If you've never visited ThreeHundredEight.com , now is the time to do so. Eric, who runs the site, is parallel to FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, if not better.

But I digress. 308.com recently did a small investigation into the history of the New Democrat's vote in Quebec since its inception in 1962 under Tommy Douglas, all the way through to 2008. Right away, you can spot an easy trend coming out of the results:

...

Michael Ignatieff was in Burlington this morning, giving a rousing and firm stump speech to a crowd of over 200 (somewhere between 200-250 is the estimate), including bigwigs like Oakville Mayor Rob Burton , former Senator Betty Kennedy , federal Liberal candidate Deb Gillis , and several Burlington and Milton candidates for city council, including Mark Carr and Marianne Meed Ward , and Cory Judson .

All in all, it was an event to remember. Maybe not as noisy and crazy like Conservative events, but Ignatieff certainly...

There is one thing, aside from Hockey, that Canadians have perfected. It is the art of complaining. We complain about our leaders, the economy, those damnable Americans, the atheist-statist nutters in Toronto, the fascist-zealots in rural BC/Alta., the lines at Tim Hortons, the warm government beer, the cold but chaotically priced private beer, those damnable [...]

A new study made by international scientist support the fact that climate change is real. The scientist show that all the effects that climate change was expected to do has happened. Everything from air temperature is going up to humidity, and everything from Artic ice to glaciers has been disapering. This just restate the thruth about the climate of the planet that it is actually happening, and that he so called "Climategate" is just one big hoax. The truth is that the global temeprature has risen 0.56 C.  Which means that the Climate is changing , and that We should stop arguing on the truth (that the climate is changing) and talk about solution to the problem like a Carbon Tax and investments in alternative energy.

But Jane Lubchenco, the administrat...

I hope for nothing but the best for Shawn and his family. Statement by Parry SoundMuskoka Federal Liberal Association Huntsville - July 29, 2010 Shawn Pudsey, the Liberal Party of Canada's nominated candidate in Parry SoundMuskoka, made the following statement today: "It is with a heavy heart that I have decided to step down as the candidate for the federal Liberal Party in Parry SoundMuskoka. A number of years ago, I was treated for cancer. It seems to be making a re-appearance. But the prognosis is good, and I am not going anywhere. I do, however, have to take this issue seriously and make health my priority." "I discussed the matter last evening at a meeting of the Parry SoundMuskoka Federal Liberal Association. I want to thank all of our local riding...

From CBC:

The federal government should be able to eliminate the annual budget deficit by 2015, a year ahead of schedule, the Conference Board of Canada said Thursday.

A report by the think-tank said it all depends on the government sticking to its promises to constrain spending.

In its February budget, Ottawa projected a budgetary shortfall of $54 billion in 2010 but said annual deficit...

And in no particularly political order here are a list of books that I’ve read that I think everyone should read in preparation of an election or campaign. These are plucked from my shelf so it isn’t a complete list, albeit this list is one I’m very familiar with seeing that I’ve read each of [...]

A federal Judge said "No" to parts of the Arizona Immigration bill. Now the parts of the bill that has been put away is that Police officers don't have to check the legal status of someone while they are enforcing other laws. I think that if there is a legitimate reason to suspect that they are illegal Immigrant then they can check. I think racial discrimination isn't a legitimate reason. They also got rid of the law that requires all immigrants to carry there legal status with them for now. I hate that part of the bill, and I am glad that they are putting this aside. I feel that why do just Immigrants need to carry there legal status with them, because if a police officer has a legitimate reason to check someone why would it only be Immigrant's they check since they are the only one's car...

Much has been made about the recent release by the whistleblower website Wikileaks, which has lead to some blushed cheeks in both Canada and Britain over possible friendly-fire deaths, which were never reported as such. It also gives the American administration some headaches, and the fact that Wikileaks has over 90,000 pages of sensitive documentation, an end to this doesn't seem to be close.

Before this, I was a supporter of Wikileaks and its raison d'etre, and I thought it had done a lot of good. But with this event, I have some serious questions as to the judgment of the people who run the website.

No doubt a lot of the other things Wikileaks has released are also highly sensitive. But the large volume we've seen with this, and the possibility that high ranking of...

The Edmonton Journal sounds off on discontent and Wildrosers hiding away their true ambitions. Mike Cummings of Edmonton writes to the Edmonton Journal… Wildrose’s True Colours The Wildrose Alliance has shown itself to be nothing but a group of flip-floppers who pretend to be on the cutting edge, but in reality are nothing more than talk. [...]

