Category Archives: In the news

| Slow News Day

Quebec’s most and least trendy baby names of the decade

People love talking about baby names, and so the time of year when Retraite Québec announces the most popular names of the year is always a tempting fruit for a journalist looking for a quick story.

Unfortunately, the top five names doesn’t tell us that much. Liam and Olivia have been popular for a while now, and the top five doesn’t change that much year to year. Some journalists go a bit further and look at the end of the list for more unusual names (misspellings, mashed-up names, or words you wouldn’t think of as names), which can be amusing if you can avoid making fun of a name in a language you don’t understand.

Fortunately, Quebec’s open data website has full datasets of first names used since 1980 for boys and girls, so how about we do some more interesting number crunching?

Rather than just look at the most and least popular, I decided to see if I can suss out some trends. So I took the full data set, with almost 400,000 first names, and added a column calculating how many times they were used in the past 10 years versus the past 40 years. Normally this would be about 25%, but many names have gotten much more or much less popular.

A few caveats about these lists:

  • The database only goes back to 1980, so names that had already fallen out of favour by then won’t show up.
  • I’m assuming the database is correct. There may be errors here throwing off the results.
  • The lists are separated by gender because it’s two different data sets. In several cases names have gotten less popular because they’re traditionally associated with the other gender. Combining them would take a while and probably crash my computer.
  • For data entry cleanup reasons, I’ve excluded compound names from these lists (whether they have a hyphen or a space separating them) as well as names that are in the database as just one letter (which I assume are initials incorrectly coded as names). I’ve also set minimums for the number of times a name has to be used to weed out outliers.
  • Since the database does not include accents, I have not included them here.

Good? OK, here we go:

Continue reading →

| In the news, Technology

Emergency alerts will take a while to get right

For the few of you who don’t still have ringing in your ears from that annoying emergency alert sound, today was the second attempt at the first test of the wireless public alerting system in Canada.

Set for 1:55pm local time (2:55pm in Quebec), the alerts started in Newfoundland and Labrador and followed the time zones to B.C. and Yukon. I’ve compiled reports of those alerts in this Twitter thread:

Every province and territory (even Nunavut, which didn’t participate last time) successfully sent out an alert, but that doesn’t mean that everyone successfully got one. There a lot of moving parts to this process, and each one has to be working properly for the alerts to reach people’s TV screens and phones.

Today’s process involved the following steps and groups:

  • Coordination of the emergency alert test, by government agencies
  • Issuing of the emergency alert test by provincial and territorial emergency agencies
  • Distribution of the emergency alert test by the National Public Alerting System
  • Broadcast of the emergency alert test by wireless providers, television providers, mobile applications and television and radio stations
  • Reception of the emergency alert test by compatible set-top boxes and mobile devices

If any of those steps fail, the message doesn’t get through.

Continue reading →

| In the news

Municipal election races I’ll be watching on Sunday

It’s election day tomorrow. That’s always fun for a newsroom. All hands on deck, breathlessly following the results well into the night, coordinating stories from dozens of journalists, not knowing what the big headline will be at the end. Free dinner, and often drinks among colleagues afterwards.

I’ll be among many in the Montreal Gazette newsroom during the evening, handling two or three stories about individual races or a collection of them. But whenever I have a free second I’ll be following the results from across Quebec.

For most of the province’s municipalities, the results won’t be surprising. Incumbent mayors and city councillors are running again and will be easily re-elected. In some cases they’ve already won by acclamation, like every position in tiny Île-Dorval, or the mayors of Kirkland, Mount Royal and Hampstead, or the city council in Senneville.

Though they are facing opposition, the mayor’s races in cities like Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Gatineau and Trois-Rivières should easily go to the incumbents.

But other races, including mayor of Montreal, are going down to the wire. Here are the ones that will get my attention tomorrow:

Mayor of Montreal: Denis Coderre vs. Valérie Plante

The big one. The headline one. The one all the media has hyper-focused on. I don’t need to go over this campaign because if you haven’t heard about it you must really not care. Coderre, the authoritarian but well-meaning incumbent, trying to get a second term leading an experienced team. Plante, the cheerful and energetic challenger, hoping to succeed where her predecessor Richard Bergeron failed.

