Outremont and Ontario Election

I’m as worried as ever that on Monday the NDP will win over the Liberals in Outremont. This would be a serious blow to my leader Stephane Dion and would make the appearance of the Liberals not having momentum. My understanding is that for the last couple weeks the Liberals have been running a spirited campaign, but I don’t know if it was enough to catch up to Mulcair. I can’t conjecture what the election results would look like. One conjecture seems as doubtful as the next.

I’ve now joined Michael Chan’s re-election campaign. I’ve also joined his re-election campaign group on Facebook. I’m afraid that there there are a few “wall” comments but not too much else content. Nobody is doing in depth discussion about how the campaign is going. I am, however, getting daily email campaign updates from the central Liberal campaign. Needless to say they highlight Liberal policy announcements and criticize the Tories and the NDP. Speaking of policy, the Green Party has announced that a Green government would put into place SIX new statutory holidays. These include Earth Day, “Ontario’s birthday”, Remembrance Day and provincial and municipal election days. What about times like this year when Earth Day falls on a Saturday or Sunday? I especially do not agree with statutory holidays on election days. That is too much of a disruption and does not necessarily encourage people to vote. The reason according to Green Party leader Frank De Jong is that workers in other countries who have more days off are more productive. I wonder if De Jong has the statistical evidence to back this up. This statutory holiday policy has a European feel to it. It is in many continental European countries that have an increased number of holidays and also often have election day as a holiday. Another thing about election day on a holiday is that there is one group of workers who don’t get the day off – election workers! Another problem is that on election day schools are a common source of location for polls to be placed. On a statutory holiday schools will be closed and unable to be used for polling locations, causing a serious administrative headache. That’s why I prefer Dalton’s single new holiday in February.

School shooting in Toronto

If either John Tory or Stephen Harper attempt to score political points against the Liberals on this school shooting in Toronto, I will be very upset. It is upsetting enough about this tragedy without politicians trying to score political points on this terrible tragedy. I don’t want to hear from Stephen Harper that this incident is all the opposition’s fault for stalling Bills C-9 and C-10. Whoever did this was probably a first offender so that neither Bill C-9 nor Bill C-10 would have applied. That’s not mentioning the fact that Bill C-9 recently received third reading in the Senate and really has not been purposefully stalled anytime recently if ever.

I don’t want to hear from John Tory that Dalton McGuinty should have already done something to prevent this tragedy from happening. Tragedies happen. It looks as though this was not a random shooting but a targeted one for a specific reason against the victim. This is not the first targeted shooting that has occurred at Toronto’s schools in the last 7 years. If anything, its incidents like these that point to a need to ban handguns so that anyone caught with one could be arrested on the spot and prevented from committing an imminent crime. This is something Stephen Harper refuses to do. Because of that, maybe it’s time the provincial government looked at introducing its own handgun ban and exploring whether doing so is constitutional. In any event I will be very angry if I hear any Conservative politicians trying to blame the Liberals for this terrible tragedy.