November 28th, 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written on November 28th, 2005.
Item 1…It will be tough to top recruiting Rachel Marsden as a potential candidate in a downtown Toronto riding; but I have faith in the limitless incompetence of the CPC.
Item 2…Lest you think I am a Johnny-come-lately to the CPC Death Pool, here is a wee quote from August 2005:
This time out all Martin has to do is hang on and he will still pick up seats. Changing the communications guard - and I gather that one of the people considered by many insiders to be a huge problem remains in place - is not going to alter the fact that Adscam is fast fading as an issue, SSM isn’t an issue and tax cuts are going to be pre-empted by Ralph Goodale discovering his 10 billion dollar surplus and handing out several billion of it to targetted Liberal leaning groups.
The Grits will hammer Harper and the CPC as a party which is committed to taking rights away from Canadians - something which will resonate in the large immigrant communities in parts of the West. Herle will go negative early with lots of pics of Harper pointing his finger and generally edited to make the poor man look like a chipmunk on speed.
moi
And, no Ralph’s Parliamentary secretary didn’t actually leak either the surplus number or the tax cut idea to me…though Lord knows he might have.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with no comments.
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Anne Althouse is trying to grok PJs media again. Not much luck but lots of comments.
My sense is that there is a deeper probblem with PJ media - it is relying on a revenue model which has jumped the proverbial shark. Web advertising works a bit. The wee text ads will drive some traffic and, apparently, Vonage and the University of Phoenix have managed to create entire businesses using banner ads.
However, ad blindness and the unholy trinity of click fatigue (the phenomena where you really just can’t be bothered “checking out” the grooviness the ad offers), mercy clicking (ah, “x” needs a square meal I’ll just hit his ads and toss another nickle in his hat), and fraud (dear God, I need a square meal so I’ll just click this ad the one time…well, one, a hundred, who’s counting) have the capacity to destroy the text ad biz. Banner ads will always be with us but they too are limited.
The inherent contradiction is that the click through ad model requires you to leave the great content you are at a site to see. There has to be a better way.
One of Ann’s cemmentors points out that the most reasonable explaination of the lameness of PJM so far is that the launch, and I paraphrase, took the folks by surprise. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Most of the PJ media crew have day jobs. A lot of them are scattered around the country and the world. Herding those cats would not have been easy. Between meetings with the angel investors, some sort of site design, meetings with the moronic brand consultants, pitches to some ad agencies and just the general wear and tear of setting up a new biz, a launch date can sort of sneak up on a business.
And there is one other and rather contrarian consideration: the folks who were picked as the PJ media team had, to a greater or lesser degree, already made it. They are at the top of the rightish side of the blogosphere. Which means that none of them are particularily hungry.
Hunger fuels business as surely as launch parties. To really have a chance of making it in a wildly competitive business like new media the idea of an all nighter should not be unthinkable. The prospect of failure should have some consequence other than the amusement of the blogosphere.
Steve den Beste used to run a blogroll on the basis that he would leave five or six people up for several months. His theory was that with the exposure he gave those people they would - or would not - reach critical mass and become self-sustaining. It was both Darwinian and organic. The fittest survived; but they only survived because they had something to offer and were willing to slug it out day after day.
A serious re-think of PJ media would make sense; but what would make more sense is to put together a tiger team of largely unknown bloggers to drive the site. There are lots of smart, right, writers who would be happy to pick up $150 for a four hundred word post. I can think of half a dozen without trying. Around that core you build back to the bigger scheme. Oh, and lose the office. You don’t need it and you haven’t earned it.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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Planners in the health-care arena shudder at the thought of having to decide what to do when they’ve run out of life-saving mechanical ventilators and a gravely ill 15-year-old comes through the emergency department door, Dr. Allison McGeer admitted.
Do they take the oldest person on a ventilator in the hospital off it? Do they call around to other hospitals to see if someone older still can be removed from a ventilator across town?
“I think, at least among health-care workers, to even have the discussion somehow creates a sense of playing God,” she said.
