In 2008 there was no incumbent mayor and it was a pretty close race between NDP-affiliated Dean Fortin and business candidate Rob Reid. In 2011, Fortin had an overwhelming victory over business candidate Paul Brown. I think most of this can be attributed to the incumbency advantage for a mayor, who is in the media much more than an incumbent councilor. Brown was a weaker candidate than Reid and I guess people weren’t as disappointed in Fortin’s first term as I was. Filipovic picked up votes as the stricter nomination requirements kept the mostly left-wing crackpots out of the race.

There were fewer council candidates so votes were more concentrated (meaning you needed more to win). Notably, John Luton lost even though he increased his vote percentage. Geoff Young obviously did so well due to his opposition to the Johnson Street Bridge process, but given the mayor’s high votes I’m not convinced that his slate did poorly because of their performance. Although the incumbency advantage should never be discounted, the pattern is too random to read a strong voice into the electorate. I think I might have to concede that Ben Isitt, Lisa Helps and Shellie Gudeon simply ran better campaigns, as lame of an explanation as that is. It’s hard to understand Philippe Lucas’ fall in particular: I assume most voters knew that he was a vocal representative of the left, even if he usually ended up voting with the center.

I’m hoping that Isitt will pick up blogging about council now that Luton is gone.

Rose Henry

Having a member of the street community on council (rather than just councillors who don’t hate homeless people, like we’ve had in the past) is a risk worth taking. There’s a potential that she could provide radical solutions to a lot of Victoria’s most pressing problems.

Lisa Helps

She was the vice-chair of Fernwood’s Cornerstone project. She runs a community microlending organization. And she’s working on a PhD in the History of Homelessness in Victoria! Unlike just about everyone else in this race, she has specific, measurable, good platform ideas.

Ben Isitt

He’s young and progressive but also definitely qualified. He ran for mayor in the past and came off as a punk, but he’s realized that he should spend some time in council and he’s been doing his time in the community the last three years. I’d like to give him a chance to show us what he can do.

Shellie Gudgeon

I like her pragmatism. In particular, her reluctance to jump into light rail seems prudent. She seems like a good voice for small business on council.

No one else has captured my attention. I might vote for Marianne Alto just because she hasn’t really had a chance, and an open data motion isn’t the worst way to leave your mark. I might vote for Philippe Lucas, because he seems like one of the more effective progressive incumbents, even if that’s not saying much. Or I might save my votes: the less you vote, the more your votes are worth in this screwed-up electoral system.

As a slate, the candidates can have whatever policies they want, but they’ve decided to emphasize the theme of open government. I’m a big supporter of open government. But it appears that these four candidates, and therefore the slate, is right wing:

• Paul Brown is obviously the right-wing candidate for mayor. He’s an accountant and his main messaging is about cutting expenses.
• Although I love to read Bernard von Schulmann’s blog, his posts show an obvious right-wing bias.
• All three candidates for council are small business owners, which tend to only run for council when they think things have gone too far left (otherwise they’re busy running their businesses).
• Linda Lisa McGrew appears to be one of those financially-conservative Greens.

It appears that their idea of open government is opening up the budget so they can find all that waste. Just like Rob Ford in Toronto. I won’t be voting for any of them.

1. React to the court ruling that homeless people are allowed to camp in parks if there are insufficient shelter beds
2. Secure funding to replace the Johnson Street Bridge

Having tent cities in parks would spur people to action about homelessness. Council couldn’t have that, so they appealed the ruling and passed a law requiring tents to be removed during the day. Because council votes are secret, it’s hard to tell whether everyone voted for it, but Philippe Lucas, the most left-wing councillor, is on record in support of the bylaw.

I want radical solutions to homelessness, not just buying a motel to house a handful of Victoria’s hundreds of homeless. So I won’t be voting for any incumbents based on their advocacy for the homeless.

Replacing the bridge was a good decision, but Council’s gross disregard for civic engagement or even basic public relations will cost the City millions of dollars due to the borrowing referendum. Council themselves have not yet been punished and I don’t see any evidence that they’ve learned a lesson. Geoff Young was the sole opponent on Council to the bridge process. Although I don’t agree with Young on many issues, I respect his courage to go against the groupthink and value his role as a dissenter so he has my vote.

I will vote for John Luton because his blog is the only way I get any idea what’s going on in the extremely secretive Council. I also like have an anti-car advocate on Council, although it’s hard to tell how effective he is at this role. Plus he always shows up at downtown events.

My impression is that no one else on Council has done much of anything, so I’m going to vote for non-incumbents in the hopes that they’ll do something.

Many political parties in Canada are described as “big tents” or even “coalitions”. The Liberals in BC and Social Credit before them are the “free market coalition”. The BC NDP balances environmentalism to keep the Greens at bay and resource exploitation by unionized labour. The Mulroney Progressive Conservatives were a coalition that broke apart in 1993 into the Bloc and Reform Parties.

You can create a coalition right now just by joining whatever government-ready political party is closest to your views and working within to shift them in that direction. People want proportional representation because they think coalitions will be built in the open – but collective platforms will be negotiated in the back rooms and your pet issues might not make the cut.

