Thursday, February 08, 2007

Election Forecast

Hysteria about climate change has now firmly entrenched itself in the public mind. If the weather outside is a little warmer or colder than usual, instead of accepting it as part of nature's usual volatility, people are now terrified that it's a portent of disaster.

If not natural disaster, then political:

A whiff of spring election is in the air, and both the Liberals and Conservatives have caught the scent.

Conservative Party workers say subtle messages drifting from the Prime Minister's Office suggest the government wants to engineer its own demise in May to pave the way for a June vote.

The rank-and-file Tories worry that a long and very hot summer, especially one that brings drought and other severe weather events, could prompt Canadians to think even harder about the environment — and could give Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion more time to establish himself as its protector.

....

One Conservative campaign organizer in Ontario, who asked not to be identified, said his party would have liked to have been into an election earlier than June “but the Quebec election was in the way.” On the other hand, he said, delaying the election until the fall would give Mr. Dion time to work the summer barbecue circuit and allow the opposition to suggest that Mr. Harper is somehow responsible for whatever weather befalls Canada over the warm summer months.

“There are some weather predictions that say we are going to go through the summer from hell here, that it is going to be hotter than Hades,” he said. “And if that happens, following after a winter that has been unusually warm, then people are going to go nuts over the summer and say ‘look, we're choking on this stuff.'”


The unnamed organizer may have failed to notice from his centrally heated office that the mild, snowless winter predicted at the beginning of January has turned bitterly cold.

Who's to say what weather will come in spring or summer?

If the temperature or precipitation varies by even a fraction of a degree or millimetre from the statistical norm, the Liberals and the media will blame the Conservatives anyway.

We can't do anything about the weather, so let's keep it out of election timing calculations.

Source: Globe and Mail

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