The Langleys Lately

Well in case you happen to live and Canada and you have missed the news, Canada’s parliament is having a time out called by the Governor General at the request of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The situation was initiated by the opposition response to a Conservative economic update.  The uproar today is that the update contained no commitment to an economic stimulus package.  That in itself would not likely have caused the uprising we witnessed, rather it was another position taken by the government; one that would see the end of public funding for political parties.  All parties with official party status, receive this funding but the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois depend very heavily on this funding to run their operations and campaigns.  Evidently, we Canadians like to reward the lazy!  Faced with either having to work for their money, or going bankrupt, the opposition parties decided to band together against the minority government to form a replacement coalition.  This coalition would led by Liberal leader Stephan Dion, the most unpopular political leader in Canada.  The government response to this unexpected opposition threat was to remove the offending party funding stance and allow the opposition to keep their money.  However, even though the real offense had been taken off the table, the coalition needed to press the issue.  By aligning itself with the socialist NDP and the separatist Bloc, the Liberals have done something that should be perceived as unthinkable and repulsive to any federalist Canadian who would like to see this country governed with any semblance of responsibility.  The newly formed coalition needed to stay together and claim it had lost confidence in the government for not offering to dump billions of dollars of economic stimulus to the Canadian economy.  If the minority Conservatives were to find themselves in a position to call a snap election, it would likely result in a Conservative majority due to a voter revolt against the Liberals for forging a formal alliance with the NDP and separatist Bloc.

Now that the timeout has been called, many Liberals are looking to push their leader out the door before Christmas and try to get a new leader installed before Parliament resumes, evidently they are very nervous that their grossly unpopular leader may lead them to oblivion rather than power.

Below is the two steps that I believe that the Conservative could have taken to secure themselves as the governing party for many years to come.  For all  those card carrying Conservatives out there, you may be pleased that the party is not heeding my advice as it would be a rough ride for the Conservative party and likely bad for the Canadian economy.

First, I believe it was a mistake to take the public funding issue off of the table.  I know that the Prime Minister was offering an olive branch and hoping that the opposition would be willing to resume working with the government but from my view, once I saw how harsh a position the opposition took on this issue I believed that they would continue on in their attempt to take control of the government.  Now it will be more difficult for the Conservatives to convince Canadians that the real reason this coalition wants to take over is to preserve their party funding.

Second, assuming the first step was followed, I believe it would be a mistake to prorogue parliament.  If this coalition did indeed take power it could very well cause Stephen Harper to resign as leader. The coalition may still go ahead and take power when parliament resumes in the new year!  I know the Prime Minister is very popular within the Conservative party membership so this would be a blow.  However, does anybody believe that Stephan Dion could successfully lead this coalition through a Liberal convention?  Even if he did, very unlikely the  coalition staying together long after.  A coalition of Liberals and NDP, backed by separatists for the purpose of maintaining their public party funding would be incredibly unpopular and would fracture the very base of the Liberal party to an extent that it may take a decade to repair.

The above two steps would be very risky for the Conservatives to take, therefore very un-Conservative.  As collateral damage of such strategy, there is a strong chance that the Conservatives would have lost their leader which would be a bitter pill for the party.  However had they taken those two steps, they likely would have enabled the Liberal party to self inflict severe and long term damage by causing them to govern at a time, and under conditions where they simply cannot.

In Alberta, we have a new premier. His name is Ed Stelmach and he came to power riding high on a platform of ethics, openness, and honesty.

Keep that statement in mind as you imagine yourself in the following scenario:

You have ambitions, convictions, desires or whatever other reasons to serve in public office, you choose a party you wish to represent based on the best match you have with your personal ideology. You purchase a membership to that party, organize a campaign and become a candidate to represent a riding for your party. After door knocking, campaigning, generating new memberships and membership revenue for the party, election day arrives and you win by capturing a landslide majority in the nomination vote. Congratulations, now you figure that the next step is to win the riding in the next general election! That is where you are wrong!

