June 13, 2011

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1008130–liberal-horizons

Alfred Apps

The old way: Liberal delegates at the party’s 2006 leadership convention in Montreal.

J.P. MOCZULSKI/REUTERS

My first idea is about our democracy generally, because I not only believe Canadian democracy is in much worse shape than the Liberal party but that in improving and extending our democracy, the Liberal party will benefit hugely.

Liberals should commit to the idea of creating a registered voters’ list as part of a broader package of wholesale democratic reform that will enhance democratic participation among Canadians profoundly.

A voters’ list that would ultimately be administered by Elections Canada requiring all eligible voters to register either as (1) an “independent” voter, or (2) a Conservative, Liberal, New Democrat, Bloc Québécois or Green voter, or (3) an exempted voter on medical or other grounds, including conscience.

And just as we permit Canadians to file and pay their taxes online, we should enable Canadians to vote online in federal general elections and by-elections. It should be as easy to vote as it is to order theatre tickets.

Further, just as occurs already in almost 40 other countries including Australia, where the voter turnout is about 96 per cent, we should make voting in federal general elections and by-elections mandatory — as an essential duty of citizens, with failure to vote being subject to a fine.

We should also permit expatriate Canadians who have been ordinarily resident in Canada within, say, the preceding 10 years, to vote in federal general elections and by-elections.

The apparatus of Elections Canada should be made available to any Canadian political party that wishes to open the franchise for nominating its riding candidates or electing its leaders by universal franchise extended to every registered party voter, rather than just to its members.

The most important aspect of these proposals, given that Liberals are nowhere near being in a position to make them law these days, is that our party should begin functioning as if this were the law now.

Just as the precursors of the current Conservatives presciently organized their fundraising on a basis that assumed the need to access thousands of small individual donors well before election financing reform was enacted. They had a huge head start. We unilaterally disarmed and paid the price.

So, if we can pass any necessary enabling reforms at our January convention, then, instead of a membership drive, we can launch a nationwide Liberal voter-registration drive for 2012.

Liberals in every riding across the country going out to visit with their neighbours at their doorsteps, over the phone and, yes, through the now ubiquitous and powerful tools of social media, encouraging them to sign up as a registered Liberal. No charge.

A hundred thousand Liberals engaging with 150 households each over the course of the year. Talking to about 22 million eligible voters. With a few survey questions. About whether they voted last time and how they voted or why they didn’t vote. About whether they ever voted Liberal and, if they stopped voting Liberal or switched, when they did and why they did. About the issues that matter most to them. Now that’s a democratic engagement exercise unlike any that Canada has ever seen. And a post-mortem process unlike any ever conducted in Canadian politics.

A Liberal outreach strategy focused squarely on reconnecting with and rebuilding our base. It’s also the way to recapture the playing field from our opponents — for building the database Liberals need to have about our supporters and for finding the thousands of small donors we need to build a war chest capable of defending our next leader when the inevitable onslaught comes and for fighting the next campaign.

Most importantly, it’s a 21st century organizational recipe for a party that needs to get up off its keister and shuck off its complacency in order to rejuvenate itself and win again. And there’s more.

Because when that registered list of Liberal voters is built, we can transform the selection of our next Liberal leader in about 18 months’ time from a one-member, one-vote process as it is currently designed into a one-Liberal, one-vote process that truly engages Canadians.

Either way, whether every member votes or every Liberal votes, I believe we should run our next leadership selection process as a series of primaries over the last two months of our constitutionally mandated five-month campaign.

With voting on one weekend in British Columbia, New Brunswick and parts of Ontario, for example. And two weeks later in Alberta, Newfoundland and parts of Quebec. And so on until one big final super-Saturday by which every part of Canada will have voted. And leading up to each primary vote, rather than having party delegates converge on the big cities to meet their candidates, we send the candidates to debate the future of our country and our party everywhere in the regions where the next primary vote is going to occur, in small towns and large.

This is a process that would truly engage grassroots Liberals. This is a process that would truly engage the media across the country and reconnect Liberalism with millions of Canadians.

Alfred Apps is president of the Liberal party. This article is excerpted from a speech he delivered to the Empire Club last week.

OTTAWA— Conservative Party members, flush from their majority election win, overwhelmingly voted down a proposed change in how the party leader is picked, leaving small ridings with the same clout as big ones.

