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Ontarians are sheep (pg. 3)
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Transmotion
if you knew how many other programs that goverment spends money on ,i'd say those 100 million dollars just nothing compared to other amounts of money. |
if 100 million dollars stolen directly out our pockets is "nothing" then feel free to send me your paycheque as you clearly have no concept of money.
I cant believe im reading that "$100 million is nothing". Sheesh!! Imagine the guy who robs a bank and gets $3000. Thats pocket change compared to what was stolen here. |
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| rabbitjoker |
| Nothing says love like a sheep and some velcro gloves... |
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| Jayx1 |
looks like the corruption went further than just sponsorship. No wonder the gun registry costs so much.
$100 million is a lot but thats what we know of. Imagine what they have managed to hide?
| quote: | MONTREAL (CP) - Federal advertising activities worth $800 million were wrought with "major problems" and taxpayers deserve better for their money, Auditor General Sheila Fraser told the Gomery inquiry Monday.
The financial watchdog, whose scathing 2002 report led to the inquiry's creation, said her team uncovered a litany of irregularities in advertising bidding and management from 1998 to 2003.
They included missing documents and bidding processes that were cancelled without explanation.
"I hope that in our co-presentation this morning, we showed that there were major problems in the advertising activities," said Fraser, whose office lifted the veil on the sponsorship scandal now threatening the Liberal government.
"The amounts concerned are very large, nearly $800 million over a five-year period. And I could conclude by saying that Canadians expect better when public funds are spent."
Fraser said vaguely worded calls for tenders provided government with "lots of room for flexibility" in deciding which ad agencies would be chosen to manage lucrative contracts.
The exact selection process, in some cases, remained a mystery to her auditors because committee reports and evaluation criteria were missing or incomplete.
The problems she outlined applied to general ad contracting as well as the sponsorship program, which has since seen some former contractors hit with criminal or civil lawsuits.
Some of the irregularities found by Fraser's auditors in 2003 have since been examined in detail before inquiry judge John Gomery, including:
-A $65.7-million Tourism Canada contract amended to include Quebec's BCP ad firm without an open competition. The inquiry heard BCP was cut into the deal in 1995 after a top executive called the Prime Minister's Office.
-Groupaction retained several
Justice Department contracts in 1999 after a bidding process was mysteriously halted. Groupaction president Jean Brault has told the inquiry he offered a public official $100,000 in 2001 to manipulate one of the contracts, related to the federal gun registry.
Fraser also noted Monday that $1.3 million in Canada Customs contracts were awarded directly to Groupaction in 1995 after a bidding process involving 17 other agencies was cancelled.
Fraser was the inquiry's first witness back in September.
At the time, she said Parliament was bypassed, the public was kept in the dark and warning signals went unheeded as the sponsorship program drifted toward full-fledged scandal.
When Fraser first looked into the sponsorship affair in 2002 - reviewing only three deals that had come to light by then - she concluded senior bureaucrats had broken nearly "every rule in the book" in awarding contracts to private-sector advertising and public relations firms.
A follow-up report in February 2004 estimated about $100 million of the $250-million program went to Liberal-friendly middlemen. |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by rabbitjoker
Nothing says love like a sheep and some velcro gloves... |
LOL |
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| Theresa |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jayx1
Thats all i can say.... im ashamed to be from this province. |
Please don't take this as my being rude, but Jay, you do a lot of complaining about Canada and Ontario, and to be quite honest, I cannot understand for the life of me why you don't just move elsewhere.
Nothing could possibly be stopping you from moving some place where the government is run better, so why not do it? Wouldn't it cause a lot less worry for you? |
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| Jayx1 |
you see theresa, the reason i complain about whats happening to this wonderful country is because i see what it has been and what it could be. In other words i give a damn. I like Canada i just dont like where it's headed. I think a lot of people have misplaced priorities now and it's starting to erode at our quality of life. Sadly most people wont understand this until it's too late. It goes to the very root of our society. Dismissing politics and rewarding corruption is just the result of what goes much deeper.
A healthy society includes a healthy desention by the way. |
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| ShadoWolf |
http://www.canada.com/montreal/mont...1b-4586055a0033
Loyalty to Grits will kill Canada
Harper: Tory leader meets Quebec candidates. 'The support for sovereignty is a reflection of how serious Liberal scandals really are'
MIKE DE SOUZA
The Gazette
Sunday, May 15, 2005
While one of his candidates proposed bringing Canada back to 1867, Conservative leader Stephen Harper warned anglophones that they would wreck the country if they remained loyal to the federal Liberals.
