Mimas

When I was a CA student, my firm paid me significantly less than minimum wage. They know that you need 30 months of experience before you can get your CA designation and they will treat you like a slave until you get that designation. That's disgusting and amounts to extortion in my opinion. After a few months I decided the heck with it, I didn't like accounting much anyway. It was a very good decision but I watched my classmates go through it. It is demeaning and disgusting. If you argue for sweatshops, go work in one for 30 months.

This is ludicrous nonsense. First, you can appoint people from wherever you want. Nor, by the way, can you pull "traditions" out your ass and claim that the government is violating them. Fortier, so far as I've heard, is doing a good job, and you expect him to resign and run in a hopeless byelection where Jesus Christ couldn't get a seat? For what? So he can die a noble death? That's juvenile idiocy. Ya, you can appoint people from wherever you want. If you are Kim Jung Il of North Korea!

Wow, somebody sounds like they take this country for granted. Have you ever lived under a communist dictatorship? I had a friend in basic and his dad was held as a prisoner by communists in Vietnam, he told me about what the communists were like. You have no clue what you are talking about. In fact I do. My family is from Eastern Europe - my parents included. I have many relatives and friends there and I have visited there numerous times during the communist days and after. Studying EE politics and history is a hobby of mine. You really ought to bring more than your friend's dad's story to have more credibility than me on the issue. Mr. Harper's top down approach to government and his clampdown on free speech and opinion in his caucus is indeed much more similar to the structure of a EE communist rule than a Western democracy. Wow, your so enlightened. Once again do you know anything about the nazis, or that time period in general. The nazis are not the point. The point is that some followed Hitler no matter what he did. At war crimes tribunals they said that they killed civilians because they were told to do it and they didn't think it was wrong. You have to take responsibility for what you do and what you are willing to accept even from your favourite leader. If you claim to believe in democracy there is no way you should accept the fact that your representatives are not allowed to make any decisions or even talk. Having the leader and his advisers make all the decisions, forcing them on his party and everyone else without any discussion is not how the leader of a democratic country should act. In a Bloc stronghold. What sense would that make, if your so unsatisfied with Harper mail your MP asking them to bring down the government. You take democracy for granted. You find excuses for putting unelected people in government. Don't give me lessons about dictatorships and democracy.

It remains to be seen what Rare will do but Harper already raised our taxes. On July 1st, 2006, the personal income tax rate on those who earned the least was raised from 15% to 15.5%. Sputtering nonsense. Will you keep it down? We already established that you live in an imaginary world were either the facts don't matter or you make them up. No need to interfere in other people's discussions by just making noise. My noise, unlike yours, at least has the advantage of being honest, succinct and to the point. The fact is that the Conservative government raised the tax on the lowest tax bracket from 15% to 15.5%. You call that fact "sputtering nonsense". You pretend that things that are real aren't real because you don't like them. That isn't healthy man. That's how cults operate - ignore reality and insist on lies even when they are obvious.

I have reported both of these comments to the moderator. Do you spend your days lurking around and reporting every word of people you don't like to the moderator? That's pretty sad.

There is no proof that anything can be done for a problem that doesn't exist. Rewarding failure by punishing success is nothing but socialist theft. Gee dude, go snack on some asbestos!

It remains to be seen what Rare will do but Harper already raised our taxes. On July 1st, 2006, the personal income tax rate on those who earned the least was raised from 15% to 15.5%. Sputtering nonsense. Will you keep it down? We already established that you live in an imaginary world were either the facts don't matter or you make them up. No need to interfere in other people's discussions by just making noise.

