icman

That has NOT been Harper's message, nor the message of his caucus. He and the CPC have been calling all coalitions treasonous, anti-Canadian, and anti-democratic, among other things, and none of them were distinguishing this Lib/NDP/Bloc coalition from the others just because it includes separatists. According to the CPC, all coalitions are devil spunk. Your notion is revisionist and overly-apologetic. BTW, separatism is not treasonous, according to the SCC. Quebec volunteered to enter Confederation, and the SCC has stated that the BNA Act does not prevent them from un-volunteering. Let me be clear - I am the last person to want Quebec to separate from Canada. But democracy is about self-determination, which any good Reform/Conservative will tell you (while they wave an unregistered firearm under your nose, screaming about the unacceptable intrusions of the Federal Government in their lives). If you believe in self-determination, then you should support Quebec if it honestly wants to separate from the rest of Canada. Let 'em go and self-determine. Who are you to tell them that they can't? And on what basis, exactly?

You shouldn't try to coerce him or trick him. But force-educate him? We do that now. We force people to go to school from K-8, and highschool is only semi-optional. Yet we don't teach civics any more. Why? By the way, I didn't say that Joe Voter was dispicable for deliberately mis-educating others, I said that the CPC was dispicable for that. What I said was that Joe Voter was not worthy of respect if they choose to be both ignorant and contemptuous of something simultaneously. The right to contempt is earned through aquisition of deep knowledge. It's karmicly poetic that improved knowledge of most things tends to reduce one's contempt for them.

Not true. The voters who voted for the Bloc did so to be represented by the Bloc. The Bloc represents their will. The CPC (I presume, perhaps incorrectly) represents yours. You can't claim to believe in self-represented government on the one hand, then limit choices for others on the other hand. That is oxymoronic.

Further to the above... There are legitimate reasons to oppose a Coalition betweent the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc 1) Don't include the Bloc in government because they are separatists on paper, and in government would be in a position to increase the probability of the separation of Quebec. I don't know if I agree, but it is a legitimate fear. This is not an objection to coalitions, though, just an objection to including separatists in government. 2) Coalitions in general don't accomplish much because they talk but can't act. I understand this objection, even though I disagree that it makes coalitions bad. I think that, in fact, it makes coalitions good, because it means all forward progress will have to pass the "sniff tests" of more unlike-minded people. But some people think that wrong action is better than no action - it can be reversed later. (Again, I disagree, there are some actions that can't easily be undone) Well, that's really it. There really are no other objections to coalitions that I can think of that wouldn't land in one or the other of the above categories. Coalitions are NOT illegal. Coalitions are NOT treasonous. Coalitions are NOT subversions of the will of the voters. I tell you now. If you disagree with any of the above 3 statements about what coalitions are NOT, then don't waste your time arguing with me... go find some good literature (ie, not from the CPC website) on Parliamentary democracy, cause you have some self-educating to do.

My problem, and perhaps Dave_On's as well, is that our leadership is content with the lack of civic knowledge within our electorate, and make no effort to educate them. Worse, the Conservatives are deliberately fanning the flames of ignorance on this particular issue in an attempt to garner votes. That is utterly dispicable. Make the population even MORE ignorant in order to hold onto power, a power whose source wanes at the same rate of advancing ignorance of the population being ruled. You may be right, and people will use their "sniff test" even though their test lacks any insight or critical thought. Their "sniff test" needs to be informed by a dose of understanding of the workings of our Parliament. And the person who laughs at the rule book and walks away from the discussion loses MY respect for deliberately abdicating their obligation to at least attempt to understand something thoroughly before becoming contemptuous of it. And make no mistake - the attitude is one of arrogance and contempt.

