Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[Canada] Politics of the Democratic Friedmanite Republic of the Government of Harper
Posts
Hell, hire three to remove any doubt
https://www.facebook.com/letalvarostay/posts/102474243177864
Walkom: The (sort of) good news about high gas prices:
^ If someone was REALLY a refugee, they'd be able to pony up the cash for a plane ticket!
it's a token gesture and the oil companies know it.
gamertag: Canadianllama
It would be epic if they read it as their response to the Harper Government throne speech.
"NEVER APOLOGIZE": PM HARPER'S GOVERNING STYLE
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/87902-wikileaks-canada-cables-cbc.html
Note: I linked this document before, but no one seemed to notice it.
We just didn't find anything to comment on, is all. Harper's a dick, we get it. This is well-known around these parts.
I'm more interested in what he's doing or planning on doing, as opposed to what the Americans dug up that we had already figured out.
I moved from there back in '96 but that's my hometown. We're trying to keep up with family and friends, I'm fully expecting the town to be non-existent by tomorrow morning.
Sorry to hear about your hometown GKS.
I just hope there is never a youtube vid about this story, the comments will bore a hole into a dimension of stupid so dense our planet will be crushed.
Hahaha. Vous êtes les bienvenues, mes amis
Kidding aside, what worries the most is than Harper is gonna piss off Québec so bad than we're gonna vote parti québécois then give the OUI a resounding victory. He got 16% of the vote here as opposed to 45% in the rest of the country.
In Québec we think with our hearts.. and our hearts dont like Harper.
If Harper starts governing like George W Bush did, I will vote OUI as well. I dont think he will, I sure as hell hope I am right!
I love Canada mais j'aime encore plus le Québec. I am not alone in feeling like this.
I emphasie the word FEELING. Le Québec n'a pas d'opinions, que des sentiments.
Just saw it on the news... Crazy stuff. They had people complaining that the fire department was not actively trying to stop the fires. When 50% of your city is burning you have to concentrate on damage control. Looked like a war zone up there.
gamertag: Canadianllama
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kma8_BIo54
He split off the CRAP from the PC, realized it was a dumb idea that would never earn him a seat east of Manitoba, and merged with what little was left of the PC again. He got leadership of the merged party mostly because there was no one else competing for the job.
He took power away from the Liberals because of public outrage at the Sponsorship scandal, not thanks to anything he actually did.
The Liberals dug their own grave with weak leadership and amazingly bad campaigning. Harper didn't defeat them, they defeated themselves. And more importantly, Harper didn't benefit from their defeat, Layton did.
He won a longer string of minority parliaments than any other PM, and when he finally got a majority he got it by only 6,000 votes and thanks mostly to vote-splitting on the left. None of this reflects positively on his strategy.
Harper is maintaining an illusion of competence by telling everyone in his party to shut the fuck up (including himself - 5 question rule) and with gross abuses of power. That's not exactly the Lord Vetinari style of governance.
Where's the master strategy I keep hearing about?
Harper is the most Teflon-coated PM we've probably ever had. We can all agree that there has been some seriously contentious shit going down under his governance. Despite all the contentiousness surrounding his government, he's won every single election and managed to destroy every opposition leader that's crossed his path.
Either Martin, Dion and Ignatieff (and probably soon Layton) were all terribad, or Harper was simply better. At some point you have to stop blaming the losses on the loser and start crediting the victor.
It's definitely not all that masterful, but getting everyone to shut up and rein in the crazy was a pretty good strategy. If the nutters had been allowed to speak their minds things would be a tad different. Now that he's in a majority position, some of it's going to start slipping out, but it won't really matter.
Over the next few years we'll find out if he really has anything up his sleeve, or if he's just been the benefactor of weak opposition. I mean, the Tories should be more or less finished with their agenda in a year or two. With a solid majority in the House and a Senate that kowtows to the PM for some reason, bills will just fly through Parliament. And then what? Will they bring back the long-gun registry in 2013 so they can kill it again?
I assume you mean his methods, not mine. And I did examine his methods, and found nothing to be impressed about. As for his results, a string of minority governments and one narrowly-won majority government is not that impressive.
"he's won every single election": Actually he lost his first election in 2004.
And Martin, Dion and Ignatieff were all terribad. Martin suffered from the sponsorship scandal and constant infighting inside the party. Dion, while a brilliant policy maker, is simply not a powerful leader, and his very televised presence killed him. And Ignatieff had a very poorly ran campaign - he had no consistent message, didn't present his platform, and didn't even practice for the debates. None of these are things Harper can be credited for.
