[Niagara]

Canada has elections/politicians/leaders etc?

and a stock market?

COOL!

[dbruning]

Canada has elections/politicians/leaders etc?

and a stock market?

You're kidding right?

[Dreamtwister]

I'm surprised how well Harper's fearmongering campaign worked. He stole 12 seats from the Liberals in Ontario. I guess they really do believe he can save us from following the US into the economic abyss.

Won't they be disappointed.

[Nickel]

From Fair Vote Canada:

Electoral dysfunction, yet again

Greens deserved more than 20 seats - voting system also punished New Democrats, western Liberals and urban Conservatives

Once again, Canada’s antiquated first-past-the-post system wasted millions of votes, distorted results, severely punished large blocks of voters, exaggerated regional differences, created an unrepresentative Parliament and contributed to a record low voter turnout.

[Note: The following commentary is based on returns at 2am ET.]

The chief victims of the October 14 federal election were:

- Green Party: 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.

- Prairie Liberals and New Democrats: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received roughly twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats.

- Urban Conservatives: Similar to the last election, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one and neither did Conservative voters in Montreal.

- New Democrats: The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 50 seats, the NDP 37.

“How can anyone consider this democratic representation?” asked Barbara Odenwald, President of Fair Vote Canada.

Had the votes on October 14 been cast under a fair and proportional voting system, Fair Vote Canada projected that the seats allocation would have been approximately as follows:

Conservatives - 38% of the popular vote: 117 seats (not 143)

Liberals - 26% of the popular vote: 81 seats (not 76)

NDP - 18% of the popular vote: 57 seats (not 37)

Bloc - 10% of the popular vote: 28 seats (not 50)

Greens - 7% of the popular vote: 23 seats (not 0)

Fair Vote Canada also has data for each province on the number of seats won and number of seats actually deserved by each party.

Odenwald emphasized that any projection on the use of other voting systems must be qualified, as specific system features would affect the exact seat allocations.

“With a different voting system, people would also have voted differently,” said Larry Gordon, Executive Director of Fair Vote Canada. “There would have been no need for strategic voting. We would likely have seen higher voter turnout. We would have had different candidates - more women, and more diversity of all kinds. We would have had more real choices.”

Fair Vote Canada (FVC) is a national multi-partisan citizens’ campaign to promote voting system reform. FVC was founded in 2001 and has a National Advisory Board of distinguished Canadians from all points on the political spectrum

[Blacksmith]

Central Canada built the railroads that made getting to the west en masse possible. We paid for them. We paid to bring the immigrants over from Britain, Germany, and Ukraine to populate the Prairies, and to sustain the agricultural industry there and get it started. That wasn't cheap, it wasn't free, and it was all done DECADES before the first drop of oil was ever found there. But now that you have to contribute, yeah, YOU wanna separate. Well, you're welcome, Tex.

Central Canada provided cheap transportation for Eastern goods coming west and expensive transportation for our grain going East. You sold our wheat for $2.00 per bushel overseas while charging us $10 per bushel for domestic grain from Ontario which was all you could make bread from until we could import pasta from Italy made from our grain than we could buy it from the East. We've paid the lions share of of the balance of payment for years.
Oh yea then there was the NEP and we would not think separation, think again.

Viva Alberta Libre.

[Maddog78]

Central Canada built the railroads that made getting to the west en masse possible. We paid for them. We paid to bring the immigrants over from Britain, Germany, and Ukraine to populate the Prairies, and to sustain the agricultural industry there and get it started. That wasn't cheap, it wasn't free, and it was all done DECADES before the first drop of oil was ever found there. But now that you have to contribute, yeah, YOU wanna separate. Well, you're welcome, Tex.

What a pile of crap. You really are clueless.
The railroads were built so the east could get access to the resources of the west and to persuade BC to join the Confederation and not the States.
They were built purely for their own self interests, which I don't have a problem with but don't go portraying it as some kind of favour to the west.
Who in the prairies was supposed to pay for them?
There was hardly anybody there.

You really have a hate on for Alberta.
If you ever spent any time there you would realise half of the people are from the east or immigrants.
It's funny how it only takes people about a yr. in province before they start complaining about what a raw deal they are getting from the east, hahaa.

