Is Harper Cooling on "Get Tough On Crime"?

There are media reports that the Harper Party has its Law-and-Order Get Tough On Crime policy agenda on shifting sands again. They ran into potential constitutional and procedural issues on some of the more right-wing issues form the 2006 election. Their 2008 “law-and-order” platform policy was not only late in the election campaign; it was pretty skinny compared to past efforts.


The Cons enthusiasm for elimination of prisoner voting rights and the abolishing of the artistic merit defense for child porn have been buried and forgotten. The news reports indicate many other election campaign promises in the get-tough-on crime category are being abandoned by Harper as well.


The list is interesting and long including some I agree with some of the policy efforts. I especially like creating mandatory consecutive sentences and no more concurrent sentences for multiple violent sexual offenders and no more additional credit for pre-trial time in custody. I wonder why he is backing off this promise.


Harper seems to have gone soft on terror with the lack of urgency indicated with still no appointment of a national security advisor. Can the same be said for the still outstanding initiative for a national strategy on organized crime?

Now we need to get Harper to back off on legislating life sentences for 14 year olds and get Omar Khadr back home to Canada.

Anchorage Daily News Backs Obama - Not Palin

It is not encouraging for McCain-Palin ticket when the Anchorage Daily News is even backing Obama. Too hard not to see the face and fictions of George Bush when you think of McCain as the faux-maverick.

Will Canada reject the radical right and return to its classic liberal values in the next election? I'm thinking so. Tough times ahead and we see a legitimate role for government in this country. We in Canada cringe at the thought that a government that redistributes wealth for the common good is somehow acting inappropriately "Socialist." This socialist labelling is the most recent reactive foray by McCain into attacking Obama as not being fit for governing.

Labels and misleading memes seem to be the essence of the Republican and other far-right Conservative political tactics these days. It is getting "old" in America and is seen as dangerous domestically and in foreign policy approaches too. Lets hope Canada returns to it socially progressive and fiscally conservative roots coupled with a political passion for the planet as a renewed common cause.

A Nightmare Video About Not Voting

I have been pushing the responsibility to vote in an informed manner for months on this Blog. Here is a video nightmare of me failing to do my civic duty if I were an American. http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=QWwp3woUAuJwaLIxPF.B3TI3MjA0OTY-&id=

Save Democracy - Lie to a Pollster

So we already know we can’t trust politicians. But do we dare believe polls now or not? Obviously we can’t rely on them as they become less and less reliable. According to a great piece by Siri Agrell in the Globe and Mail today, the American pollsters are all over the map on tracking opinions on the road to the White House.

Pollsters are showing results from 13 different pollsters we see claims of an Obama lead ranging from 14 points to 1 point. Can they all be right? Can any of them be right? The polling methodologies are the culprits. The old-school techniques are missing major portions of the population because they don’t connect with cell phone users…lots of youth are not in the results.

They use automatic dialing systems and lots of folks will not talk to a machine. More built-in inaccuracies are “normalized.” Some only use Internet pull techniques and then apply variables like multipliers to try and adjust for skewed data.

Many national polls have very small sample sizes for regional reporting but that does not seem to be any deterrence from pollsters still making statements about regional findings. Other efforts to account for wide ranging differences is be averaging all polls, the so-called poll of polls. This is still no way to get better polling accuracy because garbage-in/garbage-out is not resolved by averaging all the garbage.

Canadian pollsters were all caught in the 2006 election predictions because they failed to recognize the impact of last minute shifts and final impulse decisions in undecided voters. This election they did rolling polls over the weekend before Election Day and came up with much closer results.


Mistrust of pundits, politicians and now pollsters by the public is a prudent default position for anyone who wants to know what is really going on in politics today.

Dr. O'Connor Cancer Documentary on Oscar Short List

There is an increasing awareness and concern over the health issues in Fort Chipewyan, which some 200 kms. down stream from the Alberta oil sands. There are also Athabasca River basin water quality issues that are at issue.

I recently attended the Keepers of the Water Conference in Fort Chipewyan and got some first-hand information and insight about what is going on up there around water and health issues.

The issues received international attention when former Fort McMurray physician, John O’Connor commented on the high rates of unusual cancers in the Ft Chip residents. There is a controversy swirling around Dr. O’Connor coming out of professional complaints filed by Canada Health by he has support from the Alberta Medical Association.

Dr. O’Connor ‘s findings were the subject of a recent documentary film entitled “Downstream.” Well the O’Connor profile and the issues in the documentary are about to get a lot more international attention. The film was just short-listed for an Oscar in the “Best Short Documentary” category.

The Academy Awards are scheduled for February 22, 2009. I wonder how this film will fare in February.