WIP

I can't get all hyped up with campaigning for my favourite party (like some here do) because I see Harper mostly as the worst of a bad lot....not that there's an alternative who will set thing right on environment and all of our other pressing issues. I would even trade our Green Party for the US Green Party run by Jill Stein, which being so far marginalized in an undemocratic duopoly system, does not play any games to win support or boost poll numbers. So, right in the US Green Party platform is a plank supporting "Steady State" or no growth economics, because of the unresolvable conflict of trying to cut carbon production while spurring more economic growth that mostly benefits a small minority of the rich. Even our Elizabeth May will talk about Green Jobs and Green Technologies, but she is not willing to question any of the pillars of capitalism...or at least not yet! When it comes to the big three on environment policy, we have one party (Conservatives) which is directly at war with the environment...trying to slow down any international carbon targets, and continue tar sands expansion. So, Harper's crew is far worse than his two rivals, but there's not a whole lot to brag about with the NDP or the Liberals today. Okay, and the carbon footprint of northern nations will be a little higher than in the global south, because of the need for heating during the winter; but my main attack is against 1. consumer capitalism - which devotes excessive wastes of resources on frivolous product needs created by sophisticated advertising schemes. some controls on advertising would bring a little sanity to the process. And 2. globalization has greatly expanded transportation links unnecessarily, and the carbon costs of transporting stuff half way around the world gets added to the global commons. Some of these problems might work themselves out, as big power utilities for example, are going to have a hard time competing when people start providing most of their electricity needs off-grid with solar, geothermal and windpower. But, a lot of solutions are going to depend on people becoming a lot better informed about the problems and deciding how they want to deal with them. So far, it's been a competition between capitalist deadenders in denial, and liberal half-measures that try to make a little money on the side promoting "green solutions." That might be a big part of the reason why so many people aren't taking these issues seriously yet.

Well, from what I've read previously on the subject, the problem is due to increasing pressure from weight of ice above compressing and deforming layers that are older and deeper. 800,000 years seems to be the cutoff point...at least for now, that they are able to distinguish and analyze separately. The ice sheets themselves...at least in some areas of the Antarctic, go back 35 million years ago. Before that time there was very little icing in the Antarctic. But that may have been related more to Antarctica's continued move to the far south than global average temperatures.

I don't know what WE seek! But our Government seeks to be part of the same American Empire that England and Australia have signed up with. And I agree with your basic premise that the troubles for the west in the Middle East are interwoven with the demands of running an empire....keeping the flow of oil moving from Saudi and the Gulf States, and propping up their corrupt useful idiot dictators that are hated and despised by the people living there. How does America and us also now expect to win any so called "War on terror" when the primary motivation for terrorism and terrorists is resentment and hatred of foreign invaders controlling their nations and sucking their resources out of the ground with little or no benefit for most of the people who live there?

I don't know how much of this crap I want to step through so......... Pure Neolliberal bullshit! And it has nothing to do with either Marx or Picketty. This fabrication that global poverty has declined in the past 30 years is only based on a report by the Asian Development Bank, which set the poverty rate goalpost at $1.25 per day. That wouldn't be much 30 or 40 years ago, but it would be laughable if it wasn't for the real misery that the growing numbers of calorie-deficient people around the world have to live with. Inflation would require setting that goalpost higher, and so would the rising cost of basic foods, which make up a large share of the spending of urban poor in third world cities around the world. That touches on another fallacy of the modern era...that the migration out of rural common lands to cities is an improvement for third world poor. This facade is only maintained because subsistence farmers growing their own food don't make a presence in economic measures like GDP, which will only consider these people when they are selling their labour to buy food. On the contrary, it means that income and wealth stratification increases, and like the mafia, most of the profits continue to be kicked up to the top of the pyramid. I've been wondering ever since I first joined this forum, just how airtight and selfcontained is this bubble you live in? The forcasts by the Club of Rome, which included Dennis and Donella Meadows...if anyone's wondering about the reference, made predictions based on various responses society would make to pollution and increasing resource scarcity. We seem to be tracking very closely with the expectations based on the assumption that we would mostly ignore consequences and carry on business as usual: Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse A finite world! Imagine that. I thought the world would just keep growing and stocking new metals and minerals in the ground to keep industrial civilization humming along! And fwiw Malthus may have been wrong on a lot of things, but his basic reasoning that population (uncontrolled during his time) would outstrip available food resources, was sound reasoning. Malthus prediction was delayed because the discovery of coal and then oil, provided lots of quick, cheap energy that saved Englands forests from being completely cut down for firewood. And a substantial portion of the lower classes emigrated to the Americas and other colonies, while imported food from those colonies allowed England to grow larger without threat of starvation. Since world population is still growing...Malthus cannot be delayed much longer! The UN FAO is forecasting that we need to grow more food by 2050 than has ever been produced since the dawn of civilization just to maintain adequate food supplies for the estimated 11 billion population by mid-century.

