Photo courtesy of Ryerson University.

Kenneth Moffatt is the 2018 Jack Layton Chair of Social Justice. That sounds fancy, and it is. Appointed across the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Community Services, the Chair emphasizes the causes of the late NDP leader, and works “to effect progressive social change.” But to many Torontonians, especially those of us in the queer arts worlds, Moffatt is simply Kenny, the Ryerson University social work professor who curates and contributes to art exhibitions: shows (to list a few) about troublesome masculinities, punk rock graphics, the unreliability of institutions, fatherhood, and bears-and-moose Canadiana (deeply queered Canadiana). And by “curate,” I mean he actually hangs the work himself and brings a box of wine for the opening. When Moffatt finds himself in an ivory tower, he burns it down.

As the Layton Chair’s first artist-curator, Moffatt has given himself a challenging task. He plans to support artistic endeavours that highlight the lives and struggles of marginalized peoples. So far, so sociologically/Community Art standard. Except, Moffatt wants the works to be both about and—here’s the important part—driven by the subjects. As he told me recently, “I’m tired of going to social work art shows where the people actually in the photos or who made the work are invisible. Curators, people like me, we get plenty of air time.”

His first project was a sponsored screening of Hugh Gibson’s documentary The Stairs, a film about addiction harm-reduction strategies and how they are applied in marginalized communities. The talk after the screening was lead by the people portrayed, not outside experts. That’s Moffatt in a nutshell.

This Magazine spoke to Moffatt about his new role and his plans for it.

How did you become the Layton Chair, and what did you understand about it before you took the position? 

I am thrilled to be in this position! I highly respect the two previous chairs for their sharp social critique and interest in supporting others’ voices. I understood the position to be aspirational in nature—that is, to encourage students in social justice to re-imagine the interface between community and university. And of course, the Chair recognizes the legacy of Jack Layton, who taught politics at Ryerson and was a very dynamic, engaged educator.

Your focus so far has been to let people who are involved with/clients of social work to speak for themselves. Isn’t it weird that we’ve come to the point where having actual clients speak is considered unusual?

This is still very much a struggle. In the stranglehold of neoliberalism, the voice of service users is obscured. There is a move in social work to [become akin to] managerial duties, thus leading to “outcome measures” and data collection. There is a push to technologize measurements of a person’s worth, which leads to reductive measuring of the service user’s life. More than ever, we need to figure out how to free up and hear service-users voices.

You have been involved with projects that entwine art and social justice work/social work for years. What have you learned from these projects, and how will that learning inform what you do with the Layton Chair?

I’ve learned there is a lot of intelligent and interesting art made in community and in non-profit, and, at times, elusive spaces. You need to reach out, search for space that exists without a profit motive. Often people are not noticed or are silenced because of class, race, gender sexuality and ability. Avoid always looking for experts or “big names,” because, honestly, that can be stultifying.

Contemporary art is notorious for being disconnected from contemporary problems, issues, society, etc. But Community Art can sometimes feel condescending and simplistic. How can people interested in both the arts and helping others bridge this gap?

Academics and people tied to big institutions get caught up at times in ontological loops proving their worth to each other. Contemporary art is at its best when it ruptures disconnected abstract thought and politics. Rather than be preoccupied with innovation and entrepreneurship, guiding principles [in art] could be literacy, listening, humility, and confidence in the local. Mix it up. Rather than merely facilitate voice, let it queer your perceptions.

CORRECTION (03/21/2018): A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Moffatt was a professor of sociology, not social work. This regrets the error.

This article has also been updated to provide more detail into the role of Jack Layton Chair at Ryerson.

Canada’s public life has been diminished today by the death of Jack Layton, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the New Democratic Party. Known to millions of Canadians simply as “Jack,” Layton embodied the kind of decent, energetic, principled, and optimistic political leadership that so many of us wish to see more of on Parliament Hill. Though he was a visionary party leader and skilled at pulling the levers of power on the Hill, his achievements, in many ways, transcend partisanship. He was a champion of causes and people even when—perhaps especially when—there was no electoral advantage in being so. That commitment to his principles—that everyone deserves opportunity, that our affluent society has a duty to share its wealth equitably, that every voice has something to contribute—endeared him to people across the political spectrum (and made him a scourge to a deserving few). His family, his party, and his country are sharing a tremendous loss today.

