fellowtraveller

Do you know how difficult it would be to track secret spending by the Tories at Liberal-friendly Montreal ad agencies? We know the Liberals spent around $200 million, any way to confirm the Tory spending? I'm guessing it might be less. Must be accounting practice changes.

I don't know why she would repay the $16 for the glass of orange juice, that price is not hard to believe in London.

that is simply not factual in the context of the Quebec tuition hikes.

Numerous programs depict technology as if it was actually available. '24' did it all the time. Aside from a cell phone battery that could run indefinitely, Jack Baeuer had amazing info at his fingertips. He'd call HQ qith plans to assault a random building with bad guys inside. 5 seconds later the support team was emailing full building plans to his cellphone. Yeah, right......

The first oilsands projects had unproven technology and were considered very risky with oil at around $12/barrel, it was far from certain they would ever show a profit.. Syncrude was built in part with cash investments from Ontario, Alberta and Ottawa govts. The portion invested by oil companies was guaranteed, they got their money back plus interest out of operations before they paid a penny in royalties. Relative to the first couple of developments (GCOS now called Suncor, and Syncrude) the new technologies are much less risky.

Oh baloney. The tight mortgage qualification rules that helped save our bacon are a result of the Bank Act, passed sometime in the 1870s. Every govt since then has tinkered with the associated regulations, especially since the creation of CMHC as an instrument of social policy in 1946. CMHC is the fed govt vehicle for regulating residential mortgages, in conjunction with the strict controls on bank lending found in the Bank Act. Paul Martin had nothing to do with it, except in his minor tinkering in quailfication standards via CMHC as does every PM and Finance Minister.

In the short term, looks like many Quebec students will have lost an entire year of school.Since in Quebec as in all provinces tuition is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, many of those students are going to expect yet another year of subsidy to make up the time lost this year. Personally, I think it would be an effective life lesson to let undergrads know that the fees are going up, and they get four years of subsidy so they are on their own for full price(around $20K) for the year they chose to waste. An interesting factoid is that these fee increases have no effect on poor students since the Quebec govt increased bursaries to low income kids in conjunction with the fee increases. Only those that can afford it are getting bumped.

Conditions in a Norwegian prison are very far from hell, aside from the lack of freedom it is easy time by all accounts. I hope he does not kill too many guards, staff or other inmates while he is there. They'd have to tack a extra few months to his sentence then. The main reason he attackd these children in particular is that they were attending a camp sponsored by the ruling Labour Party. Quite likely that he murdered a few future Norwegian leaders, people who would have endosed the immigration policies he hated.

I did not know either of those things, both are great!Can't say I'm looking forward to the next couple of series in the West with only uber-defensive teams like Blues, Preds, Coyotes and Kings left in the running. There will be a lot of snoozefests ahead. The Blues look hard to beat.

non starter for one reason that really matters: there are simply no votes in having the debate.

You ned to read up on distribution of commodities like oil, or perhaps understand the semantics of upgrading vs refining. Natural gas is already used to upgrade bitumen into synthetic crude in Alberta, about 65% presently is done on site(Suncor for example) or at huge complexes like Shells combo upgrader/refinery at Scotford. But the entire planet refines crude oil locally, not half a plane t away. Finished procuts like gasoline, diesel, lube oils, heating oil are refined much closer to where they are needed. I agree that more bitumen should be upgraded in Canada before being shipped as synthetic crude. No, the current very low price in North America for natural gas is due to massive oversupply. That will not change soon.

Here is the decisive factor on Monday, as described in my #3 in the OP above, and confirmed this morning by a guy called Peter Lougheed the % of eligible voters who cast ballots went up an astonishing 16% from 2008 to 2012, which may be unprecendented. And they did not vote Wildrose, they voted PC. That is a reason too why Danielle Smith has a hard road ahead internally, wihtin her party. The bloom is off the Rose(sorry) already, with such a major asskicking on Monday after such huge expectations. Her problem now is: how to expand the vote? I think she is very close to being tapped out, the hard right and strongly organized church groups already voted in their entirety. The people she needs to add are in the cente and left, and Wildrose is the party least likely to appeal to them. If she dares to move to the centre, she will lose a lot of the right.

We already know how much your polling experts know by their laughable results. Your faith in them in the face of the facts is touching. The main reason Here are some more facts for you: NDP % of the popular vote from 2008 to 2012 actually INCREASED in both Edmonton and Calgary. So I guess they did not vote stategically, wouldn't you agree. And here is another fact: the Liberal vote did go to Redford, but it went long before the general election on Monday. The Liberals were in big, big trouble before Sherman became leader, his leadership doomed them. They were fortunate indeed to keep official party status and did it on the basis of a few very solid MLAs getting re-elected. I don't see a way out for them, they have lost it all now. Their base is gone, their MLAs are all elected in spite of being Liberals, not because of it.

