BC Iconoclast

The weakness of polling - two polls released in Alberta at the same time

2012-01-26T14:22:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of skepticism of polling because the results are so often such a very weak reflection of how the public actually votes. Pollsters all act as if their results are good and that there are no systemic problems with how they poll the public. Most political polls are commissioned by the media so they have an incentive not to find fault in the poll they paid for.

This week we see a classic example of the problem in polling with the release of the results of two polls in Alberta.

Forum Research and Leger Marketing both polled in Alberta last week

Party Forum Jan 17 Leger Jan 13-18
PC 38% 53%
Wildrose 29% 16%
Liberals 14% 11%
NDP 13% 16%
Alberta 3% 2%
Others 4% 6%
Poll size 1077 736
error 2.99% 3.61%

I am not sure if the Forum sample size is for the whole poll or only the decided voters. The Leger poll has 900 respondents and 736 decided voters. Since I am not certain of what the Forum sample represents, the math I do below could be somewhat different.

How do you explain two pollsters get things that different?

Polling margin of errors are statements of how likely the result is to land on the part of the bell curve representing 95% of the probable outcomes. If a result on one survey just overlaps with another survey the combined area is a very low probability outcome.

This is what a bell curve looks like for different sample sizes - it shows why polls really need
to have larger sample sizes than 1000 to reflect the public.

So is there overlap an in the results? Applying the margin of error to show the 95% confidence level to each of the top four parties we get the following:

Party Forum Leger
PCs 35.1%-40.9% 49.4%-56.6%
Wildrose 26.8%-31.2% 13.3%-18.7%
Liberals 11.9%-16.1% 8.7%-13.3%
NDP 11.0%-15.0% 13.3%-18.7%

If we only look at the NDP results where there is some overlap, how much of the bell curve of the two surveys does the overlap represent? 10% of the total possible outcomes for each survey fall into the overlap range. What this means is that the two surveys are saying 90% of each of their ranges will not overlap with the other survey at all. Basically we have two bell curves that only share a small tail either at the upper or lower limits.

There is an overlap for the Liberals as well, but the range is only 7.5% of the probable outcomes, a one in 13 chance.

In theory, because the curves go out to infinity, the PC and Wildrose results overlap. In the case of the Wildrose party the overlap is 0.0001% of the time, this is a probability of once in a million. For the PCs it is 0.005% of the time or a one in 20,000 chance.

The NDP and Liberal results are close enough that people will assume the mid range between the two results is the correct result, but statistically it is improbable that this is correct. It highlights the danger of how people view and manipulate the data from polls. People want to see a pattern where the statistics say there is no pattern. People assume that this improbable event of the overlapping range is what happened. Much more likely is that that margins of error in the poll from methodology is many times larger that the statistical one. The real range for the NDP is more likely from 10% to 20%, but this is only a rough guess on my part because I have no quantifiable data to show how much error each pollster causes with how they do their polling.

People are also driven by what they expect the result to be. The NDP getting 14.5% sounds realistic and I have no data to prove that is wrong. People's assumptions about public electoral behaviour is very conservative, past results being considered the most likely future results.

Too often the public seems to accept that a poll could be that one time when the poll is outside of the 95% confidence range on the bell curve. This should be a rare occurrence. Since October 2009 there have been 20 provincial polls in Alberta, only one of those polls should have had an anomalous result. The problem is that most of the time we have no data to test how accurate the pollsters are, this only happens on election day.

In Alberta there have been some significant disagreements between pollsters in the last 20 polls, not just these latest two.

Environics and Think HQ Public Affairs both polled in July 2011, the differences between the PCs and Wildrose between those two polls was as bad as in the latest two polls. One of the two is outside of the 95% confidence range

From early October to early November of 2011 Lethbridge College, Angus Reid Strategies and Environics all polled. The ranges are closer, but the overlapping parts of the curves are small, at least one of the three has to be outside of the 95% confidence level.

What this means is that there is fundamentally wrong with the polling process. Over and over again the "1 in 20" polls crop up much more often than ever should. Of the last nine polls, at least three of the polls are in that rare category. These "rare" polls occurred at least 6.7 times more often than they should have.

Effectively polls are little more than manufactured news. These two latest polls were commissioned by two different newspapers which means neither paper has any interest in reporting the other poll or questioning the accuracy of their poll. It explains why pollsters get no scrutiny in the media even when though they are wrong a lot more than anyone is admitting.

More on oil and gas - this time the North

2012-01-25T12:17:00.000-08:00

Oil has been produced in Norman Wells on the Mackenzie since the 1920s and is now connected to Alberta via a pipeline. The field produces about 5-6 million barrels of oil per year.

The estimate is that the Northwest Territories have long term recoverable oil reserves of between 1.5 billion and 5 billion barrels of oil. The estimate of probable natural gas reserves in the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea is 1.7 trillion cubic meters, though gas hydrates may more than double that. These are larger gas deposits than the total reserves Canada currently has. With the construction of the Mackenzie valley gas pipeline, these gas deposits become reserves.

If we go further north, the deposits are ever larger. The Sverdrup Basin is estimated to contain 3-7 billion barrels of conventional oil and 1.3- 3.5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. In the Canadian waters between Nunavut and Kalaallisut (Greenland) are estimated at 2.5 billion barrels of oil and 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas. The Baffin Bay reserves make it clear why Denmark and Canada care about Hans Island. The Inuit of Kalaallisut are actively encouraging oil and gas development.

I can not find estimates for Davis Strait or Hudson's Bay, both of which should have oil and gas.

Finally, there is the oil on Melville Island which is located in on the western edge of the Canadian arctic archipelago. In the early 1960s it was discovered to have oil and gas, most significantly a large deposit of tar sands. In 1966 the estimate was that these tar sands contained 100,000,000,000 barrels of oil. I can not find more recent estimates of the size of the deposit. This oil is currently not considered recoverable, but with all the natural gas on hand in the Sverup basin, it may not be as unrealistic as one might think with rising oil prices.

