The non-issue of crown donations to the human rights museum

I've been following with some interest the controversy over four provincial crown corporations and agencies (Manitoba Hydro, the Manitoba Lotteries Corporation, Manitoba Public Insurance, and the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission) each donating $1 million to The Canadian Museum For Human Rights (see story here and responses by Dan Lett and PolicyFrog here).

I suppose eyebrows are raised because the organizations in question are owned by and accountable to Manitobans, and because two of them (MLC and MLCC) pour their revenues directly into those of the government. But are the donations in question unreasonable or inappropriate?

Q. If the crowns were private corporations, would they likely donate?

A. Almost surely, if the Museum's list of major donors is any indication (available in one of the Museum's promotional kits) -- the list of companies reads like a who's who of Manitoba's private sector. If Canad Inns, CIBC, HudBay Minerals, Friesens, Ben Moss Jewellers, and Bison Transport, to name a few, are all leading the way with big donations, is it unreasonable to expect that our crowns might pony up a few dollars? I think not. In fact, given the growing list of big ticket public, private and union donors, the crowns might well appear conspicuous by their absence if they chose NOT to donate.

Q. Are the amounts the crowns are donating unreasonable?

A. Hardly. A million bucks is peanuts for Hydro, which has annual revenues exceeding $2 billion. And if Wawanesa Insurance can afford to be in the $1,000,000 to $4,999,999 donor category, surely fellow insurer MPI can do the same. And MLC and MLCC will directly benefit from the new museum as any additional tourism will boost casino/VLT traffic and liquor sales, so it makes good business sense for them to chip in for the cause. That $2 million that might otherwise have ended up in government coffers doesn't seem like an unreasonable investment.

Q. Is it unusual for the crowns to support the community through sponsorship?

A. Not at all; show up at any event in town and you'll see they do it every day. I didn't see any complaints registered over MLC's sponsorship of the Manitoba Marathon nor of Hydro's support for the Winnipeg Folk Festival. And I've never heard any boos for the crown sponsors at any of the Bomber games I've attended.

Q. Is it inappropriate for the provincial government to direct the crowns to support the human rights museum?

A. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't the very rationale for having crowns that they enable us to achieve social ends that might otherwise not be achieved in their absence? In MLC's case, they advertise very publicly their specific mandate to direct moneys to support the community through donation and sponsorship. In this case, the crowns are supporting a project likely to boost tourism to the city, generate significant economic spin-offs, and educate people about human rights.

The opposition might have had a point if the sums being given were so huge as to threaten the financial well-being of the crowns in question or to risk putting the government in a deficit position, but the donations are entirely appropriate and reasonable. And, to be frank, they might just help to put Winnipeg "on the map" with a much more realistic plan than trying to revive a long-gone NHL franchise.

The saddest part is that, as this same opposition grasps for straws in any attempt to find anything to pin on what's been a fairly resilient administration, it's the Canadian Museum of Human Rights itself that gets caught in the crossfire.

When I contrast the scale of corporate and well-to-do backing for the museum with the provincial Tories' pooh-poohing of crown support for the museum, it makes me think it's probably a good thing the Tories aren't so reliant themselves anymore on corporate donations.

The Museum website: http://www.canadianmuseumforhumanrights.com/

Photo: artist's conception of The Canadian Museum of Human Rights, to be located at The Forks, in downtown Winnipeg.

The Negotiators

Given today’s news that Canada is talking with Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents and the fact that even suggesting dialogue with Taliban opponents in Afghanistan is enough for Tory MPs and their pals to label a person with the “Taliban” moniker (e.g., “Taliban Jack”), I have just one question:

How will the same Tory MPs and their pals now refer to their own leaders -- will they opt for the more formal, full-titled version, as in the "Right Honourable Taliban Stephen Harper" or the "Honourable Taliban Peter MacKay" or will the more cutesy and informal "Taliban Steve" and "Taliban Pete" be the favoured form of address?

2007 CTV poll

The Globe's Radwanski

Photo: Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay

Drawing Winnipeg's new electoral divisions

Like clockwork, that decennial ritual has begun again. The creaks and groans of the long-cold body can only mean it's beginning to stir. Soon, arisen, it will reclaim the mantle it once knew and the power it can still taste. That’s right; as readers of Curtis Brown's blog will know by now, the Electoral Divisions Boundaries Commission is back, and it will be sure to draw amazement from some and strike fear into the hearts of others.

