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An all-time record number of visitors dropped by this site in April, which is both gratifying and surprising. I've always said that I'd keep blogging even if no one was reading this because the stuff here is my digital dumping ground for notes, background, and observations that I often find useful to refer to somewhere down the road. The notebook metaphor is a good one except that this notebook is digital, available to me wherever there's a Web connection and searchable by keyword. (In covering the Conservative in government, for example, I've often looked back to the stuff I blogged when that party's grassroots held its first and only policy convention in 2005.)

With that, here's a review of the most popular posts, as measured by the number of times they were viewed, by the 120,569 unique visitors to this site in April, 2008. These are the top 20 with their original posting date is in brackets.

1. Conservatives versus the Media: Part 132 (Sun 20 Apr 2008 09:10 PM EDT)
2. Mercedes' SmartCar (Thu 20 Jan 2005 01:03 PM EST)
3. Flanagan to Conservatives: Suck it up! (Mon 21 Apr 2008 09:44 PM EDT)
4. Was Conservative ad scheme legal? “We are not certain beyond all reasonable doubt” (Sun 20 Apr 2008 10:31 PM EDT)
5. “Who is Gordon Brown?” (Sat 13 Oct 2007 05:33 PM EDT)
6. F-35 – Test Flight (Wed 10 Jan 2007 03:07 PM EST)
7. The TSX media centre (Thu 01 Apr 2004 10:38 AM EST)
8. The Liberals have a good day (Tue 01 Apr 2008 10:54 PM EDT)
9. The RAF's C-17 Globemaster (Fri 11 Aug 2006 09:25 PM EDT)
10. On to something new … (Fri 28 Mar 2008 03:33 PM EDT)
11. The RCMP raids: Some inconvenient truths (Thu 17 Apr 2008 07:57 AM EDT)
12. Welcome to Parliament, Rob Clarke! (Thu 03 Apr 2008 07:26 AM EDT)
13. Meanwhile in Iraq, the Canadians dropped in … (Mon 21 Apr 2008 10:40 PM EDT)
14. Humour: Nigerian e-mail scam vs. Conservative financing scandal (Mon 28 Apr 2008 10:57 PM EDT)
15. Canadians mark ANZAC Day (Wed 23 Apr 2008 10:21 AM EDT)
16. The New Air Canada uniforms (Mon 01 Nov 2004 10:47 PM EST)
17. Canada's Two Economies? Maybe not… (Mon 28 Apr 2008 10:10 PM EDT)
18. How much does the middle class make? (Mon 05 Dec 2005 07:58 PM EST)
19. Dryden Vs Moore (Sat 19 Apr 2008 08:33 AM EDT)
20. Garth on the RCMP raids (Tue Apr 18 2008 06:29 PM EDT)

Wow. The Conservative Party raised nearly $5-million in the first three months of 2008, more than twice as much as every other federal party combined.
Not only that, but the NDP raised more money than the once-mighty Liberals.
The Liberals managed to raise less than $850,000 in the quarter. Once again: The Tories raised $5-million.
Elections Canada released the data this afternoon.
Now, to be fair to the Libs, some Liberal leadership candidates from last year are still raising money to pay off their campaigns and that would likely have sapped some of the party's ability to fundraise during the quarter.
And then there's average size of donation. Historically, the Liberals have always had more generous donors, i.e. the average donation was higher. No longer. For the first time, both the Conservatives and the NDP have higher average donations than the Libs.
Here's the numbers for money raised Jan. 1 to March 31, 2008 (Number of donors/Avg donation in brackets):

• Conservatives: $4,954,550.22 (44,345/$111.73)
• NDP: $1,119,647 (13,329/$84)
• Liberals: $846,129 (10,169/$83.21)
• Green Party: $210,962 (4,731/$44.59)
• Bloc Québecois: $37,006 (463/$79.93)

Some surprising news on the economy this morning –

First, the U.S. economy grew in the first quarter of the year so, technically, the U.S. is not in a recession.

Most economists work on a definition of recession that requires two consecutive quarters of negative growth or contraction. The U.S. economy grew, albeit at an anemic pace, in the fourth quarter of 2007 and, data this morning shows that it advanced at an annual rate of 0.6 per cent in the first three months of 2008.

Second, the Canadian economy shrank in February, largely because of a decline in manufacturing. That surprised most forecasters who predicted the economy would continue to grow in February.

