Except one of the ‘privileges’ of speaking in the House is that you are allowed to lie. Your data can be false. Your anecdotes can be made up. It’s all good. You better not repeat any of that in a media scrum outside, but you are allowed to say what-ever you want in the House.

“The enemy of my enemy could also be my enemy… but I’ll deal with them later.”

Historically, it would signal the removal of PP from party leader and the CONS can search around for yet another SOCON that’s unpalatable by the citizenry.

attack dog

Calling him an attack dog suggests that he has a bite. He’s all yap and as tough as wet paper-towel.

In 2015, Stephen Harper swore he wouldn’t make any senate appointments. He appointed 59.

This is the Ford government, so it stands to reason that this was entirely a change that was brought on by developers… And considering this mirrors what was previously done, I’m 99% sure it is. Unfortunately, having the province to go to in order to override a CA is something that both homeowners and municipal governments are going to find useful because of how the CAs have been operating for years… running rough-shod over municipal development plans or property owners plans to enjoy the use of their property. The fact of the matter is that not everyone owns hundreds of acres, so a 30 m setback from any ‘water’ more significant than a puddle may mean that you can’t make changes, improvements or in some cases, repairs to your entire property.

Considering that the original plan was to strip powers away from the CAs to only managing their parks, this seems to be a reasonable situation - it only formalizes the powers the government gave themselves last time when the province had to step in on overriding a CA to allow a warehouse going on a sensitive wetland the CA identified on private industrial-zoned land. It gives them blanket power to do the same thing they’ve already done in that one-off situation (although the mechanism will be different - they won’t just make a law telling the CA to issue a permit). The law does indicate that the ministry still has to consider the same things the CA does, so it’s possible that a Ministry’s ‘overrule’ (or even bypass as the law would allow) can been challenged in court at least.

If Pierre can know this information, and he doesn’t have a security clearance, then technically voters can know this information too. Put it in the news.

Well, MMP breaks down when you realize you need to define geographic areas of ridings that you need to lump together so that you can get the ratios right. An example elsewhere in the post points out lumping Victoria’s 4 seats and the rest of Vancouver Island’s 3 seats. If all lumped together, you can get the ratios of actual votes to match the representations of the MPs pretty good - but ultimately someone has to sort of ‘fix it in post.’ If 80% vote for party X in all 7 ridings (which, without looking at the data, I will concede in advanced has never bloody happened) you’re going to take one of those ridings and hand it off to an MP that didn’t win to represent the collective 15-20% that voted the second place party that might be popular there. Which riding gets the MP not elected in the riding? Of course, we need to keep ridings because the population density is very skewed in Canada. If you take a look where people live, you’d realize without ridings, in a true PR setting, the Windsor-Québec City corridor would forever run the rest of Canada. Why try to get votes anywhere else? Do you really want to give Alberta another reason to say that Ottawa has no mandate in their province?

Another option is to drastically increase MPs (that seems like a terrible idea) so that if the riding is 55% for party X and 45% for party Y, you can have 2 MPs from both parties and not add any advantage to anyone to help in forming government. It would almost be a better idea to have a run-off vote until you reach a true majority instead of a plurality in a riding.