You say you want a revolution?

Terrorists have given revolution a bad name.  So have advertisers, for that matter, who regularly coopt the word to market everything from a new brand of shoe to a marginally pinker shade of lipstick.  I attended the swaering in of Nova Scotia’s new government cabinet last night.  A beaming Darrell Dexter, the first New Democratic Premier east of Ontario, welcomed his new cabinet in a province where conventional political wisdom had traditionally ruled the NDP out as viable election winners.  It was a crowded room and during the ceremony I heard someone whisper to a companion that we were witnessing a revolution in government.

Bullshit.  If you’ll excuse the bluntness.  What we witnessed was the peaceful transition of power – a beautiful thing, to be sure, but hardly a revolution.  It ain’t nothin’ but democracy.

Scene change: Iran.  When I got home last night and logged onto Twitter as I always do, there was this chilling message from one of the Iranian sources I follow: “Saturday has begun.”  The announcement of the dawn of a new day is not normally described as “chilling”, I grant, but this Saturday is not like every Saturday in Iran.  This Saturday has the potential for making history, but what kind of history remains to be seen.  There is a rally scheduled in Tehran, to begin roughly an hour from when I write these words, that is being held in direct defiance of the Supreme Leader of the Iranian theocracy.  What kind of history is being made?  It could be the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down, the beginning of a democratic revolution that will see the people of Iran freed from their theocratic masters.  Or, it could be the equivalent of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a violent and bloody crackdown on dissidents and protesters foolish or brave enough to stare down the barrels of police and military weapons.

The world is watching, as best it can with no media there to report.  We are relying on Facebook and blogs and Twitter, yes.  The tweets heard round the world.  We are waiting, and those like me are doing so with an uncomfortable gnawing in their bellies, tears at the verge.  “Today, we are all Iranians”, and other such bumper sticker shows of support don’t come anywhere close to the depths of the feeling.  But what else is there?  We could take to the streets in our own countries, in our own cities, in a show of solidarity with our Iranian bretheren – but what can that honestly accomplish?  My gut feeling, when I can isolate it from that overall gnawing,  is that massive street protests in the west merely feed the political-religious zealots in Iran who seek to blame their domestic unrest on western interference.  This is about Iran, not The Great Satan, and we could do the people of Persia a great disservice by providing an external bogeyman on whom the Ayatollah and his puppet president can pin the blame.

Some tens of thousands of people are expected in the streets of Tehran.  Protesters are being advised to carry a copy of The Koran, because it is apparently a mortal sin to kill someone who is holding a copy of that wholly holy book of Islam.  It is difficult to imagine how this can end, if not in great bloodshed.  The Ayatollah has spoken, warning against future protests, holding dissident politicians responsible for the violence such protests might unleash.  Even though he is the one man who could stop the violence, as he is the one man who can give the order to begin the crackdown.  We are watching.  We are waiting.

Saturday has begun, and today, we are all Iranians.

1 of 310 – a post-election view

I didn’t get the 500 votes I sought.  In fact, at just 310, I fell considerably short.  Mea culpa.  Many things went wrong, were done wrong, or were simply not done at all.  A passion for policy coupled with a passion for politics is not all it takes to run a campaign for elected office.  For one thing, you have to knock on more doors than I did, which is not something that comes naturally to me.  There’s an inherent fear that I am invading someone’s private life and so will be unwelcome when I knock.  Let’s face it – not everybody is happy when a politician knocks on their door.  And some of them are downright dismissive when that politician is wearing a Green Party pin.    I did knock on some doors, and had profoundly positive reactions at a few of them, besides.  But I didn’t knock on nearly enough.  I think you have to knock on all of them during a campaign.  Twice.

Also, you need more time than I had, both in terms of advance notice that you will even be running a campaign and in terms of having enough ‘free’ time during it.  I had neither of these.  The writ had been dropped nearly a week before I was approached about being a candidate.  Another day passed while I thought about the time commitment and whether I could balance that with my stay-at-home-dadness.  Clearly, since I ran, I decided I could.  But that was before I understood what sort of a time commitment an actual campaign would entail.  I simply didn’t have the time to do it properly.  A month or two notice, and a plan could (and would) have been pretty firmly in place, with a small slate of volunteers to cover everything from canvassing to babysitting.  Ah, but for the curse of time.

I believe I could have obtained the 500 votes I sought – which was roughly 5% of the popular vote – if I had concentrated all of my efforts and all of my free time in my riding, and I am responsible for not having done so.  I could have engaged more directly with the other candidates, could have visited more community events, could (and should) have knocked on more doors.  I could have done all of these things, but the party under whose banner I ran must share some culpability.

