Wordplay

Warning: This little Google gadget can be addictive.

This morning, almost randomly while reading Twitter, I discovered Google Ngrams. It's a neat little tool that allows you to track popular word usage over the decades, as the words have been used in Google's ever-increasing database of books.

For fun, I started tossing in some words with political overtones  this morning, and here are some of the results:

Here's what happens, for instance, when you compare "security" and "productivity" from 1900 to 2008.

Or how about economy and religion?

A hobby horse of mine: consumers vs. citizens:

 It'll do more than just two-word comparisons too. Here's what happened when I threw in a kitchen sink of politically loaded words: war, peace, death, taxes, crime, terrorism: 

And journalism is a rich mine to tap on Ngrams too. Have a look at this story of my business, from 1900 through to 2008 (which seems to be the upper reach of the search capacity.)

At any rate, happy  to hear  more suggestions and interesting findings from this device. Try it yourself....

Minority with a majority

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in on some fascinating talks by eight of Canada's leading pollsters, at an event held by Canada's Market Research Intelligence Association. I'll have a full story coming in the paper in the days ahead (soon I hope), but in the meantime, I thought I'd share a snippet or two. 

All of the presentations were  great, but Greg Lyle, from Innovative Research Group, raised a question/conundrum  that would make an excellent conversation starter for weekend dinner parties. (If your guests are into politics.) I'll transcribe what he had to say here. See what you think.

First thing I want to do is talk about how the Tories won. Immediately following the election, it was noted that the Tories won the election campaign. Since then, though, it appears that Jack Layton did. [pause, then polite laughs from the crowd]And most of the debate is on how did the NDP breakthrough happen, and not so much how the Tories won. 

It's important to understand that the Tories have been winning by fighting on issues that most people *don't* support. If you think for a second, most of us, and certainly most of the people that are on the margins of whether they're going to vote or not think the way democracy works is that government does what most people want, most of the time.

But on most of the issues that mattered in this campaign, the Tories got a very strong mandate to do what the minority want.

At this point, Lyle put some charts on the screen, showing how Canadians felt about  whether corporate taxes should be raised to finance the increasing costs of health care.

Given a choice, most people would raise corporate taxes rather than trust trickle-down to work. However, if you look at how vote support works, if you think the way to go is to cut corporate taxes, you're a Tory, 84 per cent Tory. But if you are on the side of the spectrum, a few people are Tory and the others are split (among the other parties) halfway to Sunday.

And so long as you have this situation, which to me is reminiscent of the free-trade election... one party got all the people who supported free trade, the other parties split the opponents and free trade was policy.

That's not the way elections are supposed to work. That's not the way democracy is supposed to work. And what will get really interesting ... is what happens as the government consistently does a series of things that most people don't want. Where will those numbers go?

And the same thing happens if the government introduces new policies to deal with crime. Should it focus more on getting tougher on crime or should it focus more on dealing with the causes of crime? 57 per cent of Canadians say 'focus on the causes of crime.' Only 38 per cent say 'get tough on crime' -- almost identical to what the Tory vote was. Seventy-three per cent of the people who say get tough on crime voted Tory, only 16 per cent who said deal with the causes of crime.

And I did this on five different issues... and it's the same story, again and again. The topical issues in the debate, Tories were in the minority point of view, but they got all the votes of people who shared that point of view. So I'll just leave you to think about how the world's going to evolve in the next four years, if the Tories are going to do what they were elected to do, which is stuff that most people don't agree with.

 

 

 

A new candidate for LPC presidency

So it turns out that this very interesting op-ed piece, which appeared in the Star last month, is a manifesto for the newest candidate in the race for the Liberal Party presidency. In addition to Sheila Copps and Ron Hartling, who've been (officially and unofficially) in the running for some weeks now, add this man to the mix, as someone to watch.

 

  Mike Crawley is 42, relatively young in the world of politics,  but  he's a veteran within Liberal circles, having served as  president of the Ontario wing of the LPC from 2003 to 2010.

 

But he doesn't seem to be a status-quo kind of guy. This part of his op-ed piece, in fact, is typical of what he's saying and what's getting him notice, from what I hear:

 

 

 

The Liberal party needs to find its raison d’être independent of pollsters and pundits. The great successes of the Liberal party never came from being the “Goldilocks party” — not too left, not too right. Nor did it come from a belief that government must be the first option to address any challenge in society. Certainly, the great achievements of Liberal governments did not fall out of a slavish devotion to an immutable Liberal “brand.”

