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Just whom does Horwath think her party's supposed to appeal to now that she's gone and deliberately pissed off the unions in a bid for power? Let's start a petition to force the NDP to rename itself to the New Liberal Party it so desperately wants to be.
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May 3, 2014 18:37
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What you're supposed to read between the lines: "Yep, OMF funding is getting cut. I mean hahaha funding culture and the arts and poo poo, are you serious? Of course public resources are meant for the rich, not hippies; am I speaking Persian here?" Yeah, this is shaping up to be an easy win for the Liberals, as far as I can see. Hudak can't open his mouth without threatening someone's livelihood, and Horwath won't survive voting down the admittedly-good proposed budget.
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May 5, 2014 22:30
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At this point I'm honestly really annoyed by the skills training canard being used to distract from efforts to make essential but low-pay jobs earn a liveable wage. You don't fix the issue of retail service and garbage pickup paying like poo poo by training workers for better jobs unless you'd like to take your trash out to the dump site yourself every week. There will always be people working these jobs, and they will be paid like poo poo until we do something about it.
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May 7, 2014 19:43
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They made straight up minimum wage in the small town I grew up in -- good on Toronto garbagemen that they can bring the city to its knees when their livelihoods are threatened, but it's not like this everywhere.
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May 7, 2014 19:56
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Ikantski posted:Retail service isn't essential and being the person who helps kids find the tightest Chinese tight jeans doesn't benefit society at all. I'm okay with retail jobs paying $25k a year, that sounds about right. I feel bad for the kids graduating university who can't find better work but I don't think raising the minimum wage to $15 so they get paid $30k instead of $25k solves that problem. Why is it that a calculus of social benefit as a means of determining wage is only ever applied to poor people working lovely minimum wage jobs, and never to corporate lawyers, lobbyists, marketers and wealthy capital owners? More importantly, why should we rely on your gut feeling to determine who does and doesn't get to live a worthwhile life? I guess the important part, however, is that your calculus is utterly wrong and if "people who help kids find the tightest Chinese jeans" collectively walked out of their jobs tomorrow, the country would be rocked by a recession the likes of which you've never seen. Everyone has an important part to play in the economy, and that includes welfare recipients whose checks go directly into the pockets of local business owners.
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May 7, 2014 21:06
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In case you're still unsure about which small-business friendly, budget-balancing, job-creating strong leader you'd like to put in office, CBC just launched its Ontario elections vote compass
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May 8, 2014 02:45
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Tochiazuma posted:Listen, it's clearly all the fault of the CUPE employees who shut it all down. Or so says the Ontario PC party twitter account Ironically, they did fix transit for commuters by removing that one clown who was being a nuisance trying to do a no-permit photo op. How the gently caress can the PCs be polling ahead of everyone else
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May 12, 2014 00:50
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It's almost like a sensible individual would have considered it good practice to alert the TTC that they were planning to hold a somewhat cumbersome activity on a subway train that needs to be on goddamn time, and would've learned right at that time that a permit is required to do that. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of people who've never taken public transit in their life find it outrageous that a politician can't just walk into a subway station unannounced and gum up the whole works.
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May 12, 2014 02:09
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It's hard to deal with hypotheticals, but during the recession, the American GOP has made some serious attacks on EI -- trying to block extensions of it, casting it as a moral hazard that discourages people from looking for work, that kind of rhetoric. Since the OPC looks to have quite an affinity for the Republican mindset, it's not terribly hard to imagine them taking a similar stance and threatening to kick people off of EI using the deficit as a pretext (the real purpose being downward pressure on wages and working conditions). Still, as vyelkin explained, a lot of post-recession government spending can be attributed not to conscious decisions to spend more, but rather on automatic stabilizers like EI, welfare, deferred student loan repayments by people who lost their job -- all that kind of spending.