Province wide, The Green Party held steady in terms of popular vote.  In 2006, the party participated in its first province wide election and took 2.33% of the vote.   In 2009, in its second provincial election, the Greens took 2.33% of the vote.  Deja vu all over again.  So why the three year steady climb to end in the same place?

For one, there was no steady climb for the Green Party.  In the three years between elections, I can think of no meaningful attempts by the Green Party to insert itself into the political dialogue of Nova Scotia nor into the political consciousnesses of Nova Scotian citizens.  In the months leading up to the drop of the election writ, which only the most politically disinterested or uniformed could have failed to see coming, there appears to have been no concerted effort from the party to line up viable, interested, and interesting candidates.  And then, once the candidates were lined up, there was no candidate training, little advice or support from the central party leadership, and no central plan for a cohesive campaign.  We had 52 mini-campaigns instead, one for each riding, run with widely varying degrees of devotion.  Every party had some parachute or paper candidates, meaning people who were little more than names on the ballot so that the parties might be represented in all of the ridings, but the Green Party had more than the others.  In this dubious field, at least, the Greens were number one.

It was no way to run an election, and without a lot of growing up, the party would have no way to run the province.  Which was, after all, the job we were technically applying for.  I think I’d like to help the party grow up.  It needs specific (and costed) policies, and riding associations.  It needs clearer communication from the leadership and executive through the party ranks.  It needs to form a shadow government, to follow the workings of our new legislature.  It needs to applaud our new NDP government for the things it does right and offer constructive advice and insight on how that government might do things better.  It needs to get out in the community, and make its presence felt.

So many people I talked to over the course of this past campaign thought the Green party was the Marijuana Party.  And many more others believed it was a single issue, environmental party.  That’s a branding problem, and the perception of the Green brand in Nova Scotia will be one of the greatest hurdles for the party to overcome.  Especially if it doesn’t even try to.

Lest I should convey the wrong impression, I do believe in the Green Party, and I do believe it can have an important role to play in the future of the Nova Scotian political discourse.  We lost a lot of votes to the NDP this time around, simply because it was a great orange wave – or Orange Crush, as the Herald headline put it on June 10 – and Nova Scotians en masse seemed determined to put Mr. Dexter in the Premier’s office with a huge majority behind him.  A pre-election Angus-Reid poll showed that the Greens lost as much as 50% of their support to the NDP in the 2009 election.  Given that, it may be remarkable that the party even held steady at 2.33% of the vote.  We must have picked up a good number of votes from PC supporters to have done so.

Personally, I enjoyed seeing and working an election from the candidate side of things for a change.  It gave me a deep appreciation for the difficulties of the task.  And while I had enormous criticism to heap on the central party campaigns, comprised as they were of attack ads, meaningless soundbites, and politics-as-usual promises made, the candidates running in my own riding were all intelligent, decent and respectable people.  Colin Hebb, the young man running under the Liberal banner in my riding, particularly impressed me – and I would like have voted for him had I not had such an excellent Green candidate to support.  George Jordan, the candidate for the PCs, gave me the impression that he honestly cared about the riding and the province, and I respect him for that and for his involvement.  Plus he has an awesome voice.  Marilyn More, the NDP incumbent who again won handily this time, will continue to do a good job of representing her constituents, but this time with a view of Province House from the government side of things.  And good for her.  I wish her all the best, because she is my representative in government now, so her best is my best.

I am not done with politics in Nova Scotia, nor am I done with policy.  When the Legislative Assembly reconvenes, I and some of my fellow Greens will be there.  We will not sit in the House itself, because Nova Scotians have not given us that right.  But we will be in the visitor’s galley, watching the business of the house, taking notes and making plans.  We will criticize where criticism is called for and praise where it is warranted.  We will bring our ideas to the government in power, with the reminder that good ideas are good ideas and in matters of good governance and smart public policy, the origin of those ideas is irrelevant.  Good ideas can, and should, be stolen.  I encourage Mr. Dexter to hear the advice that all other parties have to offer.  I encourage him to hear the good ideas all Nova Scotians have to offer.

I believe Darrell Dexter has the potential to be a powerful proponent for positive social change in our province, and that all Nova Scotians should do what they can to encouragingly nudge him in that direction.  In the meantime, the Green Party has some remodelling and some cleaning to do in its own house.  Not until it has gone some considerable distance in that direction can it reasonably ask Nova Scotians to support it at the polls.

Guest Blog: Ridings to watch

Patrick Webber, a self-described political junkie, managing director of the Green Party of Nova Scotia, and friend of mine, has written a guest blog for Tangents.  Enjoy his tour through some of the ridings he thinks will be worth paying attention to tonight as the polls close and the results get tallied.

