The infamous CAPRU returns with another late-night edition.
Greg Weston: The Liberals are screwed. Not only was the last election the worst electoral performance in their history, but they are heading very rapidly towards bankruptcy because their few remaining supporters are not likely to open their wallets to the Liberals until they sort themselves out.
Jack Knox: There is a serious problem with homeless people camping out in the parks of Victoria. It's the fact that there are so many people are being forced to camp out in the parks of Victoria in the first place. City Hall needs to solve the problem, not the symptoms.
Tom Brodbeck: Safe Injection Sites don't work, don't listen to all of the "science" and "facts. These random scientists don't believe they work and neither do the politicians who are ideologically opposed to it, so clearly they are useless. Also, global warming is a myth, evolution is false and the Earth is actually flat. Since I don't believe in those and neither does this random scientist, they are clearly false. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is part of the conspiracy.
Lorne Gunter manages to incorporate most myths that global warming skeptics trot out to desperately protect their position into his entirely disjointed and confusing editorial. For explanations as to why these are conspiracty theories, see Grist's How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.
Toronto Star: Ontarians want to be environmental. However, they also want to keep their acreages and cottages, and don't want any of those big wind power generators popping up anywhere.
Rachel Sa:
I felt dirty after voting last Tuesday.
I've voted in every election since I was eligible, casting my ballot in each of Canada's last four general elections. Now, after 10 years of suffrage, I'm wondering: Will I ever get to mark my ballot for the person or party I really want?
Thanks to our antiquated first-past-the-post electoral system, I'm sure I wasn't the only Canadian who held her nose and voted for a candidate I don't support just to ensure the candidate I really don't support didn't get a seat.
Steven A. Sovran:
In Mr. Skinner's column, he admonishes readers about the "hidden costs" of a single-payer health care system as per the Canadian model. He writes that in comparison with the U.S., Canadian health care is in fact cheaper, but only as a result of having fewer advanced technologies, fewer surgeries and fewer medical resources.
Startling statistics presented in the article assert that for the 55 per cent more per capita spent on health care, Americans are certainly getting their money's worth -- 327 per cent more MRI units, 183 per cent more CT scanners and 100 per cent more surgeries. These statistics are striking and undeniable.
Interestingly, however, not a single mention is made about patient's health outcomes.
Does all this investment in technology, equipment, and physical space change the health of people?
Ian Shanley: Dion didn't lose this election; Canadian democracy lost it, with a paltry 59.1% of registered voters even bothering to show up at the polls.
Michael Geist: Canadian political parties needs to join the rest of us in the 21st century if they want anyone to vote for them.
This low-risk, low reward approach does little to inspire the public, instead seeking to solidify existing support.
It also leaves millions of Canadians on the sidelines as they see little reason to become political engaged or active. Indeed, by the measure of voter turnout, virtually all the parties were losers with more than a million lost votes combined for the Conservatives, Liberals, and New Democrats (each party received fewer votes in 2008 than they did in 2006).
In fact, it may only serve to propagate the perception of superior care in the public eye.
Ian Robinson: Canadians overwhelmingly voted against the environment in the election. Just ignore the 62% of voters who supported environmental parties! We clearly should ignore all of this enviromentalism stuff since more Conservatives won seats.
Trevor Harrison:
I interviewed Stephen Harper many years ago. He was thirty-one years old and already the Reform Party's policy advisor. I don't remember a lot about the interview. What I do remember, however, is his telling me that, politically, a party did not want (note: "want," not "need") the support of a lot of voters, not even a plurality -- this would mean too many debts to pay later on -- but merely enough to gain power.
This argument -- he had a fancy name for it, which I have long forgotten -- was already being practiced elsewhere. In Britain, Maggie Thatcher's Conservatives had narrow-casted its support to concentrate on voters in the English south. In the United States, the Reagan Republicans were already sorting out their cadre of hard-core voters from everyone else, a practice (often today referred to as "retail politics") that later (under Karl Rove) became even more elaborate. Ontario's Harris Conservatives -- many of whom, including Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, are part of Harper's cabinet -- adopted the same tactics of divide and rule in the 1990s.