The potential for a large scale oil and gas industry in the arctic is a realistic future.

Oil in BC

2012-01-25T10:57:00.000-08:00

People have often spoken about the potential of offshore oil in BC, but what is not talked about is the oil potential of other areas of this province.

Offshore the estimate is that there is about 10 billion barrels of oil available in BC. From that alone BC would have the 20th largest oil reserves in the world. Brazil's Tupi oil field, only discovered in 2006, is of a comparable size and considered a major find. Even though BC offshore oil is a globally significant amount, it is such a political hot potato that it is highly unlikely to be developed anytime soon.

Offshore oil is not the only oil reserve in BC, there are two other significant basins with oil reserves - the Bowser and the Nechako. The BC Government has a long list of studies of these two sedimentary basins and their oil and gas potential.

The Bowser basin is in north western BC has an estimated 2.5 billion barrels. The Nechako basin, covering the area bounded by Highway #16, the Coast Mountains and the Fraser, is estimated to hold 5 billion barrels of oil. With these reserves, BC has oil reserves not much smaller than the US. The nature of the geology in these two basins has lead people to avoid seriously looking for oil and gas in them, but as technology has changed, the likelihood that they will be developed is rising.

The Bowser basin is far enough north and remote enough that it is not likely to be developed anytime soon, though with the development of the Highway #37 corridor and a deep water port in Stewart, it might get attention sooner that I expect.

This leaves us with the Nechako basin.

If one were to develop the Nechako basin oil resource and produce 300,000 to 400,000 barrels of oil per day, this would increase Canada's oil production by about 10%. This would also require a pipeline to the coast somewhere, one that is around 2/3s the size of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Both Kitimat and Vancouver could make sense as terminals for the oil.

This scale of production would bring in annual gross revenues at current prices of around $10,000,000,000 to BC. A significant portion of that revenue would flow to the provincial government as taxes. It would also offer the communities hardest hit by the mountain pine beetle a transition era till the forests have regenerated enough to harvest again. It is important for everyone to understand there are very significant political upsides to developing the Nechako basin.

I am highlighting all this to make people sit back and consider what else could be coming vis a vis oil production. My hope is to pull people away from their single minded obsession with the tar sands and consider a bigger picture of the impact of oil and gas. Oil exploration in BC is going to increase and is going to happen in these two basins, now is the time for people to consider how they will respond.

Open Primaries in Canada

2012-01-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

I think the time has come to open public participation in who is running for office Federally or Provincially. One possible change would be to introduce primaries for the nominations.

Since Federally, and in many provinces, we now have fixed election days, it actually makes it possible to have primaries. What I would suggest is that two months before election day there is a single primary for all the parties.

So looking at this federally, it would mean everyone would be able to vote on who runs for the parties. When you get to the polls, you would decide which primary you wanted to vote in, be that Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green or some other party. You could require that party members have to vote in their own party's primary.

Who would be allowed to run in a primary? Anyone that is a member of the party should be allowed to run.

I would require people running for the nomination to have to get a reasonable number of signatures of electors, something on the order of 300 people.

Whoever wins in the primary would be the party candidate in the general election two months down the road. When someone wins the primary for a party, they are on the ballot and the party can not remove them. No need for a leader signature, no need for any party approval.

Sitting MPs would also have to always face a primary. This is important in all those ridings in Canada were it is the nomination for the party that owns the seat that is the election. Think of all those Conservative seats in Alberta, or a place like East Van for the NDP. It means all the MPs actually have to worry about re-election in every election.

If there was no race for the nomination, I would still have a vote but have a yes/no ballot and if the no wins, they do not get to run in the general election. This would apply to any independent as well. It also means an MP that has no race will still have a yes/no on if they will be on the ballot.

I would go further and require a party to have a minimum of 300 members per riding to be on the ballot at all. Those people would all have to be registered voters living in that riding. This would force the parties to build from the ground up and ensure they have minimal strength in every riding they run in.

I would have independents have to sign up 300 people as local supporters as well. Think of them as members of a local support constituency association.

I would also have all party memberships registered with Elections Canada. Elections Canada would also be the body to which a political party would have to apply to remove a member.

If there is an early election, you could still do all of this, but the timeframe would be much shorter. Three weeks for the primary, four weeks for the general election.

At the moment this is just the start of a thought as a way to open up elections in Canada and loosen the control of the political parties. Let me know what you think of this idea and how one could improve it, or let me know if you think it is dumb idea.

Santorum Won Iowa!

2012-01-19T17:24:00.000-08:00

The vote was close and in the recount it has Santorum winning over Romney by 34 votes. Took long enough for the final results to come in.

I can not imagine the Republicans would choose someone as unelecteable as Santorum as their presidential nominee, but then again they might.

The remaining major candidates in the race are:

Newt Gingrich - endorsed today by Rick Perry as he dropped out
Ron Paul
Rick Santorum
Mitt Romney - endorsed by Jon Huntsman when he dropped out on January 16th

When will the American see sense and realize that only Mitt Romney has any potential of being elected?

Ron Paul is so out of step with the Republicans that I fail to see how he can win. I also really, really do not like his isolationist stance.

Newt Gingrich, really? He is making a come back? Does he honestly think his stupid antics as speaker of the house in the 1990s will endear him to anyone? This is the man that shut the US government down because he had a hissy fit and wanted to prove he could do it. This is a man that was sanctioned for ethical wrong doing will speaker of the house.

Rick Santorum, OMG! This man does not believe people should have the right to have control over their lives. He thinks government should legislate on most social issues. If he were to win, I think we would see the first 538 to 0 election.

Stephen Colbert is looking like a rational choice for the GOP.

At this point I think Barak Obama can feel fairly secure about his re-election.

