Some news from the canvassing operation in Toronto: people are upset with Jack Layton.

There is a noticeable impact on voters, especially usual NDP voters, from the debate on the debate. Jack Layton’s attempt to keep Elizabeth May from the debates has angered many NDP voters into placing their vote with the Liberals this time around (in Toronto anyway). May did well to outplay Harper and Layton on that and the NDP seems to be paying for it. Perhaps NDP voters believed their leader was more morally convicted and “above the fray of dirty politics” than he actually turned out to be.

This will not change the election, but it is helping the other parties in close races in downtown Toronto.

Here’s some good news: Canadians are increasingly through with ideology.

They have been disappointed by parties of all couleurs, and so they have given up on voting based on ideology (emphasis added):

In the late 1980s, early 1990s, Mr. Graves says, 40 per cent of Canadians self-identified as small-l liberal, 25 per cent identified as small-c conservative and 35 per cent said they were neither. Today, he says, 28 per cent identify as conservative, 24 per cent as liberal and a whopping 48 per cent say they are neither. (A Conservative Party insider last week put the party’s core support at 27 per cent.)

The 2000 Canadian National Election Study uses somewhat different numbers but presents a similar – and perhaps even more politically intriguing – picture. It says 18 per cent of Canadians identify themselves as being on the right, 13 per cent say they’re on the left, 39 per cent say they’re somewhere in the centre and 29 per cent don’t know where they are, putting the non-ideological total at 68 per cent.

I have noticed this change in myself over the last few years. While I have certain pet peeves, essentially I am cool with any party out there – except for a Liberal Party led by Dion.

What matters to me is that we have a government that does the right things on education, immigration, taxation, crime, public transit and health care. On most other issues I am more than flexible and open to compromise.

The clock is running down on the election campaigns in both Canada and the U.S. And now only one issue really counts – the economic crisis, what the U.S. government is doing about it, and what Canada can do to stay out of the mess.

Senator Obama has edged into a narrow lead in the U.S. polls, while in Canada the Conservative party ends the second week of the campaign with what appears to be a double digit margin over the Liberals.

Canadians may fret over Conservatives gaffes while they try to figure out what the Liberal Green Shift could cost them. But these things are inconsequential compared to the financial armageddon that the U.S. is flirting with.

Don’t think the rescue package announced by George Bush is the end of the problem. Worry about the American dollar collapsing in its wake. Fret about the probabilility of hyperinflation, followed by a depression as bad as anything the world went through in the 1930s.

Yet, the same old malarky is still being spouted by the mainstream media, especially the Wall Street Journal. Take this beauty from today’s online edition:

“The point of this intervention is to stop a global panic caused both by government mistakes and private excess. The goal isn’t to control markets but to revive them.”

Totally wrong. In announcing the U.S. government’s $700 billion dollar rescue effort, President Bush described the action as “a big package because it was a big problem.”

Lack of Regulation the real problem

The big problem, in fact, has been the dominance in the U.S. of a political and economic philosphy that has encouraged manipulation of the economy by a relatively unregulated and unscrupulous financial services industry that has sucked up billions of dollars in return for worthless scraps of paper.

The problem had its origins, a reader has reminded me, in decisions by the U.S. government under Presidents Clinton and Bush to promote home ownership among low income families. It became extreme when the Bush administration decreed that 56 per cent of Federal Housing mortgages should go to this sector. Conveniently, this created a vast new market for an animal called ”subprime mortgages” – 100% financing and $500 down. The story is well told in this Village Voice article.

These worthless mortgages, wrapped into arcane financial packages no one really understands, were peddled to American and Canadian banks. When buyers began defaulting as higher interest rates clicked in, financial institutions around the world found themselves holding a trillion dollars of questionable investments.

The crisis has hit the UK as wellas the U.S. Canada has avoided the meltdown so far due to its more cautious lending practices and stricter mortgage regulations.

The result is a mass of angry and embittered voters in the U.S., and a bewildered Canadian electorate.

