Do the Cons need a new leader?

gadar wrote:

Where is Sneer, while the NAFTA negotiations are going on. No where to be seen. You know what, the job of the official opposition is not to just smile and delete old webpages which show your true personality, it is to provide constructive ideas. Or maybe he is waiting for Harper to whisper in his ear.

Singh will show how its done after the next election.

Dimple Boy must step down, Canada deserves better.

Yeah, I like how Scheer is blasting Trudeau over the NAFTA talks but is nowhere to be heard from of what HE would do in this situation. The Liberals are carrying the blame while they are forced to deal with a nascissistic petualnt sociopath in the White House, What would the Cons do differently? Wait..I know, give the Americans EVERYTHING they want and more.

 THis orangutan in Washington needs to be eliminated. Most Americans hate him. His contempt and vindictiveness is driving to cripple us as a nation but who here is talking about that? It's almost as if the Liberals are being blamed for water being wet.

I hope the majority of Canadians realize this and not run to a party who will toss Ortange Hitler's salad. Sell us much more further down the river than the Mulroney PC's did 30 uears ago.

What can Canada do? Not much with a madman in Washington.

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Elimination of birthright citizenship risks creating stateless children not only legally, but emotionally.

I don't think they would be "stateless".  If a Canadian couple travels to Japan and has a child, Japan does not consider that child a Japanese citizen, but doesn't Canada consider that child a Canadian citizen?

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Some countries do not recognise dual citizenship. Using your example, lets say that Japan does not recognise dual citizenship and Japanese law gives citizenship by birth. Now Japan would not give citizenship to somebody born in another country and the child becomes stateless because the country of birth, in this case Canada does not recognise the child as a citizen either.

I'm not sure I understand your example.  But both Canada and Japan have jus sanguinus laws, so a child born to Canadian parents in Japan would still be a Canadian citizen, and a child born to Japanese parents in Canada would still be a Japanese citizen.

So it's still not clear to me how abolishing jus soli laws would create legions of stateless children.

And for what it's worth, jus soli laws in Canada aren't really used all that often, so I'm not saying "yes, we must strike them down", but neither would I support keeping them for a reason that makes no sense.

Fair enough.  I used the example of Japan, because their citizenship laws are jus sanguinis only.  But evidently, even they make an exception for a child born on Japanese soil whose parents are stateless or unknown and confer citizenship on that child.

If Canada were to make a similar exception, would that satisfy concerns about stateless babies?

I think we can agree that no baby should be stateless, but it's much less clear to me why a child born of parents who are citizens of a country that would recognize their child's citizenship as well needs Canadian citizenship solely because they were born in Canada.

In other words, if your parents are both Italian, and you were born in Canada while they were here sightseeing, you need or should have Canadian citizenship why again?

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So try this example on for size: A Hindu Indian woman from the slums of Calcutta, working in Dubai, becomes pregnant in an abusive relationship with a Somali man, at the same time she gets the news she's been accepted to the University of Toronto. She comes to Canada on a student visa, gives birth, graduates, gets a temporary work visa, and raises the child until age 10, at which point she's arrested and goes to jail (we'll leave the actual crime ambiguous until the end of the story). The 10-year-old child, having spent his entire life in Canada, speaks only a few words of Hindi and none of Somali. The UAE doesn't give citizenship to children of expats, Somalia has no government to give citizenship at all (and the child has no relationship with his father or any of his Somali relatives), but since 1992, Indian women are allowed to pass citizenship to their children born abroad -- if the mother registered the birth at a consulate within a year. Since interreligious marriages are grounds for lynch mobs in India, she never got around to it. Nevertheless, when she's released, she's being deported back to Calcutta. Should her son have to leave with her, returning to a place he's never lived, where he doesn't speak the language, and his existence is likely to incite lynch mobs?

That's your example of the problem, the paragraph after you refer to incidents of "birth tourism" as "vanishingly small"??

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Is putting an end to the vanishingly small numbers of the latter worth opening up the former to deportation? Not to me.

Again, I'm not busy painting my "Down with Birth Tourism" placard and planning my marching route and charging the batteries for my megaphone.

But I'm still not sure why there's evidently no possible way to differentiate between:

a) a woman from the slums of Calcutta, pregnant by a Somali man, studying in Canada, arrested for who-cares-what and deported and:

b) one or both parents with clear citizenship in another country having a child in Canada

Also, I wonder about this, just academically:

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Since interreligious marriages are grounds for lynch mobs in India, she never got around to it.

In your example, the woman was neither married to the father, nor living in India in the first year of the child's life.

And also this, I suppose:

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Should her son have to leave with her, returning to a place he's never lived, where he doesn't speak the language, and his existence is likely to incite lynch mobs?

Of course not.  He's ten.  With citizenship, he can stay and get a job, rent an apartment, buy groceries, pay taxes... all the things we citizens like to do.  Huh??

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I also started by pointing out that most of the cases of tourists giving birth in Canada don't end up with the child getting loophole citizenship and using it as a back door for the family into Canada.

Then why would people do it?

I totally get that sometimes, someone gives birth (perhaps before they expect to) while on vacation and such.  But are there not people who go out of their way to travel to Canada in order to give birth here?  I'm open to hearing that this hasn't ever happened, but if it does then what, specifically, would be the point of all that if everyone just goes back to The Old Country and nothing comes of it?

