see, i was thinking about this, too. but, are voters going to hand them a majority if they can't pass legislation, or are they going to turf them? if we end up with an ndp minority, and we need another election because the senate isn't passing anything because he won't appoint senators, i couldn't see this working in his favour - he'll get slammed for obstructing parliament. and, if the reason it won't pass is because he won't appoint senators then he IS obstructing parliament.

rather, i think it is clear that he will actually appoint senators and that we can reduce claims to the contrary to simple demagoguery - which he has been doing quite a bit of in this campaign. this is a policy that is much older than mulcair is. on the one hand, i don't really doubt he'll do something or other on the file, even if he's starkly limited by the reality of it. on the other hand, he's really being a spokesperson for a longstanding party tradition, and what he says about this should really be taken with a grain of salt.

what he's been saying about it is really flatly irrational.

to me, the bigger question is whether the consistent gaffes, weasel words and inconsistencies coming from him are beginning to add up or not. it takes about three minutes of careful thinking to realize that he's not being honest about this.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-tom-mulcair-senate-problems-1.3220763

my position on this is that there shouldn't be a distinction in the first place. and, if it weren't for the precise wording of the constitution (which uses the term "natural persons"), it would certainly be unconstitutional to give corporations different tax rates than people.

corporations are people. let's tax them like people. all of them. big. small. and everywhere in between.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-small-business-tax-rates-criticism-1.3221858

very little of the polling since the beginning of september is reliable - the nanos polling will throw off the long weekend starting tomorrow. and i think we should get an ekos poll tomorrow, although i don't know if they polled over the weekend, and it may need to be taken carefully (although the larger sample size should balance it out).

the idea of a poll aggregate is good if all inputs are created equal. i know you're weighting them relative to various concerns. but, when you start taking good and bad polls and averaging them out, you're polluting the good polls rather than balancing out the bad ones.

that said, i think the trendline is clear. and, thankfully, the country is aligning into regions rather than splitting itself across the board. but, yeah - it's ontario. but, it's believable, given the recent provincial results and the seeming truth that the ontario liberal party is in the midst of a decades long dynastic rule, comparable to the previous red tory domination of the province. and, whatever you think of trudeau, he doesn't have the ideological liabilities of ignatieff [nor is the green party in a position, *this election*, to ruin trudeau like they ruined dion]. it used to be that things were kind of jumbled up regarding positions, and that ontarians wanted the parties to balance each other out at a provincial and federal level. but that dynamic seems to have receded, leaving ontarians with a smaller palette of options.

wherever you were approaching the situation from previously - red tories uneasy about harper's thatcherist bents, or the elusive literal centrist that thought it was worth a shot - has altered. harper has failed to appeal to anybody. and, it may have harris-like long term consequences in the province.

when ontario elected mike harris, a substantial number of [mostly older] voters had to think they were voting for the party of bill davis. but, they got something very different. and, as these voters have died over the last 20 years, their ideological descendants have grown up in a world where the right has never appealed to them. they may have been red tories in the 70s, but today they're simply liberals. that puts the ontario liberals in a very strong position for a very long time. and, there's little reason to think a similar reality *wouldn't* play out at the federal level, in reaction to a government that has ignored almost every issue that would be important to traditional tory voters, while pushing a number of things that make their skin crawl.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-grenier-polls-sep10-1.3222457

Love Karl Marx
Liberals today are not the Liberals of JT's father either. PET was a communist and I supported him completely and the Liberals under him. But, not any more. Neoliberalism is an evil ideology.

Jessica Murray
now, *this* is an interesting troll...

i think there's an argument that trudeau was somewhat of an anarchist, in the way that anarchism intersects with liberalism - he seemed to hold a lot of ideas that fall into that grey area. but, there's not a smidgeon of evidence that he ever supported workers taking control of their means of production. and, if you don't support worker-owned industry, then you're not a communist. sorry.

old man marx would have ripped the charter to pieces as a bourgeois document that exists to restrict people's rights. and, he may have been slightly correct in his denunciations, with a large list of caveats.

i agree with him on the corporate tax hike, and not much else.

i'm glad he's clarifying his budget stance. it's just a question of people knowing what they're voting for.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-tom-mulcair-interview-1.3221183

NeedPotLegalizedSoICanSurviveTheNextFourYears
So you're for a tax hike that may very well be the straw that broke the camel's back, forcing corporations to relocate to other countries, taking those jobs with them?

Because that what will happen as a result. MARK MY WORDS.