Since joining Confederation in 1949, the annual budget of the government of Newfoundland and Labrador has included a big helping hand from Ottawa. In 2009, that stops, says NF Finance Minister Tom Marshall and Newfoundland becomes a 'have' province.

Meanwhile, Newfoundland's seat in the have-not club looks to be taken up about the same time by Ontario, which hasn't taken an equalization dollar since 1983.

And, in other news, the Toronto Maple Leafs made the playoffs …

Technorati Tags: deficits, economy

Calgary Grit has a good one …

Dearest Candidate,

Good morning, how are you and your family? I hope fine. Please, I am sorry to bother you with my problem.

Please know that it's not by mistake I am contacting you but by the special grace of God. My name is Stephen Harper and I am the leader of the Conservative Party.

The Conservative Party has $ 9.1 million in its bank account which is destined to be used for advertising in the election campaign. However, the evil Commissions of Elections Canada is watching us closely and is not permitting us to spend more than our $ 18.3 million limit. … [Read the rest]

For the last several weeks, one of the major themes I've been reporting so far as Canada's economy is concerned is the phenomenon of two economies within one nation. One economy is B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador and those provinces are booming. The other economy is in central Canada, mostly Ontario and Quebec. The conventional thinking is that the economies in those provinces are suffering because of the high dollar and their greater exposure to U.S. markets. (The U.S. economy is definitely slowing but did it shrink in the first quarter of this year? We'll find out Wednesday morning when the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis releases GDP numbers for the first three months of 2008.)

But today, along comes Statistics Canada with its review of provincial and territorial accounts for 2007. Overall, Canada's real gross domestic product — the sum total of all the goods and services produced by working men and women in this country — rose 2.7 per cent in 2007 compared to 2006. Now that's not a knock-the-ball-out-of-the-park number but that's a pretty good year. In fact, 2.7 per cent growth was the average rate of growth for our economy over the last five years.

Now, Newfoundland and Labrador actually did knock it out of the park with provincial GDP growing 9.1 per cent in 2007 compared to 2006. (see chart, left, courtesy of StatsCan) Everyone else was between 1.6 per cent and 3.3 per cent growth. That would be Alberta at 3.3 per cent — definitely an above-average performance but given record-high oil prices, etc., etc., 3.3 per cent was all it could do? In fact, growth of 3.3 per cent was Alberta's worst year since 2003.

And what about poor beat-up Ontario? All it did was see its GDP rise 2.1 per cent — pretty good considering everyone (including me) had just about written off the province's manufacturing-based economy. Heck, Québec's economy expanded by 2.4 per cent. No wonder Jean Charest is now that province's most popular politician.

Here's Merrill Lynch's chief Canadian economic strategist, David Wolf, on this latest data:

More timely indicators generally suggest that regional reconvergence in Canada extended into 2008. Job growth in Western Canada dropped to 2.5% y/y in Q1, lowest in nine quarters, from a peak of 4.3% a year ago. Job growth in Central Canada, by contrast, has generally picked up, hitting an 18-quarter high of 2.2% y/y in Q4 before edging back down in Q1 (see Chart 2). Even inflation has eased out West, in fact by more than in Central Canada – we calculate that the average CPI inflation rate across the four Western provinces was 2.3% y/y in Q1, down from a peak of 3.6% in Q2 2007 and the lowest rate since Q2 2005, while the 1.5% Q1 rate in Central Canada was in line with the recent range (see Chart 3).
In our work, we are primarily concerned with the Canadian aggregates; regional divergences are interesting largely to the extent that they may complicate the interpretation and projection of what's happening to the economy as a whole. Our main point here is that those divergences don't look particularly complicating at this point, in contrast to the conventional wisdom. To be sure, the recent divergence between commodity prices and the US economy suggests that Western Canada's lead over Central Canada may start to widen again – but not likely in such a way as to invalidate the message in the national data.

The Washington Post today looks back at more than a 100 years of Bisphenol A, the chemical recently labelled as a a possible problem by Health Canada (a big victory for environmental activists; a bitter defeat for industry types).

Bisphenol A was the chemical that made the plastic clear and hard in the sippy cups used by my daughter and son when they were infants. Now, Health Canada says I exposed my son and daughter to a chemical that people in the environmental movement who I tend to trust say is a carcinogen. My government, which, above all else seems to want to be prudent, says: “The scientists concluded in this assessment that bisphenol A exposure to newborns and infants is below levels that may pose a risk, however, the gap between exposure and effect is not large enough.”

