overthere

What exactly is Trudeaus foreign policy, setting aside soundbite rhetoric? He is apparently intent on 'rebranding' Canada, and 'reinstating the respect we once had internationally'. I don't see how anything he has done since he began in November as PM gains interntaional respect. His immediate statement to Obama that he was pulling out of the ISIS battle is now bearing fruit, but not the kind he wanted. His massive dog and pony show in Paris was a big deal for CBC TV, but nobody else on the globe notices or cares. At his other string of international appearances - same thing. My take is that world leaders think he is is fluff. Perhaps that is his intent, since fluffy does not need much in the way of actual commitment. Smiles and selfies are enough for fluff. But the international community has noticed.....in a tangible way by excluding Canada from important planning meetings for dealing with ISIS. John Ivison says ... It is a valid question. Is this the direction we as citizens want to go with our foreign policy? Or is what is happening now an affront to the word 'policy'?. Canada has often been involved in peacekeeping activiities. There is absolutely no possibility that the situation in Syria/Iraq now is ready for peacekeepers. Canada has never been a neutral or unaligned country. We belong to alliances, serious alliances that come with serious responsibilities. And need serious leaders. Are we now ready to heed a call for help from one of our oldest and trusted allies for actual help, not 'let's pretend' help as offered by Trudeau? The ally I speak of is France by the way, who leads the fight against ISIS now. And the answer is stated every day by the silence in Ottawa. Our 6 jets in the ME are obviously a token in terms of firepower, but they are very meaningful in terms of how those friends view our country and our leader. A trust has been broken. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/john-ivison-how-can-the-liberals-leave-others-to-defend-our-national-security

It is going to be much harder to replace or repair Canadas crediibility. Our former allies have seen this movie before, they had a decade + with Chretien. I'll admit that Turudeau will out talk Chretien, who just shrugged, said who gives a s**t, and sent our forces into bad situations with poor equipment. This will be the same performance, but with selfies and more self righteousness.

^^^^^^^^^ Luckily, none of that applies to this situation. There are plenty of trades available to build the pipelines, and the money all comes from outside government. All we need is the spine and the will to say, 'get er done'. And it shall be done, with around $20 billion in direct investment hitting the ground running ASAP. That is a lot of jobs , and many more bucks/jobs in spinoffs. Let us not even consider the benefits over the life of the work required and taxes generated by the product inside the pipelines. On the sad side, both spine and will are sorely lacking in all levels of govt. We seem to love that in our politicians. Sunny ways, sunny days!!

Yet the Undead Keef Richards lives on....." We are going to have to start thinking about what kind of world we are going to leave for Keef Richards." RIP Frey, one of the two main songwriters from one of the great bands of the 1970s.

Agreed. Get out your crayons and draw him in if you like. And diversify by all means. In the meantime, get those massive infrastructure projects running now without a cent of our money involved.

This pretty much sums it up: http://edmontonjournal.com/tag/malcolm-mayes-editorial-cartoons As a nation, we have lost track of what butters our bread. The strategy from our leaders: pay for the generous social contract we all love with..... fairy dust.

The Conservatives could run Gandhi, or Jesus, and they'd lose next election badly. And all the federal elections after that too. Once Justin gets finished with the electoral system, there will never again be anything but Liberal Majorities. What's the old saying? The fix is in. More accurately it will be , soon. Clever Justin. His Dad made the Constitution virtually bulletproof against change. Junior will do much the same thing with the electoral system, and most people won't even know it's been done.

The IRS is much harsher on US expats than CRA is on CDN expats. If you are a CDN citizen that is non resident, and in a country with a reciprocal tax treaty it can be quite profitable to become a non rsident. I know three couples that are residents of Mexico now, because by doing so they protect their welath which is significant for all three. If you're still workig making , say, up to about $500k per year it might not be worthwhile to move, and might make earning that income much harder.. But if you are well off and want to legally protect investments...... IIRC Mexico has a nominal 15% income tax rate and no capital gains tax. They are one of the countries that wants rich people to live there.

I feel a sense of mounting dread

Maybe that is what Trudeau meant by 'building infrastructure": more cops, inspectors, court staff required to prosecute for possession of what will be a legal drug.

Because what bootleggers sold was often adulterated, low quality crap. Weed now is almost always very high quality, and easy to get anywhere in Canada.

start by banning racist Germans?

One he changes the electoral system to his liking, I think you are right about the 30 consecutive years.

Paul Theroux has written a few books about it, spanning about 40+ years of travel and living there. He is not so enthusiastic! WEll, OK, he is a curmudgeon......

Waldo, we simply reviewed the last half century of PMs and as I recall 37 of those years had PMs from Quebec,. The time frame was from today back those fifty years. I am so sorry if you find that time frame inconvenient in some way. And thanks for answering the bell, you are reliable and loyal. Nobody claimed that we elected the PM directly, are you trying to shift the goalposts again? It is really harder to do in winter when they are frozen solidly into the muskeg of a fetid imagination.

And it is just a complete lie that Francophones are over represented in the federal civil service.

