SECOND ENGLISH DEBATE - SECOND DÉBAT ANGLOPHONE

The debate is being replayed now on CBC, the first 30 minutes is the best, don't miss it.

Every Liberal idiot is calling in to CPAC, if they win again i'm turning pro west or for just BC and Alberta becoming a country. Its funny how Martin acts like he loves Canada and when he was naming provinces he couldnt think of a western provinces name

I caught that too. It's always "the west". On the flip side, 3/4 of them were from Quebec so we should guess anything else?

I liked the part when Harper admonished Martin for not accepting a debate with Duceppe, saying that a PM must always be open to debate. I was also waiting for the beer & popcorn line.

best blog comment from tonight . . from warren kinsella

8:27 - Martin waves his hands in circles when he talks. If you turn the sound off, you can imagine him singing 'The Wheels On The Bus.'

Ok I watched it again, Martin is full of shit, and if I hear "The fact is” I’ll puke.

He really shot his wad with the NWC thing, who wants to live in a country with a bunch of wacko appointed for life judges running this country.

Bye Martin nice not knowing you, the media will be eating you for breakfast tomorrow.

I believe Harper won.he has an excellent vision for this great nation.As far as Martin trashing the notwithstanding clause, It is not a very smart move.The notwithstanding clause was put in the Charter as a means of checks and balances.It ensures that the Supreme Court does not overstep their boundaries.It ensures the separation of powers between the Judiciary and legislative branches in our bicameral system.Our political system is designed to ensure Parliament is supreme in the process of making laws. The courts only INTERPRETE the charter and ensure laws do not infringe on the rights of Canadians.If section 33 is scuttled, the judges will be free to pass whatever laws they want and strike down any laws they disagree with, opening a pandoras box of judge tyranny.This will threaten democracy in Canada becuase that will give judges the final decision in law making.Parliament represents the people of Canada, NOT the Supreme Court judges.

Moderator: Mr. Harper, you've also called for the resignation of the finance minister. Do you have any evidence there was a leak?

Stephen Harper: Well, it's the RCMP that's investigating the evidence that's available, and we know what that evidence is. It's high trading on stocks, often stocks closely connected with this government in the days preceding the reversal of what was in the first place a very bad decision. This was a decision, let's forget about whether it was even a scandal, this was a decision that cost millions of ordinary people literally billions of dollars in their portfolios. It was a terrible decision. It should never have been made in the first place. And the fact was that this prime minister and this finance minister were asked repeatedly questions about the trading in the House of Commons, and they denied there was any problem and swept it under the rug. It's now the RCMP investigating, and that's the problem. It always has to get to the point of an RCMP investigation or some kind of an investigation before we get any answers. We've learned in this campaign about the RCMP investigation into the income trusts. We're hearing about investigation in Options Canada. We've got the Toronto waterfront. Mr. Martin should tell us tonight; will you tell us, Mr. Martin, how many criminal investigations are going on in your government?

Thank you mr, Harper a simple no would have sufficed.
Moderator: Thank you, Mr. Martin. We're going to move on to our second question in our government and ethics question and that goes to you, Mr. Harper. You have run a campaign very strongly based on the notion that the present government has been corrupted by a sense of entitlement and that a Conservative government would be cleaner. However, when you were a Reform MP, for example, you said your party would never accept MP pensions, but most of them did, said that the leader would never live in Stornaway, but he did. Said your party wouldn't take government cars, but they did. So doesn't history tell us that the opposition always runs on cleaning things up but often doesn't?

Stephen Harper: Well, I won't deny there's some truth in that...

Thank you Mr.Harper that will do.
Moderator: Thank you. We're now going to move to the second segment of our debate which is about social policy, and Mr. Harper, the first question is to you. As we know, crime has been a huge issue in the campaign. After the Boxing Day shooting in Toronto, you said that crimes such as these were the result of 12 years of lax criminal justice law enforcement by Liberals. Tell us this: if your policies had been in place for the past 12 years instead of Liberal policies, do you believe the four Mounties in Mayerthorpe, Alberta would still be alive or that the police officer in Laval, Quebec would still be alive or a teenaged girl in Toronto would still be alive?

