• November 2, 2011 11:21 AM | Read 27 comments27
• By Kady O’Malley

Note: The following meanderings originally appeared on twitter, but have been tweaked, extended and edited for readability.

Enthusiastic party press releases to the contrary, the next NDP-backed private members’ bill headed for the floor of the House does not, in fact, “ban” floor crossing outright, but would trigger an automatic byelection when an MP “becomes a member of a registered party” that did not endorse his or her candidacy in the election.

First of all, it’s worth noting that as drafted, C-306 could conceivably be seen as a violation the privilege of an individual MP to sit and vote with whatever caucus he or she chooses, although an easy workaround would be for MPs to sit as Independents, but vote and caucus with their newly chosen party, which could even put them on committees if it wanted to do so.

In fact, depending on the interpretation of the bill, the anti-floor-crossing provision may be even easier to dodge: Join the caucus, but not the party. In the section dealing with “change of political affiliation,” the bill cites the Canada Elections Act in the reference to “registered party,” which, as I can tell, would mean that the MP in question would have to become a card-carrying member of the party itself, not simply a member of the parliamentary caucus, as the latter are not registered under the Act.

Those technical quibbles aside, however, as noted above, the question of how the bill wound up on the private members’ priority list is every bit as intriguing.

Before we get down to shameless speculation as to what may have motivated the move, a bit of background: the very first iteration of a bill to trigger byelections when an MP switches parties was introduced back in 1997 by Reform MP Mike Scott.

Since then, it has been introduced, amid varying degrees of fanfare, by various and sundry NDP MPs — in most cases, by veteran New Democrat Peter Stoffer, but occasionally under the name of one of his caucus colleague — on at least five different occasions.

But despite having had multiple opportunities to do so, on only one occasion has it been brought forward for second reading: in 2005, when Stoffer added it to the precedence list just weeks after Belinda Stronach abandoned the Conservative caucus to join then-Prime Minister Paul Martin’s cabinet on the eve of a critical confidence vote. (Not surprisingly, it was eventually defeated.)

A brief reminder on the rules that govern private members’ business: MPs fortunate enough to win a spot near the top of the priority list are free to bring forward any bill or motion on the Order Paper, including those introduced by another member — a caucus colleague, or even someone from a different party.

At no point since 2005 has either Stoffer, or a New Democrat colleague with a higher slot on the priority list, chosen to do so with one of the many anti-floor crossing bills that have been up for grabs.

Flash forward, then, to September, when the now Official Opposition apparently found itself sufficiently seized with the issue for newly elected Quebec MP Mathieu Ravignat to introduce, under his own name, a bill identical to one that had already been tabled by Stoffer in June — one which, by virtue of Ravignat’s enviable slot on the precedent list, will proceed to second reading later today.

It’s almost as if the NDP is suddenly concerned by the prospect of MPs leaving the party under which they were elected.

Imagine this scenario: a post-leadership split within the party results in a good chunk of its Quebec caucus — to pick one at random –  setting up shop under a new name and leader, much like the MPs who would become founding members of the Bloc Quebecois did in 1990.

Under the current rules, depending on its size, that new caucus might even be able to challenge the NDP for the title of Official Opposition. Even if it did not, the emergence of a new caucus could significantly alter the procedural landscape: at minimum, the NDP would likely have to give up a few QP slots to the newly minted Third Party, and committee seats would likely be reallocated as well.

Under the rules proposed by the NDP, however, if the anti-floor-crossing provision does, in fact, kick in when an MP chooses to sit with a caucus under the banner of which he or she was not originally elected, those seats would automatically be declared vacant, resulting in Quebec-wide byelections — and depending on the timeline, another party — even, perhaps, the currently dormant Bloc Quebecois — could challenge many of those byelections, and quite possibly win back at least a few of those lost to the NDP during the last election.

That would seem to be a pretty powerful way to discourage a rookie NDP MP from signing on as a founding member of a new caucus.In any case, it might be well worth tuning into the Chamber for private members’ hour later today, if only to see if any MPs raise the above possibility during debate.

