dlkenny

Right, and the irony is that he must appoint conservative senators to get senate reform measures passed because the Liberal majority simply stall out the legislation. The only way for him to acheive senate reform is to appoint like minded senators on the premise that they'll pass any senate reform measures that reach the upper chamber from the legislature. I have trouble with the notion that Harper is breaking one of his core values in appointing senators, I think the Liberals in this case are bellyaching to the public and trying to tar the PM simply because they don't want to lose what's left of their power - a majority in the senate.

Yeah, and a depression is entirely possible. In reality it's inevitable and just a matter of time.

What is this supposed to mean? You have the freedom to voice your opinion, this is no place to insult people.

The sad reality is that even a Liberal government would have difficulty in today's economy to prevent a deficit. Our national spending remains at record levels and if one remembers in the past, the Libs were regularily posting budget surpluses of $20 Billion and more each year. The conservatives initially projected a budget surplus of $3 Billion after cutting taxes and additional spending and in their fiscal update are now projecting a $30 Billion deficit. Though I think some better management would certainly have helped reduce the impact, the reality is that the economy is weaker and there are fewer tax dollars flowing into Ottawa to begin with. I fail to see how any government could prepare for a severe and sudden downturn in the economy. Consider that in Alberta the government has been floating in Cash for the past 5 years since paying the debt, and were initially forecasting a surplus of $8.5 Billion but now are expecting a $2 billion deficit without changing the fiscal policy at all. I feel that the state of the economy is much more to blame than Conservative mismanagement, though better management wouldn't hurt.

I came across this article today and found it a very informative read. http://seekingalpha.com/article/103202-the...west-generation The article deals specifically with financial concerns based in the US but I feel that in a global economy that we are all affected. Although the Canadian system is one of the strongest in the world I personally think that we are in for some very difficult economic times and a massive restructuring of how the global economy operates. The issues discussed in the article are some that I personally have been thinking about for some time. As a 27 year old employed in the Financial Services industry I have followed the recent events both from a political and economic standpoint. I have also spent a good deal of time reading from the history books and have found that the 3 economic depressions since the industrial revolution (1837, 1873, 1929) have all been spurred by similar instances of frozen credit and limited capital from banks being overextended. The causes of these overextensions were all different, however the similarity remains and each time the equity markets subsequently collapsed due to the lack of available capital and pushed the global economy into widespread depression. Some will argue that a depression in today's world is unlikely since today's world is different due to expanded regulation, technology and communication. However the principles are exactly the same and if businesses cannot access investment dollars for working capital they cannot function and will be forced to cut salaries and lay people off. Moreover, decreased consumption then leads to further cutbacks because of reduced production necessity. It is my feeling that regardless of the period we live in, if the unemployment rate were to soar to 30%, while people are reduced to living with extended families and are living off of food stamps because the money supply has dried up, that no amount of technology or communication will help, and at the end of the day our basic necessities for life are the same as they were in the past. I simply want people to know and acknowledge that the potential exists so that we may try to prevent such an event by making wise choices with our finances. It is also prudent to take steps to prepare oneself for the possibility of an economic depression. I have recently spent time speaking to people about these concerns and I've noticed that there seems to be a "generation gap" and people from my generation seem to be paying attention to history and are acutely aware of the growing possibility of widespread depression. I have also had the pleasure of speaking with several older individuals who lived through the Great Depression and they too seem to be not only aware but are trying to alert people to the problem and warn them to protect themselves. The disconnect that concerns me is that of the so called Baby Boom Generation, the middle aged people whose generation constructed today's financial system (I'm not blaming anyone personally, just pointing out that it was the "leaders" of the Baby Boomers' generation who created the crisis). As I speak of a growing recession and risk of a depression to these people I find many of them are disconnected with the reality and seem indifferent, often suggesting that "things will work out" or that "markets always bounce back." I feel that the do nothing, live for today mentality is dangerous thinking and will only exacerbate the problem for future generations. As in the article, we as individuals and as a society are already hugely overextended and have lived in a false reality for 25 years and it can't last forever. Recently I have been contemplating the future, attempting to envision what a depression might look like, how we might recover from the current economic situation, and what the future will hold in terms of prosperity. My personal opinion is that we are indeed headed into a depression - perhaps as deep as the last one and quite likely longer in duration. I believe it will spark a large scale war and a massive restructuring of civilization into a truly global economy. Historically, as capitalistic societies reach critical growth rates the growth becomes unsustainable and the civilizations eventually fall, they then restructure and physically expand to accomodate further growth. I think our economy has been in a state of unsustainable growth for the past 25 years and is due to reset itself. The long term effect of this, following some of the hardest times in history, will be the greatest period of prosperity in history. I believe times will get worse though before they get better. I welcome your thoughts on the subject.

