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[Walpurgis]

There is a percentage that does chose to wear it meanwhile there is percentage that have it imposed by the husband.

I don't believe it's 100% choice or 100% imposed, but among secularists it is the imposed portion that bothers them after their mother's and grandmas struggled within the dogma of the Catholic Church before the Quiet Revolution.

Harper however is just playing politics with this

Which I find strange because they are imposing their will on others. I just wish they wouldn't be so rabid. I agree though that Harper comes out on top of this all. It's funny how this thread (and the media) turned into this thanks to him.

 

[RevoDS]

Lmao.

Your not native....

Never said I was, did I?

 

[Walpurgis]

Lmao.

Your not native....

He's the old-stock Canadian that Harper was referring to (you know, the ones that matter ). Many of the actual old-stock Canadians are living in third world country conditions and have lived on boil water advisories for more than a decade.

 

[gutter_trash]

The "Mulcair is a secret conservative" thing is a pretty bizarre tin foil hat theory.

Ideology matters not for Mulcair, he takes positions on where the direction the wind blows. Opportunism is what drives him.

 

[Walpurgis]

We do not live under the system we think we do. We think we live under a system of one person, one vote. And yet at present some votes count for much more than others. We think we live under a system of majority rule, fearing that any other system would mean endless “minority governments.” But in fact it is the present system that condemns us to minority government. We just don’t call it that.

Well put.

 

[maharg]

Ideology matters not for Mulcair, he takes positions on where the direction the wind blows. Opportunism is what drives him.

But Trudeau, well he had all his ideologies set by his pappy when he was a baby so we Know Him and What He Stands For, right?

 

[Expansion Pack]

Ideology matters not for Mulcair, he takes positions on where the direction the wind blows. Opportunism is what drives him.

Yeah, I'm sure the tax cuts Trudeau is promising for "the middle class" and his support of C-51 were driven purely by ideology... Definitely not trying to buy votes or shield the LPC from attack ads or anything.

 

[Deraldin]

To balance out the universe, Nanos was commissioned (by the friends of public broadcasting) to do a 300 sample riding poll in Del Mastro's riding and found the liberals with a nice lead there. http://ottawacitizen.com/news/polit...als-leading-in-del-mastros-old-seat-poll-says

Poor Dave Nickle. I remember interviewing him for a school project during the '03 campaign. He's been running for the provincial NDP here since '99, but has come in third every single time. He switched up to the federal NDP during the last election and managed to pull off second place but was still half the votes that Del Mastro had, only beating out the Liberal candidate by a couple thousand votes.

Interesting that Maryam Monsef is polling so well. She was a strong second place finisher in last year's municipal election behind the incumbent. I'd really like to know what the breakdown in that poll was between city and county though. The county has been pretty solidly conservative in the past while the city itself will tip back and forth.

 

[gutter_trash]

Yeah, I'm sure the tax cuts Trudeau is promising for "the middle class" and his support of C-51 were driven purely by ideology... Definitely not trying to buy votes or shield the LPC from attack ads or anything.

IMO, Canada's fresh water is more important than inconstitutional laws like C-51 that will end up getting blocked but the Supremes anyway

selling out water to scum like Nestle is worse.

As for Tax Cuts. Harper has never ever cut taxes without strings attached. The middle class deserves a tax cut. The Federal government should stop wasting money on adversting, there is a good place to save money for one

 

[Azih]

Ideology matters not for Mulcair, he takes positions on where the direction the wind blows. Opportunism is what drives him.

Mulcair opposed C51 at a time when it was polling real popular with Canadians. You're describing Trudeau with this post as well.

And I urge you guys on the fence to read the Coyne piece if you're trying to decide between the Libs and the NDP. The economic ideology of the two are similar at this point and so in terms of that not much at all is going to be different for the country if one or the other gets in. But in terms of true lasting change no major party has committed so strongly to PR as the NDP. Get rid of the CON artificial monopoly of the right. Get rid of the unfair discrimination against the Greens. Vote for PR which Trudeau does not like.

I've been working on this stuff for going on 8 years and this is the closest we have ever been to fixing this once and for all. If we don't elect a PR friendly government now then that is it for a long time.

 

[matthewwhatever]

The "Mulcair is a secret conservative" thing is a pretty bizarre tin foil hat theory.

