Tag Archives: federal politics

| Media, Technology

Cyberpresse creates political donation map

Political donations mapped by postal code from Cyberpresse

Cyberpresse has outdone itself.

Cedric Sam and Thomas de Lorimier, who brought us that poll-by-poll map of 2008 election results – and ported it into English so the Rest of Canada could enjoy it too – have mashed up a Google map with data from Elections Canada on party and candidate donations. It’s introduced here on Saturday by Martin Croteau.

As you should know, political donations are public information, and Elections Canada provides some raw data (though not all, see Sam’s comment below). Sam and de Lorimier used some Google Refine finessing to create an interactive map of donations, colour-coded by party. Each dot represents a postal code where a registered donor lives. Clicking on one reveals the name of the donor, the date and amount of the donation, and the party or local riding association the money was donated to.

It’s a fun tool if you know your neighbours and want to find out who among them is politically active. You can also search through the data. Or, if you don’t like the way they presented it, you can download the raw refined data yourself and create your own map.

Another example of the power of data journalism.

| Montreal

Liberal candidate’s QR code leads to porn site

A poster for Justin Trudeau with erroneous QR code

The campaign organizers of Liberal Party candidate Justin Trudeau are scrambling to cover up parts of posters of him that have been put up all over his riding of Papineau, in the Villeray area.

The signs – like others in the party – have what’s called a QR code, a two-dimensional barcode that’s readable by devices like smartphones. Point the device’s camera at the code, run the program, and it spits out a website address or other information.

Unfortunately for Trudeau, whoever generated the QR code for his campaign poster made a typo. Instead of typing in “liberal.ca” – the website for the Liberal Party of Canada – he or she typed in “luberal.ca”, the site of an organization devoted to “encouraging the liberal use of lube” in sexual encounters.

Staffers, who were made aware of the problem on Thursday after someone complained, have been dispatched across the riding (fortunately for them, it is the smallest geographically in Canada) with stickers of the correct code on them.

In the meantime, the party acted quickly in getting the “luberal.ca” website offline and removing almost all traces of it from the Internet. According to the website’s owner, who said she “never asked for any of this attention” and didn’t want to be named, they’re in discussions about having the Liberal Party buy the domain name.

| My articles

This Week in Me: The New New Democratic Party

Democratic Party / Parti démocratique

Democratic Party / Parti démocratique

Page A2 of today’s Gazette was all me again this week (it’s going to be the case for the next few Mondays as well). Below the usual Monday Calendar is a Bluffer’s Guide to the NDP’s proposed name change (they want to remove the word “New” and become just the “Democratic Party of Canada”), wherein you learn that the previous name for the NDP was, in fact, the New Party.

The NDP is meeting in Halifax this weekend and will debate the name change there.

| In the news, Opinion

Raitt’s fake

So Lisa Raitt apologized today, bringing out the waterworks a day after she found out that acting like a robot and refusing to address the issue during question period wasn’t a working strategy.

The video is all over the place (the news media have finally figured out that when you talk about “tearful” and “emotional” apologies, it’s best to have the video). So now all Canadians (and opposition MPs) who might have branded her a heartless politician for calling cancer treatment a “sexy” political issue now feel sorry for a crying woman who lost her daddy and brother to cancer.

What gets me about this isn’t that the tears seem so scripted, as if a political analyst backstage told her to go out and cry. It’s that the people who are so naive about politicians to think that they don’t all put their political ambitions ahead of basic human decency, the ones who were so outraged about Raitt’s candid comments as if they told us something we didn’t already know, those are the same people who are going to fall for this display, who think she will have learned her lesson and that either she didn’t mean it or she’s changed.

For the rest of us, her candid comments showed a rare honesty, and her emotional apology is unnecessary.

Sadly, the rest of us are the minority.

| In the news, Media, Opinion

Raitt’s state

It’s the kiss of death for a cabinet minister when the prime minister issues a statement saying he has confidence in him or her.

“The Prime Minister has confidence in his Minister of Public Works” was the word from Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s spokesperson on Jan. 9, 2002, when the minister in question was a man named Alfonso Gagliano, who was facing allegations of patronage. Six days later, he was dropped from cabinet in a shuffle.

So you can imagine how Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt feels that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has confidence in her, after her latest embarrassment.

It seems her aide had mistakenly left a tape recorder with a mistakenly-recorded private conversation in a bathroom (this was before she was fired for mistakenly leaving “secret” ministerial documents at CTV), and that tape got into the hands of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald.

After successfully fighting off an injunction to stop its publication, the Herald put the tape online last night and is going to see its hit count skyrocket over the next few days.

Opposition MPs are, of course, outraged to hear a cabinet minister think that a cancer treatment crisis is “sexy”. Except, it is sexy from a political and journalistic perspective, if not a human one. And opposition MPs were just as outraged at Raitt yesterday in question period.

Neverthless, Raitt’s days as a cabinet minister are numbered. Not because she’s incapable of handling the portfolio (though she probably is), not because she has poor choice of staff (though she does), and not because she doesn’t have a soul (she doesn’t, and neither does any other politician), but because she got caught talking about the stuff that every politician thinks but no one will admit publicly.

