playfullfellow

I don't know the statistics MS but I think you are right, especially in sexual abuse cases and child abduction cases. Crimes like theft I think are more crimes of oppertunity. From what I heard in the Cecelia case, the fellow ( I use the term losely ) is here on a student visa. I wonder if he will get a slap on the wrist and then sent home?

Showing or wearing a flag of your country is a matter of pride. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of Europeans have a flag pole in their yards and most have a country sticker on their cars. As for Canadian acceptance in other countries, it is generally pretty good. We are well respected in most European countries as being a fair and honest country. What's wrong with wearing that pride on your backpack or jacket, no matter what other may think.

I am sure there are plenty of other things we could get rid of to recoup the money. Compared to some, what Clarkson spends is chicken feed.

We don't have the same problem here in Alberta but healthcare costs seem to keep rising but with not much extra from the feds unless you spend the money the way they want you to. That is along the same lines as your boss handing you a pay cheque and then telling you how you have to spend the money. Doesn't make much sense. I don't agree with what BC is doing if they are indeed taking money that should be spent on healthcare and spending it on the Olympics. But in effect, is the problem underfunding or is there too much waste in the healthcare system that wastes the money?

Alberta seperating is a stupid idea. I know the East has raped Alberta beacuse of energy. And we alienate them. But it's their fault for not electing more Liberals. In theory, it makes sense to vote in more liberals but what if the liberals do not stand for what Albertans believe in? There is no free vote yet so what would more liberals from Alberta help? They have to vote the party line so what the hell does it matter what they think or believe? It is time to let politicians vote according to how their constituents want them to vote, not what the party wants all the time.

I don't really see where you come off caesar suggesting that a hockey player is more valuable than a teacher. I am sorry we are not all as briliant as you were in school and get a nice job at a cleaners. So according to your theory, someone who works a hazardous job should make millions every year. I like your thinking in that sense, sure would make the construction and oil field workers in this area happy.

So more beaurocracy will help the country be a better place? We already have too much government as it is. How is more going to make it better. The only purpose of the Feds to seemingly give more power to municipalities is to turn them against the provinces. It is just another ploy at power buying. Sheesh, they have promised more power and representation to the provinces for years and I am still waiting for that.

If they are such world class vessels, why are they still sitting in dry-dock rusting away? Most private businesses would not want to see this happen to a multi million dollar investment. Are there still problems with these things so they still don't work right? My understanding is that they were lemons to begin with. Would you go back to the same car dealership you bought a lemon from before? Not very likely. Since these bloody things are still collecting dust, there must be something else wrong with them.

I stand corrected, I forgot about fish farms.

I agree with you to a certain extent that the government should buy locally if they can but it should not be a guarantee. That would stiffle competition and lead to poor workmanship. If they can get a superior product at the same price somewhere else, then so be it.

Both systems have both good and bad teachers but I find that the private system has better parent teacher relationships. I can do a sit in on any class my kids are in anytime I want to. If I want to do that in the public system, I have to get written permission from the board. I also find that since I have a learning challenged child, I can work a lot better one on one with a teacher in the private system, the public system had no interest in what I thought was best for my kid. They just wanted to label him, drug him and then set him off to the side until he is an adult. Where do you think my preference will lie?

Just how does a banker understand the day to day running of a farm? You need a person with agricultural background to run that portfolio. That is like asking a person who lives in Saskatoon to run the fisheries department.

More western Liberal Cabinet ministers won't really mean squat if Martin or the rest of the Liberals don't really give a crap. The West has a very large agricultural base but he chose a banker from Ontario to run the Ag Portfolio. Time will tell if naything positive comes out of this but given the past history of the Liberals, I am not holding my breath. Caesar, the only reason the west got as many ministers as they did was because Martin is sucking up. If the west would have voted in more liberals, they would have done as in the past, nothing!

Caesar, thats might be in your neighbourhood, around here a lot of the kids from the public school are little pukes. I am not saying that private schools are perfect but public systems are far from perfect too. As for kids swearing like sailors and all that, that problem starts at home and the lack of a bar of soap.

