Trudeaumetre - Bravo!

appears people are just avoiding the truths of Justin and the Liberals, Sean.....lol....willing to ignore not 1 promise kept yet and it doesn't look like any will.

but Justins sure running up a hellva travel bill.

quizzical wrote:

i read  the Liberals aren't cancelling the museum for victims of communism. they're just moving it down the street a bit.

when can we expect a museum for victims of capitalism?

Btw -- this is a monument not a museum but good question.

mark_alfred wrote:

Victims of communism monument should be relocated, Liberal MPs say

Quote:

At a press conference Thursday morning, Liberal heritage critic Stéphane Dion and two Ottawa MPs, Mauril Bélanger and David McGuinty, said while the Liberal caucus supports the monument, they don't believe it should be built on a large vacant site just west of Parliament Hill on Wellington Street.

"There is no doubt that we support the idea of the monument," said Dion.

That was back in February, but they likely feel the same now.

It isn't just being moved. A redesign is also in the works. It won't be as large.

The federal government is asking for the planned monument for victims of communism to be moved off a controversial site near the Supreme Court of Canada and back to the originally planned site at the Garden of the Provinces and Territories, farther west of Parliament Hill.

The government also wants Canadians to be heard "from the outset of the design process through to final selection," Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly announced at a news conference in Ottawa Thursday morning.

"The process of this monument was too political, too divisive, and ultimately far from its goal of remembering the horror of victims of communism," Joly said, adding that monuments should provide for reflection, inspiration and learning, "not shrouded in controversy."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/victims-of-communism-monument-next-...

I'm also looking forward to the Mother of Canada monstrosity being cancelled.

Promise made and kept (or on the way, at least):

[url=http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=1025749]The Minister of National Revenue waives reporting requirements under Bill C-377[/url]

Quote:

December 21, 2015 - Ottawa, ON - Canada Revenue Agency

Today, the Honourable Diane Lebouthillier, P.C., M.P., Minister of National Revenue, announced she has waived reporting requirements for labour organizations and labour trusts, arising from Bill C-377, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (requirements for labour organizations), for fiscal periods starting on December 31, 2015 and through 2016.

These requirements would have placed obligations on labour organizations and labour trusts to track their activities for fiscal years beginning on or after December 31, 2015.

The Government of Canada has indicated its intent to repeal Bill C-377. As a result, this waiver ensures that unions and other stakeholders affected by the Bill will not be required to develop and submit detailed tracking of their activities to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) for these fiscal periods.

Quick facts

• The Minister of National Revenue has the authority under subsection 220(2.1) of the Income Tax Act to waive the reporting requirements.
• Repealing Bill C-377 was identified as a priority in the mandate letter for The Honourable MaryAnn Mihychuk, P.C., M.P., Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour.
• Bill C-377, which received Royal Assent in June 2015 and is scheduled to come into force on December 30, 2015, would require labour organizations and labour trusts to file reports with the Minister of National Revenue disclosing, among other things, detailed financial information as well as information on political, lobbying and other non-labour relations activities. This information would be made publicly available.
• Legislation is already in place to ensure that unions make financial information available. Section 110 of the Canada Labour Code requires unions (as well as employers’ organizations) to provide financial statements to their members upon request and free of charge. Similar provisions exist in many provincial labour relations laws.

Quotes

“Waiving Bill C-377 reporting requirements delivers on our government’s commitment to restore a fair and balanced approach to organized labour, freeing them from additional administrative tasks, and providing confidence in the future while the necessary steps are taken to repeal the Bill.”

The Honourable Diane Lebouthillier, P.C., M.P., Minister of National Revenue

“The Government of Canada believes that our labour laws should be fair and balanced, recognizing the important role that unions play in protecting the rights of workers and helping the middle class grow and prosper. That’s why we will be repealing Bill C-377, legislation that diminishes and weakens Canada’s labour movement, as soon as possible.”

The Honourable MaryAnn Mihychuk, P.C., M.P., Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour

there's no news on anything they promised.

we get a little what now appears to be a fake blurb on their doing something then a week later we get an "oh we can't do it"

didn't anyone listen to the 'Prime Minister's' christmas speeches? well if you didn't you didn't miss anything as sfa was said.

as i figured, and i'm sure the Liebrals knew this when they made the phoney promise combined with "we won't decriminalize we'll legalize", and dissing the NDP for only saying decriminalize.