The press and the web are buzzing with tributes to Jack Layton now, and memories of the effects he had, large and small, on our civic lives. We’re not going to repeat them here; everyone has their own thoughts and can share them as they like—or contemplate them in silence, as we’re choosing to do today. Please feel free to leave your thoughts below, but perhaps the best thing all of us can do now is to think about what the life and career of Jack Layton means to each of us—and how to preserve that spirit in struggles yet to come.

Update: Jack Layton’s parting letter to Canadians was just released, and it is a stirring read.

Canada's House of Commons. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user scazon.

With the House of Commons set to start back up again on June 2, Canadians will get their fist glimpses of the 41st Parliament. Given that the tumultuous campaign period, dramatic results, and overload of post-poll dissection nearly a month behind us, it may seem as though all the excitement in Ottawa has died down. But fear not, diligent politicos, there is no shortage of gripping storylines to follow as MPs new and old take their seats. With that in mind, here are five new trends to watch for as Parliament returns.

1. New faces

The re-opening of Parliament will also mark the debut of 108 rookie MPs. While some of them have already received a glut of press, others will be looking to make a good first impression with their constituents. With some of the youngest candidates ever to have been elected, this edition of Parliament could have a very different atmosphere. While the class of first-timers may bring a fresh new face to governance, they will also carry the mistrust that stigmatizes youth and inexperience. Prepare for a generational gap in the house.

2. New power

For five years, Stephen Harper has had to walk a tightrope over legislation, always wary that his tenuous minority government might be brought down by a non-confidence vote. While this approach helped keep Harper in office, it frustrated many of the Conservatives’ old boys. But now that he’s got his long-desired majority, the PM will be safe to push the party agenda as never could in the past. How far will the Tories go in exploiting their majority? Hard to tell, though it’s a safe bet that Harper will be a lot more willing to let his Neo-Con roots show and play to his base now that he doesn’t have to placate opposition MPs or left-of-centre voters.

3. New Jack

On one hand, the NDP’s new status as Official Opposition gives leader Jack Layton some moral clout and a more prominent soapbox from which to speak. On the other hand, with a Conservative majority in place, Layton has less power on Parliament Hill than ever. Whereas under the Harper minority, he often served as lynchpin for the government, Layton no longer has any leverage over the Tories. Will success and Stornoway change Jack Layton? Perhaps. But the 30.6 per cent of voters who backed the NDP will be looking for the same old Jack to bring more of that old stubborn idealism to a new Parliament.

4. “New Look” Liberals

After enduring their worst-ever showing at the polls, the Liberals will return to the House in a much different state than the one in which they left. The Grits will be in major rebuilding mode but, with a decidedly short-term leader, and without old pillars like Gerard Kennedy and Ken Dryden, it remains to be seen how easily or quickly a rejuvenated Liberal party can be established. In the interim, their main challenge will be to stay organized and maintain a noticeable presence in Parliament as they adapt  to their new role as Canada’s third party. Watch for new chief Bob Rae to make a big splash as he takes advantage of his long-awaited leadership role, and tries to claw back some clout for his maligned Liberals. He will be eager to get the party back into the headlines for reasons other than their historic loss.

5. New allegiances

At times in the past few years there was a cooperative all-against-one atmosphere amongst Canada’s opposition parties. There was even talk, though not as much as the Conservatives would have voters believe, that the NDP, Bloc Quebecois, and Liberals might unite under a coalition banner to take down the Conservative minority. The Conservative majority means that a coalition would do little good now but, with the Liberals having been decimated, and the Bloc virtually out of politics, a party merger isn’t out of the question. It’s happened before, as Harper can attest to. Even without a merger, we may, at the very least, see some Liberal and Bloc MPs jumping ship to join the bigger parties. Though often scorned, crossing the floor has become a post-election tradition in Canada’s Parliament.

Did Michael Ignatieff's pro-Iraq war stance doom the Liberals? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user WmPitcher.

Listening to Michael Ignatieff address his few remaining dispirited supporters on election night, I couldn’t help but picture the room dotted with the ghosts of Baghdad. I wonder whether Ignatieff saw them too, like so many Banquos’ ghosts in the room that night as he took responsibility for his party’s dismal showing in the 2011 federal election.