Stephen Harper: Well, I can tell you in the case of the Mayerthorpe Mounties, unfortunately, if there had been mandatory minimum prison sentences for some of the crimes that particular perpetrator was convicted of, that individual would not have been out at large the day he committed those murders. I'm not going to, and I said at the press conference, I'm not going to point fingers at individual politicians for individual acts of criminals. We ultimately hold criminals responsible for criminal action, but that's the kind of criminal justice system we need, that we haven't been having in our country. What our party's going to do, what I've proposed is we're going to first of all have mandatory minimum prison sentences for serious, violent, repeat offences. We're going to put more policemen on the street. We're going to deal with smuggling and flow of guns at the border. And we're going to have crime prevention programs for at-risk youth. Make no mistake, a Conservative government is going to crack down on crime in this country.

Thank you again Mr.Haper, for not answering the question.
Moderator: Mr. Harper, how about you? A federal ban on private for-profit health clinics?

Stephen Harper: I support the Canada Health Act and our universal system of public health insurance, and I should say it's the only system I've used and every provincial government in the country including Quebec has agreed they will operate under that system. It links us to most democracies in the world. The United States obviously doesn't have this kind of system, but we do. We will not solve the problems of the health care system by going out and deciding we'll try and ban this service and that service. The problem we've got is making sure the people who belong to the public health insurance plan can get the service they need when they need it. That's why we've taken up the call of the joint bipartisan committee of the Senate to create the health-care wait times guarantee. What that means is if your public health insurance plan isn't providing you with the service it promised you in your own jurisdiction, you should be able to go outside that jurisdiction and have it paid for by public health insurance. We're not going to get there and solve the wait times problem if we start banning services. We've got to make sure we provide them to people on a publicly accessible basis.

So what you mean is, a two tiered system.
Moderator: He's going to get a chance to respond in a few minutes. Mr. Harper, same question to you. Any Canadian social values that should be protected even if it means using the notwithstanding clause?

Stephen Harper: First of all, let me talk about the decision in question. I think a lot of Canadians were troubled by that decision on swingers' clubs, and I will come back to that in a second in terms of values. I think it's important to recognize this was not a Charter decision made by the Supreme Court. This was an interpretation of a provision of the Criminal Code. In Canada, and the government of Canada can look at that provision and provide new legislation if it thinks there's a way to plug that loophole, and our government will take a look at what we can do with this and it in no way involves the notwithstanding clause. The question raises the important point which is that I think there is a danger in saying that the courts will always, regardless of the decision, will always be supreme. Just as I think there would be a danger in saying that Parliament and politicians would always be supreme regardless of their opinion. Our Charter and our Constitution sets up the dialogue where there's a balance between parliamentary supremacy and the supremacy of the courts, that's the balance I support.
In other words, "the non-withstandingclause is my bread and butter jackoff
Moderator: Mr. Harper, I'm going to give you a chance to follow-up to Mr. Martin who accused you of representing the Republican views in Canada.

Stephen Harper: My forefathers have lived under the flag of this country for six generations. I have friends and relatives across this country and I have children growing up under the flag of this country, and my business, our family business, always operated flying the flag of this country. What I say to Mr. Martin is the values of ordinary Canadians are honesty, hard work, integrity and accountability, and your government, Mr. Martin, has not represented those values in parliament.
We get it, Mr.Harper, you have nothing against flags
Moderator: Fourth and final question in the area of social policy and we want to talk, Mr. Martin, this one goes to you, it's on social justice. The new year began with the TSE reaching a record high, we have half a million millionaires in this country -- what do you think can be done about the gap where the rich seem to be getting richer and the less rich can't seem to get out of the hole?

