Icebound

If anybody is serious about creating "one million jobs", they are going to have to solve the income-inequality problem. ...and if they think that cutting 100,000 jobs in the public sector will help the private sector make it happen, then they should read Thomas Piketty. And if they don't have time, they could read a summary here: http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2014/05/05/Thomas-Piketty-Destroys/ And if they dont have time for all of that, the just the third and fourth paragraphs, following the subtile "How Rentiers Stay Afloat". Further on..... "As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the economy blew up in 2007-'08.)" .... and the punch line: "What we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be gained off the backs of the 99 per cent, and less and less will be earned through hard work. Which essentially means freedom for the rich, and no one else." That last bit is just a reminder that it is not only the really-low-income-non-taxpayer who is not contributing.... at least he is contributing WORK. But his work does not accumulate wealth. Meanwhile, the wealthiest are accumulating wealth and contributing no work at all. ... ...

Why is it weird? Only because we have become used to the status quo... and keep protecting industry at the expense of taxpayers. Why shouldn't an industry pay for the unintended consequences of its products? OF COURSE, liability should be shared with the operators, but there is no reason it has to be EXCLUSIVELY and ONLY the operators... ...and of course, it is not going to happen.... but perhaps it should.

YOU ALREADY DO!!!.. Two reasons... maybe 3. 1. The less wealthy are already less likely to vote that your group, statistically. 2. Your money allows you a greater ability to lobby and pressure the government-of-the-day to pass laws that you like, regardless of their own ideological stripe. 3. (maybe a corollary of 2)...There is plenty of evidence that way more of the enacted laws have a greater benefit for the rich than the poor. And remember that some of that "forfeited" income is not strictly yours to keep, anyway. It pays for services that you are going to have to pay for anyway, whether from a public or from a private corporation. Health care comes to mind. Not to mention that some of that income is only possible because the industry (whatever it is) may have extra money that it should have used to clean up its own collateral damage. Example... we all know that automobiles are necessary.... but why should automobile accidents be investigated on the public dime?? Why should not automobile manufacturers... realizing that the use of their product has some inherent danger.... be required to maintain an insurance fund to cover the investigation of those occurrences? They don't, and we have to TAX you, to maintain a registry, and a police force and a health force to cover off the collateral damage of their product. But they could just as well have reduced their dividends, and their salaries, and used the extra money to cover that off themselves... ... ....

Right!... cost-cutting.

Is that push because of "efficacy" or because of "cost"? But in any case, today's "industry" is about the bottom line, and if industry could get away with no policing at all, it would do so. Cars would never be as safe as they are, if Ralph Nader had not come along and pushed for regulation..., although I suppose if it was not him, it would have eventually been someone else. The airline "SMS" model (where industry policies itself according to the regulations)... may be valid, put you need sufficient inspection to prove that it is actually so, and not just lip-service to a big binder of rules, sitting on the shelf. ...

Read it again. It is the fault of the LACK of TC regulation, or at least, the LACK of TC oversight. But anyway... whether more public spending can solve the myriad of messes that private industry creates may be debatable.... BUT FOR SURE....the solutions are not simple, and it is not a given that LESS public spending and FEWER public employees is somehow the magic road toward solving them.

Yeah, it was the CBC who broke that story and interviewed the CEO of the rehab. Which begs the question.... why the CBC? Is it because breaking the story to the CBC makes it more believable that breaking the details to, say, Warmington at the Sun? The only question now, is whether it was broken to the CBC because it is TRUE???.... or because it is BELIEVABLE??? ... ...

Any why not?... Top aides for the Harper Conservatives include Howard Anglin and Alykhan Velshi, who had a previous life in Washington.... writing opinions for AMERICAN conservatives.

Oh? That is not a given. Private industry has a history of creating great messes and not paying for them. Eventually it got left to the public sector to clean them up. Our airline maintenance is substandard http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/survey-finds-gaps-in-aviation-safety-procedures/article18136511/ The food industry is wallowing in inhumane practices, and faulty products We are being inundated with foreign products, including food and drugs, of questionable safety. Our automobiles are faulty, our rail lines are spewing burning oil into the middle of towns, our bridges are falling down, our roads are pounded to crap by trucks, our rivers are polluted by chemicals. Maybe these industries need to pay for MORE public jobs to regulate, oversee and penalize their behaviour...

I don't know if that is accurate. The CPC has been morphing Canada slowly, piece by piece. There is no telling what the next piece may be. But I do agree that it does seem pointless. The only point would be that you expect a free vote, and now everybody will vote the same without the necessity of a whip... ... ...