It remains to be seen what Rare will do but Harper already raised our taxes. On July 1st, 2006, the personal income tax rate on those who earned the least was raised from 15% to 15.5%. Not quite true. The tax rate on the bottom tax bracket was raised from 15% to 15.5%. That affects everyone since a portion of everyone's income is in the bottom tax bracket. You're right of course. However, that tax increase was more punishing to those who earn the least than it was to those who earn the most. Of course it is. But that's how we always cut taxes - give the greatest benefit to the richest and kick the poorest. Harper didn't do anything in terms of tax cuts that Martin didn't do, or Harris, or Campbell, etc. In 2005, Martin lowered the personal income tax rate for the lowest tax bracket. In relative terms, wouldn't that be more advantageous to those who earn the least and less advantageous to those who earn the most? Yes, and that's exactly why he lost the election. That would have given all working Canadians the same amount of tax savings (about $330/person) but it would have given business absolutely nothing. Harper on the other hand, was to give business billions in GST tax cuts. Martin's defeat in the election was the fault of his own policies. If he had stuck to giving big tax breaks to business and the wealthy as he did in the previous 11 years, I'm pretty sure that he would still be running the country.

But isn't the conventional wisdom among Conservative supporters that the media are biased towards the Liberals? Yes, it is and I am sure that many Tories won't believe that the media was more anti-Lib than anti-Con. It doesn't surprise me though. I thought Martin was pathetic in the campaign. It's all relative to your point of view. Just because the media is not as right-wing as you are, doesn't mean that the media is left-wing. Some right-wingers are so far right that they would say that Thatcher and Reagan were centre-left. The fact is that most of the big news outlets in the country are owned by conservatives and ran by conservatives, which is not a huge surprise at all because the Conservatives are the most pro-business party on the political scene in Canada. CanWest, Globemedia, etc. are multi-billion dollar corporations who obviously care more about their own financial well being than about Joe Shmoe Canadian. Of course they will endorse the politicians that will give them the deepest tax cuts and the most favourable treatment. Martin was a great friend of business for more than a decade. He gave out the hugest tax cuts to business and the wealthy that they could have every imagined. The media put Martin on a pedestal and declared him the greatest finance minister in Canadian history. But he got old and stupid and strayed from his path. When Martin made a deal with the NDP and spent their tax cuts on education, housing and other stuff the corporations couldn't benefit from, the media's tune changed significantly. When he promised personal tax cuts instead of GST cuts that business would benefit from, Martin effectively signed his resignation. Not that I miss him, but as long as Harper keeps the media bosses happy, he will have a great advantage over anyone running for his seat. So far he is doing a great job. We'll see how long he can keep it up.

What about cutting all subsidies? The only argument I can think for subsidizing businesses is to prevent job losses if the company goes under. I imagine it's probably cheaper to pay a company which employs people than it is to pay them EI. Is there any threat of people loosing jobs if the government stops subsidizing the oil & gas industry (I'm not sure how much if any they do subsidize it, I'll have to read more up on that)? Don't get me wrong, this isn't taking a shot at Alberta, I realize you give a lot in transfer payments. How would you feel if oil and gas subsidies were removed along with transfer payments? That would be the commies trying to ravage Alberta. I would ban subsidies unless it was for new but promising startups which have good potential for economic and job growth to help them start and for established industries that temporarily need help and failure would cause huge job losses. None of these dead industries that live on subsidies for years and decades or established industries that are profitable as hell anyway. Oil and gas is the most profitable industry in the country and what do we do? Ottawa sends our tax dollars in the billions to the oil companies, then Albertan taxpayers send billions back to Ottawa. So our tax dollars go back and forth with large chunks going to Texas in each round. What a great way to fund foreign billionaires.

Hardly surprising. The Libs were universally condemned by media due to the sponsorship scandal. And Harper ran a good campaign and Martin sounded like a tired old man. It was surprising. The same media was praising Martin's achievements a year earlier but as soon as Martin decided to give Canadians a personal income tax cut (which would have given the media companies nothing) and Harper promised a GST cut (which results in millions of dollars in saved taxes for media companies) Martin turned into a villain and Harper into a great choice for prime minister. It's interesting that the media made more noise about the sponsorship scandal during the election when it was already very old news then when it broke a year earlier.

Well, David Asper the heir of the late Izzy Asper and his CanWest media empire campaigned with Stephen Harper across the country. He made hefty contributions to Harper's leadership campaigns. As CanWest media journalists well know, anyone who writes against the owner's beliefs gets fired, even if the guilty one is the best editor in the country. Is it a surprise that the headline in the CanWest papers a couple of days before the election was "Why you should vote Conservative"?