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May 14, 2014 07:56
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Ikantski posted:Yeah, our prices are insane. Luckily it's a little cheaper than average out in the country, about $35 a day. Even Hudak said it's too late to scrap all day kindergarten but at this point I don't even feel like he's worth defending, he gets crazier every day. Holy gently caress, what the hell is going on in all the other provinces? How can anyone find it reasonable to charge several thousand dollars per year for daycare? To think that we in Quebec were pissed about a proposed $1/day increase during the last election. You guys have to straighten this out.
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May 15, 2014 04:23
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geese posted:Personally, I would just love for us to become the government. If we have to go all-in on populism to gain another 15-20 seats to head up a minority government, then that's fine with me. Andrea Horwath has a degree in labour studies and she was a community development coordinator before getting into politics. She's as left-wing as anyone in the base, and we have a lot of great progressive candidates and I trust them to deliver. But we have to find a way to win, even if we have to find ways to get a few more yokels in Sarnia or wherever to vote for us. Ah, the maddening scent of power. Once you get close enough to it, words lose their meaning, principles lose their form, reason loses its strength, and the cause loses its purpose. Never trust a movement that becomes its own cause, and don't vote ONDP.
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May 15, 2014 06:38
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Well, except that there's no reason to believe that Horwath is indeed running a submarine operation. Also that NDP graph is amazing. I guess people are correctly realizing that they're better off voting for the faction of the Liberal Party that is more likely to win.
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May 17, 2014 08:16
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"Horwath wants an extra leaders' debate on jobs and the economy posted:"One of the things I'm concerned about is that we're not focusing enough on [the economy] in this campaign," Horwath said Monday during a campaign stop at a north Toronto bakery. Are you loving making GBS threads me.
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May 19, 2014 21:44
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 gently caress politics. What is it about it that turns otherwise sensible people into goddamn clowns? edit Kafka esq. please make this the OP picture for the OLP. Heavy neutrino fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 19:17
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Isn't a HST cut on hydro going to overwhelmingly end up in the pockets of power-hungry industry like aluminum production? edit: "Promised to raise hydro rates by 42%." Good lord is there a limit to how mendacious the ONDP is going to be?
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May 21, 2014 15:50
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CAPTAIN CAPSLOCK posted:
Well, it's a stupid data point to begin with since you'd assume that everyone who's not voting for the OLP thinks it's time to change the governing party (to the one they support). I mean it'd be pretty funny but you're never going to see a situation where 70% intend to vote against the ruling party, but only 20% think it's time to change.
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May 23, 2014 06:22
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I don't get that logic at all. Let's vote for the Tories because things are ok now so clearly we need a change of leadership and have someone gently caress everything up again.
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Horwath responded yesterday to the letter written by disgruntled NDP supporters. 1) You know it's going to be great when an article starts out with an implicit assumption that being more business-friendly means being more electable. 2) Try to find a single reference to the issues. The Canadian Press article paints the criticism as being about triggering an election, which is fair but plain journalistic malpractice if the issues at stake in the budget are missing, and about the act of buying an ad in the Sun, which is plain journalistic malpractice -- it's about what's written in the ad, not the ad itself (and the fact that it's pretty drat misleading with the near-invisible "paid advertisement" disclosure). 3) Horwath simply states that it's great that the party is so democratic as she handwaves away the will of prominent NDP members and supporters. Politics is just loving rich, isn't it?
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May 25, 2014 14:54
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Note the bright-eyed, naive use of the verb "to confuse" in the article vyelkin posted. I guarantee you that no one who drafted the Million Jobs Plan(tm) confused anything other than the people they're trying to swindle.
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May 28, 2014 17:06
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Think of all the money you could accrue until the next financial crisis wipes it all out!
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May 29, 2014 00:32
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Debate Disco > Ontario Election Thread: Dalton McGuinty vs. Mike Harris vs. Bob Rae.