Jessica Murray
you know, i'm not really that concerned about that. there's two reasons.

the first is that a lot of our economy is resource-based. that means that we have the leverage, not them. we can tell them that if they don't want to pay their taxes, then they can't access our resources - and award contracts to other companies that are willing to pay the taxes. you've got the whole thing backwards, when it comes to resource-based economies.

the second is that i think workers should run their own industries, anyways. such a policy may make investment here less attractive for hierarchically organized foreign corporations, but i don't want an economy driven by hierarchically organized foreign corporations - i want a society driven by horizontally organized local corporations. i would say "good riddance" - and "let's build a better system".

we control what we produce. we control what we buy. we are not the whim of imaginary market forces. and we really need to remove the mental shackles of pretending that we are.

of course, none of the parties are proposing this. and, the constitution specifies "natural persons" for a reason.

i think you need to read the polls correctly to get to the right answer. and, it's just a libertarian position on the matter: it's the individual's choice and shouldn't be interfered with by the government.

if somebody wants to die, what right does a state have to interfere in the matter and force them to stay alive? it's an absurd position, frankly. and, it's broadly consistent with what polls say on a wide range of other issues. see, this is what the conservatives consistently screw up. canadians aren't opposed to economic regulation. we're opposed to social regulation. you know - real liberalism, not this perverted neo-liberal crap. but, they're slashing economic regulations while refusing to address social regulations. i think that mclaughlin is closer to the public perception on this than any of our political leaders are.

sure: it requires taking a step back from a certain religious persuasion. but, canadians have already done this. they're just waiting for the political system to catch up, and the supreme court has given them what they need to to do so.

the law needs to be written around ways to ensure the state is not able to interfere, not ways to reform state interference. you're going to need a contract. some witnesses. let the lawyers work that out - but it's not all that complicated, it's just a question of ensuring a public record exists of consent and can be verified before the action occurs.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2213196/election-2015-is-canada-ready-for-physician-assisted-death/

it's the right idea. and i've pointed this out repeatedly. but the kinds of numbers we're seeing in ontario suggest they're likely to take a bigger dent out of the gta than is present here. superimpose a map of the last provincial election to see what i mean.

my rants were rooted in the idea that they weren't running away with anything, and that the high ndp numbers were more likely to split in favour of the conservatives than actually win the ndp any seats. but, the liberals are positioned far better to take advantage of a dip in ndp support than the ndp are to take advantage of a dip in liberal support. if the liberals are really pushing 40, they will do far better in toronto than this map is letting on, and may very well leap frog. but, that's a question of regional polling, not national polling.

on the one hand, they could get 30% nationally and win 40 seats - if it's scattered around all over the place, as was appearing to be true a few weeks ago. on the other hand, they could get 25% nationally and win 100 seats if they, say, crash to near zero in the prairies and climb into the high 30s in ontario.

there's just really not any evidence that 2011 was a defining election in the 905. as mentioned, these areas just voted for kathleen wynne. and i wouldn't underestimate the effect of that pension plan, which is popular in ontario and that wynne has set up as an election issue. along with a number of other things.

on top of that, there were some factors in 2011 relating to voter apathy with ignatieff that are not present here. as i've stated elsewhere, i think all the liberals really had to do to win in 2011 is not run somebody that backed an illegal war.

but, i'm rationalizing the numbers - the fact is that the snapshots right now are almost identical to the 2014 provincial election results. and, as of this moment, i think there's little conclusion other than that you'll see similar results.

what i was worried about was that the "orange wave" might run over ontario in such a way that converted two-way liberal-conservative races into conservative wins. a three-way split across the province, even if it led to less conservative votes and more liberal votes overall, would just elect more conservatives. but, that doesn't seem to be happening.

globalnews.ca/news/2212501/10-ridings-the-liberals-need-to-win-to-get-out-of-3rd-place/

interesting polling project.

the two comments left here a little more than a year ago are similar to what i want to say, which indicates that the solutions are “in the air”, but i think it’s maybe useful to back up a little bit.

we often compare the current period of unfettered neo-liberal capitalism (or whatever you want to call it – unregulated capitalism, “really existing capitalism” – or perhaps “late capitalism” if you want to really poke fukuyuma in the eye) to the gilded age, but is that really a good comparison? globally, perhaps. when we think of the gilded age, we get images of dickensian factory labourers. kids working as chimney sweeps. and, the conditions that a lot of things we buy are made in overseas may mirror those conditions.

but, the issues we’re facing in north america are not related to poor working conditions, but to a lack of employment, itself. it’s more of the luddite critique. but, could the luddites actually be right, this time? and, if they are, is it cause for alarm or cause for celebration?

