Pie Palace

The Canadian blogosphere has been buzzing about three cops trying to throw stones at the SPP protest in Montebello.¹ It seems quite likely that the three gents in question were involved with the cops: at the first sign of trouble they fled into the waiting arms of the Sûreté du Québec; and their boots were identical to those of the Sûreté.

I’m left to wonder about the motive. Why would the RCMP/Sûreté/CSIS bother to dress a few of their own up as protesters? One of them was carrying a rock, so we can guess that they were going to try and throw it at the police line. I can only guess why the RCMP/Sûreté/CSIS would want to do that:

• The threat of violence justifies a large police presence,
  
• It would make the opponents of the SPP look more like whack-jobs and less like people with something to say,
  
• It would give grounds for the police/government to limit protests in future.

But all of those reasons seem so Machiavellian. They seem motivations of a police force desperate to justify its budget, or a government that really is afraid of a “sad” protest with “only” 1,200 attendees.

The only way to get to the bottom of this is to find out who ordered the provocateurs into the protest, and ask them why it was so necessary to smear a legitimate expression of public concern.

1. For those who don’t know, Canada’s main man Stephen Harper is meeting with George Bush and Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon to chat about further integration of North American security forces and economies. (back)

I’ve seen photographic light painting before, but only as a way to control the appearance of a still-life scene. The awesomely named Lichtfaktor uses light painting as a way to create temporary graffiti. Take a gander at their site. It’s impressively composed. (Via: okfuture)

Those of you who visit the PiePalace website may have noticed the Vote For MMP bling in the right hand column. I’m voting for Mixed Member Proportional representation because:

1. I want to see smaller parties in Ontario’s legislature. In the last provincial election, the Greens got 2.8% of the vote (that’s 126,651 votes) but no seats¹. Meanwhile, the Liberals got 46% of the vote with 2,090,001 votes. On average each Liberal seat cost 29,028 votes. Even though the Greens got more than four times that, we didn’t get a single seat.
   
2. I want to be able to vote separately for local representative and the party of my choice. So far I’ve been happy with my Green Party candidates, but it’s possible that another party would field a candidate that I prefer. In that situation, I don’t want to have to hold my nose and vote for a candidate I don’t like.
   
3. I’m tired of seeing false majorities. During the last election, the Liberals received only 46% of the vote, yet took 70% of the seats. I would much rather see a coalition government that included a number of parties.

There’s an interesting swirl of activity going on around the MMP campaign. The Yes side seems to be relatively well organized: their website looks pretty snazzy, and it has a pretty well written explanation of why MMP is good. Meanwhile, the No side seems to be relying on fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

1. All numbers from Wikipedia. The Elections Ontario website wasn’t serving historic data when I wrote this post. (back)

Stefan Thompson is holding an art auction at the Mercury Lounge on Friday night to raise money for the WWF. Usually I don’t really like the whole hippy “save the animals” scene, but Stefan’s art is fantastic. And the WWF are good people. And the Mercury Lounge has good drinks.

So go save the animals. And limit yourself to bidding on the art I don’t like.

(Sorry about the late notice, but my blog as been AWOL, doncha know…)

Over the course of about 8 hours on Monday morning, something in my DreamHost account exploded.

I’m not entirely sure what it was. I didn’t get more visitors than usual. I hadn’t edited any of my scripts in over a week. I hadn’t even logged in with SSL. But some process of mine pushed the load on the server waaaaaay up. Sadly, the DreamHost people weren’t able to tell me anything more than there was a load explosion.

I guess I’ll just have to wait for another explosion and see if I can debug it live, as opposed to trying postmortem log poking.

When I think of the Liberal Party, I don’t think “progressive.” Why?

• The Liberals voted against same sex marriage in 1999 and effectively did the same thing in 2003 by asking the haters to abstain from the vote.
  
• The Liberals allowed a chronic disinterest in environmentally positive legislation (eg, the Kyoto accord).
  
• During the Chretien/Martin tenure virtually no progress was made on native land claims.

Which is why I was so surprised when I attended last Saturday’s Progressive Bloggers get-together in Ottawa. I expected to meet a bunch of quasi-hippies who had arrived by bike, foot, or bus; eating vegan, vegetarian, or organic fare; discussing the technical side of blogging, or Canada’s future. Politically, I expected most to be NDP, Green, or a discerning shade of unaligned.

Instead I met eight or nine Liberals, two NDPers, and another Green. As far as I could tell, I was the only one to have arrived by some mode of transit other than car. When one of the Liberals asked me if I had trouble finding parking and I brightly said “Yeah, I couldn’t find a single bike rack,” I was rewarded with a blank stare.

Conversation that I heard ranged over the quality of Stefan Dion’s leadership, to the Liberal leadership convention, to potential Conservative cabinet shuffles. There was some interesting talk of the Ontario referendum of changing the voting system, but as far as I could tell, that mostly bounced around between the Dippers and Greens. There was a tantalizing moment when someone said that they didn’t think that a website could be called a blog unless the unwashed masses could comment on posts, but the depths of that topic were left unplumbed.

I’m not dissing the folks who showed up, or Scott Tribe’s hard work in administering ProgBlog and organizing the event. They were nice and the event was enjoyable. I’m just surprised that (a) there were so many people there with a party affiliation, (b) that Liberals were in the vast majority. Where were the hippies? Where were the militant feminists, the ecofreaks, libertarians, and human rights campaigners? You know, the people who are actually pushing our society to be a little more… progressive.

Blogawa.ca is now alpha. The software is installed and publicly visible, we’re sucking down feeds regularly, and we allow contributors to request to join.

There’s still work to be done, but we’re functional.