Categories for Musings

FORT MYERS, Fa. — If you want an idea about how the recession could have happened in Canada, but didn’t, take a look around here.

Once the playground of the affluent and the super-rich, coastal Florida was one of the first places to be hit by the global recession. It’ll be one of the last places to exit it.

All around southwestern Florida, there are ugly scars — unmistakable signs people are still struggling. Foreclosure notices are everywhere, as are ads for bankruptcy sales — and bankruptcy help. Shuttered businesses can be seen wherever you look. And, along a sunny stretch of beach once favoured by Floridians piloting big yachts, someone has planted some hand-written signs. “Our house for sale,” it says. “EMERGENCY.”

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Personally, I support Lilley and (like many people, most of them in the NDP), I think Mulcair is a jerk.

Read the Hill Times transcript and cast your own vote!

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The main reason for posting this, truth be told, is the big dump of snow back home.  Sorry, but I’m cruel in that way.

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Why would they do this? Am I missing something? Is crack as addictive as they say?

Discuss.

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Do you ever get the feeling that we have elections to see if the polls were right?

I sure do. The American humorist Robert Orben said that, or something like that, many years ago. Surveying the current Canadian political landscape, you’d have to agree, too.

For a few years now, surveys of Canadians’ political opinions have been pretty darn consistent. Folks didn’t like the Conservatives enough to give them a majority — and they didn’t trust the Liberals enough to give them a minority.

The pollsters also told us, regularly, that Joe and Jane Frontporch didn’t love Prime Minister Stephen Harper very much — but they loved opposition leader Michael Ignatieff even less. Meanwhile, Joe and Jane liked NDP boss Jack Layton plenty, but not enough to ever let him near power.

And so it went over the past few years — see-sawing up and down, a few points here and few points there, but no one ever really breaking ahead of the pack.

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Tories trying to win support from South Asians in Ontario have opened the door to remnants of a Tamil Tiger front group the federal Conservatives themselves banned in 2008.

The unlikely association, forged behind a curtain of tough government talk about Tamil refugee ships and a feared terrorist migration to Canada last year, has developed since the Tigers’ separatist struggle was crushed by the Sri Lankan military in 2009.

Last month, Tim Hudak, Leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives, announced Shan Thayaparan as his party’s candidate for Markham-Unionville. Mr. Thayaparan had helped run an election for a new Tamil separatist group, the National Council of Canadian Tamils (NCCT), whose key adviser, Nehru Gunaratnam, is a former spokesman for the outlawed World Tamil Movement.

Hudak is a hypocrite and a disgrace, of course, with all of his bleatings about law and order. Nothing new there.

But this latest Ontario PC disaster has me wondering: how will the new recruits, above, get along with Landowner and PC executive members like Edward Kennedy?

You know, the Hudak stalwart who calls non-whites rapists and “n****rs,” quote unquote?

Should make for interesting campaign rallies.

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My sons and my Mom bid y’all adieu. Stay warm and dry!

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A polling firm, Forum Research, has something out suggesting that the McGuinty Liberals and the Hudak-Hillier PCs are vitually “neck and neck” in the Greater Toronto Area.

I asked some friends who Forum Research was.

Then I remembered.

I’m sure they are very nice folks and all that, but no other polling firm ever, ever confirmed their GTA result.  In fact, everyone else found that Sarah Thompson and Joe Pantalone were never behind Rossi in the final few months.  Not once.  That’s why Benedict Baldy dropped out, in fact.  The Forum Research poll did not match what others were finding, or what was happening at the doors.

Can pollsters get things wrong?  Yep, they sure can.  The good folks at Forum did with Rossi, in my view.

I’m writing a column about this polling stuff for the Sunday Sun. I don’t believe the federal Liberals are as behind as some pollsters say they are.  And I don’t believe this morning’s survey, at all.

Over and out.

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From my Sun Media colleague Akin:

@davidakin: On the Hill: The Kenney Branding Strategy: “We Are Losing” but “We Are Losing Less Badly” http://bit.ly/ea98ks

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