I just came back from voting, woot ! I was suprised to see the advanced polling station that busy.
Having advanced polling on a holiday surely drives up the use of the service. I know a number of people who voted because, as they put it “well, we had the time.”
We voted yesterday also. Including us, there were a whopping four people at the voting station (the other two arrived after us). Then again, since this riding is a foregone conclusion in favour of the Conservatives, I guess there isn’t much motivation for racing in to ensure your voice is heard…
The interesting thing is that there are at least 20 ridings where there are 5 percentage points or less between the front runner and the second place candidate. That kind of closeness makes it very difficult to predict the specific outcome.
20 close ridings out of 308 isn’t that much.
Making general predictions isn’t THAT hard; on the extreme end, I think we all agree the Green Party is not going to win. There’s a general band of likely outcomes.
Coincidentally, today threehundredeight ran “ceiling projections,” e.g. the likely outcome if things go as well as they possibly can based on the very best polls each party has seen. The ceilings:
Best Conservative Outcome: CPC 170, Liberal 61, NDP 43, Bloc 33
Best Liberal Outcome: CPC 138, Liberal 91, Bloc 43, NDP 35
Best NDP Outcome: CPC 145, NDP 83, Liberal 50, Bloc 30
The Liberals, barring a truly amazing news event or three, aren’t going to win. This “they don’t poll cell phones” stuff I’ve been hearing for ten years and it’s never turned up an amazing result before and nobody’s provided a very good reason why it would.
If the polls are going to move in any direction from now on in I’m betting it will be to the further advantage of the NDP, with some advantage to the Tories, and the Liberals bottoming out (which for them would be 20-22 percent.)
Well, other than he didn’t seem to like Canada enough to live here for a quarter century. Now he wants to come here and and experiment on us.
You know the history of the Liberal party and they aren’t anymore trustworthy than any other party. Once in power long enough, they all become corrupt. What matters is in spite of this, who will run the country better long term. It is unlikely that the matters you hear about in the news are not the first or the only matter that would get you shorts in a knot. It is like the thief saying to the judge, “This is the first time I’ve ever stolen anything, your Honor”. Ingatiff and a Liberal government won’t be any different in this regard.
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From a standpoint of policy, I agree with much of the Liberal platform, and I don’t agree with, well, any of the Conservative platform. That’s the way I see it.
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So, can we agree then that ‘trust’ isn’t really an issue with you as you’d vote for the Liberals regardless even if they were the current ones with egg on their faces?
And when the rubber meets the road, the way any government runs the country is pretty close to the way any of them do regardless of their platform. Or, when you say platform, do your really mean wildass speculations based upon your perceived attitude towards anyone of a ‘conservative’ nature?
I’ve never voted NDP in my life but now I’m getting all excited about Jack Layton It also helps that I’m now drawing Canada Pension.
Never thought I’d see the day that I would vote NDP. Trudeau turned me into a Liberal and now Layton has turned me into a socialist !
The times they are a changing.
I take it you would turn down a teaching post at Harvard, and that you think it isn’t much of an accomplishment.
The Liberals have had one major scandal - the Sponsorship scandal. How many Conservative party scandals do we know about, and how many will it take for you not to trust them? More importantly, why do you feel the need to ‘punish’ the Liberals further and not feel the need to ‘punish’ the Conservatives?
No, I do not agree that ‘trust’ isn’t really an issue with me. Trust is a huge issue with me, and it is a large factor in my not voting for the Conservatives, and my not wanting anyone else to vote for them, either.
Then, on top of that, I do not agree with the idea that we need to spend billions of dollars on prisons, nor corporate tax cuts. We need to replace our fighter jets, but I don’t have enough information on the jets the Conservatives want to purchase. More importantly, neither does my MP! I don’t agree with canceling the compulsory long form census, I don’t agree with scrapping the gun registry, I don’t even agree with the child tax credits for enrolling children in sports and arts - if it’s that important (and I think it is!), give the money for school programs so that every kid can benefit instead of just the kids whose parents are rich enough to pay. And the amount of money is ridiculously small in comparison to the expense.