It's literally video of him espousing conservative views. I don't think "tin foil hat theory" means what you think it means.

Though it's interesting to note how some people here are so quick to dismiss Mulcair's own words and actions from 5-10 years ago, yet see no problem whatsoever with holding the Liberals' actions of 20+ years ago against Trudeau.

 

[gutter_trash]

It's literally video of him espousing conservative views. I don't think "tin foil hat theory" means what you think it means.

Though it's interesting to note how some people here are so quick to dismiss Mulcair's own words and actions from 5-10 years ago, yet see no problem whatsoever with holding the Liberals' actions of 20+ years ago against Trudeau.

there is this guy from BC who is opposed to Nestle bottling water in using our Water, he is voting NDP. He said that Liberals are "Conservtive-Light"

but which Leader spoke of exporting our water for private companies? Thomas Mulcair

Water needs to be preserved, not sold off as a commodity, especially not to Nestle.

Preserving Water is way more important than C-51

 

[matthewwhatever]

Not that anyone in this thread needs to be convinced, but MacLean's has a great/terrifying story up about how the Conservatives are making reams and reams of government data just vanish. I've heard anecdotal stories about how they've made departments get rid of information, and I remember the warnings about how devastating it would be to get rid of the long-form census, but that doesn't make it any less frightening. It's going to be a lost decade in terms of data and information.

 

[Boogie]

Not that anyone in this thread needs to be convinced, but MacLean's has a great/terrifying story up about how the Conservatives are making reams and reams of government data just vanish. I've heard anecdotal stories about how they've made departments get rid of information, and I remember the warnings about how devastating it would be to get rid of the long-form census, but that doesn't make it any less frightening. It's going to be a lost decade in terms of data and information.

Silly Conservatives. How are government departments going to share information with other government departments under C-51 if you make government departments destroy the information they have?

 

[Simon Belmont]

Well Justin just became the first one to officially pledge to scrap the F-35 program. I'm legit surprised it took this long.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-trudeau-announcement-halifax-f35-1.3235791

 

[lacinius]

Not that anyone in this thread needs to be convinced, but MacLean's has a great/terrifying story up about how the Conservatives are making reams and reams of government data just vanish. I've heard anecdotal stories about how they've made departments get rid of information, and I remember the warnings about how devastating it would be to get rid of the long-form census, but that doesn't make it any less frightening. It's going to be a lost decade in terms of data and information.

Well that's not depressing at all... wtf are they doing, and still people will continue to vote for Harper :\

 

[Tiktaalik]

Pollsters are mad about that terribly done "Trudeau is is behind in Papineau" poll, because they know they already have credibility problems and stunts like this just make it worse.

Questionable NDP poll adds to industry's credibility issues

A dubious poll purporting to show Justin Trudeau trailing in his own Montreal riding has set off alarm bells in an industry already struggling to regain credibility after some spectacular failures to gauge election outcomes.

The poll of voters in Papineau, conducted by CROP and commissioned by the NDP, suggested the Liberal leader was running 11 points behind New Democrat Anne Lagace Dowson.

It was strategically leaked to some media outlets Thursday a few hours before Trudeau was to face off against NDP Leader Tom Mulcair and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper in a crucial debate on the economy – an event with the potential to determine the outcome of the Oct. 19 federal election.

The immediate objective was clear: to rattle the Liberal leader and put him off his game.

But it also had a longer range goal: to break the three-way logjam in voting intentions by persuading Canadians not to waste their votes on a party whose leader can’t even win his own seat.

The Liberals immediately charged that the poll had over-sampled NDP supporters and under-sampled Liberal supporters. And five reputable pollsters who examined the methodology at the request of The Canadian Press agreed that the survey did indeed seem flawed in a number of ways, skewing the results.

Another survey, conducted by Mainstreet Research for Postmedia and involving a sample more than twice the size of the CROP poll, was released the next day with markedly different results, suggesting Trudeau was running five points ahead of Lagace Dowson.

As part of its survey, CROP asked respondents how they voted in the 2011 election: 32 per cent said NDP, just 14 per cent said Liberal – a far cry from the vote share each party actually scored last time, 28 and 38 per cent respectively.

Some deviation can be expected; people forget or lie about how they voted. But such a big discrepancy should have raised “huge questions” about how representative the survey sample truly was, said Christian Bourque, executive vice-president of Leger Marketing.