Thank you. Capital World Investoris is a private investors fund run out of Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure that's Los Angeles, California, not Los Angeles, Alberta. Wait, there is no Los Angeles, Alberta! Pyramus operates in the US, Canada, the UK, and Hong Kong. There is no mention of which Pyramus groups owns those shares, nor where its world headquarters is located. T Rowe Price is a US investment firm in Baltimore. BlackRock Asset Management Canada is Canadian, but it is owned by BlackRock, which also owns BlackRock Institutional Trust. Blackrock claims "Our firm's ownership structure is designed to maintain the independence we believe is necessary to retain our commitments to client focus and investment excellence. BlackRock, Inc. (NYSE: BLK) has no single majority stockholder and has a majority of independent directors." However, the three principle owners of BlackRock are US financial companies. Oh, and BlackRock's world headquarters is in New York, run by an American executive team which sets the paramaters and policies for its services abroad. McClean Budden claims to be Canadian, but there is no ownership information on their web site. I would have to dig deeper and I have other things to do today. I thought I.G. was Canadian, and am happy to say that they are owned by Canadian company (and headquartered in Montreal) Power Finacial Corporation, which is a scary-large company that owns IG, Great West Life, London Life, Putnam Investments, Mackenzie Finacial, and others. SO, controlling interest of SunCor is in American hands, and China purchased a sizeable chunk of it two years ago (though not enough to get on the top 10 list, it would seem). Three Canadian banks, Investors Group, and perhaps McClean Budden are the token Canadians on the board. I will relent on Canadian Tire. I thought I heard that controlling interest was sold to an American company, but I can't find any info on the web, and the latest info I have off the web was that a very Canadian Martha Billes bought up 61% of Canadian Tire by purchasing her two brothers' shares in 1997. So, unless someone has the American purchase information, I will have to concede (happily, I might add) that Canadian Tire remains a Canadian company. In fact, I found this link on Martha Billes, and it lifted my heart a little wrt the issue of Canadians owning Canada. http://www.ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool/news/General_Public/billes09.html

You are absolutely right. So then, where is the investment in alternatives? With the entire global economy, and the current carrying capacity of the planet, so highly dependent on a resource that has peaked its production, and in which demand will only continue to increase rapidly, we need an alternative. Why isn't there a "put Man on the moon" level of effort going into finding reasonably safe, alternative energy source to replace oil, which we KNOW is running out?

What is your point? Being listed on an exchange means people can use that exchange to buy and sell your stock. It doens't mean you are a registered company in that nation. And even if it did (which it doesn't), being a registered corporation in a country doens't mean that the people who control your actions are citizens, or even residents, of that country. Canadian Tire is still a Canadian company, but it's not owned and controlled by Canadians. Roots, Sears, HBC, Suncor, Alcan, Falconbridge, Tim Hortons, Future Shop - they were all once Canadian companies, but now are all controlled by foreign owners. In some cases, not even by a large number of foreign owners from different lands, but a single foreign parent firm. Canadians have turned ourselves from a proud and self-sufficient mix of owners and workers to a land of workers, and abdicated from running our own affairs. The fact that we were stupid-lucky to have ignored Conservative pressure to deregulate our banks 15 years ago has put Canadians in a position to buy back our places at the Boards of Directors in North America, what with our dollar being over par with the US, and US assets currently undervalued. We ducked the worst of the recession because of well-regulated banks. Considering the heated debates we had over banking deregulation, was it dumb luck, or sensible Canadians?

