As stated above by @elminster and @deltago , I think cutting Toronto's city council to 25 is a good thing. As stated by Ford, LA has fewer and is a much bigger city.
I do not like the pre lying factors that is bringing on this decision. This is Vendetta politics. Ford and his late brother had many enemies when they where at Toronto city hall, now he is trying to settle old scores with his new found Provincial powers. There are a lot of assholes and thieves at Toronto city hall to cull but I don't think this is being done with the City's best interests at heart.
@WarChiefZeke: That seems like a very narrow way of defining it. We know that Putin wanted Trump to be president; Putin explicitly said so in a press conference recently. We know that Putin intervened; we have a lengthy official report explaining how he did. We know that Trump does things that Putin wants him to; posters above have listed examples.
You seem to be asking for an extremely specific example: a secret message, issued by Putin's office, containing a certain order, sent directly to Trump, while Trump was in office, which resulted in Trump following that order, an order which Trump previously would not have done otherwise. It seems like an arbitrary degree of complexity.
@WarChiefZeke: That seems like a very narrow way of defining it. We know that Putin wanted Trump to be president; Putin explicitly said so in a press conference recently. We know that Putin intervened; we have a lengthy official report explaining how he did. We know that Trump does things that Putin wants him to; posters above have listed examples.
You seem to be asking for an extremely specific example: a secret message, issued by Putin's office, containing a certain order, sent directly to Trump, while Trump was in office, which resulted in Trump following that order, an order which Trump previously would not have done otherwise. It seems like an arbitrary degree of complexity.
It simply is not the case that I am asking for some written or verbal contract, all I am arguing for is for the principle that if someone was going to do/ would have done something anyway, and stated as much years ago, that really can't be considered evidence of being influenced. And if they say they will discuss something but don't do it, that can't be considered evidence they are being controlled or manipulated or have influence over them either, quite the opposite.
So we are basically left with sanctions, and joining NATO to which I have to say...is that it? Trump doesn't even want to be part of NATO so I doubt he cares and I am not particularly commited to sanctions which often only hurt ordinary people anyway. Assuming again, its all true, and that was the tradeoff for exposing the internal corruption being concealed, I see very little substance for the overblown rhetoric.
Since we *don't* have any actual evidence on Trump in the manner you suggest and we can go only by assuming motives by what we see in the geopolitical sphere, the case doesn't hold up. There are just as many counterweights to what evidence can be created and the innate conjectural nature of this sort of motive seeking simply demands more than the relatively balanced stance on Russia we see. We are not conceding to their wrongdoings, nor their biggest interests, but neither are we overtly hostile. That seems sensible, if anything.
I don't think most people are saying that Trump is definitely acting directly on behalf of Russia. I certainly wouldn't rule out that possibility, but I agree there's not the evidence to confirm it at the moment. However, there's plenty of evidence that Russia intervened on behalf of Trump and, as others have said, it's not hard to understand why Russia might have wished to do so.
If Trump was as disinterested as you suggest his nationalist and isolationist tendencies would surely have led him to condemn in the strongest terms any foreign interference in the US. I would say that the fact he hasn't done that in relation to Russia - and has worked so hard to prevent investigations and action against that interference is compelling evidence that Trump is being influenced in some way. That influence may simply be Trump's perception that it's in his own best interest to allow Russia to continue to interfere, but even if that is all that's going on that's still pretty damning behavior by someone that's taken the Presidential oath.
@BallpointMan’s first three points still stand and cannot be easily dismissed.
I’ll add another. Trump’s over all friendliness to Russia and Putin is a stark contrast to what I will call critical complaints about the rest of the world. Why is Russia the one country or region Trump does not harp on? He has attacked Canada, Mexico, The EU, the G7, Japan, both Koreas, China, Iran, Great Britian, NATO, to name a few but hasn’t said one critical thing about Russia or its policies. Why?
I agree with very little of your points, @BallpointMan. Fully half of his actions you cite as evidence the Russians are influencing him, such as his antagonism towards the EU, wishing to pull out of military conflicts, and his "America First" nationalist ideology, can be explained by his own political beliefs, plainly stated on the campaign trail, and can be explained entirely on that basis alone. There is no reason, for those issues, to even assume Russia is a factor without evidence.
