The Parti Quebecois. - Page 12

On February 22 2013 03:02 Dawski wrote:


um except for the fact this type of injustice is actually PROMOTED. They're using the law exactly like they intended to. This isn't the first time this has happened. It's happened many times in the past and there has been opposition but they continue to do so.

On February 22 2013 03:05 lepape wrote:



It is not.

Read or listen to any media since this was reported, the president of the OLF himself apologized and declared this was the act of overzealous workers.

There are terrible decisions every day made by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, or any government branch in fact, that are not mediatised nearly as much because they don't touch such a controversial subject.

On February 22 2013 04:12 lepape wrote:
The political map of Quebec (and even Montreal) is often seen as seperated on a vertical axis, I'm not sure how you see the north/south demarcation.

On February 22 2013 08:35 Dawski wrote:
I'm going to come at this thread from another angle which I've sort-of pointed myself towards in my previous posts. I want you guys to explain to me why Nationalism and pride in your culture instead of your personal merrits is... well.. a good thing to have.

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind"
-Albert Einstein

I'm a right-wing person who believes individual freedoms come way before collectivist freedoms. Convince me

edit: (man I edit my posts right after I post them way too often lol)

I'm going to try scope in a topic that's relevant to this thread so that I don't go off topic. Why should the individual freedoms of speach in any language they choose to communicate in be tarnished by the collectivist apparent freedom to preserve their culture?

On February 22 2013 04:02 Abraxas514 wrote:


I made a post about this about 5 or 6 back. OLF workers who joined because they really believed in taking English down a notch are surpassing their mandate.

I honestly believe that the french canadians in the south think of bilingualism differently than the north. Most of the french I meet around here agree bill 14 is a step in the wrong direction. They are primarily anti-seperatist even if they don't trust our current federal government. I've had no problem speaking english and being responded to in french. I usually speak to my family from france that way unless its just a bonjour comment va tu.

I'm sorry if New Brunswick's bilingualism isn't working out. In places like Brittany the traditional languages are disappearing, almost gone completely, yet the old celtics aren't trying to seperate from the rest of france. It's the responsibility of the population to upkeep their traditions, and it seems ridiculous to legislate one language and 'de-legislate' another. The french people of NB should do their best to open french businesses, write french newspapers and get streets named after famous french people. This is how to preserve a language.

On February 22 2013 08:35 Dawski wrote:
I'm going to come at this thread from another angle which I've sort-of pointed myself towards in my previous posts. I want you guys to explain to me why Nationalism and pride in your culture instead of your personal merrits is... well.. a good thing to have.

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind"
-Albert Einstein

I'm a right-wing person who believes individual freedoms come way before collectivist freedoms. Convince me

edit: (man I edit my posts right after I post them way too often lol)

I'm going to try scope in a topic that's relevant to this thread so that I don't go off topic. Why should the individual freedoms of speach in any language they choose to communicate in be tarnished by the collectivist apparent freedom to preserve their culture?

On February 23 2013 01:28 crazyweasel wrote:


because individual freedoms lead to hierarchy, inequalities, injustice. (if you consider every human should be equal). whereas collective freedom ensures every person is on equal standings. if some people calcualte merits of having "made" it, they often forgot all the people who worked under them. you can't run bizness alone (you need employees/ workers). yet you take all the merit for it. the idea being collectivism is that we can all benefit individually from cooperation while individualism will only favorise some people over others. thats called justice.

On February 23 2013 01:28 crazyweasel wrote:


because individual freedoms lead to hierarchy, inequalities, injustice. (if you consider every human should be equal). whereas collective freedom ensures every person is on equal standings. if some people calcualte merits of having "made" it, they often forgot all the people who worked under them. you can't run bizness alone (you need employees/ workers). yet you take all the merit for it. the idea being collectivism is that we can all benefit individually from cooperation while individualism will only favorise some people over others. thats called justice.

On February 23 2013 02:03 Djzapz wrote:

Right wing folks don't believe in equality. They say they do in their discourse but they know full well that we're not all born with equal opportunities, yet they don't care and don't want to make it right.

I was born in an upper middle class family so my odds of doing well are orders of magnitude higher than that of a majority of the people. And that's what they call success and merit. And they look down on equally intelligent and much smarter people who worked menial jobs because dad couldn't hold a job while I was jerking off in University scoring straight A's because most bachelors and masters degrees are intentionally made easy to get.

