JCT: Monday Jan 29, I taped my 5-minute spiel for the 2007
Burlington Ontario provincial byelection at www.tvcogeco.com
Cablevision. I explained how I kept running so we'd someday
have time-based currency accounts at the Bank of Canada that
could help us weather any bad times coming up. It will be
shown with the profiles of the other candidates on:
Saturday Feb 3 2pm, Sunday Feb 4 5pm, Monday Feb 5 1pm.

Tuesday evening, Burlington's Environmental Coalition held a
meeting to which I was not invited. Usually I just show up
and force my way onto the show but, not having any wheels to
get half an hour away and facing a 12 hour return bus ride
to make it, (leave noon, in Burlington at 1pm, wait until
7pm, Go Train to Hamilton after meeting, last bus to
Brantford at 11:30pm so I decided I'd let them have their
way and keep their meeting exclusive to party candidates, no
independents.

Wednesday evening, CFUW meeting at Nelson High School.
"lorraine hamilton" <mlchamilton@...>
All Candidates Meeting January 31 7 pm 4181 New Street

Meeting will begin at 7:00 pm and conclude at about 9:00 pm.
(We have the auditorium until 9:30 pm.)
There will be a table for campaign material outside the
auditorium for each candidate. Please note that no election
material will be allowed inside the auditorium and no signs
should be placed on school property.
Candidates seating is to be determined by drawing numbers 1-
6 (left to right).
Order of opening statements will be determined by lot.
Times for opening statements, responses and closing
statements will be strictly enforced.
Format
Welcome - Val Marshall, Vice-President, CFUW
Introduction- Mary Munro, moderator
Opening statements ( 2 minutes for each candidate)
Formal questions 25 minutes of formal, slated questions.
Candidates have 1 minute to respond. The timekeeper will
hold up a sign when the candidate has 20 seconds left.
This is not a debate format, but allows all candidates to
outline main ideas from their platforms on a wide variety of
issues. Candidates will not be given additional time to
respond to one another's comments.

JCT: No debate between candidates allowed?

Question 1 will be responded to by candidates 1,2,3,4, in
that order,
Question 2 will be responded to by candidates 2,3,4,1, in
that order, and so on.

Questions from the floor approx. 75 min.
Members of the audience will be given up to 1 minute to ask
their question.
Candidates have 1 minute to respond. The timekeeper will
hold up a sign when the candidate has 20 seconds left.
Questions may be directed at one or several candidates. If a
question is directed at one candidate, the others will have
the opportunity to answer if they wish to.
Closing statements by each candidate. (2 minutes each)
Wrap-up - Val Marshall, Vice-President, CFUW

JCT: I could only turn on one 45-minute tape so I only got
less than half the meeting. But the closing half had most of
the excitement so it should be easy to remember the
highlights.

Frank De Jong, leader of the Ontario Greens is running. No
one's more responsible for keeping LETS out of the Ontario
Greens than Frank whose been the leader not practicing what
they preach for the past many years. I spoke right after he
did which explains my opening.

Turmel: I was at the founding meeting of the Green Party of
Canada in 1984 at my alma mater, Carleton University in
Ottawa, so I'm Green at heart. Then they threw me out in
1985 for preaching monetary reform, and that explains why I
run, I'm the only engineer in the world specialized in
banking systems. Why is that important? When I ran against
Sheila Copps in 1996, the headline was "Super Loser Fails
Again" because I hold the record for running in more
elections than anyone else, 64. And losing more elections
than anyone else, 63, so far. So why do I do it? In the
Hamilton Spectator, one month after the Super Loser
headline, Hamilton Self-Help group starts up Hamilton LETS
system.
LETS is a timebank: a little old lady goes to read to her
sick friend, registers the hour, and when she's sick,
someone comes to read to her. Timebanking. Save your hours
doing good things and people will give them back. It's
spreading around the world which is why I got invited to the
United Nations in 2000 for the Millennium Assembly. Remember
when all these guys were there? (showing picture of 189
Heads of State) http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/milsum.htm
Actually, I was there too. You've got Clinton, Saudi Prince,
Blair, and John Turmel. Just imagine me walking around the
United Nations with the white hard-hat on. Which is why I
made the news. I gave the speech on banking. And in the
http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm resolution C6
to governments to use a time-based currency to restructure
the global financial architecture. So some day, collateral
just won't be your stuff because kids ain't got stuff, poor
people ain't got stuff for collateral. Your collateral can
be your time. Think of the Time Standard of Money and if you
set up one of these timebanks in your community, like LETS
Hamilton, there's there, dinky but ready to go if our system
crashes. Just like in Argentina when their banking system
crashed. They had lots of social currency to take over, now
they've paid off all their debt and you didn't hear about
it. You'll hear about it tonight. You'll hear about
financial reform with every example."

