It seems we are supposed to do some sort of mea culpa in regards to Barrie’s MP Patrick Brown. Yes Babel-on-the-Bay originates in Barrie but we thought we had that covered by calling the place Babel. It just would not remain hidden.
In writing the other day about the relative voting strength of the two remaining Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership candidates, we used only the raw figures. How those votes are going to be counted by the provincial Tories is the only reason Christine Elliott MPP for Oshawa is still in the race. Barrie’s Brown might be ahead by more than 5000 basic votes but if they are not distributed properly, he can still lose.
There are 107 provincial electoral districts in Ontario. If there are less than 100 votes in any districts, all those votes are counted. If there are more than 100 votes, they are converted to a percentage and it is the percentage that is counted. It means that the maximum votes that will be counted are something less than 10,700.
If the party officials counting the ballots have a collective brain, they will do the right thing and lie. Losing seven or eight thousand Brown votes would be about right. It would be the honourable thing to do. It could save the Ontario Tories from oblivion.
And by the way, ‘bupkis’ is a very simple Yiddish word that derives from an expression that something is worth less than goat turds. (Growing up in downtown Toronto can do wonders for your vocabulary.)
And while we are talking about Bupkis and Brown, we should explain some other confusion in that recent blog. We have a number of readers who check us on spelling and other errors. And we really do appreciate their notes. Not that we err very often but we had a number of serious distractions last week.
The concern of these readers was that in the same article about Brown, they thought we had misspelled the American term ‘ward heeler.’ We wrote it as ‘ward healer’ because that is what we meant. The original concept back in the heyday of Tammany Hall in New York City was that these people were assigned to wards to heal the problems. It was a big part of the almost two centuries of success for Tammany Hall–even if they could not spell.
Patrick Brown and many MPs like him in the Conservative Party of Canada are tolerated because they win their riding. They betray their constituents because they make absolutely no contribution in Ottawa. They are just ward healers.
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Copyright 2015 © Peter Lowry
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