Canadian Politics Roundup: September 17, 2015: Still a three way race, debate tonight!

Hello undecided voters! I'm sorry I haven't been able to update my blog as much as I'd like lately, but I'm quite busy with my classes and extra-curricular activities at the University of Northern British Columbia where I am a student. At UNBC I'm an English major, a political science minor, I'm an undergraduate student representative on the UNBC Senate, I'm on the Pedagogy and Experiential Learning Action Group for the UNBC Academic Planning Committee, I'm the secretary of the English Student Society, and a member of the Political Science Student Association. As you can imagine, I'm really quite busy. I don't reveal all of that to brag, but rather to show that I'm involved in a lot of activities, so the activities that are of a more personal nature, like this blog, must unfortunately fall by the wayside. Fortunately, I'm having a blast with all of it, I just have to suppress the urges to update this blog so I can do some reading, homework or attend a meeting. Anyway, back to the Canadian politics!

Polling still showing a three way race

All the election opinion poll watchers out there will be unsurprised to discover that Election 42 is still a close three way race. In a previous roundup from exactly two weeks ago I pointed out the exact same phenomenon, and while there has been some jockeying in the polls since, we're still at a place where everything is neck in neck in neck.

Polls today: Environics: 34% NDP, 29% LPC, 26% CPC Forum: 32% CPC, 30% NDP, 28% LPC Nanos: 31% LPC, 30% NDP, 30% CPC

— Éric Grenier (@308dotcom) September 17, 2015

To start, EKOS Research has the NDP leading with 29.9%, the Conservatives in second with 29.6%, and the Liberals in third with 27.5%. The Green Party is at 7.6%, and not in contention (I'm sorry all you Greens out there), though that's a pretty good number for the greens.

Forum Research has the Conservatives gaining and the New Democrats losing, and as such they're predicting a Conservative minority government:

In a random sampling of public opinion taken by the Forum Poll™ among 1402 Canadian voters, close to one third will vote Conservative in the coming federal election (32%), compared to 3-in-10 who will vote NDP (30%) and just fewer who will vote Liberal (28%). These results represent a sharp loss of vote share for the NDP since last week (September 10 - 36%). At the same time, there has been a slightly smaller increase for the Conservatives (from 28%). Few will vote Green (6%) or Bloc Quebecois (4%) or for other parties (1%).

Nanos Research is showing the Liberals in the lead by a slim margin and the Conservatives in third, also by a very slim margin.

None of the three major parties have been able to break away from the pack over the past seven days. The three day tracking completed last evening has the Liberals at 30.9%, the NDP at 30.4%, the Conservatives at 30.1%, and the Green Party at 5.8%.

Environics Research has the NDP leading, the Liberals in second and the Conservatives in third:

Across Canada, the NDP (34%) currently has a small five point lead over the second place Liberals (29%). This is within the margin of error. The Conservatives are in third place with the support of 26% of Canadians. Another eight percent support the Green party and four percent support the Bloc Québécois (15% in Quebec).

It should be noted that Environics's poll has a margin of error of 3.6% 19 times out of 20.

For full disclosure: Most of these polling companies will release a regional breakdown that I don't usually report on. The first reason is time. I have a limited amount of time to write this blog, so I don't want to get too detailed. The second is that when you are polling 1,000 to 4,000 people across the country, your margin of error for regional polls will be much higher. The regional numbers are much more suspect for tracking what people's voting intentions are. In a perfect world, we could poll roughly 400 people per riding to get a low margin of error for every riding and then know roughly the exact seat count, but that would mean polling about 100,000 people nationally, and that's simply not possible.

And that is why the only important poll, the only poll you should ever care about, is on October 19th, election day. Unless you are a politics nerd (like me), working for a political campaign, a polling company, a political comentator, or a pundit, you should just ignore all these polls, because they aren't telling you anything and you can't eally use them for anything.

Right now we are seeing a very close horse race with all three major parties in the lead. I wouldn't be surprised if most pollsters have everyone well within the margin of error. The most we can conclude from the polls is that every major party is at roughly 30% (and the greens are at roughly 5%).

Debate tonight!

Another exciting thing happening this election and sure to influence the opinion polls is the Globe and Mail debate on economic issues tonight. You can watch the debate in the above link, or here on YouTube. The debate will be at 5:00 PM PST, 6:00 PM Mountain Time, and 8:00 PM Eastern Time. The Globe and Mail has published a good primer on the debate for anyone interested.

