Allowing people to vote online isn't going to solve the turnout problem as long as we have a federal election every couple of years. Canada has had something like four federal elections in the last five years, which is pretty ridiculous. The voters are tired of it, and they're demonstrating that by not bothering to vote. I'm not saying this is the best way to demonstrate disgust, but the ability to vote online isn't going to fix the real problem.
Indeed. We have so many elections because the last three governments are minority governments. Why is that?
Because of the Bloc Québécois. Ever since Charlottetown, the last attempt to have Québec ratify the Constitution, failed, Québec has finally realized that the federal political parties have nothing to offer us.
So, we’ve been voting bloc. The federal parties are being denied a whole province, which holds 25% of the canadian population.
That 25% of the population has been denied the proper attention given to other english provinces; in fact, we are treated the same way blacks are treated in the US. We are “the white niggers of america”.
For about 10 years, the liberals were able to secure solid majorities despite the Bloc because were still reeling from Mulroney’s conservative excesses (which have resulted with the tories ending up with 111 less seats in parliament once the 1993 election was over — yes, you read me properly, that’s a hundred and eleven times; from 222 to 2), but the latest liberal scandals have caught up with them, and have prevented them from mustering enough support to, have a majority government.
And the Bloc is still there to say to Canada “it’s time to start to listen to Québec”.
And as long as Canada will not listen to Québec, we will make sure that the House of Commons will be deprived of a majority government.
Though fucking noogies. You thought you could get away with not listening to Québec? Well, that time is over Canada.
Its still a secret ballot. As secret as you want it to be. No one knows what you voted unless you let them stand there and watch.
Which is the problem, because in that system, there is no way to officially make sure that you did not let someone “stand there and watch”, which is the point of polling stations.
And as a Canadian let me say that the reason that "voter turnout in our most recent election was the worst on record" was because THE CANDIDATES SUCKED. I almost voted for the Communist just because I didn't know him and therefore didn't want to punch him in the face.
Fart.
We have the government we deserve.
And then there's the fact that you have to vote for the party and not the person, so if I hate Harper but like the local Conservative I'm screwed. So, to cast a vote I feel good about, both the local guy and the party leader have to be good.
People have stopped giving a shit about local candidates long ago, ever since the parties have hijacked everything.
This entire electronic voting craze began after some voters in Florida could not follow simple instructions (on the voting ballot) in the American presidential election of 2000. Because they lacked the intelligence to follow simple instructions, they created ballots that were ambiguous.
On defective machines using a blatantly obsolete technology that often would not punch a clean hole, especially when operated by a senile geezer with no eyesight left whatsoever.
I'm actually genuinely curious as to which areas of Canada use churches for voting. I live in B.C. and ALL the voting stations I know of are in schools (usually elementary school gymnasiums).
So logically Canada would be the perfect country to adopt online voting because we are small (population) and have done so well in the past. What better a voting system to do comparison to then the Canadian. If we can't pull it off well then.......
This has nothing to do with it. Online voting cannot work because the identity of the elector has to be positively ascertained. How do you do that online? With a PIN/Password? It works with banks because it directly affects people’s money, but with votes, which don’t come often, there are many people who do not give their vote the same value as their money, so you can bet your arse that people would gladly divulge their PINS in exchange of money or booze.
Now the voters will actually represent what the public really thinks. Actually going and voting is so insecure any hack can show up and say he is somebody else. The 80 yr old guy that does the "security" check is a joke.
You’re obviously a young squirt that went to vote once, and got turned-off by having to wait 5 minute in line behind some geezers, and once inside, was sufficiently pissed-off from the wait to not observe the process, which is there to insure that there is no fraud.
And you obviously never worked at elections so you have no idea of the process. (I have; I occupied most positions in polling places, so I know what I’m talking about).
As of security, well, granted, until about 5 years ago, federal election officials were actually **PROHIBITED** by law from asking ID. This was changed following Québec doing the same after uncovering significant electoral fraud ($10 being paid for people for each ballot they cast, impersonating someone else, to the benefit of, of course, the liberal party of Québec).
Put the tin-foil hats away, folks. Until you come up with a better system for identifying consumers to credit agencies, there's "nothing to see here."
Sure there is. Your credit history also contains things like your date of birth, and your previous addresses. It’s just managerial lazyness that make companies ask for the SSN and nothing else.
Not to sound too brusque, but you do realize that was a complete d1ck move to do to the people working in the store, right? To prevent fraud and abuse, they're not allowd to make exceptions. They clearly could have been fired for violating company security and financial policy in approving someone with insolvent credit. And getting fired happens all the time: having worked retail before, you become expendable hours that gets thrown out at the drop of a hat.
Do you hear this? This is the world’s smallest violin playing.
Customers don’t walk into retail stores to please the staff and give them a job; no, they walk in to be pleased BY THE STAFF by plunking down good money and — GASP! — BUYING STUFF FROM THE STORE!!!!
What you really need to have is a health care center that works more like the DMV does in Delaware.
Which is, suprise!, how emergency rooms work in Canada: a nurse sees you and assess the priority your cas shall be given. (It’s called “triage”, for the word “trier” [tree-ay], which means “sort” in french).
Will this bill stop the pre existing condition BS? Let you buy any plan that you want? UN tie it from your job?
Actually, no the bill won't do any of that. Are you sure you are not asking for someone else to pay your medical bills?
This is what is wrong with private insurers. When everyone is insured by the one and only private State insurer, there cannot be pre-existing condition bullshit, because everyone pitches-into the system and everyone is covered the same. This, in turn, saves tremenduous amounts of paperwork and overhead, because anyone is clearly covered exactly like anyone else.
The US private health insurance overhead is 35%, while the canadian public health insurance overhead is 5%.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
Which is what private insurers do by denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, and by retroactively cancelling the policies of too-expensive patients, and finding all sorts of excuses to back-down from paying their customers.
Here is the bottom line. Barack Hussein Obama does not represent mainstream America. He won the election due to the racist voting pattern exhibited by African-Americans.
Fuck-you, stupid racist white assholes. With the racism whites shove down the throat of blacks, you only deserved a black president to tax you to death.
Canada has a completely-free universal national healthcare system.
Which works well, and is thus the target of right-wing wackos bullshit-filled attacks such as this one:
You need to wait 6 months for a minor surgery that you could get in the US for under $1000 in 24 hours. Quite often these minor problems, due to delay times, develop into much more serious cases, not to mention the long patient's suffering.
Bullshit. Every procedure that is urgent is performed as fast as possible. The wait may be longer than in the US, but that’s because we do not discriminate in favour of the rich, everyone is on the same footing up here.
You can spend 12 hours waiting for emergency life-saving surgery for which you can die any minute while not treated. Many people do.
Bullshit again. Life-threatening conditions are treated right away. This is why the morons who come to the emergency room with a headache have to wait 15 hours: they pass the urgent cases before them.
- You can spend 3 hours in a doctor's waiting room for a 2-minute consultation. Then you'll be told to come next week and wait another 3 hours (and have to, if you want your prescription to be covered by the healthcare plan). The doctor's don't even fucking do anything other than look at you and tell you to come agian. Doctors are paid per-patient rather than based on the services they provide, so they just try to stack up as much patients as possible, and process them as fast as possible.
More bullshit again. The prescription is given right away, and the pharmacist takes care of the coverage.
That troll does not clearly understands how a doctor works. And in the US, the doctors have to take as much cases as possible, thus making it much more likelier that they’ll only spend 2 minutes per patient.
I understand and sympathize with the need to provide healthcare for those that can't afford it. But I do not see why people that do afford it should suffer greatly diminished healthcare (up to and including fatalities) for the sake of those that cannot afford it. Charity at gunpoint is called extortion.
This is called CIVILIZATION, as opposed to the barbarity that is so common in the US.
Rights are not something that exist in nature. They exist only because a large number of people believe they should, and are willing to assert their belief strongly enough to ensure the continued existence of those rights.
Indeed. For example, in Canada, there is no explicit, unanielable right to property; when the constitution was repatriated in 1982, it was proposed to add right to own property, but this was nixed at the insistence of the smallest canadian province’s potato farmers who wanted to be able to prevent big croporations from buying potato farms. Likewise, in Canada, band indians (who live on reserves) are forced to live in a communist régime, where they are not allowed to own anything at all and everything belongs to the tribe council.