Ok, the PM in question was Kim Campbell. Still, she's a pretty smart cookie if politically, er, unlucky. And she tells Canwest's man in Paris that Harper is “very controlling” but “competent”:

PARIS – Prime Minister Stephen Harper is running a competent government but should curb his “control freak” tendencies and make clear to Canadians his government won't impose a socially conservative agenda if he wins a majority, according to former prime minister Kim Campbell… [Read the full story]

I'm often asked to speak to conferences of public relations professionals or to meet with the employees of this agency or that agency and I'm always happy to do so.

Many in my line of work think of PR folks as pests, as “flacks”, as a nuisance that gets in the way of real reporters trying to get their stories.

I take a different view and because of that, I think I have a competitive edge over my press gallery colleagues who don't even look at press releases before throwing them in the garbage and who never grab a coffee with a PR person. Public relations people — whether they work for a corporation, an agency, a governnment department or a political party — are vital to my professional success. They know stuff I don't and I never want to give any of them a reason not to tell me what they know.

They not only know stuff about the clients they represent but they know a lot of stuff about their competitors and about the industry they're in. If I'm looking to sniff out a rumour, let's say, about an airline company, the PR folks at that airline company are unlikely to tell me much. Fair enough, because that's their job. But I'll be the PR folks at that airline's competitor, the train company, the bus company, the travel agency, and the government airline regulator may have heard something about that rumour. So it's in my interest, as a reporter, to make sure I maintain a decent professional relationship with the PR folks in what I've sometimes referred to as my “ecosystem of sources” — a term I used to describe my sources, PR folks, readers/viewers with a keen interest in the topics I'm writing about, and other journalists on my beat.

Now, I'm a professional, too, and that means it's my job to take in all this information and recognize what trends or facts would be of interest to the folks I represent: Readers of my newspaper or viewers of my television newscast. My job is highly competitive. If a press release crosses my desk and I toss it only to see my competitor do something on it for the six o'clock news, then I'd better be prepared to say why I got 'scooped' by my competition.

Professionals in the PR business, I think, recognize this: The good ones know they're dealing with professional journalists who really only need to be told something once. The good ones know that relationships they establish with a journalist should outlast whatever client they're representating or whatever project their office is involved in.

Which brings me to Joe Thornley of the public relations firm Thornley Fallis. He — and his firm — are among the “good ones”. Now, I don't know if their clients feel the same way 🙂 but my experience with him and his employees has been exemplary. Joe's got a post up at his blog right now about ethics and public relations. It — and the pieces he's linked to — are interesting reads if you're in his profession but I think some of the points he makes are also important to keep in mind if you're on my side of the fence in the business.

Technorati Tags: public relations

Barry Bearak has been reporting for The New York Times from Zimbabwe's capital Harare. He recently got arrested and jailed for “committing journalism”. His account of the arrest is fascinating:

One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: “You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.”

… I was new to Africa. My wife, Celia Dugger, and I arrived in January as The New York Times’s co-bureau chiefs in Johannesburg. With elections coming in Zimbabwe, I soon made two trips to Harare, each time taking ritualistic precautions for safety. I left my credentials and laptop at home, entered the country as a tourist and interviewed people only behind closed doors. Each night, I destroyed my notes after e-mailing their contents to myself at an Internet cafe. I wrote my articles only upon returning to Johannesburg …

The cell was about 7 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Three bare shelves of rough concrete extended a body’s length from both of the longer walls. Only the top slab left enough space for a person to sit upright, albeit with slouched shoulders. There was a circle of concrete in a corner to be used as a toilet. Behind it was a faucet. Stephen [a freelancer for The Sunday Telegraph who was arrested in the same sweep that nabbed Bearak] tried the knob. It did not work.
The floor was filthy. The odor of human waste infected the air. More bothersome were the bugs. “Cockroaches the size of skateboards,” I quipped. This was hyperbole. The insects were mostly tiny and black, others short, white and wormy. We were soon sharing our clothes with them…

The courthouse is called Rotten Row, after a nearby street. It’s a circular five-story structure built around four elaborate saucers that once fed into one another as a fountain. With the nation insolvent, there’s no money to maintain either ornamentations or courtrooms. Floors are filthy. Microphone stands have no mikes. The building’s clocks are each stymied at 7:10 . . .

Technorati Tags: journalism, Mugabe, New York Times, Zimbabwe