Saturn

LOL! That's loooooney.

Of course claiming that the provisions could be used to resolve the Air India case was hogwash. To link Bains to it based on this hogwash is uber hogwash. To say it in Parliament is an outrageous lie (but with Mr. Harper nothing surprises me anymore). The answer to this question is pretty obvious. The real question is why the RCMP are allowed to carry on in this fashion? One figures they would refrain from such shit given it was all over the papers just a few months ago thanks to the Arar inquiry. The even bigger question is why the PM is not only allowing this behaviour but he seems to be encouraging it. Looks like he'll be outing CSIS agents in the House for whatever sins their spouses have committed against him. This is beyond appalling. What's new? Deceit and fear is the conservative way to power.

You mean like maybe just the west. We do not need a carbon tax or any other silly tax. What we need are meaningful tax cuts. However, this thread shows that the left has finally admitted that taxes are the cause of a lower standard of living since they want to use taxes now to deliberately create a lower standard living. Nonsense. Countries with the the highest taxes have the highest standard of living and vice versa. Don't think so? Move to Uganda. Or go dig in the PM's backyard to find the taxes he's buried there.

It has a lot to do with poor planning but it has even more to do with the fact that poverty levels are based on income relative to living expenses. The loss of a spouse can reduce living expenses by as little as 10-15%. Compared to that a 30-40% loss in income is very significant. This is why widowed women are more 5 times more likely and men are twice as likely to end up below poverty compared to senior couples. Again women who never worked are more affected than women who have their own pensions.

That's exactly what a carbon tax is intended to do. Tax the use of carbon fuels to reduce overuse and waste. Of course the tax doesn't have to the same for all uses - you can target particular areas where there is more waste and where you'll cause less 'harm" and more reductions.

Many pollsters have commented that the questions are so poorly worded as to be void. A pollster never poses a question in the first person. Hehe, everyone will pick the second option of course. It's a clear case of leading the respondent. Yep, they'll do whatever they want and will have the full support of farmers based on the above questions

I'm not sure why that should be and even if it is so, what makes you think all those poverty striken widows are women who stayed home with their kids? Because the #1 reason for drop in income after losing a spouse for women is loss of pension income and women without pensions are far more affected by it than those with pensions. For men, losing a spouse causes a much smaller drop in pension income. This reflects the fact that many women who are currently in their 70s, 80s and 90s stayed home.

I really doubt you have anything but anecdotal evidence to back that up. geoffrey, learn how to use a search engine, will ya? Widows in Canada end up with roughly half the income widowers do and are much more reliant on GIS than widowers and married seniors. If it wasn't for Canada's generous social security system for seniors, many of them would be living in cardboard boxes. Given that generous system, poverty among seniors is only about 3% - most of them, you guessed it - widows.

Because they don't like to lend money when there is a more than minimal risk that they won't get it back. Only 80% of students graduate after all and it's not so cheap to chase people around for small loans. They want collateral and they want guarantees. Effectively, yes. And the multinational employee can afford the plumber's services. In an economy everyone ends up "subsidizing" everyone else. It's not us against them, we are all part of it and we are all dependent on each other. What's important is to be able to find the optimal combination of post-secondary education, trades and lower-skill jobs to maximize productivity and efficiency. And economy with too many plumbers and too few engineers is not as efficient as it can be.

No, unlike yourself I don't make things up. What, you don't know how to use a search engine? Here's something from someone you probably trust:

So what the heck are the questions? Or will that info become available after the plebiscite? And why does this plebiscite matter anyway? It's not binding and the gov't will do whatever it wants whatever the outcome.

That's not a valid argument for subsidizing students. Actually, it is. Education is an investment in our economy and claiming that there is no money for it in the budget while we waste many times more on complete garbage is well, complete garbage. Chronic underfunding of Canadian universities means that they are turning more an more to what provides more funds, not what's good for our economy. They expand in the arts and humanities because the funding they receive is sufficient for big classes and cheap instructors in these disciplines. They are not expanding in engineering, science, and technology because these programs require more facilities, equipment, and more expensive instructors (since they have to compete with other employers in these areas of high demand). Canada is falling relative to other developed nations in most areas of education but at the highest rate precisely in those areas, which are the ones that matter the most. It's not a pretty situation and will come back to bite us. Two reasons: 1) Most students don't have $20K/yr sitting around for education. By its nature, education must come first and earnings come second. 2) Increasing the cost of education means that students must earn more later to pay for it. In other countries where education is free or nearly free, employers don't have to pay that premium+interest. Lower salaries are a huge incentive for employers to set up shop in jurisdictions that offer them. You have to remember that we don't have the luxury of a closed economy - we have to compete globally and on an increasing scale and in more areas. I don't know about you but in Ontario you cannot declare bankruptcy within 10 years of graduation. By then they can cease wages and assets to ensure repayment. So unless you plan to stay unemployed and own nothing for 10 years, you are paying back that loan.