The debate, which at times resembled a proxy battle between the old leadership factions of Peter MacKay from the PC side, and the Reform/Alliance side of the party which saw Stephen Harper elected, was heated.

MP Scott Reid had marshalled support from influential MPs and cabinet ministers like Jason Kenney—whose future leadership aspirations would have been helped by the change.

But with the prevailing mood at the convention a jubilant celebration of party unity and the system that got the Tories to the first majority government in 23 years, the proposal died a swift death.

Reid argued Stephen Harper signed onto the original deal that brought the two parties together, but agreed to the current voting system that gives all ridings, big or small, equal weight when it comes to electing the party leader as a “one time only” deal.

Reid said the best thing would now be to move toward a system “designed to be a hybrid of one-member-one -vote and the old system of equal ridings.”

But when Nova Scotia’s MacKay stood up “as one of the signatories of the reunification of the Conservative family,” a loud and rousing cheer rose from the room.

MacKay told the more than 2,200 voting delegates that “basic principles dictate that equality is equality.”

He urged delegates to vote down any changes, saying the current system “has worked for our party.”

“It elected our leader; it brought us to a strong, stable, national, majority Conservative government,” said MacKay to another round of cheers from the floor. “Let’s keep the process that works, let’s win more majority governments with a system proven to succeed.”

MacKay met resistance from Sen. Doug Finley who objected, and claimed to be the only person in the convention hall who had run a national leadership campaign – Harper’s – under the current rules. Finley said the system doesn’t work, but “is broken” and added “the opportunity for abuse…is absolutely unbelievable.”

He argued that it did not produce the majority win, but “accidentally produced a leader who gave us a majority. Vote for balanced leadership.”

Other prominent Conservatives, environment minister Peter Kent and MP Michael Chong urged delegates to “leave well enough alone.”

With a show of red cards, “the motion is clearly defeated,” declared moderator Daniel Bellemare who suggested “60 to 70 per cent” had voted against the change.

Movement Began With Outrage and a Facebook Page That Gave It an Outlet

By JENNIFER PRESTON

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06face.html

If there is a face to the revolt that has sprouted in Egypt, it may be the face of Khaled Said.

Mr. Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman, was pulled from an Internet cafe in Alexandria last June by two plainclothes police officers, who witnesses say then beat him to death in the lobby of a residential building. Human rights advocates said he was killed because he had evidence of police corruption.

The Egyptian police and security services have a well-earned reputation for brutality and snuffing out political opposition. But in Mr. Said, they unwittingly chose the wrong target.

Within five days of his death, an anonymous human rights activist created a Facebook page — We Are All Khaled Said — that posted cellphone photos from the morgue of his battered and bloodied face, and YouTube videos played up contrasting pictures of him happy and smiling with the graphic images from the morgue. By mid-June, 130,000 people joined the page to get and share updates about the case.

It became and remains the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt, even as protests continue to sweep the country, with more than 473,000 users, and it has helped spread the word about the demonstrations in Egypt, which were ignited after a revolt in neighboring Tunisia toppled the government there.

“There were many catalysts of the uprising,” said Ahmed Zidan, an online political activist marching toward Tahrir Square for a protest last week. “The first was the brutal murder of Khalid Said.”

The Tunisian rebellion was set off after a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after being humiliated by the police. His desperate act led to protests, which were recorded on mobile phones, posted on the Internet, shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by Al Jazeera.

But Mr. Said’s death may be the starkest example yet of the special power of social networking tools like Facebook even — or especially — in a police state. The Facebook page set up around his death offered Egyptians a rare forum to bond over their outrage about government abuses.

“Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them,” said Jillian C. York, the project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. “This case changed that.”

While it is almost impossible to isolate the impact of social media tools from the general swirl of events that set off the popular uprisings across the Middle East, there is little doubt that they provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charges.

Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.

Far more decentralized than political parties, the strength and agility of the networks clearly caught Egyptian authorities — and American intelligence analysts — by surprise, even as the Egyptian government quickly attempted to shut them down.

Mr. Said, who was from a middle-class family and worked in the import-export business, was not an activist or involved in politics. But human rights advocates said he was killed because the local police believed he had shot a video showing officers with illegal drugs. Such a video did eventually show up on YouTube.

The police had told Mr. Said’s family that he was involved in drugs and died of asphyxiation from swallowing a package of marijuana while in police custody. But witnesses denied that account, telling their stories in YouTube videos.

