rain

While not denying that many complaints should be public, one wonders how many of the 2284 were serious and how many frivolous? On one occasion I received and had to submit a formal complaint from a voter that, "She had to park too far from the poll, and got wet feet". In effect, she was complaining about rain in Vancouver! Even that level of complaint would have required Elections Canada to send her a written response.

yes, hopefully...

Hopefully. If if wasn't so sad, we would have to laugh at the idea that hopefully we will have details.

Andesite, we would have to know more about that particular complaint to decide if it was frivolous. For example, I had to walk a couple of kilometres to vote in the last federal election, because parking was woefully inadequate. This was not a problem for me, but it was a serious problem for my elderly, limited mobility neighbour, who doesn't have a car anyway. In the end I gave her a ride to the polls, but had to drop her off on the side of the road and take another neighbour to help her get across the road. Returning to pick her up was the same: had to stop on the side of the road. But the real winner of the Elections Canada stupidity contest was this: the residents of one particular very low-income housing building had to go more than 15 kilometres to vote, when all the other residents in the neighbourhood in other buildings were voting at the school 2 blocks away. Do you think something funny is going on here?

In a democracy, we should definately, not 'hopefully' know.

Citizens alert: it's up to us!

Am I the only person in Canada who believes that Harper's majority was a scam, a cheat, a despicable theft of the nation's trust?

Steve's signature is there for all to see, in his appointment of the equally dubious Gordon Campbell to be Canada's High Commissioner to the U.K.

I can't pretend I know how to knock these two imposters off their perches ... but I do know it begins with making ourselves aware of what Gordo & Steve have done to this proud nation.

BC Mary

Unlike yourself, I CAN envision a way to knock these two, and the remaining, charlatans off their perch. The problem is very few citizens are prepared to engage in a civil revolution. We prefer to defer to authority and find a perverse comfort in trusting our system of politics, believing the rhetoric that it is the best they could come up with after trying the rest.

Delusions of the matter aside, turning to the government and its supporting institutions for assistance is a fool's game. Our political paradigm is about as fair as a stick-up being a legal transaction. Unfortunately there will be no consolation in a decade or two when we are on ecological and economical ruin to say, 'I told you so'.

We want substantive change? Then we have to substantively change the way we see the world, the way we behave, and what we do or do not tolerate in a government. At this juncture I wholly believe this government, let alone this model of governance, is not remotely tolerable in terms of giving it my support. But it seems few if any are prepared to stop voting, stop paying taxes and democratically (in the truest sense) remove them from office.

As Churchill wisely noted, "The greatest argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with your average voter". What did he know that the rest of us haven't figured out despite the passing of another 60-odd years of the political crime-wave?

rain complaint

Hi VivianLea. I was so astonished that I personally went outside to check. The distance from her parking space to the poll entrance was about 50 m along a paved sidewalk. At one point there was a sizeable puddle extending across half the width of the sidewalk. I suppose that someone who was not paying attention could have walked through instead of around it.

So What?

Churchill also said: "...that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

The problem is not with democracy.

The problem is with the perversion of that system by a good many of its current nominal adherents AND, most important, the way in which otherwise 'good' people refuse to acknowledge this perversion and act to root it out.

G West

And borne out quite "nicely" by this segment of CBC's The Current, 17 Nov.'11:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/11/17/the-right-to-protest-and-occupy-space/

Watch Out

The greatest threat to fair and honest selection of government representatives is electronic, or online, voting.

Elections Canada has been mandated to explore or pilot online voting.
Here in BC, Christy Clark has ruminated about it. Some municipalities have adopted it. Many American States use it for all levels of elections.

Online voting is bad because, without a paper ballot trail, results are impossible to verify and, because political office is powerful and the public coffers huge, it is immanently corruptible.

There are a couple of arguments to support online voting, all spurious, but which anyone who cares about fair and honest elections should be prepared to refute: The first is that online voting saves money, the refutation for which is that paper-ballot elections are inexpensive, and what little cost they do entail is well worth it to safeguard the system from corruption. The second is that people don't object to doing online banking so there is no reason to question the security of online voting, the refutations for which are that one's bank account is vanishingly tiny compared to the public coffers, yet still attracts hacking and identity thieves who steal the tiny, personal account, whereas the huge public coffer motivates criminals and corrupters to a vastly larger extent; also, one can detect electronic bank fraud by checking one's balance whereas no one can verify online ballots. A third argument is that online voting is supposed to encourage more people to vote, presumably because they don't have to leave their house or their job to cast their electronic "ballot." This flimsy argument is not born out by any facts or stats. Look to the USA, where electronic voting is used in many places, but where voter turn out is notoriously low, and getting lower.

The title of this article already damns Elections Canada. Why would we trust them any more if they had resort to online voting?

My biggest fear is that Christy Clark will try to institute online voting in BC for the next election. The fact that her BC Liberal party stands a pretty good chance of losing, the fact that her government is proven corrupt and dishonest to the benefit of its insider buddies should raise alarm about her real motivations and opportunities she seeks from online voting. The sleaziest way to do it is to suddenly introduce online voting right at the last minute, to avoid the possibility of a court injunction against it.

Without proper, public oversight of elections, the opportunity and motive exists for governments to win reelection dishonestly and illegally. Ethics demand that there cannot even appear to be a corruption of the voting system, not even potentially.

Don't be taken unawares. Online voting is like online gambling.

online voting is ridiculous

...we witnessed the theatre of it with the 2000 non-election of Bush as President. It is open to gaming and there is no way to confirm a vote. And its doubly hard when the ruling plutocrats have the judges call off the voting altogether,

And only the credulous think we live in a democracy. It is called a representative democracy to usurp the good will of the word 'democracy', no doubt. In Canada we are ruled by plutocrats taking cover within the corporatocracy -- we are a client state to America, the falling Empire.

Small picture folks vote, rationally, to ease the suffering they feel by supporting the lesser evil. Big picture folks refuse to vote, rationally, to protest the political paradigm by not partaking in it.

My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what you have done for your country, but ask what has your country done TO you?

I can't imagine an easier way to rig an election

There is a certanty about casting a paper ballot. Electronic data does not really exist, does it? Especially with bears like Harper and Baird stalking the woods. With animals like that abroad, we had better keep our powder dry.