Don't get your knickers in a knot over stock markets

April 8,

The stock market lost trillions of dollars, and the sky is falling. Actually, a lot of people are making tons of money on the stock market now.

The minute-by-minute market quotes are not actual money, they are the price of stocks at any one particular time. They don’t earn or lose anything until they are sold.

That’s where the old slogan came from “buy low and sell high” and that’s what’s been happening in the past few weeks. A lot of people are on their way to making a fortune by selling their shares while they are high and then buying back in the same stocks in a couple of weeks or months at a much lower price.

Stock markets and real estate always go up in the long run, despite minor ups and downs. Check back a couple of years and see where the index was at that time. There have been times when stock prices dived due to outside influences, but not only have they recovered, they’re shot past previous levels.

I’m not a financial whizz, but you may have already missed the opportunity to sell at a profit, but pick the right time in this crash to buy more, lots more, and ride it back to the top. The trick is to correctly guess when the market is going to turn around and head back up. Have patience. It may already have started as markets reported sizeable increases this morning.

In the meantime, fret not, don’t panic, your pension fund has not folded and is unlikely to do so. Sit it out, it will rise again just like the sun does every morning. So what if there are a few clouds sprinkled in?

This advice is worth exactly what you paid for it.

I’ve got this vote-splitting

thing figured out, trust me

April 6

Supporters of runner-up parties are cajoling opponents to stand aside while they pick up the remains and surge to victory. The NDP, Liberals and Greens are pretty well in a dead heat for second place in the polls, each wanting the others to step aside.

Which party gives up its vote? Do the Liberals say, “oh what the heck,” and steer their vote to the NDP? Or does the NDP redirect it’s votes to the Greens? There is an easy solution, just vote Conservative Tamara Kronis and avoid straining any loyalties..

That suggestion is not going to thrill the three parties lagging behind, but it demonstrates how far out the idea is of selling your soul to stop someone else. What they want is to collect enough votes to beat the front runner. Voters who are convinced their party offers what’s best for them should stick with it.

I am not a card-carrying members of any political party, the closest I come would be right-leaning Libertarian.

That allows me to form an objective view of the federal election that has a couple more weeks to go.

It’s quite scary to see how the Liberals took the same old package and put a new label on. After all, new leader Mark Carney was Prime Minister Trudeau’s chief advisor, directing all that went wrong for a lot of the past decade.

Carney’s earliest manifestations show he’s taking us on the same road as Trudeau, but likely faster and further.

The NDP is not going to be in a place of power or even influence. A lot of their support appears to have flipped to the Liberals. Is it any wonder after leader Jagmeet Singh jumped in bed with the Liberals in the last Parliament? Singh’s support may have swung over because members realized being one and the same with the Liberals, they might as well nest there. So far the polling numbers show that.

I lean toward the Conservatives this time around, though I’m not totally sold on their party but rather on what they offer.

I can't swallow the polls showing a massive swing to the Liberals. It all depends where those polls were conducted. If they were focused on Ontario and Quebec it’s not shocking what they show. The remaining two weeks of the campaign leave it up to you to decide where we’re headed.

After what the Liberals did to our country for the past decade, we can’t risk a continuation of that. Canada needs a new start.

Liberals, Conservatives careless

in selecting their candidates

April 5

The vetting process for political candidates isn’t what it used to be. Parties seemed to do an excellent job of making sure there was no dirty laundry to flap in the wind.

I suppose there was less digging into people’s background, letting the past be the past. The modern media in search of dirt began digging deeper and deeper into a candidates’ background. The advent of the Internet makes history searches a lot easier. There are things that never mattered in the past, nobody cared who broke wind in church two decades ago. However, that’s mainly what modern media come up with these days.

I’ve lost count of the candidates dumped so far by the Conservatives and the Liberals. At last count, four Conservatives and two Liberals are no longer running. Of the ones we know, the wrong doing was relatively serious, putting their parties in a bad light.

It started with Liberal MP Paul Chiang who dropped out after suggesting that a Conservative candidate could be turned over to Chinese officials in exchange for a bounty. Hong Kong police have offered HK$1 million for information leading to the arrest of six activists, including Joe Tay, who is running in Toronto’s Don Valley North.

The Conservatives have dropped at least four, maybe more by now, including one who joked that former prime minister Justin Trudeau should be executed, and another whose online posts included claims that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by the expansion of NATO. On the farting-in-church level, Stefan Marquis’ social media posts supported some anti-vaccine rhetoric. That’s a so-what question.

