You claim to care about the environment and you’re going to vote for the one party who’s going to do nothing about the environment? Well done.
This is why Dion is doomed to lose this election: the Liberals were fool enough to believe that Canadians actually care about the environment… Canadians talk a good game, but when it comes down to it Canadians will choose a host of things before the environment.
Well, that’s a kind of ridiculous thing to say. Of course they are going to do (and have done) something. You’re basically arguing that they’re not doing enough, and that is subject to debate.
The Conservative platform on the environment:
You’re sounding very bitter. I don’t see Canadians as not choosing the environment; I see Canadians realistically wanting sustainable solutions that don’t destroy our country overnight.
If Canadians don’t care about the environment, why has the Green Party been gaining so much support? Twenty years ago they were a fringe party that polled about as well as the Marxist-Leninist Party. Now they’re in double digit support in some places. They’re a one-issue party and their only issue is the environment, and they’ve convinced at least 1 in every 14 Canadians to embrace a fourth party, and that doesn’t even begin to count the Canadians who care about the environment but feel their vote would be wasted on a fourth party, or prefer the environmental plans of other parties. If Canadians don’t care about the enviornment, that simply could not happen.
The reason the Liberals aren’t gaining any traction on the environmental issue is that people generally don’t believe the Liberal Party cares about the environment. They were in power for thirteen years, and did no more about the environment than any government before. They signed the Kyoto Treaty and then did basically nothing of consequence to live up to it. People do care about the environment - they just don’t buy that the Liberals are a better alternative.
It’s not that you should buy anecdotal evidence, but I’ve never talked to anyone IRL who didn’t think the “Green Shift” was just a tax grab. That impression seems to be shared by a great many Canadians, judging from the polls. Whether it is or not we can debate if you like, and maybe most Canadians are wrong about this, but the fact is that they still perceive the Liberals as being an establishment party. The dedicated environmental voters are mostly going Green or NDP, not Liberal.
I have to disagree, RickJay. The first-past-the-post system is set out in the Elections Act, not in the Constitution. If Parliament wanted to bring in PR, or a mixture of geographic ridings and PR, like in Germany, it could do so by amending the Elections Act.
Unless I am reading it incorrectly, Sections 37 and 40 of the Constitution specifically defines the core electoral districts that make up Parliament.
It would be hard to come up with a sensible alternative system and still be stuck with 295 geographically defined ridings.
Section 37 of the Constitution Act, 1867 simply provides how many representatives each province and territory is entitled to have in the Commons. It doesn’t state that those members have to be elected by first-past-the-post elections in single member constituencies.
Section 40 only allocated the seats in the first Parliament in 1867, between the four original provinces. It expressly states that Parliament can change that allocation:
Footnote 21 states that s. 40 is now “spent”, having been replaced by the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act.
Also, the numbers given in the online version of section 37 are now out of date - the number of seats was increased following the 2001 census, in a seat re-distribution. The next Parliament will be composed as follows:
The candidates for those seats will be selected by the first-past-the post system, which is defined by the Canada Elections Act and the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act. Both of these are ordinary federal statutes, enacted by Parliament.
If Parliament wanted to go to a system of proportional representation it could do so by providing for a system of PR in each province. The number of members each party elected in a particular province could be directly based on the percentage of the votes that party received in that province. That wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, just changes to the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act and to the Canada Elections Act.
I stand corrected’ your assessment of the relevant sections is clearly correct.
It hasn’t been changed, then, because
The major parties haven’t any reason to change it. It would not significantly benefit the Liberals or Conservatives, and
You’d have trouble selling an alternative system, as evidenced by the absolute trouncing the electorate gave the bizarre “MMP” system proposed by Ontario’s legislature.
I cannot say whether arts have a larger income-multiplier effect than any other pursuit or industry - seems to me that sort of argument is raised by everyone seeking protection and subsidies.
As to whether it is “just the right thing to do”, I’m not sure I can agree. The issue is really not one of spending, but of control of spending.
This matter does not arise so starkly with other subjects. Take highways. I suppose I might have some concerns over where a particular road is built, but in general I’m more comfortable seeing this as a “collective issue” that some committee of experts, civil engineers and urban designers can control on my behalf as it were.
The problem with government support of the arts is that, in the end, it takes money from our collective pockets and assigns it to the arts based on the decisions of some expert committee or other as to what is worthy.
Now, it may be the case that these experts have a better, more informed and educated taste than me (or you); that they, as a result of years of thinking about the arts, and extensive experience in the arts, have developed an expertise that will result in funding truly advanced and cutting-edge stuff, better than the quotidian schlock I (or you) would spend our money on, if it was left in our pockets to spend on our own.
The problem is that by and large there is a widespread feeling in this country that this is not the case - that we are not really getting great art that will last the ages out of this process.
With a road, everyone can see that the road is there, and people can evaluate whether it is a good road or is full of potholes and ruts. With arts, this is naturally more subjective. Indeed, some art experts will tell you that it is all subjective, that there are no objective standards to art. While this raises the intiguing question of what such experts have expertise in, the immediate problem is: why should the government spend our money on our behalf? Is a committee really better placed to demonstrate taste and judgment than the individual?
RickJay, I think both of your points are correct. I doubt we’d ever see PR at the federal level unless it’s been road-tested by one or more provinces, to see how it works in practice. If a province tried it and got the Israeli/Italian experience, I think that would kill it. If a province went more with the German model, who knows?
But one thing that I think will keep it from happening is that the current system tends to produce majority governments, which I think most Canadians favour. changing to an electoral system that pretty much guarantees minority governments is probably the strongest reason it won’t happen.
as for single transferrable votes, I think they’re just too complicated to sell. I’ve always been interested in the idea of run-off elections, any time no-one gets a majority in the local riding. but I don’t know if there’s ever been any support for that idea?
