Moonbox

No, that's not at all what anyone is saying. That's just your attempt to trivialize their argument. When you combine a teacher's salary, benefits and paid time-off (3 months!) you end up with a compensation package that's so far beyond the average in Canada that the argument you're comment is ridiculous. Teachers are overpaid already, by a long shot. They're also in excess supply. If teachers' compensation was reasonable to begin with (and per pupil costs hadn't risen over 50% from 2002-2011), then perhaps the increases would be justified. If you're already overpaid, however, the idea that you should get regular raises is just funny.

The secrecy doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong. It means that we don't know and can't really judge for ourselves. The public's condemnation of the NDP in this case is no more suspect than your assertion that the Liberals and Conservatives are trying to bankrupt them. At any rate, it will all become clear at court.

Harper is done after the next election. He's not going to sit as an opposition leader. Half the country hates him already. The only reason he won, as we've mentioned, is the weakness of the opposition. Trudeau might be a moron, and he might be just as much of a belligerent and caustic a-hole as his father was, but he's good-looking and there are enough blind fools who vote based on whether they like a politician's smile than on his record. His dad was the worst fiscal manager the country has ever had, but that did nothing to besmirch his rockstar status in central and eastern Canada. The only hope the Conservatives have to win the next election is if Justin's handlers give him too much slack, because he's prone to say idiotic things on his own accord. Failing that, all he has to do is say nice things about the country and smile for an easy victory.

Yes, that's exactly right. That's where your influence lays, not in opting to pay for and use services that you feel benefit you. If that's how things worked, we might as well not have public services. You can privatize the whole deal. No it's completely ludicrous. It's some of the most insane rationalization you could come up with.

No offence Topaz but that's a silly beef to have. That's like saying it's unfair that young Canadians shouldn't have to pay taxes to support OAS. You don't get to pick and choose which public programs your tax dollars support. Your vote doesn't give you that entitlement.

It's funny that you call whatever you do here 'debating'. Putting exclamation marks everywhere doesn't hide your failed attempts at wit, nor do they make your hysterical (not in a funny way) commentary any less ridiculous. WWWTT Moonbox

Maybe. I don't really follow BC news. All I know is that the polls you linked were almost literally 100% useless in terms of determining this. As for teachers, I'm sure I'll offend you by saying this but I have literally no sympathy for you or the BC teachers union, just like I have zero sympathy for the Ontario ones. Teachers make well above-average salaries/benefits and the perks that go along with the job are second to none. Three months of holidays a year (don't even try pretend you use that time planning) is something most people can only dream of. When you say all teachers want is "A FAIR DEAL," they don't have the kids' interests in mind. They're interested in $$$. That's why they're such a militant union. I was one of the kids that sat around at home for two weeks during the illegal 1997 Ontario teacher's strike, where the picketers were regularly booed and jeered and public opinion ran so hard against them that they simply gave up and went back to work after two weeks. That was two weeks of high school wasted for me. As for class size and composition, you can blame your teacher's union for that. We'd have a lot more teachers and smaller class sizes if we weren't overpaying the teachers we have.

Exactly. Harper was elected on the back of Liberal scandal and a perennially ineffective and out of touch NDP. Nobody has ever really liked the guy. He has the charisma of a really boring cow. Fortunately for him, the Liberals chose two comically ineffective and out of touch leaders to oppose him in the next two elections, and he won mostly just by being less bad than the others. Dion ran on a totally out of touch platform, and people understandably couldn't connect with or trust Ignatieff. Hilariously, both of these clowns had even LESS charisma and gravitas than Harper. Trudeau will absolutely maul him in the next election. Just wait and see.

One that's made available only to Catholics. That's like saying "Whites-only Country Clubs" aren't segregated because whites can choose to attend them, or to mingle with other ethnic groups. The fact that taxpayers are forced to fund only one denomination of only one religion, essentially forcing public money into the promotion and spread of that religion, is comical. It's a relic of a backwards past and has no purpose in today's Canada.

