Trudeau vs Scheer

[The Green Barbarian]

[hobbyguy]

GB - yer shtick is getting old and tired and damaging to the Conservative party.

I post a serious question about a serious issue and the response is a low brow bogustube video? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/11/technology/youtube-fake-view-sellers.html

What do you think about the Huawei issue, and the Liberal government's handling of it, given the "and then what?" questions I posed?

[burnedatstake]

and yet - he will still win a majority. as matt damon so gloriously proclaimed in a movie so many years ago "how do you like them apples? huh?"

[Gone_Fishin]

I post a serious question about a serious issue and the response is a low brow bogustube video?

Doesn't get any more low brow than this.

[Merry]

I'll respond to your comments HG because, as you point out, it's a very complicated issue.

It IS a problem when most of our technological components are made in a communist country like China; and the Public needs to be made more aware of the fact that it's happening.

When one considers National Security, I tend to agree with those who say offshoring such technology is foolish. But when one considers the economic side of the argument, it's easy to see why companies are utilizing the lower wages and environmental standards such offshore manufacturing provides. I don't agree with it, but I do understand it.

However, once people know how much of our technology is produced in places like China, it tends to give lie to the fearmongering around the issue of whether or not it's safe to buy and use Hwuawei technology. Fearmongering that is often more about giving Western companies such as Apple a bit of an economic "edge" over a successful rival. It shows most of the fear mongers as the true hypocrites that they are. BUT that's not true of ALL those who are raising concerns.

I do believe that there is a genuine argument for not off shoring the manufacture of our technological equipment, particularly to countries such as China who do not share our Western values, and could potentially pose a threat to us one day. Trade with such countries is fine, and ought to be encouraged if it leads to a greater understanding of each others cultures. But allowing trade that involves the potential to compromise our national security is just plain foolish.

As for allowing the States to use Canada as a pawn in it's ongoing trade war with China, well that was just plain foolish as well. Because now we're in a "no win" position that we can't get out of. The world didn't come to an end when Chretien stood up to the States, and it wouldn't have come to an end if the Libs had quietly warned Meng Wanzhou to stay away. Trump wouldn't have liked it but, provided the Libs consistently denied having done it, there's very little Trump could have done about it.

[hobbyguy]

Merry, if you watch the way Trump operates, it would have been very dangerous for, even more dangerous for Canadians in their day-to-day lives to have crossed Trump at this time. The petty way that Trump operates would have been to do something like kibosh the NAFTA 2.0 ratification when he found out. We are not dealing with Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, like it or not we are dealing with a petty tantrum thrower. The odds that Trump would have found out? 99.9999%. US intelligence services run rings around ours.

It becomes a risk reward issue. Then in the background we have the intransigence of China regarding actually living up to WTO obligations, let alone real fair trade practices. They don't. In a backwards and unintended way, Trump is bringing that to a head.

Why did Canada get stuck being used as a pawn? Simple convenience for Trump in advancing his anti-China isolationist policy. China then escalated the situation, which was not a 100% predictable event, but certainly likely.

We may not like it, but we were always going to get stuck in the middle of the T.Rump-China trade war. We did not blunder into it, we were in a no win situation. Both the US and China are important trade partners for Canada. Trump liked the cold war situation where if you did not want to be on the communist side, you did exactly what the US said - or got thrown to the wolves. It is foolish, but that appears to be where Trump wants things to go once again.

Canada, on the other hand, has been expanding trade possibilities with other countries, with agreements like CETA and CPTPP - which works against what Trump has for a worldview (if you can call it that). As usual, Trump threw us under the bus without a thought or care. Would George W. Bush have thrown us under the bus like that? Or George H.W. Bush? Or Ronald Reagan? Or Bill Clinton? Highly unlikely.

In a sense, the Huawei kerfuffle that Trump engineered (I think Trump is crackpot, but recognize that the guy is very, very shrewd) points out that our trade diversification policies are the right ones. We are far too dependent on the US, and Trump makes me strongly question the wisdom of that over dependence. Trump knew he could throw us under the bus with impunity.

In the mix of things, such collateral damage for Canada has been inevitable ever since Trump got elected. The whole NAFTA 2.0 charade was just one example of that. Trump only cares about Trump - which extends a small amount into caring what his base thinks of him - and to heck with anyone else.

[Gone_Fishin]

Trudeau put Canada behind the 8 ball in NAFTA because he was STUPID enough to drop his pants and tell Trump he'd been game to renegotiate NAFTA before Trump even broached the idea. Way to put us in the passenger seat from the get-go, Justin.

[Catsumi]

There are four vacant seats in Quebec with a fifth coming up in Jan. 22, but JT refuses and stalls to hold elections.

If, as his cheerleaders claim, his gov't is so darn popular and will win the next Federal election, why is he so reluctant to test that claim now, as soon as possible?

Smoke and mirrors, Hair-n-Sox, all gas and no substance.

