Archive for canada
Why Gordon Brown will start the TV election debates with an advantage over David Cameron
The political impact of TV debates in other Parliamentary democracies (and yes, yawn yawn, obligatory American reference, in the US too) has often been more about expectations than about absolute performance. Beat expectations and you benefit from the debate, even if that means people viewed you as the narrow loser. But if you were expected [...]
Massive $6bn lawsuit for repeated breaches of music copyright
Defendants in Canada are facing an eye-watering $6 billion payout in a court case over repeated breaches of music copyright over several years. Claims for unpaid royalties total $50 million, but on top of that the defendants face having to pay $20,000 for each copyrighted song which has been used without payment. Records show that [...]
Canadian police told to get twittering
From The Ottawa Citizen: Aiming to do a better job of informing the public and city officials than they did during the Tamil protests that jammed downtown in April, Ottawa’s police are planning to experiment with Twitter and other social media to get word of major incidents out more quickly… Twitter and other social media [...]
If British political chatter wasn’t so dominated by looking to the US…
… I suspect we’d all be paying rather more attention to Canadian politics. The Liberal’s 2004 federal election victory is one that should be the sort to appeal to Labour in current times: long serving Chancellor takes over as Prime Minister, becomes unpopular, faces revitalised Conservative Party – but manages to pull victory out of [...]
How the Canadian pollsters performed
Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:
May 12th saw voting in the British Columbia elections. This Canadian provincial election saw Gordon Campbell’s governing Liberals re-elected and also a few barbs thrown about internet polling. As in the UK, internet polling has both its fans and its detractors. So does the Canadian experience help shed any light on [...]
Lessons from Canada: poster design
Whilst I was in Canada, there was a Provincial election under way in British Columbia. I snapped a few photos of the election posters as some things struck me in particular about them: 1. Both the two main parties in the Provincial elections (Liberals and NDP) predominantly used blue on their posters, and it also [...]
