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Not sure how a Conservative minority will work. NDP and Liberals have no advantage to working with them. BQ would but that would get the Conservatives hated in TROC.
"sovereignist area" means they run as a seperate country but with Candian currency and federal transfer payments and Canadian military and diplomatic missions.
"how come the people involved in the scandal (which was supposed to be such a big deal) are getting re-elected?" patronage has a long history in Quebec and bringing money to your riding is still money even if it was shady. Think Tammany hall and the democratic machine.
Most palimentary terms like riding whip etc. go back to 1066.
ahh, arse--thanks. i figured it was like that--our own Senator "Pothole" D'Amato was a classic GOP example on Long Island--corrupt but really good at bringing money and projects in.
you guys need a few million of us Dems to move up there--you'd never have a Conservative anything.
(oh, and i saw some cute show in montreal--sketch comedy, and they ended it with a statement on non-endorsement while holding up signs saying to vote liberal and help! and stuff) : >
Not sure who will run to lead the Liberals but one way or another Belinda Stronach will be involved and Michael Ignatieff put forward as a Trudeau like but level headed philosopher king. I imagine Ken Dryden will be mentioned but have little chance.
Michael Ignatieff has an appeal. He has never been in politics but has long been political. He is a writer and commentator and intellectual and yet he is also a Harvard prof. Lefty brainy and yet grounded. Still can he convince the party to back someone new to parliament and the hustings?
I disagree with his "coercive interrogation" position but all it really says is that the military should use things that the courts allow the police to do. I am more disturbed by his support for starwars II. And no I would NOT want him as a PM.
"Soldiers, who are trained to kill, don't make good cops" Agreed.
"good cops, who are trained to uphold the law" Sadly I can't agree. Sometime in the late 80's American cops started referring to non cops as civilians. Unless martial law has been declared cops ARE civilians. At that time many cops stopped being about upholding the law and became an oppositional occupational force.
First term I've heard coined for this election, from an e-mail to the CBC: Harper Brides - Same sex couples planing a quick marriage to beat any repeal of their right to marry.
i'm not surprised by that at all, arse--i'd make sure i was counted in too if i was Canadian. And you need couples for the court cases that are sure to happen if they do vote against it.
arsehat: cops started referring to "civilians" in the late 60's. Clint Eastwood (as Dirty Harry Callahan) makes a dismissive reference to "civilians" in "Magnum Force" - "What are the civilians doing?"
Oh, and paramilitary policing started in the 1920's when Gen. Smedley D. Butler militarized the Philadelphia police in a failed (to this day) effort to clean up corruption. The famous Col. Fairborne originated SWAT tactics in Shanghai in the 1930s. Police militarization and American comprador imperialism co-evolved begining with the Spanish-American War and the "police actions" in Cuba, Phillipines, Haiti and Central America.
The policy is laid out in the Marines' "Small Wars Manual."
One of the lessons of history is that things weren't always like this.
And one final thought -- cops aren't "upholding" the law, they are enforcing it. There's a world of difference. Think about "selective enforcement" and "enforcement emphasis." It's all tactics and what little strategy exists is deeply corrupt.
Read On the Take for a sociological analysis of how crime networks really operate.
warbaby, I agree with what you say above but I still think that police military ideation was still relatively isolated until the 80's when more and more cops changed their self identification from neighbors who uphold the law to a military force who enforces it. It seems to me parallel with the rise of black gangs like the crips and the bloods which would be in keeping with Chambliss.
I was up late last night swearing at my TV. But this morning I developed a calmer view of it. The Liberals, NDP and BQ parties are all socially liberal and can outvote the Tories any time they want to. They'll keep the Tories on a short leash.
The origins of military policing can be seen in the change in uniforms that took place around the turn of the last century: the "chandelier of gear", campaign hats (still seen on state troopers), Sam Browne belts, etc. A contemporaneous change was the federalization of the state militias by incorporating them into the Army Reserve system, while many states retained their militia as a police force.
The RCMP, for example, were always militarized. The US is somewhat unusual in how late the federal police formed and in the fact that they weren't incorporated into the Department of the Interior as is often the case in other countries (e.g British Home Office and the elaborate overlapping national jurisdictions in France, to name two examples.)
The British police in Shanghai pioneered SWAT tactics under the famous Col. Fairbarn (also the father of the Commandos.) In the US, much of this fell to the US Army, as during the various episodes of repressing labor organizing, bonus marchers, riots, etc. It wasn't until the 1960s that police established the riot troops that are now such a depressing feature of demonstrations. The SWAT teams were first formed for civil disorder and then found new needs for tactical use.
The origins of US federal policing were also entangled with private railroad police, who still exist as an obscure federal agency that exists solely to protect private property. But that's an evolutionary dead-end now.
The FBI didn't militarize until the formation of the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) in the 80's. The HRT is a spectacularly brutal and kill-happy goon squad based partly on the British SAS counter-revolutionary warfare teams and other NATO counter-terrorism forces formed after the Munich Olympics massacre.
But to return to my original point, the militarization of US police can accurately be traced by the very sudden change in uniforms at the beginning of the XXth century.
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