Sometimes, people bring heart-ache on themselves:
Cabinet borrowed more than a half-trillion dollars in 120 days, according to the Department of Finance. No date has been fixed for tabling of a 2020 federal budget: “There will need to be a sharp turn; temporary measures will have to be temporary.”
**
The Trudeau government gave $20 million to a venture capital investment company that the Liberal Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault advised.
Canadians must realise that they are economic engines for a plutocracy and nothing more.
They can easily be replaced.
(Cue anti-Americanism in five, four ...):
Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner assured she quarantined for the mandatory 14 days upon returning from the United States, where she was based for a significant part of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the latest meeting of the federal COVID-19 parliamentary committee on Wednesday, many people on social media were surprised to see Rempel Garner sitting in a seat in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
That’s because in April, the Toronto Star reported that Rempel Garner was working remotely from Oklahoma, U.S., since the beginning of the pandemic. At the time, she said the travel was due to an “unexpected and urgent private personal matter”.
Oklahoma is where her husband and stepchildren live.
Since then, there had been no indication that the Conservative MP had returned to Canada … until her appearance in the House.
So far in 2020, the prime minister has logged 48 personal days, while in 2019 he took a startling 91 days off or nearly 25% of the year.
Meanwhile, out of the 225 days that have passed since January 1, 2020, Trudeau has spent over 21% of them not at his desk.
But only a Trudeau can be a lazy @$$hole and still get paid for it.
Why should he still get paid? I don't know.
Also:
During one of his many “interactions” with his local Safeway clerks, did Mr. Davis ever inquire where they lived? Unless they happened to be independently wealthy and grocery-store-clerking as an amusing hobby, it was almost certainly not within 30 miles of the area where he himself presumably lives and does his shopping. (I have no idea where Mr. Davis currently resides, but his official bio lists his birthplace as West Vancouver, a wealthy suburb whose average single-family home price was nearly $4 million in 2017.) It is literally, physically impossible to live in metro Vancouver on a minimum-wage job — yes, even with unions! Of course, 70% of British Columbia’s workers don’t benefit from union protections, and they are in even worse shape. While Vancouver’s living wage — the salary required to meet the basic needs of a family of four — is $19.50 an hour plus benefits (actually a drop from last year), the minimum wage lags far behind at $13.85 an hour. “The checkout person may not share your level of affluence,” but if you’ve been paying the tiniest shred of attention to the people around you, Mr. Davis, then you know that they know that you know that they are barely surviving. By the time I left the city last year, storefront after storefront in my own neighborhood — the comparatively more “affordable” area near Commercial Drive — was shuttered due to labor shortages. Workers simply couldn’t afford to live in the city on the wages paid by a typical retail job.
Canadians are better than the Americans, though, because Americans.
The argument for supporting conservative-in-name candidates is that they have a better chance of being elected than ones whose focus is social (yet one could argue also fiscal given that many social issues have a fiscal element to them). That is not often the case but when a conservative-in-name only candidate is elected, he ends up being a disappointment that can still rely on the support of people who insist on performing the same experiment again but with different results:
In 2017, Brad Trost, a favourite among social conservatives, dropped off the ballot after the 11th round of voting. That outcome has commonly been explained as most of Trost’s support shifting to Scheer, which propelled the latter to clinch the leadership. But the numbers tell a different story.
After the 11th round, Trost’s votes were redistributed. Scheer was then trailing Maxime Bernier. Turns out that 40 per cent of Trost supporters simply fell off the ballot — because they defected rather than rank another contestant. Red Tories did likewise in the final round of voting: 25 per cent of O’Toole supporters did not rank either Scheer or Bernier on their ballots.
As ballots dropped, the total number counted per round decreased. That increased Scheer’s share of the vote artificially in key ridings. Contrary to popular belief, he did not actually receive the majority of next-choice support from any candidate who dropped off the ballot.
Expect similar voting behaviour from social conservatives this time around. MacKay is likely to lead after the first round, shy of the threshold of 50 per cent needed to win outright. Once votes for Sloan and Lewis are redistributed after the first and second rounds, the number of votes counted will decrease as uncompromising social conservatives decide not to rank either O’Toole or MacKay.
If defections repeat as they did in 2017, the effect will be that MacKay’s support will increase during each round of voting — without having to capture the second or third choices from social conservatives. That is, MacKay does not need the support of social conservatives to win, provided his share of the vote is sufficiently high in those ridings where social conservative votes drop off.
A vote for McKay simply assures more Liberal policies under a different banner.
This is why there should be more independent candidates. The party system has created tribes to which people are loyal and will vote accordingly. Only individuals can act as representatives of voters' wishes.
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