Moonbox

The big question we have to ask, I think, is whether Quebec is all of the sudden on board with the NDP, or if instead it is hijacking the NDP altogether. If the NDP can remain a truly federal party, things might be looking up. If, however, the NDP turns into the new Quebec-centric party, the CPC is going to be in charge of things for quite some time (barring a revival of the Liberals).

Not really. You're not taking him seriously because you're trolling him.

No problem! Slightly corrected hopefully...but I'm like 12 years out of French school so I'm sure it's still not perfect.

okay THAT was really funny.

That's not the argument at all. The argument is that Quebec should abandon their petulant "Our way or we vote Bloc" mentality and realize that the country doesn't revolve around their protesting. Alberta figured it out when they transitioned from Reform to Alliance to CPC, and look what happened. They moderated, they accomodated and they won Ontario and a majority for Harper. A lot of people out West are still frothing at the mouth that abortion and gay marriage are legal, but they kept their cool and still voted Conservative. All I have is a big *yawn* for the sovereignty argument. Montreal isn't interested. As for the Bloc, you missed the entire point. You don't need Quebec to win a majority, nor do you even need Quebec to run a minority. The Conservatives have proved that through several terms.

I just reading a seperate thread and I came across an interesting post by wwildbill that I thought merited further discussion. I'm sorry if this is cross-posting or whatever, but regardless: Quebec has left itself with no voice of power in Ottawa. That leaves them with only the perpetual threat of separation as a lever. That situation has changed as well, with large portions of TROC now believing that losing Quebec would save them much money, in a time when money is very tight. Bill started off talking about how strict supply-chain management for things like dairy etc is in danger of being eliminated, and he brought up how strongly Quebec has always supported this type of protectionism. At any rate, with governments in the past, there was always a strong element of pandering towards Quebec (Chretien Liberals and even Harper in the early days are recent examples). Quebec was always seen as necessary to winning a majority government in Canada, and although their desires seemed to differ strongly from anglo-Canada, governments often caved to them for their support. This time, however, Harper won a majority with barely a whiff of support from Quebec, and he's not likely to improve that anytime soon. He's in a unique position now, where no other PM has ever been, to start dismantling the 'panderism' that Quebec's enjoyed for a long time. He couldn't care less what Quebec wants/demands, because as far as he's concerned it's a political wasteland. We've talked about it a fair bit before, but Canada has never been more 'regionalized' in my lifetime than it is now. A lot of people will blame Harper for this, which I guess they can, but what I think it has more to do with is the fact that what Quebec demands from the federal government is so far divorced from what anglo-Canada wants that this was a pre-determined conclusion. As long as this divide continues, the situation isn't going to improve. As English-Canada becomes increasingly more and more pre-eminent, this is only going to get worse for Quebec. It seems to me that they have two options. Either they can either continue down their current course, and become more and more irrelevant, or they can moderate a little and again make themselves part of the federation. The Bloc Quebecqois or any similar alternative is not going to help them moving forward. Let's see if they're smart enough to figure this out.

waldo you and I are very rarely on the same side of an argument, but I'll give you some friendly advice for this thread regardless. They're not reading your references or cites, and they're certainly not interested in a reasonable argument. The F-35 is a debacle, it's clear to anyone who cares to look at how much the program is costing and how delayed it already is, and it's almost certain it will be delayed further. When most of the responses you're getting are stupid (not even funny) things like this: you're better off not bothering to respond.

Proving your point how? Libya's AA network would have been garbage 25 years ago and easily dismantled by the Americans even back then. Combining faulty and bargain Soviet tech with incompetent leadership and poorly trained operators is a proven recipe for failure. Add to this that Libya's armed forces were long the laughing stock of Africa (not the world - Africa...let that sink in), where rebels driving technicals were evenly matched against Libyan tanks, you start to get a picture of their efficacy. Adding 30 years of obsolesence to an already useless armed forces just took them from 2% effective to 1.5% effective. Except Amerrrica doesn't exist in a vacuum, like a lot of you seem to think.

The Americans are already so far ahead of the game it's not even funny and will continue to be for some time, with or without the F-35. So what? Libya was running a large, but dilapitated AA network that hadn't been upgraded for 20-25 years. That's the wack-a-mole I was talking about. Yeah we already went over that.

Whoopy. It's still going to cost $150-200M, or more, per plane. People have started calling the F-35 a flying piano, which is pretty funny.