“People know if they get in the situation where the decisions will have to be made, they’ll have to be made. But to overtly have a discussion ahead of time about making them? . . . The general response up till now among health-care workers is that people really don’t think they can do that.”the toronto star
Dr. McGeer knows of what she speaks - as well as being one of Canada’s leading epidemiologists, she worked closely enough with patients in the SARS crisis that she caught the disease herself.
Creating rules for the allocation of vaccines when they are available, anti-virals until then, respirators to keep the ill alive and quarantine regimes to keep the healthy functional requires clear ethical guidelines. The rules have to be effective and they have to be seen as fair if they are going to work.
This is not something which is only the concern of healthcare professionals and public health authorities. The public at large and politicians need to be involved in the conversation and the decisions.
Just to give a few examples outside the hospital: in a pandemic what is the sanction against a person breaking quarantine. Do you arrest them? Because if you do arrest them and put them in jail you might very well be sentencing them to death because they will be exposed to the virus when they otherwise might not be. Or, from the other perspective, is it justifiable to keep individuals in prison if the flu breaks out in that prison and they are non-violent offenders? Should politicians’ families have preferential access to anti-virals. Should politicians below cabinet level. Should we allocate vaccine on the basis of job status? Age? Wealth?
These are not easy questions and they go right to the very heart of what we collectively see as a fair society.
We hope that avian flu does not make the jump to easy human transmission. But we need to prepare for it and for all of the other nasty bugs which get loose from time to time. This is about when, not if.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with no comments.
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Greg Staples for whom I have a good deal of time has been following assorted polls…Ekos, Decima, Ipsos-Reid. Go over and scroll down for the info.
Polls are interesting in that they can provide a snapshot of what was happening three days before they were published and, in series, they can hint at trend. What they cannot really measure is the degree of voter engagement with the issues, the leaders and the election itself.
My sense is that the polls taken before December 20th will be largely worthless as indicators of the outcome of an election held either the 16th or the 20th of January. The only polls which will really have much value - other than as a convenient hook to hang MSM’s narrative of the day - will be the tracking polls which commence January 2.
For me this is an odd election: I detest the Liberal orthodoxy but not quite so much as I despise the exclusionary bias of the socons in the CPC and the shrill “me tooism”which seems to be directed at the ignoble goal of gentling the easily startled Ontario voter.
I do not for an instant believe that the election of the CPC will change or improve anything in Canada and, frankly, given their performance on SSM, support for the Liberal budgets and generally mealy mouthed take on tax cuts, decentralization, alternative healthcare, immigration and a host of other issues it is not at all clear to me why voting Tory could be justified.
It is welcome to see the Tories might actually propose something that is pro-family without being anti-gay in the form of income splitting for stay at home mums; but that should have been a theme a year ago, not just a hint a few days before an election call.
Current polling suggests Canadians want a change - it is not obvious is that voting Tory will give them one.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with no comments.
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While the CPC is being beaten up by the Liberals, the Grits have their own problems. Particularily in Quebec. If, as I think likely, the Liberals are able to savage the CPC and take 20 to 40 seats, mainly in Ontario, they remain vunerable to both the Bloc and the NDP.
Apparently, the only place where Gomery really matters is Quebec. Polling in Quebec suggests the Liberals are flailling as they should be having broken Quebec election law, behaved like mafioso and generally disgraced themselves and Canada. What that translates to in seats is tough to tell but last time out 34% of the popular vote yielded 21 seats. This time the percentage of popular vote may drop well below 30 and might touch the rock bottom 20% of anglophones, ethnics and federal civil servants who really cannot be seen as potential Bloc voters - and, yes, of course Parizeau was right on Referendum night, Gomery has now traced the money.
Call it a net loss of 15 seats but it could be as many as 18 - Westmount will, one suspects, remain Liberal. Winning 20 in Ontario would offset this; but there is another consideration.
In urban ridings in Canada the NDP has been making some inroads. Not huge, but a seat here and there are bad news for Martin’s dreams of a working majority.
