Wild Bill

How many are true insurance companies and how many are really smaller brokers with all their policies actually underwritten by a larger firm? It's the same with gas companies. Lots of small 'independents' like Pioneer or whoever but they don't have their own refineries. They buy from the same small group of Big Names, like Sunoco or Esso. As for ING, I guess that means all the other banks are about to close their storefronts, now that ING has shown them the way. You can't have it both ways, Guyser.

This is not surprising. Many people have only one or two issues that are most important to them. For some it's native issues, for others it's legalization of marijuana. Most of us find the decision much more difficult. Some pot champions would seem to be willing to vote for Charles Manson or Richard Ing if they were promised to end Pot Prohibition. However, there are a lot more issues that concern the majority of voters, many of them conflicting. Since with the death of the Reform Party the idea of more direct democracy has withered away, we are left with the traditional system where we vote for a candidate and a party that has a large bundle of promises. We have to accept the whole thing or vote for someone else. We don't get to pick and chose. We ordinary citizens don't get a "line item veto". Sometimes that means accepting some things that we don't support, because in toto the "other guy's" bundle has more of them. Sometimes one or two of the items in the bundle bag might be deal breakers. I'm having serious second thoughts about voting CPC next election. The fact that they would adopt someone like Fantino, along with all the talk about putting him into cabinet, strikes directly at too many of my core values. I simply don't respect the man for his attitudes towards the rights of individual citizens. I'm sure that he's too pig-headed to admit it but I believe him to be racist in his application of the law. For Harper to pick Fantino makes me question his own values and those of his party. The only thing that would make me continue to vote for him is the fact that the Liberals and Ignatieff strike me as worse, when the whole package is added up. I like to say that I always vote for who smells the least. This next time even the least of the smells is going to be pretty rank to my nose! Perhaps the Liberals will get their act together for the election after the next one and I might switch my allegiance. Oh well. I'm sure I'm not the only Canadian who doesn't have a choice he REALLY favours!

I'm not denying something happened! I'm saying that it is not as important as some are claiming. The Globe wants to sell newspapers too! Whether something is reported in the Post or the Red Star is irrelevant. Nobody is denying that something is going on. We just have different opinions as to how many ordinary voters will actually care.

Have you noticed what the "other guys" seem to believe, Tim? Apparently, observations during a short time span are not an indication that there is no global warming. However, those same observations are used to show that there IS! Tie always goes to the global warming premise! It's as if this is accepted as an article of faith. You can drag out as many contrary points as you want and you won't change any of their minds. If we have a warm summer, it's proof of global warming. Or a cold summer, for that matter. Or anything in between. What's more, it's not a natural cycle! It HAS to be all Man's fault! Listen up for just a little longer and you'll then hear that the only way to solve the problem is for us guilt-ridden western countries to tax ourselves to death so that we can give buckets of money to third world countries. This reasoning is accepted as scientific. Any contrary view is considered heresy. Any contrary evidence that is especially strong is ignored, such as when the number of seals or polar bears in an area is noted as far higher than normal by the people who have lived there for centuries, contrary to the result expected from global warming. Or when we are told that because of global warming we are going to be hit with far more vicious hurricanes and then they don't show up, at least not in anywhere the predicted numbers. Islands claim that rising sea levels are going to swamp them out. When someone does an aerial survey they quickly see that it simply isn't true. Yet all the inhabitants believe that the sea level is getting higher and higher! Of course, about that time we find out that they are asking for our money... It is faith, not science. Not surprising, when most of the people who believe in man-made global warming are not science people. They are just ordinary citizens who have been trained to accept whatever is spoken by someone in a white lab coat. They believe not because they truly understand but because of faith in the number and appearance of global warming spokespeople. Most of them are too young to remember the 70's. Those of us who lived through it likely remember that we were told that man's use of aerosols and wanton polluting of the planet was about to plunge us into an Ice Age. It was just as popular a view as man-made GW is today. There ARE proponents of GW that are indeed scientific, of course! No generalization is ever absolute. Yet they accept the support of all the unscientific "common" people as somehow adding to the validity of their belief. This is the "Delphic" method, not the scientific method! Five million flies can't be wrong so dig in! The reality is that it doesn't matter if the entire earth believes something or no one does. A fact either is true or it isn't. The Universe simply doesn't care if Mankind is right or wrong. A = A no matter what Al Gore believes. Over the years I've grown weary of even listening to the "doom sayers". I've heard too much of the same old hidden political agendas and outright lies! Too many of these folks are so righteous in their beliefs that they think it's ok to misrepresent evidence, since they think their cause is so right and so important that "that the end justifies the means". Again, there are exceptions! I'm just saying that we need more Richard Feynmans and fewer David Suzukis! Before the flames start, some of you folks might appreciate this site: http://www.solarcycle24.com/ It has a message board where some folks have been debating this issue for a long time. It has members posting from all over the world. It's nice when you read a claim that Baltic sea ice is disappearing you can read a post from someone who lives there and can look out his own window to give you a report! Some pretty eminent scientists contribute as well. Not that the initials after their names guarantee they are right but they do tend to argue with more educated credibility, on both sides of the issue.