"I say this particularly to English Quebecers and Ontarians - a few people I know who are still reluctant to let go of the Liberal party - I say this to them, and I say it very seriously," Harper told reporters yesterday.
"If these loyal Canadians care about the unity of the country, they will not put in office a party that Quebecers know is corrupt, and to do that is to jeopardize the future of this country."
The surge in support for sovereignty is another sign that the federal Liberals are finished in the province, said Harper, who was in central Quebec to address a crowd of 59 Conservative candidates at a training session.
"The support for sovereignty is a reflection of how serious the Liberal scandals really are," Harper said, referring to recent polls that show 54 per cent of Quebecers support independence.
"Let's be clear, (Bloc Quebecois leader) Gilles Duceppe has not created a whole bunch more sovereignists in Quebec. It's (former prime minister) Jean Chretien and (Prime Minister) Paul Martin who have created them. And I think it's essential for national unity to get the Liberals out of office, and I think that's the only way we're going to turn things around."
He told candidates to prepare for a nasty election campaign in which Conservatives would be portrayed as extremists, fundamentalists and separatists. But he said Canadians might have a bigger fear when they go to the polls.
"They're a lot more afraid, I think, of wrecking the country, and that's what a Liberal government will do."
One day after a meeting with Quebec Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Benoit Pelletier, Harper renewed his pledge to deliver a federalism of openness.
He said he would work within the framework of the constitution and avoid national programs out of Ottawa, proposed by the Liberals and the NDP, which infringe on provincial jurisdictions.
"Obviously, our ultimate goal is to make Quebec more comfortable within Canada, not simply to make Quebec more powerful or more independent. I think that wouldn't be the whole answer."
But Conservative candidate Gary Caldwell was a little more blunt, insisting that the confederation won't survive without a strong Quebec.
"We're offering 1867," said Caldwell, who will run in the Eastern Townships riding of Compton-Standstead for a second straight year.
"That means a chance for Quebec to survive as Louisiana did not survive in the American Union." He said the federal government took over provincial jurisdictions and taxing powers during the Second World War, before weakening the confederation even more with the 1982 Constitution.
"This has led to alienation in western Canada, and it has led to a sense in Quebec, that we cannot build our future within the confederation." While the Conservatives have pledged to restore balance in federal-provincial transfers to decentralize
Ottawa, they are not ready to say how much money they are
willing to turn over to the provinces.
"It's certain that we must sit down with the leaders of the provinces concerned to establish the amounts," Harper's Quebec lieutenant, Josee Verner, said.
But Harper insisted his party won't go down the same road as the Liberals if they win the next election.
"We Conservatives will never come here to the province of Quebec - we will never come to this proud province, attempt to buy elections with dirty money, and call it national unit," Harper said.
The Conservatives expect to have a full roster of candidates in all 75 Quebec ridings by the end of the week. |
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| naesean3 |
Youth Involvement in Political Parties
By Dr. Lisa Young and
Dr. William Cross
Previous research has revealed that in Canada, among youth, we have low rates of voting, low rates of interest in Canadian politics, and even a diminished sense of attachment to the country. In light of this research, it should come as no surprise whatsoever to discover that young Canadians’ membership in political parties is also in decline.
This phenomenon first came to our attention in 2000, when we undertook a survey of members of the five major political parties at the federal level. In this survey, we found that the average age of a party member responding to our survey was 59. Only three percent of respondents to our survey were under the age of 25, although they comprised 11% of the Canadian population that year.
There is evidence that that even in the space of a generation or less, the patterns of youth involvement in political parties in Canada have declined quite remarkably. A survey from 1990 told us that about 10% of people aged 18 to 25 reported that they had ever been members of a political party. Ten years later, that number declined to five percent. This rapid downward movement suggests a trend toward what could be called “parties without members.”
The data from our 2000 survey suggest that youth recruitment is quite important to the long-term involvement of citizens in political parties. Among card-carrying Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, aged over 45, 20% as youths. Among people a little bit younger, a third first joined when they were 25. In other words, the parties’ long-term strategy of trying to recruit young people as party members on the theory that they would remain active in the party seems to us to have been fairly grounded in reality. This, in fact, was an important source of recruitment. This means that the inability of parties to recruit significant numbers of young people now suggests a long-term trend toward parties with fewer members and fewer active members.
Not just a Canadian phenomenon
This is not uniquely a Canadian phenomenon. In fact, in most liberal industrialised democracies, the same trends are apparent. The consensus among political scientists who study political parties, is that these are organizations in decline, at least as internally democratic membership organizations.
