Friday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your Friday reading.

- Trish Hennessy finishes up her election post-mortem with a call to action:

Now is not the time to play small. Condition the field for progressive governance to stick as a natural way of doing politics.

Don’t leave it just up to the politicians (though feel welcome to throw your support behind politicians when they do take a progressive stance).

Don’t stay in the familiar comfort of critique and opposition. We Canadians ask more of you. Democratic government should be of and for the people. That’s you and me. It’s up to us to build the Canada we would be proud to hand over to the next generation. Starting now.

That takes our active engagement. It takes you and I getting out of hyper partisan mode, or out of couch potato mode, talking beyond the converted and doing new things in fresh ways. The more people we bring into the progressive fold, the easier it is to face our deepest fears and move forward, together, to secure and build the Canada we want.

- As part of the Hill Times' coverage of the Canadian Association of Journalists' conference last weekend, Elly Alboim nicely sums up the problem with far too much election coverage:

Mr. Alboim, meanwhile, also chastised the media’s analysis of polling data throughout the election. Few polls indicated a Conservative majority, but he said the results wouldn’t have been a shock had more members of the media made a genuine effort to sift through the data to come up with accurate seat projections, particularly in areas like the GTA where the Conservatives picked up 18 new seats that were essential to securing a majority government.

“The core problem for journalists is that they treat election campaigns as news events. From my perspective, it isn’t structured that way,” Mr. Alboim said. “It’s an incremental process in which nothing really happens—the electorate makes up its mind. It’s like watching paint dry, and journalists don’t know how to report on the drying of paint.”

- With Stephen Harper having already found new and worse ways to break his previous promises about not appointing cronies to the Senate, would anybody be surprised if his fixed election date promise is the next to be re-broken?

- And one of the main components of the Cons' current structure may be the next to learn just what the party's promises are worth.

- Finally, David Olive writes about the U.S.' new role as sweatshop to the world:

U.S. and a few Canadian manufacturers have long been relocating in the low-wage U.S. South. They’ve now been joined by European multinationals, most of which also operate in Canada. The Euros leave behind the social-justice practices of their homelands, as keen to squeeze blood from a stone as the most avaricious business operator.

A stunning Human Rights Watch report from last September describes systematic exploitation of U.S. workers by such familiar European names as Ikea, Sodexo, BMW, Siemens, Daimler and Volkswagen.

“Even self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ companies can and do take full advantage of weak U.S. laws,” says Arvind Ganesan, HRW’s human rights program director. “The U.S. needs to close the loopholes in the country’s woefully inadequate laws to protect workers.”
...
China is no longer the “off-shoring” jurisdiction of choice. With annual wage gains now averaging 15 per cent to 20 per cent, combined with stagnant wages in North America, China will lose its labour-cost advantage over North America in just four years time, according to a report this month by the Boston Consulting Group.

From Hamburg to Lyon to Stockholm, the question is why aren’t we serving the North American market from lower-cost facilities there? Which means that “guilt-free shopping” will soon mean avoiding “Made in USA” labels on products made by workers denied a decent living wage.

Friday Morning Links

Assorted material for your long weekend reading.

- Elly Alboim shares some observations on what we can expect out of a surge like the NDP's ascent in Quebec:

More often than not, these sorts of break outs cannot be reversed. They represent a collective decision making process that sometimes builds on mounting evidence or sometimes catches media by surprise after events or debates — although this would represent a very slow reaction to a debate. There are notable exceptions like the PC’s beating back the resurgent Liberals in 1988 but they are rare.

Often, the final results overshoot the initial wave. Momentum builds and begins to sweep into ridings that most think are not in play. I’ve been involved in dozens of CBC projection meetings where seasoned political reporters say that it is inconceivable that certain ridings and personalities are (sic) safe. And they weren’t. Canada is littered with former cabinet ministers who never should have lost. Some examples: Roy Romanow fell to a gas station attendant in her 20s. In the same election, the CBC did not put a mobile in Grant Devine’s riding in order to save money because his Tories could not possibly win...

The numbers don’t lie. On today’s numbers (if they hold), the NDP would be competitive in more than 20 ridings, not the two to four people speculate about.

Many say that without a ground game, it will be hard to take the ridings that are within reach. Ground game is important to identify and pull core and/or unmotivated voters. But voters know how to find polling stations and vote. In a wave where they are motivated, they manage to vote without being pulled by GOTV machines. The best example of this was the Rae Ontario win. At the time, the Ontario ballot did not even specify the party, so voters had to know who the candidates were. But NDP candidates won in ridings that had literally no ground game.

- And Josee Legault echoes the view that the first wave may only be the beginning:

While new polls will confirm, contradict or mitigate the NDP's sudden surge, there's another thing Duceppe must be worried about: that the numbers that came out this week, as much as they might be overestimating NDP support, could end up influencing still more Quebecers to give Jack Layton a try.

- Sam Norris at the Mace projects possible seat distributions, with predicted results of Con 131, NDP 81, and Lib 73.

- Which is why Michael Hollett is right to trumpet the ability of progressive voters to back what they genuinely want rather than buying the Libs' spin that they don't have a choice:

We’re being told to vote for the Liberals when they haven’t made a compelling case for us to want to do it on their merits. The strategic voting clan only wants us to vote NDP when the Libs are a lock.

I’m just not that cynical, and I don’t believe elections are a math problem. Sometimes results don’t add up, but breakthroughs happen, and real change occasionally takes place.
...
Many Canadians who are newly supporting the NDP this election are energized and galvanizing around the one truly progressive party in this country that they can believe in rather than put up with.

If we spend the last two weeks of this campaign looking for progressive candidates we can trust and not getting hustled into empty choices we might all be surprised to find ourselves waking up to a Canada we can believe in, too, on May 3.

- Susan Riley touches on a point I'll expand on later in pairing a discussion of the NDP's breakthrough with a comment on our ability to decide the outcome of the election:

Most startling is news this week that Jack Layton’s NDP is leading the Bloc Québécois in Quebec (or was at press time), in two polls. Whether this surge is sustainable, or concentrated enough to produce new seats for the NDP, it is a head-turning and hard-won breakthrough. If it persists and spreads, it could change everything.

And it is largely to Jack Layton’s credit. Despite being hobbled, literally, by a hip fracture, and still recovering from his recent bout with prostate cancer, the NDP leader has campaigned with increasing vigour and more optimism than any of his rivals.
...
(T)oo much ink, time and breath has been wasted on strategic, or academic, or marginal issues — from coalition speculation, to mini-scandals, to seat projections, to “trust.”

Campaigns and media alike have nimbly avoided more pressing concerns like how we get out of Libya, soaring gasoline prices, the return of inflation, the cost and safety of nuclear energy, or the need for affordable prescription drugs — although these issues come up at rallies.

Maybe the silence is a confession of impotence.

Still, it isn’t too late for voters to take back the election: to ignore the trivial obsessions of the media, the fleeting judgments of polls and those cascading, self-cancelling attack ads.

- And finally, given Stephen Harper's track record in issuing flat denials, does his response to Dimitri Soudas' alleged political interference in the Montreal Port Authority make it more or less likely that Soudas actually did interfere?