Swan is out!

On Saturday, I posted a comment to Never Eat Yellow Snow's post saying that Swan had reached his “do or die” moment and had to do well in this past weekend’s delegate selection meetings or see his support crumble amid an increasingly polarized Selinger-Ashton battle.

Today, we see the result: Swan is dropping out, changing the race into a simple one-ballot, two-candidate contest for the Premiership.

While there's no word yet on whether he'll publicly endorse one of his former rivals, it's almost a certainty that Swan will back Selinger. At least 67 Swan-declared delegates will also be freed up to vote for one of the other two candidates. It's certain they'll go disproportionately to Selinger, who, despite a slow start, has emerged in the last couple of weeks as the odds-on favourite to win.

Followers of the leadership race should also check Never Eat Yellow Snow and Endless Spin Cycle regularly for their great ongoing coverage.

UPDATE: Swan and several ministers who had lined up behind him have endorsed Selinger. As Yellow Snow notes, we can expect the rest of the Swan-endorsing cabinet ministers and labour leaders to follow suit.

Why Manitoba Liberals will never win power

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/09/15/mb-doer-conflict-gerrard-manitoba.html

How much political mileage can the good doctor expect to get by bashing the guy who's being fêted as he heads for the exit?

Be nice, Mr. Gerrard -- offer up the mandatory bouquet of nice words and funny anecdotes and then turn your attention to someone you'll actually be facing off against.

A leisurely rant

I was considering live-blogging my attempt to register for some of Winnipeg's Leisure Guide courses Monday morning, but my readers should be thankful I didn't. It would have looked very much like this, only much, much longer:




9:00 Web page tells me too many users are trying to access the system. Can't get in.
9:01 Registration by phone impossible. 311 number busy. Can they not use some queuing software?
9:05 Repeated attempts to access the website and 311 line prove fruitless.
9:11 Now, even the City's "too many users" webpage won't load.
9:15 Back to the regular error message.
9:22 Ditto.
9:29 Still no luck.
9:37 Same thing.
9:50 Ditto.

*snip*

10:57 Same thing.
11:00 Ditto.
11:01 Wow, just got in. Okay, first step after clicking "English" is to log in. How to do so is not so obvious. Found help page which told me I have to click "my basket" as the first step. Okay, in. Found my course and clicked register and got... oh no, the "too many users" error message. I've been booted out after trying all morning to get in.
11:25 Trying the website continuously for 20 minutes. No luck. 311 still busy.
11:34 Registration by phone still impossible. 311 number busy.
11:39 Ditto.

Finally, sometime shortly after 12, the e-gates opened and I was able to register. It was hardly a hassle-free process, though, as finding and registering for a few courses took me nearly 30 minutes. A few of my experiences:

- Some of the courses listed in the Leisure Guide had incorrect ID numbers, which meant having to manually search for them to find the real numbers.

- Often, clicking on the "details" button for a course provided no information or gave me an error message.

- When clicking to register for a course, the site took me to my shopping basket where the next step was to choose the "client" or course taker, assuming you have more than one person in your account. For one of the courses I added, I had to click the name of the course-taker more than 20 times before the site would accept my selection -- it would otherwise load a blank webpage; browsing back to my basket showed the person selection still not yet made.

- After selecting one course brought me to the "my basket" page, I chose the user and was informed by the site that the course was no longer available (yet checking it showed many spots still open).

Now, I love taking the fabulous courses that are offered in the Leisure Guide each year and find the quality of instruction to be very high, but can we not get a proper registration system? The site and process would have looked and felt archaic ten years ago. And the 311 phone line -- can I not just be put on hold, even if I am kindly told by an electronic voice I will be there for 30 minutes?

Websites have been around for over 15 years. While we can afford to suffer the bugs of brand new technology, there's no excuse for having a website that wonky. The standard these days is that sites are user friendly, bug-free, and linked to databases thoroughly checked for errors. With hundreds of colleges and universities in this country that take course registrations every day, there are sure to be some best practices that can be emulated.

In the meantime, assuming the folks that went through what I did didn't just give up in frustration, you can bet that the courses in anger management, blood pressure control, and meditation are now all full.

Lawrence Cannon, no friend of Canadians

As the Tories launch their latest round of plans to secure a majority government, they might find getting off the ground is easier if you first get rid of the anvil sitting in the luggage bay.

The anvil in question is Lawrence Cannon, our federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, and no friend of Canadian citizens travelling abroad. In this weekend's Globe, both Rex Murphy and Gerald Caplan eloquently describe Cannon's bungling and bizarre comments that make clear his inability to stand up for the citizens his government is supposed to represent. If law-abiding Canadians find themselves in trouble abroad, who can they count on if not their own government?

