Wild Bill

Hey, he won, didn't he? This confirmed my worst suspicions of my fellow Ontario citizens. As a whole, they don't care a fig for protecting their neighbour's rights. They'll whine and cry if it's their own ox being gored but they seem to be too self-centred to lift a finger in support of the townsfolk of Caledonia. Those who refuse to stand up will eventually be cut down.

This is a good point that rarely gets mentioned. I wonder if anyone can provide some links to show if the French forces had won if they would likely have been just as kind to the English. I suspect not. The benevolent terms of Wolfe's victory were quite progressive for the time and virtually unknown amongst other warring nations. It was an excellent way to found a new nation. It is quite likely that if the French had won the battles for the new world they would have kicked the English off their farms, enslaved their sons, boffed their daughters and eradicated their language more completely than the English had done to the Irish and Scottish. Come to think of it, perhaps that's where Bills 101 and such drew their inspiration...

Well, you sure know how to kick off a thread! That being said, I'm not sure if you're playing devil's advocate here. Surely you don't believe your point about PET's popularity? I lived through those times. Ole Pierre never had absolute support even in Ontario. You either loved him or hated him. There was no inbetween. While he obviously had enough votes to win enough of the available seats to win power (not always with a majority) he never held anywhere near the majorities of Brian Mulroney. There is a very human tendency to project our wishes onto reality. While it might feel good it is rarely accurate. If you want to make a reputation as a reliable prophet you're gonna have to learn to be a bit more objective. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could vote for Dalton McGuinty after he threw an entire town to the wolves, depriving them of even the basic right of police protection. Still, it was obvious that he was going to win the last provincial election.

It's called "off-loading" and it's one of the oldest political tricks in the book! Jails and such cost the GOVERNMENT money! Criminals on the loose cost us, usually through our insurance companies and our monthly premiums. True, governments pay with taxes collected from us but the difference is that we see those taxes in hard and obvious numbers. Whatever costs are shoved onto us are hidden in the day to day costs of just living. Politicians don't like us having a clear picture of how much they rake from us and how they spend it. To most politicians the solution to a tight budget is to find a way to off-load a cost onto the public at large, without being obvious about it. There are all kinds of examples. One might be the "Blue Box" recycling program. Our leaders chose to have the separation of metal, paper and plastics done by US, at the source. We get lectured about how easy it is to properly recycle and implications that if we don't comply we're merely lazy. What's never mentioned is the TIME involved! Labour time would cost the local municipal government. Making us do it means their budget looks good. Of course, the inevitable problem is that they off-load a LOT of the labour for a LOT of such programs onto the taxpayer. If you are working 8-10 hours a day, perhaps with another hour or two for the highway commute you can rapidly get stressed for time and energy, especially if you're trying to have some time for your family. If you oppose any of these "motherhood" programs of course you're labeled as an "evil polluter who wants to kill the planet". In many other countries trash is picked up as found by the curb and separation is done at large centres. These centres provide jobs, sometimes as a form of "workfare" but more usually just "regular" style. The more progressive actually burn the trash to produce electricity, using modern technologies that are amazingly "clean". Our politicians find it easier to just "dump" the problem on us, if you'll pardon the pun. If your city has lagged behind in running its public transit system the city will start touting walking programs and bicycle use. Ads are much cheaper than some new buses. Does your city need some new snowplows? Make the citizen shovel the sidewalk in front of his own property. Here in southern Ontario if you have an accident on the highway and your car is still driveable you're expected to drive it yourself to an "accident reporting centre". There you will be given an accident report for you to write up yourself. Instead of an actual police officer you'll deal with a cheaper civilian employee. My brother had a minor dent on the QEW between Hamilton and Toronto a few years ago and was introduced to this new system. What he found most amusing was questions on the report asking "Were you driving in an unsafe or dangerous manner?" The idea of some bureaucrat actually expecting honest answers to such posers had him in stitches!

