Scott Tribe – Page 30 – Progressive Bloggers // Blogues progressistes

July 7, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Bringing cheer into the gloom

This was good to see:

The town was not on the official royal itinerary, but the royal couple made a special stop with the hope of bringing much-needed cheer to residents who now face the daunting task of rebuilding their homes and community…Thousands of other Slave Lakers and some out-of-towners gathered outside the college chanting “Will and Kate” and “We love Slave Lake.” Many arrived before dawn to stake out a prime spot in hopes of catching a glimpse of the couple as they arrived.

You may or may not be a monarchist, but even the most hardened republicans should be willing to admit this was a very touching […]

July 6, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Somewhere, Stephen Harper is smiling at this.

Statistics Canada released a survey today on the reasons given by those Canadians as to why they did not vote in the May 2 federal election:

..The most common response for not having voted was that they were “not interested in voting” (28%), which also includes feeling their vote would not have made a difference in the election results. An additional 23% indicated they were “too busy”, which includes having family obligations or having a schedule conflict at work or school.

With regards to the 23% who were “too busy” to vote, they either didn’t see the notices from Elections Canada on where one could do advance voting, or […]

July 4, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: A prediction..

..after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (otherwise known as Will and Kate) depart from Canada, support for a continued role for the Monarchy in Canada – as long as it’s William and Kate at the helm – is going to go over 65%. That&#8…

June 28, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Think about it..

This is a status message seen on Facebook by a family member who normally doesn’t utter political statements:

So let me get this straight…Kelsey Grammer can end a 15yr marriage by phone, Larry King is on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55hr marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with everyone, 53% of Americans get divorced and 30-60% cheat on their spouses. Yet, same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really?

THat would be referring partially to some of the statements coming from New York State opponents of same-sex marriage, which was legalized yesterday.

Just look at Canada. Has the institution […]

June 27, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Evidence of climate change

Apologies for the extended absence, but there was a death in the family which absorbed my time for the middle and end of last week.. family comes before blogging.

Anyhow, to start off the new (and short) work week, I caught an article from Dr Jeff Masters over at The Weather Underground. In this article, he comments that since 2010, things seems to have gotten very extreme, weather-wise:

Every year extraordinary weather events rock the Earth. Records that have stood centuries are broken. Great floods, droughts, and storms affect millions of people, and truly exceptional weather events unprecedented in human history may occur. But the wild roller-coaster ride of […]

June 21, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Nothing new here

A new Nanos poll comes out today that shows the Conservatives slightly increasing their standing from the May 2, 2011 election results. This should be no great surprise; Parliament has barely sat since the results and is about to go in its break for the summer til September, and if you thought the electorate was disengaged before the last election, they’re hardly going to be now with summer approaching. What was done during this brief Parliament sitting was a threatened back to work legislation of Air Canada employees and a bill in the making to legislate Canada Post striking workers back to work. I would gander both actions or […]

June 18, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Weekend thoughts

The Liberal delegates have (unfortunately in my view) voted to extend the wait back to 2013 before choosing a new Liberal leader. I’ve already gone over my objection to that, but it seems from what I was hearing that the LPC brought out the party leaders heavy artillery and urged acceptance of their motion, rather then accept either the 6 month requirement or a middle of the road option as my friend Jeff was putting forward. The LPC brass got their way, it seems. I’d have thought since 2006 that some of our party would learn that the Party bosses and leaders don’t always know best. PERHAPS they will […]

June 17, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: I support the middle path timeline subamendment for the Liberal Party Leadership Vote

I’m away visiting my folks for the weekend (for Father’s Day, the immediate family is getting together), but I decided to interrupt my sojourn and get on here just to say that I think that Jeff Jedras – fellow Liberal blogger and also a delegate at this Liberal Extraordinary Convention this weekend – has put forth an amendment that is worthy of support.

Read more of it at Jeff’s site, but it basically boils down to Jeff arguing that while the current 6 month time line for choosing the new Liberal leader int he LPC constitution may be too short… what the Liberal Leadership executive is offering as the […]

June 17, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Watching the Ontario election campaign

Yes, that has already started. You know an election campaign has started when political ads attacking other parties or promoting your own come along on the television. In the federal Conservative Party’s case, they were in seemingly permanent campaign mode for years while they had a minority. Here in Ontario though, we have a fixed date election – one that the government actually sticks to. The opening salvo of that appears to have been during Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals back on Wednesday, when Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives let loose an ad on the unsuspecting populace.

