Wednesday, 29 March 2017 Kitchener Kitchener Centre https://twitter.com/laurelrusswurm/status/847531422197874688 ====================== TONIGHT Thursday, 30 March 2017 Guelph Guelph Electoral District ====================== Saturday, 8 April 2017 Halifax/PEI Halifax & Charlottetown Electoral District
Sunday, 9 April 2017 St. John’s St. John’s East Electoral District
Wednesday, 19 April 2017 Sudbury Nickel Belt Electoral District
Friday, 21 April 2017 Kingston Kingston and the Islands Electoral District
Saturday, 22 April 2017 Peterborough Peterborough – Kawartha Electoral District
Sunday, 23 April 2017 Hamilton Hamilton – Stoney Creek Electoral District
Monday, 24 April 2017 Thunder Bay Thunder Bay – Rainy River Electoral District
Tuesday, 25 April 2017 Winnipeg Winnipeg Centre Electoral District
Wednesday, 26 April 2017 Regina Regina Wascana Electoral District
Saturday, 6 May 2017 Whitehorse Yukon Electoral District
Saturday, 20 May 2017 Vancouver Vancouver Granville Electoral District
Sunday, 21 May 2017 Kelowna Kelowna – Lake Country Electoral District
How many votes does it take to get a seat in Parliament?
It’s hard enough for small parties to get elected under our miserably unfair winner-take-all electoral system.
Although the Trudeau Government won a majority of seats in Parliament on the promise of making every vote count as of 2019, it seems Mr. Trudeau has decided he would rather keep the system so disproportional that Liberal candidates only need 38,000 votes to get elected on average, but the Green Party needed 600,000+ votes to elect a single MP.
But that’s not the only institutional barrier to getting candidates elected in small parties. The Main Stream Media (or MSM) — that’s the big TV networks and the major newspapers — support the status quo too. Face it, it is a lot easier for them to give the lion’s share of the media coverage to only two candidates. In a country where the single biggest advertiser is our government, the MSM knows which side butters their bread. Nor does it stop there, as the Toronto Star tells us that’s just the tip of the iceberg: there are subsidies and tax breaks galore. (As a recipient of many of those government tax dollars, the Star is, unsurprisingly a big supporter. Oh, and let’s not forget bail outs. After doubling his own salary in 2013, Postmedia’s Godfrey wants lifeline of tax breaks, bigger government ad spending,and then the poor man was forced to accept nearly a million dollars as a “retention bonus.” Although the alternative media explains Government bailout of corporate media is not the solution to our crisis there is not a lot of listening going on. Is it any wonder our MSM supports the status quo?
2017 By-elections
Although there are rules, small parties and independent candidates continue to get short shrift during elections.
The problem we often lose sight of is that when small parties and independent candidates get short shrift, it means voters do too. The reason small parties come to exist because citizens feel unrepresented by the big parties. But every year it gets harder and harder to elect anyone else.
Voters need need to know who all the candidates who want to represent them in Ottawa are. They need to know what’s actually on the menu so they don’t have to settle for second best. But even voters who support the big parties have problems getting the representation they want from the inside. When a party foists it choice of a candidate on an Electoral District Association it’s called “parachuting in” a candidate. This top down process deprives the party members at the local level from choosing for themselves who will run in the election under their party.
In spite of Prime Minister Trudeau’s initial “real change” commitment to keeping his hands off the candidate nomination process in his own party, his fingerprints have been all over them pretty much from the start. And it’s still happening. You know it’s bad when the local Liberal candidates ends up publicly complaining about it in the MSM, as happened when PM Trudeau decided to impose one of his assistants on Markham—Thornhill.
During a regular federal election, Prime Ministers and Party Leaders have their own campaigns to run, but they carve out some time here and there to drop in on candidates across the country to lend their name brand support to the electoral contest. During a By-election period, they don’t have their own campaigns to run; which is how both the Prime Minister and Opposition Party Leader wound up in Calgary, stumping for their respective candidates in ridings recently vacated by ex-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and ex-cabinet minister Jason Kenney (newly elected Alberta’s provincial Conservative Party leader).
Guess which party’s candidates are getting the most press?
Fair Representation
Democracy is supposed to give citizens a say in our own governance.
