Wild Bill

Geez, you obviously know a lot about Lennon and his band if you keep misspelling the name as "Beetles"! You must be very young. NO ONE who grew up during the time that the Beatles' music was constantly or even often played on oldies stations could EVER make that mistake! You would have to have grown up on Mars! "You are obviously not a musician...", or perhaps you just play "slam dancing" metal where the amp has so much gain that you can't tell one chord from another. You know - "cookie monster" metal! That's where the lead singer doesn't actually sing lyrics. He just keeps croaking out "RAWK!" like Cookie Monster yelling "Cookie!"

You are absolutely right and I totally agree! So what? Politics is all about perception and the typical mainstream voter doesn't think about that! He wants to pick his own representative and expects him to look after his own riding first! Reform was the first and only party to blow the whistle on how things REALLY work and look what happened to them! Everything they ever said and stood for has been chucked down the memory hole. When's the last time you even heard someone in the CPC even mention Preston Manning's name? So it may be a myth that your local MP looks after you but that's what Joe Public wants and that's what he thinks he gets! And if he thinks he's not getting it he won't vote for that representative, period and end of story.

At least the Bloc wins individual ridings! That's what it's all about! Our system is based on giving people in small geographical areas a representative to the larger government caucus. People in Vancouver don't relate to a representative from Cornerbrook, Nfld and vice versa. The Greens get a million votes and can't even win one seat. That is proof that they don't yet know what they are doing! With that kind of popular support they must be typical newbie idiots to not yet have even one seat! When they start to act more professional then and only then should they be allowed to play in the big sand box.

This issue is a perfect example of the advantages of our traditional "First Past the Post" system. It sets a bar to screen out the fringe parties! May should never have been allowed at the debates the last time! Where was it written that the Green percentage of the popular vote passed any level necessary to be included? What made their case have more merit than the Rhinos? To me, it should be quite simple. If you have at least ONE MP, then you should be included! If you don't, then piss off! The right to participate should be EARNED! A party would earn their place by working hard enough to get a member ELECTED! Afterwards it doesn't matter if they have one Seat or a hundred. They would be a real party. Before that, they are just a club of "wannabes".

Not at all! I've stated quite clearly that just because something is legal doesn't mean that Canadian voters will cheerfully accept it! I'm also willing to grant that I could be wrong on what Canadians would or would not accept. It's just that many posters in this thread seem to blissfully take it for granted that they can wave their rule book at any pissed off Canadian voter and he would HAVE to accept a coalition! He might have to accept it for the moment and watch it take power but odds are that he will remember for a LONG time and he very well might seize the chance to punish those coalition parties NEXT election! If he's like me, he may hold a grudge for decades! As I said, I may be wrong but in my mind that's better than just ignoring the factor! It's real and will NOT go away!

Fans of the comic strip Doonesbury might recall one segment written in the 80's, after Doonesbury had returned after a lapse from the early 70's. The panels open with a university dean confronted with a student demonstration. He's commenting to his aide "Back in the 60's I marched with Dr. King for his rainbow coalition. Now, near as I can figure it, they want their OWN fountains!" Sadly, there was a lot of truth there.

That is not a clear answer! What do you mean? A party that gets more seats than any other one party? Or a majority can consist of all the losers combined? You can't take all the losers combined as a "will of the people" thing. Voters chose their one specific party that they wanted to win, by voting for that party's candidate in their riding. Nobody asked them about any second choice. If you were to talk to some NDP voter and say "Well, the fact that you voted NDP must mean that you hate Harper so I will cheerfully include you with the Liberals so we can form a coalition government!" has no proof at all behind it. My own father often voted NDP but if you had taken his vote for granted to give to the Liberals you might have lost some teeth! It is totally undemocratic to assume someone's support. If you want to have second choices on the ballot or some sort of runoff election afterwards that's one thing. To just take it for granted so you can use it to get rid of someone YOU don't like is another! You're starting to sound a bit dictatorial here, Harry. You're scaring me!

Not really! My statement was in the context of more votes than EACH of the other parties received! Of course a couple of losers can add up to more than a winner. Also, anybody who thinks that you can add up NDP, Liberal and BQ voters and they all think and feel the same way is dreaming in technicolour!

$47 billion? You've touched on the REAL factor here, Scotty! The cost of crime management is born by governments and can be seen in their budgets. The cost to the public is much harder to see. In an ideal world for a politician, they would have just enough cops and courts to APPEAR to be protecting the public but actually spend very little, so that they could use our tax money on their own pet projects, like keeping themselves in office! It's called off-loading, and it's a concept as old as government. It might cost $40k/yr to incarerate a burglar. If he's on the street, he might be responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in theft from people's homes! Sure, there's insurance but we pay for that, big time! Basically, every time someone shouts at you that we should not have more prisons he's really saying that you should have to put up with far more danger and costs to yourself! The biggest hypocrisy is that by and large you're limited in how you may protect yourself! Don't dare hurt that burglar! He might sue you! Even if he doesn't win he will cost you a lot in time and lawyers. So governments want to do a cheap job of protecting the public and at the same time tell the public not to protect itself, because that's what police and the court system is for! It's just nuts!

