I don’t call a lot of people, “friend.”  The list of people who I consider to be friends is minimal, at best, and even then, the people who I would entrust most information to is an even smaller list.  Jason Letourneau was one of those friends.  His sudden passing on Tuesday hit me hard, as it has anyone who has had the privilege of calling him a friend.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Jason Scott Letourneau. Jason was born with a major heart defect and through the generous donation of an anonymous family, Jason received the priceless gift of a new heart 18 years ago. Although 40 years of age, Jason thought of himself as just turning “18″ – old enough to vote. Jason worked hard to support those going through any type of hardship. He had been a spokesperson for the Organ Donation and Transplant Association of Canada and helped others whenever possible. He worked for various charitable institutions and had a passion for fund raising. Jason really believed you can make a difference and recently discovered a new passion working at Calgary City Hall which fed his love for communication and public [...]Read More

If you didn’t get a chance to hear the Joey versus Shane debate on CBC on Monday, here’s a link so you can listen to the audio.

http://www.cbc.ca/homestretch/episode/2011/09/19/pc-bloggers/

People in favour of tweeting the results called a victory last night.  A civil disobedience movement that really sticks it to the country’s election broadcast laws.

Of course, don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.  Last night’s trending was aided, in large part, by the disobedience to the civil disobedience.  That is, the humourous posts that seemed to be going on all night.  Between spoilers to movies, books, and historical events, #tweettheresults was then picked up worldwide and, like many trending memes on TeH InterwebZ, was then followed.  At times, it was actually difficult to find the results among the multitude of tweets that made fun of the whole event.

The most re-tweeted, of course, was one that said Cons █████████ Libs ████████, etc., both a mockery of the whole thing and of the redacted access to information requests that happen with government.

In the end, though, last night was a flurry of twitter activity.  While its use in Calgary was sporadic, at best, with exception to a few specific candidates, it’s obvious that the power of twitter in a toe-the-party-line system is not necessarily the civil discourse that happens with politicians so much as the information [...]Read More

Worldwide timezones were introduced by a number of individuals, (see wikipedia), including Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming.  As you are well aware, this enables Albertans to watch House, M.D. at an earlier time as it plays in an Eastern time zone, and enabled us in university to watch CSI at midnight (when I lived in Ontario) because it played later in B.C.

Of course, it has this other impact during elections… poll times.  And, if you hadn’t heard, section 329 of the Elections Act of Canada prohibits transmission of election results prior to all polls closing.  This means that, even if the polls are counted in the Atlantic, they cannot be transmitted until the polls are closed in B.C.

A number of social media aficionados are calling for a #tweettheresults campaign, a civil disobedience run to defy this seemingly antiquated law that cannot possibly be enforced over TeH InterwebZ.

While I think it’s important to call to attention the law and its to-be-futile attempt at containing the results, I think responsible Canadians need to look past the law itself and look at why this exists.

While we have a general idea of how different areas will vote, due to the [...]Read More

Today I read an article by Michael Taube, former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, entitled, “Vote Mob Mentality”

It reminded me a lot of comments made by a particular political scientist in Calgary during the civic election.  So much, so, that it has made me want to comment on this.

I’ll be honest – I see a vote mob as even less possible to translate into large votes as twitter, but of course, I’m no longer in the carefree days of University, and thus… old.  Maybe not very old, but I’m out of the loop on this one, so I would be fooling myself if I said that I knew how the mentality worked and that it would or would not translate into votes.

This particular line caught my attention, “I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these participants stayed home on May 2.”  Wow. I mean, replace May 2 with October 14, and you would have the civic commentary on twitter before the political scientists, in the know, knew what hit them. (By the way, I have it on good authority that the particular person I am thinking of now has more respect for social media in [...]Read More

For those who watched CalgaryPolitics.com closely during the civic election, you may have seen a debate series we ran over Twitter, which we lovingly called, “Twibates.”  We ran a twibate for mayoralty candidates, two twibates for aldermanic (even- and odd-numbered wards), and then a final for trustees.

Similar debates were either held, or considered, in other parts of the province and country, and even got some attention by a few in-the-know social media people in the United States.  A few days ago, someone asked me whether or not we were going to run any for the Federal election, and that started a discussion with CalgaryPolitics folk.

Unlike a civic election, provincial and federal have party mandates.  It would be highly likely that, in such a twibate, we would not see individuals from certain parties, or just the same talking points from candidate after candidate after candidate from the same party.  Not very conducive to the best forum format.  We also considered having representatives from parties, but that does not seem very open, nor is it good for anyone who considers the vote for the individual more important than the vote for the party logo.

So, what we are considering (and [...]Read More

Recount was called because “there were more votes cast than ballots sent to the polling station.”

Upon recount, it was determined that some groups of “50″ ballots were in groups of smaller numbers – 35.  So, it turnout out there was not the initial fear of more votes than ballots, and due to this, vote counts were changed slightly for each candidate.  However, it is not enough to turn the election.

The good news is, it does not look like electoral fraud happened.

Update/Editorial: I am curious what this means for the rest of it. I mean, if this counting problem existed here, could this have happened elsewhere?  What controls are in place for this part of the counting process?

You may already have read about it in our other post…  However, being the end of our run here at CalgaryPolitics for the civic election period (we’re not going away… but things might get a little quieter for a bit), I feel that it’s necessary to MENTION IT AGAIN!!!!!

Here’s the above-the-fold details:

Where: Beckham’s Pub at 108 17th Avenue NW that’s NW, not 17th South. And not the one close to Mount Royal as one of our crew ended up once accidentally.

When: We start this thing at 7:30pm and will go as long as possible.

Who: Anyone is welcome.  We will have media there, as well as CalgaryPolitics crew hosting.

As Joey mentioned, there will be a forum and an election for Ward 15, whose current representative is Chairman Zhao.  There’s a number of challengers, and I can guarantee the forum will be unlike any others you’ve seen this election.

Feel free to join our Facebook Event page if you are on FB.

Tomorrow night is it.  We select our council over the next three years.  You might as well come out and party, because we’re not going to have a civic election party like this [...]Read More