Conservative Support Dips Post-Election

[ticker]

If a leader flip-flops, that shows weak leadership. Clark did in 79, with the Irsael embassy, and the decision to sell out Petro-Canada and Loto-Canada.

layton didn't back down on the martin let people die in the streets and harper didn't back down on the child porn statement because it would be a sign of weakness.

[Cartman]

I think Mr. Harper has an excellent chance at winning if he stays on. The east will be familliar with him next time around, and unless the "new" Liberals prove to be superlative managers, they will not be able to live up to their promises.

I am not sure about this one. Even though the next election is far away, I predict another Liberal government unless the NDP manages to take away some of their vote. I really do not see much of a difference between the current Liberals and Conservatives anyways, so I don't really care which one gets elected though I am partial to the colour blue.

[Big Blue Machine]

Layton was silly in saying that Martin was reponsible for the deaths of homeless people. Homeless people die of natural causes, and it was their fault in being homeless and not getting a job in the first place.

[Michael Hardner]

I  am not sure about this one. Even though the next election is far away, I predict another Liberal government unless the NDP manages to take away some of their vote. I really do not see much of a difference between the current Liberals and Conservatives anyways, so I don't really care which one gets elected though I am partial to the colour blue.

The Liberals' campaign consists of mainly of pushing the 'fear' button. If Harper can take this wind out of Martin's sails, there won't be much left to run on.

[Big Blue Machine]

It's disgusting for politicans to mainly run a election campaign on fear of the other guy

[Cartman]

You might have added that he also flip flopped to some extent when he later said all levels of government were responsible for these deaths. I think he made this statement because he got media coverage and if I am not mistaken, it worked. His support was highest right after this comment.

One way or another, Canadians will have to deal with poverty as it affects everyone in several ways. They are not just going to go away even if we do our best to ignore them.

[Big Blue Machine]

It was their fault for being homeless in the first place.

[Cartman]

Let us assume that you are correct. What are we going to do should poverty rates become so high that it is clearly having a serious negative affect on society? Depending on how you measure poverty, as many as 1/5 Canadian children grow up in relatively poor homes. They are known to have poorer health (costly to the health care system), be more likely to engage in crime (costly for policing in terms of $$ and danger to people), be less educated because they perform poorer in school (costly in terms of retraining and other social programs etc).

[Big Blue Machine]

Well maybe we should help the homeless a bit. I think we should force the homeless into shelters.

[willy]

Cartman,

Most reasonable people will agree on the point that it would be nice to reduce poverty. If it were possible, it would be desirable to eliminate it all together.

The challenge comes from how.

I take a neo con approach. I believe people need to take an ownership of their circumstance and the government can only reduce the barriers for social movement. Social equity has no place in my world, only an improvement for the greatest number of people in living standard.

The left thinks they can redistribute wealth and achieve a more equitable society. The underlying assumption would be that the equity would be an improvement for the bottom end and not just a bringing down of the top end of the income scale.

Who is right? Neither likes poverty but the solutions are as different and night and day.

[takeanumber]

If you take out social transfer payments, you end up with Brazil.

I believe in social mobility.

I believe that the resulting deadweight loss is affordable.

We tolerate all sorts of deadweight losses, because we as a society are willing to pay for them to get non-economic benefits.

I think there are literally hundreds of tangible, non-economic spinoffs from social mobility. (reduction of militancy, corruption, and quality of life, just to name a few.)

Those who are not willing to accept any deadweight loss are probably those who have already 'made it' and don't see why anybody else should be given the same opportunity.

I call that Toryism, because it's what we had in Canada back before 1837.

We're not rolling the clock back on this value.

It's a value worth defending.

[Cartman]

I agree with Take on this one.

Willy

The left thinks they can redistribute wealth and achieve a more equitable society.

Do not get me wrong on this one. I realize that there are some people who just seem to be unable to make things fall in line no matter what. At times, it is not just the economic disparity that holds them back from integration. But many measures suggest that poverty is not about a core group of "offenders", but is a game of musical chairs. For many reasons, people run into difficulties including divorce, layoff, traumatic incident in their lives etc. What concerns me is the fact that child poverty was supposed to be eliminated from society a few years ago (even the Cons agreed to this one), but has actually grown during the 1990's. As I said above, it will affect everyone in some way.

I agree that the difficulty lies in what should be done. I do not think that this has been on the radar screen as of late and should be more salient.

[Bakunin]

i think its really easy to criticize the poor for povrety but its not that simple. Children devellop by immitating each others. Its quite normal that if the community and the environnement of that child is quite bad, its harder for him to devellop.

What frustrate me the most is to think about all those third world children that has absolutly no educational and job future. The stupid thing is if we would higher their quality life, it would benefit evryone. If we are enough selfish not to help them devellop ( the develloped country), lets not make the mistake of not helping the poor here. Of course their are stupid people in our society, often the society itself help people to become stupid but doing nothing about it won't help to reduce povrety.