Month: May 2011

On Bob Rae Being Appointed Interim Leader Of The Liberal Party. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?

Mulder

When Stockwell Day was the leader of the Alliance he got painted as a religious right zealot by the Liberals and the press ate it up.

When Stephen Harper took over leadership of the Alliance and eventually the Conservative Party of Canada he was painted as “Scary” Stephen Harper with his Hidden Agenda by the Liberals and the press.

When Stephane Dion became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada he was painted as the incompetent professor who was the environment minister but let emissions rise by the Conservatives and somewhat by the press.

When Michael Ignatieff took over the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, he was painted as an “Americano” who was out of the country for 3 decades and came back to be Prime Minister. He was just a visitor. This is what the Conservative advertisements told us.

So if you were the Liberals and you wanted to avoid having your leader painted for two years with Conservative advertising on some negative issue and you needed a reprieve for…oh let’s say 18 months…so your new leader could rebrand himself with the press, would it not be prudent to buy that time somehow?

Would appointing him “interim leader” and then changing your rules before convention to let him run for the official leadership be a wise thing to do? I think it would.

So my advice to the Conservative Party. Dip into that war chest you just built up with Convention attendee fees and start painting Bob Rae as Buffalo Bob. Start telling the Canadian public how his term was so bad that the NDP didn’t win a single seat in Ontario in 1993.

Because if the Liberal Party pulls a fast one and puts him in as leader in 18 months, it may be too late to brand him if he has branded himself.

I’m just sayin…

On Senate Appointments

Mulder

For all those lefty AND righty whiners complaining about Harper appointing Smith, Verner and Manning to the Senate….Tough freaking noogies.

The Liberals had control of the Senate for 65 of the last 70 years. And now that Harper has chosen to stuff it full of cronies all I hear is Wahhhhh Wahhhh Wahhhh. Grow up people. This is not TiddlyWinks or Go Fish. It’s Big Boy Monopoly and Harper is playing by the rules. He tried to change things and the other parties told him to go pound sand. So now everyone else can go pound sand.

He also told the provinces to nominate their own Senators and the PM would appoint them but only Alberta has chosen to do so. Again, shame on the provinces for not taking advantage of this.

I hope another 20 Senate appointments come up and that Harper shoves another 20 forty year old conservatives in the upper house. Maybe when the other parties see that they will not regain control of the Senate until 2050 they may change their minds about Senate reform.

Keep on rolling Mr. Prime Minister.

Tim Hudak Starts Barking Up The Right Tree

Mulder

Today the Ontario PC Party finally announced a game changer. They will be eliminating the HST off Hydro Bills.

As we have announced here at OfficiallyScrewed.com before, the debt retirement charge that never gets repaid is subject to HST and we have argued that never paying off the debt (a la Dalton McGuinty) is a way the province will keep collecting tax dollars as the debt retirement is subject to HST.

Well Hudak has come through for Ontarians with this announcement.

An Ontario PC government will provide Ontario families with real, permanent household relief by:
Removing the HST from residential hydro bills. The HST has made life unaffordable for many families. Combine that with expensive energy experiments and hydro bills are soaring.
Removing the HST from residential home heating bills (natural gas and other fuels). We live in Canada where heating our homes isn’t a luxury. Increasing the cost with a tax increase is unfair.
Removing the Debt Retirement Charge from residential hydro bills. We will remove the so-called “Debt Retirement Charge” from your hydro bills. The full amount had been collected as of 2010 – yet the McGuinty government extended it to 2018.
Taken together, these three steps will give a typical Ontario household $275 in immediate relief from rising energy bills.

Thank you Mr. Hudak. We needed something to hit the masses with and this is a the perfect shot in the arm to stimulate interest in putting the PC party in charge of Ontario.

Tim Hudak Vows to Cancel Samsung Deal…But Won’t

Mulder

Fact: Samsung is not GETTING $7B. They are INVESTING $7B in Ontario in exchange for tax breaks. (some believe to be in the neighbourhood of $500M).

Fact: Tim Hudak has said he will cancel the contract.

Prediction: Tim Hudak’s first speech as Premiere about the Samsung deal will go like this:

“After throughly analyzing the contract that the previous Liberal government signed with Samsung, we have discovered that the contract is so far along that to cancel it now would be an undue burden on the tax payers and would not be prudent. We sincerely believe to sign the contract was a travesty but at this point there is not much we can do but to honour it in the best interest of Ontarians.”

I’m just sayin….

Go Right Young Man. Go Right.

Mulder

My wife calls me an idealogue thinking I always side with the Conservative Party of Canada. Today however, I am upset at two items on the agenda.

1) The expansion of funding to the CBC. James Moore (as pointed out by Ezra Levant) is being mocked by the brass at CBC and being effectively called a lapdog now that they have funding increases coming. This is NOT what most conservatives feel should be happening and I join in the chorus of those who think the budget of the CBC should either be slowly trimmed back $100M a year for 11 years until they have learned to swim on their own or simply cut it all at once and let them sink or swim on the merits of their work.

