I will also say, I have absolutely zero sympathy for any of the key players. To quote a discussion I had in a Thai restaurant, Harper is an asshole, Layton is an asshat, and Dion is just an utter ass. Michael Ignatieff, probably the only national figure I haven’t yet totally given up on, once again proved himself to be the smartest man in the room by half-heartedly joining the high-fives and then quietly backing away while the coalition started handing out fantasy cabinet posts to each other.

Still, can you imagine if this shit were happening during, say, a critical period of a massive global economic meltdown that was expected to cripple the country’s economy for years? Oh, man, that hypothetical situation would suck!

And on that happy note, if you haven’t already seen it, here’s Wednesday’s pre-recorded video address of the man we’re supposed to think should be leader of the country. I can’t help but wonder what the rejected takes look like for this to be the one they went with.

I think I’ll revisit this post in a year and see how spectacularly right and/or wrong I am. Hopefully, I’m wrong. Feel free to leave your own predictions in the comments.

Oh, and also, the scenario I would *like* to see? No coalition. Ignatieff elected as Liberal leader. Grits defeat Tories in a proper election without the support of the NDP and Bloc.

(Incidentally, I’ve been reading Simpson’s co-authored book on the politics of climate change in Canada. I’m finding it to be an excellent political primer, but a bit light on science.)

Canada hopes to achieve a North American climate-change deal with U.S. president-elect Barack Obama and will begin working on the file within weeks, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Wednesday. Meantime, officials told The Canadian Press the Harper government has been waiting for the departure of President George W. Bush to work with his successor on an integrated carbon market.

I don’t really buy that Harper’s hands were tied by the Bush administration, but I do think that announcing it literally within hours of Obama’s win is encouraging. And yes, I think so even though part of the reason is to try to negotiate favourable terms for Alberta’s oil sands — that’s politics. At least it’s clear that putting off this discussion is no longer an option.

Of course, the Obama plan falls well short of what Canada agreed to under Kyoto, but this one seems to stand a good chance of actually happening, particularly since the state of the US economy might make for a pretty good reason to invest renewable-energy infrastructure even sooner.

Dear America,

Please don’t fuck this up.

Love, Eric

I can’t vote in the US, but I like to make-believe I can. When Obama and McCain started the campaign, I was actually hoping more for a McCain presidency more than an Obama one. Obama seemed unproven and the beneficiary of a cult of personality, whereas McCain seemed like a reasonable, honourable moderate who would be able to work well with a Democratic senate and congress and possibly steer his own party toward the center, or at least center-right. But in any case, I thought, either would be vastly better than the Bush presidency.

Turns out I was completely wrong. In picking Palin, McCain showed himself to be unreasonable, unprincipled, and beholden to the Republican far right. He also raised the spectre of a president who would be everything wrong with Bush, but somehow even worse. Pretty much everything the pair has done since then just reinforces that. (I can’t imagine McCain is happy about any of this, either: when it comes time to tell the story of John McCain, it’s going to be downright Shakespearean.)

At the same time, pretty much everything Obama has done has shown him to be the kind of person who should be president. I don’t buy that Obama is a new JFK, or even a new Clinton, but I do completely buy that he’s the man for the job. I have a strange and unfamiliar feeling when I read about American politics now. I think it’s… hope? Or at least hope’s little brother, cautious optimism?

And so, another Canadian election has come and gone. To be honest, while I’m no particular fan of the Tories, I think the outcome we got was the best available. I may not agree with or even personally like Harper, but I do think he’s a competent and committed servant of the people and not the closet ideologue he’s sometimes made out to be. And I think he’s done the right thing in not overreacting on the financial crisis, given that the foundations of our financial system really do seem to be relatively sound. However, I’m not ready yet to think Stephen Harper should be given a majority, and far and away the number one reason for that is his short-sighted view on climate change. I predict that as a nation, we will increasingly come to see our inaction as a major political, economic and moral failing in years to come. Particularly since even if John McCain manages, against all odds, to win, the US will still have a greener chief executive than Canada. Hopefully, pressure from the opposition parties, the provinces, the EU, and the post-Bush US, combined with the drop in oil prices, will tip the political scales in favour of an aggressive Tory environmental plan. It may make the base unhappy, but seriously, where are they going to go? It could even be what the Tories need to pick up some extra seats in the cities and the east.

I have a lot of respect for Dion as a person, and even as a politician, but I’ve never once seen him giving a speech or interview and thought, “now, he would be a good leader”. Hopefully he’ll be able to act as environment minister in a future Liberal government under… Prime Minister Ignatieff, perhaps? The Grits need more than just a leadership change, but having an effective leader who isn’t the compromise choice looks to me like an essential first step back to power. Ignatieff is looking less and less like an American carpetbagger, and I suspect the idea of a eloquent, slightly glamorous intellectual as leader is only going to look better when Barak Obama wins. Plus, he’s ruthless and arrogant enough to just feel right as a Liberal PM.

No, the real disappointment this election has been, as it has been for years, the Green party. Canada’s electoral system essentially disenfranchises people who chose to vote according to their conscience rather than strategically. Under this system, the Greens are pretty much destined to lose. They’ve had several elections now to find a way to turn their support into actual political power and the fact they haven’t been able to do it yet kind of suggests to me that it can’t be done. I’ve usually voted Green in the past, despite serious misgivings over their anti-science and slacktivist tendencies. But I didn’t this time, and barring a sudden leap to a sensible, Australian-style preferential ballot, I don’t know if I will again (sorry, mom and dad!).

This chart is from Political Compass, which tries to avoid the standard (and stupid) alignment of political beliefs along a single left-right axis. I’m not sure this is a huge improvement, though: I think my placement so close to the bottom is more due to my anti-authoritarian streak than my similarity to conventional Bob Barr/Ron Paul-style libertarianism, an ideology I think is both heartless and naive. In fact, in this case, the right-left axis is a pretty good indication of my voting preference.

And if only we had a preferential ballot in Canada, I could actually vote for my preferred party. Instead, I’m once again going to vote strategically, just like certain too honest for their own good politicians.

The book is divided into four sections, roughly covering the election cycles of 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972. Though the bitter and amoral genius Nixon is at the centre of the book, it’s Nixonland itself that the book spends most of its time in. Perlstein does a terrific job of letting us into the minds of the hippies and radicals and concerned middle-class parents and resentful blue-collar workers that live there. The author is, himself, a post-Boomer, and he argues persuasively that the country he grew up in is still Nixonland. Watching George Bush (and Sarah Palin), it’s hard to disagree.

xkcd.com

I couldn’t agree more.

I think it’s safe to say that nobody ever looked into 9/11 conspiracy theories or creationism undecided and came out in favour. There’s not really any point in arguing with these people — while they like to surround their arguments with fact-like substances, that serves a psychological, not rational purpose. At the end of the day, they’ve chosen to live in a fantasy world where the facts meet their preconceptions.

Not that conspiracy theorists and creationists are irredeemable — just reason-proof. They need to change the way they think before they can change their minds.