When my older brother was in high school, he built a homemade digital clock back in 1970 or 71...at a time when it was a big deal...and expensive for the time to get all the parts (about $70.00). Good thing his first name wasn't Muhammed!

How much do you want nuclear war? Because Assad's patron - Russia has it's only foreign naval base in Syria....so any expectations that Russia would just step back and let Syria fall was wishful thinking!

We don't seem to have much to do with anything anymore, except wiping America's ass! I don't know your position on climate change, but if you're a denier, you have a share of the blame for Syria becoming a failed state and devolving into anarchy and leading to millions on the march today. Because the catalyst which spawned unrest that led to a revolt and a civil war in Syria was a series of unprecedented droughts, that drove more than one million Syrian farmers off the land and into the cities.: Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria That was the first round of refugees, and in a region where fights over water spawn many conflicts, the trend towards drying in this region had been identified at least 10 years ago, and report prepared by Andrew Marshall for the Pentagon back in 2004 predicted the increase in wars and refugee crises by 2020....which is already happening now. The US Defense Dept. even during the climate change-denying president Bush was predicting a dangerous future that would strain global stability. So why did the Obama Administration reject a Russian offer to have Assad step down in 2012? West 'ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside' Seems like this is a mess that the US and their allies Saudi Arabia and Gulf States should have to deal with....since they created ISIS with all of their 'regime change' efforts!

When my kids were young, we were going to the burger joints too...but only on the weekend. There are a lot of people keeping McD's & others in business today, because they are stringing together part time jobs to make ends meet, and hardly have time to cook proper meals anymore. A provincial study conducted in Ontario this summer, found that over 60% of the workforce in Hamilton is employed in "precarious" work: part time, temporary, seasonal or contract work. Having a fulltime job in what used to be known as "Steeltown" is something of an anomaly these days! That got me to thinking on all of the American stories I've read in the past two years about how Walmart and McDonalds are providing forms and advice for their underpaid employees on how to apply for food stamps and other government benefits! I don't know if these companies are doing anything similar here in Canada...but I wouldn't put it past them! Once again, it shows us why corporate oligarchs will never become anarcho-capitalists! Government makes a convenient tool to offload their expenses...including providing food for underpaid employees in some cases.

Which has nothing to do with my point that the employer's obligations are minimal to non-existent for laid off employees in a non-union shop. Even in the union shop, the government has little recourse against foreign employers who renege on their obligations: case in point - it looks like the Ontario Government will be left with a bill of 400 million dollars to restructure the pensions of retired STELCO employees when US Steel decided to shut down most of its operations in Canada and is seeking bankruptcy protection in the US to offload their obligations on to the government. See, this is the role global neoliberal capitalism has for government: hold the bag while they run off with any profits! It's likely that US Steel had no honourable intentions in the first place when they bought STELCO. They just wanted to eliminate a competitor and work towards monopoly in North American steel production....a monopoly they lost back in the days of antitrust rules in the US...that are completely ignored today! The main reason Keynes missed on his prediction of shorter work weeks in the future, is because he didn't foresee the increased sophistication in the development of consumer desire-driven capitalism...that was just getting started during his time, and really took off after the age television began. In the 60's and 70's, it was recognized by policymakers on both sides of the border that advertising targeted at children needed greater scrutiny. I recall "Apple Jacks" cereal ads being one offender in particular that was forced to withdraw and create new ads for a cereal that was more than two thirds sugar by weight! But what about adults today? There are lots of people running around today who can't tell the difference between needs and wants! In the years since Keynes, the captains of industry and commerce have tried to keep production always on the increase...because declines in production when there is overcapacity cause depressions. So the average consumer started working longer hours to buy all of the status symbols they feel they need to impress others; women joined the workforce again (after the end of WWII, policymakers wanted women out of the workforce) but this time it was to buy a better house in the suburbs, two cars, the latest appliances etc.; and consumer credit became fast and loose so that anybody can qualify for more credit than they have the ability to pay for! But today, consumer debt, student debt, government debt, corporate debt, are all at record levels and there is no remaining capacity to provide the kind of economic growth that came to be expected for several decades. And the last thing that will solve present ills is doing more of the same, so something different...whether you want to call it socialism or not is going to have to replace the capitalism that dominates the globe today, and has spawned environmental crises, wars and millions of refugees looking for a place to go.