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May 29, 2014 20:21
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Jimbozig posted:For instance, this idiotic article seems to indicate that First Nations are getting $9868 per person ($9056 federal and $812 provincial) while the average Canadian (incl. First Nations) got $16801 per person ($7316 federal and $9205 provincial). How you can look at those numbers and then write an article headlined "Taxpayers Have Been Overly Generous to First Nations" is baffling. It just goes to show that while people like to use numbers to prove their points, they often lack the numeracy needed to understand those numbers. quote:Provincially, data was more difficult to find but from the mid-1990s forward, here is what the numbers show: in 2012, the 10 provinces combined spent $812 per First Nations person, up 985 per cent from $75 per First Nations person in 1994. It's almost like he started with a lovely thesis and then decided to double down instead of quitting when the numbers clearly dismantled his point. Politics in a nutshell, basically.
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Jun 12, 2014 07:01
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Waking up and reading the Natpo headlines this morning was the most exquisite schadenfreude. Sorry to hear that you guys in Ontario got a tyranny, too, but the PCs' laments are just wonderful. "Tim Hudak resigns as voters give scandal-ridden Liberals a second chance" "How the Ontario Liberals pulled off a crushing majority win despite years of high-profile scandals" "Hudak unable to counter Wynne's tactics of fear and anger"
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Jun 13, 2014 12:40
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vyelkin posted:London Community News, "Small business group gearing up for a fight on Liberals’ proposed Ontario pension plan", http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/news-story/4578671-small-business-group-gearing-up-for-a-fight-on-liberals-proposed-ontario-pension-plan/ Actually, I kind of agree here; a payroll tax is an abominably lovely way to raise revenues for anything, and the OLP should've gone for taxes on wealth and profit instead. That said, although the tears are wonderful, the actually sinister part of the right-wing response is buried a bit deeper into this article: quote:Meanwhile, Ontario’s borrowing costs spiked the most in six months as investors wagered the province’s credit rating will be cut. In an actual democratically-minded society, this would be front-page news, and there would be utter outrage that the wealthy, the financiers and the capital owners are attempting to exercise a veto on even the most milquetoast left-wing initiatives. Unrestrained capital rights are just fundamentally incompatible with democratic governance, and although no one in the press will ever say it outright, they'll report case after case of capital attempting to veto government policy without any comment.
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Jun 14, 2014 09:28
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Guy DeBorgore posted:Charging us a higher rate to borrow their money is somehow "antidemocratic" now? The government isn't entitled to borrow money at whatever price it wants. This isn't even like the case of a factory shutting down and the jobs moving to China, where we can justifiably claim that the owners owe something to the local people for all the indirect subsidies they've received over the years. It's just a business transaction with international investors, and we're getting a slightly worse deal now. You might as well be morally outraged by the price of bread going up. You're obfuscating the issue by refusing to delve any deeper than the shallow observation of "charging us a higher rate to borrow their money." It begs the question: why are they doing so? The article answers the question -- it's pure speculation based on a belief that Standard & Poor's might downgrade the province's credit rating in response to the election of the OLP, which would be pure ideological blowback aiming to punish the province for voting in a platform that financiers don't like. S&P ratings aren't strictly based on economic reality, as you might remember from their attribution of triple-A ratings to CDOs that almost sank the world economy, so there really isn't much of a conclusion to make out of this other than the financial system is attempting to veto an electoral platform that it doesn't like. Yes, it's certainly anti-democratic for the extremely wealthy and powerful financial system to toss its weight around, with zero basis in sound economics, in order to suppress elements of an electoral platform that it doesn't like.
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Jun 14, 2014 15:20
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Guy DeBorgore posted:The beliefs of international investors are economic reality. Put that way it sounds pretty hosed up, but that's the way market capitalism works. If everyone believes bread should cost $2 then it does, if everyone believes prices will go up then they do, if everyone believes the government will go bankrupt then it will, if everyone believes the dollar is worthless then it is... the brutally unfair part is that everyone's opinion is weighted by how much money they wield. That's a pretty sweet strawman you made up there, and the solution actually isn't very complicated -- a good start would be to slow down the mobility of capital by imposing a small tax on all financial transactions; the belief being that putting a small price tag on speculation would bring it closer to economic reality. It's actually such an obvious move that even the loving Pope suggested it. That said, if you're going to continue this conversation, can you please cut out the super-obnoxious poo poo like "I'm quite sure it isn't a starry-eyed assertion of the right of a government to borrow money at whatever rate it wants just because it won an election"? You know as well as I do that I never said anything like it, holy gently caress.
