Speech from the Throne: Federal Election Time?

[Jdot]

I think that the Liberal party really is the "natural governing party" in this country. I think that most people feel most comfortable with the Liberals overall, as the party that can best represent not just their views, but a balanced approach to running the country.

There are always waves here and there where "the norm" just doesnt cut it anymore, and we look for some form of change. Mulroney's PC's were elected because the population got tired of a long period of Liberal governance under Trudeau. Turner just didnt have any chance. The same can be said for Martin. He came in at a time where people were getting itchy for some kind of change from the previous decade + of Liberal rule. The sponsorship scandal, and a unified right just added to the downfall of the Libs.

Right now, I feel as though the Liberal party needs to just sit back, focus on the longer term - 4 years from now. They need to get rid of Dion, who has proven to be ineffective (did they really think he would be a strong leader when they elected him??) and find someone who is going to be able to pull the party together, focus it on a broad range of issues (I disagree that they should focus on 1 or 2 main points) which are tried and true Liberal strongpoints. The Liberals need Harper and the Conservatives to go about doing what they are going to do, cause a bit of an uproar with the population, and then they can come back with another majority. For that they need the conservatives to win a majority and kind of screw up a bit.... if not screw up, just take the country in a direction that the average Canadian is uncomfortable with.

 

[unimaginative2]

Raise revenue for the government for what? I hear carbon tax bandied about, but as nothing more than a method to raise general revenue for the sake of general revenue. It's just another means for people (who support this tax) to feel as if they are doing something without actually having to do anything - except to pay money to government. Add to that, the more money you have, the more carbon tax you can pay, and you don't have to change anything about why you are paying more of this type of tax (pumping the dreaded plant food carbon dioxide).

Unimaginative, to what "anti-social" behaviour are you making reference to. Breathing produces carbon dioxide. Is that anti-social (halitosis excluded)? How is carbon dioxide anti-social? What does that even mean?

In all the defence of this tax as economically "less damaging" comes the question as to how it will be applied, and how extensive it could be used. I've not seen anything that suggests limits as to how such a tax could be applied, or how high it can be set at, so suggesting that it will be economically "less-damaging" is a bit of a premature judgement.

Hydrogen, I don't know how many times I can say that the money would of course go into general revenues, and would be used as a partial alternative to more economically damaging taxes like PIT, CIT, capital tax, etc.

Anti-social means detrimental to society. I assume you want to turn this into a debate about global warming, in which you do not believe as I recall, but I'm simply going based on the presently held general consensus that excessive carbon dioxide emissions are indeed a bad thing for society. In a market system, an increase in the cost of an emission will result in a reduction of those emissions. Therefore, it seems more desirable to tax something like carbon emissions, which most would agree are bad, rather than earning money, which most would consider a good thing.

Read the C.D. Howe report. It's quite recent and it's posted on their website. It has a pretty detailed examination. I think the Pembina Institute also has a pretty good analysis.

 

[Hydrogen]

Hydrogen, I don't know how many times I can say that the money would of course go into general revenues, and would be used as a partial alternative to more economically damaging taxes like PIT, CIT, capital tax, etc.

Anti-social means detrimental to society. I assume you want to turn this into a debate about global warming, in which you do not believe as I recall, but I'm simply going based on the presently held general consensus that excessive carbon dioxide emissions are indeed a bad thing for society. In a market system, an increase in the cost of an emission will result in a reduction of those emissions. Therefore, it seems more desirable to tax something like carbon emissions, which most would agree are bad, rather than earning money, which most would consider a good thing.

Read the C.D. Howe report. It's quite recent and it's posted on their website. It has a pretty detailed examination. I think the Pembina Institute also has a pretty good analysis.

Never presume to know how a yet-to-be introduced tax will be used, and never assume that it will replace any other existing tax.

As for wanting to turn this into a debate about global warming, no. I just wan't to know what you mean by anti-social behaviour. If a person drives to work, is that anti-social behaviour because they used a car instead of a bus? Is it anti-social behaviour to raise the heat a few degrees in one's own home? I think you are employing the notion of anti-social behaviour poorly, if not incorrectly. As for consensus, there is no consensus, because the so-called consensus is self-proclaimed by believers, and not based on actual measures of what the community of climatologists actually thinks. Besides, a consensus is still not a proof of direct attribution with respect to GHG's and a minor warming trend.

Try read something other than C. D. Howe, or Pembina. There are many alternatives to these points of view. And as for a tax on carbon (dioxide), you still have not shown how it will directly attack the actual problem you are so concerned about. You are merely offering up a taxation scheme, nothing more.

