OfficiallyScrewed.com

How many Torontonians does it take to change a light bulb?

One, he or she just holds it up and lets the world revolve around them.

OK, OK, it’s an oldie, but I need to make a point here.

Everyone is still talking about the urban/rural split in the election. I criticized those promoting this hogwash once when I wrote about urban sprawl. This time I have a little help from Kerry Diotte.

You see, this is exactly how I feel. I lived in Toronto the first 26 years of my life. It’s home, and I visit regularly. But until I moved to Ottawa over 10 years ago, I thought Toronto was the cat’s meow. But it didn’t take long after I left the Big Smoke to realize that it wasn’t “all that”.

But taking Kerry’s advice, I did venture over to the Elections Canada website. One I am all to familiar with. And from their data, I created the following spreadsheet.

click to enlarge

Every city listed is an urban center. Just looking at the three biggest cities is not giving a true indication. If you include them all, the Liberal/NDP combination is 2.46 Million Votes. The Conservative total is 1.58 million. When you think about how lopsided the three biggest cities are, the rest stack up nicely and even put the Liberal/Conservative vote ratio at almost 50/50.

If you add up all the smaller urban centers of 100,000 or more people, and toss in the urban sprawl of places like Oakville, Coquitlam, and Whitby/Oshawa, you can quickly see that the urban total would shift pretty quick.

I would also like to point out that the % who voted in each urban area was a dismal 64%. Ottawa, however, blew the national average away with a voter turnout of 74%. Well done Ottawa!

In addition to the need for cleaning up multiple cards/voters and non Canadian voters in this post, I thought I would mention the following:

This morning on Canada AM there was a young American student studying at the University of Toronto. he wants to be a journalist and when he realized that you can vote without proof of citizenship, he used his student card and a bill (to show his address), and he got a ballot. He DID spoil it, and I hope Elections Canada does not charge him. His only purpose in doing this was to do it to write about it, and hopefully expose this major issue. Considering I blogged about this yesterday, I commend this young man for his help in pressuring for new policy on registering voters in this country.

Read the story here.

Well, it was just bound to happen. With all the speculation on who would be running for the Liberal Party leadership, one of the names constantly mentioned is Frank McKenna.

Not one to disappoint, Frank McKenna submitted his resignation today to Prime Minister Designate, Stephen Harper.

There was some speculation that Harper would leave McKenna in his role for awhile, which would have prevented him from running for head honcho of the Liberals. I believe McKenna made a shrewd choice. Had he remained as ambassador and missed his shot at the brass ring of leadership, he might have been left out in the cold should Harper decide to replace a short time after the Lib convention.

Another issue that is quickly becoming big news is that the Liberal Party is in debt. Original reports were that they are only $1.9 Million in debt. But tonight on Duffy’s Countdown, he and Warren Kinsella were discussing this and the rumour is that the decimal place is out, implying the debt is closer to $19 Million.

Via Sheila Copps, we already reported on the debt as per Elections Canada here, and the total was over $34 Million.

In any case, with the new donation laws, whoever takes on the job is going to have to be popular enough to raise a lot of money in smaller increments which will make fund raising a big part of the job.

I was fully intending to put together a list of recommendations for Elections Canada after my experience working for them on Election Day. But this made me speed up the process.

I worked as an Information Officer, which meant my role was to provide information to the voters, but in my role, I got to watch a lot of the proceedings from a unique vantage point of having to deal with almost every voter as they walked in the door.

My 2 Critical Situations of Concern

1) I had a gentlemen come up with three Voter Registration Cards. All had the slightest difference in his name so he was showing up in the system 3 times. i.e. he could have changed his look a bit, and come in three times to vote. I told him the Registration Officer would be glad to help him with a correction form, and he said he had done that twice before. I was told this a few times by different people with issues or wrong names or wrong middle names, etc. It is obvious that the correction forms are not being processed or not being processed correctly.

As a recommendation for an easy ‘mass fix’, Elections Canada should cross reference the electoral list by name vs. a Social Insurance Number (SIN) and have all irregularities or duplications investigated and cleaned up. WHERE someone lives is not an issue. But making sure the official list of electors is accurate would be high priority to me, as I hope it would be to many.

