British Columbia
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In support of BC-STV and electoral reform
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 12 May 2009 | Tagged as: British Columbia, politics
Today is the day. Voters in British Columbia elect a provincial Legislative Assembly. I don’t hear many people who are happy about the choices on offer. You can vote for the candidate of major party #1 or #2, but you probably didn’t get a say in choosing either one from the pool of possible candidates. You don’t get a way to say “yes” to the party but “no” to the candidate, or vice versa. You can be pretty confident that, whichever is elected, they will go to Victoria with no particular incentive to stand up for your riding to their party leadership. They are more likely to stand up for their leadership against you. You can vote for the candidate of minor party #3 or #4, or an independent, with a sinking feeling that you are throwing away your vote — or worse yet, splitting your side of the vote so that the party you dislike the most walks away with victory.
Chances are, the number of seats elected won’t match the proportion of votes cast. Chances are, as many as 60% of voters will find out they have no-one in Victoria who got their votes and answers to them.
There are better ways to run a democracy than this. The improvement on offer now is called BC-STV. It will be easy for voters to use, and gives a way out of the problems with the current system. Today is the day when British Columbia voters can adopt it, in the Referendum on Electoral Reform being held today.
I support BC-STV. I hope that you will support it too — either by voting for it today, if you can, or by helping make a reform like BC-STV happen in your own jurisdiction.
Seeking listings for the BC Polyglot Blog Directory
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 19 Feb 2009 | Tagged as: British Columbia, language, multilingual
Do you know a blog which is by or for people in BC, and is in some language other than English? If so, submit it for the BC Polyglot Blog Directory!
I created this directory in honour of the 2009 Northern Voice conference, which starts tomorrow at UBC. I wanted to highlight all those minority-language bloggers in BC. In a little bit of searching I already have blogs in French, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. I fully expect to find blogs in simplified Chinese and Punjabi as well. After all, 18% of people BC use a language other than English at home, according to Statistics Canada and the 2006 census.
I’ve created the directory on my site, at http://jdlh.com/en/pr/bc_polyglot_blogs.html. See the Rules and Q&A there for more information. You can submit listings for the directory by leaving a comment on this post, or by sending a message using that website’s Contact form for Jim DeLaHunt. Please supply the name of the blog, the URL, the language(s) in which it publishes, where the blog is located, and what geography it addresses.
I look forward to seeing this baby grow!
CASARA BC, the missing recruiting page
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 23 Jul 2008 | Tagged as: British Columbia, aviation
One of my community service projects is volunteering with CASARA BC, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association in British Columbia. They are a great bunch of folks providing a very important service. But they are hidden in a Romulan cloaking device as far as the Web is concerned. When I tried to join them, I couldn’t find a single page that described the basics of who what where when how and why they are and do. So I’m writing it, and here it is. I hope this will be helpful to others, at least until CASARA BC gets an official recruiting page up.
Or until the one obscure BC Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA BC) page can be discovered by a straightforward search. (A sneakily search-engine friendly link to it is part of my contribution.)