 Over  the past month,  Crawley has  been quietly talking to people and gathering up what many now believe is enough to take a serious run for the job. (I saw  Crawley, in fact, just a few weeks ago,  at the funeral for Jamie Deacey, where former prime minister Paul Martin spoke.) 

The Liberals choose a new president in January, at their biennial convention in Ottawa. The job, incidentally, is a volunteer one, but it's also a massive one. The new Liberal party president is going to be crucial in any effort to save the party from extinction, and getting its structure, finances and membership in serious enough shape to fight the next election in 2015.

Crawley's official declaration of his candidacy is expected to come within days.

 

 

 

 **(Photo, btw, comes from  a website known as quarkbase.)

Measured words

They are just five simple words, uttered by Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the United Nations yesterday, but they are freighted with controversy, judging from the reaction on social media. 

Harper was talking about maternal health in developing countries, according to the Canadian Press report. 

We're guided in all of this by an old saying that I think inspires anyone who truly wants to make progress: if it matters measure it. Well this matters.

Of course, many people's first thoughts leapt to the census controversy. Canada's former chief statistician, Munir Sheikh,  believes that you measure what matters too. In an essay penned for a book on "intelligent government," an essay also reported on yesterday by CP, Sheikh writes:

 No country can be among the league of civilized societies without intelligent policy development. And, intelligent policy development is not possible without good data. 

 

So apparently, on the issue of measure and matter, Sheikh and Harper are of one mind. 

But so are others. In fact, a simple Google search taught me that the phrase  "if it matters, measure it," is actually the  motto of the right-wing Fraser Institute in Canada. We learn this from Stephen Taylor of the National Citizens' Coalition, in a piece he wrote for the National Post, defending Harper's  decision to abandon the mandatory long-form census. 

The conservative/libertarian Fraser Institute think tank’s motto is “if it matters, measure it.” The untruth of the inverse of this statement is at the centre of why this government should follow through. “If you measure it, it matters” is the motto of those net tax-receiving organizations who only matter if they can make their case. ....

His greatest challenge is to dismantle the modern welfare state. If it can’t be measured, future governments can’t pander. I imagine that Stephen Harper’s view, Canada should be a country of individual initiative, not one of collective dependence “justified” through the collection of data.

Simple enough, I guess. If you want to make something NOT matter, "discount" it. Literally. 

So is this really the Fraser Institute's motto? Seems so. Apparently they ran a contest a while back, inviting people to send in videos to illustrate/elaborate on the phrase. Here's one  charmingly precocious  entry, urging that   education  be measured in dollars. Link here: http://youtu.be/THQs1pETzJA

 

But the Fraser Institute didn't invent the "if it matters, measure it"  saying. Credit there appears to go to Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), the Scottish mathematician and engineer, pioneer of modern physics. Apparently he's the fellow who said "to measure is to know," or, as he described it in lengthier terms: 

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.

I suspect we'll be hearing a bit more today about Harper and his views on measurement. The issue of course, isn't measure, but matter.  As Stephen Taylor helpfully explained, this Prime Minister will measure what matters to him, and stop measuring what he discounts. There was another phrase rattling around during the census controversy, which also probably bears repeating in all this talk of measure and matter -- "count is at the centre of the word accountability." 

What rhymes with strong, stable majority?

U.S. author Elinor Lipman set herself a challenge earlier this year -- to write one political poem on Twitter  every day leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Today's instalment, for instance is this one:

Struck down today: Don't ask-don't tell/Good riddance, stupid ban!/ 1 bad upshot was troops less hot/less neat, less fun, less tan

This weekend, as it happens, Lipman will be performing some of her poems at the Burlington Book Festival. 

Good timing -- It strikes me that our prosaic federal politics might lend itself to some poetry too: Sheila Copps rhymes with Brian Topp, right? (surely that should get some of you amateur bards started.) 

So, if the muse strikes you, and with a nod to Lipman's project, I invite you to send in your Canadian-politics-themed rhyming couplets here. Sonnets and epics are welcome, but bonus if I can distribute them on Twitter -- that means under 140 characters, ideally well under, so we can put a #cdnpoli hashtag on them. 

Another Layton tribute -- Screening on the Hill

Roughly 18 months ago, the House of Commons was a sea of blue ties -- a cross-partisan gesture of support for Jack Layton's fight against prostate cancer. (Photo comes from Canadian Press, via the CBC's website.) 

