Well Canada, it looks pretty hopeless

[saxitoxin]

The party that ruined Canada for 69 of the 100 years of the last century is now back to ruin it some more.

So you're saying the Liberals are gonna 69 Canada again?

[notyou2]

Good riddance to the party that did more damage to Canada than all other governments combined. It will take years to undo the damage and some can never been undone, such as the sale of the wheat board to the Saudis

[DaGip]

This, and the Border...stopping American tourists from spending their money in Canada because they got one little teeny tiny D.U.I. It just doesn't make any sense.

[Dukasaur]

The party that ruined Canada for 69 of the 100 years of the last century is now back to ruin it some more. Do you like endless vistas of cookie cutter houses? Thank the liberals. Do you like scads of public and private debt? Thank the liberals. Do you like the Leafs not winning? Thank the liberals. Basically, f*ck this country and everyone who voted for cocksmoking Trudeau who was born a millionaire and yet bashes those of us who scraped up the ladder from the bottom.

If you voted for them, you are clearly saying that you think hard work is irresponsible and we should just hang around bumming change.

Canada was built on subsistence farming, fishing and hunting and all of these things The Liberals have worked diligently to stamp out. Immigrants who don't go camping aren't Canadian and that includes all the fucking liberal voter base.

The Conservative drive to maximize pollution by oil companies has done more to stamp out farming, fishing, and hunting than anything the Liberals might have done.

Weren't you the one pissed off not too long ago about how they stripped away Canadian's traditional right to use navigable waterways?

Deliberately tanking the Canadian dollar in a desperate attempt to prop up oil exports represents the greatest transfer of wealth in Canadian history. The 99.9 % of Canadians who don't own shares in Suncor have had 30% of their net worth stripped away to prop up the unearned profits of the 0.1% who do.

Deliberately destroying the records of environmental research stations is something that you, as a scientist, should be outraged about.

There's nothing good about Harper's criminal gang. Except that they're going to go back to Edmonton now and leave screw each other in their inbred Evangelical communities.

[riskllama]

Harper's from Calgary, Duk...
but yeah, Trudeau...

[riskllama]

@ DaGip : same bullshit applies to your border agents. more so, probably...
plus, you shouldn't drink and drive, u ass.

[saxitoxin]

Canada was built on subsistence farming, fishing and hunting and all of these things The Liberals have worked diligently to stamp out. Immigrants who don't go camping aren't Canadian and that includes all the fucking liberal voter base.

Of all the party leaders, Trudeau had the best Alberta Campaign Costume this year. Mulcair looked like one of the Village People.

[khazalid]

basically, anything that offends DY is a massive vote winner.

[mrswdk]

I think I finally understand DY's posts.

[DaGip]

@ DaGip : same bullshit applies to your border agents. more so, probably...
plus, you shouldn't drink and drive, u ass.

Bah. I've never been pulled in by the American side, it's always been on the Canadian side...almost every single time I've been up there. And I don't drink and drive, but still doesn't mean I need to be pulled in every time I try to cross the border. Nowadays, we shouldn't even have borders; but I must say that Canada has the better looking female officers (at least between Pembina, ND and Winnipeg). However, almost every border agent that is a male looks like a lumberjack or a hitchhiker that hasn't shaved for a week.

[Dukasaur]

The party that ruined Canada for 69 of the 100 years of the last century is now back to ruin it some more. Do you like endless vistas of cookie cutter houses? Thank the liberals. Do you like scads of public and private debt? Thank the liberals. Do you like the Leafs not winning? Thank the liberals. Basically, f*ck this country and everyone who voted for cocksmoking Trudeau who was born a millionaire and yet bashes those of us who scraped up the ladder from the bottom.

If you voted for them, you are clearly saying that you think hard work is irresponsible and we should just hang around bumming change.

Canada was built on subsistence farming, fishing and hunting and all of these things The Liberals have worked diligently to stamp out. Immigrants who don't go camping aren't Canadian and that includes all the fucking liberal voter base.

