Evening Star

Well, I was responding to "If [Harper] were facing a better opponent than Trudeau..." His main opponent atm is Mulcair, who I do think is better than Trudeau.

Abacus: NDP 35 - CPC 29 - LPC 26 http://abacusdata.ca/election-2015-ndp-leads-but-70-of-voters-up-for-grabs/ Insightrix: CPC 39 - NDP 35 in SK http://www.canada.com/Poll+puts+Tories+lead+Sask+voter+intention/11298123/story.html

What would this mean in practice?:

He is!

Well, if money was coming from the CPC's fund, it would have been taxpayer-subsidized as well.

Prices for CDs and CD players have plummeted since people stopped buying them in anything close to the same numbers and switched to encoded files (mp3s, WAVS, etc). This does not really demonstrate anything about the cost of living, unless your point is that mp3s are cheaper than CDs, which is true but not an apples-to-apples comparison. (This is not representative either but it's interesting to compare with what has happened to concert ticket prices: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/08/concert-tickets-resellers-editorials-debates/2633507/) Compare this to the increases in AB (377%), SK (308%), and ON (340%).

http://torontoist.com/2010/10/rob_fords_team_created_a_fake_twitter_account_and_this_is_it/

Well, a small elite clique of opinion-makers doesn't sound that different from a cabal. You haven't provided much evidence that 'artistic elites' (which means who? Polaris prize judges? Painters whose work gets exhibited in galleries? Creative writing teachers?) are deeply connected with media and political elites and academic elites (counterpoint instructors? Chemical engineers? Environmental scientists? Early chidhood education specialists?). I would have to assume that, after 9 years of Tory rule, the political elites are largely Conservative by this point. How do we explain the overwhelming support for the CPC among newspapers in the last election?

Or perhaps you could do this for a while and then, after an election is called, you could claim to have had a radical overnight conversion and seen the light.

Don't forget the academic elites! All those lecturers and researchers at U of T and York and Carleton and McGill who are also part of the cabal that identifies Harper as a Westerner!

Can people give examples of which Layton-era policies were further left than current NDP policies? (I'm assuming that people mean 'left' in the sense of 'social democratic economic policy'?) If I see a change, it's that they've moved to a more clearly pro-Israel stance on foreign policy (but less radically so than Harper) and that they've largely moved away from green politics to a more traditionally pro-labour social democratic agenda. I don't exactly think of this as a shift to the right, though.

Yeah, things only get in the news when there is something new to report - a simple concept that seems to elude partisans.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/ndp-would-lead-a-minority-government-if-elections-held-today-tories-slip-to-third-leger-poll

Did the NDP poll this well in BC in 2011 (see p. 10)?: http://www.nanosresearch.com/library/polls/Nanos%20Ballot%202015-08-07E.pdf You need to keep the relative numbers of seats of provinces in mind. The Liberals won a (narrow) minority in 1972, even though the PCs beat them in every province except Quebec (and NB, where they were tied): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_1972#Results_by_province. The PET-era Liberals won majorities when they took both ON and QC. I also think the NDP is likely to pick up some seats in the Prairies, with some of the new ridings in SK. I'm not really convinced that the 'Bob Rae effect' is as strong as people make it out to be: for one thing, Rae was good to Northern Ontario, which has consistently given seats to the NDP. There's plenty of federal and provincial NDP support in blue-collar Ontario cities. There are a lot of seats in Toronto which have usually gone to the Liberals. I'm interested to see which way these go. I myself am leaning towards voting Green, though, especially since my riding is almost guaranteed to the NDP.

The Eysenck-based test that I mentioned had three axes: "radicalism", "tender-mindedness", and "socialism". The issue of scepticism vs traditionalism and religion is accounted for in the first ® axis.

They lost him before the last election, actually. He is a right-winger, at least on economics, but he is anything but partisan. He has been one of their harshest, and most effective, critics on ethical and democratic/procedural issues.

Thanks for the correction.

dp

In the video, he and his co-host both clearly say that men and women should be treated the same in these situations and oppose the double standards that you mention. He was not talking about pedophilia, as I explained above, but about consensual sexual relationships between adult teachers and students who are 16 or 17, which is not even statutory rape in most jurisdictions in the US or Canada. And he is not arguing that this should go unpunished but he is saying that jail time is inappropriate. You can't be seriously equating this with Roosh V's views that any actual non-consensual rape should be legalized on private property?

This was what I expected but I was going to give Euler the benefit of the doubt and try to consider the argument at face value anyway. It still didn't seem very relevant.

dp

See, expanding the power of an intelligence agency to gather information on peaceful democratic groups and potentially share these with corporate interests seems like a much greater potential threat to individual liberty to me than having to pay x% tax instead of y%.

CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/canada/britishcolumbia/story/1.3188231 They present a pro-CSIS/government viewpoint here as well, fwiw. Perhaps it will turn out that there were some justifiable reasons for this but it is certainly a valid issue to be concerned about.

Are the BCCLA pandering to radicals too? Is the information incorrect or are you arguing that there is nothing wrong with doing this (in which case the radicalism of the publication doesn't seem that relevant)?

Here's the Vancouver Observer report from 2013: http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/harper-governments-extensive-spying-anti-oilsands-groups-revealed-fois?page=0,0