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Harper Politics: Opposition Mustache, Iggy-popped
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I sort of see voting based on what's best for you as a little self serving.
When the NDP is discussed I always hear about this and money growing on trees and it leads me to wonder where the fighter jet trees are. I mean, aren't we expected to pay for them nearly equal to what our entire national deficit is?
Ah, ok.
I mean, I guess. I'd honestly be shocked if anyone, even the NDP, actually tried to shut down the oil sands projects in Alberta. At most I could see regulation of future projects. And, call me crazy, but that doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Layton wanted to push small business tax cuts, and entrench network neutrality while ditching the idea of UBB altogether. Both of those things would directly benefit me, both of them through the avoidance of taking money out of my pocket. Harper and the cons don't even seem to know what the internet does and their corporate welfare is more for the big guns than the small players.
Ah well. If I'm lucky, nothing Harper will do over the next several years will screw me over (although I very much expect Harper to let UBB slip through now that the election is over.) But I really fucking doubt he'll actually do anything to benefit me, as an Albertan.
I never finish anyth
This is a party that had a vote to ban gay marriage right off the bat in its first minority government. It's literally the first thing Harper did when he came to power. It's also a party whose core base are regressive conservatives who want to ban gay marriage but have been holding back waiting for a majority, which they now have.
This is also the party that says it will leave abortion alone while secretly defunding it. And the party that is quite overt about curtailing women rights.
If you really believe their election promise to leave gay rights alone, you're hopelessly naive.
And when someone goes out of their way to insist that they agree with a regressive conservative platform on gay rights fuelled by a homophobic base... although I'll grant that he didn't explicitly say which parts of this platform he agrees with, I don't think it's a stretch to understand he means the regressive conservative homophobic parts. Look at it this way: none of the other parties mentioned gay rights during the campaign, so why else would he explicitly and emphatically point out that the Conservative platform on gay rights is the one he agrees with?
Unless I'm mistaken, they don't actually do abortions, those are done in hospital and are paid for by your regular health care.
I may be wrong, I've never had an abortion, or known someone who has...
Anywho, it seems the States is doing the same to Planned Parenthood, which reportedly has a huge surplus. Does the same thing apply to the CFSH?
And again, your response to that need is to.... decimate the civil service and neuter its independence? To trash the civil service leaders who HAVE risen to the top through dedication, initiative and service? Linda Keen, Kevin Page, Munir Sheikh - these are civil servants who have demonstrated exemplary service. Munir Sheikh, despite being misrepresented by his supposed boss Tony Clement, never uttered a bad word, chose to resign silently out of principle.
That's how we're going to get a lean efficient effective government? How does that inspire excellence? That's like going into schools and firing the best teachers, and then replacing them with highly paid, unqualified substitutes. How does THAT make things better?
Such is how our system works. It benefited the Liberals in the past too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federal_election,_1997
Liberals got majority gov with 40% of the vote in the past, now it's the Conservatives turn.
It's very rare than a party gets 50% of the national vote. It last happened in 1984. It also happened in 1958, 1940, 1917 , 1904 and 1900 so 6 times out of 41 elections since Confederation.
Is this more of that retarded Libertarian type shit?
Other Conservative MP currently still talking on CBC mentioned that they've no plans to reduce the fines at all.
It's Reform Party type shit.
Whoa captain hyperbola. When did i say i want to start laying off everyone in sight? All I said is that I agree that we need a smaller civil service. In my experience as a lower echelon clerk was that there was a redundancy in many of the tasks being done and that SOME of the older, unionized staff had a terrible case of "don't care" going on. Please stop implying that I want to slash and burn the whole civil service. I have no problem with the upper echelon people and never even mentioned them.
If you want to keep this conversation going by yourself, please be my guest.
gamertag: Canadianllama
Disco, my wife also has experience as a public sector employee, both as a performance measures reporting analyst for City of Edmonton, and now an international qualifications and standards analyst for Province of Alberta. The city wasted millions of dollars on contractors and consultants for redundant postions within the organization (deputy city manager's office, specifically), and got little to nothing accomplished that a dedicated full time employee getting paid a structured salary could have done for less. Contractors tend to be higher drains on budgets than full time employees, as a result of billable hours and just as much waste as the worst of career bureaucrats.
There is probably room for contractors within the public sector, but within the bureaucracy I don't see it. Structured budgets and payroll allow the government overseeing those groups to manage it better financially than open-tendering bids and running into cost overruns.
Mmmmm....toasty.
Why not?
I never mentioned contractors! I just think that from personal experience that there is to much redundancy and complacency in the civil service. Apart from a very short term solution to staffing needs I don't think that contractors are a solution.
gamertag: Canadianllama
Well, I would suggest you read what we write and reply with context then. Robman and I were both referring (I believe) to the erosion of civil servant independence and initiative plus Harper's massive expansion of government via contractors.