Quote:

Trudeau's plan to legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana is already proving a complicated and controversial undertaking on the domestic front, in part because it requires working with the provinces.

Internationally, says a briefing note prepared for the prime minister, Canada will also have to find a way to essentially tell the world how it plans to conform to its treaty obligations.

The note to Trudeau was obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act.

Errol Mendes, a constitutional and international law expert at the University of Ottawa, says the government faces a long, hard slog in the global arena before it can legalize pot at home.

Legalization, he said, is a growing movement among some countries, particularly in Latin America, but it faces stiff opposition in the United States — including within some quarters of the Obama administration

Trudeau is hoping to get a free trade deal with China.  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/trudeau-sets-sights-on-free...

Oh well, it will be good to be able to afford some imported goods from China.

we don't get enough?

they said no to decriminalization way back and even i knew back then what they were selling was a lie. reserved  a bit until they started closing marijuanna dispensaris in BC. then i knew for sure it was ugly lies.

'Real change' comes early — to Liberal promises

Quote:

Still bombing: CF-18s in action again

Let's begin there. From northern Iraq, we hear of a battle near Mosul on Dec. 17. An ISIS offensive was beaten back by Kurdish forces, aided by Canadian trainers on the ground and two CF-18s in the air.

Sajjan, though, insists that the jets will be withdrawn in "less than six months." Which is interesting, because he did not pledge to withdraw them by the end of March, when the mission's existing mandate expires. 

"Less than six months," in other words, suggests an extension of the bombing, not the end of it.

Benching the CF-18s, though, is only the latest Liberal pledge to get a makeover.

Already, the pixelation of the first promise seems like ancient history. The plan to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year got the Photoshop treatment just 20 days after the swearing-in. Poof! The deadline was deleted and reappeared at the end of February.

 

In a two-step process, the Liberals first re-enacted the ritual discovery that the previous government had left the cupboard bare. Then, they said the $10-billion deficit cap was merely a hope.

Instead, we are told, the key is to keep the debt-to-GDP ratio going down. Which just happens to allow for deficits as high as $25 billion.

 

Remember the "revenue-neutral" tax cut? They airbrushed out the neutral part.

Trudeau said his tax cut for the middle class would be offset by the tax hike for the rich. But it depends what you mean by "offset." If you mean, "not even close," no problem. The tax cut will actually cost $3.4 billion a year, but the tax hike will only raise $2 billion. Do the math.

They should decriminalize simple possession now, since it will likely take years for legalization.

After Year 2 of Legal Pot in Colorado, ALL Drug-Related Charges Drop Significantly, Record Revenue

Two years have passed since Colorado residents began legally buying cannabis under voter-approved Amendment 64, and the state is seeing enormous benefits on multiple fronts.

First and foremost, thousands of people are not being thrown in a cage for possessing a plant. Charges for possession, cultivation and distribution have dropped more than 80%. Besides sparing people the stigma and financial burden of a cannabis arrest, cops and courts aren’t wasting taxpayer money going after pot smokers....

from the link above

Quote:

"Less than six months," in other words, suggests an extension of the bombing, not the end of it.

lying liars and some people wanted purity from the NDP.

quizzical wrote:

interesting and good for Colorado. i wonder how the USA says then we can't legalize or we break  our trade deals?

Was it trade deals that are supposedly violated by the legalization of weed? I thought it was international conventions on the drug trade or something along those lines.

And, while IANAL, I'm gonna guess that there is no significant enforcement mechanism attached to those treaties. So we probably COULD just announce that we no longer want to abide by them, without much happening to us. (I'd be interested to hear more informed opinions on this.)

As for the Americans, I'm not sure if it's international agreements that they'd be waving in our face, but rather just their own uncontested right to police their borders. If customs agents want to give every Canadian wishing to cross the border an hour-long cavity search, there's not much we can do to stop them, besdies deciding not to cross the border.

epaulo13 wrote:

Here's the difference between Colorado and Canada, and why you can't neccessarily extrapolate from one to the other.

