Scotty

If you hire someone over someone else not based on merit but based on skin color that is defacto racism, is it not?

I'm sure it happens - to all races - by all races. I wonder, if you did a study of hiring patterns by women or visible minority managers, whether it would emerge they favoured people who were "just like them". I suspect that in many cases it would. Human nature doesn't really change that much. That is why hiring should be done by merit, with less subjective hiring based on personal interviews. Personality is important, but neutral tests could replace interviews. Unfortunately, when you boil it down to the hiring manager, he or she is looking for someone who will fit in. Someone who is very different from those already in place, be it for race, attitudes, age, or whatnot, is less likely to be hired. As far as accents go, if someone is more difficult to understand and communicate with that is a logical reason for hiring prefences.

Society was quite different back then.

What's wrong with meritocracy so long as it's fairly applied?

Who experiences what today? Do you have evidence that visible minority groups face active discrimination in their lives to such an extent it damages their economic well-being? Granted there is and probably always will be bigotry in society, coming from all quarters towards all quarters. In my experience visible minority members are just as likely, and perhaps MORE likely, to be bigots as anyone else. The targets of that bigotry simply shift.

So do you believe that we should limit Affirmative Action programs to only natives? Is there any evidence affirmative action programs have helped the native condition? They've been in place for some time now, along with other measure to help with native educational levels. Are the reserves better places to live now than they were a generation ago? Is native poverty lower? Is native alcoholism and drug abuse and crime lower? If nothing good is happening then perhaps we might consider some other way to resolve the issue with native communities.

I think I have already acknowledged that Canada was a nation which, by modern standards, certainly was filled with ignorance and bigotry. All nations were. Most nations remain steeped in ignorance and bigotry today. But let's not compare the relocation of a few hundred people living in shacks on land they, for the most part, held no legal title to, to some horrid American massacre or other. I don't dispute that there was racism in Canada back then, but the ancestors of the great mass of people who are non-white were never here to experience it.

It's certainly regretable that women were discriminated against in the courts at one point. But I fail to see how society is improved or made more fair by having a court system which, it has been alleged, is highly discriminatory against males now. Further, if you found the one wrong fifty years ago surely the other is wrong now. I think the question, in addition to the justice of it, is whether such programs ARE, in fact, neccessary. I won't necessarily disagree, but I again fail to see how discrimination's effects can endure on the descendants of people who were never in Canada to begin with. Remember that census data...

Hang on a moment. Where do you get that they are equals? According to your own post and what I've seen and read females are in fact, disproportionate in numbers throughout the education field, and are the majority in universities. Male teachers are an endangered species, and numerous articles have indicated male students, going all the way down to lower grades, are performing worse than ever before, possibly, accoring to some, due to cours curriculums and teaching methods having been modified to help girls learn better. Is this what you refer to as equal?

Our NATION behaved, all in all, fairly well in the past. Oh, perhaps by modern standards, our behavior was less than ideal. But if you measure Canada's behavior with that of other nations of the past we come out pretty much head and shoulders above most. There was certainly widespread bigotry, but then that was the case everywhere else, and it was a lot less vicious here than elsewhere. It was, in fact, better than most of the world is even today. What liability do we owe to people whose families immigrated here within the last twenty years? If you consider that the societies they came from were more bigoted and discriminatory than ours (most were and are), less enlightened, and remain so, should those people not owe something to others, as opposed to us owing something to them?

This is not the United States. Why hould Canada make ammends to black people who are, in the main, recent immigrants, because the Americans treated slaves badly?

By 'society', you mean 'white men', don't you? I mean, if we accept it as a given that white men had all the power in these societies and discriminated against minorities and women then we have to accept that at some point those white men decided this was wrong, and decided to stop discriminating. And because of that you feel it's justified that their children should be discriminated against on behalf of the children of those you imagine they discriminated against? And yet if we review census documents we find that, absenting native Canadians, there were very, very few visible minorities in Canada prior to the last thirty or forty years - which is the time when white men decided to stop discriminating and allow minority immigration into Canada. So tell me why a black man who was born in Africa and immigrated to Canada five years ago should deserve some sort of compensatory affirmative action program on behalf of discrimination neither he nor his family ever endured. .I think my mother would have disagreed.

