Oh harper..

Didn't see this on here yet, but our Minister of Defence, Rob Nicholson, has decided to take pot shots at General (Retired) Andrew Leslie. I served under him in 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group when he was the Brigade Commander - nothing but respect for him.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/revealing+attack+Andrew+Leslie/9517123/story.html

I've already emailed the Minister and will also write my MP. Total bullshit.

The "move upon retirement" has been standard procedure forever.

Ya. Fair enough. I saw a good article the other day but I haven't found it yet. There doesn't seem to be great research into the subject. But it seems like people are willing to blindly accept the narrative that China is buying up Vancouver.

Landcor seems to have the most detailed stats on this, but I can't seem to find them anywhere. This Tyee article quotes Landcor (2010 stats) at:
2545 foreign owners from around North America
977 owners from Asia
527 owners from Europe

Those are not big numbers.

Wickedly small numbers in my opinion. How many residences are there in the lower mainland? I've got to assume it's more than 135,000?

For the record, I don't accept any narrative on Lower Mainland real estate prices other than the fact that something has to give at some point.

Didn't see this on here yet, but our Minister of Defence, Rob Nicholson, has decided to take pot shots at General (Retired) Andrew Leslie. I served under him in 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group when he was the Brigade Commander - nothing but respect for him.

Interesting how I'm seeing more and more of this -

As a life long Conservative, which I will be NO MORE, Stephen Harper you are a disgrace

In the comments section of news articles.

Didn't see this on here yet, but our Minister of Defence, Rob Nicholson, has decided to take pot shots at General (Retired) Andrew Leslie. I served under him in 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group when he was the Brigade Commander - nothing but respect for him.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/revealing+attack+Andrew+Leslie/9517123/story.html

I've already emailed the Minister and will also write my MP. Total bullshit.

The "move upon retirement" has been standard procedure forever.

While I agree its more Con Scapegoating, the General was paid $75,000+ to move to a house in the same neighbourhood or somewhat nearby. S.P. or not, you have to admit that was not in the best taste.

Did you read the article? About $60k was for real estate commissions. That's about right for a $1M home in Ottawa area. Pretty standard procedure for employer to pay RE commission for a move.

And you're totally missing the point. This happens all the time when long-serving senior civil servants retire. But this general is joining the Lib party so suddenly it's a Con targeting opportunity.

You're defending the indefensible.

Did you read the article? About $60k was for real estate commissions. That's about right for a $1M home in Ottawa area. Pretty standard procedure for employer to pay RE commission for a move.

And you're totally missing the point. This happens all the time when long-serving senior civil servants retire. But this general is joining the Lib party so suddenly it's a Con targeting opportunity.

You're defending the indefensible.

Did you read my post? Basically I said the optics are bad. Nothing more really. You must have missed the "Con Scapegoating". I didn't think my post was that long…

Did you see the "could have" cost $60,000K in Real-esate fees? "Could have" isn't "about" but I guess you could have missed that too.

Standard procedure for a move across the neighbourhood? Tell me more of these employers.

It's an obvious smear. The optics are bad. Entitled or not, it does have the look of entitlement.

I'm sure the General has tonnes of Dirt if he wants to bite back. If he does, I'll cheer him on.

While I agree its more Con Scapegoating, the General was paid $75,000+ to move to a house in the same neighbourhood or somewhat nearby. S.P. or not, you have to admit that was not in the best taste.

Many civil servants get a nice package when they retire. This is trivial for what the man did for our country.

Many civil servants get a nice package when they retire. This is trivial for what the man did for our country.

I'm sure he got the nice package as well as the pension. All deserved.

The optics are still bad.

Funny thing is that it won't help The Con cause at all. Loyalty in the CF could really take a hit.

The optics are still bad.

True.

No laws broken. Didn't know he moved from one mansion to another.

Documents attained by CTV shows $40K spent to move disgraced Bernard overseas. Sounds like there's going to be more investigations. Conservatives are serious about cutting expenses, lol.

Conservatives are serious about cutting expenses, lol.

need to find more money for advertising

Funny thing is that it won't help The Con cause at all. Loyalty in the CF to the Conservatives has really taken a hit.

FYP. Generally speaking the CF has been Conservative in their leanings. Often their families as well. Veterans. Supporters of the military.

We are not happy with what's being done with vets because we know it'll happen to us next.

We're not happy with what's being done with our benefits, especially given what is asked of us.

We're not happy with the way the government is treating our brothers and sisters with PTSD.

And now you see the Minister of National Defence either a) has no clue what is going on in his own portfolio, or b) knows exactly what is going on in his portfolio and is using that to try to embarass one of our own. Neither are signs of good leadership.

I'm done being a Conservative supporter and many of my co-workers feel the same. I'd like to think that the last federal election was a wakeup call for the Liberals, it seems that the Conservatives are in for the same next year.

harper and the cons think that paying lip service to the military is enough to fool people into believing that they actually support the military, but actions speak louder than words, and the cons are a bunch of self serving hypocritical assholes, the country is waking up to this fact.

need to find more money for advertising

Okay Flip (hope you don't mind me calling you Flip)…you inspired me. I'm sick and tired of hearing about all this advertising spending and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I dug around a government website and found details on all spending over the last 10 years or so. Details are here.

My conclusions:
1) We've spend almost $900 Million on advertising since 2002. Staggering.
2) The Liberals put up some pretty big numbers as well.
3) However…The Conservatives are all about the big, splashy campaigns.
4) The Liberals advertised things like how to stop smoking, how to save energy and how to e-file your taxes.
5) The Conservatives spent money telling us how great the economy is, how great it's going to be to harvest our natural resources and how great it's going to be when we all have fantastic jobs after we get trades tickets.

BC Liberals do the same thing. Plenty of ads on ask the great good they are doing for the province.