No, Alberta was defending its constitutional right to manage their natural resources, just as Onatario and Quebec and Manitoba and Nfld do. James Bay, Hibernia blah blah blah.When did AB ever tell Canada to eff off? You'll know when we do, your welfare cheque won't come. For the truth, its Alberta oil until they sell it, then it belongs to the buyer. In the meantime, the whole country gets royalties, taxes aND jobs. You've heard of jobs, right? aren't you the guy blubbering about no national energy strategy, or is that your other brother jacee? Hey, why don't you stop implying that those nasty Yellow Peril is planning on invading?Your racism is not very subtle. So the Kinder-Morgan pipeline that goes from Edmonton to Vancouver for 50 years serves BCs interests, but the larger proposed Kinder-Morgan pipeline that goes from Edmonton to Vancouver does not? Go ahead, I'm waiting.

I guess you didn't catch the heavy dose of sarcasm in my post, maybe you need some sensitivity training. And how do you think the thousands of kilomters of existing pipelines that crisscross provinces including BC were built? By force? By extortion? Yep, with cooperation between provinces. We don't do tolls in Canada for interprovincial shipment of goods and services. Now or then. We do pay landowners for the use of their property, like pipleines or compressor stations. Always have.

I'm not sure how a 'Yellow Peril' comment from racist Australia circa 1961 got on this website, but there it is.

OK, and in the meantime you ackowledge Albertas right to block the TransCanada and Yellowknife highways, and tear up CN and CP rail lines while those discussions ensue. Is that your Canada?I am also still waiting for your outrage over the thousands of oil tankers that deliver all oil products to the people and industry of Quebec and Ontario from the Middle East and Venezuela. That oil also moves around central Canada by pipeline. Would you support Quebec turning off the tap until Ontario agrees to tariffs? if not why not? Oh, and just to avoid some embarassment for you, Alberta does not own any of the oil in any of the pipelines

I thought Alberta was the poster province for fiscal acuity and responsibility that the rest of us are recklessly not emulating. Tell you what, do a little homework on natural gas and bitumen prices, then drop back so we can have an informed discussion. Here is a hint: natural gas price in 2008 was around $12, now it is under $2. Can you see how that would affect the Canadian economy, not just Alberta?

Should Polish border guards be getting nervous? Time to reinforce the Maginot Line?

