Well, after 2 hours of trying, I finally managed to cast my vote.I could have voted in advance, by mail or on line; 50% of party members did. That would have involved marking 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. preferences (6 candidates) if I wanted, for subsequent ballots. I preferred to wait and do it real-time on the day. Unfortunately, a hacker got there first when the polls opened at noon, after the final candidate speeches, and voting was delayed over an hour.
Of course, the results were pretty much already determined by the advance voting (although no one knew what those results were until all votes were counted after the on-line polls closed on Saturday). A majority on first ballot is an absolutely resounding victory and vote of support.
Normally, party leaders are elected by delegates from the various riding (constituency) associations. This makes watching the outcome, even for party members, like watching a beauty pageant: you bet on the winner, rather than *doing* it. It also involves the usual winner-takes-all problems when delegates are selected by first-past-the-post voting.
Last leadership election, my riding had 3 delegates. There were 3 nominees committed to Svend Robinson (left-wing, atheist, gay, pro-Palestinian rights MP from British Columbia), including me, and 3 nominees committed to Alexa McDonough (leader of the party in New Brunswick, party insider, no known policy positions of interest). By literally 50% +1, with a run-off having to be held for the 3rd position when I came in tied with the Alexa nominee at first and then lost, all our votes went to Alexa.
I went to convention as a useless alternate, and Svend conceded after the first ballot when it was plain that the 3rd candidate's supporters would all go to Alexa. And we've had several years of bland and boring and a complete lack of national profile as a result. (Well, as a result of a number of other factors outside our control as well, but the leadership vacuum didn't help.)
This time, Jack had the support of Svend, representing the left (although not the farthest left of the party; the Socialist Caucus ran its own candidate), and also had the support of Ed Broadbent, the leader in the 1980s, identified with the righter wing of the party, but much loved by the Canadian public. If we had a presidential system, rather than the parliamentary system in which one votes for local candidate/party and not Prime Minister, Ed might have been our PM. ;)
This is all different from the US process for selecting parties' candidates, where voters register as one party or another. Here, the voters' list has nothing to do with parties. People may join a party, and the party members select their leader. (The leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons, provided that s/he has been elected to his/her own seat in the house, will be Prime Minister.)
This was the first time a party held direct elections, and the on-line real-time voting really felt just damned good. I had not been completely sure of my vote, since I had long liked Bill Blaikie, and wanted to watch all the final speeches and think. Just before voting, I also talked to my sister, a former resident of Jack's municipal ward in Toronto, who dispelled my qualms that he might be a little bit too much hat and not enough cattle. Even in the context of a right-wing council and mayor, he worked his ass off and accomplished a lot on things like homelessness, a cause he also championed as president of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities. And Bill's continuing sarcasm toward other candidates helped clinch it. (Bill was one of three MPs in the running, and the fact that Jack is not a member of Parliament was a sore point with them.)
But like many in the convention hall, I would have voted for Pierre Ducasse after his tremendous speech if he'd been not quite such a newbie; he's real leadership material, and apparently a really nice guy. We hold no seats in Quebec (we once had one) and there is simply no NDP there provincially, but Quebec itself is in fact a model of many social democratic policies the NDP advocates -- for instance, its universal $5 a day child care program. Pierre needs to get himself a seat in Parliament (and I'll be one of many sending him some $$ for the effort next time). He's only 30, and there's lots of time.
We will not be having a federal election until at least the spring of 2004; Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has promised his party that he will step down as leader in February 2004, so that the Liberal party can elect a new one, and then call an election some time after. The new one will be Paul Martin, representing the far right wing of the Liberal Party. The one credible "l"iberal leadership candidate, Allan Rock, just withdrew.
Last week, "c"onservative (in Canadian terms) columnists in two newspapers handed out advice for the NDP in getting back on track. I found this interesting: they were seriously examining the mood of the country, and finding that it had swung away from the hard-right sentiment of the early 90s, and they were almost exhorting the NDP to make some hay out of the anti-war groundswell, Kyoto, and popular support for the revitalization (and re-funding) of the health care system.
Pretty much everyone, even including conservative columnists, appears to have had about enough of the anti-Canadian antics of the present Official Opposition, the loony right-wing Canadian Alliance. The NDP, as such and in its previous incarnation as the CCF, was the moving force behind universal health care, old age pensions, and a lot that is decent about life in Canada, and we might just be able to *lead* a little in swinging the pendulum back in the direction of decency now.
It's the same the whole world over. It's the poor what gets the blame.
It's the rich what gets the pleasure. Ain't it all a bleeding shame?
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have to put up with... 