“What made this case different is that Khaled Said was just an ordinary person,” said Gamal Eid, 47, a lawyer and executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo. “He was just a guy who found evidence of corruption and he published it. Then when people learned what happened to him, when people saw pictures of his face, people got very angry.”

Mr. Eid said that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and cellphones made it easy for human rights advocates to get out the news and for people to spread and discuss their outrage about Mr. Said’s death in a country where freedom of speech and the right to assemble were limited and the government monitored newspapers and state television.

“He is a big part of our revolution,” said Hudaifa Nabawi, a 20-year-old student in Tahrir Square on Saturday. “Khalid Said was a special case. He didn’t belong to any faction, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He became the way to focus our perceptions around the oppression that all the youth all face. You can consider him a symbol.”

Facebook has been the social networking tool of choice for human rights activists in Egypt. There are five million Facebook users in Egypt, the highest number in any Middle Eastern or North African country.

Its power and importance has been building for years. In 2008, the April 6 Youth Movement used Facebook to gain more than 70,000 supporters to help raise awareness for striking workers in Mahalla al-Kobra, Egypt.

In the last two years, that movement and other human rights advocates have also turned to Twitter and to YouTube, the third most visited Web site in Egypt after Google and Facebook. YouTube, which human rights advocates have used to upload dozens of videos showing Egyptian police torture and abuse, has evolved as an enormously powerful social media tool as more people have been able to capture and share video on cellphones.

When video of the corrupt police officers with drugs attributed to Mr. Said was uploaded on YouTube on June 11, 2010, a member of the April 6 Youth Movement left a message in Arabic on the video that said: “We are Khaled. Each one of us can be Khaled.”

The message urged people to stand up against police abuse and torture and say no to “bullying police.” This single video has been viewed more than 500,000 times since June and spawned dozens more videos about Mr. Said, including rap songs and more solemn presentations with haunting music.

Last June, besides providing regular Facebook updates about the stalled police investigation into Mr. Said’s death, the anonymous administrator of the Facebook page began posting invitations to join street protests and silent protests in Alexandria and Cairo, which spread to nine other cities. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was among thousands attending the protest in Alexandria.

With the conversation on social networks translating into street protests — and with the well-documented evidence of the police abuse posted online for hundreds of thousands to see — prosecutors were forced to arrest the two police officers in early July in connection with Mr. Said’s death. But the case remains unresolved.

Other Egyptians died at the hands of the police last summer. The protests continued, first every week or so, and then sporadically last fall, until Tunisia fell and then the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook group and the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page began inviting Egyptians to a protest on Jan. 25.

Signaling the Mubarak government’s growing awareness about the powerful role that social media are playing in Egypt, pro-Mubarak supporters began jumping into the Khaled Said Facebook page’s conversation soon after access to the Internet was restored last week.

There are now wall posts and comments on the page, blasting antigovernment supporters, demanding that Mr. Mubarak be given a chance and spreading disinformation, including that the “day of departure” protest on Friday was canceled.

But that did little to deter the protesters. “If you think you can go on Facebook and tell the people to go home, it’s too late for that,” said Omar Ghoneim, 32, who walked to Friday’s protest, wearing two bandages on his right hand from, he said, throwing tear gas canisters back at the police.

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/890489

OTTAWA—Democracy groups who have long complained about the way Canada unfairly favours the major political parties now hope that reviving a court challenge will force — or shame — governments into overhauling the electoral system.

“Our voting system creates a large risk of the most anti-democratic of all outcomes, which is a majority government that got the minority of public votes,” said Green Leader Elizabeth May. May was granted the right to intervene in a case before the Quebec Court of Appeal that argues the current electoral system in that province violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The voting system used to elect representatives at all levels of government nationwide is known as “first past the post,” which means that whoever receives the highest number of votes in a particular riding wins the seat and all other ballots cast for other candidates are essentially discounted.

Given that it is the party with the highest number of seats — not the largest share of the popular vote — that forms the government, this winner-takes-all approach to electing individual legislators is often criticized for overrepresenting established or regional parties at the expense of smaller ones.

That leads to results like the Green party winning no seats in the last federal election despite having 937,613 votes, whereas the Bloc Québécois got 49 seats with 1.4 million votes.

A Quebec group called the Association pour la revendication des droits démocratiques took the complaint a big step further by arguing before the provincial Superior Court that first-past-the-post violates the constitutional rights of those who cast their votes for the losing candidates because they are not reflected in the final results.