[featfan]

Love this one.

[hobbyguy]

Trudeau put Canada behind the 8 ball in NAFTA because he was STUPID enough to drop his pants and tell Trump he'd been game to renegotiate NAFTA before Trump even broached the idea. Way to put us in the passenger seat from the get-go, Justin.

That's an uninformed partisan view. Trump promised his base he would dump the CPTPP and he did. Trump told his base that the Paris Accord would be dumped, the Iran nuclear deal. None of that makes sense. Trump told his base that NAFTA was a turkey and he was going to fix it.

Trump's lunacy knows few boundaries. The has thrown every world leader under the bus, of all political stripes, regardless of how they approach him - except Puitin and his bromance buddy Kim.

Trump was going to just dump NAFTA period. (lunacy) So introducing the idea of renegotiation doesn't look so dumb - especially as NAFTA was negotiated before Amazon, Google et al and before container ports. It needed to be modernized.

For the record, I personally never liked NAFTA, but that horse has long left the barn thanks to the bleep Mulroney. The thing about such agreements is that once in place, the economy adjusts to them, and you can not just wipe out decades and decades of adjustment.

[hobbyguy]

Said it before - the juvenile meme thing of CONservatives won't win votes. Prepubescent boys can't vote.

Add in that Trump is extremely unpopular in Canada, and that kind of silly boy "Harper nasty" nonsense won't have any impact, it will work against the CONservatives.

Face it, policy and performance are what matter - not JT's socks or Scheer's silly grin with dimples. JT and the Liberals have done, and are doing just fine. 3.3% unemployment in Kelowna - the Liberals have delivered for us! So whatcha got for the adults in the room?

[featfan]

Breaking news Hobby.

[The Green Barbarian]

Face it, policy and performance are what matter -

and this is why the Liberals are going to lose their majority. It's time you faced it, instead of continually making excuses for this gang of boneheads. Are you going to go have breakfast Climate Einstein McKenna when she's here on Tuesday? It would be nice if someone could ask her some tough questions instead of just letting her chuck peanuts.

[Catsumi]

Do you think Caitlyn could donate some Gorilla glue for "slipping eyebrow boy" ?

When he returns to teaching drama again it might come in handy.

[Gone_Fishin]

Numbers are in and Trudeau's infrastructure plan is largely useless

Lorne Gunter
Published: January 2, 2019


Would it surprise you to find out that the federal Liberals’ 10-year, $187-billion infrastructure plan has been largely useless so far?

“Really!?,” you ask. “Grotesque overspending by Ottawa has been mostly ineffective? Say it ain’t so.”

But it is so.

We are about one-third of the way through the Liberals’ proposed decade of infrastructure excess and we know three things for sure.

Total new spending was never going to be close to $187 billion. At the beginning, the Liberals simply reannounced $92 billion in infrastructure spending promised by the former Harper government, added $95 billion of their own and – presto! — $187 billion.

The spending since the Liberals took over in 2015 has been so haphazard that even the best fiscal minds in the country cannot say how much of the money spent so far has gone to legitimate infrastructure projects (roads, bridges, telecommunications networks, rail lines and waterways) and how much to Liberal pet projects in swing ridings.

And, finally, the third thing that can be said with some certainty is that all this tax- and deficit-funded spending has had nowhere near the economic impact the Liberals projected during the 2015 federal campaign. The best guess (and because of the shoddy bookkeeping, all anyone can do is guess) is that the program has had no more than one-third of the stimulus effect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed it would have.

The Liberals insisted that if they could just overspend by $10 billion a year for three years, the new infrastructure those deficits would pay for would boost Canada’s GDP by 0.4% a year or nearly $5 billion annually.


Instead, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) estimates the maximum amount of stimulus generated by all these buckets and buckets of taxpayer cash has been 0.16% or less than $2 billion. The stimulus effect might even by closer to just $1 billion a year.

Our economy would have been better off leaving the money in Canadians’ pockets and letting them use it for savings or consumer goods.

The Liberals’ infrastructure spending has caused annual deficits of between $20 billion and $30 billion – much larger than the $10 billion promised by Trudeau and his party while campaigning four years ago. And those deficits could last through 2040, not be gone by 2020. Yet that red-ink spending has failed to lift our economy out of stagnation.

While there are pockets of economic despair in Canada (particularly in the oil-dependent West), our national economy has been mediocre. It has been OK, but only OK.

However, it could have been very much better had the Trudeau government not gone ass-over-apple-cart for new infrastructure spending. Sucking $30 billion or $40 billion out of the economy for questionable government spending over the past three years, in return for at most a couple billion a year in GDP growth, is a very poor investment.

snip

The trouble with people who support the Liberals and Trudeau is that results matter far less to them than appearances. Throwing money at a goal is proof of caring. (And as useless as chucking peanuts)

And caring is Priority No. 1. So actually stimulating the economy is less important than appearing to care.

https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnis ... ly-useless