Month: July 2005

I don’t remember how I found it, but it soon popped up on Nealenews and everyone started to talk about it. It’s a great resource for Canadian democracy and it sheds light on some interesting facts that would otherwise remain buried. Howdtheyvote.ca is a smart and sophisticated website that assembles Hansard data and processes it to help inform the Canadian voter.

I’ve been combing through the website and I’ve already found a few interesting facts.

Most words spoken in the House – Paul Szabo, LIB – 107873 words
Least words spoken in the House – Claudette Bradshaw, LIB – 0 words (she’s even a government minister!)

Maverick MPs (most often go against party line, # dissentions):
Dan McTeague, LIB – 21
Paul Steckle, LIB – 21
Tom Wappel, LIB – 21
Raymond Bonin, LIB – 19
Charles Hubbard, LIB – 19
Gurbax Malhi, LIB – 18
Alan Tonks, LIB – 17
Rose-Marie Ur, LIB – 17
Roger Gallaway, LIB – 16
Jim Karygiannis, LIB – 16
Lawrence MacAulay, LIB – 16
Ken Boshcoff, LIB – 15

Most absences
Chuck Cadman, IND (cancer) – 142
David Chatters, CPC (cancer) – 107
Darrel Stinson, CPC (cancer) – 101
Carolyn Parrish, IND – 79
Gurmant Grewal, CPC – 62

Best attendence records (0 absences)
Ethel Blondin-Andrew, LIB
Francoise Boivin, LIB
Marc Godbout, LIB
Michel Guimond, BQ
Mark Holland, LIB
Richard Marceau, BQ
Stephen Owen, LIB
Karen Redman, LIB
Todd Russell, LIB
David Smith, LIB
Brent St. Denis, LIB
Alan Tonks, LIB
Tony Valeri, LIB

Bills written
Pat Martin, NDP – 23
Peter Stoffer, NDP – 18
David Chatters, CPC – 11
Peter MacKay, CPC – 11
Irwin Cotler, LIB – 10

Cabinet Ministers who have not yet written a bill:
Belinda Stronach, LIB
Lucienne Robillard, LIB
Stephen Owen, LIB
Joseph McGuire, LIB
John McCallum, LIB
Paul Martin, LIB
Tony Ianno, LIB
Bill Graham, LIB
John Godfrey, LIB
Joe Fontana, LIB
John Efford, LIB
Raymond Chan, LIB
Aileen Carroll, LIB
Scott Brison, LIB
Claudette Bradshaw, LIB
Ethel Blondin-Andrew, LIB
Carolyn Bennett, LIB

Conclusion: The award for the most overrated MP goes to Claudette Bradshaw.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Elections Canada released the figures of the submitted 2004 returns of the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, the NDP and the Bloc. The report noted that the parties raised $10.9 million, $5.2 million, $5.2 million, $897,000 respectively for the fiscal year of 2004, an election year.

Not only did the Liberals raise less than half of the amount compared to the Conservatives, they raised the same amount as the NDP. Also, the Conservative cash came from 68,382 donors, and that of the Liberals came from 17,429 donors. The Conservatives are showing some real grassroots support, a trend that has continued from 2003.

But what you might not have heard is that the Liberal Party of Canada is in serious financial trouble. The party took out $35 million in loans during 2004, according to Elections Canada.

The report further states that the Liberals have $75,000 in outstanding bills to Bell Mobility, Delta Hotels and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The party took out $35 million in loans last year and they only raised $5.2 million? Perhaps its the Liberals who don’t want an election right now. Not only do they fear being punished for their state of moral bankruptcy, but it seems that they are financially bankrupt as well.

Remember too that they owe a few more hundred million dollars to the Gomery trust fund.

Today is Independence Day in the U.S. and I wish a happy 4th to all of my American visitors today.

I’ve done something that is truly Canadian on this American holiday. This post will both compare Canada to America and will do so in order to help us better understand our identity as Canadians. Quite a Canadian pass-time!

The political compass website has been a favourite political website of mine for some time. It presents a quiz to its visitors, which they complete and have their score ranked on a political grid from left to right wing, and from libertarian to authoritarian. The axes are absolute and therefore make for an interesting political comparison between Canadian and American politics. I’ve gone ahead and overlapped the American and Canadian data and found a couple of interesting things.

My first observation here is that John Kerry is more right-wing than the Conservative Party of Canada. Some Canadians often complain that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are too right-wing, however, they were the same people who cheered blindly for the senator from Massachusetts to win the 2004 Presidential election. Also, the Conservative Party and John Kerry are quite similar along the authoritarian-libertarian axis. While John Kerry campaigned on a pro-choice campaign, the CPC’s policy isn’t explicitly pro-choice, but rather a pro-status quo which supports perhaps the most permissive abortion laws in the world. John Kerry campaigned on civil unions for gay couples while the CPC would have preserved the traditional definition of marriage while allowing for equal rights for gay couples (all Canadian parties were bound by the Supreme Court in that they could not take the “civil union” route).

I still maintain that John Kerry would have been a disaster for Canadian domestic policies as his trade protectionism would have further crippled Canadian beef and lumber markets.

Moving on, the Liberal Party also appears as “right wing” which might have to be changed after the implementation of the NDP budget, C-48.

You can take a look at the data here:

Canadian Data

American Data

British data

The British Labour Party is a member party of Socialist International, yet so is Canada’s NDP. It makes the head spin.