Do it ironically posted:

sunshine is really lovely compared to louise or if you want to go a bit further kickinghorse, who even goes to sunshine ha

Helsing posted:

ZeeBoi posted:

Trudeau told Obama he's pulling out of bombing ISIS.

Helsing posted:

There's a lot of stuff to agree with in this analysis (though its hilarious that in 2005 you would write that the Liberals had overseen a "ballooning state"), though obviously I don't agree with any of their proposed solutions.

As an interesting footnote, here is one of that book's two authors (Tasha Kheiriddin) writing in 2014. Read that passage from her book and then marvel at this column:


the only justifiably government benefits are my benefits

THC posted:

On what fb page are you finding these treasures

quote:

I am 47. I have yet to live under a government I voted for. How the f*** is voting exactly benefiting me?
My wife and I will cease further voting until the return of qualified franchise. The more tax you pay, the more votes you get.

quote:

Indeed, those without assets, or minimal assets, will still be effed with Trudope as Dear LeaDUH. The solution for the pups that voted Trudopian? Just print Mo Money!
And, advice to all here in regards to that. Keep your cash to a minimum, learn from the Greece debacle, those with large cash only assets had it confiscated by a totalitarian LEFTIST government.
Assets are your house, your classic car, gold and silver coins. Property, and as another said, that other precious metal, Pb. DO what you have to do, but get out of cash.
C-51 now looks REALLY dangerous, with a confiscatory leftist government, that demands co-operation, as Dear LeaDUH hinted at last night.

Freeze posted:

Perhaps these will satisfy your desire:

The Iron Rose posted:

And Canadian free riding on American hegemony continues.

Dreylad posted:

trudeau has made a powerful enemy this day

The Duggler posted:

I like the cadence of conservatives, I really hear them perfectly in my head. It sounds like Glenn Beck

Tom Brodbeck posted:

The good news for Liberal leader Justin Trudeau is he's inheriting a healthy set of books from the outgoing Conservative government. The bad news for him is there's not enough money in the kitty to make good on the tens of billions in new spending he's pledged to Canadians.

Trudeau promised Canadians the moon and the stars during this election campaign, including $17 billion in additional infrastructure spending over four years, a $22-billion-a-year Canada Child Benefit plan, $400 million annually for home care and $325 million in extra funding for veterans.
He pledged more money for Syrian refugees, First Nations communities, guns and police task forces and a community heroes fund.

He has promised to increase the CBC budget by $150 million a year, double annual arts funding by $180 million and spend $400 million more on environmental strategies.

There's more money for employment insurance, Old Age Security and immigration.
The list of spending promises goes on and on. And while some of it may be desirable, how Trudeau expects to pay for it all remains a mystery.

Trudeau has already admitted that a Liberal government will go into deficit to finance some of it. However, he has pledged to return to balance within four years, which seems unrealistic given the magnitude of the spending increases he's proposing.
Some of it will be paid for by taxing people who earn over $200,000 a year. The Liberals are planning to bring in a new 33% tax bracket for earnings over that amount. But that's only worth about $2.8 billion a year.
Income-splitting for families will be eliminated, Trudeau has proposed, which will also save money. As will cancelling child benefit cheques to families, including those who fall into the "millionaires" club. But those measures will be offset to some degree by the Liberals' pledge to cut the middle-income tax rate to 20.5% from 22% and reduce the small business tax to 9% from 11%.

All told the Liberals are planning to spend an extra $35.2 billion a year beginning in 2016-17 which they say will be offset by $24.7 million in new revenues from tax increases and the cancellation of some programs.
Which leaves an annual deficit of around $10 billion. The Liberals have used revised GDP projections to argue the deficit they plan to create will become a surplus by 2019-20.

And that's where their blueprint becomes unrealistic. For starters, there's no contingency in their plan to maintain Canada Health Transfers to the provinces at current levels. Reducing tax-free savings account limits to $5,500 will likely see a shift from TFSAs to RRSPs, reducing any planned savings. And much of the tax savings they claim they can find, like cracking down on tax cheaters and identifying "tax expenditures," including unspecified tax credits for high-income earners, is murky accounting at best.

Either Trudeau will have to put some water in his wine and roll back some of these spending commitments, or he'll have to go deeper into deficit and/or raise taxes.

He can't have it both ways.

The sad part about all this is after six years of deficits -- most of them posted at the urging of opposition parties -- the books are finally balanced. And the first thing Trudeau wants to do is go back into deficit when there's no reason in the world to do so.

Judging by the fuzzy math in the Liberal campaign plan, they could go deeper into the glue than they're letting on. I'm not sure this was the "real change" Canadians were looking for.