And what happens when there are no new lands to conquer and new resources to exploit? the point I was trying to make before is that a time comes when nothing's left in the jar! Even before it's all gone, it gets harder and takes longer to get more out, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about peanut butter or oil or iron or exotic metals like neodymium, the costs of exploitation keep going up as developers have to go after the resources they ignored or avoided when more profitable supplies were available. Tar sands is a good example, because everyone knew it was out there in Alberta even before the oil was discovered! But until the real oil started running out, all they used that tarsands crap for was paving roads. Now they try to turn it into oil products out of sheer desperation! So, using the oil example again, when the EROEI on oil was 100 to one, it was easy to serve as the lifeblood for an energy-intensive and energy-wasting economy. But, what happens when the EROEI drops to 10 to one, or three to one as some tarsands estimates indicate? Eventually a point is reached when a resource can't even raise the capital to keep digging or pumping it out of the ground! This is why many of the tarsands operations are still producing at a loss. Because if they shutdown, there may be no money coming in to restart these big expensive operations. The supply and demand curve only functions as long as supply is elastic and can be increased to meet a rising demand. If supplies can't be increased....or are increased only at too great a cost for the consumer, then the whole globalized monstrosity we're living through today starts grinding to a halt.

I'm listening to it now, as I didn't have time for this earlier. As a general rule, arguments from authority don't win me over. Whether or not Freeman Dyson considers climate modelling valid or not is moot, since the greater understanding today of the paleo record (especially about Abrupt Climate Change), and present day evidence of increasing species extinctions, makes any denial or diversionary tactics (like this) not worth any serious consideration. Dyson doesn't understand how complex climate systems are when he makes idiotic claims that higher CO2 levels make life flourish! The geologic record shows the exact opposite...with the ice ages being the times when large mammals diversify and flourish, and seas are teeming with life. A recent study commented on in Livescience connects rising temperatures with extinctions of megafauna...not disease and not early human hunters with spears killing them off: Mighty Mammoths Fell Prey to Rapidly Warming Earth Only thing I would add to that piece is that we better include the human species along with other present day megafauna that will be at risk of extinction during a similar rapid warming event in the near future. Too many writers act like we're somehow outside the system, and unaffected by changes in planetary boundaries...but, when we see millions of people migrating en masse, and increasing food prices that are only going to be higher next year, there will either be a dramatic decline in human population this century....or there will be nobody left by the end of the century! There are too many bad trends - including climate change, that demonstrate how the apex species get wiped out in major extinction events. Maybe the trilobites thought they were going to continue on forever also! Even if their satellite imagery are giving an accurate assessment of land-based biomass (this would not include sea life where plankton levels have declined more than 40% since 1950's because of higher temps and acidification) they may want to check their satellite pictures again this year, as the past few years are showing an increasing number and intensifying level of forest fires on every continent...which are another unexpected feature of rising temps and GHG levels in the atmosphere. This is another example of how petroleum-funded BS tells half truths and less than half truths about climate! According to the 800,000 year analysis of Antarctic ice cores, atmospheric CO2 has cycled from 180 to 300 ppm, and only exceeded 300 during the just prior to the start of the 20th century. I personally believe the Gaia Hypothesis/Theory provides the best explanatory model for how and why our planetary biosphere has managed to keep CO2 levels within this range. It doesn't matter whether you accept it or not, simple fact is that all of the plants in the world are not going to push CO2 levels below 150 and kill off life on Earth, because photosynthesis becomes too difficult for plants when there is less than 180 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. And the claim that 250 is borderline starvation for plants is complete bullshit, as can be demonstrated by looking at that ice core record under the "800,000" tab. A quick look shows that CO2 levels have been below 250 for most of the past 800,000 years....that wouldn't happen if it was a "starvation" level! And when we go to the deep past, that is where oil lobby bullshit most misrepresents the paleo-record, because the long trend that can be roughly assess through chemical rock analysis, shows that over the course of Earth's history GHG levels in the atmosphere were much, much higher at the beginning than they are today, and there was a very good reason why the biosphere of Earth would try to keep greenhouse gas levels high: the Sun was much dimmer and giving off less energy two, three or four billion years ago...whenever life on Earth began, and has been gradually growing stronger over the milennia. So, the strategy of the collective of living biota on Earth has been to keep sequestering more and more carbon out of the atmosphere to keep temperatures at an optimal range for most life. So, the first thing that happened when it started getting too hot was begin photosynthesizing plants and pumping oxygen into the atmosphere and removing the methane that used to be part of the early atmosphere when anaerobic bacteria were the main life forms of Earth. And the fact that Gaia has tried to keep CO2 levels below 300 for at least the past million years, is as good an indication as any that we have set Earth on course for a wild ride with odds against our long term survival! And this is what it all boils down to: climate change denial is the refuge for those who discover that their ways of living and doing business are incompatible with any effective strategy to stop global warming! Pointless objection, since carbon credit market schemes were concocted as a capitalist method of reducing carbon outputs. It's not a strategy that anyone serious about the issue ever considered. But, it was tossed up by guess who....Stephen Harper as the Conservatives answer to Stephan Dion's plan to introduce a national carbon tax! So, are you going to reconsider carbon credits? I chose my signature line: "Anybody who believers exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" for a reason. I don't believe that any brand of capitalism, whether it's liberal or conservative, can deal with these kinds of problems, because all of our mainstream economics are based on an assumption that growth can continue on exponentially forever. Since we live in a finite world, this should be an obvious absurdity. But, arguing that the human population has to live within the LIMITS to growth that our planet can provide sustainably, leads too many people to start thinking short term....very short term, that they are going to miss out on acquiring things that are high on their wish list. So, in the final analysis, it's not a comfortable message, and likely not even a hopeful message, but people should be told the truth instead of a load of hopeful rubbish created to get them to budge in the right direction on environment issues.

