Worth Reading - January 29, 2015

The scheduled October 2015 federal election will loom over the year for political nerds such as myself. Alice Funke did great work breaking down how some of the changes in the seats will impact the next federal election, I strongly suggest checking it out. 

As a follow-up to Funke's piece, Eric Grenier has released his model for projecting the seat counts for the upcoming federal election. 

"Middle Class" is one of those over-used phrases in politics that just drives me crazy. The reason it bothers me so much is that the term has become so divorced from the reality. As the article opens, 90% of Americans believe themselves to be in the middle class. Many who believe their middle class are working class, many in the upper class presume they are middle class. This article in Maclean's helps define who is in the middle class.

The Huffington Post shared an excerpt of Brent Rathgeber's book. The selection talks about the centralization of power in the office the Prime Minister.

There are no political parties in the Northwest Territories. The Territorial government resembles municipal politics back home in Ontario to my eye. However, there are advocates to abandon the consensus government model and move towards a party system. 

Idil Burale writes in Spacing about the depiction of Toronto's inner suburbs. I like Burale's approach here, the inner suburbs, and suburbs in general are facing growing challenges, but they are not uniform and should not be seen as some alien other.

Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns offers some of his thoughts on gentrification.

From this Globe and Mail article I pull the following quote, " One stand-out finding from our recent study was the growing proportions of Canadians who say that if the country were facing “very difficult times” it would be justified for the Prime Minister to close down parliament (23 per cent) or dissolve the Supreme Court (17 per cent) and rule alone." Take a look. 

Academics are criticizing the government of Newfoundland and Labrador for its plan to cut the number of MLAs down to 40 from 48. This will make the Newfoundland cabinet roughly half the assembly.

Emmett Macfarlane modestly defends the federal government's push to expand history education/discussion in Canada. I generally agree, Canadians need more exposure to their history so long as it isn't just the boiled down jingoism the current government prefers.