04.06.2011 09:05 AM

KCCCC Day 12: What kids might say


 

64 Comments

  1. MontrealElite says:

    New ad from LPC…funny, cause it’s true!

    You should link it front page

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6hDv6gCe1I&feature=youtu.be

  2. Sb says:

    Ha! Awesome. Kids might say the darnedest things.

    I was ^not^ paid to write this.

  3. MontrealElite says:

    Chris Alexander thinks poverty has been eliminated in Canada.

    Wow, yet another Harperite in the bubble.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncUtF2E7D8Y

      • MontrealElite says:

        The only quotes there are from Kelly.

        Alexander said that there’s no poverty in Canada consistent with World Bank levels.

        I don’t see too many World Bank officials sitting on city streets.

        Alexander was stupid to even go down that road and make the comparison.

        And the video is honest, it’s him saying what he said…..how is that dishonest?

        I’m sure the poorest of Canadians are gleefully starving knowing that they have it so much better than the folk of Afghanistan.

      • JS Rothwell says:

        Uh Kelly McPartland. That’s not biased at all. Opinion columns for proof … Weak

      • Namesake says:

        Um, no, that’s McParland’s water-carrying spin (which notably HAS no actual quotes from the CPC candidate in q.);

        “the actual quote” was transcribed in the LPC website page that McParland was mis-characterizing as being “about as dishonest and distorted a claim as could be concocted”:

        The LPC conclusion he objected to was: “Conservative candidate Chris Alexander claimed that there is no poverty in Canada.” And it was based on this exchange at the candidate’s event:

        “Anyone who thinks though, that poverty reduction, or poverty elimination, and I believe in poverty elimination in this country, we’ve eliminated it for the levels the World Bank recognizes. We don’t have that kind of poverty in Canada. But we still have low income.

        UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You’re lying, you’re lying.

        CROWD: Groans.

        ALEXANDER: Two dollars a day? Two dollars a day? I would ask anyone in this room to stand up and tell me who’s living on $2 a day?”

        — so, yes, in his ‘defense,’ the World Bank DOES define absolute global poverty as anyone who exists on an annual income of $2 or less a day. Which is, um, under a thousand — i.e., $730 — a year.

        — And so Mr. Alexander concludes — but just assumes, really — that thus there really is no poverty in Canada, period… only Low Income (which is set in the thousandS, here, based on what proportion of your income you spend on necessities: and which b/w about 5 and 10% of the Cndn. population live under, depending on whose measure you use).

        Granted, there’s a lot of controversy — esp. as generated BY the National Post and their Fraser Institute compatriots — about whether the “Low Income” cut-offs in Canada should be characterized as a “Poverty Line,” but I don’t see ANY mischaracterization in the Libs pointing out that this candidate’s position is that there IS no poverty in Canada according to the very extreme level of poverty that he prefers to invoke.

    • Brian says:

      I’m really upset about this Chris Alexander BS, because any idiot with an IQ higher than 12 could see that’s not what Alexander was trying to say. He said ‘by the standard set by the World Bank, we’ve eliminated poverty, but we still -” and then switched gears to respond to the hecklers. But his remarks were clearly leading up to a point that there is still *relative* poverty in Canada.

      Isn’t it a good thing that a Tory would say that? Isn’t the world we want one where a Tory can talk comfortably in complete paragraphs about his views on poverty without interruption, so they can get used to the idea that they, too, can do something about it? Don’t we want to encourage him to finish his sentence to see where his mind was headed? How can we expect to have an intelligent conversation about complicated issues like poverty if we can’t even wait until a guy finishes his thought before we clip it and mangle it and cut it up, just as the Tories have done to Ignatieff? How on earth is a guy who spend years at risk in Afghanistan in government service, who’s now answering unscripted questions on poverty, how can that be *anything* remotely like Harper and his bubble?

      Chris Alexander is not some random CPC frat boy; he’s a longtime public servant who’s worked cheerfully and with distinction in countries where severe poverty is the norm. He also happens to be a conservative. If that’s a crime, then maybe I should be voting Conservative in a few weeks after all.

