Scotty

Answers to what? Why don't you enlighten us on what answers you want? The only one I can see is "Did Harper know about Wright paying money to Duffy" which has already been answered. What you mean is you want them to keep asking the same question until Harper gives an answer they like better. Maybe if they use up, say, ten thousand hours of question period asking the same question in hundreds of different ways Harper will finally ADMIT that he knew all about it, eh?

Dumb comparison. Adscam was about spending millions of public dollars on unnecessary work so the Liberal party could get kickbacks. As far as I know this is about who knew Wright was going to give money to Duffy so he would pay back the public and shut the hell up. So what? A storm in a teacup, and nothing even against the law. It's just a political farce.

That's true. But let's not forget the essential ongoing element of public polling on health care. They want public health care just like every other nation in the industrial world has. Their main issue with the Affordable Care Att is it doesn't give that to them.

Ideologues reviewing the findings of similarly minded ideologues.

I don't buy it. I took a few law courses in college. They weren't that hard. You just needed to memorize some stuff and have a moderate level of intelligence. The law police need is basic. They don't need precedents or complexities. They just need rules of evidence given them, ie what they can and can't do and ask and when they can and why. Following rules is not that hard. The rules of precedent surround the Criminal Code can be complex, but police officers aren't required to make decisions like that. That's why we have Crowns. No it's not, not at their level. They just have to follow a set of specific rules regarding when they can enter a premises, when they can seize something, what they can look inside in what circumstances, and how they treat a suspect. The average uniformed officer doesn't make many arrests. And I think most Canadians would be shocked at how few. The truth is the majority of police time is spent on traffic offenses and accidents. The following might be of interest, written by a former mayor of Toronto. Chief Bill Blair noted in this budget request that in 2010 the police responded to 578,000 calls for service to the end of November — about 630,000 for the full year. There are 5,600 officers, which means that on average each officer responded to about 110 calls in 2010. Since each officer works about 220 shifts per year, this means that each officer responded to one call for service every two shifts. And it is not as if officers are making arrests on every shift. The average number of arrests per officer in Toronto, as it is in other Canadian cities, is seven to eight per year, that is, one arrest every six weeks, only one crime of which is a crime of serious violence. I have no doubt working as a cop or firefighter can have its stressful moments. But life is a tradeoff, isn't it? Part of that stress is lack of predictability, not knowing what you're going to be doing that day. A lot of people would give a lot for that. Compared to spending all your days working in a cubicle staring at a computer screen, doing the same work day after day, month after month, year after year... yes, a lot of people are more than willing to accept the trade-off. Lots of jobs are unpleasant, just in different ways.

SEALS and JTF2 are elite units. The police are not, to put it bluntly, elite. It is not at all difficult to find enough quality applicants. I would hazard a guess that if the salaries were cut by 40% it still wouldn't be hard to find enough quality applicants. Of course if they have to do official work on their own time they should be compensated. That is why they should not be doing official work on their own time. Your mind seems to have skipped the elementary logic that if we do have 8-10 of those cops being paid every day to be in court (at time and a half +)it would make far more sense to hire 8-10 more cops instead, at normal pay. That way they could not only have enough on the street, but there'd be no overtime, thus drawing big savings, enough savings, in fact, to hire more cops. After all, ten cops being paid time and a half every day is taking up the same money as 15 cops being paid regular salary. You are missing the point again. I'm not suggesting police and firefighters go the route of teachers and nurses (escalating educational requirements in order to justify overly generous salaries). I agree they don't need degrees. My point was that the lack of education and training required and the large number of applicants do not mesh with the high salaries. It is not unskilled labour, but it is not difficult for most people to learn and do well. The majority of the job involves traffic patrol and minor offenses, after all. That's an old cannard which doesn't really follow through on salaries. Do we get what we pay for in generous salaries to MPs and MPPS? Senators? City counsellors? If we tripled the pay of firefighters, would we get better firefighers in some way? People who would be better requipped to fight fires or rescue people from trapped cars? I rather think not. Price elasticity works to a degree, but given the inherent numbers of people interested in the position, I doubt we'd have any difficulty at all finding applicants just as capable as that fine young officer in Toronto who shot the guy in the streetcar, those fine upstanding gentlmen in Vancouver who tazer the polish guy to death, or all those cops during the G20 who gleefully beat and arrested everyone in sight without the slightest care or interest in legalities.

