Canadian Cincinnatus

What is the nature of the 31,000 Elections Canada complaints anyway?

The description of the 31,000 complaints that Elections Canada has received concerning the robocall scandal in various press reports are vague: we are told some of them report deliberately misleading phone calls but others concern merely harassing calls. The approximate ratio of harassing call complaints to misleading call complaints I have not been able to find out (let me know the source if you do know). Hmmm... I wonder what that ratio is.

I venture to guess that most of the complaints concern harassing calls rather than misleading calls. As I already discussed the possible source of the misleading calls in a previous post (and most of those complaints originate from just one riding: Guelph, a riding the Liberals won handily), I will concentrate my attention in this post to the harassing calls. 

Why do I think most of the 31,000 complaints that Elections Canada has received are over harassing calls? Simple. Because I and many people I know were on the receiving end of those calls. The reason we did was because we are identified as Conservative supporters and the party did its best to get us to vote. As a result, our phones rang off the hook. Of course, none of us filed a complaint. Why? Because we are Conservative supporters and we want our party to do well. The calls we got during the writ period are just a petty annoyance.

So if Conservative supporters are not the people who filed the complaints, then who are?

Perhaps people who are not Conservative supporters. To see how they can end up on the list in spite of their views, we must understand how the party identifies supporters in the first place. One way it does is through door-to-door canvassing. In this process, a canvasser asks the resident if they support the local candidate. Sometimes the answer is an emphatic yes; sometimes a heated no; often it is more equivocal. That leaves it up to the judgement of the volunteer as to how to classify the response. This matter is not helped by the fact that there are only three options on the walk sheet: a smiley face (supporter), a frowny face (hostile) or a poker face (uncommitted). This means that a lifelong party supporter with the candidate’s sign on his lawn is classified the same as somebody volunteering a hesitant OK. Add wishful thinking on the part of the canvasser (most responses are uncommitted), to those expressing assent just to get rid of the canvasser faster, to people in the household who don’t agree with the person who answered the door, and you have the potential for a whole lot people getting robocalls who don’t like Harper.

I bet a vast majority of the Elections Canada complaints are of this nature.

The trouble for the Liberals and NDP is that annoying is not illegal. While the Liberals and NDP would doubtlessly assert pure motivations on their part as the reason why their phone banking has not elicited a similar volume of complaints, the answer is more prosaic: lack of money and organization prevented them from putting on the same campaign that Harper’s Conservatives were able to do.

The robocall scandal: an assessment

Let’s not kid ourselves, this scandal is bad. It is not just the opposition thumping their chest. Some of the allegations are not just serious: they are in fact criminal, and enough evidence has come out that strongly suggests that at least a few of the allegations are not smoke.

Having said that, I don’t think Stephen Harper knew about it or condoned it, and neither did anybody high up in his campaign. Why? Because the alleged robocall operation is stupid, and Harper and the people he picked are not dumb. It is stupid because it is high risk and low reward. It is high risk, not just because it has criminal penalties attached, but because it taints the whole conservative election win even if just a whiff of it came out. The latter has already happened.

The reward is low because how many opposition voters in a riding can you bamboozle sufficiently to prevent them from voting? The fact that the Liberal candidate in Guelph won by 6,000 in spite of the calls, and Conservative candidates in other ridings where this is alleged to have occurred won by similar or even larger margins, is evidence that misleading robocalling didn’t play a decisive factor in the makeup of the current parliament.

In that case, what do I think happened? 

From what has become known so far, I suspect two independent things may have occurred simultaneously. Some of the telemarketing companies may have gotten their phone lists and their calling scripts mixed up, inadvertently placing misleading calls. The principal evidence for this comes from the telemarketers working for the RMG call center in Thunder Bay, who came forward and admitted that they had placed some of these calls. They say that they identified themselves as a representative of the Conservative Party. A dirty tricks campaign would not have identified the party they work for. This sounds like a screw-up induced by campaign pressure.