MS, unfortunately the school you refer to is not the norm anymore in the public school system. Yes, there are many good schools out there but there are also quite a few bad ones. This goes for the private system too but a bad private school will fail from lack of attendance, a bad public school gets to stay in business. My kids do extremely well in the private system and love school. Their preference is the private system as they know quite a few kids from the public system and they are rude obnoxious little brats. Since my kids do very well in a private system, why should I not be able to say my tax dollars go to that school? If my kids not do well in the school, then I would have to look at other options.

I have to agree with you MS to a certain point but what I have found with private schools, well in Alberta anyways, they accept special needs kids adn do a very good job with them. It is not the public system in general that is the problem, it is the other kids in a public system that can be a problem. I am not saying every public school is the same. It has a lot to do with the teachers and administration of each school as to how that school is. I went through the public school system, some of the schools were very good and some were just terrible, mostly dependant on the principle and his way of running things. Throwing more money at the public system wont alleviate the problems we see happening now a days. More money does not solve all problems. You expound freedom of choice of so many of your threads but yet you feel the government knows best on how to educate and pick the morals you need to follow. How does the government know what is best for my child? They label him, put him in a certain category and expect him to behave as they have labeled him. This does not work, that is institutionalizing kids and labeling them which is wrong. Through the private school system, we get to have one on ones with the teacher and make recommendations as to how to help our kid. The public system wants no input from parents as to how they educate our kids. If they are to teach my kids, I want a say in what they are taught.

Ok, how do you define someone as being a heavy smoker? Anyone who smokes 2 packs a day or 1 a day? Lets say your plan works and we get rid of smoking. The only smokers left are the ones buying their smokes on the street corner. We then realize that people are still getting sick, still dropping dead of heart attacks. So what is our next target going to be? Let's pick on the fat people and their big mac love affair (this is just an analogy, I am not saying all fat people eat big macs). So we outlaw big macs, micky dee's goes belly up. Now we have lost another revenue source but people are still dying and getting sick. This is hwat we have to look at, no matter how hard you try, we will always have people dying and getting sick. We pick on smokers and fat people because they are easy targets. They are a visible target. How come we don't look at the fact that more and more people eat out, eat boxed food that has been sitting on the shelves for several months, heat and eat foods? Our canned foods contain chemicals in them that no one can pronounce or even have the faintest clue as to what they are. What about stress, how many people does that kill every year? I know of people who did everything right, never smoked, ate right and excercised plenty and they drop dead at around 50 of a heart attack. Why? Well they lead very stressful lives. They stressed about everything and it killed them. Targetting certain life styles or habits won't work. Where do you stop? No, I think we need to get people to look a lot more at themselves and the lifestyles they lead. We also need to teach people how to cook a decent meal at home instead of hauling a roast out of a box and nuking it. How can that be safe?

My preference slides more towards educational channel like TLC or The Discovery channel. I get tired of having to watch the news on 3 different stations to get a better rounded version of political type news. Heck, even reporting on weather disaster items, you still get 3 different versions but I guess that is dependant on the sources they use. To get most of my news, I generally read a selection of newspapers.

And why do you say this MS? Why shouldn't parents be allowed to send kids to the school of their preference? I have a special needs child who could not get the help or services needed to help him in school. In public school he was ridiculed, pushed around and threatened. The teachers generally did not care. We put our kid in a private school and you would not believe the difference. He does very well and the teachers actually like the kids they are hired to teach. I think taxpayers should have some say in where their portion of the school tax money goes each year. Maybe not the whole amount but at least a portion.

Making tobacco illegal is one way to to get some people to stop the habit but the government likes huge taxes they get from tobacco. Another way to look at it is, pot is illegal but how may people do you know who smoke a reefer every now and then or everyday? If it wasn't for pot, the BC economy would be totally shot. But once we start this morality ball rolling down the hill, where the heck is it going to stop? And in all reality, how are we going to pay for all this extra enforcement? We can't get enough police as it is now. Healthcare needs to picked apart and all duplicated services (provincial and federal) need to be done away with. Why not set up walk-in-clinics where interns have to spend part of their rotations where people can go with a snotty nose, sore throat or a splinter in their fingers? Make it first come, first serve. If the interns feel it is more serious than a common cold, get them to send them on further to either emergency or a GP the following day. I think we can all agree the healthcare system is flawed in Canada and I see a lot of yakking on whats wrong. Why dont we work on ideas to fix it? There are a lot of smart people on these boards be they left, right or centrist and we should be able to come up with some pretty damn good ideas. Lets get away from the blame game and start coming up with ideas on how to fix it. We all know what we like and don't like with healthcare. Lets find ways to expand on the ideas that work and fix the things that don't work.

