Where Are the Speech Warriors?

Yet again we have a Middle Eastern government demanding that a Western nation condemn a newspaper for an article that said government deems offensive to its people. Clearly this is just the sort of thing that one expects Ezra and Mark to denounce. I await their artful yet forceful defenses of free speech! When will these authoritarian twits in the Middle East learn that we in the West are not about to be cowed into curtailing free speech just so that their sensibilities aren’t offended? Wait… We’re talking about the government of Israel? In that case I eagerly await an explanation of why this is totally not the same thing at all as, say, the Mohammed cartoons.

Our Electoral System Does Not Keep Extremists At Bay

One of the reasons that is being advanced for preserving first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting in BC’s election tomorrow is that it supposedly keeps the extremists at bay. This argument suggests that countries with proportional representation like Israel are subject to the whims of radicals like Avigdor Lieberman. The drama played out in Israel in the wake of the last election saw different parties trying to find a way to please Lieberman so that he might enter into a coalition with several more mainstream parties.

That sort of thing never happens in Canada, right? Actually it does. FPTP rewards parties with lots of regional support so we reward not so much ideological radicals as we do regional ones. In the past couple of years we have seen the Liberals, the NDP, and the Conservatives all prepared to enter into coalitions or understandings or what-have-you with the Bloc. So yeah, if some horse-trading is needed here, our system is just as likely to produce radicals who might hold the balance of power.

But FPTP produces more majority governments where mainstream parties don’t have to do deals with fringe players, right? Well, um, not exactly – it still happens but it’s actually more insidious. Take Brian Mulroney’s grand coalition: he won a huge majority but at the expense of giving Lucien Bouchard the platform from which he could launch his separatist ambitions. How many PC voters in 1984 knew that they were voting for a coalition with separatists? Right now the Ontario PC Party is accommodating itself to the radical fringe that is most embodied in MPP and leadership candidate Randy Hillier. Hillier is unlikely to win the leadership but he may well play king-maker and at any rate he’s likely to get a cabinet position if the PCs win an election any time soon.

What this means is that we have extremist views inside the large brokerage parties, however these views are given the venerable stamps of the big parties. Randy Hillier does not have to run as the leader of his crazy Lanark Landowners group, no, he gets the more respectable Progressive Conservative tag – again, the same tag that got Lucien Bouchard a national spotlight. Right now our extremists smuggle themselves in under the banners of mainstream parties, under a proportional system, we could at least name them and publicly understand what they wanted in exchange for membership in a coalition government.

I hope BC voters will consider this when they head to the polls tomorrow.

More Confusion on PR from the Star

The editors of the Toronto Star hate proportional representation with a strange sort of passion that drives them to eagerly cling to any evidence they can use to purport to show that PR is a bad thing. Today we have yet another sorry example:

“Canadian advocates of electoral reform should take a long hard look at the results of this week’s election in Israel.

No fewer than 12 parties won seats in the Knesset. They range from mainstream parties like Kadima, Likud and Labour to fringe groups with various ethnic or religious orientations, like Hadash, Balad, Jewish Home and United Torah Judaism.”

So what? We have a “fringe group” with a regional orientation dedicated to the break-up of this country.

“Israel has an electoral system known as ‘proportional representation,’ under which parties are allocated seats according to their percentage of the popular vote. Advocates say it is fairer than our system, known as “first past the post,” where the winner is the candidate with a plurality in each riding. Electoral reformers say this leads to ‘wasted’ votes, whereas with proportional representation ‘every vote counts.’”

That’s because the votes are wasted in FPTP systems. If you don’t vote for the winning party in your area, your vote means nothing.

“Unfortunately, however, proportional representation also acts as an incentive to parties to form along narrow lines, sometimes religious or ethnic, as we can see in Israel.”

Again, the same thing in Canada, but just with regional biases.