I think the actual conflict, not NATO is to be blamed for all of that. I'm glad that NATO intervened, it probably is a much better situation now with the UN there then it was 8 years ago. So NATO was responsible for the ethnic cleansing? I don't really understand what your trying to say? You can keep living in the clouds and ignore reality all you want. You probably wouldn't have liked the Soviets to bomb Canada when the tanks were rolling down the streets of Montreal to support the FAQ and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Quebecers by Canadians. How about bombing Israel because of their war on Hezbullah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Hell, Sharon is a convicted war criminal. Wanna go bomb Israel back to the stone age? Stop pretending that you don't understand. The KLA is a world wide recognized terrorist group. There were no 100,000 Albanians killed and 500,000 missing. It was all lies and deceit. The mission was a complete failure because 1) it killed more people than were killed in 3 years of conflict prior to it, 2) it achieved exactly what it was supposed to stop - namely ethnic cleansing as Kosovo is now cleansed out all ethnic groups other than Albanians. 3) Kosovo is now the organized crime capital of Europe and a breeding ground for islamic extremists (the CIA says so, not me). 4) The KLA are now running free causing trouble in Greece and Macedonia. 5) What you call "probably" a much better situation is not at all better according to the facts because the Kosovo albanians are pissed off, the Serbs are pissed off, the Albanian Albanians are pissed off, everyone else in the Balkans is pissed off and there is non-stop violence in Kosovo and the conflict (KLA) has spread to other regions of the Balkans. Obviously you didn't properly inform yourself back then, you are not properly informed now, and you refuse to inform yourself about it. It's your choice but when you don't know what you are talking about, I would suggest that you don't spread confusion and misrepresentation about a topic you don't understand.

It remains to be seen what Rare will do but Harper already raised our taxes. On July 1st, 2006, the personal income tax rate on those who earned the least was raised from 15% to 15.5%. Not quite true. The tax rate on the bottom tax bracket was raised from 15% to 15.5%. That affects everyone since a portion of everyone's income is in the bottom tax bracket. You're right of course. However, that tax increase was more punishing to those who earn the least than it was to those who earn the most. Of course it is. But that's how we always cut taxes - give the greatest benefit to the richest and kick the poorest. Harper didn't do anything in terms of tax cuts that Martin didn't do, or Harris, or Campbell, etc.

You've got to be freakin kidding me. Let's cut the Newfies free ride too, ok? Holy crap you've got such a messed up sense of entitlement to other's money. So cut oil and gas subsidies to subsidise manufacturing? Way to go Trudeau, why not bring in the NEP tomorrow? If that's what Rae stands for, I can promise you even the Liberals won't elect him. What we charge oil companies is an Alberta issue, not at all to do with Canada. What right does Ottawa have to come in and enforce their dillusional sense of protectionism over the people of Alberta? Did you lose your job or something when the Ontario industry fell apart from the lack of continued subsidies through the 90's? Why do you hate the hen that lays the golden eggs so much? It makes no sense. Dude, the right place for the oil and gas industry is with the asbestos, tobacco, and CFC industries. That's exactly where oil and gas (and coal) ought to be. The people of Alberta a getting a small piece of the benefits from the poison pie. Everyone else just gets poison. I told you that favourable treatment of your oil and gas is killing jobs elsewhere in the country. As an Ontarian, I pay for that too. Don't tell me that you can force me to treat you favourably because you live in Alberta and treat poor Joe in NFLD like crap because he lost his manufacturing job due to a Canadian dollar gone insane thanks to your oil. I'm your worst nightmare, geoff. I drive a Prius. Barely. Because I usually walk or bike to work. Physical activity is good for me and your oil is bad. And there are lots of evil people like me popping up everywhere. You can keep driving your gas guzzling pick up truck and waste your clean coal electricity and when your kids have asthma and you need a hip replacemed because your hip is damaged by your bulging wasteline don't ask me to pay your health-care bills. No matter how much you kick and scream, the pollution tax is coming and oil and gas is on its way to join asbestos and tobacco. You will be better off just pushing your government to decrease its dependence on oil revenue and diversify.

