hitops

You're the one who compared them to private couriers genius. BTW changing times IS exactly about salaries and benefits.....current times don't require so many salaries. You are desperate to avoid brining the costs of labor at any cost for whatever reason, when it is the central issue. What the cause of those costs are doesn't matter, the point, and the only point that matters, is that those costs exceed the demand for those services. Apart from this, there is no issue here. Is that supposed to impress someone? When you start losing money, you adapt. Unless you don't have to, at the cost of the taxpayer of course.

lol Man you really have no clue how this works do you? If you could so easily get someone for a half million, EVERY company would do this. But you actually can't. If you could, boards would not hire CEO's, they would just do the job thmeselves and keep the money. They don't do this....for a reason. You need to start looking at the actions people take in real life, and ask your rational questions about why they do those things. When Steve Jobs re-joined Apple, they massively improved their business. But hey just dumb luck right? Anyone can do it! Get a clue. But there's a very simply test to prove your theory. If it's so simply, than everyone bitching about CEO's making major bucks should just go start their own business. If it's so easy....just go do it! Hurray.....oh wait you don't want to? Then shut up. Do you know how many businesses fail every year? It's far more than succeed. It's not easy at all.

The opposite is true. The US has moved more people from poverty into the middle class than any other nation on earth. The other western nations you are talking about, are generally running unemployment rates of 10 - 30%. Yay! I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're one of those people who believes countries like France do it properly. France is currently running a 25% unemployment rate......for new university graduates. Go team workers rights! Crushing your country one year at a time. And yet all those things happened 50 years ago, when the government was barely a shell of the behemoth it is today. But of course, it has to endlessly get BIGGER, BIGGER! After all, I don't know how I dressed myself or wiped my own bum before government was here to do it for me.

I think this is your problem, you actually don't think economics matter at all. Just pour the money in! It lasts forever! The difference between CPost and the others, which may take you a long time to think about in order to grasp, is that those other companies make money. They have an actual incentive to adapt to the times and be as relevant as possible. Canada Post does not, and this is exactly why they hemorrhage money. You have no solution to this problem, you promote the cause of the problem. Also, I don't backstop Fedex and Purolator as the taxpayer. That's a healthy business. The role of Canada Post is to provide a service, not provide employment to others at my expense. The sooner people like you realize that some people do not deserve better at the expense of others simply because they work for gov, the better for all of us. Don't miss this....providing salaries and nice pensions to post workers is not just being nice from a magical money pot in the sky. It is doing so at the EXPENSE of everyone else. It's not ethically justifiable.

So many economic illiterates out there.... Contracts are enforeable.....until you go insolvent. Then they are out the window. If you work for a bloated agency without a financial strategy connected to reality in some way, this is the risk you take. There is no reason Canada Post workers should be paid anymore than the value of the service they provide. That value by the way, is not the value according to your opinion. It's the value according to what people will pay for it. Just like the value everyone else commands in real life.

Which has been by an enormous margin, the most prosperous, powerful and innovative society in history. Boy we sure don't want to end up like that! This society BTW is largely responsible for the prosperity we enjoy that allow us to have public pensions in the first place, not mention have made it possible for all of us to be here communicating over the internet. Oh the evils! You don't BTW actually mean society costs money to run. What you really mean is that certain groups in society should justifiably cost endless sums of money at the expense of others. Groups that you support of course. Umm no. Both societies in the US and Canada ran for hundreds of years before federal government was anywhere close to the colossus it is today. Not only ran, but ran better than almost anywhere else.

What you mean to say is that you believe it's been discredited, but don't actually understand it nor understand any supposedly arguments against it. You likewise, have not offered a counter-argument. These are the facts of the collapse. The government removed the risk from risky behavior, and risky behavior flourished. We have a very similar phenomenon happening in Canada, with the exact same strategy of allowing bank risk to be bourne on the taxpayer.

No life decisions are simple....for anybody. That doesn't mean it's justified to avoid them at significant cost to other taxpayers.

Know who else had surpluses? Pretty much everyone in the western world. The 90's with good times for all, the Liberals do not get credit for a good global economy. Canada did however do much better than other nations during the bad times. This however, may be partly on borrowed prosperity, as much of it was accomplished through creating a large housing bubble which will get us later on.

On the one hand a lot of people will demand that all Canadians be employed before any foreign workers be employed, but this ignores the reality that a lot of unemployed workers simply don't want to move or take the jobs that are available, due to a sense of entitlement or because EI is simply easier than working a different job. Or they are unable or unqualified for other reasons. On the other hand it's possible employers will simply use the TFW program to get cheaper labor when Canadian labor is available. The best solution IMO would be simply require that the foreign workers be paid as well as Canadians. This allows for foreign workers when you can't get domestic, but helps to make sure you've got to really need the foreigners as the cost in hiring them is higher (transportation, paperwork etc).