Smart Meter Health Concerns

2012-01-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

I am getting more and more annoyed at the opposition to smart meters based on health concerns. Leaving aside the cancer issue and looking at what people are claiming electromagnetic radiation can cause here is the list of issues I have heard linked to smart meters:

Sleep disturbances
Headaches
Dizziness
Nausea
Digestion issues including bowel movements
Concentration and memory problems
Nervous and hormonal system impacts
Heart palpitations or a rapid heartbeat
Behavioural problems

I am sure there are more, but let us just focus on those. This list sounded very familiar to me for some reason, then it came to me and I realized that it all relates to stress. It is interesting how closely the above list fits with the list of physical symptoms that can be caused by stress.

Over and over again people have similar sort of issues as noted above about some unknown. People look for a cause for this effect and find one because humans are good at seeking patterns and finding them even when they do not exist. Got headaches and sleeping badly? Must be that new thing BC Hydro installed on my house.

Most people have a large amount of stress in their lives and worry regularly. Add a new focus to that stress and worry and you get stress related physical problems. So if you are worried and going to be stressed about a smart meter on your house, then it is reasonable to have some of the symptoms of stress. It is not the smart meter causing the problems, it is the stress.

When one looks at what an organization like the World Health Organization has to say:

Tissue heating is the principal mechanism of interaction between radiofrequency energy and the human body. At the frequencies used by mobile phones, most of the energy is absorbed by the skin and other superficial tissues, resulting in negligible temperature rise in the brain or any other organs of the body.

A number of studies have investigated the effects of radiofrequency fields on brain electrical activity, cognitive function, sleep, heart rate and blood pressure in volunteers. To date, research does not suggest any consistent evidence of adverse health effects from exposure to radiofrequency fields at levels below those that cause tissue heating. Further, research has not been able to provide support for a causal relationship between exposure to electromagnetic fields and self-reported symptoms, or “electromagnetic hypersensitivity”.

This is about as conclusive as it gets to say there is no link between non-ionizing electro-magnetic radiation and the above health problems.

So all the non-cancer health issues related to smart meters are all either stress induced or a somatoform disorder (aka psychosomatic issues). If you are worried about smart meters, you can make yourself ill, this is not something to blame BC Hydro for.

Time to be a bit cynical for the moment

2012-01-19T04:27:00.000-08:00

Let us ignore for the moment the people opposed to smart meters on health grounds - their opposition is based around a lack of understanding of science or how the scientific community works. There are others opposed to smart meters, but why are they?

My mind in running in a cynical way at the moment, keep that in mind when reading this list.

Dope growers - the old meters and distribution network are nirvana for them them because there is no way to catch them stealing power. With smart meters the theft of power will be much harder to do and people will caught. It means the dope growers will have to actually pay BC Hydro for the power. It is a $100,000,000 annual incentive to them to keep the old meters that make theft easy and undetectable.
Numerous businesses that make their living off selling people on the danger of radio waves. The whole smart meter program is giving them a huge boost. People are spending money on a solution to a problem that does not exist. I contemplated listing the ones here in BC, but then I decided they do not need the publicity.
COPE local 378 - they represent the meter readers and want to keep the old meters so that the jobs continue for the members. It would be cheaper for BC Hydro to pay the meter readers to not work and keep the smart meters than bring back the old meters.
Partisan opposition to the BC Liberals - various people have jumped on board with the anti-smart meter campaign simply because it is a way to attack the BC Liberals. Witness the very partisan vote at the Union of BC Municipalities this year.

He was more than doomed to fail....

2012-01-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

Today the last major candidate that made any sense in the US Republican primary withdrew from the race. Jon Huntsman is no longer running for president.

He is young enough that there is no reason why he could not be a serious candidate in 2016. He is clearly a much better candidate than the lot that are left in the race, bar Fred Karger.

He did endorse Mitt Romney, and I guess Romney is the best choice going. My concern about Mitt Romney is that he will do as McCain did and pander to the nutbars in the Republican party. If he governs like he did when he was governor of Massachusetts he would be a decent president.

Like everyone else that is paying attention, I know the Republican nomination is over, but it is still a fascinating race. I have subscribed to all the email lists for he candidates and it is interesting to see

NDP Leadership Race - boring our way to the end

2012-01-16T13:38:00.000-08:00

I am trying really hard to be interested and engaged in this race, but there is simply not much is going on. It pales in comparison to the US GOP nomination race. Trust me, I am trying to be interested.

This should be a major political event in Canada. The leader of the opposition is being chosen, the person that has a good chance of becoming prime minister some day. No one is digging around for more about these people, to find the skeletons in their closet. The candidates are avoiding commenting about each other.

The leadership race is as if the eight candidates are running eight separate campaigns to defeat Stephen Harper. The Conservatives are not relevant to this race, everyone knows the NDP are not the Conservatives.

What is missing is any debate on who has the skills to build a stronger NDP nationwide. The big elephant in the room is the gaggle of new MPs from Quebec - what will they do when the new leader is elected? 30 of 55 Quebec MPs that can endorse a candidate are backing Thomas Mulcair. The party has already lost one Quebec MP.

Thomas Mulcair needs to come out and point out that only he has the confidence of the majority of the Quebec caucus. If the NDP can not hold Quebec, not only will they not win government in the future, they will only have a single term as Official Opposition.

Peggy Nash and Paul Dewar need to speak about what skills they have that make them better leaders of the NDP than Brian Topp or Thomas Mulcair.

The problem with the NDP leadership race comes down to one thing - membership. Only members of the NDP get to vote and each member has one vote. If you can sign up enough new members, you can win without addressing a single issue. Sign up 50,000 people in Alberta and you could win the race. This race is not about who is the best person to lead the NDP, it is about who has the team that sign up the most members. This makes the race very boring, in fact more boring than the old delegated conventions.

The race is trying to pretend to be a primary like in the US, but is nothing like that. The race is not even set up in such a way to require a candidate to get support from across the nation. If the NDP had given each riding the same weight, there would be a huge incentive to sign up new members where the party is weakest on the ground.

What this means is that everything the public sees of the race is a bland campaign window dressing. The real campaign has nothing to do with this public image.

Canadian political parties need to rethink their approach to leadership races. The current model of some sort of variation of one member one vote has been a failure.

