hitops

Maybe not land ownership, but there should be something that in some even distant way implies a voter has a vested interest. My suggestion would be those that pay taxes. Not sales taxes, since even non-citizens pay those, but actual taxes (income or property). Something that implies you have a more substantial connection to the governance of the country beyond just choosing whoever promises to make everyone else give you the most free money and stuff.

The French system works very much like your typical health/dental plan. The insurer (French government) covers most of the cost, and you pay 20-30% or whatever. You can buy extra insurance to cover that portion or get it through work. Basically they are trying to get the best of both worlds - have the scaling and administrative leanness of a single payer, but with an element of market incentives for the individual. Through both of our systems are highly socialist, there's is more right-wing than ours. Perhaps the French have found an efficiency/effectiveness sweet spot. We can learn something here. Just imagine trying to charge native people, vastly disproportionate users of the system, 20-30% of their medical costs. You've never heard wailing and gnashing of teeth like that would produce. $10 - 15 for a consult? I have to think about how I treat myself? Bang the drums....whitey screwing us again!!!!!

We can actually do even better than that - do everything we can to get our oil to market. That includes keystone, gateway, going east, or anything else. There are 3 clearly positive effects here: - More money for us - Less need for our customers to shop from middle east - Less money for middle east for oil they do sell, as increased supply reduces price On the other hand, just stopping trade with fanatacismabad will have no impact, except negatively on us.

Which is exactly balanced by the fact that they disproportionately benefit when the ROC foots the bill for reduced revenues. BC is a gorgeous place, that's a natural benefit they have. The natural drawback is that they are the only way to leave the country westward. If the ROC should pay for their disadvantage being on the coast, the obvious conclusion is that they should also pay the ROC for their advantages. After all....we would all love coastline wouldn't we? If we have to pay for them to enjoy it the way they see fit, then they would pay us for the loss of oil revenue as a result. Only fair right?

I was about to mention exactly the same thing. France's system does have advantages over ours.....the problem is they are not the advantages that socialists think, they are in fact the market reforms France uses to make everyone pay some of their care. I work as a physician in Canada. No politician ever, ever tells the truth about our system. The frank truth is that our system cannot possibly cope with the expectations people have, and remain publicly-funded. In the current model, there will always be losers in the system, and I see this every day. There is no even close to enough money to make it what you all want it to be. The only want to get that money is to introduce user fees or some other form of cost for use, or allow much larger sections of the system to be private care. The funding problem is so ridiculous that as of right now, there are tons of people that need care and are waiting months and years, and at the same time tons of specialists who cannot find jobs. Why? Because there is no funding for them.

Utterly meaningless. Anybody can say they are exploited, it's completely subjective. Internships are 100% voluntary, whether paid or not. If you don't want to be 'exploited' in an unpaid internship, then don't sign up for one. I echo the previous poster that to say internships are like slavery, is a grotesque and offensive minimization of what actual slavery is.

Limiting is a synonym for stopping. Whatever they are limiting - that's the thing they are stopping. You can split hairs all you like, they are holding the rest of Canada hostage to satisfy their own needs. NIMBYism at it's worst.

Ummm ya they are, they are saying they will stop the pipelines and tankers coming into port.

By sanction I'm assuming you mean allow? Of you mean tax in some way?

Both those countries embarked on plans to keep the benefits of their oil for their own people. As a result, they charge nearly nothing for gas compared to what every other country pays. The result? Losses of potential trade revenue beyond comprehension, and dirt cheap gas. The net effect? - shite economies.

Ummmm....yes. Who do you think always has to donate to everyone else, for decades? The situation in BC is exactly like Russia cutting off oil to Ukraine. BC wants to cut off port access to Canada, which is needs to export goods beneficial to all Canadians. Difference is that we are not talking about two countries, just provinces within one country, which makes it particularly absurd.

Made sense for Venezuelans and Iranians too, that's why they already do that right now. How are things going for them?

