Election 2015

[Atomic]

1000th post

[Fraser]

Not surprising, the NDP has always catered to the hipster douchebag crowd.

LOL - this made me guffaw...

Starbucks coffee is mainstream now. Hipsters go to parlor coffee and places like that.

[The Unknown Poster]

Oh you've convinced me. I'm voting NDP.

[rebusrankin]

 

 

Not surprising, the NDP has always catered to the hipster douchebag crowd.

LOL - this made me guffaw...

Starbucks coffee is mainstream now. Hipsters go to parlor coffee and places like that.

 

Parlor coffee is excellent. Dammit, who do I vote for now?

[Fraser]

I've never had parlor coffee but tims is complete swill

[Mark H.]

Where does one find parlour coffee?

[Mr Dee]

One doesn't just find parlour coffee, one must be introduced to it.

[FrostyWinnipeg]

 

Not surprising, the NDP has always catered to the hipster douchebag crowd.

LOL - this made me guffaw...

 

The joke or that the douchebag word was resurrected 35 later after it was last used.

 

Okay I know the young people like to use the term but it is so late 70's/early 80's.

[Noeller]

Parlour in the Village, eh? Run by a guy named Nils Vik? ...that's one of our proud Pinawa things there. He's a grad of about 2001 or something, I believe...

[rebusrankin]

Parlour is on Main. Lil Sister's is in the Village.

[Mr Dee]

[Mark H.]

Sold the wheat board? The wheat board never even had any infrastructure

[The Unknown Poster]

I like how the anti harper crowd pretends the wheat board deal was against the wishes of farmers when many agreed with it. Sort of par for the course, that way of thinking.

[Fatty Liver]

I like how the anti harper crowd pretends the wheat board deal was against the wishes of farmers when many agreed with it. Sort of par for the course, that way of thinking.

 

Is this "the many" you're referring to?

 

In a September 2011 plebiscite (referendum) conducted by Meyers Norris Penny, 62% of CWB farmers voted that they wanted to keep the wheat board and its Single Desk power.

 

 

This is how Harper went about dismantling a truly democratic institution. 

 

Since 2006 when the Conservative Party came to power, Chuck Strahl, then Minister of Agriculture, worked towards the end of the Wheat Board's Single Desk, including the replacement of government appointees to the Board of Directors in favor of individuals who oppose the board's Single Desk, a gag order on Wheat Board staff, the firing of the pro-board President, and intervention in the election of farmer elected members of the Board of Directors.^[16][17]

• December 2006 CWB Board of Directors election. Only one of five farmer-elected seats went to opponents of the Canadian Wheat Board's Single Desk power on the selling of Canadian wheat and barley internationally. Since there was only one incumbent farmer-elected board member opposed to the Single Desk, only two out of ten farmer-elected directors were opposed to the Single Desk. Nonetheless, the government appointed five members to the board; supporters of the board's Single Desk would have only an eight to seven majority. Doubts have also been cast by some on the results because Strahl, the Minister of Agriculture, removed upwards of 20,000 farmers from the voters list in the midst of the election. These farmers were disqualified for such reasons as not having delivered any grain to the Wheat Board in the past two years or not having produced enough wheat or malt barley to have generated significant enough income from which to live off.^[18]
• December 19, 2006: Chuck Strah dismisses CWB president Adrian Measner, an outspoken supporter of the Single Desk. This was done by Strahl with the statement "It's a position that [he] serves at [the] pleasure [of the Minister/Government]. And that position was no longer his."^[16] It was suggested that Measner had gone too far for refusing to remove pro-CWB documents from the Board website and also appearing at press conferences with opposition leader Stéphane Dion.^[19] The majority of the CWB's board of directors opposed the firing of Measner.^[20]
• March 28, 2007: Barley Plebiscite. 62% of farmers vote to end the wheat board's barley Single Desk power.^[21] Legislation to amend the act dies on order paper when the September 2008 election is called.
• February 26, 2008: Conservative government loses court battle over unilaterally dismantling the CWB because it was contrary to the Canadian Wheat Board Act.^[22]
• December 7, 2008: Board of Directors elections. Four of five candidates elected support the Single Desk marketing agency.^[23]
• January 21, 2010: Supreme Court of Canada sided with the federal government in its 2006 order barring the board from spending its money on lobbying.^[24]
• December 7, 2011: Federal Court judge Douglas Campbell rules the Conservative government broke the law in introducing legislation to end the Wheat Board.^[25]
• December 15, 2011: Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act, which ends the CWB Single Desk, receives royal assent.^[26]
• June 18, 2012: Federal Court of Appeal upholds Bill C-18.^[27]
• August 1, 2012: end of monopsony takes effect

 

I'm sure you'll crow about Harper keeping his election promise to dismantle the CWB, but ask yourself who it was that really benefited from this move.  Multi-national corporations such as Cargill, perhaps?

 

 

Cargill: Food Profiteers

 

Thirty years ago, most developing countries produced enough food to feed themselves. Now, 70 percent are net food importers.