Cheesy metaphors aside, I noted last year in my post-provincial election post that the redistribution of electoral boundaries will set off some pretty intense jockeying among incumbents over who gets to run where, particularly in regions where a seat has been eliminated. For example, in a region where five MLAs of one party see their seat count reduced to four over the same geographic region, you can bet it'll lead to some heated poll number-scanning, political organizing, and quiet deal-making. It’s Survivor: Manitoba for political junkies - literally, provincial politicians will be getting voted off the island.

I’m too intrigued by the whole process to wait patiently for the Commission to come up with their first set of proposed maps, so I’ve taken a close look at the numbers they've provided, which are based on the 2006 census data, to speculate on what they're likely to propose. While southern Manitoba is likely to see some dramatic redrawing of boundaries, I started first with my observations on Winnipeg. I'll consider non-Winnipeg and political implications of the demographic changes in future posts.

Winnipeg overview

I stated in my post last year that I thought the City of Winnipeg would see its share of the 57 seats go up from 31 to 32. However, based on the numbers, I no longer think that will be the case.

Based on the 2006 census data, the population of the city’s current 31 seats divided by the population quotient provided by the commission gives the city 31.44 seats, on average. Given that seats north of 53° (of which there are currently four) are allowed to be significantly below the quotient (with all other seats within 10% of 21,147), Winnipeg should stand a little above the quotient, which means the same 31 seats it’s had for the last ten years. By 2018, the number will likely move up again.

Within the city, the seats with the largest populations are Fort Whyte (a whopping 47% over the quotient), Southdale (22% over quotient), Seine River (15% over quotient), and Kildonan (7% over quotient). The smallest is St. Norbert (7% below quotient). What I found most interesting was that inner city seats are all very close to the quotient. It seems to me that in the last couple of redistributions, the inner city lost considerable numbers of voters and saw seats disappear as a result. This time, with an apparently more stable population, the inner city thankfully isn’t likely to lose any MLAs.

So if it’s clear that south Winnipeg -- driven by Fort Whyte, Seine River and Southdale -- must see improved representation, but that the city will stay at 31, where will the extra representation come from? The only reasonable answer is that existing constituency boundaries will be dragged southward to accommodate the growth in the south. My map's arrows (click on the map to get a larger, more readable version) and accompanying discussion illustrate what I speculate will happen.

East Winnipeg

On the east side of the Red River, there are 11 seats. Of these, seven (River East, Rossmere, Concordia, St. Boniface, St. Vital, Riel, and Transcona) are about 1,000 below the quotient, while Elmwood is close to the quotient, Radisson is above by about 1,000, and Seine River and Southdale are considerably up.

If the seven that are below quotient expand to their quotient level of voters, this will almost exactly match the amounts by which Seine River and Southdale need to shrink. This likely means that Radisson will move southward to become much more of a Windsor Park constituency; much of its northern portions will become part of expanded Rossmere, Concordia, and Transcona constituencies. Then, by taking of more of Windsor Park from Southdale, the old Radisson constituency allows the former to shed voters to achieve a near-quotient level.

Seine River also needs to shed voters to new constituencies. To achieve this, St. Boniface will likely expand southward, which will push St. Vital southward and Riel southward into former Seine River territory.

Southwest Winnipeg

In the southwest, things get interesting: Fort Whyte is 9,000 voters over quotient, which means it’s grown to nearly the size of 1.5 constituencies. How to rearrange the seats here to accommodate half of a new constituency? The one that seems an obvious answer is to take the south half of Fort Rouge (the only constituency to be divided by a river, something to be generally avoided in the creation of constituencies, I would argue) and turn it into a whole constituency. This generates the additional half a constituency needed to accommodate Fort Whyte’s growth.

How then to redraw the boundaries in the south end? I think it’s likely the commission will fall on tradition and carve out a Crescentwood, which was first created for the 1970s, then vanished in the 1980s, was re-created in late 1988, and then vanished again in 1998. As with its 1990s incarnation, Crescentwood would likely take the eastern portion of River Heights, the “planets” portion of Fort Garry, and the western portions of Lord Roberts and Fort Rouge.

With the Osborne Village piece of Fort Rouge, Lord Roberts will become much like the 1990s-era Osborne constituency. River Heights would move several blocks west to accommodate Crescentwood, which would push some of Tuxedo southward to take up some of Fort Whyte’s current territory. The new Fort Garry, robbed of the “planet” streets, would also snatch some of Fort Whyte’s current terrain. St. Norbert, with its below-quotient voting population, would also expand into Fort Whyte to ease some of the latter constituency's excess numbers.

