[PHOTO] Looking out the window

Woman looking out of the window of the 510 Spadina streetcar southbound, at Harbord.

[BRIEF NOTE] On growing NDP membership in Canada and whether it's enough

Will the New Democratic Party follow up on its success in the 2011 federal election and manage to position itself as the alternative party of government, replacing the Liberals? Much depends on whether the New Democratic Party can come up with a leader who can live up to the late Jack Layton's promise; still more depends on whether the party's membership will grow sufficiently, especially in regions of the country where it has traditionally been sparse. Joan Bryden's Canadian Press report puts an optimistic spin on trends.

A record number of card-carrying New Democrats are eligible to choose the federal party’s next leader, with British Columbia and Ontario holding the key to victory.

Final membership numbers released Tuesday by the party show membership has swelled to 128,351, an increase of just over 50 per cent since the start of the leadership contest last October.

All members are entitled to cast ballots, starting March 1 and culminating in a Toronto leadership convention on March 24.

British Columbia, with 38,735 members, and Ontario, with 36,760, will have the most influence over which of the seven contenders emerges victorious. The two provinces account for 30 per cent and 28.6 per cent of the membership respectively.

Ontario outstripped all other provinces in terms of membership growth, adding more than 14,000 members since October.

In Quebec, membership numbers have shot up to 12,266 from 1,695 last fall — a 600 per cent increase.

Still, Quebec accounts for only 9.5 per cent of the total membership, leaving the province with limited influence in choosing the party’s next leader even though it delivered more than half the 103 seats won by the NDP in the May 2 election.

[. . .]

Quebec’s clout is virtually identical to Manitoba’s 12,056 members (9.3 per cent), and only slightly better than Saskatchewan’s 11,264 (8.7 per cent), and Alberta’s 10,249 (7.9 per cent).

Nova Scotia is the most influential of the Atlantic provinces, with 3,844 members (2.9 per cent). The other three Atlantic provinces and the northern territories each account for less than 1 per cent of the national total.

By way of comparison, Québec's population of eight million is ten times the size of Nova Scotia's, eight times the populations of Saskatchewan's and Manitoba's, and a bit more than twice the size of Alberta's. Québec is also the province that elected 59 NDP Members of Parliament out of a total of 75, providing a majority of the NDP's caucus in Parliament.

Dan Arnold at the National Post's Full Comment blog is more skeptical of what this means.

First off, 45,000 new members isn’t “skyrocketing” when you consider both the Liberals and Conservatives exceeded that level in their most recent leadership contests. Heck, the B.C. Liberals and Alberta PCs posted similar or higher membership totals in their leadership races last year.

As for that “staggering” increase in Quebec – a little perspective people! Yes, that’s a big percentage increase, but it also means Quebec will have just a third the votes of B.C. Adding 12,000 Quebec members is well below Mulcair’s original target of 20,000, and it’s below the 14,000 who voted in the BQ leadership race. Keep in mind, those are actual BQ votes, not memberships, from a party most describe as “dead”. It’s also a total nearly every media outlet in Quebec ridiculed at the time.

In fairness, the NDP seems likely to surpass the 58,000 who voted in their 2003 leadership contest – though even that isn’t assured when you consider many of their current members are only members because of provincial leadership races last year. Still, we probably shouldn’t sneeze at 45,000 new members, especially when that includes the NDP’s first real Quebec membership base ever. There might very well be more votes in the NDP leadership race than the Liberal leadership race – especially if no one runs for Liberal leader.

Much depends on whether the NDP can deepen its base in Québec--increase its membership, especially--in time to keep its newly-acquired base and secure its position as a national party.

[LINK] "Elections Canada investigating 'robocalls' that misled voters"

The idea that a telemarketing company connected to the Conservative Party may have made use of robocalling to keep people away from the polls in last year's election is appalling. What else can I say but wish for a thorough investigation and as many criminal prosecutions as may be needed?(The below is the story as reported by the Montreal Gazette.)