Never got around to seeing Supertramp in their heyday, though I had most of their albums. I saw Roger Hodgson a few years ago when my wife and I saw a solo show he was doing at Casino Niagara a few years ago. Before he took the stage, their were so many instruments and equipment on stage, I expected a full band coming out to back him up....even after he and one and only one sideman came out to do the first two or three songs. But, Roger with the help of one other multi-instrumentalist were able to perform all of the songs he did with Supertramp....even Fool's Overture! Seems that 'best concert' is seriously skewed by how old we were, how high we were at the time that I'm not sure if it can be any kind of yardstick to judge how good the band was that was performing. I think I'll go with Paul Simon as my pick....not because it was the best concert I ever saw...likely not, but it was one that I did not want to be at (my fiancee at the time sort of armtwisted me into this one), and it was a Toronto concert staged not long after the Graceland album was released. Graceland was taking a long time to win fans over at first, and wasn't really getting a lot of radio airplay until more than a year after release. It seemed to get unflattering comparison with other white musicians discovering African music like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel, and after turning out a few solo clunkers, there was a feeling that Paul Simon was just looking for some Third World cred to restart his career. Nevertheless, it was much better than I expected, and I was glad to be there:

Here's a term you and other believers in unending economic expansion need to learn: EROEI (energy-return on energy invested), Put simply, every non-renewable natural resource input used to build civilization....from oil to iron ore and copper to the increasingly crucial 'rare earth' elements, are exploited by the principle of 'picking the low-hanging fruit first.' So, since oil is the most studied and commented on example, when the petroleum era really took off in the 1920's, oil companies focused on the largest, most easily accessible deposits that could guarantee a return on energy invested of 100 to one. Needless to say, the extraction of oil was highly profitable, and the major costs were securing land rights as cheaply as possible, both in America and abroad as the search for cheap oil went to the middle east and elsewhere. Since there are no more cheap oil fields left in the world, the search for oil to keep the wheels of modern global capitalism rolling, has...with great regret on behalf of the producers, descended deeper into continental shelf offshore deposits, and the "tight" oil we are already so familiar with: kerogen/or shale oil, and bitumen/the tarsands equivalent of oil. This crap is not only expensive on an ecological basis, it also requires high amounts of energy to extract and refine for market. So, any honest accounting on EROEI numbers for shale and tarsands determine that....even if extraction can be made more efficient, you can't break even on this crap unless oil prices are at least $70 per barrel....hence the present quandary. Because our economies can't function apparently when oil is $100+ per barrel. Every time oil has pushed past $100, economic output goes into decline....like it is today. The rising costs/declining EROEI of other....close to 90 essential raw materials should be added in to the calculations, but the message for anyone....regardless of who or what they vote for, is don't expect economic growth next year, because when it comes to oil, the shit hasn't actually hit the fan yet, but it will very soon! Because right now, the decline in oil has been caused primarily by global drop in demand/not increases by any major oil producers. But the oil producers....even of expensive oil, can't halt production because of the high amounts of capital invested in their operations. They have to keep producing, even if it means producing at a loss for now. And the only way this works is if prices all of a sudden turn around next year. That's not going to happen until a lot of producers are wiped out financially, and then the dilemma will be prices will rise, but there won't be any available sources of capital to restart their operations! The fact that the real costs of production and manufacturing are so detached from both politics and economic theory today, is on full display when we have three candidates debate about why the economy is declining and how they....and only they will put the right bandaids on to fix it and restore economic growth. So, on a thread that's supposed to be about comparing Harper with the other candidates, ALL of them are out to lunch in my estimation when it comes to their policies and proposals about the economy. Like I said before, I'm voting for whoever provides the sure vote against the local Harper rep in my riding, and if it continues to look like West Hamilton is locked in by the Liberals, I can afford to throw away my vote and cast a vote for the Green Party on election day.

