The Invisible Hand

If you were an evil continentalist bent on oppressing the masses with your deep integration schemes, why would you build your top-secret superhighway to Winnipeg?

Labels: anti-capitalist stupidity

There's been some media coverage of a recent poll by Cameron Strategy (anyone heard of these guys before?) which has the Stelmach-led PCs falling to 32% support, down from 54% seven months ago. According to Daveberta, the full results (with January number in parenthesis) are:

PC – 32% (54%)
Liberal – 16% (16%)
NDP – 11% (9%)
Alliance – 5% (3%)
Unsure/Won’t vote – 36% (18%)

Sound really bad for Stelmach... but wait a minute, this looks strangely familiar. Why, it's one of my favourite poll-torquing techniques: leaving in the undecideds, so as to drag down the apparent support for the party you're gunning for!

Here's the real support levels, for both August and January:

PC - 50% (66%)
Liberal - 25% (20%)
NDP - 17% (11%)
Alliance - 8% (4%)

So there's still a significant drop, but nowhere near as bad as it's being made out to be. In fact, Stelmach is slightly above what Klein got in the last election.

Labels: Alberta PCs, Ed Stelmach, media, polling

Ticket to see Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in which the bad guys have a starship called Invisible Hand, so named to reflect their "greed": $10.95

Star Wars Titanium Series toy version of Invisible Hand, produced to allow George Lucas to make more money: $8.40

Reflecting on the irony of the above: Priceless.

Labels: invisible hand, Star Wars

Yay! Diane Ablonczy finally gets in.

Maxime Bernier to Foreign Affairs: I realize this is considered a promotion, but it seems like a waste to put a strong fiscal conservative in a non-economic role. I would rather he continued to beat down the regulationist hordes in Industry, and have Prentice go straight from Indian to Foreign.

On that note, does anyone have any thoughts on what Prentice will do with his new job? Is he a free marketeer like Bernier, or a meddling interventionist? The pundits tend to refer to him as a "Red Tory", but that seems to be an ignorant extension of his support for same-sex marriage. My pre-merger perception of him was that he was largely on the Blue Tory side. (Note to MSM and bloggers alike: Blue Tory vs. Red Tory is a matter of economic policies, not social ones.)

By all accounts, Prentice did a good job handling the difficult Indian Affairs file; here's hoping Chuck Strahl can do the same. (And furthermore, that Gerry Ritz continues to fight against the statist monstrosity that is the monopsonist Wheat Board.)

Oh, and I see that Dion is being his usual self:

He specifically expressed concern about the prime minister putting Bernier in the role of foreign affairs.

"He has appointed a foreign affairs minister, Minister Bernier, who is very right-wing, very close to the U.S. Republican approach about the economy, so I cannot say that I am satisfied with the changes I have seen today," Dion said.

For starters, Bush has run an administration heavily into subsidies and government intervention, the exact opposite of what Bernier is known for...

Labels: Cabinet, Jim Prentice, Maxime Bernier, Stephane Dion

If a married man wants to adopt his wife's last name, will he be allowed?

Labels: statism