“Electoral reformers cry foul over any comparison to Israel, where the threshold for getting a seat in the Knesset is only 2 per cent. But all 12 parties that won seats in this week’s election actually received at least 3 per cent of the popular vote.

What was the threshold chosen by the citizens assembly in Ontario that recommended a form of proportional representation for this province in 2007? The same 3 per cent.”

This essentially begs the question by assuming that it is a terrible tragedy to have 12 parties in a parliament.

“Now comes the next stage in Israeli politics – the backroom horse-trading as the larger parties try to attract support from the smaller ones in order to form a government. Typically, that support is offered in exchange for adoption of a key plank in the smaller party’s platform.

For Canadians who were shocked by the backroom deal late last year that led to the formation of a “coalition” to supplant the Conservatives in office, this kind of horse-trading is another reason to think twice about bringing proportional representation here.”

Heh. This part is funny. You see, now the election is over and the public is very much aware of the trade-offs going on between these parties. The same trade-offs happen in the big brokerage parties (i.e.: the Conservatives and the Liberals) in Canada as well. Take the Cons, they have to balance big business, social conservatives, libertarians and others in creating a platform. It is no different from the deal making that happens in Israel – it’s just that everyone can see who has compromised what.

Bonus: nice of the Star – an ostensibly liberal and Liberal paper – to adopt the Harper attitude that the coalition was some how unseemly or illegitimate.

Update: Queer-Liberal has more.

You saw this coming…

…so don’t act surprised that the Israeli government is claiming that the UN compound shot first. We’ve heard that one before in this conflict. So while it’s not impossible, it does look like the boy crying wolf.

Shades of the Liberty

Israel has “accidentally” shelled the UN headquarters in Gaza. This is not unlike the “accidental” attack that Israel launched on the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War or the murder of a Canadian soldier perpetrated by Israel in Lebanon. We in the West are told by Israel’s supporters that we ought to be sympathetic to Israel, yet Israel treats the rest of the world with utter contempt.

With Friends Like These…

One of the great things that a good friend can do for you is take you aside and tell you when you’re acting like a total idiot. No one else cares enough, no else is as likely to be heard. So why is it that the condition for being considered a “friend” of the state of Israel is that you can’t tell Israel when it’s doing something wrong?

Gaza: Sauce for the Gander

There’s a line of argumentation in defence of Israel that asks one to consider what one would do if rockets were falling randomly on one’s nation. It is of course reasonable for many people to say that they’d want their government and military to deal with such a situation by whatever means necessary.

Now, like the title says, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: What then would you say if your city was surrounded and enclosed like an open air prison? You have no conventional means of combating the army that has surrounded you, you need to hope that the United Nations and your captors have the good graces to periodically allow food and fuel into your prison. What would you do? Would the idea of lashing out, however futile or arbitrary, surely holds some appeal – not to advance any political cause but simply to announce your presence. If Toronto was surrounded by some foreign army and choked off I think I’d have a lot of sympathy for anyone wanting to lash out at this entity.

Both sides are acting out in ways that tragically make sense to their situations.

Not Helpful

…that’s being charitable about CUPE’s call to ban Israeli academics unless they denounce their government. What next? Should we make all American academics denounce the Iraq war? Should we make all Chinese academic denounce the treatment of Tibetans and Uighurs ? Should we make all Brazilian academics denounce the deforestation of the Amazon?

No one is served by ideologically-sanitized professors.

In the land of few options

I’ve been downed by a really nasty cold the last couple of days, but I’ve been trying to follow the situation in Gaza all the same. It’s really difficult to post something about this topic because right now the situation truly seems futile. When this calms down again, what will be different?

Aside from the death tolls that is.

Plus ca change…

I’m having a hard time believing that anything is going to change with this new uptick in violence in Gaza. Partially this is because no one actually has a plan. At the end of this Gaza will still be little more than an open-air prison, Sderot will still be subject to arbitrary rocket attacks, and Hamas will still be a force in Middle East politics.