August, your ideas are only true in a perfect world. Canadians do not benefit from Celine singing in Las Vegas. But she is an individual, not a corporation, and so her work product is hers and hers alone (except for taxes, of course). Also, her product can be copied without resource contraints and sold at higher and higher margin as the number of copies increase in volume. This is not true of oil. But that major difference isn't even the one germain to my point. We have no alternative on the back burner for when oil runs out. When oil starts to become scarce, everthing we do to provide "wealth" for people will go up in smoke. We use oil to make our food (gas for tractors), transport all our goods including food and oil, run our manufacturing plants (oil burned to make electricity), and make all our plastics. When it runs out, or starts to really run out, chaos and mayhem are inevitable. As a result, we will be richer in the future if we take steps to ration it now, and especially richer if we invest in the discovery and development of an alternative energy infrastructure. Petrol dollars will crash when oil runs out, and so will be worthless, so transforming our valuable resource into cash for later investment doesn't make sense when the basis for the value of that cash is dying. Another issue about corporations being bad is that its not the Corporations per se (though the pressure they deliberately bring to bear on governments to support their own interests doesn't help). Politicians constantly cave to their pressure. And horrible things result. For example, foreign ownership of national resources. Canadian oil extraction rights should not be being sold to Exxon and Chevron and Shell. Suncor should not be owned and goverened by a consortium of foreign oil companies. You might say, why not? They are creating jobs in Canada, developing our resources, and paying taxes here - what's the problem? Well, 1) such sentiment implies that Canadians are not "good" enough to own the means of production in their own nation, that we are only good enough to employees to foreign owners, and 2) there are ways to extract capital from Canadian companies into their parent companies to siphon off tax revenue on the development of those resources. Free trade is the best enabler - a foreign owned company in Canada buys all their supplies from a US or European company at vastly inflated prices simply to reduce their taxable income, and that cash is moved out of Canada as a tax-deductable expense, resulting in lower tax revenue for Canada. 3) Corporation management teams constantly put downward pressure on worker salaries and pay, put downward pressure on expenditures for health and safety, all while citing sob-stories of insolvency (and the resulting job losses) to regulators and law-makers, then grant themselves and their shareholders big bonuses and dividends as a pat on the back for their ingenuity. Politicians, who seem to be cowardly, and are never ones to own up to mistakes, let it slide again and again. MS media outlets, privately held by the same holding companies that own large or majority interests the offending corporations, don't exactly crusade against this type of activity which goes on ALL THE TIME. Yeah, corporations may create jobs, but that shouldn't give them license to screw the workers they provide those jobs to. Yes, they contribute to local economies, but that shouldn't give the license to get away with polluting the local water and air and slowly killing the people in that local economy. This is not the corporations' fault. This fault primarily lands back on the people of Canada, who don't demand better treatment from the institutions (political and private) that, in a democratic nation, should work for them. Your raw capitalist notions about how the world should work are just as naive as those of the pure socialist.

I guess we shall have to agree to disagree on Harper. He cut corporate taxes and the GST when times were good, and accrued a huge deficit by crazy spending on the way into a recession. Both were stupid economic decisions - how can you cut revenue at the same time as you increase spending commitments and be called fiscally brilliant? The only reason Harper comes up smelling like a rose in the recent economic turbulence is because of the stabilizers which were NOT removed from the Canadian Banking Industry when Chretien (and Martin) were running the show, despite the anti-regulatory rantings at the time of you'll-never-guess-who... Harper. But that's how it goes. When the national economy goes into the toilet under your guy's watch, I'll say he sucks, and you'll say it would have been worse if he wasn't there. There's no valid, independent way to rate the performance of the party in power when ideology gets in the way of critical thinking. And it ALWAYS does.

Which party is "tax and spend"? I get quite upset and annoyed that so many people make their decisions based on false perception and media hoopla rather than the actual track records of the parties. The Conservatives and Liberals haven't diverged much on economic policy in the last 30 years, in practice. The Conservatives typically campaign on economic reform, then spend more money less transparently than any government that preceded them. The Liberals typically promise money to everyone, then cinch the purse strings tight as soon as they ascend to power. Both parties donate taxpayer money to their favourite private causes about equally. The only difference between them in their supporters' minds is that its always OK for our guys to do what they want/need, and always wrong for the "other" guys to do what they want/need - even when the outcome is identical in both cases. The big differences between the CPC and Libs is NOT in the economic arena. It's in the other stuff - crime prevention, foreign policies, etc.

Bryan, if you think this, then I don't think that you understand how Parliament works. In a minority government, there are NO losing parties. Or they ALL lost. There are only two reasons that Harper has lasted as long as he has in his minority leadership role... 1) He hasn't done very many things that the other parties can't hold their nose and agree to it, and 2) Those items that have riled up the opposition parties weren't so bad that they overcame the feelings of helplessness and inability to capitalize on Harper's mistakes that those other parties have cultivated within themselves over the past several years. The exception was the 2009 Budget, but Proroguement staved off disaster for the CPCs. If the Libs had a strong leader, Harper would be finished. He has made too many moves that seriously pissed off 60+% of Canadians. But they don't have a strong leader, and so long as Rae is second in line with the albatros of Ontario Premier hanging around his neck, weakling Iggy won't get booted out. One thing I agree with Layton about is that we need Proportional Representation.

