Saturn

Slaughtering a million people and a third of a nation in a matter of months qualifies as genocide in my books. Sorry Turkey, grow up, it's time to recognize what you've done. Not talking about or calling it something it wasn't, won't change history to suit your personal preferences. It's holocaust denial on a national scale.

Ontarians are retards! With FPTP, the number of votes that actually count in any riding = number of votes for candidate finishing second + 1, which is what...30% on average? The remaining 70% are worthless junk. Only a retard can support such an idiotic system and believe that s/he lives in a democracy. Last night the wide majority of Ontarians proved to be just such retards. I pity the fools who couldn't afford 50 cents/year to have a reasonable voting system. I pity the fools who didn't have a third brain cell to know what they were voting for or against in that referendum but felt they had to vote anyway. And I pity the fools who continue to whine about the low voter turnout and about lazy, greedy, etc. politicians/governments. In a democracy, you get EXACTLY the voting system you DESERVE and you get EXACTLY the government you DESERVE!

I couldn't care whether it's Liberals or Conservatives. Anyone who defends corruption and theft because "it isn't as bas as..." is a pathetic loser and a sad excuse for a Canadian. Remember that next time you are tempted to defend one crook or another because they stole less than...

Just a minute, shouldn't this government be seen as squeaky clean, not just stealing less than the liberals? They have at most one more term to steal, so they ought to be quick.

Unfortunately, that's what you are most likely to get. The telecoms are lobbying very hard for deregulation and the minister is listening to them. When he reverses CRTC decisions in favour of deregulation and you see them gloating, it's not because the customer is better off.

Expect Harper to call the election next week if the election in Quebec goes his way. Hehe, it figures that a few hundred bucks of handouts for parents should buy you 5-6% support - translating into 20% more seats in the House. The interesting question is what excuse Harper can make up now for calling an election.

It's a problem because you seem to believe that you deserve to earn as much as two people. Obviously, families with one-income earner will have less income than families with two-income earners in general. You can't expect someone else to pay you a second income for nothing. Add up your CTB, UCCB, and GST credits and provincial sales tax credits, and you'll be in the neighbourhood of $15K. If you are below that, then you are certainly earning enough to support your family. Since your wife works half-days, your tax credits may well be less than $20K. Whatever the case, I wish you the best of luck and the ability to provide well for your family. I just find it very irksome when someone claims that a system with very generous benefits for parents and single-income families is somehow penalizing those families.

Average Ontarians aren't struggling because we didn't get enough taxcuts. We were struggling because the Harris/Tory gang ravaging our health-care, education and infrastructure, pillaging the provincial coffers, and sticking us with billions in the red and the interest payments on it. Oh, we know what Mr. Tory's promises are worth. And we know that nobody else's promises can be worth less. LOL! Really fun to hear the Harris crowd of crooks accuse someone else of lying.

Alberta is far from a Republic in any way, shape, or form. You've got a long way to go before it becomes one, so get working on it - blabbing in the forums won't do it. This simply means that your kids are now adults - prior to that you weren't paying for their school and you were collecting child benefits. And you still get your non-working spouse tax credits. It's moronic for you to suggest that I should pay more taxes than yourself because I don't have a spouse who's on vacation permanently. There are 2-3,000 taxpayers per kilometer of road, 30,000 per school a quarter million per hospital in a city. In your neck of the woods, there are what? 50 taxpayers per km of road, 3,000 per school and 20,000 per hospital? Well, guess what? The cities are paying for the majority of your services.

Apparently, Harper once described the problem quite correctly: He is now the party in power and it's clearly against his interests to carry out electoral reform.

Please define what you mean by the "backbone of the economy". I mean that the rich have capital but don't do much work (they make up only 1-3% the population), the poor do some work but aren't very productive in general, so the capital of the rich and the labour of the middle-class is what our economy rests on. Hate to break it to you but couples having 0.5 children on average is a problem unless those children become 4 times as productive as their parents just to "replace their parents". Somehow I don't see productivity going up 4 times in the next 30-40 years. Agreed, but currently governments are doing the opposite - giving people who are least able to provide for their kids more and more money to have more kids. You propose to "remove barriers" for the wealthy and "create barriers" for the poor. I don't see any proposal here, I see just vague ideas. Now what kind of barriers on having children does someone with $10M/yr in income face that the government can remove? And how can the government prevent the poor from having children?