Let me begin by saying that I am a confessed election junkie, and I seek a fix almost wherever I can. The Nova Scotia election on June 9, 2009 will feed my habit quite nicely, and the night promises to offer many macro and micro surprises. When the campaign began, it looked likely that only a handful of seats would switch, and that an NDP minority government would be elected by a slim margin. In the last five weeks, however, the dynamics of this campaign have shifted immensely. The trajectory of conventional wisdom about what the election result will be has been as such:

· A PC-NDP battle for a minority government.

· A likely NDP minority government with an outside chance of a Liberal minority government (at least according to Ralph Surette’s column in the May 23, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Herald).

· An almost certain NDP minority government with an outside chance of a slim majority.

· An almost certain NDP slim majority.

· The NDP will win a majority government and the only question is by how much and how much carnage will be wrought by the orange tidal wave.

Obviously there is always the potential that the polls are wrong, that some Nova Scotian answer to Truman VS. Dewey is in the waiting, but it seems increasingly unlikely. I think it is safe to say that Nova Scotians will wake up on the morning of June 10 (some with colossal hangovers) to an NDP government. Apart from the historic quality of this likely election outcome, there will be many ridings worth watching that will determine some fundamental questions. How big will an NDP win be, and where will it be won? How much damage will the Tories suffer? Can the Liberals pull out of third place and expand beyond their Annapolis Valley redoubt? Who will win the epic battle for Official Opposition? Here are a few ridings that I’ll be watching with particular interest on election night.

• Cumberland North: This riding will be decided by two features, one purely local and the other pan-Nova Scotian. The local feature is the Fage Factor, the degree to which former PC MLA and current Independent Ernie Fage can hold on to support. The pan-Nova Scotian feature will be the degree to which the NDP has made inroads into otherwise solid Tory blue areas. A drive through Amherst, the primary town in the riding, just over three weeks ago revealed an almost equal sign presence between PC candidate Keith Hunter, the NDP’s Brian Skabar and Fage. Cumberland North offers a perfect example to gauge how voters in a riding cast their ballots: do they stick with the name they know, regardless of party label (or even having a party label), do they stick with their PC habits, regardless of the name on the ballot, or will they join in a larger provincial trend? The other big point of interest here, if the NDP win, will be whether the NDP run up the middle between a combined PC and Fage vote that is larger but split, or whether the Tory collapse is sufficient enough to allow the NDP to win more votes than the PCs and Fage united.
• Halifax Clayton Park: My home riding should offer one of the great nail-biters of the evening. The riding features a rematch of the 2006 contest between Liberal incumbent Diana Whalen, who has held the riding since 2003, and Linda Power of the NDP. Whalen, regarded as one of the bright lights of the Liberal caucus, held a steady share of the vote in 2006 despite the notable province-wide Liberal decline in vote share (37.2 % in 2006 vs. 38.4 % in 2003). Linda Power, meanwhile, took the NDP from third place and 26.7 % in 2003 to 33.5 % in 2006, knocking the Tories down to third place. Therefore, Whalen has demonstrated that she has local support that resists declining Liberal fortunes while Power has demonstrated the ability to significantly increase the NDP vote. Thus, the battle for Halifax Clayton Park will determine if Whalen’s stable local popularity will win or lose in the face of Power’s growth potential. With the NDP supposedly polling in the 50%-plus range in metro, the result should be very, very close. It is interesting to note the campaign messages of each too. Whalen’s leaflets, of which I’ve received two, emphasize her accomplishments as a local MLA, with very little mention of the Liberal brand. They actually look more likely quarterly MLA updates rather than election material. By contrast Power’s leaflets, of which I received two as well, are hyper-party partisan, with little reference to Power herself but instead a promotion of the NDP’s platform points and an attack on the Liberal record of the 1990s. The NDP obviously know who the real enemy is in the riding, as no mention of the Tories is made in the second leaflet. June 9^th will prove to be a classic battle between the individual merits of an incumbent and the promise of a political brand name.

On a side note, it is interesting to note that for a third election in a row, the three main party candidates in Halifax Clayton Park are all female. Moreover, for a second time in a row, the Green candidate is also female. The sole male candidate in the race will also be an interesting addition to watch in Halifax Clayton Park. He is Jonathan Dean, who is running officially as an Independent but is in reality running for the unregistered Atlantica Party as its leader and only candidate. I was surprised to see a few lawn signs for Dean at some strategic intersections in the riding in the last couple of days, as it would indicate that Dean is making a modest yet determined attempt to raise his profile. It will be interesting to see what degree of support he gets, and possibly indicate what result the Atlantica Party may post in the next election if it were to become registered and run numerous candidates.

