craiger

I am not about to branish the conservatives as a whole about this I am true blue! this is about certain individual (Harper) lying to our faces. I voted for the SOB upon his plattform to learn a week later he lied to me! and the rest of us. lets Think rational about this. no biased opinion about any party's. This scum bag educated in economics blatant lies to us. point is if we are based on lies and leaders who don't know the job from their ars from a hole in the ground I have no trust and will not spend no money's or invest , and encourage others also to do so yes I'm mad I voted the Ars in! and he lied to me didn't even take a week to see the truth. Never again will I vote Harper again or Flattery no matter what party they rep. I also feel they called a early election as if they knew their whole platform of fiscal managment would have meant BOGUS when they ran this defecit

I suspect Alberta will be hurt the worst of all the provinces do to lack of managing growth and inflation . Labour costs are locked in by contracts and materials are not coming down making this one of the worste places to invest. Alberta's economy is not diverse outside oil with out jobs Alberta is not a attractive place to live and people will leave in droves. I was speaking with a large Encana investor he told me he is pulling out of Alberta mainly for those two reasons, but he also expressed displeasure with unconventional oil and with the new royalty regime Alberta is not atractive. Most of these investors are American and both leaders running for president are want to adopt carbon credits so the bread and butter of all industry's will be in green technology. Alberta unemployment stats are decieving as the thousands of jobs lost last month were of travel cards and temp workers, they may not be albertan but they contribute to the economy. Even nation wide Harper has decieved as he preached as hero he created 110,000 jobs yet he failed to tell 90,000 of those jobs are part time, anyone forced into part time work is most likely working 2+ jobs anyways, our goals should be in full time hobs. To make matters worse we have leaders like Harper who promises to not run a defecit to win a election, then a week later after voted in he sais a deficit is unavoidable, we have nobody to trust and untill trust is built again as a consumer or investor I would never think of spending money, not when trust is lost and the market is so toxic.

your wrong praise ALLA! I have more rights than you do and I can prove it. What you going to do about it! jack squat get in line with the rest of the sheep we own you!!

I do not have the time to argue with you. does not matter either way you have a problem with me for some reason I do not understand. what I will do Is when a decision is made on my 2 human rights cases and when I begin class action I will post findings. All I know is I gain more hope every day when contractors ask me to settle in the tens of thousands of moneys to sign document to silence me. I also know if i had nothing human rights would not pursue my case. be patient this will be up to my lawyer to argue not me. I was simply telling others my story, as I apreciate everyones opinion.

If you want a better understanding go to DOT (department of transportation) site they wrote and developed the D&A policy we adopted in Canada. Every standard test is the same uses the same forms and pocedures NOT developed by ACSA or COAA but developed by DOT.

Actually I stand to be corected. The problems I have encountered are not with Immigrants but Temporary Foreign workers. I manage crews very well when they speak english. Does not matter what race or color they are as long as we can comunicate, I also take great pride in training others. But why should I waste my time on those working with translators and all the rest of the bs when they leave after a few years anyways. I can train a aprentice in 3-4 years and then it's easy streak for the next 30 years as they are competant journeyman. I am getting so called "journeyman" off the boat that are about as useless as tits on a board.

ok loser get a life!

define a skilled immigrant! sure we could find many skilled in the USA or Europe. but they don't come here because they are skilled and their country is good. what we get is the bottom of the barrel who come from third world country's that clame they are skilled, ya maybe skilled in their country lol. Bring me a china man off the boat who can do what any skilled canadian can do you will find they are bellow mediocre. I wouldn't hire em and thats comming from experience managing them. i wouldn't trust them to clean a toilet bowl.

Do us a favour and quit your job don't help train or educate these people. I did it after running a crew of temporary foreign worker china men. I started contracting for myself I pay better wages but I also don't deal with headaches of comunication problems, broken procedures and codes it costs allot of money for re work. I don't care they can do shotty work with there unordidox trade skills. In the end I get the work as I hire the best of the best, my orders are backed up for the next 18 months as i provide quality. your only fueling the flames. resist your services, your the best. Look at it this way they are making money on you, your doing them the favour. for them to show in return a monkey can do your job should be a insult. i would quit.