Q1: The first questioner asked about student poverty and the
NDP (formerly CCF during the 1930s Depression days)
candidate, a school teacher, expressed his concern. So when
I answered, I pointed out:

Turmel: Bible Bill Aberhart was a school teacher and
principal worried about kids' poverty during the Great
Depression and he found Social Credit. Now the other guys,
they found CCF, NDP, any form of socializing but the credit
system. Fixing credit is the solution. Greens here say: give
people money. What they need is credit. Isaiah 55 says: you
who are hungry and have no money,
Moderator Mary Munro: Mr. Turmel..
Turmel: ...come buy and eat.
Munro: Mr. Turmel..
Turmel: That means credit is okay...
Munro: Mr. Turmel, I'd like you to respond to the question.

JCT: Obviously, she wasn't following my spiel...

Turmel: Madam, you can't stay with me, that's the problem.
Audience: Ooooohhs
Turmel: Why don't you just let me finish and not interrupt
again. I'm trying to give a stream of answers over the
evening at my one chance to inform these people and you
really don't want to break the concentration the speech.
We're talking credit. Give the children credit so they can
buy their schooling. Make them pay for their own and when
they're adults, they pay it back. It shouldn't be our taxes
paying for his education, it should be his credit. Isaiah
55, you with no money, come buy and eat. How do you buy with
no money? Credit's okay. Only the usury is bad and that's
what I'm talking about.

Q2: As I pointed out earlier, almost all the issues are
going to be dealing with underfunding and my solution is
fixing the underfunding rather than spread the shortage
around. If you Google for "anti-poverty engineer" I come up,
first. Because of LETS. They call it an "economic lifeboat"
in Australia, an anti-poverty system in Britain. If you get
organized and if you babysit for my kids and I babysit for
yours, that frees one of us up one night each. It helps
people.
In El Paso Texas, some nuns picked up the timetrading
software, matched every new mother in the barrio with an
older mother to teach her how to take care of her baby and
child mortality went down. Just by allowing for the mother
and child to give the old mother IOUs for the time owed. So,
you have to set up your own timebank to save yourselves.
Like I said in Hamilton, I don't need to do it, I just need
to find one person with a brain to set up the software and
do it for yourselves.

JCT: That's the end of the tape. Another question dealt with
global warming. I explained how the media were proclaiming
in the 1970s how erosion of our glaciers and desertification
of many parts of the planet were caused by a reduction in
evaporation of the oceans due to global cooling! There was
an unexpectedly large murmur of agreement so I'm not the
only one wondering about all the hype. I said I wasn't sure
whether it was global cooling or warming that was going on
but just on the basis that government almost always gets it
wrong, lies, I'd bet that the problem was global cooling.

Another question on taxes drew the usual response out of
Green Frank De Jong that they'd put taxes onto bad things to
take taxes off good things. I pointed out that the shortage
of funding for the good wasn't because of too much spending
on the bad. I explained how everyone borrowed the principal
liquidity from the bank, dumped into the economic pool, and
everyone had to come out with the principal and the
interest. So it meant someone had to lose their mort-gage
death-gamble so the others could survive. So there was no
combination of splashing in the pool by the Greens that can
solve the shortage faced by borrowers at the pumphouse.

One lady asked that only the party candidates answer and
when I responded, I noted how she made sure to ask only
those candidates who didn't have an answer. And another. So
after my put-down of the moderator, there were a few hostile
hecklers in the crowd. And since my last answers were always
explaining how to fix whatever particular underfunding
shortage not by taking from Peter to pay Paul but by
creating new funding for new projects, people who didn't
understand thought I was just repeating what they didn't
understand over and over. You can imagine how some people
might get upset at hearing something they don't understand
over and over as a solution to every problem.

At one point I did my poem about paying my taxes for
people's time at useful toil and only paying tax for money's
time could make me boil.

