Canuckistani

It's not the severity of the sentence that's been shown to reduce crime, but the chance of getting caught. So it's the strictly enforced part that is important. But laws won't do much to deter gangsters. For that we need drug legalization to make a large dent in their income, as well as preventive strategies, including poverty reduction, to prevent kids form joining gangs. But absolutely there should be some significant jail time if you're caught illegally carrying a gun, and more for an illegal gun.

http://fed-up-with-republicans.newsvine.com/_news/2012/04/18/11266433-would-you-believe-that-wyoming-has-more-gun-deaths-per-capita-than-california http://www.statemaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-death-rate-per-100-000

http://www.lcav.org/statistics-polling/gun_violence_statistics.asp

Who knows, but they had little restrictions on them to be so. Guess you'll be arguing for compulsory carry laws next. None of those will help you if somebody shoots you first. Crime? I am for restrictive gun laws. They won't do that much to prevent criminals from having guns. But they'll certainly reduce all the deaths by legals guns - from kids, to people having their guns taken away from them, to the Florida shooting etc. The guy who shoots you first is more equal than you, and no matter what the power of your gun, it won't help you if you're already dead. Or are you a shoot first type person?

None of the arguments support your claim that Canada "needs CCW" because of this shooting. Sounds like it has pretty loose gun regulations, yet a shooter just took out 5 people in Seattle. You seem to be trying to make the argument that looser gun laws prevent gun crime. Are you?

Your contention seems to be that looser gun restrictions like in the US will prevent gun crimes. Can you back that up? Seattle just had a shooting, 5 dead. WA has some of the loosest gun laws on the West Coast. How did they help?

I said top 20%, not top .0001%. I bet the guy making the median wage of 47,000 would be very happy to get a 10% boost in salary. But if we had the same division of increase in economy we used to have, ie benefits of GDP growth flowed to people in the same percentage they used to, that media wage earner would now be getting over 90,000 a year. He'd be ecstatic about that. How about that idea?

The other side of the planet is slowing down because more women are getting educated and working. But we're still going to max out at at least 9 billion, which I think is way over the limit of what the planet can support. Especially as they all want the same piggy lifestyle we have. We should cut way back on immigration. It should be a policy that is based on what's best for the Canadians already here. If we need some people, really need them and can't meet those needs with Canadians, then fine, bring them in. If somebody can figure out how to settle the north with immigrants and make it a paying proposition, I have no problem with that. But to just keep stuffing them into the same 3 urban centers just makes no sense at all. As for immigration being a form of aid to the 3 world, how does that work? We take their best and brightest, the ones they paid to educate, leave them the rest. And compared to the number of people in the third world, our immigration, which is huge per capita for us, is a tiny drop in the bucket. There are way better ways to help the 3rd world if that is what we're really interested in.

Women want to be more than breeding machines. I'm glad because it also makes them more interesting to be around. The planet doesn't need more breeding machines, it needs way less. We have to find a way to make our economies run without relying on ever greater numbers or consumers, or we're all screwed. Might as well start now, instead of always looking to the past to solve our problems.

You're thinking of neo-liberal. Liberal has come to mean left. It's a dirty word in the US, and now Republicons are attacking each other for being moderate, so moderate is also becoming a slur.

Quebec has seen a big uptick in their birthrate, they used to have the lowest. This is attributed to universal, affordable, daycare and other government programs. Universal daycare is the best thing we could do to make it easier for women to have children. Since we've decided to educate them, same as men, rather than barefoot and tied to the stove, they're going to want to actually use that education. Also, if you're really serious about it, you'd have to somehow give women preference so that their careers don't stall when they have kids. But no matter what, once we decided to educate women and give them financial freedom from men, we're never going to have the same birthrate as we used to. Contraception has a role to play here too. But, the planet has plenty of people on it. We can't keep expecting more and more people to pull our economic engine. We also have a limit to resources. We need to build sustainable economies that don't rely on every greater numbers of consumers, and ever greater exploitation of resources.

