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.

Welcome back...

Welcome back, Sausage Factory (sorry to disappoint anyone who expected to see a posting about Gabe Kaplan here). Many of us bloggers hadn't given up hope that Dan Lett's blog would return, as is evident by the long-standing, for-a-time-dead links on the sidebars of our blogs. Dan Lett is one the Free Press's best critical thinkers writers and it's good to see him posting again.

May's Greens: rising tide?

Globe columnist Lawrence Martin's latest piece on Elizabeth May and the federal Green Party was quite interesting. As many know, May is fighting to participate in the leader's debate and hoping to knock off Peter MacKay and win the first seat for her party. It won't be an easy task, but the Greens are feeling boosted by recent polls showing her party as high as 13% nationally and as high as 17% in Toronto's "guilt-ridden" 905 belt.

The big question is whether May can hold on to her poll numbers and translate them into votes at election time. It's likely that the Greens will be far outspent and outorganized by the three national parties, all of whom will be spending the maximum amount, and likely the Bloc too. Electoral history is filled with stories of overly optimistic parties driven by buoyant but ultimately ephemeral support levels.

A lot of folks assume that if the Greens do gain support that it'll be at the expense of Layton's NDP. According to the Martin article, some Greens even talk about merging with the NDP to create a new GDP (apparently that's short for "Green Democratic Party" and not "Gross Domestic Product"). However, Green gain at NDP expense isn't entirely certain. If it were, how might we explain the fact that the GP's greatest strength, when looking at all 500,000+ sized urban areas, lies in Calgary (9% in 2006, on average) and the 905 belt (17%, according to some poll numbers). These are hardly traditional areas of support for the NDP, which, at 10%, came in barely ahead of the Greens in Calgary and, outside of Oshawa, Hamilton and the Niagara region, struggles for votes in the 905 area that surrounds Toronto. Meanwhile, the NDP's two strongest cities, Vancouver (27% in 2006) and Winnipeg (28%) are actually two of the GP's weakest (5% and 4%, respectively).

My hypothesis right now is that the Greens are emerging as a or perhaps even the protest party of choice in regions where the NDP is relatively absent. Apart from a few BC ridings, wherever the NDP has a strong, well-managed campaign, the Green vote tends to be a non-factor, staying in the 2% to 6% range.

For the Greens, it certainly doesn't hurt that their message is more palatable for some suburban voters who feel a need to support a platform they see being ecologically-conscious, but who may be uncomfortable with the NDP’s traditionally pro-labour, redistributive policies (which the Greens tend either not to share or to keep awfully quiet about). If that's the case, the Greens may well be usurping more Liberal vote than NDP. Is that the reason behind the Dion/May hug-a-Green/hug-a-Liberal strategy? It's unlikely that, over the long run, they're both going to emerge victors from their quasi-alliance.

The Internet, being the ever-glorious provider of election study and polling numbers that it is, has given me quite a bit of interesting data to play with. That's one source of the tables I have above, which are simply summed riding-by-riding totals for each region. I've also found that the 2006 Canadian Election Study data files are freely available; that study consisted of interviews with thousands of Canadians before and after the election to gauge such things as party momentum, preferred second choices, and reactions to party platforms, campaign announcements and party leaders. In the lead up to the next federal election, I hope to share of the interesting findings from this data.

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At least one fellow Manitoba blogger, upon noticing my recent profile change (which states I've been a blogger since only January of this year), has concluded that my entire 2007 blogging history must have been written and posted all this month. It sort of conjures up the image of some wretched, hunched-over character in a dark, grungy basement cackling madly in between fits of wild typing to produce mass amounts of blog content (if only I was that prolific...). No harm done, but lest others make the same assumption, I thought I'd make it known that I merely changed the Gmail account I associate with the blog to a new one. For those using a Gmail address with blogger.com, it's easily done, as the instructions here, here, and here all attest. Of course, given the new profile date that'll appear by your name, you should be prepared to have any and all past election predictions challenged! Don't say I didn't warn you...

Local blogs

I recently discovered a couple of punchy local blogs more than worth adding to my blogroll.

PolicyFrog is an interesting read. See for example this

post on what I see as the Free Press's maddeningly simplistic and analytically-poor editorial efforts (in a world of exploding online content, the Free Press still seems to think its competitors are limited to the Sun and the local TV stations - the grey pap it tries to feed us in editorial form just doesn't measure up against the quality news and editorial material I can access within seconds from elswhere, including from other major Canadian dailies). While PolicyFrog's flavour is overall a little to the right of Prairie Topiary's, it's certainly worth a regular read.

The Rise and Sprawl is a pretty fantastic, well-researched, urban-focused blog. I love the fantastic photographs of Winnipeg past and present and the great research on the city's history and architecture. I love too the cogent and biting critique of our urban space's management, which is sadly characterized more often than not by its lack of vision, ignorance of planning basics, and discarding of urban history. The world could use more blogs of this calibre.

Photo: "Drawing for a Typewriter, 06/23/1868," a printed patent drawing for a typewriter invented by Sholes, Glidden, and Soule.