Whatever the issues, it’s better they came out now than after they won an election and had a four-year ride in Parliament.

Let ordinary Canadians cash in on government borrowing

April 4

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s latest enticement on the campaign trail is intriguing and it makes sense. The idea of tax-free government bonds is a revival of war-time strategy – let Canadians invest in government bonds tax-free, if held to maturity.

It’s similar to tax-free savings accounts where we deposit our money and escape the taxes on earned income.

Singh’s proposal breaks down as you and I loan the government money, with the interest flowing to us tax free rather than financial institutions. That’s appealing right off the bat.

About the only shadow is the fact that bonds are loans to the government, thus government debt. It’s not necessarily greater debt because it would instead come from elsewhere, like commercial financial institutions.

It would not solve all of our country’s problems, but on the surface, Singh has something here that is a rarity in politics – it makes sense.

Strategic voting concept is a last-gasp admission by losers

March 31

Do we vote for or against a party or candidate? That’s the big question about vote splitting where campaigns ask other minority candidates to gang up to defeat the front runner.

In Nanaimo-Ladysmith, Conservative candidate Tamara Kronis leads the polls with 35 per cent support, almost double the support for the Liberals and New Democrats which have about 21 per cent each and the Green Party is not far behind at 20 per cent, definitely not out of the race. Kronis is still listed at 99-per-cent odds of winning the seat.

New Democrat incumbent Lisa Marie Barron has lost a sizable amount of support while the Liberal candidate has soared into a tie. Can Lisa Marie's supporters reclaim some of that lost support by convincing the Liberals to join forces against Kronis?

Would minority candidates sell out their own beliefs to defeat the front runner? It is very unlikely that enough Liberal supporters would flip their votes to the NDP or vice versa. The combined NDP and Green party votes could stop stop Kronis, if her support remains the same over the next four weeks. But there's no indication that Manly support is soft.

At this stage, 338Canada.com shows Liberal Michelle Corfield has gained about seven per cent support since 2021, the same amount as Barron has lost. – 0331

Social media has changed how we think, react and interact

People who never participated in local politics before now take part and that has opened a wild west of views.

You can never have too many opinions – everyone has the right to be wrong. The City of Nanaimo (CON) Oversight Society page on Facebook more or less grew out of the Alternative Approval Process for a new public works facility and they picked up a lot of followers. Many of them are green as grass when it comes to governance and debate. Some of the postings are outright hate based on ignorance. (That word means lack of knowledge)

The Page was designed to take on city council and it has done that. Had they not been around the AAP would likely not have failed twice.

The site continues to post, focusing on council decisions like bike lanes and undriveable streets like an obsession. They are opinions on city hall operations.

Here’s where the pitfall comes in. Many people are unable to view an opinion without spewing hate. They can’t focus on the issue rather than using insults.

Lack of understanding the process is vividly demonstrated in how Mayor Leonard Krog has become the target of personality debate. By understanding, I mean they don’t seem to understand that city council is made up of nine members – eight councillors and the mayor. Council members have forever allied themselves with like-thinking councillors, thus forming voting blocks.

I followed city council closely for decades starting in the early 1980s. The two factions were identifiable then as Social Credit and New Democrat – resulting in countless 5-4 decisions. That changed from election to election. 

Today’s council is composed of five members in a group and the other four sort of freelancing. It can be like herding cats, and that’s the mayor’s job. When a majority decision is reached by council, that’s the official stance and the mayor has to champion it no matter where he/she personally stands on any of those issues.

Krog is not part of the five-member majority group of progressives, leaving him in an unenviable position. On many issues it’s him and the other three – Armstrong, Thorpe and Perrino. But once the decision is made by a majority, it’s Krog’s role to represent that cause even though it may not be his personal choice. Some unruly protesters at council meetings fail to understand the rules of proper procedure.

I’ve tried to explain that to a number of social media voices but they seem stuck in the fact that their mind is made up and don’t want to be confused by the facts. There is a positive here, they are participating and should have a greater educated interest when the next election rolls around in about a year and a half.

So keep the ball rolling, stay informed and involved in what’s going on in our city and hold those in power to account until you are elected to replace them. Maybe then they’ll understand what it’s like to be a councillor. – 0329