An Initial Reaction To The Budget

To paraphrase the Soup Nazi, young people, "No job for you!"

This message brought to you by the Harper government, not hard at work for you.



H/t PressProgress

Ann Coulter's 'Thoughts' On Marijuana

The always charming Ms Coulter equates marijuana with 'retard pills.' One can only assume she comes by her own mental deficiencies naturally.

Ann Coulter: Obama acts like he’s from Kenya — and weed is a ‘legal retard pill’ (via Raw Story )

President Barack Obama may not be a covert anti-colonialist “Manchurian candidate” from Kenya, but he sure does act like it, according to conservative author Ann Coulter. “I know we’ve spent seven years trying to persuade right-wingers, no,…

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From The Inner Sanctum (AKA Stephen Harper's Office)

I understand these are embossed in gold in a certain someone's office. Apparently some even have copies signed by Mr. Harper for services rendered.

Conservative MP Blaine Calkins' Bromance

Either the Alberta Conservative MP has a thing for the late Charlton Heston or he has a love of a darker kind.

Economic Fact Check

Contrary to what our self-described economist Prime Minister would have us believe, the jobs that are being created in Canada today are but a pale echo of what once existed. Responding to a January report about the creation of 29,000 new jobs, Star readers have this to say:

Jump in jobs eases economy fears, Feb. 8

The article begins by saying “the labour market started 2014 with a bang adding 29,400 jobs,” presenting a positive tone regarding unemployment. This is misleading. From 2004 to 2008, according to Statistic Canada, nearly 350,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared, to be replaced by a number of service jobs that paid minimum wage or less. Every sector was hit: the automotive industry, auto parts manufacturing, textile product mills, all industries related to wood and paper. Along with these jobs went the unions, and suddenly we were seeing the rise of food banks.

By 2010, manufacturing employment had fallen by an additional 375,000 workers. All courtesy of free trade agreements that allowed companies to leave Canada for cheap-labour countries.

Then there were other job losses: Sears, 1,600 jobs gone; public sector workers: 20,000; and major Canadian banks, in the thousands. The construction industry in northern Alberta, which generates the best paying jobs in the country, has been laying off workers and replacing them with temporary foreign workers earning as little as half the prevailing wage.

“They called the guys (Canadian workers) into an office, told them that they were gone, and they literally walked past the replacements on the way out,” Alberta Federation of Labour Gil McGowan said.

Job losses over the past 10 years add up to well over a million. The number of jobs listed in the article, 29,400, doesn't even wipe out the job losses of the month previous, 49,500.

And it does nothing about the million jobs already lost.

Bert Deveaux, Toronto

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty should have chosen ballet slippers instead of steel-toed shoes the way he dances around the reality Canada is rapidly becoming a part-time economy. Will that be fries with your budget, Sir?

Richard Kadziewicz, Scarborough

No doubt these facts will be viewed as just a tiny challenge to the Harper propaganda machine.

To Be Young, Gifted, And Gay

I am in awe of this kind of courage, and it is one of the reasons I am never quite wiling to give up on humanity. Despite the progress that society has made, I can't think that this could have been an easy decision.

Harper's Ongoing War Against Democracy

I had a very spirited discussion early this afternoon with the constituency assistant working in my Harper M.P.'s office. I called to ask her to convey my disdain for the Fair Elections Act and the plethora of other contempt-for-democracy activities the Conservatives are involved in; warning me about getting my information from 'the left-wing press,' she proceeded to inform me about her party's commitment to ending election fraud, running government with integrity, and all the other sweet and holy things that her boss and her boss's boss are working so hard to promote in this country. I won't bore you with the vigorous rebuttal I offered to her preposterous talking points, except for one point.

I told her that if her party were really interested in respecting and promoting democracy, it would be busy engaging Canadians in a discussion of ideas. Instead, all it can do is demonize and denigrate those who oppose its 'vision'.

A good case in point, which I used as a relevant and current illustration, is a story that appeared in this morning's print edition of The Toronto Star. Since it doesn't seem to be available online, here is a link to The Hamilton Spectator, which also carried it.

Entitled Leaked note shows how Conservatives planning to undermine Justin Trudeau, the article conveys the following tactics that have come to define the Conservative modus operandi and their concomitant absence of integrity:

Stephen Harper's Conservatives are planning to target Justin Trudeau at the upcoming Liberal convention with a carefully orchestrated campaign to disrupt Liberal communications, highlight disunity in the ranks and question his leadership abilities.

The game plan, laid in out Conservative party documents, spells out the objective in three words: "drive, disrupt, disunity."

I don't really have the stomach to reproduce any more of this Machiavellian embrace of anti-democracy so beloved of the Harper cabal, but it does raise a fundamental question, doesn't it?

If their ideas have any real currency among Canadians, why not promote them on their own merits instead of trying to erode the credibility of those who disagree?

The answer, I suspect, is painfully obvious.