Essentially it is undemocratic. I thought the same when Belinda did the same.
The people voted for their representative sold to them as a member of a certain party. As much as we want to pretend we vote for individuals we tend to vote more for (or rather against) parties.
When A member of parliment crosses the floor they basically act in their own personal interest and not that of the people who elected them. In the case of Harper’s new flunky The conservative were the third place party of that riding. 2/3 of the people voted against the party yet those 2/3 are ignored because the PM wants to have a cabinet position. That is wrong and undemocratic!
It becomes more galling when he begins to start bitching about his new party because he couldn’t work in the same atmosphere as before.
I believe there should be legislation requiring any member of parliment who wishes to cross the floor to run in a bi election and let the voters decide.
And the uproar from the conservatives was immense when that happened. There were promises that things like this wouldn’t occur in this new government and it turns out to be one of the first things that happened.
But I tore up my membership in the conservatives when they brought up the SSM issue at the beginning of the campaign and voted with a clothespin on my nose because I finally realized that there is no essential difference between these two parties and change is a good thing.
Not that I’m going to disagree, but if so then I certainly should be able to take that one step further and ask, “Is it also a coincidence that Alberta’s economy is leading the country by a wide margin because of it”?
I’m from Alberta, and I’m anything but hard right.
And I’d say that Alberta’s economy is booming because we won the geological crapshoot in the petroleum area. Yes, the provincial conservatives have gotten rid of the debt, partly by slashing program funding but mostly due to making money hand over fist from oil.
Alberta’s far and away the most conservative province in the country.
I don’t have a problem with floor-crossing per se. If issues develop between a party and an MP, so that the MP can no longer in good conscience support the party, then I feel crossing the floor is entirely legit. Take Brison for example (not exactly a floor-crossing). He was elected as a Progressive Conservative, and when it became clear that the Alliance/PC merger was going to take a social conservative stance, including opposition to same-sex marriage, he joined the Liberals. If we imagine instead that the PC party hadn’t dissolved, but had changed its stance on the issue of same-sex marriage, I think that Brison would have been entirely correct to cross the floor in that scenario as well.
Belinda’s case I’m a bit torn on. On the one hand, Harper (and the party as a whole) had been pretty damn hostile to the more moderate stance that Belinda was trying to push, and hadn’t been exactly friendly to her in particular. On the other hand, the whole thing stinks of opportunism on her part - the timing, the immediate cabinet post. So, I figure it’s up to her own constituents to pass judgement, and they re-elected her as a Liberal, so that’s all water under the bridge so far as I’m concerned.
Emerson is a completely different case. Crossing within days of being elected? After being elected by campaigning by vigorously denouncing the Tories, loudly proclaiming how opposed he was to their agenda and how he would fight against it? That is just pure and utter bullshit. If Emerson could make any case whatsoever that the Liberals weren’t the same party he thought he’d been running for during the election, as was arguably the case for Belinda, then I’d be willing to look a tad askance at him, but hold my peace till his constituents get to pass judgement. But he can’t. There is no such possible case. Harper should have told him to go pound sand, leave the Liberals if he wanted, but no way he could join the Tories at that point. And now, Emerson should just resign his seat and try to hold it in a byelection.
Most funding has been restored to far larger levels than it has been in the past and is more than, if not leading the way, in what other provinces spend currently.
Yes, Alberta has lots of oil. So does BC and Saskatchewan and yet Alberta is doing better than both. From experience I know it is a lot harder doing business in both those places than in Alberta.
Alberta’s certainly not doing well only because of oil - other sectors are booming as well, mostly because the very low tax rates make doing business there attractive. And why can Alberta afford low tax rates? Energy royalties, that’s why. Plus the huge capital investments being made in the tar sands are fueling massive spending on housing/services etc up in Ft Mac and the like, all of which generates lots of taxable incomes, etc. It’s a nice position to be in.
You can point to the energy resources of BC and Saskatchewan if you like, but they just aren’t on the same scale. In 04/05, Alberta collected $10 billion in energy royalties. Saskatchewan collected $1.4 billion (according to their respective govt websites). Alberta’s oil revenues alone are substantially larger than the entire provincial budget in Saskatchewan - as in, with Alberta’s oil revenue, we could have no provincial tax whatsoever, of any kind, and increase spending by about 40% to boot. Of course, if we had Alberta’s oil revenue, we’d have all kinds of extra expenses providing services to a larger population, etc, but I trust my point is made. We have nowhere near as much oil as Alberta, and much of what we do have is less valuable heavy and/or sour crude, as opposed to the light sweet stuff.
Nevertheless, Saskatchewan has been running with a balanced budget for many years now and has a healthier economy than most provinces, and all that with the NDP in power for the last decade. All the Tories ever did here was run up a huge deficit, so you’ll excuse me for not thinking that Tory policies are the way to prosperity.