the existence of the middle class was predicated on the existence of labour in the first place. on one hand, it was fought for through union struggles. but, the left romanticizes this to a degree that is perhaps too self-congratulatory, and largely fantastical. the existence of the middle class has a lot to do with the adoption of fordism [the idea that workers should be able to buy the products they make], and the use of keynesian policies to break the cyclic downturns and keep workers buying.

but, there needs to be workers for there to be fordism. and there needs to be jobs for there to be workers. we’re looking at tactics that worked in the past and pondering whether they can be emulated, but not questioning if the conditions are comparable. and, i would argue that they are not.

moving forwards, we are not going to see a return to the kind of workforce that made fordism possible, or keynesianism viable. we’re going to see increasing mechanization. robots can never be members of the middle class. they are necessarily slave labourers. in a society that is veering in this direction, there is no place for a middle class of comfortable labourers – there is only space for a professional class of financial managers and technocrats, and a wide swath of low wage drone workers. and, even the drone workers that we see around us everywhere – in everything from fast food to retail – are on the brink of obsolescence. the day you order a big mac on a computer screen is the day the economy implodes. and, that day is not merely close but entirely imminent.

this requires a deeper rethink. but, as pointed out, the answers are in front of us. far from being the end of progress, these answers are the resurrection of it. instead of being partisan and ideological, let’s look at history as though it is a process for a minute. i’m citing engels here, but that’s not important.

nobody doubts that liberalism was designed to maximize freedom; some claim it’s framers were naive, others claim they were just wrong, but nobody doubts the intention. and, maybe i’m naive myself, but i think it’s an entirely reasonable economic arrangement – under certain conditions. the first condition is that everybody has to own property. the second is that everybody has to own themselves. if every individual can produce their own products with their own labour, indeed if they even *must*, it is a system than can maximize individual freedom – and if everybody is working in freedom to carry out their own goals, society should be the better for it.

but, then we had the industrial revolution, and it abolished those assumptions. individual workers could not compete with the machines, and became converted into wage labourers. property was eaten up by the people that owned the factories. and, it did not make sense to work against this. within this vacuum, socialism was born as a way to apply the ideals of liberalism to an industrial society. we never got to communism, but i’d take fordism over stalinism or maoism any day. it took some fighting, a few scares, some bad crashes – but we got there. for a while.

now that mechanization has taken over, and we are exiting industrial society and entering a mechanized society, we need to ask the same question: how do we apply the liberal ideals of self-ownership within a post-industrial society? and, the answers seem to have one thing in common: we need to find a way to take ownership of the machines that we now all rely so heavily on out of the control of a minority and into broad, public oversight. exactly how this is to be accomplished is up to us to determine together. but, it seems clear that it is the answer. and, it seems clear that most people know that it is the answer.

freedom on the other side of mechanization could be true liberation. legitimate emancipation.

but, we have to get our heads around it first. and, that means, first and foremost, that we have to understand that the idea of a middle class is a historical relic of a technological era that we’ve moved out of.

www.ekospolitics.com/index.php/2014/08/from-the-end-of-history-to-the-end-of-progress/

i take your point, and it is important. but economists don't actually have jobs. they may teach. the article bit is true, but it's kind of a technicality; i'd push back against that, on some level. not too strongly. peer review is important. but it's not the only way to measure a person's contribution to a field. i'd personally rather publish over appspot than in journals, but i'm an anarchist so take that for what it is...

the other thing about a field like economics is that there's really a very small amount of base material. i had economic students in my math classes, and the way they explained it to me was that there's basically two years to the degree and the rest of it is entirely speculative and really broadly ideological. once you know what the basic glossary is, and understand a few basic mathematical techniques, the rest is just politics.

because economics is not a science. it's barely even a social science. it's more in the realm of political philosophy.

i'll call myself a mathematician from time to time offhand, depending on the context, but if i get challenged i'm not going to push the point, because i do know better than to pretend i'm really, seriously a mathematician. but, i also know that the fact that i have 30 odd credits in math (including enough taken at the graduate level when i was studying other topics to get a master's degree, if i were to apply for it) means i know more about math than you do, and can teach you more than a few things about the topic if the situation arises where i have the opportunity to.

i guess what i'm getting at is that this isn't binary. there are shades. harper may be more white than grey, but it's exaggerating to suggest he has no business talking about the economy, or something.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/frank-koller/stephen-harper-not-economist_b_8104870.html

online polling doesn't have a good track record, and the nanos polls were taken over the long weekend. you can see the conservatives snapped back to almost 29 this morning when the wednesday numbers were included (he's doing three day rolling averages, remember). the forum polling has been unusual for a long time and i'm not sure what to make of it; it seems to me that they're underreporting their margins, but i couldn't tell you how or why (perhaps their ivr system is flawed). it's less that there's a specific trend and more that there's a wider range of outcomes.

i'm still looking at the last ekos poll as the most accurate recent snapshot, but that should hopefully change over the next few days.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/08/stephen-harper-federal-election-2015-projections_n_8105740.html

Suleyka Montpetit
The only change you can be hopeful for is the downward trend of the Conservative. The house of cards is falling down and everyone can see it.

