X Marks the Spot

As taught by Green Party leader Elizabeth May:

Everyone you dislike or disagree with can somehow be compared to or attached to Nazi atrocities, Nazi sympathizers, Nazis, Nazi appeasers, or Adolf Hitler.

By linking your opponents to Nazis in any way, you instantly ruin their credibility.

Oh, wait, ruins my credibility? Oh.

Well, if your credibility is fraying, here's what you do: stand your ground. And make sure it's clear that it wasn't your idea to link the prime minister to the Nazis. After all, if a journalist wrote something comparing the prime minister to a Nazi appeaser, it must be fair, and not your fault.

Sure, there are people who will say any Holocaust or Nazi argument in a debate unrelated to World War 2 is cheap and immature, but those Goebbels-lovers don't know what they're talking about.

The fact is, the longer you hold onto your original statement, and the longer you resist apologizing, the stronger you'll look.

When it comes time for organizers to decide whether or not to include you in a national debate, they will surely want the pizzaz and flair of a good Nazi comparison. I already have one ready for the big night that will steal all the NDP support: "Jack Layton has a moustache. Hitler had a moustache. Vote Green!"

Queen's Park staffers have a little more free time on their hands this week as their employer closed off access to Facebook.

Facebook, in case you're old and unaware of developments on the intertubes, is a social networking site in which you link to the facebook pages of all your current and past friends, and they link to your facebook page.

Why do people do this?

Mainly because we don't have much time for each other anymore. There's too much to do. We work a lot. And we go to the gym so that on the rare occasions when we do see these people they don't think we're slovenly or gluttonous.

Facebook allows us to keep in touch without having to actually speak to or see people.

How is this different than email? Well, email doesn't give you the opportunity to connect with people you once knew. There are people I attended Sunningdale Public School with in Oakville. I don't plan on ever seeing them again, or speaking to them, but now I know that they work as heating and air conditioning installers or flight attendants and travelled to Tibet, or Paris, or "Spring Break 2003!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEAH, [expletive]."

I like knowing these things about people. I think we all do.

I'm way off point on this post, though.

My intention was to tell you all that Facebook is becoming a place for politicians, too.

Albina Guarnieri is signed up. So are Omar Alghabra and Navdeep Bains.

Albina has 85 friends on Facebook. The Re-elect Albina group has 159 members.

I'm not sure how many friends Bains has since he restricts viewership to his page, but his Re-elect group has 147 members.

Alghabra appears to be leading the pack in the number of friends he has: 418. His Re-elect group, however, only has 82 members.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I only have 92 friends, though I have requested an online friendship with Stephane Dion. Curiously, Stephen Harper doesn't appear to have a page.)

Paul Szabo and Gurbax Malhi don't have Facebook pages. Szabo's Re-elect page has only one member. Malhi's, 27.

Those guys are behind the curve.

Perhaps the most interesting Facebook presence is MP Wajid Khan's. Khan, as you may remember, crossed the floor back in January, leaving the Liberals for the Conservatives.

He doesn't have a page, and he doesn't have a Re-elect page. I don't think Conservatives have much of a presence on Facebook. I don't want to speculate on what that means.

What Wajid does have, however, are two groups dedicated to his work.

The first one is the "I Respect Wajid Khan a Conservative for Mississauga-Streetsville." It has two members.

Then there's the hilariously funny "[Expletive] Wajid Khan Group," which has 20 members.

Big day tomorrow.

We will be officially offered a new electoral system.

On Oct. 10, the date of the provincial election, we'll decide in a referendum whether or not to accept that system.

The new system - Mixed-member Proportional, or MMP - will allow every vote cast by Ontario voters to be counted. It will also most likely put us in a state of perpetual minority governments.

And it will give us larger ridings, with MPPs elected there serving more people. But, at the same time, it will give us more MPPs. 29 of them will not have ridings. They'll be elected at large.

There are great arguments in favour of MMP. There are great arguments for the status quo. (Many of these arguments are summarized brilliantly in a previous three-part blog entry entitled Let the headaches begin.)

It hurts the mind for a non-partisan observer to choose a side. I've been trying since first learning about proportional representation (of which MMP is a form) during the 2004 federal election.

A side will need to be chosen, though. An "X" will need to marked.

The NDP are in favour of the proposal, but they don't like that a super-majority is needed for it to pass. The super-majority for the referendum requires that, to be passed, it receive 60 percent of the popular vote, plus a majority of the vote in 60 percent of ridings across the province.

The Progressive Conservative Party is in favour of the status quo.

All I hope is that people choose to set aside time to learn about the proposed system, and our current system.

