Dewar coasts to easy win in Ottawa centre

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick, Sara Caverley and Bahador Zabihiyan

After a day where Canadian voters granted the Conservatives a new minority government, Ottawa Centre residents gave NDP incumbent Paul Dewar an easy second victory. Read the details in Centretown News Online.

Sarah Hartwick, Sara Caverley and Bahador Zabihiyan are students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Young love

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Matthew Pearson

Nepean-Carleton

Voters in Nepean-Carleton are sending Conservative Pierre Poilievre back to the House of Commons for the third time before his 30^th birthday.

Poilievre, dressed in a sharp navy blue pin-stripe suit, marched into a victory party at a Barrhaven country club behind a bag-pipe player. His 120 or so supporters chanted “Pierre, Pierre” as the 29-year-old meandered his way to the front of the room with his girlfriend, Jenni Byrne, at his side. Read more…

Love’m or hate’m

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Monique Muise

Ottawa West-Nepean

Whether they love him or hate him, Canadians are likely in for a lot more interesting sound bites from the House of Commons courtesy of outspoken Conservative MP John Baird.

The environment minister and former President of the Treasury Board claimed the hotly-contested riding of Ottawa West-Nepean last night by a significant margin over Liberal candidate David Pratt – a one-time Liberal cabinet minister. With 200 of 254 polls reporting a little before 12:30 a.m., Baird had 17,607 votes to Pratt’s 14,696. Read more…

Naked politics

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Student articles

Amanda Truscott

Saanich-Gulf Islands, British Columbia

A tight race in Saanich-Gulf Islands ended with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn holding onto his seat by 2,621 votes, fewer than the number won by  a candidate who had dropped out of the campaign.

NDP candidate Julian West’s resignation came too late for his name to be removed from the ballot, and he received 3, 667 votes. Conservative incumbent Lunn got 27,988 votes, and Liberal Briony Penn got 25, 367. Green candidate Andrew Lewis received 6, 732 votes.

Read more…

Get out and vote!–even if you are a journalist

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

I just went and voted and am happy to report that there was a line-up: not because people forgot their ID, but just because plenty of folks in my neighbourhood seem keen to get in and vote as soon as they can.

There has been a debate in the past among journalists about whether they should vote at all. To my knowledge the most prominent journalist to say in public that he does not vote as a matter of journalistic practice is CBC-TV’s Don Newman. The idea is that a journalist should be above party and that no clearer statement could be made of his or her refusal to takes sides in the political debate than to decline the ballot.

I have a lot of respect for Don, who recently won the Gordon Sinclair award for his contribution to Canadian journalism — to be awarded at the Geminis in a few days. He richly deserves the honour.

But I will respectfully disagree with him on this point. Journalists, especially political journalists, are privileged to be among the most informed potential voters in the country. While we should take care in our journalistic work to separate our personal views from our coverage, it would be far-fetched to suppose that we don’t develop views on specific policies, parties and leaders. A journalist insufficiently engaged in the debates of the hour probably wouldn’t be much of a journalist to be truthful. But what journalists need is the humility to be the vehicle for many different voices to express themselves and be heard, even if they differ from our own views.

In my experience. some people can be very opinionated without ever voting; and others can be a model of journalistic probity and balance while conscientiously voting in every election.

I don’t think that journalists should reveal how they vote, any more than they should make a big deal about their religious beliefs, for example. Personally, I am proud to say that while I have voted in every election I could since becoming a journalist, but I have never revealed how I voted (except one or twice to my wife). When friends or colleagues have guessed at how I voted, they have, I am happy to say, been more often wrong than right. I honestly believe that most people could not discern how I would vote from reading my copy or watching my news reports, and that’s the way I like it.

There was a time in this country when judges were not allowed to vote and public servants were severely restricted in their expression of political views away from the workplace. That has changed, as it should. We are all citizens, and citizenship brings responsibilities as well as privileges

I have been lucky enough to watch people in other countries vote for the first time in democratic elections, and was inspired by how seriously they counted this privilege. I have often felt disappointed at the degree to which Canadians take this privilege for granted. 

We don’t cease to be citizens when we become journalists. We do take on a professional duty to be circumspect in the expression of our views. 

So get out and vote –even if you are a journalist!

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.

Green project seeks to engage youth

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sara Caverley

Colourful chalk messages are popping up all over the Ottawa Centre riding to recognize homes and businesses that are taking measures to promote a healthy environment. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

Centretown News and Centretown News Online are publications of the students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

A strong sense of community

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick

Any candidate looking to get elected this year in Ottawa Centre should have a strong community connection, says David Blaine, president of the Centretown Citizens’ Community Association. He says his group wants an MP who will stand up for Centretown in Parliament. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

Centretown News and Centretown News Online are publications of the students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Candidates ham it up

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Sarah Hartwick

Ottawa Centre federal candidates gave a rare performance at Thursday’s debate in Glebe Collegiate – rather than spending the night clawing each other’s throats, as is often the case among their respective leaders – the local MP hopefuls held a lighthearted, often pleasant discussion. Read the details at Centretown News Online.