What can we expect during this debate? Expect talk about the recession that was announced two weeks ago, the "surprise" surplus the federal government announced for the 2014/2015 fiscal year, running surpluses or deficits, and other economic issues.

Getting ready for the debate we have some pre-debate commentary from the chattering classes, such as this article by Andrew Coyne on what the party leaders won't say during the debate. Coyne was educated as an economist and even attended the London School of Economics (Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the fictional James Hacker also attended school there). Coyne is an avowed neo-liberal, but he knows his stuff when it comes to economics. In my opinion, his economics pieces tend to be his best work.

Today the Toronto Star published an opinion piece by Jordan Brennan and Jim Stanford on why the Conservatives and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has the worst economic record since the Second World War. It should be noted that both these men are economists, but they work for Unifor, which is the largest labour union in Canada. That doesn't make anything they say invalid, but it does mean that they have a definite bias, much like Coyne's neo-liberal bias, to keep in mind while reading this article.

Yesterday, the New Democrats tried to head off criticism at the pass by releasing a fully costed accounting of their platform. Essentially, what spending, taxes, and cuts they will make to fulfil their campaign promises and keep to their promise to balance the budget. Most pundits and commentators seemed really disappointed that this amounted to a single page:

“This isn’t the Red Book, it’s a back page of the Red Book,” quipped Toronto Star national affairs columnist Chantal Hebert, who along with a few others in the room took part in the 1993 Red Book lockup—coincidentally or not located in a conference room of the Delta Hotel, which the 1993 Liberals also used, admittedly at a different spot then two blocks down from the Delta’s current location.

The New Democrats are claiming they will release more soon:

The NDP candidates—literally besieged by a crush of journalists after they outlined the program and answered or deflected questions—explained that the absence of specific detail was due to the fact that the party has so far unveiled two-thirds of its platform and will disclose the rest over the remainder of the campaign to the Oct. 19 election. While NDP distributed the brochure to journalists who attended the news conference, and posted a news release on its party web site, no detailed version had been posted on ndp.ca as of 5 p.m. Wednesday.

However, none of this prevented the NDP from using their new costing to attack the Liberals for not also having a costed platform:

In an harbinger of what may come Thursday evening, the NDP was out of the gate early in the day, accusing the Liberals of a faulty fiscal framework, and overestimating personal income tax revenues by about $1 billion.

“What’s even more troubling is that he’s run up the bill without committing a single dime to health care or education,” Andrew Thomson, an NDP candidate in Toronto and former Saskatchewan finance minister, said in Ottawa.

“How much more debt will he force on Canadians? How much bigger will the deficits get? Which of the programs Canadians rely on is he going to cut?”

Thomson said his party went to the trouble of doing its own costing of Liberal promises because the Grits have yet to do so.

It seems to me that a costed Liberal platform is far less necessary than a costed NDP platform because the Liberals have promised to take a classic Keynesian approach and post a $10 billion deficit for the first three years they're in government spent on infrastructure, green industries, and employment to boost the Canadian economy from its current stagnation, while the New Democrats have promised a lot of new spending as well as a balanced budget from the very first year they are in office. We know the Liberals are going to go into deficit to pay for everything they are promising, but the NDP have promised spending and balanced budgets.

Finally, Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada, is suggesting that the obsession with balanced budgets is hurting the Canadian economy and the prospects of people in Canada:

This election campaign has zeroed in on the trivial in economics, steadfastly ignoring the big picture. Whether the budget is balanced this year or last is not a significant economic question. A $1-billion to $2-billion surplus or deficit in a $2-trillion economy is unimportant. It will not get people to work or stimulate investment.

But for Stephen Harper’s political commitment to balance the books in time for an election, we would not be so focused on the question of deficit. Moving the budget to late April to book the sale of GM shares to 2015, while slamming the brakes on needed investment in transportation infrastructure, delaying needed military procurement and short-changing First Nations communities and the processing of refugees suggests panic, not prudent planning.

The worst thing about this superficial fixation on the deficit is that not spending on infrastructure and imposing austerity measures worsens the big picture.

We are in a recession. Our economy has been stagnant for the past three to four years. Investment is simply not occurring. Prudent government spending makes sense. To get out of recession, we need investment in those things that meet a public purpose.

