Wild Bill

And you Sir are so partisan that if a white man discovered a cure for cancer and gave it for free to all natives on reserves you would castigate him for putting doctors on reserves out of work!

Who defines the good of the collective? Somehow it always turns out that "some pigs are more equal than others." Anyhow, I'm betting that if you despise Rand so much you would REALLY loath Robert Heinlein!

Yep! No argument here! There's always one in every family, it seems.

Sorry about the delay. I must have missed your reply. To answer in haphazard order I don't use "eenie, meenie minee moe". I use "smells bad, smells REAL bad!, smells HORRIBLE!, and "God help me!" Obviously, when faced with choices that ALL stink that leaves only the least offending choice. If you checked the voting history of Haldimand-Norfolk you would see that you're dead wrong! One of the most popular Liberals was Bob Speller, who was displaced only two terms ago by Diane Finley. Bob had an agricultural background himself and was incredibly popular. Unfortunately, he had the albatross of first Dion and then Ignatief. If not for that it would have been VERY possible for him to regain the seat! Finley has no understanding of farm folks it seems and her strategy with Caledonia has been simply to hide. As for Bob Rae, who cares that he inherited a deficit? He lost respect not for the cards he was given but for the stupid way he played them! Spending your way out of a depression didn't work in the 30's and it didn't work for Rae either. Now for Caledonia! As a classic Liberal, one of the most basic responsibilities of government is to provide equal protection of the law to all citizens. McGuinty broke that trust. He literally left an entire town without the protection of the Law, merely to cover his own political ass! McGuinty had castigated Harris while he was in Opposition so badly about the protest at Ipperwash,which had resulted in the tragic death of Dudley George, that the last thing he wanted was any escalation of violence with the protest at Caledonia. So he basically allowed the natives free rein. Unless they actually started shooting it seemed there was no way the OPP would stand up to them. We even have video footage now showing OPP officers between natives and townsfolk, with their backs to the natives! In effect, they were protecting the natives from the townsfolk! If you haven't already, you should read Christie Blatchford's recent book "Helpless", which is an account of the incidents leading up to and during the protest, relating stores of townsfolk literally driven out of their homes and others living beside (but NOT past!" the dividing lines who phoned the OPP for help when they were being harassed and were told "Sorry! You're on your own!" Her book takes no side as to the right or wrong of the native land claims dispute. It simply recounts the TACTICS of the protest! Virtually all the native protest tactics were aimed at the townsfolk of Caledonia. Officially they may have been targeted at the federal and provincial governments but in the real world the people immediately hurt were the citizens of the town. Perhaps McGuinty could not be expected to provide an instant settlement to a dispute going back generations but he had a sacred duty to protect citizens, both native and NON-native! It's obvious why he was so lax with the natives. After the Oka protest in Quebec any Premier in Canada knows that natives might very well protest violently. The images of the native warrior "Lasagna" are still fresh in many peoples' minds. Non-natives rarely go to such extremes. They usually obey the Law and do what they're told. So it became easy to make them sacrificial lambs. When a government abandons its responsibility to deliver the protection of the Law to its citizens then I lose all respect for it. McGuinty is nothing but a mealy-mouthed political opportunist who obviously has no respect at all for the most basic duties of his office. This was not a case of a political choice about the HST or whatever. It was far more basic than that! Two CHCH-TV camera men were being beaten up and robbed by native protesters while OPP officers watched and did NOTHING! McGuinty's approach was and is exceedingly dangerous. Vigilantism is not bred by guys named Bubba who like to ride around in pickup trucks equipped with shotgun racks. No, it is bred by ordinary citizens who lose faith in government to protect them. We are very lucky that so far things have not gotten worse in Caledonia. If the police won't protect you from being beaten or having your property stolen then what good is government at all?

Might be a bit deeper than that, Bryan. Tory voters seem to be more of the type of people that understand things need to be paid! They know that nothing is really free and that if they want their chosen party to be successful they need to help it out financially. Leftwingers usually seem to feel that money just grows on trees! Why should they have to pick it for someone else? I truly feel that the Liberal potential donation base is just not as inclined to pony up! They're the type of people that are the last to bring beer to the party and the first to complain if it runs out!

