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Baudin posted:A fellow that had the unfortunate experience of having scandalous attack ads launched against him by his liberal opponent (which were memorable for having only things he posted about himself on his website as the "attack ad" facts). Yes let's give it up for Garnett Genuis, the new MP for Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan. I get to deal with that for 4 more loving years. Have any links to these ads? It's hard to believe that he achieved his dream of becoming an MP.
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Oct 27, 2015 04:44
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Bill Tieleman at the Tyee has a good analysis of the NDP's failure. In particular, he is absolutely right to contextualize this election as part of a greater, unsuccessful strategy:http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/10/27/NDP-Was-Not-Ready/ posted:First, the federal NDP's 2015 loss and the failed campaign strategy are hardly unique. Take a look at the depressing BC NDP campaign of 2013, when the BC Liberals snatched away what many assumed was a guaranteed victory for the provincial New Dems. I'm perhaps not as eager as some others to see Mulcair go (though I agree that whatever happens, it needs to be a democratic decision), but the party's staffing, strategies, and organization need a complete overhaul.
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Oct 28, 2015 23:38
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Helsing posted:This seems more like an indictment of the Canadian political establishment generally. The NDP was bad on Israel under Layton and seemingly indistinguishable from any other party under Mulcair. Last election we let a homophone run under the party banner while kicking out people who had at some point in the past made critical comments about Israel. Those awful homophones. 
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Feb 18, 2016 18:59
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The list of cuts and 'efficiencies' made in the 2012 budget has been released. Some real doozies in it. http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/ip-pi/trans/sor-esf-eng.asp?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=news&utm_term=wire&utm_content=release&utm_campaign=soar
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Feb 19, 2016 18:13
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Franks Happy Place posted:Colby Cosh is mostly a discount bin Mark Steyn, but god drat is he right in this one. And way better than Black's latest piece. Ugh.
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Mar 4, 2016 22:15
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The statistical beast is no longer lean and mean, it's hungry and pissed. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/shared-services-behind-tech-issues-plaguing-statscan-chief-statistician/article30985153/ posted:One memo from Daniela Ravindra, director-general of industry statistics , said there is a “very real risk” that this year the agency will hit a bottleneck in processing capacity, which will force the delay of “mission critical” releases. “Having to delay their release would be unprecedented and will impact the ability of key users, (e.g. Bank of Canada, Department of Finance, commercial banks, etc.) of making timely decisions, translating into considerable embarrassment to the government of Canada.”
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Jul 20, 2016 05:01
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So Donald Trump said "I would pull out of NAFTA in a split second". I really, really hope that our government has better contingency plans than the British government did.
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Jul 21, 2016 05:39
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Drunk Canuck posted:You realize this isn't a bad thing for us, right? If Trump is elected and dissolves NAFTA, there would be huge economic repercussions which the government should prepare for. While I'm not sure what I think of NAFTA overall, if the government doesn't plan out a potential response the consequences could be catastrophic for Canada. What's going to happen to all the cross-border trade? As well, the potential end of NATO is really significant. How is the government going to enforce our interests and sovereignty in the North if America declines to uphold its obligations?
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Jul 21, 2016 17:10
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ocrumsprug posted:I imagine that some day Canadians will realize that the POTUS doesn't make or ratify treaties. If Trump and the executive arm of the American government decline to uphold treaty obligations and Congress declines to hold the executive to account, what's the difference?
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Jul 21, 2016 17:46
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vyelkin posted:Trump is fighting a poorly organized uphill battle against a very well-oiled political machine that will feature Clinton's chief rival for the nomination and a popular incumbent president both campaigning hard for her. I agree it's unlikely that Trump will win, I just would feel much more comfortable if some moderately bright mid-level bureaucrats are working on some contingency plans now. I mean, the absolutely worst thing that could come from creating plans is that some government workers did some useful training. But if Trump is elected, having something already down on paper would make a big difference for the government's response.
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Jul 22, 2016 16:08
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Monaghan posted:lol I read the cbc article on the scc changes and the first loving comment is "why does the judge have to be bilingual" You have a problem with translation for the SCC?