Elections Canada has traced fraudulent phone calls made during the federal election to an Edmonton voice-broadcast company that worked for the Conservative Party across the country.

While the agency investigates, aided by the RCMP, the Conservatives are conducting an internal probe. A party lawyer is interviewing campaign workers to find who was behind the deceptive ``robocalls.''

Elections Canada launched its investigation after it was inundated with complaints about election day calls in Guelph, Ont., one of 18 ridings across the country where voters were targeted by harassing or deceptive phone messages in an apparent effort to discourage Liberal supporters from voting.

In Guelph, a riding the Conservatives hoped to take from the Liberals, voters received recorded calls pretending to be from Elections Canada, telling them their polling stations had been moved. The calls led to a chaotic scene at one polling station, and likely led some voters to give up on voting.

Postmedia News and the Ottawa Citizen have found that Elections Canada traced the calls to Racknine Inc., a small Edmonton call centre that worked for the party's national campaign and those of at least nine Conservative candidates, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper's own campaign in Calgary Southwest. There is no evidence that Harper's campaign or any of the other candidates were involved in the calls.

[. . .]

The RCMP's role in the investigation is unclear but it appears the force is assisting Elections Canada. RCMP officers have approached the Conservative Party, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The robocalls received in Guelph were recorded in female voices in both French and English. They told voters their polling stations had moved to a shopping mall in the city's downtown, where parking was scarce.

A Citizen-Postmedia investigation has found calls misdirecting voters were also reported in ridings across the country: Kitchener-Waterloo, Kitchener-Conestaga, London-West, Parkdale-High Park, Winnipeg South Centre and Sydney-Victoria. It is possible that they were caused by robo-dialing errors.

Liberal supporters in a dozen ridings, mostly in Ontario, reported mysterious harassing calls, often late in the evening or early in the morning, where rude callers from a phone bank pretended to be working for the Liberals. The calls seem to have been an attempt to alienate Liberal voters in ridings where the Liberals and Conservatives seemed to be in close contests.

[LINK] "Election fraud allegations raise doubts about N.S. riding results"

This story from the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, in Nova Scotia, provides an example of the sort of effect that the robocalling referred to in the previous post had in some ridings in last year.

The riding of Sydney-Victoria is located on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island, while South Shore—St. Margaret's is located on the southern shore of mainland Nova Scotia, south of Halifax.

One of the ridings in question was Sydney-Victoria, where the Conservatives invested heavily in the hopes that Cecil Clarke would unseat Liberal incumbent Mark Eyking. Stephen Harper personally visited the riding twice during the campaign.

Eyking said Thursday his team knew something was wrong on election day when they started getting “disturbing” calls from supporters. Some voters were complaining about incessant phone calls, even though the Liberal communications team had only contacted them twice, as is routine.

Others said they were sent to polling stations that were incorrect or did not even exist.

“They were complaining to our office, saying why would you send me to the wrong place?” said Eyking.

“Our local offices new something was up. Somebody on the other side was playing a really nasty game here.”

Eyking ended up edging out Clarke by just 860 votes to hold onto the riding. His team never followed up on the suspicious calls.

[. . .]

NDP MP Pat Martin said the controversy raises doubts about whether the Conservatives fairly won the 2011 election or if they cheated their way to a majority.

“It’s outrageous, it’s disturbing, it’s as offensive as it can possibly be if you care a damn about the electoral system,” said Martin.

Martin accused the Conservatives of trying to steal eight ridings across the country wherein the NDP discovered suspicious activity tied to robo-calls. One of them was South Shore-St. Margaret’s, where NDP candidate Gordon Earle lost to Conservative Gerald Keddy.

NDP official agent Angus Fields said he remembers receiving “two or three calls” from supporters who were mysteriously directed to the wrong location to vote.

