87 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Greg Weston, in today’s Calgary Sun, reporting on a new SEC poll, on leadership. Dion is toast, but voters in Ontario would still elect liberals, even tho the majority of those in Ont think Harper is the better leader. Why do voters in Ont hate their country so much?

  2. Why do voters in Ont hate their country so much?
    We are lemmings. We vote the way our parents vote. We cannot change. Save us from ourselves. Please.

  3. I am a day late but feel the need to comment on the re-dedication of the memorial at Vimy.
    Normally we (my wife and I ) would be at Timmy’s enjoying our midmorning coffee but chose to stay at home and watch the ceremony live instead.
    I am happy we did.
    I can truthfully say I was proud as a Canadian of the re-dedication of the memorial and how as a nation we truly remember and honour our heroes for giving their lives for us to enjoy freedom in a distant land.
    Our leaders have given us reason to be proud.
    Admitting to geting teary eyed over a ceremony thousands of miles away is not perhaps manly, but I confess to doing just that as that beautiful young Canadian girl from Winnpeg stood all alone on the monument playing the mournful Warrior’s Lament.
    ( Canada’s Beccy Cole?)
    I was truly proud of her as though she was my personal representative honouring those long ago lost.
    Thank you Stephen Harper and of course our media for your teaching Canadians more History in one day than Canadian schools have done in the past fifty years!
    Well done.
    Sadly six more Canadians have joined the ranks of those lost in the fight for right.
    My hope is that the Afghanis will begin to realize that Candians are paying with their lives on their behalf and join in the fight in a greater degree.
    And my last hope is “Rollover” Taliban Jack and Dion get behind the troops rather than turn tail and leave the Taliban to subjugate their women and girls.

  4. mary T:
    I don’t think the poll results can necessarily be taken at face value on their own. I think you have to look at all the recent polls and draw some conclustions.
    A few weeks ago several polls showed the Conservatives well out in the lead and in slim majority territory. Then the pundits all started talking about an impending election because Harper would HAVE to call one with those numbers. Then an SES poll comes out yesterday showing the Conservatives and Liberals much closer. But todays SES poll shows Canadians prefer Harper overwhelmingly as PM.
    What all of this tells me is that Canadians in general are happy with how things are going. And they realize that Harper is a “Prime Minister” in a sense that we haven’t seen in quite some time. Also, Canadians don’t want an election right now. We like how things are going, we like Stephen Harper and his government so why change? So every time it looks like Harper is in a position to call an election, the soft Conservative support flops back to the Liberals just to say, “No election today thank you.”
    That said, if an election were to happen, I think you’d see the Conservative numbers move to Stephen Harper’s personal numbers rather than the opposite.

  5. I’m not sure if this has been brought up yet. The link from the CBC is from March 30. But I just heard a bump for Rutherford’s show today where they’re going to talk about this report.
    But it seems that emissions from ethanol blended fuel is no better than those of pure gasoline.
    So don’t buy those Saskatchewan farms just yet in the hopes that you’re going to sell your crops to Exxon.
    http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2007/03/30/ethanol-emissions.html

  6. Mary T: Liberal, Tory, same old story.
    Vote Family Coalition Party of Ontario. 😀
    One or the other, it’s the same thing.

  7. Ontario consists of Toronto when it comes to electing the Liberals. They get the bulk of the seats in Toronto and environs. The place is rife with immigrants who have no history with us and our way of life.
    They have been fed lies from Liberals since they first set foot in the Country as they know it from the Liberal bastion which is Toronto, period.
    Westerners and rural Ontario people know about what is going on, where we came from, and the principles this country was built on.
    Dependent provinces in the East seem to head to Liberals as their security blanket. Liberals will coddle for votes rather than face up to fixing the need for dependency.
    This is not a politically correct statement, this truth hurts some delicate sensibilities.
    Danny Williams is an example of a thankless greedy
    leader. His province has been given the best deal ever in their history, they stand to reverse their dependency. Danny Boy doesn’t want to share, it’s his cake and he wants to eat it too.

