Hora, in blog format

Prime Minster Stephen Harper officially requested our Governor General to dissolve parliament last Sunday, citing political deadlock in an economically-troubled time. Federal elections have been called for October 14, 2008 (right after Thanksgiving) and this is the first time I’ll be able to vote! I think I’m too excited about this, since Canadian politics are not the most influential in the world, but they will (obviously) impact my life here.

Coming into these elections there isn’t much I knew about Canadian politics, so this series of posts isn’t just to inform others about the issues but also to make sure I understand everything myself.

I’ll start this by talking about Canada’s Electoral System, which is a parliamentary system similar to Britain’s. There are three main bodies to the government: the Governor General (Queen Elizabeth II’s representative), the Senate (appointed by the Prime Minister), and the House of Commons (elected by us). Every MP (Member of Parliament) in the House of Commons represents a certain riding. During the election, every riding will have a certain number of candidates, who can run Independently or as part of a political party. To be elected from a riding, a candidate just needs to have the most votes, not neccessarily a majority, and the party with the most elected MPs becomes the Governing Party. The Prime Minister is the leader of the Governing Party.

What I find a little weird about all of this is that you don’t vote specifically for the Prime Minister, you vote for his party. What’s even weirder is that the candidates who didn’t win a riding are completely unrepresented. If for example in a particular riding the NDP candidate wins with 38% of the votes, and the Liberal candidate is second with 30% of the votes, wouldn’t it make sense if that was properly represented in the house? Anyway, that’s the way it is.

So when you go vote, vote for the candidate who belongs to the party whose leader you want to see being the Prime Minister.

As I was driving home from Andreea’s today, I thought about a cool photography project. As the title implies, I want to take ‘a’ picture every hour for twenty-four. It won’t just be one, it’ll be a whole bunch i imagine, but I’ll choose one from each hour. Then… I’m not sure what I’ll DO with the pictures, but it’ll be fun at least.

I imagine I’ll need to plan out a little, know at least a couple locations I wanna go to and take these pictures, to save time. And I’ll have to make sure I’ll have enough battery to last me for 24 hours, although I could always recharge one at home and come back later to grab it.

For now I’ll think of what I wanna shoot, or at least the area, and then I’ll take a day this summer and do it.

I finallly bought a Flickr Pro account, and I uploaded a bunch of pictures from Victoria! You can go to my gallery and see them (the CSS is kinda fucked up and therefore looks weird), or you can see them in all their full-size glory on my flickr page.

Thanks to Andy’s photoshop skills, even Shawn and Travis are in the picture!

I’m the sweaty guy on the top left.