putin looks like his bladder is about to erupt. he's shaking. i guess even the president of russia gets stuck holding it from time to time.

it's like the initiation into a cult. creepy....

somebody needs to go to one of these things in a spiderman costume and see what happens.

well, duceppe won the debate, hands down. trudeau sounded like a robot (although he still has the best platform, sadly). i think mulcair got hit pretty badly by duceppe on a few points.

i couldn't see it swinging anybody between the ndp and the liberals - it just cements the same narrative of mulcair having more experience and talent but being wrong all of the time and trudeau having no idea what he's talking about, but reciting lines that make a lot of sense. harper & may largely don't matter. but, this was about as well as the bloc could have hoped for.

i have to say i missed duceppe. he always had his own angle. harper seemed pleasantly amused too; i actually bet he enjoyed that.

i'm not calling it. too delicate. but, here we go: now the election really starts.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/french-language-debate-five-party-leaders-1.3242417

regarding the "issue"...

i've been just trying hard to figure out why anybody cares. but, i'm ducking the question.

i agree with both sides, in varying amounts. is the niqab a symbol of oppression? yes. but, so is a bra. and, we all accept that a woman gets to decide if she wants to wear a bra or not, regardless of the history of the article of clothing.

i don't see any ground swell of muslim women rising up to demand that the state intervene in their right to choose their own clothing. i think everybody else needs to take a step back and ask what right they have to determine anybody else's oppression

the day i see public niqab burnings is the day i know there's an issue here that requires some solidarity.

Myopinion
I respect people’s rights to wear whatever the hell they wish but I do have a problem with the nijab. To women of Muslim culture and religion the nijab means one thing (I get that) but in the west it is a totally different reality. The death to America and its alliances mantra is becoming all too real. When ISIS fighters, dressed in garbs concealing their faces (Jihadi) John, and beheading people on TV happened, the nijab became a new reality for me. If I find myself in public places with someone wearing a nijab, I get the hell out of that place as quickly as I can. I am not trying to sound intolerant but I become fearful when I am around people whose faces are concealed. As a Canadian I should have the right to feel safe in public and not anxiously look for the nearest exit out of fear that my life could become endangered in that moment. I am sure I would not be allowed to take my citizenship ceremony in a Halloween mask or KKK outfit so why is the nijab be acceptable?

jessica murray
well, see, i don't see any reason why you should be banned from taking your citizenship ceremony in a halloween costume. in fact, i beg that the experiment be attempted, as i expect it will face no opposition.

i find people with beards scary. i'm not sure why. i think it might be because my dad had a beard when my parents divorced, and he may have been a little scary for awhile, and then coincidentally went back to not being scary when his beard was shaved. but, the details of my psychological difficulties with bearded people are long and arduous, and i wish not to bore you with their long-windedness.

does that mean i should be able to demand everybody shave?

talk about unreasonable accommodation. yeesh.

i want spiderman to crash that citizenship ceremony in style!

essentially nobody is going to change their vote on this, anyways. it's not the technical definition of a recession that hurts incumbent governments, it's the actual reality of job losses. what the declaration of a recession does is give people hit by job losses (and family members of those hit by job losses) an opportunity to place blame and an outlet to express anger. but, a statistical correction doesn't change anything in what people are experiencing.

given the nexus of recent job losses, you'd expect the biggest effects in alberta. but, given reality, you wouldn't actually expect much of an effect in alberta.

budget deficits are a legitimate article of faith, but whether we're in a technical recession or not is just academic.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-harper-ndp-liberals-statscan-recession-1.3240679

it's the bloc, guys, not the conservatives.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/montreal-s-muslim-community-feels-used-by-political-parties-1.3241582

the niqab fiasco, as it exists, is not a wedge issue. it's a tyranny of the majority.

i think i understand the issue, theoretically, a little bit better now. for the longest time, i couldn't figure out what the actual pretend substance was; why would anybody care? is it even about surveillance? but, it seems to be that there's an archaic british tradition where you have to show your face to make an oath. it might even be religious in justification.

but, it's a stretch to think that much of anybody - especially people in quebec - are interacting with the issue on the level of archaic british tradition. and, i'm not going to yell at a monk or a bishop for hiding his face while taking an oath, either. i mean, we're a little beyond fealty to the king (or queen, as it may be) here, aren't we?

it's a way to channel that longstanding francophone fear of assimilation, by channelling it towards a visible minority. the candidates should not be playing with this as a political issue. and, i actually hope that the debate gives at least one of the candidates the opportunity to make it clear that this shouldn't be treated as a wedge issue - because it isn't.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-french-language-federal-leaders-debate-1.3240714

you have to understand that there's already an existing line to cushing. keystone was about increasing production. cancelling keystone is about putting an increase in production on hold. move your mental goalposts, there. existing transfer of bitumen through this region is already at quite high volumes.

the fact that oil is trading low due to oversupply and likely will be for a while is going to prevent the increase in production, anyways.

