Canadian Politics Thread

To expand on that a bit more, I could imagine a situation where I would vote for the BQ if I lived in Quebec even though I'm not a separatist. I know I'm not the only one on this board who admires the BQ for being socially progressive, and I happen to like Duceppe as a leader.

And of course, I'm talking about the current state of these parties ... I'm not saying I would never ever vote for the NDP, if they elected a non-douchebag leader and stopped pandering to unions and polysci dropouts, then they might be a real option.

i know. it's a shame about the whole splitting up Canada thing. sometimes i wonder how much Deceppe even believes in it these days.

xpost

I'm sure he still *wants* it, but knows it won't happen under his leadership (or even in his lifetime).

In a way, the decline of separatism is a good thing for the Bloc because they can retain a broader spectrum of voter support -- both the hardcore separatists and the federalists who like having strong voices advocating for Quebec in parliament.

for them it's good. sort of a lose/lose for the dominion tho.

Anyone care to defend this?

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/963389--layton-vows-to-cap-credit-card-interest-rates?bn=1

I'm still working my way through a 1st-year macroeconomics textbook but why is that a bad idea? I don't have a strong opinion on it yet myself.

I could imagine a situation where I would vote for the BQ if I lived in Quebec even though I'm not a separatist.

This is exactly the sort of thing I meant btw. Likewise, I'd probably vote PQ or QS provincially if I lived in QC.

Don't expect the NDP to stop 'pandering to unions' any time too soon btw.:P They're probably as distant from the unions as they've ever been right now but they were pretty much founded as a labour party.

Admittedly, the Liberals' recent embrace of many of the economic policies the NDP has been advocating for a while has made them start looking pretty good to me. If my NDP MP weren't so strong or if I were in a swing riding, I'd probably strongly consider a Liberal vote this time.

I don't really have a strong opinion on it either. I guess as someone without credit card debt it's not really relevant to me personally. I'd be way more in favour of a price cap on stuff like the ridiculous cell phone and internet rates. I don't know, maybe working on bringing down the prices of bills and day to day living so people don't have to rely on credit cards so much to begin with would be a more productive course of action. But I never made it through my first year economics textbook at all so that might be wishy-washy idealist nonsense.

When I first started caring about politics I remember being disappointed to find out the BQ didn't run candidates outside of Quebec. I dig Duceppe. Looking forward to watching him in action in the debates.

The lower tier credit cards generally have a ~19% interest rate and a requirement to make a ~3% minimum payment on the balance every month. This encourages people who use their cards as a primary means of borrowing to hold a long-term balance on the card, making small payments and drowning in interest. The banks see this as a measure of risk assessment; e.g. they justify charging that rate because 1 in 10 don't pay any returns on their lending. Capping the rates will make the banks seek revenue elsewhere, for sure.

I think as an alternative to capping interest rates, lenders should be held to a more rigorous standard when making credit checks, approving loan access, etc. It's incredibly easy to get access to usurious credit, and the average person doesn't have alot of personal finance education (another topic; if you've been university you probably remember all the card companies hawking to the first-year students in the quad).
This helps cut down on predatory lending if the banks essentially can't approve anyone and everyone.
With deeper investigation you could approve lower rate constructive loans to people using credit for education, career advancement, etc, as well...
Also, if you raise the minimum monthly payments on credit cards, it would encourage people to reduce their borrowing and improve their long term financial health. I doubt this would be a popular decision, though.

People with higher incomes and better credit already have access to superior loan rates - the average line of credit in Canada is around prime plus two or so right now, and you can pretty easily borrow against your equity if you own property or similar capital assets. So they're not as exposed to the issue as people whose credit cards are their only means of borrowing. I don't have a good solution to that, personally :/

what's the status of the whole payday loans interest rate discussion? I recall the NDP pushing this a while back...one of the things I liked them for.

They're probably as distant from the unions as they've ever been right now

Actually, they were probably much more estranged in the aftermath of Rae's 'social contract'. Still, since then, they haven't been nearly as close as they used to be afaik.

Salsa shark, do you mean wage and price controls?

Thanks, Matt D.