Many of the accounts of declining membership in political parties point to the processes of modernization as the cause. First, increasing rates of post-secondary education, which one might think would produce more members for elite organizations like political parties have, in fact, the opposite effect. Well-educated citizens are apparently unwilling to be involved in such organizations as their participation has little immediate effect and consequently seems meaningless. Second, changing social values, particularly increasing egalitarianism and a “decline of deference,” compound this tendency. Third, changes in social organization, including lower rates of unionization and atomization of other collective enterprises, make it more difficult for parties to recruit members. Fourth, the mass media have replaced political parties as a means of conveying information to the public. As a consequence, parties are held in lower regard and party members are less necessary as a means of ‘getting the word out’ for parties. Fifth, a trend toward professionalization of politics has substantially reduced political parties’ need for members and their volunteer labour. Many of the functions that party members performed in the past can now be undertaken more efficiently and scientifically by pollsters, advertising executives and the like.
It is in this context that we launched our study of declining youth involvement in Canadian political parties. One important element of this is an effort to explain the decline. We have in mind several potential explanations.
Civic engagement
The first has to do with civic engagement. If we assume that community involvement in a formal way predicts membership in a political party or other traditional political organization, then to the extent that civic engagement is in decline, we might expect to see a party membership in decline.
The second explanation relates to values and social structures. Value changes such as those alluded to earlier may well make the hierarchical organization of political parties particularly unappealing to young people.
Thirdly, we suspect that structural changes may account for the decline. Changing economic organization, higher tuition fees and similar factors may simply render young people less available for activities like party membership as they juggle education and paid work.
Our fourth explanation has to do with the character of party organization itself. To the extent that political parties have professionalized and rely on state funding to sustain their operations, they may simply be less concerned with the need to recruit party members for either the present or the future.
The research is still in its preliminary stages. To date, we have undertaken a survey of youth members of the Liberal party, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois. Plans to survey the two parties on the right of the spectrum were shelved because of the two parties’ merger, but may be revisited. As the research project progresses, we will gather data about young Canadians who do not belong to political parties, allowing us to draw contrasts between the two groups in order to shed some light on the validity of our potential explanations.
The survey of youth members of the three parties was restricted to party members aged 18 to 25 and was conducted in fall of 2003. It was a mail-back survey with a response of 33%, which, considering that many of these young people are university students, that they move frequently, and are often busy with part-time work is a reasonable response rate.
Joining the party
Almost 60 percent of our survey respondents told us they were asked to join their party; they did not join on their own initiative. This stands in sharp contrast to our survey of all party members, the vast majority of whom joined on their own initiative. For young people, then, recruitment into the party seems particularly important.
Who asked them to join? About 20 percent told us that a friend or neighbour had recruited them, and another 10 percent said that a fellow student asked them to join. But for almost half our respondents, the invitation to join the party came from a family member. Taken together with some of our other findings, this suggests that party membership in Canada is, at least for young people, very much a family affair.
Did a specific event trigger their membership? Over one-third of respondents told us that a leadership contest served as impetus for them to join their party. This ranges from a low of 19 percent of Bloc members, to 34 percent of Liberals and 53 percent of New Democrats. It is not coincidence that both the NDP and the Liberals had leadership contests the year prior to our survey. Our findings lend particular credence to the idea that Jack Layton’s leadership contest was particularly important to recruiting young people into the NDP. For members of the Bloc, the event that was most likely to trigger their decision to join was a policy issue, and that issue was Quebec sovereignty.
Motivations
Examining other motivations to join a party, we find that relatively few young party members were concerned about helping their career or getting a government job. The exception to this is in the Liberal party, where almost a quarter indicated that helping their career was a ‘very important’ motivation for joining the party. This is not particularly surprising given that the Liberal party has governed federally for over a decade. That said, young New Democrats in Saskatchewan, where their party governs provincially, were no more likely to be motivated by careerism than their counterparts elsewhere in the country. The opportunity to socialize was salient for one in five young party members, and again was more important to young Liberals. The two factors that were the most widely cited, however, were a belief in the party’s policy and a desire to make a difference. A majority of young party members across parties cited these reasons as very important.
Finally, we had some interesting results to our questions about young party members’ political socialization. We asked them a series of questions about whether they had taken a post-secondary Canadian government course, a secondary civics course, and about their family’s political involvement. Our findings suggest that socialization plays a key role in distinguishing young party members from non-members.
Of our respondents, almost half had taken a post-secondary Canadian government course; over half had taken a secondary school civics class. More than sixty percent told us that at least one of their parents belonged to a political party; almost three quarters indicated that their family talked politics frequently and that their household had a daily newspaper delivered when they were growing up. On all of these measures, the young party members are quite distinct from the Canadian population as a whole. This suggests that socialization is a strong predictor of party membership, a key traditional form of political activity.