We should just get rid of the CRTC as they act and behave like a bunch of overlords of Canadian morality. They allow stations like AJ into our airwaves but limit local Christian shows. We have 600 sports channels but very few educational channels. I think that a tv channel should stand on it's own merits and either float or sink on it's own. Who really cares if it is a US channel, Canadian channel or a channel from Mars? If it has good shows and some educational value, then I will watch it.

Pretty well shows how much respect Mr. Robinson has for the Canadian tax payer. Hopefully he didn't visit any jewelry shows while in Scotland. That might start a war with Scotland if he did. The MP's also get a pretty good expense account too on top of all their other wages and benefits. These accounts are pretty well free to use as long as they don't get too extravagant. The pensions they get are absolutely atrocious especially for the service we get from these MP's while they are in parliament. They should only get the same as any other Canadian of their wage level does. If they want anything more, then they should have to pay extra themselves. Why should we have to keep paying for some of these jerks for years to come? I also wonder if we are still paying for services such as haircuts and manicures on parliament hill? That is also nuts if we are still paying for that kind of crap. No matter how you boil it down, we pay a lot for these MP's and for what really? So they can lie to us, steal from us and so forth. If we had some accountability from these MP's then I might not be so annoyed at the money we have to spend on these jerks.

We all seem to know that there is plenty of rotten crap heading out of the government beaurocracies these days anyways so why does this sort of stuff surprise anyone? We know our testing for BSE in inadequate but no one can seem to come up with an answer as to what has to be done. Drug resistant bugs are just as much, if not more the fault of dumb ass people heading to the doctor for a pill everytime they get a fart stuck. Livestock farmers live under very strict rules in regards to withdrawel times and dosages. After 9/11, there are plenty of incedences of various government departments getting leaned on to show that there was a much more severe terrorist threat to Canada than there actually was. The bigger the threat, the more money the Liberlas were going to throw at it. Call it job security if you may. Something the government is good at, creating work for itself. The Liberals will hang a few scapegoats out to dry now and slap a couple of hands to make it look like they are keeping their promises. As for the whistle blowing legislation, by the time it comes to any sort of reality, it will be so watered down that we might as well not waste our time or money on it.

I don't know if his numbers are accurate but I must assume so because this is the sort of stuff they research. What I do know is that living in Alberta isn't too bad right now. Yeah we have our problems but so does every region in the country. We have a pretty good economy right now despite past drought problems and the BSE dilema which has cost the province a whole whack of money. I wonder if some of the spending they are talking about includes money spent to help out farmers over the past 3-4 years? If so, then I can understand that our spending is so high. Ralph has his problems but overall, he has done a pretty good job and I hope he will continue to do so. Most of his future problems will come from special interest groups and unions that figure they need a larger slice of the pie now that Alberta is basically debt free.

Actually there have been a few intolerances towards Christians in the public school system. Saying of the Lord's prayer each morning is banned which was a cneturies long tradition in all public schools, there are no bible study classes during regular class times anymore and the most recent is the hoopla over Christmas, which is celebrating the birth of Jesus. Now we call it winter festivals, winter break, what have you. People want the benefits of Christmas but do not want to acknowledge that it is a Christian holiday. What is next, Easter? It seems that as soon as a person is called a Christian, then they are labeled intolerant and extreme. Yet, it seems society is allowed to walk all over centuries long beliefs but a Christian is not allowed to voice their beliefs in public. Canada seems to love to pander to the wants and whims of minority groups and gladly step all over Christian beleifs to do so. As long as all this labeling crap continues, then we will continue to have these problems.