 

[Hydrogen]

Right now, I feel as though the Liberal party needs to just sit back, focus on the longer term - 4 years from now. They need to get rid of Dion, who has proven to be ineffective (did they really think he would be a strong leader when they elected him??) and find someone who is going to be able to pull the party together, focus it on a broad range of issues (I disagree that they should focus on 1 or 2 main points) which are tried and true Liberal strongpoints. The Liberals need Harper and the Conservatives to go about doing what they are going to do, cause a bit of an uproar with the population, and then they can come back with another majority. For that they need the conservatives to win a majority and kind of screw up a bit.... if not screw up, just take the country in a direction that the average Canadian is uncomfortable with.

I agree, the Liberal Party needs to regroup and explore what the party and its philosophy actually is. Right now, the Liberals appear to have very little cohesion, while the Conservatives (from the outside) appear to have their game plan in action. I would not be one bit surprised if they manage to win a majority. I would have to grudgingly say that they have earned it.

No party should ever focus on one or two points or issues. While they should also avoid a platform of a thousand items, it would be helpful if one could see an element of Liberal philosophy permeate their chosen issues of focus. The trouble for the Liberals is that they have actually become the party of the status quo (the dark side of the idea of being a natural governing party), while the Conservatives sing a mantra of action and belief for country, community and family. So yeah, the Conservatives are getting the attention of the people - not all of it good - but they have their attention. That's when the "screw-ups" start to get scutinized, too.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Nonsense. It's all Harper who rammed the extension to 2009 through Parliament

We were in no position to leave in 2007, even 2009 will be a stretch. War does not have a end-date. If no one is prepared to take our place, and the locals aren't ready, do you suggest we just leave the Afghan people?

I sometimes wonder if Canada's public of today was around in the early 1940s if they would have demanded our boys stop their involvement in WW2 after we lost the Royal Rifles of Canada and Winnipeg Grenadiers at Hong Kong in December 1941. Definitely, by the time of the Dieppe raid in August 1942, where we lost 950 dead, 2,340 captured or wounded, today's Canadian public would be calling for the PM's head. Let's put things into perspective, yes we've lost close to 70 soldiers since 2003, but by comparison to Canada's military past, this is hardly hard times.

 

[Hydrogen]

Here is an interesting perspective on the issue:


Surprising poll on an unexpected war
GORDON SMITH
Special to Globe and Mail Update
October 19, 2007 at 2:33 AM EDT

Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang's new book The Unexpected War brilliantly recounts how Canada became engaged in Afghanistan and particularly Kandahar. Unexpected indeed!

We, the government and the governed, had no idea what we were volunteering to do. Nonetheless, we committed ourselves, and Canadian lives have been lost. Former deputy prime minister John Manley has now been handed a herculean task: to advise what we should do next. He is ideally suited to the task. As The Globe's Jeffrey Simpson wrote this week, we have time to get it right.

Now we have the results of a carefully constructed survey of what Afghans are thinking, including specific results from Kandahar.

The results from the Environics poll, reported in today's Globe and Mail, will surprise many people. They should be read carefully. It turns out that the people we are trying to help know we are there. By and large, they like what we are doing. They feel progress is being made and clearly believe the international community should stay engaged. That's not to say we cannot do some things better.

One thing Mr. Manley doubtlessly already knows is that no member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is going to come to replace Canada. Most Europeans don't regard Afghanistan as their war. I was told that at a recent two-day meeting of senior European ambassadors, the subject of Afghanistan wasn't even mentioned. So forget turning over the replacement problem to NATO — that is not on.

Afghanistan has, however, become our war. We have raised expectations. We have lost Canadian lives. We have inadvertently killed innocent Afghans. We now "wear" Kandahar.

Maybe we went in blindly. Maybe it was a gross miscalculation. Maybe we should never have taken on responsibilities in Kandahar. But we did. We are very much there now, which is where Mr. Manley knows he has to start.

When they understand these facts, will Canadians want us to "declare victory" and walk away? I don't think so. Instead, I believe that the highly informative Environics poll (I was an unpaid adviser), the Stein-Lang book (which clarifies both the history and the current situation) and Mr. Manley's review of options (perhaps later in the day than would have been desirable) are going to produce a serious discussion of what to do now.

Look at the survey results on how the condition of women has improved — 73 per cent said Afghan women are better off than they were in 2002. Think about what will happen if the Taliban regain power. Reflect on the Taliban's demands for control of the south in a negotiated settlement.

Will Canada tell the people of Afghanistan, the women in Kandahar, that our turn is up? Best wishes, good luck? And thanks to the families of Canadians who have lost their lives?

That's not the Canada I know.

