Oh my god it’s here! Yes, I’m that big of a dork that I circled it on my calendar… and then took a picture and uploaded it to my blog. It’s just that exciting, folks! Like Christmas. Except Harper’s going to win, so more like the nightmare before.

Here’s the latest and final prediction from democraticSPACE.com. If this turns out to be true, then maybe this really is like The Nightmare Before Christmas, in that it ends happily after all. Jack’s got the power, baby! That’s something at least.

I noticed that democraticSPACE also has strategic voting guides for each of the parties. They say that there are only 35 ridings in Canada where it actually might work, but I was happy (in a bittersweet way) to see that Saint John is one of them. Insert semi-enthused woot for Paul Zed here. He’s leading in the polls now by 0.5%. A little tight, I think. That’ll be one riding I’ll be very interested in seeing tonight.

I may not be the greatest political analyst, but I did notice today on Question Period that the Liberal Strategist John Duffy was wearing an orange tie. Orange, people! I can’t help but think that somebody will consider it treason somewhere up the line. At least he need not be embarrassed about wearing the same tie as the NDP strategist, as she was a woman and didn’t wear a tie. She had orange (a.k.a. red) hair anyway. Born to be NDP.

The whole episode was slightly overshadowed, though, by my cup of Earl Grey tea. It’s not that there was anything wrong with it per se, it’s just that ever since I found out that Early Grey is flavoured with bergamot oil my mind tells me that I’m just drinking oily regular tea. I know it doesn’t make much sense, especially since I’m kind of known for the generous quantities of oil I use in making anything in a wok or frying pan, but it was nagging at the back of my mind all through the Reporters’ Rim segment.

Nonetheless, despite Allan Gregg’s insistance that there is still movement happening, everybody’s still talking as if it’s a Conservative something. Whether it’s minority or majority we won’t know until the BC votes come in it seems. Either way, I specifically avoided working tomorrow so that I can be here to watch it all go down. Or maybe work on my Classical Mechanics assignment. Either way both must be finished by Tuesday morning. I know which one I find more interesting…

I watched Stephen Harper on a special town hall type edition of The National tonight and thankfully he was back to his regular plastic self. Maybe he just comes across better on the radio since you can’t see that awkward smile.

In a completely unrelated topic, I’m really looking forward to GO on CBC Radio One on Saturday. It’s a great show. I’d also just like to thank/curse you, Meghan. Because of your new theme song, I’m in the mood for nothing without a heapful of doowaps.

? You don’t own me… ?

This morning I heard Steven Harper on the radio speaking about… well, I don’t remember as I was still in bed and half asleep at the time. But the weird thing is that he actually sounded, well, enthusiastic. There was actual emotion in his words. He sounded confident and ready to take charge. Like someone who might actually be able to run a country… It was actually quite frightening.

All indications are pointing to a Conservative minority government come next week. According to CBC, a site called DemocraticSpace made the most accurate predictions of what parliament would look like after the 2004 election. Polls just guess at the popular vote, whereas this is actual seat counts. The good news is that their latest prediction shows not just a Conservative minority, but a strong NDP holding the balance of power :)

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I apparently agree with Jack Layton and the NDP more often than any other party, according to the CBC’s Vote by Issue Quiz. But there were only 12 issues in the whole thing, so you can see that there must be a lot of overlap. Also not surprising. Flip flopping is a distinct possibility.

The one thing that definitely isn’t surprising is that Harper’s Conservatives don’t quite agree with me. Something that’s really been bugging me about them lately is this mantra they keep throwing around: “Canadians want change.”

Stop telling me what I want!

Yes, I’m aware of the irony of that statement, having just used an online quiz to find out which party I agree with most. Also ironically, I come from one of the only two ridings in the country that elected a conservative member of parliament — albeit a Progressive one — in the election of ‘93 that saw the PCs go from a majority of 169 seats to just 2.

I may be pretty close to the NDP, Liberals, and even almost in line with the Bloc (at least on a few things), but there’s no way I’m going to cross into Conservative territory.

And yet things seem to be going in their favour lately. The funny thing is, though, that I only know that the Conservatives are doing really well because the various media outlets keep telling me that the Conservatives are doing really well. I bet there’s a fairly sizable portion of the population that will now vote Conservative because everybody else is, or even more likely just not bother to vote at all because it seems such a sure thing. I wish I controlled a major newspaper or television network so that I could publish all sorts of fake stories about how the NDP has 60% national support and it’s almost a sure thing that they’ll get a majority government. Maybe it’ll just create a backlash against the NDP… but maybe not…

Campaign Confidential on The National today talked about how the NDP has been doing so far. It’s definitely going to be either Harper or Martin as the big PM on E-day, but how much power the NDP will have is still up in the air. I think I could live with a Conservative minority government if the NDP came out with the balance of power. That way the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc can team up and stop the Conservatives from doing anything stupid.

My favourite two quotes from the Leader Debates tonight:

“America is our neighbour. It is not our nation.”
- Paul Martin, criticising Steven Harper’s sympathies with American conservative groups.

“He’s campaigning like an NDP but when he’s in parliament he’s a Tory.”
- Gilles Duceppe, about Paul Martin.