Justin Trudeau would probably be the best choice for the Liberals. I'd never vote for him, because his father was Canada's worst PM ever as far as I'm concerned, but I bet he could single-handedly throw the NDP back 15 years in the polls and get young people to vote for him.

because they wanted to fit too many things into one plane. Unfortunately, it's turned out to be way more expensive than it was supposed to be.

A couple of things...first, ICBM launches can be detected by satellite from outer space. Second, nobody needs $150M/unit recon planes. That's what drones are so good for.

Congratulations. You'll end up having spent probably 2-3x as much money as originally budgeted and have fewer planes than you originally projected. We'll probably be joining you too. I'll give you a high five when we get to the party...

Obviously. At this point, however, the program is ridiculously far off the original mark that it probably should be cancelled, and people knew that years ago. In the end putting all their eggs into this one basket seems to have been a mistake, and it's too late, too expensive and too embarrassing now to back out of it. Yeah thanks. I know... Smallc, I usually find you're one of the more sane posters on this forum, but sometimes you really stick your head in the sand. Virtually nobody, aside from Harper and the Tories, are estimating a $75M flyaway cost. Defense analysts aren't, the Pentagon and DoD aren't, foreign governments aren't and anyone that can follow the numbers aren't. Get real.

Buyouts/severance are still far cheaper in the long run than actually paying the contracts. Buyouts happen in the private sector all of the time. It saves the companies money.

Maybe spending ~$200M flyaway cost/unit so that we can play wack-a-mole bullying third world militaries isn't worth it. At this point, it's starting to look like everyone would be better off flying gen 4.5 aircraft, at 1/2 to 1/3 the price, for the next 15 years until someone competent comes out with a more reasonable platform. Canada's going to have to go along with whatever the US and its allies do, but the ideal situation for me would be to see the Pentagon pull the plug on this debacle. To put this in perspective, consider the F-22. In the overall aircraft mix, the F-22 was originally conceived as the modern day F-15/F-14. It was to be the overpriced dogfighting cadillac of the sky. The F-35, on the other hand, was meant to replace the F-16 and F-18. It was to be lighter, cheaper, far more numerous and fulfill all sorts of roles. Strangely, the F-22 was cancelled because it was deemed to expensive. At $150M/unit (with very few built), the F-22 is stealthier, more agile and more deadly than the F-35, which although originally meant to be the cheaper alternative, is turning out to be far more expensive. That just gives you an idea of how far wrong the whole process went.

You mean you don't have as many opportunities to troll and bait people into moronic arguments? Oh dear. I can only hope that this place remains boring for you. Maybe you'll move on and spare us.

What does this prove though Derek? An equally revealing question would be which nations have locked themselves into contracts and/or received any planes so far? Answer met that please. He addressed the question for what it was - completely irrelevant and a pretty lame attempt to misdirect the discussion from the very real problems the JSF program is facing. Well then why are you asking dumb rhetorical questions and then insisting that the obvious answer somehow disproves waldo's point, when in fact it means absolutely nothing?

Are they locked into anything yet? No? So who cares. If you need me to I can link you all sorts of articles about how upset the US government, Pentagon and basically everyone is about how the JSF has progressed - WAYY late, grossly overbudget and with few solutions in sight. I used to be all in favour of the program, but not anymore. I have completely different reasons from waldo, because his are based on his expert opinion that manned fighters are already obsolete, but I think he and I would both agree that the program is an unmitigated disaster at this point and will go down as one of the biggest fiascos in US military procurement history.

Thanks for the great lesson. We had no idea! Most voters don't know jack **** about the election, know less about the specific candidates in their ridings and vote based on which leader they like best, so yeah.

What specific policies are you talking about punked? I'd really like to know how uncle Jack saved the Canadian economy. Really, I'm dying to know. Ooh. Bill gets slammed with a left hook kindergarten comeback. "I know you are but what am I!?"

What are you basing this on, exactly? We'll have a housing correction, sure. These things ALWAYS happen eventually. Will the housing market implode and will the banks fall apart like in the US? Nope. It's pretty easy to come up with genius advice like this after the government pulls the rug out from underneath the housing market. If you can arrange to put the place up for sale, find a buyer and have them arrange financing within the next week or so, you might do well yeah, but good luck with that. My bet is we'll see prices fall in Toronto EXTREMELY soon.

What do you mean? Okay well the conversation seemed like an actual conversation until this...

well I agree with you, except we're nowhere near as bad as the Americans in this regard.