Federal NDP candidate Dody Crane is coming to a gathering here at 84 Fitzroy Street in Charlottetown on Tuesday, June 1 at 4:00 p.m.. This will be an informal opportunity to learn more about Dody and her ideas, and for us to provide feedback to her. All are welcome. Please drop me a line if you’re going to be coming, so we can plan coffee capacity.

A reminder that Green Party candidate Will McFadden is dropping by here today at 2:00 p.m.

Here’s the latest update of the table listing candidate websites for the 2004 Federal Election on Prince Edward Island. Comments below.

I’ve added new website addresses for Lawrence MacAulay and Reg Harper, and changed all of the Green Party addresses to point at their Island-based party website candidate pages.

There are now pointers to candidate weblogs where they exist.

Dody Crane’s website is being moved to a new address at Eastlink, and I’ve been told it will be live later today; I’ll update this page when it’s available online.

There are now NDP candidates in Malpeque and Egmont, although the national NDP office can’t give me telephone numbers or website addresses yet. I do have local email addresses, and I’ve sent out a query looking for information, which I will post when it arrives.

I have become addicted to the BBC series Coupling again. After renting season one on DVD last summer, I’ve found seasons two, three and part of four online. I’ve been watching all week. It’s very funny.

Wily-eyed friend Gary found this Robert Harris watercolour in the online Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

From the church, count three buildings to the left: that’s our house at 100 Prince Street. When the watercolour was painted, in 1870, our house was already 33 years old (see also this photo taken 34 years after the watercolour).

Kudos to the team at the Centre for developing this wonderful, elegant online resource. Who would have ever thought that the Centre would employ people with the job title of Metadata Technician.

I do shudder to think that our house is now part of the grade 4-5 curriculum, although I do take some pride in knowing that this will help students “identify and describe how people create places that reflect human needs, values, and ideas.” That’s certainly the effect we’re going for here, now.

So far Dody Crane, Shawn Murphy and Peter McQuaid are the only candidates with blogs. Only Dody’s has a complete feature-set, with things like an RSS feed (she’s using TypePad). Shawn’s “Daily Update” is built using DotNetNuke and Peter’s looks like HTML homebrew.

By the way, Dody’s website has gone dark; it’s still being pointed to by the federal NDP site, though.

And Shawn has a campaign website to replace his regular MP website during the campaign.

This morning I took another look at Prince Edward Island candidate websites for the upcoming federal election. Some candidates moved their websites, others set ones up since I first published this table, so herewith I present an updated list. This time I’ve added information about what operating system, webserver software, and Internet Service Provider the candidates are using. Comments below.

Where are the sites hosted?

• Only two candidates — Darren Peters and Wayne Easter — are hosting their websites at a PEI-based Internet Service Provider (ISN).
• Three candidates — Peter McQuaid, Lawrence MacAulay and Dody Crane — are hosting their websites at Aliant, where workers are currently on strike.
• Three candidates — Mary Crane, Shawn Murphy and Joe McGuire — are using U.S.-based Internet Service Providers to host their sites (Joe McGuire’s site currently returns magazine subscription offers; I was given the address by the campaign office, and double checked with them; they’re getting back to me).

What are they running?

• Seven of thirteen candidates — over 50% — use servers running the open-source Linux operating system.
• All of the Liberal candidates but Wayne Easter use Microsoft servers.
• Eight candidates are running the open-source Apache webserver, three are running Microsoft IIS, one is running WebSitePro, and one is running Lasso.

I used the Netcraft service to gather all technical data on ISPs, operating systems and server software. All Green Party candidates have websites based on a central Green Party server. I identified candidate’s websites either by phoning the campaign offices, or by following links from the central party sites.

I received an invitation yesterday to attend a “round-table discussion on ‘Developing a Marketing Brand’ for Downtown Charlottetown.” I am told that “professional moderators from Cossette Atlantic will guide us through a discussion” and that the end product will be “positioning for the new Downtown Charlottetown Brand and subsequent marketing plan.”

Is it just me, or does Downtown Charlottetown (I prefer the more humble downtown Charlottetown myself) need a brand like it needs a hole in the head?

Sure, the brandocrats will tell us that a brand is all about “positioning your qualities in the consumer’s mind” and associated rubbish. But brands are really, at their core, about telling a Big Lie. Or a series of Big Lies.

Downtown Charlottetown is in the process of withering away. Why not concentrate efforts on stanching the wither, and working for real improvement instead of wasting time painting a coat of socially-engineered artifice on the problem?

We’re hosting an informal gathering with Green Party candidate Will McFadden at 84 Fitzroy Street, Charlottetown on Monday, May 31 at 2:00 p.m.. This isn’t a debate or a speech or a formal Green Party event, it’s simply an opportunity for some of us to meet Will, hear his ideas, and ask some questions.

