hitops

I've often thought the west should collectively stop trading with China until China starts to recognize human rights or democratizes. That would of course raise the cost of goods in the west, but it's possible that the principle itself is worth it, and the west is still capable of manufacturing and producing, things would just be a little more expensive, and probably somewhat better quality. Domestic workers would love this I'm sure. On the other hand what Derek 2.0 says is also probably true - perhaps the best way to bring China around is to simply allow their continued prosperity and continued opening of relations with the world. With more influence, more wealth and more education and awareness, it may only be a matter of time before the Chinese people demand change in their entirely nepotism-based, totally corrupt political system. Closing them off may simply impoverish hundreds of millions without producing much political change, just as that didn't really work with NKorea or Saddam.

You're splitting hairs. Yes obviously the government physically prints money. What he meant was the government doesn't create wealth, it just moves it around. And this is absolutely true. Printing money does not create wealth, it just dilutes the value of the money. You have the usual nonsense logic that government taking money from people (taxpayer) and then giving it to people (government employees) to spend in the economy, accomplishes something. It doesn't. The money spent in the economy from the gov workers is just less money to spend in the economy by the taxpayer it was taken from. it's a wash. No the way to grow the economy is to create wealth. Printing money does not create wealth, in just increases the supply of the means of transacting that wealth. Zimbabwe learned this the hard way. Printing endless trillions of their currency and putting it into people's hands did not create wealth. Eventually they just switched to the USD since it had value, and their currency did not. Currency exists to lower transaction costs, it is not wealth in and of itself, only a representation of it. You carry in in your wallet to represent, for example, labor, since you can't carry labor around to spend very easily.

Agreed except about the caucus. Harper has permitted a more free caucus than any Canadian PM in recent history. The NDP a few months back were simultaneously complaining that he was 1) Acting like a tyrant controlling his MP's 2) Not controlling his MP's enough(private members bills, public statements etc) They couldn't figure out how to be mad at Harper for not letting MP's speak and also for letting them speak (abortion bills, etc), at the same time

Ya odds are after 10 years you can't really expect to be in power for much no longer. People will always be unhappy and want something new. There is a common psychological effect where we assume somebody else would do the job better on the basis that.......they haven't tried it yet. I would always bet against a party in Canada who has won 3 elections. Regression to the mean has to happen eventually. If the conservatives win again, I take it all back. Politicians also need to be reminded that their employment is temporary. Changing up the top after 10ish years is probably just healthy for the whole system. You are completely right, say the Liberals win and last a decade, we will no doubt be tabulating the screwups and scandals at that time and public fatigue will launch them out again. Add water, repeat.

Before signing a deal is when you do the red carpet stuff. That's how you held grease things to get the deal done. Pretty standard for political and business relations everywhere. That's no different from any government. It's the same as diplomatic immunity. Why should anyone get that? Seems unfair because the rest of us have to abide by local laws. Yet we know it's a necessary perk to offer for the sake of international relations. We can all say it's a waste, but reality is that this stuff needs to happen to schmooze ourselves some deals. The world is an imperfect place. The benefits of a free trade deal would probably be well beyond many thousands of times the cost of this plane trip. Now if we spend a few bucks and nothing gets done, that's when he's a doofus.

This statement seem to have no connection to your title of this thread. Further, there is zero similarity between Redford's actions and Harper's, for the reasons mentioned by The_Squid.

So it sounds like Rob Ford has been diagnosed with some kind of tumour. Hopefully it's nothing too bad, I guess we will know soon. But I actually wanted to start this thread due to the comments of the physician the cbc put on to talk about it. It's always interesting to me to watch prominent people get involved with the health care system. The ER doc on the cbc, when asked about the timeline, suggested that we would be able to get the biopsy right away, surgery perhaps within a day, and pathology another day. As an oncologist, I would just like to say that this timeline for the average Canadians, is fantasyland. If you are Joe average, you can get a scope maybe within 2 or 3 days if you really, really need it. Nothing non-emergent happens at night. When a biopsy is taken, I have never yet seen in my practice that the pathology is ready inside a week. Where I used to work, 2 - 4 weeks would be about average. Organizing your surgery can easily take another month, the fastest non-emergent cases I've seen were around 1.5 weeks. I have seen several people die due to delays in investigations. Now you absolutely CAN have everything done within 1-2 days. But that's not even close to reality for 99% of Canadian in our system. Obviously, being special, Ford will be expedited. But it bothers me that this is portrayed as typical of our healthcare. It is not remotely anything of the sort.

