Latest news with #Pilon
Hamilton Spectator
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Hamilton Spectator
Market Square hunger strike aims to garner Gerretsen's attention on Palestinian plight
A local woman says she is on a hunger strike until Member of Parliament Mark Gerretsen agrees to meet with local pro-Palestinian supporters. In an email to Kingstonist early on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, Lindsey Pilon expressed her intentions to sit in Springer Market Square for the duration of her public hunger strike. During this strike, she will take nothing by mouth, 'no food, no drink, no medicine,' until Gerretsen, the MP for Kingston and the Islands, meets with the local constituents and supports a two-way arms embargo between Canada and Israel. On Thursday, May 22, 2025, Pilon remained in her seat at the square, rain-soaked but smiling and energetic. She explained she has many friends in Palestine, but she also counts herself among many Palestinian supporters in the Kingston area. 'We are a collective; it is a groundswell. And there are many different organizations tethered in,' Pilon said. She feels that Gerretsen doesn't understand or is actively ignoring the large number of his constituents who are Palestinian and Palestinian supporters. 'We've been trying to get his attention and to get him to sign on to the Vote Palestine platform , which is pretty rational. And he has refused meetings consistently,' Pilon asserted. Vote Palestine, a grassroots organization with support from groups and individuals across Canada, contends that '[a]rms dealers in Canada export weapons (including parts and components) as well as military and security technology to Israel, both directly and via the United States. The Canadian military and defence industry also purchase Israeli weapons and parts, which are field-tested on Palestinians, thus directly funding Israel's war efforts and economy. These military imports and exports make Canada complicit in Israel's atrocities carried out in the illegally occupied Palestinian territory.' Their platform states that the Canadian government should impose a full and immediate two-way arms embargo on Israel that includes ending military trade with Israel through the US or any other third-party state. Pilon said there have been many requests for Gerretsen's attention to the matter, some polite and some more assertive, 'but regardless, he'll call the police [on protesters outside his office], has refused to meet with us, and is just giving stock and boilerplate responses.' 'I don't personally want to meet with them,' she shared. 'I am just showing my solidarity with the movement. I'm acting as a symbol for the movement at the moment [to draw his attention]. And this is easy and accessible for me to do.' Being outdoors in the elements helps her endorphin levels, Pilon explained. It's 'like I'm seeing a cousin or a mother,' she explained, looking around at the wind and rain. 'I'm full of fire. My body's made for this. My papa was a Mohawk, my mom's father was a Mohawk, and my mom's mother was Oneida. So we have the rebellious spirit and just [a] love for life.' Market Square is her ideal location, she said, because anyone who cares to look can see her on the City's web cam . Also, the space is potent in an Indigenous historical context, Pilon said: 'This was a meeting place. This was a bloody battleground. The Peacemaker came across Lake Ontario in the stone canoe. This place is profound.' The legend of the Great Peacemaker and Hiawatha in Mohawk tradition centres on a journey of peace and unity, starting from Lake Ontario and extending to the Iroquois Confederacy. The Peacemaker, also known as Deganawidah, travelled across Lake Ontario in a white stone canoe, bringing a message of peace to the warring Haudenosaunee nations. Hiawatha, a Mohawk warrior, was initially seeking revenge, but the Peacemaker convinced him to embrace peace instead. She likened this struggle for peace and resilience in turmoil to the Palestinian people. 'Palestinians have shown us — the journalists and the doctors —time and time again about courage and nobility and the grandfather teachings. I see my grandfather teachings in them,' Pilon expressed. 'I know that the dogma is fraught, the rhetoric is fraught. Still… we have the power as a society, as a humanity, to stop children from dying and starving. We could do that in the snap of a finger, and it needs to be done… let's get that done, and then we can figure out the rest. We'll figure out the partisanship after.' Pilon added, 'Palestinian history is being erased, and entire families [are being removed] from the Civil Registry. They feel like their memories are being trampled and they feel hopeless... There's a pervading hopelessness, a feeling like they have no future. And I very much care for these people.' 'And the bombardments of the so-called Gideon's Chariots are devastating. They are munitions testing, and [the munitions are] being launched with propellant exported from Turtle Island. And that, as an Indigenous mother, a social activist, human being... is unacceptable.' Pilon said the level of access to imagery and stories that Palestinian journalists have provided on social media is an alarming call for urgency: 'What we're seeing is devastating every day, all day.' 