I think it’s pretty obvious. There’s going to be an election this year.

The Tories have had over two years now, well above the life-expectancy of a minority government of about a year and a half (as far as I’ve heard, anyway), and already today I’ve heard of two entirely different ways the government could fall this session.

Of course, there’s the budget, but that’s always a good excuse to topple a government. So maybe that’s not so exciting. I haven’t even heard rumours about any ultimatums or back-room deals yet.

Then there’s the other thing. Afghanistan. There’s a motion to extend Canada’s mission there until 2011, extending the current 2009 timeline. Those confident Conservatives have gone and made it a vote of confidence, so if the parliament doesn’t pass the motion, we all head to the polls.

All this talk about whether Canada should stick with the mission until “it’s finished” or pull out now and save our troops from an unending struggle sounds very much like a conversation I’ve heard south of the border, swapping one middle eastern country for another. I often suspect Canadian politics just saw something exciting going on and wanted its own.

As far as I know, nobody’s saying that we should never have started a war with Afghanistan in the first place, unlike that other country. So whereas that’s one of the principle reasons cited for the American withdrawal from Iraq, it doesn’t exactly fly in the case of Afghanistan.

Now, I’ll admit, I know nothing about what sort of progress is going on or what sort of mission our mission actually is. I like to picture it as peace-keepers building schools, playing with children, and picking daisies, but I know that isn’t right, so I also try to picture it like Afghanada, which a slight bit more realistic. What I do know is that this is not an issue of Canada mucking around in another country uninvited, it’s a NATO mission. In fact, one of the stipulations of the current motion to extend our participation in the mission is that NATO needs to send more troops from other countries to help.

That’s about all I have for an argument for staying in Afghanistan. The reason we’re all reminded of by this sort of conversation doesn’t actually apply here, and, also, go team NATO. Clearly, not a very firm, lucid, or well justified argument by any means. Nonetheless, it certainly doesn’t seem like something the Liberals (who agreed to it in the first place), the NDP, or the Bloc should mutiny over. Sure, it’s more dramatic than the budget, but I’m not going to be inspired to vote for the dissenting parties over it.

Today was the day of a provincial election here in Québec. I chose not to vote, because I’m still maintaining my official New Brunswicker status for such things, but I did watch the coverage on TV tonight. I noticed two things:

1) Each of the three english networks are so desperate for results and something to talk about early in the evening mere minutes after the polls have closed, they put up results from some ridings with only 5 or 6 votes counted and say what a surprise the standings are so far. Come on guys. When the frontrunner only has 3 votes so far, each of his opponents have 2, and there are still several thousand votes to be counted, I think it’s a little early to talk about what a surprise it is that Mr. So-and-so is winning the seat. I think everybody needs to calm down.

2) When I say I watched the election coverage I actually mean I watched the two minute updates during the commercial breaks in 24, but I loved the way the anchor tried to tailor the coverage to 24 fans.

“Well everybody, while Jack tries to solve his latest problem, Jean Charest is facing a problem of his own here tonight….”

“The Liberal Party needs to get some more seats fast, because time is ticking, just like on 24.”

“And from one thrilling drama to another, welcome back to our election coverage.”

“Looks like it’s going to be a minority government here tonight, which means once and for all that Charest is definitely not as cool as Jack Bauer.”

Ok, I made that last one up. None of them are exact quotes anyway. I wasn’t paying that much attention. Really what I’ve been doing is working with a computer program my lab partner and I have put together for our research project. We call the latest version “the puffy plotter”, and that alone I think is more entertaining than the election.

The disturbing thing is that, according to one pundit on CBC Radio, this is one of the best outcomes Stephen Harper could have hoped for. He doesn’t have to worry about a referendum, his federalist buddy is still in power, and there’s huge support for the closest thing this province has to the Conservative Party, the right-wing ADQ. Combined with rumours at the federal level of poll numbers turning significantly in favour of the Conservatives and an election looming in the spring, this makes another term with Prime Minister Harper seem all the more likely.

I’m going back to play with the puffy plotter.

The political dork in me is looking forward to watching the Liberal Leadership convention on CBC this Saturday, “from 9 AM until a leader is chosen”. It’s right up there with choosing a new pope, as this might actually affect me personally. Unfortunately, I’m almost certain to be disappointed in the outcome.

Michael Ignatieff has the charisma and intellect, sure, but it seems like he’ll say anything anytime without caring what anybody thinks of it. I tend to doubt whether that’s the kind of behaviour we want in a Prime Minister. He’ll definitely get some attention on the party again, but it’s a risk. At any moment he might say something that (warranted or not) offends a group and creates a big controversy, like he’s already done with Ukranians. (This is the same reason I couldn’t be a politician—not with Sabrina calling me a communist at every right turn.)

Besides, the title tag on his webpage is all lower case. Poor MLA format, I’d guess.

Bob Rae has the opposite problem—no charisma. And from what I hear he’s not very strong in Ontario. I could, of course, be wrong. He might be fantastic. At the very least he gets a ton of points for going skinny dipping with Rick Mercer (October 10th episode).

As for Stéphane Dion and Gerard Kennedy, I can’t say anything one way or another, aside from the fact that Dion is Quebecois and Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Personally, I want to see Scott Brison come up from behind and win it all. Why? Why not. He’s a maritimer. Everybody else is a westerner. What more reason do I need?

“Beer”

“Beer”

“Beer”

“um… water for me, thanks.”

It’s bad enough that I’m as socially awkward as I am. Not drinking just makes it more obvious.

