You say you want election numbers? Look no further than the 308 for all the Canadian election polling you can stand.
And just for the record:
Current Parliament
Conservative Party of Canada: 143 seats
Liberal Party: 77 seats
Bloc Quebecois: 47 seats
New Democratic Party 36 seats
Poll projections from 308 as of March 25
Conservatives: 152 seats, popular vote 38.2%
Liberals: 72 seats, popular vote 27.4%
Bloc Quebecois: 51 seats, popular vote 9.9 %
NDP: 33 seats, popular vote 16.1%
Green Party: 7.1% popular vote
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Saturday, March 26, 2011
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
speling iz imporetunt
As a person who spends a lot of time dealing with the insufficiency of the Roman alphabet in differentiating the subtle shades of pronunciation that can change meaning in a foreign language, I can actually sympathize with the recent error made by the flunky of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who misspelled the name of a town on the PM's itinerary. Mistakes do happen sometimes. But when dealing with a transcription and Romanicization of a language that you are unfamiliar with, surely it behooves (yeah, I said "behooves" and I wasn't calling you "Shirley") the person preparing the document to check with someone who is familiar with the that language.
The names of people (something that doesn't appear anything like often enough in Japanese newspapers) can be written in such a way that there could be several radically different pronunciations and so Romanicizing them is not as straightforward as it might seem. That confusion between "L" and "R" by Japanese that North Americans find so amusing (Yes, Japan will have an erection on Aug. 30 har-de-har-har, you stupid plicks) exists because both sounds are combined in the same character in Japanese.
In translating Japanese to English, place names can be tricky to spell, so we check them. If only the Prime Minister's Office would do the same, then Iqaluit (Village of Many Fish) wouldn't become Iqualuit (Village of People with Unwiped Bums).
tip of the toque to Peterborough Politics, now known as Dispatches by Northwestern Lad