It’s election day in Canada and today’s show is an effort to explain why it is hard to cast effective votes in a Canadian election and consider how we might solve that problem in both the immediate and long term.

In the first segment, I explain our voting system and some of its unique problems. In our second segment, Ryan Cambpell of Fair Vote and the Liberal Party of Canada talks about civic literacy issues and the need for reform. In our last segment, we discuss the need for voting reform and the challenges we face with movement veteran John Deverell, former Toronto Star reporter, trade union leader and founding treasurer of Fair Vote Canada.

In this week’s edition of After Nine, we interview punk klezmer accordionist and social and climate justice activist Geoff Berner, the host of his up coming local show Danny Bell and ends with an editorial in response to correspondence received by our show.

This week’s show features four guests: Elaine Codling of Comox, associated with the Mid Island Farmers Institute, Jolene Swain of Kispiox, associated with Woodgrain Farm and the Young Agrarians movement, Laurie Gallant of Hazelton, associated with Hazelton Hops and the Northwest BC Food Action Network and Cindy Verbeek of Houston, associated with A Rocha International.

On the show, we discuss agriculture here in BC, this fall’s harvest and a number of associated community development and food security projects, and begin by placing them in the context of the voluntary simplicity and permaculture movements.

In this week’s broadcast, we are joined by lobbyist and pundit Bill Tieleman to discuss the Canadian federal election and author and project coordinator Scott Davis who designs and builds micro-hydro and other renewable energy systems.

This week’s show was a full one because it looked into a pressing issue: the lack of interurban ground transportation in Northern and Interior British Columbia since Greyhound pulled out of Western Canada. And we looked at the issue from a variety of perspectives:

In our first segment, we spoke with Jo-Anna Larson of LeadNow.ca, a Prince Rupert-based educator who led the grassroots campaign for the BC government’s replacement service, BC Bus North, a solution she now deems inadequate.

In our second, we spoke with Jeremy Hainsworth, who covers this beat for the Prince George Citizen and the other Glacier News papers about the economics and financing behind busing in BC’s North.

In our third and fourth segments, we spoke with Laura Parent a Prince George activist, who organized the campaign for BC Bus North that took place inside the BC NDP about her views of the service and of the changes to Prince George municipal bus fares this fall.

We ended with Vancouver-based transit expert, Richard Campbell who helped to place this issue in comparative international and ethical context.

This was our first show focusing on arts and culture and it featured Theatre Northwest’s Marnie Hamagami and AMDA Institute for the Performing Arts’ Heather Ramey. We talked about the concept of “relaxed theatre,” live theatre that does not require audience members to be quiet or still and consequently accommodates parents, their children and people with disabilities.

Our second show, this one featuring the two candidates on/near the left of the political spectrum in the riding of Cariboo-Prince George, the NDP’s Heather Sapergia and the Green Party’s Mackenzie Kerr. We just have the full version of the show this week, with commercials and announcements. Listen through the whole program and you can learn not just about the candidates but about where global issues meet the local scene, especially the proposed plastics manufacturing plant in Prince George.

I do not mind saying that I ended the show unwilling to vote for either candidate. Neither was willing to back the kind of Green New Deal we need and both are choosing to play a dangerous game of footsie with the fracking industry, refusing to abandon their support of a proposed plastics plant that will run on 100% fracked gas from new fracked wells. So I will be bringing them back on the program later in the campaign to see if they are prepared to stop equivocating on fracking.

This is the first episode of the show with guest Douglas Gook from Quesnel, a long-time horse logger and environmental activist.