It will be interesting to see when the Ontario Liberals […]

June 16, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: A contrast

During the Olympics, Vancouver folks were very patriotic, yet very civilized in their fervour, as it should be.
A year later, their hockey team loses a 7th game in the Stanley Cup final – a team supposedly representing all of Canada (which I&#821…

June 14, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Things that bug me about the Stanley Cup

One thing that really annoys me is banks making commercials trying to gain favour by going all nationalistic and pulling out the “Canada hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in 18 years!”. A newsflash to them and to a lot of fans saying the same thing: this isn’t the Olympics. This is 2 teams representing their cities, not their countries. There are as many Canadians on Boston’s team as Vancouver’s. Last year’s Stanley Cup champions, the Chicago Black Hawks, had the most Canadians of any team in the playoffs. Why weren’t they “Canada’s team?”

Let’s save the fervour of cheering for your country at actual Canada vs USA games at […]

June 12, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Higher standards

I have to disagree with my blogging colleague Jymn over his way about the different ways the Democratic Party and Republican Party handle scandals.

I’d rather a party not lower itself to the level of the other guys and say “well – they did it too!”. It’s not on the same scale of this sex scandal, but the Conservative Party up here has often whined like that about “the Liberals did it too, or were far worse” when pointed out their various indiscretions.. not exactly inspiring stuff for a party that promised to do better and clean things up. It didn’t affect them this election, but it will […]

June 10, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Progressive Bloggers back up

If you hadn’t seen it yet, Progressive Bloggers is back up and in a new format with some new features. We’ve managed to figure out what was causing the crashes before, and the corrections seemed to have stopped that, though the site can sti…

June 9, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: The CPC funding strategy: always look for enemies.

Now that the Liberals are decimated and the Conservatives have a majority government, that once favourite whipping boy for raising donations among its base is gone, so it will have to revert to other boogey-people.

The NDP it won’t touch for another 3 1/2 years, so it’s decided that the new threat to Conservative Party values is the media:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party is calling on supporters to dip into their wallets to help the party counter a new foe. In a letter sent out in the past few days, Conservative Party President John Walsh is urging supporters to help the party counter a “hailstorm” of […]

June 8, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: A short thought

Harper really needs to stay away from sporting events.

June 5, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: And now for something completely different..

I don’t often post a lot on here other then political blogposts, but it’s the end of the weekend, and not much is going on, so I thought I’d post something else (okay, I could talk about the Senate page protesting Harper’s throne speech and getting canned, but several thousand others have already done so).

In my spare time, I am a big fan of Role Playing Games, or RPGS. I’ve played some online, and I play those I like that are home versions. One of the major games I’ve always liked is The Elder Scrolls, which has been coming out from Bethesda Softworks since 1994. They have a […]

June 3, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Progressive Bloggers – Version 2.

Part of the reason I’ve not been blogging as much is that I along with my volunteer coder Chris have been working hard on getting a new version new look version of Progressive Bloggers up and going. The site has been crying out for a re-design for several years. It was very hard to modify or to code stuff, and quite frankly, it was a major drain on the server it was sitting on.

We had thought Prog Blog 2 was finally launced yesterday AM .. but realized there was some unexpected glitches in reading pages (it’s based on a WordPress system), that had people scratching their heads. […]

June 1, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Killing the Senate requires the Constitution to be opened as well

My Premier, Dalton Mcguinty, has been long on the record that he is for killing the Senate, rather then reforming it, and he reinforced that with another statement to that effect in response to Harper’s proposed Senate reforms. He is joined in that belief by the Nova Scotia Premier, and both of them are in agreement with the federal NDP, who have long advocated that position.

The problem of course with calling for the abolition of the Senate is the same potential roadblock that faces changing the Senate to an elected body (notwithstanding Harper’s attempts to sidestep it, and Quebec appears ready to take the Feds to court […]

May 30, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Hudak’s Harris-like approach

In case you missed it, the Ontario Progressive Conservative party had a convention this weekend. There was a lot of, shall we say, extraneous stuff that was going on that distracted from this event, but you shouldn’t let the amusement of a wayward Blackberry from a PC candidate and an even more tortured explanation from Tim Hudak’s officials get in the way of other things that was going on there.

There are some questions about Hudak’s policy financial shortfalls and where he’s going to make up the money to pay for what he’s offering Ontario for electing him. What most concerns me though is stuff like this coming out […]

May 27, 2011 Scott Tribe

Scott's DiaTribes: Poll: majority of Canadians support constitutional talks to reform Senate

It seems a new poll is out that says Canadians are more then willing right now to re-open the Constitution to do such things as Senate reform:

After almost two decades of constitutional peace, Harris-Decima survey conducted for The Canadian Press indicates a majority is now willing to risk re-opening the constitutional can of worms to accomplish some specific goals…For instance, 61 per cent said they’re prepared to re-open the Constitution to reform or abolish the appointed Senate. And 58 per cent said they’re willing to offer constitutional amendments in a bid to finally secure Quebec’s signature on the Constitution. Fifty-eight per cent also said they’re willing to open […]