[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[Josephus]

It is a mess. Vote Liberal just because.

[Barrister]

I still have no fucking clue who to vote for in Ontario. All of the parties are terrible.

I dunno - I'm from afar of course, but it seems like Hudak is presenting a reasonable platform that includes job cuts and a realistic means to get to a balanced budget, while Wynne is promising no cuts of anything, but is promising a balanced budget apparently filled with rainbows and unicorns.

Even speaking as a freakin civil servant, I know which one sounds like better public policy to me.

[Grey Fox]

Yes but you are of the opinion that deficits are the worse evil a government can do.

Wynne is not of that opinion, atleast publicly.

[Barrister]

Yes but you are of the opinion that deficits are the worse evil a government can do.

Wynne is not of that opinion, atleast publicly.

No, mass genocide of a minority religious or ethnic group is probably the worst evil a government can do.

Deficits are only #4 or #5 on that list.

[crazy canuck]

Actually BB, it looks like Haduk has no idea what he is doing when it comes to his economic plan.  Not exactly the kind of person that would give me a lot of confidence that he and his team knows what they are doing generally if they make this sort of mistake for political gain.

A growing chorus of economists says Tim Hudak vastly inflated the number of jobs his signature Million Jobs Plan would create, largely because the Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader made a basic arithmetic mistake with his own data.

The economists, including three former federal finance department officials, say some of Mr. Hudak's policies would actually create just one-fifth the number of jobs he claims. His central error, they said, was conflating person years of employment – how many people would have work for a single year – with permanent jobs.

"We strongly disagree with that interpretation," Mr. Hudak, who has a master's degree in economics, said while touring a factory on the outskirts of Niagara Falls. "I stand behind our numbers."

But a PC source with knowledge of how the numbers were calculated confirmed the party had indeed treated person years of employment and permanent jobs as the same.

Economists identified several holes in Mr. Hudak's "million jobs" claim, the centrepiece of his platform for the June 12 election. For instance, Mr. Hudak's plan to cut 100,000 public sector jobs, which would take money out of the economy, is not factored into the economic modelling. And they contend no provincial government is powerful enough to guarantee such a specific level of job creation, given the many other factors – from the strength of the U.S. economy to the value of the dollar – that influence the province's economy.

But they said all these concerns were dwarfed by Mr. Hudak's mathematical mistake.

McMaster University economist Michael Veall, who reviewed the PC numbers at The Globe and Mail's request, said Mr. Hudak counted many projected jobs multiple times as a result of the error.
For instance, a Tory-commissioned Conference Board of Canada report on the effect of corporate tax cuts should be read to project 20,500 new jobs under Mr. Hudak's proposed 3.5-per-cent corporate tax cut, he said – far fewer than the 119,808 claimed in the Million Jobs Plan. It appears Mr. Hudak arrived at the 119,808 figure by instead looking at person years of employment.

Conference Board economist Pedro Antunes confirmed Prof. Veall's reading of the data. In an e-mail to The Globe, he said employment figures in each year of the projection are person years.

Scott Clark and Peter DeVries, former top civil servants in the federal finance department, reached a similar conclusion.

"The million-job claim is quite bogus," they wrote in an op-ed on the iPolitics website, calling the size of the Tories' claimed new jobs from the tax cut "utter nonsense."

Paul Boothe, a University of Western Ontario professor and former federal finance official, wrote in Maclean's magazine that the Tories' mistake "led them to vastly overestimate the effect of their proposed job-creating measures."

In an interview, he said the public-sector job cuts, which the Tories did not factor into their economic model, could take more money out of the economy than the corporate income-tax cut puts in.

"At the maximum, it's twice the size of the corporate income-tax cut," he said in an interview. "It strikes me that certainly you would want to model that."

The various economic measures were all calculated separately by different economists who did not look at Mr. Hudak's entire plan. Then, they were rolled together and added up until they reached one million. Mr. Hudak could have avoided arithmetic mistakes by having one economist look at the entire plan, Mr. Boothe said.

There was, however, one piece of good news for the Tories: Prof. Veall said Ontario will very likely create a million new jobs in eight years – but Mr. Hudak may have nothing to do with it.

"I would hope that whoever is in charge, whoever wins the election, that eight years from now we would have a million more jobs," he said in an interview. "I would expect the employment rate to continue to bounce back from the recession. That alone, probably, would get us to a million."

[Grey Fox]

Yes but you are of the opinion that deficits are the worse evil a government can do.

Wynne is not of that opinion, atleast publicly.

No, mass genocide of a minority religious or ethnic group is probably the worst evil a government can do.

Deficits are only #4 or #5 on that list.

Fair point.

Fucking Romeo Dallaire being a coward 

[crazy canuck]

It is a mess. Vote Liberal just because.

http://www.gpo.ca/

[Josephus]

Nah...not a Green Party fan. People think they're lefties (and on some issues they are) but fiscally they're pretty right. I've a feeling this Ontario election is going to have an extremely low turnout...not sure who benefits from that.

[crazy canuck]

On the Federal front the Conservatives have tabled their new prostitution law.  On my reading of the Bill they have failed to address the Supreme Court's Concerns - they have kept in the prohibitions that were struck down and they have added further restrictions.  For example by banning advertising of sexual services.  I predict there will be a Court challenge within days of the Bill becoming law and that it will once again be struck down.  But I suppose by that time the election cycle will be over, the Conservatives will be able to tell its core it stood up for "family values" and then it can get down to the business of drafting a real law - or perhaps we will have continual trips to the SCC.

[Josephus]

Toronto Sun takes another step into the gutter:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/06/05/kathleen-wynne-cartoon-toronto-sun_n_5454325.html

[Malthus]

THE SECOND COMING OF ROB FORD
[Or, the Ontario and Toronto Elections are Upon Us]

    Turning and turning in a widening gyre
    The mayor cannot find his own car door;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mediocrity is loosed upon the world,
    The bribe-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    Confidence in government is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are just as fucking useless.

    Surely no revelation is at hand;
    Surely nothing good is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image filled with purple Jesus
    Troubles my sight: in a waste of crumbling infrastructure;
    A shape with bloated body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Crack pipes and empty bottles roll.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That both municipal and provincial elections
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Honest Ed's to approve condos?

[crazy canuck]

The new anti spam legislation is having the presumbably unintended consequence of dramatically increasing the level of spam I receive from various companies and organizations who are asking for my consent so that they can continue to spam me. 

[crazy canuck]

I liked Wente's piece in the Globe.  The main question for Ontario voters?  Who will do the least damage?

[Josephus]

I voted already. I voted NDP. Not because I want them to do well (which they won't); in fact I'm quite mad at them. But my Oshawa riding is a close call between PC incumbent and NDP challenger. Liberals do shit here.

[crazy canuck]

I voted already. I voted NDP. Not because I want them to do well (which they won't); in fact I'm quite mad at them. But my Oshawa riding is a close call between PC incumbent and NDP challenger. Liberals do shit here.

You rant about how bad decisions the NDP have made but when you entered that polling booth you just couldn't help yourself because the thought of the alternative is just too terrible.  I will likely be just like you in the Federal election only with the Conservatives.