Election 2015

[Good2Golf]

I could have spoiled my ballet with the same effect as not voting. Or voted for the communist party to the same effect as not voting.

I don't vote for the lesser of the evils. They might get the idea I support them.

Let's be clear. If my choices on the ballot are stalin,  Mao,  and Castro and I don't vote, I will still voice my displeasure no matter who wins.

I would have thought you would have voted for Trudeau's friend, Castro? 

Photo credit: National Post

 

[George Wallace]

I would have thought you would have voted for Trudeau's friend, Castro? 

AH!  Now that "canoe" photo comes to mind once again.  Just like Dad.  >

 

[Altair]

I would have thought you would have voted for Trudeau's friend, Castro? 

That would be the lesser of the evils.

A politician needs to earn my vote,  not get it by default. And while I know we vote for MPs, those MPs run for a party, and if I don't like that party they won't get my vote. Even if that means not voting.

2011 was the perfect storm. I was tired of the CPC, the CPC candidate was the best person for my riding, the liberal one was passable but Ignatieff threw me off,  and I didn't like layton (as a politician) and the ndp candidate was a wacko.

Top that off by the army keeping me busy and no, I didn't vote.

P.S. It was at a funeral. I've had to go for a family members, you gotta hug everyone. Even without cameras from all around the world.

 

[Remius]

http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/election/nanos-polls

More numbers with the blue and the red switching spots from yesterday. But still essentially tied.

The NDP continue their decent.

With Ontario tied exactly, I expect some agressive campaigning there in the next few weeks.

 

[Edward Campbell]

...
Ok everyone, I see it now. I would vote for ERC if he ran for office as well.
...

I don't think so ...

My idea of "good government" in Canada last occurred in, about, 1948 to 1952, it persisted, also for the last time, a bit longer in the USA, from, say 1946 to about 1955. I doubt that you, Lumber, or 99.99% of Canadians would welcome a return to 1950.

There would be social programmes, not niggardly ones, either, but every single social programme, except for school meals, would be means tested and social welfare would be hard to find and harder to get. On the other hand, we would reopen all the large "homes" for the mentally disabled ... because "community care" is an obvious, sad, miserable failure.

Taxes would be lower, but not by too much, because a lot of the money not spent on useless social entitlements would go towards the national defence and (legal) industrial support programmes designed to boost the productivity/competitiveness of our export industries.*

Your fundamental rights would be well protected ... police and intelligence services would need legal warrants for any surveillance of Canadian citizens in Canada. (But, the security services would have access to SECRET legal proceedings that would issue warrants that would remain totally sealed for x days (say 100 to 1,000 days) and where the identities of government agents and witnesses would remain SECRET for y years (say 10 to 50 years).) The Official Secrets Act would still exist and would be enforced, rigorously.

On the other hand the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would not exist, at all, and, in fact, the Government of Canada would have asked Westminster to repeal the British North America Act of 1867 and the Parliament of Canada would have enacted federation and division of powers and supreme court acts, and so on.

Your House of Commons in Ottawa would be larger, to ensure reasonable equality of representation over most of Canada. The Senate would be elected and effective.

My  :2c: about "good government."
____
* That means that we would have a fairly robust "defence industrial base," like, say, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden, because the one sector of a nation's economy that is exempt all trade law restrictions is national security and defence.

 

[Edward Campbell]

http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/election/nanos-polls

More numbers with the blue and the red switching spots from yesterday. But still essentially tied.

The NDP continue their decent.

With Ontario tied exactly, I expect some agressive campaigning there in the next few weeks.

But the "tie" in Ontario is significant because, just a day or two ago, thew Liberals had a measurable lead in Ontario:

Looking a bit behind those numbers:

    Atlantic Canada (32 seats): Advantage Liberals;

    Quebec              (78 seats): Advantage NDP;

    Ontario            (121 seats): Advantage Liberals;

    Prairies              (62 seats): Advantage Conservatives; and

    BC                      (42 seats): Tie.

    Overall:                                Advantage Liberals

Now the overall advantage is shifting ... towards the Conservatives.  Momentum? As Zhou Enlai said, circa 1970, when Henry Kissinger asked him about the impact of the French Revolution, "It's too soon to tell."

 

[Pencil Tech]

To be framed and hung on my wall......  saves me the trouble.

:boke:

 

[Lumber]

I don't think so ...

My idea of "good government" in Canada last occurred in, about, 1948 to 1952, it persisted, also for the last time, a bit longer in the USA, from, say 1946 to about 1955. I doubt that you, Lumber, or 99.99% of Canadians would welcome a return to 1950.