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Aug 2, 2016 19:00
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OSI bean dip posted:God forbid that someone who faces a Supreme Court judge that doesn't understand one of the official languages and cannot make their case to them clearly. Court translators are really good at their craft. Have there been any problems with the current system? I'd rather have an argument or testimony be correctly translated by a professional than have it be slightly misunderstood by a mostly-bilingual judge. Edit: Requiring bilingualism eliminates a large pool of qualified lawyers and judges. I'd also much rather have a really good unilingual judge than a moderately good bilingual one. Health Services fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 19:29
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OSI bean dip posted:You are woefully ignorant of the nuances of things when it comes to translation. I take that you only know English? Translation is really a best effort sort of thing. A lot of stuff really does not translate well from English to French and vice-versa. Haha, well, I certainly plead guilty to being a woefully ignorant anglo. I've found a couple links to further discussion of the issue (http://www.capitaldocumentation.ca/documents/SCC.pdf, http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/cei-03-e.htm), and I have to say that there are some good arguments presented there and in this thread that are beginning to change my mind. In particular, the argument that English is already a de-facto requirement and that there haven't been any non-English speaking SCC justices is rather strong. You and Kenny Logins also have made some good points that simultaneous translation is not as effective as I thought and is also considered a second-best solution in international arbitration. I'm still concerned about the effect that a bilingual requirement would have on judges from Western regions though. Maybe the whole thing could be solved by having an official patois.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:02
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https://twitter.com/gregobr/status/781890831770906624 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/781891813045141504 Also, the CBC is an 'uber-predator' and the "biggest single obstacle to there being a vibrant and innovative marketplace of ideas in the media space", according to the publisher of iPolitics. What? No, competing on quality would never work.
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Sep 30, 2016 18:09
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The PBO created a really cool tool at https://www.readyreckoner.ca to calculate the impact that changes taxes would have on the federal budget. It will create a neat little report for you. I increased corporate taxes and the GST, lowered taxes and raised exemptions for lower-income earners, and increased taxes on higher-income earners and increased annual revenue by $8b! How is this hard, Canada? We handled the GST at 7% just fine.
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Nov 21, 2016 17:21
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Yes, consumption taxes are regressive, but there are simple ways of offsetting that through rebates. Why not just raise the rebate for the GST for people making below a certain amount (like you can do in that calculator)? Raising consumption taxes discourages consumption, which is environmentally beneficial.
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Nov 21, 2016 18:02
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cowofwar posted:gently caress rebates and gently caress tax credits. Those are even more regressive because when you look at who uses that poo poo it's all upper class people because poor people often don't do their taxes, don't know what's available and don't have time to budget and seek out free money. Meanwhile rich people plan their lives around every single government provided source of free money. drat sure they are collecting every rebate and credit they can find. That seems to be a question of implementation. Making GST rebates automatic could solve the issues you discussed. Just because a tool isn't currently working in the direction you want doesn't mean it should be scrapped and thrown out. But in general yes, the proliferation of boutique tax credits and rebates under the previous government was harmful and a bad direction.
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Nov 21, 2016 18:16
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THC posted:People complain that the NDP platform isn't green enough, but rather than join the NDP and/or push for the changes they want, they instead throw in with a party whose supreme-leader-for-life arbitrarily disregards the overwhelming democratic will of its membership and disempowers anyone who disagrees. This. People complain that their union is useless, that their community association is full of NIMBYs, that their favourite political party doesn't represent their views, but refuse to participate or advocate for changes. Fundamentally, institutions are the people that are in it.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:18
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TheKingofSprings posted:Is Toronto really some magical bastion against native racism? Most major cities in the west have a higher proportion of FN people than does Toronto. With more visibility comes more racism.
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Dec 2, 2016 16:08
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cowofwar posted:I don't understand why the polling company pre-polled and clustered the results in to those five categories. Sure, do that analysis with the final data set but why do a tiny rear end sampling to identify n clusters and then do a big poll to see how the data maps on to those clusters? That's bad methodology, I'm certain the number of significant clusters would be way higher than five in the final set. It's basically a summary of the problem with the current system: if I polled ten Canadians based on the data I might conclude that only LPC and CPC exist and the rest are weird outliers, so then I poll everyone else, push it through my model and find that Canadians are 55% LPC and 45% CPC. See the problem? There's no one 'true' cluster analysis on a given set of questions. They probably could have created four, or six, clusters and had perfectly respectable results. You can determine an suitable number of clusters by making a scree plot of the sum-of-squared-errors of a different number of clusters. A dataset of 3000 responses (which is what they trained the clusters on, and is hardly a 'tiny rear end' sample) is more than large enough to perform a cluster analysis, and the number of clusters is independent of the size of a data set. They 'pre-polled' because they wanted a representative sample of Canadians. Likely the final report will analyze the public survey and the representative survey separately. PCA, or principle component analysis, is a tool to transform and reduce a set of variables into a smaller set of uncorrelated variables, and is distinct from cluster analyses, which determines similarities between cases, not variables. I'm not going to defend the question set, but the client for this survey likely wanted the study done a very particular way and gave them specific research objectives, and it's hardly fair to blame the outcome entirely on Vox Pop Labs. Given the set of questions the cluster analysis likely has reasonable validity. The issue is more the particular research objectives, how the particular set of questions was determined, and the very small-minded approach to considering the space of potential outcomes. 'Engagement'. Ugh.
