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It appears as though 3 of the 4 major national political parties have balked at the suggestion that Elizabeth May represent the Green Party at the televised leader’s debates.

The Green Party is a valid national party, now with a seat in Parliament (although the member was previously an Independent who switched to Green, not an elected Green MP).

According to The Canadian Press,

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that letting May into the debate would be in essence allowing a second Liberal candidate to participate.

He said it would be fundamentally unfair to have two candidates who are essentially running on the same platform in the debate.

Really?

Harper gets to decide on who gets to participate in the debate based on his assessment of the uniqueness of their platform? That’s not how democracy works. The leader does not get to decide which voices get to be heard, or which issues will be discussed.

All this exercise tells me is that the televised leader’s debates are nothing more than sanitized synchronous press releases. If it was a valid and honest debate, the Green party would be represented (as well as, perhaps, a few other parties).

And Harper wasn’t the only leader to threaten to boycott the debates if the Greens were allowed to participate. The only leader that welcomed May was Stephane Dion. Which means that Layton and Duceppe are right up there with Harper in avoiding a real, meaningful, democratic debate.

Threatening to boycott a debate if another valid candidate is invited to participate? Childish and undemocratic.

Update: And for the Canadian media outlets that decided to not invite May to the debate so as not to upset the other candidates – you just lost any shred of objectivity. You are no longer a separate, objective, impartial media. You are nothing more than media outlets. You are not journalists, you are not unbiased. You are a press-release distribution network. The right thing to do would have been to respond to the 3 candidates that they are welcome to participate in the debate, and would be missed by the voting public if they choose not to show up.

Update 2: w00t! score one for democracy in Canada! The Green Party will be at the debates!

This week, at the North American Leaders Summit in Montebello, Quebec, 3 undercover police officers pretended to be protesters in an attempt to provoke violent incidents. The entire series of events was captured on video, and shared via YouTube. The cops are the three goons with bandanas over their faces. None of the real protesters wore disguises. One of the cops is carrying a rock.

Agent provocateur with a rock in his right hand.

The real protesters intervene, trying to prevent violence. Somehow, they realize that the agents provocateurs are cops, and accuse them of that. The fake protesters stop dead in their tracks, and one of them can be seen leaning over and talking with one of the uniformed riot police – over the riot shield – and shortly afterward, the three “protesters” are yanked out, “arrested” and carried to the safety of the police side of the line.

The Quebec Provincial Police have admitted that the 3 “protesters” were cops in disguise.

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada (and, one can only hope, future Prime Minister of Canada) wrote a description of the event on her blog (the Green website is Drupal, by the way…) Similar events allegedly happened in Seattle and Quebec City. Police either staging or allowing violence in order to justify cracking down on protesters.

This is unacceptable. I expect all police officers involved in this action to be summarily fired. And the entire chain of command, up to whoever ordered this. We can’t stand for our police forces to be instigating violence. Thankfully this didn’t happen this time. But it was damned close.

As a Canadian citizen, I demand an inquiry. I demand it to be public and open. And I expect for this to never, ever happen again. We are above this.

What scares me is this – what would have happened without YouTube to get the video out? There was video taken at Seattle and Quebec City, but it stayed on analog tape and didn’t get as widely circulated. This is why “Web 2.0″ is important. Never mind personal publishing for cat blogging, and ego surfing and identity management. The reason Web 2.0 is changing the world is by putting the power back into the hands of individuals. Democracy is mass media, in action.

On Monday, I attended a memorial for a family member that passed away recently (part of the reason I was in a bit of a funk during Northern Voice). It was the culmination of a long illness, but was still a shock.

At the memorial, a friend of hers stood up to say some words. Not a bad speech, and a nice gesture. They had met while working to pass some legislation to protect self employed individuals in the province. I talked with him after the service, at the reception upstairs. And then he did something that really unsettled me. He handed me his card. He is a politician, working he crowd for support. I saw him handing out cards around the room, making sure to talk to everyone at every table.

At the time, it didn't bother me too much. He was a friend of the deceased, trying to make contact with other friends and family members.

But, the more I think about it, the more incensed I get. Dude. You're handing out BUSINESS CARDS at a MEMORIAL??? I don't care if you're the freaking widower. That's just plain and simple NOT COOL. I don't care if you're a politician, a salesman, or a dotcom billionaire. Using a family memorial to work the crowd to gather support (no matter how subtly done) is a huge faux pas in my book.