Gordon Smith, a former diplomat and deputy Foreign Affairs minister, is director of the University of Victoria's Centre for Global Studies. He is the author of "Canada in Afghanistan: Is it Working?" published by the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

 

[Observer Walt]

The above is interesting particularly because, as far as I can see, Afghanistan is the only major point on which Harper is seen to be seriously out of step with most Canadians. On other policy issues, he is either doing what the majority wants, or at worst, is not actually offending most people. (Yes I include the Kyoto accord, which I think everyone knows by now is not do-able, regardless of who might be in power.)

I don't think the Conservatives are any slam-dunk for a majority at the next election, whenever that may be. And I don't think we'll have an election during the next few months. But on the other hand, those who seem to think that all they have to do is sit back and wait a bit, and the Liberals will return to their "natural" position as the government, are seriously fooling themselves.

On Oct. 13, Ipsos-Reid reported that Conservative support has gone back up to 40%, with the Liberals at 28%. Even more interesting, IMO, 67% agree with the statement that "Canada is moving in the right direction". A pretty generic and wishy-washy statement, to be sure, but it's not what you would use as ammunition to say that we need a change of government.

The Liberals will be back in government at some time sooner or later. In the meantime, the voters said that the Liberals needed a time-out, and they should use it to develop new policy and explain it, develop a team with some depth to back their leader, and rebuild the party structure. They will deserve serious consideration again, once they have done these things.

 

[Admiral Beez]

I don't think the Conservatives are any slam-dunk for a majority at the next election, whenever that may be. And I don't think we'll have an election during the next few months. But on the other hand, those who seem to think that all they have to do is sit back and wait a bit, and the Liberals will return to their "natural" position as the government, are seriously fooling themselves.

I think Harper would be eaten alive if the Liberals had a good leader. No one likes Harper, and most hate his arrogance, but most centralist folk and those in Quebec adverse to the BQ have no option.

I can't help but think, had Chrétien stayed on to fight the 2004 election as leader, he would have kept Adscam in the backwoods and would have crushed Harper. Say what you like about Chrétien, but he knew how to fight and win.

 

[lordmandeep]

i think Chretien would powned Harper really.
You can't understand the guy, but he'll strangle YOU!!!

Chretien is a very clever politician really he was very smart at that game and he has been going at it at since 1963...

No question about that really. Would b a great contest to see, seasoned clever highly skilled politicians really go at it. Would be a real hardcore game of politics...



Chretien would have threw adscam to the backburner said Harper was a Bush lover and was a crazy hardcore conservative and that would be that.



However as much as I would like to see that happen, the Liberals need a new leader. I don't think a new leader will work, they need a old strong clever man like Harper really who is a big fighter.

 

[unimaginative2]

Unfortunately a lot of people love the idea of a politician who'll "strangle you". It doesn't matter what their policies might be, as long as they're some kind of tough guy.

Yes, if Chretien (or Martin) had swept Adscam under the rug, the Liberals would have unquestionably won a majority. The hilarious thing is that people use this fact to bash Martin. He essentially sacrificed his own career because he actually, genuinely believed in cleaning up government and he wanted to do the right thing.

 

[ShonTron]

Well I never had a problem with "Adscam" because as far as political scandals go, it was really small potatoes. The biggest scandal in Canadian political history was the Pacific Scandal. Then there were massive provincial-level scandals that destroyed the provincial Conservative Party in Saskatchewan, or the many scandals under Marice Duplessis, or the time that Rene Levesque was let off the hook for a fatal DWI, or when Alberta was sterlizing hundreds of women and men without consent, or BC NDP's Bingogate.

Mulroney was far, far worse - Tunagate, Airbus, or fire-sale selloffs of assets like Teleglobe. Yet he's now slowly rehabilitating his image.

That's what bothered me the most - the media was fixated on such a minor scandal, and for all his faults, Martin didn't deserve it (but oh-so-clumsily wore it by leaving it on the front burner), it was the trap that Chretien left for his nemesis.

We started to see Paul Martin being the politician I wanted toward the end of his term - standing up for social freedoms and looseing the strings, but he did pick a right-winger, Manley (who is now the tool of Harper) to run finance, and I really hate how the first act was cancelling the modest VIA improvements. Though I admit to some Schadenfreude in seeing Martin fail, because I didn't care for his politics (he was too fiscally right-wing for my tastes, and the way he treated anyone who wasn't a Martinite once gaining the power he so craved), but he left surprisingly gracefully and without bitterness, which improved my view somewhat. He made two fatal errors - by his vengeful purges of non-Martinites, he split the party further, and, as Unimaginative points out as well, of trying to appease every one (becoming Mr. Dithers). That's something that Harper is not trying to do - ie urban ridings in Toronto and Montreal and elsewhere in central Canada.