Centretown News and Centretown News Online are publications of the students at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.

Health care silence

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Kristen Cucan

When Joan Roseboom answers the phone at the doctor’s office she works in, she’s often taking calls from people desperately looking for a family doctor, and almost every time, she has to turn them away.

“Every day I get requests from people who are almost begging me to take them as patients and we’re absolutely full up,” says Roseboom, a medical secretary for a family practitioner in Ottawa. Roseboom describes how many will even break into tears over the phone when she tells them they can’t accept them as patients. 

Read more…

The not-fast-enough feedback loop…and its problems

Posted by padams under Election 2008, Election 2008 Campaign strategy, Election 2008 Media commentary

Paul Adams

There is any idea popularized by the wonderful Mickey Kaus, which he has labelled the “Feiler Faster Thesis”, named after the guy he stole it from. Essentially, Kaus/Feiler argue that the modern news environment has radically shortened the news cycle, but that this is not necessarily a bad thing because we are adjusting to this reality. 

Here’s one formulation of the thesis by Kaus:

The news cycle is much faster these days, thanks to 24-hour cable, the Web, a metastasized pundit caste constantly searching for new angles, etc. As a result, politics is able to move much faster, too, as our democracy learns to process more information in a shorter period and to process it comfortably at this faster pace.

In general, I think there is some truth to this. However, there is a limit to our capacity to identify relevant information, disseminate it through the media, and allow the public to absorb it.

As a sometime pollster and sometime journalist, I have long observed the (relatively) lengthy feedback loop involving polls. Polls are not just snapshots: they are snapshots out the rear-view mirror. Even the quickest turn-around daily tracking polls are looking backward over three or four days. 

So when reporters pick up on trends in the polls, they are starting with information which is already a few days old, at least in part. It then takes another day or so for the reporters to explore the implications of the changes, through quizzing politicians, strategists, voters and so on. And it similarly takes the parties at least a day or two to adjust to the new reality (even if they are relying on their own internal polls). Typically (but not invariably) columnists follow in the rear. 

And then, of course, there’s the public, who actually drop the kids off at daycare, go to work, schlep to hockey practice, and don’t spend their entire lives examining the minutiae of the political campaign. They take a few more days to absorb the information they receive through the media, and then, in the case of so-called “strategic voters”, perhaps adapt their own voting choice accordingly. When they do so, they close the loop, because as their preferences change they start showing up in the polls, and we start all over again.

This all takes at the very least a week. At the very least.

Now, let’s look at this in the context of the polls here in Canada in the last week. There has been, as some of you will have noticed, a somewhat puzzling discrepancy among the polls, which is a topic for another day, But there is agreement on one thing: the Liberals rose somewhat and the Conservatives fell somewhat just after the debates and coincident with the deepening of the international credit crisis last week.

For a few days, the gap between the two leading parties closed  — in all the polls, albeit to varying extents.

But then something interesting happened: the gap started opening up again but the media did not instantaneously react. For example, CBC television was trumpeting Liberal momentum on their morning show today, and the Globe had an editorial cartoon to the same effect even though there is general agreement now among the polls that the gap between the Liberals and Conservatives has been widening in recent days. The disagreement amongst the polls is about the timing and extent of these trends, not their direction.

Who cares? Well, we all should. The EKOS tracking poll last night showed that almost a quarter of respondents think the Liberals will win the election, even though this now seems quite unlikely based on where the public has been moving this week. This growing expectation that the Liberals may win is concentrated among non-Conservatives — in other words, the voters who might potentially vote strategically to stop a Conservative victory if they thought this was likely. It may also influence some voters who would like the Tories on a leash, but can’t see Dion as prime minister.

The value of polls is that they can supply timely and relevant information to the public, which voters may (or may not) choose to consider when they cast their ballots. But in this election, this year, it may be that some voters go to the polls with old information on their minds.

The Kaus/Feiler Faster Thesis is true to an extent. But it has also been articulated in the context of the much, much longer American election campaigns. The news cycle in this Canadian election may actually be turning too slowly for some voters to have the best information available on the inclinations of their fellow citizens before going to vote.

Paul Adams is a former political reporter with the CBC and the Globe and Mail, and is now a member of Carleton’s journalism faculty, and executive director of EKOS Research Associates.