The Charter of Rights – both the Canadian and the one for Quebec – guarantees everyone of age the right to vote, but the plaintiffs argued that first-past-the-post violates those rights by rendering so many votes meaningless.

The plaintiffs asked the court to declare the system unconstitutional and then give the Quebec government some time to develop some unspecified new way to vote that would better provide citizens with proportional representation.

The Superior Court judge rejected the request to rule on the electoral system in 2009, arguing Charter rights had not been violated and, in any case, the question was essentially political.

The provincial appeals court has agreed to hear arguments in February.

Those involved believe a favourable ruling would pave the way to overhauling the system, but acknowledge it would be only the first step.

“The application does not ask the court to tell the government what to do,” said John Deverell, a member of the national council at Fair Vote Canada, which has also been granted intervener status in the case. “It asks the court to tell the government it can’t keep doing what it’s doing now.”

May believes it would then be best for the government to hold public consultations, such as the Royal Commission that New Zealand held on its road to proportional representation, and then perhaps put the question to voters in a referendum.

Constitutional scholar Peter Russell agrees with that approach, saying that more than a court ruling would be needed to bring legitimacy to a new system.

“I don’t think the court should actually fix it and mandate a new electoral system,” said Russell, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. “I really think that has to be done politically, but what a court could do is provide a kind of wake-up call decision to say that the guarantee that every citizen has the right to vote in federal and provincial elections is greatly diminished when so many citizens’ votes count for so very little.”

http://www.nationalpost.com/right+tune+Laura/3416131/story.html

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/right+tune+Laura/3416131/story.html#ixzz0x4Z8e5Tq

Carl Gershman, Special to the National Post · Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010

http://www.nationalpost.com/hope+North+Korea/3416133/story.html

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/hope+North+Korea/3416133/story.html#ixzz0x4YEoRmO

Kevin Libin, National Post · Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/Liberty+lovers+meet+their+match/3416082/story.html#ixzz0x4XGtvme

Special to The Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010 8:02AM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2010 8:27AM EDT

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/expanding-the-debate-on-party-financing/article1670270/

Many observers of Canadian political parties have relied on just two of the four sources of income, as Jeffrey Simpson did Wednesday when comparing a party’s revenue from central fundraising and from the public per-vote subsidy that has been paid since 2004.

However, using a dataset that includes all four revenue sources – riding association and candidate fundraising, as well as party fundraising and the public subsidy – paints a somewhat different picture, particularly in the case of the Bloc Québécois.

Party fundraising and the subsidy payments are relatively easy to compile from the Elections Canada website, and are reported quarterly. Perhaps not surprisingly therefore, they receive the greatest attention in the popular press. However riding association fundraising is only reported annually (and was not reported at all prior to 2004), and assessing its value requires a tabulation of over 1,000 returns each year. Similarly, candidate fundraising is reported once per election period, often as much as a year later in its final form. Sixteen hundred and one candidates ran in the 2008 general election.

In the hopes of expanding the debate on the financial health of political parties and the best public policy to pursue in regulating and reporting on their sources of income, PunditsGuide.ca has completed a full review of 2008 candidate fundraising and expenditures, along with an up-to-date tabulation of riding association fundraising for the period 2004-2009, for The Globe and Mail’s online readers.

The chart below shows the four sources of party revenue as a percentage of their total revenue, with the subsidy depicted as the solid part at the top of each bar, the central party fundraising at the bottom, followed by riding fundraising. Candidate fundraising appears as the checkered part of the bars in election years only (including by-elections).

We see that in every year reported, fundraising by Bloc Québécois riding associations exceeded that by its party headquarters. Certainly the subsidy remained a significant portion of the party’s revenues, but not to the extent estimated by most observers to date (in the range of 53-70 per cent, rather than 76-87 per cent). Rather than raising $1 for every $3.5 in subsidy payments, the ratio becomes 1 to 2 in 2009, for example.

Moreover, as I’ve written elsewhere, the Bloc’s quarterly filings reveal the establishment of a monthly pre-authorized contribution program by party headquarters in late 2008, almost certainly designed to respond to and survive any attempt by the current government to reverse the subsidy in future, and whose impact can be seen in the return of their central party fundraising to 2004 levels.

