elections

OCAP Promo Video.

OCAP Action on September 26:
Raise the Rates! Mass Panhandle!
11:30 A.M. METRO PARK
(Queen and Church)

City-Wide Demonstration converging @ Queen's Park
2 P.M.

On Wednesday, September 26, a broad coalition of community
organizations, trade unions, health providers and low income people will be challenging Queen's Park to increase social assistance by 40%, raise the minimum wage, build affordable and accessible housing, and implement a Don't Ask-Don't Tell policy .

There will be a rally at the Ontario Legislature under the name of ˜Toronto Anti Poverty". Many of the organizations participating in the event, will hold their own actions on that day before marching on the Legislature for the united event.

For more information about the Day of Action HERE.

So, the conventional spin is that the Liberal lost all three by elections in Quebec today, including the "Liberal stronghold" of Outremont, and oh what a disaster for Stéphane Dion.

But the truth is, Outremont elected yet another Liberal in 2007... he just had orange campaign signs. Less than seven months ago, Thomas Mulcair was minister of the environment in Jean Charest's Liberal government. (Yes, that Jean Charest.)

The key challenge for the NDP will be to keep Mulcair from crossing the floor to the Liberals when they recover in the polls. That, or take the Liberal Party's place by becoming cynically opportunistic by running from the left and governing from the right.

Cynics will note that despite the fact that the anti-war vote contributed to Mulcair's victory, the fact that the Liberal Party is weak in Quebec is apparently likely to have the opposite effect on actual policy when it comes to Afghanistan.

Believers in party politics will tell you that Quebec now has a strong progressive voice in the house of commons, who will pressure the government to withdraw from Afghanistan and fulfill Kyoto obligations.

But he surely won't be to blame if troops remain in Afghanistan, and greenhouse gas emissions and the extractive industries that drive them remain undeterred.

A film report produced by journalist Stefan Christoff
& Kodao Productions Inc. in Manila.

Watch film report on CURRENT TV.

Upon hearing that Nicholas Sarkozy's Montreal office had been vandalized, I couldn't help but bike over and snap a few photos. They didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to clean things up; they hadn't even taken down the sheets of paper that had been pasted to the window.

Some of the slogans: Sarkozy, sacre ton camp d'ici; Ni en France ni au Canada: pas de patrie pour les fachos; Lutte sans frontière contre le fascisme.

...political parties would be buying ads in Quebec right about now, pointing out that Stephen Harper is a Leafs fan.

The Quebec election was characterized by a great deal of discontent with the traditional establishment parties, the PQ and the Liberals. The remarkable thing about this election was that this discontent was successfully shifted from the policies that ostensibly pissed people off in the first place, onto to Muslims living in Quebec. Turning anger at unrelated issues into anger at immigrants is hardly a new political technique, but watching it happen here in Montreal is pretty astounding.

It sounds far-fetched to me, too, but the media, led by Quebecor's Journal de Montreal was able to stir up a lot of discontent about basically nothing (even the Gazette didn't buy it). The ADQ's Mario Dumont had been pushing this for months, hoping to get a bump in the polls from latent racist discontent. The PQ's André Boisclair got in on it, late in the campaign (see below). With the media's help, a few isolated incidents (a kid wearing a dull ceremonial dagger to school, a girl playing soccer in a headscarf) were turned into a debate about what "accomodations" are reasonable for Quebeckers to extend to immigrants. (One assumes the Mohawk and Algonquin nations ask themselves the same question, with a bit more substance.)

Reuters ran a story yesterday about how Rigoberta Menchu is considering running for president in the next elections in Guatemala, scheduled for September 9, 2007. According to a Prensa Latina article, Encuentro por Guatemala is interested in her candidacy and will be meeting with her next week to discuss the possibility.

The Globe notes in passing that Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Canada's old Chief Electoral Officer, is off to join the International Federation for Electoral Systems (IFES).

Dominion contributor Anthony Fenton has done a fair bit of work exposing IFES and its role in the overthrow of Haitian democracy. A little background:

IFES successfully co-opted human rights groups, lawyers, and journalists, and "set the groundwork" for the creation of the Group of 184 business-led political opposition to Aristide.

The New Yorker has something of a literate puff piece on Hillary Clinton qua politician. Here's a little insight into the mechanics of being a Democrat (or Liberal, or politician, really):

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students on campus were threatening a hunger strike if the Wellesley administration did not address their demands. It was the kind of situation in which, as a classmate recalled, “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus.

Murray Dobbin has revised his assessment of Stephane Dion as "progressive". As unlikely as it is, it would be neat if this signaled a much faster turnaround in the public's willingness to take the hype of a supposedly progressive Liberal Party at face value. I confess to having very little faith that Canadians will ever stop voting Liberal unless they're really pissed off, but could it be that they'll do so without believing that for which there is no evidence?

At least then we could be reassured that Canadians are actually in