Thirty years ago, most developing countries had in place mechanisms aimed at maintaining a relatively constant price for food commodities. Tariffs on imports protected local farmers from fluctuations in global food prices. Government-run grain purchasing boards paid above-market prices for farm goods when prices were low, and required farmers to sell below-market when prices were high. The idea was to give farmers some certainty over price, and to keep food affordable for consumers. Governments also provided a wide set of support services for farmers, giving them advice on new crop and growing technologies and, in some countries, helping set up cooperative structures.

This was not a perfect system by any means, but it looks pretty good in retrospect.

Over the last three decades, the system was completely abandoned, in country after country. It was replaced by a multinational-dominated, globally integrated food system, in which the World Bank and other institutions coerced countries into opening their markets to cheap food imports from rich countries and re-orienting their agricultural systems to grow food for rich consumers abroad. Proponents said the new system was a “free market” approach, but in reality it traded one set of government interventions for another — a new set of rules that gave enhanced power to a handful of global grain trading companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, as well as to seed and fertilizer corporations.

“For this food regime to work,” Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, told the U.S. House Financial Services Committee at a May hearing, “existing marketing boards and support structures needed to be dismantled. In a range of countries, this meant that the state bodies that had been supported and built by the World Bank were dismantled by the World Bank. The rationale behind the dismantling of these institutions was to clear the path for private sector involvement in these sectors, on the understanding that the private sector would be more efficient and less wasteful than the public sector.”

“The result of these interventions and conditions,” explained Patel, “was to accelerate the decline of developing country agriculture. One of the most striking consequences of liberalization has been the phenomenon of ‘import surges.’ These happen when tariffs on cheaper, and often subsidized, agricultural products are lowered, and a host country is then flooded with those goods. There is often a corresponding decline in domestic production. In Senegal, for example, tariff reduction led to an import surge in tomato paste, with a 15-fold increase in imports, and a halving of domestic production. Similar stories might be told of Chile, which saw a three-fold surge in imports of vegetable oil, and a halving of domestic production. In Ghana in 1998, local rice production accounted for over 80 percent of domestic consumption. By 2003, that figure was less than 20 percent.”

The decline of developing country agriculture means that developing countries are dependent on the vagaries of the global market. When prices spike — as they did in late 2007 and through the beginning of 2008 — countries and poor consumers are at the mercy of the global market and the giant trading companies that dominate it. In the first quarter of 2008, the price of rice in Asia doubled, and commodity prices overall rose 40 percent. People in rich countries felt this pinch, but the problem was much more severe in the developing world. Not only do consumers in poor countries have less money, they spend a much higher proportion of their household budget on food — often half or more — and they buy much less processed food, so commodity increases affect them much more directly. In poor countries, higher prices don’t just pinch, they mean people go hungry. Food riots broke out around the world in early 2008.

But not everyone was feeling pain. For Cargill, spiking prices was an opportunity to get rich. In the second quarter of 2008, the company reported profits of more than $1 billion, with profits from continuing operations soaring 18 percent from the previous year. Cargill’s 2007 profits totaled more than $2.3 billion, up more than a third from 2006.

In a competitive market, would a grain-trading middleman make super-profits? Or would rising prices crimp the middleman’s profit margin?

Well, the global grain trade is not competitive.

In an August speech, Cargill CEO Greg Page posed the question, “So, isn’t Cargill exploiting the food situation to make money?” Here is how he responded:

“I would give you four pieces of information about why our earnings have gone up dramatically.

1. The demand for food has gone up. The demand for our facilities has gone up, and we are running virtually all of our facilities worldwide at total capacity. As we utilize our capacity more effectively, clearly we do better.
2. Fertilizer prices rose, and we are owners of a large fertilizer company. That has been the single largest factor in Cargill’s earnings.
3. The volatility in the grain industry — much of it created by governments — was an opportunity for a trading company like Cargill to make money.
4. Finally, in this era of high prices, Cargill over the last two years has invested $15.5 billion additional dollars into the world food system. Some was to carry all these high-priced inventories. We also wanted to be sure that we were there for farmers who needed the working capital to operate in this much more expensive environment. Clearly, our owners expected some return on that $15.5 billion. Cargill had an opportunity to make more money in this environment, and I think that is something that we need to be very forthright about.”

OK, Mr. Page, that’s all very interesting. The question was, “So, isn’t Cargill exploiting the food situation to make money?” It sounds like your answer is, “yes.”

[The Unknown Poster]

Yes, that is quite a bit.

[Mr Dee]

ABH....

 

 

Since winning his majority, Stephen Harper’s government has signed or finalized 23 new trade or investment deals.

The right trade agreements can create opportunities for Canada. But the Harper government has seemed more interested in getting lots of deals than in making sure each is good for Canada’s economy.

Of all the deals facing Canada, three are by far the most important. They are the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Europe, and the U.S.-led trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Considering the financial transfers they tend to create, a more precise name for these deals might be: A Locked-In Agreement to Transfer Public Money to Large Companies, Lawyers and Arbitrators.

The deal we know the most about is the FIPA with China. Of the big three, it is the only one that has been finalized.