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Dec 6, 2016 03:28
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Jimbozig posted:"Cooperators are, as a whole, the most interested of any archetype in taking action to increase the diversity of representation in Parliament. They are more likely to want Members of Parliament to better reflect Canada’s diverse population. " Vox Pop has done a lot of similar things in the past. They had one a few years ago about Toronto municipal politics that was very well received in this thread, and it used a similar methodology, including slotting respondents into clusters. The problem is that people (reasonably!) want to express their views on very important issues like this, and not be forced into a stupid vote compass designed by a poli sci phd with a hard-on for stupid vote compasses.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:22
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vyelkin posted:Yeah and I got "Innovator - you're a huge fan of online voting and lowering the voting age and mandatory voting!" despite saying I was steadfastly opposed to all of those things. The whole quiz is total bullshit. Here's how they designed the engagement quiz: http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-making-of-mydemocracy-ca-the-liberals-electoral-reform-survey/ posted:Once we had the parameters of the survey, we worked with an advisory panel of prominent scholars in areas such as research design, survey methodology and electoral politics. We developed a survey that drew from the existing literature on electoral reform in Canada and tried to identify various values that structure that discussion. We then built a very large survey with a number of questions—many more questions that you see included in MyDemocracy.ca—and field-tested those questions to random panels of Canadians to ensure that we were controlling for biased survey design or any other deficiencies. Notice that their methodology doesn't include the step 'talk to Canadians to find out what they care about'. Instead, it's an expert-driven process that didn't involve 'consulting' or 'engaging' Canadians at all.
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Dec 6, 2016 17:29
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sitchensis posted:It's time to clock out now. I quickly finish my last task within the three micro-second limit allotted to me by my Workr App. It pings softly, registering my labour, and gives me a total earned for the day. It's not much. Barely enough to cover my AirBnB for the night. Maybe I'll get a better gig tomorrow. I am woken by the sound of the daily meal kit falling through the mail slot onto the floor. My back hurts from sleeping on the couch, the recent changes to optimize the AirBnB experience seem to have led to fewer and fewer private rooms being available. I open the rations and grimace. Today's chef-inspired recipe doesn't include the needed quinoa, but I'll need to find some so today's roommates don't give me a poor review. It needs twenty minutes heating time too, and I'm not sure I can afford to rent that much power today. My phone needs charging too. I wait in line with everybody else at the farmer's market. There wasn't much quinoa today, but maybe the roommates won't notice. Peter Mansbridge's face is on the market's telescreen again, reading another newscast. My phone vibrates. "Do you agree that young Canadians' CPP should be donated to retirees?" Strongly Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly Disagree
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Dec 10, 2016 00:00
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Good story from the Star on how the lives of cyclists and pedestrians aren't valued by the legal system."David Rider/Toronto Star posted:While there is sometimes anger at the drivers, it’s Ontario laws that dictate penalties. Brown believes car bias is baked into our laws, into how police investigate and question drivers, and finally into drivers’ sentencing at court. I've gotten a lot more militant about this issue over the past couple years especially after a couple close calls this summer and then attending a town hall meeting in Ottawa about the Elgin Street redesign where some local businesses just bitched the whole time about the possibility of losing a few dozen on-street parking spots. Frankly, where possible, there should be a War on Cars. Limit speeds. Reduce the amount of dedicated car lanes and widen sidewalks and bike lanes. Move a significant amount of resources and funding away from subsidizing autos to alternative forms of transportation. Make it more difficult to drive and much harder to be licensed. Make careless driving have real consequences and not a lovely one month driving ban for using a giant machine to crush a living human being to death. Anyways, I suppose that's not something most of the ~urban elites~ here disagree with but it's a Good Article that's supported by lots of well organized evidence.