I really don’t know what you mean. Is this a reference to my distrust of Conservative candidates who are on record as being opposed to abortion, gay marriage or in favour of two-tiered medicare? In which case, I don’t think it’s wild assed speculation to quote their own words against them.
At any rate, no, I know enough of the Conservative platform as they themselves have presented it to know I do not agree with it. And I know enough of the Liberal platform to know that they are speaking about values that I hold dear - universal day care, the passport to learning, support for the arts, support for home care, corporations paying their fair share. Invest in society and business will benefit. Cutting social programs to give tax breaks to corporations, however, does not benefit society.
You, of course, are free to disagree with any of this and to argue against it - that’s why we have a plurality of viewpoints, and why we have this thread.
Ditto! I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the CPC will never touch the social issues which interest me out of fear of a populist revolt, so I may as well vote for the NDP, whose economic platform is really intriguing and exciting,
What punishment? It is usually the back benchers who end up getting the boot.
We don’t need prisons? But I agree. We have lots of unpopulated islands up north. A few penal colonies would cut the prison budget immensely.
Jets aren’t TV’s. There are only a few companies who make them. Pick up a Jane’s manual and you’ll know all you need to know about them.
Sure, make it illegal for someone to not give information to the government (that is readily available from other sources) if I don’t want to.
Obviously, you know nothing about it, or could care less that money is wasted unnecessarily for no other reason than to placate a bunch of fearful city folk.
I agree. If you want to send your kids to sports and arts then pay for it yourself. Why should I pay tax money to get YOUR kids off the couch. Have them deliver flyers. Good exercise and it teaches the the value of a dollar. We’d probably end up with less people voting NDP.
Sounds great. Who will pay for it? Taxing corporations to pay for social programs doesn’t benefit anyone as they will move elsewhere and there will just be unemployed people wanting more welfare. I guess you could give them jobs in the government, but you’d end up like Greece.
Leaving aside the fact that
- This is obviously a false dilemma, and
- A lot of progressive economists think we should be *eliminating corporate taxes entirely *and completely rethink how we raise tax money,
What social programs have the Conservatives cut?
Program spending under the Conservatives absolutely has not gone down. It has gone up. There have been no substantive cuts to program spending at the federal level in quite a long time.
The only government on my lifetime that has cut social programs, IIRC, was the Liberal government of Jean Chretien.
Now, raising another point,
- We have to cut something.
None of the major parties have addressed the serious spending problem we have; the federal government is absolutely bleeding money and you can’t just jack up corporate tax rates and expect the money to pour in, because taxation just doesn’t work that way and never has. Federal spending has ballooned during the recession for the sake of stimulus and not one federal party has a plan for cutting back to pre-recession levels. The Conservatives have not committed to any spending cuts of any social program of any significance; I challenge you to name one. They’re committed to the health transfer escalator, which is the single biggest social program the feds have. They have no plans to cut OAS, they’re raising the GIS, and have no plan to reduce CPP benefits.
But the fact is we need to find some money. Health care spending is going to bankrupt the country; it’s already killing the provinces and any serious projection says it’s a catastrophic problem waiting to happen.
I agree the prison plan is… well, it’s puzzling. You could argue that F-35 should be replaced by a cheaper alternative, though I don’t trust the Liberals to do that - I fully expect them to fuck it up the way the did the EH-101 project - and the NDP refuses to promise to cancel F-35, which means we’ll end up with them.
But even if you stopped the stupid prison plan and scrapped F-35 entirely, you wouldn’t even be CLOSE to solving our health care cost problem. You’re not even in the ballpark. The entire F-35 project would not pay the health care costs just for the province of Ontario for half a year… and that cost is expected to double in 15 years.
What’s the plan for paying for this? How’re we going to slash spending now to make room for it? I’ll tell you one thing; I don’t see it in any of the parties’ platforms. Unless you want to end up like the USA, which now has a structural back-breaking deficit with no solution, this is the ONLY question you should be asking the candidates.
On August 31, 2010 the RCMP released its evaluation of the Canadian Firearms Program. The report is dated February 2010 and confirms what registry supporters have been advocating; the vast majority of firearm related deaths in Canada are the result of rifles and shotguns. The report clarifies that the registry is effective, efficient, cost-efficient and most importantly, it saves lives. To read the full report, follow this PDF link.
