Thank you for your support everyone.  After 10 days of hard work, my contest entry video is up and running at the CBC website.

Please check out my platform and, if you think I’ve what it takes, please comment on my video.  The more comments and more *stars (5 is best) the more votes I get.  It turns out they’re counting the votes as part of the contest (Democracy is a popularity contest afterall).

Comments must be made on the CBC website. Here’s the link: www.cbc.ca/nextprimeminister/candidates/michaelcrook.html

Thank you to everyone who has already commented. I’m really humbled by the support.  With your help I’ve got a real chance of winning!

Christina thinks I should enter this contest.  It’s a lot of work and I don’t have a lot of time to put my entry together and if I enter, I’ll definately be needing some help from friends. 

Please, if you’re willing to lend a hand (it could be as simple as sending some e-mails on my behalf), please let me know in the comments or send me an e-mail.  It will help me decide whether I can enter the contest.

I’m going to decide for sure on Monday.

From Rod Dreher:

Barack Obama has suspended his campaign to rush to Hawaii to be at the bedside of his ailing 86-year-old grandmother. She pretty much raised him. If it is God’s will that Obama is to become the next US president, I pray that He preserves Madelyn Dunham at least long enough to see that happen. It would be so terribly sad if she passed away at this moment. If you will, please pray for her health and recovery, no matter how you feel about Obama’s candidacy.

I could not agree more.

“I’ve always been a friend of Canada, it’s something very constant in my political life. … If anyone tries to tell me that the world today needs an additional division, then they don’t have the same read of the world as me,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “I don’t know why a fraternal, familial love of Quebec would have to be nourished through defiance toward Canada.” (link)

The quote comes from the current President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.  It is not exactly good news to the continued movement for an independent Quebec.  Between this, the sudden silence of the Bloc on sovereignty throughout the election campaign, and the decline in Bloc seats in the face of stronger Liberal and Conservative performances, Gilles Duceppe had a rough go of things last week.

We’ve come a long way from Charles de Gualle’s 1967 “Vive le Quebec libre” speech.

I spent my week in Ottawa and got to chat with some new friends from Gatineau trying to understand the current state of separatism in Quebec.  I’ve concluded I don’t know anything meaningful about how Quebeckers think.

I have found myself thinking quite a bit about Scot Mcknight’s latest post on politics this week.  The election night results are in (disappointing), and the speculation about Dion’s supposedly inevitable resignation has begun in earnest (also disappointing by the way).  As I mentioned before the election, my feelings about the election are spurring me back into greater political involvement.

However, the world will not end on account of who wins elections. The fact is that no politician, no matter how grand and compelling his (or her) vision may be, will usher in an era of universal peace and prosperity where human suffering has been abolished.

Scott sums this up well, writing about the upcoming election in America:

Somewhere between 6pm and 8pm, Central Time, on November 4th, 2008, the eschatology of American evangelicals will become clear. If John McCain wins and the evangelical becomes delirious or confident that the Golden Days are about to arrive, that evangelical has an eschatology of politics. Or, alternatively, if Barack Obama wins and the evangelical becomes delirious or confident that the Golden Days are about to arrive, that evangelical too has an eschatology of politics. Or, we could turn each around, if a more Democrat oriented evangelical becomes depressed and hopeless because McCain wins, or if a Republican oriented evangelical becomes depressed or hopeless because Obama wins, those evangelicals are caught in an empire-shaped eschatology of politics.

Where is our hope? To be sure, I hope our country solves its international conflicts and I hope we resolve poverty and dissolve our educational problems and racism. But where does my hope turn when I think of war or poverty or education or racism? Does it focus on November 4? Does it gain its energy from thinking that if we get the right candidate elected our problems will be dissolved? If so, I submit that our eschatology has become empire-shaped, Constantinian, and political. And it doesn’t matter to me if it is a right-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Republican wins, or a left-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Democrat wins. Each has a misguided eschatology.

To be faithful to God entails that we must be faithful to him in politics, as in all areas of life.  However,  being faithful to God also entails that we not misplace our faith - investing it in a party or a politician or a particular policy reform.  Instead the horizons of our hope need be circumscribed by the doctrines of the fall and of human finitude; if we get the limits right on our hope in political life, it will help us to remain unbounded by foolish limits to our faith in God.

When this post goes online, I’ll be on a plane traveling from Vancouver to Ottawa. I thought I’d try my hat at the whole election prediction thing.

Conservatives: 135 seats
Liberals: 80 seats
NDP: 35 seats
Bloc: 60 seats
Green: 0 seats (I’m sorry Elizabeth)

I’m not trying to be particularly precise. Everything is rounded to the nearest 5 seats and I figure everything is +- 5 seats anyways.

Anyone else have a prediction?