The polls have them neck and neck, but those numbers need to be taken with a big grain of salt. Coderre has the advantages of name recognition, on-the-ground political experience, an improving economy and residual resistance to some of Projet Montréal’s more radical platform points. Plante is the candidate of change, faces fewer major opponents than there were four years ago, and has run a virtually flawless campaign, rallying those Coderre has alienated, from dog lovers to those opposed to big government spending on art projects and sports venues.

Turnout will probably be the big difference, and advance polling has shown about the same level as four years ago. That makes a Coderre win more likely, though expect Projet Montréal to make gains on city council.

Projet’s potential borough control gains: Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Verdun, Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension

These four boroughs all have a mayor and a majority of the borough council with Coderre’s party, but one or more Projet Montréal councillors. Assuming the Plateau, Rosemont and Sud-Ouest boroughs are safe for the party, these would be the next likely pickups. Ahuntsic’s mayor’s race is between Coderre’s Harout Chitilian, former council speaker and Coderre’s pick to lead his executive committee, versus Projet councillor Émilie Thuillier. Mercier and Verdun are one seat away from switching majorities, and Villeray is next travelling up the leftist axis of St-Laurent Blvd.

The party switchers

It’s pretty crazy how many of Montreal’s 103 elected officials have switched parties since 2013. More than one in 10 candidates are incumbents running for a different party than they won for four years ago. As Vrai changement pour Montréal stumbled forward after the departure of founder Mélanie Joly, Coalition Montréal disintegrated following its loss and the death of its leader Marcel Côté, and some borough parties have lost their popularity, many have jumped ship for the safer confines of Projet Montréal and particularly Coderre’s party:

  • Benoit Dorais (Sud-Ouest mayor) from Coalition leader to Projet
  • Richard Bergeron (Ville-Marie councillor) from Projet to Coderre
  • Michelle Di Genova Zammit (Anjou borough councillor) from Équipe Anjou to Coderre
  • Éric Dugas (Ste-Geneviève borough councillor) from Équipe Richard Bélanger to Coderre
  • Marc-André Gadoury (Rosemont city councillor) from Projet to Coderre
  • Érika Duchesne (Rosemont city councillor) from Projet to Coderre (now running in Villeray)
  • Jean-François Cloutier (Lachine city councillor) from Équipe Dauphin to Coderre
  • Lorraine Pagé (Ahuntsic city councillor) from Vrai changement to Coderre
  • Russell Copeman (CDN-NDG borough mayor) from Coalition to Coderre
  • Maja Vodanovic (Lachine city councillor) from Équipe Dauphin to Projet
  • Réal Ménard (Mercier mayor) from Coalition to Coderre
  • Kymberley Simonyik (Lachine borough councillor) from Équipe Dauphin to Coderre
  • Elsie Lefebvre (Villeray city councillor) from Coalition to Coderre
  • Normand Marinacci (Île-Bizard mayor) from Vrai changement to Projet
  • Christian Larocque (Île-Bizard borough councillor) from Vrai changement to Projet
  • Jean-Dominic Lévesque-René (Île-Bizard borough councillor) from Vrai changement to Projet (not running again)
  • Gilles Beaudry (Anjou borough councillor) from Équipe Anjou to independent (running as independent)

The borough parties: Anjou, Lachine, LaSalle

Let’s not forget that before 2002, many of what are now Montreal’s boroughs were their own municipalities, and despite failing to meet the 2006 demerger criteria, they still have a strong connection to their local officials and long memories. Amid the corruption fiasco in 2013, several boroughs presented independent borough-level parties led by incumbent officials. Anjou and Lachine swept the table with their borough parties, and LaSalle and Outremont took borough mayors and majorities on their borough councils.

Four years later, Anjou and Lachine borough parties lost councillors to party switches, but are still in the game. As is LaSalle’s, which has all but one seat. Will voters in those boroughs stick with their local teams? Anjou’s and LaSalle’s are still pretty strong, but Lachine is anyone’s game.

Outremont: The shit show

Elected in 2013 as a split between the borough-level Équipe conservons Outremont (which held the mayor and two borough council seats), Projet borough councillor Mindy Pollak and independent Céline Forget, the borough council descended into chaos, being regularly mocked on Infoman. Within a year and a bit, the two ECO borough councillors left the party, one borough councillor resigned, and the council was split 2 vs 2 on just about everything, becoming entirely dysfunctional.