How do you know that Rae will raise taxes? If Harper is raising taxes, Rae will certainly. It's his way. He has a proven track record of tax increases. A greener tax system is a nice way to say we're going to screw Alberta, corporations and middle-class families (those that own cars but can't afford hybrids). He's still stuck on Kyoto, how is he going to fund that without tax increases? He's attempted to drag back the ideas of Keynes before, and I really don't see evidence of a change. If there is a downturn in the economy (which there is everywhere outside Alberta), Rae will be tempted to spend his way out of it again. Martin worked hard to cut those deficits of the late '80s and early '90s. I'm very frightened about the prospects of Mr. Rae in power during any sort of recession. His website outlines billions in new spending inititives, programs and social engineering schemes. Then he says he's going to cut taxes. Either he's trying to pull a Laffer curve argument here (way beyond a socialist's realm of security) or he's lying about either taxes or programs. I'm going to bet he's lying about taxes. An NDP leader in Ottawa isn't going to be the big cutter of the three parties. A pollution tax is exactly what we need. We are not going to screw Alberta, we are going to cut their free ride on the taxpayers' backs (by cutting subsidies to oil and gas), stop favouring oil and gas polluters while applying more stringent pollution rules to other industries, and protect manufacturing and other export industries from being ravaged by the oil dollar (as the Canadian dollar is referred to these days). If Albertans want more money, they should charge the oil companies' bosses in Texas a fair price for their resources. As it i,s Alberta is almost giving away its resoures by charging the lowest fees in the world. The current model of oil companies free riding on the backs of Albertans and Albertans free riding on all taxpayers' backs doesn't work so well. A pollution tax can set things straight. I'll vote for anyone who will implement it!

It remains to be seen what Rare will do but Harper already raised our taxes. On July 1st, 2006, the personal income tax rate on those who earned the least was raised from 15% to 15.5%. Not quite true. The tax rate on the bottom tax bracket was raised from 15% to 15.5%. That affects everyone since a portion of everyone's income is in the bottom tax bracket. Besides he raised the tax on responsible canadians who save for retirement by taxing income trusts.

Iggy is completely out of touch with Canadians. Dion is ok exept he barely speaks English and he would have a hell of a time debating in English. Kennedy is too much of a question mark for most Canadians. Rae on the other hand can make Harper cry on the debate floor and can give the Libs the opportunity to tap into the base of the NDP. All the Libs need is 5-6% of the NDP vote to leak to them and they will have a majority. Besides Rae speaks French better than the other three and this means A LOT in Quebec. His weaker spot is Ontario, but after Mike many Ontarians would have kissed him and many more forgot all about the recession (for which he was not responsible anyway). Besides who is Ontario going to vote for? Harper, whose intent is to cause as much financial damage to Ontario as possible in favour of everyone else (and mostly Alberta and Quebec)?

How about a campaign around accountability when the Accountability Act is a joke. What about the Accountabilty Act is a joke? It does not do very much at all to make a government accountable. Just like the "Clean Air Act" does nothing but delay cleaning up the air. What a joke. The third party election spending law was a blunt instrument designed to inhibit freedom of the press. If the Tories get rid of it I'm all for it. As for lobbyists, they ran the last Liberal governments and even wrote legislation. I see no evidence of similar influence with the present government. Nonsense. The press can write anything they want. The third party election spending law was to prevent special interest groups from buying votes for the parties they support. How do you feel about unions spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of the NDP or the Libs (in Buzz Hargrove's case)? There was no campaign regarding this, however, it was the Tories' express policy to give more power to MPs. Clearly this is problematical in a shaky minority parliament. Hello? Anybody there? Their entire campaign was about accountability, transparency, and giving more power to our representatives. What we got is no accountability, zero transparency, and the muzzling of our representatives. Harper is acting like a communist dictator minus the free health-care and education. Once again, this was a minor campaign promise, not something the campaign was wrapped around. I wasn't even aware of it. And the Tories did live up to the spirit of their promise, if not the letter. Obviously, you weren't even paying attention to the campaign, so you ought not argue with others about it. There was no such campaign. You are kidding, right? Just about every conservative running semt letters to his/her riding's churches promissing a ban on gay marriage. The difference between you and someone who supported Hitler from the day he voted for Hitler to the day WWII ended is ZERO. You wouldn't recognize a conman even if he stood before you and told you that he is one. My "distortions" are Mr. Harper's campaign in short and you admitted that you didn't follow that campaign, so how do you know they are distortions. Your multi-millionaire idol, who is now an unelected minister in charge of over $10 billion of our tax dollars did not take his cabinet seat as an act of charity. Being the 4th guy in government gives you control over billions of dollars in contracts to give to associates and friends, who will return the favour. Do you realize how many hundreds of millions of dollars Paul Martin's company got through governement contracts and subsidies and through intentionally keeping tax loopholes on offshore tax havens open that allowed him to avoid paying taxes? Don't tell me ministers would leave multy-million-dollar positions in private industry for a pathetic $200K a year. If are naive enough to believe that, can you send me 10K cash by mail? I'll pay you back next month. Besides, there is a by-election in Montreal in a week and Fortier refused to run. So much for his promise to run.