[Nickel]

We've paid the lions share of of the balance of payment for years.

Based on one thing, and one thing only. And it's not something you worked for, or built, or had to shepherd along over centuries. It's just something that you turned out to be living on top of.

Well, like anything else you don't build or make, it won't last forever.

But we'll all still be here when it's gone.

[Nickel]

We've paid the lions share of of the balance of payment for years.

Based on one thing, and one thing only. And it's not something you worked for, or built, or had to shepherd along over centuries. It's just something that you turned out to be living on top of.

Well, like anything else you don't build or make, it won't last forever.

But we'll all still be here when it's gone.

[Maddog78]

More crap from Nickel.

Yes, it was a luck of geology but it took a lot of hard work and development of technology to exploit it.
Horizontal drilling, 3 and 4D seismic, advanced drilling fluids and waste management, Sub Zero drilling and production methods etc.
This technology is now being exported to oilfields around the world.
Go get a degree in Drilling Engineering and work in the industry and then tell me it is just as easy as putting a straw in the ground.

Again, another clueless post.

[Nickel]

More crap from Nickel.

Yes, it was a luck of geology but it took a lot of hard work and development of technology to exploit it.

Do please give us a break. People were hauling this stuff up out of holes in the ground and slopping it in buckets into barrels 150 years ago. The only difference now is how far down you have to go for it and how much money you can rub in the faces of those who don't have it.

Most of the actual work of refining it, you'll notice, is usually done a long way from where the stuff is actually found. Usually in vicinity of places that actually have to use it to DO or MAKE something.

Nice try, though.

[Nickel]

Who in the prairies was supposed to pay for them?
There was hardly anybody there.

That's precisely my point.

[Blacksmith]

Nickle is a neocolonialist.

Profile
Upper middle class WASP female. Living in Toronto or Ottawa. Not much more than thirty. Possibly unemployed or in a civil service position.

The suggestion that the East paid for the settlement of the WEST is an insult. we bought land from the CPR, we used thier railroad to ship our products and most of the land you gave to them came with mineral rights which they split off.

[DaleFromCalgary]

(First a rant about eastern Canada, then at the bottom I go to the federal election yesterday. Skip ahead if you don't like Albertans ranting.)

Quote from a previous post above: "Central Canada built the railroads that made getting to the west en masse possible. We paid for them. We paid to bring the immigrants over from Britain, Germany, and Ukraine to populate the Prairies, and to sustain the agricultural industry there and get it started. That wasn't cheap, it wasn't free, and it was all done DECADES before the first drop of oil was ever found there."

Central Canada did not pay for the trans-continental railroad. Western Canada was surveyed into square mile plots called sections, with 36 sections in a township. The Canadian Pacific Railway was given every other section of land on the prairies, excepting the smidgen put aside for tribal Reserves. The CPR also got the mineral rights to the land, in order to have a source of coal for their engines. The CPR sold most of their land to homesteaders, keeping aside the mineral rights. When petroleum became more important, the CPR made a mint, and later spun off its petroleum division into the company today known as Encana. Its coal division became Fording Coal, recently bought out by TechCominco.

Central Canada did not pay for the immigrants. They had to pay their own way to Canada, among them my great-grandparents on my mother's side, who homesteaded in central Alberta, and on my father's side, who homesteaded in southwestern Saskatchewan. I inherited family documents including account books showing that it took them years to pay off their debt to the steamship companies that brought them over from, respectively, Finland and Scotland.

Central Canada did not pay to get agriculture started in western Canada or help the farmers through the Dirty Thirties. Bay Street banks foreclosed left, right, and centre, every chance they got. That is why the Alberta government set up its own bank, the Alberta Treasury Branch, still in business today as ATB Financial. That is why Social Credit did so well during the Great Depression.

Tariffs were set up by eastern Canada to prevent cheaper foreign goods from entering the prairies, while railroad freight rates, known as the Crowsnest Pass rates, allowed export only of our grain. In 1979, the National Energy Policy looted $50 billion from Alberta (read the details at Wikipedia) so Trudeau could buy votes in eastern Canada.

End of rant. And now to the election.

