CPCFTW

Of course they don't... They pay interest on their deposits. They wouldn't do very well if they were paying interest on deposits and lending it out for free...

If they need our money so bad, we can just buy 5-7% bonds of european countries.. The market rate of their debt, not give the imf an interest free loan so they can buy those 5-7% bonds themselves.

"Lend us money so that we don't have to cut our entitlement programs that Canadians don't have". No thanks. Because we all know the greeks and french need to retire at 55 more than a Canadian. They just aren't built to work as long as we do! What's next, asking Africa for bailout money?

45k + 2 months vacation + defined benefit pension + guaranteed raises + job security + sick days is not ridiculously low for someone who may have a 3 yr arts degree and 1 yr at teacher's college. In fact, it's not really low for an undergrad of any field, regardless of the people you know with half completed college diplomas.. No one cares what you and your mother get. Your mother has probably been a bank teller for decades to get 5 weeks vacation. Most people in the financial services industry start off with 10 to 15 days vacation. If you want any credibility, you shouldn't be so obviously dishonest. Anyone who lives in the real world knows that 2 months vacation (or even 5-6 weeks) is not a normal starting benefit. You also forgot to mention the PD days, sick days, etc. It's funny to see you try to paint this as a bad thing for teachers. Most people have to contribute 18% of their incomes to an RRSP for decades and hope that the market or their financial advisers don't screw them out of a comfortable retirement. Teachers get a taxpayer guaranteed quality of life upon retirement. The "MSM" is reporting the facts... you're buying into union propaganda. You offer nothing but anecdotes about your mother and people with half completed college diplomas.

The obvious solution to Dre's complaint about socializing the risks of fractional reserve lending is to eliminate the CDIC, not to give governments the bank's profits. Besides, I'm pretty sure banks are forced to contribute to the CDIC on an ongoing basis, so the banks pay for it anyway and it's not socialized.

I did a little bit of quick research on the big oil companies in Canada, and took a shot at estimating the tax revenues they directly contribute to governments (these are multinationals, so not all tax revenue will go to Canada): ECA - Encana Employees: 3800. 2011 Tax Expense: -126M. Annual dividends: 589M. ENB - Enbridge Employees: 6000. 2011 Tax Expense: 51M. Annual dividends: 879M. TRP - TransCanada Employees: 4200. 2011 Tax Expense: 211M. Annual dividends: 1182M. CVE - Cenovus Energy Employees: 3000. 2011 Tax Expense: 150M. Annual dividends: 605M. SU - Suncor Employees: 13000. 2011 Tax Expense: 1103M. Annual dividends: 682M. HSE - Husky Employees: 4700. 2011 Tax Expense: 334M. Annual dividends: 1100M. NXY - Nexen - Employees: 3000. 2011 Tax Expense: 1328M. Annual dividends: 105M. Total: 37,700 employees, 3.051B tax expense, 5.142B dividends. Assuming the average employee gets paid 60k (imo a conservative assumption for the oil industry), and assuming these employees pay 40% taxes on average (income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, etc.), 904M of taxes are also generated through employee income taxes. Assuming dividends are taxed at an effective rate of 5% on average, dividends generate another 257M of tax revenue. In total, 4.2B of tax revenue is generated by the above 7 companies given these assumptions. Lets not forget that these companies also create significant additional employment in the financial sector. Also their employees create domestic demand resulting in more employment in services, etc. I'm considering doing a similar review of the big financial services companies, the other most hated industry of the left. Seeking comments/suggestions before I do any more research. My sources so far have only been SEDAR for tax information, google finance for the quarterly dividends, and wikipedia for employees.

