Carney was never a good choice, he was just a less bad choice then Pierre. Pierre would’ve gladly started chopping up the country for Trump, and/or brought Musk north for a Doge north department, or something even worse. Jagmeet wasn’t realistic, and didn’t offer a great platform, in part because they conceded to the libs before it even got rollin just to try and stop the cons.

Carney is a staunch neo-liberal, with a banker background to boot. Him being pro-market and pro-international business (ie. non canadian business) isn’t ‘new’ for him. Him throwing small businesses under the bus is totally on brand. But every party toted the same general neo-liberal approach, without any pushes for drastic overhauls of existing norms that would’ve been needed if we were to actually respond to what’s going on. We needed a more drastic shift away from the market-based rules, because the US had thrown out the rule book / started overtly breaking them on a routine basis – Carney, and all the rest, are still sticking to those old rules hoping things will blow over. Opening markets and acting like its business as usual granting access / control to US interests because “business!”, while the US president openly says they’ll be selling deficient military hardware to their allies cause “maybe they wont be allies for long”. Hell, the US bailed after like half a day at the G7, and spent most of that time whining about why Russia wasn’t included… if you think the status quo is still in the room…

And its unlikely that govt will listen to feedback between elections. Especially if you’re unfortunate enough to be from a riding that ALWAYS votes one way or another, as many of us are, because why would politicians even bother listening to your feedback if the vote is pre-determined in your area already? Alberta can be given pipelines left right and center, they’ll still vote conservative. Parts of Vancouver can be completely ignored for decades because they always vote NDP.

I think it became inevitable that traditional ‘sites’ were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

It’s why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that’d be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you’d likely have a really great “AI assistant” to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their ‘searches’ with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users’ ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

It’d be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications – don’t need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they’re all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.

Israel’s actions in the past couple years have all seemed like sorta a desperate attempt to leverage the US Hegemony that’s protected them, before the US buckles.

Sorta like imagine a kid in Grade 1 who’s a total racist bully to his classmates. But the kid has an older brother in grade 6 who has no issue beating the shit outta any Grade 1 kid who fights back. When the older brother nears the transition to middle school – at which point the younger will lose his protection – the younger brother starts instigating like crazy, to try and establish dominance while still protected.

Canada ought to invest heavily in vaccine tech / bio firms. Even more so with the states not doing so.

Most obvious reason being basic health concerns, and the response required for things like pandemics, which are likely to increase in frequency as the world burns to the ground. The less obvious reason is that those assets / skills double as bio weapon developers (as we’re seeing practically everywhere, things like the Geneva convention / anti-genocide stuff has become very flexible). All the talk about getting nukes is silly, when you can quietly have a team of 2 dudes in an off-grid forest hut, with a chicken coup and a couple drones, potentially do billions of dollars of damage to a country that is… in a rush to further expose themselves as vulnerable to this sort of threat, by firing all their researchers/scientists on the subject.

So we can invest in biotech for generally altruistic and proper reasons, while having a very easy to conceal / clandestine alterior motive that can serve as a bit more of a deterrent / safety net. Win-win.

Sorta like how we ought to roll our climate disaster response teams under a military umbrella, and jack up our spending on things like logistics teams for moving things in and out of disaster areas. We need to hit 2% or 5% GDP spending on Military for Nato? Don’t see why we can’t meet that target with ease, just by spending more on our own natural disaster response capabilities at the federal level. Can even lend those assets out to assist our allies when they get hit with issues. Again, win-win.

I agree that this is a significant issue / problem for democratic countries, and that the trend of violence towards journalists in America is an obvious concern.

That said, the media has generally turned a blind eye as Israel killed a record number of journalists the past few years - and not only that, but they continued to broadcast out that regimes narrative. Given that the media / journalists “at large” have ignored this sort of issue in another “democratic” country that’s gone authoritarian, I find it totally unsurprising that another authoritarian-trending regime feels emboldened / empowered to treat journalists the same.

I’m not sure the intention of this sort of note.

Yes, Harris may’ve made those predictions. People heard em. They still preferred Trump, compared to Harris. It’s not like people, outside of the potentially fringe / outlier cases highlighted in some left-leaning media sources, are all that surprised. People didn’t vote for Trump because he was promising to treat immigrants with respect and dignity.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if many of the red-voters are looking at LA, and thinking things like “Look at how bad that immigration invasion got, they’re literally destroying the city and disrupting government. Even the governor of the State is part of the problem at this point, making noise about defending the public disorder. Tut tut. Send in more marines”.

More realistically… AI Trump.

They could feed all of his bullshit into a model, and have an AI Trump spewing nonsense forever. Bet it’d even take AI golf trips.

Is this a questionable move under the current administration? Definitely. I can imagine it essentially being them wanting to broadcast racist/discriminatory things, without worrying about foreign country hate speech laws generating lawsuits for US social media companies that put that sorta thing out there. They want media companies like X to be free to broadcast as much right wing hate as possible to democratic nations, to more easily influence things like political elections. The Trump admin/repubs would almost definitely abuse the hell out of it.

But awkwardly, is there a case, generally, to be made out of this sort of thing? Yeah, I’d say there is. But the approach to resolving it is kinda extreme, and authoritarian in nature. Like step 1 of trying to have control over your nations online media, would be to bring in a China/Russia style national Firewall. If the government wants to allow people to make online comments without fear of repercussions from foreign actors, or to have social media options that are uninfluenced by foreign actors, governments need some level of control over the geo-location and flow of internet traffic. If America wants to let Musk goose-step around Nazi saluting, while ensuring that Americans are uninfluenced by how the rest of the world views that sort of thing, they need to be able to block connections to/from foreign countries. If they want to block Chinese bot farms from manipulating the public image of the CCP on social media, they need more direct control over how data from China flows into the USA. And they likely need more ‘direct’ influence/control over social media companies via stricter regulation on things like knowing your customers.

I’m not sure how you’d have to structure that sort of thing’s governance, in a democratic nation, to ensure that it doesn’t get abused, and I imagine the only politicians that would be interested in this sort of thing would be the ones hoping to abuse it.

But that wouldn’t even be full mitigation. Someone like Khashoggi, who is sort of a poster child for this concern, was killed by Saudi Arabia due to expressing his opinions in Journals / online about the SA regime (to my understanding at least). It’s questionable, had his opinions been “successfully” kept within nations that view free speech as paramount, whether he would not have still been targeted/killed. Even if that story was successfully “kept” from the population of a dictatorship, there’s no particular reason to think that the dictator would not seek vengeance for the slight. Like Kim Jong’s got a pretty tight stranglehold on the media in North Korea from what I understand, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t above trying to assassinate foreigners who campaign aggressively against him or who end up going viral for insulting him.

SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going “Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!”.

So, no one forgot, it’s all part of the same larger plan really.

I don’t get why you’re asking a question, when you have a general answer in the body of your post.

far-right populist parties increasingly draw male support through nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-feminist narratives, while women — especially racialized and university-educated — opt for progressive parties promoting equality and social protection.

So one party is targeting (racialized) minority groups, and promoting feminist-style equality (equality in ways that benefit minorities and women, but not targeting areas where men are worse off), and social protections that are historically skewed in favour of women / minority groups. The government screening for “people who identify as an Equity Employment group” is in line with left leaning policies, where Canada defines “Equity Employment groups” as “any non-male, or non-caucasian, person”. Programs/initiatives that provide funding / increased access to women, are arguably “anti” men, especially when experienced on an individual level (being denied a job because you’re a guy, even if on aggregate it’s for some ‘equity’ balancing, still feels like you’ve been discriminated against because of your gender).