Borough mayor Marie Cinq-Mars isn’t running again, and the party doesn’t exist anymore. Instead, there’s a full slate of independent candidates, including two incumbent borough councillors. Will a new team bring some calm to the council, or will the petty political shenanigans continue?

Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce: Still room for independents?

Of the six seats on this borough council, there are three parties and an independent. It’s the only borough where Coalition Montréal is running a complete slate, and the only one with a Coalition incumbent — Snowdon councillor Marvin Rotrand.

The mayor’s race is between incumbent Russell Copeman, a former Liberal MNA with lots of name recognition and personal popularity, who defected from Coalition to join Coderre’s team, against Projet’s Sue Montgomery, a former Montreal Gazette justice reporter who failed to get the NDP nomination in NDG-Westmount for the last federal election. Are the borough’s Projet-friendly demographics going to be enough to counter Copeman’s popularity?

I don’t hold much hope for Coalition Montréal generally, but Rotrand is a survivor, known for being a hard worker for his constituents, and is running against two unknowns. Expect him to get re-elected, but his caucus meetings to be very lonely.

And then there’s Jeremy Searle. He ran as an independent for the Loyola seat in 2013 and won with 23% of the vote in a seven-candidate field. He then proceeded to make himself a complete embarrassment, failing to show up to meetings, making inappropriate comments and blaming an alcohol problem for his behaviour. Rather than get help, he’s up for re-election, with posters across the district. You might think there’s no way he gets re-elected, but this is the most contested race in the city (besides mayor) with six candidates — Coderre, Projet, Coalition and three independents. That could be enough for him to squeak through.

L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève: The old boss vs. the older boss

This borough had a borough-level party in 2013, Équipe Richard Bélanger, which held all the seats, but it was beat by a de facto borough-level party led by Normand Marinacci, a former mayor of an independent Île-Bizard. He took the mayor’s race and all but one of the council seats for Vrai changement, which became that party’s only borough mayor and borough majority. That had a lot more to do with the candidates than the party.

Since then, Marinacci and two councillors have jumped to Projet. Éric Dugas, the sole remnant of the Bélanger party, joined Coderre, and Stéphane Côté is Vrai changement’s only incumbent. Dugas and Côté are both running for mayor against Marinacci. Bélanger himself is running for Coderre as a councillor, as is Diane Gibb, a former Bélanger councillor.

Will this borough stick with Marinacci and vote Projet, will they switch back to the Bélanger/Dugas side and vote Coderre, or will they stay with Vrai changement even though its leader is long gone and its incumbents have switched parties?

Pierrefonds-Roxboro: Vrai changement’s last stand

The other West Island borough is also the only other place with a significant presence for Vrai changement. Rather than try for city mayor, party leader Justine McIntyre is running for borough mayor here against Coderre incumbent Dimitrios Jim Beis. Will an increased split of the vote between Coderre and Projet help McIntyre come up the middle, or will her party finally be wiped out here like it almost was in Île-Bizard?

Plateau Mont-Royal

Just kidding. Congratulations on your re-election, Luc.

Ville-Marie

The fewest names on the ballot, with only three city councillors and no borough mayor, but each of the three races is noteworthy:

  • Peter-McGill: Incumbent Steve Shanahan has Vrai changement’s only seat outside the West Island. Can he hold on? Coderre has star Cathy Wong on his team here, and the Coalition candidate is Jean Fortier, who has abandoned his run for mayor (though he’s still on the ballot).
  • Saint-Jacques: Former Projet leader Richard Bergeron won this easily four years ago, but now he’s on Coderre’s team running against the party he founded for the first time. Do the voters support Mr. Tramway or the Pink Line Party?
  • Sainte-Marie: This is the seat Valérie Plante will take if she’s not elected mayor. But Coderre has former councillor Pierre Mainville running here (Mainville had the privilege of being at different times a member of Vision Montreal, Coalition Montreal, Projet Montréal and Coderre’s team).

Côte-Saint-Luc: Brownstein vs. Libman

I honestly couldn’t tell you the political differences between these two guys. Their arguments, beyond personal insults and Brownstein’s attempt to tie Libman to a conflict of interest, seem to be about who can more strongly push for the Cavendish extension project to finally get done while also ensuring it’s a convenience to CSL residents and nobody else. Expect Brownstein to ride his incumbency to victory, but it won’t be easy.