The way parties work is very opaque to your average Canadian. For example, my friend Adam said that I should have got involved with the leadership campaign instead of whining about robocalls – but the only volunteering opportunity I was aware of was making those very calls! The Conservation Voters had the right idea to try to influence the BC Liberal Leadership race, they were just a dollar short and a day late. Everyone calling for proportional representation needs to join a government-ready party and figure the system out if they really want change.

His argument is that although everyone has a political right to vote, they have a moral obligation not to vote badly. A bad vote is one that is not rationally justified. Votes based on emotion (eg: fear), immoral beliefs (eg: racism) and random selection are bad. Because bad votes cancel out good votes, they are harmful to society.

Brennan puts forward a number of metaphors:

• Voting is like surgery: surgeons have a moral obligation to be well-trained and to do their best, but we don’t hold it against them when they make honest mistakes.
• Bad voting is like pollution: although a single car does not have a big impact, we have an obligation to reduce emissions because of their collective harm.
• Voting is like friends choosing a restaurant: if one of them knows more about local restaurants, the others should abstain from offering unfounded opinions.

So if you’re in favour of universal voting, it is not enough to argue that people have a moral obligation to vote, they must also have a moral obligation to be rational and informed, which has a much higher opportunity cost: “there are myriad worthwhile life goals, which, due to time scarcity, are incompatible with becoming a levelheaded amateur social scientist”.

Brennan argues, “what contemporary democracies need most to preserve equality and liberty is not full, informed participation, but an electorate that retains a constitutional culture and remains vigilant enough that it will rise against any leader that tries to abuse their liberties.” The rest of the time, you should leave voting to the experts. Those 40% of voters said “I don’t see the difference between these parties, so I’ll let the rest of you decide on nuance”.

I haven’t listened to a single robocall message or voicemail. Once I realized that I was on the list, I started screening my calls. I’m conscientious enough that I listen to the first second of voicemails before deleting them. This has really underscored my need for visual voicemail.

Robocalls and voicemails often don’t even get to who they’re supporting in the first second, so calls placed to me have been worth nothing to their campaigns. Despite the fact that Obama overwhelmingly demonstrated the value of text messages in his 2008 campaign, I have not received a single text. Texts are cheaper to send than robocalls (and much cheaper than volunteer calls) and they can’t be ignored without delivering their payload.

I have not been invited to Like anyone on Facebook or Follow anyone on Twitter. In the past week I’ve received 16 emails from candidates, about half of which follow guidelines for email newsletter metadata. Because I didn’t opt-in to any of these, I have been marking them all as spam and haven’t opened any of them.

I can only assume that the barrage of phone calls and emails is effective for some voters, or else the campaign directors just don’t know what else to try. But I hope the NDP don’t expect this incompetence to win them the next provincial election. It’s embarrassing that Canadian parties still haven’t learned from the lessons of America in 2008.

Income splitting is a financial reward for marriage (including common law). The societal stability provided by married couples is desirable and the government already has lots of policy encouraging marriage (the most basic being taking marriage santification over from religious organizations). If you choose not to get married, you’re generally harming society.

The question is, how valuable is marriage compared to other behaviour the government could be encouraging, like economic growth or women participating in the workforce? This is quite a reasonable debate to be having during an election, with the Conservatives wanting to promote more marriage and the other parties preferring the present amount of marriage.

Don points out that Woolley makes a partial straw-man argument in the Globe & Mail: single-income couples produce a huge amount of domestic services, but couples where both people work full-time produce the same amount of domestic services no matter how different their incomes are. So it does make sense that a couple making $80k + $30k should pay the same amount of tax as a couple making $55k + $55k.

Simpson is correct that the tax change is regressive and as Stewart reports will overwhelmingly benefit the top 13% of households. The obvious solution to this is to make the tax change revenue-neutral: increase the income tax rate on the top 13% of earners enough to cover the $2.5-billion saved by tax payers. In fact, why not increase the top tax rate now and implement the income splitting once the budget is balanced?

My parents like watching debates, so I remember them as a way to feel connected to the abstract world of politics. (Perhaps this is why I consider politics a spectator game, like professional wrestling.) In my early 20s, I figured debate parties would be a good way to bring political buffs together and engage the apathetic, although I don’t remember many actual parties. I do remember a bartender scoffing at me when I asked if they’d switch from ESPN 7 to the Obama-McCain debate. Now I know few people with cable, so debates are no longer part of my political experience.

I agree with Potter insofar as debates seem to underscore what everyone already knows: Preston Manning and Stephane Dion weren’t bilingual enough to be Prime Minister; Stockwell Day just wasn’t competent enough; Rita Johnson was leading a dying party; and nobody, not even Elizabeth May, deserved a majority in 2008.

I approve of debates at least in principle because they’re summarize an election: apathetic voters can tune in (and will as long as it’s a watercooler topic) and the leaders at least have an opportunity to identify fundamental issues of the campaign and summarize their party’s platforms. If someone were to invest only 1 hour in a political race, a televised debate is in the running (a local all-candidates’ meeting is more effort). Debate is traditionally a very important part of the Westminister system of government, much moreso than in the United States, so it’s reasonable to expect our leaders to be good debaters, although it’s not reasonable to demand that they look good on TV.