Wild Bill

Oh! Well, that makes it perfectly ok, I guess!

I wonder how one picks stats to show if nicotine consumption is going down. Sales of legal cigarettes would show hard numbers but how can they track all the illegal cartons? Do First Nations manufacturers and smugglers fill out data forms for StatsCan? With so many cigarettes being illegal the numbers involved are huge and would make a big impact on any stats if not included. In some areas of the country I'm sure illegal smokes outnumber legal ones. As for oil smuggling, I was actually thinking of lies about the use of carbon emission credits, where a Mugabe type ruler could lie about using the money to reduce emissions in his developing country and buy bullets instead or simply put it into a Swiss bank account for himself.

Is that what you saw? At the time my feeling was that the Liberals could do pretty well whatever they wanted with such a split opposition. Chretien/Martin cut so deep because we were on the verge of having the "gnomes in Zurich" yank our national credit rating right out from under us! They had no choice, with no opposition to stop them. Is this good reason to give them credit? Methinks you're just being partisan again.

I think you're quite right when you say that this situation is different! Dion's plan reminds me of when Mulroney brought in the GST. There was all kinds of agreement that the tax was a better and more fair tax than the previous status quo and that it was "revenue neutral". If you look at it totally objectively you'd probably agree. So what? That's not how the general population thinks. The GST was a new and obvious tax, thrust before the collective noses of the entire population. Worse, it came at the same time as a very deep and painful recession. When people hurt they look for someone or something to blame. They don't care if there were good reasons! They only know that they didn't hurt before and now they do! Trying to excuse things by saying "Well, the bad times were coming anyway and if we hadn't done this it would have been worse!" doesn't cut it. No one bought it. Dion's argument seems to me to be very similar. He says that we have to do this because the alternatives are worse. We haven't experienced those bad alternatives for ourselves so he is asking us to just believe in him. Meanwhile we can expect to get hurt everyday with increased prices, at a time when in many provinces like Ontario we are experiencing pain from other economic hard knocks. It doesn't matter if he delivers "rebates" at tax time. The time differential is such that few voters will make the connection. Besides, any tax deductions will not be universal. Human nature states that people will remember those things that hurt and forget about any that helped compensate, just as people forgot that the GST saved them a couple of percent on a car or stove. They bought a new car or stove every 10 years or more. They got hit with GST on everything else they bought everyday. I guess I'm describing the difference in perspective between the common voter and those rich or well-connected enough to be insulated from day to day economic pressures. It's pretty obvious that Dion is the ultimate academic. "...the more things seem the same."

Not meaning to pick apart your model instead of your point but cigarettes might have been a poor comparison. There is simply so much smuggling! First Nations here in Ontario are becoming millionaires from the illegal sales. Variety store owners are being forced to sell contraband because the problem is so blatant that with legal product they just can't possibly be competitive. So increased taxes can also result in people pursuing illegal channels, a la Prohibition. Likely we would see rampant fraud and similar problems with a carbon market. I'm not sure how you could police such a thing but I'm positive that given human nature it would be necessary.

It comes down to that wonderful modern invention, "plausible deniability"! Chretien obviously took great pains to ensure that. You're quite right that it would have been impossible for the underlings to have got away with so much sans the protection of the chief. In politics that deniability is all you need. After all, as a people we are not very bright. As a mathematician would put it: "Intelligence is a constant divided by the number of people in a group." First you have those people who are loyal. They will refuse to believe anything bad about their party, whichever one it is. Especially Liberals. They would forgive and support Charles Manson, as long as he was a Liberal. Then you have those people that sit on the fence for their vote but don't follow politics that closely anyway. They likely would be blissfully unaware of a scandal and it wouldn't affect their vote. That leaves those who never would have voted for you anyway and last, a very small group of people who are truly non-partisan when they see evil. Those non-partisans in Canada are extremely lonely! So by the numbers you win. In Canadian politics, that's all that counts. A political statesman does what's good for the country. A political leader does what's good for his party. We haven't had any statesmen in generations. If ever!

Just curious. During the Chretien/Martin years, did anybody ever ask the prairie farmers how they felt? Or did all this resentment spring up the weekend after Harper was elected? I realize this is a silly question to ask. After all, we all know there was never a greater populist than the "petit gar from Shawinigan".

Thyroid cancer? Cut the lady some slack, jdobbin. There are limits, even for liberals.

jdobbin, methinks you are picking at the model and ignoring the point. Fine, you can't have a dual system within one province. Then make a question for a referendum that says :"Would you like the right to sell your wheat to anyone the same as Eastern farmers OR do you want to continue with the CWB?" Then we could implement the result.