There would be social programmes, not niggardly ones, either, but every single social programme, except for school meals, would be means tested and social welfare would be hard to find and harder to get. On the other hand, we would reopen all the large "homes" for the mentally disabled ... because "community care" is an obvious, sad, miserable failure.

Taxes would be lower, but not by too much, because a lot of the money not spent on useless social entitlements would go towards the national defence and (legal) industrial support programmes designed to boost the productivity/competitiveness of our export industries.*

Your fundamental rights would be well protected ... police and intelligence services would need legal warrants for any surveillance of Canadian citizens in Canada. (But, the security services would have access to SECRET legal proceedings that would issue warrants that would remain totally sealed for x days (say 100 to 1,000 days) and where the identities of government agents and witnesses would remain SECRET for y years (say 10 to 50 years).) The Official Secrets Act would still exist and would be enforced, rigorously.

On the other hand the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would not exist, at all, and, in fact, the Government of Canada would have asked Westminster to repeal the British North America Act of 1867 and the Parliament of Canada would have enacted federation and division of powers and supreme court acts, and so on.

Your House of Commons in Ottawa would be larger, to ensure reasonable equality of representation over most of Canada. The Senate would be elected and effective.

My  :2c: about "good government."
____
* That means that we would have a fairly robust "defence industrial base," like, say, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden, because the one sector of a nation's economy that is exempt all trade law restrictions is national security and defence.

Hey I didn't say I was going to vote you in as a dictator who would cause such drastic change as what you have described. But if you want a comfortable middle-ground, you need people pulling from both directions.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Hey I didn't say I was going to vote you in as a dictator who would cause such drastic change as what you have described. But if you want a comfortable middle-ground, you need people pulling from both directions.

The "drastic changes" were wrought, almost exclusively, in a period of 15 years, in the past 150, from 1968 through to 1983.

I suspect (fear?) that there is no more "comfortable middle ground" in Canada (or in America). My sense is that we, following the Americans, are drifting towards an increasingly polarized political environment.

My problem with Stephen Harper's alleged "plan" to destroy the Liberals and give us a British style left <> right (Tories vs Labour/NDP) system with moderates as a small, powerless minority, is that it seems to be a national folly. What we need, in my opinion, is a return to moderation, which (opinion, again) means that we must first stop and then reverse the Liberals' lurch to the left, begun in the 1960s, and that means looking at what we might have now had, say, Paul Martin Sr, Mitchell Sharp or, maybe, John Turner won the Liberal Party leadership in 1968. My belief, perhaps just a wild guess, is that the Canada I described ~ my Canada with 1950 values ~ is more likely to have evolved than Pierre Trudeau's Canada, which, of course, we live in, now.

I am resigned to big, intrusive, wasteful and inefficient government, and I doubt that it matters which political party runs things  ... but I don't have to like it. It's rather like being tolerant, isn't it? We tolerate something that we believe to be wrong, but, when weighed against everything else, acceptable. That's so very Canadian.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, is an interesting suggestion that the Conservatives have become "addicted" to the wrong re-election strategy:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economic-insight/harpers-big-bet-wasnt-on-oil-it-was-on-the-canadian-consumer/article26603803/

Harper’s big bet wasn’t on oil — it was on the Canadian consumer

SUBSCRIBERS ONLY

David Parkinson
The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Oct. 01, 2015

A standard line spouted by Stephen Harper’s opponents in the election campaign is that he foolishly placed Canada’s economic eggs in the oil basket. It makes for a simple, voter-digestible sound bite, but it obscures the reality. If Mr. Harper has bet the economy heavily on one thing, it is you and me – the Canadian consumer.

What’s more, by all appearances, he is campaigning on a plan that would continue to do so.

The Conservative Leader underlined that with this week’s pronouncement that if re-elected, his party would make it a key goal to increase the number of Canadian homeowners by 700,000 over the next five years. To achieve this, the party estimated, Canada’s home-ownership rate (the proportion of Canadian households that own their home) would have to rise to a record 72.5 per cent, from 67.6 per cent in 2013, the most recent data published by Statistics Canada.

Of course, a Conservative government would not buy those houses and condos for all those Canadians. But it would maintain a set of policies – personal tax cuts, tax breaks for homeowners and balanced budgets – that it believes would continue to foster and encourage home buying.

This is emblematic of the Harper Conservatives’ overriding approach to managing the Canadian economy in the postrecession years. The government cut taxes while cutting its budget deficit, giving consumers the incentive to spend and thus feed economic activity at the same time as the government constrains its own contribution. Oil? That was a fluke. Shifting consumption from the government to the consumer? That was a large and very deliberate strategy.

