Revolutionary Moderation

Election Day



I'm going to treat this site like it's an actual media source, and keep away from anything that smells like partisan politics until the polls close. I trust my regular commenters can restrain themselves for a few hours as well.



This election is the second that we've had comnpressed closing times - relative to Alberta, the polls close in Newfoundland at 5:00, the Maritimes at 5:30, the entire mainland from Quebec through to Alberta at 7:30, and B.C and the Yukon at 8:00.



When I was growing up, polls closed, and results broadcasts began, at eight pm, local time, in every time zone. The strongest early memory of western alienation I have is of my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the authors of countless letters to the editor, complaining that "the election was over before it even started here" - the psychological effect of having Lloyd Robertson, election after election, telling us at the very beginning of the local broadcast exactly who would be forming a government.



How ironic is it, then, that in an election that's widely expected to be very nearly a dead heat, Alberta will not be, and BC will barely be, the part of the country that everyone to the east of us has to wait on? It could have been Alberta's moment, our karmic reward for all those elections. But we bitched and complained, until we got exactly what we wanted. Now we can bitch and complain about that, too, because we live in Alberta, and that's kinda our thing when it comes to the federal government.



(I mock the psychological impact, but it was along the same lines of the response to Bush not mentioning Canada among the laundry list of countries listed in his speech to Congress in October 2001. We know in our minds it doesn't matter, but our inner eight-year-old is screaming "that's not fair!" Compressing the absolute closing times has been a very positive change.)



Go vote. I'm outta here until I have some results to talk about, and "Parizeau-rule" gaffes to record.



Update: I wasn't entirely correct in my Quebec-to-Alberta poll closing time. In Saskatchewan, which is split between Mountain and Central time, and which has no Daylight Savings Time, polls close at 7:30 in CST, and 7:00 in MST. So, that closes the Central Time polls at the same absolute time as the rest of the "middle", and closes Mountain Time polls at the same absolute time as BC. I think. Or maybe there's something about the international date line in there, and the polls actually close Wednesday morning. It's all very confusing.