On February 23 2013 02:15 Dawski wrote:
You seem to have a very skewed view of individualism. The idea of Individualism is that it promotes self-growth and hard work. There seems to be this idea that in an individualistic society, if your neighbour has a a lot then you automatically don't. Your neighbours success doesn't hinder your ability to have success. A boss who forgets about his employees and doesn't thank them via raises/promotions etc. won't be as individualisticly successful as one who does. The system itself uses the human condition of greed/selfishness to create success for everyone (if used by someone with a brain who knows how the angle operates so to speak).

But that doesn't even get to the heart of it. The point of an individualistic society is that everyone does in fact have equal opportunity. You can come over with 10 cents and start up your own business without the need for beaurocratic permits.

On February 23 2013 02:20 Dawski wrote:


That's not true at all. I understand that even people who are in the lowest end of jobs could've easily been equal to some of the most successful of our time. The difference is the reason why they can't. They can't do that anymore because of big government needs of beaurocratic permits for even cutting down a tree or building a house and extreme taxes on anything you own for the "collective". A right-wing society looks down on all that shit. Just listen to stories of your great great grandparents who probably came from poor europe like everyone else did on a wooden boat. They came here with nothing and because of the freedom to build your own house/start up a business for 0 cost other than your own hard work. That's when North America was in the best position

On February 23 2013 02:29 Dawski wrote:
And if you are able to like some say you are, why the fuck are you collecting $10B in equalization payments towards them?

On February 23 2013 02:40 Djzapz wrote:

That's the idea of classical liberalism which includes free market capitalism which suggests that widespread douchebaggery won't lead to chaos and actually works itself out as a great, well functioning society. Unfortunately what we saw with industrialization is that the small folks were moving into the city to work 80 hours a week with their kids in disgusting conditions in order to barely make a living. The rich were towering above the poor and didn't give a crap about them, as long as they could make them richer. Then the Great Depression happened.

A great success story for classical liberalism and individual freedoms (not really). As it turns out, individual freedoms are only nice on paper because what actually happens when you let people take as much as they want is, they'll always take what they can get away with, unless they're forced to be fair. The thing is, they can only be forced to be fair if the opposition has the capability to force them. And they don't necessarily do have it, even though many people just assume that balance forms itself which is simply not the case.


You have to be incredibly gullible to believe that, tbh. Even if you can start your business with 10 cents there's going to be a guy with daddy's $100,000 who'll do it bigger and better across the street and he's almost guaranteed to succeed. And maybe you'll also have 20 competitors who also are trying to do the same thing with their own 10 cents but the rich fellow has a head start no matter what. And odds are, he has more time for his enterprise as he's never had to work to deal with the immediate financial engagements...

Honestly you have to lie to yourself on so many levels to believe in equal opportunity in an individualistic society. It's not even just that it theoretically doesn't make sense, it's that we have clear data of the incredibly individualistic pre-1940's crumbling because of the problems that come from individualism and capitalism taken too far.

On February 23 2013 02:55 Djzapz wrote:

A lot of that money is only injected in Quebec's economy because Quebec couldn't keep up with all of its regions solely off of the economy of the few urban centers like Montreal and Quebec City and the few other "poles" of economy which have to redistribute social services out to hundreds of tiny municipalities which can't be reasonably expected to pay for their won amenities like the internet and power on their own as the costs are massive due to the fact that they live in remote areas.

In per capita, Quebec takes in the second least in equalization payments after Ontario, but I don't see anybody railing on PEI, NB, MB or NS, who take in more per inhabitant for their social services. PEI takes in almost 2.5x more than QC per inhabitant, and that's all due to the fact that it's mostly a rural area. People should understand this.

Saskatchewan and Alberta are also rather rural but they make free money from being on piles of black gold, and BC is just very developed - it helps that they're located right north of California which is great for business.

It's true that QC has made some missteps but you have to understand that it's handling a lot of rural areas which are expensive to sustain if we want those people to lead good lives without necessarily moving to Montreal or the suburbs. The right sometimes expects everyone to live in the cities...

On February 23 2013 03:09 Dawski wrote:
I know you haven't made this argument but a lot of people seem to believe that businesses screw over people out of how productive they really are. Let's take for example the idea of a Labour Union, a very collectivistic idea supposed to promote fairness. In reality they seem to be very damaging to the economy and do the opposite of promoting hard work by the employees. I am a steel working whos spent the last 2 years working in one just to get that across. Less and less work is being demanded for more and more money.