No, I made a tongue-in-cheek comment on your blanket statement saying 'public sector jobs aren't a drain on the economy', which you were supporting with the trashy circular logic that public sector salaries are good for the economy because they allow public sector employees to spend money in the economy. That's the comment and idea I was mocking. I followed up with an example of paying public sector workers to dig holes and then fill them, which is a concept ubiquitous to discussions like this and one that economists use all of the time to debunk the idea that a large public sector workforce is good for the economy merely because it reduces unemployment. Hilariously, you linked an article from a Florida newspaper (lol?) where the exact same example was used (by the economist defending the public sector no less) to explain the exact same thing I was saying. Does the public sector provide value to the economy? Absolutely. Are there significant portions of it that are completely redundant, overpriced or flat-out unnecessary in the first place? Absolutely.

We were commenting on the perversion and now general uselessness of the words "terrorist/terrorism". Quoting our small and rather mocking discussion of the subject to segway into a discussion of pot decriminalization and general Harper-hating in a thread like this is just pure goof. It's not surprising you're still around here trolling just as hard as ever.

Online polls like this are ridiculous buddy. Aside from the fact that you don't have anything even resembling a representative sample source, when people can actually SEEK the poll online and complete it (often multiple times from different devices), it's going to end up being skewed by the people who most want to influence the results. In this case, you have teachers basically bombing it with votes. If you grabbed 1000 people off the street and made them answer that same question, you'd get a completely different result. As it stands, that poll is literally worthless and wouldn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever.

I mean the US is going to go forward with the F-35 now pretty much no matter what. They don't have a concurrent program running (like they always have in the past) and if the JSF program shut down today they wouldn't have anything to replace it with moving forward. As a NATO and NORAD partner in particular, it's unlikely that Canada is going to deviate from the US in their choice of air defense platform. Frankly, any of the other options are just silly. By virtually all accounts, the F-35 program appears to have been a disaster, but that doesn't mean that it's still not going to be the best plane available to the program participants when it's ready.

That's cute. Did YOU read that article and actually consider what it was saying? Basically everything about it proves my point. I said that simply paying public sector salaries doesn't help the economy. I said only value-adding jobs help the economy. Healthcare, police, teaching jobs etc all indirectly contribute to productivity, and thus help the economy. The article you linked states: "Obviously, teachers, police and many others contribute significantly to growth. The question is simply an empirical one—do we spend too much or too little on such jobs?" That's the question. Paying for public sector workers to dig holes and fill them does NOT help the economy. Extend that logic further (if you can), and you can similarly say that paying teachers, police officers, garbagemen, bureaucrats etc more than similarly skilled private sector workers would make, and completely ignoring the supply/demand dynamics of the available workforce, is no better than paying people to dig holes and fill them.

They won't face cancellation fees if Lockheed has blown the contract and the planes end up costing way more than originally agreed on. That's an easy one to walk away from. We all know that's not going to happen though. It's not like Canada can build it's own planes and it's not like the US has a backup plan.

Way to take a small aside and bring Harper into the debate. We were talking terrorism, not drug policy. Go make a thread somewhere else. As for eyeball, yeah that was pretty goof of the cops.

The misuse of the words "terrorist/terrorism", like you exemplify here, has warped it to mean practically nothing now. The CIA didn't fund Al Quaeda and Taliban terrorists. They funded and armed a resistance movement trying to fight off Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Good idea? Debatable, but they weren't funding terrorists. Those same groups may have turned out to be pretty awful, but the US wasn't funding them as terrorists. Having bad foreign policy isn't supporting terrorism. Removing the elected leader of Haiti isn't terrorism either. I don't really know much about that example, but I don't know why you'd call it terrorism. It was, perhaps, interfering with another country's self-governing (which the US is admittedly prone to doing), but it's not like they were dropping bombs indiscriminately on Haitian villages. When you talk like this, you sound like Assad trying to pretend the revolution going on in Syria isn't actually a revolution. It's just terrorism in Syria, because it's, you know, bad.

The Toronto Star wasn't pro-Harper, but that's beside the point. The newspapers and media groups don't pay millions to advertise their agendas to people simply watching TV or driving around. They may provide informed (and perhaps sometimes biased) opinions to people SEEKING them while reading the newspaper, but they are not spending big money to ram it down people's throats on television and with signs etc.

