I would rather have a dynamic government, as in MPs vote by issue individually and not party whipped. That is more reflective of how people think.
I want to see attendance records and I want to see voting records.
Proportional representation would provide a more adequate and correct reflection of voter preference.
On the other hand, it would atomize and fragment parliamentary representation, making coalition governments a norm, rather than the exception... What a conundrum...
I would rather have a dynamic government, as in MPs vote by issue individually and not party whipped. That is more reflective of how people think.
I want to see attendance records and I want to see voting records.
Wouldn't they just kick you out of the party then? Right now you run as a party member, you put the party logo next to your name, and the party backs you up. With no party support, you just have a name and nobody knows what your deal is. Having a party supporting you is hugely important if you want to win an election.
Party system sucks.
It simplifies things. With a couple main groups, it's possible to make something like the CBC website where there's a test showing which party is similar to what you want. If it was all independent candidates, you would need to read pamphlets about your local candidates.
Basically it would turn into the way city elections work. I don't know about your city, but Edmonton elections for mayor and council have horrendously bad voter turnout. There are no parties involved and no centralization of anything, so the result is that most people have no idea what any of the candidates stand for. this (word document) shows voter turnout for Edmonton city elections:
2007 - 27.24% of people voted
Even breaking the 50% mark is exceptionally rare. These elections are really damn important, but a lot of people can't vote because they don't know what they would be voting for. Last election, I only voted for mayor. I did not vote for council because I didn't know enough about any of the candidates, and there was a total lack of information available.
Where do I get this information? Most of the people running are just random people. They don't have their own websites or anything like that. They don't get TV time either because it's infeasible to give TV time to 5-10 candidates per district when the city has many districts.turn out is low when people think their choice makes no difference. And currently, it doesn't.
You mean you don't read up on your candidates? I make sure I talk to my lead candidates in the riding and ask questions. The ones that give me party lines get the evil eye.
Where do I get this information? Most of the people running are just random people. They don't have their own websites or anything like that. They don't get TV time either because it's infeasible to give TV time to 5-10 candidates per district when the city has many districts.
Even with our current party system, I still have no idea what the individual candidates think. There's the guy with the PC logo, there's the guy with the Lib logo, there's the NDP guy. I know what their party is going for, but I don't know what this individual guy thinks. Even when they have their own web pages, they try to keep their campaign into a short blip that is so vague that it doesn't mean anything. A typical NDP campaign pamphlet would look something like this:
"Shawn is a father of three and a husband of twelve. Shawn believes in liberty and workers rights. Shawn believes workers have the right to fair wages and safe work conditions. Shawn will work with other cabinet members to prevent the exploitation of workers."
I've seen pamphlets that look a bit like that. They're worded better, but they're still incredibly vague. The only guys who give any hint of what they're going for are the party leaders.
Here were just get borderline retarded pamphlets. One basically said she's a secretary and a mother and that's why she knows what's up. One of the mayor candidates in the 2010 election runs an internet cafe but he doesn't like the internet, and on the TV debates he said a bunch of shit about how crack dealers could use public libraries to log into facebook (I swear he actually did say this). He then bashed facebook in response to several other questions. These people are a joke and there's no way they would ever get support from a political party.lulz, your candidates will for sure let you know who they are and what they have done. I got visited by every single candidate in every election.
Here were just get borderline retarded pamphlets. One basically said she's a secretary and a mother and that's why she knows what's up. One of the mayor candidates in the 2010 election runs an internet cafe but he doesn't like the internet, and on the TV debates he said a bunch of shit about how crack dealers could use public libraries to log into facebook (I swear he actually did say this). He then bashed facebook in response to several other questions. These people are a joke and there's no way they would ever get support from a political party.
I can't even remember where I was going with this. I'll spend the rest of my work day thinking about all of the other funny shit suggested. One of the mayor candidates was a high school drop out and he suggested building a circular LRT track around the city. Typically trains go inside the city but this guy wanted it around the city. Ooookaaaaayyyy.....
Retards generally don't make it that far in a party system, so it makes the election less confusing.What makes you think the party candidate is much better?
Retards generally don't make it that far in a party system, so it makes the election less confusing.
I think Edmonton's 2010 city election had something like 7 mayor candidates.
-1 of them was a pothead who left the debates ridiculously early
-1 of them was the train retard
-1 of them was a guy who just said people should get out and vote (he never really said what his campaign was)
-1 was the internet conspiracy guy
Subtracting all of the retard candidates left only 3 real candidates. One of them sounded fairly conservative. He suggested a balanced budget by slashing city services. The guy who won sounded like a liberal; he wants to keep up the city's current construction projects and he somewhat hinted that he was going to raise taxes. The other real candidate sounded NDP; he wanted major changes to homeless shelters and group homes to prevent "black holes" (ghettos). So even with 7 candidates, we still only had 3 real candidates. That's just like what we have when we run with a party system.
There are tons of wacky parties too. And they do put out wacky candidates. That is just part of election, nothing to do with party or no party.
But you know the candidate is a whack job before they begin to speak. You see a guy in a nice suit like he has something interesting to say, but there's a "communist party" sign behind him to warn you that everything he's saying is retarded ^_^
On Tuesday, the Liberal Party introduced a new Canada Learning Passport, which would pay $1,000 per year to high-school students who have an RESP account ($1,500 per year for lower income families). This money would be deposited into the RESP account, to be used by the student if they attend a post-secondary institution. To pay for part of this, the proposal cancels the Student Amount and the Textbook Amount tax credits. For a student studying for eight months, this would mean a loss of $558 of federal credits.
...