I did get the chance to point out how Jesus had said that
when it came to usury on Mammon "they will forever be
hearing without hearing and seeing without seeing or
understanding" and we've had plenty of examples of that
tonight.

There were two line-ups of questioners at the mikes and
around 9pm, moderator Mary Munro said that they could only
take 2 more questions before continuing. All the other
questioners sat down except number three who I presumed was
going to try to appeal to get a third question in.

I had come last for opening statements and presumed I'd be
first for closing statements. After the second (last)
question on education, Mary Munro announced that I had so
upset her by whatever I'd done that she was going to deny me
my closing statement! I guess Mary Munro had seethed through
the meeting and was going to try to get even before the show
was over. So I started heckling Frank De Jong to tell her
that it wasn't a good idea to try to shut me up. He was
quaking in fear of a having to take a stand. So I heckled
the other candidates not to let her turn it into an
undemocratic meeting.

Then a member of the audience out-shouted everyone about my
being undemocratic for not allowing the third questioner to
have his say! Then, this guy who should have sat down starts
ranting about how I'm an insult to politics, yadda yadda,
how dare I not let him have his say.

I said: You're number three, she said two. Can't you count?
Go back to school to learn how to count to three. That got a
good laugh that shut him up and the moderator telling him
that the question period was over clinched his public
humiliation.

But moderator Mary Munro was now trying to get to the
closing of the other candidates from Frank De Jong first. I
wasn't going to let anyone make any statement while I was
going to be shut out and, with a noisy heckling from some in
the crowd, I continued to demand the other candidates stand
up to the undemocratic moderator.

Then Liberal Joan Lougheed saved the moderator's bacon:
since most everything had been covered anyway, she didn't
mind giving up her closing statement too. NDP Cory Judson
said he'd give up his time too. Munro asked Tory Joyce
Savoline who said she'd cede her time and finally Frank De
Jong was asked if he'd give up his time too. Yes. So I
shouted I didn't want to give up my closing statement I had
saved my marijuana pitch against Ontario's grow-op closures
for the ending and wanted it on the record. But once the
other candidates had rendered the meeting democratic by
taking the same punishment Munro wanted to inflict on me,
thus we all got equal zero time, there wasn't much I could
do as some people started getting up and my mike wasn't
alive. So political meeting aborted by Turmel disruption.

Both the Hamilton Spectator and Toronto Sun witnessed it and
here are their reports:

>TorontoSun.com -
>By election a sign of what's to come
>Mon, January 29, 2007

By election a sign of what's to come
Burlington race gets ugly as candidates argue over hospital
By ANTONELLA ARTUSO, QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU CHIEF

Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital is the overworked heart of
Burlington. Each of the three main candidates in the
upcoming byelection agree that an urgent injection of
resources is required for the stressed and tired facility.
"They've gutted our hospital," said one source, who claimed
one quarter of the acute care beds have been cut at the
facility while the population around it has exploded.
The Burlington byelection, like those in Markham and York
South-Weston, was prompted by the resignation of the local
MPP. Conservative MPP Cam Jackson, a popular representative
who held the riding through Liberal and NDP sweeps, is now
nestled into his new digs as the mayor of Burlington.

A SHOWDOWN
Losing this seat to the Liberals would be a blow to
Conservative Leader John Tory as he heads into a showdown
with Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty at the provincial
general election in October. The Liberals -- through
candidate Joan Lougheed -- are delivering a pointed election
message. Lougheed is telling the residents of Burlington
that she has the ear of Health Minister George Smitherman
and McGuinty, and will be in a much better position than an
opposition MPP to get needed improvements to Joseph Brant.
"I don't think we've had representation that's taken the
urgency to Queen's Park," said Lougheed, a former city
councillor who ran second to Jackson in the race for mayor.
That message to voters isn't sitting well with her
opponents.
Joyce Savoline, the former Halton Regional Chairman who is
carrying the Conservative banner in this race, said she's
"offended" by the comments. "There's certainly a message
that there needs to be a Liberal member here in order to get
anything done," she said. "Joseph Brant is apart from any
party politics." Savoline said Burlington residents have
paid $100 million in health tax since it was first brought
in by the McGuinty government but that money has not been
invested in the community hospital. As an immigrant who once
lived in a refugee camp, Savoline said she believes Canada
is a great country and that everyone working together in a
co-ordinated fashion will keep it that way.
CRITICISM
NDP candidate Cory Judson, a public school teacher, also
criticizes Lougheed's message on the hospital. "In fact, it
appears she's running against her own government," he said.
Judson said local residents have told him at the door that
they are also concerned with climate change, the gridlock
that ties up the community and inappropriate development
such as the potential sale of the General Brock High School
site which provides needed park and recreation space.