We've covered this before but it seems people just don't want to accept it. Hudak CAN'T just repeal the HST! Dalton signed a deal with the feds that has a huge 'poison pill' in it. If Ontario pulls out of the HST then it will pay a huge financial penalty, one much higher than we can afford. So to blame him if he doesn't repeal it is just stupid, ignorant partisanship! If he did it and we paid the penalty then you'd all scream even louder! The most he can do if he wins power is to apply some specific exemptions, like maybe electricity bills or with the price of gasoline. Geez, let's all not keep pulling a CR here! :angry:

I said nothing of the sort! What I DID say is that CR's estimate of trillions is such a huge sum that Canada could never possibly pay it! Did you actually read anything I posted or do I have to keep quoting myself for your benefit? I got other things to do!

Yeah, it's really quite amazing that he got away with it for so long. He broke promise after promise but nothing ever really stuck to him! Still, the pot seemed to slowly get hotter and hotter, even if it didn't appear to be outright bubbling. At the start of John Tory's campaign it really looked like Dalton might be in trouble but then Tory snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by opening up the religious school funding issue! That was an incredibly dumb thing for John Tory to have done. His advisers must all have been young pups not mature enough to remember when Bill Davis had given the Separate Boards equal funding. Basically, he had never campaigned on the issue. He just pulled the idea out of his butt, implemented it and resigned before the flack from the voters hit the fan! It caused immense controversy that hasn't gone away totally even today. Because it was a fait accompli people had no choice to accept it but just because it hadn't been talked about for all these years didn't mean that people had come to approve of it. Again, his advisers must have been appallingly ignorant! Now the polls show Hudak with a BIG lead! McGuinty seems to have managed to tick off nearly everybody, just by doing only a few at a time with each broken promise and each new tax or user fee. As long as Hudak doesn't pull a John Tory he should be a shoo-in for Dalton's job next election.

Dief? Maybe, for a brief period. Still, he was the first Tory PM in a long time when he took power. It was a long time before we saw another one! Mulroney had the two biggest majorities in our history until the West saw that he cared about Quebec and Ontario far more than he cared for them. His awarding of the CF-18 contract to Quebec when a Winnipeg firm had the cheaper bid with more expertise was the proverbial straw. Many say that doing that was the most powerful thing that launched the Reform Party and spelled the eventual doom of the Progressive Conservatives. It's ironic how the tiny remnants of the PCs wound up running the show in the present CPC. There's little or nothing left of the Reform Platform. As I mournfully am wont to ask, why did Manning ever bother?

"Rural rump"? Jack, have you been following the polls and reading the papers? Hudak doesn't have to do anything. McGuinty is doing it all for him! Dalton keeps ticking off more and more people. Every time someone opens their electricity bill they start thinking about voting for Tim!

"Some of these points", ES? That's the rub! Those social democrats broke with Rae over a relatively small number of issues. It's just that to folks of their persuasion they were very important issues! Meanwhile, there are websites devoted to how many promises McGuinty has broken! This one has a "Top 50" list: http://www.ilist4free.com/rants/Dalton-McGuinty-Premier-Ontario.html Hell, there are even pages on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2266179927&topic=3357 I'm not denying that Rae upset many of his supporters but McGuinty is in a league of his own!