..my intention was not to extrapolate but to show an example of a process from the grassroots being successful..2 years ago already.  

Oh yeah, on that score, I agree. If legalization were to come about in Canada(though I'm not convinced it will), you'd likely see the same benefits that they've seen in Colorado etc. Moreso, in fact, since we wouldn't have another layer of government putting roadblocks in the way.

They did not just airbrush the neutral part out of the "neutral middle class tax cut" -- they airbrushed out the middle part as well.

According to the bio, Parkin is a social democrat.  They were good articles.

Here

yup just a whole boat load if lying lies. it's being noticed other than here too.

if the Liberal Party, as the one dude noted in is article too, think people won't remember the broken promises and lies next election they'd be wrong.

too many big ticket issues.

quizzical wrote:

yup just a whole boat load if lying lies. it's being noticed other than here too.

if the Liberal Party, as the one dude noted in is article too, think people won't remember the broken promises and lies next election they'd be wrong.

too many big ticket issues.

I think that some governments think they get a pass at the start but they really don't. What the public does is show optimism and suspend judgement but they notice even as they support. But once the quota for issues reaches a certain point they remember everything at once and the whole thing crashes. Every stripe of government gets this opportunity to -- for a time -- get away with things. But at the end of that period if they ahve not built up goodwill and if there are too many then they all come back and the government gets unpopular. I have seen this with every stripe of government.

The problems here are a little different: first the Trudeau government has raised expectations extremely high. Some of these promises are foundational to fairness and why people voted for them (dealbreakers). The promises were made in some cases perhaps recklessly not expecting to leapfrog to first place with a majority and then have to keep them all. And the wave of optimism is so high that they will have a longer period of good will -- a longer period to think that they are getting away with everything before they realize they are not.

Now the Liberals are seriously good at politics when theya re not screwing up (history has told us this). So they will have a window to build goodwill to make up enough to win the next election or not. They might do it.

However they are the most fragile majority government ever to come to office in my estimation. I can explain if people need that but some people already understand this well.

my analogy would be if Justin's Liberals were a music talent and they only had 1 hit on their premier dvd. they'd be a 1 hit wonder and then gone from public consciousness.

people really don't believe in unicorns but they love to pretend they do for a short time. if the unicorn doesn't show.....

mark_alfred wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

However they are the most fragile majority government ever to come to office in my estimation. I can explain if people need that but some people already understand this well.

Please do.  I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

Sure --

First the Liberal party got there more on the shoulders of one person than they may ever have before. That one person is more inexperienced than any other PM in a long time. But that is not the big fragility here.

We could say that the Liberals came to power due in large part to an NDP campaign collapse but this even is not entirely clear becuase it depends on how you saw the NDP support from 2011. If the NDP recovered even a bit Trudeau's majority would be lost in the next election -- it is after all, only a majority with 39% of the vote -- just under the margin of Harper's majority of 2011 which was big in seats but not popular support. But perhaps the NDP can be seen just to be back at normal and a "recovery" not much of a threat. Hard to say so that is not the biggest threat.

So here is the truly big issue:

Of the people who voted previously in 2011, the NDP was still around 23%, the Conservatives around 35% and the Liberals around 36%. This would be, by all accounts, extremely fragile and it would be unclear in this popular vote scenario what would happen in seats. Harper might have remained. The Conservatives lost about 3% the NDP lost about 7% and the Liberals gained about 7% and other parties lost a couple points. Or there about. The CPC lost 200,000 votes only. The NDP lost about 600,000 votes.

This marginal fragile result was boosted to a majority government due to a massive wave of people who had not voted before.

This includes a substantial number of people who, not only came of age to vote for the first time, but people who declined a ballot. Many of those people came out to vote for something they thought was different, better, for specific promises, to punish the Conservatives, or to vote for Trudeau the person. Now if Trudeau loses a little shine, the Conservatives will not be there to punish, if people those people who came out to vote that did not vote in 2011 go back to not voting -- the pool of voters who remained throughout would barely get a government and any loss of the people who had voted in 2011 as well and the Liberals would be out of power. The Liberals have the least loyal voting pool ever to elect a government.

Now it was widely expected that to beat Harper somebody had to bring those people out. To his credit Trudeau did. The thing is they cannot lose them in the next election or once the honeymoon period ends without losing government.

