"it was the conservatives that wanted to fund muslim schools?"

well, think about it for a minute. what, exactly. do you think is liberal about funding religious schools? i know that these words are flipped upside down in the united states - where liberals tend to support the democrats, which has always been the more conservative party - but it's kind of the most illiberal thing in the world, isn't it?

it should be expected that a modern conservatism would want to extend support for faith-based funding across the spectrum; but it also should be expected that a liberal party would oppose that, and would oppose any faith-based school funding at all.

the history here is complicated, and i'm not going to get into it, but the liberals have historically been a catholic minority party, and there's a lot of old identity politics around first french and then irish identity attached to this. i went to a catholic school high school in an italian neighbourhood that shipped a lot of irish kids in from the suburbs (st pius, in ottawa).

i don't actually know where the ndp stand on this issue.

of course, for those that are a little slow...

john tory wanted to expand the separate school system to include pubic funding for other types of faith-based schools, most prominently funding for muslim schools. this was ripped apart mercilessly by dalton mcguinty, who may have been a hypocrite about it, but at the least took advantage of widespread opposition to public funding of the catholic school board. many people suggested at the time that he ought to take the next step, but he never did.

the green party is taking that next step by floating the idea of removing all funding for faith-based schools, which is the exact opposite of what john tory proposed - and what a large plurality of voters have wanted for decades.

we would probably end up with a small privately funded catholic school system, and we can only hope it withers away over time.

but, my position is that i support one secular public school system for everybody - which is the most popular position in this province.

i'm making progress on this.

it's been brutal in here all day, but i have no course of action at this point to resolve it besides running the hot water to try and steam the space out.

i don't understand why she won't go outside like a decent person would.

i hope that when the cancer does hit her, she has a long and painful death.

worst case scenario, i may have to go back to school to avoid getting a job.

i'm actually glad i didn't sign anything. i could have been in for a disaster scenario.

given that everybody knows that doug ford is going to slash disability, i'm at that much more of a disadvantage - if you're a landlord, and you know assistance is going to fall, why would you sign a lease with somebody on disability?

if he had put out a platform, we could at least plan around this. as it is, i have absolutely no idea how big my check is going to be a year from now, or what i'm going to have to do to adjust to less money.

the bottom line is that i don't want to spend my last six months or my last year fighting court battles.

i'm going to focus on completing the discography, and prepare for the worst.

that likely means i'll be staying in more, too.

i'm back in a race against time: how much can i get done before doug ford signs my death sentence?

i'm kind of back in the mindset i was in over 2014 & 2015.

what's the use in quitting smoking if you're planning on killing yourself?

but, then i got my disability renewed...

now, i'm not sure that's going to happen, so i'm back to planning for suicide.

i don't think i'm going to pick it back up. but, i'm falling into apathy around it. so, maybe it's making me sick and ruining my quality of life? i'm going to fucking die anyways, right?

when i lived in ottawa, i lived in ottawa south (where i grew up) or ottawa-centre (where i lived when i moved out, and where i voted when i did).

i mostly voted ndp federally over that period, with the exception being the vote for stephane dion. i voted liberal provincially.

as mentioned: i'm less angry and more embarrassed.

i can't believe so many of us fell for such shameless charlatanism.

and, now we have no idea what he's going to do, because he didn't tell us - we just have to look at the harris government's record and fill in the blanks.

again: doug ford is not some kind of new type of politician.

he's your standard right-wing ideologue - more like paul ryan than donald trump.

i should expect the worst.

yeah....i....

i have absolutely no idea what the government is going to do for disability amounts. i suppose there's an obscure possibility that they could put through the gai - which i was kind of half planning around. they claim they'll let the experiment through, but whether what ford says means anything or not is a coin toss.

they could freeze it, which i could deal with.

or, they could slash it by 50%.

the harris government was downright savage in it's attacks on social service recipients, so there's precedent for something very damaging. and, the economy couldn't handle what that would do, either - unemployment would shoot up to 20%. we'd be dealing with an extreme homelessness problem.

but, i expect the next four years to be very dificult for poor people in this province.