I think you have it backwards, MG! Is it your premise that Indians were rich until the British came and only then became poor? If you investigate your history you'll find that India was a cesspool of poverty for centuries, with only a small privileged caste. If anything, the conditions of the poor and lower castes IMPROVED under British rule! Moreover, when Britain granted India independence and pulled out the country fell into a mess that took over 50 years to get over! Thanks to their traditional culture nothing in India ever worked! The phones and utilities were always breaking down and taking forever to get fixed. Trains rarely ran on time. Ferry boats were always allowed to sail grossly overloaded, leading to frequent tragedies. Forgive my poor memory for the errors in my Kipling but we can sum things up with "All account of doing things rather more or less!" That Presbyterian British work ethic made doing things well and proper more important than the caste in which you were born. It gave the common man opportunities for advancement in Georgian and Victorian Britain. We all saw first hand how well the Indian system worked when they were on their own. It is only recently that India has largely gotten past these troubles and only by becoming more egalitarian. Meanwhile, countries like our own Canada benefited for the past 30-40 years by accepting many immigrants who found no opportunity under the Indian system.

And you Sir have no idea what Ayn Rand is all about! Did you ever actually read her works, or do you just drag her out as a convenient bogeyman example for your arguments? Being concerned for one's own interests can encompass many things. Money is hardly the only one. Money is just a convenient method of trade and sometimes a useful yardstick. One logical interest might be to promote the kind of society in which one would feel most comfortable. When we get older we often find ourselves with the time and resources to promote such ends, since our own immediate family would have grown and flown out to lead their own lives. A rational and self-interested individual might feel it a positive step to support charities, particularly those that provide a hand up instead of giving non-sustaining handouts. Of course, this sort of thinking pre-supposes doing your own investigation of charities and making your own individual choices as to which to support, as opposed to just letting governments fleece you with taxes and waste the money in the name of charity on projects that don't work and never end, actually supporting an entire industry of those who make a surprisingly good living administering handouts. The difference of course is that you can take pride in something you've helped create that actually WORKS, as opposed to something you never bother to audit for yourself, content to simply feel "all warm and fuzzy inside."

Pensioning them off would likely be cheaper than some of the bills that the unelected Senators have run up over the years. As to "Their responsibility is only to the best interests of Canadians." - if they are unelected and owe nothing to the party or PM who put them there then what on Earth influence would hold them to such responsibility? Their fine character and the innate goodness of their hearts, perhaps? You seem an awfully trusting soul, Jacee...

Careful, Topaz! Sauce for the goose... The other parties are so poor at raising donations direct from individual citizens and supporters that if they were to get in power their Prime Minister could never go anywhere, unless it could be done with a bus ticket!

Sorry, Dre. That's just not true. My career was spent supplying manufacturers so I did earn some perspective. You're right that we COULD "make our own stuff" but it would cost a LOT more! Much more than people would be willing to pay. Worse yet, very few people ever make the connection as to the benefits of buying local or domestic anyway. They all head for WalMart and then are totally surprised when they lose their jobs. Anyhow, the reason pricing would be so much higher is that manufacturing today is designed around high volumes. Once you've made the capital investment into what's required to produce at those volumes you're costs are then low enough to be a global competitor. If you only invest enough to produce at a low volume then your costs are FAR higher! How much is low volume and how much is high? Easy. Supplying only Canada is low volume. Competing for sales globally is middle to high. So a pair of shoes that now costs $20 at "Shoe World" would not cost "a little more", like maybe $25. It would be perhaps $35, $45 or even over $50! A box of nails we buy for $2 would cost $8. My career was electronic manufacturing. I would estimate that if we followed YOUR suggestion the price of a $800 laptop computer could be as much as $3-$4 THOUSAND dollars! The Russians found that out the hard way back in the days of the Cold War. High tech electronic computer chips were illegal to sell to Iron Curtain countries so they scrounged what they could on the black market. They produced a few copies of some on their own but they spent literally millions of dollars to produce a handful of devices at a time, with a very high scrap rate. That's because electronic parts are the worst case example of volume pricing. The very nature of the materials and the necessary machines is such that you produce integrated circuits by the bucketful or you can't make them at all! The world goes the way the world goes and we can't stop it, Dre. Being a rock against the waves only gets you ground down. Much better to try to find a way to be a surfboard!

