Wild Bill

I'm not sure if that's the true reason, Mr. P! I was around for most of those policies being enacted. I don't remember the Liberals stealing them because they were so widely popular. Rather, I remember minority governments where the NDP controlled the balance of power. The Liberals had no choice but to implement something the NDP wanted or have their government fall. I don't remember being given the choice as a voter! I don't remember the Liberals stealing an NDP idea and campaigning on it. In short, the Liberals enacted those ideas to keep the NDP happy, not to keep a majority of Canadians happy. Over the years it has seemed to me that the federal NDP steadfastly refuses to modernize! Remember how Tony Blair re-invented the Labour party in Britain? The NDP here always sounds like its 1965! They always call for more union rights during times when companies are going bankrupt in droves. If you ask them why they tell you that the companies are just doing it because they're rightwing pricks! They're going bankrupt for the sheer evil fun of shafting the union man! They've done this to such a degree that if you asked people in the street who the NDP represents, they will almost all tell you it is the union man and the people on welfare. The NPD never seems to consider that by working so hard to attract that demographic the converse also applies, that if you're not on welfare or in a union then the NDP is not for you! You might be familiar with the Laxer Report from the 1980's. If not, you really should google it. Don't ask around in NDP circles 'cuz it's probably been banned! Laxer was part of the NDP commissioned to write a report for his own party as to why they didn't seem to connect with sufficient numbers of Canadians to win elections. Among other things, he warned them that they were in danger of becoming dinosaurs. The federal NDP has a perception out there of being impractical, of running on blue sky dreams and not day to day realities. If there was a leak in the lifeboat it would be the NDP forming committees on whether or not the job of bailer had been too gender-specific, while the water slowly rose inside the boat. I'm not arguing if this perception is fair or not, just that it's held by large numbers of possible voters. If the NDP wants to attract votes from outside their own choir they need to address this perception head on. Historically, they never seem to do this. When challenged over how one of their goals could work they never give practical details. Instead, they attack the questioner for being mean-spirited for posing the question! They always seem to be leading with their heart rather than their head. Me, sometimes I like them better for it than folks who work the other way around but still, most people learn early in life that Mother Nature doesn't care about your heart. Her Universe works by laws and you have to follow them if you want anything to function properly.

Folks shouldn't get too anal about polls without considering that ALWAYS when an election is actually called the incumbent party sees at least a 5% upward bump! I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps someone who actually works with polling companies can tell us. It may be that between elections people aren't paying close attention and tend to more easily talk about making a switch. Before an election it's easy to become dissatisfied with some things about the ruling party. After the writ is dropped they have to consider if an opposition party would be a BETTER choice! Or maybe there's some more arcane statistical mathematical reason. I don't know why, but I know it's true. However, it does seem logical that a series of polls over time would indicate trends...

Again, not true. The rich can easily afford to go to the States. After all, that's what Bob Rae did when it was someone in his family!

No, that is not true at all! Your experience was fast. For others it's slow! Just because you had good luck is no reason to make the assumption that everything is perfect! As I had posted, I personally witnessed how an emergency request for an MRI would take 8 weeks. The sad truth is that it is usually a crap shoot. I personally waited months for a heart bypass. Of course, if it had been an emergency I would have been rushed in. That's not the point. Sometimes you die before the ambulance can be notified and can pick you up! That's what happened to my younger brother. It's nice that we don't have to worry about the money. However, to pretend that we also give as modern and as rapid service in all cases as other countries is simply not true. No amount of emotional patriotism can change obvious facts. I'm not saying we should change to an American system. I'm saying we should stop being so complacent about the flaws in our own system and do something about them, instead of carping at the Americans like somehow we're more "moral".

Yep! Can't be true! She must be a liar! Shoot her! Same old, same old. We will never fix anything if we deny there's a problem. I guess the woman should have just waited and died, like a good Canadian. I know for a fact about wait times. A very good friend collapsed at work with a seizure. Her doctor wanted an MRI. He was told that would take 6 months. He explained it was an emergency. He was then told it would be 6 weeks. So she went to Buffalo, where she had the MRI that afternoon. It cost about $2000. Her supposedly mean, capitalistic boss paid it for her! Turns out she has MS. Could've been much worse. She might have died during the wait if she didn't go to Buffalo. During his term as premier of Ontario Bob Rae took his granny to Buffalo to escape wait times. Any politico or civil servant in Ottawa has access to a 'special' hospital. Sounds like we already have a two-tier system, to me!