Lise St-Denis Crosses to the Liberals

2012-01-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

I do not think this really matters in the overarching picture of Canadian politics. I had been waiting for the first person to make this shift. I honestly had not expected Lise St-Denis to be the first one.

Her reasons for changing parties have got to be the most lame excuses I have heard for a floor crossing

She was only elected because people voted for Jack Layton and since he was dead that no longer holds
The Liberals have more experience and can be a better job of defending Quebec's place in Canada
She was becoming uncomfortable with being in the NDP caucus as she does not share their views on a number of issues.

I am trying to figure out why she ran for the NDP twice if there were positions on issues she did not agree with?

Lise St Denis ran for the NDP in 2008 in Longueuil-Pierre Boucher. She was clearly a paper candidate in that election. She only spend $1,131 but almost tied for third with the Conservative Jacques Bouchard who spend $55,552. She managed 14% of the vote in that election. In 2011 the riding was handily won by Pierre Nantel for the NDP.

Was she that much of a paper candidate that when she ran in 2008 and 2011 for the NDP she could not bothered to read any of the platform?

I also have to wonder why she came out and backed Thomas Mulcair if she had reservations about the party? She could have stayed out of the fray if she was unsure. It makes me really wonder about her decision making process and what her actual interest is in politics.

If your French is up to it, here is a report from July referring to her as a phantom MP, though this is right around the time she let people know she had cancer.

I have to wonder when she found out she had health issues, did she run not expecting to win and therefore ran even though she had cancer?

How big a deal is this for the NDP? It does not help but it is not unexpected when you get a whole raft of new people elected that never expected to be elected. I think the NDP can weather this easily and he defection will be lost in the coverage of the NDP leadership race.

The Liberals get a day of positive media coverage, but there is nothing to indicate the addition of this MP is going to improve their caucus in Ottawa. I do not think it really improves their chances in St Maurice - Champlain. Lise St Denis is hardly known as a local organizer and the Liberals as a party have been moribund in the riding since 2004.

Few first term MPs that cross the floor are able to be re-elected. Given Lise St Denis' age and her health, I highly doubt she will win in 2015, frankly I would not be surprised if she resigned within the next year.

MPs that crossed the floor since 1997 election (only MPs that changed parties, not became independents)

1997 Election - NDP - 2, PCs +1 -4, Liberals +5
1999 Bill Matthews (Nfld) left the PCs to join the Liberals
1999 Angela Vautour (NB) left the NDP to join the PCs
2000 Andre Harvey (Quebec) left the PCs to become an independent and shortly there after to sit as a Liberal
2000 David Price (Quebec) left the PCs to join the Liberals
2000 Diane St-Jacques (Quebec) left the PCs to join the Liberals
2000 Rick Laliberte (Sask) left the NDP to join the Liberals
2000 Election - CA/PCs/Cons -3 +1, Bloc -1, Liberals -1 +3
2002 Joe Peschisolido (BC) left the Canadian Alliance to join the Liberals
2003 Robert Lanctot (Quebec) left the Bloc to join the Liberals
2003 Scott Brison (NS) left the PCs to join the Liberals
2004 John Bryden (Ontario) left the Liberals to join the Conservatives
2004 Keith Martin (BC) left the Canadian Alliance to sit as an independent but then ran for re-election as a Liberal
2004 Election - Conservatives -1, Liberals +1
2005 Belinda Stronach (Ontario) left the Conservatives to join the Liberals
2006 Election - Liberals -3, Conservatives +2, Greens +1
2006 David Emerson (BC) left the Liberals to join the Conservatives
2007 Wajid Khan (Ontario) left the Liberals to join the Conservatives
2008 Blair Wilson (BC) left the Liberals to sit as an independent and then as a Green
2008 Election - no changes
2011 Election - NDP -1, Liberal +1
2012 Lise St-Denis (Quebec) left the NDP to join the Liberals

That is 16 MPs in 14 years.

The NDP Leadership Race

2012-01-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how little interest there is in the NDP leadership race nationally. The party is choosing the person that is likely to be Prime Minister someday. I would say that at this time, the odds of the NDP winning the 2019 federal election is fairly high. 2015 is already a write off because the NDP are not ready to be competitive in 250+ ridings and they still have to finish off the rump of the Liberals. The NDP also needs the 2015 election to get a lot more serious people elected as MPs, historically the brightest and best in the NDP have run provincially in BC, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Meanwhile south of the border the Republicans are going through the motions to find a sacrificial lamb to through up against Barak Obama. That race is getting huge amounts coverage even though every rational human knows that only Mitt Romney can win.

The fundamental difference in how politics works in two countries that are more similar than almost any other pair of countries continues to astonish me.

The two by-elections in BC - Chilliwack-Hope first

2012-01-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

We will have by-elections in Port Moody-Coquitlam and in Chilliwack-Hope in the near future, the track record of governments in BC by-elections has been abysmal. Since 1966 there have been 27 by-elections in BC, 24 23 won by the official opposition and 3 by the government, ~~not a single~~ and one was one by a third party.

If the government were to lose both, it does not put the majority in any danger. We end up at 47 Liberals versus 38 others, which is still more than enough to govern with. It will not look good in the media for Christy Clark, but the premier has another year to govern before the election.

So what will happen in these by-elections? First Barry Penner's seat of Chillwack-Hope.

Chilliwack Hope is a new riding that is primarily made up of rural areas of Chilliwack-Kent and the Fraser Canyon portion of Yale-Lillooet.

2005 notional result within the 2009 boundaries

Liberals 52.1%
NDP 37.4%
Greens 8.5%
Others 2.0%

2009 actual result

Barry Penner - Liberal 8895 - 53.28%
Gwen O'Mahoney - NDP 5638 - 33.42%
Hans Mulder - Conservative 1198 - 7.10% (a Hans Mulder ran for the Greens in Chilliwack-Kent in 2005, ~~no idea if this is the same person~~ turns out this is the same person)
Guy Durin - Green 951 - 5.64%
Dorothy-Jean O'Donnell - PF 93 - 0.55%

Turn out 51.85%

So why were so many people not voting in 2009? I suspect a large number of them are social conservatives who could not bring themselves to vote for the Liberals. I also suspect the lack of a competitive race and that would depress turnout.

