Campaign roundup

Signs seen: Liberal, although it was taken down after the vandalism started. Saw a Conservative sign AFTER I'd voted.

Mailings received: Green and Conservative

Canvassers seen: zero

Answered my tweets: NDP, Liberal, and Green

This year's election night drinking game

Drink every time a riding changes hands. Go!

Voted!

Bright new green leaves just beginning to bud on the trees, diverse people walking around the neighbourhood. It looked like a condo ad, which is rather a propos. Despite the fact that there was a bit of a lineup for people who didn't have voter cards, I right breezed in and out with my own voter card. It was literally as quick and easy as humanly possible.

BUT: I didn't see ANY doggies today! This is a horrible sign! Usually petting a dog means a good election outcome and I was planning to be really assertive about approaching dogs today, but I didn't even get an opportunity!

Let's brainstorm ways to vote effectively while ignorant

The most common reason I hear for people not voting is ignorance. They don't feel familiar enough with the issues or the overall situation, but they aren't about to accept spin or partisan statements at face value. This is actually the reason behind the one time I chose not to vote. The 2000 municipal election happened just weeks after I'd moved to Toronto, and I didn't feel like I had any objective sense of the political environment. If, hypothetically (because I forget what the actual issues were), one candidate said that TTC service is woefully inadequate and needs to be improved regardless of the cost, and another candidate had said that the city was in dire financial straits and we need to cut back on TTC service to survive, I could not have determined which one was true because I'd only been there a couple of weeks and was still excited by the novelty of a subway. Even a thorough reading of the platforms and media coverage wouldn't have led me to be able to make a fully-informed vote.

General social consensus is that everyone should vote. But if you feel like you aren't fully informed, maybe it isn't a good idea. What if you fall for some spin and vote wrong?

So let's brainstorm some ways that people can make good use of their vote if they're currently too ignorant to vote informedly. I have a few ideas, but I'm hoping you guys can help me come up with more.

1. Vote for your #1 issue. What one thing that falls under this level of government's jurisdiction has the greatest impact on you, personally? OR, what one issue that falls under this level of government's jurisdiction to you feel is most important at a societal level? Consider focusing on this issue, reading a variety of comment from a variety of sources until perhaps you feel you can read between the lines on this issue, and either voting for whoever will do the most good in this one area, or against whoever will do the most harm in this one area. Note: I do NOT recommend this approach if you don't have a #1 issue at this level of government and have to kind of stop and try to think of one.

2. Vote in support of someone you care about. Is someone you care about more affected by the outcome of the election than the average citizen? Do they work for, or in a field that falls under the immediate jurisdiction of, this level of government? Are they dependent on a program that falls under this level of government, or affected by the absence of a program that this level of government should be providing? Ask them how they think you should vote. I only recommend this approach if you care enough about this person that you genuinely don't mind putting aside your own needs in favour of theirs. Unless you are closely aligned on all political issues, it's possible that the party they recommend voting for won't be the same as you would have chosen on your own.

3. Vote for an individual candidate you like. Do you find any of the candidates in your riding particularly appealing? Maybe one of them is especially responsive to your questions. Maybe one of them makes you think "THAT's the kind of person we need in public office!" If this is the case, and you don't feel capable of voting on policy, consider voting for the individual. Two caveats for this method: 1) Read the candidate's platform (and, if they've held public office before, voting history) to make sure they're not unacceptable. 2) Try to talk to the other candidates and give them a chance to impress you too, so you don't vote for someone solely on the basis of having being the first to canvass you.

Those are all the ideas I have at the moment. Anyone have any more?

Help, I'm trapped in an echo chamber!

As I've mentioned before, elections are my favourite sport. But because I love following them so closely, reading between the lines of platforms, thinking about strategy, I've lost the ability to view them like a regular everyday person who isn't especially into elections. I just can't put myself in their shoes.

The last couple of elections, I've heard pundits say "Voters will do X in response to Y", and thought "There's no possible way the general populace is that stupid!", only to find out after election day that someone I thought I liked and respected (and sometimes even someone who's supposed to be smarter than me!) did X in response to Y. I don't know what to do with this.

Sometimes people catch a glimpse of an election-related headline and get an incorrect idea about something. And by incorrect I mean empirically verifiable as false. But if I respond with a nice readable media article, they assume it's just spin or bias. And if I respond with links to primary sources, they don't want to read all those boring documents anyway. I keep encountering people who aren't political junkies and who are voting wrong (and by "wrong" I mean "in a way that does not help achieve what it will achieve, when voting differently would help achieve their goal") and I don't know how to get through to them.