 

[unimaginative2]

I do think Adscam was bad, and one of the more serious Canadian political scandals. But it doesn't even remotely compare with what seems to have happened between Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber. Schreiber met him several times in a New York hotel room barely two months after he left office and handed him suitcases full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. That obviously stinks to high hell, and that kind of personal corruption at the highest political level is absolutely unprecedented in Canada. Every big scandal in Canadian history, from the Pacific Scandal to Adscam, has been related to campaign finance. That's obviously bad and deserves to be condemned, but it's certainly no comparison with the Prime Minister personally taking cash.

 

[Admiral Beez]

I do think Adscam was bad, and one of the more serious Canadian political scandals. But it doesn't even remotely compare with what seems to have happened between Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber. Schreiber met him several times in a New York hotel room barely two months after he left office and handed him suitcases full of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. That obviously stinks to high hell, and that kind of personal corruption at the highest political level is absolutely unprecedented in Canada. Every big scandal in Canadian history, from the Pacific Scandal to Adscam, has been related to campaign finance. That's obviously bad and deserves to be condemned, but it's certainly no comparison with the Prime Minister personally taking cash.

Oh, I dare you to post that under your own name. You'll be hit with a libel suit in short order. Unless you have proof, I wouldn't state opinion as facts.

 

[Observer Walt]

Agreed. The Airbus thing was looked at up and down, and no evidence of wrongdoing was found. As for cash given by Schreiber to Mulroney, it was after he left office and was back in private business. Schreiber now says he didn't get his money's worth, for whatever deal they were discussing, but that's before the courts and so far at least it looks like Mulroney is the more credible of the two.

I agree with the comments regarding Paul Martin. He is an honest man who could have swept Adscam under the carpet, and he did the honorable thing by insisting on the Gomery inquiry. It may well have cost him the election. Although it's questionable whether Martin would have been a good prime minister anyway, I think Canadians owe him, and I think history will treat him well.

 

[afransen]

So you can state that no subsidy has ever worked? Ever? You claim to have empirical evidence to this effect? No government stimulus ever affected, supported or enhanced economic change in a positive manner at any point? You go to a university, right? Think about that institution and the subsidies related to it. Then think of the downstream effects.

I said nothing of the sort. Of course subsidies work, it just tends to be very inefficient. Lots of money put in for not a lot of output. For certain things with very high positive externalities, of course they should be subsidized... university education included. It isn't even really a subsidy. University educated individuals pay more than enough additional tax over high school educated individuals to pay for the government's share of their education. But this is a digression. However, this argument applies only for those people who would not have undertaken an education if the government did not subsidize the cost. The people who would have done it with or without the subsidy are called freeloaders. I think you need to get over the connotation of the word--it's just terminology to describe the situation, and by no means makes a value judgment about those individuals.

Taxes for what? To do what with? I don't see any particular plan related to these newly desired taxes. A carbon tax does not directly lower emissions of carbon dioxide.

Wrong. Unless carbon emissions are perfectly inelastic wrt price (a hint: they're not), raising the cost will decrease consumption, all else equal.

Taxes are indirect in there action.

As are subsidies. What's your point?

If excessive, they are inflationary, and can have considerable negative effects on the economy.[/i]

Subsidies are also bad for the economy, BECAUSE SUBSIDIES ARE JUST TAXES SOMEWHERE ELSE. It's a zero sum game... every dollar in subsidies comes from taxes somewhere else in the economic system. Consumption taxes such as a carbon tax, tend to be very efficient (least bad for the economy).

Besides, what aspects of carbon dioxide (and we mean carbon dioxide, because carbon and carbon dioxide are a little different different) are being taken into account when considering tax? Cars? Or do we tax people for their intake of carbohydrates and exhilation of carbon dioxide? Do people get a carbon tax credit for having trees on their property and plants in their homes? Is the tax guaged to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air at any give time, or at any given location? Should this be adjusted in the autumn when the carbon dioxide levels rise diue to trees loosing their leaves? Should it be adjusted for the carbon dioxide domes found over cities, but not found fifty or kilometres out? Is this designed to give rise to a whole new class of carbon accountants?

Man, you throw up such ridiculous straw men. Alright. I think you know you're being disingenuous with your quibbling on carbon/carbon dioxide (it is accepted that within this context carbon refers to CO2). And no, breathing would not be taxed. Let me clear this up for you. We tax the release of formerly sequestered CO2 or equivalent. Sequestered means it was at one time taken out of the carbon cycle, usually as fossilised carbon deposits. In order to gain a carbon tax 'credit' you would have to remove carbon from the cycle in a fairly permanent way: fixing it in minerals, pumping it into former natural gas deposits, decomposing it into some inert carbon compound, etc. Fuels like ethanol, wood, etc. are exempt because they have a net zero effect on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's not complicated... let me know if you want me to go into more depth.