hitops

Anecdotes don't make evidence. There is no evidence domestic abuse is higher in the sikh community than any other immigrant community. Some high profile cases were Sikh's and some were Muslims. The vast majority assimilate well and do well. In particular in business. Muslims come with the attitude of us against them, and create a mess in most place they are allowed to immigrant and concentrate. There is no specific inferiority mandate for women in the Sikh texts, to my knowledge. There is clearly and unambiguously such precedent in Islamic texts. From women's opinions being worth half a man's, to a needing 4 women to testify or 1 man to testify in a rape case, to Mohammed reporting that he had seen hell, that is was mostly filled with women, and that the reason was they don't obey their husbands. The beliefs people hold determine their future. Most immigrants integrate and love Canada. Muslims are an exception, not all but many. If you have ever visited the ummah forums (english forums for muslims), it is filled with Muslims in the west hating their host countries, wanting Islam to dominate Europe, etc. They come here because they know it is better, and immediately start complaining that we do not believe the same stuff that the craphole places they come from believe.

Well no, they are not, Indians (and other Asians are). Below is the American story, and ours is pretty much the same: http://blogs.voanews.com/all-about-america/2015/05/08/this-us-ethnic-group-makes-the-most-money/ Statscan reports they have roughly double the rate of education of the Canadian average. Article pointing out half the richest are immigrants: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/face-of-wealth-how-the-profile-of-canadas-richest-has-changed/article12508223/ A quick search of our immigration numbers reveals most are coming from Asian countries. Also reported here: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/young-suburban-and-mostly-asian-canadas-immigrant-population-surges

Because Siks overwhelmingly get along, and Muslims don't. Furthermore, Canadians of Indian descent are the best performing immigrant in the country other than Jews. Every county that has taken large number of Muslim immigrants is regretting it.

I have no clue about Muslim rapists in Sweden, but Muslims do have the distinct trend of causing problems wherever they go. Scandinavia and Europe have been learning this the hard way over the last 20 years. Those Scandinavian countries which have been less accepting of immigrants, have not had the same problems. I shouldn't say Muslims full stop. Muslims from the majority Arab Sunni population, is more accurate. They simply don't get along with others. They have a mentality that you and I are inferior, that they have a divine natural place above us. Some Muslim minority groups on the other hand such as the Ahmediya set or the Ismalis, do quite well. Naturally, the mainline Muslim Sunnis hate them, do not consider them Muslims and generally do their best to kill them when the opportunity avails itself. Christian and Jewish Arabs from Muslim countries also tend to get along, build lives and do well here. Many, many immigrants groups have come here and done well. Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Indian come to mind in recent history. But they have the mentality of success. They do not come with 'us against the infidels' mental posture. In today's world, Buddhists, Shintos, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Atheists, Agnostics, etc, all get along. Very few deaths in the name of religion. Muslims on the other hand, fight with all of them, in the name of religion. Again, wit the exception of many smaller Muslims sects who the majority Muslims also want to kill. I sympathize with the refugee crises, but we are a small country population wise. We need to be smart about who we let in. Different beliefs have different results. If you think a modern progressive society will allow good outcomes for all, just ask Sweden how that's going with it's Muslims. Or France. Or Britain. Or etc etc Just being in a western country does not mean things go well. There are vast difference between incomes, education levels and involvement in the society between different immigrants groups. For the same reason that African immigrants vastly outperform African Americans, different beliefs and behaviors determine very different life path and effects on society.

It is no more Harper's fault that decimated oil prices have slashed revenues, than it was Chretien's doing that the internet was invented and created prosperity throughout the entire western world in the 90's. The critics of Harper's economy record have nothing substantial to say that ties to Harper specifically at all. And at the same time, they ignore his ACUTAL economic screwup - allowing 40 year, no money down mortgages. This, via the CMHC, is by far more responsible for our current economic problems than anything else.

Who do you think sustains a healthy economy and moves money around for commerce? There is a reason the most decisive efforts in the last 100 years to bring down the rich and distribute it to the poor were also the largest humans disasters in that same period of time.

For sure there are bad CEO's, but if they are all morons, then boards would just start hiring random dudes and paying $50,000 for their services. Obviously if there were as good, that would happen instantly. PS something doesn't make sense about you claiming that the companies is profiting 100's of millions, and that the polices are 'botched'. Those don't go together. Regardless, if you think the MBA degree is like magical fairy dust that makes you rich - then you are more than free to go get one.