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But it doesn't appear that there's any evidence for the latter being so common as to necessitate changing the law.

I agree.  This is not the crisis of our times.

But even as I think this is kind of frowned upon at babble, sometimes I like to look at the logic of something, rather than the emotions of it or the team sports of it. 

It's some "progressives" who like to call citizenship "an accident of birth", so it's somewhat odd to me that they might also be the ones suggesting that if an infant doesn't receive citizenship in the country they popped out in then a great injustice just happened.  I think it makes much more sense to assume that the child born to an Irish man and an Irish woman should also be Irish than it makes to say that if that child exited the birth canal in Spain then it should also be Spanish.  I hope this all makes some logical sense and isn't just an Andrew Scheer talking point.

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Or, since Harper changed the law to prevent Canadians from passing on their citizenship to more than one non-resident generation, maybe a returnee's daughter -- born a Canadian citizen -- chooses to give birth in Canada to ensure her child has that citizenship, as well.

Why would she want Canadian citizenship for that child if she doesn't want to live in Canada and doesn't want to raise that child in Canada?

Isn't that literally the sort of thinking that some call "birth tourism"?  The desire for a child to have citizenship in a country that you're not a citizen of and don't wish to live in, solely because it might be economically advantageous some day in the future?

If she can come back to push out an infant, why wouldn't she want to stay?

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For instance, I have a friend in California who's ethnically Chinese. He speaks only English and Spanish. His parents were born in Toronto (though he's not a Canadian citizen)

If his parents were both born in Toronto, and presumably Canadian citizens by that, why is he not a Canadian citizen?

gadar wrote:

But the LOO has his own problem: sheer invisibility

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/gerry-caplans-blog/2018/09/conservative-...

That was classic. It feels good to know the Cons have bigger problems among themselves. HA!

Conservatives ARE sociopaths. No denying it. Its a fact. They are people without empathy without a conscience. What else would you call them?

Read the article.

tl;dr:  it's not about what Kenney did or didn't say (accompanied by actual quotes), it's about the author's imagination regarding Kenney.

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And Canadians can expect this entire production to be repeated next month when federal Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer makes his own unauthorized nine-day trip to India.

Huh.  Who authorizes (or has to) trips to India?  I always thought you could just go.

Most politicians have an unhealthy relationship with their ego. I think this is required to pursue the path despite everything.

I think some are outright sociopathic. But the test for that is very high and it is a continuum.

I think that the right wing is based on a refusal to consider the existence of a collective good despite evidence that it exists and is essential -- the air we breath is a collective good. You could say that the nature of libertarian thought is itself unhealthy, going against the necessary cooperation among people that is required to progress a civilization. However, if true, this is an unhealthiness that afflicts to some degree a large population.

There are studies about group psychology -- how people adopt views that on their own they would be repelled by due to group support and justification for them. We could try to break down where the boundaries are.

Alternately we could refer to the right wing movement in its extreme as "malignant selfishness." At its extreme it involves self harm.

Is it only a malignant pathology politically if it involves self harm? If it is unfair but sustainable is it an illness or garden variety greed?

So, some examples: taking two slices of pie off the dinner plate is selfish but while impolite and mean it is not malignant. The originator gets two slices and pays no price for that.

Now consider the environmental policies of companies and individuals that press for policies and behaviour that will destroy the earth. In the end this damages the originators as well. That involves self harm and is legitimately an illness in my view.

Consider tax policies that deliver so much in tax cuts to companies and individuals that others simply do not have money left to spend. At first glance this is just selfish but when you consider that this is on income and that for this income to exist others have to have money to spend, the extreme is self harm as even the originators are compromised.

Pushing people into hard lives is mean and selfish. But when you push a significant part of the population to desperation, then you have a society that is unstable and unsustainable. At that point even those who have suffer as societal structure and security of what they have selfishly hoarded is no longer feasible or affordable. That involves self harm and is legitimately an illness in my view.

So as much as you may dislike something and recognize that it is harmful to others, it may still be just greedy. However, once it compromises everyone, including the person holding that view it is necessarily a pathology.

Now comes a really interesting point: For conservatives to espouse right wing policies that are not to the point of ultimate damage to themselves, this may be just mean and selfish. However, those who are not wealthy and who support these at their own detriment -- their support may be self harm.

So for example (again) if a person gives his coat to a person who does not need it and they die -- the person who took the coat  may be just unthinking but not ill but the person who gave the coat has a pathology of self harm.

But while it is true that a person who commits self harm can be determined to be ill, what about harm to others?

Where does the behaviour leave the realm of policies we just do not like, that are greedy and fall into malignancy? What degree of harm and recklessness or knowledge of the harm do these policies have to reach for the support of those policies to be determined to be a pathology? The answer is less clear as it is based on the degree of responsibility each person has for the welfare of the other. Is it by intention to follow policies that harm others? Is it pleasure in the harm they cause? I think there is a social pathology here as well. You see right wingers delight in the suffering of others, or punishment of the poor for its own sake, without any economic benefit to themselves. We have heard from those who believe that people delight in the suffering of the poor becuase they in fact loath being at risk of poverty. That it is fear that drives this. The mass psychology of right wing views when it comes to attacks on immigrants, people of colour and poor people can range from nastiness to illness.

This is quite apart from the health of individual leaders in my opinion (although at times related).