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I just finished season 1 of Van Helsing via Netflix Canada. Filmed in Vancouver with most cast members being Canadian, this is the type of Canadian content that makes me feel proud of Canadian talent.  There were so many familiar Canadian actors from other series out of Vancouver including Flash and Sanctuary, and it even had Amanda Tapping directing 4 episodes. Nomadic Pictures , the producer, operates out of Calgary. I'm excited to hear that season 2 has already been ordered, and that production starts next month.  My hope is that for future seasons that legal Internet distribution will be simultaneous with any broadcast-era distribution. The Wikipedia page for the series  suggests that some fortunate events happened for this to be released on Netflix Canada on December 23'rd (after the September 23 broadcast launch) rather than being tied up in broadcast-only licensing for much longer : Super Channel's ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. In earlier articles ( Ad ...

I can imagine a conversation between Russell McOrmond (1997) and Russell McOrmond (2017), and how that would go. Both of these individuals feel they have a good grasp of the problems with First Past the Post, and both feel they have properly analyzed the obvious solution to the obvious failure. These two individuals would likely hate each other :-) RM1997 would think RM2017 was arrogant for constantly bringing up the fact that he was 20 years senior, and in that last 20 years had: met many sitting MPs had long conversations with some sitting MPs - in constituency and parliamentary offices, as well as in the Government Lobby (that part of center block behind the curtains on the government side), the parliamentary restaurant, as well as private pubs and private homes. I've even been invited by sitting MPs to help represent Canada in front of policy delegations from other countries. attended many federal committee hearings (more than I care to count), and have been a witness in multip...

I received an email this morning from Amazon.ca titled "Your Prime membership now includes Prime Video", indicating that Amazon Prime Video has been launched in Canada. Like Youtube(Google) and Netflix, Amazon is an internet native company, so I wasn't surprised to see that Prime Video worked on most of my devices.  It plays from my desktop, Chromebook, and has an Android App.  Missing, and something people often complain about, is Chromecast support. Amazon has a competing Amazon Fire series of devices, but they are not being sold in Canada.  This is quite unfortunate that their ongoing rivalry with Google diminishes the utility of their service. Vertical integration isn't helpful, and it is inappropriate to expect everyone to have so many different incompatible devices plugged into their televisions. This service wasn't quite what I was expecting.  I thought Amazon Prime would be more like Google Play Movies and TV, offering per-movie, per-episode or per-season...

A  straw man  is a common form of  argument  and is an  informal fallacy  based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. ( Wikipedia ) It is hard to engage in electoral reform conversations in Canada without having one of the two top straw-men thrown at you.  Which one you are thrown depends on which of the most common perspectives you hold. This is massive generalization, but Canadians could be divided into 3 groups. Everything is fine, leave it alone. Our voting system is broken, and the problem is a lack of proportionality (See Gallagher index ) Our voting system is broken, and the problem is plurality When it comes to choosing an electoral system, there are a number of interesting variations. People who believe that plurality is a feature, not a problem, in that it forces a "consensus" to form between the top two opposing visions of how to run the countr...

There are so many things I found disappointing about the MyDemocracy.ca democratic institutions voter compass site . Some aspects I found offensive, such as the question "A ballot should be easy to understand, even if it means voters have fewer options to express their preferences".  This leading question suggests the people who created this site think Canadians aren't as smart as people from most other countries already using more advanced voting systems. Since is is a common Canadian pastime to presume they are better than people south of the US-Canada boarder, we should take a look at their ballots.  People who don't like the outcome of the recent US presidential election may think their system is flawed, but if you ever looked closely at the Canadian system you realize it is purely luck and not design of our democratic institutions that gives the false impression we have something better. Lets ignore for the moment that the Liberal platform promised to change the ...

The government has created a MyDemocracy.ca website. When I first heard the government would be doing a survey I assumed there would be some code on the postcards to ensure that people could only vote once, and the government could avoid the self-selecting sampling that happened with the town halls the ERRE committee did.  This didn't happen, making the website statistically invalid. When I started to fill in the survey myself I cut-and-pasted the questions and my answers, which I then intended to comment on.  The survey was so bad I won't be doing that in detail: I include my answers at the end for curiosity, but they have no meaning. With a useful survey you work hard to avoid leading questions, so you can get an idea of what people think without answers being tainted by the question itself.  Most of the questions in this survey are leading questions that direct people to specific answers, which causes the person taking the survey to ask who the author was and why they...

The following is an edited version of a comment I added to a National Post story:  Liberals called it ‘incomprehensible,’ but professor flattered his formula was used in electoral reform debate The Gallagher Index only measures the disproportionality of an electoral outcome based on presumed support for political parties. It assumes support for parties that doesn't always exist on a ballot that doesn't separate parties from candidates, it doesn't measure a voting system only estimates of the parliament potentially formed by a voting system, and it doesn't measure any other type of disproportionality. Imagine you believed in secularism and someone came up with an index based on religious beliefs.  You would likely be quite offended by the index. This is how non-partisans, people who don't vote along party lines, will feel about the Gallagher Index. It appears to be being wielded not as one tool among many in a toolbox, but as a sword to disenfranchise non-partisans...

I haven't read every word of the third report of the Standing Committee on Electoral Reform  yet. It looks like it will be great reading, and includes information about the other times this question has been studied in Canada, as well as the fact that different provinces have used different systems historically. This is important for those who think this is a novel topic to think about.  If there is one thing I have learned from my decades involved in electoral reform it is that Canadians are in need of an upgrade to their civics education: in this I mean all Canadians, not only the younger Canadians the report focused on for civics education. The report clarifies that 1921 was a turning point for Canadian federal elections: that FPTP works fine when you have a two-option election, but since that time we have had 3 or more different options on the ballot in each riding which FPTP is ill-equipped to handle if voter intention is of any concern. While there will be more to discus...

When the current Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly suggested that someone saying " Without culture, nobody would be on the internet" was thoughtful, and possibly even a new idea, I became aware that this is a area of policy that is new for Ms Joly. We now see a new campaign aimed at the Minister called Focus On Creators launched by several associations which has a similar message the Minister may not have a context for. While I am an author of software and non-software works, and in my policy analysis and activism I always have a Focus on Creators, I do not agree that all the groups who are promoting this campaign have that same focus.  All too often representatives of these groups claim the interests of some intermediary is synonymous with the interests of a group of creators, and are focused on that intermediary.   Technology giveth, and technology taketh away It is normal technological and societal progress that new technology disrupts old technology, as well as the busines...