Westmount: Smith vs. Wajsman

Peter Trent has stepped down, which opens up this race. His replacement, Christina Smith, has the incumbency advantage, but is facing competition from Beryl Wajsman, editor of The Suburban. Amazingly, Wajsman is allowed to remain editor of The Suburban during the campaign, and has even said he wants to keep the job after he’s elected. The Suburban’s solution to this obvious conflict of interest has been to simply not cover the Westmount election at all.

Will Smith prevail with Trent’s blessing? Or will Wajsman be forced to choose between media and politics? And regardless of who wins, how does The Suburban regain any credibility in covering Westmount?

Pointe-Claire: Time for the runner-up?

Mayor Morris Trudeau isn’t running again. Instead, we have the man he narrowly beat, John Belvedere, against three other candidates, including city councillor Aldo Iermieri. Who has the advantage here?

Senneville: McLeish again?

Jane Guest isn’t running for re-election as Senneville mayor, so instead we have a three-way race. The front-runner surely has to be former Senneville mayor George McLeish, 74. But his opponents are both two-term sitting councillors: Julie Brisebois and Charles Mickie. Will long memories prevail in this quiet town?

Montréal-Est: Two-way races

Incumbent Robert Coutu is running again with a full team, but his opponent is Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, and his Équipe du citoyen has two incumbent city councillors on board. Will their complaints about wasteful spending lead to a movement for change?

Longueuil: Three options

Caroline St-Hilaire isn’t running again, so there’s an opening for city mayor. And three parties are contesting every seat here: Action Longueuil, St-Hilaire’s party, now led by city councillor Sylvie Parent; Longueuil citoyen, led by city councillor Josée Latendresse; and Option Longueuil, led by Sadia Groguhé, which has picked up the Option Greenfield Park incumbents. All three have incumbent city councillors on their teams and have a shot in a city where demerger sentiment was high and borough independence is still an issue.

Laval: Partypalooza

Incumbent mayor Marc Demers has the advantage, especially in a large field of six challengers , but there are four parties with full slates — Action Laval, Avenir Laval, Parti Laval and Mouvement Lavallois — plus an association of independent candidates. Action’s Jean Claude Gobé, who came in second in 2013, is running again. The makeup of council could be far more split than in the past.

Hudson: Councillor Duff?

Ed Prévost decided not to run again, and died less than a month before the vote. Three candidates are vying to replace him — Joseph H. Eletr, William Nash and Jamie Nicholls, none of whom lead official parties. But my eye will be on the Heights East district race, which features former print and radio personality Jim Duff.

Lac-Mégantic

 

Three candidates are vying for mayor of the small town that put itself on the map in the most tragic ways in 2013. This will be its first regular election since the disaster. Colette Roy-Laroche is long gone and incumbent Jean-Guy Cloutier isn’t running again, so the field is wide open.

Saguenay: Néron vs. Blackburn

With foot-swallowing populist mayor Jean Tremblay stepping down, four candidates are vying to replace him, two of whom have parties behind them. The race seems to be between councillor Josée Néron of Équipe du renouveau démocratique, the only party that dates back to 2013, and independent Jean-Pierre Blackburn, a former federal minister under the Harper government (who until recently led the other party but left it at the last minute). A poll before the race put them neck and neck, but with a lot of undecideds. Néron’s party had a long runway to get going, but had to deal with the scandal of a candidate having an arson conviction.

Any others I should be looking at?

| In the news, Technology

Letting Loto-Quebec force ISPs to block websites may soon be a thing

This post has been updated with a court judgment. See below.

It was the very last thing in last year’s Quebec budget. Literally, on pages 616-618 of the 620-page budget document (the last two pages are blank): The government was going to create a law that will require Internet service providers to block illegal gambling websites based on a list provided by Loto-Québec:

A legislative amendment will be proposed to introduce an illegal website
filtering measure. In accordance with this measure, Internet service providers
will not be allowed to provide access to an online gaming and gambling
website whose name is on a list of websites that are to be blocked, drawn up
by Loto-Québec. This measure will be applied by the Régie des alcools, des
courses et des jeux, which should have the necessary resources to fulfil its
new responsibilities.

