Wild Bill

Somehow, I think Scrib's point is that if the situation were reversed you wouldn't care about seeing the original quote! Your logic is not in question, just your objectivity.

You may be right, Shwa. I'm no lawyer. What happened may not be illegal, at least in the eyes of lawyers. In the eyes of the voting public, who knows? Some things stick and some things don't. What I DO know is, nobody likes a skunk at a picnic, even if he IS there legally!

Well, it seems there is more to the story than I knew, so it looks like I jumped to some conclusions. That being said, I'm afraid I just wasn't able to help it. You see, from what I've heard, seen, read and directly experienced over the years I do BELIEVE that our system would expect a victim to let themselves be killed! That the rationale is often that "you should let the police handle it", even when they don't and even if there is no time for a policeman to arrive to protect you! Sometimes today the law doesn't seem to operate in the real world and that's why I "jumped the gun". I do admit now that the woman seems actually to be in the wrong.

You might be right, TB. Maybe it will be another minority. Still, I wouldn't count Harper out yet. After all, it would appear that Canadians have become so disgusted with politicians in general that they now take a certain amount of corruption as normal! They've become numb to it. Harper still has a huge lead in the polls and the mix has changed in his favour. He's lost popular support in areas where he had an excess and he's gained it in provinces like Ontario and NFLD, where he can gain seats. So I would think it's still too early to predict much of anything. The only new factor I've seen is Ignatieff's surprising improvement as a campaigner! Mind you, it doesn't take much to look more down to earth and approachable than stiff, wooden Harper but beyond that, Ignatieff really seems to be more comfortable and easy going, which will only help him at the polls. It seems Gwiz was right, that once the writ was dropped Ignatieff would get a chance to shine. I don't he has a chance in hell of shining through 10 or 12 points of Harper's lead to defeat him but it may not be the total rout it first appeared. At any rate, I think a lot of MLW members are going to look like partisan fools for the lack of objectivity in their predictions. It should be great fun reminding them after the election! As I like to say, "If my granny had wheels she wouldn't hop when she got on a bus", or whatever!

I hope so too, but for an entirely different reason! I truly believe there are a large number of voters like me, who would NEVER forgive the Liberals and the NDP if they formed a "coalition of the losers". If it happened, those parties may suffer a hurt that would take generations to heal. I could be wrong. Perhaps few if any fellow Canadians would care. Whatever! I can think whatever I want. They're not my dice and I'm not the one who would suffer from a bad decision.

There's two different issues here, Scotty. First, is the system screwed up because it apparently can't and/or won't protect this woman from her husband? Of course it is! However, that poor woman had to protect herself NOW! She didn't have the luxury to wait until the system was reformed, if ever. So really the court was just recognizing reality. Remember, courts are not supposed to make law. That's the politicians' job. She acted in self-defence. If courts take that away BEFORE the factors that would actually protect us are WORKING then they essentially would be saying that a victim should let themselves be killed rather than take effective steps to protect themselves. That's only common sense! Would YOU die rather than break your interpretation of the law?

More open? Tell it to those Jewish speakers who were run out of town on a rail before they could speak at Queen's or U of Toronto, by "more open and less authoritarian" students!

How do you define a scientist? To me, it's someone involved with physics, chemistry or spinoffs of such disciplines. To others its biology, geology or like Suzuki, botany! There is a big difference between what a Feynman or Hawking studies and the practice of pressing leaves and flowers in a scrapbook...

Move out West? Maybe if you're single and 23! What do you do if you're 50? You've just lost your good paying manufacturing job. You've still got a mortgage and a couple of kids in University. The wife however has a job of her own and doesn't want to give it up. Do you abandon your family and go out West by yourself? Are there any well paying jobs for 50 year olds out there? Even if there are, at 50 are you still in shape for that kind of life? Do you want to lose that time with your family? Odds are you will die without having spent much time with your kids. Perhaps the choice isn't that stark. I don't know if jobs are easy for old guys out West. Maybe an older guy could land a great job, even with no experience and the age factor. Perhaps he'd make so much money his wife could quit her job and follow you out with the kids. Would his chances really be that great? Is the job market THAT fantastic even for old guys?

