Not since George Grant’s Lament for a Nation,
Did we really think that the right wing thought.
Thinking wasn’t what Rob Ford’s voters bought.
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Comment for today.
Bell Canada thinks it makes the rules for us to follow,
Bell Canada thinks it can send bills for us to swallow,
But the company doesn’t know its claims are hollow.
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Comment for today.
We never thought we’d see it, in Babel on a sign,
“Park between 12 am and 4 am, you’ll pay a fine”
Oh, the depths we’ve reached. Isn’t it about time,
For Babel’s schools to teach kids how to tell time.
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#98– Surviving the communications age, part 4.
The curse of having been an editor is that you always have a critical eye for language as it is used in daily life. You try to explain that misspellings and bad grammar can be impediments to communication. They cannot always be forgiven.
Take the most common confusion about convergence. Everyone wants to talk about convergence without understanding if they are using the word correctly. The easiest way to explain convergence is that you have two trains racing toward a point where the two tracks intersect. If both trains meet at the point of convergence concurrently, those trains are going to converge. When they converge, it is most likely that both trains will be derailed by the impact.
But that is not what people mean. They are actually referring to a confluence. A confluence is a point where two rivers meet. At a confluence, the two rivers become a bigger river and continue their journey to the sea. This is why when people talk about the convergence of technologies, they are referring to the two technologies working together. They are really talking about a confluence of the technologies.
Probably the largest and most incompetent company in Canada in this regard is Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). The company is involved with a number of technologies that are undergoing a technological confluence. BCE refers to them as their converging technologies. We can hope that, when BCE’s latest technologies come together, it is a confluence and not a train wreck.
The company has taken control of Canada’s largest television network: CTV. The company intends to sell CTV’s content development over the BCE’s wireless cellular network, as well as its satellite television and Internet services. This is a failure of the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in doing its job. It means the Harper Conservative government has allowed BCE to completely disregard the public interest in favour of monopoly practices. It is a complete reversal of what the CRTC was originally intended to do for Canadians.
It means that the CRTC now belongs to the media companies. It serves their interests and not the interests of Canadians.
In the original model, 40 years ago, the radio and television networks were independent entities that provided content to a national network of independent stations that served their individual communities. Technology has changed and so has the model. Today, the national network no longer needs the network affiliates that were its customers. The network goes directly to the consumer.
The original concern was that then strong newspapers would try to own the networks to utilize the synergy of their news gathering strengths. The CRTC was supposed to ensure that Canadians had a variety of opinions and no one business interest could create a monopoly situation. Nobody expected that when the television networks had swallowed their affiliates, they would then start to take control of the country’s print media
The Harper government and its version of the CRTC are a serious failure for Canadians.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
Harper’s inclination is to sell Potash to the highest bidder,
But if they want the company Harper had best reconsider.
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Comment for today.
Obama has a mid-term challenge that’s quite determined,
Sarah Palin and her Tea Party are nothing but an ill wind.
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#97 – The gravitas of the political ground game.
The difference between winning and losing in political wars is the critical movement of your troops throughout the campaign. It is called the ground game. The person who serves as the general leading the ground game can be a hard driving son of a bitch like WWII’s General George S. Patton or a more laid back leader like Patton’s counterpart, General Omar Bradley. As Patton learned when he outran his supply lines near Metz and Bradley learned in failing to close the Falaise Gap in Normandy, nobody runs a perfect campaign but you win or lose based on the entire effort.
Introducing this Carl von Clausewitz school of politics to Babel was a gamble but it ultimately paid off in winning the Babel mayoralty for our candidate. The first clue to the difficulty involved was when asking the campaign team how quickly we could assemble at least 400 door-to-door canvassers to knock on doors for our candidate. The look of incredulity from the Babelites around the table told it all.
“That’s not going to happen,” was the answer.
Not only were they right but we went on to find that a surprisingly few Babelites had any idea of the whys and wherefores of political canvassing. After spending a lifetime in political hotbeds, we had found virgin territory. It was enlightening: it was terrifying. You ask yourself: Do we use the Patton strategy or the Bradley strategy? Do we play ‘Ole blood and guts’ or do we soften it to be ‘the GIs general’?
The GIs general won. It was too long a campaign for bluster. And the candidate suited a more fatherly approach. One day while canvassing with the candidate, a Babel housewife asked: “Are you his father?”