Moderator: Mr. Harper?

Stephen Harper: I've said repeatedly that there's far too many people not getting the benefit of our wealthy economy. We have huge surpluses. People ask me, where's our surplus been? That's why we propose a series of tax cuts, one of the centrepieces is the cut to the GST, the only tax that every Canadian pays. Under Mr. Martin's plan, 30 per cent of the lowest-income Canadians get zero tax break whatsoever. We're going to pay a child care allowance to families of children under 6, every family regardless of income, will get $1,200 a year. That's in addition to the national child benefits and other programs that go specifically to lower income people. We're going to make sure people have trades education. We're going to make sure that people who don't necessarily have the opportunity go to university can also get some training for their kinds of -- get some funding for their kinds of education and job opportunity. We've agreed to with the other parties, I've said to the Bloc and NDP. Repeatedly, we want to see independent ... management of employment insurance so the fund is never raided again.

O.k. Mr.Harper, now you are just lying, Paul Martin has proposed tax cuts that will effect everyon, namely raising the BPA, and lowering the first tax bracket from 16% to 15%, which most directly affects the lowest tax bracket.

Moderator: There's lots more to say on this, so let's do another go-around starting with Mr. Harper. It has emerged that you would cancel the Liberal tax cut program, which would see the lowest income earners tax rates go from 15 to 16 per cent. How come you're doing that?

Stephen Harper: First of all, that's not correct. I've said this from the beginning, we're going to bring in our tax package, not the Liberals' tax package. It includes a GST tax cut and selective income tax measures for students, for families, for seniors, for trades people, for all kinds of people. The fact of the matter is the Liberal tax cut is exclusively designed for people in the top two-thirds of income brackets. We will cut taxes for those people, but our plan is more generous to cut taxes for everyone.

Top two thirds, it's the lowest bracket?Answer the damn question, do you even have a tax plan, I think you're bluffing
I think we want to take another kick at this because there's still confusion out there. Are you not raising income taxes on the lowest income earners in this country?

Stephen Harper: The lowest income earners don't pay any income tax. That's why they don't benefit from simply an income tax cut. That's why our package includes a combination of GST tax cuts, admittedly the largest, and selective income tax cuts and I name groups that will benefit, seniors, student, people who ride public transit will get a tax break, trades people, all kinds of people will get a tax break. Our tax package is larger. People will pay lower taxes and the national anti-poverty organization says the only way to cut taxes for low-income people is cut the GST.
Yeah OK Harper, cause that's who he was talking about , people who don't make over $9,500, could you redifine lowest income earners any more specifically, like those three homeless people you saw while you were in Toronto?

Delwin Don't blow a gasket. That could hurt. You don't agree, we can see that but you are not the whole of the country. The polls (all of them) have the conservitives at a min. of 6 points ahead of the liberals and a max of 14 points. Now I'm not one to put a great deal of stock in the polls unless they are all in agreement. Just Vote and we'll see how this whole thing will turn out. Even you should be able to see that Martin is getting desperate. His body language defies him. He's on the defencive doing damage control and that's the long and the short of it.

I like Martin's idea to ban the non-withstanding clause. That clause should have never been in the Charter in the first place. The courts are there to keep the Parliament and other governments from crossing the line making unconstitutional laws.

I missed the debates because I had to be at the university taking a placement test lasting for over two hours during the time of the debate. I would prefer to watch it in French anyway.

I think some of you are missing the point with the Notwithstanding Clause. The idea is that an elected body (Parliament) can have ultimate say in the running of the country instead of an unelected body (Supreme Court). If parliament doesn't have that final supremacy, it would be possible for a Prime Minister (he is the only one selecting these people) to pack the supreme court with his people and then have these guys block the legislation of the next government.

More to the point, it's a crap idea which opens up the whole Pandora's Box of the constitution. Root canal is far more preferable.