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As a single guy with no kids, none of Harpers' tax breaks applied to me. Child tax credit, income splitting, RESPs - all a waste of time. I guess he really wasn't looking for my vote.

   

Martin? Canada's banking regulations were passed by Trudeau and reformed to their current state under Mulroney. Martin had nothing to do with it.


You're still wrong about this. Jobs and per capita income have increased as a result of free trade. Lost manufacturing jobs have been replaced with value-added production and service employment. The whole POINT of free trade was to export shitty, dirty factory work elsewhere. You call that work "slavery" yourself and I agree. Do you want your kids spending their lives in a factory? I sure as hell don't. Manufacturing jobs are a 20th century thing. We don't need to be doing that stuff with our labour force anymore. Good riddance to it.

   

No. It makes NO sense.


I am single with no kids but I am not looking for a policy to help me specifically. I look for something that will place help where it is most constructive to society. I certainly don't want policy which is dressed up like help and gives stuff to wealthy people. I have nothing against wealthy people, but they have their own stuff and ...uh... wealth. They can get what they need by themselves.

   

I quite agree. Like me, wealthy people have a right to be left alone.

But if a PM is bribing people with their own money, it's nice to be offered the bribe.

   

As single guys, nobody's going to go after our vote. I agree with policies that put money in the hands of people with kids who really need it. Eliminating child poverty would do nothing but good for the country. But the money has to go to those most in need first. Taking Unsound as an example, he says income splitting allowed him to buy a new furnace. Yet he's talking about buying a new Harley next year. I don't really want to be subsidizing somebody's Harley in the name of helping kids. (Sorry, Unsound, nothing personal.)

Dealing with child poverty helps all of us in reducing crime and health care costs. Subsidizing Harleys, not so much.

   

Martin essentially banned huge bank mergers. One was Royal/Montreal and another was TD and Canadian Imperial.




No. I am still right about it. Jobs have increased (part-time and service industry predominantly). Per capita income has increased because it is an average. The top money earners are making exponentially more. That takes the average up.

I don't call it 'slavery' when it pays a living wage. I do call it slavery when someone in another country is making $5 per hour to do it (or less). Unless you can show me a company which started up after the auto jobs left which employed 50 000 people in 'value-added production and service employment' then I call BS.

I can also use the info in a job search because I am making a living wage and about what I made in high end manufacturing in a factory but I'd love to grab one of these 'value added service' thing-a-ma-bobs.

You are reading a Conservative press release and I am speaking from real world experience.

   

No, I'm not reading anything. I'm speaking from 20+ years experience as a professor of economics specializing in labour economics. You can call BS all day long but you're not arguing against me, you're arguing against facts.

   

Oh...and here is a very good indication that TPP will suck: Harper's plan was offering people money up front. That tells you right there that the thing is going to be bad.

NAFTA made Canada a resource for raw materials and TPP will do the same. Canada already has trade relation with most of those places, they don't need to be part of this big thing. With NAFTA, we already had huge trade with the USA, we didn't need anything with Mexico.

   

You said that before but then couldn't post any links that show that you are correct.

I am speaking from being a member of the labour force since 1986. Factories, trade shops, even a fast food joint thrown in there. I'd say that your professorism has you too far removed from the facts. Sheltered.

Where are those jobs again? Love to get in on a value-added/service thing that pays more than $60 000 or so.

   

Ahh, the myth of "internet links = facts", eh? Actual references to academic papers aren't possible without subscriptions to those journals. You know that, right?

You're speaking from personal, anecdotal observation. I'm speaking from professional, objective, peer-reviewed study which has formed a general consensus. Guess which one I'm going to side with? If you care about this issue as much as you seem to, I'd think you'd want to know where the facts don't jive with your presumptions. Maybe not though.

   

Ok...cool.

Just tell me who the employers are then. I'd love to know where all of these good paying jobs are that replaced 50 thousand auto manufacturing jobs.

   

So true. He offered it all to the wealthy so why not the single?

It frustrated me to no end that Harper would put in place a policy to 'help people with' but always it would require the expenditure of the money before getting the 'help' in the form of the refund or tax credit.

Nobody was helping the people insulate their home if they had no money to spend doing the work first.

   

Healthcare, skilled trades (mechanics, service techs), transportation, computing/data, training, security, robotics, precision machining, etc, etc, etc. We have an injection-moulding plant in my town of 2,000 people. They can't fill the job openings they have. Those big-factory jobs may be gone, but there are many, many more smaller operations that have sprung up and more than offset the loss of heavy, dirty manufacturing.

Again, this isn't my opinion. I have no "horse in the race". I'm just reporting the facts. And I'm not dancing a rah-rah dance for globalization and free trade. It has its costs. But loss of employment opportunity in Canada simply isn't one of those. The people who WERE negatively affected by the adjustment to free trade are now retired or dead. That hump in the road is in the rearview mirror.

   

   

Those smaller operations would have sprung up anyway. They weren't fostered or nurtured by NAFTA. The jobs that left are LOSSES. Auto assembly is not dirty.


I still think that you are wrong. The people who lost their jobs in the past 25 years are not necessarily dead, retired or working in another similarly paid field.

There was a candy factory that closed in 2007. 580 people lost their jobs there. The company opened a factory in Mexico. The injection moulding place in your area didn't replace those jobs. Nothing replaced those jobs. they weren't high paid like auto manufacturing but they were pretty good paying jobs for this area of the country and making candy isn't dirty either.

If one plants a seed in the south field and it grows, it is a new plant. It doesn't replace the plant that died off in the north field.

You are almost implying that the auto industry had to die off to spur the growth of the injection moulding plant and NAFTA helped facilitate that.

I won't change your opinion but there is no way that you can change mine seeing what I have seen. I see jobs disappear and I rarely see any reappear. People are supposed tom start building ships here soon. NAFTA didn't help that but it very likely helped Irving import entire ships made in Asia and mothball a brand new line to build them in Canada.

   

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