Segacs’s World I Know

And a shift now to the international scene, as the American coalition transferred power to Iraqis two days early:

The handover of sovereignty took place earlier in the day, at 10:26 a.m. Baghdad time. The transfer of power came two days before the June 30 deadline previously announced by the U.S.-led coalition.

Some Iraqis dismissed the event as meaningless as long as U.S. troops occupy the nation and some said the handover was a step in the right direction.

The big question now is: what will the activists chant instead of the catchy “end the occupation”?

No, seriously, the big question is, of course, can they pull it off? Will the new Iraqi leadership be able to restore calm and govern somewhat democratically? Or will the chaos of the last few months only increase, as insurgents target the interim leadership for assassination, ensuring continuing violence?

A power struggle is virtually a guarantee, but questions still abound: Will the new leadership resort to martial law in order to instill calm? Even if they do so, will the military be effective against the terrorists? There have been reports that many members of the military are sympathetic to the terrorists, and refusing to follow the Iraqi leadership.

As much as I’d like to be optimistic, the whole handover of power has taken place at lightning-speed. I’m not sure that the Iraqi people will be able to support a democratic system, in the face of kidnappings, terror attacks, suicide bombings, and every effort to stop the process.

One thing is for certain: the world is watching. Unfortunately, more of the world seems to be hoping for the experiment to fail. And that, in the end, may be its ultimate undoing.

The polls open in 8 hours.

And nobody knows who will be elected, or what will happen in the country. Confusion is pretty much the only certainty at this point, as we’re almost surely heading towards a minority government. Predictions are abounding all over the blogosphere, but the only one I will make is that most Canadians will actually tune in tomorrow night to watch the results being broadcast.

Meanwhile on the campaign front, the leaders wrapped up a low, mud-slinging campaign with – what else? – some last-minute mud-slinging. No new ideas, though. We haven’t seen too many of those in this campaign.

And it’s bad enough that American nitwits like Michael Moore and Ralph Nader are butting into Canadian politics. But hey, at least we – unlike Israel – don’t have to worry about meddlesome campaigning by the European Union.

So to all Canadians: Exercise your right to vote, tough as it may be to find someone worth voting for. May the least-awful candidate win.

Ahead of Monday’s election, several Jewish organizations in Canada have published transcripts of interviews with Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Jack Layton (with Gilles Duceppe to follow). They have also summarized interviews with MP candidates from each party in the Toronto and Montreal areas, and a report on a candidates meeting in Vancouver:

The Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy Public Affairs Committee (CIJA-PAC), Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC), and the Quebec-Israel Committee (QIC) have conducted interviews with the party leaders and selected local candidates on a number of issues including Israel, antisemitism, terrorism and community security.

In general, I’m uncomfortable with anyone who purports to speak for an entire community. But to their credit, these groups have not so much as issued an endorsement; they have asked questions that they think might be of interest to many Canadian Jews, and posted the answers, leaving it up to readers to make up their own minds and draw their own conclusions (for the most part).

This is not going as far as the Canadian Islamic Congress, which has openly been calling on all Canadian Muslims to vote NDP – or strategically Liberal, has published such articles as the one entitled ten reasons not to vote Conservative, and has issued its now-infamous grading of Federal MPs, which seems to rank MPs mainly by their stance on Israel. I, for one, find it extremely insulting that the CIC assumes that Canadian Muslims are incapable of making up their own minds on the issues.

But whether Muslim, Jewish, or any other religion, none of us are party members in a parliament without free votes. No, we are all individual citizens, fully capable of evaluating the candidates and issues, and drawing our own conclusions. Bloc voting may sometimes work inside the House of Commons, but outside it, we are all more than just a label. Not all Jews must vote the same way, any more than all Muslims must vote the same way.

So with all those disclaimers, I’ve posted the transcripts anyway… read them and draw your own conclusions.

Happy St-Jean Baptiste Day to Quebec nationalists… and to everyone in Quebec, for that matter. (Hey, who can complain about a day off?)

The opening remarks of Anne Bayefsky, addressing the U.N. Conference on Confronting Anti-Semitism, are sharp, direct, and provide a much-needed reality check:

I won’t post excerpts because I urge everyone to read the entire thing. (Via Meryl Yourish).

It had to be a mistake, right? I mean, what possible motivation could Iran have had to seize British ships? That was everyone’s first reaction anyway.

But it wasn’t a mistake. And neither is Iran’s uncooperative attitude with UN weapons inspectors. Taken together, you gotta wonder whether there’s something else going on here, and we’re just ignoring all the signs. I don’t know, but I don’t like it one bit.