On the other hand, it does appear as if somebody made deliberately malicious calls in at least one riding: Guelph. My previous statement that a deliberate scheme is improbable because it doesn’t make sense does not necessarily apply here. The people working at the riding level are a mixed bag. Some are excellent people, but, frankly, some are boobs. However, this is what you end up with when you have to rely solely on volunteers. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that some twit of a campaign worker concocted a too-clever-by-a-half strategy after watching too many James Bond movies.

What should Harper do about it?

He is right to call for an official investigation. He should also run a thorough internal investigation himself to get to the bottom of it (which I am sure he is doing despite his assertions to the contrary). Once it is clear what happened and who is responsible, he needs to act swiftly and decisively to remove the responsible elements. In doing this, he shouldn’t worry about standards such as ‘innocent until proven guilty’. That is for courts of law. Anybody stained by this scandal must go, even if the evidence falls short of securing a criminal conviction. And if a telemarketing company has been found to have screwed up caller lists and/or polling locations, all their contracts need to be terminated – for good. Mistakes are mistakes, but some cannot be tolerated.

The Conservative Party must clean house and, just as importantly, be seen cleaning house. While there is a 100% chance that the opposition parties will use this issue against us in the next election, if this has been done – and we concentrate the next campaign on substantive issues – we will survive just fine.

But if anybody thought that they were doing the party a favour by perpetrating such a scheme, they need to be publicly castrated.

 

Canada’s Lesson for the Republican Party

Here is an interesting article about the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party and the rise of the Reform Party in Canada. The author, Neil Flagg, hits the nail right on the head. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had a so-where-can-they-go? attitude with regard to his party’s right-wing. Well, in 1993, he got his answer. They formed a dynamic new party that energetically courted the hearts and minds of conservative Canadians. The ensuing vote splitting in ridings all across the country ensured that Mulroney’s party went from 169 seats in Parliament to two, while the upstart Reform Party went from one seat to 54.

A result like that can’t be blamed on Mulroney’s hasty replacement, Kim Campbell. (Like a rat, Mulroney had deserted his sinking ship barely four months before the election). She was little more than a populariser of dumb blonde jokes, but one hapless boob can’t construct an electoral catastrophe that complete in such a short time period. For that to occur, the rot had be deep.

While this resulted in “13 years of corrupt and aimless Liberal Party rule” (as Flagg says), I think it can also be said that the result was worth the cost; the old Progressive Conservative party had to be destroyed in order to be saved. The 1993 federal election was the first time that I, and many other Canadian conservatives, voted for somebody. 

To be sure, the Republican Party of 2012 is in far healthier ideological shape than the Progressive Conservative Party was in 1993, but GOP big-wigs are making a big mistake if they think there the old Progressive Conservative Party’s fate contains no lessons for them.

The most important lesson being: don’t take your core supporters for granted. Not ever.

Eliminating the long-gun registry demonstrates that the ratchet works in the other direction as well

For a long time now - since the summer of 1989 when then Progressive Conservative Justice Minister Doug Lewis wanted to ban all semi-autos - law abiding gun owners have been squeezed by a relentless ratchet, each click narrowing the rights that Canadian citizens could enjoy by yet another increment. We could fight, but it seemed that the best we could do was to delay the inevitable next click of the gun control ratchet by some finite period of time.

Until now... 

And this is the real meaning of the repeal. As I have argued before, deregistering long-guns will have little effect on established gun owners such as myself. It will incrementally decrease the amount of paperwork that I must do, but as I have already filled out the required forms, deregistering my long guns will not make my life appreciably easier. Making transportation requirements less restrictive, eliminating the orders-in-council that prohibit entire categories of firearms and decriminalizing trivial offences such as technical safe storage violations would improve my life much more markedly.

