Short answer:  Absolutely, yes.  She has a very good chance. Long answer:  Still probably yes.  However, if she runs her campaign the way she ran her candidacy “announcement”, then she could be in serious trouble. Elizabeth May seems to have definitively chosen British Columbia’s Saanich—Gulf Islands riding as her choice in which to run in the next federal election.  I have to admit that I am intrigued by May’s decision to run there.  The circumstances around this move have been less than ideal for May and the Greens, however I don’t think it’s a bad move (though the …
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Very few things Stephen Harper has done while in power have genuinely scared me. Sure he’s done plenty of stupid things (denying gays the right to donate organs even if they’ve been tested, and opposing the UN conference to end racial discrimination to name two examples).   Sure, he’s done some mean-spirited things (creating a more regressive tax structure so that poorer Canadians must carry a heavier load of the federal budget, for example).  Sure he’s continued some of the most horrendously right-wing policies the Liberals implemented in their time in office …
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“You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.” -William Bourke Cockran “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” -Anatole France Contrary to the myth that Western capitalist society obeys the rule of law, it has long been understood that the wealthy live under a different set of laws than the rest of us.  The crimes against property and against the wealthy are not weighted on the same scale as crimes against the weak and the destitute. The average OSHA penalty for a …
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No left-wing activist wishes more than I that the media hype over the Conservatives’ putative death knell in Québec was reflective of reality. Unfortunately, any progressive who wishes to buy in to that comforting and pacifying story is being sold a bill of goods.  Real organizing and the real fight to sweep the Tories from Canada’s most progressive province depends on being able to accurately estimate Conservative Party support.  The data now suggests that in the last four months the Conservatives have recovered as much as — if not more than — 50% of their lost ground in La …
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Before I had seen Naomi Klein and her husband Avi Lewis‘s 2004 documentary The Take, I was somewhat ashamed that I had not taken the time to sit down and watch it. After viewing the documentary recently, I can say with certainty that I now deeply regret not watching it as soon as it came out.  I feel like I should have been shouting this film’s praises from rooftops for several years now.  This amazing, soaring, soul-wrenching, powerful, simple and yet also profound film is without a doubt the best documentary I have seen in the last 5 years (and possibly ever). After watching …
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Normally I don’t bother to give mainstream capitalist editorials a great deal of my attention.  However, yesterday there was an OP/ED in the New York Times that was a succinct and near-perfect exposé of the poisonous cocktail that is the mixture of guns, gender inequality and institutionalized misogyny in a culture. It is well worth the read and I highly recommend it (despite the brief lapse into puritanism in paragraph 8). ~ Women at Risk By BOB HERBERT “I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George …
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And, yes kids you too can get a  multi-million dollar renovation of your religious “school” from Stephen Harper just so long as you happen to own a religious school and happen to be of the same religion of the Prime Minister (and, presumably, happen to also hate “the gays”). EDIT: A very religous friend of mine pointed out to me elsewhere that this school is not technically “fundamentalist” since they do not necessarily subscribe to a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.  Rather, this school represents a non-fundamentalist type of über-conservative …
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Don Newman, the former host of CBC Newsworld’s marquee programme Politics, gave an interview in a recent edition of The Hill Times wherein he touched on the subject of blogs and blog readers.  His comments on the phenomenon of blogs are elucidating in part because he is by no means an ignorant man nor does he normally demonstrate any obvious partisan bias toward one of the five big mainstream parties or the other.  He is, in short, a living embodiment of the well-meaning yet nevertheless reactionary nature of the mainstream media which, I would argue, makes his opinions highly indicative …
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The Paulitics Multimedia Resource continues to grow and add new documentaries and other new audio and video.  While I will be adding a new documentary and a couple of new speeches later on next week, feel free to check out the new format of the Multimedia Resource. …
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The British government has commissioned a shocking new report from the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA) which among other things argues that the law should be changed so that political commentators cannot draw comparisons between the actions of the Israeli state and those of Nazi Germany. Antony Lerman writes: “If you said ‘the way the IDF operated in Gaza was like the way the SS acted in Poland’ and a Jew found this offensive, hurtful or harmful, you could, in theory, go to jail.” However that is neither the most shocking or …
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Paulitics is proud to present the free, downloadable Paulitics Projection Model. Paulitics was the #1 most accurate election forecaster for the 2007 Ontario Provincial election and the Paulitics Projection Model was able to accurately predict 96% of all 2008 federal election results*. This powerful tool is now available at your finger tips for free. You may download it by clicking the button below. Please note: Once you download the document, you will see a prompt asking you whether you would like to allow “macros” or not. You must click “allow macros” for the program …
