Wild Bill

Sadly Jerry, this may all be too little too late! Natural gas supplies in Canada and the USA are in a glut and are likely to be in a glut for decades. New technologies have enabled us to capture vast amounts of gas from shale deposits, cheaply! It's almost certain that this is the reason all the parties involved in the Pipeline finally stopped arguing about how much each could squeeze out for themselves and hurriedly closed a deal. They're worried that the forecast for cheap shale gas may make it uncompetitive to bother spending the money on building a pipeline at all! It's just sooo Canadian!

Certainly! The big obvious one is that political tricks are a normal part of government. The fact that they can be distasteful is just our country's way of making it Canadian! AdScam, Shawinigate and many of the other Liberal scandals were clearly legal crimes. The OP referred to legal crimes, not government actions that a partisan might disapprove. As I said, I'm hardly Harper's biggest fan but what offends me about the argument from some posters in this thread is that they equate not liking the man as a blank cheque to consider him the SAME as a law-breaking thief, even though there's no evidence he actually broke the law and stole something in the same manner that the Liberals did for all those years! "Yep, pardner! We'll just have a phony trial. No need to actually have any evidence. We've never liked ole Jake anyway so let's just hang 'em! Any body we don't like doesn't deserve a fair trial! As an afterthought, let's hang his horse, too!" This kind of attitude truly scares me...

The OP link also doesn't tell us enough. Quebec has had control of its immigration for some time, but not total. My understanding is that it does it's own selection and normally Ottawa just rubberstamps the applicants. Perhaps we are seeing a conflict, where a Quebec official makes a promise but an Ottawa department sees a medical conflict. This is even muddier when you consider that although the feds kick in medicare money medical coverage is a provincial matter anyway. Hopefully the media will explain more as this story plays out.

Kind of a stretch, but if we allow it for purposes of discussion, you seem to imply that when it comes to honesty in government political gamesmanship is the only yardstick of honesty that matters. You leave the impression that STEALING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND INFLUENCING BANK DECISIONS are "no big deal", by comparison! I'll grant your definition only as an academic technicality. By any sense of objective perspective, Harper is nowhere near being in the same league as his Liberal predecessors.

Ok, let's see how your logic has worked. If we have a Liberal government with a Liberal dominated Senate, that's ok. If we have a Tory government with a Liberal dominated Senate, that's ok too. If we have a Liberal government with a Tory dominated Senate, that will be a "pain in the arse". IOW, not ok. If we have a Tory government with a Tory dominated Senate, it's not hard to see that it won't be high on your hit parade either! What's worse, while you bruit that our system has worked "for 150 years" you make no mention that Senators are not elected and therefore directly responsible to the people. They are simply party hacks, rewarded for being bagmen. Trudeau had so little respect for the Senate he actually appointed his chauffeur! Seems to me if you were truly standing on anything but blindly partisan principles you would be decrying the very structure of the system and not ONLY the fact that there are Tories involved! After all these months of reading your posts, I've come to believe that what you actually favour is a perpetual Liberal government that never has to face an election and has total control of the Senate.

Gee, it's interesting that there are still no replies to Ironstone's post about Trudeau proroguing Parliament 4 times in 4 years! Same old, same old. Some folks are just so partisan. The other guy is a devil but their guy is a saint, even if he does the same things. This is one of the reasons why I gave up on the left when I was a teenager.

And Federal Liberals sold out all the Northern Telecom jobs and industry to China, decimating the electronics manufacturing industry in this country. Nobody ever mentions that one. Not you or the MSM, yet THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of jobs were lost! I guess it's only bad if a Tory does it. Some people can only see evil through their right eye. No wonder Liberals think they're the Natural Governing Party. Their supporters would forgive Charles Manson if he was a Liberal!