More likely, reading an old copy of National Lampoon! If the OP premise is correct, then why is it that technicians, engineers and scientists in the hard sciences like physics tend to be more conservative in their politics? Why do the leftwingers tend to be "beauticians and telephone sanitizers"? (with apologies to The HitchHiker's Guide to The Galaxy) Why are the Richard Feynmans rarely liberal? While the typical leftwing champion is an Al Gore, who tells us to use CFL bulbs while using up the power of a small town in his own home? He wasn't a conscious hypocrite. If he was, he would have made his home more efficient BEFOREHAND and not needed to come up with that line about buying offset carbon credits! That was so lameass, considering it would have been better to not produce the carbon instead! No, Al Gore, the typical leftwinger, was so technically ignorant he had no idea of any contradiction! The practical types support the conservative parties because they appear more "utilitarian", i.e. they appear to be more workable, eschewing leftwing approaches for often appearing to be more "symbol" than "substance"/ What's more, the support follows the party ideology of the moment and not the party name. If the Liberal Party went Blue I'm sure they would steal much of this present Conservative support. Look how much more successful the Labour Party of Britain became after modernizing and ditching so much of the brainless old socialist shibboleths. That new support came from practical thinkers who formerly did not respect them. I think your OP is really just another case of an assumption being accepted BEFORE there's any real evidence or proof!

Bonam's post is quite correct. The benefits do trickle down. They just don't trickle down to us! Other countries are benefiting from what we've paid. The problem with metaphors like "trickle down economics" is that they are usually quite true when they are first born. However, people tend to swallow the metaphor without really understanding all the factors that are associated with it. When we first started hearing "trickle down" it was a much more local world. If the government gave a company or more likely a particular industry a tax break, that company would spend the benefits here in Canada. After all, the company was likely based here, operated here and sold to the Canadian market. Today, that company may simply use that money to finance a relocation of its manufacturing plants to China or India! Meanwhile, the government keeps giving the breaks! Why? Because governments are notoriously short-sighted and slow to react to change. Following outdated policies still gives the impression that they are doing their jobs. Neither the government nor the people tend to look deeply at how well things are working. Their thinking is just too shallow, like a chess player who can't see more than the one immediate move in front of his face. Here in Hamilton we have a conspicuous example of that kind of old-fashioned inertia with the sale of Stelco to U.S. Steel. The Feds gave lots of tax breaks, grants and concessions to the American company in order to swing the deal, wanting to preserve the industry and its jobs. The problem was, U.S.Steel didn't look at its Stelco plant as a separate, Canadian operation. Rather, it was to be just a part of its global organization. It shut the plant down in order to favour its American based plants. It did keep a coke producing operation going but not to use it for steelmaking here in Hamilton but to supply its American plants. This of course was a breach of their agreement with the Feds but it was understandable why U.S. Steel ignored its commitments. For years now governments anywhere have never gone back to audit such agreements. Companies broke them all the time, after receiving the benefits, of course. Things have finally changed somewhat. Harper's government is in the process of suing them for what amounts to breach of contract, or whatever the proper legal term would be. This is a first and hopefully will become common practice. Sadly, in itself it's not enough. The legal channels to sue U.S. Steel are so crude and inefficient that it's going to take several YEARS to complete things! We desperately need legislation to improve the ability to sue these bandit companies. So the idea of "trickle down" is not necessarily wrong. We're just using 1960 approaches with 21st century situations. Governments should be tying strings to the money and tax breaks to ensure that the benefits will be used at home and not abroad. Otherwise, we will keep repeating the Chretien years, where breaks for Northern Telecom became the best thing that ever happened to China!