Jessica Amber Murray
the lowest that the conservatives have ever polled in the history of the country is a little above 29% [if you take into account the split in the 90s, and the liberal-conservative voting patterns in the late 1800s]. polls that put them below 29% are consequently historic in scope. i may agree that harper has been a poor prime minister, but it's another thing to suggest that conservatism is at such depths. if that is true, then this election is not about stephen harper. it's about something more fundamental.

i don't claim that they're polling much higher than that. and i suspect that you may see some other parties on their right increase their vote share, especially in the west: the christian heritage party, or perhaps the libertarian party.

but it is very, very hard to believe that the conservatives are polling under 28 - because they never have before. ever. or, at least not without fracturing themselves into multiple components.

Cav
your comments and opinion would have far more credibility if you knew proper grammar and punctuation. This isn't teenage texting hour. Do you know what a 'capital' letter is?

Jessica Amber Murray
that's some fighting words from a sheridan college graduate. i refuse to capitalize! i am an anti-capitalist, an alphabetical egalitarian and a general grammar anti-authoritarian. i will flaunt the dictates of any and all centralized grammar authorities - and with reckless, wanton abandon.

i think this is a mixed bag in terms of accuracy. and, that her comments should be analyzed by the metric of accuracy. she seems to be representing a large swath of the population that...it's "hippie bullshit". but, this is a fact of life in our political system and something to get used to.

i think she's partly right on the domestic violence front. there have been many reports (including reports by the united nations) that conclude that marijuana lowers domestic violence - *if* it is used as a replacement for alcohol. that's almost certainly what she's getting at: that alcohol is very strongly correlated with domestic violence, whereas marijuana is not. that's not the same thing, though, as suggesting that marijuana lowers violent crime. the un report actually concluded that marijuana legalization is consequently preferable to alcohol legalization - and i hold that position, as well. to me, one of the most profound consequences of marijuana legalization is the hope that it reduces alcohol consumption. alcohol abuse is a serious root cause of a lot of crime.

the cancer thing is more than tenuous, but you need to bring in a lot of caveats. first, the studies that suggest that thc may be useful to reverse tumour growth are with very highly concentrated amounts that you could not access via smoking a joint, or even eating a brownie. suggesting that recreational pot use has anti-carcinogenic properties is simply a bad argument. second, marijuana is usually rolled with tobacco.

i don't know where she's getting the idea that mom smoking pot raises kids' iqs, but it seems beyond dubious - especially if mom is smoking pot rolled with tobacco. that sounds like something from some hippie website like "natural news" or something.

now, i suspect these views are part of a broader anti-science perspective. somebody needs to ask her about vaccines. and gmos. it's a continuum of thought. and it's a real thing.

it is on that basis that i would challenge her candidacy, rather than on a kneejerk anti-pot or "law and order" basis. to me, it sets off red flags that this is somebody that is not scientifically literate enough to sit in the house.

moving forward, i think this is something that needs to be more closely vetted. anybody who has been on facebook knows how widely spread this nonsense is, and how strongly it resonates with "regular people" that lean towards activism.

if i was running a party, the very first question i would ask is "do vaccines cause autism?". i'm not joking. it would be the absolute first level of screening.

www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/09/09/joy-davies-marijuana-pot-trudeau-south-surrey_n_8114066.htm

see, you have to understand that most trans people don't identify as homosexual, unless they're homosexual relative to the identity they move into. there's consequently not a contradiction. rather, the idea of conflating the issues is very false. you need to understand her comments as though they're coming from a sarah palin, as that would be how she would conceive of herself in her own mind - not as a queer person.

in a sense, i think this is an opportunity for people to really understand the trans condition. but, with that very sparse introduction as guidance, i'm going to let people reflect on it rather than write about it.

i was thinking it was going to be arnold. but i called it.

he's getting set up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KinTp7uh8Os

america is built on the idea that it's only wrong if you get caught. it's the legacy of puritanism, built right into the constitution - it's the fourth amendment. it's the political culture, the corporate culture and especially the financial culture.

so, when you do an undercover operation like this, it hits people as an affront to what they consider to be fairness - that is, the right to commit crimes so long as you don't get caught.