Centerpiece

As I said - it's important to provide a link. Your claim of a second credit downgrade is important to Ontario - and taxpayers. The excerpt you provided - wherever it came from - only refers to a "warning". A warning is not a downgrade. It would actually be prudent to warn the incoming administration not to carry on the Wynne Deficit/Debt fiasco. Until you provide a credible link - as I said, I've not heard of this revelation.

Ford is still only Premier Designate - but could you please provide a link to this additional downgrade? I can't find any record of it - and if they did, that's not good..It means Wynne put us further in the hole than anyone thought. The link would be appreciated. Thanks.

Is this just "the end of the beginning" for Conservatives in Quebec - or the "beginning of the end" for the Liberals? If the collapse of the NDP vote is prescient of what's to come, it may very well help the Conservatives if the issues fall against the Liberals. The by-election seemed to indicate that the NDP and Bloc votes went mostly to the Conservatives. Looking forward to 2019, it will likely be a two-horse race in Quebec and if the Conservatives can recruit well-known candidates to campaign against marginal incumbents, the Conservatives could pick up a surprising number of seats - at a time that the Liberals will need to retain them. It's reasonable to assume that they will not win all 32 maritime seats again - and will lose some in BC through pipeline politics. It could end up being Battleground Ontario. Other contributing Quebec factors are that the Trudeau name doesn't carry a lot of weight outside of Montreal - and the Liberals won a lot of ridings because of the 4 way vote splitting with several being very close. It's also not that well known that the Conservatives have been working hard in multiple Quebec regions. The 2019 Federal election is shaping up to be far more interesting than I would have thought.

Yes, the CBC would, wouldn't they?

It might not be "economic" but if you want to see nationalism in action for the common person - just watch the World Cup. Globalism may be trendy with the elites but when you strip away all the noise, people still love their countries, their flags and the uniqueness of their people and culture. Except the Trudeau Canadian vision of course - that bland, post national version that he touts.

One could say the US doesn't have a plan - yet they arguably lead the entire world in reducing their emissions - in spite of Obama's boast that his administration built enough pipelines to more than circle the globe. Most of their reduction comes from converting oil to natural gas through shale mining. Canada could help global reductions by replacing Chinese coal power with our oil and gas - but of course the eco-nuts will have nothing to do with that.....so our pipelines never get built and global emissions keep rising. I'll settle for that US type of "non-plan" over government-sponsored tax grabs any day. By the way, the only reason Quebec is a willing partner in the Cap and Trade charade is that the vast majority of their energy consumption is clean hydro - more of a geographic bonus - so they stand to have a windfall profit through the sale of credits. If Trudeau wants to impose a carbon tax against the wishes of Ontarians - he does so at his electoral peril. And yes - please stop the gravy train. Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-leads-all-countries-in-reducing-carbon-emissions/#4b3ddb073535

A lot of frustration - but no hate. The illegal border crossers were at first almost exclusively Haitians - because Trump signaled that the "safe haven" program that the US put in place after the 2011 earthquake was to be terminated - Haiti was to be designated as a safe country. Canada had terminated their own "safe haven" program almost two years' prior. Canada should have made that clear at the onset and turned back almost all of them - even if they had to create fast-path legislation to minimize the appeal process for these US economic migrants. It appeared to open-minded people that Trudeau was just using the opportunity to virtue-signal to the world and subtly hammer Trump. And we have been paying a heavy price.

H10 - that's not how you have a dialogue with another poster. You specifically said that the rich paid NO tax and the middle class paid everything. I showed you that claim was not only wrong - it was outrageously wrong. So now you just ignore it - and move on to complain about income. Not much sense in trying to converse with you.

When the Conservatives were in power - Harper and his boys were always the "mean spirited" bunch. Conservatives are always depicted that way. They took those lumps from the Left all through their 10 years. No sense trying to defend their policies but they certainly didn't allow for uncontrolled "refugees" flooding across the border - or taking in 25,000 Syrians in such a short time without the right support. No - it's a Liberal problem right now - largely created by Trudeau. Bad decisions, bad execution.

Perhaps a little bit of paranoia - but well-founded in the habitual lies and deceit that the Trudeau/Wynne Liberals have indulged in. There is absolutely no problem - there's actual a necessity to resolve the refugee homeless problem........but these Liberals probably don't want to draw attention to the need to throw more money at a problem that they've created - so they'll get money to the cities in other ways. If you can't properly plan for - and fund - the intake of refugees, don't take them in.....you're playing with peoples' lives. For the Syrians, it's arguably no better being homeless in a completely strange country than it is being in a refugee camp with your own people. And now we've got thousands of illegal economic migrants on the public dole.