I don't know if you're old enough to remember the National Energy Policy, ES. I still do. You can argue the politics of it but what the ordinary citizen in Alberta experienced was that they had been on a great roll economically and then one morning they woke up and they were being laid off left, right and centre! Exploration oil rigs were backed up at the border by the hundreds, going back to the States and abandoning Western Canada. Within just a couple of months Calgary went from construction cranes on every corner to having a commercial vacancy rate of over 30%! Mortgage defaults on people's homes were commonplace. You have to live through something like that to properly understand how it made people feel. One day you're living in a big suburban house with 2 or 3 cars in the driveway and a summer cottage, perhaps. The next day you're on welfare! When something like this happens to a person, they do NOT sit back and say to themselves "Well, this may be tough but in the grand scheme of political things I'm sure it's for the good of the country. Ottawa knows best, after all!" That's why the bitterness has lasted all these years. Those people are terrified the Liberals will get in again because they fully expect they would do something similar to the West the first time it might buy them some votes in Eastern Canada. The NEP was a relatively recent screwing. You might want to google up things like the Crow Rate. Basically, the feds had set things up over a hundred years ago for the Prairies to grow the grain but not be allowed to have the flour mills located locally. The grain had to be shipped back to Eastern Canada so that the East could make the lion's share of the money grinding the grain. What's more, the shipping charges were kinda' steep, as well. Whole books have been written on this kind of stuff! Google up "western Canadian alienation" and you'll get pages and pages. The Maritime provinces have been screwed in a different manner. First of all, for the first while of Canada's history Halifax was our major port for Atlantic shipping. The St. Lawrence Seaway took much of that away and gave it to Quebec and Ontario. Halifax took a major hit. It has somewhat recovered by herculean efforts to become a modern, containerized shipping cargo port but the glory days are gone forever. Meanwhile, Ottawa has another scam. Suppose you've had a widget making business in Pictou, Nova Scotia. You've worked your butt off for years but it's finally doing ok. You provide a good living for maybe 40 or 50 employees. One morning you look across the street and someone else has opened up a widget making firm! Since you proved that people could make widgets profitably in Pictou, the government gave someone a million dollars to open up another plant. Essentially, they bankrolled someone to be your competitor! Because they started out with being given a million dollars, they have it far easier than you did. So they can afford to undercut your prices. After a while you start to feel the pain, so you ask the government for money too. You get turned down, 'cuz as an established company it's felt that you shouldn't need it. Your only choice is to wage a price war with the new guy across the street. You both lose in this sort of war and eventually you both go out of business. You think up something else to make and apply for a loan. The government gives you a pile of money and off you go! However, it's not really a self-sustaining business so after just a few years it goes under. No problem! You just come up with another idea and start the process all over! After several decades of this approach we see very few examples of new, long-standing enterprise in the Maritimes. Rather, we see a lot of companies that are started on government money but only last a few years. That's because the real goal isn't to make established businesses! It's to get the whole area dependent on government money! This system was started by the Liberals and it worked very well for them. Ordinary folks knew the score but what could they do? They had to feed their kids so they kept voting for politicians who would keep giving them 'development money'. A new job every few years might not be as good as the same job for your whole career but it was infinitely better than no job at all! Don't believe me? Ask around in PEI and see how many businesses you can find that were started with government money and have lasted more than 10 years. Those poor Maritimers are hooked! They "owe their souls to the company store". The system actually makes it harder to establish a long term business! Government money looks good in the short term but in the long term it just keeps them "on the dole". The oil money out West and having Harper as PM is the first real shift in power out of Central Canada in our history. It'll be interesting to see how it eventually plays out.

Well Jack, I still don't think the average voter will care! And I think that in a pissing match with the party leader Randy will lose. Even better for Hudak, there's a lot of time for the issue to be forgotten before the next election, even by those who actually care. As for me being an unabashed Harris/Hudak/Attila supporter, I'm not as much as you might think. Harris did force Amalgamation on Hamilton, remember. I've been trying for some years now to see any area where I pay less and/or get better service for my taxes here in Stoney Creek. Haven't found a single positive for amalgamation yet but maybe I will before I die. Whatever, I've never been a committed supporter. It's just that those guys smell less to me than the alternatives. I could never vote for the NDP and Dalton is just the biggest, most expensive screwup I've ever seen as premier, rivaling Bob Rae! In fact, I have more respect for Rae. I mostly disagreed with him but at least he didn't break promise after promise and give lie after lie... I just think you're being partisan, Jack. You don't like conservatives and that's that! I suspect you'd blame Mike or Tim for hurricanes and earthquakes, or at least have deep suspicions that they somehow were involved in causing them! Hey, I could be wrong. Let's revisit this topic in a few weeks and see if anybody but us even remembers...

