Moonbox

A huge increase? 1.2 billion per year in a time when we spent $50B in stimulus (which would have required enormous administrative/consulting expenses) over the last several years? What does that mean? How is it a lot more expensive? Does it take into account that the temps and contract workers aren't getting a golden pension like the rest of our overpaid public service? This is standard Toronto Star garbage.

What was secret about it? It seems an economist from outside the government was able to put all the numbers together all by himself. The information appears to have been readily available. Words like 'shadow' however, have a negative connotation. The Star is good at that when talking about Harper. Instead of outsourcing to private sector, it's called a "Shadow Public Service". Scaaary.

Haha. Nobody's blaming you. The kid is dead though, and you are trolling.

That's what the Toronto Star does. They like to trick you with the numbers. 79% higher costs of OUTSOURCING than 5 years ago. Did you read the entire article? This is likely money that would have been spent on permanent government employees instead anyways. Harper's government is letting full time gov't employees retire and he's not hiring to replace their positions. He's outsourcing their jobs instead. As such, you'd EXPECT outsourcing costs to go up significantly.

Harper has made Ignatieff visible. Ignatieff has let Harper define him. Canadians' opinions of Ignatieff are already entrenched. He may be ready for a fight, but he's likely to get tuned out by a lot of Canadians who haven't been impressed with him at all in the last 2 years.

Yes. The hack job that is the Toronto Star posts this sort of crap all the time. Shouldn't we be thrilled that Harper is bypassing the government workers' unions and going to the public sector, where people have to actually, you know, perform their jobs adequately and only receive reasonable benefits? Keep it up IMO.

The doctors won't perform the procedure because it's dangerous and because the baby is practically done cooking by then. It's easier to make the case that something with eyes and hands etc is actually a living human beings than a bunch of goo in the uterus in the first few weeks/months.

Down south in Bible Land there's a lot of angry Jesus lovers still trying to get abortion outlawed because a couple of cells growing in a uterus has a 'soul'.

He's alive in the same sense that a carott is alive. He's brain dead and would die immediately if he wasn't on expensive life support. We wouldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to prolong the life of a carott, so why would we do it on the public purse for a human vegetable? I'd be willing to bet big money that most American insurance companies would come to the same decision that the Ontario health system has. The only difference is that in the US the parents could decide to send him to another hospital and waste their own money to keep their vegetable alive, which most American families couldn't afford to do anyways.

You're right. It's not the strongest moral argument. It does beg the question though. Why DOES everyone froth at the mouth about Israel, but yet ignore behaviour that is undeniably worse in other countries? That's just as weak an argument as the one you posted above. There are indeed tons of people who will pretend that any sort of anti-Israel talk is anti-semitism (and it's not ALL balogna), but the real reason I think Israel is so villainized is because it's a democratic country in the middle of a bunch of dicatorships and nut jobs who've made an ART out of negative PR campaigns against Israel. We hold Israel to a higher standard than Pakistan or Iran or Iraq because we can relate to them much more easily, and Hezbollah etc know this and exploit our sense of morality towards their cause. Israel's enemies have an equally big army of people condemning them. The idea of an army of 'apologists' does sound a lot like the regular Jewish conspiracy theories people throw around. Don't criticize people for throwing around the anti-semitism card and then come right back to us and tell us there's an army of jews and apologists controlling the media. That's a joke. There it is again. The Jewish lobby! Oh no! Tinfoil hat time! They have microchips in our brains too! Like the Jews supporting Israel right? Ummm...you're pretty much totally full of &*!*^ on this one. Israel routinely kills children? That's their plan? In their war rooms they have generals drawing up detailed plans of ground formations with schools and day cares as their objectives? Is that what you're saying? The have Apache gunships chasing little girls on bicycles? Give us a freaking break. What about China? North Korea? Iran?

Fighters in WW2 cost about $500,000 in today's dollar figures. A cheap-end fighter of today's standard costs about 120x that. It would take 5-10 years simply to develop the infrastructure and technical expertise to even start a program like this and our economies of scale would be a joke compared to the US'.