There is absolutely no shortage of people who want to be police and firefighter, nor has there ever been. A lot of the reasons for the overtime, I'm given to understand are regulations driven by union negotiations. As in the cite I posted in the OP where an arbitrator awarded overtime to firefighters who would have earned it (theoretically) if the city hadn't taken an uneeded truck out of service. One of the main overtime causes for police is court testimony. Whether it's for traffic tickets or murders, police generally testify on their own time. The excuse police departments make is that scheduling appearances during work time takes a cop off the road. But it's the same money, and appearing on their own time earns them time and a half, with a minimum 4 hour payment even if they're there for 15 minutes. It makes no sense at all. The point I'm making is that the requirement of the jobs is high school diploma. Nothing more. Sure, those who want to be cops and firefighters go out of their way to get all kinds of added education because the competition to get accepted is FEROCIOUS! But all that added edcuation is needed to fight off other applicants, not to do the work. Additional courses or skills acquired on the job are no different than in any other profession where people are constantly upgrading their knowledge, mostly in hopes of promotion.

I see no such post.

!st class constable for Toronto makes over $86k, which will rise to $90k by 2014. It doesn't take a whole ton of overtime to reach $100k. The point that as these guaranteed raises continue, the base salary itself will soon reach $100k

I also have a high end Braun. I only use it to trim under the chin, and in hard to reach places. It is nothing near as good as a blade. I have heard, however, that if you stop using blades period, the shaver will wind up improving. Something about blades producing scar tissue which makes it hard for the electric razor to shave closely.

I don't necessarily disagree, except there aren't that many senators. Now teachers, well, that's another one which is highly compensated, even though we have far more teachers than we need, and more and more applicants all the time.

You really think those two are that hard to find? We've never had difficulty finding enough applicants for either role. Quite to the contrary. So what is your answer? They should get anything they want? How about a million a year? Plus we'll supply them with chauffeurs for their limos? Would that be acceptable? For rescuing people. That is a tiny number of responses. Most medical situations do not require rescue. The whole point is the trucks do not need to go out for most medical situations. The only excuse most of the time now is that they get their faster, and that's because of the lack of paramedics and ambulances, which can, in turn, be attributed to the money being spent on so many firefighters. I don't know what percentage of firefighters are paramedics. I know that, like policing, there are so many thousands of applicants that many take all kinds of added courses in hopes of coming out on top in hiring. But that just points to how much desire there is for these jobs, and in turn, that we needn't be paying them so much. And plenty of make work. My uncle was a firefighter. The only reason they have to train so much is because they don't get to actually DO the work enough. You are getting the wrong message here. The military is not paid like crap. The fact a cop makes as much as a colonel with a thousand men under him is more an indication of how much the latter is overpaid. Yes, other government people are overpaid as well, at different levels. But even in the public service, my brother in law, who makes $100k, has a masters and a dozen program officer employees reporting to him and controls a budget of a couple of million dollars. And I just can't wrap my head around the fact that a firefighter who spends most of his time polishing chrome and climbing up and down ropes should be paid as much as him. The thing is, 'throwing themselves into a burning building' is becoming, for firefighters, what getting into a gunfight is for cops, something most never experience in their entire careers. According to Nightline it costs $3,500 every time a fire truck pulls out of a fire station in Washington, DC (25 calls in a 24 hour shift is not uncommon so this adds up quickly). Moreover, most of the time the call is not for a fire but for a minor medical problem. In many cities, both fire trucks and ambulances respond to the same calls http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/firefighters-dont-fight-fires.html

I don't say they shouldn't be paid well but $100k plus first class benefits for blue collar jobs with no education is ridiculous.

