[BRIEF NOTE] On the upcoming Canadian federal elections

Reuters produced the article "Canada set for October 14 election: report".

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will as expected this week ask for a dissolution of Parliament and call an election for October 14, the Canadian Press quoted senior government sources as saying late on Monday.

Hours earlier, Harper failed to persuade the country's main opposition leader to keep his minority Conservative government alive.

Harper aides have already pointed to October 14 as a likely date for what would be Canada's third election in four years.

A spokeswoman for Harper declined to comment on the Canadian Press report, while the prime minister's chief spokesman did not respond to phone and e-mail questions.

The breakdown of the talks between Harper and Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion was not a surprise.

Harper, who won power in January 2006, has made it clear over the past few weeks he thinks an election is the only way to fix what he sees as a dysfunctional Parliament.

Before an election can be called, Governor General Michaelle Jean, who represents Canada's head of state, Britain's Queen Elizabeth, must agree to a formal request from Harper to dissolve Parliament. Her approval is considered a formality.

Harper and Dion blamed each other after an unproductive 20-minute meeting at Harper's official residence, with both sides insisting the other wanted an election.

It worries me, a supporter of either the Liberals or the New Democratic Party as times allow, that the Conservatives might be able to form a majority government.

The new poll for The Globe and Mail-CTV News finds Canadian voters satisfied with the direction of the country and significantly more confident in the leadership abilities of the Tories and Prime Minister Stephen Harper than they are in those of his main rival, Stéphane Dion and the Liberals.

According to the poll, conducted by the Strategic Counsel, 37 per cent of Canadians would opt to vote for the Tories were an election to be held today, compared with 29 per cent for the Liberals, 17 per cent for the NDP and 9 per cent for the Green Party.

In the 2006 election, the Tories polled 36 per cent, compared with the Liberals' 30, the NDP's 18 and the Greens' 5.

“With these numbers, a majority is within the reach of the Conservatives, but not yet in their grasp,” said Peter Donolo of the Strategic Counsel. “I think that's the really important difference.”

The Tory gains are significant when compared with June, when scandals such as the Bernier affair left the two major parties statistically even in terms of voter support.

The Conservatives have built their lead on increased backing in British Columbia and parts of Ontario.

In areas of Ontario outside Toronto, they have turned the tables on the Liberals from the last election and now lead in popular support, 41 to 35.

[TOR] "Last week to check Toronto stolen bike cache"

Thus ends one stage of one of the strangest bike theft stories in Toronto's history.

Toronto residents looking for stolen bicycles have one more week to check a cache seized from bike shop owner Igor Kenk, police said.

Authorities seized about 3,000 bicycles from several properties owned by Kenk in July.

He was arrested and faces a long list of theft and drug-related charges.

If people don't come to the police warehouse to check for their bicycles, they may not have a chance to do so again, although it's not clear yet what police will do with the stolen bikes, said Detective-Const. Eric Andre on the weekend.

"Right now, as of this point, [Kenk] hasn't forfeited any of the property," he said. "But there could be something ahead of us shortly."

Toronto police say they're exhausting all avenues to get Kenk to forfeit the bikes, but wouldn't elaborate.

People can look for their stolen bikes until Sept. 7.

[LINK] "Things have changed"

The Prague Post features the commentary "Times Have Changed" by Srdjan Jovanović, a doctoral student in the Czech Republic from Serbia, comparing and contrasting the trajectories of the Czech Republic and Serbia over the past half-century. The Czechs once lived in a repressive Communist state isolated from the world while Serbia lived in a liberal enough Communist state open to the same world. Times, obviously, have changed.

While the Czechs debate the merits of the Lisbon Treaty, Serbia’s dark side was back in the news last month with the capture of fugitive war crimes suspect Radovan Karadžić.

Not too long ago, things were much different. If I hadn’t personally witnessed the situation as it was and is (in both Serbia and the Czech Republic), it would be hard to believe, but I have, and it seems clear that roles have been reversed.

A friend from Belgrade speaks of an acquaintance, a Serb from Novi Sad who went to Czechoslovakia — some three decades ago, able to travel with the so-called “red Yugoslav passport” — and fell in love with a girl. The couple promptly got married and moved back to Novi Sad to settle down. She soon gave birth to a baby boy. A few years passed and she received Yugoslav citizenship and the valuable red passport. Within months, she was off with her new travel papers, leaving husband and child forever, never to be heard from again.

