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Canada Poligaf - The Wrath of Harperland

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Ether_Snake

安安安安安安安安安安安安安安安
24 hours of sunshine is as bad as 24 hours of darkness.
 

Slavik81

Member
So Harper and Co. backed off and won't get involved in reviewing history classes after all.

http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle...6/005-patrimoine-histoire-recul-federal.shtml

They will instead focus on federal programs, publicity, and museums. Whatever that means.

Good. The federal has enough power without muddling with provincial matters.


Remember all those commercials for the 1812 anniversary? lol

No matter how many times I saw those shorts, I always expected they'd turn out to be for Laura Secord chocolates.
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
Oh hey, now the latest scandal is the 250 million dollar ship design thing.

Seriously, can we stop saying that Conservatives are somehow better with money than commie socialist lefties? Or does that go against the narrative that Flaherty is a magician who saved Canada's economy in 2008?
 

maharg

idspispopd
Considering it was the commie leftist socialists who forced the government to actually do anything in 2008, if that narrative were going to be busted it'd have been busted a long time ago.

That said, I think the real dissonance in the message is that CPC policies aren't bad for the economy, but neither do they really encourage the improvement in the economy to affect all strata positively. Our GDP can go up and we can get poorer at the median at the same time.
 
Looks like big oil has more influence than we thought

Canada drops out of race to tap methane hydrates

CBC said:
Funding ended for research into how to exploit world's largest fossil energy resource

Canada is abandoning a 15-year program that was researching ways to tap a potentially revolutionary energy source, just as Japan is starting to use the results to exploit the new fossil-fuel frontier: methane hydrates.

Methane hydrates are crystals full of methane gas found both offshore and under the permafrost. Low temperatures and high pressure cause methane and water to crystallize into ice-like deposits.

They represent an unexploited source of energy estimated to be larger than all the world's known coal, oil and gas reserves combined.

Methane is considered to be cleaner than other fossil fuels, and if methane is used instead of oil and coal, significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved.

While Canada has decided it isn't feasible to make further investments in the field, methane hydrate research is strategic for Japan. Exploiting the abundant methane hydrate deposits near its coast would allow Japan to end its foreign energy dependency, with enough recoverable gas to meet its power demands for 100 years.

Japanese researchers are working toward establishing commercial extraction operations for some of these deposits by 2019.

More in the article

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/04/30/f-methane-hydrates-canada-japan.html
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
So the news today is that the census results are broken because this is the first one to come after it was made voluntary. I really don't get why they even do it at all? I know in the US it's part of the Constitution, but if Harper's Patriotic Conservative Government of Canada isn't interested, why even keep up the facade of doing it? It's a waste of money AND the results are meaningless.

Yet another thing people will forget in the next few days I guess. I hope the Liberals or the NDP are remembering this shit, because someone needs to remind the amorphous blob that is the Canadian voting public that this government is broken.
 

Kazerei

Banned
It's interesting that the census results show an upswing in aboriginals and foreign-born residents. I wonder if it's just because minorities are hoping to be better represented, so they fill out the voluntary census. Lulz.
 
So the news today is that the census results are broken because this is the first one to come after it was made voluntary. I really don't get why they even do it at all? I know in the US it's part of the Constitution, but if Harper's Patriotic Conservative Government of Canada isn't interested, why even keep up the facade of doing it? It's a waste of money AND the results are meaningless.

Yet another thing people will forget in the next few days I guess. I hope the Liberals or the NDP are remembering this shit, because someone needs to remind the amorphous blob that is the Canadian voting public that this government is broken.

The Long-Form Census was most helpful for municipal planning: infrastructure, settlement services, and other things. Population counts help for federal-level infrastructure planning as well as electoral mapping. And, socioeconomic data gives us a look at how households and families are structured and, when combined with economic data, helps to inform quality-of-life related policies and any adjustments that may need to be made to them.

These are the arguments that were presented to the government when they first claimed that the LFS was so bloody "intrusive". Now that the NHS (the long-form's shorter cousin) is voluntary, response bias is a major factor and planners are less confident in the validity of the sample data. As in, we *know* we're missing a certain portion of the surveys we sent out, but we *can't* know whose surveys they were: were they all among urbanites? First-generation immigrants? Single-person households? If the non-response is uneven among various groups of "significance" (howsoever they are defined), then the resulting planning will be exponentially less reliable, dependent upon the degree of inaccuracy - which we can't fully establish - than it would be had the survey been a mandatory-response one.

Long story short: I hope the decision to run an NHS over a proper Long-Form is reversed next time around. But I won't be surprised if it isn't.
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
It's interesting that the census results show an upswing in aboriginals and foreign-born residents. I wonder if it's just because minorities are hoping to be better represented, so they fill out the voluntary census. Lulz.
It's funny, the CBC ran a story that basically said that Asians are probably underrepresented in the census and that there might be more Asians in Canada than the census would lead us to believe.