I ran a crew of chinese workers at CNRL and to be honest I will never do it again. These guys were getting paid good money like the rest of us yet I could not get any work out of them. You would think like most other tradesman you could hand them a print and they could go do the job with out me holding their hand at all times. But no, I would have to get a translator because they could not understand a word I was saying. And then when you finally do get them to do something they break all the codes and procedures. we spent more time on re work fixing their mistakes we were going backwards. And these were journeyman tradesman if this is the direction we are moving who needs a ticket I know labourers who have a better understanding of the trade than these so called journeyman.

Yes I have. I fully back blood testing as it can't be cheated or adulterated. Only thing that I would ask is that it is administered by a doctor unlike the urine test where any joe blow can complete a online test, or have no medical background. For everyones safety I would not want it to fall into the wrong hands, it becomes a risk when working with needles and blood thats how people can contracts such viruses as the HIV.

your the scab loser! how many more of your men have you killed by your unorthidox trade skills? I seen what you did to those china men at CNRL I', sure your proud of that being the bigot you are! don't worry Im bigger than you ever will be and that bothers you. I hold skills you will never posess. pff SCABS have no place in this thread FIOFO SCAB CLAC will be the first I go after. We already got Will BROS their sick of your scab ethic, your mine biotch!

I have been discusing this on other forums the point that bothers me I live in Edmonton the second largest murder capital even with the huge inflation and lack of man power in Alberta we can hire over 120 officers training and all for a few million. bothers me Harper has a damn Army protecting him like the man is not that important. seriously who wants to kill the PM of canada besides some dim witted teens from Toronto. We are talking a canadian PM a peon! $30 million could protect allot of lives. If a extremist group should choose to carry a attack it won't be our PM but most likely the Oilsand or something similar wich nearly is not as funded as Harpers protection. Harper needs to get off the dope it clearly is making him to paranoid.