Agreed. However, Harper should avoid controversial quotes like “The successor to the throne is a man. The next successor to the throne is a man,” Such an easily misconstrued statement is quite amateurish for the master slitherer.

ToadBrother - I replied before I read your post. I agree that this is not something we should consider urgent. However, we don't control the urgency of it. The British Parliament controls the agenda on this issue. If the British Parliament wants to see input from Commonwealth countries in 15 days, then we'll have to respond, as we are Canada - one of the most influential countries in the Commonwealth. If the British can wait 30 days for the Canadian Government's response, then Harper can simply say so, and that will move it off the election agenda. Though I only skimmed it, I didn't see in the Star article where the British were demanding Commonwealth position papers by April 30. Harper should be able to easily sidestep this, and if any of the other parties try to leverage this issue they will only end up screwing themselves. Which would be VERY bad, because I very badly want Harper to lose.

If the British are considering this change now, and are looking for opinions now, then the sitting government should step up. Not to do so is the same as abandonning our Constitutional responsibilities. I understand that Harper doesn't want this to be an election issue. But I want a million tax-free dollars to drop out of the sky into my back yard. We don't always get what we want. Now, if there is time to delay a response until after the election, then it can be addressed then. But as the Queen is our head of state, and Canada is one of the more influential countries in the Commonwealth, our government needs to weigh in on this issue. Unless, of course, we are planning a Constitutional change in the next 30 days which will remove the Queen as our titular head of state. I haven't received the memo on that, though.

Please explain. As I understand it, there was instense scrutiny of the Government at that time on the continued practice of remanding Afghani detainees to the Afghan forces knowing that the Afghan forces would use "extraordinary" interrogation methods on those detainees, and a committee was in place to investigate the allegations. I believe there were several other committees investigating the behaviour of government officials, plus an AG report due out that would be damning to the Government. In this midst of this, rather than recess a working Parliament with unfinished business for the year to enjoy the Olympic games, the PM asked the GG to prorogue. This had the effects of dissolving all the committees hearing evidence on the legality of various Government activities (which would have to start from scratch or give up) and delaying the AG report. Is this set of circumstances a parallel to the others that you had in mind? If the Government is Reasonable, as you have said several times, would the GG not have refused unreasonable advice from the PM in the form of a request to prorogue and called a simple recess instead?

I continue to think that proroguing Parliament to evade a confidence motion is the wrong choice. Our government has several features, and in my mind the most important one for the purpose of this discussion is the supremacy of Parliament. The PM is chosed by the GG based on essentially one criteria - can the individual gain the confidence of the House. This is because the confidence of the entire HoC is required for the PM to hold their position. This establishes the supremacy of Parliament. When the Sovereign really was the Sovereign in fact, not just for ceremony, the GG's role could arguably be seen as superior to the House's role. As the GG is appointed by the PM, now, that is no longer the case. But the supremacy of Parliament is still in place, as the PM still requires the HoC's confidence to hold their position. In the case of that first proroguement, MJ clearly understood the desire of the House at that moment. But by proroguing Parliament, she used her power to remove the right of Parliament to realize their will. That was her right and within her power, but by doing so she replaced the judgement of Parliament with her own judgement. To my mind, that violates the principle that the House is supreme. As I said, when the Sovereign really had the power to intervene if desired, that would make sense - the GG would be a paternalistic figure to "set the children on the right path". After 1982, that is not an appropriate view of our Parliament. And the PM should not have a stick with which to beat the House to his or her will. So MJ should not have provided the PM with that stick. Your argument has merit, and you might yet convince me. I did not hear about the caveat she gave Harper - I have waited too long to hear her untold side of the story, and haven't been listening lately. However, she prorogued a second time at Harper's request to evade a contraversial issue, so in the end her caveat on the first proroguement meant little.

