Moonbox

I think it's an indication of how that member feels about the present state of the NDP and the direction it's going. When you have a member cross the floor from the official opposition a the struggling 3rd place finisher (by a long shot), it raises eyebrows. I could certainly see someone crossing from the official government to official opposition and vice versa, but today's change is VERY strange. It's kind of hard to say that the floor crossing is based on some sort of policy or idealogical reason when neither party, particularly the Liberals, have ANY sort of real policy agenda at the moment other than finding a new leader.

The NDP is going to self-destruct over the next few years when the people in Quebec find out just like the rest of the country how goofy most of their members are. The Liberals are going to come back hard eventually, and all it's going to take for them is a charismatic leader. The NDP, on the other hand, has far deeper problems, mainly being an out-of-touch idealogy and a complete lack of experience and competency.

For a change I totally agree with you. Unfortunately people are generally too stupid to know what's causing their discontent and who can change it and how.

Nope. I'm fully responsible for all my comments, as are you. Your logic is as flimsy as the majority of your posts are. Like I said, I'm fully responsible for the contempt I show you. I'm simply telling you that when you write less than intelligent things, your expected outcome should be less than serious responses. It's kind of like what the expected outcome should be for a woman who dresses in a thong and clam shell bikini. She should expect to be oggled at. She's not responsible for being raped/harrassed, because she should expect that social customs and offical laws should protect her, but she knows that if she shows off her stuff that there will be men looking at her and potentially approaching her.

They sure did. Harper, IMO, is trying so hard to pander to the ethnic vote at this point that he's starting to turn me off completely. How much more Chretien-esque Liberal can he get?

A 10% decrease is just a joke. The amount of waste that goes into almost every public service is just pathetic. I have a couple family members who work for CRA in Kitchener and the stuff they tell me about there is just scary. First, in a group of 20 hirees, my cousin was the only male, and one of two white people. Yay affirmative action. The hiring process was also 8 months long, but when you apply it takes about ~1-2 years to hear back. Huh? The funniest story of all, however, is a "contest" the CRA office held there for a new management position. I guess some of the auditors there were told that whichever of the potential candidates had the best results would be the one to get the new management position. Well, it turned out to be a fiasco, it went to COURT, the contest was thrown out, and after a year and a half the position still isn't filled. I know that's really anecdotal, but the above examples are just some of the ways government workers make it cost probably 30-50% more to run a department than it should. They don't hire the best candidates (they hire according to racial quotas), they take forever to do anything and the benefits the employees receive are generally far above what hard working people in the public sector receive. It's a sad joke.

I'm sorry it took this long for our remarks to make that clear to you. For future reference, understand that the quality of the responses you get will depend largely on the merits of your posts. So far you might have found that a lot of us don't take you very seriously.

Right.... It's a discussion/debate forum for people who want to actually discuss/debate intelligently. If you wanted to be considered for such discussions, and not merely as a forum troll, you wouldn't start threads with opening posts like the one above, nor would you spam the board with garbage replies.

Yeah this is a case where she's guilty by association. I'm sure she knew he was a deadbeat, so why would you hang on to someone who's judgement of character is so poor? Maxime Bernier, as another example, should also have been long gone. Unfortunately he's immensely popular in his riding and the tools there would probably vote for him even if he had been found selling enriched uranium to Iran.

Even if he did listen, he certainly wouldn't understand.

That's usually because any sort of meeting or debate is attended primarily by ignorant, loud and obnoxious "activists" who aren't interested in debating anything.

I thought they were the same thing. Doesn't Topaz work for the Star or something? Sure seems like it....

You would stop throwing money away at economically useless subsidies and panders like solar power and lower the capital investment tax for corporations (which is one of the highest in the WORLD) that discourages companies from investing money into things like new manufacturing plants and modernization. That would be a start at least.

Umm...says who? Says you? Are you basing that on your direct knowledge of the Detroit/Windsor border, or on your belief that everything the Tories do is worth a big long whine? Neither do I, but I still get stuck at the border. I get stuck going on vacation, coming back from vacation, going to see the Bills play, going to see the Leafs play in Buffalo, going to see the Red Wings play, driving to Pittsburgh to see family etc etc etc. In fact, I can't remember crossing the border quickly in the last 10-15 times I've crossed. Because there are too many vehicles at the crossing and regardless of who's getting searched there's not enough capacity to handle it smoothly. Once a bridge is built, the cost of operating it is irrelevant. It's not expensive. Facilitating the integration of our economies by means of more convenient trade more than makes up for it.

