Canuckistani

And since this would be an across the board wage hike, all small business owners would be in the same boat - prices would rise slightly and it's all good. In fact with low wage employees being able to spend a bit more, it would increase business at the small businesses, bring in more profit. A business owner who takes his profit in wages is an idiot, since small business taxes are lower than corporate taxes. Some provinces have 0 tax for small business.

You mean Walmart doesn't pay minimum wage? The only thing the keeps Walmart in check is low minimum wage. I doubt that very much. If the economics are there, Walmart is coming and mom and pops are gone no matter what the min wage. And conversely.

Replaced by what? The demand for what they sell will still be there. Just prices rise a bit.

Take a look at the Norwegian system, and especially the "spa" prison they have on on island. They have prisoners working on the ferries to the island, all sorts of amenities, but no escapes. Norway has a very humane prison system, yet a very low recidivism rate. As I say, I would give all convicted criminals longer probation/parole periods than they get now, with much closer supervision and support. Many people wouldn't need to go to prison in the first place under such a system. If they can keep their act together, great. If not, they spend more and more time in prison. So the ones who don't find it a disincentive would be spending a lot of time there. This is another piece of sentencing. Right now judges give serial offenders shorter sentences as time goes on, because they think incarceration doesn't work anyway. Under my system those people would be spending longer periods in jail as they reoffend. Maybe they don't mind, but it keeps them away from the public. Almost everybody should be given a second chance. But once they're on their fifth chance, maybe not so much.

Where we might differ is that I would have most prisoners, even the murders be released at some point, as they are now. And I would not make prison a hellhole, that just creates harder criminals when they do come out. Prison would be quite pleasant, the punishment is being locked up, that's enough. There would be a lot of rehabilitation efforts available, and prisoners would be held longer if they don't avail themselves of them and can show progress. That support would continue once prisoners are released. There would be a lengthy parole period, but again, with a lot of support to help them stay on the straight and narrow. The hard cases, like Bernardo, say, would of course be held forever, as they are now.

It's just a conservative/right bashing point of anybody that's not just reflexively shoot first, ask questions later. And because it implies that we have a role to play in preventing crime, rather than the answer just being to kill or otherwise punish those we convict of crimes. The mentality wants to reduce everything to simple black and white thinking. And, they do have a point. I think our justice system takes criminal's past into account too much when sentencing. The most glaring example is the Gladue decision, where there's a native discount for crime because natives often have horrific backgrounds. The primary goal of sentencing should be to keep society safe from the perpetrator, so giving them a shorter sentence because they suffered abuse makes no sense to me. OTOH, the best way to keep society safe is to release prisoners who have been rehabilitated. Someone who suffered abuse should be given all the support in prison to rehabilitate themselves. That might mean they are actually in prison longer (deeper seated issues) than the next person, but criminals should be coming out of prison a better person than when they went in.

Predictably, labor has said this is just a bandaid (I think it will be too) while business is howling they'll all go broke. Good about the 15% differential, but what does it really mean? If Tim Horton's wants to pay minimum wage in a northern resource town where living costs are high, does that mean they should be able to import people because no Canadian will take the job? We should not be allowing temp work permits for any permanent jobs, only for seasonal ones. If the job requires specialized skills that can't be found in Canada, sponsor an immigrant for it. Otherwise allow wages and working conditions to rise until Canadians will take that job - we have lots of un and underemployed people.

Motivation. Terrorists have some larger political or religious agenda, even if they use that as an excuse for their own rage and feeling of exclusion. Mass killers just have the latter but not the former. And you can get to splitting hairs about all this, but I think mostly we understand the difference implicitly. And weapons used. You could, of course have snipers shooting people for terrorist reason, but bomb blasts are much more effective in instilling terror and causing mass casualties. OTOH, the ragers usually use guns, maybe in part because it's more personal for them.

Not sure why the origin has to be divine. Many people say the Jesus myth is a retelling of earlier myths, the Jewish myths also probably weren't invented holus bolus by them. The flood myth is ancient, etc. If the Norse are descendants of the invaders of Europe that came about 3000 years BC, displacing earlier peoples, they would have brought their myths with them. These people would have travelled thru or been from the middle east. Just as there is argument that inventions such as agriculture, pottery, what have you spread from a single source, so with myths. And by the time of the Norse, there was plenty of trade and movement in Europe and beyond - ie myths would travel along with the traders. No need to blame God(s) for this.

