But Turks and Caicos are presently an offshore banking hub, and financial services contribute 30% of the GDP. http://www.depstc.org/quickstats/qstat1.html If they join Canada, would they be forced to bring their banks up to Canadian standards, essentially shutting down the offshore banking...

The point is this: Let's say I live in London and am planning to go to the other London. Currently I will have to take an airport bus to YYZ or DTW and go from there. Eats up your whole day. Now let's say we have High Speed Rail in the corridor. Air Canada sells London (ON) - YYZ - Heathrow...

Check-in for US flights will probably not happen here barring an EU-style customs union, but that may not be a big problem as some US flights may no longer need to fly to YYZ. If there are direct trains to DTW, the family of four vacationing in California for a week may find it's cheaper to take...

I don't believe Stephen Harper called up the High Commission asking them to make life miserable for this person, but it's a case of crass incompetence by him and his government. This issue has been all over TV, newspapers, and internet for months, and I don't believe Stephen Harper or Lawrence...

Not true. It's reality in Scandinavia already: http://www.denmark.dk/en/servicemenu/News/GeneralNews/ImprovedCheckinForSASCustomers.htm And not just there. If you begin your journey from, say, Shenzhen and fly out of Hong Kong, you can check in your luggage at the ferry terminal and board...

Rail isn't free, but neither is the expansion of airport capacity. Or the opportunity cost incurred by the airport when it has to take in short-haul flights at the expense of long-haul ones. Neither are highways and cars. Not only are the externalities unpaid by consumers, taxpayers own the car...

I don't know about you, but I prefer even 5 hours of sitting in a train in total as opposed to commuting to the airport, security/waiting, flying for 1.5 hours, commuting to downtown, and repeating again. Less stressful. And if the train is an express Toronto - Montreal at 350 km/h, the journey...

It's just a case of incompetence? This story has been in the news for months, and unless what Stephen Harper reads and watches is censored by his minders (you never know those days), he would have known about this problem for months. He has all the authority to phone up the High Commission and...

But what is ignored are the feeder flights operated by the airlines to feed into the major hubs. Most of those flights are already of marginal profitability to, say, Air Canada, and High Speed Rail would kill them off entirely. If there was a high speed rail line which included both Dorval and...

You write as though a 5 minute disruption at Rosedale would *not already* cause the entire YUS line to collapse and strand thousands of commuters. This is analogous as arguing "We shouldn't extend Highway 4XX, because if there is a multicar pileup more people will be stuck in traffic". The...

Fire the entire TTC management and replace them with people from China Railway Construction Group.

I don't think so. The longer this government goes on, the more the "incompetence" label sticks on, regardless what happens with the economy. Just ask Jim Flaherty's constant revisions in his budget. Remember that in Britain in 1992 the Conservatives had their reputation for economic management...

I have a bad feeling this will mean millions will be spent stringing up the wires, only to have them switched off for years because bureaucratic red tape prevents the acquisition of the electric trains.

Without the support of both the NDP and Bloc, it doesn't matter. And I don't think either of them want an election now.

But the base *already* strongly supports the CPC. They know that if they want to win the next election, there will need to be gains in Liberal-dominated suburbs. Somehow I don't think telling Toronto to f off will go well with the average Mississauga resident.

Are they *trying* to lose the next election? http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/647684

Looks like the tapes themselves didn't reveal anything we don't know. A government minister is cynically manipulating a crisis to get some points. So what else is new? It does show the CPC Public Relations Department is in serious disarray, though. And that's more important than the tape itself.

Ooohhh...I love blood.

Come on here: do you want Stephen Harper putting an incompetent crony like Lisa Raitt at City Hall? This proposal is similar to the process used in the People's Republic of China, where even there municipal politicians are often at odds with the Central Committee (see the infighting in Shanghai...

What happened to all the right-wingers who complain about Human Rights Commissions being used by an ideological government to shove their agenda down the throats of public life?