Not meaning to be difficult, but this poll assumes one supports the idea in the first place! Perhaps there should be an initial poll asking if we want our tax money spent on such a thing. Some might and some might not but everyone should at least be asked the question. After all, it is THEIR tax money!

Agreed. When Pearson came up with the idea we still had a reasonable amount of military resources. We already had had some cuts and we were facing maintenance and upkeep costs in the future. So for those initial peacekeeping missions we still had the capability to mount a respectable military force. Ever since, the Liberals kept cutting and cutting until we can no longer mount any extensive military operation. Other countries want our participation for the political symbolism. Nobody expects that we have the strength to actually DO something! The nadir was in Kosovo. The Serbs outgunned us every time we faced them. Our boys were perhaps the bravest and best trained of anyone there. We just didn't have enough of them, with enough modern equipment. We keep fooling ourselves. We sneer at Americans for emotionally thinking that they are the 'best' yet we do exactly the same thing when we fool ourselves about our military. We puff up with pride while we send them out in artic cammo to Afghanistan!

Molly. I think you're absolutely right! Except in Quebec! They don't seem in the main to feel as English Canadians do about being bilingual. In fact, they don't seem all that warm to anybody but a Quebec francophone period! At least, not since John Diefenbacher! Anyhow, they apparently will tolerate an Anglophone with good french but only grudgingly. That's as far as they're willing to go. Not all of them, of course. Montreal folks are quite cosmopolitan. Still, when you count on all the Quebec numbers when you're trying to win seats for an election the attitude is so overwhelming that you have no choice but to play to it if you want to win. Without those Quebec seats it can be almost impossible to win a majority in Ottawa. It would be nice if things worked as you wished for but I just don't agree that's the reality of our situation.

Well. speaking for myself... I blame the Left for its environmental stance because I think it's short-sighted! We keep adding costs to our domestic industries in the name of 'green' but we cheerfully ignore any and all imports from countries that do not impose similar restrictions. To me, this is flat out blind and stupid! If making steel without smokestack scrubbers is bad for the air then why do we allow Chinese steel into our market? By having virtually NO environmental restrictions China has a HUGE advantage in price! We ban sprays and chemicals on our food crops, lowering our yields and increasing our costs per acre. Yet food from countries that use the VERY SAME SPRAYS AND CHEMICALS is allowed into Canada with absolutely no problems. I believe that is why the 'Right' considers the 'Left' to be hypocritical. It's as if the Left really doesn't care about the planet at all. If they did, they would insist on a level playing field. They only seem to care about making feel good moves here and then blissfully and willfully ignoring how it affects our competitiveness in the global economy. It's not what they do, its how they do it! Boneheads, the lot of them!

The issues are simple: What do they cost? Are they safe on today's roads? Do they have enough range on one charge to do a round trip to work and some driving in the evening? So far the answers to these questions haven't been very pleasing. If you view that as procrastination, perhaps you'd be good enough to go first?

I too always get a smile when I hear this. I'm reminded of the story about the American Ambassador a couple of terms ago who was ambushed at a press scrum with the question "How would America feel about allowing Canada to join the Union?" He was surprised and blurted out what perhaps was actually an HONEST rather than a diplomatic answer. He said "I don't really know, but what would we do with all the welfare cases? It's rather sad that Canada makes such a big deal out of the idea, both as a threat and as an option. Yet we are so self-centred that we never consider if it's a good deal for Uncle Sam! Since we've deliberately made ourselves into a resource based economy, like any other third world nation, the US can buy anything they want from us at a competitive price. If they actually took us into their Union, they would get all our problems! Not just sad, but kind of arrogant, I think. We Canadians are like Hobbits. We only see our own Shire, which we take for granted as the best place to live in the world. We are protected from dangers we are ignorant about by others, the Rangers, who we seldom interact with but tend to dismiss as riffraff. Queer as news from Bree!

Oh dear, I'm not feeling very well all of a sudden. I'm off to play my Micky D and the Forgotten Rebels vinyl....

