The financial meltdown has taken on epic proportions. The thought  is that it can be fixed quickly by intense government intervention. And I mean intense.  The verdict is not in. Not long ago talk of such intervention would have been laughed out of court by the market wizards . I don’t hear much laughter now. Not much mea culpa either.  What about climate change?  Strong government intervention in the tax/regulation system   in support of carbon reducation  is derided right now  by the same market wizards  who said let the markets do their thing as they bulked up on toxic securities based on predatory lending.  Looks like someone should ask them to eat their shirt? Anyone out there in this election doing that? If they are maybe we should vote for them?

Some 100 supporters greeted Ed Broadbent as he arrived at party headquarters from teaching his course on citizens and democracy at Queens University. Rick Downes, the Kingston and the Islands NDP candidate, introduced Broadbent. Downes said that Broadbent was the face of the NDP when he grew up. Broadbent said that the NDP has grown as it has attracted people from other parties. Even his own father, who was a Tory, saw the light in the 60s and joined the NDP.

The social and economic problems we face now, Broadbent said in a rousing speech, started with the Liberals. In 1993 they were facing deficits and, unlike Clinton who raised taxes on the most wealthy and did not cut programs, Chretien slashed the programs that have yet to recover, he said. He ran in 2000 because he saw the effects of what the Liberals had done. When revenues returned tax breaks for the wealthy were given, the debt was paid down, but there was no action on many fronts, especially health and the environment.

Even now 7000 people in Ottawa are waiting for affordable housing. There is no national housing strategy. Why should anyone vote Liberal now, he said. He supported Jack Layton as a candidate early on as he was aware of his activism in Toronto on the housing and environmental fronts: “Jack was there on the environment before the Greens”. Broadbent said targeted tax cuts are needed in combination with an industrial strategy. Simply cutting corporate taxes, as the Tories are doing, does not help the economy, he said. He pointed to sectors like forest products and automotive as needing to be targeted. In closing he said that the NDP has had the best record of fiscal management. One need only look at the provinces where there have been NDP governments.

In a Kingston This Week interview Rick Downes said that he has heard at the doorstep that people were worried that Harper would do to Canada what Harris did to Ontario and that the local Conservative candidate Brian Abrams was not a “Red Tory” but a Harris-Harper conservative. Downes claimed he was picking up support from Red Tories. He also said he had detected disaffected Liberals–those who think that it is time for a change in local representation. In a campaign news release Brian Abrams has challenged Peter Milliken to come to the North End of Kingston to explain why his party would add a tax on everything from groceries to home heating and to admit that the carbon tax will cost countless jobs. Meanwhile, there seems to be a dearth of all candidates meetings in the city. Candidates are talking to the press and to small groups of voters but not face to face with each other.

Green Party candidate Elizabeth May brought her whistle stop campaign to Kingston this morning. A lively crowd awaited the VIA train from Toronto and the lights in the distance seemed to be it. Instead a rush of freight engines swept by — with the VIA train soon behind — setting the stage for the energetic arrival on the platform a few minutes later of the candidate. Some 50 local Greens, in their green shirts, with Kingston candidate Eric Walton and Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox & Addington candidate Chris Walker, greeted May enthusiastically. She alighted carrying a bouquet of dried sunflowers which she waved at the crowd and launched into a rousing speech.

The whistle stop campaign she contrasted with the large carbon foot prints of her airborne rivals. She said she had seen up close the great sweep of the country and the vital role VIA plays in serving it. The Mulroney Tories had slashed VIA in the past. Increased support for VIA would happen if Greens were in power, she said. May said she would be traveling on from Montreal to Halifax and that all along the way she had been greeted by enthusiastic crowds and that the whistlestops had given her a chance to go to places no federal leader had ever been before. VIA she said had been very patient with her at these whistlestops but she said it was time to go and gave a final wave of the sunflowers as the doors closed and the train was off to its next stop in Brockville no doubt to be welcomed by another group of supporters.

There was an interesting discussion on CBC’s Sunday Morning last weekend amongst pollsters and a marketing professor from the US about attack ads. Mainly the discussion was about how well these ads work and why they work. Little was said about their value as a way of informing voters about issues. Little was said about the bearing of the truth or falsity of these ads on voter understanding of the isues or the candidates for that matter.

There seemed to be a view that if they either supported your base or discredited your opponents they were fine. It was even argued that these ads were informative and needed to allow voters to make informed choices! But if these ads distort, lie, trade on prejudice and so on how can it be said they are useful in  political discourse? There is a law in economics called Gresham’s Law. The idea is that if bad coinage circulates good coinage is withheld. The bad coin drives out the good. Is this law at work in political discourse?

The NDP has selected former city councillor  Rick Downes as candidate. Downes ran in the 2007 provincial election. Downes was a three-term city councillor for King’s Town district before coming within 700 votes of Mayor in 2006. In 2007 he was the provincial NDP candidate for Kingston & the Islands New Democrats, winning 22% of the vote. The party is asking people to re-use signs from the 2007 campaign.  Eric Walton is the Green Party candidate and party signs are up. From 1986 to 1994  Walton was a founding member and the part-time agency director of the Kingston Environmental Action Project (KEAP).  He is the Green Party of Canada shadow cabinet critic/advocate for international affairs.  Liberal speaker of the house Peter  Milliken will face off this year against Brian Abrams, a Kingston lawyer with Templeman Menninga who spent 18 years as an RCMP officer before being called to the bar. According to a Milliken news release “Abrams represents fresh blood for the local Tories, and hopes to tap into the Red Tory sentiment that made Kingston a federal Conservative stronghold in the 1970s and 1980s, in the days of Flora MacDonald.”

NDP last to select candidate — this evening. Peter Milliken, speaker of the house, for the Liberals and Abrahms for the Conservatives have been selected to run. Tory signs widespread in city. Others yet to show.

More after this evening.