The answer was automatic: “Nope, I’m his grandfather.” It just felt that way at times.
And, no, there is no family relationship. This guy is one of those very rare people in politics whom you realize is a natural. He can think on his feet. And he thinks politically. He revels in politics and in the stump speech. When canvassing, he always wants to add the next block to the route. He has a remarkable memory and a high intelligence. He is ambitious, with the ego to support his ambitions. In a lifetime in politics, you meet few like him. He will go where he wants to go.
But first Babel needs a mayor. We had to put together a ground game that could cover the majority of the 50,000 plus homes in Babel, while recognizing the unique demographics of the community. Finding the canvassers turned out to be the toughest job. We tried training them, begging for them and stealing them and gradually our team emerged. What we lacked in numbers, we made up in dedication.
The training sessions were fun. In a series of one evening each week, our classes attracted people who came to find out why we were telling them that going out and knocking on strangers’ doors is fun. It is. We got some dedicated canvassers out of that.
The best sources of canvassers are the political parties. The fiction that municipal politics is non-partisan worked for us in this case. We had Conservative Party members, NDP and Green Party canvassers to swell our ranks. Our candidate might be a liberal but the Liberal Party members in Babel need to stop fighting each each other to become an effective force. You just had to remember to quickly change the subject if a well-meaning conservative on the team thoughtlessly said something nice about that awful MP Brown.
And that team served our candidate well for the eight months of the campaign. By the time voters started going to the polls, the canvassers numbered in the hundreds.
But over the hottest summer on record, our ground game workers went to more than 30,000 homes in Babel. One in three was home (or would answer the door) and we got to speak to about 10,000 people. We learned what concerned them. They told us their voting intentions. They agreed to take signs. General Patton could not have done better. We had fun. And our guy won the election.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]
Comment for today.
It’s Halloween and the goblins are out,
But what is this they shout: Shell Out?
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Comment for today.
Expect an upheaval in Ontario in the coming year,
The political situation’s going to be turned on ear.
Ignatieff’s Liberals are gonna get their act in gear,
But we will lose McGinty’s provincials later, I fear.
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#96– Surviving the communications age, part 3.
Frankly, some people would be best to stay away from technology. It is like the problems in Babel with municipal voting. It is not the computerized voting machines that are wrong. It is the people responsible for the machines that cause the problems.
Babel is not exactly technology ready. Babel is a small town with aspirations. City hall staffers want to act like they think a large and sophisticated city staff might act but they have never had a role model to show them how. This tends to make many of the staff carry out their duties in an insufferably bureaucratic manner. What they do not know, they bluff. And they do not know a great deal. Babel is a bluffer’s paradise.
Their first problem with the voting machines is that the city employees responsible for them have no experience in elections. Unlike provincial and federal elections that are run by highly experienced political appointees in each constituency, municipal elections are run by people who have no clue as to what the political process is all about. They take pride in their lack of knowledge. They equate cluelessness with neutrality.
This cluelessness leaves them wide open for manipulation. Politically savvy people running campaigns for local politicians see this vulnerability and they use the city employees unmercifully in carrying out their objectives. More favourable rulings are easily obtained from people who do not understand the rules in the first place. The only balancing of this is when competing politicos find rulings are unfair to their candidates.
But the people who really suffer in this situation are the voters. Nobody seems to care about them. Voting machines are supposed to speed the process. There is no other excuse for their use. Babel civic employees seem to use them to impede the process. Imagine how efficient the damn things might be if people had an opportunity to learn how they work, before having to use them. Instead, a city employee has to stand there and give every voter instructions to help them to vote.
What happens is that the city does not buy enough voting machines and discourages people from voting because of impossibly long line-ups at too few voting places. They have brief four-hour advance polls at large apartment buildings but, on the scheduled election day, the nearest poll is several kilometres away. They have actually reversed the advance poll problems. Instead of making the advance polls difficult to find, they have made the regular polls less convenient.
The bureaucratic people running the election also have no concept of why politicos working for candidates need their information, in a useable form and on time. They will offer the lists of voters who have already voted in the election and then rescind their offer without understanding the costs of that change to the candidates.
Maybe part of the fault is the confusing language of the Municipal Election Act of 1996 from the Ontario Government. You would have thought those people knew something about elections.
But, until Babel’s civil servants move more effectively into the communications era, they should go back to using paper ballots and pencils.
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Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to [email protected]