January 24, 2006

Eday...
Yesterday was a general federal election in Canada, after the Liberal minority government fell at the end of November. The Conservatives ended up winning a minority government, with the NDP making significant gains, and the Liberals loosing a lot of seats.
I arrived at the office at 5:30 AM, and at 5:31 the first person called in sick. I only ended up replacing about five people throughout the day, which was better than last year. But in total, about 75 people have turned down jobs or decided not to work for various reasons on the past two weeks. It sounds like a lot of people (and it is), but considering that we hired about 650 people it's not too bad.
It was a fun, albeit long, day. The best part is the evening when all of the ballot boxes come back into the office. It was hectic assuring that all 204 boxes made it back, and that nothing was missing, but nice to know that it was the end of the election and that things had gone well. I left at 10:15, once most of the boxes had come in.
Now it's time to think about my studies...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

At least there is no threat of violence and bombing at polling stations to intimidate people from going to vote.

Glad I live in Canada not Iraq!! At least our percentage of eligible voters went up to a respectable level (65% I think). Not bad for an otherwise complacent country.

At least it's a minority so that will keep the politicians honest for a while. Pass some industrial strength ethics and auditor legislation and reform the MP pension plan and I may have something good to say about the whole lot of them :)

Stephen said...

That's very true. We are lucky to be able to vote in freedom, which a lot of people take for granted.