On the move!
Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.
Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.
Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!
—Ian King, December 13, 2004
Friday, August 23, 2002
Inky Mark, MP for Dauphin - Swan River, Manitoba is set to join the Progressive Conservatives at this weekend's convention in Edmonton.
Mr. Mark says that he will join the Tories if the party okays a democratic reform package that he helped pen when he was part of the now-defunct Democratic Representative Caucus. The Caucus, which was a group of Canadian Alliance MP's that left caucus in 2001, fell apart after most members decided to rejoin the Alliance.
While Mr. Mark claims that a majority of his constituents support his decision to join the Tories, but he cites few hard numbers in his press release (link above) . When the press release cites support for his move, it refers to a radio station's Internet poll and a mail-out survey where only about one-quarter of the surveys were returned. Those aren't the most reliable measures. Mr. Mark commissioned a telephone poll of his constituency, but he has only released are his name recognition, and the constituents' opinion of him personally. Could it be that Mr. Mark's constituents don't actually support his move all that much? Naaaah, of course not.
In a radio interview with CKNW's Peter Warren, Mr. Mark said that he could serve his constituents better by being a member of the Tories than as an independent MP. He also hasn't much choice. The Alliance will not renew Mr. Mark's membership, and party leader Stephen Harper has made no effort to welcome back Mr. Mark into caucus.
When asked about Mr. Harper, Mr. Mark said "He made a cooment to the media back in April that he was gonn talk to all the dissidents [about rejoining the Alliance caucus] and I still haven't talked to him yet."
Information about the Progressive Conservatives' 2002 general meeting can be found here.
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