By-elections normally have low turnouts.

What is likely to happen? It is hard to be certain yet because we do not know who will be running for the government in the riding. Let assume the Liberals have a decent candidate and strong campaign.

I think it is safe to assume that John Martin will be the BC Conservative nominee. We also know the Greens will not be running anyone.

If we assume the Liberals will be saying "Stop the NDP, vote Liberal", and given that they have held the seat, they should be able to get to between 30-40% of the vote. In absence of a candidate I am predicting 35%.

The NDP should be able to take a 1/3 of the vote again, as they have done in the area in 2005 and 2009. I see their range being 28-35%

Now for the wildcard, how will the BC Conservatives do? The choice of John Martin could work well but it could also backfire if he gets in trouble with the media by saying something "out there". By having been a columnist for the Chilliwack Times, he has a lot of material from the past that people can go through and find something damming.

My prediction is 25-40% of the vote for the BC Conservatives. I currently predict 32% for them.

I do think the riding has a chance of going any one of three ways. Until I know who the BC Liberal candidate is, I can not be certain of what will happen.

If the NDP can get the Sto:Lo to vote, they are a large enough group that they could boost the NDP vote enough to make an NDP win more likely. More than 11% of the people in the riding considers themselves aboriginal versus 4.8% in BC overall.

I can not call this one.

What can I say?

2012-01-05T14:22:00.000-08:00

Given the GOP field, this would be a good option for the US.

580,000 people in BC decided on election day, May 12th 2009, not to vote

2012-01-04T16:21:00.000-08:00

If you are a political junkie and have not read "Who Heads to the Polls?: Exploring the Demographics of Voters in British Columbia" I highly recommend it. It was published in March of 2010 by Elections BC. I also suggest you read "Motivations and Barriers: Exploring Voting Behaviour in British Columbia" published January 2010. Also interesting is the "2009 Elections BC Post-Election/Non-Voter Satisfaction Survey Executive Summary Report."

The three reports uncover some interesting information about who votes. The assumptions that political junkies have made about how elections work is not really true at all as these reports show that a lot of people vote some of the time and very few people never vote.

711,158 registered voters that voted in 2005 election did not vote in 2009 election. Meanwhile 393,073 people that voted in 2009 did not vote in 2005. There were 1,257,402 who voted in both elections and 633,829 voted in neither election. This means the almost 80% of the BC population voted in at least one of the 2005 and 2009 elections.

1,104,231 people voted in only one election versus 1,257,402 people voted in both elections. The inconsistent voters are close to the same as amount as the consistent voters.

When we add in 2001 to the mix, of people able to vote in all three elections, 955,212 voted in all three elections, 708,180 voted in one or two elections, and 183,147 did not vote at all. Only 10% of people that were able to vote in all three elections chose not to vote at all. 90% of the public did vote in at least one of the three provincial elections.

1,148,923 people were not registered as voters in 2001 that were registered in 2009.

When looking only at 2005 and 2009 elections, 96% of people that voted in both the elections planned on voting in 2013. 88% of the people that voted only 2009 were planning on voting in 2013, 68% of the people that skipped 2009 are planning on voting in 2013. And finally 1/3 of the people that did not vote in 2005 or 2009 plan on voting in 2013. Putting this all together and close to 80% of registered voters intent to vote in 2013.

Of all non-voters in 2009, 63% had voted in the 2008 federal election and 62% had voted in the 2005 provincial election. This means the majority of the non-voters in 2009 had recently voted.

Most interesting is when people decided not to vote. 31% decided before the election or did not even consider voting. 24% decided during the campaign not to vote and finally, this is the stunning number, 45% of the non-voters in 2009 decided not to vote on election day. This means about 580,000 people in BC decided on election day not to vote.

These are 580,000 people that up until the day before the election intended to vote. Those people who were planning on voting but at the last minute decided not to would have been enough votes to let almost every second place candidate in 2009 win the seat.

So why are these people not voting?

The two top issues are engagement and person circumstances.

Of personal circumstances, which was 44% of the people that voted in 2005 but did not vote in 2009, 43% that set said they were too busy, 21% were ill or physically unable to vote and 28% were away from home.

Of people that did not vote in 2005 or 2009, 41% of the did not vote because they were not engaged in the 2009 election. Of that set 30% were not interested in the election, 60% had some sort of dislike for politics and politicians.

What this all says to me is that you win and lose elections based on getting occasional voters to go to the polls and not about trying to get consistent voters to change their minds. The 580,000 people that decided on May 12th 2009 not to vote are all people that are the low hanging fruit. These are people that had planned on voting.

What I take from this is that 90% of the population will consider voting but they did not get enough positive reasons to go to the effort of voting in every election.

How do you motivate the people to go through with voting? Telling them that Christy Clark, or John Cummins or Adrian Dix and their parties are horrible is not going to motivated people to go to the polls.

A well thought and reasonable centre of the road campaign that focuses on the positives and ignores the other parties is the one and only thing I can see that would engage these people to vote in more elections. People a reason to go the polls and negative campaigning simply makes people stay home.

Is there an sanity in the US Republican Party?

2012-01-04T14:05:00.000-08:00

So the Iowa caucuses happened last night and no one managed to do well.

Mitt Romney - 24.55% 30,015 votes, likely 13 delegates
Rick Santorum - 24.54% 30,007 votes, likely 12 delegates
Ron Paul - 21.45% 26,219 votes
Newt Gingrich - 13.29% 16,251 votes
Rick Perry - 10.31% 12,604 votes
Michelle Bachmann - 4.98% 6,073 votes
Jon Huntsman - 0.61% 745 votes
The Rest - 0.28% 341 votes

Iowa has a long process between the caucus vote and the actual designation of the delegates. In theory Ron Paul could get some delegates, but seeing that the support for Romney and Santorum split the state so nicely, they could have all the delegates.