Well, if that is what this poll shows it will be the first time ever a poll has done so! Polls are snapshots at any given point in time. They ALWAYS change the moment an election is called! Ask the NDP. They always show higher in polls until people have to actually get serious about voting for them. Right now Canadians couldn't care less about another election. Polls show how they feel when they have the luxury of staying "theoretical". When the election writ is dropped suddenly they have to decide if even though they are not happy about this or that with the Harper Tories can they instead bring themselves to vote for Dion? In Quebec, have they totally forgotten about Adscam? The fact that the polls show that Dion is rock bottom as a choice for PM is very telling. We Canadians NEVER get to vote for someone that has our total approval! It's always a question of who smells the least. We also never get a clear cut choice. We have to weigh an entire package. We don't get to pick our hamburger toppings. The parties deck their burgers in only one style and we have to decide what we can live with. Voters will have to decide if the fact that they aren't totally thrilled with Harper's policies re Afghanistan are enough to stomach having Dion as PM. Obviously, the Tories think that for most folks it'll be just too much to swallow. It should be an interesting vote.

How do you focus on "assistance and reconstruction" while dodging bullets and bombs? In practice, aren't you saying that we would then be forced to pull out altogether? Also, which particular Afghans would be allowed to decide what's good for them? Do you mean that some of the Taliban tribes would conduct a national poll and abide by the outcome? That it would be a majority decision? Are you also saying that it's alright for us to totally abandon the women of Afghanistan to a life of no schooling and no rights? Please clarify.

Hey, "great minds think alike, but...." The thing about the lash is that from anecdotes of those times from those who received it is that the deterrent was powerful! Usually it was given to "young monkeyshines", for lack of a better term. Repeat offences were almost zero. Invariably the young offender straightened out and became a better citizen. Nobody wanted to ever receive the lash again. What's more, although modern forensics makes wrongful convictions much less likely today, mistakes are not permanent, like capital punishment or even losing years of your life in prison on a bum rap.

Perhaps we could start a thread about the value of bringing back the lash. The lefties can whine all they like but the fact is that it was effective as a corrective method.

Depends on who's playing. Jimi Hendrix always did a nice job with wa. So did Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Are you saying two wrongs make it right? At least for Liberals? I say if both or either has contravened the Elections Act then bust 'em! Don't use one as the excuse for the other!

Sounds a lot like your textbook "socialist workers paradise". The conflict between the "superiority of native culture" and women's rights must be enough to drive the typical NDP supporter into schizophrenia! Maybe not. Like the Red Queen, they seem to be quite able to "believe six impossible things before breakfast". Like Dion believing that we can restrict our Afghanistan involvement to simply rebuilding roads and schools without having to worry about anyone shooting at us or planting bombs. For too many of this type of folk it seems like for them a stop sign is a week's good reading...

That's an American rule. There is no such Canadian rule. Perhaps you should learn more about Canada.

So? If my granny had wheels she wouldn't bump her butt when she hops! How's that for mixed metaphors? If Trudeau's gang hadn't begun the national debt, or Dief hadn't cancelled the Arrow, or disco had never happened...

Well, your vote and mine will cancel out. I guess we'll just have to see who's view represents the majority.

By now you've seen a number of posts explaining how the political opinions of an adolescent rarely stay the same as he matures. This is not at all surprising. Most adolescents are running on simple intelligence that has not yet been tested with experience. They've not yet learned that logic is merely a tool of thinking. You can logically prove anything if you only deal with supporting facts or evidence and are blissfully ignorant of anything that could prove contradictory. However, your question was actually "Do you think Elizabeth May would be a prime minister within the next 20 years?" This is quite another "fish kettle"! You're asking if she personally has what it takes to attract the majority of the nation's electoral votes. Elizabeth seems like a nice lady but as I like to say she appears to have dropped all hard sciences in school shortly after her beans failed to sprout out of that jar full of tissue paper! What's more, politically she seems more interested in knocking out Harper by supporting Dion than in winning seats for her OWN party! No, she will only attract the die-hard Green fanatics, who would vote for a cardboard box as long as it was painted Green.

Egyptian pharoahs?