And yes, I realize that not being able to put myself in the shoes of people who aren't political junkies when I haven't always been a political junkie meets my own definition of assholery. I just can't figure out what to do about it.

How to vote if you're a pessimistic disillusioned cynic

Some people feel like all the parties and politicians are idiots, so it doesn't matter who they vote for or they can't imagined voting for anyone.

Here's what you do if you feel that way: rather than voting either for the best party or against the worst party, vote either for the party whose fuck-ups will hurt the least, or against the party whose fuck-ups will hurt the most (depending on your personal preferences and the prevailing situation in your riding.)

This idea was inspired by this post by Galloping Beaver. Galloping Beaver's post is partisanish, in that it focuses on the fuck-ups of one specific party and points out that another specific wouldn't make those kinds of fuck-ups, even if they do make other fuck-ups.

But this can easily be extended to a non-partisan approach towards all parties. Look at each party, look at their policies and their records and their many many flaws and how they generally spin themselves, and figure out what kind of fuck-ups each specific party would make if they don't end up giving anyone a pleasant surprise and just end up being their usual incompetent and/or malicious selves. Decide which set of fuck-ups is the worst and which is the least damaging, and then vote either against the worst or for the least worst. You're using your vote for disaster mitigation. No idealism necessary.

The weird thing about social conservatism

All economic policy needs to be implemented on a societal level, so it makes sense for that to be part of politics. Social liberalism needs at least tacit consent or utter indifference from government - they basically need to not make laws that meddle in people's private lives, and eliminate any such laws that are still on the books.

But social conservatism doesn't require any government involvement at all. Citizens are free to be as socially conservative as they'd like, regardless of whether this behaviour is enshrined in law.

As an example, the most socially conservative thing about me is I am monogamous. As it happens, I live in a culture and a city and a neighbourhood where casual sex is socially acceptable and freely available. But this in no way hinders my being monogamous. Regardless of how much casual sex is permissible and available, I can quite easily not avail myself of it. Similarly, I'm vegetarian, but meat is freely available and socially acceptable. I'm carfree, but cars are readily available and socially acceptable. I can quite easily live this way without asking the government to outlaw meat, cars, and casual sex. It wouldn't even cross my mind to ask the government to outlaw things that I'm not into.

And yet there are a lot of very loud people who try to do just that. Where is this coming from?

Why not voting doesn't send a message

Sometimes you hear people say that they choose not to vote in order to "send a message". But there's a problem with that strategy:

Suppose you're the most responsive politician in human history. There's an election, and, yay, you win! Then you notice that, say, 30% of the eligible voters didn't vote. Being the most responsive politician in human history, you're insightful enough to think that maybe they were trying to send you a message.

But what specific message were they trying to send you? What can you do to address their concerns?

You have no way of knowing, do you? For that matter, you have no way of knowing how many of them are trying to "send a message" as opposed to having moved out of the riding or died since the last enumeration or gotten hit by a bus on the way to the polling place.

The way to send a message to politicians is, quite literally, to send them a message. Email them about your specific concerns when they're campaigning, and again after they're elected. On top of this, you can sign (or start) petitions or otherwise engage in activism about your specific concerns, and work towards electoral reform if it addresses your concerns.

But choosing not to vote will achieve nothing. The only message is sends is "Meh, whatever you guys want is fine."

Why do politicians want to appear popular?

During election campaigns, politicians try to get people to put up signs showing support for them. And recently on twitter, there were some accusations being bandied about of candidates setting up fake accounts to make it look like more people were talking about them.

Which makes me wonder: why do politicians want so much to appear popular during election campaigns?

Your instinctive answer is probably "Because being popular is good, duh!"

But think about it as a voter. If the party you most strongly oppose appears very popular, wouldn't you be more inclined to vote strategically to defeat them? If the party you most strongly support appears very popular, wouldn't the idea of staying home on election day be more tempting?

I can see why parties that are considered fringe might want to look more popular, so they can be considered viable mainstream candidates. But if you're already a mainstream candidate, I can't imagine how appearing more popular than you actually are would help get out the vote in your favour.

How to Vote Strategically

This is part of my Voter's Resources post.

Some people vote for the party whose platform they find most suitable (the Best Party). Other people try to prevent the party whose platform they find most harmful (the Worst Party) from being elected, by voting for the party that's most likely to defeat the Worst Party (the Compromise Party). This is called strategic voting.

