A question for the RCMP Commissioner

What exactly is the purpose of the RCMP going to Poland to look into Robert Dziekanski's "medical history as well as his criminal history in Poland." I can understand the need to investigate the first, indeed it is relevant to figuring out whether he died because of some precondition or because the officers electrocuted* him and then proceeded to kneel on his chest and throat, entirely contrary to the RCMP's own guidelines. But why the second? It must be because police officers can somehow smell a criminal and thus don't have to ask any questions before using lethal force. We know just need to confirm their intuitions.

A criminal history is entirely irrelevant to police action in this case. A man in distress was killed by the RCMP despite posing no lethal threat to them. Whether he was a criminal in Poland or not is irrelevant.

Let's just hope that when the RCMP officers get off the plane and try to clear customs in Warsaw that they don't smell like criminals to the officers there.

In other news related to the RCMP, apparently you can fear for your life even when you have a gun stuck in the nape of someone's neck. Strange.

* Can we stop using Taser as a verb? We have a suitable word already: electrocution.

The genetics of voter turnout

A little more than a year after this, Fowler and Dawes have released another working paper demonstrating a genetic component to the decision to vote. Rather than relying on twin studies, however, this time they have obtained genetic mappings from subjects in a multi-wave, long-term study of adolescents in the United States. The results are extremely interesting, especially because they identify two genes which play a role in the decision to vote, and because these genes interact with religiosity. This at least partially answers the question of why the religious are more likely to vote without relying on an argument about the skills gained through religious observance.

This, I should think, is the future of political science.

My favourite line, by the way, is "Genes are the institutions of the human body."

Is Paul Pritchard a hero?

Hardly. Paul Pritchard, you probably know, is the 25 year old man who filmed Robert Dziekanski being electrocuted and then pinned on the chest and throat by the RCMP. He was one of many witnesses not only to Dziekanski's death, but also his confusion, delerium, panic, fear, breakdown, unravelling, distress, and helplessness.

Let me be entirely clear: Pritchard is a hero only because the RCMP killed someone in whose distress he was taking great pleasure and entertainment. Indeed, in an interview with CBC Radio, Pritchard said he thought he could use one man's distress for entertainment and perhaps some noteriety. Lucky for him, the RCMP proceeded to kill the man he merely mocked. Had they not, he would have been just another person uploading someone else's shame onto YouTube.

If you want to find a hero in this, it's Sima Ashrafinia, the only bystander with the courage and compassion to try to help Dziekanski. Let's not glorify Pritchard any more than we have. His 15 minutes were up as soon as the media obtained his tape.

To William Elliott, An Open Letter

Dear Commissioner,

I understand you are concerned that "growing misperceptions are eroding the public's confidence in the RCMP." Une petit suggestion: I would be more concerned about proper perceptions. For example, that the RCMP actively covered-up its role in the extradition of a Canadian to face torture in Syria. Or, par example, that an RCMP officer recently got off shooting a captive citizen in the back of the head. Or, that four officers, in seeing a man in distress, thought the best course of action was not to ask those around what had happened, not to seek a translater, or not to take more than a minute to assess the situation, but rather to run him through with 50,000 volts of electricity. It strikes me that you might want to be concerned with these perceptions. Then move on to the misperceptions.

Peter

Presidential Politics Get Nasty, but Maybe Not Enough

The Times Online has a nice summary story on the latest controversies in the presidential primaries. Despite the fact that the nominating conventions are still 8 or 9 months away, things are already getting nasty. Two things are going on. First, the Clinton folks are suggesting on background that they have some nasty business on Obama, but are refusing to share it. Who knows if they do. Either way it's hardball politics.

The second story is that in the last week someone was calling around Iowa doing some message testing on Mitt Romney, most of which turns on his Mormonism. The basic story is that some firm is calling households asking them, after 20 or so questions, whether they'd be more or less likely to vote for Romney for the nomination if they knew about some of the features of his relgion. Many, including Romney, have been mistakenly calling this is a "push poll". It's not. Push polls don't waste 20 questions before imparting negative information. They get right to it, because they are meant to reach several multiples more people than a poll which is message testing.

