Year: 2005

Letter to candidates

The following is a letter I e-mailed to the four major-party candidates in my riding, Joe Fontana (Liberal), Stephen Maynard (NDP), John Mazzilli (Conservative), and Stuart Smith (Green).

Dear sirs,

I’m a voter in the London North Centre riding. My vote in the upcoming election will not be based solely on a leader, a party, a candidate or a particular issue, but on a considered evaluation of all of those elements. To that end, I’d like to ask several questions of each of you, the answers to which will help me make an informed vote on January 23.

First off, if you have one, what is your personal campaign website? I’ve only been able to find Mr. Mazzilli’s and Mr. Fontana’s.

Although you are running for election to the federal government, it is as a representative of your riding that you will be elected. To date I haven’t seen much discussion of what any of you believe are the most important issues facing local ridings, i.e. not just London North Centre but London-Fanshawe, London West, Kent-Middlesex-Lambton, etc. If you had to pick three issues for this area, what would they be, and what is your position on them?

Voters will be choosing you in large part to make their voice heard by the government. If elected, how will you evaluate the opinions of those you represent? When they are in conflict, what will be your process to balance those opinions with your personal beliefs and party policy?

Three of you will belong to parties that do not form the government after the upcoming election. If you are elected, how will you work with that party to see that local opinions are represented? Similarly, how will you and your party work with MPs from other parties if yours forms the government? For example, in a Conservative government where a Liberal candidate like Marc Garneau wins his riding, would you consider appointing him to a relevant advisory position, or even a position in the government (or cabinet)? If at all, how will your actions change in a minority government?

We rarely hear about the actions of MPs unless they are in cabinet or are running for election; even then we hear more about what their party has done and less about their achievements on behalf of their riding. How will you, and your party, make government and candidates more accessible, visible, and accountable to the voters in local ridings?

Recognizing that it is run at arm’s length from the government, what is your stance, and your party’s policy, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, particularly with regard to funding, the Broadcast Act, corporate governance, and the lengthy recent lockout? Do you believe there is a need for a national public broadcaster at all? If so, what is your vision for the organization; if not, why not? Mr. Fontana, as one of the direct (albeit belated) players in the lockout, do you think the organization is being run effectively by its current management?

How would a government formed by your party alter current support for the arts and amateur sports? I’m not referring just to funding, although that’s obviously an important factor, but to other related issues like copyright and local, regional and national exposure.

Finally, I’d like to discuss your answers on my weblog. This may involve quoting or summarizing your responses to each question, in whole or in part. If you’d prefer I only do one or the other—or that I keep your responses entirely private—please let me know.

Thank you in advance for your answers. Good luck to each of you in a positive, issue-based campaign.

(signed)

Greens’ Harris on CBC

Jim Harris, leader of the Green Party, was on CBC’s The National last night in one of their interactive Your Turn segments. Before I watched all I really knew was that the Greens are focused on the environment… and afterwards, that’s still all I know about their platform. I’ll give this to Harris, though: he’s an expert at spinning any question back to his issue. The discussion went something like this:

“Mr. Harris, what does the Green Party have to say about the Gomery inquiry?” “There’s a much bigger scandal in Canada, and that’s the government’s policy on the environment.”

“Mr. Harris, what are you going to do about high income taxes?” “We’re going to put a tax on gas, but it’s not a gas tax, it’s a save-the-environment tax.”

“Mr. Harris, what is the Green Party’s policy on national child care?” “Our children won’t have a future if we don’t fix the environment for them today.”

“Mr. Harris, what about unemployment?” “Canada’s got a good profile for wind power, and we’re going to be creating green-collar jobs in that industry.”

About the only answer Harris gave that he didn’t reroute to the environment was to complain that his party doesn’t get covered by the media… apparently oblivious to the fact that he was doing so on national television. (Host Peter Mansbridge was quite pointed in reminding Harris of that, not once but twice.)

I’m not sure whether the purpose of Harris’s appearance was to show Canadians that the Greens aren’t just a single-issue party or if it was to show that they are. I do know that by refusing to provide substantial answers to numerous legitimate questions, particularly those on which any party serious about governing should have well-defined stances, he made it much less likely that I’ll consider a Green vote.

…not as I do?

It puzzles me to no end why a large majority of the important tools that are needed to build Java applications for settop boxes are written in compiled languages and provided only in Windows executable form.

This isn’t an idle complaint, by the way. I started rebuilding one of those tools in Java tonight, going from an algorithm in a specification (and I use the terms algorithm and specification loosely). Fortunately it’s going quickly: in just over three hours, including puzzling over the algorithm—which, despite being defined as an extension to another algorithm in another spec, is almost entirely different—and learning the relevant Java APIs, it’s about half done and well on its way to being an Ant task to boot. But this is at least the seventh time I’ve had cause to do something like this, and it’s getting really really old.

