Bob

It's a ridiculous article. I came across it today, and it really annoyed me. It clearly tries to associate the politics of Anders Breivik with white-supremacy movements (i.e. the ideologies advanced as Stormfront - a white power discussion forum). The article is a perfect example of what Anders Breivik rails against, which is the disinformation campaign being waged against the West by a loose coalition between intellectuals, media, politicians, and interest groups. This article is clearly trying to associate criticism of existing immigration/multiculturalism policies in Europe with white-supremacy and "far-right" extremism. The reality is the opposite - that socialism and Marxism is on the rise, working with "political correctness", as government continues to expand by taking up a larger and larger role in the economy, restricting social freedoms, and engaging in cultural suicide with irresponsible multiculturalism/immigration policies. CNN, as usual, has everything upside down.

Three episodes, so far. Nobody watches it?

Either way, your OP displays a lack of ability to think lucidly. Your implication is clear - crime is down, so why are we building more prisons? It's a stupid position, you might as well admit it.

In other words, you can't admit error, and engage in obfuscation. Tell us more about this "North American welfare" that Israel receives off the backs of the Canadian (and Mexican, too?) taxpayers.

It's not "North American welfare" and there's no "we" involved in this. Military aid to Israel comes from AMERICA, not Canada. It's almost pathetic how you're trying to act like Canada is Israel's benefactor.

Exactly. I wasn't going to provide a link, but the obvious reality is that lower crime rates do not mean we need less prisons, as the foolish OP is trying to suggest. If prisons are overcrowded and cannot safely accept more criminals, which seems to have been the case for a long time, then current crime rates being lower doesn't alleviate the existing stresses on this part of the justice system. The fact that this even has to be explained further depresses me about the average intellect of Canadians....

He's not making a value judgement. He's stating that the market rate for a service is what is "deserved". There is a value to all things, including labour, and that value is determined by the market. Intervening with the freedoms of people to engage into contractual relations is where the value judgement is. And the minimum wage laws, as I've said, predominantly hurt the poor (although I've already explained how they can hurt the rest of us through higher prices for products), who are more likely to have their children work to add additional income to the family. If you set the minimum wage laws above the market rate for certain jobs, you effectively cut off the lowest-skilled seekers of work, of whom a large proportion are teenagers from poorer families. If I am a thirteen-year-old looking for work, and the only work I can offer is valued below the minimum wage, you're cutting me off from the job market, and interfering with my ability to enter into a business relationship with a potential employer. I'm telling you, this is elementary economics. I am not trying to insult you by calling you ignorant of these matters. But I do think you and many others like yourself are a perfect example of social indoctrination into policies that make no sense when subjected to basic scrutiny. We're not doing a good job in our public education system when simple concepts like this are so widely misunderstood. There's a video on YouTube where all of the 2008 Democratic candidates (Dodd, Clinton, Obama, Kucinich, and some old white guy with glasses) all enthusiastically support the minimum wage and actually argue for increasing it on a CNN debate. So you're in good company, in a sense, where even high-level politicians share your obliviousness about certain basic concepts of economics.

We don't need regulations to keep women from being locked in factories. That in and of itself is illegal, it's forcible confinement and clearly an example of negligence. You don't need a labour law to prohibit it. Case law would do just fine. Since when were women being locked in factories in Canada, anyways? I already conceded that some of these safety laws are reasonable, but most are not. And they almost always entail unnecessary bureaucracies which I would equate with "make-work" projects so that Mr. Jean LaFrancois can get a job as a safety inspector, because he is bilingual. I never advocated abolition of all safety laws, just that the majority of them are unnecessary. You are the prototypical example of a person who's been conned into believing that we need the government to ensure safety, as if negligence would be permitted and rampant without the existence of bureaucracies that engage in silliness like food inspection. This is true for matters far beyond mere workplace safety, it's everywhere, from Health Canada's regulations of drugs to agricultural inspections to labour laws defining working hours, and on and on and on. I'll say another thing about minimum wage laws, and this is echoing Milton Friedman - there is absolutely no positive social benefit of these regulations. Nothing whatsoever. And my example ios particularly true in the context of massive employers like Wal-Mart and McDonald's. The same laws that reduce available employment in the small grocery store example keep out many more employees from places like Wal-Mart and McDonald's. This argument that "they can afford to pay more" is pure ignorance. The corporations run on thin margins, and artificial inflation of minimum wage laws do one of two things - either they limit the amount of available openings for employees, or they transfer the cost to consumers, which is essentially a tax. I know you live in a fantasy world where minimum wage laws only affect the pockets of the wealthy, but you couldn't be more wrong. Those who bear the biggest brunt of the exclusively negative effects of minimum wage laws are the poor and unskilled, who either lose out on employment opportunities or end up paying more for products because labour costs are artificially elevated. Like I said, there is no question whatsoever that minimum wage laws have exclusively negative affects on society at large. This is a point virtually all economists agree on, including left-wing economists like Stiglitz and Krugman.