Nope! I guess the context got a bit confused. Gwiz was referring to how the RCMP had been acting like the PM's personal bouncers at the rally where they barred those two girls. I equated this with PET's actions, but only to show that they were both isolated mistakes, not an official declaration of the entire RCMP being ANYBODY'S "handmaiden"!

Back in those days Star, there was and had been so much private sector oil exploration that there was no need for PetroCan to get involved. Most of the reserves they claimed came from the companies they had bought, not from any new exploration on their part. As for selling the oil, of course they did! However, it went by pipeline to the States and over to BC to go west across the Pacific. It was all export, virtually none for Canadian use. This was one of the major bad feelings about the NEP. It was supposedly a program to keep Canadian oil for Canadians, with the implication that it would be at a cheap price because that Canadian oil would not be sold at a scalped price, like what OPEC was doing to us. In actual fact, the way the program worked was that Canada bought oil for domestic consumption from Libya and Venezuela, at world prices. The oil that western Canada sold for export was sold at world prices, but it was sold through the feds, who gave Alberta and the others a much lower price! The difference between the two prices was NOT given to the western producers but was kept by Ottawa! Meanwhile, here in the East we STILL paid a much higher price for gasoline at the pumps! Lots of the usual excuses, like a lack of refining capacity and the need to invest money in more drilling and more pipelines but the price just kept on rising! So the only ones who benefited from the NEP were the Feds! The price of oil soars around the world, western Canada producers don't see any increase in their profits and all of us pay more at the pumps! Theoretically, the fact that Ottawa was getting so much oil money meant that the whole country benefited. We could pay less taxes and have more money to spend on roads, modern equipment for our military and welfare. Of course, that was just the "official line", quoted from a textbook with no connection to how things worked in the REAL world!

Am I the only one getting bored with this election already? It just seems that no leader is setting the world on fire with their campaign. I'm about ready to fall asleep! The polls are a bit interested but not that much. After all, they are hovering in the same territory as last election. True, the regional mix has changed. Harper may have shed some of the popular vote out West (where he can well afford it without losing a seat!) in favour of more votes in Ontario, which might give him his majority. Still, even there we aren't seeing anything but some vague changes. I'm ready to change the channel. Who's up for some Women's Volleyball, sponsored by the "Ah Bra Company"?

So now the RCMP are the TORY "handmaidens"? Oh dear! Trudeau must be rolling in his grave! As witness his sending the RCMP into the Toronto Sun offices to ransack the place for imaginary evidence, knocking a pregnant worker down in the process. Obviously, PET believed that they were HIS "handmaidens"! Or maybe just in both cases the RCMP, being human beings, made some mistakes making a distinction between obeying the letter of the law and the authority of the sitting PM. No need for assuming some illogical amount of partisanship.

Thank you, Sir! As a salesman, I learned to always value inside information. Someone who actually worked in a particular business could give you the REAL story, as opposed to the PR line! They could be wrong, of course but it's amazing how often they are right! Most people are not stupid and the old "grapevine" works great in any organization. Obviously, there were no Blue Grits involved in the formation of PetroCanada. Just your usual socialist opportunists. Unlike some, I don't write off voting Liberal forever for this indiscretion of about 30 years ago. Parties change as their people change, except perhaps for the federal NDP who still seem to be stuck in 1965. There are a few Blue Liberals around today and perhaps after they martyr Ignatieff they will come to power. I still believe that it will be the NEXT election that will have REAL Liberal candidates who might actually achieve a win! However, I still won't buy from PetroCan! In my entire life, I have only bought $2 worth. I was in Northern Ontario and riding on fumes. The first gas station I came to was a PetroCan and I got only $2 to get me to the next station! I've always preferred to buy Canadian, if possible!

I'm not sure if I'd go that far (and that from me, the guy who's constantly called a Conservative!) since I've worked in riding associations and I know how with volunteer help you can't always expect perfection. Still Mr. Shwa, after reading your argument I do have to admit that this riding association was either corrupt themselves or indeed grossly incompetent. This guy was around too long and the dirt on him was too easy to be noticed! I'm not sure however if we should put most of the blame on the riding association or their national HQ. Whatever, hopefully this has smartened some folks up somewhat!

