Moonbox

Yes...trying to bolster the economy by investing in a housing market already well over capacity seems like a really good idea to me. While we're at it let's build some new Chevrolet and GM plants here.

Well said. Having Canadians a whole world away condemning Israel for doing whatever it can to protect itself is absolutely contemptible.

Go read a book because you're not going to find anything reputable on the internet really. I think the R&D costs for the Arrow were well over $100-200 million alone. When you factor inflation and the cost per aircraft being built we're easily looking a billions and billions for an airplane that history has proven most militaries had no interest in and did not need. Keeping the Arrow in production would have been nothing more than a multi billion charity.

It's true. A consumption tax hurts the poor immensely. At least with income taxes a lot of their income is untaxable anyways. With consumption tax increases basically EVERY dollar the poor earn gets fully taxed because it's fully spent. Consumption taxes can also be easily avoided by more well-off people. They can just take their income and turn it into savings instead of spending it. Obviously they will spend it eventually either way but for someone who's trying to pay off debt or save for retirement you'd see a HUGE reduction in spending and increased savings and debt retirement.

You can't put any political spin on the fact that there was zero demand in the western world for the Arrow which in hindsight would have been obsolete when it entered production anyways. Also, not to be snide but I think you REALLY have to take an Avro insider's view of the situation with a grain of salt. That's kind of like taking a GM or Chevrolet employee's view on the auto fiasco as reputable. I'll agree it looked like they tried to dust everything under the carpet, but the reasons for cancelling the project were legit. Those 25,000 jobs were costing the Canadian taxpayers billions to maintain. It was a good decision to pull the plug. If people are holding grudges against Tory governments of 50 years ago for making an intelligent decision that's totally their perogative. It really limits the options, however, and is a perfect example of blind and stupid voting.

Haha exactly. I think a lot of the opinions on this thread are based entirely on that alone. Sadly for them 50% of it was completely made up and possibly very politically motivated. The fact is that NOBODY wanted the AVRO and history is also on the side of that decision because war as it has evolved has shown a COMPLETE lack of need for high speed high altitude interceptors.

They had a working prototype. Avro scrambled desperately to find buyers for the project. They found none. The merits of the project weren't worth extending it further. The Americans had a similar project at the time. It was called the Rapier. Its role and performance would have been about the same as the Arrow. THEY cancelled their project as well. The Avro's role was too limited and too focused to have remained in service. The role was too intercept and shoot down Soviet long range bombers (kind of like the B-52). By the late 50's it was already apparent that the long range bomber was becoming less and less a threat and long range ballistic missiles and ICBM's were the new inter continental threat. The Avro was not a dog fighter. It was not a multi-role fighter. It would have become a high speed interceptor with nothing to intercept and it was not suited for any other role. I don't 'believe' because I know it was a giant waste of money and an excellent example of poor planning. The Arrow WAS a revolutionary design for the role it was intended. The sad fact, however, was that the role was no longer needed and has not been needed since. Take a look at the fighters of today. None of them are long range bomber interceptors. They were all designed for air superiority and multi-role bombing.

I think the guidelines definetly need to be made more strict.

whowhere you're being foolish or you're totally wrong on basically every point. Let's examine: Your lazy and uninformed rants unfortunately lead one to this conclusion.... Or they live in crap holes that don't give them the opportunity to succeed like they could here. There is a CRAPTON of immigrants making huge money and a lot of their children do even better. Yes, refugee families coming over here are likely not going to succeed and will just drain the system but that leads us to our next point... The open-door immigration policy you complain about is LIBERAL policy. I've tried telling you a dozen times before but the conservatives have tried to reform immigration policy so we take LESS unqualified immigrants and replace those spots with immigrants more likely to become productive citizens. Stress yourself out all you want. This is 'poor me' syndrome at its worst. You have yourself to blame for your current economic situation. Blaming general ethnic minorities for your inability to compete in the work environment is about as intelligent as blaming someone nearby when you trip on your own shoe lace.