I hope it wasn't.

Tighclops posted:

I hope Justin Trudeau diverts more money to Canadian tv productions so we can get more quality programming like TekWar

Ralp posted:

keep your pants on

Slim Jim Pickens posted:

Why do these idiots all write the same? Is there some disease that makes you write the word leaDUH and feel no remorse for the English language

rawrr posted:

"we believe that government should manage the people’s money the way that they manage their own."

Slightly Toasted posted:

Our strong conservative government totally posted deficits because the other guys told us to y'all

Mystic_Shadow posted:

A lot of conservatives from the US and Canada say they love their country and that you have to respect national institutions but then they turn around and worship Putin without the least bit of remorse.

quote:

I know what you’re feeling. It’s like a bad break-up, and it’s going to take a few days to pass. Food tastes staler, the world looks greyer, there’s a horrible twisting feeling in the pit of your stomach. Believe me, I’ve been there—I’m there with you right now. It’s you I want to write this for: the stalwarts, volunteers and activists of the conservative movement. Those who poured your blood, sweat and tears into the last 78 days.

As young conservatives, Stephen Harper is all we’ve ever known. He’s been the flag-bearer of our movement for nearly two decades. Losing not just an election, but ‘Harper’ is deeply saddening and it makes us feel lost and rudderless to be without the leadership we’ve come to depend on.

There’s a temptation to lash out and blame others: the electorate, Liberals, communists, aliens, whatever. And that’s fine, it allows us to cope. But consider this: the lasting legacy of Stephen Harper for us partisans isn’t anything he did in office, it’s what he’s left us with as we face the future.

We leave government with nearly 100 seats, a floor that we can build on top of to form government again. When previous conservatives left government, we were reduced to rump caucuses—falling so low as to 2 seats in 1993. Not this time.

We leave government with millions of dollars in the bank and the greatest IT, voter contact, fundraising regime ever assembled. An operational edge that well-oiled, permanent and effective.

We leave government with a reliable path to victory that melds western populism with Ontario tory values and hard-working new Canadians. A stable coalition that will lead us back to Ottawa once we’re ready.

The greatest gift Harper left us is that we will win again. A strong, stable, national majority Conservative government isn’t historical anomaly—it’s a promise for the future.

So leave the campaign prognosis to the pundits and former chiefs of the National Post editorial board—they’re wrong anyway. We accomplished so much in so many years—we owe our detractors nothing. So be excited, be determined, be satisfied, we have all the pieces in front of us to seize what comes after.

The beauty of the game we play is that there’s always the next fight, the next election, the next leadership. Today isn’t simply the day after—it’s the day before tomorrow. To us the torch is passed, so let’s face it together.

quote:

Dear Friends,

I won't write a full message now as I won't get it right so early after last night's electoral outcome. Perhaps I will write later with more structured thoughts. Or perhaps I will let these comments stand as a sincere reflection of my reflections the day after.

I want most of all to thank the residents of Toronto-Danforth for having provided me the privilege of being the MP for this truly amazing community, where caring for each other is both a general belief and a way of life. And I am so humbled by the support and hard work of hundreds of volunteers who so much believed in the (truly) real, positive change that Canada's first social democratic government could have ushered in. As I said in my speech last night for those of you who were there, you would never know it from how the media over these last 11 weeks alternated between leaders, (occasionally) candidates, voters, and pundits as the 'faces' of democratic participation, but in crucial respects you the volunteer -- whether within riding associations or generally as engaged citizens during elections -- are the lifeblood of our democracy. Thank you, all.

I also appreciate so much the outpouring of thank yous for my work as MP and the many expressions of dismay or even shock (not to mention anger at our broken electoral system) that have come my way. The best I have to offer right now besides the standard 'them's the lumps' is that we can at least celebrate that we are rid of a truly reprehensible regime (I do not say "government" because that sugar-coats what the Harper era had come to be all about). And we can take great pride in the role the NDP led by Tom Mulcair played in that result. The simple fact is that there is no way the Conservatives would not have won again -- probably with another majority -- if the NDP had not been the most effective, dedicated, and, yes, fierce Official Opposition in modern Canadian history for the last four years. Alongside myriad voices from civil society, I and my colleagues -- amazing MPs like Megan Leslie and Paul Dewar and Jack Harris and Jinny Sims and Matt Kellway who were treated like cannon fodder in the anti-Harper convulsion that was yesterday's election -- laid bare, day in and day out, what that Conservative government was all about. We fought them at every turn in battles such as against the Unfair Elections Act and Bill C-51, while -- and if this sounds bitter, I do not hide that it is -- Liberal MPs (not all but far too many) were fundamentally lazy, sitting passively in their corner of the House (assigning the same MP to do all almost all their speaking for the other 35 for four straight years) and arrogantly waiting for the messiah to take them back to the promised land of power (and they were proven 'right' in that calculation). To all my colleagues who like me were not returned last night, thank you for being part of such an amazing caucus for whom doing the right thing and doing one's job as part of an all-hands-on-deck team effort come naturally.

