Moonbox

We're not ignoring anything. Dion has been saying his carbon tax will be revenue neutral. First, if you look at the "Green Shift" calculator on the Liberal's OWN website, the Green Shift is ONLY going to help the very poorest of Canadians and EVERYONE else will end up worse off. Try it out. Seriously. You have to make a COMBINED family income of like 20,000 and have several kids for this to really do you any good. The Green Shift is an abomination for me and anyone but full time Wal-Mart and McDonald's employees. Second, if Dion's "Green Shift" is to be 'revenue neutral'. If that's the case, and he's promised 80 Billion in extra spending, where in god's name is he getting this money if not from higher taxes? Dion has been saying a lot of things. I have been listening. I've gone to the LIBERAL WEBSITE and read everything they said there too. None of what they say there will do me ANY good at all, and I'm a young Canadian and my income is average at best! I don't believe any of the attack ads I see. I don't even believe of what Harper says. What I do know, however, is that of all the candidates he's the only one running that's not looking to attack industry and business in Canada and throw money at dubious social programs and equalization payments to the poor. No thank you. Everything Dion has said has me worried he'd herald the return of Trudeau era idiotic Liberal spending. Chretien/Martin I could stomach. Dion has me absolutely retching.

Yes, he's autocratic. You've made more topics over the last few days on this or almost identical issues than I have in my entire history on this website. Tell us something new. Make a relevant point. I beg of you. I really don't want to have to keep scrolling down through the list of threads just because you posting a new "I hate Harper" thread every time I log back in. For the record, North American leadership is typically very autocratic as a whole and it's the Europeans who have the bigger distaste for it.

I didn't try and justify anything. I said it was an intelligent move that only an idiot wouldn't make. You're the one who just keeps repeating, "But he said!!!!" Something he will quite likely make amends for this time around. Oh wow! Then what are you posting for other than just trolling? What's the thread titled? Why are you arguing with my assessment of why Harper called the election and why only a fool would have done otherwise? Really...why ARE you arguing with me at all when I haven't said anything even close to the effect that he didn't flip flop (GASP OMG a politican changed his stance!)? Go away troll, you're not worth the words anymore.

Methinks you are just trying to troll my posts now. In Canada. Maybe there's a difference. Also, considering you deal in media liability, maybe I'm having a worthless argument with someone who has a vested interest in this sort of thing? Right...be successful and you deserve having the bottom of the media scum bucket make your life a living hell. Bravo Guyser.

The media isn't interested in anyone's message. Certain newspapers and television stations have very obvious political biases. They're also run by corporations looking for 'profit' and they've decided that the most profitable type of media is negative. Screaming mobs of journalists and reporters deserve to be mocked. Saying that journalists asking loaded questions should be at all times answered candidly is stupid not only because there are too many of these rabid dogs to possibly satisfy but also because as often as not they're going to twist whatever you say and turn it against you depending on their own party biases. I didn't say she was qualified nor do I think McCain is either. I will wince for 3 months straight if the US re-elects the republicans. That doesn't mean that I don't think the media frenzy surrounding Palin is fair or reasonable. If you think the media has to answer to charges of harrassment then you clearly don't have a freaking clue what goes on there. To qualify for harrassment a media person has to pretty much threaten or physically assault someone. If you think the media frenzy surrounding Britany Spears was fair then you're either blind or just a cold cold person.

If you're going to argue that the media is fair and reasonable and that they're NOT just looking to make people look bad then you're completely out to lunch. By the way, your "but the Liberals" thing is getting kind of old. This is an election. We're doing comparisons here. It's ridiculous to imply that making these comparisons somehow weakens an argument. Palinized...haha. I seriously like that. Personally, I think Palin was a joke of a VP candidate and it's good that the Americans can see it, but you have to admit that the media has harrassed her. American 'freedoms' go a little too far sometimes and I think the media there has far too much freedom to destroy people's lives with harrasment, rumours, rhetoric and exaggerations than it really should have.

I think that's a better way of expressing what I said. Very insightful. No matter what we think, our feelings, morals and perceptions completely alter what we think is best of Canada and we're never all going to agree.

