from A Heartland Cultural Warrior
Mark Shea provided an interesting link on his blog on Friday. This story breaks down the American electorate into twelve groups and attempts to analyze how they might approach the presidential election. For the record, I would regard myself as a 'Heartland Culture Warrior.'
As I was looking this over, I kept wondering to myself how it might apply to Canadian politics.
1) We don't have much of a 'Religious Right' here, outside of Alberta and perhaps a few of the small towns and cities in Saskatchewan and central / northern British Columbia.
2) The huge chunk of Canada that falls in the densely populated triangle around the great lakes and Toronto seems to me (I've never been there) to fall into what we might call the 'religious left,' 'secularists,' and 'spiritualists.' That last group can also be found in large numbers in Vancouver and in great swaths of Vancouver Island. Eastern Tories often seem to be 'white bread protestants.'
3) The biggest difference between the two countries is Quebec, for which no analogy to the US seems to hold. Quebec was Catholic once, but that does not seem to have much effect anymore. I'd put the belle province in the 'convertible catholic' and 'secular' categories.
4) I'm not too familiar with the Atlantic provinces' voting patterns, but I think I'd use the 'white bread protestant' label for them.
5) Canada's minorities are scattered throughout the country, but are clustered by and large in the major population centers. In my experience, people from India might have voting patterns roughly like 'Latinos', but the catholic / protestant thing does not apply. Other groups might be too hard to categorize without too much fuzzing.
#2 and #3 explain why it is so hard for Canadians to elect anything other than Liberal governments, and why Tories win power only when they court the mushy middle and the Liberals abuse us too much for even a good ol' central Canadian socialist to accept. It's not a subject I know a lot about but I can't help but wonder if there is a connection between #2 and the troubles in the Anglican Church.
Anybody have some suggestions? Are any of these off the rails?
My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...
Comments