In any case:
http://opencanada.org/features/blogs/dispatch/the-mulcair-doctrine/
http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/kar...y-flaws-being-soft-on-separatism-not-one-them
literally found within seconds of googling
Based on what all you've posted in this thread so far, I'm going to assume you and gutter are clueless about pretty much everything to do with propaganda, not believing it wholeheartedly, and facts.
I'm honestly not clear on what point you think you're making here. I see a 3-year-old story about Mulcair's vague foreign policy ideas from a few days after he won the leadership, and an opinion piece from 2013 that doesn't actually refute the central point the author is arguing against. If those are your "facts"...again, that speaks to the depth and breadth of your knowledge of the Canadian political climate.
And the cbc article ain't great. Mulcair does get numbers and benchmarks wrong and that's certainly dumb of him. But he is consistent and not at all vague about wanting to raise the corporate tax rate and that's a policy that I support. He is also not at all vague about the Senate. What he wants to do might be difficult to pull off, but that's not at all the same thing as being vague. It is also a policy that I support. They are also not vague at all about electoral reform or C51. Which are two other policies that I support.
And it's sad to me that the central Canadian government has weakened to the point that the feds actually working with the provinces on policy seems like 'vague lies'. The Canada Health Act is the feds taking an active role in health care which is the provinces responsibility and frankly we also need a national transit strategy of a similar bent. It's a good thing for me that Mulcair wants the federal government to start taking a leadership role on this after decades of Harper, and Martin before him, slashing federal funding for these kinds of initiatives.
Look, you guys are Liberal partisan, and I am a NDP partisan. But attacking Mulcair's personal finances and taking his opponent's word as God's own truth on what were private negotiations isn't good politics. I really hope we can stick to policy when talking here, not smear talking points.
1) RE: C51, we've already established how much stock you and I put in what Mulcair says they're going to do (a lot in your case, none at all in mine). But I will just add that
others have
noted that there's a whole lot more wiggle room in what the NDP is promising that you seem to suggest.
2) Agreed 100% on the need for more federal-provincial cooperation. They need to have a more coordinated approach on health, on transit, on cities: no argument from me there. But I'm not sure how this fits into the discussion at all. And I'm not saying that to be dismissive on this point -- I honestly don't see where this comes from. I did say that I thought the NDP were being deceitful when it came to their minimum wage promise, since it's a provincial issue, but beyond that...if the NDP are promising more First Ministers conferences and more emphasis on Canada as a confederation, I'm not going to criticize that. It's yet another area in which Harper has been such a thorough failure, it'd be hard for his successor to not be an improvement.
3) I also agree with you that we shouldn't be spreading smears or criticizing politicians' personal lives, but I don't think that personal finances are out-of-bounds when it comes to talking about someone who wants to be PM. It's not on the same level as, say, being a rabidly homophobic social conservative while getting your babysitter pregnant (to speak of an example where the Canadian political media took their separation of politics and personal lives way too far), but we're not talking about the strength of his marriage or whether he's secretly visiting sketchy massage parlours in his spare time (to speak of a case where Sun Media, at least, ignored the personal-political divide). You don't think that someone's ability to manage their own personal finances is at all connected to whether they're fit to be leading the country?
You can blame the NDP for Harper just as much as you can blame the Liberals for him by them losing that election.
I don't think you remember how unpopular Paul Martin and the Liberal party was at the time. Even I, as a long time Liberal supporter, wasn't supporting him in that election.
The Liberals deserve 100% of the blame for losing in 2006. Who cares if Layton supported a non-confidence vote? Martin decided that the best way to spend 2003 to 2006 was telling everyone that the Liberal Party was rotten and corrupt, and then he spent the 2006 election trying -- at least if you believe the "Liberal strategists" Paul Wells quoted in one of his Harper hagiographies -- to tank the Liberal poll numbers in the hopes of scaring people so much with the prospect of a Harper government that they'd flock back to the Liberals on election day. It was a stupid, stupid strategy in every respect imaginable, and they deserved to be booted from office for it.