I was asked by several people during the reception about the "guy handing out cards" – people were surprised that anyone would have the gall to do that. I'm stunned. Even though I could never bring myself to vote Progressive Conservative in the next provincial election, I will not be able to vote Liberal either. If this is the type of person selected by the Liberal party of Alberta, it isn't a good sign.

Not cool, Len. Not cool. 

I had a long post written up about the execution of Saddam Hussein. I decided at the last minute to not click the “Submit” button. But, my friend Niran wrote up an eloquent post that says it much more clearly.

One thing I’d add is this: I’m truly curious about the proportion of the American population that think Saddam was executed as part of the War on Terror™, or to grant democracy in Iraq. His execution had nothing to do with either (no WMDs have ever been found, and execution by a foreign power – even through a fledgling local puppet government – is no way to instill democracy).

I just checked in on weblogs.ucalgary.ca, and was greeted by a wonderful surprise. Justin Trudeau was on campus on Friday November 24, and the full audio of his talk was posted to weblogs.ucalgary.ca as a podcast. I’ve grabbed the file, and have listened to the first couple of minutes, but this should be a great talk.

For anyone who doesn’t recognize the name Justin Trudeau, he is the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and is making quite a name for himself as both a public speaker and leader of youth activism.

I’m really interested to hear his thoughts on Quebec as a “nation” as well as his take on what we can do to address environmental issues. (my own take on the Quebec “nation” issue is that it only acts as a divisive instrument – instead of what we need, which is something that is unifying)

This is the kind of thing I’m hoping we can put into a itunes@UCalgary service, once we get that off the ground. For now, it’s hosted on our weblogs service.

Sami beat me to the punch, but it’s worth publicly repeating. Garth Turner, MP for the Halton Constituency in Milton, Ontario, was booted out of the Conservative Party yesterday. For blogging. An elected member of parliament was Dooced.

Here’s the comment I posted on Sami’s blog, but I want to repeat it here as well (in case someone like the MP for my riding happens to see it):

It’s strange. This is our Government, and they boot someone out for documenting meetings and voicing honest opinions. Isn’t that what we do every day? Isn’t that what we should expect, even demand, from our representatives? The MPs represent US, not Harper. They have (IMO) an obligation to be honest (and open, and public) participants, not party mouthpieces.

Turner was booted out because he was openly communicating with his constituents, even when he disagreed with the Prime Minister (who happens to be the leader of the party to which Turner was a member).

We need more people like Garth Turner, who put the people ahead of power. Who believe it’s more important to be open and honest than to tow the party line. Politicians aren’t on The Hill for their own purposes. Nor are they there to serve their Party. They are there to represent us, the citizens of this kick-ass country. One way to do that effectively is to communicate. Blog the hell out of meetings. Politics is a conversation, and all of that Cluetrain stuff.

Now, if he’d have been blogging in-camera sessions, that might be a different thing. If he’d posted Top Secret Plans For Canada’s Troops in Afghanistan or something, I could see sanctions. But from what I’ve seen, he’s simply been posting his thoughts and critiques of his own government’s actions and policies. Which is his right to do, but apparently not as a member of the Conservative Party.

My brother has a house in Phuket, Thailand, so I've been trying to follow news on this week's coup to see what's going on. I had no idea there was an ongoing corruption scandal of that magnitude. It seems unclear whether this coup was a good or bad thing. Some people say it's bad because it's "against democracy" – others say it's good because it gives a chance to reboot a democracy after cleaning out the garbage first.

I'd been following the story via Wikinews, which has been more useful than local/national newscasts. And then I stumbled across the Flickr coverage, linked from the Flickr Blog. They assembled photos from various Flickr users located in Bangkok, added audio from an interview with one of the photographers, and the result is a very powerful photographic slideshow.