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A while back here at Paulitics, I discussed the campaign by the Israel lobby to pay university students to agree with Israel in classroom discussions, university clubs and in rallies. This programme and the overwhelmingly pro-Israel North American (and, to a lesser extent, European) media coverage were however not enough for the powerful and extremely well organized lobby.  The Israeli lobby then created a desktop application called “Megaphone” about which many political commentators still remain blissfully unaware.  Megaphone serves as a syphoning tool which has the power to …
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A while back, the Strategic Counsel released a poll that managed to slip passed my attention until just now (source). Many of the findings are fairly banal, however I was surprised to discover this one particularly interesting finding.  It turns out that of the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Bloc Québécois; Liberal Party supporters are the least likely to believe that their own party shares their values. I’m not quite sure what that means.  Is it an indication that the Liberals are a “big tent” with people with many divergent ideas all peacefully coexisting together?  …
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About eight days ago John Baird, the Conservative Infrastructure Minister, gave his second figurative “F— you” to struggling workers in Thunder Bay, Ontario.  This gesture comes in addition to his literal “F— you” to Toronto mayor David Miller earlier this month. (Yes, he actually said “F—”.) David Miller, who has been lobbying for a $300 million stimulus package from the federal government, last week had his request officially denied by the Harper government.  The City of Toronto had plans to spend the more than $300 million in stimulus …
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This week marks the newly-proclaimed “Sovereignty Day” in Iraq (June 30), Canada Day here in Canada (July 1), and the Fourth of July celebrations in the United States. I’ve always thought that it was the most fortunate of happenstance that, throughout history, most people who believe Canada to be the best nation on earth just happen to have been born in Canada; most people who believe England to be the best were born in England; most people who believe France to be the best, were born in France and so on and so forth.  The Americans are actually the luckiest of all in this …
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Reports are coming in from multiple press outlets that right-wing forces have staged a military coup d’état against the democratically-elected leftist president of Honduras, Jose Manuel Zelaya. After Zelaya’s election in 2005, Honduras joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, a progressive international cooperation organization which is also known by its Spanish acronym “ALBA”.  ALBA (which also means “dawn” in Spanish) is an international cooperation agreement designed as an alternative to the U.S.-backed neo-liberal Free Trade Area of the …
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John Wright has issued a semi-substantive response to the corpus of data presented here on this blog. Unfortunately for Mr. Wright, as he continued talking he revealed far more than he intended.  Now that he has been talking, he seems to have stumbled headfirst into what I believe is a contradiction against himself and I invite my readers to think critically for themselves about whether they share in this analysis. In one of his initial comments here at Paulitics, John Wright claimed that the source for his polling data was “Elections Canada”.  The suggestion was, of course, that …
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While I take a short break before posting a final reply to Ipsos Reid (hopefully tonight), do feel free to take a look at the newest Paulitics resource — Multimedia — which is now up and running. It currently has powerful full-length documentaries, alternative progressive media sources, inspiring audio and visual speeches and programmes as well as free live TV news from the Canadian CPAC channel and Al Jazeera English. Feel free to watch it by clicking below or clicking on the icon in the sidebar. As always, comments are always welcome and appreciated. …
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A short while ago there was a post here on Paulitics which analyzed what I saw to be a discrepancy between the Ipsos Reid polling firm’s data and every other polling firms’ data. That post elicited a somewhat condescending and ad hominem response from John Wright, the senior vice president of Ipsos Reid. Despite the profoundly unprofessional tone of this comment, this blog issued a detailed, statistical, and fully-sourced response addressing not only each one of Mr. Wright’s utterances, but also posited even further evidence to back up the initial argument that there is a …
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Hello all, I am in the process of completing what is predominantly a cosmetic change to the Paulitics blog (although there will be one major new resource added, a “multimedia” resource). Unfortunately, this change has necessitated that I break many of links here on Paulitics as I restructure the site’s page hierarchy. Please note that most Paulitics resources are no longer available at their old urls so you may need to update your bookmarks. Please remain patient while the site gets completely up to date. This will likely take several days. …
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This is Part III in a three part series. For Part I, click here.  For Part II, click here. A Response to Ipsos Reid, Part III: Comparing Ipsos Reid to the other polling firms using 2 methods and with control tests. In Part I of the Paulitics response to Ipsos Reid, I showed two graphs of the level of support given to the Conservative and New Democratic Parties in all polls conducted in 2009 by all polling firms. As you can see below, the graphs tell a startling tale of just how radically out of step Ipsos Reid’s estimations of the Conservative and New Democratic Parties seem to be when …
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This is Part II in a three part series. For Part I, click here.  For Part III, click here. A Response to Ipsos Reid, Part II: How to “prove” that the Canadian House of Commons actually has 429 seats instead of the 308 seats it actually has. Here’s how you do this: just use the mathematical practice of taking the average of several unequally-weighted averages.  Normally, this would be considered a big “no-no” in the world of statistics, but since a senior official with the prestigious Ipsos Reid polling firm recently came out and endorsed this practice, we’re good to …
