Kevin Barr – Doug Rutherford

May 3, 2011May 3, 2011

I’m Going to Trademark the Expression ‘Unite the Left’

This is the last of my CBC Your Take blog entries. Thanks to the CBC for the opportunity to write them and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them over the election.

Unite the Left is probably going to be a phrase you hear reasonably frequently in the near future. This is due to the Liberal Party being devastated in last night’s election, and this result was also seen in the Yukon.

Larry Bagnell, the Liberal incumbent who has held the seat since 2000 lost (by a rather narrow margin of less than 1% of the total vote) to Conservative Ryan Leef. Larry received 5,290 votes to 5,422 votes. In 2008, the Conservative candidate, Darrell Pasloski, won 4,788 votes and 32.66% of the vote. Ryan Leef won 634 votes more than the CPC won last time when it was running a very popular local businessman.

What happened in this election? Larry Bagnell garnered 1,425 fewer votes this time. This is important in that about 1,330 more people voted in this election than in 2008. The population, using estimates, increased by about 2,000 people over that time.

Where did Larry’s votes go? I think much of the answer can be seen in that John Streicker, the Green Party candidate, received more than 1,150 votes more than he did in the 2008 campaign and Kevin Barr, the NDP candidate, received more than 1,030 more votes than the NDP representative did last time.

This was a bit of a suprise, since many people thought that either Larry or John were a shoe-in for the seat and last week, the local polling firm placed Larry as receiving about 44% of the vote. Ryan Leef was supposed to garner 24% of the vote (a result that, once again, reaffirms my belief in the correlation between polling and witchcraft).

How similar will these numbers will be when the official results are released? It will be interesting to see if the increased number of voters reflects an increase in the youth vote or not.

So, I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out. And, I’m also looking forward to seeing how many people want to use my new trademarked phrase… for, of course, the appropriate fee.

April 26, 2011

Candidates Debate Live Blog

I’ll be covering the Yukon Candidates Debate Live. The debate starts at 7 pm, Wednesday and runs until 9 pm. The link for this is here.

Please note that this will open the live blog in a separate window so you must, at least temporarily, allow popups from the site.

April 20, 2011April 20, 2011

Yup. We’re Yukoners.

Note: This is also my next posting for the CBC Your Take blog.

I attended the all candidates forum on arts issues held in Whitehorse Tuesday evening and have noticed a trend. The candidates don’t want to disagree with each other.

Art forum — Audience and candidates at the All Candidates Arts Forum, Whitehorse, April 19, 2011.

I’m not the only one see this, either. I’ve had comments from people attending the forums that there’s been “a great deal of commonality” on the issues. The local papers have also noted the lack of debate at the forums as well. There have been minor discrepencies between the parties, but, to the greatest degree, the forums have been cordial, respectful and each party seems to put forward the same message: “Yes, we support … (insert issue here).”

It took me until this morning to understand what’s going on here. There seems to be some agreement between the candidates to not be antagonistic, aggressive or belligerent. In short, they have been conducting themselves much along the lines as we have been asking them to conduct themselves for years. They’ve given us what we’ve requested.

Here’s the problem. If they’re bickering, we call parliament a daycare. If they’re agreeable, it’s boring. We’re from the Yukon. We spend more than half of the year going, “It’s too cold” and the rest saying, “It’s too hot” in a pretty whiney voice. Most of us list Eeyore as our mentor.

As a Yukoner, I guess I should express this using a beer analogy. Not having beer is a bad thing but a case would probably be too much. I guess the official election request is “Give us a six-pack.” And, as a working philosophy goes, the six-pack thing pretty much works for me…

April 14, 2011April 14, 2011

All Candidates Forum Illustrates a Big Problem

Note: This is my latest submission for the CBC Your Take blog.

Put yourself in the shoes of the campaign manager of a major political party in a federal election. What are the three main topics that interest the Student Union of your local college? What three topics are the ones that most resonate with postsecondary students? This afternoon told me that there is a good chance your first guesses would be very wrong.

Yukon College Student Association hosted the first All Candidates forum in the riding today. The format was three main questions, followed by questions from the floor. The three topics that most interested the Student Council and formed the framework of the questions, in order, were:

The environment,
The monopoly owner of internet, telephone and cellular service, and,
Electoral reform

group1 — The candidates: John Streicker (Green), Larry Bagnell (Liberal), Kevin Barr (NDP) and, via videoconference, Ryan Leef (Conservative).

Some of the questions from the floor that emerged were those things we would expect from students, such as the proposed RESP credit that makes up part of the Liberal party platform. Homelessness and housing were other expected topics, and given our housing situation in Whitehorse, this was not suprising. However, the wait time for orthopedic surgery was another concern from the floor, as was declining staffing in environmental monitoring offices in the north.

There were some differences in the answers from the candidates, although the extent to which their answers applied to the questions may have not been as much as possible. Most of the times, the candidates did agree, in principle, with the other candidates.

Some different things showed up. There was a difference from usual candidate events because, due to scheduling problems, the Conservative candidate appeared via internet videoconference. This worked quite well, by the way.

But, the biggest thing that came from today’s forum was an incredibly important point. Comparing the interests of the students with the campaign advertising for each of the parties shows a huge discrepancy. These same parties, as a rule, decry the low levels of youth engagement in voting. Therefore, it seems to me that there should have been a huge lesson learned at the College today. Hopefully, the major political parties are “academically inclined” enough to learn it…