Michelle Bachmann has dropped out of the race, something she have done ages ago because she has no business being in the race. I assume that her support will flow to Rick Santorum.

Sounds like Rick Perry may also be gone, this is also a good thing as he also had no business in the race.

With the declared support of super delegates, the totals are:

Romney - 26
Santorum - 13
Perry - 3

1144 delegates needed to win.

Can anyone beat Mitt Romney? I can not see Ron Paul winning the nomination. Jon Huntsman, no matter how much better he is than the rest of the field, is not a threat to anything. That leaves Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as the only competitors to Mitt Romney.

Should through some bizarre total hijacking of the GOP Rick Santorum win the nomination, he will guarantee a Barak Obama win.

If Newt Gingrich were to win, which I think is a very long shot, we will see the nastiest presidential election in many years. I can not see how Newt can win against Barak Obama.

If negative campaigning works, why does MacDonald's not use it?

2012-01-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

It is only in politics that people have decided negative ads are a good way to gain 'customers'. You are not going to find negative campaigns when people are trying to make money from advertising.

Why is Pepsi not running negative ads about Coke? This a is a very clear 'two party' race and one would think that if negative campaigning worked, it would work here. Pepsi could easily run ads pointing out how bad drinking Coke is for you, everyone out there knows drinking Coke is not something you should be doing regularly. You can see the problem here, if Coke is bad, so to is Pepsi. Th e impact of running this sort of an ad campaign would be destroying the market for both products, people would quit drinking as much pop.

OK, how about if dairy ran adds about how bad Coke is for you? You would think it would be a very easy sell. So why do they not do it? Because it does not work.

In politics all negative campaigning does is turn people off of being active in politics. Parties do not gain voters from another party by crapping all over them. All they do is turn off the public from voting.

To be even more clear about this, there is no research showing negative campaigning will gain you votes. All it does is reduce the size of the electorate and thereby you might win because you lost fewer supporters than the party you crapped on. I know of no example in any election where a negative campaign increased the total vote a party achieved. Prove me wrong if you can think of any.

The classic example is the 1979 "Labour is not working" campaign UK, but there is nothing to indicate in that election that this ad changed the election. The campaign was only a reflection of the zeitgeist and did not create it. Even then, the total vote for the Labour party did not fall. The big losers in that election were the Liberals and the Scottish Nationalist Party, who were not the targets of the ads.

At the moment there are about 700,00 people in BC from the mild centre left to the centre right that are not voting. They are not voting for a number of reasons, but the single biggest one is because they have been told over and over again that the BC NDP and the BC Liberals are awful parties and should not be supported. These people represent more or less the same amount of the vote the BC NDP and BC Liberals managed to get in 2009. Tapping into half of those people with a positive reason to vote for a party would be more than enough to win a huge landslide election.

At some point someone is going to figure out that positive ads and messages actually do work and that these companies spending billions of dollars on positively marketing their products actually know what they are doing.

Interesting Peggy Nash Campaign Event

2012-01-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

I like to watch how social media is being used for various election campaigns. I have rarely seen any really effective uses of the medium, though I have seen many interesting attempts. The latest is from NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash.

Next Saturday there will be a Pan-Canadian Feminist Potluck for Peggy Nash. The idea is that there will be numerous potluck events happening across the country at rougly the same time.

At the moment there are events scheduled in nine locations: Victoria, Vancouver, Regina, Toronto, Oakville, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax and St John's. The start times range from 10 am to 1 pm - times Pacific Standard Time. Five of the nine will be starting at 1 pm.

The ones in Atlantic Canada and in BC are the ones starting earlier, why this is I have no idea.

Text from the event site:

In a tried and true tradition of the Canadian women’s movement, we are hosting a women’s potluck to open a dialogue between feminists about how the women’s movement can strengthen its response to aggressive right-wing attacks on women’s rights and how to get more women involved in electoral politics.
This exchange with Peggy Nash is an exciting opportunity for more women from coast-to-coast-to-coast to discuss issues that matter most to grassroots women and the potential of electoral politics to address them

Stats from Facebook Events as of January 2nd at 11 am:

Toronto - 50 going, 33 maybe, 684 invited
Halifax - 36 going, 24 maybe, 243 invited
Vancouver - 32 going, 9 maybe, 141 invited
Victoria - 24 going, 24 maybe, 124 invited
Ottawa - 20 going, 8 maybe, 91 invited
Montreal - 11 going, 4 maybe, 39 invited
Regina - 4 going, 13 invited
Oakville - no details visible
St John's - no details, also no event location yet

This is not a big turn out, only 177 saying they are going and 102 maybes. The NDP is a party with over 100,000 members and only 1335 people have been invited.

The idea is an interesting one, but the execution is not making much of an impact. For this to seem serious, there would need to be many, many more events and those events would have to have much larger turn outs. I would see a benchmark of 50-80 events with over 2000 people attending being the bottomline of serious success.

Why offering choice to have an old meter or a smart meter does not work

2011-12-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

Various people have said that the public should have a choice on keeping their old meter or getting a smart meter. This is not physically possible.

Smart meters are only part of the upgrading of the whole grid by BC Hydro but they are a required part. Without the smart meter at the customer end there are many of the benefits of a smart grid that do not work. Things like regulation of voltage does not work, theft detection does not work, and automated notification of power outages can not take place.

The point of going to a smart grid is to use our electrical power resources more efficiently which becomes hard to do if many of the benefits of the smart grid can not be done because some people are using non-smart meters. Over the years we have upgraded technologies meaning older technology can not longer be used. It happens and will continue to happen.

What people also have to remember is that BC Hydro is replacing their equipment. The meters are not owned by the public, they are owned by BC Hydro. There is no issue of choice in any case if you do not own the meter. You do not own any part of the electrical grid and that grid starts at the meter on your house.

