Shadow Boxing

Last night was the first debate between presidential hopefuls McCain and Obama. Many people here and in the US watched it hoping to get a feel for the two candidates. However, as you may have noticed, the whole thing was rather bland and scripted. That's because since 1988, the debate format is chosen by the two candidates themselves. They choose the issues, the moderator, the audience, the time allocation, the venue, everything. There are no unexpected questions, no detailed explanations, and certainly no third-party candidates. It's essentially a joint press conference.

This is a serious problem for American democracy because, along with corporate control of the media, it ensures that 95% of Americans never learn about the fundamental issues the candidates don't want to talk about. If someone like Ralph Nader were in the room, he could ask important questions in front of the whole nation: "Why do you both say the military needs more money when Americans spend as much as the rest of the world put together for it?" "Why do we base our economy on the ludicrous idea that goods and services can and must keep growing forever?" "Why do you oppose single-payer health care for Americans while members of Congress already receive it?"

A Shadow Congress

If this week's bailout goes through, it will be a massive transfer of wealth from working Americans to the ultra-rich. But there is another aspect which is less obvious: this legislation is also a massive transfer of political power. Under the current agreement, the Treasury Secretary--a member of the President's cabinet--would have the authority to buy and sell assets at any price with no oversight or time limit. Traditionally, the legislative branch (Congress) has the final say on all spending; this is one of the "checks and balances" of the US system, intended to curb an autocratic President. If Congress agrees to grant this power to the White House, it makes itself that much more irrelevant, and makes the US that much less democratic.

It's possible that the White House will choose not to abuse this newfound power, just as they chose not to use most of the powers Congress has granted them in the past few years. But who in their right mind wants to take that chance?

Sept 25 update: An American economist gives a similar criticism here. (There are many others.) And the Monkey-in-Chief is playing the fear card again.

I just read that the current Treasury Secretary--the man who will have unlimited authority to reward or punish Wall Street--is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, with a net worth of $500 million. The White House plans to send this man into a closed meeting with his former colleagues carrying a blank cheque, and somehow that will resolve the debt crisis. Un-fucking-believable.

Sept 26 update: I asked a friend of mine who has a PhD in economics whether this bailout is necessary. He says that, in fact, it is. The immediate problem is that there is financial paralysis--no-one in the US can buy or sell a house or get other large financing because the banks are not willing to lend to anyone. Under the current financial system, good debt gets bundled with the toxic sub-prime mortgages as mortgage-backed securities, and bankers don't want to risk losing more money. Due to poor record-keeping, it's impossible to know which debts are solid and which are toxic. (Or perhaps they stopped the music because they know they'll get a bigger bailout that way.) The longer this paralysis lasts, the more it will interfere with day-to-day commerce. The only way to avoid a deep recession is to clean the slate and restore lending confidence again. I asked him whether the government itself could lend money and thereby get the financial system going again--after all, they apparently have a trillion dollars on hand, and that way they could ensure transparency. He said that couldn't work because only bank employees have enough expertise to run a lending program of that magnitude and complexity. At that point our conversation was interrupted.

It's true that the financial system is so broken that it needs to be wiped clean, and soon. But a blank cheque to Wall Street criminals won't solve the problem--there needs to be strict regulation and accountability. The details don't all need to be in place tomorrow, but there needs to a coherent and sensible plan. Senior financiers knew all along that they would get bailed out, which is why we are in this mess; if we send a message that those who destroy the economy will get punished not rewarded, it will be a major deterrent to future MAD financing.

My preferred approach would be to use FannieMae and FreddieMac, which are already nationalized, to lend money under a new set of regulations; poorly financed banks would go bankrupt, as per the rules of capitalism, thereby wiping the slate clean of bad debt. Ordinary Americans would not lose their life savings because of the FDIC protections. There would still be hardship for a lot of people, but less than the hardship they will have if they give away a trillion dollars and have another financial crash in two or three years. In any case, there are many people in the US with good ideas who understand economics better than I do; I just hope Congress listens to them and not the White House.

Meanwhile, on Wall Street (Part II)

Part I here.

In response to the debt crisis on Wall Street, Washington itself has been going into debt like there's no tomorrow. (For the world's pre-eminent nuclear and military power, that phrase takes a whole new meaning.) Now Bush is ready to write a blank cheque to prop up the debt bubble and delay financial collapse until after his term. Although they disagree on the details, senior US decision-makers agree that this bailout needs to go ahead. But they simply don't have the wealth to back up all the dollars they're throwing around. (Maybe it's time to sell Louisiana territory back to France!)