Now suppose, that the newly elected premier is more than happy to have you run as a candidate and generate new memberships along with their dues, as long as the only acceptable outcome is that you lose. That is only one example, but the most recent one where our new Premier has demonstrated his moral deficit.

Every citizen of Alberta and in particular every member of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party should look at this with a great deal of disgust! It is the party’s right to ensure that whatever individual represent the party as a candidate embrace the virutes of the party. But to permit someone that they clearly had no intention of allowing into their caucus to participate in the campaign for nomination is a disgrace, even more so when that individual wins a landslide victory in a process that the paid membership believed was a democratic process.

In this particular case, Ed Stelmach is benefiting from the way the media is spinning this issue surrounding his decision not to allow Mr. Chandler to run as a member of Alberta’s Conservative Party. I personally have very little knowledge of the core issue the Premier is using to justify his decision, but that issue is a moot point! On one hand, Mr. Stelmach would love to endear himself to the population profile represented by Mr. Chandler by claiming a few key buzz words such as ethics, openness, and honesty. There are a lot of votes in Alberta that are cast from people who hold to the values that Mr. Chandler proclaimed in his campaign. Mr. Stelmach would be delighted to include these people as far as getting their memberships and membership dues as long as they don’t have a real voice in the party. Mr. Stelmach has a word for that, he calls it democracy, I have a word for that too, and it’s called hypocrisy!

The lesson that we need to learn from this, is that Alberta is not the democracy that we think it is, and that its current leadership has completely lost touch with the party rank and file as well as general population. A grass roots movement, with real leadership (not the reactionism that we see now) is the best hope for Alberta.

Before ending this article, I suppose I could explore one other possibility that could explain how this scenario has played out. It could be that the Progressive Conservative Party was completely unaware of what platform Mr. Chandler represented when he put his name forward for nomination. In that case, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party would be showing some pretty severe incompetence to allow Mr. Chander to venture so far through the process prior to disallowing him.

So the question we must ask ourselves is this: Is the leadership of Alberta’s ruling party unethical, dishonest, and heavy handed or merely incompetent, or perhaps even both? What do you hope the answer to be?

I have noticed over the last couple of days, stories cropping up over the technology news sites about Wi-LAN launching lawsuits against a number of companies selling consumer wireless networking products. Why is this something worth blogging about? It’s the subtle ways the stories are being written, then the way the typical respondents post their comments. It is… well… typical. It reinforces my belief that the masses of individuals, especially those who troll the technology web sites are utterly predictable and easily manipulated.
Manipulated you say?
Indeed. These stories talk about Wi-LAN as a technology Intellectual Property, or IP company. IP may be all that is left of Wi-LAN, I don’t know what their R&D efforts are these days, but it really doesn’t matter. At one time they used to be a player in the R&D of wireless networking equipment, then supplier of internet service provider (ISP) grade wireless access gear. Rural broadband comes to mind. They survived the dot com crash but are a skeleton of what they once were, now they are self described as a technology licensing company.
How is describing Wi-LAN as an IP firm manipulating? Simple. Let’s start with the Rambus case study.
Anybody familiar with Rambus knows that they ultimately failed in their quest to essentially own the IP surrounding the random access memory (RAM) market, and the masses of internet posters, myself included, rejoice. Rambus, used to be a member of a standards organization called JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council). Defendants allege that while Rambus was a member of JEDEC, they participated in the definition of future memory standards and technology, for which they either owned patents for, or were writing patents for. Several years later they demanded license fees from memory manufacturers. It was a long and bitter battle, eventually their quest ended in defeat by hand of the courts. For years Rambus was the height of evil in the eyes of community posting their comments to technology forums and web sites. That is the executive overview of how Rambus became a symbol of evil to an easily identified community, their other practices and strategies are not the topic of this article but also leave a bad taste.
Next let’s consider another company described in the technology news as an IP company. This company is named NTP. NTP claimed to own patents being used by a company called Research In Motion(RIM), the makers of Blackberry. I believe NTP really was an IP company by definition. Their only business ventures were conducted by legal staff. They owned five patents that were all ultimately rejected by the US patent office after they were contested, but they stood long enough to extract over 600 million USD from RIM. If you want to research a craziness of patent law, this is a great place to start. While this story was hot in the technology news market, just mention the word NTP in the same sentence as anything else, and you could manipulate the masses of comments and opinions to follow.
The last example I will identify is the case of SCO Unix. SCO was once a reputable flavor of Unix, but their popularity instantly disappeared when they launched a series of lawsuits against other companies who had their own version of Unix, as well as the open source community. Their argument, was that these other Unixes violated their rightful copyright and ownership of Unix. In the end, it is unknown whether or not there is any copyright violation, but what SCO claimed to own, the courts found that the real owner was Novell, and Novell has stated that they have no interest in pursuing this claim. Simply suing other Unixes for copyright infringement is no big deal in my opinion, but targeting the open source community and the masses of Linux users was what ultimately brought them into the company of Rambus and NTP. Grim smiles are now exposed by those who follow these stories in the technology news sites today, as SCOs failure has led them to bankruptcy.
Back to Wi-LAN, I have no idea whether Wi-LAN is making a legitimate claim for patent infringement, and it really doesn’t matter. Simply stating in the technology news stories that an IP company named Wi-LAN is suing companies for patent infringement puts them in the company of Rambus, NTP, and SCO. People who have never heard the name Wi-LAN instantly think of them as evil without knowing anything about them or their claim. Wi-LAN is guilty, their name is forever smeared in the opinion of those who follow technology new.  If they do not win this case, they are utterly doomed, no-one would dare do business with a company who has had their name and reputation destroyed.