This entire scandal reminds me of the whole chase after DSK, in a sense. Various groups were so certain of DSK's guilt for various reasons - whether it's some hatred of "bankers" and "elites", and/or his Jewish connection, they wanted him to be guilty of such a heinous crime like rape. I suspect that you fall into the same category of folks who want Murdoch to fall, and are convinced that he is somehow complicit in this scandal. Your certainty of Murdoch's guilt is without question rooted in your disdain for what Murdoch represents - the media mogul who runs the corporation that owns Fox News. It's so transparent and obvious, and you're trying to act otherwise. If anything if pathetic it's your seeming obliviousness to your own bias. What seems more likely to reasonable people is that this scandal doesn't go beyond a few unscrupulous journalists at the tabloid newspaper News of the World. At worst, an editor or two was involved. But the assumption that somehow this scandal took place at the direction of Murdoch or other executives like his son is a product of absurd bias that I mentioned above.

What's wrong with describing homosexual orientation at the genetic level as being a defect? From a biological perspective, our jobs are to pass along our genes through procreation, and a homosexual orientation doesn't aid in those efforts. It's understandable why there is political sensitivity towards describing homosexuality as a defect, although there are many psychological defects out there. It seems to me that homosexuality could be accurately labelled as a mental disorder, but perhaps that seems more harsh.

That's not how I understood M. Dancer's post. I understood it as him suggesting that our social policies destroy the incentives for the poor to go out and work, effectively perpetuating the cycle of poverty. And as poverty grows (and I use that term lightly because I think poverty is a relative term), the natural reaction from the socialists is to tax and spend more, again perpetuating the problem. There is nothing inherently better or worse about Bajan or any ordinary low-income Canadian, the difference is social systems between Canada and Barbados regarding welfare.

He's certain it isn't a coincidence because it helps him build an imagined narrative of Rupert Murdoch being a particularly evil and heinous man, which he must be considering he owns media that is described as conservative. Remember, conservatism is evil and any media mogul that produces conservative media is capable of anything, because conservatives are inherently unscrupulous, as opposed to their noble and charitable liberal contemporaries.

Netanyahu announced a little while ago, maybe a year or so ago, that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state. Of course the devil is in the details. But Likud supports the establishment of a Palestinian state, and Lieberman from Yisrael Beitenu also supports a Palestinian state. And again, the devil is in the details. Specifically - territory and conditions.

Here's an interesting video (I think from the 70s) illustrating how minimum wage laws really harmed certain poorer black communities/ghettos. There are many other taxes we have nowadays, too, which further restrict the abilities of employers to hire people, such as EI and social security payments.

I know a thing or two about safety regulations, and I think many of them are silly and wasteful. I don't share your view that businesses and employees must be forced into engaging in safety, as I think they will do so on their own as it is in their own best interests. I don't think that there's been any meaningful improvement in worker safety as a result of safety regulations. With respect to your typical anti-business attitude, where you view businesses as inherently irresponsible unless being forced otherwise, I'll say again that in the absence of safety regulations, employers (and employees) can and would be held to account for negligence negatively affecting someone else. As far as minimum wage laws go, as I've said, it's indisputable. Minimum wage laws always have the opposite effect of their stated intentions, they harm to poor rather than benefit them. If the majority of people support such laws, as you're suggesting, it's just an illustration of ignorance about basic economics. It's sad, really, and an indictment of our public education system. It's not my problem that you don't know this. By the way, the same is true for many social endeavours, which includes rent controls and labour laws (regulating maximum/minimum work hours, overtime, etc). They all have a broad negative effect, occasionally benefits a select few at everyone else's expense. As far as the right goes, the right seems to be more concerned with increased social control, although I don't see this phenomenon in the Canadian context. If anything, in the Canadian context it is the left that like to engage in social control and removal of personal freedoms and liberties while claiming that it is in the interests of the collective greater good.

Why are you assuming he's lying? I have many such personal anecdotes from my own experience. I think M. Dancer is challenging the assertion that these social welfare policies are the "safety net" that prevent Canadians from starving in the streets, while in reality simply killing incentives for most of these "at-risk" folks to go and be productive. There's nothing wrong with anecdotes, I think they help explain and illustrate concepts.

