Tag: carbon tax

Liberals rip down Conservative signs with a blessing from Elections Canada

This campaign has seen a lot of things, from MPs using office budgets to advertise during the writ to past blogs of present candidates coming back to haunt parties that have not properly conducted the vetting process. But this story, as reported by the Charlottetown Guardian is perhaps the one to top.

Conservative candidate Tom DeBlois posted signs throughout his riding advising constituents to “say no” to Dion’s carbon tax. These signs weren’t the standard blue with the standard Conservative logo but they were authorized by the official agent for Tom DeBlois.

Liberals, infuriated by opposition to their leader’s carbon tax, or perhaps just simply frustrated the plan isn’t going over as well as Al Gore’s private jet on the way to another Inconvenient presentation, drove throughout the riding and tore down the signs.

If this sounds like the standard campaign dirty tricks, read on. There’s an interesting twist. Turns out that Elections Canada actually authorized the take-down of the signs. Even if the signs were illegal, why did Elections Canada outsource it’s muscle to the Liberal Party? With pre-election suggestions by the Conservatives of Elections Canada working hand-in-glove with the Liberal Party, one would presume Elections Canada would be more careful and do better to try and dispel this allegation. The problem for the Liberals, and for Elections Canada in particular, the signs are completely legal and the subjective arbiter of elections fails to secure the democratic process from abuse once again and in this particular case they enabled it.

Elections Canada has admitted it was wrong to have the signs removed. The executive director of the Liberal Party has apologized.

While we’re on the topic of signs, let’s bring up some suspicious advertising that Elections Canada should take a look into. Of course, as Conservatives we don’t expect them to give a green light to our (or rather their) enforcement division.


Stapled to municipal sign


Stapled to utility pole


(from Guelph) Authorized by an official agent? Who knows.

Consider the stark difference in how Elections Canada enforces its rules.

1) In this case here, Liberals complain about legal signs, Elections Canada authorizes the Liberals to take them down.

2) Liberal MP Anthony Rota buys an identifying himself as an MP and the ad runs during the writ period unauthorized by his official agent. Conservatives complain but Elections Canada declares the ad legal.

3) Liberals provide advertising for a corporation on their campaign plane. We still haven’t heard from Elections Canada if this was done for free or whether other considerations were involved.

4) Finally, an NDP supporter puts an NDP sign in their rented apartment window, the landlord threatens eviction and Elections Canada washes their hands of the matter.

Green Party releases platform

Here’s the platform of the Green Party of Canada:

Read this document on Scribd: GPC platform

Notes:
– Money for a Green VC fund for green R&D
– renegotiation of NAFTA
– corporate tax cuts for carbon reductions
– raise the GST to 6%
– combines the Liberal Green Shift carbon tax with NDP/Conservative plans for cap-and-trade. Also has a more intense GHG target than the Conservatives with 30% reduction from 1990 levels rather than Conservative’s absolute carbon reduction of 20% by 2020 from 2006 levels.
– raise taxes on cigarettes
– labeling of GMOs
– Single payer, universal healthcare
– income splitting for everyone
– raise income tax exemption to $20k
– Guaranteed Annual Income
– meet 0.7% GDP pledge for foreign aid
– turn Afghanistan mission over to the UN

From carbon taxes, to income splitting to massive increases in foreign aid, I look forward to the costing of this platform.

There is not one word in this platform on proportional representation as it relates to democratic reform. Has the Green Party dropped this from it’s goals? Was this dropped at their last party convention on policy? Is this just more evidence that PR is a distasteful policy to the Liberal Party and a Red-Green alliance depends on seat sharing and first-past-the-post rather than proportional representation? Is the NDP now the only party that supports PR?

Does Elizabeth May fundamentally agree or disagree?

One thing that we can all agree upon is that Elizabeth May talks too fast and this has got her into some trouble in the past surrounding her February 2007 comments on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin where she says “All the other politicians are scared to death to mention the word ‘tax’. And they think Canadians are stupid — and cannot — and I fundamentally agree with that assessment.”

As I mentioned in my interview on CBC, I was never of the mind that she had said “I” rather than “they” in the sentence where she says “they think Canadians are stupid”. What stunned me was the part where she said “and I fundamentally agree with that assessment”. I didn’t realize there was ambiguity over the pronoun until it was raised by other who saw my video and made comment over at Buckdog.

Now, as it has been confirmed, the audio was “they” but now May reveals that the real difference in interpretation was that she either meant “agree” or “disagree with that assessment”. In Steve Paikin’s Friday interview of May, the Green Party leader explains that she said “disagree”.

However, on Sunday’s CTV Question Period May has a different story that contradicts her explanation to Paikin. May said that she said “fundamentally agree with that assessment” in reference to another panelist who had made an observation that wasn’t recorded.

Most people that run for political office do it out of a love of service for their fellow Canadians. I do not doubt that May’s heart is in the right place. However, her reported off-hand comments after the panel discussion might reinforce for us another element of her thinking. She said “No I want [Hummer drivers] shot actually, jail is not good enough for them!” Of course, any reasonable person would understand that May was joking. However, some might interpret this as a streak of elitism in Ms. May. Some Canadians may get the impression that while she wishes to serve Canada, she likely thinks she knows what’s best for us.