For profit is often the answer. Good paying government union jobs only benefit the union workers. There's a reason why public service unions receive so little public support when they go on strike. Personally, I don't feel that I should be paying higher taxes so that I can help ensure under qualified and unskilled workers earn far more than their skills would otherwise dictate.

'Opportunistic Purveyor of Untruths' is a label you can put on EVERY (repeat that in your head a few times) politician in Canadian politics right now. An election is basically a contest on who can better fool the ignorant electorate. Harper, Ignatieff, Dion, Layton are ALL guilty of giant hypocrisy and lies. It's silly to argue against that simple fact. At the same time, until the average voter spends more than 30 minutes a year paying attention to politics, it's even sillier to be outraged when a politician is not entirely truthful all the time.

Harper is a pragmatic hypocrite. I think it's fairly obvious by now...

Haha. That's hilarious. Liberal/Green coalition. If anyone needs an example for why you shouldn't take Informed Vote seriously, this it it. Personally, I've never been a fan of news written by angsty adults who never really grew out of their teenage years. Maybe that's just me though.

Why is this thread still even alive? The Avro Arrow was cancelled and scrapped for a reason. It was NOT because the government was stupid at the time. The only thing that was stupid was allowing the project to continue as long as it did. Why do you think that there were no foreign buyers for the project? The Arrow was obsolete or redundant with most of the world's militaries at the time. People's opinions on the Arrow seem largely to have been nurtured by an assanine CBC special from 15 years ago or whatever. Get over it already.

It's a silly and implausible scenario. Their right to exist is now firmly planted in the fact that they ARE there now and nobody in the area has the ability to remove them. The 'real' scenario is that the Palestinians and Arab nations in the area benefit more now from the UN than Israel does. Israel now could clear out all of its neighbours. It's a stupid scenario to consider seeing as though Israel could, should it feel the need, deny its neighbours the right to exist while they have ZERO capability to do the reverse. Check your history. Civilization started about 1000km or more to the east...around where Iraq is now. With that said, humanity had migrated all over Europe, Asia and Africa (likely North America by then too) by the time Babylon started. Besides, there we people living everywhere in the world already before this happened....so really you're totally wrong there. More like the British decided this. That wasn't my question either. My question was now that they're there, how do you contest that their claim is any weaker than anyone else's? You deny the right for Israel to exist. From what you've said, it's because there are angry people all around them that don't want them there. You'll have to do better than that. The question now is what's the more INTELLIGENT solution? You have: A ) Try to remove a wealthy, established population armed to the teeth from a land to which they have both historic and religious ancestry or B ) Accept that they do have the right to exist, stop firing rockets at them and try to work peacefully with them. There's no possible way to respond intelligently to this.

The deficit wasn't going to be avoided regardless but the lying...well you've got him there.

and you have zero (yes zero) real justification for that position... Some people's history tie into it quite a bit more than others'. What island in the ocean is big enough and hospitable enough to provide for the Jewish nation? If there are any empty, unclaimed and bountiful islands out there let me know. We can start our own country there. And why Israel? It's easier to justify settling them there than anywhere else in the world. Something like 4000 years of Jewish history lead to that decision. Whatever 'claim' the Palestinians or Arabs had for that land was by far and away preceded by a Jewish claim. Who decides whose claim is stronger? Do we say that the 60 years of Israeli occupation makes the claim legitimate, strenghtened by the 100 years or whatever of British claim? Or the 600-700 years of Arab occupation before that? Do we go back to the Romans who occupied it for something like 400 years? The Jews before that for 4000? What do you do now? Seriously? The same could be said about the Palestinians living in Israel and the surrounding area. Israel also has the capability to wipe the floor with ANY of their neighbours, including Egypt. It's not just because of $3B or whatever in US aid. Their military training, research and spending is EXTREME.