But when we don’t have equal and effective votes, we don’t get fair representation.
When the deck is stacked in favour of the big political parties so only their candidates can get elected, we can’t get fair representation.
When a political system doesn’t work for a majority of the voters, people stop voting so they get no representation.
Or when people are afraid to vote for who they want and vote for someone they don’t want to stop someone they hate from getting elected, there is no longer any hope for fair representation.
Without fair representation, democracy stops being democracy.
Mr. Trudeau has disavowed his promise for electoral reform, but that is not his decision to make. It’s ours. So we need to keep pressuring them. If the Liberals fail to win any of the 5 By-elections, it would certainly be a very clear message to Mr. Trudeau. And I’ve no doubt it would increase our chance of getting the promised Proportional Representation.
Smart Voting Tips:
If we really want real change, we need to start voting for politicians who will actually deliver it.
We need to vote… even the disenchanted need to vote. Do you know, more people didn’t vote than voted for the Trudeau Government? If all the eligible voters who don’t vote would vote, we would see real real change.
The first thing to remember that opinion polls are just the opinions of a tiny sample of people, kind of like the surveys they cite on Family Feud. Don’t vote for anyone but the candidate you want.
Even votes that don’t count have power.
The more voters who give up in frustration, the easier it is for the defenders of the status quo to keep things from changing.
Unless we start voting for what we want, we will never get it.
Power To The People
Right now there is a shade more than a week left before the 2017 By-elections will be decided on April 3rd. There aren’t enough by-elections to change the balance of power in Ottawa, so the usual arguments for strategic voting have no power. Which means vote for what you want.
If there is a By-election in your riding, find out who your choices are. You can even volunteer for the candidate you like best, and maybe even help her win.
I imagine there are a fair number of Liberal supporters living in Markham—Thornhill who are annoyed to have local candidates cast aside to make way for one of the PM’s friends. Such shenanigans undermine the local representation Canadians want. This would be an excellent time for angry Liberals to swing their votes.
If I were a Markham—Thornhill voter, I’d be volunteering for Caryn Bergmann because she supports the things I do… including Electoral Reform and Climate Action, and I think she will fight for them in Ottawa. But I’m not, so all I can do is cheer her on from the peanut gallery.
If you are a Markham—Thornhill voter, I urge you to attend Thursday’s All Candidates Debate to get a good look at the choices. Find out where they stand, decide who will best represent you.
With the elimination of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company, the Sask. Party sent a clear message that it does not care about the Saskatchewan people who rely on the busses to get them and their packages around and they care even less about the 224 workers who are now without a job.
“Across the province, Saskatchewan people woke up Wednesday morning to find out they had to change their travel plans and scramble to arrange transportation - including for medical appointments and business needs - because the bus service they depend on was callously cut out of the blue. Meanwhile, 224 STC workers learned that their jobs were cut,” said NDP STC Critic Doyle Vermette. “The Premier and his cabinet seem to have forgotten that STC and the crowns belong to the people of the province and that Saskatchewan families should never be forced to pay the price for Sask. Party’s mismanagement, scandal and waste.”
Vermette said he was disappointed to see STC on the chopping block in the budget, especially when, in July, the then Minister said it was safe from privatization. He added that it does not make any sense to cut a service on which so many depend while also giving tax giveaways to large corporations and the province’s most wealthy.
In addition to scrapping the STC through this budget bill, the Sask. Party is also pushing a change in the law through the legislature to let them sell 49 per cent of all Crown Corporations, including SaskTel, without a mandate from the people of the province.
“The province’s crowns - from STC to SaskTel - deliver dependable and valued services to people all over the province,” said Vermette. “This plan by the Sask. Party is deceitful, it’s wrong, and it will hurt the people from all four corners of our province. Whether you’re from a rural, Northern, or urban community, the Sask. Party’s plans to scrap our Crowns will hurt us all.”
Public transit is not a discretionary choice, but a necessity, even without the added impetus of #ClimateChange.
The ERRE Committee’s Nathan Cullen (NDP) will be crossing Canada making stops in Liberal ridings to demonstrate how much support there actually is for electoral reform!
There’s one last vote on electoral reform in Parliament before the May deadline. After that, it could be too late to set up a new voting system in time for the next election.
