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Vancouverite

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Posts posted by Vancouverite

  1. It's natural that street people are drawn to the protest camp. That doesn't make the protesters "druggies".

    Then we should break up the camps. We don't want to create cesspools in our city. If they're homeless and druggies, they should go to homeless shelters and treatment centres respectively, not the front of Vancouver. And the purpose of Occupy Wherever is NOT to provide a tent for such people; the purpose is to protest against whoever they've got a beef with at the moment.

  2. If they OD and turn their site into a junkie's paradise, then they're proving that they're no better than the druggies elsewhere, in which case they should leave and go to treatment centres.

    I don't see druggies camping out on Hastings and Main - some do go to homeless shelters, you know.

  3. The movement has no leadership and no real solutions to very difficult problems, so, in the end, it can't accomplish anything above a protest message. And, without leadership or a platform, it will fizzle out.

    One more thing - some have said they don't need leadership, and they don't have a central agenda, so they're trying something new. They have forgotten the lessons of history, because that was tried in the 1960's and 1970's, with anti-business businesses and so on, but that didn't go anywhere, because any social organization needs leadership and management, and it also needs a central mission and core values.

  4. Many people, including me, are upset at the Liberals for introducing the HST after they said they wouldn't do it, and they're not too happy with the sloppy response to the recent riots, so they may not want to vote for the governing party. OTOH, they also don't want to vote for the NDP, which had an even more disastrous run. So the only alternative, it seems, is the Conservative Party.

    The question then is if they can create a proper team so as to win the next election.

  5. I read a columnist who said that the Bloc will now go to the PQ, who will then become more radicalized. Maybe. In the cut-throat world of politics, no one will listen to a bunch of losers, and, while the PQ may welcome the newly-unemployed Bloc members as PQ members, along with the new membership fees, the PQ will not listen to a bunch who have just been thrown out by the voters.

    As for the sovereignty issue, I don't think that will go away, and the NDP got elected at least partly on its soft nationalist platform.

  6. The earth may not really have moved - when Mulroney won his second majority, Peter Mansfield said that this was the beginning of a Tory dynasty, but, four years later, that dynasty shrank to two seats. The Liberals then ruled for over a decade, and, with Reform and the PC's bickering among themselves, they seemed impregnable. Then you know what happened.

    So I wouldn't count the Liberals out yet, and I would not say the NDP will become the new natural opposition, and I definitely would not count a sovereigntist bloc out.

    But Ignatieff has resigned, when he said he wouldn't - he's done the sensible thing.

  7. Duceppe is history, just as Ignatieff is. The only question is what will happen to their parties.

    The Liberals have been around for as long as Canada, so they may not disappear that easily. The voters may just have parked their votes with the NDP, until the reds select Justin Bieber, I mean, Justin Trudeau. If this is correct, then the NDP surge will shrink. The other possibility is that the NDP will make this a historic alignment, but, if they are to do so, they will have to eat the lunch of the Liberals, which will mean that they will have to become more like the so-called Natural Governing Party.

    The Bloc has only been around a couple of decades, but they have a core ideology that attracts the pure-laine Quebecers, and that is not going to go away. The Bloc may be able to come back, but, then again, they may not. If they can win back their core voters, they'll get their seats back. If not, then their constituency will be up for grabs.

    Both of the above themes show that the NDP have a chance - if they can take the votes from those two, they'll form the opposition and, maybe, some day, the government. But they may have an uphill struggle, at least with the Liberals, because the Liberals have very powerful interests and people with them, and they won't go easily.

    So the next year will be very interesting indeed.

  8. I don't see how the NDP can take support from the Tories - the two parties are on opposite sides of the spectrum. I can see the NDP taking votes from the Liberals, but not the Tories.

    And that's why the Tories should not attack the NDP too much, because the NDP can never truly be a threat to a governing Tory government, but they can hurt the Liberals, who have been forming the government for much of the last century.

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