I will be in the air for most of the day today, en route to Japan. So my availability is limited on this, Quebec election day (yes, bad timing, M Charest forgot to consult with me before setting the date!). I will be available by email from tomorrow onwards to answer questions and respond to media inquiries. Pre-emptive apologies to DemocraticSPACE readers if your comments get caught in our spam software; they will remain there for the next 24 hours, until I get settled in Tokyo and have a chance to clear the queue.

Due to the popularity of the site, we have recently had to upgrade to a more powerful server, which has substantially increased the costs of running DemocraticSPACE.com (by a factor of 20!). As the site is non-partisan and non-profit, this new hardware has forced us, reluctantly, to begin placing advertisements at the top of the page in order to help defray these costs. So, our apologies for the ads. We have also recently added advertising spaces on each of the riding pages for the Quebec and fall Ontario elections (our Canada 2007 site will be up soon) — if your local candidates is interested in placing and ad on their riding webpage, please encourage them to contact us.

Well, that was quite an ordeal! After some serious incompetence on the part of our host and two full days of downtime, we’re back up and running on a new dedicated server. This upgrade should not only prevent shutdowns such as what we experienced Friday and Saturday, but should also increase the speed of the site. Again, our sincere apologies for the past 48 hours of downtime.

It appears that our server is running rather slowly today. We’re working on getting it back up to normal speed. Our apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime.

Our apologies for being being offline for a few hours this evening. We’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.4 and beefed up our spam blocking. So if you find that your comments are not being posted, feel free to drop us an email.

I’ll be in Toronto over the next couple of months. If you would like to chat about current affairs over coffee or beer, just drop me an email at morrow at democraticspace dot com, or post a comment here. I’d like to meet as many people as possible.
– Greg

Apologies to everyone for being offline for the past few days. Unfortunately, someone maliciously hacked into DemocraticSPACE, exploiting vulnerabilities in the software to bring down the site. I have spent the past couple of days rebuilding and manually upgrading my software. I hope that the site will hold up better with these changes. I have reason to believe that this attack was a response to my recent criticisms of the Conservative government, but I will not go into that here. Suffice to say, I will continue to critique any party that subordinates the tenets of democracy to its own self interest. Thank you to those of you who have returned to DemocraticSPACE during this extended downtime.