Oh BM, what a rationalization for expecting something for free! I' so impressed, I'm going to print out your words in larger print and frame them!

Once again, I guess it depends on how we look at things. To me, this post of yours is just a classic example of your heart leading with an ad hominem viewpoint, using your head to back it up with innuendo. BTW, I'm hardly a 'rightwinger'. When things have slid so far to the left that a classic Liberal is defined as rightwing then maybe things have gone too far!

BM, there's a big difference between criticism and nitpicking.

Why, YOU have! Considering the scale of the costs in the grand scheme of things and the fact that the leader of the country is entitled to at least a modicum of respect and special treatment, the facts that you have presented, while perhaps perfectly accurate, are trivial! Nobody nitpicks like you have without some sort of agenda.

Examples of such people aren't hard to find, Molly. A 'heart' person tends to go with how something feels, not how it adds up. They are the ones who if they hear that their favourite politician was caught in a massage parlour raid will instantly minimize the significance, whereas if it is their 'enemy' politician they will consider it a crime against the universe! Back in the days of daily Liberal scandals under Chretien someone in the media tried to start a scandal about Preston Manning. It seems there was a discrepancy as to his laundry being dry-cleaned at some hotel for a party function. Technically, it was a personal bill and should not have been paid by the party. Hordes of 'heart' people who knew in their gut (because the Liberals had been constantly telling them!) that Manning was an evil agent of penny-pinching Big Business anyway trumpeted this sin in the papers like it was a Bill Clinton cigar scandal! 'Head' people just watched in amused amazement. It was a bill for less than $10! THIS was supposed to be equivalent to the Chretien scandals like getting a bank loans officer fired for not giving a loan to someone who wanted to buy some land that Chretien had been trying to sell? I'm not saying that one or the other kind of people is better, Molly. Actually, we need both and we need to BE both in different situations. I guess my point is really that people who let their heart lead instead of their head are prone to lack perspective.

You're nitpicking only the factors that support your argument, dre! There was indeed a gigantic oil reserve but there was a HUGE cost involved to get it producing money! It was NOT like Saudi Arabia, where it almost flowed out of the ground already in barrels for shipping! The Saudi's were blessed with a resource that cost them almost pennies per barrel to produce. There was a LOT of work before Alberta saw the money! Nobody came up to them while they were sitting on their collective asses and just handed it to them. You're echoing the socialist fable that every rich man was just lucky and did nothing to earn his wealth.

Dave, you've put your finger on it. The whole thing IS ridiculous! Still, we better get used to it. Many people who dislike Harper are just fanatics, for want of a better word. They see him as the Great Satan. For the next 4 years at least they are going to take every possible negative occurrence, no matter how trivial, that happens with Harper and stretch it into a crime against the Universe! When Free Trade was passed John Crosbie the Finance Minister made a great quote. He referred to all the criticism when he said "From now on, every sparrow that falls from the sky will be blamed on Free Trade!" I believe we are going to see even worse examples. It will be more like "Every time a sparrow farts it will be proof that Harper is trying to gas millions into a horrible death!" They have no perspective or objectivity at all. Worse yet, they won't shut up! They seem to think that they can just heap up a bigger and bigger pile of anti-Harper crap and people will be so impressed that they'll feel no need to actually examine the argument. These are 'heart' people, not 'head' people. With such, arguments that appeal to the head are a total waste of time. I'm not fond of Harper either but I know when a story is crap, no matter where it comes from!

Well, I'm one Ontarioan who actually HAS read up on the NEP! Actually, I've read several books on the historical record of central Canada screwing the West for years and years. I realize that probably makes me a minority of one but I just thought I'd let you know that one exists, Jerry! As for whining, you have to understand how some folks define "whining". First off, they have the blind assumption that Western resentments are exaggerated or even historical fabrications. Failing that, the "screwing" was only done for the good of the rest of the country. Moreover, Alberta has become successful only because of monies contributed by the rest of Canada. Therefor, "whining" is defined simply as daring to disagree with this orthodoxy in any way, shape or form! This attitude nicely removes any reason for guilt, don't you think?