No, I actually just don't pay into it anymore. Salaried employees must pay into CPP, it shows your CCP contribution right there on your paycheck. I incorporated so I have the option of paying into it or not. It's not that I just pay taxes in other ways, I just no longer have to pay the CPP and I get to pocket it instead (or leave the amount in my corp).

That's only true when you let the market handle housing. We have nothing close to that. By far the largest factors in our housing are government manipulation of banking and lending rules. That's why our housing prices do not even remotely follow immigration rates. Nobody's standard of living is helped by a mountain of lifetime debt....that's what buying a house in Canada means today. We didn't have a home building explosion because of a people explosion. The rate of population increase is static. We had an explosion because the government made credit incredibly cheap. This is an illusion of prosperity, done so we would look better during the crisis. When the bubble bursts, builders and tradesmen will be suffering bigtime. Your excess work today is at the cost of vanishing work tomorrow. In several major markets in the country, home prices are declining. This almost never happens, but it does happen after bubbles. The average Canadian home price is far higher than the average Canadian can gainfully support. They only buy because anyone will give you a mortgage, and on the assumption it will go up forever. It won't, and there will soon be a nasty reality to learn. True in some ways, but not really related to the housing issue. Housing is un-affordable because of cheap credit and low interest rates. But it's a ruse, in a few years people will realize just what a pile of sh_t they are in with their 700K mortgage on a POS in Toronto or Vancouver, which is losing value.

People that contribute more economically than they take. I don't need to prove anything, the economic data is available in countless places, just need to look at it. It's a plain fact that the US has borrowed far more than any other time in it's history, is in far more debt that ever before, and despite all the borrowing and spending, still has craptastic job growth and employment numbers. It's also a fact that they do not secure their border, which has been documented for the past decade and particularly in the news recently. The fact that immigrants would be less likely to be vaccinated, and more likely to some from areas with endemic infectious disease is fairly self-evident. You actually need references for this? That's the average. You can have far lower marks and get accepted quite easily.

If you need to have regulator, might as well make it national to streamline things.

This is a conversation that many of predicted would eventually happen - should everyone get CPP? Why this is being discussed is because the plan is probably not viable in the long term. I'm glad I don't pay into CPP, since it will be gone by the time I can draw on it. I completely agree not everyone should receive it.....as long as you give everyone the option of not paying into it.

You're right immigrants will buy starter homes. That's irrelevant to whether we should have lots of immigration. If they don't buy them, local poor people or young people starting out buy them. Just like they always have. The market easily adjusts for that. If there are fewer buyers, prices fall in every class, so it's a wash. The issue today is that our homes are ridiculously over-valued. This is not from immigrants, it's because the CMHC and BOC have made it possible for anyone with a pulse to borrow enormous sums that will put them in debt for life. This was done by removing the natural risk of lending, and putting that risk on the taxpayer. Homes have doubled in value in most of the country. Immigration did not double. What changed was the CMHC rules (allowed 40 year, no money down) and the BOC (dropped interest rates to historic lows).

This is not serious right? Canadian home over-valuation is our largest economic problem. It would be blessing for home values to fall, they would become affordable for people again. Our home values and NOT high because of immigrants, they are high because of cheap credit and a quasi-government agency (CHMC) which guarantees banks against mortgage defaults.

The problem is that most people who are advocating for equality, are actually advocating for special treatment. In other words, in order to make everyone more 'equal', some people need special treatment. That's not equality, it's the furthest thing from it. PA is absolutely right that immigrants have higher rates of hazardous infectious diseases. I'm not sure why you would want to debate that, it's well known and easy to find data on it. That doesn't mean they are bad people, it's just the reality of where they come from in many cases. I also question you claim about Canada's university standards. What? If you can pull a 60 or 70 in high school, just about any uni will accept you in SOME program. You would have to seriously be a moron to find no Canadian uni that would take you.

