Election Day minus 20 and 19 - Repetitiveness

Day 18 and 19: The "English" debate was last night, the only one that I understand. Tonight is the French debate, welcome to Canada.

That picture is of the three main party leaders who have representatives in Parliament from across the country, the fourth guy on the far right is the leader of the Bloc, a separatist party whose purpose at this debate is beyond me. Every time he opened his mouth it was to whine about one thing or another and how his province Quebec should be a nation - separate from Canada. Yet there he was, most of us are not able to vote for him, or against him, because he belongs to the archetypical single interest party - one Province. But that is an indication of the kind of liberal democracy Canada is, imagine such a debate in the United States, I can't imagine it.

The debate itself was uneventful, no knockout blows, but as you might expect everyone tried to gang up on Mr. Harper the government leader. His counter, was to be calm and repetitive, over and over he mouthed the mantra of his Conservative Platform, and I guess he succeeded in fending of his opponents. They eventually seemed to tire.

Fiscally, Harper sounds acceptable to me, but I don't trust him on his record or on the record of previous Conservative governments. The Liberals have in the past, been more prudent fiscally than the Conservatives, as counterintuitive as that may seem.

In my own little campaign, not much to report, no election signs yet, and not much campaigning this week. I've been busy writing speeches and answering emails from just about everyone. Tomorrow I have my first two public appearances, a radio show at 9 am, and a TV taping at 12 noon. So I need to look that over right now.  

Yuri's Night 50th

That picture (left) is ostensibly a fuzzy black and white TV image of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 (mission patch above) during his one orbit space flight around the planet on this day 50 years ago, and I remember it too. Pretty exciting day, but it must have been terrifying for Gagarin, he was the first person to orbit the earth and thus the first to spend an extended period in space - one orbit. Much of the time in orbit Gagarin was not in contact with controllers in Moscow and his capsule automatically fired retros about one hour into the flight. Gagarin parachuted from his capsule 7 km above the earth when the capsule door blew off and he landed in South Western Russia. While dragging his chute along the ground in a field, Gagarin met a farmer and his daughter and asked for a phone to call Moscow.

Ironically Gagarin died during a routine training flight in March 1968.

The video below is an interesting tribute. 

Election Day minus 21 - Futility?

Day 17 - The close of nominations - a warm and windy day, "April is the cruelest month," that is Eliot, a poet not a weatherman. Tomorrow will be cool, I always thought April was cruel because it teased. I also had my snow tires swapped today (so did everyone else from the size of the crowd at the shop). It could still snow, that would be cruel.

All my papers are in, so now the real hard sell begins. The problem for Libertarians is we have nothing to sell but freedom, and people think they already have that, and are unaware that they lose it in dribs and drabs every time some blowhard politician declares a new program to help this group or that. The good news is, I can still insult the Prime Minister, even in a public debate, and few will think anything of it, thats freedom. Try doing that to the POTUS in the States, call Obama a name in public, even FOX NEWS will defend him.

This morning's National Post had an OpEd piece from a friend (the Party V.P.). In 750 words John Shaw, tried to encapsulate the essence of the Libertarian Platform for Post readers, a daunting task. The second paragraph in my link above gets to the heart of libertarianism, and I'm sure most readers will think they are in control of their lives, so they will dismiss it but conveniently forget that as much as 50% of their income is taxed away and spent by some level of government or other, 50%. The federal government takes a good chunk of that. Is it wisely spent? Well, each time there is a spending scandal (who can keep up) that is a clue the money is not wisely spent, as if we really had a choice in how it is to be spent. Of course thats what we are about. Libertarians are all about choice.

On the topic of choice, a new movie opens this week, I hope at a theatre near you. You should choose to see it. It is possibly a foreshadowing of things to come, or just a commentary on things as they are; whatever it is I can relate now, as I could when I first read the book. Have a peak:

Election Day minus 23 and 22: Rule 8

Day 15 and 16: Rules are rules - Late Saturday afternoon I received a phone call from my Returning Officer. She is effectively in charge of the conduct of the election - all the polls - in my riding.

She informed me that everything is in order except for one item. If you scroll down to the April 8 posting, I mentioned that I must bring the original copy of a fax that my RO received on April 8.

It turns out that Rule #8 (see above) gives me until April 13 at 2 pm. to present all the papers and confirm my nomination, and that is true for everyone. So her threat to dismiss my candidacy (which she mentioned), while worrying for a moment, means nothing. She called me Sunday to apologize after speaking to her bosses at Elections Canada.

Meanwhile I have been busy researching for a two minute TV promo that the local cable channel Rogers (63) will give me on Thursday.

The coming week is already booked up, getting and posting signs, writing speeches, swapping my snow tires, campaigning in the riding and to top off the week, a Caucus Meeting of candidates who wish to run in the Provincial Election in October.