Help unravel the mystery with Professor Layton!

This showed-up in my inbox the other day from Nintendo in a case of interesting timing, given current events. I found it amusing, and surely ripe for parody by someone with graphic design skills...

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Finding it hard to get excited about Toronto’s mayoralty race

I’ve lived in Toronto for five years now after moving out from British Columbia for a journalism job, and I’m finally starting to feel at home. I still hate the Maple Leafs, but I no longer look away from the CN Tower in an effort to fool myself into thinking I’m not really in Hogtown. I even read the Toronto Star every now and again.

Still, I’m finding it hard to work-up the energy or interest to get excited about our race for mayor or to get engaged by any of the candidates. It’s not that I don’t care about any local issues – transit is my big one – but all the candidates thus far have struck me as either crazy, timid or panderers. It’s hard to be excited about any of them in the mayor’s office, and at this point I still have no idea who I’ll mark an X for in October.

I can safely cross Rob Ford off the list, for reasons so manifold and obvious I shan’t bother to list them. As much as some of his populist pap may strike a chord that is resonating in the polls though, I think his numbers have as much to do with the unimpressive performance of his opponents.

The two obvious choices for me to support based on my political leanings would be George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi. Sadly, I haven’t been much impressed with either of them.

I met Rocco a few times when he was briefly executive director of the federal Liberal Party. He seemed like an accomplished fellow, bursting with energy and ideas. I was pleased when he entered the race, even if he was leaving unfinished business back in Ottawa. But then he started making announcements.

I’ll give Rocco credit for one thing. While Smitherman has been too timid to say muchof substance as the (in his mind) frontrunner, as the scrappy challenger Rossi has been putting plenty of stuff out there. The problem is, I don’t really like any of it. He seemed to hew right so sharply when he launched I found myself wondering if it was really the Liberal Party he was formerly executive directing.

He supports empty populist pap that echoes the Reform Party of old and sounds nice but will do nothing to confront the issues facing Toronto, like cutting the Mayor’s pay or implementing recall legislation. Selling-off Toronto Hydro, besides getting rid of a valuable asset, just temporarily papers-over deeper budget issues. I can get behind putting garbage services to tender. But he loses me on the issue that matters to me most: transit.

First he wanted to freeze Transit City, a plan already funded and in the works that would see LRT lines soon crisscross the city, in favour of studying other options. We need more transit now, this plan is ready to go, and preferring an imperfect plan to more delay I opposed this. Now he wants to take the money from selling Toronto Hydro and put it toward expanding the subway. Subway is better than LRT, but a few problems. First, I don’t support selling off assets to do it. Two, subway is a lot more expensive than LRT, which means less of it, which means many areas will wait much longer for service improvements. Third, he assumes the other levels of government that have committed funding to Transit City will allow it to be ported over to this new plan. That’s a large assumption.

Still, while I don’t agree with most of them, Rossi is at least out there talking policy. Which is more than I can say for Smitherman. As someone who hasn’t followed the race super-close, the impression I have of George is that he seems very reluctant to take firm positions, sometimes gets angry, and went for a long walk down Eglington. So I went to a Web site and, while he offers a little more substance there, traffic wardens and service review don’t exactly set hearts a’flutter. And on transit, he seems to want to do LRT and subway but I don’t see how he’ll pay for it.

Then, there are a handful of other candidates. Apparently someone named Joe Pantalone is running; I know this only because Jack Layton just endorsed him (Jack appears no less than thrice on the front page of his Web site). There’s also a Sarah Thompson who may or may not be slightly conservative and has no political experience. And there was some guy that wanted to build a casino or something but I think he dropped out.

There are our choices for mayor in Canada’s largest city. Any race where people were excited about the prospect of John Tory's potential entry has problems. Maybe I should start averting my gaze from the CN Tower once more. Will any of the candidates step up and impress?

If voters like me are so uninspired we don't bother to vote, that's how Rob Ford wins. But just being the "not crazy alternative" won't cut it either.

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Layton sucks and blows on registry, but with pizazz

Follow the bouncing-ball. Jack Layton had a press conference on the gun registry today where he confirmed he can’t get his rural MPs to support what has long been NDP party policy and support the gun registry.

He doesn’t want to whip his caucus, because it seems likely some of them wouldn’t fall into line if he tried. I know the NDP insists its long-held principle they don’t whip private members bills (PMB), but in fact we all know this is only a Conservative government bill masquerading as a PMB to exploit that fact. As an aside, one wonders just what trickery the Conservatives could push through this loophole if they wanted to.

Still, Jack doesn’t want to be seen as doing nothing while his MPs kill the gun registry. So today he proposed a private member’s bill that would reform the registry. Coincidentally, his reforms are pretty much the same as the reforms proposed by the Liberals in April, reforms the NDP and its surrogates have been spending the last four months attacking as insufficient. The one notable difference is that the Liberals would enact the reforms when in government while voting to keep the registry now, while the NDP would introduce a private members bill as soon as it can this fall. Their hope is the reforms will convince their rural MPs to vote for the registry.