I mean - this is exactly the point.
Was there election meddling by Russia? The US intelligence has said there was
Did Russia aim to benefit one of the candidates in particular? Yep - Putin himself has said he wanted Trump to win.
Has Trump said and done a variety of things that are beneficial to Russia? Mmhmm. See the bullet list I already provided. None of which you really refuted. Even if Trump was saying "America First" type things 5 years ago. Putin took Russian state sponsored action to help Trump get elected because Trump has a record of wanting things that are beneficial to Putin.
That's what you asked for - The benefits to Russia that Putin wanted.
For all the talk of Trump being Putin's puppet, I still have yet seen a plausible set of policy benefits Russia has gained for their alleged Game of Thrones style control of the White House. Assuming this tangled web is all true, their handful of twitter bots and facebook ads, as well as providing the public with access to important information, tipped the election for Trump, and in return they gain...close to nothing.
I'll repeat myself: Putin took Russian state sponsored action to help Trump get elected because Trump has a record of wanting things that are beneficial to Putin.
It doesnt matter if Trump said it 5 years ago or 25 years ago. He demonstrated a value to Russia that Clinton did not. So it was in Russia's interest to see him elected. And they've benefited.
About half of the city councillors in my city just found out they likely won't have a job this fall. It's basically going to throw our election into chaos.
I do agree that close to 50 councillors is too much to get things done though. I just think this should have been tabled after the elections.
I also don’t agree with the vote parity thing that the article mentions though. High populace areas should not dominate what things are spent on or what is taxed. Ottawa, with a very rural outline is a good example of this. Rural areas do not get the same services that urban and suburban wards do, but still pay for them. If it was by populace, public buildings in these areas may even get neglected over areas that supply more votes for both mayor and councillors.
So there are a few issues with Toronto's City council in my opinion. I think reducing the number of councilors might solve some of them, but by doing so we will create far more problems than we solve. I'm going to spoiler this section since it takes up a lot of space.
One of the biggest issues is the fact that too much gets politicized for the purposes of grandstanding. The Uber debate was a perfect example of that. Council spent like 2 days debating whether or not to agree to let staff study how to fit Uber into the law (it wasn't even about agreeing to permit it, just to study how you might go about doing it). With all the cameras there councilors just grandstanded so they could get their name in the paper/5 minutes on the TV. It's a tough issue to address (and one that can never be fully solved) but I think it is the biggest thing preventing council from working efficiently. Mainly I think the chair needs to move these meetings forward quicker (even if it means cutting off the mics of some of these councilors).
We could even allow councilors to submit questions to staff in advance to speed up the process of getting answers. As it stands now council has to ask these questions at the meeting itself, which slows things down. It also means that councilors too often have the opportunity to ask the same question of staff multiple times, which wastes everyones time.
Additionally one of the other problems with council is that it has to vote on development applications from all corners of the city, rather than it exclusively being controlled by community councils (minor variances and things of that sort are approved by the Committee of Adjustment but generally council as a whole gets involved in far too many development applications). 20 years ago a lot of these applications would have been dealt with at a more local level (through the various lower-tier cities that we had at that time) but the province made us amalgamate into one big city and since then it's mucked this side of things up.
Anyways you'd think reducing councilors would solve these issues, but at least when it is done to this extent it creates far more of them.
For one thing, it just means that incumbent councilors are even less likely to get kicked out as well. Not that this was ever really likely to begin with (in the last election of the 36/37 councilors who ran again got in) this just solidifies it even further. Take the time to check out what will likely be the new wards here
The map here shows one example of one of the existing provincial ridings in Toronto. Since Scarborough has a lot of low-density housing its ridings need to be massive in size to be equal to the populations of other areas (to give you some idea of it's size, the northern boundary is steeles avenue, which is around 13km from Lake Ontario which is the southern boundary for the riding).
What person is going to find the time to canvass this massive area, in an election system that does not allow for political parties? We do this at the level of the school board (22 wards across the city) and having helped out in one of their campaigns I can tell you that it's absurd. A ward of this size works provincially and federally because we have parties at that level and because the MPP/MP's themselves don't have to handle nearly the kind of number of day-to-day affairs that councilors do (problems with understanding bylaws, problems with changes to garbage collection, etc). Imagine being the councilor of this massive ward. You are expected to go to city hall (downtown Toronto) and then make it all the way across your ward in time for the various community meetings.
