Purposeful Ramblings Through My Mind

We got back to Hamilton about an hour ago.

We started the day in Nathan Phillips Square, reading the chalk tributes and adding our own. After some street meat, we made our way to Queen and University, where we hung out with the hundreds of Toronto cyclists who were preparing to join the People’s Procession as the funeral procession passed that way. There was a samba band, and people danced to it, and there were buskers on stilts wearing orange ties. Orange was everywhere - everyone had a little bit of it and about half the crowd was wearing a t-shirt or dress of it. Mine was in the form of a ribbon in my hair (it wouldn’t stay up around my arm) and my pashmina shawl that I used as protection from the sun.

The funeral procession came down Queen St. around 1:20. We added ourselves to its back end, joining a throng of humanity celebrating and mourning together. I haven’t seen the estimates of numbers, but I can tell you that David Pecaut Square (the public space outside Roy Thomson Hall) was packed full, as were the streets nearby. Thousands and thousands of people, showing admirable courtesy and common purpose. The church next door to RTH (I think it was St. Andrews Presbyterian, but don’t quote me on that) closed its doors just as we went by - it was packed to the gills.

We wove our way through the crowd as the casket was settled at the front of RTH, and eventually found ourselves on the walkway just to the west of RTH, watching on the screen directly opposite at the other side of the square.

There we settled in to work on our sunburns and watch. The sunburn part was a blazing success. winces 45 SPF sunblock, applied an hour and a half late, does not stand up to two hours of blazing sun.

I was the only person near us who understood the French bits, so I kept bursting into applause when nobody else knew what was going on.

The funeral service itself was a celebration of Jack's life. It was also an opportunity to drive home the values that Jack lived and worked for: love, hope, optimism, social democracy, civility in politics, the ability to change the world through the power of community coming together. It was a wonderful moment of community, a single afternoon when it felt like the entire city and country felt the same way. I know that’s not true and I’m not trying to speak for people, but there on the ground, that was the feeling.

I am so glad I went. I hope Jack’s life and legacy energizes Canadians to remember that what he stood for is what we want for our nation - and that the only way to get it is to get out there and work for it, for Jack and for each and every Canadian.

I can't think of a better descriptor for this election night than that.

( Basic breakdown of the election )
I've decided what I'm going to do.

For too long, I've been an armchair politician, willing to peddle my vote between several parties on the basis of several factors, never committing to any of them. This is very, very common on the Left in Canada, and while it has its benefits for tolerance and good feeling, in the end it loses elections and costs us a voice. I have ideas. I have things to bring to the table. But they're being heard in ways that don't affect the outcome of elections.

So tomorrow, I'm stopping by my newly-re-elected NDP MP's campaign office while they'e packing up, and joining the party formally. If possible, I'll join the provincial branch at the same time, though it may require a separate trip and fee; then I'll make myself known at my NDP MPP's office. I'm going to volunteer for the NDP for the Ontario election in the fall. I'm going to go to riding meetings and write for riding association publications between elections. I'm going to take my fairvote.ca flyers, printed by mrs_dm, with me. Provincially, my talking points will be slightly different from my talking points in the federal office, because the responsibilities of the two levels of government are different, but I'm no longer confining myself to slactivism on the internet.

It's time to actually make things happen.

Right now, I'm calling in sick because I've had absolutely no sleep and I'm still not asleep. I can't face trying to stay non-partisan with my students while explaining what a Harper majority means for Canada.

Maclean's Bull Meter for political lies is fascinating. I counted, just to be sure there was no confirmation bias going on. If you discount the single-bulls, of which the Conservatives and Liberals each have one (because those are slight twists on the truth rather than outright lies) the Liberals and the NDP are tied at one 3 and one 4 each, while the Conservatives are ahead with 4, 4, and 2.

It's also interesting to note what they're lying about: the Liberals' biggest lie so far is the one about Ignatieff's family coming here from Russia with nothing after the Revolution, so a lie about personal history designed to shield him from Conservative attack ads, while the Conservatives' two 4-bull stories are about a Liberal policy that pretty much doesn't exist and about the danger to the economy of an election. I don't think it's bias to count those as more substantial lies, since they're directly related to the issues at hand, though I do wonder how much of an influence Ignatieff's silver-spoon has on his policies. (I don't think he gets to claim that he's an everyman when his education includes Upper Canada College. On the other hand, I prefer not to vote for an everyman; I think a lifetime spent analyzing international policies and writing lengthy treatises for highly critical audiences of scholars is not bad preparation for being Prime Minister, even if I don't agree with all of his conclusions; I'd be prepared to bet that he no longer agrees with all of them, either.)

