Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Susan Delacourt points out some analysis from Greg Lyle which looks to confirm my general take on the real balance of popular opinion between the Cons and the opposition:

It's important to understand that the Tories have been winning by fighting on issues that most people *don't* support. If you think for a second, most of us, and certainly most of the people that are on the margins of whether they're going to vote or not think the way democracy works is that government does what most people want, most of the time.

But on most of the issues that mattered in this campaign, the Tories got a very strong mandate to do what the minority want.
...
Given a choice, most people would raise corporate taxes rather than trust trickle-down to work. However, if you look at how vote support works, if you think the way to go is to cut corporate taxes, you're a Tory, 84 per cent Tory. But if you are on the side of the spectrum, a few people are Tory and the others are split (among the other parties) halfway to Sunday.

And so long as you have this situation, which to me is reminiscent of the free-trade election... one party got all the people who supported free trade, the other parties split the opponents and free trade was policy.
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And the same thing happens if the government introduces new policies to deal with crime. Should it focus more on getting tougher on crime or should it focus more on dealing with the causes of crime? 57 per cent of Canadians say 'focus on the causes of crime.' Only 38 per cent say 'get tough on crime' -- almost identical to what the Tory vote was. Seventy-three per cent of the people who say get tough on crime voted Tory, only 16 per cent who said deal with the causes of crime.

And I did this on five different issues... and it's the same story, again and again. The topical issues in the debate, Tories were in the minority point of view, but they got all the votes of people who shared that point of view. So I'll just leave you to think about how the world's going to evolve in the next four years, if the Tories are going to do what they were elected to do, which is stuff that most people don't agree with.

- Ethan Baron expands on the absurdity of the Cons' crime bill which would set up a more severe minimum sentence for marijuana growers than child rapists. And Stephen Maher not only slams the dumb-on-crime mandatory minimums, but questions whether there's any point to criminalizing marijuana at all.

- Paul Koring breaks the story that Canadian officials fought to prevent Abousfian Abdelrazik from returning home as far back as 2004 when there was no reason whatsoever to do so - and that the effect could have been to allow him to be rendered to Guantanamo. And pogge rightly asks why such bombshells aren't receiving much attention.

- Finally, Andrew Leach highlights the fact that most of the beneficiaries of the utterly dishonest "ethical oil" campaign have operations in - and profit from - exactly the same despotic regimes which are being slammed by the campaign.