Month: January 2014

Tuesday night there were two provincial by-elections in the “Tory Blue” Manitoba ridings of Morris and Arthur-Virden. The Progressive Conservative candidates crushed all competition, receiving more votes than all their competitors combined, both received over 50% of the vote. The night was pretty much as expected as far as the PCs go.

The story of the night seems to be the weakness of the NDP vote which collapsed, and the Liberals who increased their overall percentage.

This led to the following on Twitter:

Now both tweets say basically the same thing. However, the tweet from Drew Caldwell, a sitting NDP MLA reads like a warning not to vote Liberal if you do not want a Progressive Conservative government. It seems like less of a comment on the by-election, PCs were winning those ridings regardless, and more of a comment or even warning regarding the next general election.

This brings me back a gain to a topic I raised during the federal by-election in Brandon Souris, our first past the post system being broken. Here is a great example of that.

In Manitoba you have three centrist parties. The NDP are centre-left, the PCs are centre-right, and what exists of the liberals I suppose would be centre-centre (is that a term?). The two main parties, the NDP and PCs are fairly close in support a lot of the time. Mr. Caldwell’s point actually is in many respects true.

And it ends up being completely unfair to the Liberals.

If you look at the last number of years in Manitoba, it could be argued that the best potential premier of the province was the (former) leader of the Liberal Party, Dr. Jon Gerrard. The new Liberal leader, Rana Bokhari, seems to come with some stellar qualifications too. However, with the battle seen as between two alternatives, potential Liberal voters would most likely decide to vote strategically for one of the other parties.

This is another reason we need to reform our voting laws. If we were to go to a preferential ballot in Manitoba, then those who would vote Liberal could show that support with their first choice and then select their favourite of the main two parties for their second choice. It lets the third party show that it actually has some support, which I suspect is there, but gets lost in the strategies of voting day. If people start seeing the Liberals as having a little more support, they become more of a contender. More choice is good for democracy.

This is actually a time where we could get this done in Manitoba. My suspicion is that preferential ballot might actually be good for the NDP in a couple ridings going into the next general election, as I suspect more Liberals would go NDP as second choice over the PCs. In ridings like Morris and Arthur-Virden, it wouldn’t affect the outcome at all because of the strong first-choice showings of the Progressive Conservatives.

It may be an interesting experiment going into the next general election, and it may work in the NDP’s favour to try it.

Lastly, my friend Rob pointed out something else about Mr. Caldwell’s statement.

Does that mean that in the federal by-election in November, did drift towards the NDP give the Conservatives a win over the Liberal candidate? After all, had just a portion of NDP voters went Liberal, Brandon-Souris would have a Liberal MP.

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”
– Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1967

This September will mark the 10 year anniversary of equal marriage in Manitoba. While our neighbours to the south still grapple with the question of gay marriage, Canada has pretty much finished with the question, and we have moved on. The sky didn’t fall down, the sun came up, and heterosexual people didn’t start divorcing en-masse to join in holy matrimony with a new same-sex partner. Canada pretty much stayed the same after 2004 and 2005; we went from the status-quo to the status-quo + equal marriage.

I however look back and wonder if we even looked at the right question. After years of thought, and an awakening about my true feelings when it comes to religion, it occurs to me that perhaps the governments of the day, and of today, have the wrong approach on this topic. Why is the government involved in marriage at all? Why did governments feel that it was their prerogative to define marriage in the first place?

Historically marriage has been a religious institution, some would argue a cultural institution, but for the most part it has its roots firmly in religion. It is in many religions, and many religions practice it in different ways. It is really a religious entity.

Now, at first glance, it may seem that I am giving credence to those who would say that their religion should have some say about how we write marriage laws in this country, this is however not the case. What I am saying is that we should not have marriage laws at all.

The government should get out of the marriage business.

Sometimes, it has been said, the obvious solution is staring you in the face. This is one of those cases. Early on in the equal marriage debate we had the idea of same-sex couples having a domestic partnership, basically marriage in practice, but not in name. I’m not sure if that was the legal term, but I’m no lawyer so forgive me, please! It was not fair, it was discriminatory, and it was not a tenable solution. It did however provide us with an alternative, in my mind a much better alternative that we did not take.

The government should have taken the opportunity to get out of the marriage business altogether. Instead of moving forward and extending marriage to same-sex couples, we should have taken the opportunity to define a clear cut separation between church and state. We should have dropped marriage as a government recognized institution in Canada.

All marriages should have become legally recognized as domestic partnerships.

This doesn’t actually mean that you wouldn’t be able to get married in Canada today, far from it. It would only mean that as far as the government was concerned, your religious practice, in this case marriage, would be of no consequence to them. The law would be blind to this religious practice.