It is an important matter. It is the future of our democracy.

There is so much weight to this collective decision it is worrisome. But we need to make a choice. Let us all make an informed one.

Yeah, I know it's only Manitoba, but, still, the NDP won their third consecutive majority in that province last night.

Under Premier Gary Doer, the NDP took 36 seats. The Conservatives, under Hugh McFadyen, won 12 seats, and the Liberals, with Jon "I'm about to get fired" Gerrard as their leader, got just two seats.

After winning the historic third NDP victory last night, Doer told a cheering audience, "I believe the people of Manitoba have voted...to move forward, and that's what we're going to do."

Finally! Manitoba is going to move forward. Makes you wonder what they were voting for when they elected the same government into power in the past two elections.

I dug up some old quotations from the previous two election nights to find out.

September 21, 1999 - "I believe the people of Manitoba have voted to take steps backwards, and that's what we're going to do. We will retreat slightly from our current position."

June 3, 2003 - "I believe the people of Manitoba have voted to stay roughly in the same place, and that's what we're going to do. We will not move forward. We will not move backwards. We will stay right here."

So, now, with three majority governments in a row, Gary Doer and the Province of Manitoba will officially begin moving forward.

In our ongoing attempt to look beyond the GTA, X Marks has discovered that there is an election going on in Prince Edward Island.

Election Day is Monday, May 28.

This brings up an important question: when referring to Prince Edward Island, does one say they live "on" the island or "in" the island?

Of course, as a province, you would say "in." For example, I live in Ontario. I do not live on Ontario (though I actually do live on the province, as in, on its surface, and not in the province, below its surface).

But, for some reason, people live on an island. I would argue, however, that they live in Prince Edward Island.

Regardless, the people in the Island are expected, by pollsters at least, to oust the Pat Binns Conservatives.

First elected in 1996, Binns is going for his fourth term. His main competitor is Liberal leader Robert Ghiz.

There are 27 ridings in PEI. Going into the election, Binns's Conservative had 23 seats and Ghiz's Liberals had four.

That's a large margin to make up, but polls do have Ghiz leading with an expected 18 seats. Is that really surprising, though?

I mean, really, who goes for a fourth term? What is it this Binns guy wants to do that he didn't already have the chance to do? It's not like he was working with a loose hold on power. He had 85 percent of the seats in the Legislature.

One of the last things his government did before dissolution was scrap the ban on canned carbonated drinks.

That's right, since 1984, PEI had a ban on canned carbonated drinks. It was the only place in North America in which you could not buy a canned carbonated beverage. You could bring in canned soda and beer from other provinces, but you couldn't buy or sell it there.

So, with that huge problem finally out of the way and his canned-drink legacy cemented, what more could Binns hope to do?

We'll follow up tomorrow to see what Binns and Ghiz have planned for the Island if they win the election.

First things first.

While I was doing some research about the Prince Edward Island election, which ends Monday, I came across The Guardian, one (the only one?) of the province's newspapers.

They have what might possibly be the best slogan of any newspaper ever.

Keep in mind that I once worked for The Oakville Beaver, where the slogan once was "Leave it to the Beaver."

The Guardian outdoes that.

Here it is:

The Guardian: Covers Prince Edward Island like the dew.

That is clever.

***

Now, onto the election.

After reading the news that has accumulated since the beginning of the campaign, it turns out not much is really going on.

Stratford, the fastest-growing community in PEI, wants a junior high school. The Pat Binns Progressive Conservatives have promised to give it to them.

Unfortunately, they didn't tell the school board about it. The school board trustees had decided last year to not build the school. According to the CBC, "The board already had two projects on its priority list, a new gym for Tracadie Cross, and a new high school in Montague."

The Progressive Conservatives have also promised 25 new doctors. PEI, according to the news from out there, has a doctor deficit. Apparently 25 doctors will fix the problem. Plus 15 nurses.

Binns has also promised a convention centre in Charlottetown. Sexy stuff.

Rob Ghiz, the Liberal leader, said that in four years everyone in PEI will have a family doctor if he's elected, though he hasn't specified how many doctors that will take.

Ghiz also promised he'd bring in a water quality task force and cut the fee Islanders pay for well water testing in half.

In case you're wondering, this is, in fact, the most boring election campaign ever!

At least it's over Monday.

Islanders are going to the polls today, and it's expected they'll do so with their typical electoral gusto.

These are the people, after all, who in 2003 found a way to get to polling stations the morning after Hurricane Juan knocked out electricity to two-thirds of the population. 83 percent of them made it out that day.