  8. Liz J is correct. It really is the “immigrant vote”,although a substantial number of them are 3rd and 4th generation “Immigrants”. For example, my in-laws emigrated from Italy in the 1950’s. They, along with their children and grandchildren (my wife excluded)would never vote anything other than Liberal. I really don’t know why other than they just never consider another party as being credible. When I try to broach the subject of the Conservative party, they brush off the whole topic of politics as “all politicians are crooks.” I have a suspicion that because they are devout Catholics, they may be getting their cue from the parish priest.

  9. The leadership poll numbers from Weston’s article reinforces the thinking behind the strategies currently being employed by the two parties. The CPC obviously wants to make the ballot “question” all about leadership. For another example of that, we see the CPC war room with posters of Harper plastered all over the place. The LPC is countering with talk of their “dream team”. But lets fast forward to the fall session of Parliament (I don’t expect a Spring election, as more time is needed for Dion to further weaken the Liberals from inside. Plus we can furthere intimidate the Libs into spending from their war chest). There will be more empty chairs behind Dion, due first to the retired Liberal MPs, plus the lazy or over-worked ones who won’t/can’t show up. This will be the daily image for the public–weak leader Dion, nitpicking and whining, fewer and fewer loyal MPs behind him–hardly the picture of a party motivated to charge into battle. It’s these depressing images of a beaten Party which will hopefully discourage many Liberal supporters to either not help out in the campaign or not even bother voting. Harper and the CPC are very good at motivating the troops (donations being a good current indicator). The only rallying cry from Dion that I can see is the tired old “stop that scary Harper, don’t waste your vote on the NDP/Green/BLOC.” Time is on our side, which Harper can use to “cook” the Liberal beast !

  10. “You can observe a lot by watching.” [YB]…-
    Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
    BBC News ^ | Tuesday, 6 July, 2004 | Dr David Whitehouse
    Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
    Sunspots are plentiful nowadays [Not YB]
    A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years….-
    http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1814930/posts

  11. Deputy Liberal Leader Ignatieff Insults Queen Elizabeth at Vimy Ridge Memorial:
    David Akin of CTV thought he could stir up a nice little political controversy and give the Liberals a positive boost at the Vimy Ridge ceremonies yesterday.
    Bridging from the fact that PM Harper had mentioned Afghanistan during his speech on Easter Sunday, predicated by the fact that he was informing the attendees of the tragic deaths of 6 brave soldiers, Akin asked Prince Iggy the next day if it was “appropriate” to talk about the current military mission during ceremonies to honour one 90 years past.
    True to Liberal form to take shots at Conservatives, especially when Akin was opening the door so wide, Iggy expressed his dismay that bringing up Afghanistan at Vimy was entirely inappropriate.
    Was this said by Iggy BEFORE or AFTER the Queen of England lamented the Canadian soldiers deaths and linked the courage of our soldiers at Vimy to the current Afghanistan mission?
    For crass Liberal political opportunism Ignatieff trashed the Queen and inferred her comments were inappropriate. Note- PM Harper did not mention Afghanistan at the Vimy ceremonies. Only the Queen did.
    Iggy- You have insulted the Queen of England and we demand an apology from you.

  12. Suzanne: “Vote Family Coalition Party of Ontario. :D”
    Don’t count on my vote. I cannot imagine the parties we have now preforming so poorly that my vote would go to a “lobby group” whining for power.
    Even the Green party in Canada after several elections is just in the last few years actually putting forth a full platform showing that they are capable of governing.
    Until you come up with a better platform than: “put me in power so I can enact this one issue” (environment, family, marijuana, Christian values, animal rights), then all your really doing is trying to get a bit of press during an election period…. I’d rather vote for Dion and shoot myself in th foot then vote for some fringe lobby group.