I'm not sure about your point here. Are you implying that the idea that banks would no longer give credit to poor people is not true? That they just wouldn't care? If that's what you mean, I find it hard to believe. Frankly, if the banks DIDN'T tighten up on credit after such an NDP idea was adopted they would need their heads read! Money has no politics. One and one makes two, plus a bit of interest if you're lucky. If you lose more on default loans than you made with interest rates on good loans then you go bankrupt. The sun rises in the east. Water runs downhill. A cap on interest rates would mean it would be harder for poor folks to get a card in the first place. If you have some other explanation I'm sure we'd all like to hear it!

Well, it's obviously the will of more people than those who supported the OTHER guys! Remember, you can't automatically assume that those who didn't vote automatically were against the guys who won or even YOUR choice! In actual fact, if they don't choose to make a choice then they are irrelevant. Even so, if we deal only with those who actually voted and we seem hopelessly split into minority factions, parties have to be very careful what they do. There are many legal and not so legal options but not all of them will be automatically accepted by all voters. Some run the risk of alienating a segment of voters forever! Speaking just for myself, I expect that the party that took the most seats should always be in power. I understand that you can form a minority with two or more of the losers and saw it for myself when David Petersen and Bob Rae made their deal. I have no doubt it was a legal arrangement. That being said, I personally don't care! Because of that action, I will NEVER vote for the Ontario Liberals or NDP as long as I live! Not unless the provincial Tories get caught in a pedophile ring or something. What they did offended me personally and that has permanently affected my voting preferences. And before someone says I wouldn't have voted for them anyway, I DID vote for David Petersen! Now the Liberals and the NDP can well afford to lose a vote from an old crankbag like myself but the big question is, how many other voters feel the same way? Any pool player knows that it's not enough just to sink a shot. A good player also worries about "leaving shape" on the ball, meaning that when the cue ball comes to rest it lies in either a good position for his next shot or a crummy position if his opponent will take the next turn. Politics works the same way. Voters DO have memories and it can take a LONG time to earn forgiveness! We can argue about whether or not voters WOULD react negatively to a "coalition of losers" but it would be stupid to just assume that because it's legal it would be fine to just go ahead and do it, not expecting any future negative consequences. What's planned for can be dealt with but what's ignored usually comes back and bites you! As I'm fond of saying, only an idiot would wave a rule book at a voter and expect it to make any difference.

You give fair comment when you ask for cites but sometimes you cross the line and it appears you're trying to get your opponent to do your work for you. Whatever, the issue here is the idea of a land bridge from the Antarctic only 50,000 years ago! Or whatever equally goofy number CR suggested. When a reasonably scientific debate strays into Von Daniken territory it takes some nerve to demand that your opponents spend a lot of time and effort to play your game...

Watch that kind of talk, BM! When you slag New Brunswick folks you're slagging some of my relatives!