As it is, the old meters have a lifespan of about 25 years, some have last longer but the standards of accuracy from Measurement Canada are becoming stricter which means the old electro-mechanical meters will fail the testing sooner. Each year BC Hydro has been replacing about 45,000 meters because they no longer function correctly, this number would have risen dramatically over the next few years as almost all the meters from the 1960s, 70s and early 80s would all have to be replaced.

Also, the electro-mechanical meters are no longer manufactured in any case. For a few years now all the meters installed by BC Hydro have been digital meters, though not the wireless smart meters.

To be clear, it is not an option to return to a meter reading model of measuring power use.

The other option suggested is that there be a wired option instead of a wireless option. I assume technically this is possible but the cost would be much higher because of the need of a wired connection to something else. It also mean having to have two different systems to monitor the grid. The lack of consistency would mean there would be higher operating costs and more on going problems.

Spending large amounts of money to build a less robust and less consistent grid would be a serious breach of the fiduciary obligation of the BC Hydro to manage their resources well for the benefit of the people of BC.

Peggy Nash - her best option in this race

2011-12-21T12:13:00.000-08:00

Peggy Nash is a dark horse in the NDP leadership race, she has no realistic chance of coming anything better than a distant third. If she holds on in the race to the end she misses her chance to have a major impact on the race. Endorsing either Mulcair or Topp would be the signal of who is most likely to win the race.

Given that this is a one vote per member election and that I assume it is an phone or online based preferential ballot, if you do not have a serious chance of winning, you need to drop out early enough to be able lend your support to who you think will win. The one member one vote model does not allow for horse trading on the convention floor. You will know how you did in the race after all the votes are cast.

Peggy Nash also needs to accept the fact that she is really too old to be a serious contender for the leadership. She is 60 now, which is not too old if she was in the run up to a federal election, but that is not the case. She will be 64 in time for the next federal election, which I am quite certain the NDP will not be able to win. 2019 is the first realistic election that the NDP could win government and she will be 68 years old. That would make her the oldest person to become Prime Minister of Canada in 123 years. She would be the oldest person to ever win their first term in government.

She is just four years younger than Kim Campbell.

Robert Chisholm drops out of the race

2011-12-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

It is important in Canada for a national leader to be able to speak English and French, so I was surprised when Robert Chisholm decided to enter the race given that he does not speak French. You can not run a serious leadership race and learn to speak French at the same time.

Chisholm has not yet endorsed anyone in the race but I suspect his stature will matter, especially if it brings with it the endorsement of Nova Scotia premier Darryl Dexter and former Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton.

Why was he running in the first place? He could not have ever thought he had any realistic chance of winning or even doing well in the race. He is like five of the other candidates in the race, without any hope of doing well.

The race has two candidates that seem to have any chance of winning and one dark horse. I have to ask why are the others running? What do they expect to accomplish by being in the race at all? The time has come for the bottom five to consider why they are in the race and also consider dropping out.

For someone like Niki Ashton, given that she is so young, running and doing badly will not harm her political future. She can try to use this as a platform to build her political career. I am not a fan of people that do this because a leadership race should not be about doing something for a personal benefit.

Nathan Cullen clearly has not chance of winning, so why is he running? The one issue that sets him apart is his plank that the NDP and Liberals should only nominate one candidate to oppose the Conservatives in which the Conservatives won by less than a majority. He is young enough that he should still be around for the next leadership race, but I get no sense he will do well at all. You have to ask why no members of caucus are backing him.

Paul Dewar has some experience and skills but has little traction to his campaign. What is his goal in running? He certainly knows he has no chance. He has more or less no support from Ontario MPPs and not a single MP is backing him. It says something when not a single caucus colleague will back you.

Romeo Saganash should consider dropping out because I think he is headed towards being embarrassed in the vote.

Martin Singh - really, why is he running? What is his goal out of the exercise?

If this was an old style delegate convention, there are benefits to being able to deliver your candidates as you drop off of the ballot. In this race the leadership candidate has no direct influence over what their supports do with their second and third choice. I doubt any candidate will come out and publicly declare how they want their supporters to vote for second and third choices.

If, as I suspect, the bottom five will manage a collective 15% of the vote, they will all have very publicly failed. Getting something as low as 2-5% in an election is not only a rejection, but a fundamental failure of your campaign.

Random Political Factoid

2011-12-19T13:59:00.000-08:00

The NDP has been in power in five provinces and one territory, here is how long they have been government in each one:

Saskatchewan - 46 years 290 days
Manitoba - 27 years 90 days (and rising)
BC - 12 years 310 days
Yukon - 11 years 9 days
Ontario - 4 years 269 days
Nova Scotia - 2 years 183 days (and rising)

United Farmers parties that arose in the 1920s in Canada were in many cases filled with people that would later form the basis for the creation of the CCF.:

UF formed governments in:

Ontario - 1919-1923 - A United Farmers/Labour government
Alberta - 1921-1935 - A United Farmers government, but questionable if it was left though many of the MLAs did join the CCF

The CCF/NDP have been official opposition in:

BC - 1933 - 1937, 1941-1952, 1952-1972, 1975 - 1991, 2001 - current
Alberta - 1948-1952, 1982 - 1983
Saskatchewan - 1934-1944 (initially as Farmer-Labour), 1964-1970, 1982-1991, 2007 - current
Manitoba - 1920-1922 (Ind Farmers), 1943-1950, 1977-1981, 1990-1999
Ontario - 1943-1945, 1948-1951, 1975-1977, 1987-1990
Nova Scotia - 1921-1925 (United Farmers/Labour), 1945-1949, 1998-2009
Yukon 1981- 1985, 1992 - 1996, 2000 - 2006, 2011 to current

Yes, a couple of those times they CCF or NDP were too small to be officially recognized as a party.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T15:19:00.000-08:00

From Letters to a Young Contrarian:

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

I have read and been inspired by Christopher Hitchens for some decades now. I first read him in the New Statesman when I was still in high school. This was a man one could call an iconoclast or a gadfly

I find his writing compelling, I wanted to read on and on and it really did not matter what he was writing about. Granta had some good pieces of reportage by him the the late 1980s. I remember this one about Romania very shortly after the 1989 revolution. I loved reading his cutting attacks on people, something that I could never do because I have too thin a skin and really do not like confrontation on a personal level. One could fill pages with his brilliant quotes.