Nomenclature aside, what I think these stories are missing is a more central question. Namely, should voters be less likely to vote for Romney since he is a Mormon? Now, I for one don't really care if Romney follows the Mormon god or Zeus, but I would like him to answer the following question: Did he believe before 1978 that black males should be full participants in his church's sacrements? Because his Church certainly did not. No, they had to wait for a "revelation" before they realized that skin colour shouldn't preclude full participation. Religion is a private matter, perhaps, until it calls into question a politician's commitment to equal rights. So, let's take these questions out of polls and put them into a larger public space. I wonder which journalist will be the first to ask Romney when it dawned on him that his Church's doctrine was racist.

UPDATE: I guess this must be the reason why Romney doesn't want to talk about his religion. You don't want to give youth the idea that you could be an active leader in a church which had a fundamentally racist doctrine and then still become President.

Dear X Grad:

Nice Ring. Don't let the door get you on your way out.

Mount A is Number #1 again. As it always should be.

Harper in a Jam

Clearly, this promises to be a sticky situation for Harper. One can only hope he is able to preserve his spread in the polls in the face of this. Otherwise, questions may begin to be raised about whether he is lacking the royal jelly. In other words, he may be toast.

Think MMP could have won? Think again.

Daniel Rubenson and I cooked up the following op-ed. It didn't get picked up, so I've posted it here.

Advocates of electoral reform suffered a great blow with the defeat of a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system in the Ontario referendum earlier this month. Recommended by a non-partisan Citizens’ Assembly, this new system was endorsed by prominent Canadians of every partisan stripe. It was, they claimed, a more democratic electoral system. Yet the reform still lost, almost two-to-one.


Like an athlete after losing the season’s last match, advocates of MMP look to place blame. They argue that the proposal was little understood, and Elections Ontario’s education efforts fell short of the mark. They assert that holding the referendum during an election drowned out any real debate on the reform. Had the referendum stood alone, Ontarians would have paid attention to the issue and understood the proposal. Under those conditions they surely would have voted for reform.


They argue, in essence, that the result did not accurately reflect the public will.


These claims are probably impossible to prove. They are also likely wrong.


Reformers wag an accusatory finger at Elections Ontario, claiming that the organization did not educate or inform voters enough. They say: The campaign was too neutral and failed to communicate the values supporting MMP.


We say: Casting aside the questionable idea that a neutral government agency should play a role in promoting some democratic values over others, their objection still rings hollow. Why? Because voters don’t need to know the details of a policy to know whether or not they should throw their support behind it.


In-depth knowledge of electoral systems may thrill many-a-political scientist. And many of them think this knowledge is crucial to being a good citizen.


But this view is both elitist and wrong.


Modern political science demonstrates that voters effectively use a number of short cuts, or heuristics, to make the same decisions they would make if fully informed. They talk to their neighbours and friends. They look to their political leaders. They even look to the opinion pages of newspapers.


Citizens find these shortcuts in countless places. And with even a minimal amount of information, voters make choices consistent with the decisions they would make under different conditions.


What if the referendum wasn’t held during an election? Would it have had a better chance? If voters were more exposed to the arguments for electoral reform, would they be more likely to give it their support?


In short: Were the arguments for electoral reform winning arguments?


As scholars of public opinion, we wanted to know which side had the most convincing arguments in the electoral reform debate. We conducted an experiment during the last week of the referendum campaign using the Innovative Research Group’s online survey panel.


We presented participants with one of six arguments for MMP and one of six for the status quo. For example, “A first past the post system is better because it creates strong majority governments that can implement their policies” vs “A mixed member proportional system is better because parties should get the same share of seats as their share of the vote.” We had participants in the survey choose between them.


Our results are clear. The argument that every Member of Provincial Parliament should be locally elected overpowers every argument for MMP. In head-to-head match-ups, no argument from advocates of MMP convinces a sufficient number of voters to prefer the new system.


The arguments do not favour MMP. Even if voters paid sustained attention to the referendum, it is not clear that they would have been convinced by what they heard.


Even though the MMP loss was a blow to electoral reformers, it was not a blow for democracy. “Losers’ consent” is among the most important features of a proper democracy, where those on the short end of an outcome accept it as fair.


