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Has the previous NDP candidate indicated if she is willing to re-offer?
Would Catherine Fife want to return as the candidate if there is any indication that the NDP could take this seat in the by-election?
Does Ontario have the same 6-month limit to call a by-election as everywhere else seems to? We could be talking about this for a long time to come if McGinty decides to wait to fill the seat for as long as possible.
Yes, that's my understanding.
This is such nonsense.Witmer didn't have to accept the position; in fact she probably sought it out. Until I hear Tim Hudak crying foul and denouncing Witmer as a sellout, your hypothesis is pure fantasy.
Oh, yes, the Tories are so very much in love with McGuinty's budget as originally introduced and so very upset about the puny "concessions" the NDP extracted from McGuinty in return for supporting the austerity program that they are willing to hand McGuinty a majority just to thumb their nose at the NDP.
Where do you get your political analysis - from a fortune cookie?
Too bad they blew their chance to "stop Dalton" by joining his Liberal-NDP Majority Government™.
Latest poll in the riding:
Liberals 39%
Cons 32%
NDP 20%
Greens 7%
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1172087--poll-liberals-have-s...
One thing I noticed in that Forum poll is the big discrepancy between how people in the survey say they voted last October and how the riding actually voted.
Liberals - 41% compared to the 36% they actually got
PCs - 39% compared to the 43% they actually got
NDP - 11% compared to the 17% they actually got
So it looks to me like the people surveyed were quite skewed towards the Liberals and away from both opposition parties.
Though when one considers that, the NDP share nearly doubled...
Good catch. But the other thing I noticed was the NDP's potential:
This should be fun.
And to follow up on this, if "the people surveyed" were transposed upon the real vote, the Liberals and PCs would be pretty much tied around 35% or so, and the NDP would be at around 30%!
Still no word from the previous NDP candidate if she is interested in contesting this one?
What about the federal candidate in 2011? Any possibility there?
which is how I am reading these Liberal/Conservative tea leaves - both parties come out looking corrupt. I also made some assumptions with that poll result and growth for the NDP candidate and hit that 30 magic number.
I wonder how pox on both those parties and a popular known NDP candidate cold bust both Liberal and Conservative pipe dreams in this riding.
No word on said candidate. That candidate would need to really look hard and consider it all and also how much one would give up at this point in their political career and whether the "timing is right".
I can't be an apologist for something that doesn't even exist in this case.
And I didn't "personally insult" you. I ridiculed what you said. It's called political debate. Get used to it.
After what you've already said, I'm astonished that you think that ship hasn't already sailed.
Spector it's not called political debate and just because you say it does not make it true. The tone is purposefully bating and demeaning - for the end game of suppressing other view points and silencing. I don't like bullying.
You don't like debate. I don't even know why you bother posting here.
M. Spector, please dial down your hostility and aggressiveness toward other posters. It doesn't make for a very nice place to live. While each of these is relatively minor and may not generally invite a moderator intervention on their own, each one still constitutes a personal attack and accretively begin to look something like bullying.
Former Liberal MPP and MP Steve Mahoney was WSIB chair but was part-time, re-appointed last year.
http://iwocac.ning.com/profiles/blogs/steve-mahoney-again-in-driver
Now Elizabeth Witmer, who turned 65 last October and has decided to ease out of active political service (although she said last September when running for another term that she "has no plans to quit politics any time soon"), is being made a full-time chair at a salary of $188,000 per year.
Did she apply for the (not quite yet vacant) position? I'd say it was designed to (lure?) suit her.
How much more blatant could it be?
Mahoney announced his own retirement March 8. How long has Witmer's appointment been planned? Since March 7?
I don't really care if the Liberals appoint some of the last remaining deadwood in the Ontario NDP (or PC) caucus to a golden parachute job as a Justice of the Peace or whatever...its not like any sudden vacancy wouldn't be an easy hold in a byelection! That being said, when its so obvious that McGuinty is bribing people with taxpayers money so he can get back a majority - my line of attack would be "why doesn't the Ontario Liberal party pay those salaries in perpetuity!!"
Well, he chose right in K-W: for the Liberals, it's by far the lowest hanging fruit on the opposition vine...
Oh, and besides Telegdi hogging the left-energy, one other thing that *may* have suppressed the K-W federal NDP vote in '11 was an independent bid by erstwhile NDP candidate Richard Walsh-Bowers--not in taking votes away (only 174 voted for him, anyway), but in conveying impressions of a party schism...
good point adma.
So what's the NDP game plan here?
McGuinty makes trip to newly vacated Kitchener-Waterloo ridinghttp://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2012/05/03/toronto-kitchener...
If not Catherine Fife, would Scott Piatkowski be up to running?
How much do you want to bet that if the results in Etobicoke Centre are overturned and a federal by-election is called, then McGinty will schedule the Kichener-Waterloo by-election around the same time?
Or the week after Etobicoke, on the theory that the Liberals cannot lose that by-election. Which is also a good reason for the Conservatives not to appeal and delay; suck it up and get it over with.
I recall Frank Zappa's lamenting the number of times he and the Mothers overestimated the intelligence of their audience. Perhaps Dalton, having learned from Frank, is simply intent on not making a similar mistake, i.e. overestimating the integrity of opposition MPs.
Integrity and intelligence are two different things. One can be intelligent but without integrity, and vice versa. I suspect too that McGuinty is not a fan of Frank Zappa, though I may be wrong.
Of the three major leaders, I can see Hudak as the biggest Zappa fan--well, he comes off as a grinning high school weisenheimer who gets off on Zappa's titty-poopy-joke tunes...