It’s difficult to put into words how much I abhor alcohol. I can understand it on a small level — a drink at a wine and cheese, or a glass of champagne to celebrate something — where I will generally at least hold a glass and pretend to sip it. Still I wonder what’s so great about this vile tasting stuff when some tea would do just as nicely.

Meghan called me an old man yesterday because I ordered Earl Grey at the Route One.

Once I said to somebody that I just didn’t like the taste, to which he replied, “Buddy, it ain’t about the taste.” Well, more accurately “budddaaaae, i’ ainnn aboo the taast”, through glazed over eyes while tripping over a chair. At least that was my impression.

Considering anything with alcohol immediately costs twice as much as any other drink you care to name, tastes infinitely worse, and does nothing but embarrass people when it does anything at all, why would I want to drink it?

In the interest of full disclosure, there was one bottle of champagne a certain somebody and I shared that has the distinction of being the only alcoholic drink I have ever had that was, actually, not bad. I maintain that it was a complete fluke.

The reason I bring all this up is that there is a particular person running in the current provincial election who I once had to drive home, drunk off their ass, from a neighbour’s party. My mom claims that having the sense to ask for a lift should give them some points, but to me the impression is bad enough that I just don’t think I can bring myself to vote for them. Harsh, maybe, but such is the nature of my discontent.

I remember during the election campaign that there were only a couple things Stephen Harper promised that I would be okay with. One of them was reinforcing Canada’s sovereignty in the arctic.

It’s only been in the last few years that I found out that most countries (if any) don’t recognize Canada’s claim to the waters around our northern islands as internal waters. I’m not sure exactly why this is unsettling to me. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve always taken for granted that that whole area was ours.

On the surface it doesn’t really matter that much right now, but the northwest passage is becoming more and more of a reality every year. I don’t know how far down the road it will be, but eventually the area could become a well used shipping route. Even now there are rumours of American, Russian, and other countries’ submarines in those waters. I think this article has a great idea on how to deal with that particular threat.

And there are environmental concerns. If Canada does not exercise soverignty over these waters, then we have no way of controlling traffic, pollution, and protecting life native to the region.

My problem is mostly that I just don’t know what the international standard for these things are. The water between Hawaii and America are definitely not internal waters. What about the stretch between Kyushu and Okinawa of Japan? Honshu and Shigoku? Australia and Tasmania? There’s a set distance out from the shore you have to go before hitting international waters, right? If you apply that to the arctic islands (which you probably should), do you end up with regions outside our jurisdiction? Or do you hit the neighbouring islands first?

The population up there is pretty scarce, but there are villages as far north as Ellesmere Island. I think as much of the area as is possible should be protected, perhaps as a national park, or at least with safeguards in place to protect the natural environment from… well, ourselves.

I realise this is old news, but it would have gone well with yesterday’s post. Alas, I forgot about it. And I don’t like going back to edit old posts, even after only a day. It’s like reopening the time capsule. Anyway… I captured this during CBC’s election coverage:

Not only was the Green Party leading in one riding for about two minutes, but so was the Other Party. Whoever they might have been. Peter Mansbridge didn’t seem to notice or care. It wasn’t that independent guy from Quebec, since independents were marked IND in dark grey. My money’s on the Christian Heritage Party, and I bet it was an Alberta riding.

Election fever may be over, but I had to go through and check what the layout of parliament would be if winning seats went by proportional representation. I compiled this result based on the results from Elections Canada, accurate as of today (February 20th). For the method and to compare to the 2004 general election, see this posting.

Things are more or less the same as last time, although the Liberal and Conservative seat counts have switched. Yet again, the NDP holds the balance of power and the Bloc Quebecois has far fewer MPs. Christian Heritage Party is sticking in there with their one seat, but the Marijuana party lost their seat.

Remember that my method of eliminating parties which don’t win at least half a seat, recalculating the percent of popular vote, and rounding to the nearest whole number when awarding seats is not how I think things necessarily should work, and I recognize that there are problems in deciding who should actually get to sit in the house. And of course in a system o proportional representation, many people wouldn’t have voted the same way (no nneed to vote strategically). Nonetheless, I think this is as good a representation as any given the votes this time around.

I still say the independent seats should be awarded based on a lottery of all voters.

Everybody knows that the polls were showing a large Conservative lead going into the election. That’s why everybody knew on Monday before the voting even ended that they’d take up a minority government. But sometimes polls shouldn’t be trusted. Sure they have that 3% error that few people pay attention to, but also they can be misinterpreted, misleading, and misreported. Look at this:

He doesn’t give references so I can’t speak to the veracity of the claim, but I have talked about this before. And on top of that, there’s still the whole problem about vote splitting on the left… Liberals, NDP, Green, even the Bloc are all socially progressive from what I can tell. Maybe the latter three all merged into the New Green Bloc Démocratique Party they could actually get elected.

Well, that’s that. Prime Minister Stephen Harper. *Shudder*.

I’m still looking over my shoulder at the big friendly colour bars on the bottom of the CBC broadcast. The big blue 125 of the Conservatives and the 29 of the NDP are just barely under the total of 155 needed for the majority. I’m actually hoping one of those seats where a Liberal is leading but not quite elected yet (I think there are still about twenty undecided) will flip over to the Conservatives. If not it’s almost exactly the same situation we had after the 2004 election.

Besides that, there are still two things bringing me down tonight.

Breaking news — Paul Martin: “If you want to know what true love is, go up to your wife and say, ‘Sheila…’ ”

Ok, probably nobody gets why that’s funny… Anyway, back to my two downers:
1) CTV’s election coverage has pre-empted The Daily Show.
2) I still have Classical Mechanics problems to solve.