Evening Star

This is how the public is hurt so badly that it is justified to penalize people for not voting? 'Lefties' don't feel happy after elections?

How, in concrete terms?

It's possible for us to have a Catholic monarch now??

I can barely even understand the rationale for mandatory voting. Why on earth should it be an obligation, backed up with a penalty? Who is hurt if someone chooses not to vote?

Why is that unfair, if that's not who the majority vote for? 'Right' and 'left' are just relative terms anyway; I'm sure there will be some options that are further right than others. It seems like a bizarre consideration to want to ensure that one ideological group gets a chance to form a majority government x% of the time. Should environmentalists, Christian fundamentalists, and communists also get similar entitlements?

(Liberals and Labor fwiw)

STV sounds very good, based on the Wikipedia article.

My money is on the latter, which just makes them seem cynical, especially when they're being pushed as the progressive option. Mulcair made that point last night.

I would be fine with, even supportive of, a hotline to report domestic abuse (edit: and a task force on the issue). That is not what this is. This proposal is for a hotline dedicated to specific abuses that have been singled out because they are 'barbaric cultural practices', with certain minority cultures as the intended targets. (Anglo-Saxon men who rape children are not committing a barbaric cultural practice, of course: they are just criminals and they can be treated with regular law enforcement.) There should not be a separate channel of law enforcement for crimes committed by people of specific minority cultural groups. That is the problem.

I'm beginning to realize that people actually like all the things about JT that make me want to either vomit or laugh. I thought his digression about his father in the Munk debate was pointless and embarrassing but apparently it moved the crowd to tears.

Now I'm starting to worry about a Liberal majority (although it would be preferable to a Conservative majority, given the direction they're going).

Yeah, I had suspected that the race-baiting would backfire eventually. I wasn't completely sure if it would help the Liberals or NDP more but it makes sense that the party led by a Trudeau would benefit. Edit: The Tories might have been misjudging (or testing) the value that Canadians place on 'multiculturalism'/'the mosaic' as a part of national identity. At the least, I don't think most Canadians want to be seen or to think of themselves as racist.

I'm a little stunned that Duceppe has come to dedicate himself so thoroughly to xenophobia and warmongering.

I thought Mulcair did great, actually: the best I've seen him in the debates so far. He did a very good job of clearly distinguishing himself from both Harper and Trudeau, particularly on the topic of our role in the Middle East, and also made a strong defence of his economic plan and took a strong, distinct stance on the TPP. If he loses, he will at least have lost standing for something. His weakest moment came at the beginning of the niqab debate. He seemed visibly scared and was overly guarded in his approach to the issue, saying that while he was personally uncomfortable with it, we need to respect the courts' decisions. He became much stronger as the debate on that issue went on, making some good feminist points. His closing statement had the most substance, I thought. He responded really effectively to Harper's comment about the satellite office issue. On the whole, he may have won my vote. Duceppe is always compelling, even when I violently disagree with him, which is often. I was impressed by his stance on the Saudi arms deal. I was hoping to see a debate about the monarchy! I thought JT was a little better than in the Maclean's debate, quite strong on marijuana and the niqab. I feel like Mulcair won the economic argument between the two of them. (Interesting moment when Harper and Mulcair both agreed on the shortsightedness of the Liberal plan!) His rudeness is still grating and his closing statement was inevitably platitudinous fluff. Harper did what he usually does; he usually comes off as a bit bored to me but he calmly defends his record and gives the expected right-wing criticisms of his opponents, always managing to sound moderate and reasonable, regardless of his stance. His French sounds like mine.

Do they? Can you estimate what percentage of the vote shifted to the NDP as a result of this issue? Polls have shown overwhelming support for the Con/Bloc position, especially in Quebec, which had been an NDP base. And, again, there would have been no issue if the Tories did not create a policy and fight the courts on it in the first place. The Opposition is just responding.

I'd be open to changing these laws as well.

And, while it may not be fair to hold the current federal Liberals to account for what Liberals have done previously, I just have a hard time trusting them to follow through on promises and also am really troubled by the record of Liberal governments, including provincial ones, when it comes to using force against lawful protests.

The thing is that I don't really agree with this. The differences are pretty significant on C-51, taxes (the Lib plan seems to be closer to the Tories to me - they want to create a new tax bracket on the top 1% of income earners while reducing taxes on the 2nd to 32nd percentiles, while the NDP at least wants to begin closing the current loopholes and will probably actually collect more tax from the wealthy), pharma care, child care, and trade. There are also significant differences where I don't always agree with the NDP on the Senate, federalism, and electoral reform.

This just seems disingenuous. The Tories were the ones who brought in the policy, had it struck down by the court, appealed the ruling, had the appeal dismissed, and vowed to bring back the policy if re-elected. I'm not sure what 'mentioning' or 'talking about' it would entail but it is their policy that they have been fighting for. They made it an issue. So, yes, the Opposition brings it up and opposes it: they are not inventing an issue out of thin air, nor are they just lying back and ignoring the government's actions.

You do see Conservatives talking about it, then?

Harper himself talked about it in this ad: <<Ils veulent des nouveaux citoyens qui prennent le serment à visage découvert.>> Besides, it would not even be an issue if the Tories hadn't been so bent on fighting the courts on it.

This was the post I was responding to: Reform had a different solution to the problem but they still protested ('cried about') the same issue. In fact, the local Reform candidate spoke to my history/civics class in 1993 and told us that our electoral system amounted to "elect[ing] a dictator" every four years. (I remember leftists complaining about it as well. I despised Chrétien as a further-left-than-now teenager and resented the concentration of power.) I actually prefer Reform's solution in this case. My point, however, was that the opposition to how our electoral system leads to a concentration of power in the hands of leaders whose parties won less than half of the popular vote is not something that has begun under Harper, as much as his supporters want to believe that he is a modern-day Joan of Arc. People complained about it under Chrétien too.

Angrypenguin, you've never seen Schindler's List?

Yes! This is what I always say but NONE of the parties want this. PR would make it worse! Edit: At least the Greens consider it to some extent.

That's pretty annoying too, and a pretty weak argument imo: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/06/1260721/-The-Nader-Myth http://disinfo.com/2010/11/debunked-the-myth-that-ralph-nader-cost-al-gore-the-2000-election/