Jesus Christ. For all the doom-and-gloom about how a Carbon tax would destroy the Canadian economy, this eliminating the tax on income trusts would be far more dangerous. I think my vote just turned Green.
The issue’s a bit complicated to get into, but the income trust silliness - which has given us a totally unnecessary federal scandal - is mostly over now, and
Irrespective of who gets elected, the income trust issue is over. They’re going to be taxed, the market has already corrected for it, and no party in Canada is going to reverse that decision. Stephane Dion can throw away a promise to undo the income trust tax but he won’t, and if he does he’s going to have to either slash spending or find the tax money elsewhere or run a deficit.
The Conservatives were either stupid, dishonest or alazingly shortsighted to promise they would not tax income trusts, and in fairness taxing them is correct, so they managed to get a two-option question right on the second try.
3, However, by getting it wrong on the FIRST try, the Conservatives had the market playing for a year or more as if the rules were A, and then suddenly the rules were B, which resulted in losses for investors that really should not have happened.
NOT taxing income trusts will (likely) simply result in corporations converting to trusts, thereby avoiding bazillions of dollars in income taxes on their profits; it was estimated Bell Canada, had it converted to an income trust (as it planned to do) would have avoided BILLIONS in taxes. It was a loophole that allowed exactly the same company (more or less) to go from paying corporate tax to NOT paying corporate tax simply by redefining itself. It would be like me avoiding income taxes by calling myself a sofa, and arguing that furniture does not pay tax.
The current plan is, as near as I can decipher, to tax trusts but lower the corporate tax rate a little.
Disclaimer: I am not an accountant and while I’ve done my best here, a lot of people disagree over this mess.
So now the Globe and Mail is reporting that part of the Green Party platform is withdrawing from NAFTA. That makes for every single party having significant planks in their platform that I strongly disagree with.
Options remaining:
Marxist-Leninists, except they didn’t run a candidate in my riding last time.
Bloc, but it’s probably too late to move to Quebec and still get on a voting list.
Write in the Rhino Party.
:mad:
:eek::eek::eek:
It’s like the parties I support are trying to one-up each other for absolutely crazy economic policies? Withdraw from NAFTA? When it’s the best thing that ever happened to the Canadian economy?
Edit: Ok, supposedly the idea is to withdraw and negotiate a new deal. It’s still crazy, though. Withdraw from NAFTA and you run the risk that the US will decide not to negotiate a new deal. Protectionism in the States is far too much of a danger.
Write in Dr. David Suzuki? 
Suzuki’s a smart guy when it comes to science and as dumb as a Nerf hammer when it comes to economics. He’d cancel NAFTA in two seconds.
If you run through a list of the election promises every party has made, the majority of them are just ludicrous. It’s a laundry list of expensive ideas that, in most cases, will not help Canada or Canadians in any way. I’m especially fond of the NDP idea of setting up a “Jobs Commissioner.” The idea is that they’ll have some senior mandarin in Ottawa who looks into shutdowns and layoffs to see why jobs are being lost. I suspect the only way the “Jobs Commissioner” is going to save any jobs is by way of the fact that they’ll have to hire someone to be a Jobs Commissioner. I can just see those conversations:
JOBS COMMISSIONER: Mr. Smith, I understand Smith Industries is shutting down and 125 workers are losing their jobs. Why is that?
SMITH: We don’t have any money left.
JOBS COMMISSIONER: Oh.
The other parties have similarly insane ideas. The Conservatives have fewer of them, but of course when you’re the defending government you can’t make too many specific promises without inviting the question that if Idea X is such a good idea, why the hell didn’t you do it last year? One promise they’ve made is to cut the excise tax on diesel. Surely the high cost of diesel fuel is not new information? Truckers have been hit by that problem for years. Why’d you suddenly come up with it now?
I tell you, it’s the crazy season.
Tonight on my drive home, the CBC was giving a serious, respectful interview to some guy who’s great plan is to nationalize the Canadian oil industry and ‘get out from under the control of the world oil market’. His idea is that Canada could just use its own oil internally, sell it at lower prices, and get rid of OPEC’s influence. The state would be much better at setting prices for gasoline and such than the crazy market, what with its roller-coaster price swings and all. And we’d get rid of the collusion of the gas stations, which is obvious because they all change their prices at the same time. There are secret meetings going on, and the government needs to get to the bottom of it.
He was serious. And he got the prime-time interview spot on CBC, when he should really be hawking his book on the Art Bell show at 2 AM.
Watch this idea show up in the Green Party’s or the NDP’s platform.
Hmm. Forget getting tough on crime, or cutting greenhouse gas emissions, Quebec nationalism. What we need to do is make economics a mandatory subject in high school!
Okay, I’ll bite - when did economics ever reach a consensus? For every Neo-Con who says that tax cuts are the best way to for government to stimulate the economy, you can find a Linda McQuaig who says that tax cuts are the problem. Who is right and who is wrong is a matter of opinion and debate.
I have seen the results of the mantra of tax cuts in Ontario under Mike Harris, and don’t want any of it, thanks very much!
As to the environmentalists wanting to pull out of NAFTA, the problem there is that NAFTA makes it harder to enforce local laws against polluting factories when those factories are owned by multi-national corporations. Ultimately, who should have more power - local government or a business? Lots of room for debate there.
NAFTA stops government from enforcing environmental laws against multi-national companies? I’ll need a cite for that one.
In all fairness, it has happened that gas stations have colluded to fix prices. Here in the Eastern Townships there have actually been criminal convictions against gas station employees for price fixing in the last few months. And apparently the few stations who weren’t part of the ring were subject to harassment. Here is an article on the subject.
Not that I think nationalizing oil is a good idea, of course.