Sounds great, right? Sure. I liked these reforms when the Liberals proposed them in April, so I still like them now. I’m quite surprised it has taken the NDP this long to try to find a compromise, with an 11th-hour desperation play. While it’d be nice if Jack had said “great ideas Michael, now let’s take them one step further” instead of throwing bricks, I’m a glass half-full kinda guy.

But there’s just one thing: the vote to kill the registry will come well before Layton could possibly see his bill in the house. Layton’s answer to that?

Mr. Layton was pressed by reporters on how he expects this bill to become a reality, when Ms. Hoeppner’s bill is lined up for a vote so soon after Parliament resumes. He suggested that if all parties come onside, they could use the bill as a basis to reach a solution — presumably meaning that Ms. Hoeppner’s bill would either be amended or would die.

“There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to sit down with goodwill and open minds. There’s no good reason why we shouldn’t be able to build solutions that bring us together.”

Now I’m certainly no government spokesperson. I’ll leave that dubious honour to Dimitri Soudas. But if Layton is seriously expecting the Conservatives to agree to kill the Hoeppner bill and get onboard with reforms to the registry they rejected when proposed by the Liberals in April, I expect they won’t find the government’s response to be favourable. They might even tell Layton “it’s our party’s policy not to interfere with private members bills” with a little smile. If the NDP is counting on Conservative help here, they’re dreaming.

Which means the vote to kill the registry will come long before a hypothetical NDP private members bill reforming it could ever see the light of day. And needless to say, if the registry is killed any bill to reform it dies as well.

So, that means NDP MPs will be faced with a choice, the same choice they’ve had all along: do they vote to kill the registry next month, or do they vote to keep it based on the promise of future reforms, either by a private member’s bill or by a new government.

For the Liberal caucus, it’s the latter. The choice has been made. Their leader, Michael Igntieff, has convinced them to support keeping the registry now by promising specific reforms by a future Liberal government.

Now it’s up to Layton to convince his caucus to do the same. He made an interesting comment here:

Mr. Layton was also critical of Mr. Ignatieff, who last April proposed many of the compromises that the NDP is now suggesting. The difference, said Mr. Layton, is that Ignatieff is saying he would make the conciliatory changes to the registry if the Liberals win the next election.

“But Liberal MPs are parliamentarians now,” said Mr. Layton. “Not parliamentarians in waiting. They need to act now.”

Yes Jack, and the vote on killing the registry will come first, and your MPs are parliamentarians now too. And you're not a leader-in-waiting either. So the question still remains: can you convince your MPs to accept a compromise or not? And if you can’t, will you whip them or will you let your MPs kill the registry?

This is a test of leadership Jack and, to paraphrase yourself, you need to act now.

UPDATE: Now with video, where the media openly laugh at Layton's feeble rationalizations. I hope his caucus takes him more seriously.

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You can’t have an urban/rural divide without urban

With the latest vote on the gun registry approaching, and its fate still very much up in the air, I’ve been reading much about the urban/rural divide. Except the punditry seems to think you can have a divide with only one side. They’re nearly uniformly ignoring the urban side of the equation.

A good example of this myopic reporting came the other day from the Globe’s John Ibbitson:

The Conservatives happily exploit that divide, in the North and elsewhere. The Liberals and NDP can only suffer.

Apparently in John’s world, the Conservatives can only benefit, no matter what they do. And if my grandmother had wheels, John, she’d be a wagon.

In fact, killing the registry would very much hurt Conservative chances in urban Canada. And the NDP's, since if the registry dies it will have been with the NDP’s assistance. And since it’s in urban Canada and Quebec where the Conservatives can and must gain seats to keep government or form a majority, there Conservatives could pay a steep price.

Let’s say the Conservative attempt to kill the registry fails. This would actually be the best-case scenario for the Harper government. They can tell their rural base they tried their best and raise a bunch of money off it while keeping their support, and in urban Canada since the registry lives, its status-quo. There might be some blowback for Liberal rural MPs, but by and large those for whom killing the registry is a ballot box issue aren’t voting Liberal anyways and the party's proposed reforms are sensible.

Now, let’s say the Conservatives with NDP assistance succeed in killing the gun registry. Their rural supporters are pleased with them, and will keep on supporting them. It’s hard to see Liberal rural MPs who voted to keep it being hurt because the registry will be gone, with it removed as a ballot issue rural voters will turn to other issues. Status quo in rural Canada.

In urban Canada, though, it would be a very different story. Right now, the registry hasn’t been a ballot issue in urban Canada because it’s the status quo, it’s in place and Harper wasn’t making a lot of noise about killing it. So urban voters, particularly women, allowed themselves to be wooed by sweater-vest Steve and targeted moderate policies, such as EI reforms around maternal and parental leaves. Combined with a very effective ethnic outreach program, a number of urban seats swung Conservative in the last election and many more were competitive.