Not surprisingly, Liberal officials are loving the publicity the leader is receiving from the national media. More importantly, local and regional media are getting to meet Mr. Ignatieff as the so-called Liberal Express rolls through small towns and communities across Canada. On Saturday, the National Post even devoted half of the coveted page three to [...]

Hayward has just been fired. They finally fired him. He was clearly not good enough. When he was asked to come to congress, and was asked questions about the rig all we got was "I was not informed" or "I was not a part of that". First if he was a part of allowing the rig to explode he should be fired automatically. If he didn't know what was going on and was telling the truth then what in the world was he doing. If he does not know what is happening in all the rigs BP owns in the country then there is not just a big problem in BP , and he should be fired for not knowing was is going on in his own business. The new leader of BP is Robert Dudley. Now I hope for everyone that he does better than Mr. Hayward.

Like Hayward, Dudley is a long-time BP employee with more...

Tim Hudak has for weeks now been out flip-floping on waste diversion, attacking the government for using the same Waste Diversion programs the Hudak-Harris government brought in. In 2007 campaigning on behalf of John Tory, Hudak claimed that "creation of Waste Diversion Ontario" was part of the "PC party's legacy of environmental protection." And just last year, speaking to municipal leaders at the August 2009 AMO conference, Hudak called waste diversion one of "the most important public policy issues facing Ontario.

Hudak's claims of waste diversion being a tax and that he would scrap it if elected were put in the trash by Gord Miller's report on the program today:


"The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario supports the MHSW Program as a major st...

After weeks of no coalition talk, some people are drudging the subject up from the bottom again .

And like before, they're claiming that either we go with a Coalition, or we face oblivion - or, in a slightly new twist, we need a Quebecer as leader .

I respect their opinions, but this false dichotomy - also known as a "false dilemma," or when two choices presented are in fact not the only two options to choose from - needs to end now. This is a subject we should talk about, but its something that needs to be talked about in a w...

Case and point: Ezra Levant and Stephen Taylor frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of bad apples in Calgary’s police force. Calgary West Liberal Party of Canada candidate Jennifer Pollock tweeted a comment a few days ago about acknowledging problems with Calgary’s police force. The offending tweet is at the bottom of the [...]

Oh, this ad was just darling. It’s an attack ad mimicking the anti-Ipod fanaticism ad from a while back turned into a new, more political form against the Wildrose Alliance. A bit of caution, though, before watching it: there’s a bit of swearing in the original and, true to form, it has been carried on to [...]

A poll shows that about 52% of Canadians support re-thinking of the Goverment descision of the madatory long term census. While only  27% of Canadians think the goverment idea is correct. While the others say there not sure. Now whether Canadians support something is irelavent sometimes when it comes to policy, but the point is that most Canadians don't find it that much a problem to write it out. Clement said that he thinks it is too much of a problem to sign it out madatory. Seems that more people don't think it is that bad. Any way even if it is a problem to sign it out. The information we get from it will be shaky. So not only do the majority of Candians want the goverment to rethink this idea, also with this our informations will not be fully accurate. I think the Conservativ...

In 2001 and 2003 the Bush administration passed tax cuts. In total about half of the money that was spend for the tax cuts went to the top 5% of the nation. I say the richest people in the country didn't need those big tax cuts. So now Obama is trying to put away the tax cuts from the bush administration for the richest people in the country. I say that this is a good move to reduce the deficit. People saying that increasing taxes at this time will hurt the economy. Those people should remember that 95% of Americans are still getting these tax cuts. Now some republicans want to reduce the deficit , but they don't want it from increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans. They would rather continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy , and complain that Obama is not doing enough to reduce the...

When I noted earlier how far the Lib Dems were falling after the Coalition came to power, I never realized exactly how low they would end up - and the fact that there seems to be no end of it.

With some of the most recent polling, the Lib Dems now stand at 14% of the vote - a very, very low number for them, which may only net them a total of 16 seats , putting them in an even more irrelevant position than before.

Now new polling is out, showing that had Lib Dem voters known beforehand that they'd end up in the Coalition,...

Recently a website has come to my attention called Chandlerlist.info (Twitter). The author of that website writes of a conspiracy being committed by a Craig Chandler (Twitter, organization), specifically in that Mr. Chandler is trying to influence politics by creating “proxy candidates” to run for him because, in theory, he himself cannot run because of [...]