How would this affect your taxes? It wouldn’t. You would still file joint taxes with your spouse, but as far as the government was concerned, you would check the box for “in domestic partnership”. How would this affect the validity of your marriage? It wouldn’t. That would be between you and your church. Why involve the government? If your church believes in same-sex marriages, then it performs them. If it doesn’t believe in it, then it doesn’t. No government involvement.

As an atheist it seems funny that I have to be involved in what is essentially a religious institution for my spouse and I to have the rights afforded to each other that we want to have. Yes, there is such a thing as registering a common-law relationship in Manitoba, but realistically it is not the same. Despite having had a civil marriage ceremony with a marriage commissioner, the institution itself is still very rooted in religion.

And because of that, we don’t actually want to be married anymore.

We’ve discussed it. There is no marital breakdown, we probably love, respect, and understand each other more than we ever have before. She is my best friend, and I am hers. We just don’t believe in the institution anymore. We enjoy the legal protections that marriage affords us when it comes to healthcare, property rights, and child rearing. We have a greater commitment than a common-law relationship, and we recognize that. We just do not want to call it marriage. It’s a loaded word and we don’t like it anymore.

So we’d like the government to get out of the marriage business.

And it’s not just a matter of our relationship.

We’ve seen a few couples’ marriages break up in the last few years and the fact that it takes at least a year to get un-married when there is only a waiting period of 24 hours to get married in the first place seems ludicrous. I understand that there are legal challenges when it comes to separation of assets, custody of minor children, and income support in instances where it is required. What I don’t understand is why these civil responsibilities get tied up with the religious institution of marriage. I’ve watched people remain married for years, as the monetary and custody battles ensue, to someone they despise. If we separated the legal from the religious, these people could be “divorced” in the eyes of their religion, if allowed by that religion, while the legal issues wind their way through court.

Marriage and divorce should be in the hands of religion. Domestic partnerships and their dissolution should be in the hands of the government and the courts. The two do not need to be entwined together. They are separate issues, despite many people’s belief that they are inexorably linked.

It is also my feeling that this is possibly the only solution that would put the matter to rest in the United States. The establishment clause in the Constitution prevents the government from passing laws that favour the establishment of one religion over others. Recognizing the Judaeo-Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman to me is a clear violation of that clause. The fact that the government recognizes marriage at all, in my mid, may be a violation of the clause. The American government especially, since its enshrined in the Constitution, should be blind when it comes to religious practices. This is clearly one of them.

The whole idea that the government needs to legislate people’s relationships seems more and more foreign to me as I get older. The government really has no business in the bedrooms (or churches) of the nation, just as true today as in 1967.

A private firm’s garbage truck ran into the Eighth Street Bridge yesterday. From a layperson’s perspective the damage looks horrible. Assiniboine Avenue goes under what appears to be the 1934 portion of the bridge. The support structure at this point is much lower than that of the 1968 portion. The street is split into two lanes under that portion of the bridge. It appears that the truck hit in the westbound lane.

Judge for yourself, but that looks like one very damaged bridge.

Now back to my thoughts on the future of the bridge itself. In a previous post I put forward my reasons for thinking that the city can do without the bridge as a traffic bridge, which when I look at the above images I tend to think that the current bridge may have just reached that state. I wouldn’t drive a car over that bridge today even if it wasn’t closed.

The thing I fear is this. A sudden closing of the bridge is not a good test of my claims. We were not prepared for this, and the Daly Overpass at Eighteenth Street has not been adjusted to this new reality. We do not have a bus route planned for this.

People are going to have delays and frustrations trying to get around during high traffic times on 18th Street, and their one conclusion, the wrong conclusion, is that we need the 8th Street Bridge.

We don’t.

What we need to do is get traffic from the west end off of 18th Street. It is really that simple. If we do something with the tracks on 26th Street and hook it up to Hilton Avenue then we lessen the traffic on 18th. If we lessen the traffic on 18th, then we get rid of the bottleneck on the Daly Overpass. If we get rid of the bottleneck on the Daly Overpass, then the 8th Street Bridge becomes unneeded as a traffic bridge. Do we add a fourth lane to the Daly Overpass. Perhaps, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the problem. However, if we do add a fourth lane that means a new bridge most likely, built by the province, not the city.

And we don’t spend twenty to thirty-four million dollars on a bridge we don’t need.

I fear that this accident is going to cost us more than we ever would have thought, because it will lead people to a conclusion that they should not come to.

I want to see an active transport bridge built there, not a traffic bridge. Even after yesterday it is the only fiscally responsible option.

One further point. What the hell were we doing letting traffic go under a bridge which we know was near end-of-life and which we knew could not take a hit? The fact that we had put up signs shows that we knew a truck hitting the bridge was a possibility. Assiniboine Avenue is not so busy there that we could not have closed it under the bridge. Hindsight is 20/20, but it now seems silly that traffic continued going under that bridge.