'If you're at all able to take some time, following the journalists in Palestine means the world to them. It gives them purpose because they feel it. They feel like they're helping to show injustice. I highly recommend you follow , he is a phenomenal journalist,' she said. 'Tuesday night was the first time that I announced that I was going to stop food and water. Honestly, it's a lot easier than I thought it was, so I feel it's not going to be so dramatic. Still, I won't stay... Mark Gerretsen has to meet with the constituents before Friday. After all, the meeting of the House is on the 26th, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he will meet with them before Friday, and if not, I will then retire to prepare for other actions, because there will be no rest,' she asserted. 'Gaza is under the rubble; it's a dire time, and we were socialized out of caring for each other. Our manners hold us to these prescribed postures that are not going to help us. And so I love showing people that a different world is possible.' This is why she sits at a table with two chairs. She says she wants people to engage in conversation with her. 'Come, sit down, let's chat about it all.' Kingstonist reached out to MP Gerretsen for confirmation of the allegations he's refused to meet with the pro-Palestinian constituents, as well as for comment on this situation and whether he might agree to meet with the constituents in the future. No response was received by time of publication.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trudeau wanted ranked ballots. Would that have changed Monday's results?
Looking back on his time as prime minister, Justin Trudeau said that abandoning his promise of electoral reform was his biggest regret. "Particularly as we approach this election … I do wish that we'd been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country, so that people could choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot," Trudeau said after announcing his resignation in January, seeming to support a ranked ballot that would let voters pick their preferred candidates in numerical order. "Parties would spend more time trying to be people's second or third choices, and people would be looking for things they have in common, rather than trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other." In such a system, also called "alternative vote," if one person didn't get a clear majority on the first count, second-choice votes would be counted until someone got more than 50 per cent support. CBC News posed the question to political experts: What would Monday's election have looked like under a ranked ballot system? Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University in Toronto who studies electoral reform, says the results would not have been as devastating for the smaller parties, particularly the NDP, who were clobbered by strategic voting efforts. Pilon uses the B.C. riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith as an example: NDP incumbent Lisa Marie Barron fell to Conservative Tamara Kronis, who had just 35.2 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Liberals, NDP and Greens combined for 64.4 per cent. "The reason that we saw such a decline for both the Greens and the NDP has less to do with public judgments about their efficacy or desirability as parties, and everything to do with the kind of straitjacket that people felt they were put into, in terms of the strategic [voting] dilemma that they faced," Pilon said. WATCH | Justin Trudeau says he regrets not achieving electoral reform: He says that's why in cases like Nanaimo–Ladysmith, supporters of NDP incumbents likely felt they had to "hold their nose" and vote Liberal to hold off the Conservatives. NDP suffered major losses Such voting strategies set off heated debates among some progressives in the lead-up to the election. As results rolled in Monday night, some voters posted on social media that they wished they had a ranked ballot system. "What makes it so difficult is that voters lack the information to be able to make that strategic vote effectively, because to be really strategic, you've got to have a good sense of what everyone else is going to do — and that's the very thing you can't get," Pilon said. "It's very unlikely to get good polling information about an individual constituency." The NDP lost most of its seats after Monday's vote, falling from 24 to seven and losing official party status. Pilon says the ranked ballot system still tends to funnel support back to the biggest parties, which is why voting reform advocates generally prefer proportional representation, which would base a party's number of seats in Parliament on its percentage of the popular vote. But Pilon says Liberals in particular would benefit from ranked ballots because they would likely have more people willing to rate them in second place, whereas the Conservatives