D’Oh Canada – back to civics class

Turns out, I was definitely not the only one.

Most Canadians have no idea what our political system is based on.

Civics was a new class in Ontario when I was in Grade 10. It was half a semester. Perhaps Canadian politics should be a mandatory for all High Schoolers?

Vrooooom goes the auto industry- but where to?

Cars.

I don’t really like them.

True, cars gave us our freedom ala Jack’s “on the road” and I can’t pretend like I would have wanted to walk those 10km in the snow every morning to get to school. So yes, it’s unfair for me to say that I don’t care about cars, especially when the auto industry makes up about 4% of the US economy and directly and indirectly employs one out of every seven Canadians or so.

The industry as we know it though is failing. And (I can see some comments coming…) rightly so – they have failed to keep up with the changing times… I don’t care to go into too much detail about the auto industry bailout (enough news out there for you!), but you can see where I stand on the issue.

What does this mean though? It’s clear that the auto industry needs to revamp itself, but where do we go from here?

We have a few options worth exploring.

Cheap, lightweight, fuel efficient cars. i.e. THE NANO CAR

Shumaucher was right: small is beautiful (although he may be rolling in his grave with this one). The Tata Nano car, released almost a year ago will be the world’s cheapest car on the market – made out of lightweight composites that click together to form the body – and better yet can be shipped in “kits” to be made by local entrepreneurs), has lower emissions than the average Volkswagen and high fuel efficiency.

This is however, a double edged sword… having such a cheap car will boost the Indian car market by 65% (now stretch that thinking to the global market…). Fuel efficiency aside, great, exactly what we need BILLIONS of new cars on the road! This means more roads, parking lots, garages, and so forth – quite an unsustainable package at the end of the day.

But, we had this discussion in a class though and again I was sitting on the fence and arguing on both sides (as I often do on my own…) Who am I to tell some person who is just moving up in the world to stay on their bike? Excuse me, can you please strap your 2 children on your back and bring them to school on your bike? Thanks! There are some things that are quite hard to argue… especially when you’re living quite well on this side of the world.

So, even though I disagree with cars, Tata has done an impressive job in INNOVATING a new kind of “green” car. If one of the big three had done this we would have been hailing them as revolutionaries in the industry. But they didn’t. They marketed SUVs during that development time…

*** Check out the comments on this one. Hendrik and I have started some good stuff – would love to have your opinions!

Another possibility? (yeah, plenty).

Next post: A Better Place with Car 2.0

I would keep writing but I need to start studying for MY LAST EXAM EVER! Wow, can’t believe this program is coming to an end soon… will discuss what it is that I’m doing with my life at some point on here.

A lesson on parliamentary democracy in Canada

I’ve never been one to like politics, but whether you like it or not, you need to understand it.

Now I realize that a big chunk of knowledge that should be in my brain somewhere has been absent.

A great read on Facebook (thanks Braden!) and a clip in the Star starts to fill in some of the gaps.

A worthwhile read for anyone who is/was at all confused with the current state of affairs in Canada.

Confusion in Canada…reform in voting needed?

I’ve been pretty busy and sigh, neglecting my feeds somewhat…

But my, what an exciting (and completely embarrassing) time in Canadian politics!

Our three other major parties: Liberal, NDP & Bloc Quebecois (the separatist party)have now joined forces to take over our minortiy conservative gov’t.

The one thing they have in common is that they want the Conservatives out. Other than that, NDP has been hating on the Liberals more than any other party for a while and both of them have joined with a separatist party… interesting indeed… And, this seems like a shot gun wedding in my opinion. When/if they do take over, do you really think they’ll know how to govern our country?

(There’s a lot more here that i’m not including, but there’s plenty to read if you’re interested!)

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?  OUR VOTING SYSTEM….

Do you think that maybe its our electoral system that doesn’t work?

We work on the “first past the post” (FPTP) system. This, plurality voting is used in 43 of the 191 countries in the United Nations, so we’re not alone here.. but there’s no surprise that there are problems associated with this. Read here.

An example…

When I vote, I have to choose who I’d vote for at my constituency level (I don’t even live there, so I chose one riding in Ottawa).  I really only paid attention to the National level – but I’m forced to choose at the riding level.

So, the election result is not representational about how many people voted for our Leader, its how many “seats” a party wins through the ridings and majority wins. If you were to recount the votes through proportional representation, you’d get a very different outcome.

I have to get back to work, but this is stupid. I think I hate all of the parties.

Lets reform how we do this so our contry can stop looking so immature.