As we head into the 42nd Parliament, Canadians should, in keeping with the generosity of spirit that saw so many convince themselves to hope the Liberals can actually be a source of "real change", cross their fingers that our democracy has actually turned some sort of corner and that the same old Liberals in power will not be the same old Liberals in power. I am willing, grudgingly, to acknowledge that there is reason to be hopeful because the Liberal platform necessarily has elements that deserve to be seen as progressive or, at least, better than what would be on offer from the Conservatives. For all these elements, I sincerely hope the NDP in Parliament and citizens at large will do everything they can to make these platform pieces become reality rather than slip out of sight, through a mix of cooperation and vigorous prodding.

BUT, let me direct and blunt here: arising from the combination of odium for Stephen Harper and his gang and the distorted seat count in relation to the popular vote under our winner-take-all system, Canadians must also be aware of the result 'they' have produced. That is to say, 39.5% of us have handed a majority government (well over 50% of the seats) to a party that, alongside the Conservatives, brought us Bill C-51 and the Barbaric Cultural Practices Act (yes, the Liberals voted for BOTH), and a party that will try to bring us the transnational-corporate-rights charter known as the Trans Pacific Partnnership (TPP) with the support of their Conservative fellow travellers who are now the Official Opposition. The same two parties that agree that no greenhouse gas emissions targets (let alone mandatory ones under a pan-Canadian carbon pricing system) need to be set before Canada goes to the Paris Climate Change Conference in several weeks where the fate of a world on the ecological brink will be decided. The same two parties that are united in not wanting to see proportional representation as part of our electoral system. And to take a longer view of the de facto Liberal-Conservative Alliance, the same old parties that over the last decades collectively -- as if they were in a relay 'race' handing the baton back and forth to each other -- left a legacy of gutted transfers to the provinces for such crucial collective goods as affordable housing and gutted funding to Aboriginal communities for such basics as equal education for First Nations kids.

As I sit writing this at a picnic table overlooking Cherry Beach at the south end of this wonderful riding of Toronto-Danforth, serendipity has placed me right beside this image (below) of an empty watchtower looking out over the lake toward a blurred wall of Leslie Spit trees. With a decimated and reeling NDP with only 40+ seats in the House of Commons and with the Cons gazing across the aisle at the Libs as the Official Opposition, there is right now nobody in the watch tower of Canada's Parliament. The Family Compact is back. As such, it will be Canadians at large, engaged scholars, civil society organizations, and a media doing its job that will need to step up and help to fill this hole in democratic scrutiny. Positive change will be lost if you leave it to this House of Commons as generated by this election.

Be hopeful but also be vigilant, be engaged.

Bon courage.

Yours in solidarity and (obviously) frustrated frankness,

Craig

Jordan7hm posted:

I didn't see this on here though someone may have posted it. Someone posted it on facebook. The comments below the video are all pretty positive.

Apparently Trudeau went to a subway station to shake people's hands and thank them this morning.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2288380/trudeau-shakes-hands-with-montrealers-at-subway-station-hours-after-winning-election/

It's a small thing but pretty cool. Guy has exceptional ground game, even in victory.

Top City Homo posted:

guess there goes proportional representation to the backburner again

vyelkin posted:

Watch the Liberals set a precedent that every new government passes a law establishing whatever electoral system is most beneficial to them in particular, which gets used until they get defeated and whoever replaces them passes their own voting rules.

Adenoid Dan posted:

The world would be a better place if international disputes were actually resolved by single combat, as the Putin worshippers inexplicably think.

PK loving SUBBAN posted:

According to twitter, JT said last night's election will be Canada's last first past the post. I'll take him at his word, but brace for future disappointment.

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/656580542247366656

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

Saw some more calls on facebook for Alberta's separation. I miss those.

PittTheElder posted:

NP: Canadians fed up with divisive niqab debate turn out to vote in masks and — in one case — a pumpkin.



So which one of you was this?

Furnaceface posted:

This is a riding that is normally considered a safe one that needs minimal catering to. Sure Barrie south went deep blue but whatever Barrie south sucks.