A happy consequence of the deficit-slashing policy has been that the country has leaned on monetary policy (low interest rates from the Bank of Canada) rather than fiscal policy (government spending) to stoke the postrecession economy whenever it needed it – and it has needed it often. Low interest rates are also highly consumer-friendly, adding further incentive for people to shell out for bigger-ticket items such as cars and houses.

This all made plenty of sense in the earlier stages of the recovery, when Canada’s financial-sector health and domestic demand strength relative to those of other industrialized countries, and the lack of demand for Canadian exports from the deeply hurting U.S. economy, meant that the consumer was the one reliable place to turn to keep the Canadian economy afloat.

And for a long time, it worked like a charm. Consumers took the government’s incentives to keep spending, shook off their recessionary fears, and settled into the driver’s seat in Canada’s economic recovery.

In the five years leading up to the Great Recession, household consumption accounted for 76 per cent of Canada’s total final consumption growth. In the five years after the recession, it jumped to 86 per cent. In 2014, it was 98 per cent. While household consumption has grown by 13.5 per cent in real (inflation-adjusted) terms since 2009, government consumption has grown just 5 per cent.

But as households have been carrying more of the growth load, they have ramped up their debt, perhaps dangerously. Total household credit-market debt has more than doubled in the past decade, and is now approaching $1.9-trillion. The ratio of household credit-market debt to disposable income has risen from 126 per cent a decade ago to a record 165 per cent today.

In effect, the Conservatives have traded government debt for consumer debt. In solving one problem, it helped create another.

What is its solution? More of the same. Mr. Harper would still count on stimulating further economic growth by balancing his budgets and putting disposable income back in the hands of consumers. He keeps saying so, at campaign stop after campaign stop.

And so the Conservatives are committing to maintain conditions that will keep Canadians buying homes, the most costly and debt-intensive of all consumer purchases, at a brisk pace over the next half-decade. This despite a Canadian housing market that is, by the Bank of Canada’s reckoning, somewhere between 10 per cent and 30 per cent overvalued; home affordability that has deteriorated to alarmingly poor levels in the country’s two biggest markets, Toronto and Vancouver; and total national mortgage debt that is up more than 40 per cent since the recession ended.

The consumer-driven economy has proven addictive to the Harper Conservatives, but what has worked in the past might not work in the future. One look at consumers’ overstretched debt levels tells us that this well is bound to run dry. Push it too far, and the potential damage will be much more widespread than any oil shock.

Food for (fiscal policy) though.

 

[Lumber]

I suspect (fear?) that there is no more "comfortable middle ground" in Canada (or in America). My sense is that we, following the Americans, are drifting towards an increasingly polarized political environment.

I think you can thank social media for this. Consider: the more polarized you are, the more likely you are to make your views heard. It's kind of like how more people will complain about bad service that will praise good service. The far left and far right (thought it seems more the former than the latter) are always going to be the ones who see every issue as a big deal and will voice their opinions on it. With the advent and proliferation of social media, their voice and their opinions just got a lot louder. While I would argue that Canadians in general remain as they were in the past (more centrist/moderate), all we hear is the shouting of the polarized few. You can't hear the sound of the content middle ground, because it's silent.

 

[Kirkhill]

:boke:

Can I fetch you a bucket and mop?

 

[Kirkhill]

I didn't vote in 2011.

I was not content. I was disgusted by all of the choices.

Ah.  But you were not sufficiently disgusted to change the status quo.  You were content to do nothing.

 

[Kirkhill]

In effect, the Conservatives have traded government debt for consumer debt. In solving one problem, it helped create another.

They traded the risk of one bad, big decision for the risk of 30,000,000 small ones.

Long time ago their was a video game called Harpoon.  NATO and the USSR in the North Atlantic with swarming air attacks over Iceland and Norway.  Initially I started off organizing massive aerial fleets and tried to co-ordinate every aircraft's activity.  Eventually I discovered a strategy that worked for me: keep a number of 4-aircraft flights in the air, scattered widely, all the time and manage the conveyor necessary to keep those flights flying.  The units were big enough to be effective but small enough, and numerous enough, that I didn't have to worry if a flight lost an aircraft or two or even if I lost a flight or two.

By betting on the consumer Harper has managed his risk downwards - assuming that he actually has bet on the consumer.

As a benefit - the consumer gets more control over his or her life.

 

[Lumber]

Ah.  But you were not sufficiently disgusted to change the status quo.  You were content to do nothing.

If I lived in a Communist country, and I wanted to change the status quo, tell me, how would my vote do anything?

