As of my nomination last night, I'm now the Alberta NDP candidate for the provincial riding of Calgary-Egmont. It looks like I'm the first to be nominated in the riding, though from what I can see the Liberals have former separate school trustee Cathie Williams going through their nomination process. The Alberta Progressive Conservatives have a nomination meeting coming up on the 17th of November and it's a fight between Craig "Vote Tory or Leave" Chandler and Johnathan Denis. It will be interesting to see who wins that fight.

I've been thinking lately on ways to increase the generation of "green" power. Now one of the ways one can do this is to have the government legislate reverse metering. What's reverse metering? It is a way for individuals who produce their own power to put that power back on the grid and get paid for it. So for example, if I have a small wind turbine on my roof, when I'm not using the power it's generating, that power goes out onto the grid and I get a credit on my power bill for that power. Reverse metering gives an incentive for everyone to get into the electrical generation game.

For someone who doesn't want to re-open the death penalty debate, Stephen Harper is doing a pretty good job of re-opening it. First we have the Harper government reversing a decades old policy of asking for clemency for Canadian citizens under the death penalty abroad. Now we have the Harper government withdrawing Canadian co-sponsorship from a UN resolution on the abolition of capital punishment. I hate to break it to you Stephen, you've reopened the debate, one that even your own polling a vast majority of Canadians, including those in Alberta, don't want.

There's a bright comet in our nighttime sky at the moment. Comet 17P/Holmes is quite bright and easily visible without a telescope as a fuzzy object in the night time sky. So if you can get out of the city and take a look, there's a finder chart below for the next couple of nights (comet slowly move from night to night.) For those of you who can't get out of town, I've also thrown in the picture I took of the comet last night through my trusty telescope.

There's been a lot of electrons expended in the latest hit into far right field by the Harper Tories on the Canadian government no longer working for clemency for Canadian citizens abroad. The way I see it it speaks to two things: 1 - why the Harper Tories are stalled in the polls; and 2 - them revealing some of their so-called hidden neo-con and so-con agenda.

The Conservative Party of Canada really doesn't like the grass roots. In their time in office, they've done nothing but over-ride their local constituency associations, either protecting odious candidates, parachuting in others in snap nomination meetings and now two more candidates nominated by local constituency associations have been rejected by party central. This fresh on the heels of another override of a constituency association. It makes one wonder why the party even bothers having local riding associations.

Ok, Ok, it's been a while since I've blogged, but it's been busy here at Castle Evil. Between work, military and party commitments, there just hasn't been much time to do any blogging. So now that I have a few minutes here we go.

I've watched with some interest the banter back and forth over the financial update of the Harper government. It seems that with the throne speech not gaining the Tories any traction in the polls, a mass of tax cuts is in order. So we have the Tories re-instating the low income tax cuts the Liberals put in place that the Tories subsequently canceled as well as further tax cuts for non-poor Candians. It's a shame that the Tories couldn't have cut the taxes for the people who need it the most, the poor, from the start. I suspect they've discovered that a "screw the poor" platform wasn't getting them votes in truckloads.

With the upcoming referendum on a form of PR (specifically MMP) happening in Ontario, there's been much in the blogosphere about the various merits and flaws with PR and the MPP system specifically. This has me thinking about how hard it will be to change the current first past the post (FPTP) system we use. In fact it will likely be neigh impossible to make such a change, baring a party in power doing the change by legislative fiat.

With all the bluster going around on both sides of the political spectrum about the upcoming Throne Speech, it is important that we stop for a moment and look at what would actually be a good tactic for the opposition at this time. To recap the situation, we have Harper threatening the opposition over the Throne Speech basically demanding that they let him govern as a majority or force an election. The opposition parties are likely to humour him and force an election over the Throne Speech. This would be a tactical mistake.

Two incidents in the past couple of weeks have me thinking as to what the role of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan are. Is the role that of reconstruction or of occupation. This would then lead to further debate as to if our troops should be over there in the role that they are actually fulfilling, as opposed to the role that the government claims they are doing, or at least it should.