CPCFTW

Guaranteed anyone who has enough wealth to stash offshore paid more than his/her fair share of taxes in their lifetime. There's a reason they'd be stashing it offshore.

If someone is willing to do my job for less than me then they should be entitled to. The only reason wages are being forced lower is because globalization and free trade has corrected the enslavement of the third world. Corporations exist to make a profit, I don't know how to make it any clearer than that. You guys seem to think corporations owe you a job. They don't. They will give the job to the person willing to do it (adequately) for the least money. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't be competitive, and they wouldn't be able to secure capital for investment and growth. No one is going to invest in corporations who forego profits to hand out jobs to the "I'm entitled to my entitlements" class. There may wind up being a lower standard of living in Canada, but hundreds of millions of Chinese are improving their standard of living. I am a patriotic Canadian but I don't believe in the enslavement of billions of third worlders to prop up the socialist ideal of everyone in the West being part of a "strong middle class". I'm sorry you approve of the enslavement of the Chinese race. I guess we'll never see eye-to-eye on this issue because I will never support slavery.

Oh right... The evil bankers. My mistake. I can't keep up with the left's boogeyman of the day.

I think you're missing your tinfoil hat again. I don't think you have any idea how corporations work. First of all, most of the large corps are widely held, and "the top 1%" have very little control over their management. Secondly, the managers are not sociopaths trying to steal everyone's money, they are doing their job which is to make the company as profitable as possible for investors. Once again, companies aren't charities that hand out jobs to people for the hell of it. They exist to make a profit.

Who said anyone who is making that money is "living" off of it? It may be students who are paying their tuition while living at home. The companies isn't responsible for only hiring people who need the job to get by. Sunlife isn't a charity. Data entry isn't a middle class job anymore. You could also be part of the middle class by knowing Q-Basic two decades ago. Doesn't mean anyone who knows Q-Basic should get a $11/hr job now. If people from a lower class are willing to do your "middle-class" job for less, then it's not your noble right to keep the job. You have no right to keep the lower class down. Sorry Jacee.

Wait those greedy workers willing to work for $8.50/hr stole the jobs of those hard working elites who had a noble right to make $11/hr while others were willing to do their jobs for cheaper? Those bastards!!! You do realize that most Canadian investors have exposure to SLF in their RRSP, TFSA, Pension plans, or Mutual Funds? You do realize that the more profitable Sunlife is, the better these Canadian's portfolios perform? You do realize that the millions that Sunlife saved could be reinvested into creating more jobs, or paid out as dividends to these investors, or go towards reducing insurance pricing? You do realize that the temp agency also creates jobs by providing this service? You do realize these things right? I just want to make sure.

My favourite: Cost of Family Breakdown: Divorce costs (lawyers plus effect on children) plus imputed cost of TV watching Hahahaha do you people actually buy into this stuff?

Simple. End the culture of entitlements and make people actually work for a living. Sorry you can't have 10 weeks vacation and 20 sick days when someone in India or China will do the job for 1/4 your wage with no days off. Poor you.

I'm not sure you've put much thought into the flow of funds in these cases. Think of it this way: You know I'm a murderer and I want to buy a gun to go on a killing spree. I offer to sell you my car. The funds from the sale may be used to buy a gun and go on that killing spree. Alternatively, you offer to sell me a car. It's very unlikely that I intend to use the car to shoot people. You really can't see a moral difference in these cases?

You don't see the difference between selling oil to an unethical country and buying it from them? Like maybe the proceeds from one transaction are used to fund terrorism while the other transaction creates economic growth and jobs which improve the quality of life of a billion people? Nope, no differences there. Please feel free to explain to me your moral dilemma with selling oil to China to help their economy continue to grow and prosper. I would especially love to hear you compare it to funding terrorism by buying Saudi oil.

The funny thing about Canada's left (and Jacee in particular) is that they hate the most profitable and wealth generating industries in Canada. Jacee's got another thread going where he/she is railing on the banking sector as well. How can you live in Canada and hate both the oil and banking industries?? If it was up to him/her we'd have 40% unemployment in Canada! For reference, here is a breakdown of Canada's GDP by industry: http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/gdps04a-eng.htm

Sure they do. I would happily talk about shutting down or dramatically slashing the public service "industry". Thousands of jobs would be lost, but IMO it would be beneficial to the economy as a whole to not have so many overpaid bureaucrats trying to 'save the trees' in between bake sales. There will be plenty of productive jobs for them to do digging trenches for the pipeline!

Here's a start: http://go.worldbank.org/CVKS5Q22G0 You want us to waste our time disproving every crackpot theory you can dig up? Why don't you prove him right since he doesn't bother doing so himself?