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Jun 14, 2014 16:04
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As a quick comment on the current discussion about ratings agencies, it's honestly not clear to me how much of the financial system's political action is caused by clear-eyed short-term self-interest and how much of it is simply ideological self-capture. It doesn't take all that much exploration to figure out that Wall Street types more or less live inside their own supra-reality, disconnected from everything else.Dreylad posted:A pension plan isn't a payroll tax. "Payroll tax" and "Ponzi Scheme" are phrases used to demonize pension plans that are, essentially, forced savings. They're not used to raise revenue for the government; the money paid into ORPP cannot be touched by the government. It can only be invested and used to pay out money to pensioners. I'm remembering that the OLP plan was to be funded via a 1.9% payroll tax; am I mixing things up? That said, this isn't the argument that I'm trying to make; whether or not the government raises revenue off of it doesn't matter, the problem is the negative effect that a payroll tax has on economic activity. Since it's applied directly to total labor cost instead of profit (the employer pays 1.9% extra into the plan, whereas the employee has 1.9% held from their salary), it can actually in extreme cases turn businesses unviable. I don't particularly like making that argument, though, as a pension plan funded by a payroll tax is infinitely better than doing nothing. It's certainly worse than a pension plan funded by taxes on profit, wealth and high income, however.
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Jun 15, 2014 09:02
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Errr the NDP just engineered the most extreme prop-up of the Liberals that you can imagine. I swear politics turn normally smart and sensible people into utter loons.
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Jun 16, 2014 22:30
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The funny thing is that while marxist terminology is verboten in any sort of political speech, it's literally all over insider business literature. I'm serious; pick up your average financial/business publication, turn the page to an article that's obviously not meant to be read by the layman, and marvel at how much of the vocabulary is lifted from Das Kapital.
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Jun 17, 2014 15:52
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RBC posted:I don't agree. Poorer households spend a higher proportion of income on Hydro. It has a more significant impact for them. While you're right, that doesn't mean the move isn't regressive. Not unlike the Bush tax cuts, the NDP's proposed HST cut disproportionately goes towards the wealthy, and it would have taken about 30 extra minutes to design a plan wherein the bulk of the cut would be targeted at lower income people. The NDP decided they couldn't be assed to do it for one reason or another (I'm guessing a penchant for simplicity of message over good policy), and they got rightly slammed for it.
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Jun 17, 2014 21:00
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RBC posted:Right and you also pay the same proportion of taxes on your hydro as high income earners even though hydro is a necessary service. So what are you going to do? No; we're arguing that the HST on hydro should be made progressive, which is like arguing that a flat tax should be made progressive. Still, the argument you're making is dubious -- it's not immediately clear that low income earners would benefit more from the lower amount of HST that they're paying, themselves, than they benefit from the re-distribution of the amount of HST that the wealthy are paying.
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Jun 17, 2014 21:24
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Helsing posted:Publicly, Ms. Horwath has shown little contrition over the election, in which the NDP lost the balance of power in the legislature. Behind the scenes, however, everything is on the table at Ms. Horwath’s consultations, including party policy and how it campaigns. One source said the discussions are not focused on the November convention but more broadly on the party’s strategy for the new parliament. This part's pretty amusing -- what strategic parliamentary options does the oNDP have other than sucking it up and taking whatever the oLP gives? "Hmmm yeah we're really going to hold the majority oLP's feet to the fire here. We lost the balance of power, but buckle the gently caress up lads -- we got this." Hey oNDP if you're reading this I have free advice for you: maybe if you set Horwath on one of her boring, wishy-washy monologues about kitchen table issues she'll put enough Liberal MPPs to sleep that the balance of power will return to you. Hope this helps.
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Jul 7, 2014 08:21
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