If the NDP ran a better campaign and pulled back just a few votes -- say a couple hundred thousand and the voters who came out this time were not motivated to do it in 2019, this government would be out.

Governments usually lose a little between first and second mandate -- if he loses a couple percent only of the people who normally vote AND he fails to inspire the non-voters/ first time voters he will poll below the Conservatives. Just by not running Harper the Conservatives might have a chance. Harper was an asset in previous elections but this time he was a liability. A reasonable choice for leader coudl erase the modest advantage Trudeau had among regular voters -- add the non voters staying home and the normal decline, Trudeau does not need to screw up to lose while more new governments usually have to blow it to lose a second mandate. They normally come in with a little more strength. Little chance that the Liberals will be lucky enough to have the CPC run someone with the appeal of Dion or Ignatieff.

This is really unprecedented.

Trudeau has a lot of goodwill and we cannot count him out in sealing the deal for 2019 -- but he has to do that. He has to motivate the Harper haters of 2015 to be Trudeau lovers of 2019 becuase if he does not and they go back to staying at home, he is out.

This is why he has the most fragile mandate -- wide in seats -- modest in popular vote and damn scary close when you consider that he had to bring out non-voters to vote in order to get his victory and will need them again to get re-elected.

We may think a sea change happened in Canada a change of opinion but in fact that never happened. What happened was the Liberals took back a lot of the vote the NDP had taken from them in 2011, and with this being not near enough, managed to get the most unlikely supporters to show up at the polls -- non-voters. These are the people who in many respects gave a leap of faith but don't likely have much trust, faith or committment to voting. Trudeau cannot win in 2019 by merely saying the Conservatives are worse --  he has to repeat the inspiration of 2015. He has to re-motivate the people who were not motivated in 2011.

That is why his victory is the most fragile ever.

That's before you factor in electoral system changes. If he does not make a change he will hurt. If he makes a change to PR. He loses his majority. If he makes a change to some system that might benefit him, he might still lose as people see through an attempt to make the system better for his party. The entire process benefits Trudeau if he holds a lot of goodwill or hurts him if he has little. No middle ground.

mark_alfred wrote:

Thanks Sean.  Yes, the new voters could be a vulnerability.  A lot depends on whom the Cons choose too and what direction they take.

I am not minimizing the ability the Trudeau government may have to solidify and win again. I merely point out that this is a beyond normal solidification and a reliance on people that had not been in the habit of voting to do so again.

With these numbers Trudeau has to impress these people four years from now and I suspect keeping these promises is likely the only way to do so. Otherwise, nobody should bet on the next election. Perhaps we will see a repeat of the 1972 election as much as the 2015 election was a repeat of 1968.

It was promises to pensioners, unemployed and others who had supported him in 1969 that had Trudeau on the ropes in 1972 -- together with a difficult economy.

Hard not to see the risk of this in 2019 if the economy is performing badly and promises are not seen to have been kept. The Difference is that in 2015 the Conservatives were stronger than they were in 1968 and the Liberals less reliant on a boost in voting participation rates. (In 1968 the turnout was up only 0.9% from 1968 and still much lower than 1963 whereas the turnout increased mostly to the Liberals benefit by almost 10% in 2015 over 2011 and was the highest in over two decades.

Great video.  Seemed that jobs and competence were the issues back in '72.  I think those two issues could re-emerge in 2019 too.

Good to see you're optimistic, Pondering.  Hopefully things will work out well.

I'm less optimistic.  I suspect the fed Libs will take a path similar to the Ont Libs -- that being cuts, privatization, and divestment of assets (IE, like the Ontario gov't moving to sell off Hydro One).  In fact the federal Libs promised cuts right in their platform.  1/2 billion in the first year, $1 billion the next, $2 billion the following year, and finally $3 billion in 2019 (so, totalling $6.5 billion in cuts).  Some of the things they say they'll cut are laudible, such as "reducing the advertising budget of the government of Canada, and ending the use of government advertising for partisan activities."  But otherwise, when a government refuses to increase corporate taxes and instead preaches cuts, I generally am leery.  My impression is that they're on the side of big business, rather than on the side of people.  But we'll see.