No, the CBC won't let me. The CBC is also reminding me (like you) that Harper is a dangerous amateur because he dares raise a Canadian/Chinese human rights issue in public.BTW, the last time I checked, Arar was sent to Syria and detained there while the Liberals were in power. I think what I object to is the Liberal/CBC belief that only the Liberals know how to run the country. Don't avoid the issue. The Cons would have done absolutely nothing, just as the Libs did on the Arar case. Ablonczy was calling him a terrorist without any evidence that he was a terrorist and praised the US for dealing with him. So which is worse? The Libs doing nothing to help an innocent Canadian who was tortured by a foreign government but said nothing or the Conservatives who would have done nothing to help an innocent Canadian and accused him of being a terrorist with no basis for doing so. Which do you prefer? Are either of these two groups mature enough to run the country?

Yep. That quote button sucks. My point on Kosovo is the hypocrisy of many Conservatives who were screaming "blood" louder than the Liberals and the fact that 7 years after the conflict, neither of the two want to admit the facts and say that there was no genocide and that we were lied to to support a terrorist organization and a mission that killed thousands of civilians, displaced almost 1 million people temporarily) and had over 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic groups "cleansed" from their homes permanently. And a mission that dumped thousands of tonnes of depleted uranium, bombed chemical factories and caused an environmental disaster in the region that is yet to kill thousands of people.