Hey, it's obvious you don't like the present cons or Mr. Harper. As I said, so what? Your OP was about a revival of the old Progressive Conservatives. I gave you my opinion as to why I don't think they could get enough votes again to make that happen! Again, I think you're seeing the world as you'd like it to be rather than the way it is. If you were working for a political party you could never actually win if you didn't deal with things the way they are. You'd just be sitting around dreaming! I personally think we'd be best off with Pete Traynor of Traynor guitar amplifiers as our Prime Minister, but I'm not naive enough to think it's ever gonna happen.

I'm curious if you're old enough to remember when Reform clobbered the old Progressive Conservatives. Or perhaps you weren't interested in politics at that time. I lived it so I can tell you, one of the major reasons so many left the PCs to join Reform was that the PCs had become known as very similar to the Liberals. There were a few key issues but most of the party planks were essentially the same. Elections were actually fought not on different philosophies but rather on "who has the best management team". Canadians at the time were hungry for a clear alternative. They had become disenchanted with the Trudeau-style Liberals. Their wasteful attitude to finances had caught up to them and so people were hurting for jobs and to pay higher taxes. So Mulroney came on the scene and promptly won the two highest number of seat victories in our history! The Liberals were shell-shocked at how badly they got turfed! Yet after two terms it became obvious that the Mulroney boss was the same as the old boss, to paraphrase Roger Daltrey of the Who. He was just better at it! Then Reform was formed and it seemed in a blink of an eye millions of Canadians joined with them! Not just out West, either. People often don't realize that Reform was up to well over a million votes in Ontario and was even making some modest inroads into Quebec. They knocked the PCs down to 2 seats after Mulroney! Later they climbed back to barely enough seats to be officially called a party, virtually all from Atlantic Canada only. It doesn't matter if you personally like or dislike the PCs. It only matters if enough other Canadians would be willing to vote for them again. History says that's not very likely. The feeling was "Liberal, Tory, same old story", meaning that if the PCs were so similar to the Liberals why not just vote Liberal? What would be the point? Whether they admit it to themselves or not, the people who champion a PC revival are really just trying to return to the old days, when our choices were limited to always be on the more liberal side of the street. If your favourite Liberal party happened to lose once in a while it wouldn't matter, 'cuz the other guys were almost the same anyway. This is a VERY unhealthy way to run a democracy! Limiting peoples' choices always causes resentment that never goes away. During Mulroney's terms there was a label going around about "disenfranchised conservatives". This referred to conservatives that had to vote PC 'cuz there was no real conservative choice anyway. There was a quote leaked out of the PC inner circle that said "Let 'em complain! Who else can they vote for?" As I said, what's important is what large numbers of voters think. You would do well to develop some objectivity. The world doesn't care about our wishes. It works by cause and effect under laws of the Universe. Mother Nature doesn't care about our feelings! You might also consider that one of the problems Harper is facing is that his party now seems too MUCH like the PCs! After all, the much larger Reform/Alliance party merged with the tiny rump of what was left of the PCs, yet ever since it has appeared that the new CPC is being run in the old PC way! I suspect that if they followed YOUR advice the Liberals would throw themselves the biggest party they've ever had! All their prayers would have been answered.

Quite right, MM! In the early 90's I returned to my initial career selling IC's, capacitors and stuff to industry, after a few years on the other side of the fence as a purchasing agent. Right away I had dusted through all my old files and started making introductory visits to all the accounts that used to be the most attractive. The usual entry path is through engineering. You support engineers with data sheets and samples and in return the company will allow you to bid on the production volumes. The engineers were so eager to see me that I became suspicious! Salespeople are used to meeting a bit of resistance but these guys just seemed so lonely! I showed up at the appointed time and they gave me the red carpet tour! After it was over we returned to their department and they treated me to a coffee. They were all enthusiastic about me providing them with engineering support. Then I asked the usual question. When the time came, who was my contact in purchasing? They all got very quiet and started rubbing their shoes on the floor. Finally they admitted that there was no purchasing contact! All production had been moved to the far East! The penny dropped! When their company had taken away the production opportunities all the parts suppliers had stopped giving any engineering support. Why? There was no money to be made! What's more, it was obvious that the higher ups, after they realized the consequence of their decision, would fix it by using Far East engineering too! And that's exactly what happened within a few years. We ended up with engineers being a dime a dozen.