Previous research has found that high-income families are more than three times as likely as low-income families to hold an RESP account. While its possible the new grants will provide enough incentive to get more participation from lower-income families, it remains an open question. The credits, on the other hand, depend only on filing a tax return that has taxes owing either now or in the future.
Whether credits or grants would have better take-up is a tough call, but the key will be making an effort to ensure broad awareness and revamping the complicated sign-up process. The danger here is that the takeup will be as skewed toward high income families as the existing CESG/RESP programmes, meaning that the aim of improving access would be thwarted.
Interesting new campaign promise by the Liberals:
The Globe & Mail - Liberal plan deserves some RESP-E-C-T
This is policy for the people on this forum who are reading this, as we're all likely making a good living and will have the spare cash to sock away into RESPs so our children can attend university.
This is terrible policy for those making sub-$50k, whose taxes will help pay for that $1k/year that goes to us to help us pay for our children's post-secondary educations, but cannot afford to fill an RESP to take advantage of this themselves.
err. what? You are not understanding the policy.You just open a RESP account, you don't make the contribution, the government does. Low income family gets 1500 a year a kid, the 50K+ get 1000. Pretty fair really.
No - I understand it perfectly. The key part of the proposal is, yes, that the government makes a contribution to the RESP account - which must be used and can't be redeemed as cash. This means that the qualification for getting that $1000 or $1500 is:
1. An RESP account must be opened.
2. The money must be used as part of a tuition fee.
Assuming conservatively that tuition costs $5000 a year for four years, it's pretty obvious that the households able to spend or borrow $20k over four years are more likely to be relatively wealthy ($50k/year and over) as opposed to relatively poor. In other words this would be taxing the poor to subsidize the sorta-but-not-really rich.
No - I understand it perfectly. The key part of the proposal is, yes, that the government makes a contribution to the RESP account - which must be used and can't be redeemed as cash. This means that the qualification for getting that $1000 or $1500 is:
1. An RESP account must be opened.
2. The money must be used as part of a tuition fee.
Assuming conservatively that tuition costs $5000 a year for four years, it's pretty obvious that the households able to spend or borrow $20k over four years are more likely to be relatively wealthy ($50k/year and over) as opposed to relatively poor. In other words this would be taxing the poor to subsidize the sorta-but-not-really rich.
Another Globe & Mail article more directly states that "Liberals are strategically targeting middle-class families". What makes this even worse for the poor is the fact that this will be paid for by "reinstating the 18-per-cent corporate tax rate and by scrapping existing education and textbook tax credits". That's even more regressive. Like I said, good for you and I, bad for the poor which this is ostensibly supposed to help.
I don't think you understand it all all.
Currently (ignoring current RESP grants) you pay for full education, but get some money back in tax credits while you're going. The more you make, the more you get back.
New plan - you get money in an RESP (which will earn interest), to help pay for school, and the less you make, the more you get as a credit.
If it's revenue neutral, then it can only help families earning less, since the new program is more skewed towards helping lower income families than the old one, even if it is still skewed in general towards the upper class (which it will always be unless you don't give anything to the upper class, as they're going to be more likely to attend university).
And while university may cost $5,000 for 4 years, you can take a college job oriented program for much less than that (and possibly for only 2 years). This RESP grant won't fully cover a college education, but it'll give a huge help. Not only that - if you encourage people to open RESP accounts, they're going to be more likely to put in $100-$200 here or there (as it's now as easy as just making a deposit), which is going to trigger the 20% government match.
I think this is a great program.
The results strongly support the hypothesis that source-based taxes on corporate income are passed on in the form of lower wages. We find sizable effects using two alternative models. The more moderate effects, found in both Model 1 and Model 2, suggest that just over half of an increase in tax liability would be passed on to the workforce in the short run.
In the longer run, the fall in employee compensation would exceed the original increase in the tax liability. The effects found in Model 2 are even larger. There is also some evidence that for multinational companies, higher effective tax rates in other parts of the multinational group tend to have a positive effect on domestic wages.
Sonofabitch, it's too bad Ignatief sucks so much.
The CBC appears to have a new spin on the old joke about the answer to all multiple choice questions being "C". This time the answer is usually "G", as in Grit.
Queen's University political science professor Kathy Brock says the state broadcaster's Vote Compass online survey tool is flawed and tells people they're Liberal by default.
Vote Compass, a 30-question survey on the CBC's website, is supposed to show Canadians which party's political views are most like their own.
Brock said she completed the survey three times using three distinct strategies, and was aligned each time with the Liberal party.
"If you're giving opposite responses and getting the same result, that's not correct," she said.
Brock said the first time she did the survey she selected the "somewhat agree" response to every question. The second time, she selected "somewhat disagree," and the third time she chose "strongly agree."
Cliff van der Linden, a Toronto researcher who developed the tool, said Brock received those responses because the questions are equally split between the left and right side of the political spectrum.
"So if you answer all one way or another, you're going to end up answering half left and half right -- and end up in the middle."
It's not an issue of someone not understanding something, but of who is aware of the ramifications of policy. I contend that the two of you are being short-sighted in your views here.
Firstly, to paraphrase a UBC economist, "Other well-intentioned measures such as the Canada Education Savings Grant that were meant to boost low income attendance in post-secondary education did just the opposite... RESP usage is skewed toward higher income groups and the paperwork and complexity in setting up the savings plan may prove a barrier to pickup."
Secondly, there is empirical evidence that increases in the corporate tax rate - the explicitly stated method with which this measure would be funded - are passed on to the working class in both increased prices and lowered wages:
As I personally stand to gain from this policy I am not making a stand against it, but if the goal is to send more children who normally wouldn't get a post-secondary education off to school, there are better ways of effecting it.
Become one!
I would but I don't have $1000 laying around for the silly deposit. Want to sponsor me?