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I confess that I have been lax about my principal promise in my last Congressional campaign – reporting on my activities in Congress; not just my in-game votes and how I voted on Open Congress issues. The fact is however that for the most part Congress has been quiet since the debate on the hospital for New Brunswick which degenerated into something else entirely. There are a few things I would like to discuss with you however.

In-Game Votes
Most of the in-game votes that I participated in were the usual routine operations: transferring (donating) funds from the Treasury to Revenue Canada, Printing Money, renewing alliances, with the occasional rewriting of the New Citizen Message thrown in for good measure. Of course we all know what the big issue facing Congress was in the past week – the Peace Treaty with the UK. It was a bitter pill to swallow and had I seen any way to carry on the war I would have voted against it. The problem was that our allies, with whom we entered this war, had agreed to end their wars with the UK. Had we kept the war open we would have lost Scotland anyway and had an open war against the UK and 17 or 18 MPPs. They may not have done anything with it immediately but if there was a time when our alliance structure was less than it is now we would have been in the sort of position we faced last summer. I didn’t like losing the war and I certainly don’t like the way that the UK demanded that we return Scotland – details of which I can’t really go into since it was dealt with in Closed Congress. We were faced with the bad options and in my opinion we chose the one that was least dangerous to us.

In-Forum Votes
There weren’t many. Besides voting for the proposed members of the Supreme Court – a process which was virtually a rubber stamp since appointees to the Supreme Court are never challenged – the only official votes that I can recall was a vote approving the February budget estimates, and a second vote on the question of increasing the New Citizen Fee, which is paid by the Government when a new citizen joins the game. I voted for the budget although a number of members abstained. As to the New Citizen fee, like the majority of the Congressmen who voted opted to keep the fee at $5. The worry is that we will be disbursing funds to citizens who may quit as soon as the join the game. There is a bursary available to citizens who sign up for the eCanada Forums, an action which in my opinion indicates a certain amount of seriousness on the part of potential citizens.

In-Forum Comments
I’m afraid that I haven’t been overly diligent in keeping track of the number of times that I posted in the forums this time around. I have spoke out against raising the Value Added Tax as a means of reducing oversaturation in the markets; a higher VAT being seen as a way of “direct” potential business owners into other manufacturing business. The problem is that virtually all of the manufacturing businesses are oversaturated. Other proposals were made to reduce the Minimum Wage, increase the Import Tax on weapons to reduce the number of foreign companies in the market, or as mentioned to change the New Citizen Fee. These are all things that I personally oppose

The major issue that I think that we will have to deal with in the next one to two months is the implementation of the new Economic Module. This will have a number of effects on our situation within the game and there are things that government is going to need to deal with. Wood and diamonds will apparently disappear as commodities and we will be seeing new industries arise. Will our country be as well-endowed in terms of resources as we are right now, and what measures will the government have to take to secure needed resources that we don’t currently have? There are going to be changes to the construction and components needed for hospitals and defense systems, which will apparently have different qualities from what they have now. What will be the impact of this on our existing infrastructure? Will we and all the other countries have to start from scratch, resulting in a level playing field? Will existing constructions offer the same benefits as they currently do? Should we help successful companies to improve their quality or provide direction if there are a variety of directions which companies could take? And how will our population react to being forced to allocate time to various activities and to choose which areas to specialize in. It’s going to be an interesting time to be helping to administer the country but it is also going to be a time when we need active members of the Congressional forums.

Forum activity is a big issue with me. I’ve always said that the real business of government is accomplished in the Congressional forums and yet participation in the forums is quite frankly appalling. The in-game votes that occurred in the past fifteen days saw between 31 and 36 Members of Congress cast their votes – and picked up an experience point each time. Of the ten polls (which don’t provide XPs for voting) in the Open Congress Voting sub-forum since the current term began – including the vote for Speaker, five approvals of appointments to the Supreme Court, and votes on four other matters the highest number of votes cast was 24 for the election of the Speaker. In all of the other polls less than half of the members of Congress voted. The Budget, which indicates how government will allocate funds, including funds for the CAF and at least one of the private militias, received a mere 14 votes! This is frankly an appalling figure. (As a sidelight I wish to state that I am pleased that the four other elected members of the CNC are all active in the Congressional forums. I wish I could say the same for members of other parties.)

The importance of participating in the Congressional Forums goes beyond voting for bills. Members of Congress are responsible for approving citizenship applications, and quite frankly not all of them should be approved. And yet we have applications accepted by Members of Congress who either do not know or do not care about following procedure when checking applications. I don’t think that I am breaking Congressional secrecy when I state that we have a procedure in place to investigate applications “professionally.” It’s a good system, and it is a system that will work, but it will only work if all members of Congress spend time on the forums and know both how the system works and whose applications should and should not be accepted. There are a number of other issues like this.

I am again running for Congress in Alberta. I am pleased to run for Congress. I enjoy serving in Congress and I hope to continue after tomorrow’s election. I pledge that I will do my utmost in to participate not just in the easy part of politics that rewards one for adding an extra click to one’s daily routine, but also in the real work of politics in this game where the reward is the work itself. And I pledge to tell you all about it as well.