Toronto Star’s Somali-obsessed crack exclusive
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Wynne puts aside ‘personal qualms’ to launch Liberal class war games
Globe and Mail: Wynne urges expanded lottery system to maximize revenue for Ontario
“The Premier has previously said she dislikes gambling, but now, staring down an $11.9-billion deficit, she contends that personal qualms must be put aside in the pursuit of cash for the treasury.”
Kathleen Wynne has spent most of her political career putting “personal qualms aside” — why stop now?
While Andrea Horwath calls for an end to the Liberals’ class war games: “I would rather spend our time trying to find jobs for young people and get them into the work force sooner, than hitch our hopes on getting them to gamble so we can get more revenues into the province.”
Toronto Star wants you to ignore Kathleen Wynne’s record
NOW’s Susan G. Cole deftly confronts absurd idea that electing a lesbian leader absolves Liberals of all accountability or, worse, that somehow Wynne’s sexual orientation cancels out years of her own crass political calculations and hyper-partisanship actively opposing progressives as a prominent member of McGuinty’s inner circle (while Toronto Star’s Martin Regg Cohn argues for the Liberals here).
You can be sure Hudak is going to concentrate on Wynne’s ‘do as I say, not as I do’ hypocrisy after this same strategy has resulted in election victories for both Harper and Ford versus similarly discredited opponents.
Justin Trudeau: only Liberals can wrap themselves in the flag
Justin Trudeau to Sun News: when Libs wrap themselves in the flag and hide behind veterans it isn’t wrong because shut up.
Liberal Hoskins compares legislature to war zone
Link
“I can tell you as someone who has worked in war zones around the world it was getting to be a very uncomfortable place, the legislature,” Hoskins said Tuesday, defending McGuinty’s decision to prorogue as he launched his campaign to replace the outgoing premier.
“There was some pretty substantial verbal missiles being fired back and forth.
Liberal MPP Chris Bentley with young students
Posted with BlogsyWhat federal NDP offices looked like today when they received word Justin Trudeau entering Liberal Leadership race
An Open Letter from Leanne Iskander and Casey Oraa Regarding Laurel Broten as a Co-Grand Marshal of the Toronto Pride Parade
(reprinted below)
June 29, 2012
“Today, we are writing to you — whomever the you may be – to offer our perspective on Minister of Education, Laurel Broten, being named a co-grand marshal of this year’s Toronto Pride Parade. In a year where Pride has put a noticeable amount of energy into weaving politics back into the festival, we felt that bestowing this honour to the Minister of a Government that fought so hard against supporting LGBTQ youth is a huge error. Given the long history of our work around this issue, this letter could go on and onabout why choosing to honour Broten and by extension the Liberals for their work on Bill 13 is problematic, as well as for reasons beyond the specific parameters of our work, but instead, we are goingto focus in on two main issues: the Liberals lack of support for LGBTQ youth in Catholic schools and as well, the Liberals resistance to including specific language in Bill 13 that would clearly state the rights of LGBTQ youth to form LGBTQ support groups using names of their choosing including calling them Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) if they wished.
During the course of the battle to establish LGBTQ support groups such as GSAs in Catholic schools,both of us continually called on the governing Liberals to enforce their existing policy – PPM 145 – that explicitly mandates Boards across Ontario to support students that wish to form GSAs or like groups.Time and time again the Ministry and the governing Liberals refused to enforce this policy and repeatedly devolved responsibility down to the Boards. We both made many requests to meet with the Ministry and again, were met with silence. All while this was going on, youth who continued to step up and challenge their Boards to do their duty and to support them had their struggles silenced by the unsupportive Ministry of Education that did have the tools in place to support the youth via policy (ex/ PPM 145) but refused to use them. Silence from above further marginalizing and silencing LGBTQ youth who were already being bullied in the hallways and by their administrators as they sought to break the silence around their struggles.
With the emergence of Bill 13, we saw the Liberals coalesce numerous pre-existing policies and enshrine them in a Bill as if they were new measures to support youth in schools province wide. Again though,they resisted the inclusion of language that would specifically give students naming rights over the LGBTQ support groups that they sought to form. This specific amendment was only won through political pressure from the NDP, including Pride’s other grand marshal Cheri DiNovo, who proposed and stood solidly in support of language that supported the rights of LGBTQ youth to name their groups GSAs if they so desired. Once again, the Liberals were willing to continue the silence around the struggles of LGBTQ youth in Catholic schools who wished to form GSAs and deny them their right to self-identify as they saw fit.
As we weren’t silent in our fight to allow students the right to form LGBTQ support groups in Catholic schools, we decided we wouldn’t be silent about this either. The decision to honour a representative of the government that has been actively silencing the voices and experiences of LGBTQ youth in Catholic schools is a huge misstep and nothing less than an insult to the youth of our communities who have fought so hard and will continue to struggle to find the proper supports and safer spaces in their schools. As we approach the day of the Parade, we encourage you to wonder much as we have why we are honouring a government that has silenced so many of the youth within our communities. While we don’t know why Pride Toronto made this decision, we do know one thing – there’ll be one person we won’t be cheering for in the Parade.
Yours truly,
Leanne Iskander & Casey Oraa”
Leanne Iskander & Casey Oraa”
That time Mayor Miller held open the door to the Mayor’s office for Rob Ford
“Once this class loses its social and political role then the delicate fabric of a democracy breaks down and the liberal class, along with the values it espouses, becomes an object of ridicule and hatred. The door that has been opened to proto-fascists has been opened by a bankrupt liberalism.”
– Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class
Spacing’s Jonathan Goldsbie on that time Mayor David Miller held open the door to the Mayor’s office for Rob Ford.
To be fair to Miller, it was his mayoral opponent George Smitherman’s long shameful history of bankrupt liberalism (ORNGE, eHealth, etc.) that not only walked Ford through the door, but dusted off the Mayor’s chair for him.
I remain a fan of Miller, but, as he has chose to remain silent since last week’s damning OIPRD report, it’s only fair to post this reminder of what has now been confirmed as the most disgraceful moment of his administration.
“Our banks did not have to be bailed out.” — Andrew Coyne
According to a report released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Coyne doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
CBC reports:
Canada’s banking system is often lauded for being one of the world’s safest. But an analysis by CCPA senior economist David Macdonald found that Canada’s major lenders were in a far worse position during the downturn than has ever been previously believed.
Macdonald pored over data provided by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions and the big banks themselves for his report published Monday.
It says support for Canadian banks from various agencies reached $114 billion at its peak. That works out to $3,400 for every man, woman and child in Canada, and also to seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product in 2009.
The figure is also 10 times the size of the amount Canadian taxpayers spent on the auto industry in 2009.
It gets better/more awful:
“Indeed, the scale of the funding is eye-opening.
At its peak, CIBC received $21 billion in support — almost 1.5 times the value of the company at the time. BMO maxed out at $17 billion or 118 per cent, Scotiabank peaked at $25 billion or 100 per cent of its value, while TD and RBC maxed out at $26 billion and $25 billion — good enough for 69 and 63 per cent, respectively, of the total value of those companies at the time.
“It would have been cheaper to buy every single share in these companies,” Macdonald said.”