They or their families may be charged onerous fees back home, then told they have a debt to pay off here By TAMARA CHERRY, SUN MEDIA TORONTO -- The stereotype is a young woman forced to work in a brothel, strip club or massage parlour. But reality cuts across all walks of life. Nannies. Construction workers. Seasonal farmers. "Nobody knows the language of human trafficking," says Sherilyn Trompetter, assistant executive director of Changing Together, an Edmonton-based non-governmental agency (NGO) that leads the Alberta Coalition Against Human Trafficking. Many exploited foreign workers are treated simply as employees in poor working conditions, not as human trafficking victims, Trompetter says, pointing to the case of 30 Polish welders who arrived in Alberta in 2005 and 2006 under false pretenses and were paid less than half their expected wages. "Human trafficking in general in Canada needs to be redefined and it needs to be stated that we've already seen these patterns; these patterns have always existed," she says. "We're just not calling it what it is." In a four-part series running across the country this week, Sun Media looks at Canada's hidden trade in people; at the failure of this country to live up to its international obligations on human trafficking, to prosecute human traffickers and meaningfully help victims. Human trafficking is defined under Canadian law as "the recruitment, transportation or harbouring of persons for the purpose of exploitation," the RCMP writes on its website. Trafficking can be a family member offering up a child to work in Canada as a domestic servant. It can be a live-in caregiver who is brought into the country and told she will be paid with a roof over her head, not understanding she is also entitled to a wage. And sometimes the exploitation is based on false promises, unfulfilled visas and what seem to be a lack of options: A group of trades people who arrive in Canada only to be shuffled to another employer and paid a fraction of what was agreed upon. "It's often degrees of exploitation," Canadian Council for Refugees executive director Janet Dench says in Montreal. "The more vulnerable people are, the more easy it is to exploit them." The Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) moved to address the living and working conditions of temporary foreign workers in 2006 when, for the first time ever, Alberta had more of these workers in the booming province than permanent immigrants. At the time, there were nearly 22,400 temporary foreign workers in Alberta -- doubled from 2003 and tripled from 1997. The following year, the AFL launched the Temporary Foreign Worker Advocate with Edmonton lawyer Yessy Byl at the helm. By the time her six-month report came out, Byl had heard from more than 1,400 people and opened case files for 123 temporary foreign workers "in need of assistance." "An analysis of the 123 files handled by the Advocate reveals a troubling picture of how Alberta is treating this group of workers," the report said. "Quite frankly, we are exploiting their vulnerability and taking advantage of their precarious position." The problems can start in a victim's home country, where employment agencies have been known to charge anywhere from $1,000 to $15,000 to process Canadian job applications, says Anette Sikka, who spent several years trying to combat human trafficking in Kosovo before returning to Canada where she is researching human trafficking at the University of Ottawa. In some cases, agencies are charging workers for skills and language training in their home country and then charging a "settlement" fee upon their arrival in Canada -- calling it such gets around rules that make it illegal to charge for finding employment. Like many trafficking victims who are smuggled into this country, these victims are told they, too, have a debt to pay off. We found you a job, now you owe us some money. And there is nobody telling them otherwise. With no official agreement obligating the federal government to tell the provinces who, when and how many people are arriving as temporary foreign workers or live-in caregivers, employment standards branches across the country, no matter how good their intentions, don't have the necessary information to check up on workers, Sikka says. "There's no mandatory orientation done," she says. "It's absolutely, 100-per-cent necessary. I think it's the primary thing we can do to stop the types of trafficking that are going on in Western Canada particularly." Debt bondage aside, workers can fall into a "vicious cycle" of exploitation simply by not being informed of their rights upon arrival, Sikka says. Something as simple as informing workers about the procedure of changing employers would be helpful for foreign workers who are granted visas to work at one place, but upon arrival, are shuffled to different employers. By the time they figure out they are working illegally, experts say, these workers may be hesitant to speak out for fear of deportation. "They can change employers if they want, but they're just not told," Sikka says. "Nobody informs them they have to go through that procedure." "Families who are sending people over, they'll do just about anything: Mortgage homes, take out loans . . . So when the person gets here and if the job isn't what they had expected or they're not making the money they had expected or, in some cases, there's actually no job, they've been charged all this money and they end up working illegally," Sikka says. "And then they're stuck in this vicious cycle where they may not be working in accordance to their visa, but they're in such high debt bondage, there's just nothing they can do." At the International Bureau for Children's Rights in Montreal, program manager Catherine Gauvreau recounts a story that began to unravel a few years ago about a trafficked teenaged girl. Having been separated from her parents during a 1990s conflict in her home country and subsequently separated from her siblings, the girl arrived in Canada with a woman posing as her aunt. "The child is obviously in a desperate situation in this case. She (the 'aunt') brings the child here, the child goes through the process, is accepted under false identity." The victim ended up in a home where she "basically does domestic servitude, she takes care of the family, of the children," all the while under psychological control and physical abuse from the family, Gauvreau says. "She goes into the school system. No one believes her because this is not something that supposedly happens in Canada." That child, who is now an adult, became a successful refugee claimant after a friend's mother finally found credence in her allegations. "It's important to recognize that some of the situations are domestic ones, where you have women and men, children even, who are kind of house servants and they're kept in the house and not able to get out," Dench says with this message for the government: "Try to make sure that people have as many opportunities as possible to assert their rights." Loly Rico, co-director of the FCJ Refugee Centre in Toronto and president of Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, has seen cases of Canadians returning to their home countries to recruit people for work and bring them back to Canada. But instead of paying them money, they pay the workers with food and shelter. "But they don't let you go out." Of the three trafficked women who have walked into Rico's office this year, two were forced into the sex trade; one was in forced domestic, abusive labour, she says. "In most of the cases, they have been brought by relatives or friends," she says, adding most victims she has seen over the years come from the Caribbean and Latin America. Sikka points out domestic and agricultural workers are often excluded from Employment Standards legislation. "A lot of people want to be involved in trafficking. It's a big, sexy, glamorous, organized crime issue. Whether that's really the case is another story. And I don't think it is," Sikka says. "People don't always want to hear that. It's just not newsworthy, I guess. Because it's been happening for so long and people have ignored it for so long, now that we call it trafficking, they're still ignoring it." "It just becomes everybody's responsibility to, in a sense, look out for your neighbour," says Robin Pike, executive director of the B.C. Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons. "If people are suspicious that the live-in caregiver next door has had her passport taken and has never been paid, it really is the eyes of the public." "The one thing that I think that we should do faster than immediately is the education component," Manitoba MP Joy Smith says. "We should make sure that on airplanes people are warned about human trafficking. We should make sure that there's a 1-800 number if somebody's in trouble, with the resources behind it to make sure that person can be rescued." "No one . . . wishes to be in bondage . . . to be confined. And there's no one that wishes to be used," she says, adding more resources need to be poured into educating police about identifying victims. South of Ontario, where a state-wide task force funded by the U.S. government is set up to combat human trafficking, Amy Fleischauer says of the dozens of victims she has come across over the last year and a half, she can't paint just one picture of their situations. There have been sex workers, restaurant workers, farm workers, domestic workers, says the trafficking victim services co-ordinator for the International Institute of Buffalo. "They've been all ages. We've served some minors, but the large majority of our clients have been older, in their 30s and 40s," she says. "There really has been no trend or no one face of trafficking or one characteristic." Most don't identify themselves as trafficking victims and are referred to Fleischauer by other organizations. By the time they end up on her doorstep, they want to learn English, they want to know when they can work next, they want job skills. "We try to meet those needs and establish some trust and explain their rights and even what their rights are in this country if they're undocumented," she says. "Those have been some really tough conversations -- that even if you are not in this country legally, you can't be beaten."