It is almost pathetic to watch the once honorable John McCain rail at Barack Obama for supposedly being a prime cause of the current panic. After all, Obama’s been in Washington four years, compared to McCain’s 22 years. And McCain has always opposed close regulation of the financial industry.

McCain was one of the “Keating Five,” the five American senators involved with savings mogul Kenneth Keating in the great savings and loan scandal that almost ripped apart the American economy under President Reagan — all because of lack of regulation.

American voters will have to decide whether they wish to support a candidate attacking the record of his own party that has been in control of the White House for the past eight years and of the Congress for most of the past twenty.

Canadian voters should tell the party leaders that it’s time to drop the pointless “poopin’ puffin”-type attack ads and lay out a real plan to insulate Canada — at least to the extent that we can — against the kind of economic piracy that’s become endemic to the American way of life.

Ray Argyle

www.wildaboutwriting.com

Did you know there are people that believe that the pill (and other hormonal contraceptives) causes abortions?

I assume you all know that hormonal contraceptives stop an egg from being released from the ovaries, preventing fertilization.

What these people are saying is that it prevents the fertilized egg from attaching to the wall of the uterus, therefor aborting a pregnancy. Now if that were the case, I would agree that it was abortion. However it’s not the case. I can see where they’re coming from but they’re lying to people to make their point and that is reprehensible. It prevents pregnancy, but in my opinion it’s not an abortive measure.

On the flipside, there are upsides to contraceptives. Less teen pregnancies for one, and some women take the Pill as a life saving drug to help prevent ovarian and other uteral cancers. Other women have health risks associated with pregnancies. For instance, some kidney issues can result in death if she becomes pregnant. So lack of the Pill would kill women.

Now, the thing is that they’re lobbying in the US to criminalize contraceptives. They’re focusing on hormonal methods, for the moment. I wasn’t able to find anything Canadian related.

I do think it’s something we’re going to need to keep an eye on.  Ask the candidates in your riding what their position is on this if you feel this something that needs to be brought up.

A link for you.
This is an anti-contraception movement website.
http://www.thepillkills.com/index.html

 *Now before you start commenting on the “rightness” or “wrongness” of abortion, please let me make something clear: I believe that abortion should be looked at on a case by case basis. As I said, there are health reasons why women should have the right to abortions. It depends on the situation, and we cannot possibly know every situation that can or will arise.

The following was written to the editor of The Cowichan Valley Citizen. Unfortunately, the paper hasn’t a website so I can’t point readers to the original article. Voters in the Cowichan Valley, however, all receive the paper free at their doorsteps.

Dear Editor:

I read your article by Sarah Simpson, “More than a two-horse race,” with a growing sense of irony.

Superficially, the topic was democracy.

Certainly, the article started off describing Canada’s democratic deficit, telling of the media consortium’s decision to exclude, and subsequently include, Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the upcoming televised debates.

Left out of the account was that the NDP and Conservatives colluded to block May’s participation, both Jack Layton and Stephen Harper having threatened to boycott the events should she attend. Only Layton’s and Harper’s reversal due to intense pressure from angry citizens, including from within their own parties, precipitated the change in the consortium’s decision.

The article stated that only three parties have represented this riding since 1988. These have been the NDP and the Reform or Canadian Alliance, the latter two being earlier versions of today’s Conservative Party.

The situation for voters in this riding is far worse than this polarization would suggest.

We have not elected a member to the government in 29 years. In fact, we have done so only twice in the past 50 years. And you’d have to go back 68 years to find a Liberal candidate who had been elected

With the article’s headline, one might have expected that more than the two horses in question would be mentioned, yet only the NDP and Conservative candidates’ names and photos were included. Both Liberal candidate Brian Scott and Green Party candidate Christina Knighton were left out.

This kind of editorial omission helps perpetuate the two-horse race and the dominance of the NDP and Conservatives in our riding. But what troubled me most was not this omission, but the response by one of those two horses, NDP candidate and incumbent Jean Crowder.

Referring to the number of candidates which typically run in our riding during federal elections (up to ten), Crowder responded: “There is a lot of interest and that does a lot of good for the democratic process, that people get involved.” As to the prospect of facing the extra competition, she stated: “I think it allows us to get some perspectives on the issues. It generates good conversation. I think it’s very healthy.”