Harper shot himself in the foot by saying Quebec didn't need anymore subsidies for the arts, which cost him a majority government. He got back into office with a larger minority government because Dion shot himself in both feet by proposing the Green Shift carbon tax plan.

[Dreamtwister]

Dion shot himself in both feet by proposing the Green Shift carbon tax plan.

I disagree. I think Dion shot himself in the left foot with the Green Shift. He shot himself in the right foot by phoning in his election campaign.

Seriously, I saw more effort from the Greens.

[Maddog78]

More crap from Nickel.

Yes, it was a luck of geology but it took a lot of hard work and development of technology to exploit it.

Do please give us a break. People were hauling this stuff up out of holes in the ground and slopping it in buckets into barrels 150 years ago. The only difference now is how far down you have to go for it and how much money you can rub in the faces of those who don't have it.

Most of the actual work of refining it, you'll notice, is usually done a long way from where the stuff is actually found. Usually in vicinity of places that actually have to use it to DO or MAKE something.

Nice try, though.

Keep piling the crap upon crap, you just make yourself look more ridiculous.

Don't want to or can't get an Engineering degree?
Not smart enough?
Then do please go Roughnecking on an oil rig this winter and come back and tell us how easy it was.

[Nickel]

The suggestion that the East paid for the settlement of the WEST is an insult.

Eat it; it's the truth. Look at the demographics for Prairies before and after A) the building of the CPR and B) the Laurier immigration efforts abroad.

What I'm trying to establish here is that there's a commonality. It's not like people sprung up in the west home-grown and easterners started showing up and mowing them down like crops. More than any other part of the country, the Prairies are the willed, planned creation of the country. I don't think anyone denies people there their due; but given the history of what it took just to open the place up to habitation, it's rather galling to having some people swanning around telling the rest of the country to get bent just because they're drunk on oil from 1920-something to... 2030? 2050? A lot of westerners are glad they've got the resources and the ability to pitch in. Most of them know it won't last forever and, like the US South after the Civil War, they'll eventually have to join the rest of the country in other, less glorious, less lucrative pursuits. Nobody has a problem with them because they're regular Canadians like the rest of us... not letting petroleum, like testosterone, go to their heads and turn them into jerks...

[Nickel]

Central Canada did not pay for the trans-continental railroad. Western Canada was surveyed into square mile plots called sections, with 36 sections in a township...

The difficulties of construction and demand for early completion of the line ensured generous provisions to the company, including $25 million in cash, 25 million acres (about 10 million ha) of land in a belt along the railway, the cost of surveys totalling $37 million, monopoly over transportation south to the US for 20 years, etc.

Now... where do you suppose all THAT came from? Somebody found it under a rock in Saskatoon one Tuesday morning?

Central Canada did not pay for the immigrants.

The fact that the Canadian government maintained immigration recruitment offices in foreign countries must have been absent from your eduction. It might surprise you to realize those efforts are not free: they involved the payment of staff, bonuses for recruiters, and advertising to make potential immigrants aware of Canada as an alternative to say, the US, or Australia. Under Laurier, these offices were expanded into central and eastern Europe, and to the United States as its own frontier days drew to a close. That's why so much of the Prairies was farmed by Ukrainian and German farmers. The government even provided discount rates for immigrant rail travel that were not available to Canadian migrants. As a result, immigration to Canada doubled after 1905. Canada would be a different place today had these efforts not been made.

[Nickel]

Dion shot himself in both feet by proposing the Green Shift carbon tax plan.

I disagree. I think Dion shot himself in the left foot with the Green Shift. He shot himself in the right foot by phoning in his election campaign.

Seriously, I saw more effort from the Greens.

Unquestionably. I kept waiting for Dion to show up, but he never really did. You would have thought HE was PM and he couldn't be bothered, and was running on his record or something. Where was the guy? Where's he been the past two years? I hoped for more from him.

[Blacksmith]

See Nickle is a neocolonialist.

Quit bearing the "Whiteman's Burden".

[Nickel]

See Nickle is a neocolonialist.

Quit bearing the "Whiteman's Burden".

No, Nickel is being a "fed up with oil-addled hotshots who treat the rest of Canada like a toilet until the oil runs out and then they'll come around reminding us how nice they were to us all those years"-ist.

Quit acting like Colonel Blimp.