Aren't you missing the point? August started out by comparing Harper's government to all those years of Liberal/Chretien corruption, scandal and so on that ended up with millions of dollars stolen in AdScam. Now you blithely blow off the present government being "not on the take." as "That's good, though hardly praiseworthy." Yes, they're all supposed to be honest but for decades they haven't been! That was the flippin' point! Or do you simply take Liberal dishonesty as "no big deal"?

Man, I guess I'm not the only one bad with thread drift! Consider this from the opening post: "Since 2006, there has been no scandal of ministers using limousines, or making extravagant foreign trips with chauffeurs. There have been no stories of ministers and extravagant spendings. No minister is borrowing money from some federal bank. We haven't heard of a federal political appointee who had his chalet painted on the public dime. No minister is sleeping with prostitutes, or taking money in thick envelopes." This thread reminds me of the situation back in the days of Reform. There had been no end of serious scandals within the Liberal government. There was Shawinigate, where Chretien was accused of forcing the firing of a bank manager who refused to grant a loan to somebody with bad credit, so that he could buy some land from ole Jean! There was all the money wasted on the HRDC with Jane Stewart. There were actually LOTS more, really expensive ones but no need to list them all here. My point was, some members of the media seemed desperate to come up with some dirt on Preston Manning! I guess they felt it would be only fair, or perhaps they were just desperate to divert the attention from the Liberals. They tried and tried but Reform just didn't seem to offer much scandal. Finally, they came up with this bit - Preston Manning had apparently included some personal dry cleaning bills in his expense report for being leader of his party! Imagine! Dry cleaning in itself is a legitimate expense but only for those clothes worn when representing the Party at party functions. To include a few personal shirts and slacks could not possibly have been a simple mistake! Why, the dollars must have added up to maybe $20 or $30! It MUST have been a deliberate attempt at fraud! Believe it or not, the MSM flogged this for over a week on CBC NewsWorld and other outlets. Finally, I guess they realized how stupid they looked and gave up. It's called perspective! You can't consider Shawinigate equivalent to a $20 mistake with a dry cleaning bill. What reminded me of this incident is reading in this post the vitriol by some posters against Harper and his government. There is little or no sense of proportion here either. No proof given, or certainly nothing equivalent to the scandals of the Chretien era. No, it boils down to demonizing who you don't like and forgiving ANYTHING done by those you do! Proportion goes out the window. The extension of this kind of thinking is the lynch mob. If a culprit is someone from your "team" you let him off. If he's not "your kind" then you hang 'em! I'm far from Harper's biggest fan either but I would never support slamming him just because I didn't like him. By that logic I could NUKE Bob Rae! What kind of a country would we have if we tried and convicted people just according to how much or little we liked them, regardless of what they might actually have done?

Well, I guess it depends on what you expect when you have a problem. If you're more of a libertarian, you would prefer to work within your own country. That's assuming you live in a democratic country with a reasonably fair justice system. If things aren't to your liking you would have political channels to try to effect change. You can get an MP or whatever to get a new law passed or amend an old one. If you are successful you would then have the power of the state behind it to make sure its enforced. I hate to say it, but if you're more of the cliche Canadian you would probably want to be able to appeal to higher and higher levels of power, until you get one that finally gives you your own way. If the Supreme Court of Canada is not enough, then you would want to appeal to some World UN court, if you felt it was likely to support your claim. Of course, no Canadian citizen gets to vote for any UN representative. In effect, it would be a dictatorship. However, if you are of a leftwing persuasion and your values tend to agree with much of what comes out of the UN these days, with all the anti-Israel sentiment and countries like Libya being put in charge of human rights commissions! then this wouldn't bother you at all. You would only object to a dictator if the dictator disagreed with you! Me, I would find a world dictatorship equally frightening if it were left or right. Even if it agreed with me on one issue it would be guaranteed that sooner or later I would suffer. It's like the old song "They came for the Jews but I wasn't a Jew. They came for the communists but I wasn't a communist..."

When push comes to shove, laws only work if someone is there to enforce them! Laws without police or soldiers are just ink spots on papers. In themselves they mean nothing. Every sovereign nation develops its own laws and its own legal system to enforce them. Some countries do a better job at this than others. Some third world countries have very corrupt police and courts. The United Nations was never set up to be a world government. It was simply a meeting house for member nations to talk and make agreements between themselves. These agreements are political agreements. No country is willing to give up its sovereignty and allow itself to be ruled by the United Nations. This is especially true because as a political body often corrupt nations outnumber nations that have a respectable rule of law! So countries that oppress their people can politically ram through laws and try to apply them to western nations for their own ends, either to prevent other nations from punishing them for mistreating their own people or to make claims for foreign aid, trying to force countries like the USA, Britain or Canada to give them more money. The UN also has no police service. When they vote to perform a military action against a member state, such as to stop a war or innocents being murdered, they have to form a military made up of soldiers donated by member countries. Sometimes, for various reasons, countries may not offer enough military help, hoping other countries will pick up the tab for them. Afghanistan would be an example, IMHO. So if you understand that the UN is not a world government then hopefully things make more sense.

I'm sure it does! What you are really saying is that you are happy with the status quo but are aware that many citizens don't agree with you. It's possible that they may be a majority. For this reason you don't want any party or system that might give the majority of citizens what they want! You either believe in democracy or you don't. Anything else is simple elitism. Or as P T Barnum once said "Makers, takers and fakers. There are NO other kinds!"

I'll pay attention to this post, Smallc. It's a lie! This is Wikipedia, for Pete's Sake! A very biased source! Look at the scandal going on where they censored any scientist who disagreed with global warming. Wiki is an amateur run source. THIS a a source that demands to be peer reviewed. It's run by politically correct, left wing university students with pre-conceived notions. Show me a piece of Reform literature that confirms those points and I might concede, if it's not taken out of context. Cite the source, NOT Wiki's OPINION! Besides, it's all moot anyway! Reform was the party that believed an MP should represent his constituents wishes and not his own or that of his party's. A Reform MP could have been a gay basher or gay himself, what did it matter? He still would have been legally and not just honour bound to vote as the people of his riding wanted him to vote. His personal beliefs didn't matter. That policy WAS written down in black and white! It was such an integral part of Reform policy that for any MP to break it would have been political suicide for him! Contrast this with the FIRST same sex marriage debate, where Liberal MP's were whipped by their party to vote the party line, even though some of them had publicly stood against it during the debates and promised their constituents they would stand against it! Don't tell me this is just my opinion! The cameras showed their faces! I saw Liberal MP's crying with tears down their faces as they toed the party line at the expense of their own integrity! No doubt the CBC and CPAC still have the tapes! So you and others thump a drum that Reform had some social conservative secret agenda, 'cuz they had Christians in their party, even though The Reform policy forced their MP's to vote as their constituents believed, no matter if they themselves were "Jimmy Baker" clones. Meanwhile you ignore the actions of the Liberal Party that ALSO had MP's who were against same sex marriage, promised constituents that they would vote against the Bill then at the last minute IGNORED the wishes of their constituents and their own promises to vote their Party line! Furthermore, you make the blatant assumption that being against same sex marriage is equivalent to being biased against gays! This is WHY I have an ignore list! I don't mind people disagreeing with me. That's often how I can learn new things and correct some of my false assumptions! However, there has to be SOME logic and consistency to an opposing argument! When it gets to be just a waste of time I tune out. Life is just too short. Sometimes my DOG has a more logical argument!

Angus, it constantly amazes me the number of people who apparently don't read newspapers or listen to the news on radio or tv yet will attempt a political debate in a sneering, pontificating manner, demanding their opponent prove what everyone has witnessed for years and years. It's like an adolescent who thinks that history began with his own birth. Just unbelievable!

I don't recall anyone despising Mulroney because he wasn't doing social conservative things. We all despised him for what he did with our tax moneys and the debt of the country. We despised him for making one set of promises in French in Quebec and making different ones when he spoke to the rest of us in English! Where did you get the information to formulate your premise? Did you personally poll the Reform membership? Where you a member of your local riding association and whenever you went to a meeting you saw giant banners crying "Damn Mulroney For Not Imposing Social Conservative Values on Our Country!" Did you spend the rest of your time at the meeting being schooled in the "secret agenda"?

I dunno, Jerry. If parties practiced free votes I might agree that party mergers could lead to a better situation. However, they don't! The Whip says "Jump!" and the caucus says "How high?". Period and end of story. So mergers would only reduce the number of choices for all the various demographics, leaving more and more people without a party that's a good match for their values. Wouldn't fewer choices heighten frustration, rather than reducing it?

No, they didn't. Pity. How do you like things now?

I don't see much change! Sadly, it still appears that we are a very divided, regionalistic people. This means that there is ZERO chance of pleasing everybody! This is not a problem if you are looking at the national popular vote but when it breaks down so strongly into regions I believe it's very unhealthy. Various regions end up unhappy for generations! It's inevitable that sooner or later the feeling changes to "Screw it! It will always be this way! Our only choice is to leave!" I would feel much better if the Liberals held a smattering of seats across the West and the CPC showed better in Quebec. The breakdown regionally is just too intense to foster a strong feeling of unity.

Well Molly, I guess it depends if you're the kind of person that follows their own mind or just follows! Some folks have their own values already. They follow issues and make up their own minds. These people want their political representatives to be an extension of their values into the political system. Other folks are looking for a leader, or perhaps "father figure". This is someone who will make all the decisions for them and "show them the way". Someone who will do the hard thing of THINKING for them! The slogan was "Your Reform MP will be your representative to Ottawa, instead of Ottawa's representative to YOU!" That is the essence of populism, that a government follow the will of the people, not impose its will on its people. The people can be wrong at times, of course. That can give harsh lessons that tend to correct. Still, MP's are FAR from infallible as well! What you are asking Molly is for a citizen to just vote for an agent and give him a free rein, to follow him with blind faith. If he disappoints too many times then your only option is to vote against him years later at the next election. Of course, usually you can't do that either. Since our parties practice such strong solidarity, citizens have to accept a party as one entire lump! You don't get to pick and choose issues and values. This means that if someone like myself is disappointed with Harper my only option may be to vote Liberal. However, the Liberal party may have taken the same stand on that issue! Or it may have many other party planks that I just can't agree with! So the only real option is to grit your teeth, hold your nose and stay with the bastards. Hence the phrase "disenfranchised conservative". Reform never did work out an effective means of "polling". They never really had the time to work out all the details. Some MP's tried harder than others, having community "town halls" and making the rounds of the local Timmys. Still, we considered this to be at least a huge improvement over the other parties, who didn't believe in the concept at all. Some folks make up their own minds. Others just swallow the kool-aid, I guess.

I see, guilt by association, eh? If you belong to a particular church then you must be a certain type of person. Do you realize how prejudiced your argument sounds? What happens if you replace "Missionary Alliance" with "Muslim". Would that make Manning a closet terrorist? I have been an atheist almost my entire life, or at least, a devout agnostic. What does that make me? In the entire Reform riding where I was a director, I didn't know ANY evangelical Christians, let alone such that believed in mixing religion and politics.! By your perspective, there should have been all kinds of them. You seem to have a strong bias against Christians. Just because you don't belong to their church doesn't make them boogeymen. Whatever Manning or Harper personally believe, they were part of the ONLY party in Canadian history that put the values of the majority of their constituents over their own beliefs in Parliament votes and policy. In effect, it no longer mattered what the party leader believed. If the majority of those who elected him or her believed differently then that's the way they were legally bound to go! If a Reform MP was elected in a riding where most folks wanted to legalize marijuana he would have had to vote in favour, no matter how he personally felt about the issue! No wonder the other parties still hate them so much. Elitists, the lot of them!

So what does this mean? The older and more experienced tend to vote Tory and the younger,more naive voters prefer other parties? As for the education level, how can we make any comparison without knowing what percentage of ALL voters had whatever level of education?

More non sequiturs! The "Reform Wing" is NOT equivalent to social conservatives! Do you actually read posts before you respond to them? Have you actually ever read any Reform party policy? Must be nice to know everything in advance, by some kind of biased esp. Link 1 talks about the same sex debate. Reform had no official position on same sex marriage, except that they wanted a free vote so that it would reflect the wishes of each MP's riding. Harper knew that he would lose that debate. It was just a facade to allow his MP's a free vote and make the other parties look bad if they whipped their MP's to a party line, AGAIN! So the Reform wing got a free vote that meant nothing. Any social conservatives in ANY party got a placebo bone! Link 2 refers to arts funding being better monitored. I don't see this as a party issue at all. It's just common sense. There is funding that most Canadians support and there is also funding handed out to what many would call crap. In fact, literally crap! Some artists have received funding over the years for smearing their feces on canvas and tying bottles of urine to figures of the Pope. Is it your position that only "Reform social conservatives" take exception to this? That there are no Liberal or even NDP taxpayers that think this is lunacy? As for the last link, Reform never had a position on marijuana. I will agree that Harper's government seems to be appealing to the "reefer madness" crowd but again, social conservatism and Reform were not the same thing. Frankly, I don't understand why Harper is doing this. I don't believe there were ever enough social conservatives around that gave a damn about who smoked what. So what will he gain? Unless he's just doing the old trick of putting some excessive stuff in a Bill so that he can trade it away to get Opposition support. He IS running a minority government, after all! The Opposition can block the Bill, saying the marijuana stuff is too harsh. Harper tones it down and all the rest of his Bill passes. He gets what he REALLY wants with justice reform and the Opposition gets a chance to look like heroes by "saving all the tokers". Sorry, you'll have to do better than this.

Going by the opening post, I thought the actions of the "NDP/Leftist/Green" hypocrites WERE the argument!

Sorry, I simply can't agree. You see, Reform had ZERO social conservatism in its party platform! The whole social conservative thing was a caricature used by Reform's opponents (mostly Liberals) to attack them in the media. It's true that many of their ideas, like fiscal responsibility, Senate Reform and populism were embraced by an older crowd more often found outside of large urban centres. It may also be true that many people in those areas were Christians. Does this make a connection? Many of them were likely Monty Python fans, considering the age demographic. Does this mean that most Reformers were also upper class Twits who had arguments with their dead pet parrots? It's a logical non sequitur, like claiming that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, because most heroin users have smoked it. Most heroin users have also at one time used aspirin or even Preparation H. Does that mean that Preparation H is a gateway to heroin use? Just because A=B does not mean that B=A. You've taken this stand many times and I'm always struck by how you believe something about the Reform Party completely different than my personal memory and experience. Perhaps you might want to actually read the party's official Constitution and maybe the Blue Book, which limns their policies. Frankly, I just don't believe that you already have. You always sound like you're quoting what Reform stood for according to Jean Chretien or even Joe Clark. This might be useful to you: http://contentdm.ucalgary.ca/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/reform&CISOPTR=197 I 'm willing to grant that there may have been minorities within the party that were socially conservative but except for Day they never held any power and Day achieved that by false pretences, hiding his colours during his leadership campaign and then acting as if his values were held by a majority of the membership once he had won! Hey, the Liberals have and have had Hedy Fry and Carolyn Parrish. Nobody tries to claim that the entire Liberal Party represents their beliefs. Once your reply got beyond the social conservative thing we fall into better agreement, except that my premise is that the progress was NOT "extraordinarily slow". To accomplish all that they had within a decade is incredible, by most yardsticks! Are you seriously suggesting that a new party should be able to spring up from nothing and achieve power in only two or 3 elections? Looking at the growth rate I would have expected them to reach their goal within another 5-10 years, except for the Stockwell Day debacle. There was no sign that the PC's would ever again rise from their ashes. The Liberals had nowhere to go but down, especially since the longer they held power the more arrogant and corrupt they seemed to become. Whatever. It's all water under the bridge, as it were. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not denying at all that Harper had to change the party in order to attract a larger voting demographic. My point is simply that he seems to have TOTALLY abandoned anything from the Reform wing! Who ever would have expected that a merger between a giant and a midget would have resulted in the midget calling ALL the shots? The end result does not appear to have been a merger. It's more like a reverse takeover. The Reform documents I suggested you read have pages and pages of party planks that have nothing to do with social conservatism. As I've said repeatedly, in those days Manning and even Harper warned that such would be the kiss of death for the party. Surely today Harper could find one or two to toss to his Reform base! Even small, insignificant ones just to show an effort! So far, it just doesn't look like it's ever going to happen.