Yep. I say this as a physician - basically the entire approach to treating mental illness of any kind is to prescribe substances that are poorly understood and all serve more or less to numb you out. When you're snowed, anxiety, depression, etc all decrease......along with every other cognitive process. It's an extremely inelegant, blunt hammer of an approach but unfortunately the best we have right now.

Trudeau is not a man of anything. If he was respectful, he would leave Layton's words to Layton and not try to co-opt them. Ultimately this makes zero difference to 99% of voters, but it's classless. He continues to consistently demonstrate that he is a photogenic kid trying to play grown-up, but has no ideas or vision of his own. The liberals should have chosen somebody with more experience and substance. Any votes Mulcair loses to this guy will be entirely due to Mulcair.

I think you get embarrassed at just about anything. This issue is a red herring, it changes absolutely nothing and will not result in the increased use of cluster bombs.

Based on the polling of news agencies themselves, this is much more of an issue to the media than it is to the public. Maybe partly because it's hard to understand what exactly happened. So far it seems very unlikely that Harper would give the RCMP access to all the emails if he was involved. However, the senate should either go, or turn into an elected body of some sort. It's obvious that even the most supposedly senior statesmen cannot be trusted to act any better than greedy children when given the government credit card. I don't see why Harper would step down. It doesn't make sense legally or strategically.

Ok this is not a ban. I have written research applications and done projects with government funding, and choosing not to fund something is not a ban. There ARE bans on some things, like the use of certain drugs in humans. The research won't happen, that's different than banning it. Those of you who demand that anything is a 'ban' if it stops for any reason, are undercutting your own credibility because you value using a bad sounding word for emotional impact rather than accuracy. While the immediate result is the same, the long term result is not, and the implications are different. Nobody here is even remotely qualified to determined whether any of this research is worthwhile. Just because the topic is sexy or important (global warming), does not mean every research project under the sun connecting itself to that topic or using those words in it's proposals is automatically of value. I can tell you first hand from the scientific community that tons, TONS of research is garbage done for no other reason than self-promotion or self-preservation. If you think scientists are super-human robots with a total lack of compromise and utter invincibility to normal human frailties and incentives, you are mistaken. They, just like anyone, advocate for their own interests. Many quotes from scientists on government research were posted earlier. It should surprise nobody, that people who directly collect their paycheck from government funding of research.....would be in favor of such funding. This is about as surprising as Syncrude being in favor building pipelines. Scientists today know that global warming is a sexy topic that has meaning to the general population. This means it has meaning to a voting public, translating directly into meaning for politicians. Scientists know that global warming/climate change/word of the day is where the money is. You want cash and a chance to make a name? Climate science is where it is, and where you can most easily ride political forces into gainful employment.

You'd be wrong. Most voters have no way to assess 'competence', they simply look at their own circumstances and if things seem ok, they normally restore the incumbents. If the economy is doing badly, they kick them out. The vast majority of people have no idea how specific policies affect them, since most policies have a delayed effect. The folks who are loud on here, believe that their particular pet issue or personal dislike of someone is relevant to how voters might perceive that person or party. It is not. None of the recent CPC issues and 'scandals' really fundamentally have any practical impact on anyone beyond the people directly involved, and will not matter at election time, unless the personal fortunes of voters have taken a turn for the worse.

Ya that will be $4.79 CDN or more down at the local Safeway here.

Anybody who broke the law here should be punished for the sake of the system integrity. That includes the boss. It probably would not change my vote as the party policies are ultimately what affect my life and country, not the actions of individual senators. Would certainly be nice for a politician or two to go to jail for corruption once in awhile. I think there is probably loads of this stuff throughout the senate. Can't wait until everyone's expenses are reviewed.

Thanks for being willing to take the blame, but I think the fault lies with the parents and the kids themselves. You are absolutely right, colleges and trade schools today often turn out kids with more marketable skills than many BA programs. It really depends on the BA. You touched on a reality we are seeing more and more. On the one hand you can do a 18 month course in something useful like becoming a welder or electrician, for instance. You then apprentice at $20 for 4 years and then start making $30-40. A guy or gal willing to do some hard work and get a little dirty can do this easily. Not only that but his cost of living is lower, because he is probably also the type who can change his own oil and reno his own house. In the other example you have a kid who grew up in the burbs, and sees manual labor as undesirable. He goest to uni because that's what his parents say to do, gets a degree in geography can't land a job. He or she is now 4 years behind the first guy/gal, $40 000 in debt, with nothing useful to the world, and probably still expecting to walk into a $70,000 job that's clean, pleasant and with lots of time for coffee. Today university offers a whole lot of useless, and also some useful, but I don't believe many kids can tell the difference out of high school. The scandal is that taxpayer's are subsidizing huge of amounts of unproductive nonsense at universities across the country.