North and west Winnipeg

The downtown portion of the old Fort Rouge riding may mean the revival of the old Broadway constituency, if it gets merged with the eastern part of Minto. That would mean Minto would get pushed westward into St. James which, along with Assiniboia, is slightly below quotient. As mentioned above, most inner city constituencies aren’t below quotient and so won’t be so much enlarged as shifted around.

An alternative for north Fort Rouge is to merge into the southern part of Point Douglas, the northern half of which would then get merged into some new redrawn versions of St. Johns, Burrows and Wellington. Wellington would then probably take part of Minto from the north, which would get several blocks of St. James in return. Overall, below-quotient Assiniboia, St. James, St. Johns and Inkster are likely to see some growth to balance the addition of Fort Rouge’s Downtown into its neighbours and the accommodation of over-quotient Kildonan.

Photo: Map of Winnipeg consituencies, from Election Manitoba's 2007 Statement of Votes, with arrows suggesting 2008 boundary movement.

A quick guide to Winnipeg protests

I'm a regular reader of David Watson's Waverley West and beyond blog and find it engaging, well-written and a valuable addition to the community. Lately, however, I've been following with some amusement his attempt to uncover some grand scheme behind last week's P3/city budget protest, made notorious by one attendee's ignorant attempt, via a sign, to put Mayor Sam Katz on par with Hitler.

Watson seems desperate to find a smoking gun showing that the provincial NDP or some other political organization organized the protest as part of some larger strategy to take on Katz. Is offensive sign holder Steve Mack an "NDP operative," he asks? Is protest spokesperson Mike Lennon an NDP-paid-for "protest leader"? (oops, he's already scratched that one off the list). Is the fringe Canadian Action Party "involved with the Katz defamation"? What if the "agent provocateur was sent by someone else in City Hall?" Watson also wonders, as he seems to struggle with just why Katz would be hiring people to film the protestors, is the plot "why Sam Katz was having the protestors photographed"? The drama has all of the twists and turns of a good conspiracy theory movie and I'm almost disappointed to see each new lead turn up with, well, nothing surprising.

It's been some time since I've attended any sort of political protest and I wasn't at the one at City Hall, but what happened seems pretty straightforward to me -- along the lines of the many hundreds this city has seen before:

1. For obvious reasons, unions and their allies dislike contracting out, P3s, privatization, and right-wing politicians who support such things.

2. Political demonstrations are not all that effective in swaying public opinion. Unions and other organizations organize protests to communicate with the public and with political leaders when other avenues are limited. If you can elect your people to public office with ease or get what you want through negotiation or simply by asking without having to protest publicly, why would you go to all the trouble?

3. The provincial NDP, especially when in power, does not bother to organize demonstrations as a political strategy because they have other, far more effective avenues for getting things done. If the provincial NDP decided that Katz was a thorn in the province's side (which they do not), they'd use their communications machine to back it up or recruit someone sufficiently high-profile to run against him.

4. No political organization or protest organizer with any brains or experience directs people to compare politicians they dislike to Hitler. How much ground did Katz's political opponents gain after the incident? Absolutely zero. If anything, the incident lost them ground. It's obvious that the sign was not the brainchild of any organization seeking to defame Katz.

5. Rallies against political policies are usually open invitation events held in public spaces. As a result, they may attract all sorts of people, including political organizers, members of any number of major or fringe parties, activists who regularly attend protests on any number of issues, people elected to public office, people who want to be elected to public office, people who have lost or who risk losing a job should proposed political changes pass, people whose philosphical or ideological sympathies are consistent with the protest's objectives, people who like crowds, lonely people, smart people, dumb people, people who are there for the free coffee, etc. For this reason, it seems pretty reasonable that lone individuals attending a protest cannot be said to speak for or represent the protest organizers or the entire collective body of protestors.

6. People attending political protests are motivated enough to take time out of their day and hang out for an hour or two regardless of the weather or other committments they may have. It shouldn't be surprising then that many attendees are dedicated political activists who are also avid participants in the political process in numerous other ways to support a range of causes or organizations.

7. Filming or photographing participants of strikes and political protests is nothing new. It's an extremely well-established and often-used technique throughout Canada and the US and elsewhere for (a) making participants feel "watched" and uncomfortable, so that they'll keep a low and non-militant profile and hopefully stay home next time; (b) discourage bad behaviour, by ensuring that photographic evidence will be available if things get out of hand; and (c) provide beautiful opportunities to shift attention away from the policies being protested to the protestors themselves when, for example, some clown shows up with an inappropriate sign.

8. As much as City Councillor Lazarenko is right to be shocked and offended at the sign one protestor chose to bring, trying to ban or limit protests isn't going to solve anything. Lazarenko, who according to the CBC, feels the city may have grown too lenient over the years in terms of what it will tolerate in a demonstration, is quoted as saying, "It gets to be like a mini-riot. It comes to a point where we lose control. The courtyard is for a peaceful demonstration."