have fewer "adjacent parties" to draw from — though he notes some Conservative gains in Monday's election may have come at the expense of the People's Party of Canada. The PPC captured just 0.7 per cent of the vote, after getting about five per cent in the 2021 federal election. Trudeau promised reform in 2015 During his first campaign as Liberal leader in 2015, Trudeau promised to do away with the first-past-the-post system, where a candidate wins simply by having the most votes. His government struck a House of Commons all-party special committee to review other voting systems, including ranked ballots, and released a report in December 2016 that recommended a referendum on a switch to a form of proportional representation. But Liberal MPs disagreed, saying the recommendations were "rushed" and "too radical," and the plan fizzled. Electoral reform was not in the Liberals' 2025 platform and current leader Mark Carney has said it is not a priority for his government. WATCH | Mark Carney says electoral reform not a priority: Pilon says Australia is the only Western industrialized country that uses ranked ballots today, though Manitoba and B.C. used versions of ranked ballots between the 1920s and '50s, and the federal Liberals have toyed with the idea of electoral reform at various times dating back to 1919. Ireland also has its own version of a ranked ballot. In B.C.'s 1952 election, the Liberal and Conservative parties formed a coalition to keep socialism at bay, and introduced ranked ballots under the assumption that voters who picked one of their parties would rank the other in second place. Lydia Miljan, head of the University of Windsor's political science department, says that plan "backfired" and led to the Social Credit Party pulling off a slim victory. "That tells you that voters are savvy to this kind of political manipulation, and that can change the calculus depending on how it's instituted," she said. Ranked ballots could have given Liberals majority: prof In 2025, Miljan says a ranked ballot may have helped the Liberals eke out a majority — the party landed at 169 seats, falling just three short of a majority government. "I don't think it would have made a big difference, except probably in the few ridings where there were three-way splits, where you might have gotten a few more NDP seats and probably equally more Liberal seats," she said. "In that respect, you would have had a Liberal majority, most likely." Andrea Lawlor, associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, says while we can't be sure how voters would have ordered their preferences, it's possible a ranked ballot could have fundamentally shifted the balance of power between the parties. "In this election, with such a short walk between a Liberal minority and a Liberal majority, change at the margins could have had a dramatic impact," she said. Lawlor says she doesn't see electoral reform becoming an issue in the near future, but suggests politicians should carefully consider the possibility "if we want to see the continuation of the multi-party system as we know it, in an environment of increasing polarization."
CBC
30-04-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Trudeau wanted ranked ballots. Would that have changed Monday's results?
Looking back on his time as prime minister, Justin Trudeau said that abandoning his promise of electoral reform was his biggest regret. "Particularly as we approach this election … I do wish that we'd been able to change the way we elect our governments in this country, so that people could choose a second choice or a third choice on the same ballot," Trudeau said after announcing his resignation in January, seeming to support a ranked ballot that would let voters pick their preferred candidates in numerical order. "Parties would spend more time trying to be people's second or third choices, and people would be looking for things they have in common, rather than trying to polarize and divide Canadians against each other." In such a system, also called "alternative vote," if one person didn't get a clear majority on the first count, second-choice votes would be counted until someone got more than 50 per cent support. CBC News posed the question to political experts: What would Monday's election have looked like under a ranked ballot system? Dennis Pilon, a political science professor at York University in Toronto who studies electoral reform, says the results would not have been as devastating for the smaller parties, particularly the NDP, who were clobbered by strategic voting efforts. Pilon uses the B.C. riding of Nanaimo–Ladysmith as an example: NDP incumbent Lisa Marie Barron fell to Conservative Tamara Kronis, who had just 35.2 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Liberal, NDP and Greens combined for 64.4 per cent. "The reason that we saw such a decline for both the Greens and the NDP has less to do with public judgments about their efficacy or desirability as parties, and everything to do with the kind of straitjacket that people felt they were put into, in terms of the strategic [voting] dilemma that