And now those slippery Liberals are giving money to the cities under the guise of their Homeless Initiative - when in fact the cities will use a lot of the funding to offset the costs of housing all the refugees......without making it look that way..... Link: http://aptnnews.ca/2018/06/11/liberals-target-indigenous-homelessness-in-revamped-funding-program/

Not as far as taxes are concerned - the 1% make a lot - and pay their fair share of taxes - if not more - as has been shown. I'm certainly part of the 90% and I'm very happy. My mother is part of the bottom 50% - and she's very happy. If you took the excesses of the very top earners and spread it around - it really wouldn't make much of a difference....other than de-incentify people to make a lot of money. As I've said before - Capitalism and social programs (not socialISM) need to work together and overall, Canada does a pretty good job of it.

I want you to read/listen very, very carefully. This could be a valuable teaching moment for you - one that could be life-altering. The top 1% of earners in Canada pay 22% of ALL the tax that's collected. The top 10% pay 55%. That leaves the next 40% of earners - that middle class paying - wait for it - about 40% of all taxes collected. To finish off - that leaves the bottom 50% paying less than 5% of all taxes. Does that change your mind? Didn't think so. Link: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/william-watson-thank-the-rich-theyre-the-ones-paying-for-everything

Good leaders know how to assemble, direct and motivate a team. Politically, Ford has not had the opportunity to demonstrate whether he has those skills or not. He's now got a bunch of very capable people to choose from - and he seemed to listen to his campaign team and stay on message - so you certainly can't call him a terrible leader at this stage. He might surprise people.

And the media would have us believe that they could all be thrown into the same bucket and called "progressives" - and that is nothing short of fraudulent. It's just a convenient way of implying that Ford's election was really not a legitimate one. There is nothing "progressive" about endless deficits and mountains of debt - leaving our children and their children to pay the bills and suffer the inevitable tax increases and cuts in vital services. Their is nothing "progressive about the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers who voted NDP instead of Liberal - simply because that's where they would get the best deal. And let's not forget that much of the remaining Liberal base is made up of fiscally responsible taxpayers who have traditionally been centrist. Yes - much of the 60% leaned Left but Progressive? Hardly. It begs the question as to what the term "progressive" actually means nowadays.

And Wynne also got less than 40%......little outrage there either. Such self-serving hypocrites.

You didn't answer with regards to the accuracy of the headline. It said he had not made any payments to the children when in fact the content of the story clearly said that the Will specifically said no payments were to be made until they were adults (25, actually). We don't know what the will said for the widow - except that she had full ownership of the family house because she had already blown through the proceeds from a couple of mortgages. So really - do you think the headline in the Star was fair?

There's a difference between subsidizing to be competitive - and having price fixing and tariffs to keep competitors out. You're right in that we BOTH don't know the repercussions of change - but putting our farmers on relatively equal footing with the competition with a few caveats to guarantee our national self-sufficiency sounds like a reasonable goal to aspire to - especially when it leads to lower prices and more choice for Canadians.

BBBBut.........it's Trump.....so this time it HAS to be a bad thing.

Some media apologists keep saying that Trudeau didn't say anything different than he's said before. That's true of course, because those few lines were tightly scripted so he wouldn't put his foot in his mouth (yet again). But he chose the wrong time to repeat them. As the host of the G7 conference, his remarks should have focused on a positive summation of G7 activities and accomplishments - not on our NAFTA squabbles. He should also have taken the opportunity to say that "we're sending our hopes and wishes to Mr. Trump as he attempts to deal with one of the most perplexing and worrying issues of our time" - now that would have won him - and Canada, some bartering currency. Instead, Trudeau tried to look tough to a domestic audience instead of looking more statesman-like to the world. As it turns out, he did neither.

Then you should vote NO - otherwise the results will look better for Trump than they should.

As with anything that requires some thinking, Trudeau is coming up short again. When you cut through all the BS, we have a Prime Minister who can do nothing but repeat scripted lines. Jean Chretien was a street fighter - he might have found a way to get out ahead of Trump and find out what he really wanted for his end game - securely and privately one-on-one. Same with Stephen Harper - but with more of a substantial/strategic view. Both these former PMs would have been better prepared and pro-active - because they were smart enough to read people and understand the issues. In the end, they might have hit a wall - but they would have both added a lot of value to the process. Trudeau is incapable of adding any.

Hopefully, that won't be the case. It's the sum of all fears - running up reckless deficits and debt in non-recession times - and when a recession does hit.....KA-BOOM! Thank you Kathleen and Justin.

I'm not as hopeful. I think the media will be just as anti-Ford as the US is anti-Trump. Read The Star - they've started already - bringing proportional representation to the forefront because Ford only had 40% of the vote (Trudeau of course was just fine with 39%, as was Wynne). Today they hauled out the Child Care advocates who were "heading to the battlefield".

Trump is a tough act to deal with but the point was made beyond just Trump - it included alienation of Japan, India, China - and Belgium was thrown in for good measure.