Saturn

Agreed. People are too lazy to vote but they always have time to complain, complain, complain. I support mandatory voting. Even if it doesn't force people to think when they vote, it will at least force politicians to cater to all segments of the population (not just to the elderly or social conservatives because they are more likely to vote than others).

Yes, anything - the Republicans can win or the Democrats can win.

If it is a good idea and is of great importance (such as this issue), then the government is obliged to interfere. What you are asking is whether the government should get involved in putting criminals in jail. Yes, it's a good idea and the government should put them in jail. It's that simple.

Polling will not be banned. Even without polling people will have perceptions (lawn signs, gut feeling, etc.) on who is going to win. In reality, Canadians simply don't care about politics because most of us don't have a clue what politicians do and we don't think it matters (until we end up in a Syrian jail or on a long waiting list for surgery in which case some of us realize that politicians do have some influence on our lives). Canadians care about Britney Spears, cool cars, sports, etc. and voting comes last on our list of priorities. If you ask people who don't vote why they don't vote, they will tell you that they don't have the time. But they have time to watch the hockey game or reality TV shows and they all know about the latest celebrity gossip.

You mean the massive amounts of data from one Israeli and one Canadian election? I'm inclined to believe that tax compliance is the result of penalties for non-compliance. I'm inclined to believe that hardly any of us would be paying taxes if not paying them would not get us in trouble.

Well, if your ballot will change nothing, then you shouldn't vote in the first place.

Wouldn't it be easier to tell the judge to take a hike? If she is offended by the X-mas tree, she can sue. I don't like the stupid paintings on the walls at work but it's not up to me to take them off the wall and put them in the janitor's room.

Really? What does the star on the top of the tree reprsent? Communism!

Are you out of your mind? Our problem is we have TOO MUCH choice! lol.. unreal.... LOL!! heheh I just can't beleive you said that. You don't know what democracy is. Democracy only holds true if 100% of the poeple vote. That is factual. It's like saying 1 + 1 = 2. I guess you'll just have to force everyone to vote then. But you also have to make sure the immigrants don't vote. That would be pretty tough.

Wow, participation dropped like a rock after 1999. Interesting.

What does a team-player mean to you? An obedient brownnoser? What she said is true - I don't see anything wrong with noting the truth.

I liked him. He was a gregarious and good teacher of geography. I can' recall him having a theory or even a body of work on warming or cooling though. I believe that he retired in 1986 and he hasn't done any research since. Also, he's never done climate research as far as I can tell - he was into geography. He is still gregarious and a good presenter/sweet talker.

What's the voter turnout in Israel? It was 80% a couple of elections ago but I imagine it varies from election to election. It's certainly higher than it is in Canada though.

The only way to bring democracy is to give people more choice. In first past the post, the voter really gets to choose one of two possible candidates and that's just not a lot of choice.

In many cases, voting for your party of choice is a wasted vote (aside from giving $1.75 to that party but you can donate the $1.75 to the party if you really wanted to anyway). The only reasonable thing for a voter to do is to look at who has a good chance of winning in his/her riding and choosing between those 2 or 3 candidates. For example, an NDP voter in a riding where the race is between the Liberals and the Conservatives, would be a fool to vote NDP because that vote means nothing. S/he should choose between the Liberal and the Conservative. In a riding with a 3-way race (say Green, NDP and Conservative), a Liberal vote would mean nothing - so a smart Liberal voter would vote for one of the 3 candidates who have a chance of being elected. In first past the post voting blindly for your party of choice makes no sense indeed.

Again, this makes no sense. PR has nothing to do with urban and rural. Under PR cities will have just as many MPs as they do now and rural areas will have just as many MPs as they do now. The only difference between the two systems is that urbanites will elect city MPs using proportional representation and people in rural areas will be electing rural MPs using proportional representation. This will not change the rural/urban balance in any way (it could if other changes are made along with PR but nobody wants that so it's not in the cards).

Well, the judge is jewish and is obviously clueless that the Christmas tree is NOT a Christian symbol or she has some particular agenda.

Yes but that would mean that Harper has to do a lot of work and no real changes are possible right now. If he rolled up his sleeves and did real work he would not be able to advertise his work as a "new era in Canadian democracy" because he would have achieved nothing before the election. It's much easier to write up a BIG poster with empty words and advertise it as a real change. Some may be fooled.

Harper's plan is such a pathetic joke! If we start "electing" our senators and if the PM approves of our choices and actually appoints them to the Senate, we will have an "elected" senate by 2050. So if all the IFs are satisfied, in 2050 we'll have an elected Senate with most of the senators having been elected decades ago. If Mr. Smith is "elected" and appointed to the senate in 2015 at the age of 35, he will still be in the senate in 2050 and most of the people who "elected" him will have passed away. That's some real good democracy there.

I don't know what Tim Ball was like back when he was your professor, but right now he is just a lunatic (I'm guessing that his age has something to do with it). What was your impression of him when he was still teaching?

The CPC hasn't started a damned thing. They just wrote a document and called it the "Clean Air Act". That act is not worth the paper it's written on and all it says is that they will start working on the issue if Harper gets reelected 10 times. That's what they've started - ONE BIG FAT NOTHING!

That's precisely how the Liberals are going to win the next election. While the left and the right were weak, the Liberals could occupy the space (very wide space indeed) in the center. Now that there is a strong right, they have to move left a bit and take votes from the NDP. The reason being that under first past the post gaining 10% of the vote from the NDP has the potential to give the Liberals a majority. Essentially in first past the post there is no room for more than 2 parties. You can have 1 strong center party with some small ones on each side or 2 strong parties - 1 on the right and 1 on the left. Furthermore, the Liberals are not going to win the next election on their own good looks. Harper has polarized the electorate and lots of NDPers will vote Liberal just to get rid of him. The Liberals don't even need to move left more than an inch - Harper has insured that lots of the NDP vote will go to the Liberals (as long as they stay to the left of him).

That's the most ridiculous argument I've heard so far. What does vast have to do with anything? Why would PR in any way change the balance between provinces/regions? Will PR produce acid rain too?

While this is part of the problem, the other part of the problem is that even when there is minority government in power, the PMO has 95% of the power, the rest of the party has 5% and the opposition parties have 0%. Prime Ministers in Canada truly have the power to run the country as kings (and the current PM is making the most of his powers). How many other democracies do not require the approval of Parliament to go to war? Going to war is one of the most serious decisions a country can make. In Canada the PM and his unelected advisers make the decision to go to war, without even consulting the cabinet, the caucus, or any of the opposition parties. It is beyond me that Canada can go to war at the PM's whim and that Parliament has no say in it. That's true for most other important issues as well. The only time the PMO has to consult with Parliament is on the budget and then the PMO + finance minister can throw a million other issues into the budget and get it passed.

Absolutely. But the leaders have too much power over the MPs if the MPs don't do precisely what the leaders tell them to do, they get thrown out of caucus. Like Garth Turner who complained in public about Mr. Harper's appointments of unelected people to the cabinet and about Emerson. He got tossed out of caucus without an explanation and now the PM has decided that Turner cannot run as a conservative even though the members in the riding elected him to represent them as the conservative candidate in the next election. The PMO won't give up any power without intense pressure from inside the caucus and from the general population outside. It is us who have to make it clear that we won't accept MPs who serve their leaders' interests and not the interests of those who elected them.