      • Namesake says:

        well, except that I gather the full context was that the constituents at that event were asking this uber-patriotic star candidate the CPC brought in to bump out their LPC MP in this riding….

        what he and the CPC were going to do to combat the high levels of poverty in that riding, which had been getting worse rather than better over the course of their 5 years in office.

        And the candidate’s response: “Meh; there is no poverty in Canada… at least you have something to eat.”

      • JenS says:

        A TORY upset about a quote possibly being truncated to make context an issue? Are you flipping kidding me??? What a joke. Pot? Kettle called.

        You’re right – Alexander is no frat boy, which is what makes his decisions to put out his rarified view that poverty doesn’t exist in Canada and to consort with alleged fraudsters really odd.

      • Rob says:

        Nicely put, and a good message for everyone to keep in mind.

      • MontrealElite says:

        Vote whoever you want to vote for.

        Canada’ poor aren’t interest in the World Bank’s definition of poverty and their statistical ranking in relation to it.

        Ending poverty in a developed G8 nation is an absolute goal, not a relative one.

        Alexander goofed and the LPC was right to call him on it.

        • JenS says:

          Yes — saying we don’t have Third World level poverty isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement that poverty doesn’t exist in Canada. Jeepers.

          • JenS says:

            George seems to have confused the issue, so to clarify, I will say responding to actual interested parties, people with valuable insight, isn’t troll-feeding. But as for the newbies who seem to have shown up since the Conservative astroturfing cattle-call (and they got cattle, all right, complete with the bullshit), nope. No more troll-feeding. I would suggest it’s not a bad policy.

      • Michael S says:

        That’s not a way to answer a question.

        • Brian says:

          I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years criticizing conservatives for attacking Iggy for writing books or “being elitist” or having taught at Harvard or having complex thoughts on global issues that couldn’t be distilled into a single sound bite.

          I guess I was wasting my time. I guess we should only defend scripted bots who pander in every sentence to exactly what local voters already know and already want to hear, provided they do it in perfect 8-second clips, of course.

          My mistake. Glad it was pointed out to me before E-Day, though.

          • Namesake says:

            No: your mistake was in not looking into the circumstances more before leaping to the CPC’s talking point conclusions on this.

            Because you’re wrong to describe the audience members he was doing verbal combat with there as “hecklers” or depicting this as a matter of him being ambushed without enough time to defend himself (above).

            Because it turns out this was an all-party forum ON the topic of poverty, that was hosted by a Community Development Council at the city of Ajax’s council chambers.

            http://urlm.in/hmde (Globe & Mail today) ;

            So he wasn’t ambushed, or heckled: he was invited to come to speak specifically on that topic, of what his party intended to do to alleviate poverty in Canadian communities like theirs, and that’s what he came up with: the reverse Crocodile Dundee argument (‘Poor? You’re not poor. They’re poor.’)

            And your candidate’s fuller answer when the moderator asked the crowd to quiet down, that you & the CPC complained that the LPC left out, or that the audience didn’t give him a chance to say?

            Well, it appears it was just the same rote recitation of the CPC’s talking points that Diane Finley first delivered in QP a couple weeks before this, when the gov’t summarily dismissed all the rec’s of the new Anti-Poverty Report http://bit.ly/fqLHGk that they themselves had commissioned:

            “Mr. Alexander said the Harper government has created 500,000 jobs since the peak of the recession. “A growing economy, one of the most successful in the world, is the solution to eliminating poverty,” he said.”

            http://www.durhamregion.com/news/ajax/article/173832

            http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/950023–harper-government-passes-on-anti-poverty-plan

            Viz., “Get a job!”

            As for your defense by resume: well, fine, let’s go there:

            Don’t you find it the least bit troubling that a long-time diplomat and then official Ambassador in a very volatile and culturally sensitive area would be so very UN-diplomatic in his language and interactions with a crowd he should know would be very sensitive about this topic? I do.

            So it appears he combines the worst of both worlds: not good on his feet, and not above just peddling the shameless party line delivered by his masters.

  4. MississaugaLibPeter says:

    That is one friggin’ great video!

    Now if it could get a few hundred thousand or million his among our youth.

    • MontrealElite says:

      Yeah, it’s good to see Harper champion the stimulus his supporters say was forced on him.

