Civis Romanus sum

If you want a forum with a more robust respect for freedom of speech, and less one-sided moderation you should google canadiancontent forums. The conversation can be more rambunctious, though.

He commited to electoral reform, not pr. Electoral reform could mean second choice voting. That would almost certainly benefit the Liberals and make them the perpetual top party.

You people are delusional if you think Trudeau, with a taste of majority government under his belt, will put anything in place which will make it less likely for that to happen again. He might switch to second choice voting if studies show that would benefit the Liberals, but that's it.

The welfare provinces need to be bought with promises of more free money. That's all they care about, really. Harper didn't offer them anything new, and Trudeau had a big bag of cash on his back when he came calling.

I think Tom Flanagan had the right take on it. The Tories didn't offer anything unique, anything new, anything to entice people to vote for them. They offered no change after almost ten years, nothing to get excited about. Experience suggests that a conservative party cannot successfully run only on a theme of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility, except perhaps when government spending has gotten completely out of hand. In normal times – and this was a very normal time – a conservative party has to show how its free-market, fiscally responsible policies will make ordinary people better off – and that means better off in the next four years, not in the past. The Conservative party of 2015 seemed to have forgotten the lesson of 2006. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/conservatives-had-the-money-but-forgot-the-message/article26883457/

The last thing the Tories need to do is become liberal light again, a poor copy of the Liberals, standing for nothing. The conservatives didn't get booted out of office because of what the party did, but how it, under Harper's direction, did it. Politics is a game, and Harper refused to play it by the rules. You need to let the opposition make mouth noises over bills if they want. You need to play the schmooze game with the media. And you can't be so hyper partisan about everything. You also can't make the party all about one man unless that one man is an awfully attractive and charistmatic one. Harper's government wasn't very conservative at all, in fact. It was solidly centrist. But they got no credit from the frenzied mob of the left.

Those on the left live to hate. An extremist Muslim seeing a cartoon of Mohamad has nothing on a progressive who sees someone with a different opinion. The only difference is the progressive doesn't believe in God and isn't about to off himself. Harper was hated, loathed and despised before he was even elected as prime Minister. And everything he did thereafter was read through the most paranoid, frenzied eyes to see the supposed underlying evil in it. No one in this country is as angrily intolerant as progressives. Any conservative will be hated by the left no matter what he does or says, simply for being conservative. If he holds money back from public service unions or the CBC or causes the progressives like he's satan himself.

Yeah, you just selected Jews and Catholics for no reason, eh, and lumped them in with the Fraser Institute? Suuuure.

The NDP were hoist on their own strategic voting petard. They were so clear about the absolute need to get rid of Harper above all things that as soon as it looked like Trudeau might have a better chance tons of previous NDP supporters jumped ship. When you make it clear that hatred of the guy in charge should be the most important factor in who you vote for, and do everything you can to create that hate, well, you better expect it to turn on you.

Since when did any of those 'francophone rights' listed guarantee that all senior positions in government could only be held by those who can speak French?

Wow. You want CRA to target those you hate, like Jews, Catholics and conservative research groups? The targeting of 'charity' groups which get involved in politics beyond 10% of their funding, which is contrary to the rules which govern their charitable status, is not politically motivated, despite what the paranoid freaks of the far left have suggested. There's never been any evidence a charity was cut off improperly. I know of no Jewish or Catholic charity which is heavily involved in politics, but if you do feel free to report them.

And the French make up about 20% of the population now, yet a hugely disproportionate amount of federal jobs (and power) go to them given most bilinguals are French. Few of Canada's prime ministers have been bilingual, aside from those who are from Quebec .Diefenbaker was not nor was Pearson.

Speaking of French. To be prime minister of Canada you have to know French. To be governor general of Canada you have to know French. To be chief justice of the Supreme Court you have to know French (and debate rages about the other eight). To be head of the Bank of Canada, the Canadian armed forces, the CRTC, or the CBC you have to know French. In 2012 Parliament voted unanimously in favour of making it mandatory for the "auditor-general, the chief electoral officer and a number of commissioners, including those for privacy, information and ethics" to know French. Above a certain rank, most federal bureaucrats (regardless of what province they work in) invariably hit a promotional glass ceiling unless they know French. This is an awful lot of power to concentrate in just 17 per cent of the population. If you heard of some third world dump where a linguistic minority of less than 20 per cent held a permanent, legally-protected monopoly on all of the country's top jobs, you'd probably think it wasn't much of a democracy. You'd be right. Discriminatory, arbitrary barriers to full civic participation remain a blight no matter where they're practiced, and we undermine any pretence of being a truly egalitarian nation when we seek to normalize or rationalize them. Yet a lot of Canadians seem distressingly eager to do so. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jj-mccullough/bilingual-elite-canada_b_4977174.html

Brad Wall