Yeah, that’s my cite. Like I already stated, the media is reluctant to come out and publish what everyone already knows. Once again I state that the political correctness of the media is sheltering the truth, therefore there ain’t a lot of cites to be found.
Alberta’s economy has been outperforming Canada’s for a long time - much longer than the current run-up in energy prices. In fact, until very recently, Alberta made less money, after equalization, from oil than Quebec made from equalization payments. And per-capita, several other provinces got more money in equalization payments than Alberta got from oil after you factor out what we paid to the rest of Canada in equalization transfers (about $3500 per capita).
And there are plenty of other provinces and states that have had huge windfall profits and squandered it. California is an economic mess despite making huge money during the dot-com boom. Rather than cut taxes and pay down debt, California chose to go on an insane spending spree. Alberta didn’t.
It’s not just luck that Alberta is where it is. In the 1990’s we made some very hard choices and cut spending dramatically at a time when we didn’t have that much oil revenue. As a result, we balanced the budget, paid off the debt, and today we can spend more money because we’re not spending 21% of the provincial budget on debt servicing costs.
Simply that Jamaican gangs are responsible for a lot of gun-related crime in Toronto, and Asian gangs are responsible for a lot of the crime in Vancouver.
Not all crime, but a LOT of it. This isn’t a racist comment; it’s fact.
I’m not saying all Jamaicans are gun-carrying murderers, or that all Asians are involved in gangs. I’m not saying any of that. Are you people naive enough to believe that the increase in violent crime is not linked to lax immigration policies? Come on.
Here we go again, assuming facts not in evidence. WHAT increase in violent crime? Did you miss the quote I posted from Statscan above? The part that said
?
(Re: your cite - it seems I need to point out the obvious, that gun violence going up != rate of violent crime going up, especially when Statistics Canada says that the rate of total violent crime is declining.)
Can you do us the honor of addressing this before you assert your falsehood again? Do you have any evidence that there has in fact been an increase in violent crime?
Sorry for the hijack, folks, but I think this is important. It is precisly this sort of rhetorical sleight-of-hand that (in my opinion) allows people like Harper to obtain and keep power. They tell us what to fear and hope that we fear it, unquestioningly.
Would that be like the Liberals telling us to fear the Conservatives because they are meanies with no proof, either?
Are cats now living with dogs now that the Conservatives somewhat in power? Is the sky falling? Has Canada given up its sovereignty to the Americans? No, the same old shit is going on that was happening when the Liberals were in power, but at least we start with a clean slate and it will take time for the Conservatives to get as completely corrupt as the Liberals. Right now they are in the buffoon stage.
It’s not just about government revenues, though. Oil companies have been heavily investing in Alberta for a long, long time, and all those investment dollars get spent over and over again as they percolate around. If some of the govt revenues are siphoned off for a different province, well, that helps the other province’s govt budget, but it doesn’t do much for the other province’s economy. Look, I’m not disagreeing that King Ralph has done a fair bit to facilitate the current boom, and rather a lot to capitalize on it, but to pretend that oil isn’t a huge piece of the puzzle is just silly.
Anyways, none of this has anything to do with Harper’s childish tantrum with the media. He seems to genuinely believe that the press corps should behave the way he wants them to. When has the press corps ever behaved the way the PM wanted? For the Liberals? That wall-to-wall coverage of the Sponsorship Scandal was Martin’s idea? The obsession with a hotel and golf course in Shawinigan was all at Chretien’s prompting? Harper is becoming more of a cipher for me as his term progresses, rather than less. Some decent ideas put forward in legislation, nothing particularly objectionable, but whenever there’s the least little bump in the road he throws a hissy fit. WTF is up with that? He’s an intelligent guy, how can he not understand that getting things done in a minority setting will take patience to deal with the little speedbumps the other parties will throw up whenever they sense it’s politically advantageous to do so? How can he not see that his anti-conservative biased journalist friends are just a bunch of people pretty much representative of mainstream Canadian views, sniping at him trying to catch him out, try to get that quoteworthy quote, just like they’ve done since time immemorial on Parliament Hill? I don’t understand the man, not one little bit.
I think it is a character flaw in the man. I think he is incapable of handeling dissent in whatever form it comes. The Whole Stronnach affair was about just that. He went ballistic on her becuase he feared she was going against him.
I think he takes these things as personal assaults on him.
Mind you there is a little something to the press bias against him (“Mr Harper do you love Canada?”) but nothing really serious. And his current actions are not endearing him to the press any further.
As stated the press do this to the Governement in power… that is their job.
He’s just gotta suck it up.
Damn I miss Trudeau, Mulroney and Chretien’s ability to take on the press face to face. They may have been asses at the time but you had to admire their balls.
This makes Harper look like the dork in the park threatening to take away his ball and go home unless everyone plays by his rules.