Agh I don't know, it's just something I threw out there in response to the credit card cap thing, haven't really given it much thought beyond that!

As is this:

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/breakingnews/liberals-promise-1-billion-a-year-in-student-aid--118834939.html

I'm still working my way through a 1st-year macroeconomics textbook but why is that a bad idea?

The other parties are rolling out plans for education and helping small businesses today (i.e. major issues that real parties talk about during election campaigns) and the NDP's response is ... credit card interest rates? It makes them look so small and insignificant next to the serious politicians. What are they announcing tomorrow? Discounts on bus passes?

It's very much in character for Layton, seeing how he's got a boner for taking on EVOL corporations such as banks. Yeah, everyone knows that banks make a lot of money. But as we've learned in the last couple of years, our banks are run exceptionally well compared with all the other major world economies. Was there a serious problem that was in need of fixing? Or does Layton get cheap thrills from taking on The Man? Rather than listening to what their constituents want, they're inventing new problems out of thin air and then offering "solutions" for them, essentially dictating to the voters what they *should* want. This is the exact opposite of what politicians should be doing.

And like Matt said, the banks will make up for the lost revenue in other ways and/or deny or reduce credit to their lower income clients that the NDP thinks they'll be helping.

i don't really care about that one either way.

I've been living around the Vancouver riding boundary line for the last few years and am never totally sure which riding I'm in. But now I am in the riding of Canada's best MP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Libby_Davies.jpg

http://www.ndp.qc.ca/commissions/lgbtt/libby.jpg

cuet!

Possible ground for the Opposition to work (although who knows what will sway the public?): http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/03/29/cv-f35-costs.html

Hey symsymsym, we are neighbours.

For one thing, the Bloc don't get as embroiled as the Parti Québécois in some of the more odiously anti-anglophone components of the language debate on the island. A week doesn't go by without some Parti Québécois-connected nutjob talking about how the English eat French babies or whatever. PQ-funded think tank reports that Chinese dépanneur owners are selling cigarettes made of out shredded ENGLISH newspapers. Overall the PQ seem more committed to keeping Québec white and stupid than anything else. I could never, ever, ever vote for a party like that.

The Bloc however is more of an actual political party with an eye for a multi-cultural, progressive, and resolutely French-speaking future for Québec as a province, or country, or whatever. I get Duceppe leaflets every once in a while and I like what he has to say. If it wasn't for the weird fragility and blunted aspirations of the English community on the island I'd vote Bloc. Ah fuck, maybe I will. The problems of other anglos are not really my problems and Duceppe probably has a bit to do with why this is the only neighbourhood in the entire country worth living in. Better to be awesome than English, I guess.

Ha, I forgot about that aspect of the PQ. I guess I was mainly still thinking of Levesque-style socialism. QS is probably more what I'm looking for.

This seems like it could be a potentially winning/salvaging strategy for the Opposition but it would require a near-total reversal of what the Liberals have been doing so far and seems unlikely: http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=18437&pid=647006&st=0&#entry647006

(referring to the OP)

QS is a party made up of all the remnants of Québec's various Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist-Leninist, Workers Parties, blah blah blah etc. etc. They field exactly one compelling candidate, a man whose father still holds weird pseudo-revolutionary training camps/supper clubs on a farm in the Eastern Townships. Membership seems comprised of some D&D guys, a couple of crust punks, and some of the softer elements of the militant French language defence groups.

QS could not get elected anywhere other than the Plateau. The fact that it's even a party is testament to how odd a place the Plateau is. In the only provincial electoral district in Canada where Live Action Role Playing is more visible than baseball as a public sporting event, fantasy certainly plays a role.

I may have screwed up my boundaries here. Can't remember the eastern border of Amir Khadir's Plateaustan (as the media are fond of calling it).

wait west.

hello everything! we vancouver ilxors are few but proud

Yo. It's nice to be in a riding where it's possible to vote for the candidate and think less about the party politics. I'm not a huge NDP fan but I'll vote for her for sure. She's proved herself to me on a personal level. I work on the frontlines in social housing and she actually sought me out to get some off the record/ground level feedback that was not filtered through the sector organisations/BC Housing information machines. I'm not a party member or anything - she just found me via my job description and invited me to meet her, asked intelligent questions and listened to what I had to say. I really respect her for that.

