Vote Smart

I've been having a lot of conversations about strategic voting, and how to avoid a Conservative majority, with different friends. Some people think it doesn't make a lot of sense, that you could choose your second or third choice party just to avoid the Conservatives, but for me, a Conservative majority is sooooooooooooo frightening, and all the other parties are soooooooooo much more appealing, that it makes more sense to vote strategically than any other way.
How do you do this? Simple: you find out if your riding is close, and how the different candidates are doing in the polls. A lot of ridings that are won by the Conservatives are won by a close margin, and if there was less vote-splitting on the left, can be won by one of the three other parties: Liberal, NDP, or Bloc. Heck, maybe we can even get a Green MP in there!
You can find out whether your riding is a close one here. Good luck and happy voting!

Canada's First Climate Exchange Now in Business

Check this out. Today is the opening day of the Montreal Climate Exchange, which allows companies to buy and sell carbon credits.
It'd be nice if the government would actually set emission caps to make this more effective, but kudos to these guys for not waiting for Harper et al to actually do something, and making it happen themselves. If nothing else, it's a start, and might have some impact to at least push action on climate change forward.
A scary quote from the article above:

Since 1990, Canada's emissions have risen faster than all of the other Group of Eight industrialized nations -- the United States, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy.