Wild Bill

It was always a political solution. There was some scandal in Toronto a couple of years ago about ammunition. It seemed that criminals would buy some ammunition, knowing that they would have to sign into an address book. This gave them the opportunity to read the addresses of legitimate ammunition buyers, that they could later rob with a quick B & E! I would have had at least a shred of respect for the Liberal gun registry if it had have added at least ONE DAY to the minimum sentence for USING a gun unlawfully! Read it for yourself. It doesn't. In fact, one criticism of its initial draft was that the penalty for not registering was proposed to be greater than the typical sentence for using a gun to rob a variety store, which was less than one year. The illegal use of a firearm does not add any mandatory time to a criminal's sentence. It may look like its adding time but the firearm charge is always either plea bargained away or simply served concurrently, meaning at the same time as the robbery charge so that there is no EXTRA time! How anyone can make the claim that the Liberals wanted to make us safer when their registry did NOTHING to criminals is beyond me! Obviously, it was simply politics, for a cheap vote grab.

Yes we did. So did many other countries, including Britain. My point is, we abandoned it far sooner than the Americans and did not practice discrimination nearly as severely as in the American South. Of course we have had some problems, Africville being only one. I'm just calling for some perspective. American blacks have never forgotten Canada. My father was a sailor and used to tell me stories about tying up in Buffalo, New York. They would hail a cab driven by a black driver and ask to be taken to a "coloured" bar. The driver would ask them "What ship and what time do you have to be back?" He would then take them to a bar where the black folks would buy the Canadian sailors drinks and show them a great time. At the end of the evening someone would always make sure the sailors got to their taxi and back to their ship in time! My dad and his shipmates thought the world of those people and their hospitality, all for an Underground Railroad of a century before! Just another reason I'm proud to be Canadian!

Usually I hear that line in defense of some Liberal but it does often go both ways, Dave. I think it's actually a strategy. Maybe not a conscious one but a strategy nonetheless. Consider, Adscam REALLY knocked the Liberal Party's reputation, especially in Quebec! Until they can shake all that baggage and look like an entirely new group they haven't a chance at getting back into power. So step one is some sort of moral equivalency, where anytime some dirt appears about a Tory or two it gets trumpeted to the skies! It doesn't matter if the incident is severe or trivial. The intent is not to compare scores but just to get the public thinking that "they're all the same!". Being "all the same" is an infinitely better situation for the Liberals than "Man, are those Liberals ever crooked!" Once they're thought to be no better or worse than the other choice then they can move to step 2, which is to find some parade that a lot of Canadians are watching and get out in the front of it! Mind you, it's only prudent to be suspicious of ALL parties and politicians! Still, there were a LOT of Liberals guilty of AdScam shenanigans who never received any punishment or even were identified for their crimes! One man and only one man took the fall for the entire party. It will be interesting to find out if he is "looked after" once he finally gets out. Meanwhile, the Liberals are still at step 1, which explains why they seem to go overboard and stretch even minor transgressions into "crimes against the universe". Their only alternative is to simply bide their time and let another election or two go by but that's incredibly difficult to do for the "Natural Governing Party". Heaping dirt on Harper will hopefully (for them!) speed up the process. The trouble is, when it comes to scandals, the Tories are so boring! Even the Helena and Rahim thing is kinda lame, when you think about it! Where are the juicy sex scandals of the British governments? Where's our equivalent of Monica Lewinski? It would seem that in our entire history as a country all we can claim is MacKenzie King talking to his dead dog at a seance and Gerda Munsinger during the Diefenbaker years. Who could imagine it? An entire nation of "Ned Flanders" types!

Oh, we had some problems. Still, nowhere near the degree of our neighbours to the south. After all, the Underground Railroad did deliver blacks to Canada. If we were in the same league of bigotry as the country where the rails started, why would they have bothered?

Hmm. It seems we've had a very recent change, at least as far as Britain goes. Have you seen anything similar for Germany, France, Italy and the rest of "white" Europe? I do admit to a preference myself for Brits, since that was a founding and until recently a core culture of Canada. I enjoy some ethnic foods but that's about my limit as far as participating in changing our culture. To me, it will always be "Merry Christmas" (even though I'm a devout agnostic!), "God Save the Queen" and Yorkshire pudding at Sunday dinner.

White's only? What a rigged poll! Conspicuously missing is the option: "Only people of ANY descent with skills necessary to Canada's immediate needs should be allowed in!" Really, that would be the only criteria that matters. Race is irrelevant in today's "Star Trek" society. Besides, it's far harder today to get white Europeans to WANT to come to Canada! It's no longer 1952, when Europe was so badly war-damaged. Most of them enjoy a higher living standard than Canada can provide! Many of us would kill for European mandatory paid holidays! We no longer have the luxury of being so fussy. Still, we only need people who can help create wealth. Wealth which is not defined as simply spending a government cheque backed by tax money. That's an economic tautology which leads to bankruptcy. You can't make a country rich by having everyone do government services to each other! Those immigrants from the 1950's BUILT all those homes and apartment buildings! You cannot create the same strong economy by modern immigrants who simply come here and LIVE in them! And you need young working men and women, not old grandparents here by family unification.

Well, money may not be the worst thing. I guess we should consider treason. Still, it's a BIG thing! Especially when it's stolen from the taxpayer. It shows a a party's absolute contempt for those taxpayers. As for having paid back the money, aren't you forgetting something? Perhaps conveniently? The Libs paid back only that small portion of stolen funds that the Gomery Inquiry was able to trace. There was FAR more still under investigation, even if there's little hope of tracking it down through all the shredder machines! You really let the Liberals off easy, don't you?

Save your breath, Kimmy! To some folks, there's just no such thing as perspective or context. It's enough to either like or dislike a politician, or anybody, for that matter! If you tend to like liberals and dislike Harper and Tories, moral equivalency is not something that needs to be measured. The sponsorship scandal is easy to measure. It was hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars! Helena and Rahim measure nowhere near that amount with their "alleged" influence peddling. Doesn't matter. If you want to smear the Tories, you measure it the same. It has more to do with your very perception or definition of a yardstick. Some of us think more mathematically, or in practical terms. Others are more intuitive, with "feelings". "Ne're the twain shall meet!"

You're not wrong, TB. It's just that the story is a bit more complicated than that! Yes, Reform couldn't shake the smear campaigns. Yes, the Chretien style was successful and therefore a good model for Harper. I agree that we weren't "one election from taking Ontario". I figure more like 3, or at least 10 years. Still, all that aside, it can't be denied that Reform came from nowhere and in less than a decade commanded over 60 seats, took several MILLION of the popular vote, reduced the PCs to a piddling rump and forever changed popular expectations of parties in Ottawa. It introduced the ideas of Senate reform and populism, which are slowly being debated and considered today, albeit with tiny steps like Harper's intentions. The NDP would have given their left nut and a sack of diamonds to have had that kind of success! So would the Greens, for that matter. None of what you said changes the fact that it's likely a good chunk of those millions of ex-Reform voters still feel as they did before. They likely are NOT overly happy with Harper! What's more, they are DEFINITELY NOT all social conservatives! They never were! Guys like Randy White and Stockwell "Barney the Dinosaur" Day were minor anomalies, not representative at all of the majority of the party membership. This fact is what really pissed off the left! When you paint them as American style "bubbas" it's easy to dismiss them. When they are just ordinary Canadians they are a much more formidable political opponent. My point is that they're still out there, as an untapped electoral demographic. I am really surprised that Harper takes them so obviously for granted and that no one else has made an appeal to them. Harper keeps their support by the same tactic that Mulroney and Clark used all those years ago, by making sure those voters had no other choice! Any salesman knows that restricting customer choices is a very dangerous marketing tactic. Customers aren't stupid and just get more and more angry and frustrated. They will begin to resent having to accept your choices and if someday someone offers a more palatable alternative they will be GONE! Manning proved this by the very success of the Reform Party. You can choose to focus on their mistakes but that doesn't negate their successes. The basic factors are still there.

Well, if you apply the margin of error on the high side of one poll and the low side of the other...

Eventually? Either you are too young to remember or you never paid attention! Mulroney was one of the major causes of the Reform Party's very formation! He was a huge disappointment, especially to the West. Manning and others were originally Tory party members and had tried futilely to change the Tories from within. The PCs were just as "top-down" as the Liberals. It was "Please bang in those campaign signs, give money and do all the grunt work! In between, you can sit on internal committees to develop party policies that will be totally non-binding and forever ignored!" The awarding of the F-18 maintenance contract to Quebec when the cheaper bid came from a Winnipeg company with more experience and better expertise was the final straw. The bad blood between Reform and the PCs was so thick it might as well have been granite! That's why it was only when the PCs finally realized that they were NEVER going to have a comeback and were doomed forever to a few seats in the Maritimes that the parties reunited. The irony is that now for practical purposes the Mulroney Tories seem to be in charge! The tiny PC rump appears to be totally in control. In terms of real actions, today's CPC shows little or no resemblance to the old Reform Party. If anything, it acts like a clone of Mulroney's old party! I keep saying it but it bears repeating. Why did Manning (and several million citizens) ever bother? Once again we have a sizable chunk of the electorate that votes Tory only for lack of anything better. If someone else came out of the wilderness and offered these folks a choice they actually LIKED Harper would lose them all virtually overnight. That must be Ignatieff's biggest wet dream! Sadly, it would seem he would prefer to split his opponent's support more than actually attracting it to his own party...

Of course! It's a private members Bill, for Pete's Sake! It didn't come from the CPC! How many private members Bills ever get enacted? One zealot puts out a private members Bill to please the folks in his home riding. Everyone knows it will never go anywhere. Meanwhile, all the anti-Tory partisans are trying to make out like this is CPC party policy and an attempt to make it the law of the land. If this is an example of how so many fellow citizens think (or actually, DON'T think!) then it's no wonder we get the politicians we deserve...