Likewise, Canada does not believe in free speech either. Just ask this guy what happened when he said the holocause didn’t happen And technically, you can be jailed for saying that Canada ought to be a republic or by flying the patriotes flag (our rebel flag).
A Constitution is a meta-law, the law from which all other laws are derived. In it, you put the general, broad principles that are the norm of your society.
The Constitution should not be too specific in the means of effecting rights, as those means will change over time.
Suppose that you did the same exercise 20 years ago, and you put in the constitution “the right to freely gopher on the Internet”. That would not prevent the government from implementing rigorous web censorship, because the technology changed.
Even much of the Chinese intelligentsia believes that their country needs a brutal government to avoid total chaos.
The chinese have, indeed, a passion for disorganization. The term "clusterfuck", abbreviated C.F. is actually the politicall-correct version of the original meaning of C.F., which was "chinese firedrill".
The current communist régime is fighting very hard to rid China of it's historical demons that made it stagnate for so long (how else a billion people strong nation could be comparatively harmless compared to, say, Israël, which for it's absurdly tiny size, has brought about an unprecedented amount of grief and destruction on Earth?), then fell prey to western imperialism, and one such demon is their passion for disorganization...
Libertarians and Ayn Randists will also declare that their goal is "power to the people", and they aren't communists by any stretch of the imagination.
Their "power to the people" is just a demagogic smokescreen to hide the fact that, like any right-wing political party, they really mean "power to the more powerful people/croporations", which has been the norm for unevolved societies throughout History.
Make no mistakes. Rail as an industrial transportation sector predated all (save marine) by almost a century. Initially at the hands of powerful "robber barons" (the Bill Gates of the day), rail has had the time to generate pretty powerful ennemies and longlasting resentment (witness in the canadian west, where "goddammed CPR" is still used as a curse, and likewise in the southwestern US where the Southern Pacific has not mucha in matters of a saint's aura). At the hands of those robber barons, rail has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on overland transportation for about a century before road and air transport managed to get off the ground, generating fortunes and attracting talent that has previously made rail the high-technology sector of it's time.
With talent gone, rail first sank into routine operation and management, and as it slowly started it's long descent into hell (the 1970's), it degraded into crisis management and deferred-maintenance and emergency patch cycles that were no match for the lobbying efforts of the road and air upstarts who had developped an ever increasing arrogance.
Case in point: when the Alaska pipeline was first proposed, Boeing seriously submitted a proposal to fly the oil in special 747-tankers, which could have brought a totally new meaning to the words "black tide"...
Still riding high on it's nouveau-riche influence, the road and air sectors do not see the brink of the collapse they are about to succumb to. First the air with the unprecedented paranoïa that followed 9/11 that brought about billions in governmental support to troubled airlines, and now the bankrupcy of General Motors that will suck even more public money in an industry that was too arrogant to see it's own pitfalls.
In the meanwhile, rail still trundles around, carrying stuff (and some people, too) around without much of a fanfare (save for whistling at crossings).
Elsewhere in the world, rail systems were either developped by the States outright, or with heavy State involvement. That heavy State involvement meant that elsewhere, people were spared the costly shenanigans of private railroads (such as duplicate lines by competing railroads, or outright purchase of competing more-efficient routes), so "other" railroads were far more efficient at providing public service than their U.S. brethen, and did not generate the resentment the robber barons of the gilded age did in the U.S.
And those "other" railroads have managed to pull pretty impressive feats, such as the world's fastest scheduled passenger service, something U.S. railroads would be hard-pressed to manage in the hostile environment they have to deal with. It seems that the only way the U.S. can press forward with improved rail service would be following the utter collapse of other modes of transport...
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Indeed. We have so many elections because the last three governments are minority governments. Why is that?
Because of the Bloc Québécois. Ever since Charlottetown, the last attempt to have Québec ratify the Constitution, failed, Québec has finally realized that the federal political parties have nothing to offer us.
So, we’ve been voting bloc. The federal parties are being denied a whole province, which holds 25% of the canadian population.
That 25% of the population has been denied the proper attention given to other english provinces; in fact, we are treated the same way blacks are treated in the US. We are “the white niggers of america”.
For about 10 years, the liberals were able to secure solid majorities despite the Bloc because were still reeling from Mulroney’s conservative excesses (which have resulted with the tories ending up with 111 less seats in parliament once the 1993 election was over — yes, you read me properly, that’s a hundred and eleven times; from 222 to 2), but the latest liberal scandals have caught up with them, and have prevented them from mustering enough support to, have a majority government.
