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God Bless Canada

And now we’ll have a Conservative minority government. And now we’ll have to listen to a prime minister who finish his speeches with « God Bless Canada! » And now we’ll have a prime minister with many positions close to those of George Bush. The truly interesting question now is how will he going to make compromises and for how long can he hold in there?

On the morning after the elections, here are the results, still preliminary since some polls have not been reported yet:

						Ind.
Seats	124	103	51	29	0	1
Seats	40.3%	33.4%	16.6%	9.4%	0.0%	0.3%
Votes	36.3%	30.2%	10.5%	17.5%	4.5%	—
Votes	5,369,827	4,476,098	1,552,043	2,590,663	665,876	—

Other statistics: it seems 14,815,680 people did vote, on 22 812 683 registered electors, which brings voter turnout to 64.9%.

Meanwhile, let’s hope that our new prime minister will be able to keep religion out of politics, that he won’t send our soliders to Iraq or somewhere else just to please the United States, that he won’t spend money on that unproductive ballistic-missile defence system, that he will try to respect the Kyoto protocol in which Canada is already engaged, that he won’t reduce abortion rights and that he will be able to stands against the United States if needed. Am I dreaming in color? Maybe. But after all this is a minority government and everything can happen… especially since these things was in the platform of every other party that will be represented in the House of Commons and who, together, hold the majority.

Fortunately, we are not in a two-party system!

Ever followed a presidential campaign in the United States? Given the overkill media attention a U.S. election gets from international media, who wouldn’t? Well, I’ve just read this very touching piece from a former U.S. citizen, now Canadian citizen, who is about to vote at her first Canadian election. Despite the fact that the campaign revolves too much about form and not enough about policies, and despite the fact that we desperately need a reform towards proportional representation, she shows that she still has a real choice :

See, for the first time in my nearly two decades as a voter, I will have the option of voting not for the lesser of two evils, not for a candidate and a party who are still lightyears away from me on the political spectrum, but for someone who actually comes very close to standing for what I believe in.

And this is what an election should be all about: choosing someone who will represent you well. If only more journalists were helping the citizens through that task instead of making the campaign a sport, commentating performance, errors, and pool results.

So on January 23, please vote; vote for a candidate you feel will represent well your view, someone you think will bring good policies to you and other Canadians, someone you feel you can count on.

And if you’re not sure for who you should vote, get informed, look at the platforms, ask people around you, or even call you candidates and ask questions. It’s the duty of every citizen to keep informed and vote knowledgeably.

On this I say: Good Election!

Green

While the current federal election campaign in Canada is nearing to it’s end, its seems the media is focusing more and more at Paul Martin’s defeat and Stephen Harper success. This push aside others who may have good ideas. So I’m going to give a voice to someone who could have made the tv debates much more interesting, if only he had been included.

Green Party leader Jim Harris has been excluded by the tv consortium from the two debates. That’s unfortunate as I think he’s giving a very fresh look on what politics should be. But don’t believe what I say, watch him talking at the Empire Club in Ontario to get an idea of what he’s up to. Go to the 38th minute of this CPAC video (Windows Media), right after Duceppe answers.

And I won’t hide that I’ve been helping (on my own time) the green candidate in my district to build his web site (in French), unveiled last week. Ironically, when I accepted helping him I hadn’t chosen yet for whom I’d vote. That was somewhat his chance at convincing me seeing what he would write on it.

Markdown and Wordpress 2.0

WordPress 2.0 has a new “rich” visual HTML editor which generate HTML markup directly. This editor should work fine alongside Markdown, but Markdown-formatted text won’t work in this new editor. You can tell the rich editor is active when there are icons for bold, italic and other functions above the text editor. To edit Markdown text, you need to deactivate the rich editor. Here’s how.

There are two places you can deactivate the editor. Each user can activate or deactivate it from the “User” section of the administration interface: uncheck checkbox “Use the visual rich editor when writing” at the bottom of the page. You can deactivate the rich editor for new users from Option > Writing > “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” checkbox.

If you want to use the rich editor again, no problem, you can reactivate it and use it at anytime. But then you should make sure the rich editor is disabled before editing a Markdown-formatted post.

Also note that WordPress 2.0 official distribution does no longer include the Markdown plugin. You’ll have to get it from the PHP Markdown project page.