The most important thing about strategic voting is that your strategy has to apply to the reality in your riding. The media feeds us national polls for breakfast every day, but they're not directly relevant. Regardless of what the rest of the country is doing, your vote will only be used to elect your own MP. If your riding is already disinclined to elect the Worst Party, there's no point in a strategic vote - you'd just end up making the Compromise Party look more popular than they really are.

So here's what to do if your priority is stopping the Worst Party from winning:

1. Ask yourself: "If I don't vote, who's going to win in this particular riding?"

If the answer is a party other than the Worst Party, vote for the Best Party. If the answer is "the Worst Party" or "it's too close to tell," go on to step 2.

2. Ask yourself: "If I don't vote, who's most likely to defeat the Worst Party" in this particular riding?

This is your Compromise Party. Read their platform. If it's acceptable, vote for the Compromise Party. If it's not acceptable, vote for the Best Party.

Remember: ignore the national polls; think only about the situation in your riding!

So now you're thinking:

"But how do I figure out what's going to happen in my riding?"

There are many many resources this time around. Check them all out and see what they say about your riding.

- The Election Prediction Project
- Hill and Knowlton Election Predictor. (You need poll data for this. The site provides some, more is available all over the media.)
- DemocraticSPACE
- ThreeHundredEight (riding predictions in the right-hand column)
- LISPOP
- How did your neighbourhood vote? (If you're voting strategically, you still have to look at the whole riding rather than the individual polls, but this is still interesting)
- Project Democracy is designed specifically for those considering a strategic vote against the Conservative party. If this includes you, it might be of use. If not, stick to the other predictors.
- Too Close To Call

Prediction sites update constantly, and I will be updating this list as I find more prediction sites, so check back again closer to election day.

Who is the target audience of coalition scaremongering anyway?

Apart from the fact that coalitions are perfectly normal and constitutional in our form of government and scaremongering about the possibility of a coalition shows ignorance of how our system of government works and insults the electorate's intelligence, and apart from the fact that they're talking about coalitions instead of policy, leading me to wonder if there's a dearth of policy, the weird thing about all this coalition scaremongering on the part of the Conservative Party is that I can't imagine why it would lead to any additional Conservative votes.

Because the scaremongering focuses on the possibility of coalition of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc following a minority Conservative win, I'm going to focus on that model in this post.

If your politics align most closely with the Conservative Party's, you're going to vote Conservative anyway. No impact.

If your politics align most closely with the Liberal Party's, you might prefer for there not to be a coalition because you'd rather have a purely Liberal government. However, if the Liberal party wins the election and forms a government, they wouldn't need a formal coalition because they'd already be in government. However, if the Conservatives win, you'd rather have a coalition than not because then (assuming seat ratios follow historical patterns) you'd have a Liberal-led coalition government. So either way it would be best for you to work towards getting Liberal votes. Any Conservative votes would make it less possible for your party to get its policies implemented.

If your politics align most closely with either the NDP or the Bloc, and assuming based on current polls and historical outcomes that you're not going to form a government, a coalition would give your party more power, so it would be a good thing. Insofar as a potential coalition might affect your vote, you might choose to cast an Anything-But-Conservative strategic vote if you live in a tight riding so as to prevent a Conservative majority and thus make a coalition more possible. But nothing would be gained by voting Conservative.

So who's the target audience of all this? Who would be likely to vote Conservative because of the prospect of a coalition who isn't doing so already?

Things They Should Study: income range for which additional tax credits would actually make a difference

All this election talk of tax credits makes me wonder how many people they're actually useful for.

People at the low end of the income scale hardly pay any tax anyway, and most of what they do pay gets refunded, so they wouldn't achieve any additional savings with additional tax credits.

But the more money you have, the more the savings from a tax credit become negligible. For example, I currently don't feel the tax credit I get for my TTC Metropass. If it disappeared, I wouldn't notice. However, I still feel my RRSPs. Someone who makes ten times what I make might not feel their RRSPs either.

Tax credits whose goal is to modify behaviour (fitness, home renovation) tend to apply for things that require a certain amount of disposable income. If your budget is so tight that you just can't find room for a kickboxing class or a new kitchen, you aren't going to be able to benefit from these.

And, of course, the more tax credits you already have, the less impact any additional tax credits will have. When I was in university, my tuition deduction and educational tax credits were huge (relative to my income at the time - now they'd be nothing more than a nice little bonus). But because of this, any additional credits would have been useless to me. I was already paying no taxes and getting money back, there was nothing left to deduct!