The Conservative Party’s pattern of fundraising meanwhile is completely the reverse of the Bloc’s, wherein it obtains proportionately higher fundraising proceeds centrally than it does in the ridings.

The starting point for most of the recent debates about the subsidy’s role has been the proportion of registered parties’ revenue accounted for by public per-vote payments. This metric is invoked to argue that one party might be more dependent on the subsidy than another, that one party might be less deserving of a public subsidy than another by virtue of its raison d’être, or that one or more parties might be more likely to disappear (to the alleged benefit of other parties) were the subsidy to be eliminated.

But when we look at the combined effect of all four revenue sources, the picture that emerges is of one party (the Bloc Québécois) that is significantly less dependent on the subsidy (if dependency can even be defined as the percentage of its revenues), one significantly more reliant on the subsidy (the Conservative Party), and three for whom it represents a more-or-less significant minority share of its revenue (the Liberals, NDP and Greens). The subsidy represented 66.7 per cent of total Bloc revenues in 2009, 56.1 per cent of the Greens’ income, 49.8 per cent for the NDP, 36.7 per cent for the Liberals, and 31.4 per cent for the Conservatives. Those percentages variously represent the high or low watermarks for each party over the past six years.

“In every year reported, fundraising by Bloc Québécois riding associations exceeded that by its party headquarters. ”

The latest proposals to eliminate the subsidy and replace it with a different regime originated in June from various wings of the Liberal Party, in response partly to some recent work by Professor Tom Flanagan and his then-student David Coletto, but also to present an alternative to the proposed post-election coalition discussions. Championed by such Liberal bloggers as Jeff Jedras, Dan Arnold and others, the new regime would see the subsidy eliminated and replaced by higher contribution limits, and even a return of corporate contributions in some variants of the proposal.

We should be honest enough to say that those Liberals are proposing a regime that best fits their relative advantages and disadvantages in the fundraising realm. And why not, when the Conservatives clearly intend to eliminate the subsidy as a way of enhancing their own, opposite advantages. Or when, supported by the NDP, the Conservatives moved to reduce the contribution caps to $1,000 from $5,000 several years ago.

But if we go too far down the road of allowing the victor to create the rules, that’s the most anti-democratic outcome of all. Whatever one might believe about the merits of public funding of political parties, the fact remains that prime minister Jean Chrétien introduced it unilaterally, thus violating a longstanding convention that the parties in the House of Commons would collectively establish rules they could all agree on, a rule that was still in effect as late as the 2000 Elections Act amendments.

The second element I hope people will consider is the importance of establishing a principled basis for making those rules, rather than picking some solutions that appear to have a short-term benefit for their own party but might later be found to have altogether different consequences. No doubt Mr. Chrétien believed he was promoting greater democracy by “keeping big money out of politics”, but he did not perhaps fully anticipate the impact it would have on his own party.

A number of Liberals who now argue (quite brazenly in some cases) that eliminating the subsidy would eliminate the smaller parties who are currently their most pesky competition, ought to take a second to examine more closely how, if at all, their own dependency on the subsidy differs from that of other parties. Eyeballing it as a proportion of revenues, it does not seem significantly different from the NDP’s over the same period of time.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/quiet-use-cash-you-could-be-a-terror-threat-british-ad-warns/article1668960/

London — The Associated Press Published on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2010 5:45AM EDT Last updated on Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2010 7:22AM EDT

Britain’s advertising watchdog on Wednesday banned an anti-terrorism commercial that asked people to watch out for suspicious behavior by their neighbors, including keeping curtains closed and paying for things in cash.

The Advertising Standards Authority said the radio ad could cause “serious offense” to law-abiding citizens.

The ad was part of a campaign for a police anti-terrorist hotline. It described a man who “likes to keep himself to himself,” doesn’t have a bank card and keeps his curtains closed, before advising that “this may mean nothing, but together it could all add up to you having suspicions.”

The watchdog said innocent listeners who identified with the behavior described could be offended by the implication that it was suspicious.

“We also considered that some listeners might be offended by the suggestion that they report members of their community for acting in the way described,” it said, ruling that the ad should not run again.

The Association of Chief Police Officers, which sponsored the commercial, apologized to the “small number” of listeners who had been offended.

The Metropolitan Police force defended the campaign of which the ad formed a part, saying that “the behavior listed in the advert was based on trends identified by police and had been included in evidence given at recent terrorism trials.”

Watch this amazing video here.