it does not make sense to do anything at all until i get some idea of what they're doing. the reason he didn't release a platform was because he knew people wouldn't like what he was cutting. but, that means i'm stuck in the dark.

i need to wait.

yeah, i...

i have no idea, right?

i get $1200/month. if i move somewhere in august, and that gets cut to $1000/month, i'll probably have to move again right away.

it doesn't make sense for me to plan to move until he announces how deep the cuts are.

i'll have to call to explain this morning.

i may just have to call my landlord to explain that i can't afford to move right now, due to instability in my income source - and all of this conflict is going to have to drag on.

so, what's going to happen if my benefits get cut?

i don't really know what the point of telling me to go work at a fast food restaurant is. there are people with kids that need the job. and, i'm not socially capable of dealing with anything more complex than that, either.

when working was a task, i could deal with it - i could go waste however many hours was necessary in order to save numbers to apply to some purpose. but, when you take away that task, and tell me it's forever, i'm left with what's essentially a death sentence - and the reality that i'd rather kill myself.

the problem is that i don't feel i'm done yet. i have a lot more work to do, before it's time to die. the question is whether i have enough time left to waste at a job or not.

i do think that it's a given that doug ford is going to cut disability rather drastically; this is going to hurt me quite a bit. and, i'm almost wondering if i want to cancel the court process in the short run.

i may have to make a call today.

"you think it was stolen? it's almost exactly what was predicted..."

that's right: it's almost exactly what was predicted.

....and, i've explained the flaws in that reasoning.

i'll reiterate: the tories usually poll at the bottom of their error bars. this generally leads to exaggerated predictions that fail to materialize. tonight, they polled in the middle of it. this is an exception to the rule.

the tories have never won a majority government with less than 40% of the vote - and have ended up with leads in the 30s many times, always ending up with minorities. this has also repeatedly produced many exaggerated predictions. but, tonight was the exception to the rule.

while red/blue switchers were the dominant voter in the twentieth century, they have not existed in large numbers for the course of my conscious lifetime. liberal voters simply haven't voted for the conservatives in large numbers in decades. but, tonight they did.

& what the data suggested, when adjusted for all of these known historical errors and biases, was that we were looking at a small pc bump (not much more than the margin of error) that was distributed equally across the province, as well as exaggerated bumps in ndp support in urban ridings, which should have produced big ndp gains in urban seats and not much for the conservatives, who had a less concentrated vote. while we saw these big ndp bumps in the very downtown cores, we also saw large conservative bumps in suburban areas that i maintain was not something that was predictable from the data, besides through projection. but, it happened, nonetheless, whether via projection or via something else.

i'm not going to adjust my methods over this. i'm going to shrug it off as weird.

and, as mentioned repeatedly, both before and after the vote, as very fishy.

turnout appears to have actually been higher than last election.

so, this was an unprecedented shift: after vehemently rejecting him for mayor a few years ago, and living through what was widely seen as hell for his brother's time at city hall, liberals in toronto actually swallowed themselves whole and voted for doug ford. i find this incomprehensible, but, barring the premise of stuffed boxes, that's what happened.

it's fishy enough to be suspicious.

the ndp didn't split the vote. liberal voters made that choice. in large numbers. apparently.

i don't think i made any errors in analysis; i think my criticisms of the mainstream analysis were grounded, and that the results were very much unexpected. i did not see any convincing evidence of large scale movement from red to blue in toronto. this is the lowest popular vote for a tory majority...ever...as far as i can see: the conservatives hadn't ever won a majority with 40% before. the tory vote was not "efficient", so much as liberals voted for them in large numbers, which has never happened before, either. &etc.

this was really just an exercise in mass idiocy, the likes of which i never thought i'd see here - and which, i need to reiterate, was not suggested by historical data, at all. it really is unprecedented.

but, so be it.

now, we must fight as hard as we can to stop him from ruining the province.

doug ford does not have the slim upside that donald trump has.

he's a dime a dozen market neo-liberal - pro-trade, pro-nafta, the whole thing. he's into empty vacuous jingoism; thankfully, he has no war powers.

ford is really just absolute idiocy, at every level - it's stupid all the way down.