So someone should do research: for what segment of the population are tax credits useful, and for what segment are they useless? How big do they have to be? How many people have room for those kinds of expenditures in their budgets?

Rerun: Deciding where to vote (for students)

The substance of this post is a rerun from 2005.

University students can often swing it so they can vote either in the riding where they're going to school, or in the riding where they grew up/where their parents live/where their "permanent address" is.

Since this election's advance polls are in April (when most people are still at school) and election day itself is in May (when many students are back at their parents', or gone elsewhere for summer jobs) I've decided to post this early so you can decide where to vote and make plans accordingly.

***

Where to Vote:

1. If one of the ridings is a really close race, vote in that riding. If both are close, vote in the riding with the closest race. If neither is really close, follow the instructions below.

2. Of the parties running candidates in your riding, decide which one has the best platform that comes closest to meeting your needs and your vision of the country (hereafter the Best Party). Then decide which one has the worst platform that is furthest from meeting your needs and deviates the most from your vision of the country (hereafter the Worst Party). You are judging the parties as a whole, not the individual candidates in your riding. Assess each party individually without regard to possible strategic voting - that comes later.

3. Based on your own needs and your own vision for the country, decide whether it is more important to you that the Best Party win, or that the Worst Party does not win.

4. If it's more important to you that the Best Party win, vote for the Best Party in the riding where the Best Party is least likely to win.

5. If it's more important to you that the Worst Party not win, and the Worst Party has a chance in either of your ridings, vote for the party most likely to defeat the Worst Party in the riding where the Worst Party is most likely to win.

6. If the Worst Party doesn't have a chance in either of your ridings, vote for the Best Party in the riding where the Best Party is least likely to win.

***

To determine which party is most likely to win in which riding, check out the Election Prediction Project and DemocraticSPACE. More resources will likely become available as the election progresses. I'm going to be making a Voters' Resources post closer to election day, I just wanted to get this up early so people can make plans.

Update: I'm now collecting links to riding predictors here.

***

From Elections Canada:

- Your options for different voting methods (election day, advance polls, special ballot
- How to register to vote in your preferred riding.

Why polls are stupid

I'm really surprised what a big deal the media makes of polls, because they're very nearly irrelevant. The percentage of people who would vote for a specific party doesn't directly affect the number of seats that party gets. What's important is the distribution of those people among different ridings. Because the person with the most votes in each riding gets that seat, and the party with the most seats gets first dibs at forming a government.

Example:

There are 308 ridings in Canada. For mathematical simplicity, let's say there are 100,000 voters in each riding, and 100% voter turnout.

The Purple Party gets 51% of the votes in 155 (or just over half) of the ridings.
51,000*155=7,905,000
So the Purple Party received 7,905,000, and holds 155 of the 308 seats in Parliament, thus forming a majority government.

Meanwhile, the Yellow Party receives 100% of the votes in 100 (or just under one third) of ridings. 100*100,000=10,000,000
So the Yellow Party received 10,000,000 votes, but holds only 100 of the 308 seats in Parliament. The Purple Party still gets to form the government.

However, polls would have shown the Purple Party polling at about 25%, and the Yellow Party polling at about 32%.

I chose these numbers for mathematical simplicity, but there's room for a lot of variations in between. For example, because we have at least four parties running in each riding (and often more), the Purple Party could easily have won with something like 35% of the vote in 155 ridings, which would only show up as about 18% in a poll. There are entirely too many variables.

To be effective, polls would have to poll each riding. Which would be hella useful for people considering a strategic vote! But as it stands, polls of the country as a whole are uninformative. Please stop reporting on them as though they were useful!

Wherein my late grandfather predicted the current state of Canadian politics over 50 years ago

One of my grandmother's treasured possessions back in the old country was her family crest from her family of origin. It had been handed down for generations since before memory. You see, my grandparents lived in an area of what is now Poland that had, for as long as anyone could remember, been passed back and forth from one oppressor to another, and the family crest reminded them of where they really came from and who they really were, regardless of who the occupying force of the day was.

I was recently trying to google up a picture of the family crest so we could make a new one for my grandmother to put on her wall, and I stumbled upon an interesting factoid. It seems that the presence of a family crest likely means that we are the descendants of szlachta, a long-defunct type of nobility. Our noble ancestors would have been deposed in the late 18th century by the conquering empire of the day, but if we could just figure out how to trace our genealogy back another 100 years past where we've got it now, we'll likely turn up noble lineage dating back as early as the 1300s. Kind of cool, although obviously doesn't apply to us any more after generations of war and oppression. My grandparents were raised on farms and worked in factories to support their children, my parents were the first generation in living memory to scramble their way up to white collar, and my generation is hanging onto that white collar by our fingernails.