Except they're not doing so. They can't create land, so housing prices will remain high with the influx of people we get, while wages remain low. Nnobody wants to pay the taxes required to build the transportation infrastructure - govt's can't agree on where the money should come from. It doesn't make sense to put people out to pasture who still want to work, and who will just cost the govt money, while we import people to fill those jobs. If we had lower immigration, then your 23 yr old native born Canadians would have lots of jobs for them without having to kick out the oldsters. Also look at how the govt is raising the age when you can receive OAS - they're putting in disincentives to retirement. Our immigration system allows in many old folks. To truly reverse the demographic tren, we would need to let in 1 million people a year, all of them young people. And, as you yourself said, that would just kick the problem down the road for a generation. How long can we continue to have economies based on an ever increasing population - at which point is the planet full? Timmies competitive edge against who? McD's? If we have a smaller labor pool and low wage jobs have to raise their wages to attract workers, then everybody in that business is in the same boat. Yes, your double double will cost you 10 cents more, but that seems worth it to me. The worker gets a decent income and pays taxes on that to the govt. It's a win win for everybody. Instead we import masses of people, create a large class of working poor that pay little in taxes and draw a lot in govt supports. That's a mugs game.

Infrastructure. We have all the construction we can manage. We're importing people to do that construction. In Vancouver the issue is land for housing, the high cost of housing that forces people to live far away from their work, and the transportation infrastructure to allow them to do that. That latter costs a fortune and nobody wants to pay. Retirement. Does it make sense to have people drawing government benefits in retirement, not paying taxes, just so we can bring in more immigrants to do the jobs they were doing? I've been hearing about the worker shortage since the 1980's - hasn't happened yet. When that really comes, we could open up our immigration system then. We used to do that, open and close immigration according to need. Mulroney is the one who set a high immigration level and kept it there, as has every govt after him. Training. It's not all about university, many skills we need are more technical training. But whatever, what we need is to open more spaces for the skills we need - Canadians will naturally fill them. And more supports for retraining, so that older workers can get the skills that really are in demand. Strategy. One is what I said above - focus on training Canadians for the jobs we need, instead of importing people. Then take the changes introduced by the govt and take them much further, where immigrants are matched with a specific job before they ever come here. It would benefit both the immigrant and Canada. We could have a system where the prospective immigrant comes here on a temporary permit for a specific job. If things work out, after say 4 years he would automatically become eligible for permanent resident status. As for immigrants taking jobs Canadians don't want - Canadians don't want the job because it doesn't pay enough. Raise the pay and Canadians will take the job - that's how it's supposed to work, a shortage of labor causes wages to go up. Farm labor and other seasonal jobs is the one area I can see bringing in temp workers, since we can't just keep a ready pool of people who only want to work seasonally. But make sure those temp workers are paid and treated fairly, not like semi slaves. It treating them well makes the project uneconomic, then so be it.

What you say about Germany makes sense. But they also instituted a system where during the recession the govt paid companies to keep their employees on payroll. This meant that when demand for their products returned, they were ready to go, had the people in place. Also, they have an industrial strategy where the companies, government and the unions work cooperatively. We could emulate some of that. Second point isn't about taxes. It's about our society splitting into a 20% elite who earn good wages, while everybody else goes down. Using the tax system to redistribute the wealth may be necessary, but better would be to have the 80% share in the wealth in the form of income. Then they would be in a position to pay those taxes.