No doubt, this is difficult. But the idea of electoral reform has its own persuasive force and will not die with this loss. However, it's crucial that those who claim to be great democrats begin to act less like sore losers looking for someone to blame, and more like a team determined to do better next time around.

Into the Wild

On Friday, I headed to the Parc with three great friends to see Into the Wild. The film is everything the critics have claimed: beautifully shot, elegantly and sparsely scored by Eddie Vedder, and terribly well-written. This is much to Sean Penn's credit, however great the original accounts by John Krakauer.

For those who don’t know the story, the movie recounts the real life journey of Chris McCandless, a young, idealistic, ram-rod righteous, and driven man. A fresh graduate of Emory University, he gives away his remaining college fund to Oxfam, intentionally ends contact with his family, and decides to tramp across America. After two years, he makes his way to Alaska, heading alone into the bush in April. He soon finds an abandoned-bus-turned-hunt camp. He is terribly unprepared, carrying a meagre 10 lb bag of rice, a rifle, a pad and sleeping bag, and other sundries, including a guide to local flaura and fauna. He has no proper map, and thus no firm knowledge of the topography of his surroundings.

He has, apparently, little knowledge of the local wildlife, either. In June, McCandless' journal records the shooting of a large moose, which Krakauer claims was a large caribou. These are not similar animals. If Krakauer’s account is correct, and if Penn’s portrayal is wrong, then this suggests the McCandless was quite distinctly unprepared for his adventure.

Despite this unpreparedness, McCandless survives until July. He decides then that he has proven his point, tested his resilience, and that the time has come either for an end to adventures or for a new one. But as he leaves his camp and makes his trek back to the road, he finds that the waist deep finger of a river he crossed on his way out is now a chest-deep and raging arm of water. Writing "DISASTER" in his journal that night, he is left to again scratch out an existence from the abandoned bus. What the movie does not reveal is that the river could be easily crossed just a few miles upstream. With no map, McCandless could not know this. He is instead left again to his devices.

McCandless eventually starves to death, probably because he was eating a poisonous root, misidentified in his field guide, which prevented his body from absorbing any nutrients. His body is found some weeks later, alone in a blue sleeping bag his mother had knit for him many years earlier.

The scene of McCandless’ death, if the metaphor is not too crude, is simply breathtaking. It is some strange mix of horror and stoicism. It is also likely wrong. If Krakauer is to be believed, McCandless’ death was not welcome. Rather, those who found his body first found the following note on the outside of his bus:

"S.O.S I need your help. I am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone, this is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. Thank you. Chris McCandless. August ?”

This was no welcomed death. There was no evidence of courage. There were no signs of a stoic passing. Instead, there were just signs that a young man’s luck had finally run out, that his righteousness had gotten him no where, and that he knew it.

There is no question: this is a breathtaking movie. And it is angering. There is no undue compassion invoked for McCandless. But, still, I cannot understand why Penn does not go the extra step and tell the story with extreme accuracy. Why does he omit, for example, that McCandless was an afternoon’s walk up the river from safety? Why does he not reveal McCandless’ ignorance of ungulates? And why, even at the end, does he omit the trip of his half-brother, one of six-half siblings of which Penn only reveals one, to retrieve his ashes? Why does he say it was only his sister who made the journey?

This is a breathtaking movie because it tells a true story and tells it well. But it was a story which needed no embellishment, and it’s for shame that Penn chose to ignore some fundamental truths.

Team Player

Denis Coderre has turned down Stephane Dion's offer to make him Quebec lieutenant. I guess he should quit now. He does have an MBA, after all. He could open a restaurant called Team Player.

A Personal Note

I just had the most positive customer service experience of my life with Bell Mobility. Not just with Bell Mobility either. And I am not being sarcastic. Honestly.

Magna and the CAW

I worked for Frank Stronach and Magna Int. for two summers. Watching the executive operations of a company was one of the luckier opportunities in my life. The highlight of both of these summers was occassionally bumping into Stronach, or listening to him wax to summer students in the boardroom, or watching him at the head of an employee meeting in a plant. He is strangely charismatic and so consistently unpredictable. This "Frank Factor" has, at times, probably discounted the stock of Magna. But it's hard to imagine what Magna would be without him. So, when this was announced today, I was greatly suprised. But I wouldn't bet against its long-term success.

