overthere

"It's about the wisdom of bringing in hundreds of thousands of newcomers every year without the requisite skill set to support themselves without lifelong government assistance." Huh? WTF are you talking about? Refugees now comprise <10% of the quarter miilion per eyar. Most of the rest are 'economic' migrants, meaning they are educated, speak an official language,experienced, young and capable fo looking after themselves because those are the criteria for entrance.. The rest are sponsored, which means that their sponsors take responsibility for supporting them. They initially have no access to services such as health care or welfare. The only people that get substantial help are actual refugees, and of those many are privately sponsored, so what we are talking about are govt sponsored refugees, who come nowhere remotely close to 'hundreds of thousands per year'. And of course the majority of that small group do not need 'assistance for life'.

They have been operating without subsidy since the 1980s. Their biggest threat is political intereference aka Trudeau.

These vested interests......are you talking about yourself, the federal government, rednecks in general or First Nations? I ask this sincerely, because First Nations have been in a position of near complete subservience since at least 1867. They own no land, they have no power, they are in jail, they die young from bad health, they have no power and they are hated. Are those the benefits they enjoy?

It truly makes my skin crawl when people refer to 'cohesion', 'practical solution', 'assimilation'. That's what residential schools were for.... Pack up the kids, and either make them white or kill them in the effort. At least the churches had the excuse that it is what Jesus would want for them. The ugliness in our collective hearts is no less today than it was then. First Nations have had self governance for a generation or less, after 150 years or so of sly attempts at genocide. The reaction here is predictable: they are scum and crimnals for sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. How does our record of governance stand up to a little scrutiny, to bring us to this, to the situation we have today? Yep, it won't take another 150 years to wipe them out entirely with our welcome and kindness and compassion.

You are lumping refugees- a small part of the total intake annually- with far more numerous regular immigrants, who are generally self sufficient and not permitted to access social services. And many of the refugees(and some non-refugee immigrants) are privately sponsored, which means their sponsors assume all costs for the first year or more. Oh and most refugees start their lives off here in debt to the CDN govt, they are obliged to pay processing fees.

Think of the children. Actually you don't have to do anything except pay taxes and let others get on with it. And it will change, the current situation is intolerable. Your credibility is greatly diminished when you state that all First Nations governments are the same. The quality of governance ranges from very competent to very poor- not unlike white man governance . . Maybe you could acquaint yourself with both types, not just insist incorrectly that there is only shit and that it will prevail indefinitely.

Agreed. Universal mail service is desirable and made possible via increased privatization(it is already very common in Canada, many functions are done by CP with contractors) and the cost does not have to increase more than it has. What I want to see is Trudeau get behind Canada Post by allowing them to operate their business within modern poltical guidelines. The Corp has actually done very well in the last 30 + years, when compared to the previous 30 years. Strikes are rare(they used to paralyze the economy regularly), the mail gets delivered, the cost is moderate, and they don't cost us anything beyond direct user fees via stamps etc. They have developed a sophisticated distribution system with large capital investments generated from operating profits, not subsidies. The best thing Turdeau could do is to stay out of it and let them execute their business plan.

My suggestion is that Canada Post is not required in any areas, rural or remote. There are always options, and in fact Canada Post uses those options daily in many cases. The cost is no different, and it it were the volume is so small it doesn't matter. I guess your sentence linking CP and remote/rural delivery is what threw me off, made me think they were linked.

You don't come across as being stupid or arrogant to me. But you do not seem able to acknowledge the current situation of First Nations, and our collective responsibility to address it. It is not something my ancestors here did, it is an ongoing and completely unresolved situation/serious problem in the here and now.

We do not require anything more from people born here, why would we ask it of newcomers?. In reality, the vast majority recognize it is greatly to their economic advantage to integrate, but it is none of my business or yours for that matter.

Consider the ratio of first class mail volumes in most of Canada vs the amount of mail volume in , say, Nunavut. Consider that Canada Post uses private sector aircraft to deliver all mail to those places, and the same plane service is available to , say, Fedex. We already massively subsidize the cost of delivery of a letter to Iqaluit or Dog Nuts, SK. That does not have to change if Fedex filled the community mail boxes in those places. Option: dump the mail bags at the airport and let a community based contractor take over the simple job of putting the letter in a mail slot, and selling stamps: as already happens many places. Canada Post should be allowed and encourgaged to execute their business plan within government priorities that respect that this is 2015, not 1915. Letter mail is on deaths door, let it go. Parcel delivery will soar. Let Canada Post bepart of that.

I understand that may be true where you live, but it is not in Alberta. You have to work longer to get EI here. But perhaps the biggest difference is that you cannot get welfare if you are a) employable and b )do not have dependents. What that means is that if you are young and able to work, you have to get a job or hit the homeless shelters. Not surprisingly, it contributes to a greatly different attitude towards work and the role of govt..

No, it is accepted only by the ignorant and unobservant. On even the slack scale of Western social democracies, Canada has a very narrow band of centrist parties with centrist policies. There are no far left or far right parties in Canada. However it is convenient to be able to pigeonhole people, so do carry on if it gives comfort.

Yep, there are many services that have never been and will never be as good in RR1 , Dognuts, SK as they are on Queen Street. Yet many feel the quality of life at RR1, Dognuts SK is superior to living in downtown Toronto. Life is full of choices, and the choices we make all have consequences. So many Canadians have this self righteous sense of entitlement that their personal choices and consequences should be paid for by others. Too bad for them I reckon. I lost mail service to my door 6 months ago, makes zero difference to anybody here except the chronic whiners. They should have cut doorstep service to the whole country in the 1980s, instead of expecting the rest to subsidize this little treat to a few.