Because keeping the status quo is way cheaper and easier than making changes. The technology for much more efficient cares is already available (and there is a lot of room for improvement) but neither the consumer, nor the producers want to pay for it. Now some producers are smarter than others and realize that paying their engineers to build better cars pays more than paying an army of lawyers and PR firms to fight environmental standards but some (read American car manufacturers) are still having difficulty coming to terms with reality.

You get no CTB, no UCCB, no GST credits, no spousal and child tax credits? I suggest that you look at your tax form. You get plenty of benefits that people with no kids and/or working spouses don't get. Factor in the health-care and education costs of your family and your net transfer to government will more likely turn into a net transfer from government. Whatever the case, people with non-working spouses and people with kids are far ahead of dual-income families and people with no kids in terms of tax breaks and government transfers. To claim that this preferential treatment is somehow not preferential enough or that you are being penalized somehow is ridiculous. There are over 200 countries for you to choose from. That's a lot of choice.

Good for the Ontario economy. Lots of "help wanted" signs around. A decent minimum wage will give a push to some of the welfare crowd to get a job - excellent for government coffers.

Yes. In Ontario we already do.

Since you forgot the working middle class and the working middle-class is the backbone of the economy in this country, I'll add one more point: Remove barriers to working middle-class parents having kids, in effect encouraging working middle-class parents to have more kids. A fact: Children generally follow in their parents' footsteps. The harmful long term effects of current federal policy on child care: Current federal policy completely disregards the shortage of good-quality daycare => better educated, working middle-class individuals will continue having 1 or no children. Hence, federal policy will have a shrinking effect on the working-middle class. Current federal policy provides cash for parents and to stay-at-home parents in particular. An additional $5-$10K for parents may encourage some non-working individuals to have more children. It is also an incentive for low-income individuals to exchange their jobs for raising more kids at home. It most certainly is not enough of an incentive for the better-educated working class to quit their $50+K jobs to stay at home and raise more kids. Hence, federal policy will have an augmenting effect on the lower-income, less-skilled class. The net effect of current federal childcare policy - smaller working middle-class, larger lower-income class => persistent low-incomes and poverty, shortage of skilled workers.

Your problem is that you have a stay-at-home spouse and a large family and you find it difficult to support them. Under the current tax/benefit system you get around $15K in government transfers + $20K in tax credits for having a non-working spouse and a large family. Which in turn means that you most likely receive more government transfers than the total taxes you pay - in other words, you are $20K ahead of anyone else who doesn't have a non-working spouse and kids and chances are that consequently you pay no taxes. And you get this enormous benefit precisely because you have a non-working spouse and a large family. Then you come around claiming that children have been removed from the tax system and that there is some tax penalty for having a family. You get $20K/yr from the system. How is that a penalty?

Maybe that "freedom of religion" needs to go from the Charter. Fundamentalists of all stripes interpret "freedom of religion" as freedom to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else. Alternatively, maybe "freedom from religion" should be added to the Charter.

Benefit payments (like the CTB) are handouts (welfare) for people who can't make ends meet. If you want to get rid of these handouts, I'm all for it. Working families don't generally collect very little those handouts. It's generally families with one or two spouses who don't work that get them in much larger amounts. As far as I can tell, you are eating someone else's cake because your wife is vacationing while other wives work an pay for that cake. So be happy with the preferential treatment you are already getting and don't make too much noise while eating your handout cake.

Why the heck would anyone want to have 3+ children? Also, do you greatly enjoy sitting home with 3+ screaming kids? I bet you don't.

The biggest reason for the change is that people smartened up and currently have a lot more things to live for and enjoy than locking themselves up at home to become baby factories. What's the benefit of locking up yourself at home and raising 4-5 kids? Absolutely none.

The likelihood of a recession is not to be taken lightly. American and Canadian belief that the housing market could not not go down is already showing repercussions. A downturn in consumer spending is a distinct possibility. That's precisely how the Harris government ended up leaving a $6 billion deficit in Ontario. Project using the most optimistic scenarios, leave no cushion, and when the optimistic scenarios don't work out - well, you leave a mess. And you hide it and lie about it for as long as possible.

The first two are very valid criticisms. The third is a little out there... And you got a very valid reason to seek the services of a mental health specialist.

The Liberals care more about the Taliban than about Canadian soldiers, care more about criminals than their victims, care more about pedophiles than children....

From Garth Turner's blog: So, is Harper a sell-out?