It would be pointless for me to discuss solutions to this crisis. They are obvious, and it's up to the US public to demand them. I'm more interested in what the ripple effect will be for me and mine if the bailout does go ahead. I readily admit that I don't understand macroeconomics, but here's the situation as I see it.

In the short term, since the government is offering no support to individual debtors, hundreds of thousands of families will lose their homes and become New-Orleans-style internally displaced persons. Although this will cause widespread misery, it will not affect the economic or political systems much because those Americans are already disenfranchised. In the medium term, the most likely outcome is hyperinflation. By all appearances, the government intends to keep running a deficit, but sooner or later creditors will no longer be willing to buy US securities (public debt). To stay solvent, the government will need to either default on its debt payments or print a lot more money*. When this happens, US dollars and US securities will devalue, international investors will dump them, and the value of the currency will crash. The end result would be that financial wealth (dollar bills, bank accounts, shares) quickly becomes worthless while real wealth (real estate, factories, goods) becomes much more valuable. Wages couldn't keep up with inflation, so those in debt would go bankrupt. Nearly all of the debt-free real wealth is held by the richest 1%, so in practice, hyperinflation quickly leads to deep and widespread poverty. What happens next depends on many things, but there would certainly be a humanitarian crisis.

The financial industry protects itself with opaque or absent record-keeping, so very few really know what's going on. It's impossible to predict with any certainty what will happen in the US, let alone in Canada. Export-oriented industries will certainly suffer from a loss of American spending power, and if Canadian financiers get spooked, our own debt bubble could burst. Individuals can insulate themselves somewhat by reducing their debt load, but the only real defence is to work collectively to create an economy which is insulated from speculative bubbles.


*The fundamental value of a US dollar has been very murky since they stopped using the gold standard in 1971. The dollar has been anchored by the global oil trade--Washington (backed up by the Pentagon) insists all oil must be traded in US dollars. In other words, any time the US wants $20 worth of oil they can simply print another $20 and get the oil. In fact, any country that wants to buy oil must first buy dollars from the US at face value. Most countries also use US dollar reserves to anchor their own currencies. So if the US dollar has hyperinflation, it would trigger hyperinflation around the world. Theoretically a country could protect itself by starting to sell its US bonds and dollar reserves, but no-one is willing to do so because such a public "lack of faith" would trigger a mass sell-off of dollars which would wipe out their own currency.

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

The Conservative party is actually running a "tough on crime" campaign. Longer jail time, less protections for young offenders, that sort of thing. Crime rates have been falling for 20 years, we are facing economic and environmental meltdown, and this is what he focuses on?

The Liberals finally released their full platform today. We're still waiting on the Conservatives and NDP.

The Other Election

Any time I feel bad about Canada's stunted democracy, I just need to look south. Their political system is even more archaic, arcane, and corporate than ours. And they are 16 months into an 18-month campaign--my heart goes out to them. At least this time one of the candidates gives good speeches.

I try to avoid following presidential elections. A few years ago I realized that mainstream US politics--primaries, recalls, conventions, debates, elections--have as much to do with government policy as an office's Christmas party does to its year of work. The Democratic and Republican leadership agree on nearly everything, and they co-operate to marginalize third parties as well as dissent within their own parties. Off the top of my head, here are a few policies which will continue under either Obama or McCain (and feel free to consult their public statements if you don't believe me):

increasing military and paramilitary spending
private health care
narrow media ownership
for-profit prisons
the occupation of Iraq
corporate control of the economy
unhindered stock market, real estate, and currency speculation
spying on Americans without a warrant
no bill of rights, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, etc.
endemic poverty and homelessness
the War on Drugs / Plan Colombia
the death penalty
privately funded elections
the G8, WTO, and IMF/World Bank
expansion of NATO
unconditional support for Israel
fossil-fuel-only transportation policy
capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich
inadequate action on climate change
support for foreign dictatorships
war profiteering
antiquated infrastructure

I'm not saying that none of these problems will ever be fixed; there are numerous avenues for active and informed Americans to influence their government. I'm saying that Americans need to ignore the electoral theatrics and study their political system as a whole. I myself could get involved in the Canadian Liberal Party to defeat the Conservatives; but in practice, the two parties are not very different, and in the long term I would be better to invest my time in alternate democratic channels.