This spring, MPs will vote on whether to accept the recommendations of the Canada-wide consultation tour, including that the government hold a referendum where Canadians can choose between the current voting system and a proportional one.
We just need 20 Liberal MPs to keep their promise and vote YES to electoral reform.
Visit the Website to find out the itinerary to find put when the Broken Promise Tour will be coming your way: http://keepyourpromise.ndp.ca/
Help convince Liberal MPs to keep their promise and vote YES to electoral reform before the May vote.
Three Ways to Help Canada win this vote!
#1 Bring your family and friends out to your local event
(contact Nathan Cullen or your local NDP folk to get involved to help bring the tour your way)
#2 Circulate the Petition and ask your family, friends and neighbors to sign on.
Go door to door, or spend an hour or two with your clipboard outside City Hall, your grocery store, Speakers Corner etc.
Get signatures at family gatherinngs or local activities or events (ie after church, at PTA or service club meetings, fundraising events etc.)
Your local Fair Vote Canada chapter may have a post card you can send, or you can make your own. You can even send your own letter to your Liberal MP (better yet, say it is an open letter and send a copy to your local newspaper!)
Fair Vote Canada’s “Keep Your Promise” postcard, and our Waterloo Region Chapter’s postcard for Kitchener Centre MP Raj Saini quoting his own words from the 2015 Election campaign.
Electoral reform is not dead, the movement is growing. Because every vote should count.
An excellent tool to keep track of whether or not the Trudeau Government is fulfilling the promises made in its election platform is the non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative website called the “TrudeauMeter.” We are reminded Trudeaumeter On the use of Omnibus Bills: Parliament: “Change the House of Commons Standing Orders to end practice of using inappropriate omnibus bills to reduce…
An excellent tool to keep track of whether or not the Trudeau Government is fulfilling the promises made in its election platform is the non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative website called the “TrudeauMeter.” We are reminded Trudeaumeter On the use of Omnibus Bills: Parliament: “Change the House of Commons Standing Orders to end practice of using inappropriate omnibus bills to reduce…
An excellent tool to keep track of whether or not the Trudeau Government is fulfilling the promises made in its election platform is the non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative website called the “TrudeauMeter.” We are reminded
“Change the House of Commons Standing Orders to end practice of using inappropriate omnibus bills to reduce scrutiny of legislative measures.”
As it happens (although the Trudeaumeter hasn’t caught up as of this writing. But far from keeping this promise, the Trudeau Government has chosen to use an inappropriate omnibus bill to change the House of Commons Standing Orders to reduce what little power opposition parties in phony majority governments (such as Mr. Trudeau’s Government which he likes so much he’s disavowed his clear electoral reform promise to replace our unfair winner-take-all voting system).
“We’re filibustering to protect the right to filibuster. Who would have thought it would be this government, under this prime minister” to try to use its majority to make changes to the Standing Orders without all-party backing, he said. “It’s not your House… we have rights, too.”
Rather than making Parliament more transparent, this is yet another attempt to make it more efficient for a party with a phony majority to undemocratically impose its will on our nation. Promising one thing and not doing it is bad enough, doing the opposite of what you’ve promised is unacceptable. In a democracy, that is.
Although CPAC is not covering this, @Kady is LiveTweeting, so Canadians can follow along and watch this unfold…
PARLIAMENT HILL—Opposition MPs spent nearly 15 hours in the basement of Centre Block on Tuesday, holed-up in a committee meeting room filibustering the Liberal government’s attempt to expedite a study on possible sweeping changes to how the House of Commons rules, and the saga is set to continue on Wednesday too.
After going through much of the day and well-into the night with just a handful of suspensions for votes and a pizza dinner, the Conservative and NDP members of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee will be back at it on Wednesday following their caucus meetings—a deal that was agreed to at about 3 a.m., according to Conservative MP Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard, Alta.) who is not a regular committee member, but is one of the Conservative caucus members who spent the night on the Hill to lend support to caucus colleagues.
NDP MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.), a member of the House Affairs Committee, is calling it “war,” and told the committee on Tuesday evening that he would be addressing caucus on Wednesday with the plan of having everyone of his New Democrat colleagues “on the ceiling” and “ready to bleed” to defend the House rules from the Liberal majority interference.