Having since resigned his leadership, it may seem to rude to kick him now that he’s down. But the colossal scale of the Liberal defeat in this election can’t be fully understood unless we talk honestly about Michael Ignatieff’s career as an intellectual and politician—and the Iraq War remains central to both.

Ignatieff’s career as a Canadian politician is bound up in the war: he was first courted by backroom Liberals in the spring of 2004, as an iconic “serious” small-L liberal. (American liberalism was entering what would be years of toxic, self-destructive debate about whether “good liberals” could oppose the war.) For this type of centrist liberal, supporting the invasion of Iraq was the “serious” choice, contrasted with the dreamy foolishness of pacifism.

Paul Martin’s government, terrified that the brief moment of spine Jean Chrétien had shown by avoiding direct Canadian involvement in the war, was terrified about the state of relations with the Bush government. Ignatieff’s recruitment was a signal to the Americans and the Canadian elite that the Liberal Party could still be trusted, despite Chrétien’s heresy. It was more about distancing the Liberals from left-wing policies than the war itself.

Ignatieff wasted no time. His landmark speech to the Liberal Party in 2005 was full of rhetorical slaps at the left, but here’s my favourite, in retrospect:

“…many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.”

Last night’s election was extraordinary in more ways than we would have thought possible a few weeks ago. Canadian politics has been shaken up in a serious, permanent way, and this election will be studied for years to come. As we start to digest the result and its consequences, there are some clearly identifiable changes and trends at work:

1. A Majority Conservative Government

This is crashingly obvious, but the 166-seat showing for the Conservative Party last night was more decisive than anyone expected five weeks, or even 24 hours, in advance of the polls. A Harper majority represents a true departure from any Canadian politics of the past; we are in uncharted territory. The loss of the moderating influence of a majority opposition gives the Harper conservatives truly free rein for the first time, and given this government’s conduct as a minority, we should expect a swift and substantial turn to the right. Need an example? Last night, with results still trickling in, Heritage Minister James Moore told the CBC that the government would move right away to abolish public funding for political campaigns. The Conservatives now have both hands firmly on the levers of power, and they are going to move. Fast.

2. The NDP Ascendance

The pollsters predicted a good showing for the NDP, but again, the idea that the New Democrats could take more than 100 seats would have been laughable as recently as a week ago. Yet here we are, Jack Layton bound for Stornoway with 101 NDP MPs at his back. Layton will make a skilled and energetic opposition leader, and will undoubtedly use his bully pulpit to solidify the NDP’s newfound national base. The “Orange Wave” phenomenon is, for many progressives, a silver lining of this election, but the grim irony, as every pundit observed last night, is that Layton has less leverage now as leader of the opposition than he had as leader of the third party in a minority government. This election has to be counted the NDP’s greatest success to date — but still a qualified one.

3. Twilight of the Liberals

There were plenty of factors that led to yesterday’s electoral result, but if you were looking for one doorstep to lay it at, the Liberal Party’s would be the one. Their unprecedentedly poor showing in the polls echoes, in sentiment if not in absolute numbers, the trouncing the Progressive Conservatives received in 1993; the added humiliation of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff losing his own riding, and then failing to resign before resigning anyway, has shaken the party to its roots. Speculation about merging with the NDP is probably premature but no longer an outright joke. Rumours of the Liberal Party’s death are exaggerated; still, even contemplating such a thing would have been unthinkable a year ago. The Liberals pulled the trigger on this election — though, having found the government in contempt of parliament, it’s not clear they could have reasonably chosen otherwise — and their strategists must have felt there was a reason to do so. The fact that they were so terribly wrong is going to prompt plenty of Grit soul-searching.

4. The Smashing of the Bloc

The apocalyptic showing of the Bloc Québécois spells the end of the separatist movement at the federal level; it’s hard to see how it can be otherwise. Reduced from 47 to just four MPs, with their leader defeated in his own riding, and swamped by the NDP in Quebec, the Bloc is over as a parliamentary force. That’s important because the party since 1993 had been a spoiler, changing the electoral calculus necessary to take the House of Commons. That fourth party, wielding many more seats than its popular vote would indicate, had been a keystone of the minority government structure that has prevailed since 2004. Their decimation will change the math for every election to come. What this means for the sovereigntist movement in general is unclear, too — will it dampen the appetite for another referendum, or embolden the Parti Québécois provincially? Again, who knows? We’re off the map here.