Is it similar to the reason that there are almost no Liberal ridings in the rural areas of the province? I'm just disagreeing that this issue is important enough to most people. I suspect that most folks won't even pay attention, except for political junkies like us. If you're avid for any dirt on Hudak whatsoever then fine, knock yourself out. I just find the argument a bit of a stretch. I'm reminded of how years ago the federal Liberals were mired in some deep scandals (like always, I guess!) so when an incident came up that apparently Preston Manning had a dry cleaning bill paid by his party instead of personally the Liberals, led by their mouthpiece the Toronto Star, headlined it as if Manning had robbed every nunnery and orphanage in Canada! I mean, have some perspective, people!

You completely ignored my main point. If we lost in the World Court, why should we care? What mechanism would force us to accept their ruling? Why on earth would any Canadian politician accede to a World Court ruling if it was unpopular with the majority of potential voters here in Canada?

Well, if it's about Tories and its in the Star then it must be just as bad as they say it is! I read the link. Sounds like a nomination battle over one riding to me. Hardly a rift in the entire party! We had a far more bitter nomination fight in my riding between Liberals Sheila Copps and Tony Valeri and I don't recall witnessing the utter destruction of the federal Liberal party because of it. Looks to me like its just the same old story of those who don't like someone anyway flinging as much crap as possible at anything negative they see, hoping some of it will stick. It's certainly not enough to make a senior on a fixed income forgive Dalton for the hike to his electricity bill...

Hey, for the type of money CR talks about, we'd all have to settle on Ellesmere Island and leave the natives the rest, to square up on that kind of bill. If you're implying that some sort of negotiation and quid pro quo is possible I would agree that is a rational option. I'm just saying that CR's financial claim is so far out into orbit as to be a mathematical impossibility. This makes his position useless for opening negotiations, like a man going to a Cadillac car lot and starting off by saying "Well, I might go as high as $50..." The salesman is just not going to waste his time!

Canada is a sovereign nation. How on earth are we subject to any ruling from the UN? The same UN that puts Libya in charge of Human Rights? The UN is NOT a world government! They can rule whatever they want! They have no legal way of enforcing a ruling on us. Most of them don't even pay their UN dues anyway so cares what they say? Bums and hypocrites, the lot of them! As for "destroying what Canada has become", is that not your opinion and not a legal status quo? Perhaps the majority of Canadians would consider some form of change to be a positive thing! Lord knows the status quo has been a dismal failure, except for a few very wealthy chiefs and cigarette manufacturers.

You said TRILLIONS! That means more than one, in case you didn't know. How could we possibly afford to make high enough payments that the interest on the remaining balance wasn't still higher than the payment? Either your claim of trillions is absurdly high or we could never pay the bill. One or the other. If your claim is true Canada would be like a man in debt to a loan shark, paying interest so high that he can never clear off the debt.

Well, at least they'll protect us from SCREWED UP gun control systems! Billions of dollars spent on smoke and mirrors hasn't made me feel any safer. It did make me feel over-taxed but supposedly that wasn't the intent. I have 2 daughters to worry about. I only appreciate systems that WORK, not systems that buy votes from the ignorant and mentally challenged! However, I do agree that today's Tories do have a 'control freak' streak in them. This shows how yet another Reform root value has been thrown down the memory hole. Reform believed that governments should represent values driven upwards from the people, i.e. from constituents through their elected representatives and eventually into law. A Reform MP might personally be against abortion but if the majority of people in his home riding were ok with it then that's the way he would be expected to vote in Parliament on any abortion legislation. Today's Tories are just clones of the old 'Progressive' Conservatives from Mulroney's day. However, what can we do Eyeball if the alternatives are worse? The Liberals haven't been champions of the rights of the individual against Big Government in generations, if ever. The NDP are socialists. They believe in the government telling you what to do by definition! The sad truth is that if you believe in the rights of the individual coming first and "he who governs least governs best" you DON'T HAVE an electoral choice! Theoretically you could vote Libertarian but in reality that's a waste of time. I've wondered for years what would happen if a Liberal 'Mike Harris" type came along and won the leadership of the federal Liberal Party, making it into something representing true classic liberal values instead of the modern liberal touchy-feely socialistic mishmash platform of the Liberal Party since Trudeau. There are a lot of Canadians starved for an alternative choice. The rapid rise of the Reform Party, who in their first real election knocked the old PCs right out of the water proved that! In fact, if you look at Trudeau, Mulroney and Mike Harris, who all at least appeared to be something new and different at first, they won overwhelmingly huge majorities! It was only when we discovered they were just like the old boss (and in Mulroney's case, not only the same but slicker!) that we turned away from them. Today's choices are all 'beige' and 'middle of the road'. If any more keep fighting to get into the middle of the road they're gonna just block the whole damn highway! We Canadians don't get inspiring leaders any more. We just get the latest products of an advertising agency.