You came in and said, "I'm for a smaller civil service," then implied that it's impossible to create an efficient civil service, so I filled in the blanks. If I misunderstood you, I apologize, but you didn't exactly clarify it in your subsequent posts either. And I rather explicitly asked you to clarify it:
Also, this is a hyperbola:
Because it doesn't solve any problems, and just creates a hostile debate environment.
I'm not saying you can't disagree, but outright bashing someone for who they voted for (or was going to vote for) is both offensive and ignorant. We haven't gotten to that point, yet, but it's happened already much earlier in this thread.
The point-by-point highlights of why a choice was poor is just fine, imo. I just don't see why every time someone has an opinion around here that goes against the current grain this forum knee-jerks. I understand sometimes it seems like we're debating against a brick wall, but are we really trying to turn this thread into a SE++ thread? I thought this was D&D.
Mmmmm....toasty.
I agree that there probably is too much redundancy in certain ministries or departments. However, there's also a very large under-staffing problem in others. High profile ministries like Health, Energy, or Education tend to have robust budgets that get eaten up in large part by their bureaucratic agencies instead of the face of their ministries - doctors, nurses, teachers, etc. That's definately a topic worth discussing. But the need for an administration of payroll, HR, procurement, etc. will never go away. How to improve efficiencies without stripping an imporant block of the public service is a delicate problem.
Mmmmm....toasty.
What's ignorant about it? And what's the difference between "bashing" and "point-by-point highlights of why a choice was poor"? These are the same thing.
Not that this is currently happening...I just get utterly frustrated when I read stuff heading down that cliff.
How hard would it be to say "I disagree with your reasoning because of X, Y, Z." Instead of "If you think that A, then you are a B and a C".
But, I'm not a mod, so I'll just fade into the background again before I get put into the time-out zone.
Mmmmm....toasty.
That said, I retain the right to hate on people because of WHY they voted Conservative, and honestly I haven't heard a truly compelling answer yet.
I'm actually suprised that the NDP seems to have gone off with a stumble, especially over their MP's.
- be a Canadian citizen;
- be 18 years of age or older;
- not be in jail.
The new MPs are fully qualified. The reason they're being attacked over their supposed lack of qualifications is because of classism. A single mother who works in a bar and vacations in Las Vegas? Clearly she makes poor decisions in life and is unfit for office, unlike Bev Oda, or Helena Guergis, or the serially bankrupt Kerry-Lynne Findlay. God forbid we have commoners sitting in the House of Commons.
Classism? WTF?
They are getting attacked because they have no experience in politics or aren't from the riding or didn't campaign or are really young or whatever. Not all are good reasons to criticize them, but none have anything to do with class. (Well, except the student thing. That's got something to do with class and whether he will keep attending it or not.
Countless Conservative MPs have little to no political experience ("business experience" is an adequate substitute for any other kind of experience, apparently), don't live in their ridings, and/or were completely AWOL throughout the campaign. Yet they were chosen by the Party to run for office. There is clearly a double standard at play.
@Diorinix; can you cite any examples in this thread where people were straight out bashing someone for being conservative?
Sometimes we talk about conservatism being kind of irrational or how voting for them this election was somewhat inspired by ignorance, but I wouldn't call that bashing. Sounds more like the Bin Laden thread or something.
Gays, lesbians and transgendered people continue to endure threats, violence and discrimination. Their rights are violated on a continual basis and are hardly "fine". Given the Party's apparent lack of regard for the rights of ordinary people, I have little confidence that this government will maintain policies and programs that protect the rights of LGBT people and help them out when their rights are violated.
Well yeah. The double standard is that they are NDP.
gamertag: Canadianllama
Essentially the criticisms of Mlle. Brosseau are that she is not a wealthy career politician. Apparently this makes her fair game. This kind of drive-by character assassination, purposely directed at figures who are unable to defend themselves, is sadly typical of Harper and the Republican spin doctors that he keeps on his payroll. I don't know why I was foolish enough to hope that they might let up for even a single day after the election was over.
this right here. I thought the whole point of our political system in which we vote a person who we expect to represent our needs at the big-boy tables was that the sole qualification for the position is that we have confidence in that person to act in our interest.
Honestly I don't give a rats ass how much money you paid for piece(s) of paper that say you're qualified for the job, when I vote for you all that my ballot should be saying is "I think you're the one who will act in my interest." By buying into the whole he said/she said politics bullshit you are quite literally the cancer that's killing the nation.
(FTR by you I don't mean Azio you, I mean like the people who are reading this post you)
It hadn't gotten that far over the last few pages, but there are some very passionate folks who really don't like the conservative party. And I wouldn't say that Disco IS conservative just because he voted for them.
There was some bashing for him choosing to vote for them and saying so vocally way earlier - somewhere in the first 40 or so pages (I think). It was right around the time I was arguing with another poster over oil & gas development.
Mmmmm....toasty.