Worth Reading - January 31, 2013

Certainly it has been an interesting week in politics/news. Ontario has a new premier and a few stories broke that could have long-term implications.

Cooperation. Electoral alliances. We have heard a great deal about these ideas over the last few years. Nathan Cullen (NDP – Skeena-Bulkley Valley, BC) and now Joyce Murray (LPC – Vancouver Quadra, BC) have proposed one-time electoral alliance between progressive parties to reform the electoral system to some form of proportional representation. Columnist Andrew Coyne has offered some support for this idea, but Aaron Wherry of Macleans tells us why it is hugely problematic. 

On Monday the House of Commons returned and the NDP had some business it would like to propose. Nathan Cullen, mentioned above, has proposed new rules to improve decorum and civility within Parliament. Serious punishments would be applied to the more unruly Members of Parliament to encourage the “proper” comportment. 

Ontario’s next Premier, Kathleen Wynne, has dedicated her government to tackling the province’s second or third (depends on your perspective) stickiest issue – gridlock in the GTHA.

Adam Radwanski, in essence, calls out Andrea Horwath. The Globe and Mail reporter argues it is time for the ONDP to step up the challenges we are facing and start proposing real policies as the Tories have, or make cooperation with the Liberals feasible. 

Eric Grenier of 308 has posted a breakdown of the recent Forum poll that showed the ONDP in first, the Tories in second and the Liberals trailing in third. In many ways we are looking at a three-way tie.

The Atlantic reported this week that the biggest housing bubble in the world may be in Canada. Unlike in the American housing bubble it is not really caused by people over-borrowing for homes they cannot afford, but high levels of property investment, especially in Toronto and Vancouver.

Peel District School Board recently released a report that highlighted some of the inequalities in their hiring practices. To correct for this the school board will be looking at more merit-based hiring in the future... which raises the question – what took so long?

I found this piece really interesting, and when added into some conversations I’ve watched on TVO over the last couple days it has me rethinking the way we pick our political leaders. If nothing else comes up I may do a full write up on this on Tuesday.