Personally I think both of you are wrong. I'm a financial advisor and I would suggest that the Canadian economy, while fundamentally stronger than the US is going to slump because it is tied in no small degree to the US markets. If the US housing market slumps, the canadian forest industry slumps...if Americans don't drive the Canadian oil and auto industries slump, etc. Like it or not we rely heavily on exports to drive our economy, and a good percentage (I do not offhand know this number) of that export is to the US. Stephen Harper is right in the sense that the Canadian economic system is much stronger than that of the US because we do not have the credit crisis that the US does and our policies are much better. Moreover for anyone who understands the nature of capitalism, where there are investment dollars there's investment and where there's investment there's business, where there's business there are jobs...etc. Unfortunately, much of our investment dollars come from foreign investors, which again ties our economy to global markets and foreign sources of capital (lenders).

I said nothing about limiting democracy, I simply disagree with the idea of a one-region federal party because it doesn't take into account the needs of the country. It doesn't make sense in my mind to have a party holding the balance of power that doesn't account for the needs of the entire country. It is a FEDERAL election for a reason.

It has become evident that our country's progress will continue to be slowed by minority parliaments for as long as the bloc quebecois is allowed to run as a federal party. I am not necessarily a conservative but it seems to me that an overwhelming number of Canadians voted in favour of a Conservative government, indeed if it weren't for the Bloc Quebecois putting the brakes on the momentum it would surely have been a healthy Harper Majority. It is my feeling that until someone takes a serious stand and speaks out against the Bloc being allowed to run as a federal party that we are going to be hampered by minority parliaments, whether Conservative or Liberal. Moreover it seems to me that the purpose of the Bloc's existence is to do exactly that...to destroy the integrity of the Canadian parliamentary system and put the leader of the Bloc in a position to blackmail the governing party into submitting to it's demands by holding the balance of power. By splitting the vote it essentially puts Gilles Duceppe and the separatists in a position of power and if their purpose for existing is to break up the country I would have to agree that is exactly what is happening. This whole idea of a one-region federal party (from any region) is ludicrous and in my opinion the Bloc Quebecois shouldn't even be allowed to exist.

