What are they teaching in school?

Concordia’s student newspaper on Movember (November 2011):

The whole ‘Movember’ thing is cute and all, but can we stop and be real about it for a second? Movember is a movement to celebrate North American guys not practicing basic facial hygiene for a month in order to raise money towards saving a group of extremely privileged people—themselves.

Yes, if Movember was to raise money for people in third-world countries, for illiterate people, or homeless people, or for anything but what it is—which is privileged guys pretending they have it as hard as people with real problems—then it might come close to approaching something vaguely resembling worthwhile.

Furthermore, it’s worth mentioning that, as far as cancers go, prostate cancer is not much of a cancer.

Flashback to Carleton 2008:

The Carleton University Students’ Association has voted to drop a cystic fibrosis charity as the beneficiary of its annual Shinearama fundraiser, supporting a motion that argued the disease is not “inclusive” enough.

Cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men” said the motion read Monday night to student councillors, who voted almost unanimously in favour of it.

Queen’s University, 2006 (Toronto Star):

Queen’s University, one of Canada’s most academically elite schools, admits it has allowed a “culture of whiteness” to take root that fails to welcome visible minority students and professors.

And the university vows to be more aggressive in shedding its reputation as a tony enclave of white privilege, says vice-principal Patrick Deane.

Announcing Election Maps

This has been a long time in the making. You may recall that back in 2009, I put together this short video where I gave an overview of mapping/translating/projecting NRCan .shp files in Google Earth. I took the 2008 poll boundaries and the 2008 general election results and mashed them up so that every poll division from that election could be visualized in Google Earth.

What about the results from the 2011 General Election? Could those be mapped too? Yes.

When I first put the video out lots of people were interested in the project and asked if they could play around with the maps themselves. I’ve been up to a few other things since then and lost track of the project, but recently I’ve been busy on this again and I’ve put together a maps section on this website where you can explore election results in Google Maps. Not only this, you can download the files to zoom around on your desktop version of Google Earth.

Not only this, but I’ve gone ahead and mapped the 2006, 2004, 2000 and 1997 election poll divisions and results in addition to those from 2011 and 2008.

So, for those counting: that’s 6 general elections, 308 ridings per election (301 seats in each of 2000 and 1997), about 200 average poll divisions per riding and a handful of candidates running in each riding. That’s amounts to approximately 1.6 million polls! The data, all-in-all, takes up about 12 GB on my server’s MySQL database.

Go on and take a tour of the new Maps feature (if you don’t have the Earth plugin you can easily switch to Maps, Satellite or Hybrid). Many of the maps are too large to render on a simple browser iteration of Google Maps so you’ll have to download the maps to Google Earth to get a full appreciation (links are provided).

If you like what you see, give it a shout-out on twitter. I’d be happy if more people had access these files.

Here’s a sample of some of the visuals from the maps:


2011 Labrador


2011 Central Nova


2004 Esquimalt Juan-de-Fuca


1997 Vancouver Centre

Tsk, tsk Freedom Party

The Freedom Party is running in the Ontario election, hoping to eke out a seat or two for libertarian hopefuls. I like libertarian principles but unfortunately this “fringe” party really has no shot of getting elected as the government. In fact, they may stand as a spoiler to the Progressive Conservatives in some ridings. Yet, this situation may cause PC candidates to compete for votes in the freedom space of the electoral spectrum, so this is a good thing.

However, I must take issue with their latest commercial on prayer in public schools. Their ad uses a clip of mine, and not only do they take Tim Hudak out of context but, these property-rights-loving folks didn’t ask to use (or even credit) my video!

Here’s my interview with Tim Hudak from April 2, 2009:

At 4:08, I ask about vouchers and faith-based schools. If we go to 4:50 we hear Hudak say about faith-based schools,

“Very clearly, in the 2007 election, voters rendered a clear verdict that they didn’t support the party policy of faith-based schools support. And as leader of the Ontario PC Party, I won’t be opening that door again. It has been closed by the voters. I’ll look forward to working with our grassroots policy process with our members of the PC Party who are involved and our PC caucus colleagues. I’ll look for ways to innovate, create competition in choice, but within our public school system.”

In the Freedom Party ad below, the narrator says “PC Leader Tim Hudak is quietly committed to faith-based public schools.” Hudak: “Choice, but within our public school system”.

Hudak wasn’t talking about moving the faith-based argument from tax-credits of private schools to infusing religion in public schools. He was talking about creating competitive elements within the public school system. It was quite clear that he recognized faith-based meddling in education wasn’t a winning strategy in 2007. Vouchers as a general concept is a good one (and an competitive tool which I imagine the Freedom Party would support in our public schools system). The Freedom Party distorts this point using a quote from Hudak out of context.

And without any tagline for my video! Fair use is fair use, but please pass on the credit.