it's surprising that the only candidate that has come close to levelling with people about the actual realities around getting any pipeline built is harper. mulcair was initially pushing some weird manipulative scheme to use the environmental review process to reduce opposition, but has lately dropped that argument in favour of preferring local refineries. it's all based on the unrealistic projection of rapid oil-industry growth. and, while trudeau has been less obvious and more interested in carbon transition, he's more or less thinking the same thing in terms of short-term financing. only harper has pointed out that the industry is actually facing a lot of challenges that could lead to medium term decreases in production.

this ought to be an issue. but the issue ought to be discussions surrounding the circumstances of over-reliance on an oil industry that is not going to meet unrealistic expectations. that would be some actual leadership.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-pipelines-chris-hall-1.3241032

bgGruff
Harper is biased and does not govern with Canada's future in mind.
can't blame him though, big oil owns him along with his Fraud Party.
Keystone expansion will create est. 42,ooo jobs and $Billions in revenue, at the expense of Canada's environment and water resources

populist
no that is simplistic thinking.you think more Hydro dams are better .Remember all the Caribou that dies when James Bay 2 was being built??

jessica murray
changes in landscape can be planned and adjusted for. the atmosphere is not such an easy thing to engineer.

and, those jobs numbers are bunk, even under unrealistic projections. the ndp always says "according to the government's estimates" because they know it's a trash projection. if you ignore the short-term construction jobs, long term job estimates are more like 42 than 42,000.

but, i'm not letting the ndp change the narrative, it doesn't matter how many jobs it creates. there are better ways to create jobs. we're not so desperate for employment that we have to throw every other consideration out the window. exporting asbestos creates jobs, too.

--

Paul Bourgoin
We have enough oil for Canadian needs, why not refine our own energy, keep it for Canadian consumption while keeping our money in Canada, creating jobs and reducing our green house emissions and most important keeping our money in Canada until we master clean energy.

jessica murray
in the past, canadian governments have tried to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by increasing our consumption of domestic oil but it led to massive opposition from alberta. it's a large part of the reason the political spectrum is as it is today.

i've been making this argument for quite some time, now: world war two is ancient history, now. it truly remains at the core of our entire society. but, young people are increasingly oblivious to it, and will mostly argue that it was such a long time ago that it doesn't matter, anyways. we're on the cusp of what is going to be a pretty big generational overturn, as the memory of this war exits our collective consciousness. and, the ramifications of this are both profound and extremely varied.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news/canada-election-2015-ndp-hamilton-alex-johnstone-auschwitz-1.3241065

H.S.C
yah...like slavery...it was soooo long ago... Ancient history...lets play video games and forget about all that old stuff...

One word sums your comment up....pathetic.

jessica murray
i'm not attempting to take a moral position on the matter, i'm pointing out that this is a part of a developing social phenomenon.

Think twice
These young people you refer to, are they the ones with massive student debt and little job prospects?

jessica murray
i think this is more broadly cultural.

H.S.C
you have clarity issues...

jessica murray
i think i'm perfectly clear; you have comprehension issues.

people don't want to live their lives shackled by the oppression of history, either. they want to look forward.

as it stands at the moment, the israeli state is carrying out far greater crimes than they're being subjected to.

Think twice
Is this your assertion or do you have facts?

jessica murray
i'm not sure how you'd propose that i prove such a thing.

it's an intuition brought on by observation, but the intuition is accelerating due to increasing observation.

Think twice
I get it. What you are saying is that young people are mostly interested in current things.
Quite a revelation. A similar thing happened in the 70's apparently:)

jessica murray
it's more profound than that, though. wwII is our modern founding myth - which is not to say the things didn't happen, but to say that the way we interpret it is through myth. my grandparents were born *during* the war; i'd have had to have had a relationship with great-grand-parents to have any first-hand recollection of it, and i don't. my stepmother's father has told me some stories about seeing u-boats off the coast of nova scotia. he was just a kid. he could've been seeing things. that's the closest thing to firsthand knowledge.

basically, the myth of wwII - rather than the reality of it - is our existing justification for the state. it's a social contract that gives it the right to fight bad guys - cartoonish, but the reality in the public perception. if the myth begins to fade into history, then the state begins to lose it's legitimacy.

the "war on terrorism" that came out of 9/11 doesn't have the same legitimizing effect, because the enemies are not as clear and the policies are far too transparent - it's as clear as day that it's a ploy to contain the russians. there was a really definable bad guy in wwII. there was even a really definable bad guy at the beginning of the cold war. funding islamist extremists while you pretend you're fighting them in order to hem in the russians just isn't as convincing as fighting a legitimately powerful state entity bent on world domination on frightening terms.

so, for world war two to pass into history requires massive adjustments in virtually everything. a real generational overhaul.

when you live in a basement, outside lawn mowers can make some rather gorgeous ambient music.

i want to see him running up the steps to parliament yelling "adrian!".

careful, though: it runs too far into the series and we've got justin taking on putin, who we all know will be badass well into his 80s. maybe if we get a plot twist to hockey, we can pull that off.

https://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/23/trudeau-spars-with-former-trainer-on-eve-of-french-debate/