We are now  seeing “parties of independent candidates”. For example, in Ontario, in the October 2011 election, Onarians were introduced to the Canadians Choice Party – a party of Independent Candidates.  In Quebec,  the CAQ is  a  party (at least according to the following article) formed largely  from Independent Candidates.

See the following article:

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1085378–a-powerful-new-party-rises-in-quebec

In June, he dumped the Parti Québécois, for which he acted as the immigration critic and is sitting as an independent for the riding of Deux Montagnes, northwest of Montreal. But over the summer, he said, he found himself more and more captivated by the new Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec.

“I find it interesting, and I think many Quebecers are on the same page,” Charette said. “For the first time in 40 years we are proposing to bring people together on a base different from the national question. It’s refreshing.”

Come the next legislative session early in 2012, he and a handful of other independents and members of the rightist party Action démocratique du Québec, could become members of the CAQ.

On Monday, the new party will officially join the restless Quebec political landscape, but unlike most start-ups, this one stands a good chance at winning power.

Polls say if an election were held today, François Legault’s new party would win. Support for his coalition at 39 per cent, the Liberals at 22 per cent, the PQ at 17 per cent and the ADQ at 11 per cent.

Led by a former ardent sovereignist within the PQ, the coalition believes strongly that Quebec has big problems with its economy, debt, health and education systems that must be tackled before the old federalism-sovereignty debate.

Legault’s remarkable polling numbers — coming before his party is even formally launched — comes from a general appetite for his ideas, to put off any referendum and focus on the economy, for instance, but also from the current upheaval in provincial politics.

The Liberals are dogged by corruption allegations and a premier who appears out of touch. The PQ faces internal squabbling, backstabbing and resignations, fuelled by an inability of leader Pauline Marois to capitalize on the Liberals’ problems.

“People have the impression that nothing is going on in Quebec and they want to see change,” said Legault’s spokesperson, Jean-François Del Torchio. “What Mr. Legault is proposing is positive change.”

Legault was not doing interviews before the Monday launch, but he is sufficiently a threat to Premier Jean Charest and Marois that both are both questioning his motives and leadership.

Recalling that Legault has called himself a “leftist sovereignist,” Charest said earlier this week that “the people know what they’re getting with a Liberal government, not with a party led by a former péquiste minister who has put aside sovereignty.”

The sovereignty issue has been a touchy one. Legault says he’s been a sovereignist his whole life, and used to be the PQ’s most vocal pusher of independence.

But since leaving the party and founding the coalition he has managed to attract prominent federalists, including his coalition founding partner Charles Sirois. Del Torchio, for instance, worked with three federal Liberal leaders, including most recently, Michael Ignatieff.

“What he’s saying,” Del Torchio explained, “is that he’s not going to promote sovereignty. Nobody wants to hear about it anymore. Quebecers want to see the real challenges tackled.”

Legault, 54, is married with two teenaged children. His wife, Isabelle Brais, runs a high-end clothing store in Montreal’s trendy Plateau neighbourhood. He grew up in a household of modest income, his father a postmaster, his mother a homemaker.

But he became a successful businessman, co-founding Air Transat, before turning to politics. Within the PQ government in the 1990s, he headed several ministries, including education and health. As a critic, he dealt with finance.

For Charette, the party might be ideal; he left the PQ precisely because Marois wasn’t promising hold off on a referendum. Sovereignty, for him, remains an ideal but is the “dream of a young man.” He’d prefer to work on pressing issues until such time as the debate is viable again.

For Marc Picard, another independent legislator and former member of the ADQ, the coalition fits his style for ideological reasons. It has a centre-right orientation. “The coalition wants to tell the truth to the citizens,” Picard says, “and it has the courage to . . . deal with things that have never been dealt with, like the debt.”

Legault’s team is preparing an “action plan” to present Monday. He’s proposing to cut thousands of government jobs, do away with school boards and mid-level heath agencies, raise teachers’ and doctors’ salaries, use resource royalties to pay down the debt, and finally make Quebec a “have” province.

