g_bambino
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Posts posted by g_bambino
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will Harper Conservative supporters ever accept any degree of accountability for their favoured party? Ever?
Specifically regarding the case you're discussing, why should they?
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Ford was not immediately available to comment, but his brother, Coun. Doug Ford, said the mayor did not suggest Dale was a pedophile.
I wonder if Bob and Doug could devise... No, they could pay someone to devise a machine that automatically responds to reporters by playing back the reporter's question but placing a recording of Doug saying "The Mayor did not..." over the "Has the Mayor" or "Did the Mayor" part. It would then play a randomly selected phrase from a collection including "gravy train", "saved taxpayers a billion dollars", "lots of people enjoy a few drinks on the weekend", and "drunken stupor".
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We do, in fact, vote for presidents. Just not officially.
I of course meant officially and of course there are people in this country who actually think "prime minister" is a quirky Canadian title for our president; I recently saw a tv show in which a guy on Parliament Hill said something about "all these statues of presidents" around him. Like him, all the others are wrong, too (he was thankfully corrected on camera), which is clearly only going to assist the decay of our democracy. Prime ministers love to be thought of as presidents, because then they can act like presidents, there to do as they wish until at least four years passes (though, even then, they can "call" "their own" election any time before that); but, keeping MPs as nobodies is a big factor in the prime minister maintaining as much of a presidential status as our constitution will allow. If people saw MPs actually hold a prime minister over a real (metaphorical) fire more often than only in minority parliaments, they might come to learn the prime minister isn't supreme over parliament, it's the other way around.
[ed.: +]
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They need to give the power back to the grassroots and not the caucus.
The diminishment of MPs is exactly what's taken power from the grassroots.
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I can't imagine Harper trying to prorogue this.
That just looks like desperation and weakness.
Not gonna help him in any way.
That's different to "he won't get one"
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Andrew Coyne was discussing the bill and said that it wouldn't be killed on prorogation, just dissolution. Perhaps he was wrong.
Bills which have not received Royal Assent before prorogation are "entirely terminated" and, in order to be proceeded with the new session, must be reintroduced as if they had never existed.
House of Commons Procedure and Practic
That's off the Parliament of Canada website, but I can't access it from my desktop, for some reason, but can via my phone. So, no link. Sorry.
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He won't get one.
I see no reason why he wouldn't.
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To my understanding, proroguing parliament wouldn't kill it once it's in the Senate.
No, it'll die if it's still in the Senate; a proroation closes both houses of parliament. Bills also can go back and forth between the Senate and the House of Commons; I don't think it would be workable to have legislation from the previous session coming back to get mixed in with the new session's business in the Commons.
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Which is why it makes sense that MPs can deny the leader his/her cabinet position by voting together. It prevents someone from running away with power.
An article in the National Post yesterday (I think) spelled out just how many people in a prime minister's caucus can benefit financially, in one way or another, from sucking up to the PM; it was around half.
Jeffrey Simpson shed a lot of light on the consolidation of power in the PMO in his book The Friendly Dictatorship, so I find it kind of ironic that he's vocally against reform now.
I've always found Simpson to be a bit of a dolt.
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Harper's going to call an early election to kill Michael Chong's reform bill.
You think? All that just to stop a bill? And, could what that bill proposes not then become an election issue?
My suspicion is that, if Harper wanted the bill dead, he'd ask for a prorogation.
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Doubt that he would break his own law and call an early election.
So many misconceptions in one short sentence...
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Harper's gov is being accused of offering money to whitewash a report.
No, a person in Harper's office is being accused of such a thing. Nigel Wright is not the government.
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Bambino, you and I know that in practice voters choose a party/leader.
No, they choose a person for their representative in parliament and the majority of the House of Commons then says who it supports as prime minister. We don't vote for presidents. And if any Canadians think we do, don't encourage them.
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[T]he provincial Liberal dictatorship.
You seem unaware of the definition of dictatorship.
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Chong seems to think that people vote for an MP.
They do.
IMHO, in civilized Canada, our best protection against a dictator is our federal system: Quebec, Alberta and Ontario governments are checks against a dictator Harper.
The provincial governments and parliaments have zero control over federal bills or laws and who is in or out of the prime minister's chair in Ottawa.
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A very important point made by Chong:
I think a lot of what he says there is misguided and thus misleading to others (electing everyone and everything isn't an ideal), but I can't disagree at all with most of the final paragraph.
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Did that stop trudeau from putting troops on our streets with guns?
"Our streets"? You make it sound like the whole country was made subject to martial law.
Anyway, troops were first out on the streets of Montreal at the unanimous request of Quebec's political party leaders, per the National Defence Act. Then, at the urging of the Mayor of Montreal and the Quebec Cabinet, the federal Crown-in-Council declared a state of apprehended insurrection under the War Measures Act. It was all entirely legal, meaning your retort above is inapplicable.
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The leaders can only 'whip' MP's by threatening to veto an MP's nomination for the next election.
No, leaders can also deny MPs any chance of getting into Cabinet or any other important positions and eject them from caucus altogether.
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If he is denying it, then it has to be true.
If it's found he did try to buy it, he'll simply say nobody asked him the right question.
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In my view, the immediate necessity is to take away the power that the Party leaders have assumed to 'whip' MP's (ie, threaten them with job loss) into voting lock-step with the party line. That's accomplished by removing the leaders' veto over local nominations.
How? Regardless of how the candidate for MP was nominated, it's once the MP is an MP that the party leader can whip him or her.
A majority government leader with total control over MP's votes is a one man government with no checks and balances on his absolute authority.
Not absolute authority. But too much, yes. Or, at least, too much without enough democratic accountability to affect how it's wielded. Right now, almost all the limits there are are legal--constitutional--enforcable only by the governor general or monarch and only in the most dire circumstances because both are unelected; they're a last resort.
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Watching ezra last nite and he said he read it and he said you only need 15% of the mp 's to do it and in justin's case that is 5 MP'S and I think he said they can then put in thier own interm leader. And then justin get 4 mp's to back him and they do it again... By going what ezra said this is very stupid.
Well, because 15% may be a little low doesn't make the whole proposal stupid. Bills get reformed--hopefully improved--as they move through parliament; that's what parliament is for.
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I guess there's mealy mouths and then there's also mealy ears where pretending you don't understand something is just as distracting.
And then there's people who divert discussion off on tangents and make passive-aggressive attacks when they're publicly embarassed by their failure to explain how their own proposal would work.
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It's when democratically elected representatives of a population have a democratic vote on leadership. That's a coup.
Well, that is what Harper said and he will stand for no less than his devout followers saying what the leader says!
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It's not overturning responsible government, but returning to responsible government.
I don't think you quite grasp what responsible government is. It is having the government accountable to the House of Commons, the members of which are accountable to the electorate. A randomly chosen "citizens' assembly" is responsible to nobody.
Parliament employees face a lifetime ban on revealing information
in Federal Politics in Canada
Posted
Talk about trying to mislead and cover things up...