The current student loan program doesn't take most of this into account at all. The student loan formula is roughly min{maximum amount, tuition+incidental fees+$400/mth for rent and food (if you live on your own)+$1000 for books} - any assets/earnings you have - clawback for parents' income. Do you see anything here about earning ability, about the cost of tuition (because every program will put you above the loan amount whether your tuition is $5K or $10K or $30K), or about time requirements? Anyone who qualifies, gets the same amount - regardless of what they are studying or where they are studying. In Ontario, the maximum amount you could borrow was around $9,500 in 2000 and it was at that same level since 1990. In the meantime many programs were "deregulated" meaning that the universities could charge whatever they wanted, causing fees to skyrocket in these fields. Residences were also "deregulated" and universities had a special exemption to increase rents as much as they wanted (something other landlords cannot do). Since the student loans office was flooded with applications and the government was questioned about skyrocketing student debt levels, they simply tightened the eligibility requirements and started refusing loans for any stupid excuse they could find. I applied for a loan once and was refused because there was a discrepancy in my earnings between my tax return and my loan application ($500 more on my loan app. than on my T1 because that was the exemption on scholarships for income tax purposes). It took them 3 months to process my app and by the time they told me I was trying to cheat them by reporting more income to them than to the CRA, it was too late to resolve the issue (the deadline for getting the loan had passed). From talking to others it was pretty clear that they were trying to find some absurd excuse to send your app back, and if you had time to re-submit they would pick on something else and send it back again and again allowing deadlines to pass and you'd fail to get a loan because you missed deadlines, not because they had a good reason to refuse you. The retards even sent me a note 4 years later (and a couple after I had graduated) to tell me that my loan account was suspended and that would not be able to apply for another loan until I resolved the $500 discrepancy. In conclusion, the student loan formula is junk to begin with and administrative delays and tricks are used to reduce loan availability beyond that formula. Neither the structure, nor the application of the student loans program makes sense and it badly needs to be improved.

So if you work full-time at 40hrs/wk and spend 15hrs/wk in class, you spend 15hrs/wk on your studies outside of class??? Maybe there is some truth to the claim that universities have been handing out degrees lately just for paying your tuition. Engineering, math, science, some business programs, etc. After complaining that after attending classes and doing five 15-20pg assignments every week we have 2-3hrs/day left for sleep, we were told to work in groups (as if that's somehow more efficient - I just didn't do all of it). The problem here was that my faculty was "forced" (by the provincial government freaking out over shortages in certain areas) to accept 30% or so more students than it could support, so they had to kick about 20+% out by the end of first year. It's pretty ridiculous that so many students were squeezed out thanks to impossible demands from a stupid government. Nice to say in retrospect but by the time I graduated my tuition, other fees and housing had doubled. It's not easy to foresee such things. I'd much rather subsidize students than snowbirds and Disneyland vacations. Education requires a lot of effort and sacrifice on behalf of the student and by 2020 over 2/3rds of jobs will require some level of post-secondary education. Education is a requirement for the new generation, not a luxury. It is also a requirement for a competitive and healthy economy - so it is a worthy investment. The cost of student loans programs is not even a tiny spec compared to the cost of funding seniors and handing out money to parents who tell their kids they may be able to give them some funds for education when their retirement savings hit a million but until then, they are on their own. If children are the future (like so many hypocrites claim), why are we constantly cutting education (at all levels) and dumping the money into old age benefits and health care, 4/5ths of which goes to retirees? Are those retirees the ones who will be productive and keep our economy going? What kind of an investment is that?

I did just fine. But I can definitely say that the student loans program is everything but "generous". If anyone says it is, he is either lying or doesn't know a thing about it. That's precisely the attitude of most babyboomers when their kids decide to go to school - we made it ourselves (at less than 1/3 of the costs), not it's up to you. This is precisely why parents' income should not be taken into account in the student loan formula. This is also why money should not be handed out to parents to blow on beer and popcorn but should be used for the benefit of children (by improving the availability of loans, scholarships and bursaries) not for the benefit of their selfish parents.

That's false. Daycare was widely available at very low cost and many took advantage of it but there was no law forcing them to. Nice thinking, magrace, but children may not be as dependable as you may think. I happen to know a lawyer whose mother stayed at home to raise her and her brother. The mother is in her 70s now and she asked her daughter for money because she wasn't able to make ends meet on her OAS/GIS (small amount of pension money from her husband who's passed and no pension of her own because she stayed home). The answer was "I already pay for your OAS through my taxes and that's enough." Now I don't know what kind of mother she was and how she raised her children but in this case she clearly did herself a bad trick. Women who sacrifice their own financial security to stay at home with their children are not necessarily doing themselves a favour (actually most of them end up below poverty when their spouses pass away).

