Thursday, June 15, 2017

New column day

Here, on the current state of the federal NDP's leadership race - and how the potential outcomes would figure to affect Canada's broader political scene.

For further reading...
- L. Ian MacDonald discusses how the NDP's campaign (unlike the Conservatives') is actually offering meaningful debate and choices. 
- Eric Grenier takes a look at what we know about the state of the race so far - though the unknowns looks to dominate the picture for the moment.
- Finally, Dan Hancox examines how UK Labour's movement politics helped to radically reshape the existing electoral map. And Colin Horgan wonders whether the UK's election signals an end to the perceived effectiveness of microtargeted ads as a means of winning over voters.

4 comments:

  1. Sub-Boreal10:43 a.m.

    This BC member is at the stage of whittling down a list of possibles.

    Singh's weak debate response to the specific question on the Kinder Morgan pipeline looked like either evasiveness or a lack of preparation. Anyone who took so long to enter the field had plenty of time to understand how pivotal that issue is to the BC section of the party. Not a good start.

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    1. Agreed that it was a poor choice to try to evade the issue after entering the race, especially when he obviously wasn't far from having something to say.

      He does seem to have reached a reasonable position in substance:
      http://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2017/06/17/jagmeet-singh-takes-stance-against-kinder-morgan-pipeline-unveils-climate-plan-3/

      But we'll see what impact the underwhelming first impression has for members as the campaign goes on.

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  2. I deride the whole notion of climate emergency because of the actions of man in consuming fossil fuels, and submit one note of averaging daytime highs on a limited number of land sites on a planet with more ocean than not and storm actions that mock any concept of static and 'average' conditions. http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/globaltemp/GlobTemp.JNET.pdf

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    1. Needless to say, I don't see that position having any particular relevance to the NDP's leadership campaign.

      And to the extent there's uncertainty in the calculations being made by the thousands of scientists who have actually examined climate change rather than throwing up their hands and complaining, "who can really measure anything, anyway?", it's equally likely that they're *underestimating* a problem which is an expected result of the undisputed effects of an increased concentration of greenhouse gases.

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