Some details of the FIPA will illustrate my point that the government has been behaving like a salesperson who gets lots of orders by selling at a loss. For example:

1. The Harper government gave Chinese investors “market access” to Canada — meaning a right to buy what they want in our economy — without getting the same for Canadian investors in China.

That is the most lopsided concession I had ever seen by Canada or, for that matter, any other country across hundreds of similar agreements.

2. When he announced the FIPA, Harper said that a FIPA “ensures non-discriminatory treatment” for foreign investors. But the actual terms of the FIPA (Article 8(2)(a), to be exact) let China keep all its existing laws, policies, or practices that discriminate against Canadian investors.

No one could fact-check Harper’s misleading claim at the time because the text was kept secret for about eight months after he made it.

3. In the FIPA, the Harper government exposed Canada to potentially massive financial liabilities due to the generous protections it gives to foreign companies, including a right to seek uncapped amounts of compensation from governments directly before international tribunals.

 

AND

 

Harper was clearly desperate to finalize the CETA before the election. Several times he has announced it with fanfare. Yet, despite various concessions, he could not get it done in time. This is mostly because the Europeans looked closely at the deal’s generous protections for foreign investors and asked about the consequences for domestic courts, democracy, and public budgets.

 

ALSO

 

Harper is poised to compromise Canada’s dairy and auto industries in a bid to finish the TPP negotiations before the election. The Americans seem to have sensed his political vulnerability and played him to Canada’s expense.

My guess is that, if the TPP is concluded before the election, its text will be kept secret until after the election. Voters will not have a chance to learn from outside experts what the government gave up.

 

http://t.thestar.com/#/article/opinion/commentary/2015/09/30/selling-canada-out-one-deal-at-a-time.html

 

 

[kelownabomberfan]

LOL - Mulcair just got his pee-pee slapped for blabbing on national TV about Saudi Arabia. It appears that he upset his bosses at Unifor, as all of the work being done for Saudi that the weak-kneed commies in this country hate so much provides thousands of union jobs. Perhaps you need to co-ordinate your propaganda better with NDP headquarters before posting it here.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/union-asks-ndp-to-keep-saudi-armoured-vehicles-deal-under-wraps-fearing-significant-job-losses

[Mr Dee]

It's a tough question, isn't it? Jobs versus human rights issues..

But one thing it isn't, is....a laughing matter.

[kelownabomberfan]

It's a tough question, isn't it? Jobs versus human rights issues..

But one thing it isn't, is....a laughing matter.

Right, just like Obama had to balance giving a massive human rights abuser the ability to make nuclear bombs so he could look cool to his far left-leaning anti-Israel idiots in his government. But of course, when Obama does stuff like giving enriched uranium to human rights abusers its cool, and when Harper sells weapons to a different one he's a jerk. Just like how he's a genius when he sells his GM shares, and somehow Harper is a villain. Politics sure makes for mass hypocrisy.

[sweep the leg]

 

I like how the anti harper crowd pretends the wheat board deal was against the wishes of farmers when many agreed with it. Sort of par for the course, that way of thinking.

 

Is this "the many" you're referring to?

 

In a September 2011 plebiscite (referendum) conducted by Meyers Norris Penny, 62% of CWB farmers voted that they wanted to keep the wheat board and its Single Desk power.

 

 

 

Yes, that is quite a bit.

A response only a politician could love.

[sweep the leg]

 

Right, just like Obama had to balance giving a massive human rights abuser the ability to make nuclear bombs so he could look cool to his far left-leaning anti-Israel idiots in his government

 

This is a very nuanced breakdown of the Iran deal.

[The Unknown Poster]

 

 

I like how the anti harper crowd pretends the wheat board deal was against the wishes of farmers when many agreed with it. Sort of par for the course, that way of thinking.

 

Is this "the many" you're referring to?

 

In a September 2011 plebiscite (referendum) conducted by Meyers Norris Penny, 62% of CWB farmers voted that they wanted to keep the wheat board and its Single Desk power.

 

 

 

Yes, that is quite a bit.

A response only a politician could love.

 

I have no dog in the fight on the Wheat Board but any suggestion "farmers" ie. all farmer were against it is absolutely false.  And I believe support or lack thereof split down age and type of crop.  It wasnt as simple as saying X amount opposed it.  And again, Cons won.  Did what they said they'd do.  Dont like it, hope your guy wins because if he does he will do what he wants and the rest of us can whine about it but to the victor go the spoils.  Thats democracy or something.

[kelownabomberfan]

Right, just like Obama had to balance giving a massive human rights abuser the ability to make nuclear bombs so he could look cool to his far left-leaning anti-Israel idiots in his government

This is a very nuanced breakdown of the Iran deal.

Yes, almost as nuanced as this crap:

[sweep the leg]

 

 

Right, just like Obama had to balance giving a massive human rights abuser the ability to make nuclear bombs so he could look cool to his far left-leaning anti-Israel idiots in his government

This is a very nuanced breakdown of the Iran deal.

 

Yes, almost as nuanced as this crap:

 

I agree that you're both ridiculous at times.

[sweep the leg]

 

 

Thats democracy or something.

Remember that line when you're stomping your feet about a coalition government.