When my grandparents decided to pack up their worldly possessions and get on a boat for Canada, my grandfather insisted that my grandmother had to leave the family crest behind. For reasons that none of us understood, he thought that having the crest among their possessions might be frowned upon, or even get them turned out of Canada.

My grandfather passed away nearly 12 years ago. But it turns out he was a very prescient man.

Things They Should Invent: compressed parental leave

Maternity and parental leave currently pay 55% of your income up to $468 a week, and give you up to 15 weeks of maternity leave and 35 weeks of parental leave.

It is possible that this might not be enough money to support you in your year off work. If you're renting in Toronto and your apartment is big enough for your kid to have their own room, it might not even be enough for rent. I'm sure some parents have to go back to work earlier than they'd like simply to avoid running out of money.

Obviously the ideal solution would be to increase the government benefits to a more realistic level, but in the interim here's a zero-cost solution: allow new parents to compress their maternity and parental leave, so they get more dollars per week over a period of fewer weeks.

For example, the total maximum maternity and parental benefits payable is $468x50 weeks, which totals $23,400. For mathematical simplicity, let's say you've determined you need $1,000 a week. Under this proposed system, you'd be able to draw $1,000 a week for 23.4 weeks. So instead of getting a year off with insufficient money, you can have just over five months off with sufficient money. That would be far more useful!

This is beneficial to new parents because they can still take time to be with their new child, but they wouldn't have to worry about money. It would cost nothing to the government (it's possible they might even save a tiny bit of money by not having to send out cheques/direct deposits and do paperwork for as many weeks), and it would also be beneficial to employers because their employees might come back from parental leave earlier. Better for everyone, no cost, no downside.

How to set politicians' salaries

There's been some debate recently here in Toronto about whether our city councillors should get a pay raise. On one hand, they already get way more money than most of us and the city is short on money. On the other hand, it would be morally wrong for me to oppose a cost of living increase for anyone. I don't object to politicians being paid more than me. They don't have job security, they're subject to public scrutiny, and usually have to quit (or at least take unpaid leave from) their regular job just to run for office (with no guarantee of being elected.) But there needs to be some way to make their pay reflect the average citizen's situation.

So here's what I came up with.

Each politician's salary is the sum of the following numbers:

• the median individual income in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of all people represented by their level of government
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% represented by their level of government

(For the purposes of this post, "the jurisdiction they represent" means a ward at the municipal level and a riding at the provincial or federal level. "People represented by their level of government" means everyone in the city, province, or country at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels respectively.)

If the sum of these four numbers is not within a range that's commensurate with current salaries for that particular government, then the total is multiplied by a coefficient. The coefficient is whatever number will make the average salary under the new system equal to the average salary under the old system. The coefficient will then remain constant year to year.

The result of all this is that politicians would have an immediate personal investment in the fortunes of their own constituents and their level of government as a whole. The poorest 20% receive extra weight to make sure we don't create an incentive to make the very rich excessively richer (thus bringing up averages) while ignoring ordinary people. Similarly, we're using median instead of mean because of what we learned here, although I'd accept mean if there's a sound argument for it.

Possible issue: under this system, representatives of ridings with higher incomes would get more money.

Possible mitigating factor: maybe that will just mean that their income is commensurate with the cost of living in the riding, so it might all even out.

Another possible issue: "star" candidates who are parachuted in to ridings where they don't live because the parties think they can win will have more incentive to pick richer ridings.

Possible mitigating factors: 1. Might this already be happening anyway? 2. Would it actually affect the results that citizens get?

"Forced'?

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has accused the Liberals of wanting to revive a national child-care program so that parents don’t have to raise their own children.

“It’s the Liberals who wanted to ensure that parents are forced to have other people raise their children. We do not believe in that,” Finley said in the Commons Thursday, the same day that Liberals were promising to revive the national program scrapped by the Conservatives five years ago this week.

This has been all over the blogosphere already, but I haven't seen anyone focusing on what I think is the key word in Minister Finley's statement: forced.

When a government program is available, people can make use of it or not make use of it as they choose. They are by no means required to make use of it, and certainly aren't expected to modify their life choices to make use of it! For example, the Employment Insurance system provides maternity and parental leave benefits of 55% of your average insured earnings up to a maximum of $468 per week. People with new babies can apply for this program, or they can just not apply. However, the existence of this program does not in any way mean we are forced to have babies.