The final document will be the product of a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists as authors and reviewers, along with representatives of more than 120 governments as last-minute editors. It will be the second volume of a four-volume authoritative assessment of Earth's climate being released this year. The last such effort was in 2001. Yeah and the 2001 report was riddled with errors and intentional mis-claims. I found an article written last november by a British Columnist with regards to the IPCC and their intentional mis-information. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...lit/nwarm05.xml The IPCC admitted that they intentionally left out the "medieval warm period" and the "little ice age" to highlight the warming trend in todays world. In addition they doubled the value for lambda (in reference to the Stefan-Bolzmann law of thermodynamics, for those of you who don't understand physics this is a law similar to einstein's mass-energy theorem...lambda is a constant and doesn't change) used in computer climate models to inflate the rates of global warming over the next 100 years. Interestingly, if one considers the effects of the sun's forcing on climate and if the sun's radiation were to increase on the surface of the earth it would also increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere (due to increased evaporation from the world's oceans and an increased saturation point of water vapour in the air). Water vapour is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas (94% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour) and therefore if the atmospheric concentration of water vapour were increased, the total warming effect would be intensified. In addition, increased water vapour in the atmosphere and a warming trend would cause changes in weather systems. This is due to weather systems being driven by temperature imbalances in the atmosphere; nature hates imbalances and wind always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure. Being that temperatures are greatest at the equator and lowest at the poles, and air pressure varies in the atmosphere this causes circulation and convection within the earth's atmosphere. If the insolation (radiation upon the earth from the sun) were to increase even slightly it would cause changes in the convective cycles and hence changes in weather systems. It is shown that in the past the numbers of sunspots correlates directly with general variances in global mean temperature. The number of sunspots have been counted and documented since the first telescopes were invented in the 1400's, after Galileo's time. It's difficult to disregard the correlation between the numbers of sunspots during the medieval warm period compared to temperature. In contrast, there were very few sunspots during the little ice age of 1650-1800 (also known as the Dalton minima). Since 1800 the mean temperature of the earth's atmosphere has risen (with some anomalies, namely the "global cooling" of 1940-1979) and continues to rise today. Incidentally, the number of sunspots has also increased since 1980. These facts cannot be overlooked but seem to appear only as appendices in the IPCC reports, one must wonder why. If you have the time, read through the references cited for the website I've provided. The link is on the top of the page and you'll find some very interesting although in depth reading. If you don't understand the physics that's okay, just try to understand the concepts being presented.

I want to add a little detail that's been overlooked on this topic. The truth is that bio-fuels do release carbon dioxide the same way petro-fuels do. The difference is that the CO2 that is released is that which the plantlife absorbed from the atmosphere and the net effect is a recycling of the CO2 back into the atmosphere. It would have the same effect as if the plant were to simply die and decay as it would release CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. Bio-fuels therefore wouldn't amount to a decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere but a near eradication of man-made CO2 being added. An interesting point that I was made aware of recently is that fossil fuels come from plantlife from millions of years ago and the CO2 that we release by burning these fuels is actually the same as the CO2 that was absorbed by the plantlife millions of years ago. Carbon is never lost or gained but is always recycled in the earths ecosystems. That said, one could argue that changing to bio-fuels would have a deeper impact than simply on greenhouse gas emissions; also on airborne aerosols and soot, in fact bio-diesel emissions contain more aerosols than the emissions from petro-diesel. I work in the horticulture profession and it's a fact that one tree can absorb as much carbon in one year as is emitted by a car driven 26000 miles. Therefore one logical solution to greenhouse gases is to plant one tree for every car on the road...why not? Just an idea.

Well, I think Harper's doing a fine job for everybody. He's running a balanced budget, paying down the debt and giving Canadians tax relief from the savings. For an average family in the past two years he's given you more than $2000 in tax relief ($100 a month for parents, plus another $600-$800 a year in tax relief for a family of four in the middle class). We can't make everybody happy all at once and if you have some patience perhaps it may be rewarded in the upcoming budgets. In addition, he has to play politics somewhat because he does have a minority government and if he were to not give in to some of the opposition's pet demands then he'd be playing political suicide. He said in the election that he plans to govern for four years and I think that's exactly what he plans to do, it's up to the opposition to bring down his government. If he had a majority he'd no doubt cut some social programs and give the savings back to Canadians in the form of tax relief. That's what his party stands for.

