Canadian Election Update

Greetings friends.

The 2008 Canadian federal election was last night. If you read my posting from a few days back, you got a bit of a preview of Tuesday night's action. Some of you may have even watched the election feed from the CBC, via CSPAN, last night in prime time. (You actually might have seen more than some Canadians did as the USA received the feed when it kicked on in Atlantic Canada. The rest of Canada did not get the feed as early.)

Check out this map of the results that has been released into the public domain. Note that the darker the shade of one color a province is, the stronger the share of the vote for the party that received the most votes was in that province.

The results were not much of a surprise in some respects. Canada will have its third straight (one Liberal, two Conservative) minority government as the ruling Conservative party failed to gain over 50 percent of the seats in the House of Commons. The reason the Conservatives had called for an election was because polls in the late summer showed that they could very well gain enough seats to get a majority, which would have been their first since 1988 when they were known as the Progressive Conservatives. Analysts are saying that their failure to do so can be blamed on two things. First, they ran a poor campaign in Quebec, managing to hold their seats in that province, failing to make any real headway against the Bloc Quebecois. Second, the provincial Progressive Conservative party in Newfoundland and Labrador ran an 'ABC' (Anybody But Conservative) campaign against the federal Conservatives. The ABC campaign was a result of the provincials feeling that the federal party was too conservative in the American mold and was too far adrift from the 'Red Tory' philosophy of the Atlantic provincial conservatives. As a result, the Conservatives lost all three of their seats in Newfoundland and Labrador. Still, three more seats would not have given them a majority.

However, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives failed to gain a majority, they did pick up a net of 17 seats, giving them a total of 143 in the new house. Despite the results of ABC in Newfoundland, the Conservatives/Tories picked up seats in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They even picked up a seat in Prince Edward Island, their first in the province since 1988, when they held three of the current four PEI seats (the one they picked up being the one of the four they didn't have in 1988 naturally). All in all, Atlantic Canada was a win for the Tories and saw Liberal losses, which was unexpected.

Quebec saw the Bloc Quebecois stiffle any dreams of Conservative majority. They lost one seat to the Liberals, to the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and they gained one seat from the Tories. This demonstrates a problem the Conservatives seem to have. When the Tories make gains in Quebec, as in 2006, they don't seem to make headway in Ontario. Gains in Ontario, as in 2008, are not accompanied by gains in Quebec.

Ontario was a score for both the Conservatives and the New Democratic Party. Both parties took seats from the Liberal party. The Liberals lost 16 seats in the province. The Liberals poor performance has many questioning if Liberal leader Stephane Dion will make it through an upcoming leadership review. He may find himself replaced by a fellow Liberal MP as Opposition Leader. The New Democrats as a whole made gains in most of Canada, not quite approaching their best ever performance in 1984 under Ed Broadbent.

The Prairies and Alberta saw little change. Conservative strength was solid here, as expected. One surprise was the Conservatives losing their complete hold on Alberta when the NDP candidate won by less than 500 votes in the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona. Still, it is difficult for any one party to hold all the ridings in any province and the Tories typically do not hold one of the Edmonton ridings. The Tories now control all but two of the ridings in Alberta and Saskatchewan combined.

British Columbia saw the Tories make headway against the Liberals. They performed better than they did in 2006. The three northern/arctic ridings are now split among each of the three main parties. The Conservatives won the seat in Nunavut from the Liberals. Commentators have suggested that this may be due to the increased focus on Arctic Canada by the Conservatives.

One election down, one to go with the US election coming up in early November. Political pundits are in a bit of heaven right now.

JWF

Paddington Bear is 50

Check out the Google logo for Monday October 13.

I went to GALILEO and selected from the Subject list Literature, Language and Literary Criticism, then I selected Literature and Literary Criticism.

There are 5 databases offered for searching:

• Academic Search Complete
• LION (Literature Online)
• Literary Reference Center
• Literature Online Reference Edition
• Research Library (at ProQuest)

I was able to add NoveList and Book Index with Reviews to the list

I searched for Paddington bear. Delightful articles came up.

Remember that NoveList has curriculum guides that help extend a story!

You may get the current password to use GALILEO at home from your Georgia librarian.

-kls

Sailing, sailing

over the Ocean Blue...today we remember Christopher Columbus and his adventures that began in 1492.

There are several books available on-line that might open your eyes to the man, the myth, and the perception. Columbus Then and Now: A Life Reexamined by Miles H. Davidson takes primary and secondary sources to pull together the facts. Mr. Davidson in the epilogue notes he is neither a historian nor a biographer but an accumulator of facts. He has placed the sources he used and why at the beginning of the book. It's not a traditional bibliography but a telling of what, where and why the information came to be used in this history.

Amazon shares the review by Margaret Flanagan from Booklist:

Davidson offers a comprehensive overview of the life of Christopher Columbus while analyzing a host of modern versions of the Columbus myth. Rather than relying on secondary sources, the author utilizes fifteenth-and sixteenth-century manuscripts, diaries, letters, naval records, and shipping logs to compile a detailed chronology of the facts and events that shaped the life of the much lauded and much reviled navigator....

The facts add up to more than the myths. Read about the man - online through netLibrary!

-kls