But even had CROP’s methodology been beyond doubt, Bourque is disturbed by the idea of a pollster’s research being used “a bit like guerilla polling” by a political party to destroy an opponent’s prospects.

“To me it does look like or sound like survey bombing, much like photo bombing,” Bourque said in an interview. “And as an industry leader, I don’t find it’s a direction that we want to go in collectively as an industry ... I find that a source of worry and concern.”

The Papineau poll flap is a cautionary tale for so-called progressive voters who are being urged by various groups to vote strategically for the opposition party best positioned to defeat Harper’s Conservatives. National poll numbers tell voters nothing about the dynamic in individual ridings and riding polls aimed at helping them make a more educated decision can be badly flawed or misleading.

Guidelines established by the industry’s voluntary professional watchdog, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, caution polling firms against marketing a product under the guise of market research, Bourque noted. Conducting a poll for a party to advance its own political interests treads too close to the line for Bourque’s comfort and “does not do our industry any good.”

CROP vice-president Youri Rivest did not respond to a request for comment.

Mainstreet is not doing any partisan polling during this election but has done some polling in the past for municipal campaign candidates. Mainstreet president Quito Maggi said his firm would never allow a client to leak survey results to score political points.

“In fact, my contract with Postmedia, they can’t publish a poll if I say they can’t publish a poll. It doesn’t matter how newsworthy it might be, if I don’t feel it’s responsible, they can’t publish it,” Maggi said.

Among other things, Maggi said he wouldn’t allow publication of a riding poll that surveyed fewer than 600 respondents or that had a margin of error greater than four percentage points, 19 times in 20. The CROP poll surveyed 375 Papineau voters and had a margin of error of over five points.

Maggi suggested that CROP may not have known the NDP would leak its poll. However, the NDP leaked another CROP riding survey a couple weeks earlier, which suggested Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe was running a whopping 37 points behind the NDP incumbent in his old Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte-Marie.

The controversy comes just as the polling industry is attempting to salvage its reputation with the creation of the new Canadian Association for Public Opinion Research, aimed at enhancing the quality of polling. It’s founding chairman, Ipsos Public Affairs head Darrell Bricker, has in the past railed against shoddy polls peddled to credulous news outlets and reported to the voting public as gospel.

“All of this MUST stop,” Bricker and Ipsos partner John Wright wrote in a 2011 open letter that bears re-reading today.

“We are distorting our democracy, confusing voters, and destroying what should be a source of truth in election campaigns – the unbiased, truly scientific public opinion poll.”

Edit:

Meanwhile the margin of error in the latest Nanos Poll is +/- 6 for Quebec, +/- 9 for Atlantic, +/- 5 for Ontario, +/- 8 For BC (!!!!!)
Canadian polling is truly garbage.

 

[SRG01]

Isn't this tactic similar to push polling, but engineering the results instead of the questions?

Edit: I just had another question pop up in my head: when the CPC do lose their majority or even government, will the party swing further right like the US Republicans or will they swing more center like the other Canadian parties?

 

[Tiktaalik]

It's literally video of him espousing conservative views. I don't think "tin foil hat theory" means what you think it means.

Though it's interesting to note how some people here are so quick to dismiss Mulcair's own words and actions from 5-10 years ago, yet see no problem whatsoever with holding the Liberals' actions of 20+ years ago against Trudeau.

The fact that Mulcair is a centrist and to the right of the majority of NDP members has never been in question. The bulk water issue was brought up by I think Dewar in the NDP leadership debates and Mulcair was elected regardless. I'm not debating that.

I'm stating that the idea that Mulcair has a hidden agenda and would dramatically remake the NDP in his own "secret conservative" image is a tin foil hat theory. The NDP is adopting a centrist election tactic because they crunched the numbers and recognized that they were #2 in a ton of Conservative held ridings and they need to win over cautious conservative voters in order to unseat Harper. The NDP has become more centrist over time but that path started long ago under Layton. I think any speculation beyond that tin foil hat stuff.

It remains reasonable to bring up Liberal actions of the 90s and question how much the party has changed since that time due to the fact that many of those 90s era MPs are still MPs and are running for reelection.

 

[Tiktaalik]

Here's a pretty good article about the election in the context of BC that tries to explain BC politics, which are unusual and a bit out of step with the rest of Canada. Many issues that are significant in other parts of the country are irrelevant here, and likewise the opposite.