Whatever. I cheated my D&A test last week using a number 1 belt. I switched out the fake urine with my own urine so don't tell me it cannot be cheated, I was forced to I need to work. Pains me to say I am now a cheater but hey a guy has to do what a guy has to do right to make a living. I don't do drugs but i am being asked for the impossible I have been forced to cheat.

Conservatives offered the 40 year mortgage how can you honestly say that

point I am making is go ahead and privatize I know how bad it will be, but i also have the years to prepare when cutts are made to health and social services or pensions don't pay the bills, seniors don't be coming to the rest of us to bail you out. They don't care about the future generations kids in school that will not be able to afford private healthcare, prime example is the USA the life expectancy is much lower than country's with healthcare if you break your leg whatever these kids will not be able to afford it. So i figure if the old want to screw these younger people I refuse to help any of them out.

Are you saying the Canada’s national police college was about to sacrifice the lives of Canadians in a war founded on lies?

Quit with the petty stuff harper would have taken us into war with Iraq! Harper is not a leader with good decision skills Harper is a sheep he would have preached weapons of mass destruction lies to the people. Harper does not think for the people he represents he has no brain to make choices, his choices are dictated by elites that will make him huge moneys in the private sector when he is done

Love what you have to say. Best part critical thinking I belive it to be the best trait in man. Problem is man has showen in other generations a miss trust, greed. quet frank I don't trust anyone greed and deception by our elders has been proven. I have more trust in my dog

If the lg is to protect the people from government then why do they hold vested interest in corperations? example i will give is louis hole, holes greenhouse, Lockerbie and hole one of the largest corperate entity's in the oilsands. To go farther with this I will tell you Lockerbie and hole stole money's from unions by taking MERF funds to start up spinnoff non union company's. Sorry I have a hard time understanding the lg's position in protecting the people.

$10,000 a month in medical expenses adds up fast even with the help of healthcare. Yes she has money tied up in the retirement retreat but its not turning profit. 8 months they have been trying to sell but with the slowing economy its not selling so even though she has money in assets the overhead is sincking them deeper into a hole in the last year tottal assets have depretiated 15%.

Darn straits something is fishy. Because of freedom of information I am forced to start suing my own union and the other 30 building trade unions who entered into contract. In court the informations of names will be made public and further action can be taken

Harper claims parliment is dysfunctional as he wants to be king. Harper is true Monarch

WEll haper 1.) He did admitt he was adement about invading Iraq and admitts It was a wrong stance. we don't need leaders who make such bad decision Bush jr 2.) income trusts he screwed allot of people out of allot of retirement cash 3.) sucessor of Ralph klien same man who would get drunk and have his limmo driver drive down to the shelter to berate working folks who could not afford a home with a inflated economy. 4.) 6 months into the conservative temporary worker program chinese workers were killed at CNRL investigations showed they were paid 30% the wages, they also secluded them in Gulag work camps in alberta. 5.) People like me have friends and family wanting to get into trades. 12 years ago I told them we need boosting in appreticeship training, nothing was done as temp foreign workers do it cheaper no regard to educate or manage growth 5.) ATB a province owned bank operated by conservatives under conservative government has lost $1 billion of tax payers money in the mortgage crisis. CEO's made millions in the last year while profits droped. Profits of $30 million, $26 million was paid out as bonus to fellow neo cons. 6.) the fact raw bitumen is exported at 1 cent a barrel to be refined in other countrys. harper is giving a 50 billion dollar tax credit for corperations that money could be used to build taxp payer owned refinery's that could provide fuel for Canadians at 40 cents a litre still turning a profit, would also make our company's more competitive cutting energy costs 7.) 30% of the homless problem is people turned away for disability's or medical problems with cutts to social programs and health these poeple are on the streets.