As well the sites provided show genocide perpetrated by the Serbian government, as well as war crimes which have been committed by the KLA. First this is an accusation by a procecutor that has not been proven to date. Undobtedly, people were killed on BOTH sides and most of the killiong occured after NATO attacked. Because civilians were caught between the Serbian forces, the KLA and NATO bombs. In fact, about 1000 people were killed in Kosovo by NATO bombs. The civilian death toll due to NATO in Kosovo and Serbia is estimated at around 5,000 by the Serbian government. NATO admits killing about 1,500 civilians. The final result was that instead of stopping ethnic cleansing, Kosovo was cleansed almost entirely of Serbs and all other ethnic minorities after the war. Second, even if it were the case that 4,000 were killed (that's over 3 years of "war" between the KLA and serbian forces) and that was prior to NATO getting involved, this is hardly a genocide. The estimates we were bombarded with prior to the war were 100,000 killed, half a million missing. To put these 4,000 claimed victums in perspective, about 2,000 homicides occured in New York city over the same period. In fact, it took years for the Canadian government to recognize that the slaughter of 800,000 in Rwanda was a genocide. Canada officially recognized the slaughter of 1 million Armenians as a "tragedy" but not a "genocide". Several hundred thousand people have been killed in Durfur in the last 3 years, but we don't call that a genocide and we don't move a finger. If we went to war whenever a couple of thousand people were killed, then we would be fighting on at least 50 fronts over the world right now. How so? Honestly, whenever the left seems to do something you disagree with all you say is "the right" pushed them. If you can't provide anything to back that statement up then its a fairly weak argument. As well knowing how intolerant and ignorant you are of views on the conservative side of the spectrum it doesn't surprise me. Especially taking criticism's to the extreme fringe of debate on here. Here's a better question, what did Blair, Chretien, Clinton, and NATO, gain from intervening in Kosovo??? Well, war is good business. The military industry needs a war at least once every 10 years to survive. NATO was an organization of Western states to DEFEND them from the Soviets and company. When communism fell, NATO was dead. The NATO establishment didn't want to go, so they had to reinvent an enemy and a purpose for the organization. Both the military industry and the NATO establishment are powerful lobbies that governments would have a hell of a time dealing with when they are unsatisfied. Besides, it was a good time to take the news reporters away from the Lewinsky scandal and unpleasant issues at home. An added benefit was pitting Europe against Russia, which works out in favour of the US. We like the US and Tony is the thorn in the behind of Europe, so it's a good deal. We are not talking about the same thing here. The KLA was not there because the Serbs were oppressing the Albanians. In fact the huge drop of Serbs and other ethnic minorities over the previous few decades is evidence that the Albanians were slowly pushing the other guys out. The KLA was formed to push the Serbian police out of the province because they were getting in the way of the drug and illegal weapons trade that was going on in Kosovo and speed up the departure of non-Albanians from the province. The KLA has now moved onto border regions of Macedonia and Greece. Of course we don't hear about that because any mention of Kosovo and the NATO mission there is an embarrassment and we want people to still believe what they were told in 1999. We can't admit that we supported a terrorist group and that we called them liberators. Just like Bush never talks about WMDs in Iraq because bringing up the topic will make more people aware that there were none (apparently half of Americans still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq). All this shows that the Serbian military kept records and the KLA did not. 44 doesn't sound like genocide to me. And the date was "covered by scribbled notes" because it was after the NATO attack. Because the Serb military was mad as hell when NATO attacked (NATO claims killing 5,000 Serb soldiers and not surprisingly the Serb soldiers blamed this on the Albanians - besides they couldn't get to the NATO forces and take their anger out on them) and any atrocities by the Serbs happened after the attack, not before. We were told that 100,000 civilians were killed before we attacked. Of course Belgrade directed the operation. When a terrorist group attacks the police of a country and kills dozens of its officers, the government gets involved. Did Ottawa not direct the operation when tanks were rolling down the streets of Montreal in 76? Is Tel Aviv not involved in directing Israelli opperations against Hezbolah? Of course it is.

Canadians have been held, charged and convicted without Consular notification. The government has done things quietly rather than make a fuss about it.The CBC and other media are under no obligation to be quiet though. Dobbin, that's disingenuous.If someone held abroad doesn't identify himself as Canadian, how can the local authorities notify the Canadian government? In any case, there are far more detentions in the US than in China. I was contrasting the noisy Liberal/CBC attitude to the US with its current criticsm of Harper. Are you forgetting Mr. Arar? What was the Conservative response to his detention and having him shipped by the US to Syria to be tortured? Diane Ablonczy screaming at the Libs in Parliament about doing nothing to catch Canadian terrorists and having our American friends deal with our terrorists. She never regretted or appologized for calling an innocent man a terrorist or for assuming that a Canadian detained abroad is a terrorist without any evidence to that effect. As far as I am concerned, we should defend Canadians detained abroad, not assume that they are guilty and accuse them of being terrorist for no reason. But the Conservative spin on the issue is if you are detained in China you are innocent and if you are detained in the US you are a terrorist. Have you seen any reports in the media about this Conservative assumption?

Unfortunately, none of this is on the current government's plans. All that's on the government's plans is to do nothing about emissions and then buy emmissions credits from other countries. In other words, oil, gas and coal companies don't have to pay a penny for better, more efficient technologies, and the Canadian taxpayer gets to pay (probably into the hundreds of millions) for their free ride. Oil, gas, and coal companies are subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of a billion dollars a year as it is, so why not increase the subsidy to a couple of billion a year?

Harper was choosing to cancel meetings long before there was a Canadian being held. Yes, Harper chose to cancel his trip to Finland to meet with EU leaders because he was afraid of critisism on Kyoto. How many Canadians are being held in Europe?