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This is Part I in a three part series. For Part II, click here.  For Part III, click here. John Wright, the senior vice president of Ipsos Reid polling firm — and longtime avid Paulitics reader — recently made some comments here at Paulitics that called into question the methodology I used to examine a perceived discrepancy in Ipsos Reid’s polling data. These comments deserve to be answered in a respectful and courteous manner irrespective of the manner in which they were delivered. Mr. Wright explains in his comment: “First, the Conservative average vote percentage January …
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Paulitics is back to its old look temporarily until I can launch a new and improved layout that allows for both the new Paulitics word logo and red flag of socialism logo as well as providing enough width for the Paulitics polling resource page (and a sidebar that doesn’t apply only to the home page and not to individual blog posts). The process is a complicated one given the limited availability of templates suitable to a blog with as many associated pages as this one has. Stay tuned for more information… …
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In statistics, the more one repeats something, the less likely chance there is that one will end up with really unusual data. For instance, flipping a coin only twice and having both flips land ‘heads’ would yield the not entierly unusual result of a 100% occurance of ‘heads’ versus ‘tails’.  If, however, like Rosencrantz, you filp a coin 92 times and you end up with the same 100% result, you can rest assured that either something stupendously unlikely has happened or that maybe something ‘untowards’ has happened. Now take polling: one would …
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It hasn’t been obvious just looking at individual polls conducted since the Tories unleased their volley of attack ads against Michael Ignatieff, however when you look at a rolling-5 poll average of the last few polls, the data now suggests that the gap between the Liberals and the Tories has contracted by statistically significant margins. On the plus side for progressives, the Bloc Québécois seems unaffected by these ads and remains relatively strong in Quebec (though certainly not invincible as before), the Greens have rebounded slightly and the NDP has also rebounded by …
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In their stirring call to arms that is The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make argument after argument why capitalism is an inherently flawed, anti-humanist, grossly authoritarian and ultimately doomed economic system. As it turns out, Marx and Engels left out what could have been probably one of the most effective arguments to win over the hearts and minds of blue collar workers to the cause of socialism.  We’ve long known that making alcohol retail a nationalized monopoly can bring in billions of dollars to the public coffers and thus reduces taxes.  For …
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Given that Israel’s new (or rather, once-old-now-new-again) far right wing Prime Minister recently visited Washington to talk of peace, it is worth taking a moment to take a look at the two constituent societies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and consider which of the two societies — Israel or Palestine — truly constitutes the bigger threat to piece. Consider for a moment that in May, 2000 (before any hostilities began and there was still relative peace between Israel and Palestinians despite the fact that Israel was illegally occupying their land), only 39% of Israelis …
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Whenever anything dramatic happens, one this is for certain, you can first expect a massive flurry of propaganda from the corporate media. I’ve already been reporting on some of the ongoing propagandistic coverage of tonight’s Venezuela referendum here and here. Here’s the latest morsel of propaganda, this time from the good folks at AFP: “Unlike in past elections, there were no European Union or Organization of American States election monitors” (source) Now, to be fair, the AFP article does point out that despite the lack of EU or OAS observers, …
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If, like me, you live in the Western, capitalist world, you likely haven’t heard anything about the revolutionary referendum that just occurred in Venezuela except the lie that it’s going to make Chavez “President for Life” (see: Fox News, Daily Telegraph) or that the referendum was likely going to be won by the “no” side In actuality, the amendment to Article 230 merely removes the two-term limit on the Venezuelan president and allows him/her to continue serving so long as the public continues voting for him or her in regularly scheduled (7 years apart) …
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If one were to get one’s information from the media one would think that today’s referendum to reform the constitution in Venezuela wasn’t even a close competition. Here are all polls on the Venezeuala referendum that were released. Polling Company: Date: Yes side No side Source: IVAD Sept. 12 40.6 22.5 here Hinterlaces Oct. 5 31 41 here IVAD Nov. 16 38.8 42.7 here Data Nov. 21 30 41 here Keller & Associates Nov. 23 31 45 here Datanálisis Nov. 24 30.8 44.6 here Hinterlaces Nov. …
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A new poll just released by Environics, shows something more revealing than it bargained for. What it shows can be considered even more proof that the media does not have a left-wing bias. The Environics poll asked Ontarians what they thought the most important factor/issue determing their vote in the upcoming election would be. The results are interesting. Now, some of these factors can be broadly categorized into socialist/social democratic issues (namely heath care and social programs/poverty/minimum wage) and conservative/capitalist issues (namely the economy and taxes). Recompiling the …
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The latest Decima poll released (available here) shows some promising news for the New Democrats in the province of Quebec, for the Greens nationally and juxtaposes this with some less-than-promising news for the Tories, who appear to be in a free-fall.  With this poll (and two other polls, one by Ipsos-Reid and another by Strategic), the Paulitics Polling Resource national trend lines show the party standings in flux.  The parties are currently at: For the long-term trend lines of national party support, click here For the breakdown of party support for all the regions/provinces, click …
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