Whether from genuine support of his ideas or traditional party malaise, polls indicate Legault would win the premier’s seat.

The figure of 39 per cent support for the coalition, reported in the CROP poll of 1,000 Quebecers in late October, would translate into a landslide 102 of the province’s 125 seats, according to the website threehundredeight.com.

And if the coalition and the ADQ merge — a real possibility — the party would get a whopping 48 per cent of the vote, something a CROP executive called “surreal.”

These numbers spell catastrophe for Marois.

Despite record support at the party’s congress last April, she has had to deal with a kind of ongoing mutiny. Last spring, five prominent members quit the caucus. In late October several caucus members, fearing Bloc Québécois -style obliteration, were said to urge her to pass the torch. There have been resignations in local riding associations. One Laval association sent a letter to her last week asking her to go.

But following Monday’s party launch, Charest and Marois will have their work cut out for them. So, too, will Legault.

The honeymoon period will come to an end. Legault, however, has committed to give 10 years more of public service.

It could be a long romance.

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2011 2:00AM EDT

Last updated Wednesday, Apr. 13, 2011 4:50AM EDT

Gordon Gibson

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/democratic-reform-should-be-the-central-issue-of-this-election/article1982405/

We are now well into one of our occasionally scheduled games of “futures markets in stolen property,” otherwise known as an election. (Thank you, H.L. Mencken.) The promises are flying.

Stripped of all the fine words, the parties all come to us with a remarkable proposition: “We will confiscate a goodly portion of your hard-earned money and remove it to Ottawa. There we will launder and shrink it and then return some of it to you. We will also issue a series of orders called laws and regulations that will tell you what to do with your lives. You may now say thank you.”

More related to this story

• The torture of Question Period
• An election is war by other means
• We don’t have fixed election dates, and can’t

Strangely, we mostly buy into this pitchman’s plan. This is partly because much of what government does is necessary, even good. But alas, much of what government does is also stupid or wasteful or improperly gives the advantage to one region or group over others to buy votes. This doesn’t sound attractive, but the politicians are so cunning in their packaging, the issues are so complex, the media so lazy and the voters so resigned or so busy with other things that the shiny tinsel looks good enough to draw support for one party or another.

This is notwithstanding the fact that three of the parties – the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Greens – have no conceivable chance of implementing their promises (and so can promise anything at all). By contrast, the Conservatives or Liberals might be able to implement their promises – they just have no believable way of paying for them, short of higher taxes or higher debt – both things, as we know, they’d never, ever do.

Agreed, this is a cynical view of a political system wherein are entrapped many good people who genuinely want to make the world a better place. And it could be a lot worse – one need only look south of the border to see a great nation now struggling with a truly sick democracy. So we must get past the cynicism, look at what we have and ask, “How can we make it better?”

That should be a central issue of this election – democratic reform. The available options are well known and researched. At the top of the list is more power to the ordinary MP. After all, this is the only person you get to vote for and thus the only person you can call to account.

The list goes on to more freedom and resources for parliamentary committees (where the iron discipline of the party whip is less in evidence) and a sharp restriction in the matters deemed to be issues of “confidence” (and thus capable of forcing an election) by governments.

There are institutional matters such as electoral reform and campaign finance. And there are things such as a truly muscular freedom-of-information law, so that the knowledge and options available to the government would also be available to the public. Without good information, there can’t be good accountability. Without such knowledge, the shiny tinsel carries the debate.

The trouble is, the reforms that would make our political system work better involve a transfer of power. Some would move power from the Prime Minister’s Office to Parliament. Some would move power from governments to voters. Unlikely. An iron rule of politics says no one ever voluntarily gives up power, and the PMO has been centralizing more over the past 40 years. But some great people have voluntarily done so in the past and, more rarely, some great citizens’ movements have forced change. We can hope.

