No.

You can typically get a public defender for a criminal matter — but this isn’t a criminal matter. You don’t get a lawyer provided to you free of charges to represent you at a non-criminal hearing of this sort, just as the government doesn’t hand out free lawyers if you want to sue someone (or get sued by someone).

What, you’ve never seen someone writing a JSP introduce a syntax error in a tag?

Manager at a big tech company here. I’ve been fortunate to have been WFH since 2012, and my team is a diverse set of amazing developers from all across North America. Our company has started taking the position that new hires should be in office, and anyone close enough to an office should be in office — so I’ve informed my staff that if any of them gets any sort of demand they return to office to let me know so I can help void that as quickly as possible. I won’t be in their office (I don’t even live in a city that has an office…), and neither will any of their coworkers, so having any of them report to an office would be purely performative.

We’re developers. Many are somewhat introverted, and all are amazing with technology and already know how to use online technologies to work and collaborate together. I’ll continue to fight tooth-and-nail to keep them from having to return to an office (unless they want to).

Fortunately I have the support of my VPs above me. They know my team is very high performance with tons of institutional knowledge and don’t want to upset the apple cart.

There are those of us out there with some power who are doing what we can to fight the good fight!

I hope this goes through — in so many ways ranked ballot is the best system for Canada as a whole:

1. No need to change tidings or riding structure.
2. Still just one representative per riding
3. No need to modify or change the seat count in Parliament (or the Legislatures)
4. …all of which means only the most minimal of legal changes, as little else changes.
5. In particular, this won’t require any messy Constitutional changes to implement.
6. Ridings get the candidate most acceptable to the most people in a given riding — you need wide support to win, meaning all winners will wind up with a plurality of votes.
7. No “party lists” filled wIth party ‘hacks’ who get seats without being directly selected by the electorate.
8. Particularly if you’re a supporter of MMP or some other more proportional system — ranked choice ballets is a much better starting point for passing MMP and the like than FPTP, as it’s much less of a cognitive leap for voters. Baby steps, instead of a giant leap (which IMO is one big reason why all attempts to change the voting system have so far failed).

So I hope this goes through, and I hope they can show Canada a better way to run elections.