JAh-man

ROTFLMAO now I've heard everything talk about a vocal minority ! What haven't you ever been talked back too before lets here some fightin words!!

You still din't answer the question.. If you were really in touch with whats actualy happening in parliament, the conservatives are teetering closer to non confidence everyday.. And I'm not liberal I'm NDP, the party who is going to finish you guys off.. Do you even watch parliament?? The NDP were responsible for overturning the liberals.. I could give a rats ass what happens to either of you.. But it is sad how a vocal miniority can perpetuate the illusion of superiority.. Very typical of th macho conservative cowboy attitude wich frequents this page.. you guys where cow boy hats and ride around on horses..

Well you are a miniority..

I'm glad that Harper isn't signing on to this, it gives us a good reason to overthrow him using non confidence which is going to happen in the next few months.. When you underestimate the will of the people, you end up like Bush who gravely underestimated the people of his country, and is paying the price as we speak.. Harpers next..

Honestly whats going to happen when Bush has lost all his power, leaveing the Harper all alone surrounded by a country that hates him??

Good grief, gimme a break will ya. Nope, no more more breaks.. Just the begginning of the end, so deal with it..

Just wondering what people think is going to happen to Harper now that his puppet master is losing control of his country.. With no Bush propping him up and telling him what to say, Harper isn't going to last very long.. This is the beginning of the end for the conservatives.. I'm really going to enjoy watching this..

In reality the conservatives have about a month left.. Hope they enjoy it..

Maybe the liberals wouldn't be doing this if some conservative weren't such easy targets.. Generalizing women as being weaker and less knwoledgeable proves my point.. It might be shocking too you guy's but thats sexism.. The rest of us realized this in the 60's.. As a coloured person the more I here about people black and asian people being barred from entering bars in Calgary it, makes me wonder if people really are as arogant as they portray themselves on this page.. Luckily I live in a place where conservatism doesn't exist.. Halalujah

I would say he's whiney and anoying because he is/was the leader of the conservative party.. Their pretty good at it so he has to try to impress them..

There's abig difference to being against decisions Israels government has made, and being completely against the very concept of Israel existing..

These people who are attacking us now are the same ones we were there to save a year ago.. What if they decide they don't want our form of democracy?? Should we be forcing it on them??

Harper has accused the liberal candidates of being anti Israel.. Considdering none of the Jewish ridings in the city voted for him maybe he should let them know.. I would love to see a list of the things Harper is against, but it would be too long to read.. Enough is enough, this guy should be over thrown.. He's a disgrace to our country..

Hey this crap team beat Ottawa 6 nothing.. In my oppinion the best team, them and Detroit.. Still love the leafs though..

It's funny how the people who defend Harper all come from a province which has the least pollution standards and the most polution per capita..

AS someone who has both family and friends in Quebec it makes me sad to see people so aggressive at gaining cultural respect while they trample on other peoples.. I've have encountred racism and prejudism based on the fact I live in Toronto and speak english.. It is practicaly a sport to bash english speaking Canadians there, and Americans are treated worse..

Maybe he can actualy understand the side of the arguement from a perspective other than the english speaking north American point of view..

Sorry but I think the blue men are boaring.. I've met lots of Americans, most I liked, some I didn't..