The bottom line is this: The gatekeeper to reform is the prime minister of the day. That’s the person who can make change – or stop it. If you believe that reforming a dysfunctional system is more important than any of the other issues in play, then the thing to do is look at Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff and ask: Which one is the more credible reformer? Which one will make plain-language commitments, no fingers crossed, no cross my heart and hope to die, to institute this or that reform?

Maybe neither. But one thing is certain – if we don’t ask, nay, demand, things will go on as before and perhaps get worse.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2011/0209/politics.html

A total of 564 candidates will be contesting the General Election – nearly a hundred more than in the last general election in 2007.

The number of those running as independents or for smaller parties is 233 – this compares to 108 in 2007.

Fianna Fáil has 75 candidates, down from a total of 106 in 2007. Fine Gael has 104 candidates, up from 91 in 2007.

The Labour Party is fielding 68 candidates, up from 50 in 2007.

The Green Party is fielding 43 candidates. Sinn Féin is running 41 candidates, the same number of candidates as 2007.

There is a very high number of other parties and independent candidates this year.

New Vision, a new political group of independents, is fielding 19 candidates.

Nominations may have closed but candidates can withdraw their names up to midday tomorrow.

The total number of people on the Electoral Register 2011/2012 is 3,161,854.

This compares to 3,066,517 on the register in 2007 – a rise of almost 100,000 (95,337) voters since the last election.

These recent figures do not include additions to the Supplementary Register.

Historic low number of FF candidates

Since its foundation in 1926, Fianna Fáil has always fielded enough candidates to give a majority in the Dáil if they were all elected.

The last time Fine Gael had more General Election candidates than Fianna Fáil was in 1969, when they had 125 compared to 122.

Before that, you have to go back to 1927 to find an election where Cumann na nGaedheal (forerunner of Fianna Fáil) had more candidates – 97 to 87 in June 1927, and 89 to 88 in September 1927.

It is also the highest recorded level of Independent and minor party candidates – the next highest was in 1992, when there were 186 recorded under ‘Other’ in the official results, made up of 103 Independents, 5 Christian Centrist, 19 Green, 41 Sinn Féin, and 18 Worker’s Party.

Focus turns to jobs

After last night’s televised debate between Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, the parties today focused on a range of issues including tourism, jobs, and literacy.

As Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny spent the evening in Carrick-on-Shannon at what was billed as a ‘town hall meeting’, Mr Gilmore and Mr Martin were going head-to-head on TV3 in the first televised leaders’ debate of the campaign.

They disagreed on a range of issues including tax, the bank guarantee, renegotiation of the IMF/EU deal, and political reform.

Attacking the Labour Party’s plan aimed at getting the public finances back in order, Mr Martin said it represented a policy of higher taxes and increased borrowing.

In response, Mr Gilmore said Fianna Fáil’s plan for recovery would cripple the economy.

Both participants later declared themselves satisfied with their individual performances and with the one-to-one format of the programme.

Mr Martin said Mr Kenny should engage in future debates.

Mr Kenny had travelled to Carrick-on Shannon in Co Leitrim for a public meeting that was attended by around 300 people.

On his arrival, he told reporters that while he believed televised debates were important – they were not the single issue.

He said he was looking forward to participating in three televised debates during the rest of the election campaign.

What follows are links to everything you need. But, you need to get started now – by that I mean that you must:

- get somebody to be your official agent

- find out who can be your auditor

I really encourage you to do this – but a much greater degree of organization is required for you than for party candidates.

To get the flavor of this you might be interested in:

http://independentcandidates.ca/blog/independents-tax-free-democracy/

http://independentcandidates.ca/blog/how-would-an-independent-represent-a-riding/

http://independentcandidates.ca/blog/chretien-on-the-party-mp/

http://vodpod.com/watch/3643512-torontotv-federal-election-2008-john-richard-20081006?u=votejohnrichardson&c=votejohnrichardson

http://www.prlog.org/10310467-independent-candidates-unite-to-return-the-democratic-process-to-ordinary-citizens-wwwdemocratca.html

Links To the Relevant elections Canada pages and the required forms:

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=can&document=index〈=e

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&document=index&dir=can/formsreg〈=e

http://www.elections.ca/pol/can/ec20010_e.pdf

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&document=index&dir=can/vid〈=e

http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=fin&dir=can&document=index〈=e

by Rachel Rose Hartman

Credit the tea party, our election system or just plain ambition, but 2010 is fast becoming the year for established candidates to shun the two major political parties.

