dbd33

How much is the tax on that mansion thingy? I doubt it beats the $800/month on the exe's place.

Novocastrian

Good point, well made. We should move this off the board and into a suitable pub.

I'm off to Colorado on Tuesday* (at an ungodly hour) but I'll be back Thursday. Let's discuss it then.

*I've already voted.

Novocastrian

Whoa! That beats my bill. What the f*** are they doing in Mississauga?

Biiiiink

Bloody hell, no! Six thousand and something. I was in tears handing the cheque over

dbd33

Where in Colorado? You wanna try the beers from New Belgium (I like Fat Tire) and O'Doul's (the OH likes their 90/-).

dbd33

Not ploughing the street. For years, decades even, I've resented paying that tax bill to not have the street ploughed.

Novocastrian

Boulder. You know what I do. Where else?

dbd33

The Republic of Boulder, as the rest of the Coloradans call it. Beware the Trustafarians. Still, they get the same beers as the rest of the state.

Novocastrian

Ah, the trusties. Nothing like mad hippies to speed the days of dry meetings. (On environmental policy and research).

dbd33

As it goes, I know a worker in the arena of wilderness therapy who lives in Boulder and who makes bathtub mead; there's no requirement to be dry as a mad hippy. I haven't tried the mead due to fear of cross contamination from their bio-diesel but then I'm really very urban.

Steve_P

Well it appears the Dalton gang are in again.

Being an Albertan I have no idea if that's good, bad or indifferent.

Good I would think, me not being a Conservative supporter.

The Conservatives appear to have not done well at all, even their leader lost in his bid to win a seat.

Novocastrian

It's good Steve. Four more years of relative sanity is better than nothing.

What's not good is that the MMP voting system got creamed.

I hope this doesn't end it and obviously it was a daft idea to hold the referendum on election day. Media attention has been negligible. Basically, your average thicko Ontario voter has no clue what it's about.

Oakvillian

A thoroughly bizarre election to watch from the sidelines (I'm not eligible to vote) - the whole campaign turned into a bit of a single-issue slug-out on the funding for religious schools thing - not good for healthy political debate.

I did have a bit of a rant at the radio this morning, though - they were discussing (on Metro Morning) why the turnout was so low - at 52%, the lowest turnout since 1927 or something. The one potential reason they didn't raise was that the negative campaigning - particularly in TV and radio advertising - was so extensive that the only message most voters will have heard is "don't vote for them" rather than "vote for us." If politicians want to engage the voting public, they ought to explain what they're FOR rather than what they're against.

On the referendum, if I'd been eligible to vote, I think I'd have voted against MMP - while the present FPTP system is not ideal, I really don't like the idea of candidates being selected from a closed party list and having accountability to no local constituency - this gives too much of an opportunity for patronage from the party machine, further distancing the voting public from the process. I don't know what the right solution is (STV seems to be better in terms of local accoutability, but ballot papers tend to be confusing and the process is relatively complex) but it's not MMP as it was proposed here.

iaink

So now hes back in, I wonder if we will hear more from Dalton that the ridiculously low profile he kept after introducing the health tax supplement?

I am a little surprised that the Tories crashed and burned so badly, to be fair to John Tory he chose to run in the area he was born in, rather than where he lives now, and he took on a strong incumbent candidate, so perhaps its not so surprising he lost as it might appear from the outside.

The electoral system referendum had almost no media profile that I detected. I though MMP to be a fairly reasonable system, patronage might be an issue, but then its more of an issue in the federal senate. At least there is a lot of scope for local representation under MMP. I suspect what killed it is Liberal and Conservative hardcore voters voting for FPTP, as those two parties have the most to lose from increased Green and NDP representation under proportional representation. 63.3% voted for FPTP. The combined popular vote for Liberals and Tories was 73.9% Close enough to make the case anyway.

Oh well, we can all safely go back to sleep now and forget about all this shit for another few years.

Biiiiink

Re property tax - email back to say they allocate in January but the previous owner was supporting the board of my choice, so no need to change anything.

Strange that you don't get asked whenever you buy a property