Kill the registry though, and all of a sudden it becomes a ballot box issue in urban Canada. It becomes about gun control and crime, and suddenly the Conservatives find themselves on the wrong side of a soft on crime wedge. And it won’t take that many votes to swing a number of Conservative urban ridings. Not only that, they can say good-bye to adding the seats they need to grow. (Particularly as they abandon their ethnic outreach strategy in favour of more pandering to their base.)

As for the NDP, while their urban MPs will have voted to keep the registry, with their party having allowed it to be killed they will also be hit with the anger over its death. This will mean pressure for people like Paul Dewar in Ottawa, for their Vancouver area MPs, and even for Jack and Olivia in Toronto. And it may well be death for Thomas Mulcair in Outremont.

We’re reading much from the media about the pressure rural Liberal and NDP MPs are under. What has been completely absent is the same scrutiny of Conservative MPs that represent urban and Quebec ridings. Can Alice Wong really claim she’s voting freely the wishes of the people of Richmond? Can James Moore in Port Coquitlam? Andrew Saxton in North Vancouver? How about Peter Kent in Thornhill, or John Baird and Pierre Poilievre in Ottawa? How about Keith Ashfield in Fredericton?

And those are just a few.

In fact, there are nearly 30 Conservative-held ridings that are suburban or urban-enough (or in Quebec enough) that you’d have to ponder if their constituents really support the government’s supposedly free but surprisingly uniform opposition to the registry.

It would be interesting to hear the answers, if John Ibbitson and his colleagues could be bothered to ask.

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Canadian views are hardening on gun control, & away from the Conservative line

Angus Reid released survey data today with a lot of questions on gun control and gun registry-related issues. I’m sure you’ll hear many of the usual c/Conservative suspects grab a few of the figures to support their talking-points. Indeed, they already are. But looking more closely at the numbers, and more importantly at the trend lines, show some interesting findings they’ll chose to ignore.

They don’t provide the trendlines directly, but if you pull-up the last gun study Angus Reid did in 2009 and compare the findings (the bulk of the questions are identical) some very interesting trends emerge showing the views of Canadians are trending toward greater measures on gun control. You also see some of the funny inherent contradictions that come with public opinion measurement.

For example, Canadians by and large agree gun violence is becoming less of a serious problem. Just 28 per cent called it serious, down by six points, while 42 per cent called it moderately serious, down by four points. Some 23 per cent said it was not too serious, a rise of eight points.

You’d think with that trend, people wouldn’t favour stricter gun control measures. But they do. When asked if they’d favour a complete ban on handguns in Canada, nearly half, 49 per cent, said yes it would be justified, while 39 per cent said it would not be justified. Again, besides the near majority, the interesting thing here is the trends: support for a ban was up three points, and more strikingly opposition to a handgun ban was down by seven points.

Which brings us to the infamous gun registry. One question you’re seeing be latched-onto is if the registry has been successful or not fighting crime. Just 13 per cent said it was (up two) while 43 per cent said it wasn’t (down four) and 20 per cent said it had no effect (down three). Those are interesting results, particularly when compared to the complete ban results. Do they mean many want the government to go further because the registry hasn’t been effective enough, or scrap it all together because it’s ineffective? Probably both, but it’s impossible to say with the available data.

On support/oppose scrapping the long gun registry, the figure you’ll hear most is that 44 per cent support scrapping it, while 35 per cent oppose it. That those numbers aren’t more wide given the opinion on its effectiveness shows that some simply want a more effective registry. And again, here, the trend is telling. Support for scrapping the registry has dropped by seven points since last November, while opposition is up by one point. Which means some former registry opponents are on the fence, and support for scrapping the registry is on the decline.

Finally, going further than just a handgun ban, Angus Reid also asked if it should be legal or illegal for ordinary Canadians to own firearms all together. In a reversal from last year, a plurality of Canadian (45 per cent) said it should be illegal, and 40 per cent said it should stay legal. Illegal was up by six points, while keep it legal declined by seven.

So, look at the numbers and the trends in totality and what can we take away? Canadians are increasingly favouring stricter gun control, not looser. Support for scrapping the registry is declining, and support shouldn’t be taken as a condemnation of gun control.

Finally, a few things are often overlooked by the pundits and the media around this issue. They paint it as a rural/urban thing, which is fair enough. But while they spend much time on how this could impact rural voting, they ignore how it could impact urban voting. We have the registry now, and I’d argue this issue has largely been factored into rural voting patterns. Urban, though, is a different story. How many swing urban soccer mom votes who have gone Conservative during Harper’s sweater vest era (and moved seats) would flip if he succeeds in killing the registry and is seen as soft on gun control? Those are swing seats at risk, while the votes they’d gain are in rural ridings they probably already hold.

Also, look at the regionals and you’ll see opinions in Quebec are quite staunchly anti-gun. Some 76 per cent of Quebecers view gun violence as very or moderately serious, 54 per cent support a handgun ban, 54 per cent would make gun ownership illegal, and 51 per cent oppose scrapping the gun registry.

A: Urban Canada. Quebec.

Q: What are two places the Conservatives can’t afford to lose support if they’re going to ever get a majority?

Were I an NDPer representing a riding like Outremont I’d be a little concerned here too.

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