2) Proof of Citizenship is a major concern I have. In Sections 3 and 4 of the Canada Elections Act it states:

In my DRO (Deputy Returning Officer) Training, we were given a handbook to keep. It is entitled Ordinary Poll Election – A Manual For Deputy Returning Officers and Poll Clerks. In this handbook on page 5-12 it lists the types of identification required to register as a voter. The list is broken out into three columns to outline which documents contain a) name, current home address and signature, or b) name and current home address, and c) names and signatures. You need one item from column a) or one from each of the b) and c) columns which together provide all the required information.

There are a few items listed which would qualify as proof of citizenship, yet nowhere is it indicated that proof of citizenship is required. This is a critical point. Hypothetically, ANYone could walk in with a drivers license; or a health card and phone bill; or a credit card and blank personalized cheque; and get registered.

I find this a gross example of an exploitable guideline. Continuing from the recommendation in 1) above, you could take the cleaned up list, and run it against the Citizenship list I am sure the government has somewhere. Anyone who uses excel can probably figure out an easy way to do it. Any names not on the citizenship should be stricken.

Taking this one step further, from now on, when someone goes to register they should have to show proof of citizenship. A passport; or citizenship card; or a birth certificate/photo ID combination would help minimize the risk of non citizen’s voting.

Some may think these are pretty harsh suggestions, but how can we go around the world telling other nations what democracy is and scritinize their elections (as we did for the Ukrainian elections) when we have such fatal flaws in our own system?

I am open to criticism on these suggestions in the comments below.

This picture of the Harpers is via the Edmonton Sun. If I was out googling for images and came across this, I might come up with quite a few descriptive words. But none of them would be ‘scary’.

The Harpers are in town now. I just listened to someone tell me they ran into him once at the hockey rink in the wee hours of the morning. Gadzooks!! He must be a slave driver getting his kids out of bed at that God awful hour to excercise!! (Yes, Virginia, that was sarcasm)

I am glad that the transition has already started. It will be a couple of weeks before it happens, so we have to wait for the official schedule when the PM-elect speaks on Thursday.

I know what my 9 year old loves to do too. Cookie loves to swim. All summer, everyday, she would come up and ask if she could go swimming.

Early morning hockey, kids who love to swim, a wife who genuinely smiles a lot. He must be a demon!!! (more sarcasm) We’ve edited

Still Scared? You shouldn’t be. He lives and breathes Canadian values. He has done and will continue to do us all proud.

It may seem like a stupid question, but has anyone looked at maps of Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal lately? I am pretty sure you can scratch Vancouver and Toronto from this list of cities with no Conservative representation, leaving only Montreal left without. The key here is the pickup line. This is the imaginary line drawn around a city where the vehicle majority moves from SUV’s and Cars in the city, to the pickup truck in the country. Vancouver and Toronto both have Conservative MP’s within the pickup line.

In Vancouver, the city is starting to sprawl into the mainland. Yes, the border may not officially included some ridings, but if anyone doubts that Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam is part of Vancouver, needs to take a drive from Vancouver through Port Moody and Port Coquitlam. These two areas are highly dense and are a continuation of the Vancouver city proper and from what I hear, you wouldn’t notice much of a difference.

When you cruise around the Greater Vancouver area you have others as well. Randy Camp took Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission. John Cummins took Delta-Richmond East.

Looking at the Big Smoke, there are bedroom communities that the urban sprawl has reached. In the east we have Oshawa and Whitby in particular. There isn’t any no man’s land in between Toronto and Oshawa. You can even see the huge residential growth happening a bit further east in Clarington.

Jim Flaherty took Whitby-Oshawa. Colin Carrie took Oshawa and Bev Oda is returning as the MP from Durham which covers Uxbridge and Clarington.

To the west of Toronto, Mike Wallace took Burlington and Garth Turner took Halton. Halton is home to a big chunk of Oakville. Although not part of the GTA, these areas are very well developed and connected to the 416 area code with main streets and residential surburbia. If there wasn’t signs, you would have no clue you exited Toronto when driving clear through Oakville and on to Burlington. The 407 has made the drive from Pickering to Burlington pretty much an easy cruise across the top of the city without dealing with traffic or highway interchanges.

A city line may be drawn to designate where the metropolis ends, but the desire to live close to it has created no delineation when it comes to the scenery. Suburb after suburb, mall after mall, strip plaza after strip plaza, Tim Horton’s after Tim Horton’s. A drive around Vancouver and Toronto will clearly show that the above areas can be included in their respective cities.