Thailand Coup, told by Flickr users

In our North American State of Heightened Alertness, I doubt we’d be allowed to freely pose for photographs with active tanks in the streets, if such a thing happened on this side of the Pacific…

I’ve been thinking about the moronically shortsighted DOPA doowackie that got passed South of the Border. Basically, if I understand correctly, it attempts to protect children from online predators (which is a Good Thing To Do™). But, it wants to do this by banning minors from websites that let them contribute. They won’t be able to use MySpace. Or Blogger.com. Or Wordpress.com. Or Flickr.com. Or any other social “Web 2.0″ stuff. Kids will be protected by locking them out.

Which is akin to protecting your children from harm by locking them in the basement.

Sure, they’ll be safe, but they’ll be completely isolated and unable to function in a connected, online world once they reach the arbitrarily decided “safe” age of 18 or 21 or whatever silly number got picked from the hat.

You don’t protect kids by locking them away from danger. You cripple them.

And, this assumes the clever kids aren’t aware of anonymizing proxies, or something as difficult as clicking the wrong/right box on a web form, to gain access to verboten sites. Groups are working hard to provide these freedom tools to the oppressed civilians of China, unfairly locked behind the Great Firewall. While simultaneously allowing their government to impose the same arbitrary limitations on their own children.

Thankfully, there has been no word of a Canadian copycat legislation. Yet.

There are better ways to protect kids. The best, and most effective (but most difficult) way is to actually educate them. If they are aware of the issues (in whatever age-appropriate manner) they will be better able to safely cope with dangers. There’s already a handy group forming around this issue.

It’s better to teach kids to swim, than to trust a fence around the swimming pool. Or the lock on the basement door.

With the big brouhaha about the evacuation of Canadian (and American, and British, and French, etc…) civilians from Lebanon, I think we're all kind of missing the point.

There are 50,000 Canadian citizens in Lebanon right now. The Canadian government has had to rent some cruise ships to ferry them to Cyprus and/or Turkey for further evacuation by air. The process is taking longer than many would like, but our people are being transported out of the danger zone. Prime Minister Stephen Harper even used his PM Airbus (our version of Air Force One) to ferry a few Canadian civilians out (Stephen, that was a classy move. The only thing that would have topped that, since you were already in the area, would have been to clear everyone off of the plane, fill it to the gills with civilians, and wait for it to return with backup).

But, what about the Lebanese civilians? Are they officially to be left behind? If it's too dangerous for a North American or European civilian, why is it considered an acceptable risk for the 3.5 million innocent civilians that happen to live in the region?

I may be extremely naiive, but this really seems like a perfect candidate for the UN blue helmets to move in and help restore order. Likely a much better allocation of military and humanitarian resources than securing oil supplies to maintain a particular hegemony… 

This is so depressing. It looks like Harper might be on the path to a minority government on Monday – with a slim possibility of pulling off a majority. That is sad for so many reasons.

In my riding, “my” MP Rob Anders doesn’t even have to show up at local events and debates. He’s rated “F” for his performance in the House, he’s described as dangerous and scary by reporters across this country – even by reporters in the States, where he made an impact as a Republican cheerleeder. He called Nelson Mandela a communist and terrorist, and blocked the granting of an honourary Canadian citizenship to the man. Then refused to come to the phone when Mandela called him with a “WTF?”

And Anders is probably going to have yet another landslide victory handed to him. He doesn’t have any real competition – the Liberals don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell in Calgary. The NDP aren’t even trying to compete – putting up a U of C student as their best challenge to Ander’s seemingly neverending reign of mediocrity. I saw the NDP candidate yesterday – as he was running to class. I’m sorry, but if a party isn’t going to put forth a serious candidate, they should just concede a riding.

The thing is, I consistently voted for the Progressive Conservative Party. They tossed the Progressive part away in the merger with the right wing wacko Reform/Alliance. But, the vast majority of Calgarians will be voting simply for tax cuts, without thinking about the repurcussions of handing the country to these nutjobs. Even my senior citizen parents are rooting for the Conservatives, saying how the tax cuts will be great for them. But, they’re on a fixed income, and not paying much income tax to begin with. I’m really glad they’re involved in the process (volunteering for Harper’s campaign) but can’t understand the logic behind their choice.

Of course, the Conservatives will have to give so many concessions to Ontario and Quebec that even under a “western” party’s government, this side of the country will be neglected. And, the election will still be all but decided by the time the polls open here.

The thought of moving from Calgary is growing more attractive, but then the rednecks would win a little more. Leaving would be giving up.

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