There is a national energy program, it's called federal transfer payments. The in Ontario have to deal with the risks of a crappier economy and less tax revenue from oil. That affects them in realtime just like BC is affected by enviro risks. If BC said nobody else can use their pipeline, but also refused to accept the benefits of any other provinces, that would be a fair position. But of course they don't, they want everything that your province brings, without having to sacrifice anything themselves. They want it both ways. They want your tax money to support their services AND they want you to share the costs of less revenue.

There are risks to everything. Welcome to living in the modern age where we have electricity, medical care and lifespans beyond the age of 50. To have that, we need to trade, and we need to release energy from the ground. By saying no to pipelines, by default, BC is saying yes to lots more railcars. That is far more dangerous, both to the enviro and to people. I see so you think BC'ers are just inherently more important that other Canadians?

BC eats huge gobs of oil-profit money happily every year, courtesy of Alberta. The day they stop doing that is the day the argument for 'their' coastline can be made with anything but utter hyprocrisy. Sorry you can't have it both ways. Either Canada's resources are for all, or they are not. The 'we will make trouble' argument is just childish and immature. The country cannot function if each region gets to puff their cheeks and stamp their feet like a 2 year old. Canada is a sovereign nation, not BC. The argument for preventing pipe because BC doesn't like it, makes as much sense as every in Canada having to pay BC a fee for everything they buy that gets to them using BC ports. In other words, none.

Why? The coastline doesn't belong to the people of BC, it belongs to the people of Canada. Every people in Canada should have equal benefit and say in what happens to it.

No, it isn't. I've clearly explained why and provided multiple real world examples. So? When gov hands out billions and protects your business (or that of your clients) model by law, a group of trained monkeys could turn a profit. That profit comes only when they can reach into your and my pocket for help via gov. Which is exactly why it's a fool's errand to believe a government mastermind can respond in a way that does anything but suck wealth out of the population. I've been explaining this to you for a good 3-4 pages. Glad you're staring to catch on. But your'e still missing the greater point. You believe: build stuff and export = good country. China has the world's largest manufactured export economy. Yet given the choice, 9/10 people would rather live here. Why? Think about that, and you will hopefully clue in a little more. That depends on whether those industries are competitive without taxpayer support. If they are, such as in energy exports, shutting them down would tank the dollar. If they are not, such as in the auto sector, it would make little difference or perhaps even increase the CDN value. This is the critical difference which I believe is the aspect you are not recognizing. The point is not to just produce things, it is to generate wealth. If you are taking wealth from the citizens via taxation or regulation, and using it to prop up a manufactured product, you are not generating as much real wealth. You are just shifting wealth around. I never said the USD was pegged to anything. Please try to pay attention. I said the Renminbi is pegged to the USD, which is a plain fact not denied by anyone. Year after year, the US fights with China to un-peg their currency. They may soon succeed. Yet another strawman - I never said the US exports are the only ones of value. What I said was the comparing our currency to the USD is 250x more relevant than comparing to the Aussie dollar. The reason is simple - if you want to know the value of your currency, what you want to know is what it can buy. We buy 250x more stuff from the US than we do from Australia.

This is true, but perhaps also misses the underlying causes of why people flee. Decades of systematic policies that chase away people who produce and lead to a vicious cycle. These policies eventually produce poverty. Several maps are available showing US cities that have declared bankruptcy. They are basically all in heavily democratic voting areas, with California hosting more than any other state. Yes, you can borrow and provide services on money you don't have and make things seem ok for awhile. No, this is not a long term sustainable strategy.

This is a good suggestion. It takes no effort to scam a vote by vouching, and we have no way to identifying fraud if it's occurring. It would require a lot of effort to evade the purple mark though, too much to make it worth it.

