The results of the 2013 Liberal leadership race were announced on Sunday. The data the Liberal Party have published now include riding-by-riding specific results, but they aren’t in a particularly convenient format, and don’t include the popular vote.

However, the published data does include both the total votes cast in each riding, and the points for each candidate, and that gives us all we need to calculate the popular vote. (The points for each candidate are that candidate’s percentage of the popular vote. Multiply points by the total valid votes cast in each riding and you have the actual number of votes each candidate received.)

That’s what I’ve done here, en mass. I used some automated scripting to pull all the results for each riding from the Liberal page, and tabulate it (clicking on each riding would be a little tedious). I then dropped that all into a google spreadsheet that calculates the popular vote.

The results: Trudeau got 78% of the popular vote, and pro-cooperation candidate Joyce Murray (who was almost unknown going into the race) picked up 12%.

Now, for the details (click on any title to load the source google spreadsheet)…

1. Raw data from the Liberal results page, with popular vote calculated

2. Totals of popular vote and points:

3. Interactive Graph of Popular Vote

4. Pivot table, showing popular vote totals by province:

Final thought: if “blank ballot” had actually been a candidate, it would have beaten both Coyne and McCrimmon.

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Canada does not – as yet – export much tar sands oil to Europe. So why, you might ask, have the Canadian and Alberta governments been working overtime using tax dollars to fund a massive misinformation and lobbying campaign on the other side of the Atlantic?

There’s a clue in this press release from January announcing Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert’s $40,000 lobbying jaunts to the US and Europe: “The European Union is not currently a major market for Alberta’s oil sands products, but any legislation or tariffs adopted by the union’s government can serve as a model for individual nations around the world. We want to continue to share our story with the legislators so they have the facts about our clean energy strategies”

(I’ll let the “clean energy strategies” rubbish slide for now.)

It’s not about protecting existing markets. At the moment the vast majority of exported tar sands oil goes to the US. For the most part, it’s not even about securing a regulatory environment in Europe that protects future potential markets (although that is no doubt a contributing factor). I’ll tell you why the Canadian and Albertan governments are so worried that they’ve been applying pressure on European legislators to a degree at least one EU parliamentarian has declared “unacceptable”.

It’s about precedent. And they’re scared.

Read the rest of this story at DeSmogBlog.com →

A new policy adopted by the US National Farmers Union slams the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would pump bitumen from the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta thousands of miles across America’s farm belt to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas. The Nebraska Farmers Union notes:

“The proposed route of the 1,980-mile pipeline would slice through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It would cross the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska – source of 30 percent of the nation’s agricultural water and drinking water for millions – with a pipeline carrying diluted bitumen, a thick, heavy, corrosive and toxic form of crude oil associated with pipeline ruptures at 16 times the rate of conventional crude.”

Read the rest of this story at DeSmogBlog.com →

Just in time for world water day, researchers at Penn State university have discovered a new “waterless” method for extracting oil from the thick mix of clay, water and bitumen that makes up the tar sands.

The current method for getting the oil out of the sand involves using huge amounts of both fresh water and energy. Hot water is mixed into the sand, which is then piped to an extraction plant and shaken up to release the bitumen. Some of the water from the process is recycled, but huge amounts are simply dumped into toxic lakes.

The new process, according to the Penn State scientists, uses ionic liquids – salt in a liquid state – to separate out the oil from the sand, and, since it doesn’t use water, doesn’t create the tailings ponds. It has been widely reported as cleaner and eco-friendly.

There is not, and never will be anything intrinsically eco-friendly about the tar sands.

Read the rest of this story at DeSmogBlog.com →