Just put on a tinfoil hat and get it over with.

Here's a hint: Consumer debt isn't the issue. People have been defaulting on loans for longer than you or I have been alive. Now come back when you educate yourself on the difference between government debt and consumer debt.

Lol are you comparing the results of two different pollsters to editorialize this BS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_general_election,_2011#Opinion_polls You can't compare the poll by Forum Research to the one by Nanos Research. They ask different questions and use different methodologies. According to the latest Nanos polls, libs lost 5.7% and PCs lost 6.7%, while NDP gained 6.6% and the undecideds went from 16.9 to 8.8%. http://www.nanosresearch.com/library/polls/POLONT-Ballot-201109.pdf Sounds to me like the undecideds are overwhelmingly choosing to vote NDP and the libs and PCs have failed to capture many additional votes. Leave the obvious bias aside please.

Much of the western world's inflation is caused by printing money for the middle and lower class' entitlements. Want consumer prices to stabilize or drop? Stop printing money for homeless shelters, safe injection houses, welfare cheques, encouraging the hiring of immigrants, and whatever other pat yourself on the back brainchild you lefties come up with next. There's no magical pill for poverty.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about or are you just going to spout off BS? Government debt is issued by governments, not the financial sector. The debt is used to pay for all the liberal entitlements you want to protect.

Let's face it, your problem is you seem to think the rich took your wealth rather than earning theirs. Most of the wealth in the Western world was earned. If you want to steal it, then just come out and say it rather than playing the victim.

Who said I have anything against globalized trade? Unlike the "progressive" left, I don't believe that western nations have a noble right to better paying jobs than the poorer nations. I guess the "progressive" mindset is that only whites or immigrants are entitled to a 'living wage'. The three billion humans who don't live in the Western world can either immigrate here or rot?

That's the politically correct way or liberal spin way of looking at it, yes. In reality the left is trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. "Oh crap people are poor and there's an income disparity. What should we do? Clearly the markets have failed to give everyone equal outcomes because we all know that each person is equally productive. It's time for the government to step in and fix this. Wait now there's even more income inequality because of the inflationary effects of borrowing money, controlling prices, and legislating minimum labour costs?? Time for the government to step in again!!" Corporations didn't destroy the middle class, we taxed away the middle class. Anyone making middle class income outside of the government can't afford to retire comfortably and send their kids college. You make 60k in ON and you can only take home 45k. Rent in Toronto is 1/4 to 1/3 of your income. Food is another 1/4. Your taxes go to pay for the government bureaucrat's pensions rather than your own. If you're a single person making 60k in Toronto and you max out your RRSP every year, you can put away 10k/yr into RRSPs for 30 years and then you have a 300k nest egg to retire off of. The way the markets are going, you'd be lucky if that turns into 500k. How can you live off of 500k for 25 yrs of retirement? That's a 30k/yr annuity in 2040 dollars. That will be minimum wage by then. If you're a government worker making 60k, you get more disposable income in the present (you don't have to contribute 18% of your income to your pension.. I think you contribute about 8%), you get guaranteed inflation indexed raises, and you get promotions based heavily on seniority rather than talent. By the time you retire, you're likely to be making 100k and get a guaranteed 60k/yr pension, paid for by the guy in the above scenario retiring on minimum wage. The great social engineering experiment of the hippy generation has failed. Instead of manufacturing products, we manufactured a middle class of bureaucrats, public service workers, and bus drivers. We did this through the unsustainable model I described. Overtax the rich and private sector, borrow from borderline slave labour nations, dump all the money into feel good programs and pensions for government elites and listen to the great wooshing sound of the socialist model flushing real profit-creating jobs down the toilet.

The options are to let our poor work for less than minimum wage and rebuild our manufacturing sector, or to continue to pay Chinese workers to manufacture for us while simultaneously borrowing from China to pay our unemployed a 'living wage'. Your way results in an economic collapse under the weight of the debt. When the inevitable rapid devaluation of our currency occurs, EVERYONE will be working for less than minimum wage in real terms anyways but the western world will have much more debt to pay off.

Pretty simple. Look at the 1970 and 2005 bars on slide 13. 15% above average income, 66% average, 19% below average in 1970. 19% above average, 29% average, 52% below average in 2005. Looks like the poor are flourishing to me. The only people who can escape the gravitational pull of poverty in the borderline socialist framework we live in are the very affluent/successful or government elites (aka bus drivers and other municipal/provincial/federal government employees).

That was not an argument against outsourcing, it was an argument against minimum wages and unionization which has destroyed our manufacturing sector.

http://www.urbancentre.utoronto.ca/pdfs/curp/tnrn/TorontoDivided-PolarizingTrends-TDSB-January2010.pdf