• Kings South: This is probably the hardest riding to call in the province. It promises to be a tight-three way race with a relatively strong performance by the Greens. A quick glance at the results here in 2006 may suggest an easy NDP pick-up, as PC incumbent David Morse won by about 700 votes over the NDP. The simultaneous Tory collapse and NDP surge would put the current New Democrat candidate, Ramona Jennex, easily over the top. However, the riding also features two relatively strong anti-Tory contenders in addition to Jennex. Liberal candidate Paula Howatt is, according to my sources in the riding, a highly respected local and a known-name in the riding. The Green Party’s Brendan MacNeill, meanwhile, is running a relatively strong campaign (by Green Party standards) and is also a known entity in the riding, as he was the Green Party candidate in Kings-Hants (of which Kings South is a part) in the 2008 federal election. These two candidates make an easy NDP pickup much harder to guarantee. It is also clear that the NDP and Liberals both smell blood here, as both Darrell Dexter and Stephen McNeil have made repeated stops in the area. Kings South will be the ultimate example of a riding where vote shifts moving all over the place should produce an almost unpredictable race. A PC, NDP or Liberal victory are all valid, and the margin between the victor and third place will probably be among the closest in the province.

At a macro level, Kings South is just the sort of riding that the Liberals must win if they are to secure Official Opposition status. As it is unlikely that the Liberals will topple any NDP incumbents, Liberal gains must come at the expense of the Tories. Ridings that the Liberals must snatch from the Tories to become Official Opposition include Victoria-The Lakes, Hants West and Bedford-Birch Cove. Moreover, Liberal hopes of moving out of third place in Province House depend to a degree upon the success of the NDP outside of Metro. Simply out, the Liberals should pray for a NDP tidal wave, as such a wave will wipe out many Tories in the rural mainland but leave well-entrenched Liberals in the Annapolis Valley secure. Now, why does it matter so much that the Liberals emerge as the Official Opposition on June 10? It matters because this election, I believe, is the last chance for the Liberals to break out of the third party status they’ve held since 1999. In each subsequent election since then the NDP has widened the seat gap between themselves and the Liberals, making the Liberals appear less and less like the government in waiting. If the NDP complete the long march to government on Tuesday and secure the mantle of Tory-slayers, and the Liberals still emerge in third place, a defined PC-NDP dichotomy will be hard to resist as the new political paradigm in Nova Scotia. The Liberals, written off as realistic competitors for government, could soon find themselves in the same state as the Liberals in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, a permanent third-party rump winning 10 to 15 percent of the vote and winning a seat or two. Once the NDP in those two provinces secured the middle ground and established itself as the primary anti-Tory vehicle, the Liberals decline was assured, a decline only slightly mitigated in both provinces by temporary upswings in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nova Scotia could be on the same path.

Can’t get a satisfactory election?

As I have previously noted, voter turnout in the last provincial election was something less than stellar.  Also something less than 60%.  I hope we can do better this time, as a province, because if we do we can actually do better as a province.  The province wide voter turnout last time around was 59.89%, but turnout in the individual ridings varied widely.  They ranged from an abysmal 48.84% in  Halifax Clayton Park to an impressive and encouraging 82.45% in the riding of Clare.  That’s quite a range.

My hope, of course, is that Nova Scotians in general take their cue from the people of Clare and show up at polling stations in droves.  I voted at an advance poll on Friday morning and, although lineups often frustrate me, I have to say I was pleased to find one when I got there.  I was more than happy to wait my turn to mark an X in the circle next to the name of my chosen candidate.  (Who happened to be me.)  Last week, I helped write and create a short video that is clearly pro-Green, but mostly pro-voting.  It’s a spoof of those ads for Viagra and such, offering a cure for Electoral Dysfunction.  You should watch it – it’s kind of funny, if I do say so myself.  I hope it might get you to vote, if you don’t already, but at least it will probably get you a chuckle.  We could all use chuckles almost as much as we could use credible and meaningful representation.

The election campaign is pretty much over for us now.  Voting day is on Tuesday, and on Tuesday night I will be gathered with a small group of close friends to watch the results come in – possibly over a beer or two.  I am interested, of course, in finding out whether I got my 500 votes or not.  I am also interested in whether the great Orange revolution is going to be all the N-Dippers hope it will.  I share their hope (because who doesn’t want good government, no matter what colour it comes in?) but, based on Mr. Dexter’s right-of-centre campaign, I  rather think it will be more of the same-old same-old.  My greatest interest in election night, though, is always in watching voter turnout.

I have a keen passion for democratic reform – I want fixed election dates, proportional representation, a lower voting age, more opportunities and more locations for actually casting ballots.  I want legislated transparency in government.  I want political parties to be unable to accept donations from corporations, unions, organizations of any kind really – including my beloved NGOs that comprise civil society.  I want freedom of information, and not the kind we currently have that makes us pay for access and then makes us wait more than half a year to find what we were looking for.  I want the need to toe a party line to be abolished, so all members can vote according to their conscience and according to their constituents’ needs.  I want voters to vote, and believe that if they do so en masse, then we can eventually get the democratic reform we so badly need.  And so badly deserve.