We have already established that the PM is almost always from Quebec, not need to keep repeating the facts. Ding!Ding!Ding! here comes Pavlovs Dog.... I am looking forward to the usual crop of Liberal Cabinet Minsters resigning in scandal, another feature of Liberal governments. Somewhere, out there, a Montreal ad agency is going hungry and homeless.

The situation is not comparable to alcohol either. Lets face it: homemade beer and wine, for the most part, tastes like ass. People who make it are proud of it, but in reality their friends drink it out of courtesy. Not so with a lot of homegrown weed. A couple thousand bucks, a few quality seeds, and a bit of easily obtained knowledge can create some very, very fine weed in any garage or basement. And does. Not so long ago, the best cannabis/hashish came from faraway places: Lebanon, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanisitan, Mexico, Colombia etc. It was a very high risk business, people went to jail for decades by importing the product. Lots of weed was grown domestically in places like the Kootenays, but it was crap. Then along came hydroponics. In short order, major importing was kaput. Extremely high quality weed, far beyond the potency of the imports, could be grown anywhere with electricity and a bit of privacy. The best didn't come from the Hindu Kush, but from an acreage near Lumby, BC. It was the perfect cottage industry, and it still is. Trudeau knows there is no way around this reality. He claims international treaties blah blah blah but really it is the economics and optics and most of all the political capital risk that leave him cold......

I did not go down the whole list. I would say if it is made in the last 30 years, I have about a 95% chance I've seen it in a theater. If it it is older, about a 90% chance I've seen it somewhere.

I just don't understand why people have no faith in our govt being able to efficiently operate a system to grow, distribute and sell weed at a price and quality cheaper than the very large existing network of private growers already serving this market. What could possibly go wrong? Unless Trudeau and his crew are utter fools, they will restrict themselves to just removing weed from the Criminal Code. Then they'll turn the whole sorry reeking mess over to the provinces to manage so they can stagger into chaos. If the provinces take the route of trying to run it as a business, its a win(fed) - lose(provinces) affair. And I think that is what will happen. The provinces will have to find some way of making a legal product controlled and subject to heavy fines and prosecution. They'll need staff and cops to find and somehow identify the wildcat weed that will undercut their market relentlessly. There is little money to be made, and much political capital to be lost. People who smoke weed have been buying/using it illegally for years, and are entirely confortable with that. Legalizing won't change any of that, especially if the 'legal' brands are more expensive. It is untaxed and has no layers of bureaucracy now, how will they compete when those factors are added in? I expect Trudeau knows this, and has told his man Blair to get him out of this mess pronto. Another election promise met!

There is an equal chance that his leaving TO is as much a comment on Shapiro as it is on Anthopoulos. Sooner or later we will hear which it was....... I think the timeline is instructive....... Toronto is basically floundering under Beeston and AA for years. The owners have spent a load of money under AA, and the team is underperforming, again. Beeston does nothing really, has no purpose and they owners blunder badly in trying to dump him in the offseason. The Jays start 2015 with more underperforming, and AA is now really running the whole show. Beston waits to leave in fall 2015, with little involvemnt. Midseason, it all changes on the field. But.... the owners have already reached out to Shapiro, the deal is done. Shapiro no doubt would have fired AA as soon as he started if the Jays had not had a miracle turnaround, the first time in AAs career that they have looked like this. So does Shapiro come here and become Beeston, a spectator to the AA show? No. Does AA want to step back and start taking orders, be cut off from ownership, be a subordinate? NO. Something has to give, somebody has to go and it won't be Shapiro. And the owners have to go along with that. It must have been sobering for AA that it took this long to get a job..........But LA has buckets of money to spend on players.......

I'm asking you. You know, how did they diversify when it became obvious that their base was gone/going and still is. But the world is back to where it should be for Ontario: cheap energy, cheap loonie, and superb leadership in Wynne and Trudeau to guide the comeback. I'm going to make some popcorn and watch us succeed. ASnother fun fact about O'Laery. He is the New Black, Conrad Black to be specific. Just mention his name and the 'progressives' start sunfishing in a paroxysm of snit. He has bumped Ezra Levant I fear.

Luckily it is actually teeming with fish. Halibut(up to 200 pounds) , several salmon runs, rock cod, and many others. Of course, the major fishing is done just outside PWS, in the Gulf of Alaska where there is one of the largest commercial fisheries in the world. Valdez is the base for a considerable and active commercial fishery. There is also a big fish hatchery there, right next to the tanker depot. I can also assure you that the fiercely independent people in the area don't want you to 'do' anything, other than perhaps keep that piehole shut unless speaking the truth.. And yes I said teeming.

You misunderstood. It isn't my autobiography, it is Suzukis, Volume 2. You can check, it does exist. Why would you condone and actually cheerlead such a wanton, wasteful rape of The Earth? Principaly originate?- I am quite sure that greenhouse gases come out of jet engines used to promote vanity book tours. Or did you mean Dr Suzuki is a Prince? Other weell known activists like Neil Young arrivd here in pimped out zero emission vehicles. Are you saying David is above this, he is exempt from any accusation of hypocrisy? I can see where I went wrong here, by implying that CBC Radio and TV would lick his intimate bits between tossing softball questions. I confess I saw only part of that, the rest was off camera.

Whatever happened to the industrial heartland in Ontario and Quebec?