The Globe and Mail should do these for every region of the country.

Too long to post so I'll just post a few paragraphs. Well worth reading though.

The political romance of B.C.

British Columbians vote Conservative in one election and NDP
the next — and they could mean the difference between minority rule
or a change of government,

...

Conservatives are fighting to preserve the high-water mark of 21 of 36 seats that they scored in B.C. in 2011. They are almost certain to lose some of those seats – a few, perhaps, to the Liberals. “I know this is a target riding of the Liberals because they did hold it from 2004 until 2008,” Mr. Saxton said in an interview, adding the Liberals have a “decent candidate” in businessman Jonathan Wilkinson.

But, broadly speaking, the threat to most Tories is actually the New Democrats. “The NDP are likely to come out with a majority of the seats in the province,” said Richard Johnston, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. “The question is how big a majority. Every seat that the Conservatives retain, in what could be a swing against them, could be important.”

Prof. Johnston may be overstating the case. Stephen Harper’s Conservatives might continue to hold a plurality of B.C. seats on election night. But most observers predict the Tories will suffer losses in B.C – an outcome that could help trim the Tories towards a minority or bolster the NDP towards government, depending on results elsewhere in Canada.

...

B.C. can be divided into four political regions. There is the resource-producing economy of the Interior, a blue bastion since the days of Reform. There is Vancouver Island, divided between a more rugged and Conservative-leaning north and the more leftish capital of Victoria. There is downtown Vancouver, where the Liberals and the NDP fight it out. And there are the suburbs and exurbs of the Lower Mainland, where all three parties battle for power, with the inner suburbs trending progressive and the outer suburbs trending Conservative.

In the last election, that resulted in 21 Conservative seats, 12 NDP, two Liberals and one Green; one of the Conservatives has since become Independent.

But underlying all of this is an ethos, which permeates the political culture today just as it has since the province was created more than a century ago. David Black, a political scientist at University of Victoria, calls it “the political romance that is B.C.”

“You see more political variety in a smaller geographical footprint than anywhere I know of in Canada,” he said. “There's a waywardness, a fickleness, a curiosity about politics … that moves people to take educated bets on new things.”

He attributes this waywardness to the province’s historic isolation from the rest of the country, which has produced a place “where people are incredibly passionate about politics,” and quite indifferent to what anyone in the rest of the country is thinking.

...

 

[MikeyB]

Not that anyone in this thread needs to be convinced, but MacLean's has a great/terrifying story up about how the Conservatives are making reams and reams of government data just vanish. I've heard anecdotal stories about how they've made departments get rid of information, and I remember the warnings about how devastating it would be to get rid of the long-form census, but that doesn't make it any less frightening. It's going to be a lost decade in terms of data and information.

Do we have any political commitments to address this?

 

[gutter_trash]

Isn't this tactic similar to push polling, but engineering the results instead of the questions?

Edit: I just had another question pop up in my head: when the CPC do lose their majority or even government, will the party swing further right like the US Republicans or will they swing more center like the other Canadian parties?

If Cons don't form government, Harper will quit.

So we will have to wait to see who their new leader will be since the current Government has been tightly controlled from the PMO.

It also depends if their new leader is Reform stock or old PC stock

 

[gabbo]

If Cons don't form government, Harper will quit.

So we will have to wait to see who their new leader will be since the current Government has been tightly controlled from the PMO

If it's not Kenney, what has he been doing for the past five years?

 

[gutter_trash]

If it's not Kenney, what has he been doing for the past five years?

His French has improved over the years.

The Cons don't have that many bilingual replacements available .

Lots of their Qc MPs are either lackeys or uncharacteristic

Or else they resurrect Jean Charest but he may be too PC for the current Cons

 

[SRG01]

There are still PC members in the CPC?

 

[GSG Flash]

Gretzky is getting slammed on his Facebook page for his endorsement of Harper.

 

[Terra Firma]

Gretzky is getting slammed on his Facebook page for his endorsement of Harper.

 

[Vamphuntr]

I'm surprised Mulcair's opponent didn't bring up his past with Alliance Quebec yet. Just bringing that up should damage him up quite a bit in QC, especially with Bloc voters that went NDP. I mean they are now scrubbing his past for stuff he said 20 years ago (the "newfie" thing) so I have to wonder why they have yet to open that Pandora's box.