It’s been so long since I had one…but I want a satisfactory election and I know there’s a cure.

So vote.

1 of 500 revisited

It looks like an orange tsunami is about to sweep over Nova Scotia.  If the polls are to believed – and that’s a mighty debatable if – then the New Democratic Party is about to grab virtually every riding in the province outside of the Valley and Cape Breton.  A prevailing sense that it is simply the NDPs turn is in some measure responsible for this wave of support, but profound disenchantment with Rodney MacDonald’s Tories has much to do with it as well.

The seeming inevitability of such a strong NDP showing on election night has convinced me more than ever that the Green Party has a necessary voice to add to the political spectrum.  I am going to give Darrell Dexter the benefit of the doubt, and hope that he will not govern from as far to the right as he has campaigned.  I am assuming that, sure of support from the NDP base, Mr. Dexter abandoned addressing social issues in this campaign for fear of putting off small-c conservatives and small-l liberals, who might come to the NDP camp if Dexter hammered home the point of fiscal responsibility.  Plus it isn’t a bad point to hammer.  It’s important.

But social responsibility is just as important, and here is where the Green vote counts.  Every vote that is pulled away from the NDP that lands in the Green column will remind Mr. Dexter and his band of new New Democrats that Nova Scotians want socially responsible legislation.  That it isn’t all about the budget for everybody.  That, for some of us – a lot of us – it is about the people.  Every vote that lands in the Green column reminds Mr. Dexter that Nova Scotians are looking to make a better province for their children and their grandchildren, not just an HST cut on electric bills and a few new emergency room beds.  That we want our government to make ethical decisions, like getting out of the VLT business.  Every vote that lands in the Green column reminds the new government that our physical environment is something we care passionately about.  That our health care system should be the greatest in the world and that it can be if we take a holistic approach and listen to the nurses and nurse practitioners and other health care professionals in our province.  Every vote in the Green column reminds Mr. Dexter he cannot take the voter for granted and that he must craft a vision that looks beyond the next election or two.

And so I return to the theme with which I started this campaign: 500 votes to increase the voice for sustainability, self-sufficiency, and social responsibility.   We’re in the last days of this campaign (and I admit that I’m looking forward to some quality time with my boys when this is done), but the real work for the Green Party starts after the election.  The real work starts with us standing and using our small but growing voice to speak to the government, with the citizens, with the  wonderful people who do so much good work with the province’s non-profit organizations.  The real work begins with connecting with the disenfranchised; with poverty, health, education, and environmental activists; with the working and the non-working poor.

The other parties will stop campaigning when this election is over, but that is when the Green Party should really begin.

You can’t get a voter’s card with no fixed address

Health care.  Homelessness.  Addictions.  Inadequate education.  Hunger.  What do these all have in common?  Poverty as an underlying cause.  Poverty is the single greatest social ill in our city, in our province, in our country.  This is something I have had much intimate first-hand experience with, as well as something I have intellectually understood.   But I began to appreciate the problem on a different level this morning.

A handful of HRM Green candidates – Leader Ryan Watson, Halifax Needham candidate Kris MacLellan, Preston candidate Sarah Densmore, and yours truly, from the heart of Dartmouth South-Portland Valley – spent a few hours talking to some of the people who populate the organizations that take the fight against poverty directly to the street.  It was a walking and talking tour of the Gottingen Street anti-poverty non-profit sector.  These organizations are essential to social welfare delivery in our society, stepping in and providing services where government delivery is insufficient or inefficient  or has even failed entirely.  I honestly find it tragic that these NGOs are even needed, but they are.  I always believed our society could banish poverty if it decided to.  I still believe it, actually.

We stopped at Community Action on Homelessness, the North End Community Health Centre, Halifax Housing Helps, and the Maynard Street Supportive Housing Units.  A planned one-hour tour tripled in length.   And how could it not?  There is much to learn about poverty, and these organizations have much to teach.  The morning turned into an eye-opening, and sometimes jaw-dropping, exploration of the intertwined world of housing, health, addictions, disabilities, and poverty.

Did you know, for example, that shelter beds were used in Halifax over 52,000 times in 2008?  That’s more than a thousand times a week, and an increased need is anticipated.  Or that nearly half of all the people recieving income assistance have some form of disability?  Or did you know that in order to satisfy the definition of “affordable housing” of 30% of your income, a single person living alone in a bachelor apartment in Halifax needs to be earning $12.48 per hour for forty hours per week and that the minimum wage is nearly three bucks an hour less than that?  The income assistance allowance for housing is $300, in a city where the average bachelor apartment costs $599.  Which would be laughable if it wasn’t such a social tragedy or public policy travesty.   One thing some of the  people I met today seem to encounter in government is the difficulty in getting anybody to understand that the best cure for homelessness is homes.  Sure, it seems obvious to you and me – but something happens to the normal human brain once it reaches deputy-ministerial level in government, and it is rendered completely unable to see obvious things.

