This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Andrew Phung highlights how important it is for younger voters to be heard in Alberta’s election. Travis Benson offers plenty of suggestions as to why even people who aren’t always NDP supporters should be happy to re-elect Rachel Notley. And PressProgress rounds
Continue readingTag: Doug Ford
Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Assorted content to start your week. – Martin Regg Cohn discusses how workers are bearing the brunt of Doug Ford’s budget. Joe Light offers a reminder that Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric predictably gave way to a tax scheme designed to further enrich CEOs at the expense of everybody else. And
Continue readingThe Daveberta Podcast: Episode 34: When you play the Game of Thrones… Alberta election edition.
In this episode Dave and Ryan discuss the huge turnout at the advance polls, some of the key races to watch on election night, and recap of the final days of the campaign. We also dive into the mailbag to answer some great questions from our listeners. And because we couldn’t help ourselves,
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: In the arrogance of ignorance.
You saw the big beaming smiles on their faces. If not in the newspapers or television news clips, you can imagine the smugness that Ontario’s conservative government felt bringing in their first budget accounting for Ontario’s billions in revenues. Despite their promises of efficiencies and despite the braggadocio, they failed
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Tories take a try at Toronto transit.
You really need to be a Torontonian to recognize the absurdity of the Ontario government’s latest plan for Toronto transit. It seems to be a right of passage for Toronto politicians that they all have to give transit another kick in passing. Premier Doug Ford should be passing out cigars
Continue readingMontreal Simon: Will Andrew Scheer’s Con Friends Help Justin Trudeau Defeat Him?
In Alberta the advance polls are open, and Albertans have started voting in a provincial election Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party are favoured to win.But the UCP has been hit by one bigot eruption after the other. The RCMP is looking into allegations of voter fraud during Kenney's leadership
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Notice to public employees: Jason Kenney and the UCP are eyeing your pensions again
If you’re a public employee in Alberta and you’ve been deferring your salary for years to build a secure retirement through your modest pension, Jason Kenney would like to take it away. If he can’t do that, he at least wants to ensure no one else can have the same
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: PCPO Budget Is Mild Stuff
I don’t like the directions taken; cutting healthcare spending below the rate of inflation, and etc. But this government in this budget is definitely no Mike Harris Mark II. Mind you, they’ll never meet their deficit reduction targets at this rate, but they’ve probably figured that nobody really gives a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Donald Gutstein examines the crucial difference between advancing toward a zero-carbon economy, and incentivizing further fossil fuel development through misleading terms such as “low-emission”. And Arthur White-Crummey reports on Nic Rivers’ response to the Saskatchewan Party’s attempt to self-assess climate policy while
Continue readingAlberta Politics: A question begged: Where were the UCP’s top operatives if they weren’t vetting candidates?
Apparently someone in the United Conservative Party could run a sophisticated vote-diversion scheme but the party didn’t have the technical wherewithal to operate a simple candidate vetting process capable of eliminating candidates with a high potential for causing embarrassment. And not at the same time either, so it’s not as
Continue readingPolitical Potshots: 73+ Reasons Why I March Against Doug Ford (Guest Post By The Girl Who Waited)
Doug Ford and his Conservative Government: Cancelled Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, that cost $3 billion in lost revenue according to Ontario’s fiscal watchdog. Fired Privatization Officer, Ed Clark. Fired Environment Commissioner, Dianne Saxe. Fired Chief scientist, Molly Shoichet. Fired Chief Investment Officer, Allan O’Dette. Refused assistance to Toronto for asylum seekers.
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Smooth Move, Mike
In 1998 the Ontario government of then premier, Mike Harris, sold the 407 highway to for $3.1 billion to a Spanish-led consortium that included – wait for it – SNC-Lavalin. The Ontario government had built the 407 for around $1.5 billion but Mike needed to get the books in order
Continue readingBigCityLib Strikes Back: Doug Ford’s OHIP Changes: A Bummer, or Not?
I’m especially wondering about his plan to cut back on pain relief for colonoscopies. I’ve gone through the procedure twice. First time around they hit me with a General and I still didn’t pass out. I watched on a B&W TV screen as they maneuvered the probe up and down
Continue readingPolitical Potshots: The Mike Harris Sequel No One Wanted
“We will be there to support you one 1000%. What I can tell you one thing… I promise you… you won’t have to be protesting on the front of Queen’s Park like you did with the Premier here” Doug Ford Was Mike Harris really that good that we needed a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – CBC reports on Canada’s Changing Climate Report showing that we’re facing climate change twice as severe as the rest of the world, while Phil Tank writes about the anticipated effects on Saskatoon in particular. And the Canadian Press reports on the latest report
Continue readingAlberta Politics: A generation of impulsive right-wing politicians ruins Preston Manning’s dream of ‘green capitalism’ – what’s next?
Let’s start with a pop quiz. Who said this? “One of the biggest issues will be the question of how much of current revenue from non-renewable resources should be saved and how those savings should be invested … so that, if the day ever comes that oil and gas isn’t
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Roland Paulsen is rightly critical of the billionaire-funded take that we should ignore the ready availability of resources to end severe crises simply because they were worse on an absolute level in the past: To exclusively discuss social progress based on a certain
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day…
As inept and foolish as the Ford government in Ontario might be, you have to admit it when occasionally the chuckleheads do something right. It is like when the impossibly ideological Mike Harris government in the late 1990s amalgamated the city of Toronto. The province did it for the wrong
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Ontario’s going to Hell in a handbasket.
There are various opinions about ways of getting to Hell but my American mother liked the phrase about a handbasket and I first heard it from her when I was quite young. It seems appropriate now that we have elected a Ford as premier, that the province is heading for
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