[PinkLucy]

It’s not like it’s the first floor crossing in history. Some people who crossed the floor do not get reelected, and some people do. Apparently, he spoke with his constituents and felt there was support for him doing this.

 

[afransen]

Not sure how this crossing the floor thing makes sense. In parliamentary politics, voters primarily vote for the party platform, less so for the candidates. Almost feel that if the crossing happens, it should be deemed as a resignation and a by-election be automatically triggered.

No, in parliamentary democracy, you elect a local representative to act as your agent and representative in the HoC. They are empowered to change their party affiliation if the circumstances dictate it.

Some people try to jam the reality of representative parliamentary democracy into a pseudo presidential frame where MPs are just an electoral college for the PM who acts as president. That may be how people think the system works, but it is not how it works in reality. We should be reinforcing the parliamentary role of MPs and empowering them, not making them meat puppets to rubber stamp the party leaders.

 

[kEiThZ]

The meh: I get the need for a competitive tax environment for businesses and to boost productivity, but we already tried Accelerated Capital Cost Depreciation under Harper and it didn't move the needle on productivity. Business that is unambitious and reliant on simply being lower cost due to labour is unlikely to make the investments in plant, equipment and training that will level them up. If we were to go the tax competitiveness route, I would rather eliminate many existing tax credits, raise the small business rate, but lower the general corporate rate. The idea would be to create the same marginal tax rate achieve through this budget but without market-distorting effects.

Raising taxes while companies are being pressured to move to the US? Bold move for sure.

No reductions in OAS or the Old Age Amount for higher income seniors,

And there will be nothing like this while they are in a minority. It would probably be a redline for every potential partner. Hopefully, if they get a majority, they go for it over the next 2-3 years.

The transit infra. component is not as good as it first appears as they are rolling the existing program into it. We're still not really hearing clarity on nation-building, paradigm-shifting infra. projects.

Good. Time for the feds to stop doing work that the provinces should be doing. It would also reduce the incentive for outlandish proposals like Ford's tunnel. Or the tendency to simply cave to every local demand. The feds need to give some funding so that MPs have ribbon cuttings. No need to have it be substantial at all. We will never building anything of national significance while the feds are scrambling to fund local trams.

Also, I wouldn't expect clarity on the national projects in the budget. They have absolutely massive allocations for those. But it'll go through another agency. The CIB, for example, saw their allocation go up to $45B. And there's several billion in defence and security infrastructure that will now go through the Defence Investment Agency. I would expect more on this as these individual projects mature.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Not sure how this crossing the floor thing makes sense. In parliamentary politics, voters primarily vote for the party platform, less so for the candidates. Almost feel that if the crossing happens, it should be deemed as a resignation and a by-election be automatically triggered.

Theoretically - in practice, we have seen a number of elections where the platforms were barely released, if at all - that's not even taking about the fiction some of these platforms were.

AoD