Obama will certainly be more progressive than McCain. (And Joe Biden may be an establishment man, but Sarah Palin is a lunatic.) He probably won't repeal Roe vs Wade or invade Iran. He may even improve health care, permit gay marriage, and invest in alternative energy. But the central concerns of the establishment are not on the table. He will defend the American establishment to the bitter end... that's what he was chosen for.

Sept 29 update: An anonymous internet denizen gave this succinct description of the Democratic leadership: "they don't mind imperialism; they just want a more efficiently and rationally managed one." That's what I mean--both parties are inherently authoritarian and imperialist, and the only difference is their management style.

Many Americans oppose the policies I listed above, and they do elect a few anti-establishmentarians like Dennis Kucinich or pre-2000 John McCain. But the structure of the parties and of the political system itself means that even elected dissidents have little effect on the overall government policy.

Yawn

This election hasn't been very interesting so far. The media are obsessed with "gaffes" and "campaign strategies"; party leaders promise chocolate éclairs for all, trying to exude Leadership Potential; and rank-and-file candidates (let alone party members) are invisible unless they do something stupid. Only the Green Party has released a platform so far, and the consensus in the media is that platforms are all hot air anyway, so they focus on the theatrics instead. I wish we could sit down like grownups and discuss what problems we are facing and how to solve them.

I haven't seen much coverage of the Greens since Elizabeth May got accepted to the debates. CBC mentioned approvingly that she is financially prudent and that she is slowly gaining in the polls. Private media are openly dismissive of Jack Layton and Elizabeth May because they won't be Prime Minister.

This is interesting. A man from Hamilton has set up a Facebook page to co-ordinate vote-swapping to help defeat the Conservatives. Last time I checked there were 6500 swappers out of 10 million voters, so it probably won't have a big impact. Considering the distortions* of our electoral system, though, it's worth a try.


*Our "first past the post" system has several flaws. First, it discourages new parties because until they have 20% or so support in a given riding, all votes for them are wasted (except for vote-based federal funding). Second, it exacerbates regional divisions because it benefits regional parties, which have concentrated voters. Third, it punishes similar parties or candidates through vote splitting. The final result is that a party can form government with 30-40% of the vote, while a party with 10-20% support (like the Progressive Conservatives in the 90's or the Greens now) get little or no seats.

Under the Misty Mountains

Above: Deep Cove at night. More photos here.

Two weeks ago, I moved from Vancouver proper to the District of North Vancouver, just below mount Seymour by Deep Cove. I'll describe my area briefly then give my impressions of Vancouver as a whole in the next post.

I wish I could live here forever. It is half an hour from downtown Vancouver, but it is in the midst of wilderness. (I've seen a coyote and two deer, and one of my roommates saw a bear.) Everywhere you look are lush plants, wild berries, and fragrant flowers. It is a rainforest, after all. Although I loved living in downtown Montreal, I felt oppressed by all the concrete and car exhaust. (I can't imagine living somewhere like LA.)

It is also old and prosperous enough to have good cultural facilities, and if I want something more, Vancouver and its boroughs are a short bus ride away. Mass transit is expensive--like every else here--but I can travel cheaply on evenings and weekends.

I live 3 blocks from an inlet, Indian Arm. On the waterfront, of course, there are many rich houses. The richest of all are in Deep Cove itself, which has a yacht club and a bunch of yuppie stores. Even the house I'm staying in is valued at about $2 million. (There are 6-10 tenants staying there, so the rent is affordable.)

I haven't met many people here or gotten involved in the community: I haven't found work, so I'm keep my expenses to a minimum. I spend my days looking for work, reading, hiking, and so on. I temporarily have a computer at home, so I can blog as well. I've been helping with the local Green Party election campaign as well, which is much better organized and financed than my 2006 campaign in Montreal.

This may turn out to be just an extended vacation. I calculated that I can afford to stay here until Christmas; if I can't find work here by then, I would move back to Ottawa with my parents until I got a job there. Or I may take a McJob and stay a few more months.

Also nearby:
Baden-Powell trail

Meanwhile, on Wall Street

Americans are so fucked. But first, these messages...