The latest mistake -- trapping Toronto woman Suaad Hagi Mohamud in Kenya after Canadian officials wrongly denied she was Canadian -- has resulted in a $2.5 million dollar suit against the government. Abdelrazik, the Canadian citizen trapped in Sudan for over six years until a court forced the government to bring him home, will likely cost the government millions more. Money of course doesn't make up for the grief and trauma experienced by the victims.

While we can't personally blame the Minister for every mistake made, it's his inability to speak up and resolve issues that we should question. In some cases, his department is
completely silent when dialogue with a foreign government is clearly warranted. In the case of Abdelrazik, for reasons still never thoroughly explained, his department deliberately created additional roadblocks to prevent the citizen's return home.

The question now is how much more will this Minister cost Canadians before he finds the exit?

Building mosques as economic strategy

This Globe article makes for some thought-provoking reading: it details how Prince George, BC is building a mosque and Islamic cultural and educational centre in the hopes of luring in the high-skilled workers it desperately needs.

Interestingly, this comes at a time when some citizens of the western world – in a decade likely to be defined by 9/11 and the sudden economic downturn near its close – are being taken in by the dark side of xenophobia and anti-immigrant finger-pointing (see this week’s European Parliament election results).

While it was undoubtedly in the works for some time, Prince George’s announcement dovetails nicely with Barack Obama’s recent overtures to the Muslim world. His message of peace – eloquently quoted from the Koran last week – was no doubt expressed also in the hopes of achieving not just social objectives, but economic objectives: in this case, economic stability, improved trade and access to markets, and an end to the costly and controversial military conflicts that continue to rage through many Islamic regions of Africa and Asia.

The likely role that Prince George’s mosque will play in its future might also bear some comparison with the role the Winnipeg Central Mosque (or WCM) plays in the West End neighbourhood’s development. Open in 2004, the mosque is a resource and prayer centre for the local Muslim community, which must be quite large if the crowds that can be seen coming to and leaving the centre are any indication. The WCM, along with the Halal food shops I also see opening up in the neighbourhood, likely represent both a sign of and a draw for local and immigrating Muslims.

While Winnipeg continues to face its own significant skilled labour shortages, there is also hope that the WCM, along with other West End developments, represents a new wave of community pride in the neighbourhood, which many suburban Winnipeggers may have long written off as lost to prostitution and crime. Along with neighbours such as the Ellice Café & Theatre, the Black Sheep Diner, and the new West End Cultural Centre, the WCM is one of a number of growing spaces of vibrancy in an area long characterized by its pockets of vibrancy.

If Prince George’s strategy works to its benefit – and I think it will to some degree – this will only fuel the debate over what religious, cultural or artistic investments a city or region can make to successfully lure and then settle new migrants to ultimately benefit its own economy (take note, Richard Florida).

Governments of course have a long-running preference for investing in large "bricks and mortar" type projects that have more finite, predictable, and mathematically-derivable estimates of economic impact than something more indirectly beneficial like a mosque. Of course, those same "bricks and mortar" projects usually bring in office drones who extend the morning Tim Horton's lineups even further down the street but who, like clockwork, quickly desert the neighbourhood to the shadows a moment after 5 pm.

Maybe building mosques and other types of community centres is a better strategy for developing thriving neighbourhoods and healthy economies.


Photo: Istanbul's Blue Mosque, also known as the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, was built between 1609 and 1616. It is renowned for its more than 20,000 handmade blue ceramic tiles and six minarets.

Election watching

It's been a slow spring in the Manitoba blogosphere, including here at PT. That's not to say there isn't a lot going on politically around the world.

Europe

Election watchers might be interested in this BBC summary of the EU election results.

I find it quite fascinating how diverse political parties from very different European political cultures have managed to forge a series of pan-European slates. On the left, labour-oriented, moderate socialist and social democratic parties are largely united under the Party of European Socialists (PES) banner. They are second to the bloc of centre-right, Christian democrat and conservative parties that have banded together under the umbrella of the European People's Party – European Democrats (EPP-ED), which Britain’s Tories are in the process of leaving in the hopes of forming a new coalition. Centrist and liberal/pro-free trade parties comprise the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, known as the Alliance Of Liberals And Democrats For Europe (ALDE).

The mostly right-wing Euro-skeptics, those mostly opposed to greater European integration through the building of pan-European institutions and regulations, have their own pan-European party, called the Union For Europe Of The Nations or UEN. Extreme Euro-skeptics, those looking for their country’s complete withdrawal from the EU, are part of the Independence And Democracy (IND/DEM) coalition.

