I know there are a lot of headlines and blogs all about the NDP’s plan to “cap credit card rates”, but it would be a good idea to look at what THE NDP ACTUALLY SAYS, rather than rely on secondhand (wrong) information.
I guess you can twist this wording into a “cap on interest rates” if you like. I really don’t mind if financial regulators are given powers to identify and ban excessive rates, and I don’t really worry that banks and credit card companies will suffer too much. Maybe you think rates of almost 60% per year are justifiable, but others would disagree.
Well, I guess since you know that this is always the case, we can just trust that you can tell the future too.
Yes, Canada almost ceased to exist after Harper halted BHP Billiton’s takeover of Potash Corp. Oh wait, that was the Conservatives doing that, so it must have been OK
It’s a free country? What does that even mean? Um, ya, I’m in the majority in this country that would not like to see the Canada Health act gutted, and I"m not ready to “enjoy” the private medical system that is working so efficiently (not) in the US.
I remember that the federal and Ontario NDP parties are not the same, identical thing.
I think your ideology and past biases are taking precedence over your ability to dispassionately look at the platforms as they are written.
So, you said that the statement that the NDP was going to cap credit card rates was wrong, then to prove it you quote the NDP platform - where it says that they will ensure that credit card interest rates are no more than 5% above prime. How is that not a cap?
Do you know WHY credit card rates are so high? They’re so high because default rates on credit cards are very high, as are disputes, charge-backs, and other time-and-money consuming activities.
If you cap credit card rates the way the NDP wants to, I guarantee you one of three things will happen:
People with poor credit will not be able to get credit cards at all
Credit card companies will compensate by jacking up annual fees and transaction fees to cover their risks, or
There will be some creative means to achieve the same thing they used to have through the invention of some new form of credit (rent to own is a current example of that - at even higher credit cost than credit cards).
As for whether 60% per year is ‘acceptable’ - I would say that’s something to be decided between the credit card company and its potential customers. If you don’t want to pay usurious rates, don’t get into debt with such companies.
The NDP in Ontario tried to muck about in the housing market, and made a hell of a mess. The U.S. has been engaging in social policy through manipulation of the housing market, and look how well that worked out for them. Have a look at the projects in the inner cities to see what’s happened to public housing there.
Perhaps you can point to a success the NDP has had with housing market manipulation? They’ve had lots of opportunities to try it in the various provinces in which they’ve held power.
Just because a single sale has been stopped by another government doesn’t mean large-scale government intrusion in foreign investment is a good thing
Right, it’s always about us vs the U.S., isn’t it? Canada is actually one of the few countries that completely disallow certain private medical treatments. France, Singapore, Sweden, and other countries with good health care systems allow a private system to coexist with the public system. Canada has been moving in that direction for a long time, because a completely public system tends to suck.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that RickJay is well educated on what the NDP wants to do. You just don’t like his opinion, so it’s easier to just call him an ideologue than to actually answer specific challenges.
Let me bring up another form of craziness the NDP wants to engage in: They want to DOUBLE the size of Canadian’s pensions. Do you have any idea how much that would cost? And why should pensions be doubled? If you’re a low-income senior, you’re eligible today for $934 in CPP, plus if you retire after age 65 you can get up to $526 in Old Age Security, and if you’re poor you can receive up to 665.00 per month as a Guaranteed Income Supplement. That’s $2125 per month for an individual. For a married couple, it totals slightly under $4,000 per month.
In what universe is this not an adequate pension? Consider that retired people in Canada have free health care, many services are free or at reduced costs, there are rent supplements and food supplements available, you have no work related costs any more, AND you had an entire lifetime to save some money for retirement.
Frankly, I think Canada Pension and all the supplements are TOO generous, and probably one of the reasons why Canadians aren’t saving their own money for retirement very much. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that it would be a good idea to give retired people $4,000 per month from the government. Or that it would be remotely affordable without cranking up the CPP and employer contribution to at least double (more than double, unless you’re going to wait until people have contributed at the new rate for their entire lives before doubling their payout).
The NDP also wants to provide universal day care and early childhood education - another extremely expensive program with marginal to no benefit which would saddle us with more taxes and ensure more kids get raised in institutions instead of the home.