Sorry I misunderstood you. I really should wait for my morning coffee before posting sometimes! I disagree that Reform stood no chance in the East. I was a Director here in my Ontario riding and of course followed the Ontario election results quite closely. We DID have one or two seats once or twice! So "no seats whatsoever" is not quite true, although not by much. Still, what is important is the popular vote and the number of ridings where we were eating into the former PC vote. We were up to a couple of million votes and each election the percentage in many ridings grew and grew. In many ways it was a parallel to the situation of the present CPC, which keeps growing in popularity once you get outside of the big city cores like metro Toronto. We were just on the verge of starting to win Ontario seats in serious numbers. We were making inroads in the Maritimes. Even in Quebec we were showing some hope in a few ridings! Then two things happened that brought the growth to a screeching halt. First, the party turned away from Manning in favour of Stockwell Day. We didn't really know much about Day but the image was of someone younger and more photogenic. There was a feeling that Manning had peaked and it was time for someone new. So we threw him over in favour of Barney the Dinosaur! After he had won the leadership Day let his evangelical beliefs dominate his politics. This was precisely what Manning and Harper had warned about from the beginning. Canadians don't feel comfortable with mixing religion and politics. Day did it and the party was promptly hammered in the polls! Second, the party got impatient. They really thought that if they could merge the two conservative parties together it would be instant majority. Of course, that was incredibly naive. Die-hard progressive Conservatives were too left of centre to ever feel comfortable with any merger with Reform/Alliance. Most of them chose to drift to the Liberals. So Harper retreated to the old Mulroney approach that had worked for previous generations. He allowed the new party to become a clone of the old PC rump. This would make it more attractive for those PC types who were left. Meanwhile, once again the old Reform core was left with no alternative but to vote for the CPC, even though it no longer represented anything of the Reform philosophy. The Liberals were an even worse choice so, just like the days of yore, the Reform wing had to hold its nose and vote CPC. As I keep saying, it makes you wonder why Manning ever bothered! Over a decade of popular activism became a futile waste of time. However, after being disappointed twice in the same way within one lifetime, the Reform demographic voter is even hungrier for change! If another alternative ever comes again out of the wilderness, this time it may very well totally destroy the present CPC! When you burn a voter twice and he finally gets another choice your chances of keeping his vote are essentially zero. I have no idea what this choice will be. Maybe the Wild Rose will field a federal party once they totally win over Alberta. It's hard to see clearly at this point. Harper still has a bit of time to head this off, of course. All he has to do is throw his Reform wing a bone or two. So far he seems content to let them starve to death. Maybe he thinks he needs to wait until he wins a majority. Somehow, if he pulls that off without any enthusiastic Reform support I don't see why he would bother at that point. To him and his advisors it would look like they had been successful in their strategy, so why change? More likely, only an actual visible threat of another party more appealing to the Reform demographic would be enough to force a change, IMHO. Of course, by that time it would likely be too late. As I said, when you burn a voter twice in his lifetime... Who knows, maybe the Liberals will actually become classic Liberals! If they became more of the laissez-faire capitalists of classic Liberalism they might actually be able win that demographic away from Harper? These are interesting times...