Scrapping the F-35 project is a good idea. The cost has ballooned quite a big and it's a never ending disaster. So does scrapping C-51.

 

[killer rin]

Stephen Harper announces $100M manufacturing fund in Windsor, Ont.

I'm actually quite happy about hearing this... because it means that something tipped the Conservatives off enough that they feel the need to pander to my little region. Sadly for them though, Windsor-West and Windsor-Tecumseh have never in their lives gone Conservatives, and in the 2008 and 2011 elections, the Conservatives came in second place 10,000-12,000+ points behind the NDP.

So if it wont effect those two riding's, they are probably trying to save Jeff Watson in Essex... which from what I can see on my drives has a severe lack of Blue signs compared to the sea of Orange ones.

 

[Walpurgis]

 

[Fuzzy]

Stephen Harper announces $100M manufacturing fund in Windsor, Ont.

I'm actually quite happy about hearing this... because it means that something tipped the Conservatives off enough that they feel the need to pander to my little region. Sadly for them though, Windsor-West and Windsor-Tecumseh have never in their lives gone Conservatives, and in the 2008 and 2011 elections, the Conservatives came in second place 10,000-12,000+ points behind. So it it wont effect those two riding's, they are probably trying to save Jeff Watson in Essex... which from what I can see on my drives has a severe lack of Blue signs compared to the sea of Orange ones.

They also pretty much told the auto industry to get ready to get fucked by the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

[Walpurgis]

They also pretty much told the auto industry to get ready to get fucked by the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Is there any party against that thing?

 

[UberTag]

Well that's not depressing at all... wtf are they doing, and still people will continue to vote for Harper :\

People love to vote out of fear and willful ignorance.
We liked to mock Americans for doing this with Dubya... but we're no different.

He's enjoying some nice momentum these past two weeks as well.

 

[Stage On]

Is there any party against that thing?

I'd like to know more about this as well. Doing a bit of googling right now and it isn't bringing up much.

TPP is a huge pile of shit and frankly I don't want to support any party that is in favor of it.

 

[Fuzzy]

Pretty sure none of the top 3 are against TPP. At most they're against the secrecy involved with the negotiations.

 

[Tabris]

People love to vote out of fear and willful ignorance.
We liked to mock Americans for doing this with Dubya... but we're no different.

He's enjoying some nice momentum these past two weeks as well.

But the big difference is it's 50% of Americans but 35% of Canadians. Our voting system sucks.

 

[Stage On]

Pretty sure none of the top 3 are against TPP. At most they're against the secrecy involved with the negotiations.

Urg. Great that means whoever wins we're all screwed.

Secrecy is only the start of Tpp's problems. The fact that something so important is so behind closed doors and not transparent for all to see is seriously messed up.

That it will allow corporations to sue governments to obtain taxpayer compensation for loss of "expected future profits." is absolute balls to the wall insanity never mind all the other stuff in it that mucks with IP rights and internet freedoms.

 

[Mr.Mike]

Stephen Harper announces $100M manufacturing fund in Windsor, Ont.

I'm actually quite happy about hearing this... because it means that something tipped the Conservatives off enough that they feel the need to pander to my little region. Sadly for them though, Windsor-West and Windsor-Tecumseh have never in their lives gone Conservatives, and in the 2008 and 2011 elections, the Conservatives came in second place 10,000-12,000+ points behind the NDP.

So if it wont effect those two riding's, they are probably trying to save Jeff Watson in Essex... which from what I can see on my drives has a severe lack of Blue signs compared to the sea of Orange ones.

There was a pretty sudden transition from Brian Masse signs to Jeff Watson signs when we drove into Lasalle (for Sake Sushi, which is pretty great). Also, Joe Comartin is retiring so there's no incumbent in Windsor-Tecumseh.

I'm thinking I might vote for the Greens becuase I saw a reusable Green party lawn sign, something I found very endearing. All these other candidates are just gonna throw their signs in the trash along with their hopes and dreams when this is done.

 

[Deleted member 126221]

"Hey, I wonder what's happening in the canadian election thread. It's been a while since I read it."

I just wish they were actually pro-gender equality and would allow women to wear what they want. They just come across as racist hypocrites. I just can't like Quebec as a province.

