Evening Star

At least you're upfront about this. My impression was that the Tory party line is still "we want to preserve our wonderful social programs; we just want to be sure we can afford them."

I think I'd actually appreciate seeing an election campaign fought over ideological principles.

Sometimes intelligent people have other interests and goals than making millions of dollars.

I just read Chrystia Freeland's Wikipedia entry. Afaict, her professional experience has mainly been as a journalist. What makes her a more qualified potential Finance Minister?

Nash was an assistant to the president of CAW, heading important campaigns and negotiations. Does that not count?

Lol that something that economists have debated for decades has been proven conclusively by Canada's Conservative government.

I tend to agree with August here. What sorts of credentials does one need, exactly? Many of our finance ministers, including Flaherty and Martin, have been lawyers. Ralph Goodale had legal training and was basically a career politician. Guy Caron, currently in the NDP caucus, was mentioned - he is a trained economist with professional experience. Erin Weir is another economist who will run for the party. Why doesn't Peggy Nash cut it?

I hate the provision of public funding for Catholic schools with all my heart but: i) that is a provincial issue and ii) even I would not let this keep me from supporting adequate funding for schools. It was one reason why I voted Green in the last Ontario election, though.

I guess I was thinking of the Libertarian Party's preference for FN sovereignty. I suppose that if you looked at it this way, you could argue that individual FN members might have more 'freedom' in the libertarian sense, if you do not interpret the Canadian government's jurisdiction over FNs as colonial.

Any way you slice it, the individual MPs are still chosen by, and accountable to, the parties (using whatever method the party uses), not directly by, or to, voters. Keep in mind that MPs do, or should do, more than just vote on bills: they are expected to do constituency work, committee work, etc. I'd prefer to have directly elected officials doing these things, not party hacks. You know, if I took this argument to its logical conclusion, I could ask why I should not be allowed to vote for Bernie Sanders or Aung San Suu Kyi. The fewer the number of constituents each representative has, the greater the representation each individual voter seems to have, I would think. It's a logical way of breaking down a whole country to let everyone vote in a local election and send a representative to Parliament. Grenier's system tries to balance this with the potential benefits of PR, at least. Also, by restricting people to only vote for those in their riding, in many cases you prevent people from voting for the party they want to because they are not running in their riding (because they are a small party and cannot afford it). If I want to vote for say the Freedom Party, Libertarian Party or Communist Party, and they aren't running in my riding, why should I not be allowed to? See, I think this is still assuming the primacy of political parties. And, of course, if it means that much to you, you could always run for one of those parties.

OK, I'll give you most of these points. They have only loosened government oversight in specific areas, e.g. environmental regulations on business. They have totally been on the side of authoritarian big government when it comes to crime policy, defence and foreign policy, FN issues, restricting communication from PS scientists and academics, drug policy. C-51 significantly expands the scope of state power over the individual, more so than e.g. a higher corporate tax would seem to do. One could make a case that in many of these areas, the Green Party or even the old Liberal Party are more libertarian. Still, I probably wouldn't vote for a libertarian party anyway so maybe I'm guilty of what I suspected Second Class of doing on the socialism thread? Edit: also see - support for the monarchy, size of the cabinet

I'll grant that it was probably not the wisest idea for Ashton to go ahead and make public pronouncements on international issues on her own via social media before there was an official party statement.

This seems on point (and gives one partial explanation as to the low level of tax collection): http://www.businessinsider.com/greece-referendum-result-and-the-meaning-of-debt-2015-7

Krugman's argument was that the reason this worked in Canada was that it was accompanied by a currency devaluation that made exports more competitive, that without this, the austerity measures led to collapse/depression in Greece.

This is pretty vague about what exactly was rosy about the Greek economy in late 2014.

Even if I were to assume this logic works (and I find cyber more convincing so far), I'm not sure that "Yes to democracy; No to austerity" means this.

They do want to implement a cap and trade system, which is not worlds away from a consumption tax, even if it's not exactly a boost to the GST. They also advocate something pretty comparable to 'co-determination laws', which I quoted earlier. I still feel like you are being disingenuous with those other two suggestions. It would make no sense at all to eliminate the minimum wage without first creating the conditions that make them unnecessary in Sweden. The labour movement would need to be tremendously empowered first. If you would seriously propose eliminating the minimum wage before doing this, I would start to wonder whether you have no real interest in social corporatism or practical, effective social democracy and are just concern trolling to push an extreme-right economic agenda. Minimum wage laws are under provincial jurisdiction anyway, I thought? I start to see red flags too if eliminating the Canada Health Act is one of your 'incremental' suggestions, with no mention of e.g. adopting the sorts of maternity and disability benefits that are provided in Sweden. (And, besides, I like a lot of things about our health care system, although it could be improved, in part with more funding. Just because two-tier is done in Sweden doesn't mean we need to adopt it.)

I can see reasons to agree with her: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-brink.html

You know that Tsirpas was elected recently and isn't responsible for any of the policies that might have led to the crisis, yes?

What do you think the federal NDP's chance of winning would be if they campaigned on turning EI over to the unions, greatly increasing the size of the public sector, jacking up income taxes, bringing the HST closer to 25%, moving towards two-tier health care (but expanding drug coverage), and leaving NATO? Would you vote for them? Electable parties in stable and prosperous democracies tend to advocate for gradual and incremental changes from the status quo. Scandinavian governments are also able to do certain things because they have small populations, are more culturally homogeneous than Canada, and are somewhat isolated, geographically and linguistically. If we had a 25% sales tax, it is likely that people would just start shopping across the border much more often, for example. By the way, Sweden's educational performance, as measured on international tests, has clearly declined in the time period since school vouchers and privatization were introduced. Their contemporary educational system is referred to by writers of differing ideological stripes as a cautionary tale. Some blame these market-driven reforms, some don't, but, either way, it is not necessarily a model to refer to.

This is more or less how I see Rae's premiership, although I realise that I'm in the minority: http://theagenda.tvo.org/blog/agenda-blogs/bob-rae-was-right-his-time http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2012/04/15/bob_raes_failed_premiership_is_a_myth.html Balanced budget legislation is foolish. There are times when it is appropriate for governments to run deficits, just as there are times when it is appropriate for individuals to take out mortgages or student loans.

And, yes, this is probably also why they don't need minimum wage laws: when unions have this kind of power and are able to bargain collectively on behalf of the majority of workers, the government does not need to set a minimum wage for unprotected workers. (Even un-unionized workers who work in unionized workplaces get the wages that the union bargains for.)

Giving unions control over some major social benefits, as opposed to governments or employers, is huge: this gives unions a whole dimension of power that they do not have on this continent. Do you advocate this for Canada? It seems disingenuous to say "they have RTW legislation in Sweden but the NDP won't even consider this" without including this tidbit of information.

OK, I read about it and the system IS very different. Although they technically don't have the 'closed shop'/'union shop' as far as employment is concerned, unemployment insurance benefits (and perhaps other benefits too?) are administered by the union rather than by the government, meaning that you won't get those benefits unless you are a union member. As a result, yes, the vast majority of workers do 'choose' to join the unions. This is not at all comparable to RTW legislation in the US.

You know that Germany uses PR too, right? I'm not even a big supporter of PR but this is a silly argument against it.