The Weather Network says it's +9C with light rain, so one expects the voters of PEI will be out in full force.

The polls close at 5 p.m. (our time), and results are expected in shortly after that.

***

In other news, the first Peel-based campaign in favour of electoral reform has started up in anticipation of October's referendum.

Though there's not much on their website now, Fair Vote Peel has taken root and will probably grow quickly between now and October 10, when we vote on whether to switch to the new system or not.

This group is affiliated with Fair Vote Canada, which has been around for many years trying to get our governments to change the way in which we elect our representatives.

I'll be writing a story about them later this week. Will keep you updated.

I'm sure you were glued to the television last night as the results came in from the Prince Edward Island election.

I'm sure your fingernails were digging into the arm of the couch as riding after riding painted the blue island red.

I'm absolutely certain that after the CBC announced that Robert Ghiz would be the next premier you must have thought long and hard about what it all meant to Canada.

And I can only imagine you concluded, after long discussions with friends and family members, that the election of Ghiz, son of former Premier Joe Ghiz, didn't really mean much, and that if your remote control's batteries hadn't run out and left you stranded on CBC Newsworld you might not even be sure PEI was still above sea level.

But it is! It is still above sea level, and, get this, it's moving forward!

Premier-elect Ghiz announced last night that "We're going to move this province forward over the next four years."

You may remember that last week, Gary Doer, after winning a third NDP mandate in Manitoba, also decided to finally move his province forward.

"I believe the people of Manitoba have voted...to move forward, and that's what we're going to do," Doer told the crowds.

Has there been a more exciting time to be a Canadian?

Manitoba and PEI are both prepared to move forward. Now if every other province will get on board, we'll all move forward together, if only one of the premiers can figure out what it means to "move forward."

People are calling the new federal Conservative advertisements "attack ads," but they're actually really funny, so I'm going to call them "humour ads."

The new humour ads came out this week, and the great thing is it's not just an ad, it's a whole campaign.

Here's the website: Not a Leader.

On that website, you can read about why Liberal leader Stephane Dion is not a leader, then you can listen to audio that explains why he's not a leader, and then you can watch a video that tells you why Stephane Dion is not a leader.

If that's not enough, you can read about why Stephane Dion's dog, Kyoto, doesn't think Dion is a leader.

It's a brilliant campaign. It makes bashing Dion fun. It is the kind of thing one might send to one's friends, if one was a big enough politics dork to find this stuff interesting.

Now the question: when will the Liberals fight back? Or are they going to fight back? So far, the fight between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Dion is like a fight between Bob Probert and a bag of popcorn.

Mississauga's second-favourite turncoat, Tim Peterson (our favourite is still Wajid Khan, in my mind), has garnered two distinctions from the media this morning.

In the Toronto Sun, columnist Christina Blizzard announced that Peterson won the "most likely to be defeated" and "least improved MPP" awards.

Peterson's victories were part of Blizzard's annual survey of the Queen's Park Press Gallery.

Her colleagues picked the winners of everything from best dressed (Norm Miller and Madeleine Meilleur) to most likely to start smoking (Mike Colle).

Blizzard's column is a fun read, and I was happy to see that Minister of Education Kathleen Wynne, the minister I have to deal with most often, got a mention as Ms. Congeniality.

She is, as one person polled noted, a pleasure to talk to. Beyond that, the former trustee knows the file inside out, and has the patience to offer a history lesson every now and then.

The day after the Conservatives came out swinging, the Liberals are fighting back.

Well, the Young Liberals are anyway. At least somebody's fighting back.

Pretty good ads, too. Funny, informative, and cheap. I'd love to compare the cost difference between the Conservatives' "Stephane Dion is not a leader" website and the "Hi, I'm a Liberal" site created by these youngsters.

The "Hi, I'm a Liberal" spots are, in case you're too lazy to click the link above, spoofs of the Apple "Hi, I'm an Apple" commercials that have been all over the television for a year now.

It's a simple and cheap concept, and one gets the feeling the two whippersnappers on camera are actually the people who came up with and wrote the idea. If that's true, they could have made this whole thing with about $20, a borrowed video camera, and some free time.

Spoke to Tim Peterson just moments ago.

The point of the call was to talk electoral reform, but I just had to ask how he felt about the Toronto Sun column penned by Christina Blizzard that stated her press gallery poll had Peterson as the MPP "most likely to be defeated" and "least improved."

Peterson said, jokingly, that he was crushed, and had ingested anti-depressants to deal with the emotional pain of reading the column.

He added, still joking, I think: "I just can't believe I didn't make best dressed. I just don't think she knows what she's doing."