Svend Robinson has been charged with theft for stealing a ring at an estate sale.

The “incident” caused him to step down as an MP for the NDP, amidst self-serving crocodile tears. But if he thought that his apologies and his life as a public figure would allow him to escape responsibility for his actions, well, think again. He ‘fessed up. Now it’s time to pay up.

I’m trying not to be too jubilant here, but, well, it’s difficult I’ll admit. Robinson has been a first-class ass for a while. Now his political legacy finally reflects that.

Ever the politician, of course, Svend did manage to resign just in time for these charges to be unlikely to stick to the NDP. That’s my only regret in this whole debacle. Svend, I’m sure, has plenty.

Demerger activists in cities that lost their bids due to the 35% rule are decrying it as undemocratic:

Disgusted.

That’s how Michael Vadacchino felt about the result of last night’s demerger referendum in LaSalle.

Vadacchino, a borough councillor and leader of the demerger committee, said the system implemented for the referendum vote was completely undemocratic.

[. . . ]

But getting 35 per cent of people to vote at all, let alone the same way, isn’t easy, he said.

“They made the barrier so high, they knew it would be as difficult as possible to achieve.”

LaSalle voted 60% in favour of demerger, but those 60% of votes represented only 20% of all registered voters. People who stayed home, were out of town, or who moved away or even passed away and didn’t get their named removed from the heavily-padded lists, all counted as automatic “no” votes under the 35% rule.

In the other Montreal sectors where demerger failed, the result was even closer. Anjou and Ste-Genevieve are bitter about the 35% rule as well. In Saint-Laurent, 75% of the votes cast were for the Yes side, but they represented only 28.5% of registered voters. Pierrefonds also voted over 70% “Yes”. And Roxboro and Ile-Bizard both lost by razor-thin margins.

The 35% rule was designed as an added hoop for demergerites to jump through before they could get their cities back. But despite that, I’m starting to re-examine it with interest.

Maybe – just maybe – it’s not such a bad idea after all. In fact, I think we ought to immediately apply this rule to all Montreal municipal and provincial elections from now on.

That means that Gerard Tremblay would have to get 35% of all registered voters in Montreal to turn out and vote for him in the next election. No simple majorities for you, M. Tremblay. And Jean Charest would need 35% of all Quebeckers of voting age to turn out and vote for him before he could get back into office.

With this rule, we could ensure that no politican ever got elected to any office… ever again.

A world without politicians? Sounds pretty good to me.

Whatever your opinion of the demerger referendums, the dirty tricks that cost some cities their demerger bid, or the eventual outcome for both demerged and still-merged cities, they changed the face of democracy in Quebec, as Henry Aubin explains (sorry, link requires registration, which makes me feel less guilty about quoting a large chunk of it):

The demerger voters have not only rocked the boat of Quebec authoritarianism. On Montreal Island and Longueuil, they’ve capsized it.

By authoritarianism, I mean that tradition in which elected officials – on both the municipal and provincial levels – bring citizenship to its lowest possible level on the democratic scale. In return for being allowed to vote every few years, grateful citizens are supposed to shut up between elections and let people they’ve voted into office become bullies. The public possesses no automatic right to being consulted between elections on policy issues – a right that in most North Americans and western Europeans take for granted.

[ . . . ]

These results augur a sea change in the way provincial and city governments in the Montreal region will have to relate to citizens. In the most impudent display of people power in memory, voters in many municipalities across the province have insisted on the right to have a say in decision-making between elections.

Legally speaking, the provincial and city governments will be as free as they’ve always been to treat the public highhandedly. But the political ethos has changed.

Just as the demise of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords created a political (as distinct from legal) precedent that has made constitutional reform unthinkable, so the collapse of mega-Montreal and mega-Longueuil will make certain practices unacceptable.

No longer will a provincial government dare to transform public institutions without an electoral mandate, as did the former Parti Quebecois government in its breathtaking abolition of more than municipalities.

No longer will a provincial government refuse even to hold public hearings on so vital issue.

No longer will it dare to embark on so sweeping an enterprise without having studies to back it up.

True, this new mindfulness by government will not be automatic. In examining yesterday’s results, politicians are not going to slap their foreheads and renounce arrogance.

No, what will change is the public’s confidence in its ability to stand up and insist on being heard – and not just by the provincial government but also by city governments and other public bodies.

In fact, with all the conflicting studies and pieces of propaganda issued by both sides, it’s almost impossible to predict whether cities that demerged will be better off than ones that didn’t. But for most demergerites, this wasn’t the issue. The point was that the government can’t steamroll over democracy.

And, at least as far as this goes, mission accomplished. Next time, they’ll think twice.