Much of what you say is true, Jack. Except as always we still have a great big "Yabbut!" What you don't mention is that most times businesses have no choice! Nowadays they have to compete against cheap imports. They can't lower the cost of their materials so that leaves just wages. They start to chip away and chip away. If there's a union the union will fight them, of course. If the union loses the workers eventually end up with poor wages. If the union wins, the company ends up with continually less sales volume, leaving less money to pay those wages. Either way, eventually it just makes more sense to re-locate the company to Elbonia or wherever. There are a few exceptions with specialized products but that's generally the way it works today. Stelco/U S Steel has to compete with cheaper Chinese steel. If they can't get the iron ore any cheaper or get their labour costs down then they lose, period and end of story. I've posted before about how I think that one way to give our domestic manufacturers a break would be to levy "green" tariffs. It's not just stupid but almost criminal to let Chinese steel come into Canada when they don't pay diddley-squat in "green", anti-pollution measures. Our steel plants are forced to spend literally millions to "save the planet" and those extra costs HAVE to end up included in the price of our steel! We should calculate how much those extra costs are and apply them as a tariff on any steel imported from countries that don't have similar anti-pollution methods. Any farmer will tell you that we've done the same sort of bonehead things with agriculture, for years! A politician will ban the only insecticide or anti-fungal agent that works worth a damn on a specific crop and the farmers will immediately begin to suffer losses in their crop yield. Meanwhile, dozens of third world countries not only use that stuff all the time but their crop workers crap right in the fields while they're working! Canada lets their stuff come into our grocery stores. Believe it or not, the official policy is "Inspection at Source". This means that WE don't inspect the food or the growing of it, we just accept the exporting country's word for it! No wonder we find poison in our pet food and lead in the paint of children's toys from China! If a chemical is unsafe for our farmers then it makes no sense to allow it on foreign food imports. Yet our government has never given a damn! Why? Because the photo-op of banning the stuff WINS votes while changing the import regulations DOESN'T! Most "eco-warriors" are too stupid to see past their nose and follow the entire process. Most citizens don't pay any attention at all. So no politician lifts a finger to cover that part of the problem. I sympathize with your rants about business, Jack. It's just that I've been there most of my career and I've seen that it's not like most businesses have chosen to screw things up. They are just reacting to forces over which they have no control, trying to keep their businesses alive. If you want to blame someone, blame the politicians! I watched the NorTel story right from the beginning of the 90's. It started with Chretien cozying up to China. They wanted to make a deal to build a national telephone system, since they didn't have much of one and what they had was pretty primitive. Ol' Jean and his boys were selling this as a golden opportunity! China was going to need millions of phones and the associated equipment! NorTel built this stuff so a deal involving NorTel would send their production into warp speed! Zillions more jobs and zillions more trade dollars! That was the official story. The Chinese were far smarter than Jean and his cronies. They insisted that NorTel build factories in China to supply Chinese phones, while teaching them how to make them and providing zillions of CHINESE jobs! Once those factories came on stream the next step was obvious. Close all those plants in Kanata and elsewhere in Canada and have China supply US with phones and phone equipment! Kiss all those Canadian jobs goodbye, forever! This didn't have to happen. NorTel had the expertise and it would have been simpler for them to take orders and supply China from their existing infrastructure. It worked out the way it did because politicians were involved that had no idea of the effect of their deals! CHRETIEN personally killed that industry, with all those jobs! For the photo-op of cosying up to China, a country that has thousands of industrial spies within Canada! We don't even get the benefit of any friendship! I'm just saying you might want to think things all the way through, Jack. And put the blame for the way our economy is going precisely where it belongs.

Was it that much, Scotty? Geez Louise, they are good at walking way from hundreds of million dollar investments in military purchasing, aren't they? Like the EH-101 helicopters, they would cheerfully blow off that $200 million invested in the F-35 for purely partisan political purposes. Don't they give a damn for how well our soldiers are equipped? May the bastards all be forced to commute in Sea King helicopters!

Your idea pre-supposes that the countries we want to trade with will all say (in the words of an old Loony Toons cartoon character) "Gee! That sounds logical!" We don't have an exclusive lock on a lot of what we have to export. Basically, since Ontario's manufacturing took a big hit we have become a resource-based economy. That's the definition of a third world country in some circles! Every third world country, having nothing else to trade but its resources, frantically ends up in price wars in order to compete on the world market. So most countries would rapidly find more advantageous partners to trade with. In other words, your idea forgets that we have no way to force anybody to trade with them and if we hit them with the type of restrictions that you suggest they would likely just politely tell us to get stuffed and move along to a country more amenable to swinging a deal.

Jack, we both know that until and unless the Senate is reformed to give the people the power to pick and elect their Senatators ANY PM will have to stack the Senate with his patronage! If he doesn't, he would be slitting his own throat! It would be a more stupid move than letting Stephane Dion run your campaign. So you might as well stop harping on it. Harper may be sly and he may be a bit of a bore but NOBODY is stupid enough to do anything else as far as appointing Senators! Might as well bitch at a man with no legs for not dancing for you! As I've said to others, I'm not super fond of Harper myself but let's stay within reality here...

Don't need a new thread, Michael. I can answer it for you in one simple post! The right to property was deliberately left out of our system as a sop to Ed Broadbent, of the NDP. This puts a certain flavour to the legality of owning property in Canada. Usually, defenders of our system will make the claim that in the USA they have a Right to property and the government still can and does expropriate people's land when they need it, for a dam project or whatever. Then they point out that only very rarely does a government in Canada expropriate someone's land and take it away from them against their will. The reality is that these statements are true but there are some details not mentioned. If a government in any country wants your land, using the excuse of "for the public good" the fact is that they will take it! The difference between Canada with no codified Right and America is that in Canada it is far easier. Expropriation in the States means big time court fights and the government usually has to pay the landowner far above the market rate for his trouble and inconvenience. Here in Canada the process can move much swifter on the government's behalf and the land or homeowner might have a hard time even getting the market rate. Others can argue the legal differences but in the real world this seems to be the way it is. Here in Canada it's never been much of an issue, since it doesn't happen very often. So unless it's you yourself who is affected you don't pay much attention.