Which ones have tried exactly? and how? Having been involved in the post-secondary education for the better part of the last 12 years, my perception is that universities make almost not attempt to do this. Why would they? The incentive of a university administrator is to balance the books and her her/his job. That means bring in more cash, which means enroll as many students as possible. It doesn't matter if the degrees help them whatsoever, or contribute any kind of useful skills or economic impact in the future. The incentive for the university is simply to make as many programs/departments/courses as possible, because that widens the potential poor of tuition-payers. The other incentive is for the prestige of the uni and it's bosses. None of that is necessarily tied in any way to future national prosperity. And the underlying reason for this......is simply because it's ultimately regulated and funded mostly by the government. They cannot move quickly enough to adapt to the needs of society in reality, and any job with government funding is basically impossible to remove somebody from, and usually costs and lot in salary and benefits. So, we get higher and higher tuition. The other reason is simple. Everybody assumes today that university is critical, and so the demand is really high. This will always increase costs. Also, in previous generations it was assumed that you help to provide for your own education, if you go at all. Today kids just expect mom and dad to foot the bill, and of course they often will, and this again drives demand and thus prices. Kids who are not themselves making sacrifices, don't take it seriously, leading to a proliferation of the problems mentioned above, mainly taking pointless degrees that seem interesting at the time.

Also a verifiable fact. Not one you're going to have much fun thinking about, I'm sure. It's pretty simple. 30 million is conservative estimate on Stalin's death toll. Find anything that comes close, ever. You can't. It's not the bankers fault, nobody put a gun to the government's head and forced them to borrow. Banks offer a service and if you don't want to serve their interests, you don't have to use it. But if you do, you have only yourself to blame if it goes bad. But you are right, taxation is not equally beneficial. It takes a far larger portion of earnings from the high-earners than the low earners because it is progressive. It is also confers vastly more benefit to the poor, as they bear the largest benefit and the smallest costs.

Because of ROI. But when there's no perceived ROI, it makes no sense to use it. That would accomplish the opposite of what you are trying to do. You have a problem with companies moving their money around, and then propose a solution of taxation here, which would precisely motivate them to move their money around rather than spend it. Please try to stay on topic. The extent of the crisis which has affected many more countries than just Iceland, does not change the fact that American legislators forced American banks to make foolish loans by law, or that fact that they agreed to use taxpayer money to cover the losses (Freddie and Fannie) if defaults ever happened (which is exactly what happened). A classic example of gov making laws to solve problems created by gov making laws. Right now Obama to his credit is trying to scale down and hopefully get rid of Fannie and Freddie. We should also get rid of our own version of it up here, the CMHC. That has nothing to do with my point. Small businesses get killed relative to large ones, because they cannot afford to employ the people required to cope with the regulations. If a new tax law comes in, a large company can hire an accountant or 10 who specialize in that. A small business cannot, it's usually the owner doing everything or a few family members. More laws and more regs will always favor Wal-Mart and Target over the local guy's corner store or even a medium sized business. More regs are targeted at large businesses to make the frothing public feel good for a politician's benefit, but they never hurt them as much as they hurt small businesses.

Communism has killed far more people than every other form of government, religion, economic system or other system in the history of the world combined. Estimates for Stalin alone are around 30 million. The 'hundreds of millions' you are talking, is simply made up.

There's no doubt that more personal time per student and tailoring to their needs is the most helpful. But this ultimately comes down to the parents, the taxpayer cannot afford universal education of that kind. Students used to do quite well vs rest of the world with the standard approach. We have not evolved in beings incapable of classroom learning, we have simply had cultural training to be unfocused, undisciplined and lazy. And a it starts with the parents, who prefer vegging in front of American Idol and working overtime every day for the bimmer payments, rather than holding the stick at home and making sure those marks are good.

Good points. I think the problem is that things change much faster now over the course of a career than they used to. Maybe it will require a paradigm shift where you simply have to assume that what you are doing today may be completely different from what you will do in the future, and simply expect to have to constantly learn and adapt. That's certainly the perspective I have at my job.