Just kidding.

Recommended.

The parties’ seat dis­tri­b­u­tion matters for the four years between elec­tions, and this past election gen­er­ated a sig­nif­i­cant shift in seats. The popular vote will also matters for those four years as the parties try to align their policies with their under­standing of the voters. After that comes the 2015 election, where seat dis­tri­b­u­tion will be mean­ing­less and popular vote will once again mean every­thing. So let’s not forget the popular vote in our col­lec­tive, well-​​justified con­ster­na­tion around seats.

Here’s the popular vote from 2008 and 2011:

These changes may have tipped a lot of first-​​past-​​the-​​post riding outcomes, but in them­selves they are moderate shifts.

I’ve read a few articles from a range of politicos stating or implying that Canadians must broadly support the Conservatives’ con­ser­v­a­tive politics, given that they “just won the election” (see here for a fresh example). Yes, but without the actual support of the actual majority of voters, and with little improve­ment over their last lukewarm endorse­ment. And if you believe the post-​​election focus-​​grouping, even the people who voted Conservative aren’t espe­cially moti­vated by con­ser­v­a­tivism. This will be a trying four years, par­lia­men­tary process being what it is. But the left won’t be any stronger through those years if it forgets that it rep­re­sents the sig­nif­i­cant majority of Canadians’ values. That’s not a trivial factoid, that’s a baseline fact.

And how about that “historic collapse” of the Liberal party? From 26% to 19%. A shift of one voter in 14.

If you follow the par­lia­men­tary trend over the last few years you could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve seen a entrench­ment of con­ser­v­a­tive values in Canadian politics, and now a massive re-​​arrangement of centre-​​left party politics. I think what we’ve seen is parties luffing their sails in the fickle winds of minority politics, some slight shift in Canadian voting, and very little shift in actual Canadian values. Those votes and those values are what will matter in the long run, even if the short run is a sorry mess.

See pre­vi­ously: Plus Ca Change

We’ve been seeing cor­re­la­tions between climate change and local­ized bio­log­ical events for many years. Now we’ve begun to see research linking climate change to regional and even global outcomes. In the last few months there’s been seperate studies sug­gesting a global warming driver behind extreme rainfall events, flooding, and now inter­na­tional food prices.

These are all inter­esting and alarming findings on their own. It’s also inter­esting that some com­bi­na­tion of increasing mag­ni­tude of climate change and increasing intre­pid­ness of research method­ology is facil­i­tating continent-​​scale climate outcome analysis. It’s one thing to identify a general trend of change in the climate. It’s another thing to move on from averages to spotting trends in extreme moments and changes in fre­quen­cies of outlier events. It’s another thing again to credibly link those trends and vari­ances to specific outcomes big enough for people to care. Continental weather patterns are com­pli­cated systems with multi-​​step chains of causality. That’s hard to see through. Especially when you’re stacking a layer of eco­nomics on top of geo-​​physical systems, as in the case of food prices. But that doesn’t mean that climate won’t have serious outcomes at the local, regional and global level, and that means we very much need to try to spot those as soon as we can.

It’s also inter­esting to consider what effect these kinds of studies might have on opinion and policy, if science and media can get along well enough to effec­tively artic­u­late them to the public and to gov­ern­ments. The like­li­hood of climate change hasn’t been enough to motivate us to prevent it. Maybe the iden­ti­fi­able presence of the con­se­quences of climate change in our everyday life will be. That’s not just a science problem, although its surely that. Its also very much a com­mu­ni­ca­tions problem. But I’m glad the science is being done.

It’s a ridicu­lous time for spec­u­la­tion, given that the one poll that really matters is actively underway, but I’m going to spec­u­late anyway. I’ve got four ifs and a hopeful then.

• If Harper doesn’t get a majority.
• If the NDP comes in number two.
• If the NDP and the Liberals have more seats together than the Conservatives, without the help of the Bloc.
• If the NDP cal­cu­late that the public opinion cost of spear­heading a coali­tion wouldn’t be too high.
• Then we could have an NDP-​​led centre-​​left coali­tion within weeks.

I’d assign about 2/​3rds like­li­hood to the #1 if. The best two polling aggre­ga­tion and mod­el­ling sites are both pro­jecting 143 seats for the Cons, 12 short of a clear majority. Polling and mod­el­ling some­times gets it wrong, but not usually very wrong right before an election. Especially if multiple models are coa­lescing on the same projection.

#2 if is probably 2/​3rds likely as well. Even the more cautious three​hun​dredan​deight​.com is pro­jecting the NDPs in a strong second place. Given that the numbers were getting higher right up until the last poll left the field, that could mean that the final results could look even better.

#3 is hard to tell, but let’s say ¹⁄₂ chance. tooclos​e​to​call​.com says yes, three​hun​dredan​deight​.com says no.

#4 is probably 3/​4s likely. The Liberals made a choice to under­write Harper’s very effec­tive framing of coali­tions as back-​​room deals to elect second place leaders. They probably had to. But the NDP never bought that message, and they’re better placed to lead the charge on re-​​framing. And if they do form a rel­a­tively stable two-​​party sans-​​Bloc coali­tion, it would likely give them a full four years to prove to the sus­pi­cious Anglo masses that coali­tions are a boring, prac­tical arrangement.

I’m not sure how to boil those prob­a­bil­i­ties into a single math­e­mat­ical like­li­hood, because they’re all cor­re­lated with each other. But gen­er­ally I’d say we’ve got a one out of two chance of a won­derful outcome here.

