The key demographic in this referendum is swing voters. They are UCP supporters on the more moderate side of the party whom @JKenney brought into the coalition from the PCAA. Having served as a UCP constituency president during his premiership, I know many of these voters and understand what motivates them. Their votes could shift roughly 15% toward either side. The campaigns and strategies should therefore focus on these pragmatic “test drivers” rather than the deeply committed separatists (I call them the "Better dead than reds") or staunch federalists ("True believers") whose positions and votes are already firmly set.

UN-commissioned experts say Gaza ceasefire has not stopped Israel from committing genocide ctvnews.ca/world/israel-hama…

Michael Walzer published “Just and Unjust Wars,” an attempt to delineate the rights and wrongs of warfare in both its causes and its conduct, in 1977. In the nearly 50 years since, no other book on the subject has matched its influence. The precepts are not complicated: it is just to defend your country from an invasion and it is unjust to invade a country that has not attacked you—although Walzer does allow for exceptions, mostly for humanitarian causes. It is just to assume certain risks to avoid civilian casualties and it is unjust to bomb towns indiscriminately to compel an enemy to surrender. The justice of going to war—what philosophers call jus ad bellum—is separate from jus in bello, the justice of how a war is fought. The war in Gaza has made Walzer rethink one of the book’s fundamental principles. “The wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy,” Jordi Graupera writes. As Walzer said to him, “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust.” Read about why a philosopher of war is now reconsidering his seminal work: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/T7…

This 260-year demographic timeline of Poland’s Jewish population reveals the devastating scale of the Holocaust. Source: buff.ly/MEHJWla

Fair Vote Canada, the proportional representation people, crunched the numbers. B.C. Conservatives got 48% of the vote, 69% of the seats and 100% of the power. The 2018 Eby-engineered referendum kept first-past-the-post. #bcpoli

You know who makes this argument? Losers. Always losers. Conservatives made the same point in 2019 and 2021 when the won the popular vote but did not command the most seats.

BC Politics full context

McGill’s law school receives roughly 1,500 applications for just 180 spots. It gave one of those spots to a convicted murderer in his mid-60s, who will never pass the good character requirements to practice, and who violated his parole multiple times. theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…

B.C. election results revive debate over proportional representation ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article…

Friendly reminder that while 48% of registered voters in BC bothered going to the polls, of those, roughly 23% voted conservative. So we now have a majority government that is supported by less than a 1/4 of registered voters. Friendly reminder about that.

Bronwyn Eyre: How USask tried to ruin a man's career for questioning critical race theory Tim Haggstrom has misconduct on his student record for defending the notion of treating people equally. He's still trying to clear his name nationalpost.com/opinion/bro…

B.C. Conservative swearing-in ceremony, according to Rach’

I don't get why so many on the left and the right point to ideology being at the heart of the BC results, when the evidence points to "BC NDP made a cynical election call and NDP voters stayed home" as the real factor.