Although I would've explained the flaws of minimum wage laws with some other hypotheticals, this video is alright. Consider a small grocery store, which has a new need for about 15 hours of labour a week, in order to deal with deliveries, stocking, and inventory. Now consider that the grocery store owners have a budget of $75 a week to pay for this new need. Unfortunately, the minimum wage is $7/hour, so now the owners can only pay for about ten and a half hours of labour with their available budget for this need. This has several negative effects. Let's assume that the owners wanted two people to work concurrently in two shifts of about 3.5 hours each, on Mondays and Thursdays. Unfortunately, Now they cannot afford to do so, so it is likely that one job has been lost, before it's even been created. You can play with these numbers and see how these effects remain true in small and large examples. Remember that the same thing holds true for massive businesses like McDonald's and Wal-Mart, who have large bases of entry-level low-wage jobs. So the primary effect of minimum wage laws is, necessarily, the killing of jobs. Now lets assume that the grocery store owners decide to bite the bullet, and still fill their need for an additional 15 hours of labour a week to deal with increased demand, and they pay the $7/hour, effectively bringing them $30 a week over-budget. The business will then need to increase costs in order to recuperate the costs, which can be described as a tax on the consumer. So now the consumer is being taxed in order to pay the workers an artificially inflated salary. And all this occurs when there was a supply of young high-schoolers who wanted some work after school and were willing to work for $5/hour. Remember that this phenomenon remains true at all levels, from the small grocery store example here to the large corporations like McDonald's and Wal-Mart.

This is a really stupid post. Anecdotes like that are not political fictions, they help illustrate certain realities. Aside from extreme situations, such as a person suffering from serious illness, there are very few situations in which a Canadian can really blame 'poverty' on factors beyond his or her control. Many welfare policies allow people to sit around and do nothing on the backs of taxpayers. Spend some time in subsidized housing neighbourhoods, which are often located within nice neighbourhoods (which has negative effects on the housing market, as well, typically depressing the values of adjacent housing blocks), and see for yourself welfare moms who sit around all day watching TV and working under-the-table jobs as waitresses while enjoying artificially low rent that is subsidized by the taxpayer. Is it any wonder there is a huge waiting list for these housing options? I'm getting off topic here, but I agree with M. Dancer's suggestion that poverty is Canada is largely a fantasy, and is perpetuated by welfare policies, rather than the other way around.

I don't think we need regulations and the massive associated costs in order to have people protected. It's just a cottage industry that benefits a few people at the expense of everyone else, particularly the stakeholders in the industry. If you abolished all safety regulations tomorrow, I doubt we'd see any meaningful change in injury/accident statistics. This typical anti-business attitude of yours where they need to be forced into behaving responsibly is tiresome. If they are negligent they will be held accountable in courts of law. The same goes for employees and all other stakeholders. We have all sorts of crazy laws regulating scaffolding, dimensions, materials, clothing, safety courses, and on and on and on. As far as minimum wage goes, it is indisputable that is has the opposite effect on the very people it claims to protect - the lowest wage earners. This is elementary economics, and the date supports it in every research study. Your support for minimum wage laws is another example of how mainstream socialists are ignorant of high-school level economics. I am not here to represent the right-wing, either. I will not support positions I haven't advanced, as you listed anti-abortion/pro-life movements to increased police powers. Those are red herrings that are irrelevant to the discussion, and we've already gone off topic. Back to the topic at hand, I've already stated that Francophones are far more likely to learn English in Canada than the other way around due to social/environmental pressures. There is so much more English to be exposed to, and the need for English far outweighs the need for French in a broad sense. Thus, bilingual legislation unfairly benefits Francophones when it comes to candidacy for bilingual-only positions. So the suggestion you made about Francophones being more ambitious, or something to that effect is completely untrue. Imagine we could turn the tables, where 80% of Canadians are now Francophones, and French is largely the "international language", with a 20% minority Canadians being Anglophones, with a few other countries around the world such as French and Belgium and Haiti and Lebanon that have French as a primary language. In that hypothetical you'd see a lot more Anglophones becoming bilingual than Francophones by virtue of social pressures and access. Don't get me wrong, I can consider many different types of jobs and sectors where bilingualism is ideal, but as far as official governmental policy on bilingualism - it it pure insanity. There are departments and bureaucracies all across the country which are stating bilingualism as a requirement for most jobs - even when there is absolutely no practical need for French for the job. Rather, the demand for French language skills for many of these jobs is simply based on official regulations rooted in bilingual ideology. There are thousands and thousands of examples of this. My point stands, bilingual policy in Canada benefits Francophones, and not the other way around. Are you disputing this simple truth? You can support bilingualism, that's fine, but you can't deny the effect bilingual policy has with respect to benefiting Francophones towards access to these jobs.