  13. The government is scaling back funding for global warming research. The “science is settled” and we need to start taking action.
    John Baird is quoted in the article below as saying, “At some point, it’s sort of like the planet’s on fire, we’ve got to throw water on it. We don’t need to research it, we need to act.”
    I guess the science isn’t 100% settled though, because gw scientists are not happy about not getting the $250 million they asked for.
    http://www.canada.com/topics/news/cns_writers/story.html?id=eb013ce1-8bdd-4fcd-85bc-73cf9695c968&k=64486

  14. Did Iggy go to Vimy with PMSH or did he go on his own. Libs can’t find a candidate in a BC riding.
    I hope that when a majority conservative government is elected, that the AG will really do an audit of the immigration department, during the Trudeau years. If those facts ever become public, it will explain why so many 3rd world immigrants vote liberal. Ever wonder where these people got the money they had to have on entering Canada. Talk to retired immigration officers, who were sent to these countries to pre process applicants.

  15. Belisarius, I saw that article and I thought what a brilliant move by Tories. Defund the welfare scientists who are screaming that the world is ending and we must do something. Then take that money and pretend to actually do something. This could be good fun.
    What it actually exposes is that these scientists are not scientist at all but paid lobbyists who are producing a product for which there is demand. When they are no longer being paid to produce global warming hysteria they will have to find another cause to put bread on the table.

  16. In either tis morning’s Vancouver Sun or Province there was a small clip indicating that the Liberals couldn’t find a candidate in an Interior riding (not sure which). Seems that no one wanted to spend his/her money to get beaten badly (or so the theory goes).
    Mike in White Rock

  17. Actually, Lorraine, she is the Queen of Canada and was there in that capacity.
    Both the Queen and the French PM mentioned Afghanistan and made the link. Harper did not do so at this meeting; he had done so the day before, making the link that day.
    Ignatieff was criticizing for the sake of being opposed. Very petty. It was a perfect ceremony – including all speeches – and the young woman playing the Warrior’s Lament from the heights of the Memorial.
    Ratfuc – yes, it’s the immigrant vote, but this is from the 1950s. Canada has essentially had only one party for over a generation. And since the big cities are where the immigrants go – that means they are Liberal. Not because they consider the policies; they don’t. It’s about multiculturalism, which has been transformed into a mythic religious ideology, obscuring its diseased results.
    The Liberal multiculturalism ideology has only one purpose – getting the vote from the massive post war immigration. Why? Not because they believe in multiculturalism for the sake of the immigrants. No. The Liberals have only one belief and one agenda. Power.
    But, Harper is appealing to the working families regardless of ethnic, religious or other ‘origin’. His focus is that we are all Canadian – not hyphenated people and most certainly, not trapped within isolate ethnic identities that each compete with each other for funds and power.
    Multiculturalism is, for the immigrants, a disastrous policy. For the Liberals, it was part of their platform-to-power.

  18. Global warming debunked, sort of:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3869753.stm
    provides information about how the sun’s sunspot activity
    is the highest it has been in over 400 years. After the
    “Little Ice Age” of the late 1600’s, sunspot activity has
    steadily increased, Here’s a quote from the article:
    ” But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the
    Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years.”
    But, as usual, they have to appease the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) crowd, so he also adds:
    “Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant,
    yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.
    This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels.
    This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past,
    causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun’s latest attempt to warm the Earth. ”
    Uh-huh. So when we argue that we are NOT seeing the changes in temperature
    predicted by the AGW wingnuts, they claim it’s because there are “lagging effects” in the
    earth’s ecosystem. But if we tried to point out that when you apply an impulse to a system
    in the form of a suddenly raised input, the system generally overshoots at first, and then
    settles down after a few cycles at a new level, (as an electrical engineer, I know that this
    is common when you suddenly apply power to a circuit), we’re still “AGW deniers”. We
    can’t win!
    God knows I’d love to meet David Suzuki in person so I could cram the article down his
    sanctimonious little mouth.

  19. Mike in White Rock:
    The riding is currently held by the NDP. But to be fair, the incumbent Conservative retired and his replacement was booted out of the Party in the last election for having a criminal taint attached to him.
    I wonder if the Libs could recruit Derek Zeisman to run for them? After all they let the AdScam crooks back. The Liberal Party of Canada: We accept all crooks, big or small.
    From the Province:
    http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=0a08221b-3506-4b5f-87ac-139265099b09
    “The NDP and Conservatives have candidates in place for the B.C. Southern Interior riding, but the Liberals have failed to arouse any enthusiasm for their party’s nomination, a riding association spokeswoman admits.
    “We have approached people but we have not been able to find anyone interested,” said Rose Calderon.”