The Conservative drive to maximize pollution by oil companies has done more to stamp out farming, fishing, and hunting than anything the Liberals might have done.

Weren't you the one pissed off not too long ago about how they stripped away Canadian's traditional right to use navigable waterways?

Deliberately tanking the Canadian dollar in a desperate attempt to prop up oil exports represents the greatest transfer of wealth in Canadian history. The 99.9 % of Canadians who don't own shares in Suncor have had 30% of their net worth stripped away to prop up the unearned profits of the 0.1% who do.

Deliberately destroying the records of environmental research stations is something that you, as a scientist, should be outraged about.

There's nothing good about Harper's criminal gang. Except that they're going to go back to Edmonton now and leave screw each other in their inbred Evangelical communities.

Strip mining destroys a region for 100 years and then creates prime wilderness. The Chernobyl fallout zone is the largest greenspace in Europe.

Nothing ever undoes the damage suburbs cause.

Yes, losing the right to canoe (went away with the navigable waters protection act) sucks, but all in all, things have been good.

Good riddance to the party that did more damage to Canada than all other governments combined. It will take years to undo the damage and some can never been undone, such as the sale of the wheat board to the Saudis

Harper is a charter member of the Reform party, the only party that has ever been worth voting for.
Viva Preston Manning! viva Stockwell Day!

Preston Manning, Stockwell Day, and Stephen Harper are all Evangelical Protestants who believe in the breakdown of the separation of Church and State, and in making the criminal law an enforcer of their religious dogma. Evangelical Protestants are no less frightening than fundamentalist Muslims, who believe in many of the same things with a slightly different flavour.

Like ISIL, Evangelical Christians believe that happiness and joy are mostly sinful, and that everyone should be mean and miserable like they are.

Seventy MPs in Harper's government, or about 40% of the total Conservative caucus, were members of various Evangelical sects, while only 8% of Canadians are. This resulted in the massive hijacking of the federal mandate.

Already Harper had announced that one of his main goals for the next term was a restoration of criminal prosecution for marijuana possession. Projecting a Harper government another ten years into the future, one can imagine alcohol prohibition being not far behind. Construction of prisons in preparation for vastly expanded criminalization of joy was the only category of infrastructure in Canada that was being adequately funded -- this at a time when even the Americans are finally realizing that the War on Drugs causes more problems than it solves and has starting slowly de-intensifying that War.

Already Harper had eliminated cultural grants to almost all dance troupes and musical conservatories. Projecting a Harper government twenty years into the future, it's not hard to imagine an outright ban on singing and dancing.

Already Harper had moved to replace the prostitution law which the Supreme Court had struck down with an even more draconian law. Projecting a Harper government thirty years into the future, it's not hard to imagine the criminalization of all sexual activity which does not result in procreation. This is what Evangelicals preach, not too different from what radical Muslims preach. Can you imaging people being publicly executed for premarital sex, as they have been in ISIL's Iraq? It may seem far-fetched, but the history of extremist religious dogma is that it's not safe to underestimate how crazy it can get.

While the courts have moved to grant people the right to medically-supervised abortion and medically-assisted suicide, Harper has been pushing hard in the opposite direction. Back to the dark ages of abortion clinics in filthy covert locations in trailer parks. Is that really what you want?

Harper's War on Science is well-documented, but while Conservatives still try to make excuses and say that it's just fiscally-prudent budget cuts, the evidence is overwhelming that the scientific data destroyed is politically motivated. The book burnings extend to environmental science, which is displeasing to Harper's oil industry cronies, and human reproduction, which is displeasing to his Evangelical caucus.