No, you just hear about the ones laying people off. When a new one starts, or hires a bunch of people, it is 100% certain you don't congratulate them. You just like hating companies. Companies starting and stopping, growing and shrinking, is a normal part of business. It is a normal part of the areas of the world where anybody wants to live There is a place where everybody is provided for and nobody is ever fired, it is North Korea. Working great eh? People don't get laid off to pay CEO's money. CEO's are paid based on the value they bring to shareholders. If they bring value by expanding and hiring, or by contracting and firing, it can be either. There is no necessary connection between CEO pay and worker layoffs. You don't understand this. There is however a necessary connection between taxation and layoffs. Notely just boost taxes in Alberta, making several large employers go from profitable to taking a loss. Directly as a result they announced layoffs. But of course, we will never ever hear you say that she doesn't care about people, will we? We will not, because you are a hypocrite. Those poor, families and their kids who lost jobs. You will be out there protesting that won't you? Of course you won't. Because for you, the more important thing is companies made less money. Never mind that this affects regular people far more profoundly than any CEO. It doesn't come from them. As your political identify is tied to the idea that it does, I'm sure you will continue to believe it regardless. No, workers and families suffered here. Many, MANY more workers and families gained overseas. The standard of living in the third world is dramatically better than a generation ago. Oh goodness me, not $100! Of course that's not true at all, and the royalties paid by big oil far exceed any government outlays. What we do actually hand out $100 a month for (now $160), is every single kid in the country under 6. You know, all those kids that we held guns to people heads and force them to have? Well I guess we better pay for it right?

Except they are not forced at all. The whole premise of your argument is that the alternative is better. What you don't understand or refuse to understand is that it is not. They choose these jobs because they are better than the alternative. Removing those factories or those industries does not mean things get better for the poor there, it means they get worse. The 'sweat shop' like jobs that we love to criticize in the west, are so prized that workers will bribe local bosses with months worth of wages just to get them. On average, they pay double the local earnings for a similar person. The problem is that we are completely sucked into a void of evidence where stories of sadness determine what we think about international commerce. Before that commerce, lives of the poor were far more brutal and shorter than they are today. Yes they look bad. And yes the alternative is worse. Forcing companies to pay x amount does not mean workers will get x amount. It just means the factories and the jobs leave. This is what you don't compute when making your judgements. The reason peasants get forced off their land, is because they do not have robust property rights. That is a completely separate issue which was always a problem there, and did not start just because a factory started up.

You missed his point, which was that yes the vote is always low, and the predictions are always that it will be high.

CEO's don't 'take' a share of anything. They are paid it, by the boards representing the shareholders of companies. It is not your money. Whether those boards want to pay them $1 or $100M, it makes absolutely no difference to you, me or any poor or rich person. The only people it affects, are the company shareholders. More pay for CEO = less for them. It is absolutely not rational for them to pay huge dollars if they are not getting value for those dollars. They have NO incentive to overpay. They have EVERY incentive to get the best person for as cheap as possible. If a $10M CEO increases corporate profits by billions, he was probably underpaid. That $10M was an incredibly good investment. The reason you dislike massive CEO pay is not because it takes anything from you or anyone else, it is simply because you don't have it, and that bothers you. If any person can do what the $10M CEO can do, then go ahead and do it. Start your own company and show those morons who's boss. Of course, we both know that 99% of the people who complain about CEO's could not run a KFC franchise competently, much less a fortune 500 company. Meanwhile, every last one of them continues to consume all the stuff those companies make, happily giving their money (exactly in response to the CEO's plans for them to do so) in exchange for goods they want. And then keep complaining.