Not even close, less than 4% of CO2 is man made. In addition, if you include water vapour which makes up well over 99% of all of the Earth's greenhouse gases, the human contribution to global warming through CO2 emissions is about 0.117%. (http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html) This number is really insignificant, if you consider this as a function of the warming over the past thirty years (less than one degree celsius) it accounts for about one one-thousandth of a degree change. The sun is a much better indicator.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here. I'm assuming this is an innocent mistake. 1) This is not by the BBC 2) Some of the facts have been very loosely presented. 3) The Director has a shady past of misrepresenting facts and footage used in his 'documentarys' Carl Wunsch appeared in the film here's his story. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/sto...2031455,00.html Don't believe everything you watch!!! Do your own research including the motives of some of the people who appear in this film. It doesn't take much. Most of them are associated with some very right-wing lobby groups. Who happen to get funding from Exxon Mobil and other energy corps. Just a thought. Cheers I've done some research and there's over 17000 scientists documented around the world who have spoken out to date. I've seen some of this evidence before and I think this is pretty well put together. One of the scientists in the film admitted to having been paid by an energy company but I know that Richard Lindsen of MIT is a legit scientist and he was on the IPCC. Dave Rutherford also had another scientist from UVic here in Canada that is on the IPCC and he was talking about the implications of sunspots on climate change and how it affected the "global cooling scare" of the 1970s. This is all in the video but it's elsewhere too, and I think that's what these people are trying to say is that the body of science is wider than what is being presented by socialist lobby groups. The alarmism is overkill. After the interview with the UVic scientist I went and did some looking around for information on this subject and I found a growing consensus that this is indeed happening. Nobody is saying that CO2 doesn't have any impact but that it's a very minute impact compared to the effect of the sun on climate. I've also seen an argument that the CO2 being released by the burning of fossil fuels is simply the re-releasing of CO2 into the atmosphere that was absorbed by plants millions of years ago while those plants were alive. This makes sense because matter isn't created or destroyed but absorbed and released by the earths ecosystems. The carbon in the fossil fuels came from somewhere and it's quite possible that it came from the atmosphere. Thanks for the post.

That's wrong, they are both. My cousin spent 36 weeks over two years in training (in between semesters at RMC) for this purpose, don't tell me they're not peacekeepers. What most don't understand is that peacekeeping isn't always peaceful, their job is to curb violence.

Right, I think he does support the idea of a free and democratic Iraq. In retrospect its easy to say "no, I wouldn't have sent our troops there" but realistically it may have been different at the time. That said, I think Stephen Harper is a decisive leader and frankly under Jean Cretien it wasn't so much that Canada said "no" to the war in Iraq that bothers Harper it was the lack of leadership on making that decision. If you remember he (Jean Cretien) didn't make a decision but just dithered and waited until it was too late and said later that he didn't think it was a good idea. That's quite strange because Cretien was a pretty decisive leader. One other thing, I mentioned in another post that in areas of Iraq where British Troops are concentrated there is significantly less violence. This has been attributed to the British Forces training in peacekeeping. The US forces are combat soldiers and aren't trained in peace keeping. Furthermore, George Bush said quite blatantly last year to Tony Blair in regards to the British "They're doing a fine job but there just aren't enough of them." Perhaps Harper is suggesting a future offer to Bush for Canadian Forces in a peacekeeping role to help secure Iraq. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing as it would probably build relations with the US and it would likely give the green light to some Canadian companies interested in helping to rebuild Iraq.

Pardon me? Not sure who that was intended for, but... I think the title of this thread made the discussion wide open for what we, the posters thought they would never see. And in my case, as I said. I never thought I would see this, Canadian soldiers killing Canadian soldiers, so much so, that one would be charged with manslaughter. That another would be shot and killed while he was just resting in his tent. I would think that other people on this forum who SAY they also are soldiers, would be quite upset by thesr events. Apparently not I'm sorry to break this to you but that's the way that war is. I don't think most people understand what it is like to live life knowing that at any moment you could be dead, that there are people on the other side of a fence who are foaming at the mouth for a chance to kill you. The extreme pressures and duress that these brave people face often boils over and causes internal disputes. Things happen, accidents happen, internal violence happens; my cousin just came back from Afghanistan and he won't even talk about much of what he saw. War is horrific and how do those Canadian soldiers that killed the "innocent" afghans know that the people they're shooting at aren't taliban suicide bombers? They've got a very specific order to shoot if anyone disregards orders at a checkstop and frankly that's what they do, they have to. In their mind it's either "him or me" and in a war you have to choose the former. Unfortunately sometimes that means civilian casualties...that's what war is. As far as the soldier killed while resting in his tent, who's to say that the perpetrator wasn't suffering from Post Traumatic Stress disorder? Think back to after other conflicts the number of soldiers that came back and wound up in asylums or prisons because they simply couldn't fit back into "normal" society. It's one thing to be against the war, it's quite another to bash our troops without fully understanding what they endure.