The NDP wants to reinstate the 360 hour qualification for unemployment insurance, regardless of region. So all those seasonal workers can get back on the pogey in the off-season instead of building a diversified economy. This is a terrible idea.
The NDP wants to mandate that employers give any employee six months off to help look after family members near the end of their life, and the government will pay unemployment insurance benefits to those people. That sounds all compassionate, but it will be a significant burden on employers and will be quite expensive. And of course, it’s kind of hard to tell where the last six months of a person’s life starts. You don’t know that until they’re dead. My father was supposed to be dead in two weeks at one point, and lived another five years. It’s an unworkable program.
I could go on. They offer all kinds of tax breaks for the poor, for families, all kinds of new tax credits for small business, a home energy tax credit for heating oil (which is bizarre, since I thought they wanted to increase energy taxes), double Canada Pension payments, institute universal day care, double health care transfer payments, and on and on. These are huge, expensive programs. We’re already running a deficit. Where is the money coming from?
Their ‘green’ plan is laughably naive. They want not just a cap-and-trade system, but they want to put hard limits on emissions for specified industries, with a goal of reducing our CO2 emissions by 80%! That’s an insane number we have no hope of reaching, and they’d bankrupt us if they try.
They want to pay for all this by raising the federal corporate tax rate to 19.5% - A hike of nearly 50%. They also think they can get a large amount from a ‘tax haven crackdown’, which seems unlikely, but if true would amount to the equivalent of another 20% tax hike on corporations. They also claim to be able to save $2 billion a year by eliminating ‘fossil fuel subsidies’. I’m not sure where that comes from - Is this a euphemism for raising fuel taxes? Or is there really 2 billion per year being handed out as subsidies to energy providers?
As for the corporate rate remaining below America’s - there’s a big different between the literal rate number and the effective rate paid by corporations. Canada’s listed rate of corporate tax is significantly below the U.S’s, but in terms of effective tax rates we’re nearly on par. The NDP would make Canada a much more expensive place to do business, at a time when we’re about to reap a harvest of having a smaller, more responsible government than the U.S. Let’s not screw that up.
Although you’re very convincing in your use of capital letters, I’ve read the platform, from the first word to the last, and was referring to it when writing my post.
“Make sure Canadians have access to credit cards” no higher than 5% above prime either means caps or that the government’s getting into the credit card business. You tell me what else it could mean. I could explain WHY credit card rates are high, but gosh, surely anyone can figure that out?
Incidentally, 60% is pretty high for interest on a credit card. Do you have any links to such an instrument existing in Canada? I don’t care if one exists in another country. Don’t we already have laws limiting what the Money Marts can do?
We absolutely do not need the government jamming its snout into what Visa is charging.
No, it wasn’t okay.
Ah, yes, the tired old false dilemma; “if we don’t ban private care it’ll be just like the USA.” It’s the one logical fallacy that has become like gospel to so many Canadians.
I must point this out again; almost every country in the industrialized world allows private health care while maintaining a public single payer system. The USA is an outlier, but so are we. Amazingly, these mixed systems in Europe and such WORK, and by many measures some of them work a hell of a lot better. The consensus best system in the world is France’s, which has private care. France is no richer a country than us, they have an aging population like us, and they have a better system that allows private care and private insurance while maintaining an effective basic care system paid for by the government. Can we not examine that?
It’s time Canadians put aside this ignorant attitude that Canada and the USA are the only health care systems that exist anywhere in the world or that can exist, and that any attempt to improve our system means we’re going to be like the USA. It’s simply not the case that allowing patients and doctors to freely engage in health care services means we scrap universal health coverage, as proven in more countries than you can shake a stick at, and this “Booga booga booga you want the American system ooooh!” nonsense is scaremongering and ignorant.
Gosh, people are accusing the Conservatives, and now the Liberals, of scaremongering, but there is NO more ignorant and irritating scaremongering than the silly defense of our weird ban on private health care. We’ve had situations where after 5 PM you could get an MRI for your fucking dog by paying a few hundred bucks, but you couldn’t get one for your sick child and might have to wait months, while Fido got care right away. It’s just stupid. There is no reason we can’t have a mixed system like France.