Well, I watched the whole PetroCan thing, Star! Perhaps you are not aware of a few factors. First off, PetroCan was formed by buying up private sector companies, like BP and Gulf Oil. Some of these companies really didn't want to sell, so the Liberal government of the time offered them so much flippin' money that they simply couldn't turn it down! The amount was not only kept secret at the time, it has been a secret to this very day! A succession of Auditor-Generals have tried to find out how much the Liberals paid to form PetroCan but NO ONE has been able to find out! You can't help but wonder why this is so! Second, once there were PetroCan stations all over the place it became common knowledge that PetroCan was always the first to raise their prices and the LAST to lower them! EVERY TIME! Radio announcers on the air would even joke about it! As I said, it was common knowledge. So could PetroCan have been made "a profitable generator of revenue"? Maybe, but it would have taken a miracle! First off, the company was run by Maurice Strong, a socialist liberal who likes to play the part of a business tycoon. He's always done this by being underwritten by the Liberal Party. To my knowledge, he has NEVER run a totally separate private sector company with no buckets full of public tax dollars to subsidize him! Second, how do you define "profitable"? It seems obvious that the amount paid for PetroCan was some obscenely scandalous amount or it wouldn't still be some kind of state secret. In any normal company you have to pay off your purchase price before you can start to claim a profit. If you want to define it as "operating profit" that might actually be true, although it would be really hard to tell. No one really knew where PetroCan's money from all its service stations was actually going! The company had been "sold" to Canadians as a government lever amongst all those "greedy bastard" private sector oil companies, so that we could force them to keep their prices low at the pumps. To the best of my knowledge, no Canadian EVER saw PetroCan start a price war! It has always been suspected that their profits just went to the government as "general revenue". Worse yet, PetroCan never sold a drop of Canadian gasoline! It bought it all from Libya and/or Venezuela. That was during the first decade or so. I don't know if that's still true today. Note that when Mulroney came along he didn't do much to change the situation, or reveal that secret purchase cost. When political rivals all do the same thing it must have been a sweetheart deal for any government of the day! So I leave it to you to make your own estimation as to how profitable PetroCan could have become. Me, I'll grant that it was theoretically possible but in the real world where the company was formed and run by politicians and their puppets, I just don't believe it ever would have happened!

Both, BT! Just one of his gaffes was to call natives "featherheads"! Still, as Kimmy says, all 3 parties have had some candidate turn out to be a dumbass. It happens every once in a while because it's very difficult to prevent. Riding workers are only human and make mistakes. Sometimes a riding is a very unlikely choice for a particular party to have even a bare chance at winning so they may have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a candidate. Nobody wants to look a gift horse in the mouth. The real test is not if a party comes up with a bad apple but rather how they handle the situation. In the early 90's we saw 2 examples of a bad candidate, in a Reform riding and in a Liberal one. In both cases the candidate was revealed as a serious racist. The Reformers immediately turfed their man, even though there was insufficient time left to appoint a replacement. They left the riding uncontested, rather than keep a candidate of poor character. The Liberals KEPT their man, bleating "What can you expect of us? We have to have A candidate!" Just another reason why I lost respect for their character, particularly after they had so blatantly tried to paint all Reformers as KKK members! Just hypocrites, the lot of them! The problem this time for the Liberals is that it was so easy to expose this guy. Apparently, a simple google search of his name would have turned it up! There was a Liberal spokesman on CTV Power Play this evening and he tried to defend what happened very clumsily. It sounded like he was a computer illiterate and had no concept of how easy it was to better vet a candidate or how much more quickly Ignatieff and his people should have reacted. Whatever. next week it may be a Tory and the week after that an NDP. Big deal. As long as we hang ALL of them impartially it really doesn't affect things much.