Obviously the number people on a dollar per day is increasing, the number of people is rapidly increasing period. However the standard of living of huge chunks of the world, in particular in China and India, is vastly improved compared to generations past. The hard data, shows that more people in more places have better lives as a percentage of the world, than ever before. Because Detroit is falling apart, does not mean the rest of the world is having the same problem. You don't have to sign up if you don't like it. It's possible, but 'bad things might happen to you one day, so you should hate rich people' is not a coherent argument. Everyone of of us has the opportunistic to position ourselves prudently for the future. The more we support unions, the more rapidly we accelerate the automatic, btw. Because the working poor have skills that lose value over time, and the rich are largely asset-based, which is protected from inflation. The poor vs rich thing is half nonsense. Just look at the census data, the most glaring difference between the poorest and rich quintile is age. Young people have less money, what a shock. A huge chunk of the 'poor' in US census data are just the kids of the rich. The interesting thing is not that low wage workers in the west are losing, but that eastern ones are massively gaining. For reason we believe that because we are westerners, we are somehow owed those jobs by divine right, and should not face competition from overseas. As a poor person in Bangladesh has any less right to a job than you. I am 100% certain that your house and life is completely full of things produced for you by evil capitalists and corporations small and large. You want the stuff, you pay the money, then you don't like that the money went to somebody.

I get it that people will have different opinions, but what debate was he watching? Trudeau? You've got to be kidding me, he was the worst bar none. Maybe he means compared to his speeches from a year ago or something?

Jacee you have, as usual, not a hot clue what you are talking about. It's cute that you ask if anyone read that report, since you obviously did not and just regurgitated a few facts somebody fed you. The report certainly does not say that in total.You live by an ideology where if somebody has less, that means somebody did something bad. What a sad existence. Not supported by shred of evidence. Standards of living are up everywhere in the world by huge margins with few exceptions. Because of evil rich people who you hate, expanding goods and services to huge portions of humanity who could never before access them. You are typing here because evil capitalists put up money for this site to exist, for the software to make it exist, to build the servers that host it, to build the equipment you use to use it, as ifinitum. Your life is enriched by the people you hate. It's irony that you will never see. Sorry that you don't have any more useful skills than people on the other side of the world have, who can outcompete you. Sorry others bring more relevant increase to others lives and are compensated for it, and you are not. If you want your life to get better, then go make it better for somebody else. Here's the part that will shock you about that.....that means YOU go do something or get skills that others want, so they compensate you, not just complain until somebody else (the taxpayer) is forced to do it for you. Quit whining about what others deserve. You have no clue what they deserve, you don't even know what you deserve. Maybe you deserve nothing, since somebody somewhere is starving, right? It's not your money. You lose nothing when CEO's make huge wages. Those companies pay them what they want, you don't. If they did not think they were worth it, they would not pay them. It work be a terrible business move unless they brought that value. If they succeed, you succeed because you can access new products/services. If they fail, you lose nothing. You are paying those CEO's when you consume stuff. Every time you buy an iPhone, a coffee, an Internet service package, a book or anything else....you are casting your vote for a CEO somewhere to get more money. YOU create the conditions that lead to their pay. Do you get this? Are the lights on anywhere in there?

I know lol. It's as if they have never seen a political poll before.If you get < 60% against you in Canadian leader polls, you are freaking killing it.

Inequality is a red herring. Standard of living for every class is improving by almost any measure compared to previous generations. The gap between rich and poor is irrelevant to that. This is true in the west, and resoundingly true in most other parts of the world. The primary reason the rich get richer is because of globalization. What you do does not gain value unless it can be exported and scaled to more people as they develop. If you are an average Canadian, your job does not do that. But Lebron James will make far more money (in adjusted dollars) than Michael Jordon because in Lebron's time, he can provide value to billions more people than Jordan could (all the people who can watch him in the internet age/so many more middle class people with TV's in the last 20 years vs before). The entertainment value he brings, can be market to probably 3-4x more people than Jordan. Same with companies. The exec today of an electronics firm has product that can now be marketed to chunks of people in China double to triple the size of the same chunk in that market in the US. Obviously that guy can benefit much more than the same guy a generation earlier. Zuckerberg is the perfect example - nearly everyone on earth can access and benefit from his product. Not true of internet/tech kings a generation earlier, who basically sold to NA, Europe and Japan.

You've offered false choices. The most likely answer is that yes it will certainly continue to exist (not simply a possibility), without the requirement that it form the next government.

Don't ask hard questions like that here. Complication is scary.

