OH, CANADA
- MICAH L. SIFRY
- October 19, 2015
- 5:10 pm
Canadian conservatives have a police hotline for “barbaric cultural practices,” and other election news from the north.
- About that other election: Canadians are voting today in national elections that could remove the ruling Conservative party from power. It’s only been an eleven-week campaign, which for Canadians is apparently too long, Ben Terris reports for the Washington Post. (If American national elections were that truncated, the whole political campaign/tech industry would probably go up in smoke.)
Here’s a backgrounder from Google Canada on the role the internet is playing in #elxn42 (that’s the hashtag you want to follow). Some interesting tidbits: 30 percent of Canadians say the internet is their primary information source for politics. A similar number are digital-only and have no cable TV or satellite connection. Voters who favor a change in government are more likely to rely on the internet for news. And 56 percent of Canadian voters say they have used a search engine to fact check something a candidate or party has said.
Evan Solomon’s review of the campaign’s major turning points explains fairly well how the “change” theme has played in the election and why it is likely to put Liberal Party candidate Justin Trudeau into power.
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s declaration that he opposed the niqab—stating that he wouldn’t permit a Muslim woman to wear the traditional veil during a citizenship ceremony—apparently got the most interactions on Facebook, ITBusiness.ca reports. The Conservatives tried to capitalize on that attention by announcing a police hotline for people to report “barbaric cultural practices.”
The Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau has promised to pour nearly a billion dollars into the country’s start-up and innovation sectors, the CBC reported.
Here’s a binder full of some of the sillier social media blowups of the Canadian election campaign, courtesy of Micki Cowan of CBC News.
Elsewhere in our brave new world: Writing for Medium’s Backchannel, Susan Crawford explains why she doesn’t think Uber is a good idea for American cities.
Watch live or follow the hashtag #CityLab2015 to track the urban innovation conversation underway today in London hosted by The Atlantic, the Aspen Institute and the Bloomberg Foundation.
Martdha Lane Fox offers a vision of Britain as “the most incredible place in the world for a woman to be in technology.”
The always-provocative Cathy O’Neil has a fun suggestion for everyone following the rising questions around the “disruptive” blood-testing company Theranos: users should get their blood tested and share the results, comparing them to regular tests.
