As we enter week 271 of the Canadian federal election I thought it might be useful to do a quick review of the situation on the ground here in the Charlottetown electoral district.

I’ve a feeling that, if I were allowed access to the Conservative Party demographic profiling database, I would find our neighbourhood coded as “Bolshevik.” At least that’s what the evidence would suggest, as their candidate Tom DeBlois has no presence down here whatsoever: nothing’s appeared in the mail, I’ve yet to come across a campaign sign, the campaign HQ is way out at Oak Tree Place, and, short of a brief sighting at a party on Friday night, I’ve yet to lay eyes on the man. Of course this may just be prudent use of campaign resources on his part: if there is a centre of Bolshevism in the city, it’s probably centred in south-east Charlottetown, and maybe his time is better spent in the tonier suburbs.

Contrast this to the campaign of incumbent MP Shawn Murphy: there’s a big four-by-eight campaign sign up at the corner of Prince and Grafton, we’ve received two campaign fliers in the mailbox, Shawn’s headquarters are two blocks over in the heart of the downtown, and it’s hard not to run into Shawn making the rounds in the neighbourhood.

If the Murphy campaign literature is any gauge, the Green Shift is not playing well with the local electorate: there’s only a brief allusion to the plan in the latest flier, and the campaign home page contains neither the word “green” nor “shift.” This is a too bad: no matter whether the plan is the right one or not, the Conservative response to it — childish attack ads and “Stéphane Dion is going to take your children and send them to green energy tax camps in Uzbekistan”-style rhetoric — demands an impassioned, forceful defence.

The NDP has officially nominated a candidate, but haven’t yet gotten around to updating the party website, which is a metaphor for the party’s presence in the district (non-existent). It doesn’t help that their opening sound-bite of the campaign from their candidate was “I was hoping it wouldn’t be called because I knew that they were going to ask me to run, but when the election was called, all of a sudden it occurred to me that this could be the one that the NDP wins,” a statement with a perfect mix of regret and delusion. Makes me pine for the fiery partisan passions of Dodi Crane (the only federal candidate whose campaign ever prompted me to make a political donation).

To date the Green Party doesn’t have a Charlottetown candidate, which strikes me as being weird, as you would think that if there was a natural concentration of the Green constituency, Charlottetown would be it. Of course in a province where running for the NDP means you must reconcile yourself to a life on the fringes of polite society, I can’t imagine what running for the Greens would do. So recruitment must be an issue.

Oh, and there’s Christian Heritage Party and their candidate Baird Judson, someone who, if nothing else, deserves credit for tenacity. For tenacity and also for being the largest single financier of the democratic process in the district in the last election.

On a national level, the campaign has been reduced, in my ears, to a daily barrage of “Leader X today promised to immediately inject $700 billion into issue Y if elected.” The names and issues are interchangeable, and the amounts of money are so divorced from my reality as to be meaningless.

So whether it’s the Liberals (“A new Liberal government will double the budget of the Canada Council for the Arts to $360 million annually”) or the Conservatives (“Providing $100 million over the next five years for geological mapping focused on Canada’s North and our polar continental shelf.”) or the NDP (“Layton said the New Democrats will commit $100 million a year for an expanded Canadian Training and Apprenticeship Tax Credit.”) it just feels like a meaningless nightly pummelling by Peter Mansbridge.

Makes me pine for the fiery passions of Pierre Trudeau.

As regards the local punditocracy, Kerry Campbell’s my man: he’s the radio news reporter covering the election for CBC Prince Edward Island, and his weekly roundup of the campaign is witty and wise.

Over at Compass they’ve rolled out Dr. Ian Dowbiggin again to be one half of their political panel. It’s not so much that Dowbiggin doesn’t have insights as that it would be nice, for once, to hear insights other than his. Are their no other political scientists on Prince Edward Island that they could call on?

And then there’s the weekly political panel on Island Morning: completely free of insight of any kind, what with all the joshing and catcalling. It may be “must listen” radio, but in more of a “last episode of Survivor” kind of way than for any elucidation on election issues it might offer. The best thing that ever happened to the panel was the one-time inclusion of Daniel Schulman as the “not in the mainstream” panelist during a previous election campaign. Schulman’s considered and honest discourse showed the hollow name-calling of the others for what it was, and made me wish that a new panel could be built around Schulman and others who actually have something to say.

We’re off to Iceland tomorrow for a week, which will give us a break from all of this. Looking forward to returning for the last two weeks of the campaign.

It’s been an exciting day here at Reinvented HQ as all manner of electricity professionals have been running in and out of the building, all with the mission of upgrading the silverorange electrical system, the primary addition being the huge propane-powered generator behind my office window that will keep our collected servers running well into and beyond the End Times.

Although silverorange has done an excellent job at keeping operations humming along and powered — as I type my laptop, monitor and Internet are all being powered by a thick electrical cable that ultimately is wired into the oven plug of the apartment in the house next door — all the power upping and downing seems to have pushed the 5-year old Linksys switch that was tying together our entire operation over the edge. This meant flaky connectivity for the first half of the day, descending into no connectivity by midday. Fortunately there was a spare switch hanging around that I’ve been able to borrow (thanks Keith!), and everything is humming along smoothly now.