Yep pretty much this. What JT says simply has no meaning, or at least it comes across the way. The way I would sum it up would be to say that of the four, Trudeau appears to not care about what he's saying. I get the genuine sense that the other three truly believe and have some passion for what they are saying. Trudeau is just trying to sound nice and couldn't care less what his lines actually are, just wants to deliver them. I don't think this means much. It is the same as the Facebook poll the macleans hosts mentioned at the start of the debate where they emphasized that majority favored carbon pricing. Same problem in both cases - it is a facebook poll. Obviously this will disproportionately represent younger people, and disproportionately those with the highest social media usage. Not even close to sampling of Canadian opinion at large. I can't prove it, but I would remain confident that facebook usage-hours directly correlates with inability to make informed decisions.

Wow Trudeau's closing remarks were cringe-worthy. Pretty awful. It appeared he was still talking to the bathroom mirror. I liked May's closing because it was a little different (mentioning a bunch of members running in election), but it made sense for her and her party's situation. Hard to pick a winner, though definitely Trudeau was the worst. Still sounds like a high-school public speaker. May not be fair to him, but he still looks and sounds like a kid. He had a decent answer to Mulcair pushing him that one time. Winner? I would probably say Harper. He held his ground without much fluster and sounded calm. No misteps. Nobody was amazing. I would pin the ribbon on Harper with a resounding 'meh' for this one. I think the low-risk, low-reward approach was appropriate for his situation.

Yep pretty much. But I think probably worse, since our housing is more overvalued than the early 80's. Those who saw this coming (such as myself) took mortgages at variable rates despite everybody saying rates would go up. As the BOC lowered it's rate, that saved us cash. However fixed rate mortgages will need to be renewed every 5 years normally, and those rates are determined by the US bond market, which means as they improve, those rates go up. Those people will be in trouble if they are at all struggling to make the payments now.

So far it seems like a competition between Mulcair and Trudeau to explain who would be more generous in buying us off with our own money. Harper certainly gets in on the contest to a lesser extent. May is pretty articulate, and relies less on sounds bites. Nobody is saying anything patently false as far as stats quoted, just using them selectively. Harper is making decent points about how tax revenues increased while rates decreased. Also good points about increasing payroll tax as being useless. Mulcair is doing some serious cheery picking but normally he sounds a little more put together. Trudeau is pretty much all sound bites, except he made one true statement that Mulcair basically just panders to those who love to hate corporations. May is the most engaging and interesting. She is very precise in her points. They are all mostly nonsense from fantasyland, but she delivers them well. On style, I would rank in order of most to least annoying: Trudeau Mulcair Harper May

Without a doubt this handout is a terrible idea. Unfortunately the other parties would prefer even more expensive handouts.

You're the kind of guy who looks at a pie chart of traffic accidents showing 50% 'women' and 50% 'other', and concludes that women are bad drivers.

You're missing the forest for the trees. The reason housing is so expensive, is because of CMHC. Without it, prices would fall dramatically and people certainly would be more able to make the down payments. No CMHC = no guarantee for the bank agains default = greater risk to bank when lending = much more careful lending = far fewer loans given and in lower amounts = less capital flowing around for homes = lower home prices. The only reason prices are so high is because people have the money to bid them up. The only reason they have the money is because the bank is willing to give it to them. The only reason they give it, is because it is nearly risk-free for the bank, because the taxpayer has them covered if things go bad. It's false that this would make the industry tiny, as plenty of countries without a cmhc-like entity have normal, healthy housing sectors. Without exception, far more affordable as well. The banks did not drive the horror show, they were required by law to lend to sub-prime borrowers because of politics in response to blacks being unable to get as many loans. This was called the community reinvestment act. This carried on for decades and finally blew up in 2008. The sub-prime mortgage existed decade before the crisis. It takes a pulse and regular respiration to quality for it. The fact that we are talking about the well known overblown Canadians housing market, proves that this market intervention was not successful in the long term. Canada has been routinely rated as having the most overvalued or second most overvalued housing in the world, in the range of 30-50% overvalued. You have it backwards - the CMHC poses the SAME type of risk that the US lenders posed. The only difference is that in Canada, you cannot walk away from an underwater mortgage. Which just means instead of a bust and restart, we are looking at many years of stagnation. Both lead to a bubble. But our system prevents a fast meltdown. Instead, we get a slow one. No functional difference the long term. The US is already back to where they were. We will drag on downwards for many years. It's true that we have priced ourselves out of having a competitive industry in many areas through unions and protectionism. Energy is only better because the oil can't leave. Our housing was vastly overblown and is now in retreat. Canada does not have a good outlook for the next at least 10 years.