Within the NDP’s platform one can find a small section on electoral reform. Yet rarely does one hear NDP candidates voicing their concern that the votes of the majority of Canadians, including those of citizens in this riding, fail to be represented in the House of Commons.

For example, in Nanaimo-Cowichan during the 2006 federal election, the votes of 53.2% of us elected no one. That’s 32, 499 votes. That’s 32,499 of us whose opinion didn’t matter.

Since only first place matters in a winner-take-all system, even the votes for the Conservative who placed second didn’t count.

This Citizen article was a golden opportunity for Crowder to raise the issue of the lack of democracy in our voting system. That she didn’t has to make this voter wonder how committed she and the NDP are to democratic and electoral reform – and not just the kind of reform which the party prefers, but that which the people decide.

(I omit the Conservatives because they do not profess to want change to our voting system.)

It’s fine for Crowder to state, in response to a question about facing added competition, that “it allows us [presumably the horses in the two-horse race] to get some perspectives on the issues, [that] it generates good conversation.”

It’s another to acknowledge that with our first-past-the-post electoral system THERE IS NO COMPETITION beyond that between the two front-running horses.

Clearly and once again, politicians in the lead don’t care about this issue and would prefer that it be buried.

Will voters allow this?

We’ve shown what we can do when we get angry, when we witness a threat to our democratic choice. We got Elizabeth May into the televised debates.

We have the power to force change. Therefore, I urge anyone who cares about our country’s growing democratic deficit to visit Fair Vote Canada’s new website, www.orphanvoters.ca. It pulls together the facts about electoral reform, answers your questions and offers constructive suggestions on what you can do to promote this change.

In the words of FVC’s Executive Director, Larry Gordon, “The abused, neglected and abandoned voters of this great land will no longer meekly say ‘Please sir, we want some democracy’. When the new government takes office we will remind whoever forms the government that they do not have a democratic mandate from the people.”

Chrystal Ocean, Duncan.

Is Michael Ignatieff, Member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, in for the fight of his politcal life? As the Conservatives creep into majority territory, you’ll find more Liberal seats come into play. In the City of Toronto (AKA as “the 416″ for its area code), it appears that Etobicoke-Lakeshore is no longer a sure thing for the Liberals. Wilfred Lauier professor, Barry Kay, has been doing election projection analysis for many years and he has moved the riding to a “leaning to” status for the Grits. His latest effort, updated yesterday (September 19, 2008), shows the riding not the dark red that you see in most of “the 416″ but pink. Greg Morrow’s analysis of September 17, 2008, which does not show the latest slew of polls, pegs Iggy with 39-43% while Conservative Patrick Boyer gets 32-35%. For those who don’t know, Boyer was the MP for the riding during the Mulroney years. Both the Greens and the NDP are projected to get 11%-14%. In a causality of the First Past The Post system, this riding may suffer from a split of the left allowing the Conservative candidate to run up the middle. It is still midway in the campaign, polls change, and these are just models which don’t take other factors into account but it is a interesting tidbit to ponder. Dion goes down to defeat and takes Michael Ignatieff with him.

OK, enough is enough.

“Tories on cusp of majority with 40% support,” shrieks CanWest. And then the fine print:

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have moved within reach of a majority, according to an Ipsos Reid poll, primarily because the party has found new strength in key election battlegrounds in Ontario and Quebec.

The Conservatives have surged to 40-per-cent support, up two points from a week before, according to the poll, commissioned by Canwest News Service and Global National.

Meanwhile, the Liberals have dipped two points to 27 per cent. The NDP jumped two points to 15 per cent and the Greens dropped one point to sit at 10 per cent nationally.

“It seems like this relentless march by the Tories. They’re not really making huge strides, but … obviously they’re moving in the right direction,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Reid Public Affairs. The poll, conducted by phone from Tuesday through Thursday, has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. [emphases mine --DD]

For crying out loud. Conservatives “surge” in a “relentless march,” Liberals “dip,” and the NDP “jumps”–two whole points, well within the statistical margin of error. Whom on earth do the pollsters and media think they’re kidding?