Assigning others all the blame and Harper none of the credit is as silly as saying the Liberals will win purely because everyone will realize how dumbdumb the CPC and NDP are
And in this case Harper isn't even benefiting from the Liberals acting dumb. The NDP swept a massive chunk of the seats. Harper benefited more from vote-splitting on the left than from the Liberals' missteps.
Also, in your two replies you haven't pointed me to anything we can actually credit to Harper. You referenced Harper winning elections, therefore he must be a brilliant strategist (rather than a beneficiary of unfortunate circumstances for Canada). What exactly is the brilliant strategy he engineered to win that you can see?
Yeah, he pretty much is. But then, most PMs have been, so it's not really a slight against him. He came to power in part due to an RCMP investigation that occurred in the middle of an election campaign. Chretien came in on the back of the disintegration of the PCs. Mulroney took out a weak leader who was hamstrung by some unpopular patronage appointments. Clark's PCs actually took a considerably smaller percentage of the vote than Trudeau's Liberals in 1979, so he just got lucky.
The last PM who really came to power on his own merits was Trudeau in 1968, and even he was a continuation of a previous regime.
Now, I generally wouldnt attribute such basic common sense for campaigning as "master strategery" but given the apparent lack of such in the Liberals...
Harper's brilliance can be best summed up with the first prorogation. He knew the second one wouldn't do more then ruffle some feathers - after all, he had proof. He was still in office, still popular, and the opposition was still considered far worse.
The first decision to prorogue parliament was an incredible political gamble. On its head, it is the essence of a coup d'etat: the opposition was talking about going to the Governor-General to take control of Parliament, and Harper blocked this by shutting down Parliament in order to wage a PR war to make the idea untenable. It was subtle enough (a coup from within the House, by procedural means) that most of the public dismissed this idea.
Harper's PR campaign afterwards was a masterpiece of Rove style politics: block the will of the majority within the Parliament, representing the Majority of Canadians, by claiming that they were violating the will of the people, and acting undemocratically. People bought this. Harper has engineered this belief into the public space such that people have largely forgotten about his actions - a combination of the triumph of his post-prorogation PR campaign, and of his ongoing campaign to make people disinterested in Federal politics.
The opposition, and the media certainly play some part in this - the opposition and the media's harping on topic to topic, looking for anything that might stick - but Harper and his team engineered the narrative. Politicians are all corrupt, and out of touch - they're not here for you. So vote conservative.
Except it didn't actually work. The Tories didn't make any vast gains off their PR campaign, and only managed to pick up an extra 2% of the popular vote from 2008 to 2011. The fact is that most people just plain didn't care about the first prorogation or even the second one because people don't care about the minutiae of politics and they never have. Scandals -no matter how severe- have a very minimal effect on a government's popularity. Even the Liberals managed to more or less survive the Sponsorship Scandal.
Federal elections aren't really so much won as they are not lost. Harper has managed to not lose two by not fucking up royally. That's not strategy, it's just basic competence. If he were some kind of amazing strategist he would've been riding high in the polls for years, and a majority would've been a foregone conclusion. Instead, Tory popularity has risen all of three points in the last five years. Apparently his master strategy was to have a somewhat reasonable showing in the debates, have the Green Party focus all their attention on a couple ridings, have the NDP surge out of nowhere, and the Liberals collapse in the last three weeks of the campaign.
Harper prorogued parliament hours before Dion would have met with the GG to have Harper removed from power. If Dion and the other leaders had been smart and played it closer to the vest - the way Harper did it back when he secretly tried to form a coalition with the NDP against the Liberals - instead of going public in great feats of advertisement about how they were about to remove Harper from power, then they could have done it without Harper ever knowing what had happened. Instead they were stupid, showed their hand before playing their cards, and allowed Harper to play one last desperate move to save himself. Again, Dion and the other leaders' stupidity cannot be credited to Harper.
I won't lie to you: the town's in bad shape. Maybe a little less than half of it is in danger, and maybe half of that portion is cinders.
The town's been very diligent about it's evacuation & emergency response plan, though. Nobody's been seriously hurt - just homes & stuff lost. It sucks, but at least homes & stuff can be replaced.
Wildfires are fucking everywhere right now, though. For once I almost feel bad for Pennwest and CNRL - they've had to freeze huge projects due to fire proximity.
This would be the first step to an elected Senate that fully represents the provinces.
The House of Commons is regional enough.
Says someone from Ontario.
:^:
As a Torontonian who votes NDP and bemoans the constant Conservative presence in regions like Durham and Parry Sound and Barrie, I'm completely baffled as to what regional power imbalance currently exists that needs to be corrected via Senate reform.