His essays can only be called brilliant but they were also very relevant and cutting to the world around us. So much of fiction in the English speaking first world world is all about irrelevant mid life crisis of some sort upper middle class over educated person. It is very bland and boring. Hitchens essays told the real stories of the life around us.

I also identify with Christopher Hitchens' political path to some extent. When I was young I was a fairly hardcore lefty, but after years of evidence of the errors of orthodox left wing economics and the general underlying authoritarian nature of so many on the left I have ended up on the right by default. Much in the same sort of way Hitchens ended up on the right but was not right wing.

He was clearly on the side of freedom and liberty in his life and was not willing to be an apologist for bad ideas. Yes he did not have the full courage of his convictions in his 20s, but it is still there. In politics it is very easy to become an apologist for the politics you follow, to excuse the mistakes. It takes courage to speak out about the mistakes of your own side because most times you will be excommunicated from the faith.

When one looks at politics using the analogy of faith is a good way to see what happened to Hitchens. He went from being an unwavering believer in the orthodox left to becoming a political agnostic. There was no political conversion from one faith to another. As far as I can tell the underlying values of Christopher Hitchens did not change. This is the sort of path that George Orwell went through in his life.

Some good essays today on Hitchens
David Frum
Graydon Carter
From Harry's Place

What the hell - some quotes:

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
“The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.”
“Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.”
“The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.”
"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."
"Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them."
"My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass."
"Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth." "We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth"

Smart Meters - Alabama and the April 27th Tornadoes

2011-12-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

I ended up at the website for Alabama Power and read their December 5th 2011 newletter. They quantify the benefits coming from better information about power outages.

Alabama has a population on the same scale as BC and has their own season of storms that knock out power. On April 27th 400,00 customers lost power. It is because of the smart meter system that they could much more quickly and effectively use their resources when restoring power. They have shown in action how the smart meters do really improve managing outages. They also got an award for sharing what they learned to other utilities.

My understanding of the BC Hydro smart meters is that they are even better in signalling when they are connected and not connected than the ones used in Alabama.

The smart meters allow the company to know immediately when the power goes out. It also means the company knows exactly how far the outage extends. It also allows the company to focus the resources where the problem is and are then able to know when it is all completely fixed.

Power outages should be shorter now and the Alabama experience indicates this really is the case. For most home owners getting power back on is not as crucial as it is for many businesses. Power outages are especially problematic for food retailers and restaurants. If the temperature in a fridge rises over 4 degrees C, everything should be disposed of. If the temperature in a freezer reaches 0 degrees C, everything should be disposed of. The longer the outage, the more likely that there is a problem.

For businesses that are open during an outage, the lack of electrical power makes it unrealistic to continue doing any work. You can not work on your computer, your landline will be down, cash registers will not work, point of sale will not work, and there will be no light. There are some sort of businesses open at any given time of the day. Every outage has an negative economic impact. Shorten the outage and you reduce the cost to the economy.

New Zealand Vote on Electoral Reform

2011-12-15T20:13:00.000-08:00

The Kiwis had a referendum on their electoral system as part of their recent general election. The referendum results were announced today.

Keep Mixed Member Proportional - 57.77% (+3.91 from 1993 referendum)
Change the System - 42.23% (-3.19 from 1993 referendum)

A fairly strong win for keeping the system they have been using since the 1990s, about as strong as the vote was in 2005 for BC to change to BC-STV.

I remain skeptical of MMP as a electoral system. I think the unintended consequences of it lead to bad a reflection of popular will and problems in government. I could go on, but I will not.

People were also asked if there were a change, what should they change to

First Past the Post - 46.66%
Supplementary Member - 24.14%
STV - 16.73%
AV - 12.47% - interesting this did so badly since it is what Australia uses and many Kiwis have spent a lot of time on the other side of the Tasman.

I am of mixed feelings about the outcome.

The US primaries make me shake my head

2011-12-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

Here is an email sent out today by Jon Huntsman's campaign

Friends,
We have exciting news to share tonight.
A Suffolk University poll just released a few minutes ago shows Governor Huntsman surging in New Hampshire, jumping into third place with 13 percent of the vote.
This poll confirms that Governor Huntsman’s message of restoring trust in Washington, ending bailouts for too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks, and eliminating crony capitalism is resonating with voters who are fed up with politics-as-usual in Washington.
This comes on the heels of a new Wall Street Journal poll that shows Governor Huntsman’s support steadily rising across the nation. The American people are desperately searching for a principled leader who can unite Republicans and Independents to defeat Barack Obama next November. As the L.A. Times noted earlier today, people are now beginning to recognize Jon Huntsman as that leader.
Now we need the resources to defeat Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
This evening we are launching a new fundraising push and asking all of our supporters to make an immediate donation of $10, $25, $50 or more to help our campaign reach our goal.
Your immediate donation will help us take advantage of our rising poll numbers and give us the resources we need to set up phone banks, contact voters and distribute campaign literature across New Hampshire. Please click here to help make a difference at this critical moment.
Thank you for your continued support of Governor Huntsman!
Standing proudly with Jon Huntsman,
Matt David
Campaign Manager

Surging into third place with 13%. I find this sort of hyperbole amusing. Polling 13% is pathetically low and will get you nowhere. This really is grasping at straws. Also one poll is not a surge, especially when he has been polling between 7% and 11.3% for the last few weeks. The poll was also a very small sample size, only 400. Finally, his polling elsewhere sucks.

That said, the more I read about Jon Huntsman, the more I am liking him. This should really be a warning to the Huntsman campaign because I have this tendency not to favour politically mainstream candidates. I am iconoclastic and like the outsiders, assuming they are sane, smart and open minded. I end up backing people that lose elections.