Write-in or third-party candidates look to significantly shake things up in several major statewide races Nov. 2 — and this week, yet another major candidate disclosed he may be adding his name to that list.

Republican Rep. Mike Castle said Wednesday that he “probably” would not wage a write-in candidacy for Delaware senator. But he also said he hasn’t ruled the option out; he’s pondering it, he said, “simply because it’s there, simply because I’ve had a number of people who’ve asked that I do that.” Castle, like Sen. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, lost his Republican primary campaign to an insurgent tea party candidate, and is looking at a write-in effort like the one Murkowski announced last week as a way back into the 2010 political fray.

Below is a roundup of  some of the year’s most significant independent candidates — together with a look at their motivations and the odds that they’ll prevail on Election Day.

• Tim Cahill for Massachusetts governor: Cahill was serving as state treasurer last year when he announced his decision to leave the Democratic Party. The switch allowed Cahill to avoid a tough primary battle against incumbent Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick. Cahill has been a prolific fundraiser and a frequent target of GOP attacks aimed at boosting the profile of Republican nominee Charlie Baker. But Cahill’s role in November may just be as a spoiler. Most recent polls indicate that Cahill trails both Patrick and Baker. Cahill appears to be siphoning votes from both parties — meaning that the party base losing the smaller portion of its supporters to Cahill probably has the best shot at the governorship.
• Lincoln Chafee for Rhode Island governor: Chafee was a member of the Republican Party when he served in the U.S. Senate, but after losing his re-election campaign in 2006, he left the party and became an independent.  So after several years working in the private sector and being officially aligned with independents, Chafee brought his new political identity back into the political arena. His record as a maverick moderate vote in the GOP Senate caucus  has helped him secure key endorsements from labor unions and other organizations that lean to the center and the left. Polls show that Chafee has a strong shot at besting Democratic challenger Frank Caprio in the open-seat race. Republican Ken Block continues to trail his two opponents.
• Charlie Crist for Florida Senate: Crist, the sitting Republican governor of Florida, was campaigning for the GOP Senate nomination at the start of this year. But Crist’s GOP primary bid soon fell afoul of a strong challenge from tea-party-endorsed candidate Marco Rubio. So in April, Crist, who had drawn criticism within the GOP for his moderate policy record and his support for  Obama on key issues such as the 2009 economic stimulus, announced in April that he would wage a “no party” bid in Florida. Initially, Crist was able to siphon support from both major parties, especially since the Democratic nominee, Kendrick Meek, has failed to gain major traction. But polls show that Rubio has built a strong lead the open-seat race.
• Lisa Murkowski for Alaska Senate: Sen. Murkowski lost her Republican primary to tea party candidate Joe Miller in a stunning upset last month. Last week, Murkowski announced her decision to wage a write-in campaign. Because of the uncertain nature of write-in campaigns, it’s unclear whether Murkowski will win the race in November, but her re-emergence has national Republicans girding for a very tough race.
• Tom Tancredo for Colorado governor: Tancredo, a former Republican congressman and 2008 presidential candidate, was so unhappy with the GOP bench in Colorado’s gubernatorial race that he issued an ultimatum to the candidates this summer: If polls showed the primary winner behind in the open-seat race, the nominee would have to drop out or face a challenge from Tancredo himself. But Tancredo didn’t wait that long. He launched a candidacy under the American Constitution Party before the primary. Democratic nominee John Hickenlooper, the mayor of Denver, leads the open-seat race in most major polls, while Tancredo continues to complicate GOP efforts by splitting the Republican vote.