Month: July 2005

The NDP claims to be the party of youth and thus claims to appeal to voters of my generation. Let’s take a look at the “party of youth”…

The NDP currently has 19 MPs in their caucus, 18 of which are older than 40.

The NDP caucus could hardly be described as “youthful”, except maybe for this guy:

This is NDP MP Brian Masse and he’s 37.

Contrast the NDP with the Conservative Party of Canada. The Conservative Party has 20 MPs who are either 40 or younger. That’s right, the Conservative Party has a greater number of young MPs than the NDP has MPs of any age in its entire caucus. The Conservative Party continues to attract youthful candidates to run against the old and tired Liberal and New Democratic Parties. The young professionals in the Conservative caucus represents significant momentum in the party and reflects a greater representation of my generation.

The Young Conservative Caucus

I have come to the conclusion that the NDP (and similar socialists) have a political philosophy that is based upon two common fundamental beliefs: that our society is wrong, and that it must be changed. Consider the status quo approach to any issue and the NDP has fought, or is fighting, for society to change it (e.g. environment, labour, marriage, economy, defense etc.)

I think that the NDP stereotypes young people as naturally contrarian (ie. rebellious adolescents). Most of my peers do have concerns about society, however, their concerns are rooted in whether or not they’ll be able to make a good life for themselves and their families and whether or not their families will be safe in their communities and in the world. We’re a lot more mature than the NDP would wish us to be.

CORRECTION: Daveberta has pointed out that I misplaced NDP MP Nathan Cullen who is actually 33. Upgrade that youthful NDP total to 2 MPs. Huzzah!

The Ottawa Citizen this morning discusses a recent poll in which parents expressed overwhelmingly that the office of Prime Minister is not one that they would like to see any of their children occupy.

“Honey, you can grow up to be what ever you like, one day you could even be President”

This seems to be a cliché quote from a Hollywood reflection of the American dream which states that any individual in the United States can achieve any heights given hard work and determination. Whatever your inclination to believe this ideal, the aspiration is there: the office of President is something so remarkable that almost any American parent would wish it for their son or daughter.

In Canada, the same cannot be said for the office of the Prime Minister. A full 61% of Canadians would not wish this upon their son or daughter. The current political climate is certainly indicative of this hesitation. Conservative MP Monte Solberg comments “If the perception is that you have to sell your soul, and lie, cheat and steal to become prime minister, then I can see why parents are a little reluctant to see their children enter politics”.

In a past discussion with a Conservative MP, leadership and Prime Ministerial aspirations came up. The MP commented that there was a study that revealed that 1 in 5 federal MPs wish to become Prime Minister. I remarked that about 99% of that 20% will be sorely disappointed. Would their parents feel the same?

Over the past few years, I’ve become more and more involved with federal politics in this country by contributing with my blog, working towards the formation and maintenance of Blogging Tories and by volunteering locally and nationally for the Conservative Party. In my weekly phone calls home I tell my parents about my latest exploits.

(warning shameless self-promotion ahead)
“Mom, I’m going to Montreal for the CPC Convention”

“Dad, James Moore reads my blog”

“Mom, the Globe and Mail called about Jean Brault”

“Mom, CTV called about Gurmant Grewal”

“Dad, CBC Radio called”

“Mom, Warren Kinsella just called me dumb”

“Mom, Warren Kinsella just called me smart”

“Dad, Blogging Tories is now the 100th most popular blog in the world (by one measure)”

“Mom, I interviewed Monte Solberg”

The answer is always the same,

“Don’t quit your day job (finish that graduate degree)”

Politics of late has been quite dirty and I don’t blame parents for wanting to keep their children away from it. But we really ought to work towards making politics an honourable profession (no, really). Parents should be encouraging their children into public service, yet are reluctant as they perceive these servants to be serving themselves. When we move past character assassinations, bribery, fear-mongering, threats, and corruption perhaps we can then hope to recruit good people to do good work for the public good.

As you might have already noticed, I’ve recently looked into tags. Tags, in blogging terms, are user-defined annotations of blog posts. If I write a long-winded post about Jean Lapierre for example, I might use the following tags to annotate my post: lapierre, bloc, liberal, transport. These annotations make it easier for users to find relevant information and allow web services to deliver better results. As I’ve mentioned on Blogging Tories, Flickr and Technorati are two services which use author-defined tags to annotate information. Odeo is a newly launched service that allows for the annotation of podcasts using tags.

Another type of tag is used on the Internet and that is the end-user-defined tag. del.icio.us is such a service and allows any website end-user (not just the author as with technorati and flickr tags) to annotate a website with relevant tags. You, the end-user can annotate this very post yourself if you like by clicking on the + del.icio.us link below. Most users of del.icio.us use the bookmarklet which allows one’s browser to tag the website that the user is viewing at that time.

I have tagged this post with relevant technorati tags (tags, socialbookmarking, del.icio.us) to increase this post’s exposure and to help consumers of blogs find relevant information.

Technorati and del.icio.us are two websites that I highly recommend. I use del.icio.us to store my bookmarks online (sorted by my own annotations) so that I can find favourite websites quickly and from any computer connected to the Internet. “Social bookmarking” is a key feature of del.icio.us as your tagged bookmarks are accessible to others through their common tags and through a tag-based search on the del.icio.us website (so, it would be recommended to use an anonymous username, and not to bookmark your bank account webpage for example).

Tagging, in my opinion, is a blogging feature that has grown past its infancy and has been accepted into the mainstream. Become a tagger today!