A civic election is on the horizon in Calgary, where the incumbent mayor is a shoe-in to win because none of his opponents have a name that will be recognized at the ballot box, and a complacent population that could not be bothered to do it’s homework. Mayor Dave Bronconier won his first term in 2001 when the previous Mayor decided to retire. With three terms on city council, a failed attempt to win a federal seat in Ottawa, and a boatload of campaign donations behind him, Mr. Bronconier managed to squeak out a win against his nearest competitor by the narrowest of margins, mostly because people recognized his name. His campaign message was extremely well crafted politically, yet it contained no substance whatsoever. He literally bought (or his contributors bought) his way into the mayors office. I remember watching an all candidate town hall question period during the 2001 campaign and Mr. Bronconier wisely chose not to show up. Why risk being cornered on an issue but some unknown candidate?

His slogans at the time read something like this (though not literally):

I’m Dave Bronconier, and I’m for (insert some fluffy comment here like better transportation, better health care, or fuzzy kittens) … and you!

It made me think that all the naive Calgarians were saying

Wow! I’m second on his list, what a nice guy! I should vote for him!

Even more remarkable is that Mr. Bronconier is a Liberal in a conservative stronghold city. He ran for the federal Liberal party and lost by a landslide in Calgary West to his Reform Party opponent. However, the media in Calgary loves him so much that they nickname him Bronco, he is constantly giving them a story. Now largely because of the media, not only does he have a known name, but he has a known alias. What do you think that is worth in politics? Bronco’s bargaining style is to make hostile statements in the eagerly awaiting media to attempt bully other levels of government into giving into his demands. It usually ends up with our Mayor spewing insults to his Provincial counterparts while those he spews at say very little, maybe because it would just end up in childish circular insults. It is utterly remarkable that he succeeds but with no coordinated opposition, there seems to be no way to stop him. Makes me wonder what the city counselors are doing on the sideline? And what about Calgary’s mostly conservative citizens? The economy in this city is just too good and it’s citizens are just not annoyed enough at this behavior to take notice of any alternative.

It leaves me with this question: How would an honest, qualified, and hard working individual raise the kind of money required to put their name on par with the mayor and generate any sort of interest? Maybe some very wealthy individual could spend their own money to put their name out there, but chances are any honest person with enough money of their own is too busy with their business ventures.

As it is, I think Mr. Bronconier has “The Name“!

Sean