Moonbox

LoL. You might want to check the "state of affairs" Trudeau left Canada in after 1984. Canada's debt level was around 9% of GDP in 1968. By 1984, when Turdeau finally bailed, he'd turned our debt level to 40% of our GDP. He did that in about 9 years. Not only did he grow our debt level (relative to the size of our economy) faster and more than any PM in history, he also did it at a time when interest rates were higher than ever. The Bank of Canada rate in 1984 was something retarded like 14% (right now it's 1%). The cost of simply SERVICING Pierre Trudeau's debt was about 5.0% of GDP when Mulroney took over. To put that in perspective for you, 5% of GDP today would be about 66 billion dollars. The cost of simply keeping up interest payments on Trudeau's debt when Mulroney took over was the equivalent today of 66 BILLION dollars each year. That's even more than Harper spent on stimulus at the recession's worst. Another interesting fact is that if not for Pierre's debt repayment, Mulroney would have ran operating surpluses from about 1986 on. He spent less on federal programs than he collected in taxes, but about 5% of his GDP was being spent on interest payments thanks to the debt Trudeau saddled on him. I'll agree with you that Mulroney was a bad PM, because he should have recognized the mess Trudeau put us in sooner and he didn't, but GWiz you need to get a freaking clue when it comes to numbers. You don't have a clue. Here's some reference material which I'm sure you'll ignore/not understand: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2007/03/a_brief_history.html

No I think your numbers are based on NOTHING. Run them by us please. Mulroney was a terrible PM, but he inherited a Canada in shambles from the worst fiscal manager Canada's ever seen in Pierre Trudeau. Chretien and Martin ran the country through the most prosperous 14 years Canada's seen since the 1950's. They had to be idiots to screw things up then. I'll give them credit for not blowing their load on and actually paying down Canada's debt, but they certainly didn't do anything special. I'm not terribly thrilled with it considering THEY felt they had to import Ignatieff to do the job. I shudder at the thought of Turdeau II getting a shot at things. I'm not thrilled with him either, but I'm used to PM's being not doing what I want. At least I know what Harper's planning and he's likely to follow through with it. Ignatieff and the Liberals have been so shifty and mercurial over the last 5 years that I can't trust him even BEFORE he forms a government. Personally I think the long form census is a joke and it didn't bother me at all. I'm wary of the F-35 and don't really like the plane much, but I'm not army and I don't see much out there that would do the job a whole lot better.

They do. Do you think something like a hospital would have a backup diesel generator, but a nuclear power plant wouldn't? You don't have a clue. They had backup generators in Japan, it's just a tsunami and a 9.0 earthquake sometimes cause problems. The best and most expensive fusion reactors in the world have managed to output something stupid like 1.000000001 x more energy than it has cost to contain the reaction, and it cost BILLIONS and BILLIONS to build. We're 20-30 years MINIMUM from even pioneering commercial use.

Lol Lindsey Lohan. That was funny. You're totally right about Chernobyl though. The Soviet Union was probably the most environmentally disastrous regime to ever exist on Earth. Their environmental and safety standards were atrocious and their Chernobyl design and the safety standards within were pathetic.

So if he opened the contract to competition he'd get the replacement fighter for free? Or at least 60% cheaper? You're not very good with numbers are you??? No I'm pretty much with you on that and I'm certainly against the tax cuts. Nope. I think Harper is a bad fiscal manager and socially he's a bible-thumping wing-nut. My problem is that I trust him more than Ignatieff. I tuned Ignatieff out completely when, after the cons already opened the floodgates and committed tens of billions in stimulus, he wanted them to spend more. Harper's the evil I know. Ignatieff's given me about a dozen different reasons to fear him even more.

Because it provides enormous amounts of clean energy. The waste is stored safely and the radioactivity doesn't leak out.

A lot of markets in the US make tons of money...just not so much the ones where there are palm trees outside. Shortl list of NHL franchises set to fail: Atlanta Phoenix Carolina Florida Nashville Islanders There are two or three markets in Canada that would happily take some of those on. Winnepeg Hamilton Quebec It's going to happen it's just a matter of time.

Yeah I think you've made it pretty clear you've voted one way your entire life. You're about as far from the fence as anyone on this forum and you haven't moved in ages. Head in the sand is a better description than 'walking along the fence'.

If it was up to Ignatieff he would have spent even more. I seem to recall him flipping out and carrying on that Harper wasn't spending ENOUGH during the recession. It's interesting how you and he forget that after the fact...

An appeals process would, in effect, do the same thing as allowing the parents to have their own way. It would take months and months all at the taxpayer's expense. The taxpayer's generosity knows limits. One of those is throwing money away at a hopeless cause. In Bible Land it seems taxpayer's generosity ends more or less as soon as you walk into the hospital.

Sure. We should always have a full accounting of these sorts of things. I would hope that it's being done. As for why do I think it's more expensive, that could be for a number of reasons. You could be getting better/more effective servicing. The nature of the jobs themselves could be completely different. A huge part of it is probably the way accounting is done. When we say a private sector contractor does the work more expensively, is that comparing the wages and the profits they take merely to what you would pay public sector employees as a wage, or are you comparing it their long term costs? The effective salary of a public sector employee skyrockets once you include their benefits and pension plans.

Using CAPITALS and BOLDING does not really make your argument any STRONGER. Outsourcing government contracts to PRIVATE companies is FINE if you are actually paying for SERVICES at a decent BUCK. That's no different than paying public sector employees to do the SAME thing. Adscam provided no SERVICES and WAS nothing but FRAUD I'm sorry you can't see the difference...for your sake and for your poor childrens'.

I agree with this in principle. If the parents have the money and means to prolong the child's life, that's completely their business. If it's money out of someone else's wallet, however, like the public purse or an insurance company, throwing money at a worthless cause serves nothing but the parents' grief and somewhere the line has to be drawn. Ontario doctors drew the line here and they had every right to do so. An American health insurance company would have done the same.

Prove to us that the money is being spent on little to no service and then you can say it's exactly the same. Adscam was a total fraud of taxpayer's dollars where money was given away for pretty much NOTHING to Liberal cronies. The fact that you can equate outsourcing to Adscam is scary...scary in how dumb the idea is.

I didn't even read your update. Other than the article in the news and the last page or so, I've read next to nothing on the topic. You're baiting people. You're trolling. I'm not whining about it. A lot of the time it's pretty funny. Keep it up for all you like.

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?