Furthermore, the two are not unrelated. Harper's war on environmental science has been even greater than what the oil industry has asked for, and the article below explains why. Harper's Evangelical crowd is not just dismissive of environmental damage, they wholeheartedly embrace it. They take literally the parts of the Bible where all the living things on earth are put here for Man's sole benefit. They believe we should consume everything we possibly can and destroy everything else.
http://rabble.ca/news/2015/02/harper-government-and-evangelical-capitalism

Regarding the church that Harper has belonged to for nearly three decades -- the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church -- McDonald noted that its "adherents believe that the Bible is ‘inerrant' and the Second Coming is 'imminent'."

That would place Harper's church squarely in the Evangelical tradition called dominionism, those who believe in the so-called "dominion mandate" spelled out in Genesis 1:28: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."

Many (although not all) dominionists take that passage as a divine trump card against any thoughts about environmental protection or regulation.

In taking the Bible literally and as "inerrant" (rather than as metaphorical or symbolic truth), most dominionists also believe that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and that the "end times" are not only "imminent" but welcome, because the Faithful will be "raptured" to Heaven before the Battle of Armageddon takes place in the Middle East. The handy Rapture Index at raptureready.com helps them determine just how "imminent" those end times are.

Soon after the 2006 election, Harper cancelled the position of National Science Advisor, dismissing Arthur Carty, whose mandate was to provide the PM with "sound, unbiased and non-partisan advice on science and technology." Environment Canada also removed all references on its website to the scientific findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN-sanctioned group of scientists.
In 2009, Gary Goodyear, Harper's Minister of State for Science & Technology (2008 -- July 2013), oversaw $147.9 million in funding cuts for science programs, leading the Globe & Mail's science reporter to note (March 17, 2009) that some scientists wonder if Goodyear "is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist." When asked his views on evolution, Goodyear told the reporter, "I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate."

The incident caused a brief media flurry, with the National Post calling it a "pseudo-scandal" targeting "white, male, English Christians." By that point, the Harper government's muzzling of scientists was underway.

After McDonald's book was reviewed in the press, little was mentioned in Canada about the issue of Church and State separation, even while Harper doled out $26 million to 14 private Christian colleges. The silence continued in March 2011 when dominionist Evangelical Stockwell Day, acting as Treasury Board president, announced $1.6 billion in cuts to environmental services across several departments, including a 20 per cent cut to Environment Canada.

The silence continued in February 2012, when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews announced that environmentalism had been listed among "issue-based domestic extremism" targeted for increased security surveillance. (Fellow Evangelical Deb Grey is now interim chair of Security Intelligence Review Committee, the watchdog that oversees the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.)

The Cornwall Alliance is an American Evangelical lobby group founded in 2006 by Calvin Beisner, recently described by religiondispatches.org (August 15, 2014) as "the most influential evangelical anti-environmentalist in the United States." Beisner is a dominionist vehemently against any government regulation of the environment. He is also dismissive of climate science.

That's because Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance believe that "Earth and its ecosystems -- created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence -- are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth's climate system is no exception."

In 2010, at a special function hosted by the (oil industry-backed) Heritage Foundation, the Cornwall Alliance launched a book and accompanying video called "Resisting the Green Dragon," which labelled the environmental movement "one of the greatest threats to society and the church today."

In February 2014, the Vancouver Observer's Warren Bell similarly questioned Harper's Israel trip. Regarding the Christian & Missionary Alliance Church, Bell stated that such Evangelical authorities "pinpoint global warming and extreme weather events as an indication that the 'end times' are imminent (and attempting to mitigate climate change as even against God's will.)"

Could the Cornwall Alliance's clever mix of free-market capitalism and dominionist thinking be the impetus behind the Harper government's policy decisions? Bell thinks so: "This intimate intermixing of religion and politics is entirely new in Canada. The shaping of domestic and international policy by the federal government on the basis of a doctrinaire Christian ideology has really never been seen before."