Some of those following Canadian politics have come to the conclusion that Michael Ignatieff will follow his predecessor into devastating defeat in the next election. Personally, I’m not sure it would be wise to write off the Liberal Party just yet. Indeed, the Liberals may even benefit from the bar being so low. One need only look to the election of 2006 to see how low expectations can be overcome during the course of a campaign. When the writ was dropped in November of 2005, I think it’s fair to say that most people predicted a second Liberal minority government. The day the government fell, the Liberals held an eight point lead over the Conservatives. Despite several damaging stories, including the Stronach defection as well as Liberal assurances in the form of attack ads th...

The Bloc Québécois will tomorrow celebrate 20 years of existence, having confounded the federal parties and the political establishment since its founding. Born out of the the fervour over the failure of the Lake Meech accord, the parties progressive-nationalist policies have attracted Québécois voters in large numbers, having never polled less than a third of the Québec electorate since it was created in 1990.

The party has a wide appeal, from rural conservatives to urban progressives, and every demographic in between (except of course for the Anglophone population). The progressive tone of the party's social and economic policies blends seamlessly with nationalist rhetoric, with neither strand overpowering the other. This is important in a country like Québec, where its...

Tony Abbott , the ephemeral leader of Australia's conservative Liberal Party (also called the Coalition, since it runs in tandem with the smaller National Party), had an interesting debate last night with Labor Party leader (and the new PM) Julia Gillard .

While he didn't do horribly, his performance reminded me of Stockwell Day's performance in the 2000 debates, where it was awkward but well enough to defy critic expectations . However, expanding on that point, it seems Mr. Abbo...

At least, according to Vision Critical. See here [PDF] for full report. In the online survey of a representative sample of 1,012 Canadians, almost half of respondents (47%) oppose the federal government's decision to scrap the mandatory long form census, while 38 per cent support it. Opposition to the federal government's move is highest in [...]

Good news and bad news from Washington DC. Good news is that there will be no cap and trade initiavtive in the U.S, because the energy bill will be changed. The bad news is that the reason it was changed is because there are not nough votes for the bill to pass. I think this is in total good news considering the U.S will not have a fony cap and trade system that just let's polluters keep polluting. I think the U.S could do so much better with a carbon tax. Obama has even talked about putting a price on pollution, but I doubt that if they can't pass a cap and trade legeslation then how will the pass a carbon tax legislation.

"Many of us want to do a thorough, comprehensive bill that creates jobs, breaks our addiction to foreign oil and curbs pollution," Senate Majo...

Don’t know what CNGPM is? Read its wiki page. CBC page. Watch online at ctv.ca The Canadian Youth Assembly, a non-partisan advocacy and Model Parliament, has called on the CBC to continue the program seeing that its cancellation “breaks from a long tradition of engaging youth in the political process outside the usual election cycle.” [...]

1Liberal leader Ignatieff had a speech in Montreal. Ignatieff said that he supported Affermative action. I hate this idea. I feel that Affirmative action insults who people think it is helping. Affirmative action for (example: women) tells them that the only reason they got the job is because they where born a women. I think they would rather want to get a job because they where the best qualified not because they where born. To quote Martin Luther King " I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." So we should not judge people by there gender in this case, and give them a job because of it. We should judge the...

I thought I should post this as it’s quite notable for our local paper, the Muskoka Weekender, to be so critical of Conservatives as they were today. I have to say, they said it as well as I could: MP Tony Clement is grasping at straws if he thinks he's going to curry favour with a small pocket of the electorate by relieving 20 per cent of Canadians of their civic duty every five years. There is absolutely no indication that the long form of the census is even an issue, save with chronic deadbeats. If Stephen Harper is trying to score points with these folks by risking decades of historical data and the ability to compare and observe changes in Canada's population, then perhaps the writ- ing is on the wall. This government has become bored, disenfranchised and has obviously lost...

CalgaryGrit explains the issue of the Conservative led census changes quite succinctly. Globe and Mail really hammers Clement and friends hard, and finishes with a poll. The National Post also holds Harper’s feet to the fire. Former StatsCanada Chief said he would resign if the census was treated this way under his term. Current Stats [...]

North Korea is going to have a metting abouth the sinking ship. This will be the second talk North Korea will have since the sinking of the ship. Since the attak as my last post has been the sanctions have been put in place against North Korea. The U.S has shown there strong alliance with South Korea by having 8,000 millitary personels have joint millitary exercises with the South Korean millitary. I think North Korea finaly knew it was over if they did any more. I am glad they finaly had talks. If there is a little more luck then maybe they could get North Korea to talk aboiyt there nuclear weapons.

About 8,000 military personnel from the United States and South Korea are to participate in joint military exercises dubbed "Invincible Spirit" from July 25-28, Combi...