It's just corporate spin to try to put a positive light on something the company is forced to do. Nothing more, nothing less. Why does this need to be spelled out to you?

Yes. We don't need specific laws to attack negligence. Minimum wage hurts the very people it claims to assist. It wholly counterproductive. It runs contrary to basic laws of economics. Advocating for minimum wage doesn't necessarily make someone a socialist, but I've seen enough of cybercoma's comments to comfortably describe him a as a socialist. He has an inherent desire for more government and less business. It's his reflexive bias. Look, it's really simple. Businesses, such as Air Canada, should not be forced to comply with Canadian bilingualism. It's pure coercion, and it's a tax we all end up paying for, directly or indirectly. Let individuals and businesses decide for themselves. And as a result of official bilingualism, Francophones benefit, not Anglophones.

I have no problem with that if the business independently decides that it was bilingual employees. it becomes discriminatory, however, when this policy if forced onto businesses, as in the case of Air Canada. Without exception, this inevitably leads to businesses compromising on certain assets (experience, skills, characteristics, etc) of employee candidates in order to satisfy governmental regulations. It's one thing for a business to do something voluntarily, it's something else entirely to be forced to comply with unjustifiable government coercion. Constitutional arguments could easily be made to support my position, even at the governmental level. I also oppose this as a governmental policy in many respects. I can share many anecdotes about how government bureaucracies are acting resources on complying with official bilingual policy at the expense of more important issues - primarily efficiency.

Except for environmental regulations, I oppose all of the social interventions you mentioned. They all do more harm than good. Being the good socialist that you are, however, you diligently subscribe to the "social benefits" of regulation like minimum wage. So Air Canada was built with only English and French taxpayer money? What about Canadians of other backgrounds? If we have this conversation in another fifty years, will you still be claiming that Air Canada must forever be beholden to bilingual governmental policy because of its origins as a public project? Facts, results, and laws of economics tend to lend more credence to certain "opinions". Either a policy works or it doesn't. It's not arrogance, it's environmental/social pressures that increase the likelihood of Francophones learning English than vice versa. Francophones are certainly not more ambitious about learning English as a second language than Anglophones are to learn French as a second language. It's a product of environmental/social factors, and bilingual policies benefit Francophones.

It's no longer publicly owned, so why should it indefinitely be beholden to governmental imposition of bilingualism? I wonder, have you even made one comment in this entire thread expressing how absurd the story in the OP is? I cannot fathom how you support government regulation that leads to such exploitation from opportunistic thieves like this Thibodeau character. In your view, government regulation can do no wrong.

Well, Air Canada is now a private business, so why should it adhere to standards set by the government? Just because Air Canada was forced into agreeing to these terms doesn't make them right. Legalistic arguments mean nothing to me. Any absurd idea can be argued for as long as there is a law on the books supporting it. I'm making a broader point here, that individuals and businesses should be allowed to interact with each other through voluntary associated, and should not be coerced by the government in order to appease political interests. You completely ignored my point that people fly every day in situations where they don't speak the language of service, yet they still get where they're going without governments forcing airlines and airports to service their minority interests. Moreover, what makes you think that without such silly regulation, that Air Canada wouldn't still make efforts to have reasonable access to French services given the signifant French market? And you're going on again with your communist rhetoric about vulnerable minorities and "institutional power". Fro heaven's sake, we're talking about airline service here! Can't you give the communist rhetoric about minorities being trampled on by the evil corporations in the context of such a simple discussion? I really don't think a Francophone experiencing some communication difficulties on an airplane with the flight attendants factors into your narrative about abused minorities being held down by evil capitalists. It's just a possible inconvenience in this thing called life. Although somewhat tangential, I don't think French/English labeling is too much of an intervention. It's quite simple and low cost for food manufacturers to do such a thing, and they would likely do something similar in the Canadian marketplace voluntarily even without government regulation. This is quite different than ensuring bilingual staff all over the place, though. Lastly, in terms of practical effects of bilingual regulation of businesses, this unfairly benefits Francophones who seek these jobs in the sense that Francophones are much more likely than Anglophones to be bilingual. So what we end up seeing is high proportion of Francophones in bilingual jobs, which isn't a problem in and of itself, but the reasons for them being there are grounded in a sort of indirect discrimination against Anglophones.