause in Section 1.

[Linus Van Pelt]

For what it's worth, Jeffrey Simpson, who is among the most reliable in the Ottawa press corps for this sort of thing and not into publishing unconfirmed leaks just to be the first to get it out, claimed the following in the Globe today:

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[Linus Van Pelt]

All these dramatic scenarios strike me as less likely than the Liberals just continuing to exist as a LibDem-like combination of urban moderates and the more traditional parts of the Atlantic, always with a small chance of some time returning to seriousness through either a government getting into a total food fight with its base (either social conservatives or unions) or a national unity crisis caused by one of the two main parties tying itself into knots over Quebec's status.

[Linus Van Pelt]

What evidence is there for this claim?

[Linus Van Pelt]

What evidence is there for this claim?

Something I've heard. I thought this came up when Rob Ford was elected?

What is true is that many middle-class suburban immigrants (like many middle-class suburban non-immigrants) are not particularly keen on, and certainly don't feel solidarity with, the poorer and darker-skinned immigrants who live in social housing and other dismal tower blocks in the more troubled pockets of the 416, so Rob Ford making anti-refugee comments in the midst of the Tamil human smuggling controversy didn't hurt him much. But that's different from being anti-immigrant generally - if the Conservatives were hostile to standard economic immigration from Asia they'd never win all those GTA seats.