If you aren’t confused by the recent polls on Canadian federal politics – with the first Gomery report on the Liberal sponsorship scandal due this coming Tuesday, November 1 – you haven’t been paying attention.  On our current rough count of surveys noted in the media, since about mid-September the Liberals have been successively reported as enjoying 40, 33, 36, 37, 38, 38, and 34 % of decided voter support. The Conservatives have been as low as 24% and as high as 29%. The New Democrats have ranged from 15% to 20%. And the Bloc Quebecois has appeared all the way from more to less regionally dominant than it was in the last federal election.

Meanwhile, the continuing havoc wreaked by natural disasters in 2005 continues to draw attention to weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security in the USA. And the case of “Killer Karla” Homolka, still living secretly somewhere in Montreal, continues to play a strange counterpoint to the latest polls on just how stubborn the sovereigntist impulse remains in the homeland of the Bloc Quebecois. In Canada, as in other parts of the global village, it would seem, something has been blowing in the wind in 2005. But it may be sometime in 2006 before we really start to learn just what?

Confusing Canadian polls …

There has been a little intermittent evidence in the recent polls on Canadian federal politics that Paul Martin’s neo-Machiavellian Liberals just might be able to slip some kind of majority government through the next federal election, whenever it may come. But the much clearer message is that the at all serious prospects here are not very good at the moment. And if anything the prospects that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives could at least usurp the Liberals’ current status as the party with the single largest number of seats in parliament seem equally dim.

WHAT THE POLLSTERS ARE TELLING US IN THE FALL OF 2005

SOURCES: Decima Oc 17; Environics Oc 16; Strategic Counsel Oc 14; Ipsos-Reid Se 29; Decima Se 26; Praxicus Se 23; Leger Se 11; Ipsos-Reid Au 18; Ipsos-Reid Ju 23; Elections Canada.

If you average all the polls reported here for June-October 2005 (by calculating arithmetic means), and compare these poll averages with the actual June 2004 results, both the Liberals and the Conservatives have lost small amounts of support since the last election, and both the New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois have gained small amounts. On balance and at the margin, one might say, voters have been mildly annoyed by both main parties, and are showing their annoyance by leaning gently towards the protest parties. [Nine-poll average (six-poll for BQ): Lib = 36.3 (36); Cons = 27.2 (27); NDP = 17.4 (17); BQ* = 12.5 (13)].

The most this would seem to suggest about change wrought by the next election is a somewhat weaker Liberal minority government, that might nonetheless count on a clear majority in parliament in combination with somewhat stronger New Democrats. Any change scenario beyond this would seem to depend on something new that gives the pot a more vigorous stir. At the moment the best candidate may or may not still be the first Gomery report on the sponsorship scandal, still due on Tuesday, November 1.

Meanwhile, raw percentages can be deceptive in some respects. A look back at the absolute numbers of votes won by each party at the last election in June 2004 at least casts a little different light on some of the underlying problems in Canadian federal politics today. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, e.g., actually won more than twice as many votes in Ontario as they did in Alberta. Very close to 40% of the Conservative vote came from Ontario in 2004 – which is somewhat better than Ontario’s share of the underlying Canada-wide population. Harper’s problem is not just that he has to do well enough in Canada’s most populous province (where he was born and raised). He has already done that.

2004 ELECTION RESULTS IN ABSOLUTE NUMBERS OF VOTES CAST

SOURCE: Elections Canada.

Low Homeland Security morale in the USA

According to the Disaster Resource Guide in the United States: “The Department of Homeland Security is the agency responsible for protecting us against terrorism and helping us respond to natural disasters. But a new survey … at the Department suggests employees are suffering from very low morale.”

According to David E. Rosenbaum at the New York Times, “the survey by an outside research organization found that only 12 percent of the 10,000 employees surveyed said they felt strongly that they were encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing things ‘… Similarly, only three percent felt they were confident personnel decisions were based on merit’ … and just four percent were sure that creativity and innovation are rewarded.'”

Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told Rosenbaum that the survey “shows there is something fundamentally wrong at the organization.” But according to Homeland Security spokesperson Russ Knocke, “the morale problems” are just “a result of the fact that the formation of the DHS was a merger of 22 agencies, a start-up all at once.'”

In the end you still have to wonder why anyone with real experience in the field thought that “a merger of 22 agencies” into such an unprecedented bureaucratic behemoth as the Department of Homeland Security ever made sense in the first place? (Especially when one of the merged organizations was the once increasingly effective Federal Emergency Management Agency of James Lee Witt, under the Clinton administration.)

Whatever else, 2005 seems to be showing clearly enough that creating massively centralized public organizations is just not a good way of responding to natural disasters. (As James Lee Witt used to say, and at least actually try to do, the key to an effective federal role in disaster mitigation lies in inspiring, supporting, and helping to build local disaster management organizations, in both the public and private sectors – before disasters take place.)

You also have to wonder whether the continuing bureaucratic behemoth at the Department of Homeland Security can be any more effective in the fight against terrorism than it has proven to be in the fight against natural disasters? Something no doubt had to be done in the wake of 9/11. But why it had to be something that looked quite as much like the kind of thing the now happily defunct USSR used to do remains one of the great mysteries of recent US history.

The Case of Killer Karla carries on …

According to the latest report from CBC News, Canada’s most famous convicted murderess Karla Homolka, now legally at large somewhere in Montreal, “will find out by the end of November whether her release conditions will be eased to let her move about more freely.”

So said “a Quebec judge after hearing an appeal by her lawyers … The laywers appeared before Superior Court Justice James Brunton in Montreal on Monday [24 October], asking him to loosen restrictions imposed in June by another judge who thought Homolka might re-offend … The judge, who also heard arguments against any change in the restrictions imposed shortly before Homolka’s release, said he would make a decision by Nov. 30.”

Among those arguing against any change in the restrictions imposed earlier were the families of the two Ontario teenage girls Homolka and her husband Paul Bernardo sexually abused and then gruesomely murdered in the early 1990s (along with Homolka’s own younger sister). Tim Danson, the lawyer for the families, said that they feel “they have a responsibility to do everything within their power to make sure what happened to them does not happen to any other Canadian.”

Meanwhile, the CBC report concludes, Quebec police “have now finished an investigation into allegations that Homolka breached her release conditions while working in a hardware store” in Montreal this summer. A “spokesperson with the Crown prosecutor’s office in Longueuil, Que. said on Friday that officials have not yet decided whether to lay charges.”

The Case of Killer Karla continues to intrigue the public at large, in both Canada and the United States, for various good and bad reasons. They of course include the salacious details of the murders she and Paul Bernardo committed (and that she managed to get such a light sentence for, by agreeing to testify against Bernardo, at least once thought to be the true mastermind and initiator of the heinous crimes involved). But they also include the disturbing if also beguiling cleverness of Ms. Homolka’s own twisted criminal personality.

One side of this cleverness with a few odd political overtones turns around how Homolka has used her ultimate detention in a Canadian federal jail in Quebec to remake her original Ontario anglophone suburban personality into some kind of born-again Quebec sovereigntist, who assiduously spoke only French in a TV interview a few months ago.

It may also be that Killer Karla’s decision to remake her life in what she apparently sees as the already separate country of Quebec at least keeps her away from the local Ontario scene, where she would most disturb her victims’ surviving families. But all this is still just one more bizarre feature of an already bizarre story that would probably be best forgotten in the very end.

One way or another, the world will not be forgetting Killer Karla quite yet. Her victims’ families have also now decided that they will not continue to fight the Canadian release of Karla – “the controversial US-made film … which stars US actress Laura Prepon from TV’s That ’70s Show in the title role.” (And why Laura Prepon would even want to play Karla Homolka in a movie is just yet another bizarre feature of an already bizarre story – from the standpoint of anyone who was living in Ontario when Ms. Homolka’s crimes first hit the news. Karla certainly does not deserve her current celebrity, to say nothing of anyone’s sympathy for her present plight.)