Ah no. It is advantageous to the immigrants to integrate to the extent they speak an official language, learn to cope with bureaucracy, and function at a high level socially. But there is no necessity. It is entirely possible to survive without any of those things and a fair number do just that. And that is what Canada is really about: you have that choice- you can suck it all up like a sponge or not. When I welcome a guest to my house, I require that he or she respect the rules of my home, but I have no need that they become like me. This is what I see as required of both new and old Canadians: 1) obey the law 2. pay taxes. That's it. All the rest is up to you, make of it what you wish. Freedom baby!

Thats been the law in AB forever. You have to wait until the person on the marked crosswalk has reached the far curb, unless there is a median on the road. It is not harder to enforce than other traffic laws, if you are observed breaking it the cop writes it up. The purpose is simple: to try to keep people from blowing past stopped cars when a pedestrian is still on the roadway and vulnerable. The idea is that if you see a stopped car on the road, it should alert your brain.

I wasn't speaking for anybody but myself. I am certainly aware that my position is privileged.

Your national (and your personal) debt is massively increased as a result. Or did you think Barry has paid down your personal and national debt in recent times? It makes me laugh to see you characterize what happened in your country as being the exercise of capitalism. It was anything but that! First the retail, then the merchants bank acted fraudulently, then your govt bailed them out with YOUR money, then they let those most responsible go with massive amounts of money and all has been forgiven just in time for another round of theft. God Bless America.

Buddy it is a shell game. "adjust rate windows"? What a wonderful euphemism for pounding it right up your colon: you'll pay for it all including replacing infrastructure, and you'll think you're doing something meaningful while you are. Now that is what I call power marketing.

But you don't understand at all if you think the recently homeless took on the debt. American taxpayers took on the big debt. Much tighter lending rules that apply to all high ratio mortgages . For regular mortgages, banks can do more or less whatever they want. Explain how it is bad to avoid a collapse of the financial system and loading trillions of doallrs of debt onto taxpayers? So sorry, I was mistaken in thinking you are a US taxpayer. Because if you are, it did happen to you. Just curious, I don't give a shit really but why wouldn't you want your country to have a stable housing and banking sector? Is it a Communist incursion to oblige people to qualify for a high ratio mortgage? Our countries have similar rates of home ownership so obviously it does not prevent people from buying houses. 2008 saw 8 million people lose their jobs and 6 million lose their homes, and you are paying for it. It's going to happen again.. Explain the upside of that to me.

Well there you go, one idiot on Facebook spouitng nonsense proves your case. It surely applies everywhere. And Harper did not cut funding for abortion, they just did not include funding in the gloabl(and much praised initiative) initiative to relieve suffering for women and children. But do continue with the ridiculous partisan cherry picking. Oh, and were you aware that abortion is somehitng that is not just a controversial thing in Canada? In 3rd world countries there is also strong oppostion to abortion. And to contraception. And to vaccination. And to womens health. And to childrens education....... oemtimes you have to be careful what you fund so as not to jeopardize it all. But now you will want to explain how when and where that evil bastard Harper cut abortion funding in Canada. I'll wait. In the meantime, I'll answer the OP another way. The Cons should bring forth policy explaining why they support FPTP. Yes, I know that that system just cost them a bunch of seats, just as it gained them a bunch of seats in a previous election. But they need to start swinging soon, and so do the NDP, or the Liberals will make sure they are our government permanently.

How do you feel about the harsh reality that the Cons did absolutely nothing to change the relatively easy, govt paid access to abortion in Canada? I thought it was wonderful that somehow their hideous social agenda did somehow not get to this item. How about you?

That is the main purpose of smart meters.......Ontario Hydro is obliged to push hard on energy conservation- less power being consumed, and less power consumed during peak hours which has a crucial crucial impact for them: they do not have to invest monster bucks into capital investments to handle increasing peak capacity requirements. and the bonus for them is that they can maintain their revenue streams without providing more product overall. It is all gravy for them, and it is all couched in the language of a feelgood green initiative. It does not matter what consumers do to reduce consumption, OH will just adjust time-of-use and rates to keep the same or more money roilling in. And now they can do that without spending anything. Of course.

Oh man, that is laugh out loud stuff. His comments have nothing to do with a campaign several months back, he is doing now what is his second biggest priority: managing expectations. More accurately, he must effectively lower our expectations on many fronts. Yes, I promised you deficits, but now guess what? I'll exceed that promise and deliver an even bigger deficit! Sunny ways! And he has to downplay the whole refugee issue, as it is obvious today that the Trudeau Government has fallen far short of even very modest, revised estimates of refugees landed by Dec 31 2015. It really does not matter to most Candians that he has failed, but the man is very sensitive to criticisim and there are so very many promises yet to be addressed. Nobody wants to talk about a couple of things regarding the refugees. One is that by far most of the refugees landing here now were organized by Harper, and most are not govt sponsored but privately sponsored. The Trudeau govt had little to do with getting them here other than arranging flights, nearly all the screening was done long ago for this batch. The other item they'd like to keep quiet is where the refugees are coming from... The great campaign refugee lottery that Trudeau won with a bid of 25K before Decemeber 31, 201 was spurred by the daily media streams of hordes walking the roads of Eastern Europe, crossing the stormy waters of the Med, and washing up dead toddlers on beaches. Of course, we are not taking any of those people, none as far as I am aware. We are taking people long settled into camps if Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Justin needs to shift our focus away from all this, and he hopes to revist it in a few months when they have actually geared up to get some refugees here in significant numbers. This won't be an issue for him soon, all he needs to do and is doing is shift the goalposts for a while..