Until recently, there was a major housing bubble in the US: normal working-class houses would sell for a million dollars or more. Banks offered subprime mortgages, multiple mortgages, and interest-only mortgages with minimal credit check, which encouraged many Americans to buy houses they couldn't afford. Some call it NINJA financing: "No Income, No Job: Approved!" As long as the price of houses kept rising, they were solvent because they could theoretically sell the house and make a profit. Investment banks like Bear Sterns began trading mortgages, insurance on mortgages, and other pieces of paper as if the housing industry were a stock market, and this kept driving up the price of homes. Homeowners acquired more and more debt to avoid losing their houses, so superficially the money supply kept growing. At some point, though, too many people started missing mortgage payments, and all those pieces of paper became worthless overnight ("loss of investor confidence"). At the end of the day, a few dozen people on Wall Street became billionaires and many Americans lost their life savings. To add insult to injury, the US government bailed out Bear Stearns but not homeowners, so the fraudsters got another $2 billion windfall. Fast-forward to this week: the US government just stepped in and nationalized the $5 trillon mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If their assets are made of air like those of Bear Stearns, the US public debt will double overnight, and all that money will go to the people who are responsible for the crisis in the first place.

The subprime mortgage crisis is not the end of the story; there is a similar crisis looming with consumer debt (credit cards, installment debt, etc). We all know people with several maxed-out credit cards they'll never pay off. Sooner or later, a critical mass of creditors will call in their debts, credit card holders will go bankrupt, and the apparent wealth of the nation will evaporate. Obama's VP Joe Biden has deep connections to the credit card industry, so a government shakedown is very unlikely.

I won't waste my breath highlighting the massive injustice of all this. It's clear that those responsible deserve to work in a rice paddy the rest of their natural lives. The point I'm trying to make is this: the US government itself is very shaky financially, and soon it won't be able to backstop the "failures" of the economy any more.

For 200 years, the fastest way to get rich in the US has been to take over an essential service, run it into the ground, and wait for a government bailout (cf railways, Lockheed Aircraft, Chrysler, Savings & Loan, Enron, Bear Sterns). When the industry becomes profitable again, it gets sold back to the private sector for cheap because a profitable government agency is "socialism". The stakes are bigger than ever now because of all the corporate mergers. But now, the government itself is broke due to decades of corporate handouts (especially via the pentagon) and tax cuts. It has stayed solvent by taking on more private and foreign debt--an additional $2 trillion or so since 2000. A leftwing administration could redistribute money back from Wall Street to the public purse, but there is no American Left to speak of. Besides, there needs to be serious, longterm investment in education and infrastructure before the US can become economically self-sufficient again.

So where will it end? What happens when an essential service fails and Japan and China aren't willing to underwrite a bailout any more? Will we discover that all the non-imaginary wealth in the US is owned by a few hundred thousand people, like 1929? And what will happen to the rest of us?


September 20 update: Since I wrote this post, the US government has pledged another 800 billion dollars of bailouts for Wall Street. No word yet on where all that cash will come from. This raises the US debt ceiling to 11.3 trillion dollars, $32 000 for every man, woman, and child in the US.

I wonder when this will start to qualify as odious debt.

High Noon in Debate Gulch

Green Party leader Elizabeth May has been excluded from the Leaders' Debates next month. Stephen Harper said he would not share a stage with her because she is secretly a Liberal (!) while Jack Layton says the Green Party is not a real party because we have no elected MPs yet.

Harper's evidence is that Stephane Dion is not fielding a Liberal in May's riding. Yet May represents the Green Party, which is running 306 candidates against Liberals. If we really were closet Liberals, Harper would support us 100% in order to split the Liberal vote. Clearly that isn't the case.

Layton is invoking a rule that doesn't exist. The Bloc Quebecois had no elected MP the first time they were in the debates. We represent as many voters as the Bloc--if all our voters were concentrated in one place like them, we would have been in Parliament years ago.

The Green Party takes voters away from all the major parties, which is why they have a common interest in marginalizing us. But I think this kind of backroom chicanery reflects badly on them.

This is a major setback for us because we have big ideas but not a big wallet; we can't afford TV ads like the established parties to get our ideas heard.

Sept 10 update: the Green Party will be in the debates after all! Harper and Layton bowed to public pressure. Now May has had free publicity as the defender of democracy, and we still get to speak our piece to a national audience.

The New Kid in Town

The first post in this series is here.

The Green Party is where I intend to invest my time and my vote. We are still poorly understood, so I'll explain how we are different than the other parties.