Lougheed, a former Conservative Party member, also calls for
an end to gridlock and cleaner air and water, and makes no
apologies for her argument that Burlington needs a
"champion" with a direct line to the people who make the
decisions at Queen's Park. Until recently a Conservative
Party member, Lougheed said she blames the Mike Harris
government for the problems at Joseph Brant and finds
herself more aligned with the Liberal vision. "I haven't
changed; I think the Tories have changed," she said.

Other candidates nominated to run are Barry Spruce, of the
Freedom Party of Ontario, Frank de Jong, of the Green Party
and John C. Turmel, an independent candidate.
--

>Hamilton Spectator
>February 1, 2007
>Liberals hope to capture Burlington
>By Daniel Nolan
BURLINGTON (Feb 1, 2007)
The Liberals are stepping up their attempt to capture the
Burlington riding from the Conservatives in the Feb. 8
byelection on two fronts: a visit by Premier Dalton McGuinty
and TV ads highlighting candidate Joan Lougheed.
McGuinty is set to make an announcement today at the Royal
Botanical Gardens in the riding which hasn't had a Liberal
MPP since 1943. TV ads featuring Lougheed, speaking about
health care and the environment, have begun running on CH-TV
and are set to run until next Tuesday, two days before
voters go to the polls. It's the first time an Ontario party
has run TV ads in a byelection.
The Liberals are also running TV ads in the two Toronto-area
byelections.Political observers say the governing party
believes it can steal Burlington from the Tories, which was
held by longtime MPP Cam Jackson until he made a successful
run for mayor last fall. The Tory candidate is former Halton
chair Joyce Savoline.
Other candidates are New Democrat Cory Judson, independent
John Turmel and Barry Spruce for the Freedom Party.

"They're in the ball game or the premier wouldn't be
coming," political scientist Henry Jacek said yesterday.
"You can take away from this that with this strategy (TV ads
and McGuinty's visit) they think they can win the
byelection." Lougheed's opponents, however, have attacked
her party for its treatment and lack of funding for Joseph
Brant Memorial Hospital, likely making health care the top
issue. An all-candidates' debate is set for tonight at the
hospital. Lougheed, a former city councillor, is trying to
get Health Minister George Smitherman to visit to address
the issue.

Savoline dismissed the TV ads as having any impact on her
campaign. NDP Leader Howard Hampton, in town to campaign
with Judson, also downplayed the ads. "My style is to meet
people at the door, not through their television sets," said
Savoline. "I don't think the TV ads will cut it. I think
people will see it as wasteful spending."

Hampton said the use of TV ads shows the desperation of the
Liberal government. "They are finding that voters at the
door are very upset about the pay raise (for MPPs) ... When
they go to the door canvassing, they face a barrage from
upset voters." dnolan@... 905-526-3351
With files from John Burman
---

JCT: Reporting all the drama and excitement of the evening?
You wouldn't know it was the same meeting.

Finally, Thursday morning was a meeting with the Burlington
Chamber of Commerce to be televised by Cogeco right after
the profiles on Saturday Feb 3 2:30pm, Sunday Feb 4 5:30pm,
and Monday Feb 5 at 1:30pm. I'd have loved to make this one
too but I wasn't invited and rather than show up and force
my way onto the show, I let them have their way and keep
their meeting boring with only the party candidates to
parrot their 1-minute party platform statements.

At least people will get to see the candidate profiles
before noticing that the only lively candidate wasn't on the
debate. I wonder if they're going to admit I was not invited
to participate or say they couldn't contact me (bull), or
say I just didn't show (bull).

Anyway, I did my duty and attended all the meetings I was
invited to. Sad the truth about what happened got censored
out by the Sun and Spectator editors.


--
Abolitionist Slave Leader John C."The Banking Systems Engineer" Turmel
for UNILETS interest-free time-based currency in U.N. resolution C6
to Governments in the http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel 519-753-0645 USENET: can.politics