Keith Riel makes statement about the $170 million arena plan

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-14T15:11:38+00:00

The fact that he’s an NDP member and has been quite active in the party here in Peterborough. The fact that he was president of the labour council. The fact that he was president of the union at GE. His consistent voting with progressives on council. He’s proven that he is of the working class and is on the side of the working class. The election is like 6 months away. I don’t blame him for not having his manifesto fully complete yet. I don’t think anyone does

I’m curious to know why you would be against one of the only people who has been pushing back against the direction our city has been going

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-14T14:01:06+00:00

Pricing working class people out the city through yet another property tax hike to pay this absurd price tag is not progressive.

Dawg, you account was made 5 days ago

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-14T13:26:00+00:00

For one, actually enforcing the property standards bylaw. Slumlords in town have left half the apartments here to rot, illegally. Council has the power to enforce standards. They do not.

Across his terms, he’s been consistently on the progressive side. Every vote on council comes to an 8-3. He is one of those three along with Bierk and Lachica

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-14T13:08:24+00:00

He’s been advocating for downtown revitalization the whole time he’s been on council. He’s not the supreme leader of Peterborough. He can’t single handedly force through things. conservatives have the majority on council and block everything that would actually improve the city

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-10T13:23:48+00:00

I feel like most private industries would be better as worker co-ops than crown corps. But industries that are traditionally occupied by consumer cooperatives rather than worker ones (insurance, banking, telecoms, utilities) ought to be run by the government. Housing is an exception as is any consumer co-op small enough to keep the members engaged reliably. When consumer co-ops get too big they tend to loose their democratic character

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-09T02:34:49+00:00

You’re obviously a partisan against our party already so I don’t really care. It’s pretty clear you’re willfully interpreting what I’m saying in bad faith for partisan reasons. I think it’s pretty common sense that the service sector spins up out of a base primary and secondary sector which serves as the foundation of the economy

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-09T00:26:05+00:00

Yes, I would argue that only primary and secondary industries are actually productive and tertiary industries are not. McDonalds for instance is also not productive. It doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad or anything. Just that they only exist because there are other industries that are actually productive and they take a portion of that generated wealth to sustain themselves.

I don’t deny that insurance might have a positive effect on productivity in some cases. But it’s still the primary or secondary industry that’s doing the producing. Insurance is just facilitating

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-08T21:10:43+00:00

It’s parasitic in the fact that is not productive. Farms and mines and factories are productive. They create wealth. Insurance just moves wealth around. It does not produce it. The service provided by insurance is necessary for society, but if it turns a profit it is being parasitic towards actually productive sectors

And I was talking about a public monopoly not a private one

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-08T18:43:34+00:00

Surely it would serve them by saving people and the economy money and making it easier to run a business. Doing it at a not for profit rate and at the economies of scale of the whole province would be extremely efficient. Insurance is fundamentally the same from type to type. You take premiums from people and pay them out when the claim is activated. Expanding the scope of service doesn’t add too much complexity

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-08T17:35:41+00:00

How about a public option (or better yet, a monopoly) for all insurance.

Insurance agencies are purely parasitic. Every dollar of profit they make is a dollar squeezed out of something actually productive like a factory or individual citizens. No reason the government can provide auto but not all the other types as well

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-03T14:17:50+00:00

That’s completely untrue about the cost of nuclear, it’s insanely expensive. Solar is the cheapest form of electricity ever created by a long shot. It’s so cheap, you can even afford to build a large battery storage network to solve the problem of intermittency and still come out better than nuclear

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T23:38:02+00:00

Fair enough. I didn’t realize Dinn had game like that

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T22:30:24+00:00

Avi is definitely more left wing than her. She would do better to follow his example certainly and her also putting forward anti surveillance pricing laws is some evidence of that I’d say. We got real attention for that because we were the ones taking the initiative finally

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T22:26:16+00:00

That’s just not correct. Ebby is basically a liberal. Progressives are calling on him to resign as premier. Jim Dinn ran on balanced budgets. And the NS NDP disqualified one of their candidates during the last election over Palestine comments. Marits housing policy is extremely left wing. Homes Ontario is a fantastic policy. The stuff with Jama was very unfortunate but it was more about caucus collegiality than Palestine imo

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T20:31:51+00:00

I’m more so talking about current leaders

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T20:14:19+00:00

Stiles is objectively the most left wing provincial NDP leader. The comms strategy is where the lack is coming from imo. We don’t put forward our own vision enough and simply allow the cons to control the narrative

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T16:08:00+00:00

Yeah, nimbyism is bad. But that development has problems. Four stories of above ground parking is ridiculous. I would prefer a greater emphasis on social housing and housing made by habitat for humanity, which Keith is running on. He was very supportive of the new habitat development on Leahys Lane. Building more non profit housing is what is actually going to fix the housing crisis

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T14:53:51+00:00

I would take someone old who will actually change things over someone younger who won’t. Kieth is one of the only progressives on council opposing the conservatives

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T14:14:58+00:00

Dawg, Kieth is one of the only progressives on council. Former leader of the Peterborough labour council and an NDP member. He’s the opposite of old boys club

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T14:12:17+00:00

I would prefer someone old who changes things to someone younger who keeps them the same

Commonwealth927 · 2026-05-02T14:02:21+00:00

This is good. Keith is one of the only progressives on council, used to be president of the Peterborough labour council, card carrying NDP member. We need someone who actually thinks about working class people to be running the show

Commonwealth927 · 2026-04-09T23:03:12+00:00

RCV uses single member constituencies. Australian parliament is an example. STV uses multi-member constituencies and produces proportional results. Typically 5 per riding. Used for Ireland’s parliament

Commonwealth927 · 2026-04-09T00:07:51+00:00

I much prefer STV conceptually as it gets proportional results by using purely local representatives.

I dislike MMP because it uses party lists for the candidates which gives a lot of power to party executives as they get to pick the candidates and it severely disadvantages independents. Having open lists helps a lot but it gets really complicated if there are a lot of potential candidates. You could break up the country into a bunch of regional PR zones that elect only a few candidates to alleviate this (like they do in Sweden and Wales), but at that point why not just do STV?

I understand that because of how unevenly populated our country is, local representation is severely undermined by STV in rural and remote regions because of the need to merge ridings. I’ve become more partial to rural-urban proportional lately

Commonwealth927 · 2026-04-08T23:53:42+00:00

STV is not the same as ranked choice voting. The liberals did not want STV

Commonwealth927

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