-TSS-

But surely immigration into Canada is far from being evenly distributed. Aren't the majority of the people of the city of Toronto people who were born overseas? Simultaneously there must be areas in Canada where a dark-skinned face is still a rarity.

Obama is a clear favourite to be re-elected but there's still more than four months to go. So I wouldn't bet my fortune on it.

Isn't there in Mexico a very long interim period between the election and the elected president taking office? The election is now and the president-elect takes office in January?

There was an interesting article in the recent copy of The Economist-magazine how Canada is much more friendly and welcoming towards foreign entrepreneurs than the USA. Very surprising really. The process of getting a permanent residence-status is so much more complicated in the USA than in Canada that many people with skills and ideas take those skills and ideas elsewhere as they lose patience.

Loks like ND will be the biggest and together with PASK there will be a solid majority in the Greek parliament and they can continue obeying their German masters.

We in Finland are witness Nokia being slowly and certainly phased out of existence and ready to be swallowed by Microsoft. It has been going on since Stephen Elop became CEO of Nokia. Btw, he is your fellow countryman.

The excuse of ageing population is used in all western countries to support the idea of mass-immigration. The reality is that the population has been rapidly ageing ever since the invention of contraceptive methods but none of would like to return to the days prior to contraception, would we? Another thing is that often the immigrants may be very skilled persons but whose skils are not recognized in a western country and, as someone mentioned, they end up as taxi-drivers or flipping burgers, therefore totally wasted. They would have been so much more useful with their skills in their countries of origin if we're talking about so-called economic migrants who are fleeing poverty rather than war. It is difficult to think of more immoral action than by the British NHS when they have been actively poaching Nigerian nurses because the NHS in Britain is understaffed as if the nurses in NIgeria would not be needed.

As long as the first-past-the -post system is being used with single-memeber constituencies, or ridings as you call them, the system is open to manipulation and corruption. Do the people in Canada trust the commission and its impartiality when the boundaries of those ridings are drawn and are they redrawn often enough to correspond the changes in population?

I must say that I enjoy reading your opinions on this issue as here in my country all those people who are against mass-immigration have cited Canada as an example as to how a country should manage its immigration-policy as Canada has a point-based system of immigration whereby people's age, skills and possible existing relatives in Canada are taken into account whether someone is or is not allowed to settle in Canada.

I wonder what were those women saying causing him to flip his lid in that manner.

I'm sure it must mean to be comfortable with vast distances. I am going to spend the weekend in the northern-Finnish town of Oulu which is 600km away and takes six hours by train to travel to and that's the fast train. Everyone here considers Oulu to be terribly far away. Surely hardly anyone in canada considers a distance of 600km being far away. However, am I right in assuming that it is not at all uncommon for Canadians not to have visited every corner of their country because of its vastness? I mean, if someone lives in toronto it is by no means strange that he may have never visited Vancouver, or vice versa?

This is the main reason why there can never be a level headed debate on this issue as one side of the argument is so fond of such emotive language using expressions like "babies we've murdered" etc.

Sweden has a right-wing government today and they are fast dismantling the welfare-state.

If you have a house where a man and a pregnant woman live then how many people live in that house?

Do some people really believe that if Israel was dissolved today and the land given back to the Palestinians and the US and other western troops left Middle-East and Afghanistan then there would be an eternal peace on earth and muslims would no longer preach hate against the west?

Indeed, Denmark and Sweden voted no to the euro in their referendums. The Swedish referendum was preceded by the tragic asasination of a popular foreign minister Anna Lindh who spoke in favour of the euro. The assasination was thought to be linked to the heated euro-debate but it turned out that the assasin was an insane person with no interest in politics. Despite the massive sympathy effect following the assasination the Swedes still rejected the euro by a wide margin.

The euro was a political idea in the first place, never an economic idea. The idea that countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Finland could ever be in the same league with countries like Greece, Spain or Portugal was ridiculous to start with. It was all politics. perhaps the euro was designed to fail from the outset just in order to give more power to the Bundesbank, hard to tell.

I just read an interesting article about the growing number of Hispanic evangelists. The evangelists are usually very pro-Republican when as the Hispanic people usually vote for the Democrats. The article concluded that it is bad news for Romney.

I think SYRIZA should be given a try at managing the affairs. After all, the Greek electoral system awards bonus seats for the largest party, so a party with only 30% of the votes could even win a majority as long as it is the largest.

So, if Quebec ever declared independence there would be years and years of wrangling over where the borders of that new independent country would be?

According to the latest poll SYRIZA would get 30% of the votes and be the largest party.

Is there really any possibility to dispute the borders if Quebec some day in the future decides to secede from Canada?

In the Greek crisis the traditional right-left division is meaningless. The country has been governed for years by two parties taking their turns, the left-wing PASOK and the right-wing New Democracy. Rather than parties both are family dynasties of the Papandreou-family and the Karamanlis-family respectively. Both have been equally reckless in running the finances of the country.

It is quite interesting that it took a crisis of this magnitude to destroy the duopoly of Greek politics where PASOK and New Democracy took their turns with screwing up the Greek people. Usually they mustered about 80% combined votes. Last month their combined share was 30% On the other hand, if even this wouldn't have collapsed their duopoly then one could have asked what would have. Very similar what happened to Fianna Fail in Ireland, their perennial largest party which was shrunk to a small party-status by the angry voters last year.

This thread has been slightly derailed regarding the title of the thread, don't you think?