gutb

They are typically men with little means being taken to the cleaners by absurdly unjust laws and a bureaucracy that couldn't care less if Frank Forklift Driver gets laid off and he can't make a few payments to his ex who is making more than he does from tips and under the table work while going out clubbing every other day. Even though I wouldn't necessarily be friends with Frank, I have no problem pointing out that he's being victimized. Why do you have a problem with that? Does it make you feel good about yourself to see someone being victimized by a bureaucratic police state? If Frank has a lapse in judgement after having his driver's license suspended by the bureaucracy for late payments and he attempts to flee his child support obligation is that a crime that must be punished to the utmost extent of the law? Should Frank be put away with the violent criminals? The only leniency a victim like Frank enjoys now is the fact that Canada's justice system is so overburdened that they will get off relatively lightly along with the real criminals.

No, let's not get "tough" on crime, as our criminal system is stuffed with men who can't make absurd child support payments, those in violation of some sort of paper regulation, and so on -- not madmen bent on assaulting innocent people. The reason why the madmen don't get put away for longer is because our prisons have to make room for deadbeat dads, tax evaders and pot heads. The solution is to STOP MAKING GOOD PEOPLE INTO CRIMINALS. But we can't talk about that; let's just talk about being tough on crime.

Wait. Stop. Some of you appear to be suggesting that teacher unions are not funded by taxpayers? Did I misunderstand something basic here?

Well, going by the polls it seems that BC is going to dump the HST -- however, it's plain sad that it will not be voted out by a super majority. Close to half of BC voters believe that the HST is better than PST/GST, I can't even wrap my mind around how deliriously scrambled with propaganda one would have to be to believe that.

Well, I followed climate change science only sparingly keeping abreast of major studies and developments over the past few years just so I could avoid embarrassing myself when discussing the issue. The actual research papers are very technical and outside of my comfort level for political bullet-point arguments with people over broad topics so I tend to just pay attention to the key points and results. For example, we know that human activity been responsible for the lion's share of CO2 due to isotope analysis from geological samples -- however, right-wing ideological debaters need to deny this fact because they have incorrectly determined that to deny the other side's access to their wealth they need to first deny the science. To the other side of the fight, the science is just seized upon opportunistically to sell their own agenda -- and, what I hope we all realize, will continue to be their goals with or without climate change.

Climate Change as a result of human activity is real. The data has been checked numerous times by parties that have nothing to do whatsoever with the UN, including a Republican congressional study that threw every serious attempt at debunking it they could scrape together in 2005-2006(?), and was only able to find mild criticisms. THAT is why there has been no serious legislative debate about it since then, and it has nothing to do with the UN. There has been plenty of debate on awful treaties like Kyoto and stealth tax schemes like carbon trading, but these are only attached to the science of global climate change by political association. Give it up already. Science is not a left-right issue, it's simply data points quantifying a certain aspect of reality. If it makes you feel any better, those melting ice shelves are finished and we are getting hit with the results no matter what we do or don't do -- and it's going to be a gradual change, plenty of time for human civilization to adapt. The end of the world will have to wait for something better to come along.

Ontario politicians understand economics very well, which is why they launched the green energy spending program. The problem is that "green energy" has nothing to do with the public's best interests, but rather their own interests. "Green energy", as known in Ontario, is essentially a tax fund for elite-connected contractors, developers and investors. Calling it "green" or "renewable" is just marketing to taxpayers -- nuclear power is green and renewable, but that's no good; the point isn't to deliver inexpensive power infrastructure, it's to make sure a gigantic political empire criss-crossed with contractors and policy elite stakeholders gets a piece of the trough. Well, guess what, the era of invented wealth is coming to an end and soon the Canadian economy will be so marginal that it will no longer be able to support these political employment and contractor empires.

No, I'm not. Business management does include a compnent of organizational management, but this is very superficial in regards to being a mayor, as the mayor has an office and a staff with experienced managers. Two decades of local journalism, however, means spending a whole generation tied to the politcal pulse of the city, or at least to it's power-players and opinion leaders. It's hearing both sides on politcal issues, and navigating city's political landscape. It's witnessing many of the real-world issues facing people in the city. It provides the training in charisma and public speaking to be taken seriously. It builds a large database of local history. Again, this is virtually self-evident, and I don't see how a rational person could conclude working as a manager consultant for a few years with large international government enterprises that spend more money than they know what to do with on people like Nenshi is a better credential for being a mayor over 20 years of local journalism. It absurd on it's face, and I can only conclude you are simply being contrary in a misplaced desire to "win" an argument.

I don't consider it a good qualifying credential. Merely, it's a better credential than Nenshi's, and the reason for that is self-evident.

Of course not. We are having a forum discussion, not a debate, and so a great deal of logical formalities can be done away with for the sake expediency; I will just say for the purpose of this thread that it is virtually self-evident that 20 years of local journalism is a better crendtial for a mayor than a few years working in a large multi-national management consulting firm and teaching a non profit management course. Furthermore, I will suggest that any denial of this is probably not rational, unless a rational argument can be made to the opposite. Telling me that declaring something doesn't make it so is simply a comment, not an argument.