If you’re interested in coming by, please drop me a line, just so we can get an idea of how many people are coming.

We’ve sent out invitations to other candidates in the Charlottetown district to come to similar gatherings over the next couple of weeks; watch this space for details.

I grew up in Ontario. Ontario is large. And far more socially stratified than Prince Edward Island.

I grew up in a left-leaning household. Socially progressive. Open-minded. My grandmother was a scrutineer for the NDP. I never ever heard my parents grumble about paying taxes. We were thankful.

And it was easy to demonize, or at least marginalize, those who thought otherwise. Like our anti-metric MP Geoff Scott. Or the inexplicable Tory leader Frank Miller. Or the whacked out fast-talking candidate for some fringe party who wanted to install particle-beam weapons in the neighbourhood.

Growing up near Hamilton, and having lots of friends whose parents worked for Big Steel, it was easy to see the political world as black and white: you either supported the workers, or you supported their corporate bosses. Later, when I worked in a union newspaper, echoes of the same: you were one of us, or one of them.

I’m not suggesting this was a positive thing, at least not completely. When the teams are so clearly defined, it’s not hard to just join the regular team by default, which doesn’t inspire a lot of thinking. On either side. Nonetheless, if you’re going to end up on a team by default, I think I ended up, generally, on the right one.

Segue to Prince Edward Island.

Politics here, to someone who didn’t grow up in the midst of it, is incomprehensible. Black is white and white is black. Conservative and Liberal don’t mean here what they do in Ontario, partly because the lack of big corporate patrons forces them to be more grounded. And because big labour on PEI is more white collar than blue collar, the sensibilities of the NDP are somewhat foreign as well.

Suffice to say that every time I think I understand Island politics, I get knocked on my ear, and realize it will take another 12 or 13 years before I even get an inkling of what’s going on. Is it any wonder that I’ve choosen to concern myself with understanding the apparatus of politics rather than its substance?

Which brings me to my current quandry.

I’m faced with a slate of candidates here in the Charlottetown district each of whom I either know directly, or at least through friends.

When I headed up the Victoria Row Business Owners Association (long story) a decade ago, I worked closely with Shawn Murphy, who owns property on Richmond Street. He was a smart, capable, generous colleague.

The second Christmas we spent on the Island, Catherine Hennessey invited us for Christmas dinner with her, David Weale, Reg Porter and Darren Peters. Although that is the sum total of my personal time with Darren, he has nonetheless said hello to me absolutely every time we’ve passed each other on the street in the years since. Many people I’ve come to know and respect on the Island also know and respect Darren. It’s rare to hear an unkind work spoken of him.

Dodi Crane is an occassional regular at Eddie’s Lunch (aka Viva’s, aka the MarinaGrill). She’s married to a friend of mine. Her office used to be next door, and we shared the same recycling bin for six months. In a province where NDP candidates are sometimes described as “knuckleheads,” Dodi has always stood slightly above the fray, and seems respected even by people who don’t agree with the substance of what she espouses.

Will McFadden lives across the street from my brother Johnny. He parked his van in their driveway last week. A friend whose opinion I respect says Will is a smart, intuitive, crackerjack thinker.

So if I set aside the swirling confusion of the national campaigns — something that is becoming increasingly necessary as things descend into quote-trading and ad hominem attacks – and see my local decision as one between four well-respected neighbours, all of a sudden things start to get really difficult.

I have a friend who was once courted to run provincially. He was invited into the office of the Premier of the day and shown the results of polling in his district with his name in the fray. He told me it was an eerie experience to see his character judged in such a clear-cut numerical way by his friends and neighbours, to have an actual percentage attached to the question “on a scale of one to ten, how honest do you think I am?”

But, when the decision is concrete — “who’s the best neighbour to send up to Ottawa” — and not abstract (and specious) — like “who will put more billions into healthcare” — then the campaign crystallizes into something more akin to a public job interview process than a pointless pep rally. And so questions like “who is more honest?” or “who’s the better manager?” become really important.

And so for perhaps the first time in my life, with the bedrock of “left = good, right = bad” removed from play, no deal-breaking issues to cleave off superfluous candidates, I’m forced to think really, really hard about my vote. I’m going to have to work at this. And I only have 32 days.

Good citizenship, of course, demands nothing less.

Compass ran a very well-produced story tonight on why Prince Edward Island’s voter turnout is as high as it is. I don’t know exactly what it was about the piece that was so compelling, but there was a good combination of interviews, historical photos, B-roll and commentary that was all tied together into more than the sum of its parts. Kudos to Nancy Russell and crew for an excellent piece.