And then this:

Still, while the poll shows that Canadians are warming to the prospect of a Tory majority, 49 per cent still say they would be “dissatisfied” with such a result. Thirty-seven per cent would be satisfied, while 14 per cent had no opinion.

In other words, the folks who are going to vote Tory anyway would be “satisfied” with a Tory majority. (I think it’s fair to assume a certain amount of overlap here.) What almost classically British understatement!

That’s it for me. No more polls, which more and more are beginning to sound, in their interpretation if not their methodology, like a certain notorious MASSIVE one. La, La, La, La, Ipsos-Reid, I can’t hear you!

And, as always, the real lede is buried deep under the cornfield. 40% of the voters will bring a party close to “majority” territory. Minority rule as usual. Ain’t formal democracy grand?

[Crossposted from Dawg's Blawg]

Christie Blatchford has redeemed herself somewhat after her “gaffe” not too long ago. In her latest column she attacks the media, particularly the CBC and Keith Boag, for focusing their “reporting” efforts on Gerry Ritz’s “black-humour comments” about the listeriosis outbreak. The minister of agriculture, while “at work, with people he works alongside or who work for him”, made some off-the-cuff remarks that, in his mind, were designed to lighten an otherwise dark and gloomy situation.

Keith Boag’s report the other night, for instance, noted that Mr. Ritz’s jokes came late in August when the government was showing a public face “meant to reflect compassion and understanding,” the film moving slickly to a shot of Mr. Harper speaking on the subject and looking stricken. What? The viewer was to take from this that the Conservatives’ real position is closer to Mr. Ritz’s than Mr. Harper’s? That the expression of sorrow and sympathy was insincere?

Exactly. Boag’s “reporting” is a gross violation of journalistic ethics, if that’s what he did (I didn’t see his report, but I’ll believe Blatchford on this one), shaping the news to fit his own ideological and partisan mould.

Blatchford goes on to say that everyone uses black humour when the situation is grim, with journalists being the worst “offenders”:

At the Toronto Star, which gave the late Terry Fox the properly warm and reverent coverage he deserved (I was there then and wrote some of it), the newsroom also had a pool guessing the date Terry would die.

While Ritz’s comments were indeed inappropriate and clearly offensive to some, that one-time outburst of black humour, or his attempt at such, does not reflect on the work he has done or is about to do on the listeriosis file.

The comments made by the victims’ families and publicized in the media are disingenuous, as Blatchford notes:

One woman, whose relative died only three weeks ago, said she “was trying to put the pain behind her” when there came Mr. Ritz, bringing it all back. Another, whose adult daughter died a month ago from listeriosis, said the family was just getting over the shock. A third referred to Mr. Ritz’s comments as “ruthless, disrespectful, frustrating.” I’ve got news for them: There is no putting the pain of a parent’s death, or a child’s, behind you, whatever its cause, and it wasn’t, to use the mildest of epithets cast Mr. Ritz’s way, even “a mistake.”

In politics we have seen much worse in Canada. Ritz and his “humour” don’t even come close to qualifying as newsworthy. Glad to see that at least one member of the mainstream media has enough common sense, unlike Keith Boag and the CBC, to call a spade a spade (apart from yours truly, bien sûr).

Two of the Edmonton-Strathcona candidates are hosting events today, Saturday September 20th. Linda Duncan and her team are welcoming federal NDP leader Jack Layton today at the Winspear Centre (Sir Winston Churchill Square, downtown). The event takes place from noon until two, and all are welcome. If you’re on facebook, you can get all the details here.

Rahim Jaffer and his team are holding a Meet and Greet his afternoon at the campaign office from 3 to 5, and in the evening there will be an event at the Urban Lounge at 10544 Whyte Avenue. If you’re on facebook, you can get all the details here and here.