  20. Liberals can’t find Kootney candidate that runs from Kootney Lake to Manning Park. -“We have approached people but we have not been able to find anyone interested” said Rose Calderon. The conservatives and ndp have candidates in place. Story in Lethbridge Herald, page 2, from Trail BC,(cp).

  21. The Liberals have a very affirmative action criteria for candidates in those ridings they cannot win: (for PR purposes only – the candidate is disposable but useful for photo ops)
    The perfect Liberal candidate would be:
    – a First Nations disabled woman wearing a burka

  22. Why do voters in Ont hate their country so much?
    Because it’s not their country. It belongs to some self centred elites.
    I was on a bus tour in europe once and every couple was upset with all the shenanigans going on back home that ran against every value they held.
    Whether it was schools crime etc. Funny how that happens in democracies like Kanuckistan, Australia, UK, New Zealand,
    God bless the blogs,

  23. – a First Nations disabled woman wearing a burka
    … at least lesbian, possibly transgendered, and with a limp

  24. *
    Pikangikum back on the radar
    This place is apparently a near iron-age ghetto,
    with one of the world’s highest suicide rates.
    The people who live here have just stopped
    caring.
    This isn’t a problem you can solve by throwing
    up some infrastructure.
    It’s subsidising a culture of defeat.
    *

  25. Re: Belinda’s bake a better competitive pie vanity article in today’s National Post:
    I had to go hmmmmmmm? I wonder who Belinda hired to write this article.
    In all of the wordiness and throwing around of quite trite cliches (condensed: better education = better jobs = better workforce = better competitive pie. (Oooooohhhhhh – that must be DEEP dish pie)
    The fact that the author actually thought this well known premise was something profound leads me to think Belinda hired a recent business or economics grad or somebody equally without real world experience.
    It is like penning an article as some kind of new thought on, say, the sun will come up in the morning. If it does not we will have perpetual night.
    Embarassing shallowness. I am surprised Belinda would allow her byline on this kindergarten lesson in economics but then maybe her so called “business acumen” as “the head ” of Magna really was a token way for her Daddy to funnel $9 million per year in “salary” to his little girl and get the write offs..
    Can you imagine if this is Belinda’s depth of business acumen what would happen to any company, even daddy’s, if she was in a decision making role?

  26. Y2Kyoto oopsie
    Following are weather forecast highlights from Weather Trends International:
    LAST WEEK’s WEATHER TREND (1-7 APR): Temperatures plummeted as a strong Arctic cold front dove deep into the South late in the week. There were 100s of record low temperatures across the U.S. with the Southwest being the one exception. Hard freezes most likely did 10s of millions of dollars damage to trees and crops in the Southeast over the Easter weekend. Snowfall was also the most in at least 14 years with dozens of record snowfall totals from Texas to the Middle Atlantic and throughout the interior Northeast and Great Lakes. Even Dallas had a trace of snow which was the latest snowfall in 69 years.
    After 3 consecutive weeks of mild temperatures across the Corn Belt, last weeks temperatures were the coldest in 15 years. The same week in 1996 and 2002 were cold. Corn Belt moisture was not overpowering. However, with cold temperatures, evaporation was minimal so field firming was at a snail’s pace. The commodity markets are primed for instability and this past weeks weather can only be called unsettling.
    THIS WEEK (8-14 APR): Last year was record warm, this year record cold! April is currently tracking as the coldest April in 113 years ”
    3w.agweb.com/get_article.aspx?pageid=135336&src=gennews

  27. Barcs wrote:
    “I cannot imagine the parties we have now preforming so poorly that my vote would go to a “lobby group” whining for power.”
    Whining for power? How is going out and EARNING votes “whining” for power.
    “Until you come up with a better platform than: “put me in power so I can enact this one issue” (environment, family, marijuana, Christian values, animal rights), then all your really doing is trying to get a bit of press during an election period…. I’d rather vote for Dion and shoot myself in th foot then vote for some fringe lobby group.”
    The fact that you’d rather vote for Dion than another right-wing group says more about you than the FCP.
    Here are the FCP policies on a wide variety of issues.

