So John Ivison had another column today criticizing the Ontario Liberal government’s green energy plan: here. The column focuses on a solar energy company that Dalton McGuinty visited this week, Eclipsall Energy Corp. The upshot of the column is to sug…
Continue readingTag: ontario election 2011
Impolitical: Hudak visits Toronto Star ed board
It’s too bad that the Star only taped just under 3 minutes of the meeting they had with Tim Hudak. The Ottawa Citizen met with Dalton McGuinty the other day and their video shows the entire meeting, running just about an hour. So it would have been nic…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: 2011 Ontario Election: Parkdale-Highpark All Candidates Forum Response
The following is my observations and reflections from attending an All Candidates Forum for the riding of Parkdale-Highpark. Click here for an overview on the candidates for this riding. While this post will obviously be specific to this particular On…
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: This Is An Economist?
Like Stephen Harper, Tim Hudak has as Master’s degree in economics. But, as Jim Stanford points out in his latest publication from The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Hudak’s economics don’t pass the sniff test:This detailed statistical review…
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: The Hudak Conservatives are in trouble: polls
We had some people wondering if the Harris-Decima poll earlier last week showing an 11 point Liberal lead was an “outlier”. Well, we have 32 new polls out this evening in a matter of minutes within each other, and while the #’s are different, the momentum is confirmed by those polls for the Liberals.
First off, we have a poll from Ipsos-Reid;
According to a new Ipsos Reid poll conducted for Global News, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have 38 per cent support, compared to 37 per cent for Tim Hudak and the PC party. The New Democratic Party under Andrea Horwath trail with 24 per cent… the McGuinty campaign has […]
Continue readingImpolitical: Horwath weighs in
Finally addressing the big issue of week one that the NDP curiously declined to speak about: For a week, Andrea Horwath has been reluctant to talk about the issue sucking the air out of the campaign so far – the Liberals’ plan to give employers who…
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: Them!
The paranoia of the 1950’s is perhaps best captured in the 1954 film, Them!, a ninety-four minute saga which turned on two common themes of the day — nuclear Holocaust and Communist subversion. In the film, a species of gigantic irradiated ants threat…
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: Miscellaneous Ontario election campaign tidbits
A couple of things here and there this AM:
Eric Grenier of threehundredeight.com has a piece in the Globe and Mail about his seat projections for the Ontario election. If the election were held today, based on recent poll results, he gives the Conservatives and Liberals each 44 seats, with the NDP holding the balance of power at 19. Yes, that is still a sizable seat loss for the governing Liberals, and it still might put their hold on government in jeopardy if that result were to pan out, but considering where the polls were 2-3 months ago, and considering they seem to have Tim Hudak and the Conservatives […]
Continue readingImpolitical: Challenging the politics of division – part III
This is a very clever 90 seconds. McGuinty is articulating a moral view here, of what Ontario is about and what he believes, in continued response to Tim Hudak’s divisive attack on the tax credit for businesses to hire skilled new Canadians. Just to br…
Continue readingImpolitical: Another flawed attack on green energy in Ontario
This John Ivison column from yesterday is the latest from a Canadian pundit to attack the Ontario government’s green energy efforts: “McGuinty’s green bubble ready to pop.” It, like the Wente column (response), relies on some questionable material that…
Continue readingImpolitical: About that tax credit
On the topic of the week. The tax credit to businesses to hire new Canadians is targeted at Canadian citizens here less than five years. 1,200, at that. When skilled workers get to practice their professions, our tax base benefits. More competitive, mo…
Continue readingRedBedHead: Killing The Bob Rae Myth
Watching the Ontario election you’d think that there was nothing of much import going on in the world. Why else would there be so little difference in the platforms of the three major parties in this election? For instance, you’d never know that a majo…
Continue readingImpolitical: Early days but good signs
A poll out tonight in the Ontario race shows a Liberal lead: A newly released Harris-Decima poll shows Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals have an 11 point lead over Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives – the first time the governing party has bested i…
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: A stunner of a new Ontario poll, if accurate.
Wow:
A newly released Harris-Decima poll shows Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals have an 11 point lead over Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives – the first time the governing party has bested it’s main rival in many months.The Ontario poll has the Liberals in the lead at 43 per cent, the PC’s with 31 per cent, the NDP at 21 and the Green Party trailing with five per cent. The 43 per cent support for the Liberals, if accurate, puts the party in majority government territory.
Even though I thought Tim Hudak’s abortion stuff would not go over well in mainstream Ontario, and the Liberals have fought back against the immigrant […]
Continue readingImpolitical: Q & A with Tony Genco
Seems Tony Genco, PC candidate in Vaughan also shares the view that the PCs are a divided bunch: Q: Your nomination has spurred some division within the Conservative party itself, with some critics still pointing to your Liberal roots. What are your th…
Continue readingImpolitical: Canada falls from competitiveness Top 10
Noted from the Globe yesterday: Canada has continued its slide in business competitiveness, falling to 12th place from 10th last year in a World Economic Forum ranking of countries around the globe.The Conference Board of Canada, which prepared the dat…
Continue readingImpolitical: Challenging the politics of division – part II
“Hudak’s politics of division” gets appropriately called out. First, on his hypocrisy: New immigrants to Ontario must wonder how they suddenly went from being valued Canadians, whose skills our economy needs, to being publicly derided as “foreigner…
Continue readingProgressive Proselytizing: McGuinty’s immigrant pledge is simply bad politics
McGuinty has recently made an election pledge to provide $10,000 dollars in support for businesses that hire immigrants. Regardless of what one might think about the policy itself, it is a tactical error in a political campaign and will almost certainl…
Continue readingNorthern Reflections: The Battle for the Middle Class
In today’s Toronto Star, Tom Walkom writes that the winner of the Ontario election will be the party which best calms the fears of the middle class: “The battleground in this Ontario election,” he writes, “is a middle class unnerved by the recession.”T…
Continue readingScott's DiaTribes: Conservatives of all stripes hoping Ontario voters have short memories; are mean-spirited
Last year, ‘Progressive’ Conservative leader Tim Hudak presented a bill that would give a 10 per cent wage subsidy for employers who hire skilled newcomers. Now he’s out there attacking the Ontario Liberals for proposing something very similar – tax credits for businesses that hire immigrants.
A few months ago, the federal Conservatives appealed to the ethnic communities in Canada’s big cities, with a proposal to provide loans for “skills training and accreditation”. Yet all of a sudden, Dean Del Maestro, MP for Peterborough and Harper’s secretary is attacking this as being discriminatory – apparently towards “young white males” if you read his reference to himself. I’m not sure […]
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