Talk about the “permanent campaign” has been around for much longer than most people credit it for. In fact, the earliest mention I’ve seen was in a letter that then-PC youth leader Joe Clark sent to then-party leader John Diefenbaker warning about the implications of the permanent campaign, and well, things have only gone downhill from there. The advent of the “fixed election date” did nothing to temper the permanent campaign – instead of fearing an election that could come at any time, we are instead treated to a fixed date that everyone builds their campaigning around, and year-long campaigns are certainly now the norm, following in more of an American example than we have traditionally had in this country. Amidst it all, the former Chief Electoral Officer, Jean-Pierre Kingsley, is warning that the fixed election date is eroding the campaign rules that we’ve developed over years, and in particular, campaign finance rules. Those rules, built for the era of when a campaign could come at any point, have no sway over the election spending limits that happen outside of the writ period, which means that they can spend as much as they want, particularly on advertising, and don’t have to report it. When the writ does eventually drop, people will have been bombarded by this messaging over the summer, and it’ll get pretty tired. But Kingsley is right – we have developed the best system in the world for election spending controls, and the permanent campaign of the fixed-election date is undermining that. There is a bill in the Senate that has stalled at committee for years that would see the same caps from an election apply to the writ period also apply to the pre-writ period, so that if you do a blitz of pre-writ advertising, well, it’ll deduct from your total spending cap in the writ period. It’s a novel idea, but it’s no surprise that nobody has picked up on it. It goes to reinforce that while fixed election dates sound swell on the face of it, if you look a little bit deeper, you’ll find that all of their supposed good aspects are in fact swamped by the unintended bad ones, which is what we seem to have completely taken over. Time to pull the plug on them.

Good reads:

• The RCMP plans to publicly release as much information as possible as to what happened with the various police responses on October 22^nd.
• There are some theories as to why the government decided to replace the Correctional Investigator now.
• Japan has apparently lost interest in trade negotiations with Canada.
• Andrew Coyne writes about Trudeau’s “gaffe” that wasn’t a gaffe, but a legitimate philosophical difference in the concept of “fairness.”
• Tabatha Southey muses about Stephen Harper thinking himself to be the new Doctor with his omnibus legislation TARDIS.
• Scott Feschuk imagines Stephen Harper circa 2015 calling Stephen Harper circa 2005, and telling him about how great his decade in power has been.

Odds and ends:

The “by-election” in John Baird’s old riding is now off and running, despite the fact that it will get folded into the general election.

Here’s an odd little piece that places the four federal leaders in their classic archetypes.

Rachel Notley was sworn in as premier in Alberta, along with her lean 12-person, gender-balanced cabinet.