  28. The *experts* at Volvo have compared 18 auto fuels and allow you to choose the 7 you think are lowest in co2 emissions.
    You select those 7 in the form of race cars and then watch the *contest*. Beer bets are only valid on the first run.
    Hint* Results are surprising. One has to find a farmer with a certain specialty in order to fuel up with a winner.
    volvocars.com/corporation/environment/Alternativefuels/
    AlternativeFuelsAndPowertrains.htm
    http://tinyurl.com/38m5gu
    There is no mention of any battery type. Volvo, like any big automaker would prefer not to consider the death of the Internal Combustion engine. A golden goose of profit.= TG

  29. *
    If I lost a child, under any circumstances, the last thing
    I would welcome is someone looking to make a buck
    off my misery.
    I’m sure the media can report this sad event without
    having to wrench a ten second sound-bite out of some
    grieving mother’s soul
    .
    *

  30. The problem with Ontario is the same problem with most large cities. The conservatives have left the cities. Small businessmen, Families, even the backbone manufacturing jobs that are left (trust me, private sector unions may talk left, but most unionists vote right) have all moved to suburbia and beyond. What is left in Toronto is students, academia, the CBC, and public sector workers in a happy little multicultural utopia. Vote conservative? Never goin’ to happen.

  31. Ahmadinejad wants 50,000 uranium centrifuges to bolster enriched uranium production for Iran’s ‘civilian’ nuclear program.
    India, for comparison, operates about 3,000 centrifuges, which individually can produce about 30 grams of weapons-grade uranium a year (and, presumably, more fuel-grade uranium, since it doesn’t have to be enriched anywhere near as much). And they are able to run six nuclear power plants and crank out 18 or so Agni missiles per year.
    So why does Iran — with a population barely 1/16th that of India — need over sixteen times as many centrifuges for a ‘civilian’ power generation program?

  32. Joe Molnar referred to her as “Canada’s Beccy Cole” – to my knowledge Beccy Cole was and still is Australian. But, I like her music and message and would adopt her into Canada in a minute.

  33. The Liberals are now claiming that THEY were the origin and initiators and driving force behind the ‘Quebec is a nation’ motion in the House of Commons.
    Fabrice Rivault is running for the Liberals in Quebec, and he is claiming that the ‘Quebec is a nation’ Motion is a Liberal motion – and that Harper was opposed.
    Note also that he is distorting the truth. He is saying that the motion was about ‘Quebec is a nation’. No. It was ‘the Quebecois are a nation within a united Canada’. The Quebecois are not a synonym for the territory of Quebec.
    The site is on National Newswatch
    http://www.rivault.ca/default_e.aspx?id=224

  34. How come the G&M has some article about the Queen of the North fuel spillage spoiling the shellfish?
    Why has the crew responsible for steering the ship not been charged a year after the fact?
    Why have the crew of the Sea Diamond been relieved of duty and charged by Greek authorities less than a week after that tragedy?
    Canadians are pussies…..

  35. Dion takes credit for the clarity act, so why not have liberals take credit for the quebecois nation idea. If they keep up this theft of ideas, maybe they will turn against suzuki/gore and come out saying GW is a scam. Since their source of stolen funds is gone, all they have left to steal are ideas.

  36. So Prince Iggy attended the Vimy memorial as the 2nd in Command of the divided Librano Party.
    If he could attend that magnificent commemoration of such a pivotal event in our history and come away with ANY CRITICISM OF ANY OF THE PEOPLE THERE, HE’S ONE SICK AND DESPICABLY STUNNED INDIVIDUAL.
    I saw the whole thing twice. The Queen, our Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of France gave amazing, thought provoking speeches. They were all sincere and appeared to be genuine, no sign of hypocrisy to be found.
    Never have I seen such a class act.

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