[…]
Conservative MP Scott Reid called it a “despicable attempt” by the government to ram through sweeping changes to how the House of Commons operates, even including when it sits. Mr. Reid (Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston, Ont.) made the comment about two hours into the filibuster. He said the way the government is going about forcing the vote to change the Standing Orders, or House rules, is a “contemptible abuse” of the system.
Throughout the evening, members of the opposition took turns holding the floor, including Mr. Christopherson, who went over previous parliamentary studies of the Standing Orders and the much longer timelines they had to complete them, compared to the time frame proposed by this motion. He also took every opportunity to highlight previous broken promises or contradictions of the Liberal government’s word on things like electoral reform and the independence of committees.
“We’re filibustering to protect the right to filibuster,” Mr. Christopherson said. “Who would have thought it would be this government, under this prime minister” to try to use its majority to make changes to the Standing Orders without all-party backing, he said. “It’s not your House… we have rights, too.”
They call it “the Red Chamber” but it sure seems like Canadians have been singing the Senate Blues for most of my life.
In the dying days of the Harper Government, the misadventures of Senator Mike Duffy proved to be a major embarrassment for the Canadian Government. By the time the dust settled, Duffy had resigned from the Conservative Caucus, the criminal charges against him were dropped, and Duffy, now an un-aligned independent, resumed his seat as Senator for PEI (even though he still doesn’t actually seem to live there). Then Prime Minister Stephen Harper was certainly mixed up in Mr. Duffy’s case, but was never properly investigated or held to account.
But Duffy’s case was just the tip of the iceberg. The Auditor General report identified thirty (THIRTY!) past and present Canadian senators or former senators as having “made inappropriate or ineligible expense claims.” In addition to being implicated in the expense scandal, 39 year old Senator Patrick Brazeau had a host of still unresolved other problems. About a year ago Press Progress shared an Angus Reid Opinion Poll that suggested only 6% of Canadians were happy with the Senate as is.
Real or Imagined?
Canada’s new Trudeau Government had ostentatiously promised, ahem, real change.
And yet, once again, there are Senators making news in ways that reflect very poorly on Canada’s Upper House.
It has become increasingly clear that a code of conduct that hopes miscreants will quietly resign in the face of exposure is simply not sufficient. Real change requires a framework that allows for summary suspensions of Senators (and MPs) accused of impropriety and/or lawbreaking, removing them from office if such charges proven. Our Westminster System of government was designed for a feudal society that allowed the nobility to get away with a great deal. But in a society that aspires to citizen equality there is no place for such abuses of power.
I speak partly for the record, but mostly in memory of the kindly and well-intentioned men and women and their descendants — perhaps some of us here in this chamber — whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged for the most part and are overshadowed by negative reports. Obviously, the negative issues must be addressed, but it is unfortunate that they are sometimes magnified and considered more newsworthy than the abundance of good.
Even the United Church had some strong words for the Hon. Ms. Beyak:
“Indigenous peoples and organizations have responded to Senator Beyak’s comments. As one of the parties responsible for the operation of residential schools, The United Church of Canada also feels a responsibility to respond.
“Senator Beyak spoke of the “good intentions” behind the residential schools system. Thirty years ago, The United Church of Canada apologized to First Nations Peoples for our role in colonization and the destruction of their cultures and spiritualties. In the process of preparing, delivering, and attempting to live out that Apology, we have learned that “good intentions” are never enough, and that to offer such words in explanation is damaging and hurtful.
“The United Church of Canada participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission not just as part of a legal agreement but also as part of a moral and ethical commitment to understand the impact of our role in the residential schools system, to atone for it, and to participate in healing and building of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.”
Not everyone is right for every job, and it’s pretty clear to everyone but Senator Beyak that she is not a good fit for the Senate of Canada. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any provision to remove her in spite of the growing outcry. The longer this goes on, the worse the Senate, and, indeed the Government of Canada looks.
Canadians need a government capable of governing itself with decorum and accountability.
As often happens in Canada’s unrepresentative democracy, there is a Petition:
Makaristos have been dedicated to the public domain. Click the images to find the originals on Wikimedia Commons.
An excellent tool to keep track of whether or not the Trudeau Government is fulfilling the promises made in its election platform is the non-partisan collaborative citizen initiative website called the “