I also liked Paul Martin’s promise to pay half of tuition in a student’s first and last years of post-secondary (and a full $3000 every year for those from low income families). I wonder if that will get in gear in time for my last year starting in September… somehow I doubt it.

It’s always been a bit weird hearing Conservatives and Liberals talk about revoking the right of same sex couples to marry. The Liberals are against it and say it would require using the notwithstanding clause, while the Conservatives say it won’t. I’ve always known that one of them must be wrong, and finally I’ve found 134 law professors from various Canadian universities that say it’s Harper that needs to bone up on his constitutional law.

The problem with proportional representation is that you still need to preserve the advantage of having people vote for specific people for representing specific areas. I think you’d keep all the same ridings, and just award the right number of seats to the parties based on where they had the strongest support.

Unfortunately it might end up a bit like the yearbook editors awarding the Grad Class Superlatives. Anybody who’s done that knows how fun, but slightly undemocratic, it can be. Allie, Becky, Caroline, and Lisa definitely know what I’m talking about here. “Hmmm Julie won eight categories, but she can only get one. Let’s give her Most Musical, even though she didn’t actually win that, because she had more votes there than any of the other categories… then, let’s give the categories she actually did win to the people who came in second, unless they already won something else first, in which case we can probably just decide which one is better for them. Like, Bob obviously doesn’t have a better smile than Joe, so let’s give him Most Likely to Succeed.” Etc.

In the case of the election, you’d have to start at the bottom I think. Otherwise Christian Heritage would end up getting the riding that has the gay village in Montreal, probably. So they get the riding that they have the best showing in (by percent of vote, probably). Marijuana and Independent (that’s still an awkward one though) are the same way. Hopefully none of them have the best showing in the same riding… then Green, BQ, NDP, Conservative, and Liberal. I think that’ll make sure parties like the BQ will get the seats they would have won in first-past-the-post, but not all of them, since that would be too much. The NDP would get all the seats that they would have won as well, assuming the smaller parties haven’t taken any yet, then they’d have to get other ridings where they came in second place, etc.

Actually, they might even get their second place ridings first, like Julie in the yearbook. If the breakdown is in one riding is Liberal 51% and NDP 49%, then they should get that riding before they get the one with NDP 40%, Liberal 30%, Conservative 30%, since they have more support in the former even though they would have won the latter.

Well, the whole thing is bound to make lots of people very angry, but it has a certain appealing logic to it. It’s more entertaining with everybody throwing things at each other anyway.

So the good folks at CBC are already debating who the new leaders will be once everybody comes out loosers in this election round.

I like how each of the Liberals and Conservatives (the NDP and Bloc weren’t addressed as everybody seems to like those guys fine) have New Brunswick Premiers as some of their top contenders. I remember Frank McKenna was the Premier back when I was first learning what a Premier was in elementary school. Bernard Lord seems pretty cool too, but I don’t know much about provincial politics beyond what I picked up in Mrs McIntyre’s class.

Tip: If you get Prime Minister and Premier confused, note that Prime Minister is two words and therefore more important than a Premier.

I wouldn’t know who to vote for if it came to a showdown between McKenna and Lord. Except I would, because one of them would be Conservative. I don’t care how charismatic you are, Lord, you aren’t getting anything from me that way!

This, I think, really was tasteless, and even though it was a personal blog, this guy is a part of an entirely public organisation and should have realised that it wouldn’t be a good idea to be such a public idiot.

However, I don’t see a problem using a picture of Stephen Harper and Gilles Duceppe together just because it happened to be taken at an event marking the holocaust. As far as I can tell there wasn’t anything said about the holocaust, that these guys were conspiring to say it never happened, that they weren’t paying attention to the veterans of the war, or anything. Just that they were whispering. (And therefore hatching evil separatist conspiracies.) So what.

I also don’t think it would be offensive to be identified as “Jew Couple” on an order in a restaurant anymore than “White guy” or “Dude in the red shirt”. The university professor racism authority who said that it was racist wondered why there had to be anything at all written down. Well just maybe there were a lot of people in the restaurant and the person was new and having a bad day and couldn’t keep everybody straight, ok!? Get off their back! Geeze. Or maybe they were racist. This was, I am loathe to admit, on Oprah, by the way.

I have the same problem with people in the queer community (maybe more the transgendered and/or transsexual community, which may or may not be part of the queer community anyway) wondering why you have to identify gender on forms (“sex?” “yes please!”). Well, sometimes I like to know if I’m excepting a man’s or woman’s voice on the phone, if I should say “is he home?” or “is she home?”, or if I should charge more for their auto insurance. (Non-gender specific pronouns only work for the second one!)

But then again, I never understood how people can be offended by particular words…

What do Jewish people think when they go to Japan and see swastikas all over the maps? (That’s a map of Teramachi, literally “temple town”, in Nagasaki by the way. It’s a beautiful area to walk through in the early morning. Or really any time.)

Clearly I could never be a public official because I think people worry too much about these things and I, clearly, don’t. But you’re free to debate and change my mind on anything! As Douglas Adams said, “That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!”