5. The Greens Take the Field

As special-interest party the Bloc exits stage left, the election of Elizabeth May as the first Green Party MP ushers in a new parliamentary voice. This was an important symbolic win for May and for the Greens, and perhaps an important substantive win, too. Being the only Green in the house of commons will hardly make May a power broker, but it’s a foothold, and May is known for being an articulate rhetoritician; she’ll make hay from even the sliver of Question Period time this seat grants her. Whether that translates to growth for the Greens remains to be seen, but if that federal election campaign per-vote subsidy is taken away — now a near-certainty — the Greens stand to lose a big chunk of the funding that helped put May in her seat. Have they built a big enough party machine in the last few years (and can they continue to build it for the next four or five) to do it on their own?

6. The Pollsters Are Jokes

The 2008 election was bad enough for the pollsters, who saw their accuracy deteriorate markedly. This time around was even worse. While they all saw the Orange Wave coming, no major pollster predicted the Conservative majority; none grasped the extent of the Liberals’ crashing fortunes, and the utter collapse of the Bloc was barely on their radar. And the media, hungry for numbers, babbled every poll projection regardless. Susan Delacourt of the Toronto Star predicted that way back at the beginning of the campaign when she provided a lesson learned from previous campaigns: “All media will declare that they’re going to not report on polls in the same old way and will break that promise by Day 2.” Bingo.

7. Voters Still Aren’t Voting

Turnout increased a bit this election, bobbing back above 60 percent. But electoral participation remains at distressing lows. Some blame our antiquated first-past-the-post system; others disillusionment with partisan incivility; or perhaps it’s that Kids Today don’t vote in elections. Whatever the reason, it’s a discouraging trend, and more discouraging is that there is no indication that most of these factors will improve. Electoral reform is off the table; a Conservative government has no interest in proportional representation. The U.S.-style attack politics that has metastisized in Ottawa will continue; the Conservatives slathered it on thick and were rewarded with a majority, and that lesson will stick. Perhaps younger people can be enticed to the ballot box by a resurgent NDP, which has traditionally enjoyed their support. Yesterday’s slight uptick in turnout could be the start of an upward trend — or it could be a bump on the long slide downhill.

In any case, it looks like we have four to five years of a Conservative government during which we can contemplate all these questions — and many more besides.

This week the Green Party launched an anti-attack ad criticizing other parties for their sensational advertisements. The meta attack ad aims to benefit from Canadians’ supposed distaste for ad hominem vilification and mudslinging.

It’s commonly believed that the first attack ad was the iconic 1964 “Daisy Girl” commericial, which threatens American voters with the prospect of nuclear war (another long-held American political tradition). Attack ads returned in 1988 with the George HW Bush “revolving door” spot suggesting a candidate’s prison reforms led to an increase in violent crime.

That same year featured Canada’s NAFTA election, in which the Liberal party ran ads suggesting Canadian sovereignty was at stake. You can read about it in a CBC interactive feature documenting 10 prominent attack ads from the English-speaking world.

A 1993 Kim Campbell ad mocked Jean Chretien’s facial Bell’s palsy. Political figures decried the ad as “political desperation” and “totally inappropriate and in poor taste.” It’s a shame the same terms apply to today’s political discourse.

Conservative Senator Doug Finley, a “genius of political attack ads,” was interviewed by the Globe and Mail last month. Responding to those who believe negative ads turn off voters, his response: “Politics is an adversarial business. Kellogg’s doesn’t make their money by telling everybody General Foods are a great product.”

There’s little consensus on the effectiveness of attack ads. A 2007 psychological study suggests that although negative political ads make us want to turn away, we remember their negative messages. Some studies suggest negative and positive ads both have the same effectiveness.

Attack ads have made a lot of inroads south of the border. A study of the 2008 US presidential campaigns found that almost all McCain ads were “negative,” with many focusing on Obama’s personality over his politics. It’s gotten to the point where the hilarious “demon sheep” ad was actually used to sway voters, before it went viral and generated a spinoff.

In the past five years, attack ads have gained worldwide prominence.

An ad from the 2006 Mexican election compares one candidate with Hugo Chavez. Australia, a country with some really broken political discourse, saw the rise of attack ads in last year’s national election — including one monumentally stupid commercial.