Any hard definition of terrorism will include cases not normally seen as such. But the US mass shooters didn't seem to have a motive beyond a personal one, vs the Boston two. While the Boston two were likely acting for personal reasons of alienation, they at minimum cloaked it in political/religious reasons, and sounds like the older one was radicalized by somebody, or he likely would have just become an ordinary criminal.

We have no official measure of poverty, but the but people under the LICO are at the lowest since the stat was kept in '76. OTOH, child poverty, after declining has risen again: http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/child-poverty.aspx

qué?

Poverty is one thing, but too much inequality also has very negative effects on health, the justice system and even productivity as people feel the playing field is too slanted and stop trying or just underperform on the job.

There's a reason the right are called reactionaries I guess. They would rather react to crime rather than work to prevent it, and assure themselves that if they can just make the punishment tough enough, and kill those scummy perps dead enough it will act as a deterrent. With terrorists, that really fails, even more so than an ordinary criminal, because the motivation isn't as self centered.

There isn't a modern state that could function without a mix of statist elements. The eternal question is how much. By all indications the Scandinavian countries have it right.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2010/12/01/con-rich-get-richer.html All Canadians should benefit from the increase in GDP, not just those at the top. We get a much stabler, healthier society with a strong middle class participating in the increase in wealth, and even the lowest earners getting a piece of the action. It actually reduces all sorts of societal costs, from healthcare to the justice system to increasing productivity to not have inequality too great. http://business.financialpost.com/2011/12/05/canadas-rich-still-getting-richer-oecd/and

Look at the upper graph again and ponder the meaning of a quintile.(Hint = 1/5 of the population). That bottom quintile income has not gone up since 1976 in constant dollars. Bringing in the LICO is just a red herring.

You mean the low income folks actually have to earn less money for you to say they're losing ground? Seems to me to if they're not partaking of the increase in GDP while the higher earners are, that is losing ground. It is relative, seems to me. Especially considering the corrosive social and health effects of greater inequality.

More from stats Can: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/130128/dq130128a-eng.htm283/ So the rich (ie 1%) are got richer by 48% while everybody else, lumped together got richer by a whole $400 = 1%. That shows what the problem is. The median income for 99% of the population has remained static while the top 20% and especially the top 1% have way enriched themselves. Not a way to keep a country cohesive. More like corrosive.

Just read the title of the one I posted and you'd know that. Note also the discrepancy in incomes - Stats Can shows an after tax income of well under 20k for the lowest quintile, Bonam's unsourced graph has it at 23k.

Stats Can does not seem to agree with you: http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/[email protected]?iid=22

So what? That's where the money is, so that's who has to pay the taxes. The 20% have benefitted from the labor of others and the social and physical infrastructure that allowed them to make and keep that money. They should be sending in thank you notes with their tax remittances for the opportunity afforded them.

He's arguing for no regulated health care. People can do what they want. Of course what would happen is that a private insurance system would spring up, with the higher administrative costs and medical costs we see in the US. He may not believe that health care is a benefit to business, but business would soon find that they can attract better employees if they offer health care coverage. In other words, the system would default to the US system, except without Medicare and Medicaid, meaning there would be millions without any coverage at all who couldn't afford health care. Guess those would be just left to die, and a whole new industry would be created - people driving around with pickup trucks yelling "bring out your dead." His posts show the danger of "sophomore disease" where somebody has taken a couple of courses in a field (in this case economics) and now thinks they're the expert.

What does healthcare do for business - only that American businesses tried to sue Canada under NAFTA callilng our system a subsidy because in the US employer paid healthcare premiums are so high. What does education do for business - this from someone who purports to be an economics expert? It is to laugh. Cry. actually.

Except that figures show the better off pay the bulk of taxes. But there's a simple fix for that - pay the lower income people more, and they'll contribute more tax revenue back to the government, as well as needing less spending from the government to support them.