However scrapping the registry is still a giant step in the right direction because the only purpose of the long-gun registry is – as all gun owners realize – to help disarm Canadians. Once they know where all of them are, the government can gradually prohibit one class of firearm after another, until there is nothing left. And there is not a God damn thing we can do about it because they know where everything is. They are inhibited from doing this if a significant portion of the guns aren’t tracked, because each prohibition order drives the guns the government doesn’t know about even further underground (hence this last ditch effort to prohibit more stuff).

And just as importantly, the act of deregistration sets an important precedent, demonstrating to freedom loving Canadians that if they push hard enough against our effete political establishment, the ratchet can sometimes click in the opposite direction too.

 

Grits are right to reject Liberal-NDP merger

According to this Toronto Sun article, some Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, are open to a Liberal-NDP merger. However, Bob Rae is having none of the merger talk – for now. From the Liberal perspective, Bob Rae is right and Justin Trudeau is wrong.

Though it doesn’t seem like it from the afterglow of their greatest electoral triumph ever, the NDP has limited growth potential from here on. In all probability, this will be their high water mark. The NDP ideology is too left wing to be seriously embraced by mainstream Canada, and the party has serious internal divisions between its Quebec and English Canada wings that can only been held together by a charismatic leader. And that charismatic leader is now dead.

It is likely that the new leader will not be as capable as Jack Layton and it is also possible that the party will fracture along federalist-separatist lines. All of which are reasons why a Liberal-NDP merger is the best outcome from the NDP’s perspective. It is their best – really their only – shot at power. The Liberals will bring with them the crucial factor of respectability that the dippers need to form a government.

Though it doesn’t seem like it in the shadow of their greatest electoral catastrophe ever - the Liberals should be able to recover from the debased state that they currently find themselves in. If the story of the federal PC party tells us anything it is that the brand name of an ancient political party can have an amazing resiliency. Tying themselves to explicit socialists will only tarnish the Liberal name further.

From the Conservative perspective, I think Stephen Harper is right to want a two-party system. An NDP-Liberal merger will push right-wing Liberals (and there are more of them than you think) straight into the arms of the Conservatives. And faced with a clear choice between left and right – without the chameleon-like Liberals to muddy the waters - the electorate will much more often pull the conservative lever than the socialist lever, thus making the Conservative Party dominant in a way that the Liberal Party once was.

The right of Canadians to self-defence under attack again by our legal system

Peter Worthington relays another tale of outrage perpetrated by the Canadian legal system on an honest citizen:

The Chen case pales before the most recent incident in Toronto, where a guy escorting his girlfriend to her home at night, found signs of a break-end-enter, and checked out the house.

He found a burglar hiding, and in the ensuing fight the interloper was stabbed several times and ran away. He was admitted to hospital, but was not charged.

When the police eventually arrived, the guy who fought with the burglar was charged with “aggravated assault” — using unreasonable force by stabbing the guy.

If found guilty — as unlikely is this case — he could get 14 years. 

This is nuts.

This is nuts. And it is indicative of the contempt that the ruling classes have for the average citizen.

If asked why they are so hostile to the right of self defence, doubtlessly the cops and lawyers inhabiting our legal system would cite a fear of vigilantism, ‘street justice’ and kangaroo courts.

This is contrary to the experience in the US where the only measurable result when “castle laws” are introduced is that the crime rate drops. It seems that criminals are opportunists who discount the future heavily. They are looking for an easy buck and the prospect of facing physical resistance right now weighs much more heavily on their minds than the possible prospect of a prison sentence a year or so from now.

In contrast, the motivation of the legal system apparatchiks is a combination of paternalistic arrogance (“we know what’s best for you”), fear of job security (“hey! that’s my job, not yours”) and an ambient socialist pose that is so omnipresent that it is not even acknowledged by those afflicted by it.

In reality, the right to self-defence is our most basic right, even more basic than freedom of speech (and I am a big proponent of freedom of speech). If we aren’t allowed to even defend ourselves, what in blazes have we allowed ourselves to become?