Although such ads remain uncommon in UK elections, there’s been a recent increase in Europhobic ads — the word works for both definitions — attacking EU policy by airing stereotypes of continental neighbours.

TV ads in the 2006 São Paolo mayoral race speculated on a candidate’s supposed homosexuality. The tactic is eerily similar to a homophobic Tamil-language radio ad that aired in Toronto’s recent mayoral election.

The rollin’-in-dough Conservative party financed comparatively civil attack ads with funds allegedly arranged through the now infamous “in and out scandal” (that ironically focused on accountability and transparency). While it’s tempting to pin attack ads on one party or political persuasion, the Liberals, Bloc and NDP take part too.

These ads have repercussions on our democracy as a whole. In the 2008 election, the Conservatives made the daft choice of posting their pooping puffin ad online. The ad itself was intellectually (and otherwise) insulting. But more troubling: the Toronto Star ran a frontpage story about it.

Rick Mercer’s 2009 rant on the issue makes some pretty poignant points (and his parody ads are pretty funny, too). Attacks ads are bad for democracy. Instead of helping us debate serious issues as a society, it creates poisons our discourse with character assassination, the politics of fear, and a culture of sound bites over substance.

UPDATE, Sept. 22, 1:55 pm: CanWest Postmedia reports that C-391 sponsor MP Candice Hoeppner “has all but conceded defeat” and “given up on last-minute lobbying” for today’s vote, and calls the eight liberals and 12 NDPers who voted in favour last time, “turncoats.” She estimates the government is one — one! — vote short, which is why it’s all hands on deck today: Jack Layton told reporters “Everybody will be there unless somebody gets struck by lighting.” The Prime Minister also flew back from New York where he was addressing the UN.

UPDATE, Sept. 22, 3:56 pm: There were questions about the registry during Question period, but seems to be nothing new to add based on that. However, Susan Delacourt just published a surprising and sad story about why Liberal MP Scott Simms, who originally voted to abolish the registry, has changed his mind today: because between the last vote and this one, his father took his own life, and the weapon he used was a long gun. Simms will not be talking about it publicly, but a colleague tweeted the story put the gun registry in “unprecedented perspective” during this morning’s Liberal caucus meeting. Addendum: Barb Adamski replies to us on Twitter that no gun registry is in a position to prevent suicides by a determined person, which it must be conceded is a fair point. However, it does not negate many other good reasons to register guns, and the fact that the story broke today is bound to be significant, no matter how indirect the connection to the vote itself. Addendum to the addendum: Delacourt explains on the Toronto Star blog why they published the story today before the vote.

*****

Today is the day that parliament will vote on bill C-391, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act. This private member’s bill (full text here), introduced by Candice Hoeppner, the Conservative MP for Portage-Lisgar, Manitoba, on May 15, 2009, if passed would bring about the end of the long gun registry, which is one component of the Canadian Firearms Program.

Note that there is a difference between a gun licence and gun registration — the RCMP describes the distinction as being analagous to a driver’s licence and vehicle registration. There are also three classes of firearms that the program regulates: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. Ordinary hunting rifles and shotguns have always been “non-restricted” — that is, anyone over 18 can purchase and own them as long as they’re registered and licensed.

Bill C-391 does not affect licensing requirements; the only thing the bill would repeal is the requirement to register a non-restricted firearm — i.e., a rifle used  for hunting game. The reason this distinction is important is because critics of the gun registry have focused on its cost, and they claim that repealing these requirements would save money. This claim, to put it bluntly, doesn’t hold water. The RCMP will continue to run a gun registry; almost all of the expense will continue to be incurred whether Bill C-391 passes or not.

The cost of the long gun registry has been widely misreported, misinterpreted, and deliberately overblown. An RCMP report (completed in February but not given to Parliament until August; it was promptly leaked to the CBC) has placed the cost of the long gun registry portion of the Canadian Firearms Program “in the range of $1.1 and $3.6 million per year.” The “$1 billion” figure that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other Conservative politicians have repeatedly quoted is simply not accurate. According to that same report, according to The Tyee, the $1 billion figure actually refers to the entire cost of the whole Canadian Firearms Program from 1995 to 2007.

