CBC Online News Now Available in RSS. As well as why i like cbc.ca as one of my regular news sources.

I get mail from the CBC online and at the moment i don't use RSS or Atom feeds and such. But i do remember coming across a blog entry recently (where i'm not sure) about Canadian news sources that lamented that CBC online did not have RSS feeds.

Since i think CBC is a good news source and I've found this new way of accessing it i thought I'd go over the different ways you can get news from them. I know that personally i don't want them as my only news source. The articles online can be short and to the point. But they are often the first out with a story and they have very good indepth sections. My computer died during the last election and i got it back about half way through. There was an indepth section on the election that had lots of things in it (commentary, news) but what was the most wonderful thing was it had every news story they had published since the election started sorted by date. Made it much easier to catch up on what I'd not seen on TV, and on issues all across Canada.

I signed up for email links from them awhile ago (years ago actually, way before I'd come across RSS as a way of doing things). They send me email 6 times a day with a short summary and a link to the story. They also have an "alerts" feature where you can sign up for them to send you an alert notice if something important has happened (so you can log in and see what is going on). For example i got three on the 19th. One about Parrish and appendicitis, one about the first part of the budget passing and one about the second part passing. However the norm is that i get less than one alert a week.

To get news this way you become a member (its on the top page of CBC.CA) and then you sign up for what you want. I'm set for the four reports they put out every day and two reports that include local news that I've asked for. These also have some national news but not all that much. At the same time i haven't signed up for the sports section. Not a big interest for me, I'll go the website if something interesting is making the main news (i still get some links but since the CBC introduced membership i can't link automatically).

The CBC.CA memberships weren't there when i started using the service. My best guess is that it's a way of showing how many people are using them in part for their statistics and for funding. My CBC news comes into one account and I've never gotten any spam from them. I get what i asked for. At the top of each email they make a quick mention of things (that's how i noticed the RSS) but that is it.

I don't normally read the news four times a day. If i'm online, or a story interests me i might. But it's a way of keeping track of what is going on. If i have a few that i haven't looked at i just don't click on the same story twice.

Now for all you RSS folks they are offering the same type of service except they are

1. Updating the headlines every 15 minutes
2. It's on RSS so you can put it with your other RSS feed
3. You can customize the feed in a lot of ways (over 20) so you get feed on the headlines that interest you.

I decided to put this up for a couple of reasons. Because the CBC having feed seems new and because i think having news from the CBC is worthwhile. I'm sure it won't interest everyone, but it might interest some. And i think they are a very good news source. Their stories are good. They are in the centre (IMO) and don't tend to take sides. I like reading a newspaper that has more than that (i keep track of two other newspapers regularly, although not daily through email lists of articles and i get some for Quebecois newspapers as well) but if you want it fast, when it happened and a relatively non biased view they are a good way of staying informed. And their indepth sections can be quite good if the topic interests you. Oh, and they often have video stories and audio that are related to stories from CBC.CA of articles so it's multimedia as well(they take these from their TV reports and radio reports)

I haven't moved into RSS. I like emailed lists of articles and they've been around a lot longer than RSS. Then i move around the site depending on interest a search or what else i see them talking about (nobody sends a list with all the articles in a newspaper, with RSS you will get all the CBC.CA articles if you subscribe to all of them. I don't get to read everything or even the basic kinda stuff that interests me all the time. But i have a history of the articles if i want to go back and depending on the newspaper i can read back for a week to infinity. This is still my style and in a way it's an early form of RSS, but RSS does get updated way more frequently. I thought it was worth passing on a change in the CBC to using RSS and why i like having them among the news sources i use.

On a final note it appears the same service is available for news in French. I haven't looked into it personally though.P

Thoughts on the Budget Voting Tomorrow. Not all of them have to do with Belinda Stronach moving to the Liberals either.

Things have certainly changed in the last few days, in trying to figure out how the vote will be tomorrow on the budget since Belinda Stronach left the Conservatives and moved to the Liberals. However even before she left the Conservatives there were already other developments that were making the vote look like it would be more complicated than it would.

The first thing i came across was before Stronach left. It appears that two Conservative MP's from Newfoundland are having a huge amount of pressure on them to vote for the budget since it has the Atlantic Accord in it. The Conservatives say they will pass the legislation regardless, but lots of political promises are made that aren't kept. It's a much surer bet if the budget is passed that the Atlantic Accord passes. So there were already two Conservative MP's that were saying that they were not sure how they would be voting on the budget because their constituents had made it fairly clear that they weren't weren't in support of them voting the budget not passing. One of them was saying that he was waiting to see final opinions, but it was an issue that was growing.

The first thing that i do notice about Stronach leaving is that Harper has changed his tactics on what to tomorrow. The reason he has changed his policy seems to be more about spin to me. He's said that he the Conservatives will vote for the first budget bill tomorrow but will vote against the second budget bill.

The fact of the matter is that if the government is defeated neither part of the legislation passes. Both need to pass and both need to go to the budget before they become law. And while one could argue that the motion last week was procedural it is absolutely impossible to talk that way about either of the budget bills. In fact I've come across Harper and the Prime Minister both saying they consider them confidence bills.