These conclusions will be tested more rigorously in the next phase of research. For comparative purposes, we plan to undertake a survey of university students early in 2005. We have decided to study university students, as opposed to young people in the population at large, because we find that the vast majority of young party members are university students. Students are therefore a closer comparator and there are reasons of convenience for studying university students as distinct from young people in the population at large. We are going to follow this up through interviews and focus groups, both with young party members and with some of the same kinds of people on which CRIC’s research is focusing – young people who are active in the community, who are involved in anti-globalization movements, and other civil society organizations, but not political parties. These are the people who, a generation ago, we would have expected to also belong to a political party; so we want to find out what their perceptions of parties are and how these might be turning them off of party membership.
Dr. Lisa Young is Associate Professor of Political Science and a Professor of the Institute for Advanced Policy esearch at the University of Calgary. Her recent publications include Advocacy Groups with Joanna Everitt, Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics, with R.K. Carty and W. Cross, Feminists and Party Politics and articles in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Canadian Studies. Dr. Young’s research projects include a study of the impact of new campaign finance regulations on political party organization in Canada, and a study of youth involvement in Canadian political parties.
Dr. William Cross holds the Edgar and Dorothy Davidson Chair in Canadian Studies in the Department of Political Science at Mount Allison University. Dr. Cross is Director of the Canadian Democratic Audit. His recent publications include Political Parties; Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics with . Kenneth Carty and Lisa Young; Political Parties, Representation and Electoral Democracy in Canada; and journal articles in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Party Politics, Political Research Quarterly and the Journal of Canadian Studies. His current research projects include an examination of young Canadians' participation in political parties.
:eyes: hmmmmmmm......
Without picking apart who/what and where of this study - the general ideas are quite true in this country....
Too many people (youth) feel unimportant/unnecessary to the political process in this country......we have taken control of many elements in our (popular) culture - we should also be doing the same of our political culture..........
I was involved in a Youth based branch of a national political party and found it very rewarding on so many levels.....there are so many aspects to this political machine that drives our democracy - that you cannot learn from the news or even some textbooks.....make your voice heard and contribute to the continued political climate of free speech and democractic ideals that we are so lucky to have in Canada.....
We - don't listen to/want 59 year olds rapping on the radio - why should we be listening to them "rapping" on in Queen's Park/Ottawa - the time for change as always is now........ |
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| amb_ |
| quote: | Originally posted by naesean3
I was involved in a Youth based branch of a national political party and found it very rewarding on so many levels.....there are so many aspects to this political machine that drives our democracy - that you cannot learn from the news or even some textbooks.....make your voice heard and contribute to the continued political climate of free speech and democractic ideals that we are so lucky to have in Canada..... |
Nice, Sean.
I was involved with a provincial youth branch, and have to agree it was a very rewarding experience. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to set aside to remain active... |
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| Jer. |
Jay: Although I applaud your patriotism, this is hardly 'rewarding' corruption.
It's my opinion that Canada could not withstand a Conservative-led government. Not right now, not under Harper. If Joe Clark were still in charge I'd have the faith, but I simply put don't trust him.
I'd still trust the Liberals after this, just because they're coming clean about the whole debacle. |
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| Jayx1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Jer.
I'd still trust the Liberals after this, just because they're coming clean about the whole debacle. |
If they came clean there wouldnt be the need for an inquiry now would there?
Voting Liberal is voting for corruption. There are 3 other parties from which to choose.
I love Paul Martins style of confession. "yes somebody may have stolen something but i promise we will put it back if they did"...id love to see a criminal enter that as a plea in front of a judge :stongue: :stongue: :stongue: :stongue: |
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| naesean3 |
| quote: | Originally posted by amb_
Nice, Sean.
I was involved with a provincial youth branch, and have to agree it was a very rewarding experience. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to set aside to remain active... |
Alas - it is the same with everything we do in life - in order to reach our full potential much effort has to be involved - people mature - priorites change - I was very involved in my high-school/post-secondary years - now at the VERY least - I vote - I am ashamed sometimes that I do not do more - those who do not vote - have no right (IMO) to complain about anything - that nihilistic approach is a major reason we have such low numbers of youth caring.......It has taken 20 some odd years of negative portrayal of the effects of the smoking that within a generation...a "cult" of non-smoking ideals/laws have swept over our Country......if only we placed as much money/time/energy/value into the promotion of YOUTH POLITICAL INVOLVEMENT - that would be amazing.........I have no problem with my tax dollars going to this......
Thanks Chris - I can tell from your statements in previous posts that you might have been politically involved as a youth member.....it makes you understand the process a bit clearer no???? :D |
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