Category: Other

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.

In Ottawa right now doing the Canada Day things with friends. There aren’t any wireless hotspots to which I care to lug my laptop on a hot day, so I’m at Chapters in the Byward market with, oh, about 4 minutes left on my Internet Café gift card. This is all very interesting I’m sure…

Nothing much to report except that the fireworks at the Hill were great and that Sam Roberts is a twit.

Happy Belated Canada Day!

In the spirit of my interviews with MPs Monte Solberg (1, 2, 3, 4) and Andrew Scheer (1, 2), I created the Blogging Tories Podcasting page because I wanted to get the whole Blogging Tories community in on the action.

If you’ve been thinking of getting into podcasting, here’s your chance. The Blogging Tories today has officially launched its Postcasting Tories site.

I’ve purchased branding on the iPodder software for ease of use for our audience (the Blogging Tories feed is already integrated) so go there now and download it from our servers (PC and Mac available).

The idea is to integrate podcasts from members of the Blogging Tories community into one Podcasting feed that is downloaded regularly by the Podcast Aggregating software run by our global audience. Whenever a new podcast becomes availiable, the software downloads it automatically for the user.

I’m currently trying to round up some conservative radio pundits and personalities to include in the podcast XML feed as well. If you’re such a radio personality, let me know and I’ll put you in the feed! Of course, if you’re not a Canadian radio celebrity — here’s your chance to tryout!

Conservative talk radio has hit Canada… in podcast form.

UPDATE: You DON’T need an iPod!