The only real good reason i can see Harper's position is that he's hoping that Canadians don't realize that all money bills are confidence votes. Automatically. Always. I guess maybe the Prime Minister wants to be clear he will count this as a confidence vote after last week. Harper's motives are likely different. I think the optics he is looking for is that the Conservatives didn't topple the stuff in the first budget vote, but the stuff in the second. But the effect is exacty the same. I guess he's hoping Canadians as a whole won't get that part.

(reedited somewhat because blogger lost the end of the entry! May 18)

Poland's Minority Government Survives Three Confidence Votes in a Day

I came across this article today when going through the Star. I'm not so sure that i agree with the conclusions that Rosie Diamanno draws about how all of it relates to Canadian politicians. For that matter i imagine the situation in Poland is a lot more complicated than she says (although to give her a fair hearing she admitted it was hard to keep track of). I also don't know exactly how many parties there are in Poland, but one has to either have a lot of parties with similar levels of support (i suppose with more than 10 parties that are popular it's possible) or be dismal and really hated by the electorate to have 5% support in the public. I'm including the parts of the article that i think are the most relevant to the post...So if you want the more opinion parts related to Canada's situation feel free to follow the link.

What particularly caught my eye was that the government had survived three votes of confidence in one day. This seems to be an example (in extreme) of how i discussed that minority governments can be quite stable, especially when each party has no real chance to get a majority in soon a while ago in Minority Governments Can Work . Throw in 20% unemployment (which if it is a government figure likely doesn't count all types of unemployment or underemployment) and, well the politicians seems interested in keeping their jobs. I guess the difference in how i view it is that i wonder if they are just quite as slimy as she depicts the situation. There is a lot of cultural and political information that i certainly haven't read and that i doubt she has. Neither of us reads Polish. And i think it is quite different from Canada. For one thing it's not the Prime Minister that is trying to loose the confidence vote. I've only included the parts of the article i really considered relevant to the post, although you can follow it back to the Star if you want to read more of it.

For integrity, try Poland

ROSIE DIMANNO
May 16, 2005. 01:00 AM

A week ago, I was in a country — Poland — where the ruling coalition had just survived three non-confidence motions in one day, each put forth by a different opposition party.

What's even more remarkable is that the prime minister, Marek Belka, was entirely in favour of dissolving his own government and, frustrated by the coalition's refusal to die on the count, had tendered his resignation to the president, who rejected it.

That most rare of creatures — a forthright politician — Belka had accepted the mantle of leadership last May, promising to spend only one year in office. Now, with the government ditching an earlier promise to hold spring elections, he wants out. More specifically, and quite openly, Belka pines to leave the party he reluctantly heads in order to join another, newly created party in the chaotic Polish parliament.

If I understand correctly — no sure thing when one doesn't speak the language and can't read the papers — the ruling party is down to something like 5 per cent popularity, according to polls.

Yet the Democratic Left Alliance manages to maintain its greasy grip on power — if unable to pass any meaningful legislation — because the coalition deputies are fearful of losing their own seats and enviable salaries, thus joining the ranks of the unemployed, which, nationally, stands at nearly 20 per cent, worst in the European Union.

Parliamentary democracy is still a relatively nascent thing in Poland, liberated from the Soviet yoke less than two decades ago. The politics are boisterous, messy, impassioned and — this they got the hang of right away — self-serving. But at least their motivation is transparent. Nobody pretends that anything noble is going on or that the public isn't being ill-served by the cynical politics of governance by cabal.

Those who have power will go to any length to retain it, even cancelling promised elections, in the manner of some banana republic. Those who don't have power will go to any length to obtain it, even rendering the sitting government incapable of governing.

I think we should consider ourselves lucky to be in a better economic position (although unemployment even at the official rate is still way to high) that our government is not about to fall (or perhaps hold on) for the same reasons. Not to the same extent in any case. And maybe we should consider the fact that despite all the rhetoric about what a mess we are in, we are a lucky country. Not to mention that people that are able to get elected generally are in good shape to get a job if they loose their seats (for social and educational reasons, not all of which are necessarily fair, but are there)

And of course that depending on the situation minority governments can be quite stable! And i think there is a good mechanism (or a convention anyway) that if the PM doesn't have to go to the Govenor General to leave a party in Canada. He could just sit as an independent or cross the floor. I'm less concerned about when politicians say they will call elections, although i think there does need to be a maximum period for a parliament. I think (or hope anyway) this is probably not much more than a hiccup on the way to full democracy---the solution to me seems to be making alliances not quite as strong as they appear to be, like someone being able to cross the floor or just leave the party and be an independent (which we have seen here). I doubt we would ever end up now in a situation that is similar no matter what type of government we have or electoral system.

I do think something that needs to be taken into accounts is thatwe had a chance to make our mistakes before they attracted as much attention, first in how our government evolved in the UK and then in Canada, something i don't think is taken into account when people look at developing democracies and i think they get less credit overall than they should. But if it wasn't for the fact that the country and people deserve better i, i think it would almost be funny (say if you heard about in abstract where nobody was being affected by what was going on). I could see this as being a potential joke that people would tell about politics. What is unfortunate is that it is actually happening. The population of Poland deserves better.P