If you disagree entirely with all of the parties/candidates, how is your vote doing anything?

 

[Edward Campbell]

It is not universal, by any means, but I suspect  this (the crowd's) reaction to Syrian refugees is much more common than many of us think. It is an election issue.

 

[Kirkhill]

If I lived in a Communist country, and I wanted to change the status quo, tell me, how would my vote do anything?

Short form: It wouldn't.  The solution would be to do the Communist thing and revolt.

If you disagree entirely with all of the parties/candidates, how is your vote doing anything?

Is that strictly in the Communist context or generally?

I'll assume generally.  The question you have to ask yourself (suddenly feel a Dirty Harry urge) is "do you feel lucky?".  Are you sufficiently upset with the conditions of your life that change has to happen?  If you feel change has to happen and none of the characters on offer are providing what you want then your next choice is simple - if you live in a democracy.  See if you can find enough people that think like you to sign up and support you as you run for office.  If you live in a Communist society then see that revolting thing.

Revolting is possible in a democracy but most people don't feel it is necessary most of the time.  Mostly they are content.

 

[MARS]

:boke:

wow, what a retort. So very....deep.

 

[Remius]

I know several parties are courting Mayor Nenshi.  Here in this article he expresses some of his views/opinions.

http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/nenshis-harsh-words-for-harper/

 

[The Bread Guy]

An interesting (trying to make nice?) open letter from PMSH to public servants:

Since coming to office, our Conservative government has made life more affordable for Canadian families and protected Canada’s fragile economy in the midst of the most severe global recession in a generation. We have worked to lower taxes on individuals and job-creating businesses, increase Canada’s economic opportunities around the world through new trade agreements, and protect Canadians here at home and from threats abroad.

We have accomplished all of this because of our partnership with, and the hard work, dedication and integrity of you: Canada’s public servants. Canadians are well-served by our world-class public service, and I have seen this first-hand as Prime Minister. During our time in Government, we have worked with you to ensure your efforts are focused on the things that matter most to Canadians, and to create a healthier workplace where good work is recognized, red tape is removed, and benefits meet real needs.

Unfortunately, in the current election context, misleading statements are being made about certain issues that matter to you and your families, including sick leave and pension entitlements.

I want to give you the facts to correct this misinformation.

Sick Leave

A new round of collective bargaining between the Government of Canada and federal public service bargaining agents began in 2014 to renew the Government’s collective agreements. The Government’s overarching goal in these negotiations is to reach agreements that are fair and reasonable for both employees and taxpayers.

The Government’s priority in the current benefit negotiations is to ensure public servants have a disability and sick leave program that is modern, comprehensive and actually meets your needs. The current, antiquated sick leave system is failing everyone. Here are the facts:

    Over 60 per cent of public servants do not have enough banked sick leave to cover a full period of short-term disability (13 weeks).
    25 per cent of employees have fewer than 10 days of banked sick leave.
    Many employees, especially new and younger employees, have no banked sick days at all.
    In contrast, a select few long-tenured individuals, including many executives, have far more banked sick days than they will ever reasonably need.

The current sick leave system leaves gaps. The Government wants to fill those gaps so that, if you get sick, you have seamless support. Canadians are best served by a healthy and productive public service. You want a healthy workplace and peace of mind knowing that, if you face a serious illness, you will have the support you need. Our Conservative government wants the same.

Some of you have accumulated sick days, but are being told that these will all disappear as though you are starting your career in the public service all over again. This is not true and has never been true. These days will be assigned an extra value under the new system, and will be available to those who need them. Discussions are ongoing about how best to integrate banked sick days into any new plan.

Pensions

Recently, some public sector union executives have alleged that the Government wants to take away your pension, in whole or in part. This is false.

In 2012, we moved to modernize and secure the public service pension plan by ensuring employees and taxpayers both pay a fair share towards pension contributions for public servants. Since 2012, the Government has not proposed any other changes to the public service pension plan nor are any contemplated. We will not be moving away from the current defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan, target benefit plan, or any other shared-risk model. The public service pension plan is solid and fully-funded, and there is no need to make any such changes. These are the facts.

Our Conservative government has been proud of the good work done by Canada’s public servants as we navigated the global economic recession, cut taxes on families and job-creating businesses, and balanced the budget. Like other families across Canada, we know our public servants want Canada’s economy to grow and thrive, despite the continued economic turmoil we see around the world. We have protected Canada’s fragile economy, and our positive low-tax plan for the next four years will do even more, with your help, to make our country strong and prosperous.

Sincerely,

Rt. Hon. Stephen J. Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
Leader, Conservative Party of Canada