Need I mention Quebec? A province with a very successful party specifically designed to cater only to their interests?
How can you even type this with a straight face?
The past like 10 electoral maps speak to the power of regionalism in Canadian politics. Shit, just the NDP surge this election speaks to it.
Or we can look at the whole idea of getting x% of the vote, but no seats that people bitch about right here in this thread.
What do you think these things are a product of?
My response to this would be to note that there is no Ontarian region, in practice. Toronto voters vote distinctively different than suburban Ontario voters who vote distinctively from northern Ontario voters.
I mean, more people live in Toronto than all of Atlantic Canada, yet there are 32 ridings in Atlantic Canada and only 21 in Toronto; that's 1 riding per 73 321 Atlantic Canadians versus per 124 628 Ontarians (though we're due for a Parliamentary expansion in 2014, I believe). Plus the last time that Ontario voted in anything close to resembling a block was back in the Chretien years, when, quite frankly, he was well in majority territory with 40+% popular vote and a Reform/PC split anyways.
On a practical level, wherefore this drive for regional representation? Has Ontario, as a block, in some way voted against the interests of BC or Atlantic Canada in recent history? Ontarians haven't demanded any special recognition by the federal government, have been rather quiet about its underrepresentation in Parliament, and have been happily paying equalization payments while receiving far less in returned government services. I don't really see any impetus for regional representation other than Albertan/Quebecois obstructionism or a drive to Americanize Canada.
On a more theoretical level, look, I have... intellectual issues with democracy. Democracies innately entail a tyranny of the majority, a feature that is only magnified due to the continued disintegration of federalism and political compromise. But most people seem to employ a shifting notion of fairness that pivots whenever they find themselves outside of the majority; I mean really, the notion that a region with more votes can boss around a region with fewer votes is no different than the notion that in a given riding, the winning party's supporters boss around the supporters of the other parties. There are ridings where half vote one way and half vote the other; should we have regional representation within ridings for MP selection too? Or what about the fact that Canadian cities have more MPs than rural Canadians? Or the fact that Toronto has a significant chunk of Ontario's MPPs? Or the fact that anglophone Canadians have more MPs than francophone Canadians? I can continue with these examples ad infinitum, so I have to say, if you're not okay with Ontario having more votes in Parliament because more people live in Ontario, then you're really not okay with democracy (as is practiced globally in politics).
... hypothetically, what if Toronto just split off into its own province. Then Ontario's at 84 ridings; Toronto's at 21. Does that satisfy this strange need to destroy Ontario's voting power? What if we further split Ontario into northern and southern Ontario? Like, I'm confused as to what exactly it is about Ontario's 106 ridings that's offensive; would a 21/42/42 split be inoffensive? I'm just not too sure what it is about the collection of 106 ridings under the same artifical provincial label that makes it an issue, given that these ridings don't naturally organize themselves in such a way.
The results: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Bay%E2%80%94Atikokan_(provincial_electoral_district)
Notice the lack of the name for the Greens for 2011. They're waiting for me.
I will be running for Organizing Chair in the Young Greens Council Election. Paperwork should be in within 2 days.
This means if I win, I will be organizing the national Get Out the Vote campaigns for the Greens.
I also will try to get this adopted party-wide:
I already have the web application speced out and blueprinted. I just need to code it, which will take me about 3 days as I'm using Wordpress. I will release the code under the AGPL.
Ummmm... that's not the point of a democracy. It's designed to serve the will of the people, which is a not insignificant differnence from serving the majority.
EDIT:
One could argue though that the FPTP system used in a parliamentary democracy, doesn't really gel with the underlying principles of a democratic system. One could argue that.
Meanwhile, the Maritimes has 24 seats in the Senate. The complaints regarding the representation of the Atlantic provinces are nonsense. The maritimes are absurdly over-represented.
Alberta and BC have good cases to argue about the lack of proportional representation at the Senate level, but as long as the Senate appointments continue to be a political favour-granting tool for the PMO the concept of regional Senate seats is meaningless.
In this regard, giving the Provinces the ability to appoint their own Senators would actually be an interesting development: yes, ultimately, an appointed Senate will be an exercise in patronage. However, it distributes the Senate appointment process out across the nation and makes it more insulated against Federal political swings.
Now if we're going to talk about regions that regularly get shit upon at the Federal level, let's leave out the West shall we? We are, after all, destroying our international image so that Alberta can continue to not be bothered to address the massive pollution that their primary economic driver produces. No, let's look at Toronto. Despite 2 out of 4 of the official party leaders coming from Toronto ridings, neither of them had anything to say about their home city in any meaningful regard.