Settle down, councillor; it was a peaceful protest, like one of many that happen in Winnipeg all the time.

Photo: A less-recent protest at City Hall. Depicted is a crowd gathered outside old City Hall, at Main Street and William Avenue, during the Winnipeg general Strike. Visible on the left are the Union Bank of Canada building and Leland Hotel.

The devious Mr. Katz

The mayor's office has released its detailed Service Based View of the budget. The document, which is available here, outlines a range of cuts to city services.

Shockingly, it was released just before the long weekend and a mere six days before the budget vote on the council floor. Its release also comes days after a public meeting in which citizens were invited to express their views on the budget. The Free Press covers the story here.

Can it all be coincidence that the mayor's office has released the bad news with virtually no time for the public to digest it, let alone debate it? Or, more likely, was this a sly attempt by our mayor to sneak some nasty cuts past the council floor when no one in the public is really paying attention? If the latter, it's more than just the usual lack of vision or fear of open debate; it's a wilful abuse of power.

Policyfrog has a great post on our mayor of "none" here. I'm personally keenly interested to see how each of our city councillors reacts to this one -- kudos to Councillor Gerbasi for drawing attention to the issue quickly.

Photo: Winnipeg's modernist City Hall (aka Civic Centre), completed and opened in 1964.

A punditry-inspiring week

What a week. While being buried in my work life, I've seen about 50 blog-worthy topics pass me by. See here for a small sampling of the utter ridiculousness. I've commented on a few items that provoked some thoughts.

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Quite a new low for the Liberals this week -- they're actually introducing a motion in the House of Commons blaming the NDP and Bloc for voting to defeat them in 2005. To quote Warren Kinsella: "Lord God Almighty, the Liberal Party of Canada needs help."

Mr. Dion and friends seem to be under the impression that their fellow parties are to blame for ending the long Liberal reign in Ottawa. Do they forget the voters who booted them out in the election that followed their defeat? Rather than pointing the finger for alleged wrongs committed by everyone else, can they not take some responsibility for the corruption and bad decisions that appeared endemic to their own party? Does the Liberal Party not look in the mirror and wonder if the source of their own troubles is staring right back at them?

It's more of the unspeakable arrogance we've seen before. Sounds like they're badly in need of some reflection time, of exactly the sort that comes with lounging in opposition for a long, long time.

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Speaking of Kinsella, he's calling the US Presidential race for McCain in the wake of the seemingly endless Democratic nomination race. I wouldn't go so far as to call it yet, but he's right - I'm worried about the Democrats' chances. The added months of publicity, fundraising, and organizing time that the Republicans have while the Democrats scrap it up can't be underestimated. When the dust settles in the Democratic nomination and the winner emerges, expect the Republicans to be well-prepared, waiting with boats of money and a battalion of attack ads.

It's a damn shame.

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A lot of people were shocked at the Alberta election results, particularly by the huge increase in Conservative seats at the expense of all three other parties that were represented in the Legislature. That came despite a whole lot of talk about voters being in a mood for change.

The result can be chalked up entirely to the Tory increase in Edmonton, which is the only part of the province where the opposition parties have a large concentration of seats. Tory increases in the opposition heartland, combined with slippage in parts of the province where it doesn't really make a difference (e.g., Calgary) equals a big increase in the majority.

At a glance, the overall popular vote didn't shift by a massive amount -- the Conservatives went up from 47% in 2004 to 53% in 2008, while the Liberals dropped three points to 26% and the NDP dropped one point to 9%. That's not a cataclysmic shift. For all the talk about the new Wildrose Alliance on the right, their 7% this time is below the 9% their 2004 counterpart earned. The Greens crept up from 3% to 5%, mostly as a result of two high-profile candidates who did well, but didn't come close to winning.

In Edmonton, though, the Tories soared from 31% to 43%, while the Liberals dropped from 41% to 33%. The NDP lost three points to land at 18%, which was enough to cost the two of their four seats, sadly including that of former leader Ray Martin. I wonder if Edmonton Liberal popularity in the Klein years was driven to some degree by Ralph Klein himself. The former Premier was a high-profile and not uncontroversial Calgarian, something that might not have entirely endeared him to voters in rival city Edmonton. Remove the Klein and see the Liberal balloon deflate, despite what most pundits agree was a better-run campaign by the party.