Old? Launched during the Second World War? That means it was maybe a bit less than 20 years old when it was scrapped! Is it your position that 20 years is old for an aircraft carrier?

Here's a list: http://careerchem.com/NAMED/Canadian-Inventions.html As I had said, if you look at the dates it gets kind of thin for the last 30 years. Foxcroft invented a whistle. Gosling invented the Java programming language. A few others.

Yeah, seems so. We have the talent. We just discourage it. We've become the farm team for other nations. We send them our most capable and in return we accept as immigrants everybody's grandparents. I'm still wigged out about Dancer's post. 5 satellites! He seemed almost proud! We really had better break this penny ante mentality soon or this country might as well petition to become part of the USA.

5? That's IT???!!! 5???!!!

I was waiting for that one! I was selling parts to them when they were still just a small engineering outfit at the local university. OK, we have ten fingers to count on. You've just used one. Will we need all our fingers? Will we actually have to take our shoes off? THAT's my point, after all!

I thought I'd start this thread after all the posting about Canada's military, or lack of it, in the "10B dollar" thread. It's easy to list our accomplishments from decades ago. What are we doing today? We have brave soldiers. Both of them. We send them out with bows and arrows against the lightning. Our navy has a few modern frigates but we can only afford to fuel a few at a time for active sea duty. When the balloon goes up like in Kosovo we send our canteen ship to supply coffee and sandwiches. We built the CanadArm for the space shuttles and the space station. Where's the other arm and the legs? I'm not suggesting we've done NOTHING since the mid 70's! Just that the pace seems to have dramatically tapered off. Please, let's not have someone drag out that hoary old saw that we are a nation of only a small population. We've ALWAYS had a small population! Yet there is a LONG list of what Canada invented and produced, from baseball to walkie-talkies that seems to peter out about 30 years ago. What happened? When did we decide to become a nation of only resources, like any country in the third world? What happened to all our Alexander Graham Bells or Reginald Fessendens? We still produce world class artists and writers but a country can't survive with ONLY Margaret Atwoods! Premier McGuinty talks about how Canada will develop 50,000 'green jobs' that will pay as well as the auto manufacturing industry, yet Ontario bans the ZEN electric car! Was it losing the Arrow? The Studebaker? When did we abandon having the resources to be serious PeaceMAKERS in favour of basically a heavier armed police force, that has to hitch a ride from some OTHER country in order to get where it needs to be? How many satellites have we built and launched in the past 30 years? Even with having to have some other country put them into orbit for us? Have we become just a nation of tired old men and women, dreaming about past glories? Anyone care to venture an opinion?

And the Bonnie was fresh from a zillion dollar complete refit, only to be promptly scrapped and sold to Red China for the steel. This seems to be the perpetual Canadian story. It seems to leave us with not much to be proud of, except for some Pierre Burton book on the coffee table. Whenever this sort of question is posed lots of people jump in with historical examples of what Canada has invented...almost all of them OLD! What have we done in the last 30 years? A few good or impressive things, I will concede. Do we need more than two hands of fingers to count them? I guess what I'm really asking is, does Canada today box according to its weight? Have we become an 'underachiever' nation? I think I'll go start a new thread!

No, you're not! You're simply labeling anyone who disagrees with your premises in an ad hominem manner. You are right and anyone who disagrees must be evil. You rewrite history to benefit your own arguments, in the face of videotape. If you looked in a dictionary under the word 'zealot'... You actually do the Six Nations protesters a disservice, by making them look irrational. There is no point in dealing with irrational people. The most you can do is ignore them unless they get violent, at which point you use whatever force is necessary to lock them into a rubber room. I refuse to feed the troll any longer. I'm off to the control panel to add to my 'ignore' list.

Are you saying we scrapped the 'Bonnie' so we could replace it with Sea Kings??? At least the Bonnie didn't sink, unlike the Sea Kings which keep falling out of the sky!

Maybe not. History might have followed a different path. Von Braun wanted to build infrastructure for sustained moon and space colonization. Instead, we went to the moon, lofted a couple of golf balls, brought back a few rocks... And for the next 40 years or so we never went back! We just built some shuttles to buzz around close to the earth so we could do "weightlessness experiments" over and over and over again.