The program is cancelled. The planes are prohibitively expensive. The program, overall, was a failure for anything other than experimentation and showcasing US technological expertise, which is impressive. 186 planes for how many billions spent? That's one of the most epic failures in US procurement history.

I will ABSOLUTELY roll my eyes at you, and you deserve it. You brought up Germany in WWII to compare to Canada's G20 summit. That's a freaking joke. Using your brilliant logic, I could say that the black masked protestors were just like the murderous red band communist revolutionaries who overthrew the Czar in WWI. I mean, they burned and smashed stores and stuff and attacked police property etc right? It's TOTALLY the same thing.... Some were protesting peacefully. Some weren't. There may have been breaches in constitutional rights, but they were so minor, particularly under the circumstances and given the history of G20 summits, to be barely noteworthy. Ah. More anectotes. I'd betting you weren't actually at the protests. As far as I know, nobody was seriously hurt, so beat up the citizen day seems like a pretty hokey thing to say. There was maybe a handful of people out of thousands who sustained minor injuries, but they were the idiots who decided to clash against a riot police wall for their own genius reasons.

Also saying that the F-35 and F18E use the same technologies is rather dubious for someone who's read a lot about it. I'm not really all that on board with the F-35 myself, but I'd rather go with that than the F18E

I don't think you've read anything about the F-35.

First F-18E flight - 1995 First F-35 flight - 2006 That's a difference of 11 years, not to mention the fact that the F-18e design borrows heavily from the even older F-18 and shares much of the same avionics systems. So yes. The F-35 is much better and much newer.

I'm sorry if I've offended you. What is crud about it though? As for my physical dimensions, let's just say I'm about 5000 Bigmacs behind May.

Concentration camps eh? It seems we've entered Godwin territory here. My favorite part of the Charter is the part that says, "In a REASONABLE and JUST society". A lot of the stupidity that people cry about when trying to reference the charter goes down in flames when it encounters the 'reasonability' test.

You don't know what you're talking about. The Super Hornet would be close to a 20 year old design by the time Canada replaced its CF-18's. Within 5-10 years we'd be in the exact same position we're in now. We'd have an aircraft nearing the end of its relevance. The US, for example, is planning to start retiring them and replacing them by 2025. Why would we buy into that???

Torontonians on their own streets felt safe. The fools who came out to protest anything and nothing maybe felt less so, but even they were largely left alone and nobody really got hurt. Mulroney was definetly a crook. As far as Adscam went, however, there more than a few people involved. As to our rights being stolen, there was more damage done to personal property and to innocent bystanders than there was to protesters as a result of police actions. Get over it. My family is full of laywers and the 'honest to goodness' conversation I have with them is that the North American legal system has become a travesty of political correctness and pussy-footing.

Hospitality? The G20 security measures were there to make sure foreign leaders and dignitaries felt safe. Me thinks you're painting a doomsday scenario. Personally I'd rather not have our politicians steal from us. Anectotes! So relevant!

The prevailing sentiment in Canada, even with us evil conservatives, is that Sarah Palin is an absolute moron and a snake. As for Elizabeth May, she's a total slob. You don't have to be good looking to be in politics. Look at Hilary Clinton. Some pride in your appearance, however, is worth something. Elizabeth May looks like she's never done a minute of exercise in her life and that does, to an extent, tell us something about her character. Is the irony of having a glutton crusading to save the trees and the animals lost on you???

Doesn't seem like they're too pleased with the costs so far. At any rate, costs per plane are driven by production values not per order per country, but by overall sales. If only we could just decide how much each plane would cost us. That'd be nice I know thanks.

ditto to that. I'd also like all my money back for 'arts' funding. I'd like my money back for transfer payments too. alas, our system wasn't designed to be fair.

That's what I've been trying to say all along. US officials are predicting the program is going to come out with production costs of $120 million per plane, the Pentagon is furious about it but too far invested, and somehow magically people think the Canadian planes are going to come out on budget. Doesn't make sense to me. We might as well start buying B2's at that cost lol.