It may be impossible to prove the economic benefits of immigration overall, but we can look at some proxy measures. For example, which ethnic groups have the best/worst outcomes in terms of crime, social mobility, education, employment etc? We can look at both examples of different group in the US and Canada, and also the examples of nations where immigration is very restricted. In the US there are plenty of stats to inform that. In the US, we know that people of Asian descent outperform whites, latinos, native americans and blacks. Those statistics are reported. This is a very important example, because it shows how the type of person you let in matters. The Asians that come here are very often for professional or technical expertise, and so you are selecting our the professional class to a large extent. Obviously your average Asian has a far worse outcome worldwide than you average white person. Top of the heap are Jews, who have the best outcomes worldwide. I realize 'Jew' is not a color, but it is an ethnic group and an interesting fact. Now what about countries with limited immigration? The ones that come to mind are the Scandinavian nations, Japans and South Korea. They also all tend to top the lists of economic and educational metrics. This is not a coincidence, being very choosy is important in maintaining prosperity. The reality is that not everyone is equal. That's why not every group does about equally well. Different value systems have different results. For a long time the US demolished the world in terms of productivity, innovation and standard of living. Currently they are working hard at destroying that; just letting in anyone who can make it across the border, launching massive social projects, printing trillions of dollars, emphasizing skin color/cultural/religion differences for voter exploitation, etc.

Benefit from? If you mean get cash from, then yes. Benefit from? Not likely, over many decades of many example of free handouts, very little benefit has resulted. One more source of free unaccountable cash will not change that, it will probably just make it worse. Autonomy over land will not result in less dependency. Many native groups have autonomy in many ways......and at the end of the day they still only survive with massive taxpayer handouts. If you gave full autonomy without handouts from the rest of us, native standard of living would plummet to Somalian levels. They don't want to move forward socially. If they did, they would have done it already the same way every other Canadian does it (without any kind of land claims) - by their labor and discipline. What they really want is to be a mini-Saudi Arabia, rent-collectors from natural resource wealth. That hasn't worked in Saudi Arabia very well - the entire country is run by foreigners because the Saudis are incapable of doing anything except sitting and collecting. Whether rich like them, or poor like the natives, the basic calculus remains the same. If you don't require any kind of personal effort or accountability, you won't get a well-developed, productive people. You will get a dependent, weak people, which is exactly what we have in both places. Don't believe me? A huge political problem in Saudi right now is trying to get Saudis to do any real, productive work, known as the 'Saudiization' program by the King. They have never done it, and have no idea how. Being rich and having dominion over your own territory doesn't fix that if you have no need to be more than landlords.

Gotta give him points for being honest at least. Also not sure why this is news.

Not really, nobody is under any compulsion to do unpaid work unless they choose to. Then quit. Are we actually at the point in society where we enter agreements of our own free will, then demand government fix the situation for us? For crying out loud, this isn't the cultural revolution where somebody forces you at gunpoint to a certain field and uses you for slave labour. Nobody enters an unpaid internship but by their own choice.

My wife saw this on the national tonight, and said "I don't get it, what's the problem?" An hour of news needs to be filled with something, advertisers would not pay much for a dark screen.

Hey I'm just proving that I can make arguments as good at you guys!

That would be because despite your classroom training, you have not factored in the cost of reduced access to global markets into your calculation. Speaking of which, what exactly IS your calculation? You know, the one you learned to compose after all that training? I can't take credit, just repeating your argument. Shaky things = pipelines will break. Thanks for the amazing thoughtful and insightful comment. Care to revise it?

Bingo. There's nothing new under the sun. The immediate gratification of free cash now wins out over the long term goal of a self-respecting, contributing people.

Good thing some leaders are concerned about it. After all, since we are not independent free-minded humans but merely automatons, none of us has any choice here. When an unpaid internship shows up, our programming compels us to apply for it and perform it's duties. It's exploitation! Given our absence of authority over our own person, government should step in and fix it for us.

Don't distort the issue with the record of a 50 year old pipeline. I know stuff.....earthquakes happen, they break things, I've seen it on TV. Nobody who builds things or lives in BC has ever thought about this or ways to deal with it, that's why every single residential, industrial and commercial property and every piece of infrastructure in that area falls apart and needs to be rebuilt after every earthquake, right? Ha ha see how smart I am. Earthquakes are shaky!