Bryan

There still are a couple of big deals, and that's who illegally leaked the AGs draft documents, and more critically how the media "coincidentally" releases it the day before the debate. It was an orchestrated "lets get the Conservative" moment. Anyone who still thinks there is not a very serious Liberal bias in the Canadian media is completely stupid.

Standard? So it must happen all the time in Canada then, right?

You seem to think that the constitution was handed down from Mount Sinai. Trudeau was no Moses.

The tooth fairy and the flying spaghetti monster will be ignored too.

Indeed. Don't forget to add in just not paying billions and billions in obligations for things like healthcare and education. Leaving bills unpaid is not a surplus.

When Ignatieff and the LPC tell people grand stories about his past, they seem to be ramping up the rhetoric that he's a true blue Canadian. No one could begrudge him of this, anyone proud of their country would want to do so, especially when Harper is fond of pointing out how long Ignatieff was out of the country, etc. The question that comes to my mind though, is why do they go so far in their attempts to connect with Canadians, that glaringly obvious lies end up being shovelled out? Last week we had him claiming to have been a poor, paycheck-to-paycheck immigrant who went to public school. We know for a fact that he's a descendant of Russian nobility, that his family was wealthy, and that he lived a life of privilege. We know this, because he wrote about it extensively in his own book, The Russian Album. Yesterday though, the Liberals brought out the show stopper. To show us how Canadian he is, Ignatieff's team is claiming that he's never voted in a foreign country. Which makes the following statements a bit odd in context: What book was that in? "Identity and Politics". Co-written by... Michael Ignatieff. All politicians lie. Lies of ommission and questions of semantics are one thing, but outright falsehoods like this are bizarre. Why would he insult the intelligence of his electorate to the extent that the truth is found in his own books? Now that takes some serious stones. http://www.winnipegsun.com/news/canada/2011/04/10/17944316-qmi.html

I'm well aware of how MMP works. You still end up with elected members that don't actually represent your region. Parties can assign a member from their list, without even running an actual candidate in your riding. Your analysis of FPTP with regards to rural vs. urban "clout" is exactly backwards. Ontario has far more say than Saskatchewan, and far more MPs, specifically because there are more people in Ontario.

It's time for a change alright. Time for a Conservative majority so that we can put a stop to this fractious house of left-wing idiots, and get on with the serious task of governing this country.

I've never understood the value (real or symbolic) of a government apologizing for something another government did (or neglected to do) in the past.

But FPTP rewards local representation. A million people scattered across the country with one shared representative wouldn't actually have any representation at all. What's important to farmers is different from what's important to city dwellers. You expect them to share the same representative, and call THAT more democratic?

Me too. It'd be nice if anyone out there was actually proposing them.

Ridiculously complicated yes, but I'm still left with more of my own money in my pocket. Everyone else want to take money OUT.

Those tax credits add up.

There's a lot of truth to this. The NDP and CPC share a lot of the same concerns, they're just miles apart on what to DO about those concerns.

I'll agree that the targeted tax incentives/credits/rebates/etc are getting too complex. Across the board reduction in the tax rates would be better and easier to implement. However, the middle income earners definitely have seen significant tax relief under Harpers' leadership. I'm paying a lot less now than I was 6 years ago, even though I make more. More buying power for sure. That's the primary reason why my support for the CPC is strong: they are the only governing party in my lifetime that has told me the truth when they said they'd reduce my taxes.

In theory, I like that idea a lot. I wonder about the practicalities of it though. The logistics and expense are one concern, but the biggest one, IMO would be getting people to actually DO it. We have enough trouble getting people to come out to vote. If we ask them to do it twice per election, I fear turnout might drop even further.

Reform permanently replaced one of the established top two parties, and always increased support in every election. NDP is fourth place, and has never made a legitimate push to even be opposition, let alone government. That's a huge difference.

I do exclude myself from that, emphatically so. My discussion on that matter was specifically about taking the current reality of the make-up of our political landscape more seriously.

Really? You're comparing our democracy to a military dictatorship that kills people who dissent? Can we not have some semblance of a serious discussion on this site? This kind of hyperbole is really getting old.

This email was sent to St. Boniface Conservative volunteers today. I'm heading down right now. Hopefully Ray's people come down too. No reason to make this a partisan thing at all.

They can choose to tax and police their own resources, but a scheme that even had the potential to end up taking even more money from Alberta only to end up giving it to Quebec is untenable. Albertans have had enough of that, and anything that even sort of smells like that is a vote loser.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Jack Weber to show respect, insults are his primary means of communication.

Local representation is far more democratic than PR for me, especially in a country this big with such diverse concerns. If anything I think we should find ways to make the regional voices stronger, not weaker.

While I think they should help out, the optics are no win. If you do show up to sandbag, you're seen as an opportunist pandering for a photo-op. If you try to avoid being seen as an opportunist, well then you just don't care. The media can frame it any way they choose, and the label sticks. It's quite possible that some of them have helped out but deliberately did not alert the media to their presence. Around here, we all remember Chretien holding up a sandbag for the cameras, then tossing it right back and leaving. Angered a lot of people for a long time.

Your reading comprehension is still as weak as your arguments.