If you could explain the slant the Globe took on their VERY half-hearted endorsement of Tim Hudak, I'd really appreciate it. You might not like the endorsement, but if you can find any spin on it I'd love to hear your explanation. They pretty much said Tim Hudak was a lousy choice but on a tight minority leash he's probably better than a Liberal government that's swindled/blown billions of our dollars for nothing. The Globe has also not spent millions advertising their endorsement on television. The difference there couldn't be more different, but I'm not surprised you don't see that.

He provided BS numbers as his election slogan. They were easy to discredit. The Liberals are of course being dishonest when discrediting them, but that doesn't make Tim Hudak's numbers any less dishonest. As for why people are voting Liberal despite the scandals, it's because things aren't that bad yet, and Kathleen Wynne has succeeded in convincing GTA Ontarians that Tim Hudak is a snake and he'll send us back into recession. It doesn't matter that she's even more of a snake herself. Her campaign is smarter and Tim Hudak's has been completely incompetent. It reminds me of John Tory's faith-based schooling fiasco. Back then too it was his election to lose, but like Tim Hudak he and his handlers took a loaded shotgun and pointed it at his face. The Liberals just helped him pull the trigger.

While I consider the F-35 fighter program to be an absolute disaster, this one engine concern is complete rubbish. One of the main reasons two engines were produced for most fighter airplanes was to provide extra thrust. The F-35 has, IRC, the most powerful fighter engine ever built, so this was less of a concern. It's also not built or meant to be much of a dogfighter, so if it works properly it doesn't need to have the weight/thrust ratios that some of the more agile planes have. As for birds, most of the concern there is just rubbish too. The F-16, as already mentioned, works fine with one, and the fact that Canadian F-35's may have to travel way further up north and thus further from airfields isn't much of a concern either. The vast vast vast majority of bird strikes (ie. almost all of them) happen during take-off and landing, which by its very definition is close to an airfield where the planes should be able to land safely.

The electorate has always been dumb, and I've been saying that on this forum for years. The majority of NDP, Liberal and PC voters are dumb. It doesn't have anything to do with their political leanings. It has to do with the overall apathy and lack of interest of the electorate. Most voters vote the way they do on little to no information. Their ultimate vote is determined more on their upbringing, riding and whether or not they 'like' the individual party leaders than anything to do with issues or understanding thereof.

It doesn't really matter scribblet. The 100,000 job cuts number is as much fantasy as the 1,000,000 jobs created one. Hudak chose to present big, rounded, pretty numbers to the electorate rather than intellectual honesty, and in so doing he made the election about him. He gave the other parties something solid to attack him on, and his doesn't have anywhere near the charisma required to deflect these criticisms and get people to trust him. This is the second time he's turned out a huge flop in an Ontario election, and his campaign managers are now proven idiots. This election could have and should have been the easiest one in the history of Ontario for the PC's to win. The level of corruption and mismanagement is unprecedented. McGuinty made the Bob Rae deficits look like child's play and his Green Energy Act is likely to end up being the biggest swindle in Ontario's history (worse than Flaherty's 407 sell-off). Forget the gas plants, Orange, E-Health and such. There's enough crap for the NDP and PC's to shovel on the Liberals to bury them for 10-15 years. It's too bad they're far too incompetent to do it.

Said no worthwhile economist ever. The economy relies on money being spent on value-adding activities. The idea that paying a salary alone is of benefit to the overall economy is an intellectually bankrupt concept and the essential pillar of lousy economic policy. When the government pays for a public sector job that isn't required, or pays too much for a public sector job, it is in fact taking money out of the economy that could have been used for value-adding activities that actually grow the economy. Using your logic, we could hire 100,000 public servants and have them each making $100,000/year digging holes in the ground and filling them. This would, according to you, benefit the economy because these new public servants would spend that money back into the economy, right? The idea is completely absurd.

Good idea! Maybe a Death Star too just in case things get out of hand, right!? Assuming more than one guard would be a good precaution to take when escorting a killer is the same thing as requiring an armored brigade, right? That's how logic works, isn't it?