Ha, fields, OK, it's been 10 years since I lived in Montreal (for a year) so I'm kind of talking out of my ass wrt QC provincial politics. I guess I'm just really disappointed with Charest, though I really tried to like him for a while.

that's awesome. her office helped a friend of mine receive a scholarship from ubc that he deserved and they were trying to deny him. her level of constituent outreach is pretty amazing.

xp

I need to move downtown (live in N Van now).

East Van, Bryan. Downtown has Hedy Fry. Did anyone see that article in one of the papers last week talking about Trevor Linden possibly running as a Tory against her?

Here it is

Ha, I wish Canadians were as obsessed with politics as with hockey!

What a tool: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadavotes2011/story/2011/03/30/cv-election-harper.html

It's like he keeps trying to spin the election as some sort of Presidential-style race.

Just looked at a boundary map. Showing my ignorance of Vancouver, I would consider the western boundary of Vancouver East as downtown (especially the northern portion), even though it's probably not. Anyway, doesn't matter. I should move there.

xpost,
13,929,093 votes cast in 2008 federal election
16,600,000+ viewers of Canada-U.S. Olympic men's final hockey game last year

;_;

those #s are closer than i would have guessed!

16.6M could include a lot of people unable to vote, but the point's taken.

Just read this: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/canada-watches-its-democracy-erode/story-e6frg6ux-1226030310248 Is it overly cynical to think that Canadians would assume that the same things would happen anyway if another government was in place? We've gotten so used to this shit that we would believe and just shrug at anything?

well that article is making me feel bad about being so indifferent to the outcome of this election.

but yeah, I think one of the big reasons so many people don't care about this is that they think the liberals are just as bad about these kinds of things, and who can blame them really. I mean this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal is still pretty fresh in the minds of lots of people (at least here in quebec) and is often cited as one of the reasons people refuse to vote liberal.

What Peter said + I'm guessing those sorts of issues matter less to most people than the country's economic performance during the recession (regardless of who deserves credit for that) or their lower tax bills. (Many people are probably glad that their money isn't going to a group like Kairos anymore and are relatively unconcerned about the Parliamentary niceties.) The sponsorship scandal probably had such an impact (everywhere in the country) because of the huge sum of taxpayer money that involved. Also, it had quite a bit of time to percolate before it really hurt the Liberals: They still won the 2004 election, remember! Tasha Kheiriddin made the point that if the Opposition gave e.g. the in-and-out campaign financing issue some time and maybe waited for a Supreme Court ruling, it could make more of a difference.

Also, while Ignatieff is growing on me, he hasn't really inspired much passion in most people. I'm able to forgive McGuinty's government a number of things because the alternative is so much scarier to me.

This said, I live in one of the safest NDP ridings in the country so I might not have the best sense of what the average CPC voter in the general public thinks.

"... taxpayer money that was involved."

I was one of the few people who didn't care about the sponsorship scandal because a) all the alternatives to a Liberal-led government were far worse than having the Liberals stay on, and b) I'm kind of Morbs-ian in that I think most governments are intrinsically corrupt and that's just something you have to deal with.

Look at it this way: the G20 meeting cost taxpayers TEN TIMES as much as the sponsorship scandal did.

Overall the PQ seem more committed to keeping Québec white and stupid than anything else.

a comment like that confirms me it was a mistake to click on this thread :-)

To be fair, we got something for the cost of the G8/G20 summits. We can question how wisely it was spent but, as far as we know, it wasn't simply being funnelled back into the CPC.

We also got something for the sponsorship money -- some of it went toward its intended purpose. Anyway, a lot more money got blown on G8/G20, but if the Tories lose the election, it won't have anything to do with how they handled the G20 summit.

... unfortunately.

um. what did we get, exactly, for the g20 btw?

what i got was no work because so many agencies had to shut down or slow production while downtown toronto was on red alert for an entire week.