Thoughts on culture, education, and having been a Canadian in the US

I had a great time last night watching the Canadian leaders debate and twittering about it in real time. Connected to a few other people twittering about it, and got a few reactions to my posts from some of my Facebook friends. It was interesting, too, to discover that CBC was monitoring Twitter and reported on the reaction of microbloggers on The National news at 11:00.

I only gave in once to the temptation to watch Palin and Biden once. After the Canadian leaders started talking about crime, I briefly switched channels. After hearing Palin say “nucular” twice, I was happy to switch back to listening to Stéphane Dion, who’s more articulate in his second language than Palin is in her first.

I’ve yet to go back and watch the full VP debate, but fortunately I have Palin’s Debate Flow Chart to help interpret her responses. Brilliant.

I’ll be watching the Canadian leaders debate tonight, after watching the two-hour French debate last night (imagine if leaders in the US had to debate in Spanish as well as English…). I’m sure, thought, I’ll be tempted at many points to watch the vice-presidential debate, which will probably be more riveting and potentially surprising than the one occurring north of the border.

Last night’s debate was fascinating at times, frustrating at others. A poll immediately afterwards by the La Presse newspaper in Quebec showed Duceppe and Dion getting the most favourable reactions from the viewers they questioned, while Harper’s performance was ranked as favourable by only 18% of those responding. It will be very interesting to see how all this plays out in English tonight.

The interviews Couric did with Palin and Biden say a lot about the southern matchup tonight. I don’t think this will be an easy debate for Biden in any way, but I don’t see how anyone could watch the clip above and think that they’d prefer to have Palin potentially in charge of picking Supreme Court justices. What frightens me, though, is that although these interviews are being widely discussed in the media, none of the students in one of my classes had even heard anything about the Couric interview, nor did they really know anything about Palin other than she was McCain’s running mate. Only two of these students had even watched the Obama/McCain debate the other night. And yet, most of them seemed set to vote in the upcoming election.

This leads me to wonder, and this connects to both elections, do debates and media coverage really even make that much of a difference? How many people in either country are really paying attention to the campaigns? I saw a headline today about how Obama is up in the polls. When I read it more closely, though, Obama only had 48% compared to McCain’s 42%. The last time I checked, 48% is still less than half. That’s scary. I mean, in Canada, Harper could win a majority with only about 35% of Canadians voting for his party, but that’s because there are four other major parties running candidates against him. If you think about it, that’s not bad at all. On the other hand, if there are only two parties and you’re at 48%, you have to be worried. What will it take, really, for anyone to break that seemingly automatic Republican/Democrat deadlock in the US?

I don’t know if this is, as the Conservatives suggest, a mark of the desperation of the Liberals who seem to be at risk of being passed by the NDP in this election. If it’s not, then I don’t see why they’ve been holding on to this for so long. In any case, this video might well become a classic example for schools, colleges, and universities across Canada of what constitutes plagiarism.

Ouch! Harper knows better than this, or at least I thought he did. I have to assume that someone wrote this speech for him and that he didn’t catch it. This reminds me of a case back in Calgary where one of my colleagues caught a student who submitted an essay that had been purchased off the internet. When confronted, the student, in tears, said: “But I didn’t plagiarize! I paid my roommate $20 to write the essay for me and he must have got it off the Internet!” That argument didn’t cut it for the student, and it shouldn’t for a politician in such a prominent position.

This one-minute summary from 236.com is interesting to watch. If one were to create a word cloud out of what was said on Friday, the words foregrounded in these clips would be some of the key words that were repeated over and over.

From yesterday’s episode of Marketplace:

As other people who commented on this story have already said, I don’t buy Wilkinson’s comment about Canada’s healthcare system. Other than that, though, I’m happy to see him raise this point. As an interesting series of articles in the NY Times in 2005 noted, social mobility seens to be more possible in Canada and Europe today than it is in the US. And, for those who tell me on both sides of the border that people pay higher taxes in Canada, I have to say that I’ve found the opposite to be true here, at least in my circumstance. I pay more here — it just comes out of my pocket a bit differently. Municipal taxes, for instance, are three times what I paid in Canada, and I get far fewer services here in return. And, I’m not even taking into consideration what my employer and I pay for my family’s health insurance or the deductibles I need to pay any time one of us goes to see the doctor. I’m not complaining, though. Life is good here for my family, and I’ve been given many great opportunities. Each country has its good sides and bad, but the argument that America is freer economically hasn’t proven itself to be true in my five years on this side of the border.

Courtesy of The National Post:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) today released results of a national public opinion poll showing that by a two-to-one margin, Canadians are more likely to accept the validity of Bigfoot than they are promises on the campaign trail.

[. . .] The survey of 1,000 Canadian adults was conducted by Praxicus, a pollster known to have close ties with senior Conservative Party officials. The results are considered accurate to within +/-3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The question asked: “Which is more likely to happen … Politicians will keep their election promises or scientists will prove the existence of Bigfoot?”

58% said Bigfoot, while 27% opted for promises. 15% were undecided.

Obama for PM!

As I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, the Conservative Party is likely a bit surprised at the vastly negative reaction across Canada to the cuts they made recently to cultural industries and artists.

It’s been really great to see how artists and cultural organizations have rallied to show Canadians exactly why these cuts are so potentially detrimental to our cultural (and fiscal) well-being. This latest piece on YouTube, though not safe for some workplaces or family ears, gets to the heart of the politically motivated cuts to vibrant and successful programs such as the one that supports Canadian artists touring abroad. It’s a brilliant and scathing critique.

(There’s also a YouTube version with English subtitles. One of the big parts of the joke is that the song is about “une phoque,” which in English means a seal. ‘tit is short for petit)

Things to do today:

1) Vote in the federal election. CHECK!

Being from Alberta, I sometimes feel like my vote doesn’t count. Aside from a few ridings in my hometown and a few in Calgary in recent years, the province is a sea of blue (Conservative). And yet, I also once saw an election in my own riding in which the Premier of the province was turfed out of his own riding because everyone thought he’d win and didn’t bother to vote for him, while the opposition did a great job of getting the vote out. So, every vote counts.

So, I hope everyone reading this makes certain to vote in your own election this fall, whether you’re in Canada or the US. It’s worth the effort.

I’ve not watched it yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Moore’s new film: Slacker Uprising. He’s made the film freely available on the Internet so that more people can see it before the election. If young Canadians and Americans voted en masse, they could quickly change the face of both countries. You can tell how much that makes politicians nervous by how little they are actually doing in both countries to mobilize that demographic. Obama, Layton, and May are leaders on this front, but I think there’s still a long, long way to go.

One thing Canada could use, for instance, is an equivalent of Rock The Vote.

Speaking of how little some Americans know about Canada, the Wall Street Journal got our country’s name wrong TWICE in August. One article referred to it as “New Canada” while the other referred to the “Commonwealth of Canada.”

I truly wish that I could say that this surprises me. As Homer Simpson once responded when it took his kids 40 minutes to locate Canada on the map, “Oh Marge, anyone can miss Canada, all tucked away down there.” (Matt Groening’s dad, Homer, was born in Canada, btw)

Though I have met many Americans who have travelled widely in Canada and who follow the news there, I’ve also met many Vermonters from this area (40 minutes from the border) who have lived here their whole lives and have never been to Canada. When asked about this several of those people have told me that it had never really occurred to them before to go to Canada.

Anyhow, the comments thread on the Gawker story about the Wall Street Journal made me laugh. Lots of good names suggested for Canada there. I liked “New and Improved Canada.” Then I could be part of the “New and Improved Canadian Studies Program.”