Also, don’t forget the All-Candidates’ Forum, to be held at 7pm on Thursday, September 25th postponed to Monday, September 29th at the Myer Horowitz Theatre on the U of A campus (second floor, Students’ Union Building, 8900-114 St.). The format will be a moderated debate followed by an open question-and-answer period with questions taken from members of the audience. The details are on facebook here.

Will the October 14 election turn on Stephen Harper’s sleeveless blue sweater? The name of Stéphane Dion’s dog?

Two American political scientists, Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, showed in a 2004 paper that 2.8 million voters cast their ballots against Al Gore in 2000 because of poor weather in their states (p.29). Woodrow Wilson’s 1918 presidential campaign was jeopardized because of shark attacks along the beaches of New Jersey. Picking up on the theme in an article in The New Yorker that appeared at about the same time, Louis Menand makes reference to an earlier commenter:

“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” the economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter wrote, in 1942. “He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking is associative and affective.”

Menand goes on to note:

The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty.

Achen and Bartels conclude their article on a note of deep pessimism. Their study, they write,

questions the ability of ordinary citizens to assess their public life critically, listen to the proposals for change coming from contenders for public office, and then choose between the candidates in accordance with their own values. Like most survey researchers who have talked extensively to real voters, we believe that few such citizens exist. The present paper is one more item of evidence. The central fact about democracies is that the voters understand little beyond their own and their community’s pain and pleasure, and they think about causes and effects as the popular culture advises them to think. The romantic vision of thoughtful democratic participation in the common life is largely mythical. Democracy must be defended some other way, if it is to be defended at all. [emphasis mine --DD]

The current view of the average or “mass” voter might well be rooted in a pivotal article published in 1964 by Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” In it, using data available at the time, he argued that only 10% of the voting population (whom he termed “ideologues”) had a coherent, “constrained” set of political beliefs. “Constraint” refers to the degree to which holding one political position allows us to predict other positions. Those whose beliefs are constrained are not likely, to give a Canadian example, to support massive cuts to the public service and an increase in public services at the same time. But we know that both positions have been very popular indeed among the “mass public.”

Converse has not been without his critics. J.H. Wray*, for example, believed that he greatly exaggerated the gap between the elite and the mass publics. Converse held the view that college graduates would have more coherent political beliefs, but Wray used statistical techniques on Converse’s national sample data, and found very little actual difference. And he made a key point: “An irony of ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’ is that it tells us so little about the nature of belief systems in mass publics.”

As it happens, Converse, in retrospect, was inclined to agree. Answering Wray, fifteen years after his original paper appeared**, he conceded:

[A]s a Wray quotation or two make clear, I mistakenly assumed that measures of education, political information, ideology or political sophistication would all be sufficiently correlated that any one of them would be a reasonable proxy variable to produce the kind of discriminations being discussed. What has turned out in the interim is that while educational differences fail to yield much of the expected discrimination in constraint as statically measured or in attitude stability as longitudinally measured, measures of political involvement tend, with much greater reliability, to show discriminations in the expected direction, and often quite large ones.

In other words, those who are more politically involved tend to have more coherent political beliefs. Speaking as someone who is not a political scientist, my impulse at this point is likely a “mass” one: “Well, duh.”

In the 1974 election, a photographer snapped a picture of Stanfield fumbling a football on an airport tarmac. It served to depict him as clumsy and inept, despite the fact he had been firing perfect spirals to a reporter for several minutes before the errant toss came his way.

People are susceptible to media images and soundbites at election time. This sort of thing forms part of the non-political calculus by which they make their decisions. It’s not that the reasons for their choice are necessarily irrational or stupid: they simply aren’t political.

Ah, yes, political conservatism, dealt with exhaustively by John T. Jost et al. here (p.369):

Variables significantly associated with conservatism, we now know, include fear and aggression (Adorno et al., 1950; Altemeyer, 1998; Lavine et al., 1999), dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity (Fibert & Ressler, 1998; Frenkel-Brunswik, 1948; Rokeach, 1960)uncertainty avoidance (McGregor et al., 2001; Sorrentino & Roney, 1986; Wilson, 1973b), need for cognitive closure (Golec, 2001; Jost et al., 1999; Kemmelmeier, 1997; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), personal need for structure (Altemeyer, 1998; Schaller et al., 1995; Smith & Gordon, 1998), terror management (Dechesne et al., 2000; Greenberg et al., 1990, 1992; Wilson, 1973d), group-based dominance (Pratto et al., 1994; Sidanius, 1993; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), and system justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2001; Jost & Thompson, 2000).