That was all the budget said about this measure. There were no further details given (except for the fact that it was based on a recommendation from a working group on gambling) and there was no legislation drafted yet to criticize. But various players caught on quickly to the potential slippery slope of Internet censorship, as well as the inevitable jurisdictional battle between the provincial government’s legislation of gambling and the federal government’s responsibility over telecommunications.

Fast-forward a year later, and as Quebecers get ready to receive the 2016-17 budget, several aspects of the previous one still haven’t been put into law.

Introduced in November, and currently working its way through the finance committee, Bill 74, called “An Act respecting mainly the implementation of certain provisions of the Budget Speech of 26 March 2015” has various provisions, including the one about Internet website blocking.

What the bill says

The text of the bill modifies Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act to insert the following clauses:

“TITLE III.4

“ONLINE GAMBLING

“260.33. For the purposes of this Title, “online gambling site” means
a website on which a person may make wagers and bets through an interactive
mechanism.

“260.34. An Internet service provider may not give access to an online
gambling site whose operation is not authorized under Québec law.

“260.35. The Société des loteries du Québec shall oversee the
accessibility of online gambling. It shall draw up a list of unauthorized online
gambling sites and provide the list to the Régie des alcools, des courses et des
jeux, which shall send it to Internet service providers by registered mail.
The receipt notice or, as the case may be, the delivery notice serves as proof
of notification.

“260.36. An Internet service provider that receives the list of unauthorized
online gambling sites in accordance with section 260.35 shall, within 30 days
after receiving the list, block access to those sites.

“260.37. If the Société des loteries du Québec becomes aware that an
Internet service provider is not complying with section 260.36, it shall report
the non-compliance to the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux.
In such a case, the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux shall send a
notice to the non-compliant Internet service provider and send a copy of the
notice to the Société des loteries du Québec.

“260.38. For the purposes of this Title, the Régie des alcools, des courses
et des jeux and the Société des loteries du Québec may enter into an agreement
on the frequency at which the list of unauthorized online gambling sites is to
be updated and sent and on any other terms relating to the carrying out of this
Title.”

It also changes the Act Respecting the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux, to give it authority over enforcing this law, and the Act Respecting the Société des loteries du Québec, to give Loto-Québec the responsibility to draw up the list of banned websites and investigate ISPs. The latter adds these provisions:

“17.1. The president and chief executive officer, or the person the
president and chief executive officer designates for that purpose, may investigate
any matter relating to the carrying out of Title III.4 of the Consumer Protection
Act (chapter P-40.1).

“17.2. The person who conducts an investigation under section 17.1 of
this Act cannot be prosecuted for acts performed in good faith in the exercise
of the functions of office.

An ISP failing to block a website within 30 days of getting a list from Loto-Québec (by registered mail) is added to the list of offences in the Consumer Protection Act, which makes that ISP liable for fines from $2,000 to $100,000, or twice that for a repeat conviction.

The bill also states that while the Consumer Protection Act is supervised by the Minister of Justice and the consumer protection office, the provisions regarding websites and gambling are supervised by the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux and Loto-Québec, under the Minister of Public Security. (Finance Minister Carlos Leitão explains that Loto-Québec informs the RACJ that a provider is noncompliant, and the latter does any legal action.)

The problems

As highlighted by Michael Geist and others, this legislation has serious issues, some of them legal and some practical. Among them:

  • Telecommunications are a federal responsibility, administered by the CRTC, not a provincial one. The legislation could be challenged on constitutional grounds.
  • Telecommunications regulations forbid ISPs from manipulating Internet traffic in this way.
  • The legislation forces ISPs to block people from doing something that is not illegal: viewing an online gambling website.
  • The slippery slope argument: Implementing this could lead to the government ordering the blocking of other websites it doesn’t like. (Major ISPs block sites that contain child pornography, but that’s an industry measure, and isn’t required by law.)
  • The motive for this legislation seems to be as much about protecting Loto-Québec’s revenue as it is about blocking an illegal and unwanted activity.
  • There seem to be few checks and balances to ensure that the websites listed by Loto-Québec deserve to be there. There’s no obvious appeals process.
  • Implementing a government blacklist of websites would cost a lot of money, particularly for small Internet providers. (Leitão dismissed those costs in December, saying “Je ne pense pas que ce soient des coûts énormes, là, c’est une question de mettre la «switch on and off»”. He then threw out a range of $100,000 to $500,000 for additional costs to ISPs, plus another $15-75,000 a year in maintenance costs, and said the government might be willing to subsidize the costs for smaller providers.)
  • There are technical means around such blocks. And someone interested in online gambling will probably make quick use of such measures.
  • Online gambling sites could get around the blocks by setting up new domains or new sites.
  • There could be issues when traffic crosses provincial borders. If I’m a Wind Mobile customer in Alberta and I walk into Quebec with my cellphone, is Wind suddenly obligated to abide by this Quebec law for data it sends to my phone, even though it doesn’t operate in Quebec? Or is that the responsibility of the network I’m roaming on?
  • Other measures might be just as effective without the censorship problem, such as making it illegal for credit card companies to process payments to illegal gambling sites (though there are ways around such problems as well).