I agree. In fact, I was just having this discussion with my colleague yesterday. The Supreme Court of Canada is largely apolitical in nature. They have VERY specific jobs - rule on the cases that the appellate courts can't figure out or totally screw up, and rule on the Constitutionality (and therefore validity) of various laws enacted by the legislative branches of the government. These jobs require enormous legal rigour, philosophical rigour, and laserlike focus on the law as a body of work. Popular opinion is not relevant to the job of the Supreme Court. If the public doesn't like a ruling by the Supreme Court on a particular issue, the solution is to write a better law that will more likely reach the desired outcome than whatever piece of crap law which was enacted and led to the ruling. Take a look at the decriminalization of marijuana position taken by the Supreme Court recently. Some people believe that the Court is writing law from the bench and saying that they will legalize pot. These people are victims of three things - bad reporting, broken telephone, and their own prejudices. The SCC said that the decriminalization law as written is unconstitutional, and leads essentially to the legalization of marijuana. That is a VERY different statement, but is also apolitical. The judgement says, if you want pot to be decriminalized, then remove laws making it illegal. If you want it to be illegal, make is illegal. But the law as it stands does not pass the test of Constitutionality. Making the SCC Justice positions elected would be a disaster. It would introduce another body to the government which has to pander to a base to get elected. And therefore it would change the nature of the job from ensuring the consistency of the law and its application to writing legislation from the bench to appease voters. Then there would be no group in government whose job it was to ensure that legal consistency, and the law and its enforcement would become very inconsistent. If there is concern about who gets to become an SCC Justice (er, like the Chairman of Air Canada, appointed to the SCC by Trudeau), then posit some selection criteria, like 10 years as a federal court judge, or equivalent experience (PhD in law, teaching at a respected law school, perhaps?) However, we trust our elected leaders (to a reasonable extent) to manage our country for us - perhaps we can trust them to appoint decent Supreme Court Justices with reasonable experience and expertise, who aren't hobos fresh off the last train.

Jefferson, just because you are low income doesn't mean you can't educate yourself a little better. Clearly you have access to the Internet, so please go find out more about how your government functions. The Queen USED to pick the GG - she does no longer. Since Trudeau repatriated the Constitution to Canada in 1982, the PMO selects the GG. The Queen may ratify the choice, but that is only ceremonial - the true power to select the GG is in the hands of the PM. The PMO can remove the GG and reappoint another, too, at any time; and though I am certain that such a move would be very unpopular with most Canadians, I am equally certain that Harper would do it if the GG got in his way. Harper has made it abundantly clear over the last 6 years that he cares not one whit what "most Canadians" want. I wasn't displeased with Martin's choice of Michaelle Jean when it happened. She only really showed how useless she was as a GG when she blinked playing chicken with Harper and prorogued Parliament that first time. And Adrianne Clarkson was never really tested. I wasn't unhappy with her as GG, either, and she seemed intelligent and thoughtfull in interviews and news reels. She never did anything controversial during her tenure, and worked hard to improve Canada's image abroad. I think you are just prejudiced against their origins, and haven't really looked at their track records.

Saipan, please tell me you're joking. You are not seriously equating marijuana with RPG's and Claymore mines, are you? Why don't you just take your argument to its logical conclusion? "If we allow people to smoke pot, we might as well give them access to nuclear launch codes, or stockpiles of sarin gas, or weaponized ebola." I am embarassed that I have to point out that pot only harms the user, and even that is highly debatable, whereas use of heavy artillery harms the target, lots of bystanders, and nearby structures and vehicles. I have a question for all the "I want free access to firearms" crowd. Why should drugs be illegal? Please be detailed and rigorous. Seriously present the case for criminalization of recreational drug use. And when you are done, compare your arguments against those used to justify the criminalization of firearms possession. I think you will find that people who advocate gun possession who also think pot users should go to jail are hypocrites.

Well, how is that any different in English Canada, where we pillioried Dion, not because he was an ineffectual Environment Minister (where in contrast, he was in fact quite effective), but because he sucked at speaking English. All any of the pundits and talk-show hosts could talk about was his horrible French accent and how no-one could understand him when he spoke English. My point is, those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. S