$530 is quite typical. All you have to do is drive across the border and take an American airline from an American city. This would prove that Harper is just an "ordinary Joe" like the rest of us, since this practice is exceedingly common among Canadians today. Flying out of cities like Toronto has become so expensive as to be ridiculous by comparison. Any body who doesn't believe this is invited to see with their own eyes all the Canadian licence plates at the Buffalo Park'n'Fly. Eppur Si Muove...

I quite agree. I think we all are forgetting the basic facts. First off, the PM is NOT ALLOWED to take a commercial flight himself. He travels in the PM's plane or he doesn't get to fly at all. Now, "Canada One" will always be far more expensive than a commercial flight, particularly with all the security staff involved. Therefore, in the interest of fairness and to avoid appearing elitist with regard to the ordinary citizen, all Prime Ministers should not be allowed to go anywhere! They should stay in Ottawa! Buy them a cheap TV and let them veg! Hell, no more limos, either! Limos are far fancier than the average citizen's sedan. They should be forced to live like hermits! It might help to keep them from getting too used to keeping their position! Unless they're Liberals or NDP, of course! Some pigs are more equal than others!

Okay, you shot Mike down. Now, where does your argument leave us? It would appear that the consequence of your argument is that since your side is in the majority then 20% of Canadians, rural or whatever, should just shut up, bend over and take it without complaining! Man, if you ran a club you'd have the entire membership quitting within 6 months! Members don't meekly obey according to their percentage of the group's makeup. If it's bad and no fun for THEM then they will want to leave! Where is it written that patriotism involves being a martyr to an indifferent and mostly ignorant majority?

I don't think you are being fair on this point, CC. You seem to have a cartoon, or caricature, of the typical Conservative, who among other things considers all immigrants leeches. This 'toon is real but he only represents a small number of Conservative supporters. So you admit on one hand that some Conservatives support immigrants for being "like-thinking" and then you drag out your cartoon out of your back pocket and hold it up as if somehow it's of equal weight to the first kind of Tory! There is no contradiction except in your rigged example, CC. The fact is that relatively few Conservatives hate immigrants the way YOU say they do! Your arguments always sound so partisan that it can be hard to give them serious consideration. You can start off very calm and then suddenly you paint Conservatives or Harper as some kind of kitten-eating Anti-Christ! People are just not that simplistic, CC. There are as many overlaps as differences with the average supporter of any party.

I would agree, but at least he's consistent! Caledonia is an excellent example of how McGuinty considered the protection of the Law to be a mere political convenience, to be waived when it served his own interests.

It's obvious that you support the young woman simply because you hate Harper. However, the situation goes far beyond that. Certain jobs are supposed to be non-partisan. How would it be if the Governor General decided to support a Tory-Liberal coalition government simply because he hated the NDP, AND SAID SO when he or she made their decision? Now, we all know that if the GG supported the NDP instead you would think that just fine but ANY sense of partisanship by the GG is wrong! How would it be if the postman stopped delivering your mail because of the campaign sign on your lawn was for the wrong party? The lass was a Page and pages are not supposed to be partisan! She had the same rights as any other citizen outside of Parliament, in her civilian clothes. Instead, she deliberately chose to use her job and a specific ceremony as a venue to shout her personal partisan feelings to the whole country. This was a cheap shot! I admire her gumption but deplore her poor sense of judgement. In any job in government that's supposed to be non-partisan she has shown herself to be forever untrustworthy. You really should hold off on your kneejerk support for any action no matter how blindly partisan that serves your own favourite party and consider that these things can work both ways. It can be rather stupid to set a precedent that could some day come back and bite you.

As opposed to the ideal of truth and transparency - Brian Mulroney? I think the real reason you're so disappointed with Harper is that he's not a Liberal! I don't happen to like him myself and we share some reasons why. Still, I never understood how anyone could consider the old PC party to be conservative! What did you lose when the PCs ended, Molly? You could still vote Liberal and it would have been very nearly the same.