In fact, the Coalition for Gun Control has a handy list of resources, featuring links to statements and presentations supporting the continuation of the gun registry. These include police associations, public health experts and women’s safety experts. One of my personal favourites is Sheila Fraser, in her capacity as Auditor General of Canada. She is, you will recall, the person who criticized the cost overruns of the gun registry in 1996 and 2002. If I may quote from her statement (PDF link) regarding her last audit of the gun registry in 2006 -
In other words, the cost overruns are a thing of the past. According to the YWCA,
If it is scrapped and the information destroyed, that would, indeed make it a total waste of our time and money. It would render women less safe from domestic violence, and it would leave police officers less safe. Remember Mayerthorpe, Alberta?
So in response to your off the cuff remark, whether it is obvious to you or not, I do know quite a bit about it, and I do care that opponents mistakenly parrot the erroneous viewpoint that it is money is wasted unnecessarily for no other reason than to placate a bunch of fearful city folk.
I haven’t time this evening to go into any of your other interesting points, though I do thank you for engaging with me on these issues. I would just like to quickly comment that it is strange that you hold to the out of date idea that the gun registry is a waste of money when it is supported by so many members of the police forces in Canada, while you don’t seem to feel that new prisons for the perpetrators of unreported crimes is a waste of money, even though the crime statistics are down…
Yeah, a guy who was prohibited from owning firearms killed 4 police officers. Yay, gun registry!
I don’t know how closely you read that report, but the vast majority of firearm-related deaths are suicides. You aren’t going to stop suicides with a long gun registry.
In fact, most HOMICIDES are committed with weapons that had already been restricted - handguns and restricted types of long guns. You will note the statistics on page 21.
I’m not necessarily saying the LGR should be scrapped but let’s ensure we have the facts straight.
Whoa.
WKOS today released a poll in which they claim the NDP is going to win FIFTY-THREE seats in Quebec, and 100 across the country.
Going riding by riding it is nearly impossible to figure out how the NDP could win that many seats in Quebec, and EKOS’s trend lines look like their latest data is probably really skewed, but there is no doubt the NDP is now in position to replace the Liberals as the Official Opposition.
A lot of pundits are wondering if the NDP can keep it up over the last week. I think it’s more a matter of whether or not the Liberals can shake off the stench of death. I think not.
Getting back to this, a few days later … seems to be true in spades. I’d never have dreamed that the result of this campaign would be a Liberal implosion. Never.
I still do not rightly understand it. While Iggy is an uncharismatic leader, the Lib campaign was, I thought, at least reasonably gaffe-free. Turns out that isn’t enough.
The NDP becomming the official opposition (which still seems to be unlikely, if less so every day) - that will change the political map, allright. If, as seems likely, there is a Con minority … what would the Libs have to gain from a coallition gov’t led by the NDP?
That’s an interesting question. EKOS’s wild 100-seat projection included the theorizing that such a result would almost necessitate an NDP-Liberal coalition, since they’d hold more than half the seats and the Conservatives would have done much worse than anticipated.
Leaving aside my absolute terror at the idea of Prime Minister Layton, since he’d spend us into bankruptcy and abslutely murder business… such a coalition strikes me as being potentially devastating to the Liberals.
As it is Michael Ignatieff and his team have driven the Liberal bus right into a wall. As bad as it is, as least they haven’t driven it off a cliff. The never-ending calls for the Liberals and NDP to combine their forces ignore the fact that they’re different parties for a reason. If the NDP had wanted to be Liberals, they never would have formed the NDP, they’d have joined the Liberals.
In a scenario where the NDP commands the confidence of Parliament with 100 seats and Liberal support, the Liberal party’s purpose for existence, at a federal level, becomes even more questionable. Their relevance is put to the test; what’s the point of having them if Parliament is, in effect, a bipolar battle between the Tories and the Dips?
Of course, there’s this “de-cleft the left” sentiment that the only reasonthe Tories are winning is that they “united the right.” But that just doesn’t square with the facts. For one thing the Tories, prior to 1993, always were united, and they usually didn’t win. If uniting the right means doom for the Liberals, then why were Liberals winning elections? How did Pierre Trudeau keep winning?