The alter­na­tive could be terrible. Who says Canadian politics are boring? OK, nobody lately.

Also worth noting: the first major act of a re-​​elected Conservative party is pre­sum­ably to re-​​introduce the same budget that par­tially trig­gered the last dis­so­lu­tion. If a coali­tion is to be formed, that will be an obvious moment for it. If it happens, it could happen in a matter of weeks. Another wildcard: even if a coali­tion meant a second-​​place Liberal party very pub­li­cally going back on their word and allying them­selves with the nasty Bloc, they might still go for it. I’m not sure it would be stable or play well in the inevitable next election, but it would be hard to resist.

Oh boy.

I’m pleased to report that a photo of mine is going to be used on the cover of this new book:

That’s Jane schlep­ping in across the scree slope at the top of a truly nasty block on the Bluebird road outside of Creston. Looks pretty good to me. And I like the font.

The book is by Charlotte Gill and pre­sum­ably has its roots in this award-​​winning short story. It should be out in a few months. I gather there’s a lot of back-​​and-​​forth in book pub­lishing, all of which takes time.

Swing33​.ca links to the donation pages of 33 can­di­dates that could be key to the outcome of the upcoming election. The idea came from Mitch Anderson, who rents a desk beside the desk I rent, and who has an op-​​ed in the Tyee today explaining. I helped build it.

We’re not fans of the Harper admin­is­tra­tion, and we’d like to do some­thing to boost the prospects of the leftist (and centrist) Canadian parties. There’s 308 ridings in Canada, but not all of them are likely to switch sides in 2011. Of those that are in play, not all are being seri­ously con­tested by a Conservative can­di­date. We had a look at the results of the last election and spread­sheeted out the ones where Conservatives came close to winning or close to losing. There are 33 ridings where there was less than a 5% dif­fer­ence between the Conservative and the top non-​​Conservative can­di­date. That’s our list. If you’re going to donate to a polit­ical campaign (and Mitch argues there’s good reason to), then you might want want to target it at cam­paigns that are likely to decide the number of Conservative seats in the next par­lia­ment. That goals feels impor­tant right now.

We did simple-​​ish math to pick out those ridings, and it’s not a perfect system. We’re using recent history as a guide and history doesn’t sit still. We’ve already spotted a couple of dis­tricts where local con­di­tions have changed since 2008 such that the best con­tender probably isn’t the one Excel picked. Saanich — Gulf Islands is the most obvious to me. (Donate to the Greens there, not the Liberals like the site says.) A com­menter at the Tyee has already called out Esquimalt — Juan de Fuca as another flub.

We’re con­sid­ering aggre­gating that kind of local­ized knowl­edge, and/​or bringing in con­tem­po­rary polling data and pro­viding an alter­na­tive curated list. Time is the lim­i­ta­tion. In the meantime we didn’t want to make it any harder to under­stand what the site was about by adding excep­tions to our algo­rithmic approach.

In sum: if you or someone you know can be con­vinced to pony up some cash to help facil­i­tate a good outcome in this year’s election, Swing33 could provide some rea­son­able guidance for giving that donation the most impact. The Conservatives are far better fundraisers than any of their com­pe­ti­tion, so give it some thought. Links to the donation pages of 33 likely can­di­dates are just two clicks away.

“Trawling through Vincent’s col­lec­tion we pulled out 10 con­tem­po­rary and classic grooves straight from the streets of Kinshasa. Many of these records are released as limited press­ings and finding them can be an arduous task. Our best advice is to try the spe­cialist African music outlet Stern’s.“

Congo, where rumba meets r’n’b — Josh Surtees, The Guardian

The article goes on to describe the ten tracks, each with a Youtube link dis­creetly included for those who don’t have time to scour Stern’s.

I would never have pre­dicted that a video site would become some­thing like a rough-​​and-​​ready uni­versal library of audio.

Here’s Wendo Kolosoy, described in the article as the grand­fa­ther of Congolese rhumba, per­forming Marie Louise:

When I was DJ-​​ing at WCBN there was some dis­agree­ment over the probity of playing Youtube clips over the airwaves. The Program Director felt, rea­son­ably enough, that DJs should strive for highest audio quality and to showcase the extra­or­di­nary, vinyl-​​anchored WCBN music library. I’m not sure exactly how that dis­cus­sion resolved itself, but I don’t doubt that people will still fire up Youtube when they catch a tricky request or just can’t find a special track in the stacks. Because they can.

I’m working on a fun project for the BC Forest Practices Board. We’re taking great whack­loads of province-​​wide spatial data and trans­mo­gri­fying it into handy reports on the physical status of forests in dif­ferent admin­is­tra­tive and eco­log­ical zones. And I’m pleased to report that the project is begin­ning to produce some GIS art.

bio­geo­cli­mactic zones around Port Alberni

GIS art, for those who haven’t had the pleasure, are the serendip­i­tous bits of aes­thetic map flotsam that tend to pop up as inter­me­diary products in geo­graphic analysis chains. They’re the recom­bi­nant product of the natural attrac­tive­ness of land­forms, the semi-​​random auto­mated assign­ment of colours to land­cover classes, and the quasi-​​organic dis­tor­tions intro­duced by algo­rithm. The above is a rel­a­tively unprocessed version, see for com­par­ison one of my old favourites:

local­ized explana­tory power of soil water for shape­ness
of juniper, Strawberry Crater, Waputki AZ

OK, so maybe it’s not great art. But when GIS art does show up, it’s often a nicely timed dis­trac­tion from the more abstract “plea­sures” of ana­lyt­ical troubleshooting.