Feminist theory doesn’t hide its intentions, but people don’t bother to think about how men perceive it in ‘late stage’ feminist cultures (where the imbalance is far less extreme than other areas of the world). Feminism is NOT egalitarian at its core. It’s defined (a bit loosely) as the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. That means they are not advocating for equality in areas where women are advantaged, nor in places to gain equity for men – theories about making groups “actually” equal, would be egalitarian, not feminist. Think of it like a list where you’ve defined the advantages and disadvantages of both men and women, but then there’s a giant social movement to remove the disadvantages from just one side of the list… it gets lopsided real quick, and unsurprisingly the group that’s been ignored gets pissed off and starts pushing back. We constantly hear about the wage gap, or health care deficiencies for women… but we ignore that women live 5 years longer on average (so better ‘results’ at a high level for health care, and longer time in retirement on CPP/OAS) – they get ~25% more time in their retirement years, which in addition to old age supports, translates to far higher medical costs for that period as old people eat more resources. Even something like increased supports for seniors, a “general” social support program, disproportionately benefits women because of this underlying inequity that’s ignored. We ignore men’s poor showing in higher education, which forecasts their earning potential in decades to come – they’re now double digits behind women in terms of getting degrees. The govt funds womens centers with Fent task force money, cause 1 in 5 deaths from fent are women… the 4 in 5 deaths that are guys are just… whateva, let em die. We celebrate all woman companies, they get special features in newspapers and tons of public support; companies that are men-only are just waiting to be sued. We allow women only spaces like women’s gyms, male exclusive clubs are generally not allowed / torn down by lawsuits (if they grow beyond a facebook group or whatever): I’ve seen local barbers taken to human rights tribunals, men can’t even have ‘men’ only haircut spots.

Discussion of trans rights, are almost entirely couched in protecting women’s rights – preserving their gender-based privileges in a world where men can “identify” to gain those privileges. Its likely partly why they push hard for a clear definition of what a woman is, so that they can continue to exclude men from those privileges. It’s super rare to see cases where someone’s in an uproar about a FTM trans person playing a sport (I haven’t seen any of these, personally). I’d posit that the lack of defined privilege programs supporting men is one reason FTM doesn’t raise as many concerns. That even goes beyond just trans concerns somewhat, in that on job applications, if checking “female” means you pass a quota check, why wouldn’t every man identify as woman (or as “gender fluid”) for gaining employment? It’s not like work’s gonna force you to fuck in the employee lounge to prove it. People like Rowling are basically feminists working to preserve women’s privileges, which is at odds with a chunk of trans folks who want to gain those privileges by ‘opting in’. The fear is basically that men will realise there’s no reason not to opt in unless there are very clear barriers put in play, which if not planned for could eliminate a chunk of women’s privileges.

Anyhow, to rephrase what you said a bit:

One party is about providing programs and benefits to women and minorities. That party isn’t really about providing anything for men; it may benefit them in general with its policies, but those policies are “for everyone”, while they specifically target additional beneficial policies to “anyone but men”. The other party said they’d remove the programs that target women and minorities with benefits, which indirectly benefits men/the majority race. The party that aligns more to men’s general ‘needs’ got more of the male vote. The party that aligns more to women’s general ‘needs’ got more of the female vote.

Really not all that surprising.

Left-leaning policies, parties and politicians have typically aimed to appeal to demographic niches, rather than broadly stated goals that benefit larger subsets of the voting population. Someone like Jenny Kwan, an NDP MP that’s been in her seat for decades now and serves as a ‘minority rights’ type critic, is basically unable to empathize with / represent “average white middle class” voters interests, and it really shows in any communication you have with her. Her political support is almost explicitly rooted in appealing to minority groups, and saying “You have it so much worse than white people, so govt should help you out!”, which gains her enough appeal amongst her various niche sub groups to continue to control the riding (even though her riding has gotten jack shit in terms of fed funding for her entire tenure – they just keep voting against their own interests really).

Because their base has become so entrenched in demographic politics / appealing to racialized groups, any platform that attempts to speak more broadly / appeal to non-racialized groups, presents a potential threat to their underlying base of supporters. Jagmeet, when doing “meet and greets” with the public, instantly and almost exclusively gravitated towards other sikhs – because his support in the party was largely based on his appeal to that particular minority group, who voted en masse for him because he’s Sikh, moreso than his policies/electability.