Although environmentalism has a long history, its political arm (the Global Greens network) was slow to develop. Most environmentalists are individualistic, nonconfrontational, well-rounded, and middle-class, whereas electoral politics favours those who are hierarchical, aggressive, single-minded, and rich. However, we know urgent political change is needed, so we overcame our reluctance and entered the political arena.

Traditional political parties came from economic divisions--Conservatism from landowners, Liberalism from merchants, Socialism from workers--but the Green Party started as a philosophy, so it cuts across class divisions*. Its fundamental principles are ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity. Among global Green Parties, Canada's is considered more capitalist, eg. by proposing tax and subsidy changes rather than deeper systemic changes. Still, compared to Canada's other major parties it is very radical.

The major difference with other parties is that Green Party policy is based on concrete facts and proposals, not horsetrading and piecemeal election promises. Canada has a variety of short- and long-term problems, and to address them all, the solutions need to be holistic and comprehensive. It is important to us to have a detailed plan because we intend to plan ahead several decades, not simply until the next election. We also want to encourage genuine debate in hopes of improving it further.
Until the mid-90's, the federal Green Party was essentially a protest vote, a way for local activists to raise awareness of environmental issues. In 1997, the first comprehensive policy was released, 20 pages long. This was expanded and improved to the 120-page Vision Green released 18 months ago.

Incidentally, the Green Shift promised by the Liberals is the same tax shift the Green Party proposed three months ago, including slogans like "taxing bads not goods" and "neither Right nor Left." It's a good idea, and I hope they adopt more of our platform; but I still don't trust them, and I don't intend to vote for them.

(The central idea is to tax things we don't want, like pollution, and reduce taxes on things we do want, like income and trade. That way, society discourages pollution and not benign commercial transactions. There are exemptions so people like farmers don't go bankrupt from the new tax.)

The Green Party isn't perfect, but it's the best we've got right now. In subsequent entries, I'll address more specific issues of this election.


*Political activity in general is highly class-based: the poor almost never get involved because they have the least time and money to spare, whereas the rich are always involved because they have the most to lose.

The Old Democratic Party

The first post in this series is here.

I have a lot of respect for the NDP. They have been fighting against economic and political inequality for decades, a voice in the wilderness. Their approach is different than mine, but largely I feel that we are on the same side. So why am I a Green and not an NDPer?

The platform, tactics, and organization of the NDP reflect an industrial viewpoint, workers versus capitalists. To them, the most important thing is to weaken big business and strengthen John Q Public: the more secure and prosperous the working class becomes, the more government policy will reflect their interests. (Presumably, working class interests include complex and longterm problems like climate change.) So far so good. But they will alleviate inequality through economic growth, which is part of the problem--we need a zero-growth economy, or we will continue to expand and degrade more and more of our life support system. If we reduce our enormous inefficiency, we can provide a good life to everyone without selling out our future in the process.

The Green Party, on the other hand, is concerned with issues which affect rich and poor alike such as climate change, a stable economy, and an ethical foreign policy. We are cooperative rather than confrontational. I would like to dismember transnational corporations as much as anyone, but first I want to make sure that my children don't die from tainted food or water, out-of-control weather, or tropical disease.

I'm not a big fan of Jack Layton. He cooperated with Stephen Harper several times against the Liberals, which strengthened the Conservatives but didn't help the NDP much.

I hope that the NDP and Green Party can someday join forces. We have so much to offer each other. First we need to overcome egos in both parties, and that probably won't happen unless our infighting causes a Conservative majority next month.

Ad Libs

The first post in this series is here.


Above: a Liberal ready to retire from politics.

Liberals in Canada are nicknamed Grits, from their 19th-century slogan, "all sand and no dirt, clear grit all the way through." At the time, they were abrasive opponents of Sir John A MacDonald's corrupt Conservative Party. Recent Liberal governments have been quite different...

High-ranking Liberals are expert politicians. They give handouts to the right people to get re-elected. They are effective at solving problems which concern them, such as Canadian unity, low taxes, and a growing economy, but they pay lip service to other issues (child poverty, aboriginal land claims, health care) or ignore them entirely (American war crimes, media concentration, the global financial bubble). They also have an authoritarian streak; they ignore backbenchers, civil servants, and civil society in favour of backroom deals, and they coddle foreign dictators when it suits them (notably President Suharto). So they are similar to the new Conservatives except that they are better managers and they care more about Canadian sovereignty.