We may argue about the propriety of the Pro-life statement..... But on the larger topic of "excluding MP representation for a huge swath....". There is ALWAYS a "huge swath" for whom representation is problematic.... specifically those who, if they were "represented"... would trample human rights, There is no problem with any Party deciding that there are certain policies that they simply will not represent... capital punishment, bigotry towards minorities, etc.. EVEN IF there is a significant population who supports those... Representative democracy does not imply that the representative is supposed to be a puppet of the electors. Representative democracy asks that you choose the smartest person from amongst you... and he represents you by doing those things that are best for all of society. (One problem with our democracy is that we no longer choose the smartest person, we choose the one that looks the prettiest or the one who has the most money....but I digress) So... does anti-abortion qualify as a valid policy not to be supported? Is it a good idea to insist that every candidate adhere? Trudeau has made that choice and it may cost him votes or it may gain him votes, that's his problem. Personally, I think it can cost him a small number of good candidates, but again, that is HIS problem. The policy itself is embraced by a group, is reviled by another group, and is a non-issue for most. There will have to lots of other policies, good and bad, in order to sway voters sufficiently to make him PM, or to send him to 4th party status. ...

.. Interesting to have produced a program where all the protection is afforded the employer, and absolutely none to the employee. Sharp cookies, those lawmakers. ...

Yeah, I think I missed the sarcasm until after I posted...... Sorry about that

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Oh, I don't know....... GM managed to write off billions in debt and resurface happily on the other side. Why can't a public entity do what private enterprise does all the time? ....

Yes, Harris' advocacy of scrapping the Canada Health Act, together with the general "lower expenditure" policy.... ought to go over real well with voters, especially the lower income voters. It is easy to balance the budget, if you do not DO anything. ... ...

Sure. Why not? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car ...

I think the car is the culprit. ...but it wont be long before we fix that. It should not be too long before the cars will recognize whether the driver is impaired or not... if not at start-up... then after a few minutes of erratic operation. So then every light in the vehicle starts flashing in a very noticeable, alternating / strobelike fashion while the vehicle slows down gradually to a stop, at the same time dialing 911. The technology exists. We mandate seatbelts and airbags, child restraints, why not this? Might even solve some of the texting problems, as well. ...

He may not know it, living as he does in his PMO bubble, but this is a battle that he has already lost. ...

Precisely. Which undermines the argument that somehow she is "anti-Harper", or some sort of law-making activist. She swore in the Prime Minister's appointee as per normal protocol. She did not initiate any action to remove him.. The SC, as a whole, rejected his appointment only when the legal arguments for and against were made by outside parties. .

Looking at that rant transcript in detail, it is not hard to connect the dots as follows: 1. Ford probably IS a bigoted, racist (or at least semi-racist), homophobic misogynist... just like many people say...., okay, fine. 2. He most likely DOES want to do good.... but also most likely DOES hate politics. ... but is in it for some unknown reason... like maybe encouragement from somebody he looks up to??? 3. His "friends" know about 1., but they still just can't resist egging him on to say it out loud,... hoping for what? Maybe a good quote on a recording that they could sell to somebody??? So... if the highlighted portion of your post happens... and if "home" means "friends and family".... then yes, your final statement has an odds-on probability, as well...... In order to survive this, he will probably have to get a new set of "friends". ...

Crack is the least of his problems this time. http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2014/04/20140430-204114.html ..

A committee "accountable to no one" ??? What you want is a committee "beholden to no one". The latter might make some very good appointments ....

Its one thing to talk "positively" about his legacy... ... but would you say... the way that he played John Doe in THIS movie makes it a lot better than all those OTHER movies... with the implication, of course, that all those other actors were useless.

QUOTE: By November 2008, Jim and I had both concluded, not easily and certainly not what would have been expected, that the calamity befalling the global economic and financial system meant, among others things, that we had to run a deficit. That is, not merely allow a modest deficit, but deliberately engineer as large a deficit as could be reasonably run, as a response to a collapsing marketplace. So this, Jim did. Canada announced one of the world’s larger stimulus packages and he engineered the money out the door far more rapidly than most. This people remember well. What they remember less well is that that was not all there was to it. Jim knew that, in the past, even modest, short-term deficit spending had resulted in severe, long-term fiscal problems. So, even as he pushed out stimulus spending, he made changes in longer-term expenditure policies that would reduce their growth path. And then, there was what Jim did not do. He did not use the crisis to build new bureaucracies, to create permanent new programs, to recklessly enhance entitlements or to reverse any tax cut that had been legislated. He took other actions in housing and banking to ensure even greater long-term stability in our financial system. And he put constraints on any excessive experimentations in monetary policy. The result is this. While, at one time, Canada was no better than middle of the pack, today in an uncertain world, Canada will have a balanced budget years ahead of others, with low debt and low taxes, and is recognized to be the best managed major developed economy. UNQUOTE Take that piece out, and you have a nice eulogy to a dedicated public servant. With it,.... BAH.