Heh. We knew that. But it doesn’t make our task any easier.

What task? Well, if we aren’t going to give up on democracy altogether, cynically exploiting the masses’ alleged fixation on trivial and irrelevant matters, we need to look at an alternative kind of politics. To begin with, perhaps the notion of polarized positions, as Morris Fiorina (cited by Menand) suggests in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, is a polarization of elite, not popular, opinion. As he puts it, “The simple truth is that there is no culture war in the United States—no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.”

Indeed, this would conform to the opinions already noted that most voters are not motivated by actual political issues. While we might still be confronted by conservative values, then, at least we may not have to penetrate the wall of conservative politics. We face, in other words, a social challenge, not a political one.

Menand himself concludes the same thing: that voting is social, not political:

Fiorina quotes a passage from the political scientist Robert Putnam: “Most men are not political animals. The world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to them—possibly benevolent, more probably threatening, but nearly always alien. Most men are not interested in politics. Most do not participate in politics.”

Man [sic] may not be a political animal, but he is certainly a social animal. Voters do respond to the cues of commentators and campaigners, but only when they can match those cues up with the buzz of their own social group. Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.

It would be a mistake, however, to leave matters thus. The underlying notion in all this is that the general public doesn’t care about the real issues, or is even incapable of caring, and votes accordingly. But one shouldn’t take this as irremediable ignorance, foolishness or incapacity. It is, first and foremost, indicative of alienation from present-day politics, from a system that encourages public participation only for a very short period every few years.

People might be forgiven for taking the view that no matter who they vote for, the government gets elected. Why learn about the issues? Why delve into the politics that surrounds even what directly affects them? The day after the election it’s back to normal, as though nothing had happened. Do they have any more say in things? Will the promises of the day be kept? (Hands up, all those who think that we’re really out of Afghanistan in 2011 if Harper is returned with a majority.)

At the very least the present estrangement of citizens from their current political system calls for wide public discussion of a kind we’ve never had. Until then, pray for an early snowfall on October 14: some folks will be bound to blame it on the Conservatives.

[H/t frequent commenter John Cross and Marie Ève.]
______________________
* J. Harry Wray. “Comment on Interpretations of Early Research into Belief Systems.”
The Journal of Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 1173-1181.
**Philip E. Converse. “Comment.” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Nov., 1979), pp. 1182-1184.

[Cross-posted from Dawg's Blawg.]

This is the second in a series of four posts about each of the four major parties in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding, which will be posted in the order of the 2006 vote totals. The second-place candidate in 2006 was Linda Duncan of the New Democrats, and so Duncan and her party are dealt with here.

2006 results

For the NDP, the Edmonton-Strathcona results weren’t good enough to win in 2006, but they were still a milestone. For one, it was the best showing the party’s ever had in the riding. But even more importantly, in this riding that has always relied on vote-splitting to deliver a Conservative MP to Ottawa, it was both closest anyone’s come to unseating Rahim Jaffer since he was first elected in 1997, and the first time the other parties’ vote was low enough for anyone to be able to make a strong case for voters to rally behind a single candidate. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the post-2006 NDP candidate nominating process dealt more with trying to convince Duncan to run again rather than a riding-wide candidate search. This made the nomination race a rather trivial affair, because as soon as Duncan did decide to run again, any interest anyone else might have had in the position dried up. And she hasn’t stopped campaigning since then.