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentSe...d=1160345410322

I've not once seen a pro Afghan war article in the Toronto Star.. Here's todays Gen. Rick Hillier is fighting a war on two fronts: in Afghanistan and at home. He's doing this now, restored to the more publicly prominent position he formerly held — before somebody put the gag on — because of a government that cannot explain itself adequately and a prime minister sadly lacking in oratorical skills. (Though this is no excuse for Stephen Harper not speaking directly to the country, over the airwaves, with an articulated mission statement on what Canadian troops are doing halfway around the world, how that operation's surging and waning grind should be reasonably measured.) It is, quixotically, the hearts and minds of Canadians that most urgently need to be won anew if the formidable challenge overseas is to have any chance of success, a far from sure thing. Every time a flag-draped casket comes back to Trenton — and the 40th Canadian soldier slain, Trooper Mark Andrew Wilson, will emerge from the belly of a transport plane today or tomorrow — the domestic heart seizes a little more, collective minds recoil. This is our precious blood that's being spilled. "Every death takes a piece of my heart," says Hillier, who's the first to acknowledge that, while he's been under fire as a soldier in-theatre, especially in the Balkans, never has he personally experienced so relentless a risk as this, what Canada's 2,300 troops are facing daily in Kandahar — in ground combat, from roadside ambushes, from suicide bombers, even from "friendly fire" bombardments. Those troops may be doing it willingly, indeed with astonishing fervour for the task, given their losses; the dead and the injured. But they are doing it directly at the bidding of their government — this one, the last one. If, increasingly, without the support of their fellow citizens. It is disingenuous to separate "the mission" from "the soldiers." The soldiers are the mission; they certainly look at it that way. A great many of the shrillest voices raised in opposition to the Afghanistan deployment have a long and well-documented aversion to all things military. These are the same individuals who raged against the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, mostly because it was U.S.-led — and the Americans are, you might have heard, responsible for global terror. (This is, essentially, the Osama bin Laden/Ayman al-Zawahiri manifesto.) Lips were zipped when the Taliban toppled so easily from power and when Kabul exploded with joy as the Northern Alliance rode into the capital. The same dissidents have crept back to their rhetorical platforms, cravenly conflating Afghanistan with Iraq, and coalescing now — dishonestly, in my view — around Canada's sacrifices, purportedly pointless and for a doomed cause. But they're far from alone or politically homogenous. The polls say so: Fifty-nine per cent of respondents, in the latest pulse-taking, agreed that Canadian soldiers "are dying for a cause we cannot win." Hillier doesn't believe in polls. There's good reason for his skepticism. The question referenced above is loaded with spin, formatted to elicit a particular response. "The soldiers don't believe in polls, I don't believe in polls," Hillier says. "Unless you put the question this way: Would Canadians be content to allow, because of inaction — partly on our nation's part — the Taliban to reassume control of Afghanistan, with all their extreme ways, and with the whipping of women because their heels click when they walk on asphalt. "I think the answer's a resounding `No.'" Yet those polls are worrisome enough, to the military and the Conservative minority government, that both seem anxious to re-engage the public in the problems and possibilities of Afghanistan, in the commitment this country made as a main combat troop contributor to the NATO-led (UN-created) International Security Assistance Force, and the gone-astray reconstruction component of that sweeping mission. "Yes, there are folks who are worried," Hillier told the Toronto Star in an interview. "They want to be assured that we're actually achieving things behind the fighting or dying or killing. Obviously, we need to walk through the mission, what the aims are, what we're doing in all of the mission, not just the combat operations in things like Operation Medusa." This is difficult to quantify, for a home audience, and to some extent because we in the media have focused on the bang-bang narrative. But in our defence, that has been the main story these past six months. Most Canadians care a great deal more about a soldier killed than a village well dug, a ring road around Kandahar City built, or the 150,000 Afghan women who have benefited from the Canada-funded micro-credit program for small businesses. Culturally, Canadians want our soldiers — even though this isn't a peacekeeping mission, was never designed as such — to do good things, reputation-polishing things, helpful things that are faithful to our national values. But all those fine objectives, which did and do still exist, are portrayed as intrinsically incompatible with an ever-more dominant combat assignment, a shift of mission that has been inflicted on ISAF by an enemy — and be clear about this, an enemy of Afghanistan as much as an enemy of NATO troops — that gains for itself disproportionate notoriety, as if they were mythical hordes, for every single soldier it kills. When all it takes, really, is one remotely controlled IED or one poor, misguided, ruinously poisoned young Afghan (or Pakistani) to strap a suicide vest around his chest. Against this landscape, reconstruction has faltered drastically in Kandahar and Helmand, particularly. Canada's losses, like Britain's, are crushing domestic support. But fulfilling the humanitarian, economic and governance objectives can't happen — or can only occur in unsatisfying dollops — in an insecure, perilous environment. Insofar as any of these internal goals have been met, it has been on the broad back of NATO's combat troops that have largely contained the neo-Taliban invasion, not allowing them to radiate into all the provinces that have remained, in the context of Afghanistan, largely peaceful. "Security efforts in the south have been able to keep the Taliban on their back feet, constraining their activities largely to the south," Hillier says. "Yes, they do occasionally get into Kabul and other places. But two-thirds, three-quarters of the countries, are moving along, some parts fast, some slow, some with a few steps forward and the occasional step backwards. "The challenge now is keeping the Taliban knocked back on its feet and to continue supporting the population in a whole variety of ways so that they are confident their lives are actually going to get better. "I was just there, in the villages of the Panjwaii area, and the vast majority of those villagers want nothing to do with the Taliban, which they view as a millstone around their neck. What they need are options, so that they can go away from the Taliban." In the combustible southern provinces, the neo-Taliban can provoke, hunker and flit as best suit their purposes. They can terrorize by executing teachers and burning schools and nailing their threatening night letters to the front doors of homes and shops. They can — as will happen over this winter — concentrate their efforts on soft targets, which have such a big bang-for-the-buck impact: buses full of local contract workers, children clustering around soldiers handing out classroom supplies, women's right activists, humanitarian agencies and journalists. This is not an insurgency; it's an incursion, an invasion, with dreams of reoccupation. Yet war-battered Afghans are immensely brave and resilient. If more Canadians shared their stamina, their spine, we'd be a greater people. If not for Afghanistan, then for us. Or have Canadians so quickly forgotten what happened in Afghanistan the last time the world turned a blind eye, when the Taliban ruled, when Al Qaeda was embraced and 9/11 fomented. Should Canadians break faith with Afghans, forfeit the passion that rages against injustice, the Taliban will be proven de facto right: that the treacherous West is never to be trusted.