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Dec 13, 2016 20:35
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It's not exactly news that the deeply reactionary RCMP security branch compiled dossiers on hundreds of thousands of Canadians during the Cold War, but having proof that wiretaps were authorized by the Privy Council is surprising and extended for decades beyond the nominal reason for surveillance is significant."Federal cabinet secretly approved Cold War wiretaps on anyone deemed 'subversive,' historian finds posted:A Canadian historian has found top secret documents from the dawn of the Cold War that show the federal government secretly approved an RCMP surveillance program to wiretap suspected spies, communist sympathizers and others deemed "disloyal" or "subversive." Worth putting into the context of recent reporting by Vice and Justin Ling about the push by current security agencies to erode privacy protections. "Justin Ling posted:A Canadian federal court dropped a bombshell this week when it revealed that intelligence services have been collecting and storing the metadata of Canadians not suspected of committing any crimes. "Justin Ling posted:As the Trudeau government contemplates new powers for the federal police force, the documents call for the RCMP to push for “the creation of a new public narrative around why police need judicially authorized and timely access to online information.” One of the things has stuck with me from reading some about the history of the Canadian security services is that they have generally had very limited, dim, and frankly intellectually uncurious outlook on what actually constitutes a security threat. They spent a lot of effort monitoring what they considered 'subversives', mostly First Nations groups, people advocating for gay rights, students that joined socialist clubs, academics, environmentalists, and what remained of the Communists after the 1950s. But they basically had to be hit over the head by Igor Gouzenko to recognize the reality of Soviet espionage, and I suspect that's hardly changed in recent years--certainly, the professional class that staffs the security services has more formal education nowadays--as they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince mentally ill people to commit crimes, move resources away from investigating organized crime, and don't seem to have any success or any will to fight money laundering. It doesn't seem like there's much in the way of efforts to deal with espionage from China, but I'd be happy to read reports contradicting that. But when it comes to First Nations groups standing up for their rights, the RCMP will be right there to stop them! Maybe instead of taking away Canadians' rights, CSIS, CSEC, RCMP, and FINTRAC should stop being poo poo at their jobs.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:53
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THC posted:It makes a lot more sense when you realize that their first job is to ensure the security the Canadian colonial project, which is the theft of land from the indigenous peoples and the exploitation of natural resources therein for Canada's powerful clients - Britain, the USA, and now China. The safety of the public is a secondary concern. Oh yeah, but even considered within that context, it's often counterproductive and ineffective and the people involved are third raters. "Glen A. Jones' Review of Spying 101: The RCMP's Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997 posted:With the professionalization of the RCMP, the situation changed, especially as the level of formal education among officers increased. In fact, many officers became part-time university students and, occasionally, informants who would write reports based on their observations of "radical" activities on-campus. This new generation had a much greater understanding of the university context, but reports continued to focus on over-stated threats involving misguided assumptions. In many respects, this is a story of a bumbling, ballooning bureaucracy where tremendous energy is devoted to justifying the importance of devoting tremendous energy to monitoring the activities of faculty and students. It is the story of reports based on innuendo and questionable evidence being sent to a central office with limited capacity to synthesize and organize the mammoth documentation that was submitted. At times, I found myself reading the book as a multi-layered game involving Hewitt's masterful sleuthing and analysis of the rule-bending and exaggerated narratives of a bureaucratic, frequently paranoid Security Service.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:28
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Dreylad posted:The early files where the RCMP tries to figure out what communism is (bad) and capitalism is (good) in order to explain to their security agents what they're looking for is kinda hilarious reading it now, but you didn't need a high school degree to join the RCMP until the 1970s. The immediate Royal Commission following the Gouzenko Affair, the Kellock-Tascherau Comission resulted in 13 or so people held without being charged or access to counsel for weeks. On the upside, it mobilized civil rights activists and began the slow march towards the Charter. The Herbert Norman affair was utterly shameful. It feels that the same bureaucratic mistakes are being repeated over and over again. So much resources and effort is being expended on systemic surveillance, with roughly zero useful analysis being done afterward. Even on its own terms, it's a failure. They are the drunk looking for lost keys under a lamppost because that's the sort of visible, measurable effort that gets a promotion.
