Worth Reading – November 29, 2012

This week’s two big news stories were the by-elections in Victoria, Calgary Centre and Durham, which I blogged about on Tuesday, and the other was Mayor Rob Ford being removed from office by a judge’s ruling in a conflict of interest case.

With the strong performance of the Greens in the Calgary Centre and Victoria by-elections the party has taken some heat for “causing the Liberals to lose.” I think the Liberals did enough to lose the race all by themselves, but that’s the charge. The Green candidate from Calgary Centre offered this response in the Globe and Mail. 

Emmett MacFarlane helps us understand the court case which will likely have removed Mayor Rob Ford from power. MacFarlane is largely responding to charges of judicial activism and overreach, which he says is totally baseless. Blame the heavy-handedness of the law, not the judge, if you disagree with the ruling.

Related, the Toronto Star has the four possible outcomes following the trial. 

Earl Washburn at Canadian Election Atlas offered superb analysis of the three by-elections before the results came in. He was just as surprised at the results from Victoria as anyone else, but he definitely set the stage perfectly. Here you can read about Calgary Centre, Durham, and Victoria.

This piece drips with sarcasm and explains (in part) why the ousting of Mayor Ford has been met with cheers and not very much outrage. The long list of Ford’s embarrassments surely makes him a difficult man to defend.

Huffington Post Canada has joined in the bandwagon and authored a very interesting piece about millennials in Canada (those born between 1980-2000, I believe). I thought the Huffington Post did an excellent job in elaborating who the millenials are and what issues they are confronting. However, I was disappointed in the cheery end note. It did not fit at all with the rest of the article and undermined the fundamental point, in my opinion.

This piece in the Globe and Mail was more than a little shocking. It turns out the membership of the Liberal Party of Ontario is dismally low. As a result a few thousand people will select the next premier of the province. Furthermore, most of the membership is in the two ridings, Vaughan and Kitchener-Waterloo, that just held by-elections. Each riding in Ontario gets an equal say, and most likely have less than a hundred voting members. Welcome to Ontario’s grand democracy.