On the MMP Referendum

There is a lot of grumbling in the media today about the failure of MMP to win the referendum. A lot of it is coming from academics. Here's a nice example.

I don't have much to add to this debate, save the following three points:

i) There is absolutely no evidence right now that the Elections Ontario education campaign was ineffective. There are some rather esoteric statistical reasons for why this can be said with confidence, but it's true.
ii) There is little evidence that I know of which suggests that the arguments for MMP are more convincing than those for FPTP, when they are pitted head-to-head.
iii) We don't know if the YES side's campaign was effective or not. Indeed, their materials may very well have turned voters off electoral reform.

This is an admittedly very self-serving post. I have no horse in this race, but I am in the process of completing a study on the referendum with Daniel Rubenson. We are both pretty ambivalent about electoral reform, but we are curious about the reasons for the reform campaign's failure or success. To that end, during the election we conducted a series of experiments -- both in the field and in surveys -- to try to answer the questions above. And we now have a survey in the field which will also help to answer them. We'll have no quick answers, but they'll likely be alright and plausible when they do come out, and they certainly won't be as self-serving as those proferred up in the article cited above. It's time that advocates for electoral reform - those great democrats - at least acknowledge the possibility that other citizens may not share their views. Academics should be at the forefront of that.

The case for Dion forcing an election

This is almost certainly a mistake. Advisors to Stephane Dion, presumably the new ones which he has brought in, are counselling him to take on the Tories case by case after the Throne Speech, rather than opposing the speech and triggering an election.

By being outfoxed by Duceppe and Layton, Dion's strategic judgement could be called into question. That is, by allowing them to set their terms of negotiation, he was put against the wall and forced to either accept the government's agenda or call an election. Instead, he appears ready to take a third route, which is to oppose the government on legislation as it comes. This calls his strategic judgement - or that of his advisors - into even greater question. Here is why: this scenario only plays out in two ways. First, Harper gets all the legislation he wants. Second, Dion forces Harper's hand on some obscure piece of legislation and suddenly we're having an election over amendments to the wheat board, or minimum sentences for drug trafficking, or some other small issue. Dion will be seen to have forced the election, and Harper will be able to ask him why he would call Canadians back to the polls over such a small issue.

There is an alternative to this. It is to roll the dice. Oppose the speech from the throne in vigorous terms on the grounds that it is entirely contrary to the Liberal program. Then put it to the people. This is Dion's best course of action. Here's why. First, the opposition within his own party is not going to die down. If they get a clear signal that there will be no election for a year or 18 months they will continue to undermine him. So, the worst case scenario for Dion is that he is eventually forced to step down after a long, Fabian battle. Second, the best he can be in a year from now if he doesn't trigger an election is Leader of the Opposition with 90-some seats. However, if Dion triggers an election, the downside doesn't change. He could still get thrown overboard. But the upside is potentially larger: he could become prime minister if several things fall into place and Harper makes a few mistakes. It seems highly unlikely at this point, but it is not zero-probability. So the downside is the same, but the upside is higher. The only conditions under which waiting make sense are if Dion can force an election under more favourable terms. This seems highly unlikely. Instead, he will have to force it over some small issue, or wait until Harper has pushed through one or two more budgets. The stars are hardly aligned for Mr Dion - and it makes a lot of us honestly sad, because we've had high hopes - but the time to go is now.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this whole case with Dion after the Throne Speech is a nice illustration of the struggle between leaders and local members. From Dion's perspective, he cares principally about his leadership and advancing his party (with him at the helm). He is as capable of backward induction as anyone else (that is, working backwards from likely outcomes to determine actions), and he certainly must have sensed that now was the time to go. But many media reports suggested the view was not shared by his MPs. This is fair enough: they do not want to lose their jobs either, and probably a third to half of them view themselves as being in marginal ridings. Dion likely doesn't care which MPs win, so long as he has the same number more or less after the election. But those losing MPs do, as their interests are put before those of the party. It's a thought for another post, perhaps.

Oral Roberts "University" scandal

I guess when God tells your father to build a university to God's glory but to name it after himself that something like this is the logical result.

UPDATE: Oral Roberts has assured the OR"U" community that the devil won't steal their university. I imagine the devil already checked the bank balance and figured it wasn't worth the effort. He may want to look into Richard Roberts' account, though. What's the phrase? Ah yes, Chaucerian fraud.