 

Why ending the long-gun registry is a good idea

Recently I had a conversation with a few fellow gun owners. One said (and I paraphrase), “Well I am obviously against gun control, but personally, I don’t have a problem with registering my long guns. After all, even after if the registry is abolished, I still have to register my pistols. So what if there are a few more items in the registry under my name? They already know who I am.”

My reply was: “While I am against the long-gun registry on principle, there are many other things about Canada’s gun control laws that irk me more. For instance: the nonsensical restrictions on ATTs, barrel lengths and mag capacities.”

At that point another friend said something that I believe got to the heart of the matter: “If the long-gun registry were just a registry and nothing else, I would agree. But it is not. Canada’s entire gun control approach from Kim Campbell on down to Alan Rock has been a steady march towards complete civilian disarmament. Getting rid of the registry would be a step backwards – a big step backwards that couldn’t be easily undone by the Liberals later.”

I think this is right. Abolishing the registry is not merely a symbolic act. It was designed from the beginning as a tool that helps the government take our guns away from us. Why else would the hoplophobes be so interested in setting it up? It’s not like it solves crimes or anything. It is there because if the bureaucrats have a list of everything you have, they have got you. They can merely confiscate our guns one slice at a time until there is nothing left and there is nothing you can do about it except go to jail in protest. But if they don’t know where most of them are, any move to grab the guns that they do know about will drive the ones that they don’t know about underground. 

That’s why the registry must go.

 

Ordering the Posties back to work is not a free market solution to the postal strike

Most conservatives do not like unions in general - and postal unions in particular - because they believe unions are an enemy of productivity. And to a significant extent they are right. Unions very often stand in the way of productivity-enhancing innovations. Nevertheless, this does not mean that legislation aimed at ending the postal strike is the right thing to do from a free market perspective simply because you are opposing the unions.

I believe that the best thing parliament could do to counter the postal strike is to remove Canada Post’s monopoly on door-to-door mail delivery. Because it would take a while for competitors to step up and do the job Canada Post won’t do, this legislation wouldn’t provide quick relief. But it would result in much needed, long-term changes to mail delivery in Canada. The door-to-door mail delivery industry would then experience the sort of creativity that free market competition unleashes, becoming both more efficient and providing unique and previously unthought-of solutions and services.

While a back-to-work law will cause mail service to return faster, what we will get when it does resume is just more of the same-old-same-old. 

 

Tom Flanagan is wrong about the nature of moderation in Canada

In this analysis, Tom Flanagan - the former advisor to Stephen Harper (and also his former professor) - explains how the preponderance of moderate voters in the political middle ensures that the parties on the left and the right will converge ‘in the middle’ in a two party system. While some of his conclusions are not far off the mark, Flanagan’s analysis itself couldn’t be more wrong, mostly because he has made two serious errors: he completely misunderstands the nature of the moderate voter, and he has too much faith in the one-dimensional model of politics.

Lets look at the second error first. The one-dimensional model states that ‘political space’ can be described with one parameter, usually by a big government index. According to this model, the NDP is on the left, the Bolsheviks are on the far left, small-c conservatives are on the right, and Ann Rand objectivist are on the far right. But if this model describes the key features of politics adequately, how come Hitler’s National Socialists are universally considered to be on the far right? And how come socially conservative, big government populists like Pat Buchanan and libertarians - who believe in small government and personal freedom - are both classed as right-wing parties. If the one-dimensional model is right, shouldn’t Pat Buchanan be a lefty moderate while a gay libertarian is a right-wing extremist!

In reality, one parameter is nowhere near enough to describe important features of the body politic.

In science, there is a saying: all models are wrong but some are useful. What makes the one-dimensional model useful is that the parameter it uses – economic freedom – is usually dominant. But this is not always the case. Take Quebec, where politics is split on federalist-separatist lines. There the conventional left-right split occurs within the parties themselves. In the real world, all political parties are expedient coalitions of diverse interests and how they come together depends on specific circumstances.

