Evening Star

OK, yes, you and Bonam are probably right about this.

I defended these guys for a while but it's been getting hard.

I always wondered why books are so much more expensive. That makes sense, thanks.

Have we seen lower prices as a result of lower corporate taxes? Not denying, just asking. I guess it might be hard to say since there are so many factors involved with pricing.

Oh cool, I thought you were a Liberal somehow.

I'm not a big Obama fan or anything but I don't see at all how he has screwed up the US. Leaving aside that he's limited in what he can do without Congress's support, it seems pretty clear that he's largely been dealing with a mess that was handed to him by the Bush administration. Having said that, if Obama is too far left for you, you should probably avoid the Liberals as well.

That's not a reason why public school boards should do this.

Yeah, actually, some of the posts here are convincing me that reducing every employee's hours is kind of a crass way to trim a budget.

I mean, it was mentioned on another thread that we've become so much more individualistic that it's hard to imagine a generation going off en masse to fight in a world war again. And this probably did really begin with the boomer generation. However, the generations that followed have probably gone even further in this direction so I don't know that we can really blame the boomers for much. Edit: Both left and right today see themselves as defenders of the individual - whether against corporate/military power or against big government/big labour. There was a time when e.g. the left actually advocated for the common good of the group over the individual.

Anywho, I think I can buy much of the boomers' side of this, especially since subsequent generations, including (especially?) mine, don't really seem much more unselfish. I do think that government debt might have more to do with planning issues than with actual selfishness per se - and it hasn't really caused us any catastrophes so far. (The PET-era Liberals did e.g. think that the NEP would generate enough revenue to cover government expenditures.) Besides, Canada's biggest social programmes were introduced in the mid-60s Pearson era, when the very oldest boomers would have just reached voting age. Those policies that I associate most closely with PET - bilingualism, multiculturalism, abolition of the death penalty, the metric system, the Constitution Act, the Charter, the NEP, Petro-Canada - don't necessarily reflect an attitude of selfishness or entitlement to me as such.

Yeah, that does seem to be the definition but it's challenging my preconceptions as well. I never thought that people who were undergraduates in the mid-80s were considered baby boomers.

Yeah, I definitely agree that PET's politics could have appealed to baby boomers even though he wasn't a boomer himself. (John Lennon and Bob Dylan were not themselves baby boomers either.) (And I'd imagined you to be younger than that, for some reason!)

I'd always thought of baby boomers as the generation that came of age in the mid- to late 60s but looking at it more critically, that does seem a little off, going by those definitions of the baby boom. A 20-year range seems rather broad if we're defining a generation, mind you.

Uh, PET was still PM until 1984, actually. I'd be interested to see the statistics as to the age breakdown of the voting public in that period. PET was definitely not a boomer himself, having been born in 1919, but it would be interesting to see whether his success was largely due to support from the baby boom cohort or from an earlier generation. (Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the birth years 1946-1964 for the baby boom; the Canadian Encyclopedia gives 1946-1965.) Even someone born in 1955 would have been able to vote by the 1974 election. It's also true today, though, that younger people tend not to exercise the right to vote as much as older people do. Was this different in the 60s and 70s? Edit: In any case, Mulroney did not do much to counter the debt.

Absolutely.

Yeah, economics is definitely a social science.

Was he really? How many elections did this cost him?

I'm not sure where you're coming from but I'm guessing it's because it's cheaper to just fine people/throw them in jail if they don't pay taxes?

But she was finance critic!

Martin's not a leadership candidate. You may be right about Cullen.

Which one? I haven't heard this about any of them.

Yeah, I'm kind of bowled over by the lines that it's fine and dandy for laypeople, even MPs, to have dual citizenship but not OK for a potential PM. If you think dual citizenship is a sign of questionable loyalty, it should not be acceptable in anyone, certainly not for MPs.

Why is there a distinction? Citizenship means something either way, right? Or is it less of a solemn bond of allegiance when someone is a citizen by birth? Are they not still expected to be loyal to their country of citizenship? Why would you not then ask someone born in the UK to choose Canada first and give up his British citizenship when he becomes PM?

I did in my first post.

Who's trying to erase it? You can download that thesis for free. Worth noting that it was a mainstream idea at the time and that Douglas never implemented any of it in office, unlike the provincial governments of AB and BC. I don't know that it's fair to judge him too severely based on something he wrote for school vs what he actually did in office.