You know, you might have a hard time getting a Liberal to support the prairie farmers against the CWB. After all, they don't expect to win any votes from the Prairies anyway! Meanwhile, in downtown Toronto you can spin the situation to make the CWB the hero and Harper look bad. And that, for a Liberal, is enough!

At this point in time I think the Tories would be fools to reveal any plans or details! Is that what you're asking them to be? There's likely to be an election in the fall. Certainly not too many months past that. Why should an incumbent government reveal their platform before the writ is dropped? To give their opposition the chance to critique it or steal ideas several months or more early from the campaign? No, if you're pretty sure your opponent has a weak platform then you would be wise to wait until he actually starts his official campaign and doesn't have the time to backtrack or modify it. Your posts sound like partisan wistful thinking, jd! I wouldn't expect ANY party to be that dumb!

That makes no sense at all! Before the fact bluff and bluster is normal. If Israel did strike at Iranian nuclear bomb making facilities do you really think that Russia and China would trigger a huge war just to protect that nutbar Iranian leader? What would be in it for them? They could be dragged into an escalation that would be far beyond what they would be prepared to pay. No, it makes much more sense that while they will make lots of noises if the balloon goes up they will condemn Israel with harsh words while secretly heaving a sigh of relief that Iran will no longer be able to threaten the stability of the area. Unless of course, they are all mindless fanatics who would "push the button" anyway, but that is a view quite contrary to your usual postings. I'd be surprised if you'd make that sort of accusation.

Well, once again the Reformer in me rises to the fore. I am suspicious of polls. Again, I would favour an actual plebiscite. Give the farmers a ballot with a clear question like "Do you want the CWB as your only channel to sell your grain or would you like a free choice to sell to the CWB or anyone? Yes or No?" 'Course, that's just me. A populist democrat. Man, am I lonely!

I don't see your point. By losing 3 times that only proves that the Tories don't have the power of a majority to amend the existing legislation and their attempts to do it by other means have failed, 3 times. You seem to be implying some sort of moral failure on behalf of the Tories for even trying. How do you support this? To me, no matter how you dress it up the present situation seems a sin against the idea of the right to property. It's the farmer's crop after all and NOT the CWB's! Or the government, for that matter. Still, we have the right to free association as well (in most instances, if politically correct, but that would be another thread) so I would not rail against farmers using the CWB if that is their choice. The real issue is, what do the farmers want? Unless you can provide proof that a clear majority want the CWB monopoly to continue then I don't see how you can claim the moral high ground. I would support a clear question on a referendum of ONLY the farmers involved! The CWB would then live or die and we could all get on with things. So far it would appear that farmers want freedom and the right to choose.

Not in some areas. Oil companies, banks and insurance companies have limited or no competition. It's called an oligopoly, describing a market with only a few players. When you have only a few players in a market it's easy to keep prices up. Everybody understands that a price war hurts everyone, including themselves. If you have a LOT of players then chances are excellent that someone will either be stupid and/or unable to resist and will slash his prices hoping to increase his sales volume. In an oligopoly situation there is no need for a written or provable price fixing agreement that could be grounds for legal charges. It's a "gentleman's agreement" that would be impossible to prove in court. We have only a handful of oil companies. Don't be confused by all the corner gas stations. 99.9% of them are controlled by the parent oil companies and have no power to raise or lower their prices. Those that buck the system don't get their product for resale. Banks and insurance companies get government protection, in the name of patriotism for protecting them from foreign competition, usually American. Every Ontarioan knows that there's really not much difference in auto insurance premiums. As Gilda Radner used to say: "It's always SOMETHING!"

I vividly remember the promises to close the coal plants. No mention was made of deficits and finances. The promise was to shut them down IMMEDIATELY upon taking office! This is not at all surprising. We're talking a technical issue here and to be fair I'm sure that if the circumstances were reversed the Tories would have made a similar stupid and ignorant promise. Politicians are rarely technical people. Chuck Cadman was about the only one I ever heard of. They are poli-sci people. Artsies, not engineers. They could not be trusted to replace a plug on a lamp. I'm sure Dalton had to have it explained to him that they could not simply shut the coal burning plants down and replace their output with a few 2w solar cell re-charger panels from Canadian Tire. Likely so would have John Tory. It's an absolute certainly that the entire NDP caucus couldn't build a crystal radio let alone understand about power plants. The idea of having money available is not only moot but irrelevant with such people.

At the rate we're losing decent paying jobs here in Ontario I would think that we will have no shortage of volunteers among our youth. Not everyone wants to move to the oil patch.