Put slightly differently, they don’t target “traditional” left leaning economic / political ideologies, because their position in the ‘new’ left is based on appeal to influential minority groups. You don’t need to appeal to “everyone”, or “as many people as possible”, if you can lock down a big minority group, who’ll vote for you just because of your race. So you don’t see them appealing to the broader public interest. And while that approach works in some segments (Like Jenny’s riding, or at NDP conventions), it generally isn’t a winning strategy when replicated across the broader voting public. Jagmeet could win his NDP leadership race, because the people voting there skewed heavily into his niche, but he couldn’t win the more ‘open’ race, because his race-based supporters weren’t a significant enough slice of the broader population to carry it. Even more, the racial-based support block actually serves to alienate voters of other races – you can’t have a bunch of Sikh people goin “Finally one of us is gettin in, we’re gonna see good changes!” without that reading as “We’re voting for our own race because we assume there will be race-based benefits / targeted programs to help us as a result! We’re voting for racism in our favour!”.

And that fear is somewhat justified, unfortunately. I mean, JWR was our first FN AG. She reformed bail to specifically address FN representation in prisons, and is the person responsible for Canada moving to a rotating door for criminals – she literally revised bail to make it so that LE had to let everyone out asap before their official day in court, because she felt some demographics were over-represented in prison. She also mandated race-based reviews of cases, which has resulted in things like a FN dude who stabbed a white stranger in an elevator, killing him… getting zero jail time as a result, because he was FN and his victim a white guy (happened in Vancouver in 2020). These are moves that are explicitly “bad” for the general public, and arguably bad for equity; a FN AG put in policies benefiting her race explicitly to the disadvantage of everyone else / ‘the public at large’. Canada also had Harjit Sajjan from the Liberals, use Canadian spec ops to save non-Canadian Sikhs during the pull out from Kabul – a fairly clear case where he racially discriminated in favour of his own race, to which the Liberal gov said “He’s not racist, cause you wouldn’t call him racist if he wasn’t a Sikh himself!”. Like no shit, someone of a certain race using govt resources to benefit their own race is what people call racist… but not in Left-leaning politician speak. In left leaning politics, it’s ok for minorities to use govt resources that way.

I dunno. I think left leaning parties / politicians have decades of this sort of stuff to try and work through, if they’re seriously wanting to try and appeal to the broader “working class”. And the political base of the party is not really interested in moving in that direction. Sorta like how the dems in the states were so hard up for getting a woman on the ticket, that they torpedo’d Bernie and alienated a crapload of working class voters. Same general vibe.

Yeah… though to be fair, even more ‘typically’ Canadian companies rely heavily on American / foreign supply chains, which in the eyes of some may also be considered deceptive.

Like almost every “local Canadian Credit Union” has their online banking hosted by Intellect Design, an India based multinational company. A ton of them have their back office entirely in M365. A large number use American banking systems such as FISERV – there’s like, only 1-3 tiny CUs in BC that use a Canadian back-end banking system, another 4-5 in Ontario. Yet they generally all advertise as Canadian businesses, because they’re Canadian owned (by their members), Canada “incorporated/operated” (business lic in Canada, physically operating exclusively in Canada), and are subject to Canadian regulations (which allow/encourage them to outsource to other countries). They’re unable to function without America/foreign involvement, paying/supporting foreign companies on the regular, and are exposed to potential disruption risks should trade deteriorate (eg. USA impeding digital service to Canada, equates to them “turning off” any company reliant on those services…).

In regards to what counts as supporting a kind of patriotic Canadian consumer movement, where the line gets drawn is entirely up to the consumer. If they don’t want to bother looking too closely, they may be fine with just the ‘store employees’ being Canadian. If they want to dig deeper, they may want to make sure that the products are generally made in Canada. Deeper still they may check the supply chains / operation items that support the business.

While I personally disagree with the lightest interpretation of it, ie the “well, our employees are Canadian, good enough!”, I can’t realistically expect people to research every product/service they may buy. Macroscopic alterations like that are best done through govt actions, sorta like forcing people to recycle. Our govt hasn’t really taken any tangible action on this front as of yet, just pageantry and bluster for them to get re-elected. And it’s unlikely that it’ll become a political wedge issue in the long-run.

Programs like OAS are given to the rich, because they’re old. Questioning the legitimacy of ‘old’ and/or ‘married’ as being qualifiers for targeted aid, and instead implying that benefits should be given to ‘poor people’ no matter their age or marital status as per the charter’s tenants, fits with your rebuttal. A rebuttal which didn’t address the questions.

