Scotty

As long as you're consistent about it. I find most of those on the Left who mock Christian beliefs haven't a clue that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs share many of those beliefs, and recoil from mocking or ridiculing minorities no matter what their religious beliefs are.

The NDP were clearly using these hopeless ridings to run females so they could boast about the % of female candidates they were running. That's part of it anyway. But there's more. Was there a local riding association in that riding? If so, you don't just show up and offer to be a candidate. The riding association usually chooses someone from amongst its members. Either that or HQ parachutes someone there they want to give a chance to. In some ridings, clearly, they took just about anything they could get because they thought they were hopeless. But I'm sure not all the ridings, even the hopeless ones, had mere placeholders. Parties sometimes use these ridings to train candidates who might have a shot elsewhere. They get some experience in running an election campaign and the party gets to see them in action to determine if they're worth putting into a better riding next time around. It could have been that if you had offered yourself as a candidate in one of the other ridings you'd have been accepted because they had no one there and wound up using people of limited qualifications. Or maybe there was some other reason. Maybe the person didn't like your looks, or thought there was something else about you likely to cause controversy or trouble.

Maybe, but if you've got syphilis are you gonna worry about gonorrhea? Tell me you wouldn't rather have three Brousseaus instead of Davis and Fry...

So all Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus and such... they shouldn't be accepted as leaders or parliamentarians because of their beliefs?

Read what? Read bullshit? "allows the offender to serve the balance of their sentence outside" Serve their sentence outside? Exactly how do you serve a sentence when you're at home, going to bars, going to the beach and having fun partying? We have a 37% recidivism rate. Seems to me that locking people up, setting them free, then arresting and locking them up again is a costly exercise.

Oh come on. Can she possibly be worse than Libby Davis or Hedy Fry?

Because there are a lot of flakes in Vancouver. The same bunch that keeps voting in Hedy Fry - a soul sister wingnut of Davis'. Something in the water, and too many gays with too little taste. They're both in power in large part because of the gay community out there.

Would you dare to call a Sikh or a Muslim a nut job because they believed in creationism?

I would tend to agree - if the money was surplus. But if the money was surplus - why did they then have to raise the contribution rates?

I have consistently voted, throughout my life as a voter, for the least-worst choice. This election was no exception.

Yeah, because it had a whole pile of women running in what they regarded as hopeless ridings in order to be able to say their party has a lot of women candidates. And through the strangest electoral fluke in half a century (at least) a whole pile of them got elected.

I don't know if it is in the party constitution, but even if not it is a VERY strong tradition that a French leader must be followed by an English leader and vice versa. That would mean only Francophones need apply for the leadership job.

All I know is that every communist state murdered people by the truck load in the pursuit of their ideological aims - no different than the Nazis. In fact, have a look at North Korea now, or China for that matter.

Not quite true. In point of fact, most of the original research is government funded. The drug companies then take information from that, and do their own research - which is tax deductible, by the way. And for the most part, they invent very little in the way of actual new drugs. The industry mostly produces 'new' drugs which are only minor variations of those already on the market. They're not there to improve anything, just to allow them to grab a share of an existing market.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits... Second, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of “new” drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called “me-too” drugs. The idea is to grab a share of an established, lucrative market by producing something very similar to a top-selling drug. The Truth About Drug Companies

Imagine if the Tories had a "former Nazi" in their caucus.

Picture perfect wouldn't have crashed a helicopter. Speaking of picture perfect, the Americans have said they will not release any pictures of the dead Obama. Thomas Mulcair, a fellow you might have heard of lately, has told the CBC that's because there aren't any such pictures. I'm gathering he disbelieves the American story, which would fit in well with his fellow deputy leader Libby Davis, who is a 911 truther.

Nobody cares anyway, outside the national liberal press elites and the socialists in opposition. Mom and dad in the suburbs could not possibly care less, and it was going on long, hysterical rants over crap like this which got the Liberals so little public support.

The odds of any Tory foaming at the mouth more than you do are extremely remote.

I don't get why liberal bigots think it's an awful thing to mock Quebecers, but gleefully mock and ridicule people from Alberta. Maybe you could explain that to me.

I am given to understand that virtually all the costs of research and development are covered by government funding anyway. Is that not the case?

I am completely confused by your equating the oil sands, which is the basis for Alberta's entire economy, and Bill 101, which is a bigoted law aimed at and for the benefit of parochial, provincial bigots.

The problem is the NDP has two audiences. It has the Quebecois types who it appeases by supporting expanding Bill 101, by supporting the law to make all SC judges bilingual, by opposing the clarity act, by suggesting he'd reopen the constitution. Mulcair derided the Conservatives for 'attacking Quebec' during the election by its dismissal of separatists as possible partners in a coalition government. This sort of thing is bread and butter for the Quebec victim people, but it won't sit well for long with NDP supporters in Toronto, Hamilton and BC.

What makes anyone think the NDP has anything against sovereigntists? I saw Mulcair on CBC tonight. His attitude seems to be that whatever Quebecois want they should get, and if you don't agree then you're attacking Quebec. He mentioned that the NDP supported the 'language rights' of Quebecers by supporting expanding Bill 101 into federally legislated areas. Any party which refers to Bill 101 as a necessary protection for the 'language rights' of Quebecers is not going to denounce Quebec 'nationalists' in their party.

Shwa, you don't understand how unions work, especially the big ones. The president of the PSAC works in an office in a tower full of PSAC employees. She meets with real public servants about as often as Jean Chretien met with real voters. Remember how he once claimed he'd drop by a bar or something to get the mood of 'his constituents', but it turned out he never showed up except at election time? The fact is that 95% of public servants couldn't name you any union people. If they know anyone its probably the local shop steward, and then only because he works amongst them. The president of a large public service local spends no time working as a public servant. Instead he basically focuses on union work, very little of which concerns individual members. He reports to a regional rep, who I guarantee you no one outside the union activist ranks could possibly know. The regional reps then report to a component, with its own leadership, and that component then reports up the line to the top of PSAC. Thus Turmel spent her days amongst senior union people, most of whom hadn't worked as public servants in many years. When she did meet public servants it would be senior directors, deputy ministers and the like, and not as good friends and drinking buddies likely to share secret stories. And if Turmel had any dirt on the Tory government she would have provided it to the NDP years ago. By the way, there's been a lot of talk about Brosseau's poor French skills. I don't know how bad they are, but Turmel is barely understandable in English, despite spending years working in Ottawa.