If he had a majority government I would agree with you and I'd not be able to defend anything he said. In a minority government where the opposition has announced its intention publicly to bring down your government (when it's advantageous to them) only an idiot would cripple himself and hand over every advantage to his opponents. Non-confidence was informally declared by the opposition and they avoided it to play the 'poll and wait' game by the silly technicality of abstaining from every vote. You can complain all you want going, "But! But! He said...!" but if you think that it would have been intelligent and reasonable for Harper to make absolutely certain the Liberals had every advantage and should have been allowed to poll until they knew they could win before they finally voted non-confidence then you're clearly incapable of having a 'reasoned' and worthwhile discussion. Again, I don't think Harper holds the high ground here and I don't think anyone is claiming he does. This, however, does not change the fact that only an idiot would have allowed the liberals to scheme against a weak minority government until a Liberal victory was assured. The liberals were not doing their job. They were abstaining from voting on legislation they felt was completely wrong for Canada. They were ONLY looking to keep their jobs safe and they were more concerned with getting back into power than they were with looking out for Canada. Don't throw the balogna around about who should be or shouldn't be trusted. We all know every politician out there is more slippery than a snake bathed in KY. I vote in my best interests and so do you and we make our own decisions but acting like Harper is somehow less trustworthy than anyone else out there is stupid. You've seen Layton's and Dion's spending promises. They're criticizing Harper for SPENDING while their spending promises DWARF Harper's. It takes no genius to understand that they're both making things up as they go along. I won't even comment on May because I think she's an even bigger joke than Layton.

and you make the blind and foolish assumption that the media is not biased and fairly reports only the facts. Like I said, the media wants to report glaring catastrophes and political bungles. Again, why give them the opportunity to twist and exaggerate your words when they're going to completely ignore everything intelligent and good you say? Wait...yes...I forgot. In Dr. Greenthumb's opinion it's a travesty for someone he doesn't like to think and act intelligently.

I know I've tried to explain it like a 100 times but I'll try to briefly explain it again as simply as possible so everyone here understands. The fixed election date became 100% meaningless when Dion and the opposition started threatening to vote non-confidence. When this occurred, it became painfully obvious the opposition was only prepared to co-operate until public polls started looking good for them to win an election. Regardless of whether or not you think it's 'fair' or 'right' for Harper to have brushed off his own piece of leaky legislation, it would have been supremely stupid to allow Dion and the Liberals to drum up public and financial support until they felt they could win an election and then FINALLY vote non-confidence. You can fuss all you want about it but when the opposition throws threats and rhetoric around about opposing Harper and bringing down his government, they really shouldn't cry about it when he decides to step into their ring and play their own game. What I find absolutely hilarious, however, is how for months and months people were bravely posting about how there should be an election to put the Harper government out of its 'misery'. Now these same people are pouting and carrying on that there's an election because it seems the polls aren't really agreeing with how they feel right now.

Because the media and your political rivals determine what is 'stupid and scandalous'. Small jests never intended to be a true reflection of how a politician feels can get twisted and spun out of context and exaggerated tremendously. Politics aren't really like businesses. Publicity generally works against you. No news is good news in politics and that's the smartest way to look at it.

I don't vote for what's best for Canada. I vote for what's best for me and how I feel. If I believed that Global Warming has been proven and that we are headed for disaster, I would vote for the Green Party. If I believed that people unable/unwilling to work deserved more social assistance, I would vote NDP. The Green Shift, any way you try to explain it, is ultimately just an equalization formula to tax the haves and give to the have nots. There is NOTHING in it for me with the Green Shift. It's incredibly naive and borderline crazy to think that people should be expected to vote for 'what's best for canada' instead of what's best for themselves.

Why don't we take our tinfoil hats off for a second and look at things for what they are. The 'media' is not looking for hard facts or 'news' as we sometimes call it. The media is looking for 'stories' and shock value. This election has been more about which party members are being fired/forced to resign than it has been about election issues and it's DEFINETLY not just the conservatives blowing their own brains out with the press. When the 'media' is full of sensationalists looking SPECIFICALLY for someone to say something stupid or do something scandalous, why feed them? They're not looking for feel-good news and they're not reporting on it. They're looking for and reporting about bad things. Harper is in a good position already and he can only go down from here. Why risk playing the media game with the viscious idiots in charge of it???

99,000 foreclosures is about 0.3% of Canada's population, which is low. Credit card debt, however, is most assuredly out of hand in Canada. This is a combination of poor application standards for mail-out lenders and then mostly just plain stupidity on the part of consumers. Personally, I don't have a lot of sympathy for consumers who end up bankrupt from $80,000 revolving credit balances and incomes in the mid 40,000 area. If you spend too much money, you end up broke.

haha that made me laugh out loud at work. That's certainly the best case scenario. I don't think that they will though because I don't think they'll replace one losing weenie for another weenie.

