Bryan

Most MPs are a lot more busy during the breaks than they are during session. It's hardly a holiday.

Like I said, you're obviously reading a different thread. I never discussed any of that. It does prove my point though, that it's intentional obfuscation for the express purpose of avoiding rational discussion.

You must be reading a different thread. This one is about Israel. Feel free to start one about Syria if you'd like.

I see. Other people treat the Palestinians like crap too, so that makes it OK.

IIt would have to be a seriously reality impaired partisan position to imply that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is NOT an apartheid situation.

Equating criticisms of Israel's military action with anti-semitism is infantile and it assures that the situation is never dealt with in a serious manner.

Spot on. It's like Godwin's law in reverse.

That's a very dishonest position that is not backed up by the video posted in this thread. Do you have some other secret video that shows any of what you are saying?

No he wasn't, those were deliberate attempts to get a "gotcha" quote, when she repeatedly said that those are NOT her views, that she's not the one to even answer such questions, and that she didn't appreciate the line of questioning. She did in the video, several times.

I don't see what was so over the top about what Ms. Davies said (and you won't see me say that about any NDPer very often). It was a lot more rational that I expected considering the furor it's generating. If anything, I'd say she was deliberately careful not to say anything incendiary, no small feat with that videographer trying desperately to put words into her mouth. Granted, she's clearly getting her dates mixed up, but I'm not seeing where she said most of what she's being accused of.

What does cooperation on the voting on one bill have to do with coalitions?

Good luck ever commanding the confidence of the house if you pull that one out. Voters decide who wins. Crossing them to prove you're right is a career limiting move.

Agreed. The legality of such a coalition is almost irrelevant. The only real issue is the voters' appetite for it. If the people like something unconstitutional, they'll support it anyway, if they don't, they won't. No voters' support means no seats. A party that's willing to risk long term damage in exchange for short term chaos would have to be in even more immediate trouble than the polls and the media are telling us.

DRM is evil. It does nothing to stop piracy, it only hurts legitimate consumers. IMO, the digital lock provisions in this bill are untenable. By allowing them, it erases the entire concept of property rights. If you sell me a product, you have no right whatsoever to tell me what to do with that product for my own purposes. Your only right is to stop me from profiting for your work. At bare minimum, we need an amendment to this bill that delineates between commercial piracy and home use in a serious way. Breaking DRM to facilitate a massive counterfeiting scheme? Great idea for extra teeth to combat this kind of thing. Not allowing me to import a CD or DVD into iTunes? Really bad idea, creates criminals out of paying customers. Likewise with the one copy rule. It's almost impossible to only ever make one copy of a digital media file for personal use, even if you try. Everything I buy gets imported into my iTunes library, then I decide how and where I'll watch or listen to the content from there. It could be on any of the 4 iPods we have in our house, it could be on a SD card, or on one of the two laptops, or on the iPad my wife's been taking about buying. Add to that, when you back-up your hard drive on your computer, you're making yet another copy. It's not that I would ever be using all of those at once, but even by only using a CD on one iPod, I've made three copies (iTunes, computer back-up, iPod).

As a Conservative, I sure hope they do. It'll guarantee CPC majorities for generations to come. I doubt they would do it though.

That isn't the issue at all. The banks themselves were not in any financial trouble. Canadian Banks were still recording record profits, even in the middle of the "great recession". The issue that the government wanted to avoid was liquid capital being in short supply for consumers and businesses. That is not semantics, it's a profound difference. No liquid capital MIGHT have impacted our banks financially a bit, but they were fine either way. Where it would have caused serious pain is when businesses and individuals could not continue to contribute to the greater economy.

No. Canadian Banks did not receive a bailout.

This is pretty much how I feel about the NDP as well. Their M.O. is mostly to do with cutting down people who work hard for what they have. There's nothing there for me to support. They have openly identified me as their enemy, laid the blame for the ills of the world at my feet, and threatened to take my hard earned dollars away to give to people who didn't earn it. I'm surprised they even get as much support as they do.

Either you have a different definition of bedroom community than I do, or you're not aware of how far south the Churchill riding extends along the east border of the province. They are within commuting distance from the city. I know people in Pine Falls, for instance, who do it daily for work, shopping, and their kids sports. I have to drive out there regularly for my son's lacrosse because their teams are in the city league.

I used to live in the Churchhill district In Manitoba. It covers over 450,000 sq kilometers. Includes towns that are essentially bedrroom communities for Winnipeg, all the way up to Hudson Bay, and the border with the NWT. Their concerns couldn't be more different, one MP.

Some on the left see a merger as a means to do the same thing that the Reform Party did, but they forget a few things. 1) the right did not unite all at once. There were enough holdouts to keep the parties still split for several more years. 2) Reform and PCs had actually been one party only a few years previous, so they already had a working history, just some disagreements to work out. 3) No configuration of conservative parties were ever as far right as the Liberals or the media made them out to be. PCs were centre left, there was almost nothing conservative about them. Reform and Alliance were centre-right. More conservative than Canadians were used to, but still very much to the left of the Democrats in the US. What the unite the left people are proposing is merging a full-left party with a centrist party--with whom they've never been one united group. This will alienate far left people in the NDP, as well as centre-right people in the Liberals (and there are more of those than many people realize). A very real probability of such a merger is an INCREASE in CPC support, and a new left-wing party that is SMALLER than the sum of its intended parts.

I don't like the idea of any system that would allow MPs that don't specifically represent the will of a specific region. I do think there should be more balance given to geography as a means of distribution, it's too heavily weighted on population right now. Right now you have communities 500 miles apart with completely different concerns with the same MP, while another single community could get 20 or more. Sure that community would obviously have more people, but it's still ONE place.

I don't doubt that some Francophones are lying about not being able to speak english. I've spent plenty of time in Quebec, and I've lived 30+ years in St. Boniface, Manitoba, one of the largest French communities outside Québec. I know more native french speakers than I can count, but I've never found a single person that I couldn't at least converse with in english. Not one. Sure n=1, and just because I haven't seen them doesn't mean they don't exist, but if they were a common (even increasing) occurrence, I do not believe it to be possible for me to have never come across such a person. Myself, I've had a love-hate relationship with the census for quite a while. I get it that governments use that data for distribution of tax dollars, etc. But, like Fellowtraveller says, they already have most if not all of that info from my tax forms. Also, if you end up with the long form version (which for some reason I usually do), they ask a lot of questions that in my mind fall firmly into the category of "none of your business". Last time around, I threw the forms away and when the census people came around to check I lied and told them I already mailed it in. So, Manitoba "officially" has at least 4 less residents than there really are. Is that omission as much of a lie as the francophone one?

It's already too difficult for the sitting government to get things done without opposition interference. Having them be members of Cabinet, or even have say in its composition sounds like the worst thing that could happen. If anything, I'd like to se the opposite. Not only should the Prime Minister have full authority over the selection of the cabinet, he should not be limited to the available pool of elected MPs or sitting Sentators. He should be able to hire the best person to do the specific job, even if they didn't win their seat, even if they've never run for office at all.

"Five years" has a different definition in Canada though. Our sentences are always "up to" the time ordered, not precisely that amount. If he's in a Canadian prison, it's very unlikely he'd serve more than one third of it.