This morning I received a big, big box filled with 10 copies of a book I created two weeks ago using Lulu.com, the publish-on-demand company founded by fellow Hamiltonian Bob Young.

The Lulu experience was a pleasure from start to end: I used Apple’s Pages word processor to create a 346 page book, complete with table of contents, and Wordle to make a colour image for the cover. I created two PDF files, one for the inside and one for the cover and uploaded them to Lulu, used their tools to set up the page size, cover format and binding, paid for 10 copies (I could have ordered as few as one), and that was it: the next thing that happend was the box at my door.

The quality of the finished product is excellent: I ordered perfect-bound 6”x9” books on ivory paper with a full-colour coated cover. You wouldn’t know that these were “self-published” books from the look, feel and heft of them: they are every inch bona fide books.

I was inspired to do all this by my friend Steven Garrity, who achieved “The Best Christmas Presents Ever” by creating a book of Garrity family aphorisms. In my case a good friend and fellow blogger is having a significant birthday, and to mark the occasion I turned her blog into a book.

While not quite owning the means of production, Lulu certainly puts those means closer to the ground than ever before and makes creating lasting cultural objects within reach of anyone with something to say, some basic design sense, and an application that can emit PDF files.

The skycraper that’s going up two doors down from the office has finally started construction this week — I know this, in part, because they are using some sort of vibrating machine to excavate the basement that causes my office chair to vibrate as well. It’s interesting how you can start to see the shape of the new building even at this early stage:

There’s been a lot of change over the bridge in Stratford at Home Hardware over the last few years. After the Home Hardware is a co-op, and I’m just not a co-op kind of guy days, there was a brief flirtation with Callbeck’s, and now, staff tell me, the store is a corporate store managed by Home Hardware itself.

I hadn’t been in for a while, but as the store is helping to sponsor some painting at Prince Street School, Catherine, volunteer colour consultant on the job, had to go over to immerse herself in the Beauti-Tone and Oliver and I went along for the ride.

They certainly have changed things around. The second-floor furniture section has been moved downstairs, and now takes up almost half of the retail floor area, squishing out the hardware section to the back, and moving the paint section up to the front. The co-located Radio Shack is gone. The in-store Tim Hortons has a reduced footprint. It’s essentially a brand new store inside.

The newly-expanded furniture section is a sort of mixed bag: they had several really nice and not-too-expensive dining room tables that were refreshingly simple in their design, but the balance of the living room furniture seemed to fall into “overstuffed recliner” category that you’ll find elsewhere on the Island. Which is too bad, as one of the nice things about the old era was modern, non-gingham furniture.

Staff were as pleasant as ever. Worth a visit if you haven’t been over since the upheavals.

Apparently a “looking glass” is a mirror. I went 42 years thinking it was another name for “magnifying glass.”

The Merchantman Pub, on Queen Street in Charlottetown, built on an addition last year and, after opening a restaurant extension around the corner on Water Street called Gooner’s Bar & Grill, this year the owners have opened Merchantman Galley, a bakery cum coffee shop.

Last week we had a baguette from the bakery — very good — and today on the way back to the office from Tai Chi Gardens I stopped in for some dessert. I ended up choosing their dessert of the day, a fruit-infused bread pudding with rum sauce. It was very good. And very substantial (i.e. enough to sate the dessert appetites of a small family).

My favourite aspect of the Merchantman Gallery experience, however, is the note “We reserve the right to be spontaneous” on their menu:

I had the added pleasure of being served by a recent immigrant to the Island who, it seems, is also a longtime reader of this blog.

Although you’d never know it by watching or reading the media, Ralph Nader is running for President again this year, along with his running mate Matt Gonzalez.

Nader joined Ron Paul and other independent candidates last week in a press-conference to release a joint statement on foreign policy, privacy, the national debt, and the Federal Reserve. You can watch the video of the event on C-SPAN.

From Rob’s Island Energy weblog, a link to Fortune, PEI company Prompt Plumbling’s geothermal energy page.

Earlier this week Catherine and I stopped in for supper at the Seatreat before “meet the teacher night” at Prince Street School. Catherine had french fries with her meal, and the french fries struck us as being markedly different from any french fries we’d had a the Seatreat before: they actually tasted good. Not that the french fries we’d had there before were unusually bad; they were simply the same run-of-the-mill fries you get in most Island restaurants.

When I stopped in again this afternoon for a bowl of Louis’ chicken and rice soup I ran into Joe, personable owner of the Seatreat, and I complimented him on the change, and asked him what they were doing differently, thinking perhaps they’d upgraded to “McCain Super-Duper Premium Extra” fries or some such thing.

“We just switched to using potatoes,” Joe said. “You mean regular old everyday potatoes?” I asked. “Yes,” said Joe.

This would explain why the french fries tasted, well, so much like potatoes.

If you are a fan of the occasional fry, I encourage you to drop in and sample the “old and improved” ones at the Seatreat.