As a further example, we might consider Harper's sudden about-face regarding Communist China. According to Marci McDonald, "for years, Harper and the Conservative Party had refused to consort with China," but in 2009 Harper sent seven ministerial trade missions to that country. "As it turns out, the religious right has played a role in justifying that about-face," McDonald wrote in The Armageddon Factor.
During a trip to China in 2008, Stockwell Day (a dominionist Evangelical and Harper's Minister of International Trade at the time) met Dr. Zhao Xiao, "a prominent economist and one of the country's rare influential Christians, who is best known for a research paper arguing that the secret to America's financial success is its churches," according to McDonald.

Dr. Zhao subsequently partnered with the Masters of Arts Leadership program at Trinity Western University (a private Christian college in Langley, BC) to train a new generation of Communist Party officials in ethics. The program was "set up by Don Page, the former external affairs mandarin who … specializes in teaching management techniques modeled on the example of Jesus Christ."

Trinity Western (currently in the news because its law school discriminates against LGBTQ applicants) now oversees "the education of thousands of Chinese officials, even offering them degrees," McDonald wrote in 2010.

Harper allowed the controversial 2012 sale of tar sands company Nexen to Chinese company CNOOC, and he recently signed the FIPA investment deal, which locks Canada into a 31-year agreement by which Chinese companies can sue municipal, provincial and federal governments if they don't like our regulations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/the-closing-of-the-canadian-mind.html?_r=0

But the nine and half years of Mr. Harper’s tenure have seen the slow-motion erosion of that reputation for open, responsible government. His stance has been a know-nothing conservatism, applied broadly and effectively. He has consistently limited the capacity of the public to understand what its government is doing, cloaking himself and his Conservative Party in an entitled secrecy, and the country in ignorance.

His relationship to the press is one of outright hostility. At his notoriously brief news conferences, his handlers vet every journalist, picking and choosing who can ask questions. In the usual give-and-take between press and politicians, the hurly-burly of any healthy democracy, he has simply removed the give.

Mr. Harper’s war against science has been even more damaging to the capacity of Canadians to know what their government is doing. The prime minister’s base of support is Alberta, a western province financially dependent on the oil industry, and he has been dedicated to protecting petrochemical companies from having their feelings hurt by any inconvenient research.

In 2012, he tried to defund government research centers in the High Arctic, and placed Canadian environmental scientists under gag orders. That year, National Research Council members were barred from discussing their work on snowfall with the media. Scientists for the governmental agency Environment Canada, under threat of losing their jobs, have been banned from discussing their research without political approval. Mentions of federal climate change research in the Canadian press have dropped 80 percent. The union that represents federal scientists and other professionals has, for the first time in its history, abandoned neutrality to campaign against Mr. Harper.

His active promotion of ignorance extends into the functions of government itself. Most shockingly, he ended the mandatory long-form census, a decision protested by nearly 500 organizations in Canada, including the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Catholic Council of Bishops. In the age of information, he has stripped Canada of its capacity to gather information about itself. The Harper years have seen a subtle darkening of Canadian life.

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The darkness has resulted, organically, in one of the most scandal-plagued administrations in Canadian history. Mr. Harper’s tenure coincided with the scandal of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto who admitted to smoking crack while in office and whose secret life came to light only when Gawker, an American website, broke the story. In a famous video at a Ford family barbecue, Mr. Harper praised the Fords as a “Conservative political dynasty.”

Mr. Harper’s appointments to the Senate — which in Canada is a mercifully impotent body employed strictly for political payoffs — have proved greedier than the norm. Mr. Harper’s chief of staff was forced out for paying off a senator who fudged his expenses. The Mounties have pressed criminal charges.
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Recent Comments
em August 18, 2015

The tainted judges scandal will bring him down if journalists or the opposition parties start asking questions.Why did the PM and his...
Kevin Wilson August 16, 2015

Part of the problem is that the middle-left assumes that all people are concerned about the erosion of democracy and when presented with...
YC Lee August 16, 2015

Few Canadian voters are ever in total agreement with a party’s (any party’s) platform. Therefore in our democracy, the voter has two...