That's the problem with you lefties... You are so easily misled by facts. Here's some more facts for you: 1. The US population grows by about 2.5 - 3M per year. So there are around 7M more people in the US during the time those 4.5M jobs were created. I believe the guesstimate is that there has to be 100-150k jobs added per month (ie. 2.9 - 4.35M over 29mo) for unemployment to remain stagnant. 2. January 2009 was near the bottom of the recession in which the private sector lost millions of jobs. In fact, the private sector lost 101k jobs in Aug 2008, 167k in Sept 2008, 263k in Oct 2008, 540k in Nov 2008, and 531k in Dec 2008, totalling over 1.6M jobs (meanwhile from Aug 2008 to Dec 2008, government jobs increased by 63k, and the "health and education" component of the private sector increased by 198k). Essentially, most of the private sector jobs that were "added" in the past 29 months are jobs that were lost due to the recession, or subsidized "private sector" jobs in Obama's favourite industries. 3. Private payrolls are significantly higher for nearly every US president in history due to the US's abnormally high population growth (among industrialized nations), and 4 year presidential terms. If you lose jobs after the population expands by 10-12M people, then you must have done something seriously wrong. 4. When Obama took office in Jan 2009, there was a 234M civilian noninstitutional population, 154M labour force (65.8% participation rate), with 143M employed (22.5M of which were in government) and a 7.2% unemployment rate. Currently, there is a 243M civilian noninstitutional population, 155M labour force (63.7% participation rate), with 142M employed (20M of which were in government), and an 8.3% unemployment rate. The unemployment rate has risen and the labour force participation rate has decreased. There are still 1M less people employed now than when Obama took office. 5. Since Obamacare was signed into effect in March 2010 (coincidentally, just before the 29 month time horizon that your article quotes), the private sector has been forced to "create" approximately 850k (over 1/5th of the 4.5M) "private" jobs in the health care & social assistance category: Source for all of the above: http://www.bls.gov/schedule/archives/empsit_nr.htm Now if you ever bothered to look into the facts yourself, rather than letting journalists tell you the facts, you'd see that outside of the financial services and automotive manufacturing sectors recovering due to bailouts, and the health care sector benefiting from subsidies, private sector job growth has been stagnant at best.

Yes, ban people from homeschooling unless they align with your political beliefs. Thanks for your input Stalin.

Regardless of whether or not ESL is a learning disability, the point was only raised as some sort of evidence of the efficacy of public schools. However, if we're measuring the efficacy of education on the results of standardized testing, anyone who has attended a public schools in the past 2 decades could tell you that it is ESL asian students who dominate math standardized testing, so the learning disability argument is moot.

Well that explains the delusions.

Educated at public schools? Wow you're really going out on a limb! It's also probable that most of the "neo-cons" on this forum also were educated at public schools. What a revelation!

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm still digging the reforms I proposed. The main objections seem to be centered around charter rights violations of implanting a gps tracking device in serious offenders. It looks like a pretty weak argument to me though. Who said that the devices could never be removed? You'd have to serve a sentence of being tracked just like you currently have a sentence to serve in jail. Not really: 7. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. If I were interested in being a contrarian like you, I would have cited S. 12. But who would initiate the charter challenge? Lawyers for some criminals might, but I think that they would be outweighed by the lawyers for those criminals who want to stay out of prison.

So you're not even a teacher yet and you already feel entitled to "what you deserve", and are an expert on the rigours of the teaching profession, particularly "what we have to go through"? The sad thing is that you probably have no idea how ridiculous you sound. /you will live a long life of suckling on the taxpayer's teat, brainwashing our children, and voting NDP. A true Canadian tragedy.

The private sector minimizes these issues by design. If you run a business making widgets and are hiring based on nepotism or handing out sweetheart consulting contracts, then another company making widgets will underprice you and take your market share (in a competitive market). I'm not saying these issues plagued RIM, but the downfall of RIM is an example of how a company that loses its competitive edge can quite suddenly be "corrected" by the "invisible hand" in the private sector. Air Canada is another example. In the public sector, there's simply no corrective mechanism. If you are hiring based on nepotism or handing out sweetheart consulting contracts, it just means your service quality decreases and that you have to get the taxpayer to pony up more money (for example by striking and forcing them pay for daycare and babysitters until they are more amenable to your demands).

