In the wake of the three by-elections, Pundit’s Guide crunches the numbers. While I disagree with the aggregation of the three events into a single grand number (for the same reason that I will remind you that the national “popular vote” numbers are a fallacy), the voter share breakdowns seem to indicate that the Greens were eating into the Conservative vote in Calgary Centre and Victoria, which further problematises the already dubious “unite the left” propositions. Because seriously – bundling both the Liberals and the Greens with the NDP as the “left” is too facile of an understanding of some of the issues the parties stand on, and one of the reasons why these “vote splitting” arguments annoy me. Colby Cosh gives his post-mortem of the Calgary Centre vote.
The government unveiled new emissions regulations yesterday for passenger vehicles a few years into the future – never mind that regulations are a far more costly way of controlling greenhouse gas emissions than simple carbon pricing. Meanwhile, Aaron Wherry gets a response from Preston Manning about his thoughts on carbon pricing – apparently he wants complete cost accounting, but that includes things like paying for the volume of land flooded by hydro projects as well as oil sands development.