All the higher wages of the unions do is raise the price of commodities for all consumers while the company earns even less profit. Because of the higher cost of wages and lower profit for the company they turn away job opportunities because they simply have less money. The only way to tackle these higher costs are less investment and makes the companies less competitive.

Like I see with the shop I worked at, higher costs make them have to reduce labour costs by outsourcing work to other cheaper companies which doesn't profit the union members. In extreme cases like when the NDP won in BC back in the 90s all the companies who unionized realized it was more profitable just to leave even further slowing economic growth.

I guess I agree that wages do need to be kept at sound levels but I feel a collectivist union raises them so unrealistically high.

That's what I feel is happening around the world today. Societies are asking for so much help from the government that it doesn't promote self-growth and in turn economic growth.

I'm still worried about personal freedom of speach violations going on in Quebec at the moment. I still don't see how the collective right to preserve culture and nationalism is greater than the right of free speach which was what I was trying to focus on to prevent derailing the thread. How does that first collective right promote equality and justice?

You seem to be misunderstanding why people don't harp on the other smaller provinces for equalization payments. Equalization payments are there so that they provinces who obviously couldn't support themselves can give their inhabitants social services that are ON PAR with the rest of Canada. In the Quebec case, the government demands these equalizations for the sole purpose of having a better social security net than the rest of the country based on the fact that that's just your culture.

If your province can't afford the social security net they want for all people including those in the rural areas, you need to cut it back like the the rest of Canada so that you can. I feel that's pretty simple

Well I don't disagree. Unions used to have their place when workers were clearly being abused, and unions still have their place in that IMO it's outright immoral to strip people from their freedom of association, hence the necessity for the State to keep unions on a short leash in the same way that it keeps businesses from abusing their employees. A balance needs to be hit. Plenty of left-wing folks seem to think that all businesses are "bad" but we're talking about extremists or just uneducated people who have very rainbow-ey views of life. I think that businesses can be unfair though, and so can unions. Both can be damaging in their own ways

There are problems with the welfare state and it needs to be adjusted to promote growth, but many people see the failings of social democracy as a call to work out an entirely different paradigm or rush back to the ways of pre-1929 even though that has been proven not to work. I think we have a good thing going on and we should work on the many issues.

I'd have to write a book here wouldn't I . I don't know how to respond to this, frankly. The right to preserve culture versus free speech is a moral question. Nationalism is a load of shit. And collective rights specifically aims to promote equality and social justice by making everyone as equal as possible, not only by law but also in practice. Obviously it can be extrapolated to the extreme here, hence the necessity to strike a good balance once again. There are many issues in the way that we do this, which need to be worked on.

The equalization payments come with no strings attached, what we do with is only looked down upon by the rest of Canada because it's too "left". But that's a characteristic of QC, we're further on the left than Canada. We're more like Europe and less like the US.

Unless you believe there's something inherently wrong with the left, what we do with the money is not bad. You can criticize it much in the same way that we Quebecers would tend to criticize what other provinces do with their equalization payments because it's less "socialist" than we'd like.

On February 23 2013 03:51 crazyweasel wrote:
dawksi are you implying poor people are just lazy? if you're not succesful its because you havent worked your ass off? People can work in shittiest condition ever 18hrs a day (say chinese industrial workers) and yet get paid 1% of their work's value. how is that promoting hard-work. then you're gonna tell me, well they have the choice of working in that said place. well where is the choice when capitalism instored so high competition that it has become impossible to work for yourself (off subsistance production) if you want to live in decent conditions. your only choice is to join the wheel. that right there is exploitation at its finest. individualism isn't about hard work, its about egoism. (and don,t say we are biologically egoist cause that is not true. i study that field). go read lyotard and foucault on post-modernism, they define individualism perfectly.

as for the language thing. taking mesures for the collectivity by restricting english individuals to a certain amount of things(french basic and secondary school for immigrants, french services). English imposes certain condition to us francophones, we have to learn it, we have to know it to get jobs. to be equal we "force" you to function on the public sphere in french because it is a french province with french in decline. we're maintaining our culture while yours remains fine either way. its the same logic as revenue imposition (which your are propably against), we all give proportionnaly to what we gain in order to fund social programs such as free education(or low cost) free health system, work ensurance etc. accessible to everyone. how is that injustice?