The other source of criticism of the long-gun registry is generally perceived to split along urban-rural lines, with many game hunters unhappy at the cost and inconvenience of having to register their firearms. Hoeppner, introducing her bill, claimed that “law-abiding Canadian hunters, farmers and sport shooters … have been treated like criminals” since the introduction of the registry (in its current form) in 2001. As James Laxer noted this week on Rabble, however, the urban-rural break is a red herring. Plenty of people in the country want the registry to continue, particularly rural women. When polled, 47 percent of rural women supported the registry.

The registry’s other important support continues to be police forces themselves, who have unambiguously spoken out in support of the gun registry for years. Toronto’s Chief of Police, Bill Blair, is also president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, and testified before parliament on Bill C-391 on May 26, 2010. He was clear on the position of law enforcement on the gun registry — it’s not a panacea, it’s a tool, and a useful one.

Like all of the tools we use, the firearms registry is not a perfect, universally effective tool. Not every criminal will register their weapons. Not everyone will obey the law. It will not deter every criminal nor will it solve every crime. The police never claimed it would.

What we do claim, with the authority that comes from actually using the information contained in the Firearms Registry every day, is that it is a tool that helps us do our job.

[…] In 1994, the CACP adopted a resolution calling upon the Government of Canada to enact legislation requiring the registration of all firearms, including long guns. This is a position from which the CACP has never wavered.

Leading up to today’s vote, police forces and other pro-registry groups from across the country — from Halifax to Toronto to Vancouver — have joined together to call for the registry’s continuation. The CACP, along with the Canadian Police Association and the Canadian Association of Police Boards issued this helpful one-pager correcting the “Top 10 Myths of the Canadian Firearms Program“:

Despite all this, today’s vote is expected to be a squeaker. When C-391 was last voted on, it passed with 164 votes in favour and 137 votes against, with 8 Liberals, 12 NDPers, and one independent siding with the Conservative government.

This time around, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has pledged to keep his party members in line to vote down the bill. NDP leader Jack Layton has not whipped his party, and NDP MPs will be free to vote their conscience. (Bloc Québécois MPs will all vote opposed, as they did last time). Layton has told the press that he is confident that the bill will be defeated, and that he has persuaded enough MPs in his caucus to switch their votes.

We’ll be following what goes on as we get closer to this evening’s vote, which is expected to happen around 5:45. Keep checking back here for details, or follow us on Twitter for any quick developments that crop up today. Have any questions about C-391 we haven’t answered here, or have any tips? Leave your questions and everything else in the comments below…

Part of Barack Obama’s victory came on the back of a grassroots campaign that effectively used the internet to collect supporters and funds. Among social-media-savvy politicians, the president is The Man. While Obama might be down with the kids today, have any Canadian leaders managed to cash in on the social-media cachet? Or is Twitter anathema to politicians raised on lawn signs and pancake breakfasts?

[some figures have been updated since November 2008 publication]

Stephen Harper

Presence: Harper has accounts on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Facebook, and even MySpace. Besting the other leaders, he has over 42,600 Twitter followers and 29,300 Facebook fans, where his third-person profile proclaims he is a curling fan. The Conservatives have even ventured into an attempt at viral marketing with their Ignatieff.me attack website.

FAIL or FTW? Harper’s tweets, which typically begin with words like “Statement,” “Visited,” and “Announced,” sound like stodgy, third-person press releases. Is Harper a man? Is he a machine? Are his tweets being written by a Communications dropout from Laurier? All we know is that they are vaguely reminiscent of headlines that appear on the fronts of government-owned newspapers in tinpot dictatorships.

Typical Tweet: Visited construction site of Queenston-Lewiston Bridge project.

Michael Ignatieff

Presence: More than 28,700 Facebook fans are privy to Ignatieff’s reading habits, which include Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, and the essays of Isaiah Berlin, and he has over 34,300 Twitter followers. IggyTube, his YouTube channel, features dozens of videos—though most have fewer than 1,000 views.

FAIL or FTW? Although more comfortable with bandying “I” than Harper, Ignatieff’s self-conscious use of “we” to denote his real, actual Canadianness undermines the effort. His Twitter feed is also short on interaction with real, actual Canadians.

Typical Tweet: In the birthplace of our nation’: It was in Gaspe that we first became Canadian #lpc

Jack Layton

Presence: Layton has adopted Flickr and FriendFeed accounts and has over 32,600 followers on Twitter, despite the background being that eye-burning hue of NDP orange. His Facebook page has more than 27,700 supporters. There, he says his favourite movie is Star Wars.