"Oh. Same old same old. Bye then!"

 

[Tiktaalik]

I'm thinking I might vote for the Greens becuase I saw a reusable Green party lawn sign, something I found very endearing. All these other candidates are just gonna throw their signs in the trash along with their hopes and dreams when this is done.

Surely there's a better justification to vote for a party...

 

[gabbo]

But the big difference is it's 50% of Americans but 35% of Canadians. Our voting system sucks.

Our voting system isn't much different, they've just just synthesized a system that cuts out the possibility of a 3rd party causing that 35% to happen.

 

[SRG01]

I don't even understand how the TPP is even a thing in the 21st century. Is the US willing to throw away what's left of North American manufacturing that easily?

 

[Tabris]

Our voting system isn't much different, they've just just synthesized a system that cuts out the possibility of a 3rd party causing that 35% to happen.

It is also different due to the presidential, house, and senate all being separate votes.

If PM and MPs were seperate votes, I am pretty sure Harpers numbers would be even lower. NDP and Liberal do have some bad MP candidates out there in some ridings.

 

[Walpurgis]

Urg. Great that means whoever wins we're all screwed.

Secrecy is only the start of Tpp's problems. The fact that something so important is so behind closed doors and not transparent for all to see is seriously messed up.

That it will allow corporations to sue governments to obtain taxpayer compensation for loss of "expected future profits." is absolute balls to the wall insanity never mind all the other stuff in it that mucks with IP rights and internet freedoms.

I don't understand why a government would agree to such a thing. It's the dumbest thing ever.

"Hey, I wonder what's happening in the canadian election thread. It's been a while since I read it."



"Oh. Same old same old. Bye then!"

You somehow manage to catch me each time I mention that place. Just let it go, man.

 

[killer rin]

There was a pretty sudden transition from Brian Masse signs to Jeff Watson signs when we drove into Lasalle (for Sake Sushi, which is pretty great). Also, Joe Comartin is retiring so there's no incumbent in Windsor-Tecumseh.

I'm thinking I might vote for the Greens becuase I saw a reusable Green party lawn sign, something I found very endearing. All these other candidates are just gonna throw their signs in the trash along with their hopes and dreams when this is done.

I think Cheryl Hardcastle can hold on to the NDP seat in Windsor-Tecumseh, looking at its history, the district seems a fairly safe NDP Seat considering one of the two elections where the NDP lost to the Liberals, they were both in a close second by under a hundred votes and under 3000 votes.

Though now that you said your observations I am again back in the worried camp.

Spoiler

Thanks for ruining my fantasy

What I find interesting though is that Essex essentially has a candidate running in all three corners of the region. Liberals will probably get a chunk of the Kingsville vote. NDP will get the Lakeshore vote and Conservatives will likely get the Amherstburg vote, so the real battleground is in the center as the candidates battle over LaSalle and Essex on top of trying to make inroads in each others regions.

Anyhow, I'll have to check out that Sushi place next time I'm in the region

 

[Morrigan Stark]

You somehow manage to catch me each time I mention that place. Just let it go, man.

"I hate a whole province for stupid irrational reasons, and make a point to repeat it every now and then, get over it already, gosh!"

 

[Tabris]

Honestly, selling out our manufacturing sector in benefit for other industries wouldn't be a bad thing if we were ahead in knowledge based sectors. We are lagging behind though due to poor investment into education and a commodity-focused economic plan.

It's natural for the manufacturing sector to go towards other economies in a global market. They will eventually transition from countries like China and India to Africa and South America to eventually Mechanized / Robot-based manufacturing once the economics make sense.

Our economy should be split between 4 sectors - knowledge based, construction / trades, commodity, and service. Holding on to manufacturing jobs is a waste. It's the equivalent of how the record industry fighting online services for music.

Infrastructure spending will be a boom to construction sector, so Liberals are on track for that. This also should be done based on the ebb and flow of the commodity sector since they often have parallel employment bases.
Universal Education will be a boom to knowledge based sector, so Greens are on track for that. Unfortunately no other party wants to look at this.

NDP and Conservatives are the ones living in the past here.

 

[gutter_trash]

looks like Thomas Mulcair of 20 years ago is catching up to him

http://www.thestar.com/news/2015/09/20/thomas-mulcair-apologizes-for-using-newfie-in-debate.html

He used the word "Newfie" during a debate 20 years ago. In both English and French it has a derogatory connotation.