Anyways, this just means councilors will be less reachable and accountable to the public.
Regarding the voter parity. This stems from a supreme court decision from 1991 which the Ontario Municipal Board has chosen to uphold (not sure with the OMB being gone how that plays into this however).
As stated above by @elminster and @deltago , I think cutting Toronto's city council to 25 is a good thing. As stated by Ford, LA has fewer and is a much bigger city.
LA only has 15 people on its council but it has 97 elected neighbourhood councils. These are in charge of things like passing their own bylaws and have a very limited degree of funding (someone familiar with LA may be able to speak to how that plays out in terms of land use planning and council decision making). They sound like Neighbourhood Associations that are legally part of the governing structure.
In any case I'm not sure it's really a better system at all. With less accountability they seem to have been able to get away with raising their pay. So now each of their city councilors is entitled to a salary of $189,041 USD/Year. That's $247,161.66 Canadian (that is about $70,000 CDN more than the salary of Toronto's mayor).
Edit: Looks like LA City Council also has 12 year term limits (three 4 year terms max)
"This kind of announcement isn't based on careful study," Gabriel Eidelman, director of the Urban Policy Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy said of the premier who served a term on Toronto city council. "It's based on his own perceptions of what is working and what isn't working, and his own perceptions of what the effects will be."
The Administration missed ANOTHER court ordered deadline to reunite parents with their children. I honestly can't recall if this is the 3rd or 4th deadline they have missed in the last month, but it hardly seems to matter, as there seems to be no one who is being held accountable for ignoring them anyway. They seem to have just decided to ignore the courts altogether, because they realize this is just another norm that, if you simply choose not to follow it, there are no actual mechanisms in place to enforce it. This is how democracy erodes. The lawyers and agency heads in charge of this need to start being held in contempt of court and jailed until this is resolved. Of course, we know that in reality "law and order" only applies to certain people.
Trump's business has been going badly until he started dealing with the Russian oligarchs. The same oligarchs who are under Putin's control. This isn't some elaborate political "game of thrones"; Putin took an opportunity when it presented itself.
Trump's "general belief in non-interventionism" seems to be limited to confronting Russia, he has no problems going after Iran with ALL CAPSLOCKS on.
The Iran thing is so troublesome. The prediction immediately after the nuclear deal was blown up was that it would drive Rouhani closer to the hard-liners, and he has at least had to start catering his rhetoric to them because he will look like a fool if he doesn't. Everyone who said never to trust the US now looks like a prophet. In the meantime, Trump is threatening annihilation over Twitter, and Bolton, who has had a hard-on for bombing Iran for a decade, is sitting at his side in regards to national security. At this point, Trump and Bolton seem to be actively manufacturing a crisis that wasn't there before, on purpose, to justify future possible military action.
The US spends years upon years lecturing the Iranians about becoming more moderate. They make the ultimate gesture in that direction by surrendering their nuclear program and agreeing to strict inspections. And the moment we elect another right-wing leader in this country, we tear the damn thing up, handing the ultimate talking point to the most extreme elements in Iran. Tell me again who the warmongers are. The groundwork has been laid.
Recently i traveled to Bariloche - Argentina and was gorgeous. The gothic archictecture in a lot of places, a lot of beautiful woman, handmade chocolate, snow, skiing lessons, was amazing. Skiing is much harden than i was thinking.
I visited "cerro catedral" and "cerro bayo" but only snowed on city on my last day(18 - July - 2018). All other snow days was on mountains.
So what we have here is concrete numbers. The Trump Administration was ordered by a court to return ALL these children to their parents. They are saying they basically have no plans to even TRY to reunite over 30% of them. At this point, this is just straight up human trafficking. And, lo and behold, here come the sexual assault stories:
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Comments
As stated above by @elminster and @deltago , I think cutting Toronto's city council to 25 is a good thing.
As stated by Ford, LA has fewer and is a much bigger city.
I do not like the pre lying factors that is bringing on this decision. This is Vendetta politics. Ford and his late brother had many enemies when they where at Toronto city hall, now he is trying to settle old scores with his new found Provincial powers. There are a lot of assholes and thieves at Toronto city hall to cull but I don't think this is being done with the City's best interests at heart.