No, because her clay feet are already getting chipped away at today....her main skeleton in the closet is the one she flies as justification to vote for her: becoming Hewlett-Packard CEO and first woman in US history to head a major US corporation. Problem is that her term as CEO was a disaster, marked by the failure on all fronts of her decision to push for the merger with Compaq. The HP takeover was heavily leveraged with high interest junk bond borrowing, that was paid for by slashing payrolls of both companies....even worse, HP employees were forced to compete against Compaq's for the remaining jobs that were left. HP went into a decline that continues to this day...so they can't blame all their problems of Carly of course. But, nobody at all levels of the company had anything good to say about her, after she grabbed her golden parachute and bailed out. Worth asking if Carly Fiorina is such a great businesswoman, why was she never apparently invited to take on a top level managerial role at some other corporation? Instead she's played the right wing "charitable foundation" circuit, tried to get a job at Fox news, and then turned to politics. But, she's never been able to follow up on her great business credentials for some reason! But, it is pretty damn obvious that the billionaire puppetmasters who run the Republican Party and right wing media, are scared shitless of a Trump nomination! When I got home several hours after they had their little debate, the first thing I did was turn on my computer and check the rss feeds on my browser. And reuters had not one, but three news entries just on Carly Fiorina and her wonderful performance in the debate. Not that I'd bother watching anyway, but even if she set the place on fire and smoked the other Republican wannabees, every other news search I did made it pretty damn obvious that a lot of important people are shifting towards her as the anti-Donald. FWIW, Carly is an even worse choice for Republicans to make to try to woo back women voters than Sarah Palin! At HP, Carly condemned any and all policies that might provide more opportunities for women or address issues like sexual harassment on the job. That may put her in good standing with old white Republican men....but she would expand the base about as much as Ben Carson will win black votes for Republicans!

Fine and dandy EXCEPT that we have a capitalist system which has thrown off all restraints since your side was able to get globalization and the dismantling of unions and workers rights and benefits over the last 30 years or so. Under a capitalist system, a worker with no rights to collective bargaining, is a serf, who can be cast out when their work is no longer needed for the profitability of the company. If we had an economy organized around socialist principles, the introduction of automation would allow EVERYONE to work fewer hours and still be able to make a living. This was actually the futuristic vision of John Maynard Keynes, who made the unfortunate assumption that the owners of capital were interested in the welfare of society at large, and not just in their own narrow self-interests. So, Keynes prediction of what should have become an 18 hour work week a few decades ago didn't happen, because the capitalists have taken all of the surplus benefits of increasing productivity!

There's a different/but similar thread somewhere here where I posted about the US example of dangerous occupations using Dept. of Labour statistics, that listed policing as the 14th....not first....most dangerous occupation in America. You wouldn't know it from the media spin and propaganda, but at some point, over-concern for the safety of police officers puts the public in danger.....and I'm talking about the stage they've clearly reached in a lot of US cities, where police have a carte blanche to assault, injure and murder without consequence....providing there's no video of the incident of course!