Today, with Layton gone, his seat left symbolically open for the day yesterday, MPs will be participating in yet another cross-partisan salute to Jack's fight against the disease. From 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today, in the office of Commons' Speaker Andrew Scheer, prostate-cancer screening tests will be held. By poignant coincidence perhaps, this is Awareness Week in Canada for this all-too-common  form of cancer. Prostate Cancer Canada is reminding us that  one in seven men in Canada will be diagnosed with this disease during a lifetime. Early diagnosis, usually coming from the kind of PSA-screening test being conducted today on Parliament Hill, makes it a very curable disease, though. And indeed, at Layton's last news conference in July, he made clear that it wasn't prostate cancer, but a second, still unspecified cancer, that had struck him. 

Layton, you'll also recall, had hip surgery earlier this year that kept him on crutches in the scrums during the leadup to the election. Again, coincidentally, another leader is headed for hip surgery this month -- Green Party leader Elizabeth May. She's scheduled to go into the hospital next week (this will be her second hip surgery) and she told me yesterday she wanted to be up and back in the Commons as soon as possible. I think we'd urge her to take all the time she needs -- we don't have another election for four years. 

I think we can expect that there will be a huge turnout for the Prostate Cancer  event today on the Hill.  If it's anything like yesterday, in fact, MPs will be at their best selves when it comes to Layton tributes outside the normal parliamentary business. But sorry to report, when it comes to Question Period, all indications are that, in the words of John Baird yesterday, it's "same old, same old" rancour across the aisle of the Commons. From both sides. 

Back to school: First lesson, history

Well, we're back in business here at Parliament; with the fall session starting today. I decided to ease into things with a morning stroll over to Ottawa's Old City Hall, which was renamed today as the John G. Diefenbaker Building, in honour of the Old Chief who led the Conservative party and the country in the late 1950s-60s. 

 I don't think anyone would argue with the nod to history (well, Jackie Kennedy might have had some views, as we learned last week), and in fact it fits appropriately with all this renewed talk of Harper's efforts to "conservatize" Canada with his new majority.  And given all the institutions around the capital with Liberal names, it is undoubtedly time to even up that balance a bit. 

So, for those of us who live around here, it means that the Lester B. Pearson Building and the John G. Diefenbaker Building sit side by side on Sussex Drive. Or, as one wag privately suggested on Twitter, we now have "Fort Pearson" and "the Diefenbunker" gracing the route that the Prime Minister takes to work each day.

  John Baird, one of the ministers present at the announcement (there were three!), had hauled along a Red Ensign that had last flown on 24 Sussex when Dief was PM. That's actually how I guessed the new name in advance of the official announcement -- I saw that flag in Baird's office last December when I was working on this story. It doesn't belong to Baird (as I incorrectly surmised on Twitter)... It's borrowed from a friend.

Speculation had run rampant that today's renaming was part of a "royal" series of rebrands by this government, following on the heels of the word "royal" being reinserted into the name of our armed forces, as well as the decision to put the Queen's portrait in the place of Quebec art at the Pearson Building.

Baird made a joking reference to the speculation, saying that Old City Hall was *not* being renamed as the Queen Elizabeth II Building.  And in fact, the only royalty relevant to this rebrand is Prince, the  musician  who eccentrically renounced his stage name in 1993, becoming, in popular parlance,  "the artist formerly known as Prince."  Ottawa's Old City Hall,  in the same fashion, has been burdened with the name of what it used to be  before  the city amalgamated in the 1990s and moved camp to a building on Elgin Street.

But even if this renaming  didn't fit with the renewed royalty fixation, it does very much fit with this government's *acute* attention to symbols, brands, props  and political-product placement.  And that's of course the result of this government's attention to political marketing -- enduring interest  in this corner.

It will be interesting to see what this government plans to do with Wellington Street, the  street that's home to Parliament, amid any effort to put some Conservative brands on buildings in the capital. Right now, the street is pretty much a ghost street, filled with abandoned, neglected or mid-construction architectural gems. (You can read more about that here, if you're interested.) Who knows? Maybe we'll end up with a street lined with Bennett, Meighen, Borden, Clark and Mulroney buildings. (Okay, maybe not so much the Clark and Mulroney ones, at least while the current Prime Minister is in power.)