You seem to be asking for an extremely specific example: a secret message, issued by Putin's office, containing a certain order, sent directly to Trump, while Trump was in office, which resulted in Trump following that order, an order which Trump previously would not have done otherwise. It seems like an arbitrary degree of complexity.
So we are basically left with sanctions, and joining NATO to which I have to say...is that it? Trump doesn't even want to be part of NATO so I doubt he cares and I am not particularly commited to sanctions which often only hurt ordinary people anyway. Assuming again, its all true, and that was the tradeoff for exposing the internal corruption being concealed, I see very little substance for the overblown rhetoric.
Since we *don't* have any actual evidence on Trump in the manner you suggest and we can go only by assuming motives by what we see in the geopolitical sphere, the case doesn't hold up. There are just as many counterweights to what evidence can be created and the innate conjectural nature of this sort of motive seeking simply demands more than the relatively balanced stance on Russia we see. We are not conceding to their wrongdoings, nor their biggest interests, but neither are we overtly hostile. That seems sensible, if anything.
If Trump was as disinterested as you suggest his nationalist and isolationist tendencies would surely have led him to condemn in the strongest terms any foreign interference in the US. I would say that the fact he hasn't done that in relation to Russia - and has worked so hard to prevent investigations and action against that interference is compelling evidence that Trump is being influenced in some way. That influence may simply be Trump's perception that it's in his own best interest to allow Russia to continue to interfere, but even if that is all that's going on that's still pretty damning behavior by someone that's taken the Presidential oath.
I’ll add another. Trump’s over all friendliness to Russia and Putin is a stark contrast to what I will call critical complaints about the rest of the world. Why is Russia the one country or region Trump does not harp on? He has attacked Canada, Mexico, The EU, the G7, Japan, both Koreas, China, Iran, Great Britian, NATO, to name a few but hasn’t said one critical thing about Russia or its policies. Why?
I mean - this is exactly the point.
Was there election meddling by Russia? The US intelligence has said there was
Did Russia aim to benefit one of the candidates in particular? Yep - Putin himself has said he wanted Trump to win.
Has Trump said and done a variety of things that are beneficial to Russia? Mmhmm. See the bullet list I already provided. None of which you really refuted. Even if Trump was saying "America First" type things 5 years ago. Putin took Russian state sponsored action to help Trump get elected because Trump has a record of wanting things that are beneficial to Putin.
That's what you asked for - The benefits to Russia that Putin wanted. I'll repeat myself: Putin took Russian state sponsored action to help Trump get elected because Trump has a record of wanting things that are beneficial to Putin.
It doesnt matter if Trump said it 5 years ago or 25 years ago. He demonstrated a value to Russia that Clinton did not. So it was in Russia's interest to see him elected. And they've benefited.
One of the biggest issues is the fact that too much gets politicized for the purposes of grandstanding. The Uber debate was a perfect example of that. Council spent like 2 days debating whether or not to agree to let staff study how to fit Uber into the law (it wasn't even about agreeing to permit it, just to study how you might go about doing it). With all the cameras there councilors just grandstanded so they could get their name in the paper/5 minutes on the TV. It's a tough issue to address (and one that can never be fully solved) but I think it is the biggest thing preventing council from working efficiently. Mainly I think the chair needs to move these meetings forward quicker (even if it means cutting off the mics of some of these councilors).
We could even allow councilors to submit questions to staff in advance to speed up the process of getting answers. As it stands now council has to ask these questions at the meeting itself, which slows things down. It also means that councilors too often have the opportunity to ask the same question of staff multiple times, which wastes everyones time.
Additionally one of the other problems with council is that it has to vote on development applications from all corners of the city, rather than it exclusively being controlled by community councils (minor variances and things of that sort are approved by the Committee of Adjustment but generally council as a whole gets involved in far too many development applications). 20 years ago a lot of these applications would have been dealt with at a more local level (through the various lower-tier cities that we had at that time) but the province made us amalgamate into one big city and since then it's mucked this side of things up.
Anyways you'd think reducing councilors would solve these issues, but at least when it is done to this extent it creates far more of them.