Good point! Contempt of the House is NOT the same as contempt of all Canadians! Actually, if we counted noses we'd probably find that millions of Canadians hold their House in contempt!

The native protesters actually got caught salting the area with arrowheads to make it look like a native archeological site! Whatever, doesn't matter. All issues had been resolved to the point where all the contracts had been issued and the bulldozers were digging at the site. Rae took power and immediately cancelled everything. This is a bit of a drift but the outcry from Hamiltonians was huge! Rae felt the need for damage control and held a public meeting in Stoney Creek at a local banquet centre, which I attended. They had a microphone at each side of the hall, where citizens on both sides of the issue could speak to the attending "suits". It quickly became apparent there was a problem. While there was a lineup out and down the hall of people wanting their chance to tear a strip off Rae's representatives for cancelling the Expressway (judging by the capacity of the hall there must have been 500-600 of them!) the "treehuggers" could only muster about a dozen or so! They had been alternating speakers of each view so they just let the Rae supporters keep speaking, over and over again! So much for doing something truly popular! I laughed till the tears came. Anyhow, I could see myself voting Liberal some day, at least federally. Provincially, MCGuinty has put a bad taste in my mouth after what he did at Caledonia. Being new you might not be aware but ever since the protests there happened I have said that while I actually support many of the Six Nation claims I have no respect at all for their protest TACTICS! They should have blocked McGuinty's streets, NOT those of the ordinary townsfolk in Caledonia! As far as predicting the future for various parties, I would suggest that you could use a bit more objectivity if you want to be accurate. You come across as simply partisan. You don't like Harper. So what? I don't particularly care much for him either. Who cares what you or I think or how we're going to vote? Together, we only number 2! As always, the real question is how the entire Canadian electorate votes. They have their own likes and dislikes. A good tea cup reader will know how THEY are going to vote!

Canadians are being reminded but that still doesn't mean they care! All through the Harper term the Opposition has thrown crap at him, hoping something will stick. It hasn't worked much, because you don't successfully sell something by knocking your competition. Even if you get someone to admit that Harper is a hypocrite over forming a coalition, you will still have the problem of that someone turning back to you and saying "Well, so what? Your guy STILL sucks! Why should I switch my vote?" You need a "one-two" combination punch. You knock your opponent down but you also have to present your own product, service or Prime Ministerial candidate as better! This is where Ignatieff and his Liberals have failed to succeed. So their mud-slinging has had only limited effect. Frankly, at this point I don't see any pitch that could be successful enough for the Liberals. Maybe they will find something during the campaign. If they don't, Harper might get not only a majority but a bigger one than many would think.

McGuinty's Liberals have been plummeting in the polls here in Ontario. It won't help Duncan much to have "McGuinty's Finance Minister" on his federal resume.

In most Alberta ridings the Liberals couldn't beat a dog for the seat! Even a dead dog!

Be careful! There are a lot of folks on this board with great memories! After the election if your predictions looked like silly partisanship you will find your words echoed back to you, likely in LARGE fonts!

I don't think that Bob had been in office a week when he cancelled the Red Hlll Creek Expressway project, that had taken 30 years to get approval, due to delaying tactics by the tiny but powerful group of treehuggers. The contracts had all been let and the bulldozers had already started up. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for breaking contracts had to be paid. The total amount has never been released to this day. Bob and his people also hired thousands of casual workers into government jobs like the Dept of Highways, where they were put on make-work projects until they accumulated enough paid weeks to qualify for EI. They even had those guys pouring concrete in January, when the cold would prevent the concrete from setting properly! It all had to be replaced in the spring! He added over $10 billion to the Ontario deficit, believing that somehow he could just buy his way out of a recession! This was an old, simplistic, socialistic idea that of course, didn't work! All we had to show for it when we finally dumped the dork was an extra $10 billion in debt! Unless you live in Ontario you just can't imagine how bad a name Bob Rae has and the federal NDP. A lot of people will have to grow old and die before the NDP has a chance here again. He is hated more than Harris and more than Brian Mulroney. You would have an easier time getting a Liberal elected in Calgary than Bob Rae getting widespread support in Ontario. The idea of Bob becoming Liberal leader and taking the party into a national election is Harper's biggest wet dream! This is NOT just my opinion! All you have to do is go into any representative sample of coffee shops, anywhere in Ontario, and start asking people at random for their opinion. Guaranteed you will provoke an earful and almost all of it negative! If you wanted poll results that favoured Rae you would have to restrict your poll to people 20 years old or less, so that there was no possibility that they were around during the Rae times! That's just the way it is. The sun rises in the east. Water flows downhiil. Ontarioans old enough to remember despise Bob Rae.