The jurisdictional issue seems to be the most problematic, though a legal analysis of the bill points out that many issues cross jurisdictional lines, and a law that seems to involve the other government’s turf isn’t necessarily unconstitutional. Leitão told the committee he was confident the law would stand up to challenges, because of a “latitude” in enforcing provincial law against illegal gambling, but he said there was no formal legal opinion provided on it beyond the opinions of people in his department.

Opposition MNAs Nicolas Marceau (PQ), André Spénard (CAQ) and François Bonnardel (CAQ) grilled Leitão on these aspects of the bill during the committee hearings in December and February. And they’re not done yet. (Reading the transcripts of those hearings gives you a good appreciation for the value of opposition legislators, regardless of party, who give a critical eye to legislation even when they may be in agreement about the overall goal.)

Bonnardel, the MNA for Granby, was strongest in his opposition on legal and constitutional grounds:

Il y a un enjeu où on serait la première province, à ma connaissance au Canada, qui pourrait censurer la libre circulation sur Internet. Coudon, qui censure la libre circulation sur Internet? Cuba, la Corée, le Québec en 2016? M. le Président, mon collègue l’a mentionné, il y a 70 gros moyens, petits fournisseurs au Québec.

…

Mais au nom de quoi, aujourd’hui, on veut censurer la libre circulation? Tant qu’à faire, pourquoi ne pas bannir ou barrer les sites de pornographie juvénile, propagande islamique tant qu’à y être? On est rendus là.

There’s opposition outside the National Assembly as well. Even the Union des consommateurs, who would normally be all for increased consumer protections, has expressed reservations about this law.

In La Presse last month, columnist Stéphanie Grammond asked why the government was rushing this legislation through. Even though it’s been a year since the plan was announced, it seems clear the government hasn’t been doing a lot of reflecting about the unintended consequences of its proposal.

Maybe it would be a good time to start, once the finance department is done talking about this year’s budget.

UPDATE (April 3): The Canadian Press has a story about this proposed law. It includes a new justification from the Quebec government, that it has the authority to impose Internet censorship laws because problem gambling is a health issue and health is under provincial jurisdiction.

UPDATE (July 24, 2018): Quebec Superior Court has struck down this law as unconstitutional. The decision is here.

| In the news

Are parties more likely to have female candidates in no-hope ridings?

Every election, after the final list of candidates is published, there’s some analysis of how many of a particular group (usually women, because they’re the easiest to count) running for office overall or for each political party.

This election, those numbers show either how we’ve made significant progress over the years (in 1980, we had only five female MPs) or how far we still have to go because women make up half the population and no party has women making up more than half its candidates.

The increase in the number of female candidates is encouraging, but I had this nagging doubt in the back of my head: Not all candidates are the same. An NDP candidate in rural Alberta has much less of a chance to get elected as one in Toronto or Vancouver. Ditto a Conservative candidate in downtown Toronto, or a Liberal in Quebec City, or a Bloc candidate in the West Island.

What if the parties were padding their numbers by putting women as candidate-poteaux in ridings they knew were hopeless?

To find out, I did some number-crunching. I took all 338 ridings and used the projections from ThreeHundredEight.com to separate the candidates into “winnable” and hopeless based on a simple criterion: If the candidate was 15 points or less behind the leading candidate in that riding projection. (This includes candidates who are leading.) Then I counted what percentage of those candidates were women.