I am not one of those people who hates unions, nor one of those people who wants everyone to work for minimum wages. I think a fair wage for a position, along with decent benefits is what government should be paying its employees. But we have to remember there is a limited pie, and when people take too big a slice it costs the rest of us. Police and firefighter salaries and benefits, at least in Ontario, are the most obvious examples of the waste of public resources. Both of them are now making about $100k a year plus very generous benefits and pensions. These positions do not require high compensation in order to attract capable applicants. Every time one becomes available 100s or 1000s of applicants show up. And that's more the nature of the jobs than the overly generous compensation. Neither job requires a great deal of education, and neither job requires a particularly rare skillset. As in the cite below, firefighters rarely fight fires any more. Most of the time they're despatched to accidents, either on the road wherever. If you have a heart attack or fall down thes tairs, a big pumper full of firefighters will show up, in addition to the ambulance you called. This is designed to justify their existence since most of their time is spent sitting around the firehall, eating, reading, practicing, polishing and sleeping, The Fire Department will defend this by saying their fire trucks are often the first on scene so they can administer first aid. Yeah, because those truckloads of $100k firefighters have drained the funding away from ambulances and paramedics! Our cities are perrenially short of ambulances and paramedics because all the money is going to overpaid firefighters sitting around watching television! The fact is that, based on education, required skill sets, and demand, neither police nor fire departments need to pay anything like what they currently pay for these positions. A 40% pay cut would seem in order, as well as a cut in benefits. But that's not going to happen in large measure because of arbitration rules which need to be changed. Cities and towns can try to negotiate all they want with the unions, but in the end, the contracts usually go to arbitration, and the arbitrator does not take into consideration the ability to pay. He simply looks at other places and then awards a big pay hike. The arbitration system needs to be changed. Unfortunately, the Ontario Liberals are so friendly with unions that they refuse to consider it. Cities and towns are going broke paying for a bunch of guys to sleep and watch TV, and for overpaid cops to write parking tickets. BTW, firefighting is the 56th most dangerous professoin, while policing is the 127th. Taxi driving is much more dangerous, as is roofing and most other construction jobs, fishing, farming, lumber jobs, oil field jobs, etc. And as one of the commenters stated in the following cite, the clown who shot that idiot in the streetcar was making as much money than an army major or light colonel who might have hundreds or even thousands under his command. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/a-nation-of-100000-firefighters/article13647608/

The amount of space here is not expandable unless you think we're going to be living on the tundra. So yes, in terms of the environment, it is a zero sum game. The more people, the more pollution and the less forest and farmland.

Yes, I'd say, to a certain extent. On the other hand, the west supports the PLO. Does that make the west complicit in all the brutalities committed by PLO police etc.? I think you have to look at the larger goals, and the difficulties of picking and choosing among world nations which, by and large, do not show anything like the respect for human rights we do. Can we shun them all? And if we do nothing to hold up a given government, what form of government would topple it? Something better, or something worse, both for its own people and ours? I believe the support for Indonesia's regime was wrong, but I still don't equate those who supported it with the deliberate planning of and carrying out of attacks against civilians. I also believe any support for China's regime is wrong, but then again, I do understand the arguments which say you can't influence them unless you're on the inside. I think western governments tend to want to do the best both for their own people and others around the world. I don't think terrorists have the same goals.

Three of them set in the middle east for God sakes. You can't have military movies set in the middle east and not feature Arabs! Munich, well, again. Come on! Again, a historical film where you can't have anyone else as the enemies. The point August was making was that when Hollywood does an action movie where it can have any kind of terrorists or bad guys it avoids using Arabs/Muslims. Obviously war movies set in the middle east or historical movies about the hunt for those who killed Israel's athletes don't have that kind of option.

The problem I have is you're suggesting what the Indonesians did is terrorism. I don't agree. I don't think what Pol Pot did was terrorism either, or what Hitler did, or what Mao did or what Papa Doc Duvalier did. The question is whether or not a foreign country has some moral responsibility to the citizens of another country which would cause it to do something which is not in its own best interests in order to help these foreign citizens. I know that our governments do a lot of international charity, but that's voluntary. Do nations have an actual moral duty to not act in the best interests of their own people by avoiding supporting a potential friend and ally because that friend and ally behaves with brutality towards their own people?