Hitchens Cut Open

Daniel sent me this article. It is Christopher Hitchens' account of finding out that a soldier who he inspired to enlist in the war in Iraq was killed by an IED. Hitchens goes on to meet the solider's family. It's a pretty amazing story of a man coming to terms with the consequences of his words, all the while not using that reckoning to make himself any bigger or proud.

Funny...

Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski, a member of the Commons standing committee on procedure and affairs, wants Mark Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer, to read between the lines of Bill C-31. You see, even though the law actually says nothing about Muslim women reveiling their faces, and even though everything Mayrand has mandated accords strictly with the law, Mayrand is in the wrong for not reading into the law so see what it actually meant. You know, like judges do...

Craig Chandler

Craig Chandler must be the single most comical guy in Canadian politics. Just two weeks ago he was suggesting that those who don't vote Conservative should leave Alberta. Now, Craig doesn't care which conservative party you vote for. Heck, he's run for all of them! But if you want to be Albertan, you must vote conservative. I guess the sad thing is that it's not the most absurd thing he's ever said.

I had an email exchange with Craig today which ended with him claiming that Stephen Harper asked him to run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 2003 (a run which he did in fact make). This seems like quite an explosive claim. Chandler is asserting that he was put up for a leadership run by the leader of another party. It would actually be quite newsworthy, I should think, if it were to be believed.

PS Check out the sweet advertising on his website!

On a silly bike...

Mark Richardson has an article on Harleys in today's Star. Now, he's just returned from riding out to Sturgis on an HD, so I guess it's to be expected that his brain wouldn't be working terribly well. Mine often doesn't after a few days in the saddle. Nonetheless, for those of you unacquainted with the world of motorcycles, let me state my point up front: Harley Davidsons are not good motorcycles, if they ever were.

Richardson starts out the article by stating that a Harley can't really be compared with other motorcycles. This is true enough. It is worse than all of its competitors on every practical dimension. But then he somehow draws the conclusion that Harley's still (if they ever) provide value for the money and are still respectable motorcycles. Let me put this as clearly as possible. From every objective standard, Harley Davidson motorcycles are overpriced and provide incredibly poor performance. They can rarely reach even moderately high speeds, they do not handle well in corners, and they have quite substandard pick-up. They are comfortable, but so is a chesterfield. Then again, chesterfields only get about 1000 miles less riding each year than the average Harley.

For the money you pay for a Harley you could generally spend 75% as much and get a Japanese bike which did everything just as well. Now, it wouldn't be a Harley, and it wouldn't have that unique sound which indicates that you are riding on decades-old and antiquated technology. But it will do everything a motorcycle should do better.

This is admittedly just a rant a day after seeing about 1000 Harleys this weekend and probably not a good rider among them. But seriously, if I have to see another middle-aged man buy a bike which he spends more time polishing than riding, totally blissful in his ignorance of what a poor machine he owns, I am going to cry. Or I am going to ride away somewhere that he can't come, or would never think to try.

On a bike...

I passed my 25,000th km on a motorcycle yesterday. My father came across from North Bay on Friday, and yesterday we rode down to Smugglers Notch and Stowe, then across the White Mountain forest and up Mount Washington. This was the single most enjoyable 8 miles of motorcycling I ever completed, beginning in thick forest and ending above the trees in clouds with 25 feet of visibilty.

All in all, it's been a wonderful first bit of motorcycling, of which I should hope for many more bits. I have been meaning for months to write up my trip reports - including the week my father and I took across Spain in March, the loop around Le Gaspesie and down to Halifax that Sam and I did in May, and the 9-day loop Sam and I just completed across the Trans-Labrador Highway, down Newfoundland, back through Sackville and then home. I shall write these soon, I promise. I've been put off only by the difficulty of trying to capture what it is I love so much about being on a bike, away from home and the grind of school. In short, I think it's two things. First, it's a time when I do some of my best and most clear thinking. And it's also time when I do less thinking that any other time. I think it's good for the mind. And I think, to cop Burt Munro, a man lives more in 5 minutes on a motorcycle than some men live in their whole lives. Anyways, more to come...