I don’t think I’m being overly partisan in saying that Duncan has an impressive career behind her. She held a senior portfolio as the Chief of Enforcement for Environment Canada, and also served as Assistant Deputy Minister for Renewable Resources for the Yukon Government. Internationally, she’s been a senior legal advisor to the Indonesian, Bangladeshi and Jamaican governments in instituting programs for effective environmental enforcement, and as Head of Law and Enforcement for the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, she also spent four years working with Canadian, American and Mexican officials. More locally, she founded Alberta’s Environmental Law Centre, and helped found the Society for the Protection of Architectural Resources in Edmonton (SPARE), the Catalyst Theatre, the Edmonton Rape Crisis Center, and the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. In Todd Babiak’s new column in the Edmonton Journal on September 10th, he declared: “If this Conservative city in the prime minister’s home province has a star candidate with a national profile in the 2008 federal election, from any party, it’s Duncan.”

It should be said that that kind of attention from the media is a fairly recent phenomenon in the Duncan camp. Her late 2006 public declaration that she was seeking the nomination was attended by almost no one but party insiders, and while the alternative papers covered it, it barely made a dent in the mainstream media. That began to change, though, with her nomination meeting in January of 2007. Nearly 400 people crowded into Garneau’s City Arts Centre to watch Duncan be crowned the candidate, and having federal NDP leader Jack Layton as the guest speaker drew a significant media presence as well. Most of the subsequent coverage focused on Layton, but Duncan’s name got out there too. Since then, Layton has made a grand total of four additional visits to the riding, prompting one observer to remark that you couldn’t “swing a cat” without hitting the NDP party leader in Edmonton-Strathcona these days. This attention has prompted increased coverage of Linda’s campaign during this election season, and she has appeared not just several times each in all of the various local television, radio, and print media, but also on a smaller scale in the national media as well, including CBC’s nightly television news programme “The National.”

Every candidate has their negatives, though, and Duncan is no exception. She wasn’t always as good a speaker as she is these days, prompting Edmonton-Strathcona-based blogger daveberta to remark during the 2006 election that he “hadn’t been incredibly impressed with her performance at the various candidates’ forums.” She is also infamously blunt and brutally honest, and often says things that make party highers-up cringe (especially when these things get quoted in the media). But while this prolonged campaign has been brutal for everyone across Canada, it’s been good for Duncan on both of these fronts. Observers at the upcoming all-candidates’ forum next Thursday night can expect to find a still-outspoken but slightly more polished Duncan going up against Jaffer this time.

A lot of the buzz on the ground in the riding this time has centred around one phrase: “can she actually win?” Phrased like that–i.e., with a ‘can’–I think the answer has to be yes. Without any change at all to the Conservative vote, Duncan would only have to increase her own vote by nine points to tie Jaffer. A look at the available data shows that not only has the NDP vote been steadily going up in the riding over the past five elections, it actually increased by…how about that, nine points!…in each of the 2004 and 2006 elections. If she can manage that performance again, it will be a nail-biter. And if any of Jaffer’s 2006 Conservative vote either stays home or goes to another candidate, she’ll have won handily.

But just as Jaffer’s vote will depend in large part on Edmonton-Strathconans’ level of satisfaction with Stephen Harper, the number of people who are willing to swing Duncan’s way in this election will largely depend on how people feel about voting for Jack Layton’s NDP. Overall, Layton is a comparatively popular leader, but those who hate him–i.e., boatloads of the kinds of more partisan Liberals Duncan has yet has to win over in Edmonton-Strathcona–really hate him. The NDP’s strategic choice to ignore the Liberals in favour of attacking only Stephen Harper’s Conservatives could work to Duncan’s advantage, because to win, Duncan needs to gain the trust not just of those Liberal voters in the riding who are unhappy with Stéphane Dion, but also those who are more interested in voting against the Conservatives than they are in voting their conscience. But if the national NDP strategy were to change on that front, inevitably pissing off that not-exactly-small contingent of Edmonton-Strathconans, Duncan would have a much more difficult time of coming from behind to overtake Jaffer.

So the actual open question is less “can she win” and more “will she win,” and for an answer to that one, we’ll have to wait until October 14th. One way or another, though, I think we can all agree that these are exciting times in Edmonton-Strathcona.

Further reading:
Linda Duncan’s campaign website
Edmonton-Strathcona: a snapshot
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Conservatives
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Liberals
Edmonton-Strathcona: the Greens