The country under The Harpers party was going off the rails. We held an election to deal with it.
Now you can rail over the country going off the rails as much as you want, but when you base your attack on the difference between one and two handed handshakes, you’re not going to be taken seriously.
Two-handed handshakes? Really?
Want to make substantive change? Stick to substantive issues.
You know, Canada has a number of Speakers’ Corners. Go to the one closest to you, and start railing against the Liberals because of the Prime Minister sometimes using a two-handed handshake. Who knows, you might just gain a following, although I expect that the squirrels have pretty much stored their nuts away for the winter already.
And I believe that so far we have rolled back his promise to distribute 5 divisions of Syrians , changed the policy from everyone and anyone to families with children. I don’t believe that anyone seriously expected him to magically transport them here by years end, so I wont hold that against him.
The decision to end strike missions in Syria has also been revisited and the gov will make a decision on that most likely after he recalls parliament in December. That and revisiting the cancelation of the F-35, of which I was personally agnostic on.
His promise to legalize weed, has been back burnered to next summer at the earliest, and lo and behold the provinces have a problem with that, just like I called a couple of weeks ago.
Let’s by all means examine this scathing criticism of Trudeau’s first 24 days.
The Syrian refugee policy that I had some reservations about, particularly with respect to the accelerated timeframe, has now had its timeframe extended and vetting policy clarified because “it’s more important to do it right” – and you say you won’t hold that against him. Neither will I. I applaud it.
I think your perception that “the decision to end strike missions in Syria has also been revisited” is just a strange way of saying that your pals the Conservatives are still whining about it. As recently as just one hour ago, the Globe and Mail reported that Francois Hollande had met with Trudeau and was OK with the decision to end the air strikes while refocusing on training fighters on the ground, as Trudeau had said all along.
The idea that Trudeau might revive Harper’s disastrous F-35 fiasco seems, just like the claim that he’s revisiting the air strikes in Syria, to be a product of your fevered imagination. Plus you said you don’t care anyway.
He promised to legalize weed, and now a schedule for doing so is emerging.
Seems to me that Trudeau is doing exactly what the people voted for.
You realize that at this point you’re just making yourself look like the worst kind of sour-grapes partisan, utterly blind to facts and reality?
Call that one a half victory, the total amount won’t equal the initial euphoric statement and they are gonna be families instead of single males
Unless he actually redeploys the F 18’s back to Canada, the mission runs till March. After Paris, if he was not revisiting the idea, he has no business being PM, so yeah if he wants to pull out early, thats his call.
Nope, was in the papers. Unless JT can find a legal way to exclude lockmart from the fly off to determine the next fighter, its still in the running. All JT gets for revisiting it, is recovering 150 mil spent on R&D, not causing problems for 16 companies that are sub contractors for lockmart, and thats it
You realize that hell freezing over is a scheduled event right, sorry but his own lieutenant ( his version of McGary) was the one that said Summer of next year, and the provinces are having issues with this as reported.
I’d be more believing if the provinces were to come out with plans for sale and distro, when ever parliament signs off on what ever JT is going to do
Trudeau held the first First Minister’s conference in 6 years, within 3 weeks of his swearing in; Harper held 2 over the 10 years he was PM. (Mulroney held 13, Chretien held 7)
Welcome back to the Canadian way of cooperation and communication between Federal and Provincial governments.
Trudeau ordered the return of the long-form census. Even the Harper Minister who ordered the original cancellation could not find fault with this; apparently he did not agree with Harper’s decision to can it in the first place.
Trudeau ordered the re-opening of the coast guard base in Vancouver; Another Harper decision that nobody apparently agreed with.
And yet, even though it’s been ONLY THREE WEEKS and a few days, there are some that complain that he has not done enough yet. It’s actually hilarious to watch them spin and spew.
So it hasn’t dawned on you yet that your hatred for Trudeau is based on nothing, nada, zilch, zero?
[ETA: Obviously, a question for Declan!]
Well first of all, according to you, Trudeau has no business being PM – ever – just because you say so, and because he’s not Harper. So we’ll put that nonsense aside and focus on the fact that the definition of “ending strike missions” is that they will no longer go out and strike targets by dropping bombs on them. Fairly straightforward English language. What the Globe reported just a few hours ago about the conversation Trudeau had with Francois Hollande was equally straightforward.
Where those particular F-18s happen to be at any time, for whatever purpose, such as flying support missions like they did throughout all of the first Gulf war, isn’t material to the policy question. As far as the Paris events are concerned, the right policy decision is to do what is most effective within our means and resources. It’s called being rational.
Since you don’t have a cite I have no idea what was supposedly in the papers. I do know that I couldn’t find any reference to that allegation in reputable media. And I have no idea what the subsequent two sentences are supposed to mean or who “lockmart” is. It all tends to support the “it’s from your fevered imagination” theory.