Here’s what I came up with:

  • Bloc Québécois: 33% (13/40) vs. 28.2% (22/78) overall
  • Conservative Party: 18% (32/178) vs. 19.5% (66/338) overall
  • Forces et Démocratie: 0% (0/1)
  • Green party: 100% (2/2) vs. 39.8% (134/336) overall
  • Independent: 0% (0/2)
  • Liberal Party: 31% (64/206) vs. 30.7% (104/338) overall
  • NDP: 38% (45/120) vs. 43.2% (146/338) overall

 

Among parties with more than two winnable seats, the difference between the number of women in winnable ridings and those running overall is at most 5.2 percentage points. And in two of the four cases the percentage of women in winnable ridings is higher.

Now, there are a lot of caveats in this calculation. The 308 projections are an incomplete science, and the numbers I used come from after the deadline for candidacies — the number of winnable races for the Liberals has greatly increased since then, and decreased for the NDP. A lot of candidates are considered unwinnable according to the calculation that pundits think could have a shot (Maria Mourani, Anne Lagacé Dowson, Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, Allison Turner, Pascale Déry). And it doesn’t account for other factors like incumbency (you can’t take as much credit when you’re running a female MP for re-election), or how contested the nomination race was.

The NDP, for example, shows 43% female candidates overall, and 38% in winnable ridings. But if you exclude Quebec, where a bunch of women were elected in 2011 by surprise and are now incumbents (names like Ruth Ellen Brosseau, Charmaine Borg and Laurin Liu), only 27% of the winnable ridings in the rest of the country have female candidates.

That raises a bit of an eyebrow. Maybe it’s just chance, or maybe it’s subconscious. But overall, as a rough guide, these numbers are enough to convince me that women aren’t being systematically dumped in unwinnable ridings.

It makes for a less interesting blog post, but at least my curiosity is satiated.

(By the way, you should read that CBC story about women in politics. It includes some interesting statistics and comments from female MPs.)

| In the news, Media, Opinion

Some things to consider before your next Jian Ghomeshi think piece

This post was updated Oct. 31 with some new information that has come forward, particularly about how the CBC handled this affair.

When news broke on Friday that Jian Ghomeshi, one of CBC’s biggest personalities, was taking a leave for unspecified “personal reasons”, it seemed suspicious. When news broke on Sunday that the CBC had terminated its relationship with him, it seemed unbelievable. And then it got worse: a $55-million lawsuit, and reports of eight women (oh wait, make that nine) coming forward and saying he abused them, with stories that seem disturbingly similar.

I don’t have any exclusive reporting on the subject — Toronto media personalities are not my specialty and there are plenty of Toronto journalists covering that — but I’ve been seeing so many misinformed comments on social media that I thought it would be useful to round up what is being said and make a few points to better educate those who are talking about this. I’m not an expert in employment law, human sexuality or most other fields, so I’ll try to link to experts where possible. Feel free to suggest other points or improve existing ones if you’re more of an expert than me.

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| In the news, Montreal, Opinion, Photos

“Homeless spikes” are gone — but what about Montreal’s other homeless deterrents?

Scars on the concrete outside a window of Archambault on Berri St., where spikes had been installed to deter people from sitting or lying down there.

Scars on the concrete outside a window of Archambault on Berri St., where spikes had been installed to deter people from sitting or lying down there.

When Le Devoir came out with a story this week noting the presence of anti-homeless spikes outside of a downtown business, the outrage was immediate. Heartless, disgusting, inhuman, dangerous. All sorts of angry comments directed at Archambault, the music and book store who Le Devoir said installed them.

Mayor Denis Coderre, outraged, promised to have them removed by any means necessary within the day.

As it turns out, Archambault wasn’t at fault, it was the owner of the building. And public pressure resulted in a crew removing the spikes by noon. News outlets discussed the issue, offering comments from the public who again noted their outrage. There was a comparison with a similar thing being done in London, another move that was reversed after public outcry. Or with a similar thing at a McDonald’s two blocks away as seen in Google Street View images taken in 2012, but those had already been removed.

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| In the news, Media

Pierre Dion becomes Quebecor’s third boss in a year

Robert Dépatie was head of Videotron before taking over from Pierre Karl Péladeau.

Robert Dépatie was head of Videotron before taking over from Pierre Karl Péladeau.