The fact that a government minister landed on the word "forced" in reference to the hypothetical availability of a program makes me inclined to take a step back and look at the other programs this government is providing. What are they trying to force us to do?

But aside from this, you know what is actually, in real life, forcing parents to return to the workforce and send their kids to childcare? Labour conditions! As I've blogged about before, if I had a child, staying home with the kid wouldn't be an option, because I'm the one whose job provides dental benefits. I would be forced to go back to work as soon as parental leave runs out because the current economic context doesn't make it possible for my partner to have a job with benefits.

Even if both partners have jobs with benefits, it still isn't necessarily safe to just leave one's job. I blogged before about my grandmother's co-workers, who voted not to have a pension because their spouses had pensions. Doesn't that sound ideal? A world in which your spouse's pension is enough to support both of you in retirement, so you don't have to worry about accumulating pensionability and can work or not depending on what best meets your family's needs? Well, it turns out many of those spouses worked for Stelco. And this is what happened to their pensions. In a context like this, it would be outright irresponsible to walk away from an opportunity to accumulate pensionability - or even to accumulate CPP eligibility! Even if one pension looks perfectly good now, who knows what will happen in the future? We will spend far more time being seniors than children spend being children, so we can't just put our ability to support ourselves in the last couple of decades of our lives at risk.

Of course, if improving employment conditions is beyond the scope of the government's influence, they could also reduce the likelihood that new parents will be forced to return to work earlier than they'd like by improving the social safety net. My issue of being the only one with dental insurance would be moot if OHIP covered dental care. Concerns about maintaining one's pensionability would be lessened if the CPP provided more than an absolute maximum of $960 a month. If OHIP covered everything we might conceivably need in terms of elder care, we wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to support ourselves in the last decades of our lives.

If this government is really concerned about new parents being forced to return to work sooner than they'd prefer, they need to create a combination of labour conditions and social safety net that makes it possible to stay home, in terms of both meeting the family's immediate needs and long-term consequences.

And, in the meantime, we need to start thinking about what would lead a government minister to conclude that the existence of a program forces Canadians to change their life choices.

Things They Should Invent: political system wherein you only have to express your opinion once for it to count

This post was inspired by this development.

A lot of activism is repeating the same message over and over and over again. You have to sign petitions and write letters to the editor and attend rallies and contact your elected representatives and repeat the same thing over and over and over.

That's inefficient. We need a system where you express your opinion once to the pertinent people, and that's sufficient. And expressing your opinion more than once gains no further reward, and perhaps even annoys people and/or is detrimental to the credibility of your cause.

Case in point: I wrote a cogent and persuasive email to the appropriate elected representatives about the importance of Transit City to me personally and to our city as a whole. But now there are people convinced that I don't really care about Transit City because I didn't attend this one rally that I didn't know was a rally, or because I sent an email instead of making phone calls, or because I didn't skip work and attend some city meeting. And meanwhile I've been spending the past month thinking constantly about what I can do to convince the powers that be that Transit City is important.

Wouldn't the world be a better place if that one email was literally all I could do, and the powers that be would give it precisely my share of all due consideration no matter how much noise the other people make? Then my attendance at the rally would be redundant (maybe we wouldn't need to go to all the trouble to have rallies at all!) and I could have spent the past month putting my thoughts and energy into a wide range of other things, all of which could also be knocked off with a single well-composed email. Politicos' offices would run more smoothly, people would feel more engaged in the political process, people could inform themselves about and commit effort to a wider range of issues, and the world would be a better, more informed, less stressful place.

Things They Should Invent: all public meetings must be justified or obsoleted

I received an email inviting me to a community meeting regarding a political issue I'm interested in. Unfortunately, it didn't say anything about why there was a community meeting. Is there new information that they can't post on the internet for some reason? Are they trying to physically carry out a specific action? They didn't say. They got my email (and, I assume, everyone else's that they copied on this) in the first place through a piece of slacktivism, so why would they think I'd put on make-up and pants and go somewhere at a set time without some hint of why this needs to be in person?

I also saw a tweet recently by someone who was attending a public meeting, and said that they wished more people could be there so they could find out all this information. But why should you have to be there to find out the information? Why can't they just post it on the internet?

It isn't always necessary for people to be in a specific place at a specific time for consultation or information dissemination or activism to happen. Often an email or a website will do the job. Instead of constantly holding public meetings, they should think critically about how much of this can be achieved online. And, conversely, if they do in fact need people to be present in person, they need to specify why.