Long story short: I hope the decision to run an NHS over a proper Long-Form is reversed next time around. But I won't be surprised if it isn't.
You know, I actually don't know the Liberal or NDP position on this issue. But I can't imagine it being sexy enough for anyone except nerds and social scientists to make an issue out of though. :(
 

maharg

idspispopd
It's funny, the CBC ran a story that basically said that Asians are probably underrepresented in the census and that there might be more Asians in Canada than the census would lead us to believe.


You know, I actually don't know the Liberal or NDP position on this issue. But I can't imagine it being sexy enough for anyone except nerds and social scientists to make an issue out of though. :(

Pretty sure the Liberals and the NDP are both vocally opposed to the end of the mandatory census. The social programs both of them believe in depend heavily on accurate census data, so it's definitely not just a policy wonk thing.
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
Pretty sure the Liberals and the NDP are both vocally opposed to the end of the mandatory census. The social programs both of them believe in depend heavily on accurate census data, so it's definitely not just a policy wonk thing.

Well, I just wonder if it's like the GST thing where people say they are against it but if they actually became the government, they won't bother touching it.

Like, I assume the long gun registry is dead even if the Liberals or the NDP take power in 2020 or whenever. There's no reason to even try to open that debate again (short of a Newtown-like event happening in Canada anyway).
 
Considering it was the commie leftist socialists who forced the government to actually do anything in 2008, if that narrative were going to be busted it'd have been busted a long time ago.

That said, I think the real dissonance in the message is that CPC policies aren't bad for the economy, but neither do they really encourage the improvement in the economy to affect all strata positively. Our GDP can go up and we can get poorer at the median at the same time.
the same commie leftists socialists who brought down Paul Martin in a vote of no confidence and propped up Stephen Harper to power?
 
It's funny, the CBC ran a story that basically said that Asians are probably underrepresented in the census and that there might be more Asians in Canada than the census would lead us to believe.


You know, I actually don't know the Liberal or NDP position on this issue. But I can't imagine it being sexy enough for anyone except nerds and social scientists to make an issue out of though. :(

From the CBC story:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau told reporters after his party's caucus meeting that he "absolutely" would reinstate the long-form census.

"It boggles my mind a little bit that in the data-driven 21st century, we would have a government that would choose to know less about its citizens, and about the needs and about getting good data on what people are struggling with," he said. "We have a government that has decided that it doesn't want to know what Canadians are facing."

Mulcair didn't go quite as far, though:

Opposition NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair also criticized the NHS, saying after his party's caucus meeting that the survey provides "a much lower rate of return, less information which to base government programs on, and taxpayer dollars are not going to be spent as efficiently as possible.”NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair reacted to Wednesday's Statistics Canada population survey by saying taxpayer dollars won't be spent as efficiently as possible.
 

diaspora

Member
Made this for the YorkU grit page a while back:

46095_10151404994234715_459026360_n.jpg
 

diaspora

Member
I'm actually graduating now, but I'm 99% certain it's possible to still participate as alumni, which means going with the club to the biennial policy convention.


I can't wait. Especially if the race for the national board president is contested.
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
I guess the funny thing is that if either party does reinstate it, the Conservative opposition position would be as predictable as "Here come the socialists wasting your tax dollars by invading your privacy". :(
 
I guess the funny thing is that if either party does reinstate it, the Conservative opposition position would be as predictable as "Here come the socialists wasting your tax dollars by invading your privacy". :(

You're right, it would. And those other parties should laugh, and say, "well, you felt quite alright letting bureaucrats examine the confidential medical files of people who disagreed with your treatment of veterans with PTSD, and allowing for the random and arbitrary surveillance and recording of private conversations just in case law-abiding people might commit a crime sometime in the future, AND lost hundreds of thousands of young Canadians' financial student loan data and treated it like it was no big deal, so...stick it."

The purpose of the LFS (as we all, by now, know) is to get aggregate level data so that municipalities are adequately funded and represented and get the infrastructure they need. Intrusions on privacy are just a red herring to distract from the real issue: the Conservatives want to be able to cut transfer spending; they can't spend where they don't have the information to justify it.
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
Canada's Greatest Human Being and MP in the history of Responsible Government, Mr. Penashue, seems to have lost his riding. How will Canada go on without the great leadership and political acuity of such a great man? Harper might as well just declare his government defunct and call it a day.
 

diaspora

Member
Canada's Greatest Human Being and MP in the history of Responsible Government, Mr. Penashue, seems to have lost his riding. How will Canada go on without the great leadership and political acuity of such a great man? Harper might as well just declare his government defunct and call it a day.

Senate.
 
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