Silly question, but can someone explain how things like OAS and other ‘age’ defined benefits fit with the Charter’s protection against discrimination due to age? Likewise tax benefits given to married folks, as the charter supposedly protects against discrimination there?

I mean, it’s listed as a protected characteristic just like race. So wouldn’t something like saying “Let’s give old retired people a bunch of money” be similar in terms of violated charter rights, as saying “Let’s give white people a bunch of money”? ie… wrong and against supposedly ‘protected’ charter rights? Even how CPP tiers the amounts you get depending on if you take it at 60, 65, or 70 seems like it’d run counter to charter rights… ?

*just an edit to clarify protection against discrimination based on marital status is seemingly in the human rights act, not charter, but still a protected area…

Yeah, it all seems really wobbly. Like one of their notes related to using public lands for building initiatives, though it wasn’t clear if that just means … like selling off the parks in Vancouver to developers, or government-subsidized planned neighbourhoods around smaller towns to try and spread our population out (praying that jobs would somehow follow), or what.

I admit, if I could find a way to move to a more remote location, that still had necessities like medical services, and I’d get a functional, easy to maintain, eco friendly / eco resilient type of detached property, I’d be interested… the costs on that sort of thing are really quite high though. And shaving like $50k off the top of that cost isn’t really gonna do much to help with affordability, when you’re talking about housing costing millions.

Well, the liberal plan is already including a chunk of red tape removal – the criticism is more about having a large public institution overtly shifting market trends, especially as the intention appears to have it be both lender, and builder. They’re right to note that there’s potential conflicts, and that govt programs typically aren’t about ‘efficiency’ in terms of service delivery.

My napkin math is terrible, and the different amounts noted for different programs is a bit unclear to me in terms of what amounts the govt intends to invest directly by building housing vs how much its just going to try and subsidize builders.

Canada’s already got a Trump-negotiated trade agreement. CUSMA / Nafta v2. So we know how reliable a Trump trade agreement is.

The Ontario auto sector folks are milking this a ton, and our Govt seems to not be registering what they’re explicitly saying – and are eating it up. The govt is busy putting tariffs on the viable EVs of today because the Auto industry floated a piece of total vapourware, that they openly admit even in this article is not a prototype for production, but rather a “platform” to show off the sub-component manufacturers and what they can do.

You can’t put any weight in the $35k 2029 type claims, as there’s no intention to make this car from any manufacturer / business / the project leads. They aren’t even trying to sell the whole car, but just the individual bits that go into it, in business to business interactions – not business to consumer. If there were an actual business case that showed you could mass produce these cars in Canada at a profit, it’d get picked up and done. But it’s not.

This project being used to get our govt to block things like BYD, is looking more and more like how Musk used a vapour project like Hyperloop to derail high speed mass transit options in the USA, which would’ve competed with Tesla for eco friendly transport options. Using the Arrow, the niche auto manufacturer companies in Ontario, who are all intimately tied to US company interests, is able to block non-US companies from competing fairly in Canada’s market.

Albertans should use the lowered threshold to get referendums to get a referendum on exiling Danielle Smith.

When the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, they had less support amongst the public than the republicans do today.

If you think it fair to hold all of Nazi germany accountable for the atrocities that went on, there’s no reason to pretend America is some “special” exception. Germans take responsibility for their past, with things like banning AFD – even if a German can legit say “It wasn’t me gassing those jews”, they still recognise they were responsible for what occurred as a result of their inaction and apathy. In the US, like 30% of them didn’t even bother to show up and vote. Apathy is no excuse, and not worthy of absolution. They literally elected a felon and a rapist.

Regardless, I still stick by the reduction in visits and the on going boycotts aren’t about making them “realise our value” or whatever. It’s a visceral recoil experienced on an aggregate scale, to the vitriolic bile being spewed by the people they elected, targeted quite literally at all of us here in Canada. If someone vomits on you constantly, you move the fuck away – and it isn’t about “wanting to make them miss you”. It’s about the vomit.