I don’t think you understand what “legalizing” means. The objective isn’t to get marijuana out on the streets so everybody can get stoned ASAP. Legalizing means repealing the existing federal laws, which only the federal government can do. What the provinces do in terms of control and distribution, if any, is entirely within their purview. If they don’t agree with the federal principles I would direct them to the revised policies of respected institutions like the Ontario Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, but no matter – it’s the provinces’ call. They’re perfectly entitled to control distribution however they see fit. In addition, though, one thing that Trudeau is doing that Harper utterly failed to do is create a collaborative and congenial rapport with the provincial premiers, so it’s especially funny that you use this issue to slam Trudeau since this is far more likely to be a collaborative initiative than anything Harper ever did.
France has long had a close and special relationship with Quebec. In case you didn’t notice, the Premier of Quebec was in attendance at the Paris memorial along with Trudeau and Hollande, and so was the mayor of Montreal. My guess is that it was an acknowledgment of that special relationship, nothing more.
I believe Harper’s biggest accomplishment in his first month was to remove every picture of previous prime ministers from the government lobby in the house of commons and replace them with his own.
Well the provinces aren’t going to have a plan in place already. Do you have a cite for the next Summer thing and provinces having a problem with that? Can’t seem to find anything on it myself.
If marijuana is made legal at the federal level, will provinces still have the option to make it illegal at the provincial level? (I assume that territories will have no choice.)
No they couldn’t make it illegal but there’s varying levels of regulation they might put on it. The article Spoons linked last page describes the ins & outs of the situation.
I’m agnostic on the sale and distro, its not like you just can’t go out now and get a bag, so I don’t really care if its legalized or left alone. If anything, the provinces really have no excuse’s, regardless of who the PM is or party in power, this was coming down the pike and they should have had some sort of idea of what they are in for.
Obviously mandatory drug testing would get complicated. I would imagine that CN and CP would still require it, for the locomotive drivers and anyone else must submit for same reasons like bus and subway drivers. Olympic and National sports testing, another can of worms.
You said it was reported that the provinces had problems, that article doesn’t mention that. That article also said Summer 2016 is “fast work”, iow the earliest we could expect it.
A couple of US states did it within a year, since we have their experiences (as well as others) to draw on I really don’t get why you’d think this was some Agean stables type task. It’s not flicking a switch but few things are in law making.
It can hardly be called a “Fiasco” when no planes were bought. There wasn’t even a contract. Also, the process was initiated by the Chretien administration, which I realize most people don’t know but, jeez, man, this stuff’s on the Internet.
The Trudeau administration is saying now they’ll hold a competition for a new fighter aircraft. Frankly, that logically should include consideration of the F-35. If it’s the best plane for the job it is, and if not, it’s not. I have no doubt whatsoever they’ll include it in the consideration; I also doubt it’ll be picked as it’s probably not going to be affordable and the project has gone off the rails (to be honest, had the Harper government been re-elected, I don’t think THEY would have ended up buying them either.) But it’d be stupid to exclude it from the conversation just because people incorrectly think Stephen Harper bought a bunch of them and paid too much.
Come on, Rick, I think most people are well aware that the initial evaluation process for the F-35 started almost two decades ago. There’s nothing wrong with starting to look at replacement aircraft when your military tells you they will be needed. But it was only with Harper that things started to go downhill in a very bad way – to wit:
[ul]
[li]A mere 10 months after Harper ascended to power, the government suddenly signed a Memorandum of Understanding for “Production, Sustainment and Follow-on Development” committing Canada to half a billion dollars of expenditure on the F-35 program[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]In 2010, after hyping the program for years, and despite the lack of competitive bidding and escalating costs, Harper announced the government’s intention to buy 65 of them[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]A few months later, after intense criticism from many independent sources, the Auditor General “identified ‘troubling’ systemic problems, rigged competitions and cost overruns in defence procurement programs and indicated that the F-35 purchase could cost far more than the budgeted numbers indicate.”[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Then on March 10, 2011 the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page presented a cost analysis of the F-35 program and concluding a total cost C$29.3B over 30 years, not the C$16B to C$18B claimed by the government, and a resulting per aircraft cost of C$450M each.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]On 3 April 2012 the Auditor General of Canada again heavily criticized the government’s F-35 procurement in his spring report. The report stated that the government did not run a fair competition, that costs were seriously understated and that decisions were made without required approvals or documentation.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]In September 2015 Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia wrote an analysis of the F-35 procurement that concluded “the fact is, Harper took a reckless approach to replacing the CF-18s. He could have held a fair competition at the outset, and bought a proven model of fighter jet on-time and on-budget. Instead, he reached for the latest and most expensive technology, took on a significant cost risk, and got burned.”[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Wikipedia sums it up thusly:[/li]In April 2012, with the release of a highly critical Auditor General of Canada report on the failures of the government’s F-35 program, the procurement was labelled a national “scandal” and “fiasco” by the media. In a December 2014 analysis of the government’s handling of the procurement Ottawa Citizen writer Michael Den Tandt cited the Harper government’s “ineptitude, piled upon ineptitude, and bureaucracy, and inertia, driving a lack of progress”.
[/ul]
All of the above cited from Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Canadian procurement - Wikipedia