As a side note: Elizabeth May was excluded in this debate, so she plans to tweet videos of herself responding and reacting to the debate in real time. I don't think she should have been excluded from the debate, shame on the Globe and Mail for that, but this is the next best thing, so check that out as well as the debate.

I think most economists seem to agree that as long as the debt to GDP ratio is shrinking (how much debt Canada has in relation to what Canada's GDP is), going into a deficit isn't that big a deal. Andrew Coyne says as much in the above linked article:

Likewise, you are unlikely to hear any of the leaders say that it doesn’t matter whether we run a deficit, at least of the kind that any of them are talking about. It doesn’t matter in a negative sense — a $10-billion deficit would scarcely be detectable against the continuing decline of the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio — and it doesn’t matter in a positive sense: whatever miracles might be claimed on behalf of “fiscal stimulus,” a deficit of one-half of one per cent of GDP is not going to work them.

All in all, this will turn out to be an interesting debate that could very well change the course of the election. I hope anyone who has the opportunity should make an effort to watch it and see what the leaders have to say. As for myself, I can't promise any post-debate commentary here on Outside the Cacophony, but I will try to update soon! Maybe next week. If I'm not too busy. If you're lucky.

As always, you can follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab. Thanks for reading!

Wendel Schwab

Canada still has to have hate speech laws

Now that Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is effectively dead and gone, some folks are crawling out of the woodwork to celebrate its demise and to write rousing defences of hate speech in Canada. One such commentator is Andrew Coyne, former national editor for Maclean's, columnist for the National Post, and TV personality.

Such a defence of hate speech was published today in Full Comment column in the National Post entitled "Why does Canada still have a hate speech law?" In this column we see Mr. Coyne argue that Section 319.2 of the Criminal Code of Canada is somehow an affront to freedom. The column is a little muddy, as Mr. Coyne seems to equivocate quite a bit by presenting some arguments in favour of hate speech laws, and never really coming out and saying clearly what he means; but I think his main argument is that hate speech laws infringe on freedom of speech (guaranteed in Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,) but I maintain that hate speech itself violates Section 15 of the Charter, has no actual basis in fact, deserves absolutely no special protections and is a bad thing for all of society.

What's wrong with hate speech? To put it quite simply, hate speech creates an unequal society and contributes and expands already socially existing institutional hatred towards vulnerable groups. At its heart, the unbalancing of society is the very antithesis of what Canada was founded on and what it stands for today. After the Battle of the Plains of Abraham Britain had the opportunity to attempt to assimilate the French colonists in Canada, to force them to speak English and adopt British customs and culture. Instead, the British mandated that the habitants could keep their language, culture and even their own civil laws (which is why Québec does not use British Common Law, but instead uses French Civil Code of Laws to this day.) In that same vein, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 ruled that Indian lands could not be settled on by British settlers until treaties were signed between the Crown and the Indian nations who lived there. This was in contrast to the American treatment of Native Americans which essentially amounted to attempts at genocide, and while Canada's history regarding First Nations people is not spotless by any stretch of the imagination, the Royal Proclamation was another example of attempts to live in peace and harmony with all cultures and peoples within the borders of Canada. The rights set forth in the Royal Proclamation are even mentioned as still in force and protexted by Section 25 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Hate speech is often depicted as a difference of opinion, as one valid way to look at the world. It is often defended as political speech, or personal speech. However, if one examines the scientific and historical facts surrounding "race," one quickly discovers that there is actually no scientific basis for race, that race is an entirely social construct based on minor differences between groups of people and ingrained social and historical prejudices. When the human genome was mapped in the late 1990s, it was discovered that "there is the same amount of genetic variation among individuals within a so called racial group as there is between individuals in different racial groups" (Beckerman). Here is an interesting YouTube video that explains how "race" has no basis in genetics. The final nail in the race coffin is when we look how it was applied to group of people historically. For example, at one time the Irish were considered an inferior race, more akin to "Negros" than to Teutonic races. Such speculation ignores the fact that it is now thought that every human being is descended from ancestors in Africa. Another "proof" that some races are inferior to others is cited IQ scores, however this ignores the fact that it is impossible to make an IQ test that isn't culturally biased, and thus most IQ tests will measure how much of a middle-class white person one is rather than real intelligence. The curious phenomenon of one experiment showing that the IQ scores of black students improving after the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States and becoming statistically equivalent to white IQ scores suggests that positive stereotypes and negative stereotypes have an influence on IQ scores.