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After the 2011 election, a Conservative staffer, Michael Sona, was convicted of using robocalls to send voters to the wrong polling places in Guelph, Ontario. In the words of the judge, he was guilty of “callous and blatant disregard for the right of people to vote.” In advance of this election, instead of such petty ploys, the Canadian Conservatives have passed the Fair Elections Act, a law with a classically Orwellian title, which not only needlessly tightens the requirements for voting but also has restricted the chief executive of Elections Canada from promoting the act of voting. Mr. Harper seems to think that his job is to prevent democracy.

But the worst of the Harper years is that all this secrecy and informational control have been at the service of no larger vision for the country. The policies that he has undertaken have been negligible — more irritating distractions than substantial changes. He is “tough on crime,” and so he has built more prisons at great expense at the exact moment when even American conservatives have realized that over-incarceration causes more problems than it solves. Then there is a new law that allows the government to revoke citizenship for dual citizens convicted of terrorism or high treason — effectively creating levels of Canadianness and problems where none existed.

[warmonger1981]

DaGip wrote: Nowadays, we shouldn't even have borders;


That's the stupidest thing you've ever said. You shouldn't have a front door to border yourself from the outside. You should just let anyone inside your home. You obviously don't understand multiculturalism and its negatives. Communities that have common ideologies have created countries/borders to keep out unwanted ideologies. It's better on a micro not macro.

[khazalid]

@ DaGip : same bullshit applies to your border agents. more so, probably...
plus, you shouldn't drink and drive, u ass.

Bah. I've never been pulled in by the American side, it's always been on the Canadian side...almost every single time I've been up there. And I don't drink and drive, but still doesn't mean I need to be pulled in every time I try to cross the border. Nowadays, we shouldn't even have borders; but I must say that Canada has the better looking female officers (at least between Pembina, ND and Winnipeg). However, almost every border agent that is a male looks like a lumberjack or a hitchhiker that hasn't shaved for a week.

it's on account of your suspicious, lumberjack-induced erections

[mrswdk]

DaGip wrote: Nowadays, we shouldn't even have borders;


That's the stupidest thing you've ever said. You shouldn't have a front door to border yourself from the outside. You should just let anyone inside your home. You obviously don't understand multiculturalism and its negatives. Communities that have common ideologies have created countries/borders to keep out unwanted ideologies. It's better on a micro not macro.

>equating immigration with multiculturalism

[AndyDufresne]

You obviously don't understand multiculturalism and its negatives. Communities that have common ideologies have created countries/borders to keep out unwanted ideologies

Here is a place for you: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/nyreg ... erman.html


--Andy

[tzor]

Do you like the Leafs not winning? Thank the liberals.

HEY ... I'm calling a FOUL here .. the season is only just starting. It may be a 1-3-1 record so far but at least it's not the Blue Jacket's 0-6-0 (a classification for a locomotive, by the way) Besides, you know who is leading the eastern conference with a 6-0-0?

Yes, the Montreal Canadiens ...

[2dimes]

Do you like the Leafs not winning? Thank the liberals.

Yes, the Montreal Canadiens ...

What colour sweaters do each team wear?

[tzor]

What colour sweaters do each team wear?

[2dimes]

Liberal red. Correct...

[warmonger1981]

If you don't have borders all that left is immigration. I live in one of the most diverse areas in the country. I have no problem with Sharia law if that's what you Choose to obey. Don't push it on a whole country. If you have no borders then you have no distinction between idiologies and theologies. Like the 50 states being able to dictate their own philosophies.

[riskllama]

apparently, mr Trudeau just got off the horn with Barack and told him Canada would not be flying combat missions in Syria anymore...

not a bad first day.

[muy_thaiguy]

apparently, mr Trudeau just got off the horn with Barack and told him Canada would not be flying combat missions in Syria anymore...

not a bad first day.

Next, he'll publicly announce that syrup and pancakes will be outlawed, Mounties will now ride pigs, and lumberjacks will now be gigolos.