You are math-challenged, aren't you? If they are owed trillions of dollars then it can never be paid off, ever! The amount is just too high for the amount of money Canada has or will ever have! It's like having a VISA card where you owe a million dollars and your yearly income is $40,000. You could never pay off enough of the interest to chip away at the principal. Even if you took ALL the money Canada has, including what every citizen has in their piggy banks, you would not pay off the debt you claim. Everyone could starve to death and the debt would still not be paid in full. Trillions is simply an unreasonable sum to expect to recover. It has nothing to do with political will and everything to do with 1 + 1 = 2. Go ahead, con someone into paying you a penny on day 1, double it on day 2 and so on. By the end of the month you have an astronomical figure. Now, how on earth can he come up with enough money to actually pay you? Just another reason why people don't take you seriously.

Gas wars are impossible today, Jack. That's because there are only a few refineries. All the gas stations of all brands are buying from the same few sources. Those few sources set the price. When everyone has the same cost and their margin is so low there's just no room for any price wars. More companies with more refineries would mean more competition. Sooner or later one or another company would have an excess of refined gasoline on hand and would drop the price to move it out of their tanks. Canada has always avoided competition on the big things. The government has always made some kind of deal so that a small group of companies enjoys protection from "those big foreign guys who would just wipe us out!" 'Foreign guys' of course really meant 'Americans'. That's why we still have only a few banks, a few insurance companies and a few gas brands. With the banks, ever wonder why ING is an internet bank in Canada, with no storefronts? It's because our banking regulations won't let them be anything else. If those regulations weren't so old they would have included the internet as well! The trade-off is supposed to be that the government will keep some control over those they've given protection. Like car insurance companies who have to apply to the government for a rate increase. Of course, a government has no idea if a rate is justified or not! They get snookered every time and thus do we. Canada is a much bigger nation today than we were when these systems were first implemented. Many of our businesses are competing in other countries all the time. Maybe we should open things up at home. It might hurt a few fat cats but a little 'laissez-faire' would sure benefit us consumers!

I'll agree that some folks push the idea of provincial powers to an extreme, Jack. Still, it's easy for us in Central Canada to believe that the 'system' has worked just fine all these years. We're also the ones who have pretty well called all the shots all these years! Some provinces HAVE been historically screwed! It's all very well to scold them and tell them to "suck it up and be Canadian!" but that's just not going to work. People have long memories. Look how so many of us Ontarioans still feel towards Bob Rae. People in those 'screwed' provinces just don't trust Ottawa anymore. Well, actually, I guess a lot of people EVERYWHERE don't trust Ottawa! Whatever, if you want those provinces to believe in a strong federal system then you'll have to show them it works well FOR THEM, in a manner they will believe!

I'm not familiar with these regulations but going by your second quote, are these the only things that could stop the thousands of firearm-related deaths every year at gun shows?

It's not the problem you might think, Rue! You see, in a war NK wouldn't have to feed its army for very long. We Canadians tend to be blissfully unaware of how modern warfare has changed. We still think it's like WWII, when we had a couple of years to build an army from scratch, hacking down trees and air strips in rural areas to set up a Commonwealth pilot training organization. That all went away years ago. Today's wars are over quickly, in a matter of weeks if not days. When the balloon goes up it's "come as you are". Those nations that don't have much in resources promptly lose, for they have no time to develop anything more than what they already have on hand. How well do you think Canada would do in such a situation? How much do we have on hand at any given time? So NK only has to feed its army for a few days or weeks. If it wins, it will have access to all the food in SK. If it loses, its leaders won't care. Besides, its enemies will feed them. Marshall Plans are just part of America's character. NK has been rationing its food to its army first for generations. Its leaders have no problem with storing up a supply to handle a few weeks of combat. If some of its civilians starve in the meantime well, what else is new?

This is the inevitable result of giving too much power to academics!