In French the term "Newfie" has a more derogatory meaning and it was used often in Quebec to make fun of Newfoundlanders as the butt of jokes just like in France they make fun of Beligum.
Kids in school used the word "Newfie" left and right in jokes and it meant stupid, dumb, retarded, lesser inteligent in those schoolyard jokes.

No wonder Atlantic Canada is not pulling for Mulcair

 

[Madness]

I don't even understand how the TPP is even a thing in the 21st century. Is the US willing to throw away what's left of North American manufacturing that easily?

Money talks. There is no red white and blue anymore in the US, it's all green. In 1999, many economists and manufacturing companies begged Bill Clinton not to allow China to enter the WTO because cheap Chinese exports would flood the world market and destroy US manufacturing. One of his last acts in office was to grant them most favored nation status and much like everyone predicted, within a year, Chinese exports rocketed to the top, the trade balance grew and manufacturing declined in almost every western country. That's not to say it wasn't Made in Taiwan or Made in Japan before.

Same thing now. Money talks and the corporations want this and so it'll happen. They love the fact they can now utilize Vietnam for manufacturing because wages are even cheaper than China. I can't even remember the last time I bought something Made in Canada. Literally lost millions of jobs of good paying manufacturing jobs. There is very little economic hope for this country, especially if TPP is passed. The next step might as well become full economic control by the US and the selling of our resources (freshwater, oil).

 

[matthewwhatever]

The tiniest bit of action in the polls!

The Globe and Mail/CTV/Nanos nightly tracking poll also shows the Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau, has knocked the NDP off the top perch as the party most Canadians would “consider voting for.”

Admittedly, it's now at Liberals 49, NDP 45.5, so hardly a sign of massive movement, but it's the first time in months the Liberals have overtaken the NDP in that area.

Do we have any political commitments to address this?

The Liberals and Greens have committed to bringing back the long-form census. I thought the NDP had as well, but I can't seem to find anything to that effect.

As to the broader question, of whether the data can be rescued...I don't know. I don't think any party can commit to addressing it if the Conservatives have destroyed it. Hopefully most of it is salvageable, but we won't know for sure until we have a new party in government.

I'm stating that the idea that Mulcair has a hidden agenda and would dramatically remake the NDP in his own "secret conservative" image is a tin foil hat theory. The NDP is adopting a centrist election tactic because they crunched the numbers and recognized that they were #2 in a ton of Conservative held ridings and they need to win over cautious conservative voters in order to unseat Harper. The NDP has become more centrist over time but that path started long ago under Layton. I think any speculation beyond that tin foil hat stuff.

It remains reasonable to bring up Liberal actions of the 90s and question how much the party has changed since that time due to the fact that many of those 90s era MPs are still MPs and are running for reelection.

I think you're vastly overestimating how much power those '90s-era Liberals MPs have. The few remaining are either established on the left-wing of the Party (Dion, Carolyn Bennett) or guys like Mauril Belanger and Lawrence Macauley, who aren't exactly known for being all that policy-oriented.

looks like Thomas Mulcair of 20 years ago is catching up to him

http://www.thestar.com/news/2015/09/20/thomas-mulcair-apologizes-for-using-newfie-in-debate.html

He used the word "Newfie" during a debate 20 years ago. In both English and French it has a derogatory connotation.


In French the term "Newfie" has more derogatory meaning and it was used often in Quebec to make fun of Newfoundlanders as the butt of jokes just like in France they make fun of Beligum

No wonder Atlantic Canada is not pulling for Mulcair

"I unreservedly apologize to anyone who might have taken offence at that statement made in the heat of a debate more than 20 years ago," Mulcair told reporters following a rally at the Sheraton Hotel in St. John's.

In Mulcair's defense -- which is not something I ever thought I'd write -- he did apologize. It's one of those weasel-y apologies where he just says sorry if anyone was offended, but he did at least walk it back, rather than doubling down. (Though it would've been hilarious to watch him doubling down on his right to call Newfoundlanders Newfies.)

I'm much more concerned by his response to a niqab question this morning:

Mulcair asked if he believes people should be allowed to wear a niqab when saying citizenship oath. Mulcair says courts have ruled #cdnpoli