they faced," Pilon said. WATCH | Justin Trudeau says he regrets not achieving electoral reform: Trudeau says he regrets stalled electoral reform 4 months ago Duration 0:52 He says that's why in cases like Nanaimo–Ladysmith, supporters of NDP incumbents likely felt they had to "hold their nose" and vote Liberal to hold off the Conservatives. NDP suffered major losses Such voting strategies set off heated debates among some progressives in the lead-up to the election. As results rolled in Monday night, some voters posted on social media that they wished they had a ranked ballot system. "What makes it so difficult is that voters lack the information to be able to make that strategic vote effectively, because to be really strategic, you've got to have a good sense of what everyone else is going to do — and that's the very thing you can't get," Pilon said. "It's very unlikely to get good polling information about an individual constituency." The NDP lost most of its seats after Monday's vote, falling from 24 to seven and losing official party status. Pilon says the ranked ballot system still tends to funnel support back to the biggest parties, which is why voting reform advocates generally prefer proportional representation, which would base a party's number of seats in Parliament on its percentage of the popular vote. But Pilon says Liberals in particular would benefit from ranked ballots because they would likely have more people willing to rate them in second place, whereas the Conservatives have fewer "adjacent parties" to draw from — though he notes some Conservative gains in Monday's election may have come at the expense of the People's Party of Canada. The PPC captured just 0.7 per cent of the vote, after getting about five per cent in the 2021 federal election. Trudeau promised reform in 2015 During his first campaign as Liberal leader in 2015, Trudeau promised to do away with the first-past-the-post system, where a candidate wins simply by having the most votes. His government struck a House of Commons all-party special committee to review other voting systems, including ranked ballots, and released a report in December 2016 that recommended a referendum on a switch to a form of proportional representation. But Liberal MPs disagreed, saying the recommendations were "rushed" and "too radical," and the plan fizzled. Electoral reform was not in the Liberals' 2025 platform and current leader Mark Carney has said it is not a priority for his government. WATCH | Mark Carney says electoral reform not a priority: 'PM should be neutral' on electoral reform, Carney says 5 days ago Duration 1:29 Heading into the final weekend of the election campaign, Liberal Leader Mark Carney was asked about his thoughts on electoral reform. He said if there is a process initiated to change Canada's election methods, it should be 'objective' so as to not 'tip the scales in one direction or another.' Pilon says Australia is the only Western industrialized country that uses ranked ballots today, though Manitoba and B.C. used versions of ranked ballots between the 1920s and '50s, and the federal Liberals have toyed with the idea of electoral reform at various times dating back to 1919. In B.C.'s 1952 election, the Liberal and Conservative parties formed a coalition to keep socialism at bay, and introduced ranked ballots under the assumption that voters who picked one of their parties would rank the other in second place. Lydia Miljan, head of the University of Windsor's political science department, says that plan "backfired" and led to the Social Credit Party pulling off a slim victory. "That tells you that voters are savvy to this kind of political manipulation, and that can change the calculus depending on how it's instituted," she said. Ranked ballots could have given Liberals majority: prof In 2025, Miljan says a ranked ballot may have helped the Liberals eke out a majority — the party landed at 169 seats, falling just three short of a majority government. "I don't think it would have made a big difference, except probably in the few ridings where there were three-way splits, where you might have gotten a few more NDP seats and probably equally more Liberal seats," she said. "In that respect, you would have had a Liberal majority, most likely." Andrea Lawlor, associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Hamilton, says while we can't be sure how voters would have ordered their preferences, it's possible a ranked ballot could have fundamentally shifted the balance of power between the parties. "In this election, with such a short walk between a Liberal minority and a Liberal majority, change at the margins could have had a dramatic impact," she said. Lawlor says she doesn't see electoral reform becoming an issue in the near future, but suggests politicians should carefully consider the possibility "if we want to see the continuation of the multi-party system as we know it, in an environment of increasing polarization."
CBC
25-04-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Why have federal party leaders spent little time in Alberta this election?