You have to go back a couple of years to get it right, the recent past greatly affects the present. 1) 2006- Klein quits, leadership battle begins. Frontrunners are an oldboy oilpatch favorite Jim Dinning, Morton as hard right 2nd place, Stelmach as third place rural moderate. The PC leadership process has a couple of quirks in the process, First, anybody in AB can vote on PC leader by buying a $5 memebership. Second, there is preferential voting where not just your fiorst choice but also your second pick can have influence on the winner. After the first ballot it looks quite likely that Calgary oilpatch fave Dinning will be beaten by calgarysocial dinosaur nightmare Morton. Albertans including many non-PCs take note and join the party in droves and elect non-Calgarian moderate Stelmach as leader and Premier. Wildrose is really born at this moment, in two ways. Calgary business peope have picked the PC leader for decades, and they don't like having a northern farmer as Premier because they cannot control him. They don't like it at all, and that includes a bunch of oldschool Tory ministers still in office, icluding Morton himself. There is another group of ministers- the church kind- who also hate it that Morton has lost, since he hates women and gays. The evangelicals massed behind Morton, and came really close to backing his bid for power. They brought many people to Wildrose. Wildrose organizes and fundraises, dissent grows between Stelmach and the old guard within the PCs, many of whom have been MLAs and Minsiters for decades. Calgary has been shut out of power, for the first time in decades of Calgary based Premiers. 2)Fast forward a few years. Stelmach has won a huge majority, but can see the cracks within his own party and the quiet growth and big oil money and church votes in Wildrose. He knows their support within his own party is almost entirely the extreme right. He knows he will have big trouble from Wildrose if he is leader in the next election, due in a year. He knows a chunk of his support is irretrievably gone, so he knows he a) has to resign and move the Party into the niddle. There are votes to be mined there, because the Liberals are coming apart at the seams. (liberasls got 26% of popular vote in 2008!). When the leadership campaign runs, the hardcore right rump represented by dinosaurs like Morton and Orman do badly, not surprising since the hard right wing has defected to Wildrose. The two remaining are Gary Mar and Alsion Redford, both centrist Red Tories. They are more or less the same candidate, though Mar is much more oldboy than Redford. Significantly, both are from Calgary. Redford runs a brilliant campaign and comes from behind to win. Rememeber the ease of joining the PC party to vote on leader, it happens again- many outsiders and many Liberals join the PCS and vote for Redord becuase she is not at all unlike them. The Liberal Party is in serious disarray now, haing elected a new leader themselves(Raj Sherman) who is widely perceived as being a fool. [u]3)Fast forward to April, 2012.[/u] Redford knows that Wildrose has momentum, but she aso knows through quiet polling that it is soft and there are many undecided. She also knowsd that voter turnout was very low last election, and many Tories stayed home secure in the knowledge then that a win was inevitable. The campaign for the last weeek for the PCs has three themes: get that vote out, get a viral campaign to highlight the homophobia and social conservatism of the Wildrose, and try to get some strategic voting going so that Libs and NDP will shift votes to her. Of the three, the last was by far the least important since many Liberals had already shifted to her in the center, and NDP voters are the elast likely to vote PC under any circumstances. The most importsant is getting out the vote, since she knew Wildrose had already peaked with committed votes, there weren't any more hard right or hard religious to get. And it worked. The voter turnout went from 41% in 2008 to 57% in 2012, an huge increase and very unusual in Canada. They came out because they saw the threat of the draconian social conservatism of Widlrose. They mostly voted PC because they are mostly PC, and they knew Redord was a centrist . The lack of impact of strategic voting was clear with NDP support increasing from 8% in 2008 to 10% in 2012. If there had been any significant startegic voting, it should have dropped. The Liberals polled a solid 26% in 2008 and a dismal 10% this year. All of that 16% went to Redford, but it did not go on April 23, it went in the previous three years as the party collapsed. The Libs really jumped ship when they helped elect Redford as PC leader, and many more left when they elected the dismal Raj Sherman. The PCs polled 44%, a drop from 52% in 2008. They actually lost much more than 8%, since the Wildrose gained popular vote dramatically from 7% to 34%, nearly all from the PCs. The PCs replaced almost all of it with centrist votes from the Liberals. An interesting result is the electoral map of Alberta. Calgary is overwhelmingly PC, with a couple of Wildrose and Liberals. Edmonton is strongly PC, with a some NDP and a coupke Liberals in the mix. Eveything rural in the north is PC. The only place the Wildrose dominated was southern rural Alberta- the Bible Belt. 4) The future, as in 2016: The biggest political challenges in Alberta will be tied to the economy, and the future is not that bright. America, our only customer, is rapidly increasing domestic oil prodcution. We have no other markets. Natural gas is in very sharp decline as North American inventories soar. The rosy pictures painted by everybody will be very hard to achieve in this environment. But politically: NDP won't crack their 10% threshold with their current leader, who is as charismatic as a turnip. They might do a little bit better with Rachel Notley. The Liberals are deceased for the foreseeable future, they have conceded the center to the PC and have nowhere to go and nobody to lead them there anyway. The Wildrose have maxed out their vote now, and have to move to the center socially to expand that. Danielle Smith is well capable of playing that chameleon, but it will not sell well with her power base. Not well at all. PCs as noted have a perfect base now, with all others isolated and on the far right and left, but face really serious money problems ahead. Howe they handle that will determine their future.

would you also agree to a tariff being paid for every rail car and truck that passes through every province on the way to every other province? How about airspace, why should anybody pass over for free?

Do you mean you do not support McGuintys purchase of green energy at 10 times the cost of other sources?

Maybe Harper should develop a national energy strategy that involves developing markets other than the USA. Do you think that might help with stable employment and maximizing benefits? I think you should email him as a suggestion.

Much scarier than that, Harper rules like a Liberal.

the math does not work on a very big scale.I see the EU as being a tradeoff, a giant social engineering gamble. On one side the wealthy countries of north and west Europe know they have to somehow compete with global economic juggernauts like China/emerging Asian economies/USA and .... they cannot compete. On the other side are pretty big markets right next door in eastern and souithern Europe who want the deluxe social contract enjoyed by the north/west. The tradeoff: shared social contract vs access to captive markets. But..... the cost of that contract means poorer countries get access to big and very cheap credit lines enjoyed by the rich Euros and of course they borrow far too much and move far too fast..... In the end, Germany emerges as the only superpower in Europe and they will dominate the EU in whatever form it takes in the near future. Have we seen this movie before? Don't mention ze war.