At the same site is a promise tracker. It's fascinating as much for what's left out as for what's there. For example, the Conservatives are the darlings of agricultural communities across Canada, but have made not a single promise in regards to agriculture. The only one of the bunch of them promising to do something about the issues with EI (and they are myriad, beginning with the fact that they've set the number of qualifying hours so high that most part-time women, i.e. second-time moms who went back to work part-time after the first, do not qualify) is the Bloc Quebecois. The NDP, traditionally a strong alternative on the environment, has no environmental promises laid out for this election, and neither does the Bloc. The Conservatives are planning to throw money at a panel about hunting and wildlife, which only just barely falls under environment at all.

Some interesting stuff.

Toronto: the vote on the left was split several ways, while the vote on the right was concentrated on one right-wing ideologue who got the ear of the suburbs by promising an end to corruption and a drastic reduction in social services that the suburbs use less anyway. Want to know how it is that a country where most people lean to the left of centre manages to keep electing these clowns? Here's how: there are so many good ideas and decent people on the left that people can't settle on just one, and with a first-past-the-post system, it means the right-wing guy with less than a majority often comes up from beind.

All of which boils down to one thing: it's time for voter reform in this country. A ranked ballot would be an improvement, for example. Rob Ford did not - quite - have a majority of the votes.

Hamilton: Oh, puh-LEASE. Bob Bratina? Really, Hamilton? The a.m. talk radio personality from the eighties with a rep for a short temper and a thin skin during his seven years on council? Don't blame me if City Hall continues to get nothing done, while we continue to miss out on money and services from a provincial government fed up with trying to get us to make decisions. The best thing about Bratina is that his platform boiled down to, "Can't we all just recognize how much we have to offer each other?" I appreciate the "let's all just get along" message - I'd just rather see it coming from someone else.

I didn't really follow any other race closely. How'd it go in Ottawa? I know that race was being closely watched.

Tories threaten fall election

I have no idea how well the other parties are prepared for an election, but I'd hope they're starting to get their acts together. It's time to boot Harper out of government.

For heaven's sake, LARPer weapons are not real threats! Can we all mock this pathetic attempt to make it seem like the arrests resulted in seizure of actual weapons? Does no one in the police force belong to the SCA or a LARP?

Still from siobhan63, as was the last one.

Apparently, the Conservative government is quite happy to slash funding to pro-choice groups, including refusing to fund international initiatives of maternal health that include abortion, all while starting an initiative aimed at maternal health around the world. But they're prepared to give $800K to groups that are translating the Bible into various African dialects.

And they still manage to deny that the choices of which agencies to fund is more about ideology than their ability to run their agencies well.

I haven't been following politics as closely as I should have been lately. The only time I have is right before bed and the antics of the Cons led by Harper have a history of causing me sleepless nights due to sputtering about their stupidity.

However, I was nonplussed to find a link to this in my inbox this morning. I was unaware of any of these points. I'd like some confirmation from anyone who's been following the situation closer than I have, followed by the perennial question: what can we do about it?

http://www.acreativerevolution.ca/node/1944

http://bouquetsofgray.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-on-shona-holmes.html

Thanks siobhan63 for the links.

The woman in that commercial who is trashing Ontario's health care, saying she would have been dead in six months if she'd had to wait that long, so she mortgaged her house and went to the States?

She's lying about that. She didn't have a tumour. She had a cyst. Her vision may have been threatened, though there's only her word on a previous testimonial for that. Her life was not in significant danger from this cyst.

Furthermore, she's not suing the Ontario government to get her money back. She's suing with the backing of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a registered charity (i.e. donations are tax deductible, so taxpayers are funding this) dedicated to challenging all aspects of Canada's socialist system, in particular single-tier health care.

That is, she's trying to take away other Ontarians' access to single-payer health care, and she's using tax money to do it.

I think it's time for another letter to the editor to point this out. Not only is she lying to Americans about what happened, not only is she trashing a system without having actually gone through it, she's using a taxpayer-funded charity to try to destroy the system for everyone else.

I'm incensed.

Edit: Please, go ahead and link, either to me or to the articles I listed. Spread this far and wide. She's going to slander our system, she's going to be exposed as the fraud she is.

EDIT #2: A link to the cached page from the Mayo Clinic. They took down the original version a few days ago when Daily Kos linked to it, but it was cached first.