Just a big old flappy bag of hot air. His comments will be given the merit they deserve (nobody will pay attention).

Title says it all. I know there are tons of people who've got their panties twisted about this one, but let's just look at some simple logic regarding the stupid thing. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing in the West for decades in favor of cheap labour in Asia and Mexico. We barely make anything here anymore. The Kyoto protocol, and other equally impotent ideas like Copenhagen, will inarguably make manufacturing more expensive for participants. If the countries that we're exporting our manufacturing jobs to (ie China, India etc) are excluded from Kyoto, all that will end up happening is that Kyoto participant countries will export even more jobs to countries with no environmental regulations. In effect, all we'd be doing is outsourcing our pollution. The whole argument for excluding countries like China and India is beyond stupid as well. They say that the Western world is responsible for most of the accumulated effects of pollution thus far, and thus they should be the ones to pay for it. That WOULD make sense if not for the fact that the excluded countries in the third world etc are accelerating their industrial pollution exponentially themselves and will just be replacing our pollution with their own, and often dirtier, pollution. It's not like these countries were less pollutant in the 50's-70's out of any altruistic motives or anything. It's largely because they were crapholes and piss broke. What sort of environmental model is it to say, "Hey, you guys have polluted a whole lot and you should have to reduce your emissions. We'll maybe reduce our emissions eventually as well, , but only after we've caught up and done as much polluting as you have over the years." What a joke.

It's certainly something the government needs to look hard into. Realistically, the whole thing stinks to high heaven and it APPEARS she's been involved with some shady dealings, or at least some shady people. I don't really have a lot of faith in the Mexican justice system, however, and I don't think she should be left to rot in a mexican prison while we find out either.

I completely agree with you. They could wear clown makeup everywhere they go for all I care, but if we're asking to see their faces for legitimate legal reasons, such as identification (driver's license/passport) or the citizenship oath, suck it up. If they don't like it then there are some really nice third world dictatorships in Sandland that are more than happy to accomodate them.

If it's too much to ask a woman to show her face for a brief moment in her life to say a few words to become a full fledged citizen of Canada, then she doesn't deserve to be a citizen. What's retarded here is how SOME people think that Canadians and their Laws need to bend over backwards to keep minorities happy, but at the same time those minorities shouldn't have to make the most minor of concessions to us. What a joke.

Whatever it takes to boost your fragile ego Shwa. Anyone that uses 'pwning' in an actual sentence is clearly going to need whatever he can get. I think I can hear your mom calling you for dinner upstairs btw...

Cybercoma, you and I don't really agree on a lot of things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this instead of just bullet points from an article. I'm usually a little right-of-centre myself, but I believe income-inequality and the shrinking middle class is probably the biggest problem facing the western world. The larger the number of poor people we have, the larger the number of kids are raised without opportunity, good examples and postive, supportive parents. There've been hundreds of studies confirming that kids from poor families, regardless of IQ or intelligence, are FAR less likely to succeed academically or financially. The Bill Gates', Sidney Crosbys etc all grew up in middle or wealthy class families.

No offense but this is the type of moronic degredation of political discussion that has the Americans so screwed up down south. More regulation and equitable social policies =/ communism. That's like saying mixing a tiny drop of red dye in a great big bowl of blue dye makes the bowl red. It's still going to be blue, or more technically a very blueish shade of purple.

It's going to be hard for you two to communicate then. Your thought process is so muddled up and bizarre that if he can't understand abstracts, he'll never understand a thing you say.

There are really only two outcomes for the next election. Either the Conservatives self-destruct and the Liberals redeem themselves, or the NDP maintains it's second-place status and previously small-c Liberals flee at the prospect of a completely incompetent NDP government and bolster the cons to a sweeping majority. You can dream though bud.

He's saying the Chretien used many of the tactics Harper is using today. People are pretending like he's committing gross violations of our constitution or something when, in fact, all he's really doing is barrelling through a lot of the symbolic and pointless bickering that a majority government has to contend with from a minority opposition. It's kind of like, "Yes yes yes. We get it. You're upset about EVERYTHING we do. Whining and fussing is noted and ignored. We're moving on now."