How does that logically connect, Dave? People have ran afoul of drugs while members of the Liberal Party, or the Rotary, or the Boy Scouts! Association does not logically follow both ways. It's like calling marijuana a gateway drug to heroin, because most heroin users at one time used marijuana. They also likely used aspirin, or CocaCola, or ate hamburgers. Could Helena and Rahim have run afoul of drugs while eating at McDonalds?

Apples and oranges, Molly. To the best of our knowledge, Emerson is no racist. If you equate crossing the floor with wearing a pillow case hood...

Don't be bitter, August! We Anglos are not the ones who put guns to Quebec politicians' heads and forced them to be corrupt! The longtime culture of corruption in Quebec is historical fact and can't be denied. If it bothers you then do something about it. Don't carp at us Anglos! You've already got Chambly beer and your parties are more fun! What more do you want? The roof and concrete slabs in Olympic Stadium didn't fall down because of constipated Anglos.

When the two articles are side by side I should think the context would be obvious!

And the Liberal motivation to keep their scandalous candidate was...? Obviously, they considered having a candidate with a shot at winning the seat more important than their candidate's character...

Exactly! Yet have you noticed how over the past few years the "Greens" have totally stopped talking about cleaning up any such things? All they talk about is CO2 and political wealth re-distribution schemes like Kyoto and Copenhagen. We have carbon trading credits but nothing about reducing car emissions or cleaning up water. Nobody cares about cleaning up the environment anymore. They just want bleed the west in favour of the third world.

Optics? My local paper is owned by the Toronto Star group. Last Friday when the story was just coming out I couldn't help but notice how they devoted a full page to Helen and Rahim. At the top, beside the headline about Harper dumping her was another headline for an article asking "Is Harper Unfriendly to Women?" It's like the old joke that stated if a particular someone found a cure for cancer they were just trying to steal doctors' jobs! Damned if you do and damned if you don't. This sort of thing is why I've believed for years that the Star has an obvious bias!

I worked in the construction industry years ago Molly and vividly remember this very question arising as we began to see Sikhs wearing turbans in the workforce. The reality is that their turbans gave almost NO protection! They are simple cloth, nothing more. Any protection they gave was only spiritual. I left the industry before it was all worked out so I can't claim to know the eventual outcome. I do know that CSA had a conflict. They were tempted to just allow Sikhs to do what they wanted in the name of allowing free religious expression but the employers started screaming! One of the ways governments enforce helmet and safety laws on construction sites is to force employers to be their own policemen. If they allowed Sikhs to forgo safety helmets then they could have had their asses sued off if a Sikh was hurt or killed in a job related accident! I had one Sikh workmate who had actually wound a turban around a conventional hard hat! It seemed a sensible compromise to me. Perhaps that's what's being used today.

You have to be at least a bit of a techie yourself to understand. To most techies, the whole idea of "Green" technologies being our lifeline for our economy is a bit of a crock! It is something driven by politics, not by economics or often even physics. There are huge questions about whether these technologies are necessary or will even work, let alone put us in a competitive position compared to other countries that are playing in these waters. Have you noticed how quick politicians are to abandon ideas of free trade to promote "green" industry? McGuinty has rigged the game with his "MicroFit" program to allow only private local manufactured wind and solar power equipment to qualify for the program. If we need to rig the game to be competitive at home then how on earth do we expect to make our fortune exporting green technology stuff to the world? The answer is obvious. We won't! Green technologies are no different than any other technology. Those countries with labour, tax and government paperwork advantages like China or India will still be more competitive than us. Since Conservatives tend to be more practical and detail oriented, that explains why they don't offer the same support for these green initiatives. If you don't believe in something you can't help but feel like a hypocrite for promoting it! I'm not saying that Liberals and NDP find it easier to be hypocrites. Since they tend to be more "artistic" rather than scientific in their backgrounds they put their faith in these "green" ideas without noticing discrepancies in the science and economics behind them. They aren't "detail" people! So they aren't lying with their support. They are quite sincere, since they have "faith" in it! You can see even in "green" discussions on this very board how the "left" tends to view the argument in terms of character, as in "Harper just wants to pollute the planet" and "businesses don't support the latest green initiatives because they are evil money grubbers". Conservatives tend to be the ones asking if the science or economics behind a plan are valid. I'm generalizing, of course. Not everyone on the left or right falls into these definitions. Still, I believe the percentages favour my points. As Judge Judy says: "The preponderance of the evidence...".

Don't tease! Tell us more!

Yep! Those too!

No argument, Mr. B! However, we weren't talking about solutions for the grid! That's McGuinty's problem! Rather, we were talking about getting totally away from the grid, leaving utility bills that include fixed charges for transmission lines and retiring the stranded debt from all the Nuclear Ontario patronage waste behind. So deep cycle golf cart or tow motor batteries can be quite practical for the individual user, along with compressed air. Or, as you reminded us, water can be pumped up into a tank to achieve enough "fall" to power a turbine. As I posted before, these aren't always solutions for everyone's situation but we shouldn't be petty and resent those who DO manage to get "over the wall" and free!

No argument! Still, there is a world of difference between a Randy White being a bit of a goof and being an out and out racist! If we chucked out those MPs that are only a bit goofy we'd have few left!