I should clarify, however: twice I've held a ballot in my hand with Stephen Harper's name on it, in the two leadership elections he's contested, since the former Canadian Alliance used and the new Conservative Party uses a "one member, one vote" system in which many thousands of party members each got to vote for their leader. Whether we actually voted for him or Ablonczy, Day, Hill, Stronach, and/or Clement, we were asked for our opinion and were part of the democratic process.

That's wrong. The issue is the coalition itself.

Canada has two major parties (Liberal and Conservative) and two minor parties (the Bloc, which only runs in Quebec, and the NDP, which has extreme economic views). The major parties at least nominally try to present platforms that take in all of Canada, and try to attract a majority of voters, while the minor parties have narrower positions that may be appreciated by their bases, but which are inimical to a majority of Canadians. The only way the minor parties can get their hands anywhere near the levers of power is to engineer a situation where they hold the balance of power, as in a coalition government. However, a government that has to cater to their views, one that has to stir three positions into a pot and serve up the result, is going to serve up a lot that sticks in the craw of folk who aren't in the tiny intersection of the two minority party target demographics.

Another issue is that the coalition idea wasn't presented to the voters in the recent (October) election, other than for the leaders to say "no" and that their parties would stay at arms' length from the others. That means the parties are mandated to keep their pants on and stay out of bed with each other.

So Canada's three opposition parties have gotten into cahoots to form a coalition and push the Government aside, claiming that the Conservative Government isn't doing enough to stimulate the economy RIGHT NOW.

• The Government has been stimulating the economy over its time in office, with cuts to the Goods and Services Tax and a generous amount of spending.
• Present stimulus to the auto industry in particular depends on an actual plan (the Big 3 have been challenged to show how they'd spend it) and not just on scatter-gunning them with cash. Also, the US is presently in transition to the Obama administration, and how best to co-ordinate efforts with them isn't clear yet. There are some noises out of Washington about making a bailout conditional on the Big 3 moving all their jobs to American workers, too.
• The Canadian stock market, adverse to political uncertainty as always, tanked further at this news, so the Opposition isn't helping them.
• A change of administration at this point will mean that any governmental action is delayed until probably the new year, as a new batch of Cabinet ministers would need time to come up to speed, at which point a Conservative budget would have been in front of Parliament already.
• They propose to take the economy out of the hands of an actual working economist and put an academic in charge instead.
• The opposition has admitted that its best brains have already retired, and is proposing putting policy in the hands of a cabal of four retired politicians who won't have to answer to the voters.
• The unwieldy coalition of opposition parties includes separatists, who care only about goodies for Quebec, and socialists whose economic record in provincial government frankly sucks.
• This proposal would let Bob Rae near an economy again.
• The voters gave the Liberal party its weakest showing ever, and they're still trying to wangle it into a chance at government.

Coalition government? Just Say No.

In the wake of the Sunrise Propane plant explosion a few weeks ago, Toronto mayor David Millar was claiming that facilities like that need to be at least 1.6 kilometres away from residences. Now, with a non-round figure like that, one might suspect that he's done the physics and the math, figured out the amount of thrust a propane storage tank gets as its contents breach out and light up, the air drag and possible trajectory and all, and came up with that figure. On the other hand, 1.6 km happens to be a mile, and you figure someone had once said "Yeah, Ah figure as how y'all'd wanna be a mile away from one of them puppies if it blew up real good" and that became the official number.

The other interesting thing is that a 1.6 km radius (a 3.2 km diameter circle) is an amount of land that I doubt you're going to find residence-free anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area.

Today, for the first time ever (and I've been driving for a lot of years) I saw something I'd never seen before: a BMW stopping to let another car into traffic. I'm suspecting he/she/it did so only because they still had the opportunity to delay the vehicle behind them instead (and my front-row view of the situation was of course due entirely to being the driver of said following vehicle). I very seriously contemplated giving the Bimmer the horn, but the issues involved were complex.

I really have a problem with software that starts becoming self-aware, because there's no useful way to buy each other a beer and come to a peaceful relationship with it.

PF, it seems, can tell that I'm trying to SSH home from a Linux conference, and is feeling jilted.

(Footnote: issue seems to be an issue involving PF tripping over MTUs, and yes I tried clamping the MSS/MTU with iptables from my client end. With more time to test before hitting the road I'd have taken a trusted client outside and actually authenticated, instead of just verifying an untrusted client could telnet to an SSH banner.)

• Attitudes have changed a lot since back then, and quickly enough that people who were around back then are still around to have to deal with the fallout. The quaint attitudes of a century ago are mitigated by the fact that the people who espoused them are dead now and can't be held to account against 2008 standards. And there are a host of other attitudes that were still around in the early 1990s, like smoking in the office, sexual harassment of female coworkers, beer in the office, gender stereotypes, and a whole lot of other things we're generally happy to be past. That tape is a historical snapshot of what people thought in that place in that year, and shows that a lot has changed.

• The other problem is that in our electronic age, the volume of archived quotes and photographs of each of us is considerable, and if every skanky bit is going to be held up against us, only the most terminally boring will be able to run for public office. It may behoove us to develop a more flexible understanding of stuff that goes back more than a decade or so and acknowledge that life is a process of learning and adapting and hopefully increasing in wisdom.