      • George says:

        Oh, I remember Ignatieff on his feet urging the gov’t to supply stimulus money – several times in fact. I do believe that the people you hear crying the deficit tune are the same ones who voted for the short-term stimulus to see the country through the world-wide economic challenge….that vote included the Liberals in favour. Was Ignatieff even IN the house for that vote?

    • Namesake says:

      No, that’s not a game changer… it’s a Hail Mary.

      First, it actually undermines Harper’s Chicken Little / ‘Chaos is Lapping at the Shore’ message, because the OECD’s prediction is that our economy is humming along, thank you very much, and will be regardless of who’s in power… and it’s almost all due to our exports being bought by the rest of the world again, as it recovers.

      Second, it’s JUST a prediction, by a Think Tank; and a pretty rosy one, at that. The BMO thinks these forecasts are over-stated (OECD says 5.2% GDP growth this current quarter, BMO says 4.4%; OECD says 3.8% next quarter, BMO says 2.3%)… and warns that they were both judging on the basis of what was happening in Dec., BEFORE the Japan ‘quake/tsunami, and the spike in food and Oil prices, which could set our exports back considerably.

      http://www.thestar.com/business/markets/article/969530–oecd-bullish-on-canada

      Third, very little of this has anything to do with what the CPC did — or wouldn’t have done w/o being pressured into doing, by the Opp. Arguably, it would have all happened w/o ANY gov’t in power,* that we took a hit when our customers economies all suffered when their greedy, negligent bankers precipitated a financial meltdown…. and our business would pick up again when their govt’s bailed them out & spent their way out of that mess.

      *(Conrad Black is delighted to point out that the Parliamentarily grid-locked Belgium has gone nearly a full year without a gov’t, now http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/Campaigning+between+yard+lines/4547980/story.html

  5. MontrealElite says:

    Canadian dollar charging ahead…the TSX doing fine and last week’s GDP was better than expected.

    But, but, but King Stephen said an election would destablize the econonmy.

    And this clown has an MA in Economics?

    • MontrealElite says:

      At least Ignatieff has called a full investigation and has said he’ll turf the candidate if it’s true.

      What he didn’t say was that staff runs the campaign and hide from the media.

      It’s called leadership and accountability.

    • james curran says:

      “Ignatieff said that, if he learns that what Forbes said is true, he will not be a Liberal candidate.”

      • james curran says:

        OTTAWA – The Liberal party is considering dumping one of its Quebec candidates – a former spokesman for the Association for the Rights of Whites – for allegedly making disparaging comments against aboriginals.

        Leader Michael Ignatieff said Wednesday morning he planned to take swift action against Andre Forbes if a party investigation supports the allegations.

        “The remarks that have allegedly been made are utterly unacceptable. They stand against everything a Liberal has always said and believed,” said Ignatieff. “So I am asking for a report on those remarks. If they prove true I will take decisive action this very day.”

        http://links.visibli.com/links/cd80d1

    • Namesake says:

      It’s a regrettable lapse in their due diligence, to be sure (assuming that’s the right guy & the offensive assertions were his rather than ones he was critiquing), but isn’t it interesting that:

      – the damaging revelations were unearthed & made by the war room of the supposed coalition partner, the NDP, but,

      – NOT by the CPC’s, which is too busy screening the general public to protect their leader from being confronted by a real person with dissenting views, to do their actual job of Oppo. research, despite being the best financed party in the land.

      An unfortunate one-day hit, but we should actually thank the NDP for tbringing this to light, because it’s far better to weed out the bad apple now than to let him become a Cheryl Gallant or Shelly Glover style MP who’d continue to cause black eyes for their Party.

  6. Cat says:

    “H/T from David Akin
    Liberal bubble? #LPC supporters couldn’t get in to @M_Ignatieff rally in QC: http://bit.ly/gss87P #elxn41″

    • james curran says:

      The Liberal war room provides this explanation this morning:

      We were delighted to have supporters greet the arrival of our tour bus. We were meeting local social advocacy groups in their very small office space. Media were pooled (and we held a scrum outdoors after the event for all) and due to very tight space constraints, we couldn’t bring our supporters inside their offices. This was not a rally or a town hall event.

      http://davidakin.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2011/4/6/4789354.html

    • Namesake says:

      uh, huh. Well, again, it says right in there (altho’ its buried in this hostile piece) that there wasn’t enough room to squeeze in the late arrivals.