Small regional and nationalist parties, such as those from Scotland, Wales and the Basque region of Spain, have banded together as the European Free Alliance (EFA) and are now allied with the European Greens. Communist and radical left parties also have their own left parliamentary bloc.

Results in this weekend's elections mark a continued decrease in voter turnout to just 43% and a general rightward tilt in votes cast, particularly in Britain, where Gordon Brown’s struggling Labour Party was reduced to a mere 15% of the votes. Left-leaning parties in France, Spain and Portugal also saw their share of the vote decline.

Alarmingly, a number of xenophobic, anti-immigrant and far-right parties, including the British National Party, saw their numbers increase.

Finally, Sweden’s Pirate Party, which runs on a platform of copyright and patent law reform, won its first seat in the European Parliament.

Lebanon

Election followers are no doubt casting their eyes southeast of the EU to Lebanon, where the governing coalition just staved off a strong challenge from the opposition coalition that's led by the infamous Hezbollah movement.

This Globe article provides a good overview of the different religious, ethnic and political associations of each party.

Nova Scotia

Closer to home, a lot of people are following developments in Nova Scotia, where the NDP looks poised to form its first government ever in Atlantic Canada. Three polls have now put the NDP around 45%, far ahead of the governing Conservatives and third-place Liberals, who are each reported to be holding around 25%.

Some good sites to follow the coverage include those of the Chronicle-Herald and CBC, Nodice, an elections facts and figures site, and the Elections Nova Scotia site itself.

Elsewhere around the world

Election watchers can follow recent and upcoming elections at sites such as Election Guide.

Photo: A display meant to promote the 2009 European elections.

PT turns two!

Prairie Topiary turned two today, an event worth celebrating! (somehow, I managed to completely sleep through the blog’s first anniversary.)

While the posts here tend to be wordy and infrequent, they also tend to be well received by readers.

In two years since this blog has started, the local politics-oriented blogging community has changed somewhat. Missed are Blackberry Addicts and Comments Closed. Great new additions to the community include PolicyFrog and The Don Street Blog. A host of others continue to provide regular, valuable contributions. My blogroll provides a selection of the blogs I follow regularly and that are worth checking out.

No blog anniversary is complete without a look back on some favourite posts:

Are we bad eco-citizens? (January 2009): I asked this after coming across some Statistics Canada data that suggests Manitobans are behind most other Canadians when it comes to a range of environmentally friendly behaviours.

The prorogation and 2009’s limping victor (December 2008): We all remember the drama that played itself out before Christmas, with government and opposition battling it out for power. My take was that the prize wasn't much of a prize given the long hard road ahead either government would face, something that Ignatieff likely came to realize and that Harper is finding out.

A two-horse race and other pre-election myths (September 2008): Looking back to the eve of the last federal campaign, it seems obvious now that the Tories were strong, the Liberals were in disastrous shape and that the NDP hadn’t lost dramatic numbers of votes to the Greens. However, that’s not what you’d think from reading news reports and poll punditry at the time. One Liberal commenter took strong exception to my post.

The non-issue of crown donations to the human rights museum (May 2008): Policy Frog and I debated the merits and appropriateness of provincial crown donations to the CMHR, with me taking the side that the donations were appropriate.

New software does not an urban vision make (February 2008): I critiqued Sam Katz’s annual Chamber of Commerce mayoral speech, particularly for its lack of vision and obsession with the CrimeStat software program. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to Katz's 2009 one.

The endorsement game (January 2008): I had fun watching American celebrities line up behind their favourite candidates for the Democratic and Republican nominations. Who knew then that Obama would go on to trounce first Clinton and then McCain?

Canada’s shameful day at the UN (June 2007): I called attention to the federal government’s disappointing decision to withdraw support for the UN’s Draft Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples after years of work promoting it.

Forward not back (May 2007): Manitoba’s voters elected a greater share of women to its Legislature than sit in the House of Commons or in the legislative assembly of any other province. Obviously, at 32%, we’re a long ways yet from gender equality among our provincial representatives.

Triumphant! (May 2007): While I love making election predictions, I can't say I’m always right. However, I did very well in Manitoba’s last contest, successfully predicting the result in 54 out of 57 constituencies, for 95% accuracy.

Tory justice: lock up the poor (May 2007): In Manitoba’s last campaign, the Tories came up with the ridiculous idea of denying legal aid to people who have a previous conviction for certain types of offenses. Not only did they throw the concept of being innocent until proven guilty out the window, but the plan would probably cost more in the long run than it would save. It's clear they didn’t think through that one very well.