Left wing? What? How is that left wing? I find the whole anti-Israel sentiment in the West to be very ironic. If you contemplated Jewish history for a second, maybe you'd understand a bit better. We've got an entire race/religion of people with literally thousands of years of history. In that whole time they've probably never had a safe place to call home. They were finally granted a place to live in their ANCESTRAL HOMELAND and now their neighbours one and all demand they be wiped off the face of the planet....AGAIN. Here people are now, speaking critically of THEIR discrimination against Arabs!??!?? How can WE in Canada or North America possibly judge their right to defend themselves??? It's not like they're inventing the danger. It's there. It's real...and Jewish Israelis are dying on a regular basis from it. They don't have the luxury of being politically correct. Their families and lives are legitimately at stake. Unlikely to happen so why bring it up??

It goes a lot further than that. There will be no peace in the Middle East in our time. Give it 50-100 years when we don't need oil anymore. Then Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia etc can sit on their sand and get laughed at. Maybe by then they'll also accept that Israel is there to stay, because it's not going anywhere.

Personally I think Martin was a good finance minister and Chretien was a good PM. I'm a young Canadian (25) and my biggest concern in government is that the old farts that voted in Trudeau and Mulroney start paying off some of the debt they're leaving my generation. Yes, they were arrogant and quite likely corrupt. Yes, they screwed the provinces over on funding, but they DID pay down the debt. I'm thankful for that. I voted for Harper because I was disgusted with Liberal entitlement back in 2006 and I voted for him again because I was disgusted with the current batch of Liberal leaders.

I'm a very strong supporter of Israel. I don't think, however, that there is any role for Canada to actively play there other than to provide public support. Havings said that, I don't think people understand what it's like to be a Palestinian today. They're cut off from the outside world by military checkpoints. People, food and supplies are restricted access to the area and it's like living in a prison. It's such a huge mess it's not even funny. On one hand, you have over a million people denied access to anything more than what's absolutely necessary to stay alive. On the other hand, you have people (often from other Arab nations) hiding amongst the civilian Palestinians launching rockets into Israel. What is Israel supposed to do? Israeli brutality is well documented but they HAVE to be that way. Israel occupied all sorts of territory around itself to act as a buffer for attacks from outside. Any time they withdraw from contested lands it does NOTHING to appease its enemies. Militants simply move in and start attacking Israel proper. Israel isn't going anywhere. The sooner Arab countries accept that the sooner they can stop firing missiles at each other and compromise on peace.

you'd hope we would have thought about it PRIOR to going yes. Now that we're there, what do we do? It's difficult internationally to just bail and leave a power vaccuum. It's generally seen VERY negatively.

Military procurement IS complicated and highly technical/political/logistical. You have to plan WELL in advance for future procurement and you have to make sure those procurements are being done with 'the Big Picture' in mind. Throughout the mid-late 80's and 90's, the US military completely overhauled itself. They anticipated what future conflicts would be like and where they would be, what sort of equipment they would need for these conflicts, and then they designed/purchased equipment that integrated perfectly with their existing and/or future systems. This sort of fore-sightedness is what led to things like the M1 Tank, Apache Helicopter, the Black Hawk, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, LRMS etc that nobody on earth now could hope to match in combined quality/volume. The Canadian military, on the other hand, has been hamstrung by the idea that we don't need a military. Instead of cooperating with American and European military development, we've left ourselves out and ignored the forward thinking that has streamlined processes around the world. Now that we've landed ourselves in a conflict our government has had to improvise to get equipment on the field. We've borrowed Leopard Tanks from Germany, bought second hand from Holland and scrambled to find someone to make the right helicopters in time for our troops to be able to use in Afghanistan.

What is it particularly about Ignatieff that you like? I find him very unlikeable. He seems to me to have a lot of the same stances and opinions as Harper. He was pro-war in Iraq. He's pro-torture. He spent most of his life living outside of Canada. He only came back to pursue politics and run for the Liberal leadership. I'll ask again, what is it about him that you like specifically, other than he's not Dion???

Yeah...there's an idea. Let's make sure that all our leaders are uneducated in the arts of politics, economics and law, and let's replace them with 'hard workin' folks who have no idea what politics, economics and law really are. Bach, I think you're on to something....either that or you're smoking something...