      Not admitting people into an over-crowded room is a pretty far cry from pre-screening & then ejecting even admitted people after a second wave of screening. (Like the guy who got ejected after they spotted an NDP bumper sticker on his car.)

      (let’s see if this quote from the cyberpresse article gets by WordPress’s accent police:
      “Le refus de laisser entrer militants et journalistes locaux a été expliqué par un manque d’espace à l’intérieur.”

      • JenS says:

        Because not allowing people in to comply with fire codes and selecting individuals from a room based on some sort od screening process are the same, right?

  7. Cat says:

    “David Akin;

    Liberal candidate called aboriginals “Featherheads”, says they’re lazy. Over to you , Mr. Ignatieff.

    Robert Fife chokes – “Ignatieff orders immediate inquiry into Lib candidate Andre Forbes who once headed Assoc of Whites.”

    Who’s the knuckledragger now, Bob?” (SDA)

    enough crap on all sides is seems.

  8. Dr.J says:

    I am still waiting for the “Game Changer” in the Toronto mayoral race to take affect…The left always need a “game changer” and I understand Warren it is your job to feed the left their daily piece of red meat but come on, why are the Liberals not talking about the great new “Red Book”? We both know why…because the platform is left of the NDP and no matter how they try to sell it no one isn’t buying it, well except for the Liberal bloggers of course

    • MontrealElite says:

      Buy me another car company Dr. J

      Is the J for jerk or jackwad?

      • Roger says:

        there it is….why the name calling?

      • Dr.J says:

        Mr.Montreal…I do remember that,when the Pm literally save the automotive sectoe in Ontario, This is when Iggy stated in BC he would not help the car industry in Ontario, however in Ontario he stated he would help the car industry….love the Iggman, his is a pure gift. As far as the name calling goes……thank you very much

        • MontrealElite says:

          No worries, glad that you prefer state intervention over free markets deciding its fate.

          Smaller governmnet means expanding the PMO yearly and fiscal conservatism means running bigger deficits.

          Dr. J please remember “We have always been at war with Eastasia”

    • The poster formerly known as James says:

      You missed some talking points, but, still: Cha-ching!

    • Namesake says:

      There’s plenty of time left in the campaign to talk policy, yet… at this point, we’re just delighting in watching you guys keep scoring on your own net.

  9. james curran says:

    Trolls are now being fed by the minute instead of by the hour. Con war room has kicked in.

  10. MJH says:

    A Liberal listening to the CBC? Tell me it isn’t true!!

  11. MJH says:

    Why have the Liberals moved so far left. Ignatieff sais the Libs wee a “centrist” Party. The Big RED Tent is getting smaller.

  12. MJH says:

    This is a story primarily about racism not leadership.

  13. Michael S says:

    Oh, look: According to the Landowners Randy is still running for leader! http://72.29.74.183/~ruralrev/website/

  14. George says:

    Watch this issue slowly sink into the abyss now that the truth comes out.
    http://blackrod.blogspot.com/

    • Namesake says:

      Yeah, sure, the presses will stop, because that fringe windbag blogger is on the case, and figures he has the goods on why at least one or two of the turfed youth were activists who, um, don’t belong at political rallies. Even though they wouldn’t be allowed to ask questions, anyway, unless they were one of the 5 accredited, vetted, pre-selected members of the media permitted to speak per event.

  15. The other George says:

    Say Warren, you would know the answer to this: The local radio here in Vancouver (CKNW) keeps calling Steven Harper “Prime Minister Steven Harper”.

    After the vote of no confidence and the subsequent dropping of the writ, is Steven’s position as prime minister no longer applicable? Did not the Speaker, after the non-confidence vote address Steven Harper as “Member” and not “Prime Minister”?

    • The Doctor says:

      You heard it here first, folks: Canada is currently without a Prime Minister. Harper was right: chaos is reigning!

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