Another place where the one-dimensional model doesn’t work is a blue collar riding like Oshawa where voters are socially conservative but economically socialist. Because the main parties are split along conventional left-right lines, there is no party that really services them. They alternate between Conservatives and the NDP, depending on whether social issues (like gun control or family values) or economic issues (like free trade and middle class entitlements) predominate. A conventionally moderate candidate who is socially liberal but economically conservative, like say John Tory or Scott Brison, are poison to them. The one-dimensional model does not explain the Oshawa voter.

Now lets tackle Flanagan’s first error, a misunderstanding of what political moderation is. As I explained in this post, the moderate voter in the middle is not somebody whose political philosophy lies in the statistical midpoint of politics space. Rather, he is simply an apathetic voter who doesn’t care about politics at all. What political scientists like Flanagan see as a preference for moderation is really just a sensible desire to not rock the boat when things are OK. These people believe that there are a lot more ways to break things than there are utopian schemes that will actually make things better.

The flip side of this sentiment is a preference for decisive action when they see the wheels coming off the machine. This is why Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mike Harris and Rob Ford are popular, even though they were decisively to the right of the people who elected them. In serious times, the moderate voter wants – nay, demands - a leader who offers him a credible answer to the problem of the day and then boldly carries it out. A ‘moderate’ split-the-difference solution just repels him. Because Thatcher, Reagan and Harris offered convincing solutions that worked, they succeeded in moving the statistical middle towards them.

So when times are good, splitting the difference Median-Voter-Theorem-style works. But when the seas get choppy, you better have an answer that isn’t a weasely half-measure.

 

Don’t write the Liberals off yet

It has already been conjectured many times that the federal Liberals are finished, primarily because of the historic shellacking they received Monday night. In addition, Harper’s former colleague, Gerry Nicholls, claims that Harper has a long-term plan to accomplishing just that goal:

“Indeed, his desire to eliminate the Liberals is something he and I discussed way back in the days when we worked together at the National Citizens Coalition. His theory, as explained to me, was that conservatism would be better served in this country if Canada had a two-party system, one that pitted right against left, free enterprise against socialism, Conservatives against New Democrats.

He believed that, in such a polarized political environment, a conservative-oriented party would have a huge advantage over its left-wing rival. When given a clear choice, voters will usually pick conservatism over socialism.”

Well it certainly sounds like something Harper would say. Furthermore, I agree with it. Except that – unfortunately - I am sceptical about whether the federal Liberals are going to cooperate and stay dead. 

For starters, there is the example set by the Progressive Conservatives in 1993. Reduced to 2 seats, bankrupt and in complete disarray, they had nothing but spite and a 125 year history to fall back upon. But history proved that that can be enough, even if Joe Clarke is your leader and his right-hand man is David Orchard - a wild-eyed crank. Perhaps spite and history are enough to keep the Libs going for a decade or so until they get back on their feet again.

And then there is the state of the NDP, whose predicament is much more perilous than their sensational victory would suggest. Lorne Gunther sizes up Taliban Jack’s situation accurately (here and here):

“Lurking just beneath the surface of his party’s 103-seat win on Monday are two enormous problems: His caucus is made up mostly of neophyte MPs, many of whom may not even want to be MPs. And as the official voice of Quebec discontent, he runs the risk of seeing his newfound popularity in that province evaporate overnight if he does not do an acceptable job of playing the victim card.”

“Outside Quebec, there was no NDP surge. Yes, the NDP gained 65 seats Monday night over their 2008 total, but 57 of those gains were in one province — Quebec.”

“And I hate to rain on Jack Layton and Co.’s parade, but if they do not now spend most of their time giving voice to Quebec’s demands, they could easily see most of their Quebec gains wiped out at the next election.”

So how well do you think this pack of neophytes will do against Harper’s well oiled machine?