The creation of the new CPC is just a reset of what had existed prior to 1993 - indeed, I could argue it’s still less than it used to be because many Mulroney Tories are still with the traitor party.
More frighteningly for the Liberals, let’s be honest; the “union” that created the Conservative Party was nothing of the sort. It was the complete and total surrender of the Progressive Conservative party to the Alliance or the Reform Party or whatever the hell they were called at that point. The federal PC Party was a dead man walking and agreed to be absorbed by the Alliance so they could be part of a party that had a shot at winning again. And in their first shot… THEY LOST. They went out there in 2004 and lost, taking fewer than a third of Canada’s seats.
It’s simply not a guaranteed thing that a united right can always win elections in an electoral landscape that includes the Liberals and NDP, as evidenced by the fact that they have, in fact, lost many such elections.
The Liberals can win elections. They don’t need to let a resurgent NDP devour them. But they need to look in a mirror and have an honest talk about the shitty job they’ve done selling themselves to the Canadian people. In the last four elections they haven’t had any platform beyond “Vote for us because you owe us, you dumb assholes,” except for Stephane Dion’s Green Shift, which they dumped as fast as they could. (Like it or hate it, at least it was a platform.) The Liberals aren’t losing because the political dynamics have changed in some irreparable way; they’re losing because they deserve to lose, and they need to fix themselves. I hope they do, 'cause I’d like to vote for them again.
I think some of these more outlandish projections are a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the media - not out of any partisan bent, but out of a desire for something interesting to happen. I don’t want the NDP in a position of actual power either, but in a pure horse race sense, the surge of the NDP is an interesting development (cutting the Bloc in half isn’t a terrible thing either, even if it is the NDP that does it).
I’m reminded a bit of the last UK election when some polls had the LibDems in the lead near the end, only to have them actually lose seats from the last election. I don’t think that’ll happen here, as some of the gains appear to be real, but it’s not going to be as much as some are projecting.
Then again, a big part of the battle is getting people to think their votes will count, and that they’re supporting a viable candidate. In the recent Calgary mayoral election, Naheed Nenshi was a fringe candidate until a poll came out that had him in striking distance of the two front runners. Suddenly people realized that their vote might count and bothered to vote. Perception becomes reality.
Do you have any factual basis for this, or is it just generalized fear based on a “sense” of what the NDP is all about?
Which of the following NDP Platform planks do think would contribute to “murdering business”? Do you think the bolded one below is particularly left-leaning and scary?
Reducing the Small Business Tax Rate
Establishing a Job Creation Tax Credit
Extending Tax Credits for Job-Supporting Investment
Ensuring Foreign Investment Delivers Quality Canadian Jobs
Setting the Corporate Tax Rate at Below the USA’s
Investing in Critical Infrastructure
Well, you can cherry pick your platform items. The NDP platform proposes to raise spending to some $30 billion more than its recession stimulus level. So either they’re gonna have to jack taxes through the roof, or some future government will have to. Even the NDP is admitting they can’t find it; they’re already backing off the idea of a cap-and-trade system raising billions.
It’s partially that and partially a general sense, though. To use an example, their idea around capping credit card interest rates is so remarkably stupid, so unbelievably imbecilic, that I don’t know whether to be repelled by their stupidity or their dishonesty, because it’s hard fr me to believe that sane and educated adults could make such a ridiculous promise and mean for it to be taken seriously.
This is a meaningless promise; the USA has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, and “Corporate tax rate” is such a general term that if put in charge of tax law I could quite easily take actions that would both lower the corporate tax rate and raise it at the same time. The NDP could in fact jack the rates up and still keep this promise, since the bar they’re setting can be argued to be way, way higher than where our corporate tax rates are now.
National housing strategy? It’ll be a disaster, as in fact “housing strategies” almost always are.
More interference in foreign investment? Why, that’s worked so well in the past. And by “so well” I mean “not so well.”
Guaranteeing a DOUBLING of health transfers in 12 years? Well, in fairness, the Liberals promised that too. But while cutting off private options? Come on, it’s a free country.
I’m not even halfway through here. And yeah, I remember the NDP’s run at power in Ontario. Hoo, boy.
Investing in Critical Infrastructure
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