It reminds me of a discussion I was listening to on a radical left/anarchist podcast discussing the first hit movie after the creation of motion pictures and cinema: Birth of a Nation. This classic silent movie which revolutionized and set the template for how to make action movies and film outdoors (even after the introduction of soundtracks) presents the Northern War of Aggression (some call it The Civil War) as a marauding band of bluecoats supposedly raping and pillaging their cities and farms and worst of all: setting the negroes free to run amok and rape and pillage....until the Ku Klux Klan forms and rides in to save the day, and save the white race in the South. The message from the KKK and every other rightwing fascist government and movement ALWAYS presents the persecuting dominant class as the real endangered oppressed class....whether they be white Americans, white Europeans, Jews in Israel, the tactic of fascism....which bleeds its way into all nativist rightwing thought to varying degrees, focuses and utilizes the fears, hatreds and resentments of their target base, and it turns from conservativism to fascism when that formerly comfortable ruling class is declining in income and status, and fearing losing control and the benefits they've enjoyed while being #1.

And now we have atheist assholes like Sam Harris and Bill Maher, to present a hip, pseudoliberal argument for US neoconservative empire-building! When the neocons were Republican assholes in the Bush Administration and right wing media, they couldn't appeal to anyone to the left of the rabid right. So they recalibrated their message to make bombing, invading and regime-changing targets on the world map is the liberal thing to do.....it's for their own good....to save them from Islam and give them freedom.

If you're referring to The Club of Rome, Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich and others.....they were right! Look at the Club of Rome forcasts for business-as-usual exploitation of the environment, and everything is on track for modern global capitalism to grind down to ashes. The only thing missing 40 years ago was global warming/climate change, because the effects of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere were not very well understood in the late 60's. The basic scenario for how the club saw things would go in this century is sure as hell a lot better forcasting than the techno-optimists like Julian Simon or Herman Kahn ever came up with!

You can bet for damn sure that Harper and the now-ex Australian Prime Minister were happy to wrap themselves around their resource export-focused economic policies when the prices were on the way up. Now that they are down, and the prices won't go up any time soon because the main developers cannot just unplug them during economic downturns, Harper is trying to erase all connection with resource-focused economic policy.

And they will....if they don't fall asleep first.

At best, religious training and education instills good social principles and reinforces the message through regular practice. But nobody...including fundamentalists...whether they claim to be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu etc. follows orders contained within their holy books EVEN if they claim to do so! It is rhetoric that demonstrates the careful cherrypicking behind the claim every single time a fundamentalist.....like Kentucky's Kim Davis, in the latest pop example, apply their adherence to scripture to justify what they want/ or don't want to do, YET ignore the same books when it orders them to do things they cannot or are not willing to do.....like never divorce under any circumstances! But, the suspicions and the assorted crap on your rightwing sites are just a re-shifting of rhetoric that used to apply to communist infiltration in an earlier time when the Soviet Union was presented as the threat for warmongers and rightwing demagogues to rally against!

I would advise any reader who is not a conservative unthinking drone, to go to the manifesto (notably not linked on this MSM rightwing rag) and read it themselves. When it comes to the politics....sadly the last truly principled national NDP leader was David Lewis...way back in the early 70's...compare his concerns with the stated bland concerns of Mulcair and today's NDP is badly in need of a Jeremy Corbyn on this side of the Atlantic....to clear out the middling, opportunistic centrists and make the party on the left a REAL party on the left that offers a clear alternative on policy. Ever since David Lewis bucked advice from his inner circle to accept a Trudeau budget in 1974 and was forced to resign, we've had Broadbent, Jack Layton, and now Mulcair (and of course others in the middle years hardly of note) who make that shift to the center every damn time they smell the opportunity to become Prime Minister! Well, if the primary objective is to just win, what happens the day after? I would argue that the examples of Blair....especially Blair!, but also Clinton and Obama, demonstrate that issues on the left suffer in neglect every damn time some centrist opportunist takes control of the political left. So, now that Mulcair is pivoting to the middle with his balanced budget/middle class rhetoric, I hope he fails in his main objective...like every other centrist NDP leader has failed when they abandon all principles, and if Justin Trudeau wins, his pivot to the left will mean either put up/or shut up if gets elected. But, we have no way of knowing one way or another, because the Liberal Party is the great chameleon of Canadian politics!

it must be lonely out there on the prairie as a wheat farmer defending the conservatives who have destroyed the tools like cooperatives and marketing boards that Canadian farmers used to have to protect themselves from being economically destroyed by glorious capitalist market forces!