I dunno, RNG. Maybe we're being to quick to pick on Justin because of antipathy towards his old man. It would only be fair to judge him on his OWN merits! Also, as our life expectancy has added more than another 10 years it seems we've also added a decade to our time of adolescence. Young people seem to need at least 10 years more to reach maturity than the generation that put a man on the Moon! There was a time when many 18 year olds were flying Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Now we see many 28 year old slackers still living in their parents' basement. If this is so, we really should wait until Justin is 50 before we start to judge him, or expect much of him either, for that matter! He may yet turn into a competent choice for PM, or at least for an MP. Or not! Still, he deserves the chance to make it on his own!

For the 1000th time, I'm NOT a Conservative, BT! Keep it up and I will begin to call you a Marxist! So far we have seen diddley-squat from the main student bodies or their representatives to censure those who have been disrupting meetings and stomping on the concept of free speech! You may be right however that it's a baby boomer thing. We had a politics club at our High School, way back when. We occasionally had speakers from the various parties at school assemblies. We invited the local Marxist-Leninist, which scandalized our teachers but to their credit they allowed the assembly to go on. We listened politely, with some tough questions but very little theatre. Certainly there was nothing like what we've seen in anti-Israel speakers, shutting down the entire event as in what happened with Christie Blatchford. Afterwards, we of course had some good laughs but we also learned a few things. If today's antics had happened when I was at university there would have been counter-demonstrations! We would have been lighting torches and storming the castle of the administration to have these anti-free speech idiots restrained! We would have been terribly embarrassed that the country might think that they actually represented all of us! Today, by doing nothing, students and their representatives are actually condoning their actions! I truly feel that this is a poisonous meme that must be stamped out! I never thought that the next group of jackboots would come from our universities! Godwin be damned, the metaphor is appropriate!

After some of the censorship antics at Queens, Western, U of T and other campuses with speakers like Christie Blatchford or some folks from Israel, I say SCREW THE STUDENTS AND THE HORSES THEY RODE IN ON! University students and the student unions and campus management that has supported them have abrogated the right to be respected at such gatherings. If they have either forgotten or never learned the value of free speech then they have no right to expect consideration in return. They have lost considerable respect and will have to put forth some sincere effort in ever getting it back! Reap the whirlwind, you ignorant, fascist louts!

By "it" I did not mean solely and only one of the demo aircraft. I was also including all the technical research info and documentation. Several of the books I have read on the Arrow mentioned that those other countries tried to buy the engineering documentation, if nothing else. Engineers LOVE that kind of stuff 'cuz it often might contain nuggets of info they did not already have! As for "reading the minutes carefully", I had noticed the reference to the Liberals. It would not have surprised me to learn it was an opposition party scam. That's always been par for the course as far as Canadian politics, anyway! While I've never subscribed to the view that the Arrow was years ahead of its time I've always believed that it was competitive and the engineering was something for Canadians to be proud of. The AVRO Jetliner was perhaps a far bigger missed opportunity, one that indeed the Liberals were solely responsible. We'll never know what sort of aerospace industry we could have had. As a small country we lacked the large scale manufacturing resources but that could have been contracted out to the States or Britain. We were even closer allies then than we are now and such a partnership would have been quite feasible, especially when the lion's share of the profit would have been in the manufacturing. The engineering alone could have been a quite respectable industry for Canada. I still keep remembering the quote in one book from a Tory apparatchik, who called A V Roe after the Black Friday layoff to ask "Why are you doing this? Couldn't you just make tractors or something?" That was just so typical of a Canadian politician. They tend to be law and poli-sci graduates. We need those types, I suppose. Still, when it comes to anything at all technical the only one I ever respected was the late Chuck Cadman. The rest I wouldn't trust to put a new plug on a desklamp!

Nope! They were all hacked, slashed, torched and made into toasters!

A poster on this site has lectured all of us many times as to the fact that First Nations are sovereign and not subject to the government of Canada. If this is true, then why would a native aboriginal have any more right to vote in a Canadian election than someone from any other sovereign nation, such as Poland or Bangladesh?