It is that time of year. Mid-summer is no time for serious. Even Elections Canada has joined the fun. In a television interview yesterday, an Elections Canada spokes person said with a straight face that she did not know what is being told to environmentalists about the rules of arguing
Continue readingTag: Campaigns
Babel-on-the-Bay: Mad Dogs, Englishmen and Candidates.
That knock on your door on this hot July day is more likely to be a candidate for the coming election. This time is gold for candidates, they can pick and choose strategic areas of the riding, they can test various approaches for the campaign to come and, most important,
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Political polls and other summer games.
It is like playing Snakes and Ladders without the dice. It is phoning people at random and hoping they might tell you the truth. It is annoying people with recorded telephone calls and thinking they might be civil in return. It all adds up to bad guesses in a mug’s
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: It’s going to be a smack-down election.
The anticipated federal election in October looks like one that nobody can win. All the political parties are going into the election with heavy baggage. Nobody has the confidence of the nation. It could be the most bitter, hardest fought election in Canada’s history. There is too much at stake
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: A year late and a candidate short.
Welcome to the fray, Jeremy Broadhurst. As the just appointed campaign chair for the liberals this year, you have your work cut out for you. I would not say the job is impossible but Easter is over and I am sure God restricts us to only one resurrection per year.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Chuckles checks conservative campaigns.
You would expect that one of these days, conservative leader Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer will have to take the training wheels off his federal election campaign. He was out on the hustings with Jason Kenney in Alberta last week and little new came from either conservative. The signature complaint we have
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Team Trudeau tells the tale.
An invitation came from the liberal party the other day to sign up for Team Trudeau Campaign College. It is just $25 for the day and you have your choice of attending campaign management, official agent or a single stream covering the three areas of digital management, volunteer management and
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: “Some animals are more equal…”
George Orwell’s Animal Farm told us more about humans than about animals and why some pigs are more equal than others. This subject came readily to mind the other day when reading about our liberal government’s attitude regarding protecting political party databases. Having worked with some of the earlier and
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Brown: No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Ontario Conservative Leader Patrick Brown does not have a problem. He is the problem. His handlers are not sure how to present him to provincial voters. They are concerned that the more people they introduce him to, the fewer people like him. It is not supposed to work that way.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: NDP changing times, changing directions.
The CCF—the party of Tommy Douglas—represented the working man, the farmer and the socially conscious in an era of rapid growth and acquisition after the Second World War. We had little time for CCF concerns or socialism in those exciting years but the party was respected as a political conscience.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The Candidate: KISS the web site.
Part 5 of our series for Canada’s federal candidates. Yes, you have to have a web site. Yes, it better look like the party web site. Yes, you have to Keep It Simple Stupid. What you do not need is a web site that only a systems programmer can love.
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: The Candidate: That pre-writ lit.
Part 2 of our series for Canada’s federal candidates. There are many arguments about the literature required by candidates in the pre-writ period (the time between being chosen as the candidate and the election call being official). If the Prime Minister decides to wait for the chosen date of October
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Alberta stumbles as the Hair’s empire crumbles.
There are at least a couple ridings in Alberta that could attract some smart Liberals for the federal election. Voters in that province are not stupid you know. They might also like to send a message to the Prime Minister after what he has helped to do to the province’s
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Who leads Canada’s progressives?
Canadian media are a lazy bunch. They follow the paths of least resistance and false assumptions. Take this past week when some supposed progressives were gathered at the Broadbent Institute in Ottawa for its Progress Summit. The one question that was never answered was ‘Who were the Liberal Progressives at
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Harper’s Conservatives already have enough evidence
Harper’s Conservatives don’t need you telling them how incompetent or wasteful they are. They don’t need to know those things and they certainly don’t need anyone telling their faithful – dare I say, blind – voters either. They already know. They have enough evidence. Due in part to laws that
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Stephen Harper is offering us the Blue Pill
Stephen Harper has created a magical world around him, not unlike that of the rabbit hole described in Alice in Wonderland or the Matrix in the Wachowski brothers’ Sci-Fi masterpiece. In Harper’s world, what you see is merely misdirection and subterfuge. What you hear are mostly baseless talking points that
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Lukiwski doesn’t understand the meaning of transparency
Full disclosure: Tom Lukiwski is a four-letter word in my home. The fact this man continues to get elected in our home province embarrasses us deeply. He has a demonstrated ability, practiced really over decades, to offend people with thoughtless comments. Thankfully, we don’t live in his riding, so our
Continue readingThe Right-Wing Observer: Mashup of public opinion and political events
Angus Reid has begun a series of public opinion polls – I hope – leading all the way up to the 2015 general election. So I thought it would be interesting to plot these results on a time-series alongside a timeline of interesting events that might have an impact on
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Mr. Mulcair, you better not pout.
It looks like New Democrat Leader Thomas Mulcair got an early lump of coal from Santa last night. The orange surge in Quebec came up short and Tommy’s star candidate in Toronto did not make it. And it was the Liberals who benefitted from the anger with Prime Minister Harper
Continue readingcalgaryliberal.com: Vincent Visits the Manning Centre
The other day this blogger went to a Manning Centre training seminar on visual communications — on building better looking websites, designing election signs, and creating campaign literature. This is the same Manning Centre that has been in the news recently and been a target of a fair bit of
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