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Dec 16, 2016 01:04
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Helsing posted:As for the UFCW we talked about them around the time Hassan Yussuf beat Ken Georgetti on a platform calling for a slightly more militant approach, and some of the tepid movements by labour toward embracing social movement unionism have been encouraging, but frankly I've found that most of the posts I make about internal union affairs are just lost in the white noise of this thread. People are at least somewhat willing to talk about the NDP or what I sometimes call the campus left, so I tend to discuss those topics more. I used to try and make more effort posts on the general state of left-wing institutions but frankly I got tired of typing up long screeds that nobody else seemed particularly interested in reading. At least with the NDP I usually get some responses, often unfriendly ones from people like Jordan7hm or Pinterest Mom, and that at least allows me to think about my own opinions in a new light or evaluate how other people are interpreting my arguments and ideas. So I guess the somewhat selfish answer is I tend to talk about the issues upon which I think I'm most likely to get feedback, because that way I feel like I'm actually getting something useful out of the discussion. I've always really enjoyed your posts about union politics and found them quite insightful, but have limited experience myself, so have been reticent about commenting on them. Hope you'll keep them coming from time to time, as it's an important area that's not really well discussed otherwise.
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Dec 25, 2016 05:50
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My MP's voicemail was full, but I sent an email to both her and the PM, and will call in the morning. What an utterly cynical decision. No wonder Coyne is defending it on Twitter.
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Feb 1, 2017 23:53
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So given the calls with Australia (here), not to mention Mexico (here), what are the odds that the Trump call with Trudeau was a total disaster? It looks like Canada has two paths to go on with regard to foreign policy, we can have closer relations with the United States, or we can increase multilateral cooperation with other Latin and South American states, and the rest of the world. Given that the US has shown itself to be an unreliable partner, I think the best course would be the second. Tie the giant down with a thousand threads.
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Feb 2, 2017 03:08
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Bob White passed away. If you haven't seen it, this is a really good documentary about the CAW's split from the UAW.
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Feb 21, 2017 04:43
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Looks like it's an unreasonable burden now to expect drivers to avoid slaughtering pedestrians and cyclists. Ridiculous.
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Nov 22, 2017 16:30
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Agreed. The correct response here is that institutions need to step up their game. It's dispiriting and corrosive when mediocrity is accepted as the only way it can be.
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Dec 7, 2017 05:48
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DariusLikewise posted:What is wrong with Saskatchewan Interesting. Another way of looking at that is that across the country, only 30% of Canadians approve of their provincial political leadership.
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Mar 21, 2018 16:30
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DynamicSloth posted:I can't find any specifics on how EKOS purports to break down Ontario into 4 distinct classes (each with a significant sample size) but it has to be garbage. Respondents self-identify their class in a regular survey question. From what I remember, the proportion identifying as upper class is usually pretty small, in about the 1%-2% range. Edit: A public report released in 2017 by Ekos has 4% of respondents identifying as upper class. Health Services fucked around with this message at 15:32 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 15:18
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MMM Whatchya Say posted:I had a few NDP supporters tell me today that they voted liberal to stop Doug... except they’re not in a riding the liberals can win I'm always amazed at how many people try to vote 'strategically' in an environment with close to zero information as opposed to voting their conscience.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:05
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If you vote your conscience you may not get the result you hoped for but you'll never feel stupid.
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Jun 8, 2018 02:08
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At least the polls were right on
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Jun 8, 2018 02:28
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Hand Knit posted:imo the key for the NDP now is to be very active with positive proposals, and making themselves significant in the ridings they won. Don't let people forget about dental coverage. don't make the mistake of 2011 and just assume that you'll become the not-tory default and attrition into power This will absolutely be the case, and as in 2015, the party decides on a direction immediately: MMM Whatchya Say posted:Hey guys I know the mood in general is low, but I’m here at the NDP convention and we’re feeling good about the wins we did get. We’ve had a lot of growth in the party and there is a sense that even though we didn’t achieve everything we could have. We have roots to grow from in the future
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Jun 8, 2018 04:10
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enki42 posted:At the end of the day, the problem is precisely that Doug Ford isn't respecting the idea of good government or the reasons that the Charter is in place. No one gives enough of a poo poo about the number of seats in Toronto to make this big a fuss. If the specific problem is abusing the constitution, instead of abusing the constitution being a means to some other horrible end, then responding by abusing the constitution worse is nonsensical. I just don't understand how it's an abuse of the constitution to protect and entrench democratic rights and processes at the municipal level. Not loving with ongoing elections is something that at the very least should be part of our unwritten constitution. By acting to protect democratic processes, the norms are strengthened, not abandoned.
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Sep 12, 2018 17:27
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