Federal party leaders have nearly finished marching the campaign trail, but they have spent little time in Alberta along the way. CBC News has tracked where the major party leaders held campaign events so far, ahead of election day on April 28. While the Conservative, Liberal and NDP party leaders have visited Alberta, so far each leader has only visited one of the two biggest cities on the campaign trail. Liberal Leader Mark Carney, for example, has only been in Calgary, though he did visit Edmonton a few days before he called the election. "It boggles my mind how the Liberals would not send their leader into Edmonton," said Dennis Pilon, a politics professor at York University in Toronto. He described Edmonton as a "key battleground" for the three major parties, but especially the NDP and Liberals. "That seems like a shot in the arm — particularly when the polls are looking Liberal-positive." Pierre Poilievre is scheduled to be the first major party leader to visit the province's two largest cities, when he makes a campaign stop in Calgary Friday afternoon. Nationally, CBC's poll tracker suggests the Conservatives, led by Poilievre, are chipping into the Liberals' lead. The NDP, led by Jagmeet Singh, is trying to hold onto official party status. Alberta, historically, mostly votes blue, and the poll tracker suggests the Conservatives are well ahead of the other parties in the province. "You have a pretty good idea what's going to happen [in Alberta] before the starting gun's even fired," said Justin Archer, partner of Berlin Communications, an Edmonton ad and communications agency. "It doesn't make a whole ton of sense for people to spend a lot of resources here trying to pick up seats." So far, major party leaders have combined for 11 visits to Alberta, a province with 37 seats. The four provinces in Atlantic Canada, which combine for 32 seats, have had 23 party leader visits this campaign. Archer and Pilon said that parties have limited resources and, legally, can only spend so much during a campaign, so they have to be strategic about where to send their leaders. Leaders tend to get sent where they can generate buzz — and, potentially, make inroads, they said. Singh held five events in Edmonton, though four were in the Edmonton Centre riding. Poilievre held two events in Edmonton ridings, plus a rally just south of the city. He will visit Calgary for the first time on the campaign trail Friday afternoon. Carney, meanwhile, held three events in Calgary, but none in Edmonton. The Green Party co-leaders have not visited the province. The Bloc Québécois only campaigns within Quebec. People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier has made stops in Edmonton and Calgary, as well as in smaller centres like Red Deer. While most of Alberta's seats will go blue, the Liberals and NDP will be competing in Edmonton for progressive seats, Pilon said. Pilon acknowledged Edmonton seems to be an important place this election, but said those races are unlikely to swing the election unless Monday turns into a tight contest. The Conservatives dominate in Alberta, he said, but the Liberals tend to have an "efficient vote," winning seats across the country. "Ultimately, the contest is won by how many seats you win, not by how many votes you get," he said.
CBC
19-03-2025
- CBC
Saskatoon teen sentenced to probation for joyriding crash that killed 16-year-old friend
A Saskatoon teen who pleaded guilty to crashing his dad's car and killing his 16-year-old friend while joyriding is not going to jail. Rather, the teen, who is now 16, will be on probation for two years and then not be allowed to drive for another four years. Provincial court Judge Brad Mitchell accepted the joint sentencing submission from prosecutor Michael Pilon and defence lawyer Ron Piche in court Tuesday. The teen pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death and dangerous driving causing bodily harm. He cannot be named because of his age. Pilon detailed the sequence of events that began just after midnight on April 14, 2024. The 15-year-old took his dad's 2008 Honda Civic without permission to go joyriding with friends. The teen had neither a learners or drivers licence at the time. His dad was working a night shift and not at home. The teen and a group of friends spent the next five hours "cruising around Saskatoon," Pilon said, until around 5 a.m. CST when he began dropping off his friends "and racing to beat his dad home." None of the teens were drinking or doing drugs, he said. The teen and two passengers were in the car on Taylor Street East when he lost control travelling at twice the posted speed limit, spinning out and broadsiding a shear-proof power pole, which then caused the car to flip onto its roof. The driver and front-seat passenger were wearing seat belts, but the teen in the back seat was not and he was thrown from the car. "The victim died on impact," Pilon said. Police at the scene described the 15-year-old as "remorseful and co-operative," at one point volunteering to officers, "I killed him." None of the victim's family were in court Tuesday for the sentencing "because it was too traumatic for them to attend," Pilon said. The 16-year-old was the youngest in the family and the only son. Friends said his father is still devastated, and he is now simply "waiting to meet his son," Pilon said. Piche spoke for the young driver, describing its "profound impact on him." "He is still feeling remorse, and he has empathy for the family." The teen and his father were the only family members in the court gallery. In addition to the probation and driving prohibition, the teen must obey a one-year curfew, do 240 hours of community service and prepare a written apology to the victim's family.