There is some consensus among the people we spoke to at each of these organizations as to the failure of our health and community services departments to take a holistic perspective on the causes and consequences of poverty in Nova Scotia.  There is consensus, also, that funding is too scarce and too difficult to obtain.  Too much of their time and too many of their human resources must be dedicated to pursuing funding, which draws away from their doing what they do best.  It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that maybe the government ought to do the funding part (a job it is reasonably good at) and get out of the service delivery part (a job it consistently sucks at), while letting the non-profits do just the opposite.  Then everybody would use all their time doing things they are really good at.  This could just be me, or it could be one of those obvious things to which deputy ministers are blinded.

On June 2, with one week to go before polling day, the Community Advocates Network called a press conference to take all of the political parties to task for their failure to address the issues surrounding disabilities and poverty during this election.  They were right to do so.  In the partisan quibbling over a handful of new emergency room beds here and a few rural roads paved there – it seemed nobody was talking about the big issues.  Nobody was talking about poverty.

And that’s what the political parties – all of them – should be talking about.  It is a point of only small partisan pride that the Green Party stands alone against VLTs and the role they play in poverty.  But we should all have been talking about it in the first place, long before the election.  And we should keep talking about it until long after the election, until it is a thing of the past – until the only thing Nova Scotian children know about poverty is what they have learned in history class.  The thing is, before we can talk, we must listen.  That’s what this morning was about for me.  I went to learn.

The media is as culpable as our political leaders for keeping poverty out of the headlines.  It is, by far, the single greatest cause of disease in our culture, and it warrants hardly a mention.  But we couldn’t get enough about the Swine Flu (ahem…H1N1), with the media reporting every sneeze of every new diagnosis.   Poverty is plain, not “sexy enough”, as I heard at one location this morning. Maybe one of those trendsetting media types can help us out here, and figure out how to sex-up affordable housing.

In the meantime, I urge everybody to start talking to their politicians about taking a broad and holistic approach to poverty.  Ask them about people with disabilities, and what our society is doing for them.  Ask them about the failure to recognize the connection between having a safe place to live and having good health.  Ask them about the terrible and unnecessary strain homelessness puts on our emergency rooms.  Ask them to listen to the people who actually understand poverty – to the people who live with it and work with it.  Demand they reject the notion that anybody chooses homelessness, that anybody chooses poverty.  Tell them a society is judged by how it treats its least advantaged and ask them what they will do to ensure our society gets high marks.

The next debate doesn’t have to be boring

There’s a party leader’s debate Tuesday night in Nova Scotia, for three of the four party leaders.  If it’s anything like the last one we had, the Chronicle-Herald will crown Stephen McNeil the winner by virtue of the dubious distinction that he was marginally less boring than the other two.   And no wonder – there is virtually no distinction between these three guys.  The only thing that does make one of them stand out – the fact that the marginally less boring one is considerably taller than the other two – was compensated for in the first debate by having the other two guys stand on risers, so as to convey a false impression of comparable height to the viewers at home.  I’m not sure whose idea that was, but it did give me a hint as to why the leader of the Green Party of Nova Scotia was excluded from that debate, as well.  Ryan Watson is even taller than Stephen McNeil is boring.  He’s 6′7″!  Clearly, the CBC didn’t have enough risers and the only other option was to actually dig a hole in the stage and make Ryan stand in it.

I kid, of course.  The real reason the Green Party was excluded is, like the discarded gas price options presented to the MacDonald government, unrevealed.  It is my own humble opinion that because we got public funding, like all the other political parties, the public broadcaster might have recognized that Nova Scotians had a right to hear the Green voice.   They helped pay for it, after all.  But that is not how it transpired, and Green Party leader Ryan Watson was not invited to participate.  Mired in the mindset of 20th century media, the debate hosts failed to recognize a 21st century party.

They can be forgiven their oversight, because they at least recognize the limitations of their old school media and are beginning to change their models to better utilize the potentials of the social web.  Take Tuesday night’s debate, for example.  Sure, they have excluded the Green Party leader from sharing the stage with any of the would-be premiers, but they have excluded all the rest of us citizens from doing so too.  Yet they have provided the online tools for all of us to participate live during the debate.  Both the CBC and The Chronicle Herald will provide live and interactive forums, and I would encourage all Nova Scotians – citizen and candidate alike – to participate in this potentially most democratic of debates.   Indeed, (pipe dream alert) I’d love to see the the leaders come down off their risers and join we mere mortals in the fray.

I know I’ll be there.

Party Machines

I heard an interesting anecdote today.  A former bar employee told me a story about two women and a VLT.  It seems these women were sitting in a bar, where they could regularly be found, watching a man play a VLT and eyeballing the large “bonus” that was available on the game.  The man finished playing, without “winning” the “bonus”, and left the bar.  One of the women immediately moved in to start dropping money in the machine.  The other woman, asserting that she was there first and so the VLT was hers to play, grabbed the seated woman by the hair and pulled her off the stool.  A fight ensued.   “Fisticuffs!” the gentleman telling me the story exclaimed.  “Actual fisticuffs!  It was crazy…these women were both there to lose all their money and they were actually fighting over who would get to lose it first!”

Anecdotal evidence is no sound basis for serious policy initiatives, of course, but you have to talk to a lot of people to find someone who doesn’t have a comparable story related to the insanity of government sponsored VLTs in bars all across this province.  From this man you hear a story about the welfare cheque that gets returned every month to the provincial coffers by way of the VLT bill insert slot.  From that woman you hear about the divorce in the family because the husband or the wife had a gambling addiction that was out of control.

The biggest VLT addict in the province is, of course, the province itself.

I wonder if Nova Scotia’s politicians fall asleep at night and dream about rows of 7s and swinging bells and and the 140 million dollars or so per year that VLTs contribute to the general coffers.  Unfortunately, as so often is the case with mainstream party power, the government forgets that all equations have two sides.  This equation has 140 million dollars on one side, and all the related social costs of gambling addiction on the other.

Look at this story from the May 31 edition of the Chronicle-Herald, about Green Party leader Ryan Watson’s position against VLTs and the responses from the opposition parties, which range from the cryptic to the absurd.

NDP leader Darrell Dexter cited the need to maintain government control over VLTs as necessary because otherwise “you may well be chasing those people into unregulated Internet gaming where there is no form of control.”

Liberal leader Stephen McNeil cited a government conflict in removing VLTs from bars because they also exist in First Nation communities where the government lacks jurisdiction.  “You can’t allow them in one part of Nova Scotia and then not in another part,” he said.

And Finance Minister, Jamie Muir, said:  “They are going to be here anyway…The most appropriate role for government is to regulate and make it safe and secure and responsible as possible.”

These are all probably politically sound things to say, but do not stand up to even the most cursory analysis.  Both Dexter’s and Muir’s responses could, for example, be equally well applied to crack or heroin.  By not providing a safe outlet for crack users to obtain their fix, the government is driving them into unregulated crackhouses “where there is no form of control.”  Similarly, crack is going to be here anyway (have you heard any claims of outright victory in the drug war lately?), so would Mr. Muir assert that “the most appropriate role for government is to regulate and make it safe and secure and responsible as possible.”  I rather think not.

As to Mr. McNeil’s claim that we can’t enact legislation that applies one set of rules to First Nation parts of Nova Scotia and another set of rules for the rest – perhaps he can explain the ready availability of, for example, cheaper cigarettes from First Nation outlets.  The whole reason we have designated parts of our country as First Nation Territorries is exactly because different legislation applies to them.  Sure, as Mr. McNeil asserts, the province could (and should, probably) engage in three-party negotiations between Ottawa, Province House and First Nations to address the role of VLTs on Native land, but this should in no way deter the provincial government from taking action regarding the other VLTs in the province.

The Green Party’s dedication to developing a sustainable, self-sufficient and socially responsible Nova Scotia has been setting a political trend in prompting  the other parties to start addressing these themes.  The Green Party is firmly opposed to having the government in the VLT business and encourages the big 3 parties to similarly adopt this socially responsible position.  Sadly, I don’t think we can expect any major announcements to that effect.

Back to school

I have to be honest here.  I would like to see change in how the education system works, but I’m not entirely sure what I want the finished product to look like.  I’m not even sure there is a perfect finished product, unless you could design a system so fluid it could mold and adapt to the specific learning mechanisms of every individual child.  Let’s face it, we all learn best by different means – check out this video by a 16 year old with Asperger’s Syndrome for a wonderfully descriptive explanation of this – and an education system that could adapt to the child instead of forcing the child to adapt to it would certainly have advantages beyond measure.  And not only do we all learn best differently, we all learn different things differently, too.  This has a lot to do with our natural talents, and even more to do with our natural interests.  Our best education system would take best advantage of our natural talents and interests.

Our public schools have adapted somewhat in recent years to an approach based on individual learning plans, but  have yet to progress toward individualized curriculum.    Certainly the best possible education system we can design should be a primary social goal.  There is much to be done, though, before such an adaptive public school system can be accomplished.  And that begins with a community dialogue.   Toward such an end, the Green Party platform calls for “broad consultation with parents, teachers, school administrators, paraprofessionals, academics, psychologists, and students.” The italics are there, right in the platform,  because somehow it seems we rarely ask the students, even though they have the deepest and most direct interest in education.  New Brunswick is looking at a novel approach by giving students direct representation on district education councils.  That might be a good place for Nova Scotia to begin.  It seems to me that we can never have the best possible school system until:

a) we ask the students directly: “How do you learn best?” and ” What do you learn best?”,  and

b) we adapt to their answers.