For one thing, it just means that incumbent councilors are even less likely to get kicked out as well. Not that this was ever really likely to begin with (in the last election of the 36/37 councilors who ran again got in) this just solidifies it even further. Take the time to check out what will likely be the new wards here
The map here shows one example of one of the existing provincial ridings in Toronto. Since Scarborough has a lot of low-density housing its ridings need to be massive in size to be equal to the populations of other areas (to give you some idea of it's size, the northern boundary is steeles avenue, which is around 13km from Lake Ontario which is the southern boundary for the riding).
What person is going to find the time to canvass this massive area, in an election system that does not allow for political parties? We do this at the level of the school board (22 wards across the city) and having helped out in one of their campaigns I can tell you that it's absurd. A ward of this size works provincially and federally because we have parties at that level and because the MPP/MP's themselves don't have to handle nearly the kind of number of day-to-day affairs that councilors do (problems with understanding bylaws, problems with changes to garbage collection, etc). Imagine being the councilor of this massive ward. You are expected to go to city hall (downtown Toronto) and then make it all the way across your ward in time for the various community meetings.
Anyways, this just means councilors will be less reachable and accountable to the public.
Regarding the voter parity. This stems from a supreme court decision from 1991 which the Ontario Municipal Board has chosen to uphold (not sure with the OMB being gone how that plays into this however).
Honestly I think making sure a person's vote is as equal (as possible) with another persons vote is just the right way to run an election. Otherwise you get a silly situation like a candidate losing who won the majority of the ridings, and the majority of the vote, but didn't get enough support in specific ridings so they lose. LA only has 15 people on its council but it has 97 elected neighbourhood councils. These are in charge of things like passing their own bylaws and have a very limited degree of funding (someone familiar with LA may be able to speak to how that plays out in terms of land use planning and council decision making). They sound like Neighbourhood Associations that are legally part of the governing structure.
In any case I'm not sure it's really a better system at all. With less accountability they seem to have been able to get away with raising their pay. So now each of their city councilors is entitled to a salary of $189,041 USD/Year. That's $247,161.66 Canadian (that is about $70,000 CDN more than the salary of Toronto's mayor).
Edit: Looks like LA City Council also has 12 year term limits (three 4 year terms max)
"This kind of announcement isn't based on careful study," Gabriel Eidelman, director of the Urban Policy Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy said of the premier who served a term on Toronto city council. "It's based on his own perceptions of what is working and what isn't working, and his own perceptions of what the effects will be."
from: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/will-ontario-s-plan-change-how-toronto-politics-work-a-look-at-the-possible-implications-1.4031309
And to put it in perspective, Ottawa has 23 Wards with a population of less than a million. T.O. has a population of 2.7M and will only have 2 more councillors. I personally think 47 is too much, but 25 is too little for T.O. size.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/torontos-struggle-against-amalgamation/
Dunno about you but I sure as heck didn't get a 4.1% raise last quarter. Hmm who got richer? Tweren't me.
The US spends years upon years lecturing the Iranians about becoming more moderate. They make the ultimate gesture in that direction by surrendering their nuclear program and agreeing to strict inspections. And the moment we elect another right-wing leader in this country, we tear the damn thing up, handing the ultimate talking point to the most extreme elements in Iran. Tell me again who the warmongers are. The groundwork has been laid.
he didn't go on TV in desperation saying "look at me, I'm the greatest, I did it" either.
I visited "cerro catedral" and "cerro bayo" but only snowed on city on my last day(18 - July - 2018). All other snow days was on mountains.
Here is a video of a Argentine woman in cerro catedral
And here is some photos took on my trip
Boats
Snow
Constructions
I will not post all photos cuz will polute the topic but here is a more complete album > https://imgur.com/a/oy0ngie
So what we have here is concrete numbers. The Trump Administration was ordered by a court to return ALL these children to their parents. They are saying they basically have no plans to even TRY to reunite over 30% of them. At this point, this is just straight up human trafficking. And, lo and behold, here come the sexual assault stories:
However, we have very high standards on the Beamdog forum, and we want to elevate the level of discussion. After long deliberation, the moderating team has decided to restructure the thread and introduce a new set of guidelines to make the discussion more positive, informative, and welcoming for all forumites. You can view the new thread here.
We'd like to thank everyone who has contributed to this thread since it was created more than four years ago. We hope to see all of you in the new thread.
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