Sorry, writing too fast - if you gathered from my earlier writings that I thought we needed to remedy too many left-of-center parties, either I misspoke or you misunderstood. Aside from the fact the Libs are not particularly 'left' anymore, since at least Chretien signed NAFTA and Martin gutted the social programs, I hope I never implied that we need to somehow 'join' them all into a big-circus coalition, so we wind up with a two-party system, that is NOT what I think - I think people should be able to join whatever political movement they want - and have their voices heard in the national forum to the extent of their membership - which is what PR would do. What we really need to talk about is how to bring Democracy to this country - and getting a decent media is a central part of that discussion.

• 6 weeks ago

Me, I don't think we're going to arrive at any useful conclusions, poltiical or otherwise, if we don't acknowledge the central role of the media here, in everything from turning people away from PR to their refusal to talk about 'class analysis', as I made the case for in the essay noted earlier (Canadian Media: Reporting or Managing the News of the 2008 Election? http://www.rudemacedon.ca/lgi/media-narrative.htm...) , At least one reason the NDP is hitting a glass ceiling is because most Canadians equate the NDP with 'socialism', and, quite falsely, then equate both with the worst sorts of totalitarian communism such as under Stalin or Mao - and that is the direct result of 50 years of media propaganda. Most people seem to have no idea that most Canadians ('they'!) are actually 'social democrats' in their political and social beliefs, which is a pretty good accomplishment of the capitalist press - they say they want democracy, but vote for their feudal masters - and most if not all of this wrong idea of what is going on here can be laid at the feet of the indocrinating press. Which is why I continue to say that if 'we' the progressive sorts here are ever to have any success, one of our first priorities must be to figure how to counter this mainstream media propaganda, as a top-level priority, as a central part of any useful post-election analysis. And if people aren't talking about this, then I just don't see such discussions going anywhere useful. I try to keep an open mind, and listen to other things, but if people are talking about rearranging the deck chairs, whilst I am looking at the iceberg - well. There it is.

• 6 weeks ago

samthemacman, I think we're mostly on the same page, but I can't understand why you think analysing what happened during the election is not important - if 'we' don't understand what happened this time (and the time before and before and before etc) - how can we possibly hope to do something better? That's (as you have no doubt heard ofte n) one of the definitions of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a better result. It ain't gonna happen - actually, 'they' love us for doing it, of course. Such analysis would, to me, involve things not many people seem to be looking at - aside from PR, as I have talked about, and making it one of the top 2-3 issues (along with other democratic reforms), we need to talk about the way the media controls things, and what we can do to counteract that MUCH more effectively than we have been doing (I expect this is poorly done because not a lot of people seem to understand how important this is). And we need to do some thinking about why 'we' apparently followed along like meek rabbits as 'they' set up a system of 3 major English parties splitting the anti-Harper vote, giving him the best chance of a majority he will probably ever have - we were just lucky he didn't get it, really. I don't know exactly what 'we' could have d one, but what we did (follow meekly along) was about the worst of the options, and if we had of had some serious discussion about it, we should have been able to figure something better out. That the leadership of the various parties tried to do nothing except go meekly along should raise some pretty hard questions there as well - who exactly are they working for? And finally, we need to start campaigning NOW for the next election, not after it is called - that is one reason the Cons do as well as they do, they understand that getting support takes time. One PEI riding went Con for the first time in twenty years - the lady has been campaigning since January, and still barely got in - but they are on message, all the time, and that has an impact. What do 'progressives' do? Bitch about what the Cons are up to, and not a bit of organising to try and improve their odds the next time around, except to abuse people who suggest it (been there done that). Well, that should be enough out-of-the-box ideas for one day - I won't even start on how we need to be working towards getting rid of parites altogether, if we ever want to have a real democracy around here.

• 6 weeks ago

If anyone is interested in a longer commentary, I have one here - Canadian Media: Reporting or Managing the News of the 2008 Election? http://www.rudemacedon.ca/lgi/media-narrative.htm.... Written as the election was called, turned out to be pretty accurate. Although I claim no great ability as a prognosticator, as it all was and is pretty obvious to one outside the box.

• 6 weeks ago

You're being a bit semantical there - the 'reasons' we need PR might not 'explain' what happened, but the lack of PR explains quite a lot - the low voter turnout is certainly related to so many people feeling their votes do not count, and the Harper plurality is certainly related, as with PR they would have gotten about 40 seats less than they did, and the NDP-Libs-Greens could easily have formed a 'progressive' coalition of some sort, a minorty-in-name government that represented a majority of voters, which would undoubtedly be undertaking a considerably different legislative agenda than Harper and Flaherty and BaySt-Calgary will be getting up to. So at least acknowledging this, and thus understanding why fighting for PR has to be pretty much at the top of any actually progressive agenda as we start to fight NOW for the next election, seems to me to be pretty key, and saying to 'forget PR' as we 'analyse' the election is kind of like saying let's analyse global warming but pretend humans don't burn fossil fuel or something because we need our cars after all, and our airplanes - guaranteed to reach poor if not entirely useless conclusions. Aside from that we could use some much deeper probing than I have seen suggested here or anywhere else for that matter - why was nobody talking about the SPP, or the current Eurpean FTA, or Afghanistan, including the NDP (little squeaks do not count as making such things the issues they should have been, should still be)? Why does nobody seem to understand the major role of the media (directed by the corporate-banking elite who actually run the place) in setting the agenda of debate, and refuse to allow them to do this? We are being completely led around by the noses here, and few people seem to understand this - simply reacting to their actions is not setting OUR agenda, but dancing to their tune, letting them drive the train. We have a LONG way to go. And not much time to get there. Questions indeed - but OUR questions, not theirs.

• 6 weeks ago