Tomorrow I will be at Dartmouth High School with Green Party leader Ryan Watson.  I want to talk to students about electoral participation.  And I want them to talk to me about what they want from an education.  I’ll let you all know how it goes.

If we’re not using our democracy, we might as well put it away

“Parties scramble to find candidates to run in election” says the Chronicle-Herald headline.  It seems all the big parties were doing some last-minute filing of candidates to beat the 2 pm deadline yesterday.  Electoral participation is down on both ends.  People are less willing to vote and less willing to run, too.  We think that if we can’t win, we shouldn’t run.  That if the candidate we really want can’t win, we shouldn’t vote.  It’s sad, really – because elections should be about the dialogue as much as they should be about who wins.  Elections provide the golden opportunity for an engaged citizenry to speak in loud and clear voices, because they are the time when the entrenched power structure is actually listening.  Elections provide a golden opportunity for an engaged citizenry to have a broad and open conversation about the direction we want our society to go.  I’m telling you, I love democracy.  I get goosebumps.

I just wish we used it better.

Lets face it, no matter which of the big parties win this thing, the actual governance of Nova Scotia isn’t likely to change that much.  The NDP use to look ideologically distinct, but Darrell Dexter got a little whiff of power and flew to the right as fast as his Tory blue signs would carry him.   Premier MacDonald’s proposed stifling of youth rights notwithstanding, it is difficult to distinguish between the philosophical perspectives of the big three parties.  They are all behaving, well, like Liberals.

In the last provincial election, we had 59.89% voter turnout.   That means that 271,984 people who were eligible to vote decided to have no say in the matter of who would govern them.  271,984 people!   They have their different reasons for not voting, but some form of apathy or frustration is always hovering around the top of the list. 

Who cares? They’re all the same, right?  There is almost no ideological or philosophical distinction between the parties.  The only means of telling them apart is by the colours on their ties and on their signs, and even this line has become blurred.

Who cares? They’re all the same, right?  This is often said derisively with allusion to the notion that politicians are somehow universally criminal.  This is absurd, of course.  Some politicians have been criminals, it is true, and they do get the most media coverage.  But most politicians who actually get the chance to govern, I would guess, are hard-working and honest people in a tremendously difficult job.   Deciding how to allocate precious public resources (and how to acquire them in the first place) is a pretty tricky business and one that will always result in disappointing someone.  The politician’s job is to get elected representative.  The representative’s job – if he or she is doing it well – is to see that the resources are all allocated so that they are doing common good and not just special interest good.  The citizen’s job is to ensure the representative is doing his job well.

Who cares?  The person I want in won’t win, so I’m just wasting my vote. The only way to “waste your vote” is to not use it.  Our system isn’t perfect – not by a long shot.  There is desperate need for democratic reform so that the final composition of the legislature more accurately reflects the popular vote.

Here’s how many people voted Conservative in the last election, giving Rodney the keys to the premier’s office: 160,119.  That’s 111,865 fewer people than didn’t vote at all.  In fact, even if you throw in the 94,872 votes the Liberals got with the Tory lot, you would still have a larger majority of non-voters.  That seriously blows my mind.

Here are the election results expressed as percentages of eligible voters instead of actual voters:

PC – 23.615%

NDP – 20.666%

Liberal – 13.992%

Green -  1.387%

Independent – 0.022%

Non-voter – 40.113%

Twenty-three percent made Rodney the premier!  23!  Clearly, we must have problems with our democracy, since we just leave it lying around, hardly ever using it.

Mainstream parties never have a vested interest in intensive democratic reforms, such as the introduction of proportional representation.  Mainstream parties seem to actually benefit by the low voter turnout and the first-past-the-post system.  Mainstream parties pander to the known voting demographics – watch them at their business luncheons – and ignore the disenfranchised, further disenfranchising them.  They don’t vote so they don’t matter.   Remember, although a good elected representative is doing his job by listening to constituents between elections, too, a good politician only has to listen during elections.  If you don’t vote, they have no incentive to listen.

Here’s a nice dream: 100% voter turnout.  I know it’s a pipe dream – even in places like Australia, where they take electoral participation seriously enough that they have mandated voting by law, they don’t quite hit the golden 100 mark – but it’s still a nice dream.

And, the last number I will throw out, here are the chances of the collectively disenfranchised changing the electoral system if they don’t actually get out and use their right to speak and their right to vote: 0%.