More than that, Dalton's a hypocrite! There's scrubber technology already developed that will clean up the lion's part of the emissions from the coal plants. You'd think that if he was going to let them run for 15 years past his initial renege on his promise the least he could have done was to clean them up! But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! That would just draw attention back to his broken promise and be embarrassing! Obviously, dirty laundry is more important than dirty air.

I'm surprised that more people haven't seen the obvious. Drive-thrus came on board about the same time as smoking in Timmy's was banned. Smokers did NOT stay inside buying an extra coffee and donut when their habit was banned! Watch any drive-thru and see how many cars contain smokers. See how many just drive back into the parking lot where the driver sits there and sips his coffee with a smoke. The call for a ban on drive-thrus has nothing to do with engine idling. It's just another attempt to remove one more place where a smoker can smoke.

You might want to calm down and have a coffee. You're getting a bit righteous! You're exaggerating a bit when you say why some folks don't agree with you. You might consider it from a different perspective. You seem to be saying that you don't know yourself if some of the GW fans's approaches are practical or cost-effective but you're willing to place your confidence in them, particularly when you consider the problem real and dire. Not everyone agrees with you. Some of us know enough of the science to have problems accepting the approaches championed by the GW crowd. We know enough that we have grievous doubts about their premises. We believe that many of these approaches will cost vast sums of money and do not appear to have much chance of doing anything positive. You brand this as foolish because 1: we should just accept your experts and deny any contradictions with what education we already have and 2. we should get on board because it's IMPORTANT and doing ANYTHING is better than NOTHING! Sorry! I'll give you the same answer I gave the Witnesses who came to my door this afternoon. "I just can't accept your beliefs on what evidence and argument you have to offer. I'm just not a man of faith."

One word: contraband!

The problem with buying Manitoba power is that we would need to build a new and long corridor of high voltage transmission line towers to get the power to where we need it. That's a large capital investment and takes a few years. Dalton would certainly want to dodge that one. Since most folks have no idea that power needs wires to get to the cities they wouldn't give him any credit for building those lines. As for the NDP, from what I've heard they've been calling for the elimination of all coal fired plants with absolutely no mention of replacement power. All they ever seem to talk about is conservation, which of course is a mug's game anyway. How much power do they think conservation would offer? Conservation is really just another word for efficiency. Even if every one of us bought enough extra insulation to bring our homes up to R2000 standards it wouldn't be nearly enough to meet our growing needs. One steel plant or aluminum smelter makes our residential demands look like chicken feed in comparison. Besides, what if we achieved 100% efficiency? Not a single watt of power was wasted. We became 100% conservers! Now, how do we cope with growing demand? Consider a farming community of 100 people. They have a certain finite amount of cleared farmland available to grow food for everyone in the community. One spring they wake up and there are 5 new babies in the community. So they get a bit more conscientious about their farming and improve their efficiency. The babies are fed and grow just fine. They eventually marry and one spring there are 15 more babies! More "conservation" tactics are applied. They get more out of each plowed acre and they stop throwing away the potato peels and make them into restaurant appetizers. 25 more babies are born and 50 relatives retire and come to the community to live with their relations! See what's happening? Sooner or later there are no practical conservation efficiencies left! Without new land everybody will start to get hungry. Just as without new power sources we will have blackouts in our growing cities.

Well, maybe because we've been a net buyer rather than seller for some years now! When I was a lad we made a healthy profit exporting power but that was so long ago I was actually thin!

Good Lord! Now I'm Stephen Foster! Oh well, maybe I should sell the plantation and move to Beale Street. I can wait for Handey to midwife the Blues! Please don't misunderstand me. I too believe in the right to property. I just think that in the case of music those drafting the legislation are out of touch with what's happening and are moving so slow that the market abandoned waiting for them. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to PUT that genie back in the bottle! I'm just glad it's guys like you and not me trying to defend this present attempt as something workable. The thought of taking on such a job to me is a pretty formidable task. I think I'd find sifting water to be easier! I doubt very much if any musician anywhere will care a whit about this Bill if passed. As for the record companies, they deserve what they get. They asked for it!

Something tells me you're not a fisherman. Anglers have been having a ball since Darlington was created. The warm water is perfect for giving fish a longer feeding and growing season! Great Lakes are HUGE! Darlington only manages to raise the temperature of the water close to the plant by a couple of degrees. We're talking an enormous heat sink here. To the fish however, it makes all the difference in the world. Perhaps things are different where you live. Maybe your nukes are built by small ponds.