Well the original discussion stemmed from me stating that slowing GDP growth by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing (and certainly not from a 1 month sample). I stated that you would have to look at the underlying components of GDP growth.. in particular, the growth caused by private sector consumers vs public sector. Unfortunately Moonbox got lost and confused and derailed the discussion. So to work our way back to my initial point, you cannot conclude that the economy is doing poorly solely on GDP growth slowing. It's like concluding that the economy is doing poorly because the unemployment % rose (which may have resulted from losing jobs [bad], or from people re-entering the work force [good/neutral]). We should all be able to agree that a discussion regarding 1 month's gdp growth is pointless. I just wanted to dig a little deeper into the mainstream obsession with gdp growth when gdp growth in and of itself is not necessarily desirable. I tried to illustrate this with my example of a government borrowing to give every citizen a free massage (although this would have offsetting inflationary effects that reduced real gdp growth, but the inflation may be lagging or not completely offsetting of the nominal gdp growth).

Really? That was my original statement? You may want to double-check that since you are actually quoting WWWTT's response to me. You might want to slow down on the "snipes" if you can't keep track of who said what.

And yet you still haven't explained how I "misunderstood" gdp. All you've done is paint yourself as an expert, point out the obvious flaws in punked's understanding of gdp, and use that to make assertions about who is more right. You're not fooling anyone. Like I said, I'm not an expert. Please feel free to explain how I misunderstood gdp.

Finally you actually explain something instead of just telling everyone they don't understand... Now why don't you do the same for my supposed misunderstanding of GDP (I'll admit I'm not an expert). I'd also suggest that you re-read the thread to determine where the "sniping" began. Hint: it originated from you and punked, with WWWTT also taking some "snipes" before I even entered the fray. Not so funny now is it?

Quite the substantive response... It will be pretty evident to any readers that you are in over your head, so you are just using your heart to argue (which is usually the case with you). Thank you for recording this evidence in the annals of the internet's series of tubes.

Don't tell me that you're a teacher? Well there goes my hope for Canada's future..

You're the only person discussing the consumer. Consumer spending is not the only component of GDP (although it is a large component). But if you still need me to hold your hand through this... I'll do my best: A. Consumer spending through the private sector (eg. an employee of Telus paying his internet and tv bills, buying food, going to a movie, buying a car) = + personal consumption part of the GDP equation = good component of GDP growth B. Consumer spending through the public sector (eg. a TDSB teacher paying his internet and tv bills, buying food, going to a movie, buying a car) = + personal consumption + government consumption part of the GDP equation = not necessarily desirable components of GDP growth Why? Because the government only borrowed from China or increased taxes on the private sector consumer to pay for the "growth". In the long run, only GDP growth generated by Consumer A is sustainable growth. Caveat: even consumer A GDP growth is unsustainable if it is financed through too much consumer debt.

It's good of you to read up on GDP this time before responding. Good job! Now that you may understand what GDP is, think carefully about how I said "Gdp growth generated by the private sector is what really matters in the long term". Now look at the bold above and try to think critically for once in your life (please avoid going to rabble.ca to "groupthink" this) and reconcile what I said with the bolded. I'll help you: if private sector spending and investment accounted for a 0.3% increase in GDP growth, but reduced government spending reduced that number to 0.1%, would that necessarily be bad?

And that's why I made the distinction that the only part of GDP growth that matters is the part generated by the private sector. We could borrow 1% of our GDP from China and pay for every Canadian to get a free massages, but that doesn't make that 1% GDP growth a good thing. Government services are paid for by taxing the private sector and borrowing money. If we are reducing government services (cutting public sector jobs), and reducing borrowing (reducing the deficit), but GDP is still growing, I think it can be argued that our economy is doing quite well. But my main point was to disrupt the lefty circle-jerk over a 1-mo GDP growth number. For you lefties, here is a good resource for you to start following economic indicators so you don't look so foolish next time: http://www.forexfactory.com/#detail=41945

Watching lefties draw conclusions about the Canadian economy based on 1 mo GDP growth numbers is hysterical. You can't make this stuff up! It's also not surprising that gdp growth slows when the government is cutting.. But that doesn't make it bad. Gdp growth generated by the private sector is what really matters in the long term.

That goes up until FY 2010-11. We've already finished FY 2011-12 and are currently in FY 2012-13. Try reading the budget which was just passed a month and a half ago... are your memories that bad? http://www.budget.gc.ca/2012/plan/chap6-eng.html#a13