And more importantly,

2) As pointed out by Mark Steyn, the new criminal omnibus bill has a clause that will make it a two year prison term to link to a website spewing hate speech. The vagueness of this or the risk of errant links is too great. But the reality is that hate speech is free speech. At the Conservative policy convention in Winnipeg, the party unanimously voted to scrap section 13 on hate speech. So why are we reinforcing it? I was in Winnipeg. The support was incredible to move towards free speech above all.

Some have labelled Steyn’s site a hate speech site. Well I link there and am proud to say I link there. I guess I’ll wait for the internet cops to track me down and toss me in jail for 2 years.

So I am bringing both of these points directly to my MP and letting him know that I am not happy about this. When we won a majority, I thought we would be leaning further right, but it seems that on these issues we are just riding up the middle of the road just like our predecessors.

Holy Smokes! Don Boudria Agrees With Me That We Need To Enumerate

Mulder

Tonight on Goldhawk, Don Boudria, while discussing voter turnout, said that he thinks the number is not correct because we have moved to a permanent voter’s list and there are errors. He then said that we should move be enumerating.

As many of you know, I have been calling for enumeration for quite some time and agree that the % turnout is far higher than it seems.

To reiterate.

When I was an Information Officer in the 2006 election, I had more than one person come up with multiple voter cards. One gentleman came up with three cards.

One for John Davidson.
One for John W. Davidson
and one for John William Davidson.
(names were changed to protect the innocent)

So to Elections Canada, there are 3 voter cards mailed, yet only one voter.

To read my previous posts on Electoral Reform see links below.

Two critical flaws in our Electoral System that need addressing

and

More on our Electoral System

RIM’s Playbook Makes Like An Android Offering Best of Two Worlds

Mulder

As many of you know, I occasionally stretch outside politics to give picks or pans. In this case I am bringing great news to Playbook owners (like me).

RIM has been demo-ing a new Android App Player on the Playbook at Blackberry World. This is an app that will let you play Android Apps on the Playbook. The app would need to be recompiled by the developers with a plug in RIM has developed for the Android development software and occasionally would need a tweek to run on the Playbook but it looks like an easy way for app developers to increase exposure to the Playbook owners.

What it also does is expand RIM’s Playbook application list. Right now the list is small compared to Apple’s App World, but the Google Android application list will surpass Apple’s in August, 2011.

This means that RIM will likely have access to more apps than Apple very soon. In any case, the access to apps for Playbook users is about to jump dramatically which is a good thing.

Hit the jump to view the video demo.

How OfficiallyAwesome is this news? Comments?

Layton Inadvertently Smacks a Few of His New MPs With Debate Comment

Mulder

In the English language debate, Jack Layton dealt a death blow to Michael Ignatieff by saying something to the effect of “If you want a promotion, you need to show up for work.”

How many of his new Quebec MPs didn’t campaign a single stitch? How many did not even show up in their riding during the election?

Unless they have $150,000 a year jobs now, many just got a promotion without showing up for work.

I’m just saying….

The real losers here are the constituents who will have poor representation by someone who does not understand the local issues. But they are also the ones who did the voting so it seems they are stuck with their own bad decisions.

OfficiallyScrewed.com 41st Canadian Election Seat Predictions

Mulder

Posting red text with actual results

For the record, I will say that my numbers are educated guesses based partly on the last election, partly on the tides of change happening in this election, partly on my desire to see a stable majority government in Canada, partly on my seat by seat analysis, partly on the pollsters data and finally to throw much of this out the window, partly on my decision to move a few blocks of seats out of sheer gut instinct.

i.e. to figure out how I got these numbers, you will likely yank your hair out for hours.

In any case here they are.

Nationally:
Conservatives – 170 166
New Democrats – 61 103
Liberals – 57 33
Bloc Quebecois – 19 4
Green Party – a big fat goose egg 1
Independent – 1 (Sorry Helena, it ain’t you) 0

Provincially:
Alberta:
Conservative – 28 27
All other parties – 0
NDP – 1

BC:
Conservative – 25 21
NDP – 8 12
Liberal – 3 2
All others – 0
Green Party – 1

Manitoba:
Conservative – 10 11
NDP – 4 2
All others – 0
Liberal – 1

New Brunswick:
Conservative – 8 8
Liberal – 1 1
NDP – 1 1
All others – 0

Newfoundland and Labrador
Liberal – 3 4
Conservative – 2 1
NDP – 2 2
All others – 0

Nova Scotia:
Liberal – 5 4
Conservative – 4 4
NDP – 2 3
All others – 0

Nunavut:
Conservative – 1 1All others – 0

Ontario:
Conservative – 63 73
Liberal – 27 11
NDP – 16 22
All others – 0

PEI:
Conservative – 2 (bubbye Wayne Easter) 1
Liberal – 2 3
All others – 0

Quebec:
NDP – 27 59
Bloc – 19 4
Conservative – 14 5
Liberal – 14 7
All others – 0

Saskatchewan:
Conservative – 12 13
Liberal – 1 1
NDP – 1 0
All others – 0

Western Arctic:
Conservative – 1 0
All others – 0
NDP – 1

Yukon:
Liberal – 1 0
All Others – 0
Conservative – 1