If you’ve been following the news about Quebecor’s change in management, you won’t learn anything new here. I don’t know if the unspecified “health reasons” that Quebecor mentioned as the reason for CEO Robert Dépatie’s sudden retirement are the whole story, or if La Presse is correct and this is more about a difference of strategy.

But there are some things we do know. Dépatie was CEO of Videotron before he took over from Pierre Karl Péladeau as head of Quebecor and Quebecor Media last year. He comes from the telecom side, and he knew it very well.

His legacy includes some big spending: a deal the Globe and Mail puts at more than $1 billion over 12 years to acquire NHL broadcasting rights from Rogers, and a purchase of wireless spectrum for $233 million. It also includes big moves away from print media: The decision to shut down three free 24 Hours newspapers and either weeklies, then a deal to sell all 74 of its remaining weekly newspapers in Quebec to competitor Transcontinental for $75 million, and to shut down the flyer delivery service Le Sac Plus.

The effect of these moves will likely last more than a decade.

Both La Presse and Le Devoir suggest Dépatie wanted to go further, selling English-language Sun Media papers as well (it’s unclear if these would be the Sun chain or the smaller weekly papers, including the Osprey Media chain that Quebecor spent more than $500 million to buy in 2007).

Analysts quoted in various media have had very positive views of Dépatie, and their main concern about his successor, TVA president Pierre Dion, is that he comes from the broadcasting side and not the money-generating telecom side. There was a slight drop in the company’s stock as a result of the news.

On one hand, having a third CEO in under a year is destabilizing. On the other hand, Pierre Dion isn’t a stranger to Quebecor’s upper management. He, along with Péladeau, Dépatie, corporate affairs VP Serge Sasseville and more recently new Videotron president Manon Brouillette have been present during major events involving the company as a whole, whether it’s major announcements or big CRTC hearings. Dion has been on Quebecor Media’s board since 2004 and has been part of its major decisions.

La Presse asks whether this shakeup might prompt Pierre Karl Péladeau to abandon his political ambitions and take back control of the company he still owns. That presupposes, of course, that with his friends and former colleagues still in control of the company, that he doesn’t already exercise some sort of control, unofficially if not legally.

Pierre Dion may shift Quebecor’s emphasis and make different decisions, but I doubt there will be any big sea change. The company’s personality, whether you love it or hate it, remains the same.

| In the news, Media

Pierre Karl Péladeau analysis in point form

Pierre Karl Péladeau

To say that Pierre Karl Péladeau’s announcement that he’s running for the Parti Québécois was a bombshell would be an understatement. The announcement monopolized the news cycle on Sunday and again on Monday. We’re still talking about it because of its implications. Canada’s largest newspaper chain is owned by a separatist. A media mogul is running for office, and everyone expects the media he owns to stay objective on the matter. And his selection is a huge risk for the PQ, which can ride his economic bona fides to power or see itself torn apart by ideological differences (whether or not it wins a majority).

His media outlets insist in French and in English that he has no control over them. Sun News handled the news straight, declaring that they too are not under Péladeau’s control. Here’s Brian Lilley and here’s Lorrie Goldstein. (Ezra Levant is fighting a libel lawsuit and hasn’t been on the air.)

There are news stories and analyses of Péladeau all over the place, but here are a few that are worth reading: 

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| In the news, Technology

Could Videotron become a national wireless company? Maybe

In what a lot of people said was a huge surprise (but was actually predicted by plenty), the end of the 700MHz wireless spectrum auction showed that Videotron bought licenses covering Canada’s four largest provinces, and everyone now assumes the company will go national, becoming that fourth big player that the government and unsatisfied Canadian cellphone customers have been hoping for.

Quebecor is forbidden by the spectrum auction rules from commenting on its future plans in order to preserve the integrity of the process and avoid collusion between bidders. So all we have from them is their press release on the subject. It includes these quotes from CEO Robert Dépatie:

“With the high-quality frequencies acquired in this auction, Videotron is now well-equipped to develop its network in the years to come and to continue offering its customers the best in wireless technology.”

“Given the way the auction unfolded, Quebecor Media could not pass up the opportunity to invest in licences of such great intrinsic value in the rest of Canada,” said Mr. Dépatie. “We now have a number of options available to us to maximize the value of our investment.”

Read into that what you will.

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