If the Bloc comes out of Quebec with, say, 70 seats and the Tories are reduced to 50-55, the NDP’s votes into seats ratio becomes interesting. It takes 154 to form a bare majority, 160 to be mildly comfortable. If the Block plus the CPC take 125 the question becomes whether ot not the NDP can increase its current 19 seats by, say, 10. In ridings like Vancouver Center relatively weak Liberal incumbents - Hedy Fry in this case - may face serious contests from NDP candidates.
To give an idea of how serious the NDP challenge actually is, in British Columbia alone the ridings of Kamloops, Southern Interios, Dewdney, Fleetwood, Newton, Surrey North, New Westminster, Port Moody, Vancouver Kingsway, Vancouver Center, Esquimalt, Nanaimo, Gulf Islands, Vancouver Island North and Victoria are all very winnable - a margin of less then 4000 votes, by NDP candidates. That’s 14 ridings.
All of which means there could be the rather frustrating result that:
a) the CPC will be reduced to a 50-55 seat rump
b) the BQ will become Her Majesties Loyal (when it suits the interests of Quebec) Opposition
c) The NDP will go to 30 seats
d) Dithers will have a minority government
Pandimonium will ensue.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with no comments.
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I spent a pleasant later afternoon with Kevin Grace reviewing the dismal state of the CPC’s intelligence. We discussed at some length the Tory’s prospects at a riding level - Grewels gone - but I realized that I still owed this blog an explaination of why I think the Tories will be reduced to a fifty seat rump.
Here is the first part: start the count with “safe seats”. Short of a Mulroney or Diefenbaker sweep - which I can’t see happening this time round - seats where Tory members were elected by 10,000 or more votes in the last election are unlikely to fall into Liberal or NDP hands. Basically, a safe seat is a seat where the Tories can, and often do, run a fence post, and still keep the seat.
Here is the breakdown:
BC 10
Alberta 24
Sask 2
Man 5
Ont 2
Maritimes 0
Total 41
(source: Wikipedia)
The CPC will be going into its “Christmas gifts for Grits” election with 98 seats so having 41 safe seats will ensure that they are not deprived of party status, however, everyone of the 57 seats which are not safe will be contested strongly. In five of those seats the Conservative won by less than 500 votes.
Political commentators talk about momentum. Momentum works three ways - as a party gains traction with voters it begins to “win” seats. Its votes add up to enough to beat incumbents from other parties. A party which fails to gain traction will tend to “hold” seats; the advantages of incumbency are significant beginning with name recognition. In this election my view is that the best the Tories can hope for is to hold.
The more likely scenario is, however, that the Tories’ lack of policy, the perception that they have a “hidden agenda”, the media bias against the CPC, the predictable rumblings from the paleo and theocon Tories which will feed the media frenzy and the fact the nitwits have been suckered into a pre-Gomery Christmas election, will ensure they are in “loss” mode pretty much from the beginning.
If the media smells Tory blood the ledes will tend to read, “a struggling Harper”, “fighting to hold critical Ontario ridings…” Once that snowball gets rolling every marginal CPC seat in Canada is up for grabs.
Elections are not subtle things. The 41 Tory safe seats will not see a glimpse of any Liberal more senior than the riding candidate. But there are fifty Tory seats which are going to be targetted hard. Ralph “Goodfairy”dale will be spreading dollars, Cabinet Ministers will be making announcements, star candidates will decend from the heavens. Belinda will be sent on a tour of the 905 to tell lurid tales of the horrors inside the CPC caucus.
For my fifty seat prediction to come true - and to some degree I hope I’m wrong though it seems to me that the Tories’ only hope is such total defeat that they rebuild from the ground up - all that is needed is a few point shift in the polls and some smart constituency fights. From the Liberal perspective, with Gomery likely reducing their seat count in Quebec to single digits, the only place to win a majority is out of the hide of the CPC particularily in Ontario. You can bet that is where David Herle will be pouring blood and treasure.
Written by jay on November 28th, 2005 with 5 comments.
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