It won't, but enacting our own tariffs will not fix that, it will just make it worse. The answer to a less open market is not to make your own even more closed. What I've decided is irrelevant. The facts of history are that the 'domestic' auto makers have proven this by failing multiple times and requiring many billions in bailouts. If you need bailouts, by definition you cannot compete. If this is not the clearest and firmest evidence of a non-competitive industry, nothing is. And many millions of Canadians subsidize those livings. It's an illusion, not real wealth generation. There is no claim here, it is a fact. China pegs its currency to the USD at a fixed rate, causing it to be artificially low. I've never claimed its currency is low because of what it exports. The exports don't make the currency low, it's the other way around. The currency is forced down to make the exports go up. Thank God, you've finally figured out that exports is not the biggest factor in the value of our dollar. Something has been accomplished today. Next lesson: Exports have no impact on the dollar unless they come with a net increase in productivity. Moving money from some Canadians to others (auto workers and those supported by the auto industry) with no value in return, does not accomplish this. Handing billions in taxpayer money to the auto sector with no value in return, does not accomplish this. You have to refer to something to know what our dollar is doing. As the world's reserve currency, the USD has the most consistent value (more than gold even), and therefore is the best benchmark. The USD is also the most useful for comparison for another more important reason - we buy a huge majority of everything we use and consume from the US and China. For the value of the dollar to have meaning, you have to talk about how it affects the average person, in other words, purchasing power. Because we buy so much from the US, and because China pegs it's currency to float exactly with the USD, it is by far the most meaningful comparison for sensing change in our standard of living. Hooo boy, this comment is truly ignorant. Comparing currencies has nothing to do with how similar your economies are. What matters is how your currency affects your life. We buy almost nothing from Australia compared to the US. Ergo, what the CDN can buy from the US matters in real-world standard of living terms, to the average guy, not what the CDN can buy from the Aussies. We import 250x more goods from the US than from Australia. That means it is 250x more relevant to compare our currency to the US, than to Australia.

Not one of your real world examples is actually unable to vote however, as I've demonstrated. If they want to vote, the means are available. No, not necessarily instantaneously, with zero effort, 30 seconds before polls close. But with very little effort in a reasonable time. And guess what, that applies to everybody else as well. With the most basic of preparations, everyone can vote. Did you make any effort to confirm the list and think of how my explanations for those people would not work? Of course not. It's just easier for you to attack and make assumptions about me than do your own homework. A soup kitchen can attest to your residence. If you can't be bothered to go ask them, you probably don't really care about voting that much. The reality is that most homeless don't give a hoot about voting. But those that do, can easily do so.

Sounds like Eve won the riding last time, but because of lower appeal this time, it's a borderline riding at risk to lose. She wanted to try to run in a different riding that was safer to win. Neither the PM nor riding association is on board though.

The auto industry and the city had the same problems - bloated salaries and pensions. It's destroyed Detroit, and destroyed the US auto industry several times over if not for massive bailouts. Unions are directly responsible for those benefits and pensions. The flight from the city was a symptom, not a cause. 30 years of bad policy and ignorant political belief helped turn it into a hovel. Detroit is far from the only city to file, they are just the biggest. A whole pile of cities and towns in California have done do as well. The common political beliefs allowed to foster nearly opposed for decades are coming home to roost. Some states are prospering and gaining, and some are sinking into debt and losing people. The pattern is fairly clear as to which.

What you've said is you favor tariffs if the other guy is doing it. You're right in that this is where much wealth (but not all) comes from. You're wrong that the auto sector accomplishes this, or that matching tariffs with Korea would better enable this. You seem to believe that exporting of any kind, magically generate wealth simply because it's exporting. Nope. The point is not exporting for the sake of exporting, the point is generating wealth. It is possible to massively increase production and export, and destroy your economy in the process. Exporting only helps if it;s profitable in the free market . If you are costing the nation or the citizens money to sustain the exporter, you're just shifting money around, not generating any wealth. Your currency doesn't gain any value just because you increase exports. China is the proof of this right in front of your face if you so choose to look. Many things affect the value of currency. If you can figure out why, during an era of declining export of manufactured goods, the CDN gained 30 cents vs the USD, or why the world's largest exporter's currency has barely moved over decades, you might be on your way out of the tunnel vision you find yourself in.

It's human nature. The bigger guy is always wrong, until you are the bigger guy.