There was also an issue of some voters being deluged with pro-NDP robo-calls. Earle’s office was swamped with complaints for three days, but they were never able to rule out that it was an internal mix-up by NDP election headquarters. The party did not have a definitive answer by deadline Thursday.

NDP riding association president Wolfgang Ziemer conceded those issues would not have changed the final result. What was expected to be a tight race ended up being a comfortable win by almost 2,900 votes for Keddy.

[BRIEF NOTE] One note on the habitability of worlds orbiting red dwarf stars

Red dwarf stars, small and relatively cool and dim, much less notable than our yellow dwarf Sol, are the most common stars in the galaxy; the small amounts of mass that go into red dwarf stars gather together more readily than the larger amounts necessary to produce brighter stars. Because red dwarf stars are so common, the question of whether or not these stars could support Earth-like worlds has been hotly debated--Wikipedia even has a page dedicated to the potential habitability of worlds in red dwarf systems.

The biggest possible strike against red dwarf stars is that they are so dim that the odds a planet could exist in an orbit hospitable to an Earth-like biosphere may be very small, and that those worlds which did would be tidally locked--that is, they would not rotate relative to the star, leaving one side permanently exposed to its sun and the other side in permanent darkness. Secondary concerns include the question of whether or not the tendency of red dwarf stars to experience large stellar flares might make potentially Earth-like worlds un-Earth-like.

So far, theoretical studies suggest that tidal locking wouldn't necessarily be a problem, an early model suggesting that so long as a planetary atmosphere was a tenth as dense as Earth's (about twice that of Mars') the atmosphere would carry enough heat from the side facing the sun to the side facing away from the sun, preventing catastrophe. Stellar flares, similarly, needn't pose an existential threat to life on a world in a suitable orbit; at worst living organisms would be protected by a couple of metres' water, atmospheres and oceans need not experience significant erosion, and as red dwarf stars age their tendency to flare dminishes.

Now, via Centauri Dreams' post "M-Dwarfs: A New and Wider Habitable Zone", I've learned that a recent paper may mean that broadly Earth-like worlds could orbit red dwarf stars at greater distances than previous thought. Why? The relative abundance of dim, warm light produced by red dwarf stars has an impact on climate.

It would be helpful, then, if we could find a way to back a planet off from its host star while still allowing it to be habitable. The flare problem would be partially mitigated, and tidal lock might not be a factor. [Manoj] Joshi, now studying planetary atmospheric models at the University of East Anglia, has recently published a new paper with [Robert] Haberle (University of Reading) arguing that the habitable zone around M-dwarfs may actually extend as much as 30 percent further out from the parent star than had been previously thought.

At issue is the reflectivity of ice and snow. M-dwarfs emit a much greater fraction of their radiation at wavelengths longer than 1 μm than the Sun does, a part of the spectrum where the reflectivity (albedo) of snow and ice is smaller than at visible light wavelengths. The upshot is that more of the long-wave radiation emitted by these stars will be absorbed by the planetary surface instead of being reflected from it, thus lowering the average albedo and keeping the planet warmer. Joshi and Haberle modeled the reflectivity of ice and snow on simulated planets around Gliese 436 and GJ 1214, finding both the snow and ice albedos to be significantly lower given these constraints.

The effect of this would be to make it possible for worlds with Earth-like climates to orbit red dwarf stars at distances 10 and 30 percent greater than previously thought. Further details, the authors note, remain to be determined by detailed atmospheric models.

Already, there are speculations that there could be as many Earth-like worlds orbiting red dwarf stars as brighter stars, on the grounds that though red dwarf stars' habitable zones are substantially smaller than those of brighter stars, there are so many more red dwarfs that the two categories of stars host Earth-like planets in equal number. Could red dwarf stars host more Earth-like worlds than their brighter counterparts?

The paper is Joshi and Haberle, “Suppression of the water ice and snow albedo feedback on planets orbiting red dwarf stars and the subsequent widening of the habitable zone"