Liberal leader Stephane Dion is not very popular, even less so than Stephen Harper or Jack Layton. He's seen as awkward, academic, and "another Quebec candidate." Maybe he'll improve his image during the campaign.

The issue that concerns me the most is the environment, and this graph says it all:

(If you can't read it, it shows Canada's greenhouse gas emissions rising throughout the Liberals' 12-year term.) I could show similar graphs with respect to urban sprawl, pollution levels, deforestation, etc. They now claim to be the party of the environment, but I'm not impressed... did they think we weren't paying attention for the past 15 years? A Conservative government means disaster, but a Liberal government means the status quo, and neither option is acceptable to me.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Because of our electoral system, only the Liberals or Conservatives have ever controlled Parliament. Many people vote Liberal purely to keep the Conservatives out of power ("strategic voting") even though they dislike the Liberals. I can understand that sentiment, but I can't do it myself. The endless promises and betrayals remind me of an abusive relationship--"This time he'll change! I know he will!" We need to break the cycle or the Libs will end up like the US Democrats, who are distinguishable from the Republicans only during an election campaign.

Pros and Cons

It sounds like Prime Minister Harper plans to call an election, breaking his previous promise to wait until October 2009. Rumour has it that he fears an Obama victory in the US will weaken Conservative support here. So I'll give my current impressions of the major national parties, starting with the incumbent Conservatives.

The new Conservative party is essentially the Canadian branch of the US establishment. They favour direct military and economic integration with the US, eg. the "Security and Prosperity Partnership." Before he was PM, Stephen Harper was president of the National Citizens Coalition, which campaigns for private Medicare and CBC, widespread deregulation, privately-funded elections, more military spending, etc. Their religious wing is anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, and generally draconian. Thankfully, they haven't had a majority government, so they haven't been able to fully implement those policies.

My major concern is to have robust national food, water, transportation, and energy systems which can withstand the disruptions of climate change, financial speculation, and peak oil. For some reason, that is considered part of the Ministry of Environment. How do the Conservatives fare in that respect?

Allow me to introduce Canada's environment minister, John Baird. His approach is to attack political opponents and to ignore all inconvenient facts. Canada's greenhouse gas emissions are still rising exponentially, and sustainable infrastructure is a patchwork of local initiatives. Baird is the poster boy of business-as-usual government.

Aside from their ideology and general nastiness, I dislike the Conservatives because they are self-serving, secretive, and short-sighted. A poor man's Republican Party, if you will.

I call them self-serving because they ignore any rules that don't suit them. The party was created in 2003 when Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay broke a written promise not to merge with the Reform party. Since they were elected in 2006, they broke many rules and traditions such as appointing an unelected businessman to Cabinet (Michael Fortier). Harper's comment was "If you look carefully at what I said in the election campaign, I did leave open that possibility." With that attitude, how can I trust anything they say?

Which leads to the next problem... they don't say much! In the last election, their platform was released only a few days before the election, and it consisted of vague promises on Accountability, Opportunity, Security, Families, Communities, and Canada. Even so, they've largely ignored that document. They rarely announce their plans, and we know little about the operation of government because of their policy of secrecy; they routinely deny access-to-information requests. For instance, by law military spending needs to be published every year, but it hasn't been published since 2003. (Notice the continuity with Liberal policy; I'll address them in the next post.) I suspect that our military is heavily funding the war in Iraq, but at this point there is no way to know.

Finally, I say that they are short-sighted because they ignore pressing issues such as climate change, endemic poverty, and the collapsing US economy. In fact, they make things worse by expanding the tar sands, cutting social programs, and increasing trade with the US. The Kyoto Protocol, which is already woefully inadequate, has been ignored: when the Conservatives were elected in 2006, we were 24% above the emissions limit, and now we are about 35% above it. In contrast, Norway's emissions are 25% below the Kyoto target. We are a rich nation, so in the short term we are insulated from our mistakes, but as a sparse northern country we are also very vulnerable to climate change and economic dislocation.


According to this poll, party support nationwide is currently 38% Conservative, 28% Liberal, 19% NDP, 8% Bloc Quebecois, and 7% Green. Because of the electoral system, that would mean about 60% Conservative, 20% Liberal, 10% NDP, and 10% Bloc in Parliament. We progressives have our work cut out for us.