Why are people so eager to defend such garbage speech? It does nothing to advance society, it does not lead to enlightenment or answer any important questions. Indeed, hate speech actively damages society, it is like a poison that infects people's thoughts and creates a hostile environment towards certain groups in society that are already vulnerable simply because they are not the societal norm (i.e. white, able-bodied, male, heterosexual, etc..) Free speech is important, but there are far better examples of speech that should be protected without resorting to accepting and defending hate speech.

Hate speech is not a political speech, and it does not convey political ideas. Politics applies to all people, regardless of who they are, and I doubt you'd ever see a political party defending or espousing hate speech, unless they want to become unelectable to large swaths of the population (just as the Conservatives or the Liberals, both parties tussling over the immigrant vote in Canada.)

The purpose of the government in Canada is to maintain "Peace, Order and Good Government." (Section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867.) This is why we have the Criminal Code of Canada, it's why we have laws protecting consumers from dangerous products, it's why we have a court system that is tasked with settling disputes between people, it is why we prosecute murder and other crimes.

Hate speech is dangerous and actively damages society. It turns the powerful majority against powerless minorities, it undermines the basic idea that all people should be equal under the law (the Rule of Law,) it can lead to harm of minority groups, and it can perpetrate a cycle of hatred for vulnerable groups in society much the same way abusive parents can spawn generations of children who in turn become abusive parents.

If a product on the shelves in Canadian stores contains a dangerous ingredient that leads to the harm and death of people in Canada, then is it not the government's duty to ban that dangerous ingredient? The current government of Canada seems to agree with that sentiment when they declared Bisphenol A a dangerous substance, toxic to health and the environment. In that same notion, isn't it important for the government to make laws and rules to protect society from toxic thoughts and ideas that have the potential to harm and damage society? If a certain, vital, rich culture in Canada is targeted by those who spew hate speech, and that group is marginalized by society or damaged by that hate speech, then is it not the government's duty to protect that group just as they would protect any Canadian?

If I may, I'd like to speak from a personal point of view. I'm legally blind, and as an elementary school student, my fellow classmates felt this disability was a valid reason to marginalize and make fun of me. It didn't help that the school and CNIB furnished me with a special desk that put my schoolwork closer to my face to prevent straining my back and neck from being hunched over all the time. While this desk was a way to help me, it made me different from other students, no longer "normal," and made me an easy target for ridicule. This (very loosely defined) "hate speech" levelled towards me had a huge impact on my sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Those taunts against me made me feel worthless, abnormal, it robbed me of the sense that I had the ability to accomplish things. Someone who doesn't have a physical disability simply can't understand what it was like for me, they can't understand how psychologically damaging it is to be insulted and taunted for something you were born with and can never change about yourself. Likewise, white folks like Mr. Coyne and I cannot possibly understand what racism is like, what effects it has on those who are it's victims. I imagine it is something like what my classmates did to me when they bullied and harassed me for simply having poor eyesight.

Mr. Coyne argues that hate speech laws are simply a case of "hurt feelings," but that is a flippant and very inaccurate description. More accurately, hate speech is hating someone simply for the way they were born, it is invalidating a person's very humanity itself. Hate speech, and institutional racism in all its forms, accomplishes the same thing torture is meant to do on an emotional, mental, and (dare is say?) spiritual level: strip someone of their humanity. It has the effect of turning them into something not "normal" or acceptable to society, of "othering" people. And those who post their hate speech on the internet are using a public forum to broadcast these views and disseminate them to the public at large. By allowing people to engage in hate speech, we are allowing them to spread ignorance, hatred and fear of people for being who they were born as. It seems to me that the "hurt feelings" defence of hate speech is simply a way to minimize the experiences and feelings of those who are a target of hate speech. It hearkens back to the old lie that "sticks and stones may break my bones..." but the truth is that you have to be in a pretty high place in society (i.e. a white man in Canada who's also a public figure in the media) to never experience what real hatred and prejudice feels like or what affect it has on one's very mind and soul.

All this being said, I do not think Andrew Coyne is racist in any way. I also often really enjoy his writing (his recent piece "How Canada broke up with the U.S." is funny and interesting) I also do not begrudge him writing the piece I am responding to, his opinion in this case is perfectly valid, and I welcome the debate, which is why I wrote this rebuttal.

Follow me on Twitter: @WendelSchwab

Wendel Schwab