And the Bloc is still there to say to Canada “it’s time to start to listen to Québec”.
And as long as Canada will not listen to Québec, we will make sure that the House of Commons will be deprived of a majority government.
Though fucking noogies. You thought you could get away with not listening to Québec? Well, that time is over Canada.
Fuck you very much.
Which is the problem, because in that system, there is no way to officially make sure that you did not let someone “stand there and watch”, which is the point of polling stations.
Fart.
We have the government we deserve.
People have stopped giving a shit about local candidates long ago, ever since the parties have hijacked everything.
On defective machines using a blatantly obsolete technology that often would not punch a clean hole, especially when operated by a senile geezer with no eyesight left whatsoever.
Well, I once worked as an electoral official in that church, which is, you’ll notice once you zoom out, not even 4 km from the federal parliament Ironically, that’s where Elections Canada film their training videos :)
Often, a chuch hall is the only place available to put a polling station, precisely to avoid having to drive 300km to do so.
And, besides, you can also vote by postal ballot, and there are travelling polls available.
(I once worked elections in a church hall, and for a while, we were treated with choir music :) )
This has nothing to do with it. Online voting cannot work because the identity of the elector has to be positively ascertained. How do you do that online? With a PIN/Password? It works with banks because it directly affects people’s money, but with votes, which don’t come often, there are many people who do not give their vote the same value as their money, so you can bet your arse that people would gladly divulge their PINS in exchange of money or booze.
You’re obviously a young squirt that went to vote once, and got turned-off by having to wait 5 minute in line behind some geezers, and once inside, was sufficiently pissed-off from the wait to not observe the process, which is there to insure that there is no fraud.
And you obviously never worked at elections so you have no idea of the process. (I have; I occupied most positions in polling places, so I know what I’m talking about).
As of security, well, granted, until about 5 years ago, federal election officials were actually **PROHIBITED** by law from asking ID. This was changed following Québec doing the same after uncovering significant electoral fraud ($10 being paid for people for each ballot they cast, impersonating someone else, to the benefit of, of course, the liberal party of Québec).
Sure there is. Your credit history also contains things like your date of birth, and your previous addresses. It’s just managerial lazyness that make companies ask for the SSN and nothing else.
Do you hear this? This is the world’s smallest violin playing.
Customers don’t walk into retail stores to please the staff and give them a job; no, they walk in to be pleased BY THE STAFF by plunking down good money and — GASP! — BUYING STUFF FROM THE STORE!!!!
Er, no. Not my perfectly ordinary prepaid phone plan When there is no more money in the kitty, it just cuts there.
Which is, suprise!, how emergency rooms work in Canada: a nurse sees you and assess the priority your cas shall be given. (It’s called “triage”, for the word “trier” [tree-ay], which means “sort” in french).
No. The point of insurance is to make the executives and (maybe) the shareholders as rich as possible.
This is what is wrong with private insurers. When everyone is insured by the one and only private State insurer, there cannot be pre-existing condition bullshit, because everyone pitches-into the system and everyone is covered the same. This, in turn, saves tremenduous amounts of paperwork and overhead, because anyone is clearly covered exactly like anyone else.
The US private health insurance overhead is 35%, while the canadian public health insurance overhead is 5%.
The problem with Margaret Thatcher is that she ran out of neurons a long time ago.
Which is what private insurers do by denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions, and by retroactively cancelling the policies of too-expensive patients, and finding all sorts of excuses to back-down from paying their customers.
In Canada, there is no denials whatsoever.
Fuck-you, stupid racist white assholes. With the racism whites shove down the throat of blacks, you only deserved a black president to tax you to death.
Which works well, and is thus the target of right-wing wackos bullshit-filled attacks such as this one:
Bullshit. Every procedure that is urgent is performed as fast as possible. The wait may be longer than in the US, but that’s because we do not discriminate in favour of the rich, everyone is on the same footing up here.
Bullshit again. Life-threatening conditions are treated right away. This is why the morons who come to the emergency room with a headache have to wait 15 hours: they pass the urgent cases before them.
More bullshit again. The prescription is given right away, and the pharmacist takes care of the coverage.