I'm sure this forum has had this discussion, but I didn't get to be a part of it, so I would like to open this topic again. I wonder if it's possible for people that are interested in this topic to have the discussion without the race card being thrown? Of course that would also require any actual racist comments to be held in abeyance. But just being against our current immigration system doesn't make anybody a racist. 1. Demographics - to reverse the aging trend in Canada, we would have to quadruple immigration to 1 million a year. And only young people would be allowed, no grandma or grandpa. Is that what we want? And when that massive group of people gets old, do we increase immigration even more to keep our population young? Where will all these immigrants come from - thankfully the world population increase is slowing down. 2. Jobs - does it make sense to import so many people while our economy is struggling and we have high unemployment? Shouldn't the available jobs go to Canadians first. 3. Wages - do we really want people coming here and driving down wages because they're more desperate and willing to take anything? If employers claim they can't find Canadians to do a job at a given wage, do we really want to bring in people to work at those low wages? It's just a race to the bottom. 4. Skills - doesn't it make sense to train Canadians for the skills we need, rather than bringing people in and consigning many native born Canadians to underemployment? Is it fair to practice neo-colonialism where we let a third world country train their best people and then we scoop them up? And, how does it make sense to bring in doctors who are then not recognized by the medical association of their province and wind up driving cab? 5. Infrastructure - Most immigrants go to Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver. Those cites are bursting at the seams. In Vancouver we have very high housing prices with a below average median wage. How does that help the people already here, or the people coming here? It would be different if immigrants were settling our empty spaces, but what would they do there to support themselves. It's not like the original settlers that were farmers and would support themselves off the land. 6. Underperformance of recent immigrants. Recent immigrants don't do as well economically as immigrants in previous times. Seems to me our immigration system is not selecting the right people to come here who can do well. This may be because of language barriers or because their training isn't recognized or even because of racism on the part of employers. Whatever, it's not working. At least the government has taken some steps to correct this, by expanding the pre-selected category, but they're tiny steps. I think we need some bold moves here. Some of our industries need skilled people and they need them now. I can see bringing in people who have a specific job waiting for them in Canada on a temporary permit, and if that works out putting them on a fast track to immigration. But why is Canada always doing this? It's like we haven't grown up and don't trust ourselves to train our own people. Compare our technical training to Germany's say (supposedly the best in the world). What's stopping up from doing it more like them? Again, I would very much appreciate this if people can keep the race card out of any discussion around this.

That is an interesting exposition that I've never seen before. Do you have a link for it? I may want to use that on another forum.

As long as they pay as well and don't cause harm - like jobs in the financial industry, say.

Overall, 1/3 of the manufacturing job losses can be attributed to dutch disease. You can't look at one sector, say it's OK, and then claim that everything is OK. There are other factors that go into our manufacturing job losses - the recession and globalization. But where we can do something, we should be doing it, not just singing lullabys to ourselves that everything's OK. If we could indeed get 1/3 of those jobs back, that would be significant.

It's not a burning issue for me, and opening up the debate would probably just cause a mess. I would just like to see it codified, so there isn't some drift to late term abortions that aren't really necessary. So if the debate does get re-opened, there's my position.

It's killing. I only support it because the alternatives are worse, not because I think it's not a big deal. We have to balance harm. Which is why I support limits on abortion on demand - say 20 weeks.

I'm not making an argument against abortion. I'm making an argument against abortions that could have been prevented. That would mean better education, better access to contraceptives including the morning after pill, whatever we can do to keep abortion as low as possible.

The real danger is what happens when he resources run out or aren't in demand anymore. Canada for my entire life has agonized about being hewers of wood and drawers of water, and how we wanted to move beyond that. All of a sudden it's back to the future, and we're just fine with that.

I wouldn't say that 1/3 of manufacturing job losses is a minor effect. The report itself suggests things the govt should be doing. Just that setting your hair on fire isn't one of them.

Maybe talk to a few women who've had one. I don't know why you call it mental health problems - it's distress. A sense of shame or guilt and a lot of regret. In other words, if they had been able to prevent that abortion by contraception, it would have not nearly the same impact on them.

Thank you for the information/sources. The information that you linked to states that older women are more likely to be having repeat abortions, which would indicate that young women aren't having abortion after abortion rather than using contraceptives. Furthermore, the info says that only slightly more than 8% of repeat abortions are a third abortion. And of course some of these women did use contraceptives; contraceptives aren't foolproof, and some have a higher success rate than others. The information presented also doesn't tell how much time has elapsed between abortions, suggesting to me, that since older women are more likely to be having repeat abortions, a few years have passed between their first and second or third abortion. Again, I don't see the information as supporting the scenario that was presented; I don't see it as supporting the idea that young women are having abortion after abortion rather than using contraceptives. In a way it doesn't matter, since I would never advocate denying a woman an abortion because she's had one before. I just wanted to look it up for myself, and was shocked to see how common repeat abortions are. I do think we can do better here. I'm for abortion because I see it as the lesser of two evils, but would rather we prevent it as much as possible. Not least because of the psychological effects it has on many women.