Please, elaborate and support this statement. Your opinion on what 'seems' to be working is worthless unless you explain and support it.

Oh I suppose you know that as a close insider of the Liberal Party. You're good friends with most of them is that right? Are you even from Ontario? People most certainly DO remember what he did here. He managed to alienate the right and middle classes and at the same time the LEFT as well! I can't even think of a comparison for his government in Ontario. Not even the Trudeau/Mulroney federal governments were as bad as Rae's in Ontario. Ernie Eves was an old fart that nobody wanted to vote for. John Tory ran the worst campaign in Ontario's history. Make no mistake, McGuinty is NOT a particularly popular Premier, but the Tories haven't been able to manage anything better than bumbling old men in Ontario elections since Mike Harris resigned so there's really no competition. The Provincial Liberals will flop in the next provincial election.

This is a silly way to look at things. Even a renewed minority government would give Harper a renewed mandate. It effectively removes the opposition's ability to call an election on a frivolous issue just because polls favor them. Harper would have to do something tremendously stupid for an opposition to vote non-confidence and NOT feel voter backlash within a year or two of this election for calling another one so soon. There is a huge benefit in a renewed minority but an even greater one in a majority government. Harper said that the opposition wasn't willing to work with him, which they were quoted as saying. He did not say he wouldn't work with them. If Harper wins this election it gives him a stronger minority and shuts down the opposition for a time. They'll be even more afraid then they were recently to call another election.

This is so not a big deal. Harper is an autocrat. He likes to manage everything. Good on him for taking the bulk of the responsibility. When he starts infringing on your rights maybe then you should start talking evil dictator, but not until.

Being employed in the banking/finance/investment industry, the comparison between American and Canadian lending practises underscores ENORMOUS differences.

I know that Alberta typically has the lowest poverty rates in the country. No you need to take your basic economic theory one step further. More spending does indeed equal more demand, but more demand generally also means more production to meet this demand and therefore higher supply. Higher supply = lower prices so it heavily balances things out to some extent. Alberta is unique to Canada and perhaps even the world as well in that the DEMAND for workers has increased so sharply over the last 15 years that pretty much nothing in the market could keep up. It had nothing to do with minimum wage laws and everything to do with the fact that people were moving to the province so fast that property demand and demand for everything else skyrocketed beyond what the province had previously been designed to sustain. Possibly but businesses paying $8-10 an hour that can't make profits in Canada don't exactly propel the economy forward anyways. We're witnessing right now a reversal of the Chinese outsourcing phenomenon too. Oil prices will bring jobs back to North America in droves.

I don't even understand how you possibly could have said that. It makes no sense at all.

but in this you're making the erroneous assumption that the people with increased minimum wage would be no better off because prices would increase. This is simply not the case. Yes, prices might increase slightly on goods and services pretty much throughout the entire country, but the vast majority of the increased cost would be passed on to those with high disposable incomes. Why? Because they're the ones spending most of the money. If you doubled minimum wage (which I know is impossible), you wouldn't double the price of any goods. This, as far as I have thought it through, would solve a great number of problems in our country all at once. First, it would even up the country's ENORMOUS income disparity. Second, it would reduce the need of various social services because people would not need to seek as much assistance on higher wages. Third, it provides a strong incentive to the people who should NOT be on welfare to get off their butts and work for a decent wage.

you linked a google search page. What the heck? Even so, I said that the actual addiction itself is similar to a disease in that there are very heavy physical consequences and complications. Putting yourself in a position to GET addicted is where you show a true failing of character on every level. Yes. I'm ultra judgemental. I know.

Nobody anywhere anyhow is ever going to convince me of this one. "Addiction is a disease" is an excuse for stupidity. If stupidity is a disease, then we're on the same page. Getting addicted to heroin, for example, requires the profoundly idiotic leap to take that first hit. Addiction itself can be monumental to overcome once started, but starting it in the first place is an epic failure of character no matter what the circumstances. I didn't assume you could just waltz in to a rehab clinic. I didn't say you could either. What I said was I was completely unsympathetic to the drug addicted welfare recipient's plight and that we should force them into some sort of rehab, and yeah, you're right, I didn't know how much it costs. Either way, it's naive to expect the public to pay to support drug addictions with public money. The welfare payments are not enough to support a decent lifestyle in the first place and when you add the addiction on top of that you can only assume the rest of the money is coming from abusing child benefits or crime. What POSSIBLE benefit is there to supporting that?