FAIL or FTW? Layton’s Twitter account is the office equivalent of the chirpy guy who comes in on a hungover Monday morning, praising the latest sales targets and joshing with the boss while trying to steal his job. The leader’s over-caffeinated updates often include Twitpics of him posing with the common folk.

Typical Tweet: Obama got it … New Democrats get it; working together we can win from the ground up.

Elizabeth May

Presence: May can be found on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter with 6,100 followers, and Facebook with 6,400 supporters. She uses Facebook Notes to blog about topics like media speculation on the upcoming election.

FAIL or FTW? If you ask May a question on Twitter, she will probably respond to you.

Typical Tweet: @intuitiveartist aside from storing it in the garage … trying to reduce the amount of packaged goods you purchase is a good way to go.

Gilles Duceppe

Presence: In addition to maintaining a “blogue” at blogue. blocquebecois.org, Duceppe can be found on Twitter and Facebook, where he’s acquired a following of around 23,000 followers and 3,900 fans, respectively.

FAIL or FTW? While most leaders make an effort to use French and English, Duceppe is French-only, perhaps explaining why he has a social media following on par with an infrequently updating English-Canadian blogger.

Typical Tweet: Au Delta à Trois-Rivières ce matin pour une nouvelle journée de tournée en Mauricie

If we ran a “WTF” blog post every time another ridiculous, inconclusive political poll came out, you’d never read anything else here. But since this particular batch of ridiculous, inconclusive polls came out as all the Canadian political parties were gearing up for the fall session, we’ll make an exception this time.

Harris-Decima says the Tories and the Liberals are in a “dead heat.” Ipsos-Reid says the Conservatives “have leaped to a strong lead.” They can’t both be right, which likely means neither of them are. But this kind of thing gets trotted out by big media (and small) all the time, the perfect non-news news story for the dying, dull days of August. The Liberals are “gear[ing] up for fall election” in one story, but Michael Ignatieff is also “dispel[ling] election rumours.” In short, if there’s an election (which no one knows) then no one knows that the hell is going to happen.

The party leaders are meeting around this time to horse-trade and try to angle for their agendas in the fall session, and then coming out of their meetings with the prime minister to give partisan but essentially non-committal statements about whether they will (or won’t!) support Stephen Harper’s minority government. They speculate about the possibility of an election, but it’s the equivalent of a nauseating phone call that just won’t end (“You hang up first!” “No, you hang up!”)

There will be an election, or there won’t. We’re watching and waiting. Just like the people at Ipsos-Reid and Harris-Decima.

The New Democratic Party convenes today in Halifax for its federal convention, and one of the hottest questions is whether the party will drop the “New” from its name. Sure, there’s a bunch of boring old policy meetings and stuff, to, you know, lay out a vision for the country and junk, but there’s something irresistible about the razzle-dazzle of a rebranding. Nick Taylor-Vaisey jumped on this story weeks ago, way before the mainstream media caught on, but now everyone’s got an opinion.

Anyway, the reason I’m filing this under our cheery Friday FTW section is that it actually has shoved Canadian progressive politics into the spotlight again, which is crucial. (I’ve reposted James Laxer’s important and controversial This cover story from last year on the future of the NDP, just to stoke the fires a little more.) The prospect of a name change has fostered some important talk in progressive circles about what exactly we want from a left political party: do we want uncompromising, principled ideological stances, regardless of the electoral outcome? Is it actually important to pursue power? Are these goals mutually incompatible? Have we been seduced by the success of the Obama electoral machine and just want to grab some of that excitement for ourselves in Canada? I don’t know, but I’m sure glad we’re talking about it.

The nice thing here is that there have been all kinds of useful, necessary questions asked, and the stakes are actually pretty low at this point. Judging by a hilarious poll commissioned by the Canadian Press and released yesterday, it really doesn’t matter:

Of about 1,000 Canadians surveyed, about one-third each believe the name change is a good idea, a bad idea, or just don’t give a shit. Practically no votes ride on the decision; if there’s a name change, lefties aren’t going to flee the party, and righties aren’t going to flock to it. In other words, maybe we can get the whole name-change thing out of the way, whatever the decision is, and talk about the truly important issues.