+1! I worked in business for years and heard this crap all the time. The unspoken "rest of the story" goes like this: "Because of our disadvantages you have to set me and a few other guys up in a protected oligopoly! In return we'll be sure to make political donations!" So we have banks and insurance companies protected at home from foreign competition while they are free to go out into the great wide world to buy up or compete with foreign companies on their home turf. I live by Hamilton, Ontario. This is a city with great problems, having failed to replace lost manufacturing business with "new wave" over the years. The standard joke going around about my city goes like this: "When a new business approaches most cities they roll out the red carpet. Hamilton rolls out the red tape!" This problem in philosophy runs all the way to the federal level, in too many cases.

Does it matter to you?

FOUR adults? News to me! Have you got a link for this? Preferably one not from Six Nations? I don't need to guess what they'll say.

http://www.thespec.com/article/255859 The youths charged appear at the end of this article. Two aged 18 and one aged 15. They couldn't handle a 52 year old man? For that matter, couldn't they have simply ran away from him and got some adults involved that could have escorted him out of the house? And this link has the initial report of his injuries, which later were reported as even more serious. http://www.thespec.com/article/248482 "Yep! It was self defence, officer! The old guy attacked us so we had no choice but to beat him into a coma! That old guy is some kind of ninja!" Again, Goebbels would be proud! It's incidents like these that make me think the best solution to the Six Nations dispute is a Gaza Strip style wall. For reason to work both parties must be reasonable.

Thank you, DOP! Much appreciated! And there you have it. Jennie's next alias should be Dennis!

Gee, and I thought only white men could be racist! http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/env....html?id=270365

He was an OLD MAN! They were teenagers! What glory! What honour! I'm surprised those young lads didn't feel the need to use a howitzer to defend themselves from the old geezer... Every time we hear of this sort of thuggery we get a steaming load of historical revisionism about how it didn't really happen, or they were forced into it, or an old man was actually a Kung Fu ninja warrior armed with razor sharp shiraken, or the situation was a faked putup by white racists trying to make natives look bad or yadda, yadda, yadda... Goebbels would be proud...

This only emphasizes the point that the aboriginals have made a mistake by getting mad at the Caledonia townsfolk and using them as cannon fodder in their dispute with the government, idiot politicians and lawyers. There was little to win by such a tactic and a lot was lost. The Six Nations dispute is only going to fester as it goes on. I don't expect Dalton will do anything significant for the townsfolk or come to any lasting resolution with SN. It may become a big issue next election, depending on what stand the opposition Tories take. Harper is in no hurry. Why should he help get Dalton off the hook, when Dalton has been so negative towards Harper and his party? No, he's going to let Dalton squirm on the hook till the cows come home. Meanwhile, most of the folks taking the aboriginal side on this board strike me as very naive. They seem to take it as a fact there is some "Cosmic Policeman" who would force Canadian governments to obey the (aboriginal!) interpretation of Law. In reality there is nothing to force governments to obey their own laws. These aboriginal spokespeople posters have proven this with their own words, when they say that Canadian governments have broken their own laws. Moreover, the townsfolk of Caledonia have learned this, to their sorrow, when an OPP dispatcher tells a scared housewife "Don't call us anymore! We can do nothing for you!" After these examples, how on earth can they expect that if they demanded the moon Canadian governments would just say, "OOPS! Sorry! Quite right! Just let us get our wallets out!"? It won't happen. If the natives decide then to get violent they will find that while the Canadian military is no longer much by world standards it is more than enough to deal with Six Nations. And Six Nations has burned much of their support in the mainstream community. It's the difference between being anal-retentive and realistic. When someone shouts "You have to do this! It's in the rules!", usually they end up being mocked and ignored. Remember the peasant Arthur met in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"? When he asks for directions and the peasant gives him a long political "loony left" diatribe, until Arthur finally shoves him out of the way and just leaves him? I wish I could remember the peasant character's name. It might be a useful suggestion for a new member alias for some on this board who keep continually changing theirs...

Bankrupt Canada? In what court? Any government that caved to such ridiculous demands would be hooted out of office by Canadian citizens. The natives in effect would be expecting such a government to commit political suicide. Of a certainty the natives would never get such judgments or Canada would simply refuse to pay! Certainly, all Indian Act payments would be considered in any theoretical judgement.