I wasn’t defending Ford, clearly there’s something wrong there. It’s just that Trudeau will get a pass on many things that Ford couldn’t …
Taxing the middle class…such as my wife and I, to the tune of an extra $2000 for instance.
I don’t know how your comment could be read as anything but defending Ford? (And insulting to women, but we’ll save that sexism-nugget for another day.)
I am also of the “middle” class that will pay more taxes (and a lot more than an extra $2000 a year), and frankly, I think we should be paying more. Especially property tax. Why on earth does Toronto have lower property tax rates than Hamilton? Thats absurd!
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No not at all, name-recognition combined with an ABC strategy supported by numbers manipulated by conflating polls with projections is powerful electoral strategy and new to many Canadians.
While the numbers began swinging away from the NDP about 6-12 days before the election depending on riding, the polls and projection conflations swung away sooner. In my riding the full effect wasn’t felt until 3-4 days before the election. But here the LPC fielded an asshat and the dominant incumbent CPC candidate easily trounced him with a few days campaigning.
But it’s all over now. I wanted an election decided on issues but personalities, quips and weapons of mass distraction won the day. You can’t always get what you want tho.
The LPC will serve Canadians better than the CPC. particularly that manifestation of the CPC, but this nation has not moved back to the left of old. If the LPC wants to return to the centre or (gasp) even move left of centre a touch they will be welcomed.
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If you thought that my observation about how women react to images was sexist, you must be jumping at shadows 24/7.
Men do precisely the same thing in different ways.
Trudeau was, and still is, the perfect device to distract large voting blocks from real fiscal issues.
Women and hipsters will not vote for 70 year old men. Media says they are the guardians of the Banks/Patriarchy/whatever bad word, and so people are left with…what they voted for.
A beautiful and elegant double- bind
As always.
Much like basketball, the last 30 seconds is where the real game begins.
People are insane about taxes.
If someone offered to pay me $2000 per year to look the other way while they destroy libraries full of research, allow pollution into formerly protected waterways, shut down watchdogs who complain about their various frauds, try refusing healthcare to refugees and then screen out the Muslims, etc., etc., I would tell them to go to hell. What kind of slime wouldn’t?
Well, make that same difference a matter of taxes, and apparently the kind of slime who wouldn’t make up 32% of Canadian voters. It’s infuriating how so much depends on such pettiness.
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So women and hipsters never voted prior to this election then? LOL
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Yes, I was surprised that in all the talk about “weapons of mass distraction” no one seemed to realize that the niqab was to the CPC as Trudeau was to the LPC. The NDP sadly lacked such a weapon.
I mean really, glad they are out an all but there isn’t a chance in hell that even a privileged white man with similar credentials and experience could have been anointed the LPC leader let alone win an election as decidedly but for the legacy thing. An ABC strategy would be enough on it’s own, but whatever it is done.
I don’t know that I’ll ever accept JT as a leader though. I didn’t have much respect for GWB either. Their successes in elections were all largely antithetical to the positions they achieved.
I think that this campaign has targeted these groups more than in other elections, and also these groups are ready now (empowered, if I dare say?) For change to meet their needs.
My oldest son is 30 and was talking about NDP as his likely choice and I know he voted Liberal, as did his mother, believing they had their best interests in mind.
Boy are they shocked now they found how much their new tax bill will be.
The phrase " I hear what you are saying, but I see what you are doing" sums things up.
Distracting pretty images take ones focus off the important issues the majority of the time.
Especially when selling a consumer product.
What happened to the previous guy (Ignatieff? He was a Liberal, right?)
I spoke to a German native this morning visiting her Canadian husbands home and she asked me where all our middle eastern immigrants were.
She was genuinely shocked that there weren’t some sitting in Starbucks where we were sitting.
Idealists voted for this Liberal cluster fuck and immediately got a back- hander for their troubles.
That poor chap was a terrible error on their part. An ex-pat who was solicited to run for the leadership while still out-of-country ( I have no problem with it myself but if any other party had chosen a leader who lived outside the country when they were chosen there’d be hell to pay ) Ignatieff embodied all that people held as wrong with the LPC, privilege, entitlement, patrimony, condescending classism and a right-wing perspective veiled (ha) in a wisp of lefty intellectualism.
He was part of why they needed what they had for this past election. He lost his riding, his party was reduced to third party status and he summarily left the country after an appropriate cool-down period. He now instructs students at Harvard in how not to do things based on his personal experience. He suffered quite a lot for drinking the kool-aid, but tis to be expected.
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I only know a few visible minorities who live in these parts I’m in now, Eastern Rural Ontario, but in Toronto there certainly is a vibrant and diverse community. Canada is still mostly white but I don’t see your point.
Was the visitor confused that much of the tone of the election was set by xenophobic discussions over visible minority / religious minority questions that taken empirically register as but a blip on the screen of our populations? I was certainly surprised by it. As if I could care about niqabs, If there were 100x as many people in Canada wearing them it’d still be but a few thousand at most among millions. Canadians were complete suckers to allow Harper that trick, and it backfired on him in the end.
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No, I think she was bragging about how considerate that Germans were in openly welcoming so many Syrians into her country, and carefully asking why we (apparently) weren’t.
I didn’t have either the time or inclination to show her the new mosque opening in a 150,000 square foot retail space just around the corner from where we sat.
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Yes they’ve certainly got us there, & she was right, we weren’t. Still aren’t, not until everything gets squared away.
Sooo much land, we can still count as frontier. As long as Class 1 & 2 arable lands manage to get some protections against development (that’s the latest fancy way of saying sprawl up, not out) I would say that Canada could take ALL the syrian refugees, and the only thing that would happen is that our labour problems, labour development problems would cease to be. TFWer’s would need not apply.
IRL of course the logistics of that alone make it super unlikely if not unpossible, but you get my point.
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I do. In the 1850s ukranians went to Winnipeg willingly based on nothing more than a poster on a pole.
New immigrants want housing and a clothing allowance.
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Citation required.
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If we’re talking about Syrian refugees, they likely need both unless they kept assets outside Syria they would be among many (most) who being forced to flee made destitute.
And they would want these things, the clothes on your back, or the clothes you wore in Syria would be insufficient. Take it from an immigrant from the SouthernUS who came to Canada. You need hundreds of dollars to properly equip for winter. More if you work outside.
Housing = same. I think most Syrian refugees would be government sponsored refugees if Canada eventually begins accepting them en masse, thus they’ll all be entitled to resettlement assistance which includes housing assistance and clothing allowances.
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If we’re talking any kind of refugee, absolutely, I agree. They should get clothes and housing and medical care and education and all the support we can throw at them.
But the word used was “immigrants” not refugees, hence the citation required. 
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So…refugees then.
My error.
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