Specific harm

MOE: I’m a well-wisher, in that I don’t wish you any specific harm.

Sleazy downtown nightclub Club Phoenix has been shut down due to incidents where patrons used beer bottles as weapons and a minor was served alcohol. And I really don’t wish them any specific harm… but still, my thoughts are more along the lines of another Simpsons character:

Ha ha!

Three agents and a student

Of the four candidates from national parties running in the local riding, three are real estate agents and one is a university student. Only one has his own website, and surprisingly (to me, anyway) it’s not the student. Doesn’t mean anything, necessarily, I just find it interesting.

Conservative candidate John Mazzilli is the only one with his own domain, a webpage hosted on GeoCities. It includes an email address, phone number and address of his riding office.

Green candidate Stuart Smith doesn’t have a site of his own, but he has contributed one original item to a shared site for the three city-riding candidates. His page on the party website lists email and phone number, plus the office and contact info for the riding association.

NDP runner Stephen Maynard also doesn’t have a site of his own, but at least the party has a page for him which lists an email address and phone number… good, since apparently he’s had nothing to say about his candidacy.

Liberal MP Joe Fontana doesn’t appear to have a website of his own—the obvious guess, joefontana.ca, is closed—and his Parliamentary homepage is currently down because The security policy for your network prevents your request from being allowed at this time. The Liberal site doesn’t list a website or email address for him; they don’t even show a riding office! Fortunately the Google cache of the Ottawa site is still around, although I’d wager that very few of the people in the riding would think to use it.

Candidates

CBC’s list of ridings and candidates is already behind, at least for my riding and one of those adjacent. One is somewhat understandable—UWO student Stephen Maynard just won the NDP nomination on Wednesday—but Liberal nominee Glen Pearson was acclaimed almost a full week ago, and was pretty much a given for a week previous to that.

But that’s nothing compared to the other national news media sites. I can’t even find election coverage on CanWest Global’s canada.com site (which features the purported National Post), The Globe and Mail has an election section but doesn’t have a list of candidates, and CTV’s election mini-site doesn’t appear to have a list either. (None of the sites’ search engines turn up hits for Maynard or Pearson either.) The local paper fares better, as one might hope: it had Pearson in its map of regional nominees, published the day after the writ dropped, and had a brief mention of Maynard’s nomination on Wednesday.

Just do it

A simple plea: If your site depends on having Macromedia Flash installed, just include the code to use it, and don’t bother trying to detect whether a browser has the plugin installed or not. People that have it will see your page as you intend; people that don’t will be prompted to download it by the browser.

Tonight’s rant is sponsored by the so-called moock flash detector and the browser makers who invented navigator.plugins.

What’s this all about?

Noticed in the footer of CBC’s Vote by Issue Quiz:

Produced by: CBC.ca in Canada

To submit feedback to CBC.ca, visit cbc.ca/contact.

To report bugs or leave feedback, email webmaster@wbur.bu.edu

Curiosities include:

  • The oddly-phrased CBC.ca in Canada. It makes a little more sense if you realize that…
  • The quiz is on a non-CBC website, the American votebyissue.org run by Boston University. I’m guessing that the content was created by CBC employees but the issue-matching webapp is from BU.
  • The text of the contact link points to a different URL (cbc.ca/contact) than the link itself (the CBC.ca homepage).

The forms in the webapp are strange too: they use checkboxes (suggesting multiple selection) with Javascript to allow only one selection instead of radio buttons (which are designed to work that way). The only reason I can see for this, and it’s suggested by the instructions but not overtly, is that you can choose not to answer a particular question; if you’ve already made a choice you can uncheck a box entirely. A more intuitive/natural interface, I think, would be to use radio buttons with a third item for “no selection”.

To give credit where it’s due, it is nice to see that all of the items in the quiz forms are marked up with <label> elements. On the downside, though, navigation between the post-quiz issues pages is done using radio buttons instead of simple links, even though getting to the pages in the first place does use links. Why‽

Finally, I also noticed that the page titles for the “issues” pages all say WBUR :: Yahoo UK & Ireland :: Vote By Issue Quiz. Where did that come from?

And no, I’m not going to publish my results.

Life of the party

Tonight is the company Chri…er, holiday party. It’ll be the fourth I’ve attended in the 10 years I’ve been working there. The last one I was at was six years ago at an inn an hour outside of town; about 11pm I was fed up and left the event, and I got up out of bed and left the inn entirely about three hours later. Truth be told, I’m only going to this one because a coworker who’s also a close friend convinced me to… and even then, I’m leaving early to go see Harmony Trowbridge.