Why does it not concern you that they are the majority? Should you not now be upset and demanding that the affirmative action programs be turned around so that men are given preference? I am aware of no job, no profession in any field at any level where men are paid more than women based upon seniority, educatio and experience. If you are, please enlighten us. The gender gap is not going to go away until someone figures a way for babies to be born to men, and for women to have their maternal instinct surgically removed so that the males look after children as much as the females, and until their cooperative instincts are replaced by the aggresive competitive nature we see in a certain number of alpha males.

If you believe that today's 'white males' ought to be punished due to what their ancestors did should we not visit punishment on other groups based upon percieved ancestral affronts and misbehavior too? The fact is that no one who is benefiting from today's affirmative action programs in Canada was in any way challenged or influenced by the discriminaion of the past. They are, inssence, recieving compensation for a wrong never done them - by people who never did any wrong to anybody.

You don't think this is a pretty crude version of that?

Well, to begin with, the person who wrote the article has no inside information. He assumes, somewhat arrogantly, that his 4 trips through Dubai somehow clue him in to the haggling mentality of the middle east far better than the Canadian diplomats who spend years dealing with these people. Did he even talk to any of those diplomats to try and get an off the record indication of what talks took place? There's no evidence he did in the article. As to the closing costs, those were inevitable, whether we left this year or next or three years from now. So bringig them up is pointless. They're a cost of doing business. If the UAE thought that the new landig rights were a quid pro quo for letting us put the camp there - which they probably did, in part - the Canadians obviously felt the price was too high, or that the principle was wrong. We'r there helping these people. If they want to charge a reasonable rent for space, that's acceptable. Demanding something else is not. And frankly, their conduct since then is, if anything, an indication of a sulky, spoiled, arrogant, and spiteful mindset which must have been extremely difficult to negotiate with.

Systemic is the word they tend to use when they can't identify what practices are biased. IF the genders are unbalanced then there is presumed to be 'systemic' bias - unless the imbalance works in favour of women or minorities. You don't see the affirmative action people trying to address the gender imbalance in universities, for example, even though the proportion of males in many programs is far below their numbers in the population. Boys are faring worse than girls in schools. You don't see them crying out for a solution, for changing teaching methods to encourage boys.

It's good for US tourism, bad for Canadian tourism. American and world tourists find it more expensive to come here now, and so some go elsehwere.

Presumably you are pricing them at cost plus a reasonable profit. If your dollar apreciates in value by 25% against your market you must either somehow cut costs by the same increment, lose money, or raise your prices in order to make the same profit. Meanwhile, your competitors in that market, in this case the US, have no such difficulties. Their costs or production remain unchanged, and so their prices remain unchanged.

The US has been deliberately encouraging its dollar to fall in order to help its exports and protect its home market from imports. It has fallen something like 50% in value against other major currencies over the past 10 years. The Chinese do the same. How did Canada survive? I imagine that was so long ago that there were differen world circumstances. It was before the Chinese and other third world manufacturers were priced so much lower than us, and I suppose most of our exports were raw materials - where again we had less competition from abroad than we do now.

For the same reason I can't buy satellite or cellular services from an American provider, or buy cheap milk from New York.

But they can turn a profit more easily if they can, while flying from Vancouver to Dubai, drop people off and pick them up at Toronto, and then Paris along the way. That, of course, means they are actually also selling tickets between Vancouver and Toronto, and between Toronto and Paris, and that would be the majority of their business since very few Canadians have any interest in travelling to Dubai.

According to the article both Russia and China have now dropped their opposition to the referendum and are trying to get oil contracts with the new government.

I don't believe anyone has made an argument here that the two cartoon figures didn't make. The only difference I see is the two cartoon characters didn't call each other names - until the end.

Just because the House sat for 119 days doesn't mean MPs were out lounging around watching television the rest of the time. They do work from their offices, both in Ottawa and in their constituencies, and attend all manner of meetings, dinners, etc. in their ridings, as well as attending party meetings. The one thing you will rarely find is an MP taking a lot of days off from politics. This is not the Senate, and their jobs are not guaranteed.