UPDATE: I got an e-mail from a friend suggesting 162 CPC / 60 Liberals

UPDATE: Results

CPC: 143 (+8)
Liberals: 76 (-4)
NDP: 37 (+2)
Bloc: 50 (-10)
IND: 2 (+2)

So I was within 5 on the Liberals and the NDP. My bet that the Liberal and Conservatives would lose ground in Quebec never materialized. Instead, my failure to anticipate the Conservative breakthrough in the 906 area code made up the difference for the Conservative numbers.

Total variance (to nearest 5): 25 seats (8% off)

This morning I was up early to go vote before taking a plane to Ottawa for the rest of the week. I want to share with you what I was thinking about when I marked an X on the ballot.

To start, Christina and I were reading the bible together on Sunday night and these verses lodged themselves in my head:

The LORD takes his place in court;
he rises to judge the people.

The LORD enters into judgment
against the elders and leaders of his people:
“It is you who have ruined my vineyard;
the plunder from the poor is in your houses.

What do you mean by crushing my people
and grinding the faces of the poor?”
declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.
(Isaiah 3:13-15)

Then on Monday morning, a good friend of mine, who works on behalf of marginalized women and families who are victims of the sex industry and global slave trade sent out an e-mail to those of us who are following her work. She doesn’t really have high hopes for this election making a difference, but she can imagine change.  I asked her permission to share this on the blog:

I hope you all have had or will be having your fill of turkey this long weekend and were able to spend time with loved ones.

I am writing this because tomorrow is the day we Canadians fulfill our democratic right and vote. I have never been one who is big on politics, in all honesty coming from and now working with marginalized people groups I have never found any government or change thereof has ever made a significant difference(well except for Gordon Campbell who decimated social and women’s program’s). In fact I will go so far as to say that I believe until governments start to see social programs as a honour to provide and that we are morally responsible to take care of our least and need to stop viewing them as a drain, I am not sure I will have anything that great to say about government.

Can we all daydream with me for a minute and imagine what our country could look like if we took care of the poor, the widows and the orphans out of our first fruits instead of trying to scrape some programs together and patting ourselves on the back for for not letting them starve but providing little else. What would our country look like if we were to invest in our social programs and build stronger families, helped the single mom to get a head instead of always pointing the finger at her and telling her what she is doing wrong, make sure children with disabilities were seen for their potential not for being a financial drain the examples can go on.

In this last week alone I have had to find someone a detox bed and I could not (and I have connections!) she is out there using again because she could not wait any longer. I assisted some people to help a mom and 5 kids leave a highly abusive husband only to be told she had to many kids we cannot help her here by one agency and another solution posed was perhaps let’s put the kids in foster care (no guarantee they will stay together as a sibling group) and the mom can go to a safe house. Why would we want to take a mother’s kids away from her for leaving an abusive situation?

So with these things in mind, I’ll be casting a ballot knowing that there is not a party that doesn’t fall short of these standards.  This election has renewed my sense of the need to do more than vote. I’m convinced again of the necessity of trying to shape the system between elections rather than simply choosing from among a bunch of bad options every couple of years.

Perhaps a few of you might be willing to join me?

As I was watching Jean Chretien give a speech in a Liberal rally in Brampton this past Friday, I couldn’t help but hear Joni Mitchell play in my head: “ Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone?”

Warren Kinsella has even offered himself back to the Liberal cause in Ottawa.

Somehow I can’t help but feel that Mr. Harper is going to have a real hard time pushing himself across that goal line to majority status.  As for me? I can’t wait to get back to rebuilding the Liberal party.  I can’t help but feel like my time on the bench is coming to an end

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen posts the following in the category of ”too simple to be true”

We need a new banking system. A new banking system takes years to build. We will be in an economic downturn for years and because this crisis is global it will not be better than Japan in the 1990s. It is hard to build a new banking system through the current, old, nearly insolvent banking system. Maybe some smart person has a plan to build a new banking system through the old system, while avoiding toxic contamination through the problems of low-solvency institutions. That smart person remains silent. I have not given up hope. The Great Depression had bank failures, we have bank zombies.

Replying in the comments, ramster suggest the following solution to what ails the global financial system:

How about this. Each of the 5 Canadian big banks is assigned (i.e. given) one or more of the most struggling banks worldwide. They’re also given a capital infusion from the G8 and others of a few trillion $$$ in order to absorb all the garbage on the books. Then they’re forced at gunpoint (metaphorically of course) by the govt. of Canada to get global commercial credit flowing again. Canada does end up running all of world finance and Toronto becomes THE global financial center but that seems only fair since we apparently are the only ones who weren’t stupid enough to get into this mess in the first place.

Canadian banks are apparently in the best shape in the world.  Our banking system is strong enough that Washington is now asking the big 5 Canadian banks to start buying up the failing institutions south of the border.  This is because Canadian banks are highly regulated.  The soundness of our banks comes largely from the Canadian government wisely refusing to follow suit on the deregulation that was conventional wisdom in the late 90s.

Any thoughts?

As a follow-up to last week’s post on the Prime Minister, here’s a link to an extensive (8,00+ words) article on Stephen Harper: whence he came and where he hopes to go.

(link)