OMFG - that is our lame ass Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper. I am so ashamed to be Canadian

Awwww! He's just being conservative!

They carried him off, what do you want him to do? :/

lol Stephen Harper our PM. He's so chill.

Hey, now! Am I the only Canadian here that's a little irritated that the Canadian Prime Minister is referred to as just "this politician"? Sorry, Sugar- but I'd expect an American site to at least know who the Canadian Prime Minister is. Even if he is a doofus.

Was he supposed to go help?

QuiteContrary, I should have known. I will put his name and title in so he gets full credit for this!

Thanks, Sugar! He's a bit goofy and (apparently here) quite passive, but goshdunnit, he's our PM! ; )

QuiteContrary, that's why, when I was asked to be VP, I turned the offer down. I can't see Canada from my house and I can't recognize its leaders.

oh giggle

!!!

lol when you kept saying QuiteContrary I thought you were using it in your sentence, it took me reading it a few times for it to clue in that Quitecontrary was the one who wrote the comment haha...

I read "Quite Contrary, I should have known." and thought "thats not how you use 'contrary' in a sentence...."

Duh.

Fallen, this post is generating all sorts of confusion! Politics!

hahaha he will not tolerate any distractions, kinda like this dude: http://tinyurl.com/3qcv7a

vote liberal! (erm, Stephan Dion is a bit of a dork though... hmm)

ew don't vote liberal!

Harper's great. I love all the jokes about him being cold and soul-less =p hahaha

i never thought i would say this....but i think i'm going to vote NDP >.<

I vaguely remember the NDP era. I was like... 13. Wasnt everybody really pissed off all the time? Ugh, I wish it was made 100% clear what we're voting for here. I dont like Dion but I kind of want to vote Liberal. I dunno. I want to vote for Obama.

*gasp* NDP!

communist!

what could possibly inspire anyone to vote liberal when the conservative government has not only NOT f*cked anything up yet (a feat in itself!), but also LOWERED TAXES! That practically never happens!!

it's about values too, though. I believe in a socialized healthcare-- everyone has the right to their health. everyone!
Lowering taxes sounds great in theory-- but you know that 2% that was lowered--- we could have gotten 75% of Canada out of poverty if we kept it and put th money towards social services. Le sigh.
NDP--- they're a labour party. Some people will vote them as a "protest" vote, but i also only vaguely remember them too!
I'm wavering between Green Party (as a protest vote) and liberal (ugh, but Dion is SUCH a dork!)
I agree, I wish I could vote for Obama!

oh, so you are a communist, then?

No one has a "right" to anything, but even if that weren't true, healthcare is a unique resource. It's not a physical commodity, it's a service, and it relies on thousands of trained professionals to execute its benefits. A socialized healthcare plan enslaves physicians and nurses to their patients. It demands that they provide their skills on the basis that their ward "deserves" it -- on no other account than he or she simply exists, and thus is entitled by some undefined notion of fundamental "rights".

The talents of a trained healthcare worker do not belong to me (or you) free of charge, so I do not request them without payment (Canada doesn't exactly give you a choice, but we still continue to pay our doctors six-figure salaries so at least that much is just).

Every human interaction has to be a trade. Anything else is theft. No person on this planet has any rights to another -- not their body, not their mind, and not their talents.

You cannot claim the skills of one person are the inborn right of another. It's profoundly immoral.

And social services don't need to be increased. They're abused and promote laziness and incompetence. Assistance programs are a way of rewarding those that fail at life at the expense of those that succeed. Know who contributes the most to social programs? Our best & brightest, the doctors, the engineers, the CEOs -- all those on high payroll. Nevermind that they earned it with years of post-secondary or a lifetime of hard-work, there's 17 year old moms that dropped out of highschool that need to pay their rent so they'll have some money left over for drugs and alcohol!

Canada is a free country, and people have the right to live their life as they choose -- even if they choose disparity. Poverty is a choice, not an affliction.

The only poor that should be protected are the children, because they have no means whatsoever to provide for themselves beyond the receipt of care from their guardians. Maybe if we put more money into social services so they could remove children from their destructive home lives instead of just trying to band-aid the bullet wound that is a bad parent.. but we don't have the manpower or resources to exercise such a feat, and doing so raises further moral dilemmas anyway.

At the end of the day, we all know that, no matter who is in power, things will remain roughly the same, with the same benefits and the same draw-backs, and the same problems with the same consequences, because for the most part, we like it that way.

It's nice here.

very interesting. i am a "health care professional", so I have a very different stance on this.
i also know the social service work quite well to know that the stereotype of "there's 17 year old moms that dropped out of highschool that need to pay their rent so they'll have some money left over for drugs and alcohol!" is a little striking. But i respect your opinion on that--but I have a very different stance on that.

the communist line is hilarious.
there has never been a truly communist nation. the ones we always discuss are dictatorships more than anything else.

everyone in canada over the age of 60 still thinks ndp=commie