What's wrong is that the minimum time requirement for my program was around 100hrs/wk, which is the equivalent of 2.5 full-time jobs (and it wasn't enough for me personally). Not even one of my classmates had a job for that very reason. Now, I don't know what you are studying to have time to work full-time but not everyone is on vacation at school handing in one assignment a term. Secondly, many universities are located in small towns (not in Calgary) and jobs in those places are few and far between relative to the number of students in town looking for them. Get off your self-righteous pedestal - if every student had a well-paying full-time job available and the time for it, the student loans program would not even exist.

Canada cannot win this even if we sent our entire military there and got them all killed. This was meant to be a team effort and if our allies don't take it seriously, I see no point in further overextending our military for nothing. In fact our allies are so appreciative of our efforts, Bush regularly forgets to even mention that we are making a contribution (to save his ass really). In a year and a half, Bush will be out of office along with the need to save his ass.

Where exactly can Harper go in Alberta? Win the seats by even greater super majorities? Nowhere really. You are going to let him transfer all of Alberta to Quebec before you consider taking a seat or two away from him.

Yipee, geoffrey is up in the clouds again. geoff, have you ever applied for a student loan? The very generous Ontario student loan program provided a maximum of $9K per year when my tuition was $7K/yr. Somehow the remaining $2K don't pay the rent, food and books for the year. Of course if you earned $5K in the summer, your loan was reduced by that amount, so in effect you couldn't have more than $9K/yr and get anything in loans. If your parents earned over $50K, you couldn't get a loan either. Of course parents are happy to collect handouts for their children but when it comes to passing some of it to their children for education many kids are out of luck (according to the latests stats only 40% of parents who want their children to acquire post-secondary education have made any sort of financial arrangements for that). From my own and my peers' experience with the student loan program, I can say that anyone who claims that "our very generous student loans program will cover post-secondary for anyone who can't financially afford it on their own" clearly has never had any dealings with said "generous program".

With that statement, it's clear that you are too young to understand how much effort and responsibility goes into raising children and how much strain children put on parents and marital relationships. As if the enormous responsibility of having children isn't life shattering enough, forcing parents out of work because good quality daycare is not available is unnecessary punishment that fewer and fewer people are willing to subject themselves to. Is having children worthy of destroying a successful career, losing an income while increasing costs, and reducing an individual to the level of a babysitter locked up at home and away from her peers while putting more stress on the other because the financial health of the whole family rests entirely with him? Really? We can afford to have half our workforce sit at home changing nappies but we can't afford to pay for our children's education and give them a clean, debt-free start in life? That's pretty odd of you to say. Your doctor is such a "state" employee. So are your teachers and professors. So are the police and the military. And the guys who pick up your garbage, plow your street and test the safety of your food and water. You are nuts!

Someone with a BA has all the marketable skills he or she needs and more marketable skills than someone without a BA. This is precisely why they don't need government handouts. They've made the decision to forgo one income because the other spouse makes enough to support the whole family. And I know women who earned roughly as much as their husbands but had kids just to have a good excuse to get out of jobs they hated. Not surprisingly they did it because their husbands earn enough to support the whole family. No need for government subsidies there either. Most people think only about themselves and society's benefit is the last thing that would ever cross their minds. Parents who can't earn as much as daycare fees are precisely the worst equiped people to raise kids. The best predictor of school achievement and educational attainment of a child is maternal educational attainment. This is why children of poorly educated mothers and from low-income families benefit more from attending daycare than children from any other socio-economic group. By locking up kids with a parent who has nothing to offer and taking away the better quality parent for longer hours, you are doing kids more harm than good. There is nothing contradictory about my arguments. I approve of people who make wise choices for themselves and are able to raise their own kids and I disapprove of laziness and those who imagine that they are entitled to procreate and multiply at someone else's expense.

When did that happen? Any sources on this? Thx.

It's a very beneficial relationship - Harper gets his own private militia in the police and the military and they get their own private PM and benefactor. They lie and leak in his favour and he gives them more powers and funding. Nevermind that this is clearly against the interests of the Canadian public, who also gets to pay for it all.

Right. He was simply reading a newspaper because QP is just so boring there is nothing else to do. The article just happened to link Mr. Bains' father-in-law to the Air India investigation. Harper had absolutely no intention to imply that Mr. Bains is related to terrorists and that Liberals do not favour extending the clauses in order to protect his father-in-law and because they like terrorists (and pedophiles if I may add).