fellowtraveller

Ummm, England has snow storms and cold weather pretty much every winter, this one included.Speaking of irony....... Speaking of oblivious.....

do you think the shareholders of private sector companies are either consulted or outraged if the employees of the corporation get a muffin and coffee at a meeting? Get a grip.

Speaking of lefty head exploders, could we get Ezra Levant to follow Connie Black in prime time?

The NDP need somebody new but old, tried and true..... How about Svend Robbingstores? Does he have a day job?

I am outraged, no correct-thinking Canadian could be anything else.. I sincerely hope they hire Conrad Black as an anchor commentator, it will set leftist veins throbbing on foreheads from sea to shining sea.

It will go like this: the provincial govt will up their portion of the tab to $300 or $400 million and it will get done. What will be overlooked is the feds end up paying for the entire thing no matter what, as always in La Belle Province. Merci, suckas!

I smell a great business opportunity....how much would it cost to set up a Liberal Friendly ad agency? I foresee vast amounts of cash flowing soon, very soon.

I saw quite a few Conservative signs in downtwon Montreal in the 2006 campaign. Nearly all of them had been vandalized by respecters of the democratic process.

Our nation will collectively have to consider an appropriate gift for the heir to the Throne and his spouse. I'm thinking either steak knives or Quebec.

Au contraire, the Oilers provide numerous laugh-out-loud moments.....

The Liberals need money? What happened to the $200 million gift they got from Chretien?

Let us hope they can find many more money losing economic turkeys and flush them too. Next up? How about Indian and Northern Affairs, Health Canada or the CBC for starters? They'd have to find some suckers to take them off their hands for a penny each, but they could save billions in lossess every year.

None at all. Both are intended to influence and lobby regulators and legislators, since both operate within those frameworks every day. There is no effective difference in their ambitions, actions or planning. Nearly all public utilities are actually agencies operating at some arms length from government, and all are expected at a very bare mimimum to have a return on capital that equals or betters that available to the private sector. If they don't operate in that fashion- as woul;d a private sector company- they will never have any capoital and their owners/shareholders will be screwed..

Agree. The plot deviated from the Book with the womans role, but otherwise was pretty faithful. And if you think that everybody lived happily ever after.... not likely at all..... The Road was te first McCarthy novel I read, and I went out and bought/read all the rest after. I reckon Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the best living American novelist. He presents very difficult ideas in prose that is both wonderfully lyrical and savagely forthright. Many of his books are not intended for the squeamish. The next movie from his books will be Blood Meridian, surely one of the most violent, frightening (true) stories ever and considered by many critics to be one of the best American novels ever written. He also wrote No Country For Old Men, a fine book and IMO Top Ten all time movie.

I wonder how Andrea feels about large unions donating large money exclusively to the NDP?Some companies donate to all parties.

Imagine, a business taking an expense as a credit when calculating taxable income. What next- deducting employee costs? Declaring revenue? Where will it end?

Huge capital expenses by utilities - like electricification of rural areas- are approved by whomever regulates electricity in the province. They get permission to add a bit to everybodys bill to pay for it. There is no risk at all for the utility and because there are many more urban customers than rural, the urbanites effectively pay. Each landowner has to pay to have poles run into his home(also often heavily subsidized), and pay a small surcharge on their bill for a few years, but it does not come close to paying for the cost. Doesn't matter if Podunk Lane is closer. What matters is that there are 3 houses in a km of road in Podunk, and 60 houses in the same km in Toronto, and many more roads. In this context, you are right that it is irrelevant. The question is wheteher the CRTC will decalre broadband an essential service. The answer is yes, and they will ignore the hopeless economics and take the previous reasoning appliued many times in Canada in the past to rural electricity, gas and telephones to justify urbanites paying for the expensive expansion of broadband. It is a mandate/political question for them, and I cannot see a circumstance and opportunity for them to flex their muscle to go unheeded.

Wrong about the electricity. Rural electrical networks were almost all paid for by big pools of money skimmed from urban cuistomers. No way could a few people on Podunk Lane afford the miles and miles of poles, wire and transformers needed to get it to their property line, much less finance the increased generation capacity and transmission lines. It was considered good public policy. And that is what might sway the CRTC into decaring braodband as an essential service. Not because they think iot is, but because the CRTC sees itself as a shaper of the country, a maker of policy and big player.

Unusual, around here rural developments pay less and sometimes much less than urban homes. They tend to pay more and sometimes much more for things like fire insurance and utilities.Have you compared your rural govt budget to an urban budget to find the discrepancies?

The USA is not a Third World country. not quite yet.But they could pretty easily supply all our food, and much cheaper than Europe ever could.

There is plenty of precedent for city folk being obliged to subsidize rural services. Natural gas, private phone lines, electricity were all heavily subsidized by urban areas to pay the high capital cost to expand to rural areas. If the proponents of broadband-for-all can sell the need for their service - like benefit to society - the CRTC will bite and oblige internet providers to do it. And citydwellers will pay for almost all of it.

I too wish it was not true, but the reality is that there is a significant segment of our society who see Khadr as a martyr and victim, and see our govt and our soldiers as an oppressor. A few are on this thread.

This bit of monumental stupidity and wilful revisionism of the facts Gets more and more irrtiating. Canada has NEVER been an unbiased mediator. Canada has NEVER been a neutral country. Canada IS a member of miltiary and political alliances and always has been, the primary one for the last 65 years being NATO. And finally, NEUTRAL COUNTRIES LIKE SWEDEN AND SWITZERLAND ARE ARMED TO THE TEETH, AND EXPORT WEAPONS AS A CORE BUSINESS.

It is putrageous. We should have a full forensic accounting, a nonpartisan Parliamentary committee, a public inquiry and a complete and full [rocurement process. Then we can spend $800 billion on helicopters in 2082, in full confidence we have acted with prudence and foresight.

Things were kind of quiet from 1867 to the Boer war........other than those pesky Metis at Batoche.....Otherwise, Canada has had an unbroken string of strong alliances and participation in wars where plenty of people wanted to kill us. So, there was no 'before'.