A big disappointment is that the voter turnout has dropped yet again, this time to a mere 41%. It's no coincidence that the lowest voter turnout in Canada happens to be in the province that's our closest thing to one-party state. There's not much point in voting when the outcome's pre-determined, so why bother? The Tories now have won a mandate based on 53% of 41% or about 22% of the electorate. How low does it have to get -- in Alberta or in any voting jurisdiction --before people start to question the government's very legitimacy? What then?

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Ed Schreyer, Manitoba's resident loose cannon ex-Premier, sure had something to say recently. Can you blame him? Did the boosters of Waverley West not do any research on the technical requirements associated with installing geothermal energy before announcing the project? Sounds to me like "geothermal" was a nice-sounding term some folks decided to slap in their PowerPoint presentations when it came time to do the dirty job of selling sprawl. It's more than a little disappointing.

The Rise and Sprawl has a some good comments on the topic.

Photo: Downtown Edmonton. The city shifted quite dramatically toward the Alberta Conservatives this week.

Polling mysticism

So today's poll has the Tories "flirting with a majority." Now wait... didn't yesterday's poll have them in "a dogfight" with the Liberals?

Apparently, yesterday's competitive Liberals are now suddenly today's underdogs fighting even to stay above historic party lows (of which their reported 27% would certainly be). The NDP, whose 12% in today's poll put them well below their 2006 support levels, were just two weeks ago at 19% and apparently well-positioned to make gains. Back then, the Greens found themselves at 7%, a standing barely above their 2006 election result and far short of their apparent rapid ascendance to 13% in the latest poll.

As political observers, we all ooh and ahh at each new horse race figure that's printed in the papers, trying to read into the numbers some sort of truth about who's ahead and who's behind and who's going to be sorry and who's going to be rewarded. The art of poll watching has taken on an almost mystical quality, with its high priests quick to ascribe some dramatic trend or, in some cases, validate the various notions and myths their particular political tribe feels a need to hold on to (which includes partisan false bravado).

For political junkies, prognosticating election results after every poll makes for fun exercise, but it's fairly pointless, for a number of reasons:

• First, most of us who read about polls regularly know some of the reasons that poll numbers jump around: sampling (± a certain percentage, 19 times out of 20) and various sorts of non-sampling errors, and the way survey questions are asked (debates continue about what question wording best replicates how voters are likely to respond upon arriving at the polling booth, something that Blackberry Addicts were never exactly shy about raising).


• Second, polls taken in between elections are often more about party brands than they are about the true competitive standing of each party relative to one another. It's what I often call a "parking lot" effect, in which poll respondents instinctively "park" their vote in between elections. Asked by a pollster who they'll vote for and they'll tend to blurt out whatever party brand they roughly associate with or that happens to be top of mind. The Liberals and Greens tend to be beneficiaries of this tendency in most parts of Canada.


• Third, pre-election campaign polls don't take into account party organization, finances, gaffes or infighting, strategic positioning, the name recognition of incumbent "star" candidates, media exposure, and party messaging, all of which play a huge role in that complex game of chess that plays itself out in each election campaign.
  

For these reasons, the hype that follows most polls tends to be pretty hollow. A better analysis might take into account some of the above factors.

The Greens, currently buoyant in most polls, have considerably less ground organization, campaign experience, cash resources, star candidates, or media exposure than the other three national parties and will almost surely sink when the next election campaign goes live. Nik Nanos, of SES Research, suggests that the Greens typically drop 1/3 of their vote from the last poll to the actual election. That's after the deflation of the Green balloon that's likely to occur during the campaign itself.

The Liberals, in their current state of endless infighting, fundraising difficulties, mass retirement of MPs and loss of valuable potential candidates, to name just a few of their problems, had best shape up and fast if they expect to hold the 27% to 35% the polls currently peg them at.

Worse for the party is the unenviable position they keep backing themselves into: critiquing the government but then doing all they can to make sure it isn't defeated. For them, voting to defeat the government in a confidence motion means risking catastrophic losses in an election (for some of the reasons noted above), yet supporting the government or abstaining from confidence motions means branding themselves as a "weak" opposition that has little alternative agenda to that of the government.

A weak, indistinct, vision-less Liberal Party is one that's going to find itself wedged in an election between the Conservatives and the NDP when centre-right Liberals find they have no reason to vote for a "me too" Liberal rather than a Tory and when centre-left Liberals find that the alternative vision they're looking for lies only with the NDP. Is it any wonder, then, that the Tories and NDP are literally trying to goad the Liberals into an election, while the Liberals are finding ever new and interesting ways to contort themselves in an attempt to avoid just that?

We live in very interesting times.

Photo: a map of the 2006 federal election results.