Obviously not. But being a part of the public political landscape in Calgary for over 20 years by itself makes her a better candidate than Nenshi, all else being equal. It's really beyond any rational debate. Any further attempt to deny this fact is really just promoting a desire to be "right", and for me to be "wrong"....unless you or someone else can put forward a rational argument that can make a few years working as a management consultant working for non-Canadian corporations and teaching a course on non profit management trump over two decades of journalism in Calgary.

Nenshi spent 7-8 years in university in which he gravitated to non-profit organization management (ie, taxpayer funds, either directly or via grants from other instituions) and earned a degree in that very field from Harvard, was taken in immediately upon graduation by a company that hires new graduates from prestigious business schools, where he worked with governmental industries (banking, oi, etc) which are the traditional clients of management consulting firms, and then later went on to start his own firm (what white-collars do when they work as contractors) and teach non profit management. In other words, he has about as much credentials to run for Mayor as you or I. His "credentials" are extremely typical of a lifestyle university elite from Canada, and in no way differentiates him from that clique of people. They are, almost literally, a group of people who have formed a sub-culture of entitlment to the public purse, and to a certain lifestyle they are accustomed to. If he is exceptional in any way, it's the fact that he's ended u in the limelight, as his type of elite usually end up in the rear echelons of government management.

The immigrant vote in 2007, another Muslim by the way, was only 35k. So 105k additional voters for a dopey-looking visibile minority nobody Muslim with no credentials except being a university lifestyle elite and no message that isn't utterly generic going up against candidates with a long history, and much more powerful personalities. I understand the country we live in, and how we shouldn't expect anyone to perform a demographic breakdown of the voters, but let's be perfectly and brutally honest -- if it's not his personality, if it's not his politics, what could possibly energize an additional 105k voters to come out and vote for him? It's simply who he is -- a visible minority and Muslim. I don't discount the youth vote, as the "youth" in Canada's urban centers are just a bunch of ethno-centric cliques of visibile minorities. Would the "youth" in Calgary to the tune of 105k turn out to vote just because someone on Facebook tweeted them to? That's utterly absurd.

There seems to be a great deal of celebration over the fact that a large immigrant voting bloc mobilized to defeat the majority of Calgary voters who split their vote between two conservative candidates. Wouldn't that normally be seen in a negative light? Or are we to believe the laughable fiction that a virtual nobody, a typical example of a young university elite with a silver spoon stuck in his mouth without even a small ability to be taken seriously as a public figure, energized a huge and dormant voting block of Calgary liberals to suddenly find a mission and march to the polls to stick it to the conservatives and shatter the imgage of their city?

DON'T BE FOOLED! Ontario's "green" energy plan has nothing to do with reducing emissions. If the government was even a little bit interested in lowering emissions, they would have had scrubbers installed in coal-fired plants. Better yet, they could have increased nuclear generation and eliminate emissions altogether while giving Ontario an abundance of electricity to use and to sell on the market. The OPA's website basically states that the feed in teriff, what is under discussion here, is for the benefit of "entrepreneurs and businesses". What's an "entrepreneur"? That would be Schneider Power, as one example, who will shortly begin construction of a 10 MW solar farm. Wow! How much of a dent in coal-burning generation does this represent? Rounded down, coal-fired generation in Ontario is about 6,500 MW. Are you paying attention? That's 0.15%. That's a completely insignificant amount. A hundred such solar farms would be required to discplace just 15% of coal, and once you add oil/gas, it's even more absurd. Of course, the 10MW probably refers to peak capacity, which will rarely be fulfilled in our climate and geographical location. If referring to average capacity then the project will be much larger than similar projects in better locations. So if it's not about emissions, what could possibly induce the government to give public funds to "entrepreneurs and businesses" far in excess of the commercial price of power? Well, who benefits from it? It's certainly not the tax-payers. The polar caps are doomed regardless of what we do, but even for feel-good reasons, the actual amount of carbon emissions that stand to be impacted are completely marginal and will probably amount to zero as it's probably not feasible to reduce coal-fired generation by fractions of a percent per generating station. The elite business players on Schneider Power's management team certainly do, and looking at their profiles at http://www.schneiderpower.com/management gives us a clue as to what kind of people they rub shoulders with. When people talk about "activists", someone like Thomas Schneider doesn't come to mind. Or what about Sky Generation's Glen Estill, another brilliant light of eco "entrepreneurship" -- I fear I won't be able to make enough sarcasm drip from the word to do it justice -- and his couple of wind turbines? A board member and once president of government-connected "non for profit" group of renewable energy businesses, who ALSO found himself representing his own company on the government's Ontario Wind Power Task Force. Yes, you heard that right! The CEO of a wind energy company was put on a government task force to make recommendations to the government for spending tax dollars on wind energy! That's an absurd abuse, an insane conflict of interest. It goes on and on, but I've already spent enough time on this and I hope you all get the point: renewable energy, carbon emissions -- all just an excuse to for business as usual, putting tax dollars into the pig through and the pockets of government offices and the biosphere of the Canadian elite entitlement regime. We are living in a banana republic.