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There will be a federal election on Monday, March 9th. The campaign for that election will be the longest in Canadian history, since it started a few hours ago, in the first week of December.

There will be essentially no spending limits for this election, since the bulk of it will take place before the writ is dropped in the final few days of January, after the Harper government is defeated on its budget. This, of course, is of immense benefit to the Conservatives, who are sitting on a pile of cash, while the election-weary Coalition forces are bereft of money.

Furthermore, a ton of money to be spent on this campaign will be coming from you, the taxpayers. That’s because the Conservatives are still government until defeated on January 29th or 30th, and will be using ministerial budgets, free MP travel, householders, ten percenters and every other resource to wage war on the Coalition. These things, as you might imagine, are a huge advantage to the governing party.

This has been engineered by Stephen Harper as his final, hyper-partisan act. In persuading the Governor-General to shut down Parliament, effective immediately, the guy has just erased the leadership of Canada at a time when leadership is most required. He’s shown himself to be an extraordinary coward, running away from the House of Commons rather than face a vote and the Parliamentary process a prime minister should be expected to uphold.

In this action, Stephen Harper has disgraced his office by shuttering the very chamber in which the people of Canada have a voice. So, between now and the end of January, we will be adrift. Shame on those we elected, who formed a government, to so abdicate their responsibilities.

As I said yesterday, whether or not you agree with the notion of a Coalition government, supported by a majority of MPs, we have been moved onto a new plane of crisis. Our democracy has been hijacked and replaced by a ruling party that now does not have the confidence of a majority of Canadians. That Her Excellency would support this is an immense disappointment, but not an overwhelming surprise. This may be our last Governor-General.

What comes next?

I’ll address that shortly. For now, let us grieve a little for what’s been lost.

One thing I may be recalled for is being the first politician in the world to be dooced.

Unknown to me, analyst Christopher Berry has been watching this journey. He’s just let me know he’s published the following, and for that I thank him. — Garth

Political Web Analytics
I’ve been following Garth Turner on the entire Digital Democracy initiative from the beginning.

He’s the only MP that has a real blog, and, he was the first MP in Canada, to my knowledge, to have been booted out of a political party for maintaining a blog. (Talk about fighting the last war.)

The state of Political Web Analytics is extremely young. It largely began with the emergence of forums and usegroups, and basic volumetric figures, and has since exploded with the blogosphere. I frequently find Google Analytics tags on several blogs – so I can only assume that somebody out there is using those analytics. Whether or not there’s much optimization going on is another story.

What’s possibly the most exciting aspect is how Obama built on the Dean legacy of 2004. No, I’m not talking about the scream, I’m talking about how Dean was really the first major candidate to fully leverage the power of the online channel.

Garth Turner, to my knowledge, is the only Federal Canadian politician to start leveraging the channel.

The most recent example? Garth called on a large number of the regular posters and trolls on his weblog to come out and meet Dion in a private session before a huge townhall in Halton. Garth used the Internet and his mailing list he gathered from his comment section, to advertise the event.

The result? A massive mob of diverse Canadians who came out to see Dion and Garth.

I believe that Digital Democracy is coming to Canada, and I somehow lament that there are not more political scientists with experience in the field of web analytics.

The web analytics could really inform some of the causal and influential variables about how Garth’s blog grew. The financial analytics, if Garth was to ever to volunteer them in 10 years time, could unlock another deeper level of insight. Canada traditionally lags the United States in a few respects – and here it is…the actual cradle of real Canadian Digital Democracy.

The possibilities for the use of web analytics in the optimization of political campaigns, I can foresee, as becoming a major component of political life in Canada. Just as you have polling firms that do political polls in their spare time (and it’s heavily commoditized), there will eventually be an intense demand for web analytics to optimize political campaigns.

Are we there yet?

The Conservative Party of Canada has imported a large amount of Republican database RFM segmentation technology. We see this in part with the abuse of “10 percenters” – the direct mailing spam that the Canadian taxpayer pays for. It all goes into a database. It was all pioneered down south.

The Liberal Party of Canada and the Democratic Party of the United States are catching up though, and, are more acutely aware of the social aspect. Web 2.0 is actually in the core DNA of Gen X and Gen Y, and the LPC definitely has an inside track if they can figure out how to use, measure, and optimize those channels. In fact, these technologies could be absolutely key in getting out the vote.

In sum, I’m calling it out now.

It’s trend, it’s happening. We’re in very, very early days, still.

But it’s exciting.
Posted by Christopher Berry

The time has come to ban MPs from killing trees and wasting tax money sending propaganda into each other’s ridings. In the scheme of things – a government which now spends more than $200 billion a year – this is small stuff. Just ten million or so. But it has to stop.

Today MPs can get literature printed for free by the House of Commons, then have Canada Post deliver it (free, of course) to thousands of homes, thousands of miles away. All the MPs in a party can get together, pool their resources, and thereby carpet bomb ridings they want to win in the next election. You know this. You see it every day. And when it comes to this mail war, nobody beats the Conservatives.

I have a small example for you.

In order to let my constituents know about the Town Hall meeting I held Wednesday night with Dion, I decided to use my ability to send mailers, called “ten percenters” to residents. Each one can cover only 10% of the riding, and each has to be different. So, I prepared ten of them, rushed them into the print shop and ensured they could be in mailboxes in time for people to book a seat.

In all, there were 60,000 pieces of mail, and getting this project done was a major task. The printing was done by August 6th, and they went to Canada Post the next day, marked for immediately delivery in Halton.

Sadly, on the day of the event – August 20th – not a single resident in Halton had seen one of these. Instead, skids of the mailers were sitting in Canada Post substations in Milton, Oakville and Burlington.

But at the same time, just prior to my meeting, two Conservative ten percenters arrived by mail to blanket the riding, sent by MPs in eastern Ontario, and Alberta.

So, my printing was garbage – expensive garbage, since it had all been paid for with tax dollars and was now worthless. And yet MPs that my constituents can never speak to and will never see, also used tax dollars to send them mailers on the benefits of Conservative policies.

Obviously, we called the postal service to get an explanation. Human error, said Gilles Campeau, our Canada Post liason. Sorry.

But M. Campeau also made it known that because of the barrage of mailings by out-of-town MPs, the agency’s workload has increased, “by 500%.” He also let it slip he’d been pressured by CRG (the Conservative Research Group – the marketing arm of the Harper caucus) to give it preferential treatment. Finally he told us that, “trucks are pulling up non-stop from printers all over the city (Ottawa)” full of MP literature, and they can’t keep up.

As I said, this is a small issue in a town where $4 billion is spent on a single military plane which nobody gets to vote on it. Even the ones that can’t fly. But that doesn’t make it any less irritating. Letting MPs communicate with their own voters is one thing, but having the taxpayers fund millions of dollars in partisan electioneering which is then hidden in MPs’ budgets is obscene.

I’ll be taking the steps available to me to try and shut this down.

BTW, can you imagine the meeting that might have been?

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