That troll does not clearly understands how a doctor works. And in the US, the doctors have to take as much cases as possible, thus making it much more likelier that they’ll only spend 2 minutes per patient.
This is called CIVILIZATION, as opposed to the barbarity that is so common in the US.
Indeed. For example, in Canada, there is no explicit, unanielable right to property; when the constitution was repatriated in 1982, it was proposed to add right to own property, but this was nixed at the insistence of the smallest canadian province’s potato farmers who wanted to be able to prevent big croporations from buying potato farms. Likewise, in Canada, band indians (who live on reserves) are forced to live in a communist régime, where they are not allowed to own anything at all and everything belongs to the tribe council.
Likewise, Canada does not believe in free speech either. Just ask this guy what happened when he said the holocause didn’t happen And technically, you can be jailed for saying that Canada ought to be a republic or by flying the patriotes flag (our rebel flag).
A problem which only affect ass-sniffing tailgaters.
The Constitution is not the place for that.
A Constitution is a meta-law, the law from which all other laws are derived. In it, you put the general, broad principles that are the norm of your society.
The Constitution should not be too specific in the means of effecting rights, as those means will change over time.
Suppose that you did the same exercise 20 years ago, and you put in the constitution “the right to freely gopher on the Internet”. That would not prevent the government from implementing rigorous web censorship, because the technology changed.
This sounds like the output from a "My hovercraft is full of eels" translator...
The chinese have, indeed, a passion for disorganization. The term "clusterfuck", abbreviated C.F. is actually the politicall-correct version of the original meaning of C.F., which was "chinese firedrill".
The current communist régime is fighting very hard to rid China of it's historical demons that made it stagnate for so long (how else a billion people strong nation could be comparatively harmless compared to, say, Israël, which for it's absurdly tiny size, has brought about an unprecedented amount of grief and destruction on Earth?), then fell prey to western imperialism, and one such demon is their passion for disorganization...
Their "power to the people" is just a demagogic smokescreen to hide the fact that, like any right-wing political party, they really mean " power to the more powerful people/croporations ", which has been the norm for unevolved societies throughout History.
Make no mistakes. Rail as an industrial transportation sector predated all (save marine) by almost a century. Initially at the hands of powerful "robber barons" (the Bill Gates of the day), rail has had the time to generate pretty powerful ennemies and longlasting resentment (witness in the canadian west, where "goddammed CPR" is still used as a curse, and likewise in the southwestern US where the Southern Pacific has not mucha in matters of a saint's aura). At the hands of those robber barons, rail has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on overland transportation for about a century before road and air transport managed to get off the ground, generating fortunes and attracting talent that has previously made rail the high-technology sector of it's time.
With talent gone, rail first sank into routine operation and management, and as it slowly started it's long descent into hell (the 1970's), it degraded into crisis management and deferred-maintenance and emergency patch cycles that were no match for the lobbying efforts of the road and air upstarts who had developped an ever increasing arrogance.
Case in point: when the Alaska pipeline was first proposed, Boeing seriously submitted a proposal to fly the oil in special 747-tankers, which could have brought a totally new meaning to the words "black tide"...
Still riding high on it's nouveau-riche influence, the road and air sectors do not see the brink of the collapse they are about to succumb to. First the air with the unprecedented paranoïa that followed 9/11 that brought about billions in governmental support to troubled airlines, and now the bankrupcy of General Motors that will suck even more public money in an industry that was too arrogant to see it's own pitfalls.
In the meanwhile, rail still trundles around, carrying stuff (and some people, too) around without much of a fanfare (save for whistling at crossings).
Elsewhere in the world, rail systems were either developped by the States outright, or with heavy State involvement. That heavy State involvement meant that elsewhere, people were spared the costly shenanigans of private railroads (such as duplicate lines by competing railroads, or outright purchase of competing more-efficient routes), so "other" railroads were far more efficient at providing public service than their U.S. brethen, and did not generate the resentment the robber barons of the gilded age did in the U.S.
And those "other" railroads have managed to pull pretty impressive feats, such as the world's fastest scheduled passenger service, something U.S. railroads would be hard-pressed to manage in the hostile environment they have to deal with. It seems that the only way the U.S. can press forward with improved rail service would be following the utter collapse of other modes of transport...