Today, a Czech seeking Serbian citizenship would be considered insane. The Czech Republic is a part of the European Union and faring well, all things considered. Serbia, on the other hand, has in the past few decades gone through at least four wars and remains mired in conservative nationalism and religion. Since communism’s collapse, the two countries have gone completely separate ways. Czechs chose progress; Serbs chose madness. The diverging paths emerged quickly, leading to the questions: How did this happen? What’s next for Serbia? Are their lessons to be learned from the Czech path?

Jovanović isn't hopeful that Serbia's trajectory will change enough.

[AH] Riven Lands: Canada and Laurentia from 1980

In line with today's previous posts, imagine a Canada that fell apart rather nastily.

* * *

I probably shouldn't have packed this book on my trip north of the border, for the sheer number of quiet horrors this book described if nothing else. This first-person journalistic account does a good job describing Canada's slide from the Second World War era, from final disaffection from the wider world to the election of successive Social Credit governments, from the decision to distract (most of) a populace outraged by economic failure with hatred of the Laurentians, from further economic failure and the "Quiet War" to the disastrous decision to judge the French decadent on racial and social grounds and invade St. Pierre and Miquelon in 1982. Everything after that, from the creation of an independent Laurentia including not only the old Province of Quebec but the Petitcodiac in the east and the right bank of the Ottawa River--including Vanier--to the west and Labrador to the north, from the quiet immiseration of both Canada and Laurentia, to the unsavoury nationalisms that dominate these countries even now, is expected.

My parents left Atlantic Canada, cut off from the main body of Canada depopulated more quickly than Ontario, early enough for me to be born with American citizenship but a claim to Canadian citizenship. (I've not nearly enough Acadians in my family background to claim Laurentian citizenship, if you were wondering.) My claim to Canadian citizenship has always seemed dubious, after all of the stupid street fights between Canadian- and Laurentian-American youth gangs back in Roxbury, after all the stupid street jokes about "Would you like fries with that, eh?", after all the stories of continued relative decline and occasional hyperinflational spike that I saw on the nightly television news. Less legitimately, I admit that I've tried to hide when friends and colleagues complain about the Canadians and Laurentians taking their jobs and thought that if they only knew ... But they don't since we fade in. The Laurentians don't, but they have their own thriving community to fall back upon, and it was the Laurentian-American community that played a role in prompting the United States government to let France to dictate most of the post-war peace.

The book makes the point to me that the war was so unnecessary. Social Credit did have a lot of support in Quebec, don't forget, and Laurentians might have been isolated by language from English Canadians but they shared a religion and much culture with the Irish-Canadians. (This might show, I'm tempted to argue, in the decrepitude of Cabbagetown and the other Irish neighbourhoods in east Toronto, and in the prevalence of Orangemen. Can the IRA be too far behind? But I digress.) The fact that the two sides had to carry out ethnoterritorial consolidations in Miramichi and Temiskaming and Vanier and Manitoba shows how the two nations had to be forcibly separated. They never will be completely, as Straithairn's blustering over Vanier shows; others will have to intervene, as shown by Ambassador Chesnutt's quiet reminder that it is the United States supports Canada's balance of payments. More's the reason not to live here.

On that note, I'm pleased to note that Sinclair has quite a bit to say about population movements. Laurentia's stable economic growth of late hasn't kept several hundred thousand Laurentians from permanently immigrating to my native New England since 1983. Canada is much the more notable provider of immigrants, with this province of Ontario alone sending a million to the Midwest and New England states. Community member-states are also recruiting immigrants here, for just as Germany has been recruiting Volga Germans, Spain Latin Americans, and Yugoslavia Bulgarians and Albanians, so have Britain and Ireland been actively recruiting immigrants with roots two- (Britain) or three- (Ireland) generation removed in the old country, Iceland going back four generations. He has even managed to touch on the tensions this has created between Canadians of older and newer stock.

"The Maple Leaf, our emblem dear,/The Maple Leaf forever!" others might sing, but not me. I don't mean to knock any of my Toronto friends, yours is a nice city, but it could be and should have been nicer still and that's why I'm glad I don't have any part of it. It's just, well, Spain and Yugoslavia could manage their own transitions well enough, why couldn't you (or more precisely, your parents' generation)?