Well, of course, my opinion’s different from yours. So mine must be based on not reading the platform, whereas yours is a wholly dispassionate examination of the evidence.
Polling news from the last few days are, obviously, stunning.
It appears the NDP is most definitely in second place in popular vote and may well be first in Quebec. Conservative support is down a few points but the real victims are the Liberals, who are at a historical nadir, and the Bloc, who are also about as low as they’ve ever been.
How this will play out in seats is hotly debated. The projections are all over the damn place, ranging from 308’s very slow-changing projections, to EKOS’s wild 100-seat win for the NDP, to Democratic’s Space’s projection of a Tory majority with the Liberals and NDP both in the 50’s.
The seat arrangement is really hard to predict at this point without riding polls, because the NDP surge and Liberal collapse are so unexpected and vary from region to region.
308 continues to predict not a lot of gain for Quebec, in part because that’s the model and in part because of the lack of an NDP “ground game” - the NDP apparently doesn’t have a huge organization in most Quebec ridings. I’m always skeptical of such things. How many people do you know who vote only because of the ground game? Neither do I. If the NDP actually has that much support they’ll win seats.
An interesting story; Sun Media, owners of the various Sun papers and the EEEEEVIL new Sun TV (which I admit I’ve never watched, but so many people say it’s evil, it must be so) was apparently sent a picture claimed to be Michael Ignatieff with an accompanying story that Ignatieff had helped the USA as an advisor in the invasion of Iraq. The picture looks very convincing and apparently the story and report were quite thorough. To their credit, Sun, realizing the staggering implications, investigated it deeply - and discovered it was an elaborate hoax. They’re convinced someone was trying to discredit Sun.
The timing on this one is clearly no accident. The Conservatives want this one to hit the media just in time for Canadians to go to the polls, with the Liberals having no chance to refute the allegations in time(and even if they did, the initial allegation always sticks with some people). The Conservatives have been caught red-handed on this one. I hope that for once Canadians don’t let Harper off of the hook. Trying to get the media to publish flat-out lies about your opponents is beyond the pale.
It will be interesting to see how the media reacts to this. I have to imagine that they’ll be insulted that Harper tried to use them like that, and that rarely ends well.
(Of course, I thought the same thing when Harper refused to take questions from the Parliamentary Press Gallery from day one. Or when Harper refused to answer more than five media questions per day in this campaign. So who knows. The fact that Sun Media publicly named the source of the lie tells me that they, at least, are rather miffed at Harper’s presumption)
ETA:
I think that it’s clear that the Conservatives thought that Sun Media was just their lap dog. Oops.
Speaking of dirty tricks, I wonder what Gary Lunn’s folks have up their sleeve. They are currently worried, since Elizabeth May of the Green Party is currently polling a close second - or in the lead according to a recent (disputed) poll.
Last election, someone mysteriously called voters before the election, urging them to vote for a NDP candidate who had withdrawn. The subsequent vote split let Mr. Lunn win the riding. There were also questions about third party spending - and where the money for these “third parties” actually came from.
If the “Ignatieff in a uniform” thing was actually dreamt up by the Conservative party… well, that’s baffling. I mean, isn’t it 100% obvious the story would have been totally debunked within 24 hours? The picture is ridiculous - why in heaven’s name would Ignatieff be in full battle uniform? Why would you do this when the Liberal campaign is already dying?
Is this Patrick Muttart, in fact, the stupidest human on earth?
If we’re going to start speculating and ascribing motives when we have no idea what actually happened (did Patrick Muttart do that on his own, or at direction of higher-ups? We’ll never know.) I had a call from a polling company, and when I tried to vote non-Liberal in their questions, it wouldn’t register. OMG! Liberals only allow people to vote Liberal on their phone polls!
You have got to be kidding me. The guy is a key part of the 2006 and 2008 Conservative campaigns. He served as Harper’s deputy chief of staff. He left the party to join some company in Chicago, but has been working part-time on the Conservative campaign since the election began.
Either Harper knows that his campaign is pulling dirty tricks, or he has no control over his party. Either way, it would seem that whoever is calling the shots in the Conservative party is resorting to outright lying to win this election.