What Indonesia did was not terrorism. It was brutality and murder, but unfortunately, not all that atypical among the third world dictators who were the norm back then (and not all that uncommon today). I'm not going to get into the morality or ethics involved in western states backing deplorable regimes like the Indonesians and many others except to say that whatever that was it was not terrorism. The West, collectively or individually, pursues relationships with nations regardless of how brutal those regimes are towards their people. And it tries to ensure those relationships are to its own advantage wherever possible. Thus it has interest in sometimes assisting other nations against mutual enemies. Again, that is mere explanation, but in order to say that it still does not constitute terrorism. Terrorism is a specific action taken against innocent people to deliberately terrorize them or their governments into supporting or abandoning support for particular political aims and goals. Hijacking airliners is terrorism. What Hitler did to the Jews is not terrorism. And supporting regimes which are brutal against their people (most of the world until fairly recently) is also not terrorism.

The definition of terrorism by those on the Left depends on who they're talking about. If you're talking about Americans, then just about anything counts as terrorism. A lot of people on the Left despise the West, and would only be happy living in something like Stalinist Russia or Mao's China.

I guess you chose not to even read the story. The quota had nothing to do with her doing her job. She was tasked to investigate claims and find improper claims. Note, not fraudulent claims, just claims where the documentation or times had issues. There would have been a lot of these cases where people made honest mistakes on their paperwork or in their statements. The quotas urged her and others like her to cut them off at the knees rather than showing any discretion.

Nonsense. Cops quite literally get away with murder. Not usually in Canada. Oh? Really? So cops don't have discretion to write a ticket or give a warning? Cops don't have discretion when they see someone drunk to arrest them or send them home? Cops don't have discretion about whether to tazer a guy or try and talk to him for a few seconds? Don't give me that nonsense. Cops have tons of discretion. It's the quotas that are invalid. Quotas means that in grey areas where an employee needs to have discretion so as to not come out as an overbearing scumbag their discretion is limited by the numbers they face. Quota means that harried single mom in the fourteen year old car late for her minimum wage job gets a ticket for barely exceeding the speed limit.

They've been trying to buy these things forever. I frankly think that DND should not be allowed to buy anything any more, not even toilet paper for the johns or pencils for their clerks. We need to fire everyone there even remotely involved with purchasing, and give the job to another agency. There used to be a department called DSS, Department of Supply and Services. It centrally purchased a lot of stuff. We need another one like that. DND should be allowed to offer its opinions on military gear, but have no other say in what's ordered. They're beyond incompetent, and have been that way for decades. It's an institutional thing that can't be solved.

What gets me about Harb, even more than Duffy, is that he never needed the money. He's been a sleazy local city Councillor for many years, and a big landlord with a lot of properties. The guy is worth millions. But he still has to fake expense claims. Then again, there was a column in the paper a few months back from a columnist who remembers renting a two bedroom apartment in Sandy Hill decades ago (a very nice neighborhood) from Mac Harb. One day his toilet broke, and he started calling Harb, getting only an answering machine. Eventually, after several days Mac Harb showed up at his door with a new toolbox, new tools, and a Plumbing for Dummies book (not kidding). He spent hours working on the toilet before getting it fixed. To say Harb is cheap is a huge understatement.

No, of course not. Israel has far more respect for human rights and freedom than such countries. I'm merely asking what your yardstick is given the intensity of your concern. Israel is in the middle east. Surprised you didn't know that. But I guess it gets you out of complaining about Russia or China because they're not in the West, right? Thus your lack of concern about their occupying other people's territories. Name one country today, anywhere, which is surrounded by violently inclined enemies and which has to fortify its borders because of the legions of crazy murderers who will do anything to just kill an Israeli -- any Israeli. NAme any country where terrorists are waiting, watching, and constantly, desperately trying to sneak across, to fly across, to tunnel under, to come in from the sea, desperate to get in just to kill every person they come across?