And so Raitt will be replaced by some other politician who’s better at lying and keeping things out of the grubby hands of the press. And our government will continue to be run by people who can manage their image instead of people who can do their jobs.

Such is politics, I guess.

Now if you’ll excuse me, question period is about to start. And it’s gonna be gooooood.

| Opinion, TV

If you were a journalist now, what would you have done that Mr. Murphy has not done?

It was underhanded, mean-spirited, even arguably discriminatory. CTV executives decided to air the raw tape of an interview between ATV host Steve Murphy and then-Liberal leader Stéphane Dion in which Dion has trouble understanding a grammatically confusing question. The network said it was because it had news value, but in reality it was because it wanted to make Dion look bad.

The move backfired, with public opinion turning against CTV. And now the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has agreed, with two separate rulings that the network violated the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics. (Two panels were actually convened, one regional panel to deal with the CTV Atlantic airing, and a specialty channel panel to deal with the Mike Duffy CTV NewsNet rebroadcast later that evening.)

Coverage from CP and Canwest. Still waiting for a news outlet that actually bothers to link to the decisions. Also no peep from CTV so far.

The decisions basically rule that Murphy’s question was poorly worded, that the network should not have aired the outtakes after promising not to do so, that airing them was unfair to Dion, and that his restarts were not newsworthy enough to justify their airing.

I find myself mostly agreeing with the analysis of the council, though their analysis of Murphy’s grammar is thorough to the point of absurdity.

The specialty channel panel wasn’t unanimous, with two members providing a dissenting opinion that favoured CTV. CTV’s arguments shouldn’t be dismissed here – they argue that restarts like these are rare, even in live-to-tape interviews like this one, and that it should be up to CTV, not the council, to decide what is newsworthy, especially when it comes to the most important interview a newscaster can give – a candidate for prime minister during an election campaign.

One argument that CTV didn’t make which I’ll add is that the question Dion was asked is textbook to the point of being cliché: What would you have done as prime minister? And politicians with even a moderate amount of public exposure should know how to bullshit their way to the next question if they don’t understand it (or don’t have the answer). Had Dion just picked an interpretation of his choosing instead of asking for clarification multiple times, this would never have happened.

But that doesn’t change the fact that CTV said it wouldn’t air the outtakes, and acted in a way that made it clear to Dion they wouldn’t be aired. Dion took advantage of an opportunity, and then got a knife stabbed in his back for his trouble.

UPDATE (June 2): ProjetJ looks at the differences between the CBSC and the Quebec Press Council. The latter has been losing members who also belong to the former (arguing they shouldn’t have to belong to two organizations that do the same thing). It also suggests the press council is more secretive, making its decisions anonymously.

| Blogosphere, Video

Maxime Bernier has new technologies

There’s no way I can make this better than it already is. (via @mediabeat)

It occured to me I’ve never actually heard Maxime Bernier speak in English before (my attention must have been focused elsewhere). Now the new Conservative minister of nothing is putting it in practice with a new blog.

Don’t expect him to be too honest or outrageous though, the Tories don’t like honesty on their members’ blogs.

| Opinion, TV

Low on cash? Just ask the gummit

The federal government, apparently spooked enough by Canwest and CTVglobemedia’s cries that the mediocalypse is here, is reportedly considering a $150-million fund that would help small-market television stations. This would be in addition to the Local Programming Improvement Fund which has the same goal.

As much as I’m not a fan of consumers paying for local TV stations they already get for free, even that would be preferable to a government bailout with who knows how many strings attached.

| Opinion, Video

A lack of decorum in the House of Commons

Ian Capstick points out this Macleans post which points to this video of House of Commons speaker Peter Milliken reminding members of Parliament that they shouldn’t be attacking each other personally in the House.

It’s kind of sad that this video exists at all. I haven’t watched question period recently, and I don’t know what specific incident prompted this, but I’ve watched enough to say that this could be read after question period on just about every day the House is in session. Members are banging their hands against their desks, applauding, booing, yelling incoherently, and just plain heckling people on the opposing side.

Why is this?

Is it tradition? We take our parliamentary system from the British, and a look at their house shows an even worse situation when it comes to respect of honourary members. But we’ve grown past a lot of our traditions.

Is there some other reason that this background noise is necessary when people are asking others politically-loaded questions? Maybe it’s like a laugh track on a sitcom. The cheers and jeers tell us subconsciously whether we should accept or reject a particular person’s point of view, since we’re too stupid to judge the questions and answers on their own merits. But, of course, for every cheer there’s a boo, so it all kind of washes out in the end.

Is it to keep the ratings up? Nobody wants to hear politicians asking and answering questions. But when they quiz each other to the background noise equivalent of “OH NO HE DIDN’T!”, it suddenly becomes more fun to watch. The rest of parliamentary sessions, which include statements from members, petitions, or the dedication of National Honour Your Garbage Collector Day, are dreadfully boring. The yelling might just be to wake us up so we know to pay attention, the equivalent of those sound effects machines on morning radio.

Sadly, none of these explanations instill in me much pride at being represented by this government.