No, if what the party is proposing is against what the respective MP's jurisdiction wants then that MP should vote accordingly. Otherwise what good is the representation?

I think he feels he needs to go liberal to gain votes. I don't think he's lying though, I'm sure that he fully intends to follow through on his spending promises. He's daring the opposition to vote against his budget yet appealing to voters, he's built a reputation (for the most part although I think the income trust thing is a scam) of following through on his promises and voters are aware of this. I would think that he's willing to give a little in return for a majority government in which he can move forward with some of the items in his government's agenda. He has to play the game because he currently only has a minority government.

Yes, if I remember right this was one of the proposals in the 1960's for the new Canadian flag. It was symbolic of our British history because the Union Jack is Red, White and Blue. Some people thought our flag should reflect this and wanted the blue on the flag.

My apology, I put this on and then was reading the following post on global warming and posted it there as well. Next time I'll watch for other related posts.

Note that they never once deny climate change but they've got some serious evidence that opposes the CO2 theory. According to these guys the greatest carbon sinks in the world are the oceans and the oceans emit CO2 when heated and absorb CO2 when cooled. Therefore as the sun warms the earth the oceans warm and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise, hence the correlation between the rise in temperature and the rise in CO2 levels. What I find interesting is that I've never before heard anyone explain that the rise in CO2 levels lags behind the temperature rise, this like they say in the video adds serious doubt to the theory. Also, they clearly show that the changes in the Earth's temperature is very closely linked to solar activity and not so clearly linked to CO2. Watch the video, I found it very informative.

Just thought I'd post this for anyone who might be interested. It's a documentary video by the BBC and includes many very highly respected scientists, some of whom were IPCC scientists. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6IPHmJWmDk...related&search=

I'm going out on a limb here but I'm going to suggest something that hasn't really been discussed. I was doing some research into the viability of renewable energy sources including bio-diesel and ethanol and they're saying that these sources wouldn't contribute significantly to CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The reason for this is supposedly because we would be simply re-releasing the same CO2 that the plants consumed back into the atmosphere. Here's my take on this...if fossil fuels came from plants that existed millions of years ago then wouldn't it follow that we are doing nothing more than re-releasing into the atmosphere the CO2 that those plants consumed millions of years ago? According to scientists the levels of CO2 at times in the past have been 10 times what they are today; oceans and volcanoes and decaying life are by far the greatest emitters of CO2 and I see no reason why this won't continue into the future.

Hooray, I'm so happy to hear someone else with this opinion!!! I've been saying this for years with respect to healthcare. Healthcare specifically costs taxpayers in the neighbourhood of $7000 a year for every man, woman and child in Canada. The costs of healthcare delivery reportedly costs about $5700 per person in Canada. The difference is $1300 and is spent largely on unnecessary bureaucracy. This is the same in many programs and the truth is that conservative governments for decades have been coming in and immediately making cuts to less than necessary bureaucratic spending. I think we should downsize the public service, automate as much as is practicable and we should cut out the wasteful spending. If we did this we could have a very promising future in publicly delivered healthcare, education and defense; in addition I think that would give the prospect of some serious tax cuts for individuals.

Absolutely true. In addition I'd like to point out that french canadians are traditionally conservative people. They largely come from strong Roman Catholic backgrounds and in the small towns you'll find people as being strongly conservative. I would propose that these folks have been voting Bloc and PQ for separatist reasons more than leftist political reasons, and since the referendum failed I would propose that the reign of the Quebec liberals is proof of this. Jean Charest is a progressive conservative before anything else and the quebecois undestand this. They understand that they need to allow the markets to work to have a strong economy and if they speak up Charest will listen. Also, l'action democratique du Quebec is perhaps too right wing and therefore won't garner a large percentage of the votes, giving the Jean Charest liberals another mandate.