What a fucking clown. You and I will just have to be enemies. I don't give a fuck. I'm not one of those who feels the need for "sunny ways".
2024 Canadian Political Thread
- Thread starter licks2nite
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Just saying that switching off the ignore button in this thread sure lets a lot of vitrol flow, so I turned it back on.
MPH opinion/
Anyway, as we all move along, you know that feeling that things are a bit heavy, not as light as it all used to be? Prices in '24 causing folks to pull back, be more aware of spending all across the board? Maybe freaking a bit about making everything work out?
Yeah, common feeling I think.
And why is it that we in Canada have tax brackets where they are? Compared to the you es of eh, the top federal bracket is in that 247K mark, and the stats are such that anyone making in the 350K and up range is in the top 1%. States wise that same number might be in the top 6-7% and the top 1% make 2M+ a year.
What that indicates is that we have a LOT of people who have not made more for some time. In fact our productivity, GDP per population is at about 71% of the US, or is at about 2017 productivity level.
But costs are at the 2024 level we see today.
Better productivity will get better income which in turn allows an easing of just trying to make it and starts removing that heavy feeling.
Cultural? Political? Paying for mistakes made over the years?
/MPH out
MPH opinion/
Anyway, as we all move along, you know that feeling that things are a bit heavy, not as light as it all used to be? Prices in '24 causing folks to pull back, be more aware of spending all across the board? Maybe freaking a bit about making everything work out?
Yeah, common feeling I think.
And why is it that we in Canada have tax brackets where they are? Compared to the you es of eh, the top federal bracket is in that 247K mark, and the stats are such that anyone making in the 350K and up range is in the top 1%. States wise that same number might be in the top 6-7% and the top 1% make 2M+ a year.
What that indicates is that we have a LOT of people who have not made more for some time. In fact our productivity, GDP per population is at about 71% of the US, or is at about 2017 productivity level.
But costs are at the 2024 level we see today.
Better productivity will get better income which in turn allows an easing of just trying to make it and starts removing that heavy feeling.
Cultural? Political? Paying for mistakes made over the years?
/MPH out
I’ve often thought that the political spectrum is more circular with moderate and exterme poles.
It's often true. The whole "system / anti-system" theory of parties, where some want to maintain the existing order while others want it radically changed. Some call it "horseshoe theory" as if the two radical ends cannot cross over, but I do think of it as a circle.
There's parts of the system in Canada that 100% need change, and I find all the political parties disappointing.
In Anglo countries we are too used to the poor descriptor of left and right as the only dimensions. It's political shorthand, but not always useful or accurate. Why would the economic right have anything to do with the church-going social conservatives? Why would environmentalists make common cause with wood-working labour unions which want to cut those forests down? If you are pro-police why should anyone assume you are "anti-minority" (when most of street crime's victims are them)? There's a lot of political "big tent" groupings in our party system that make no logical sense. There's not just one dimension of politics, there's different ones, like imagining a line versus three dimensional space. Economic left (pro worker/poor) versus right (pro-business/rich); social libertines versus moral traditionalists; elitists versus populists; pacifists versus militarists.
That lack of political choice is because we have this First-Past-The-Post electoral system, and you cannot really see how it forces all those political choices into a version where there is just two. It is all about the way they have to gain strategic and tactical advantages over each other at election time. They can't be themselves, they can't be honest with us, and that means they have to try and stifle and personal / conscience issues that individual MPS might have, groups within one party who do not believe the same thing. Nope, it is FPTP and how you leverage small gains or losses into big wins or losses is - everyone shut up and get behind the leader no matter what he or she says. Do not ask why the policies are not logical or stay consistently the same, do not ask why there's never any personal viewpoints allowed. Definitely do not ask a "majority" government almost never has the support of a majority of voters. Nope, it is all about maximizing the numbers in just the right ridings at just the right moment - nothing else matters.
The media does not help - they hate complexity, and want to dumb everything down so they can just run the "Coke vs. Pepsi" story, focusing on the leaders and never mind examining policies or checking facts. Look at the COVID issue - "X number of people are satisfied with the government response, Y are not" is how they report it. Do they report whether dissatisfied with the government response being too strong, or too weak? The media almost never says it - they just say "oh well it's controversy so that must mean in favour of the opposition leader", even if more dissatisfied people want the opposite of what he is demanding. Nah, the media just bolis it down to "leader popular" / "leader unpopular". Headline, photo or 15 second sound bite, and it's done.
That approach feeds into propaganda networks, with fake activists, eager trolls and bot networks, and all the ways in which they manipulate the public. Leaders of parties now craft messages just so they can use like a one or two second sound bitee for their social media campaign donation appeal.
But what's the biggest manipulation of all ? That as a voter you have only the choices they give you, that there is only two of them, and that it will only ever be this grouping of ideas or parties, forever - no room for you to make up your own mind on what your personal ideology actually is, or who you want to support.
So when people scream they want "change" and I always ask "change to what?" If they have no idea beyond "this guy replaces that one as leader" and a few scripted talking points, then they should exit the conversation and leave it to the adults.
That's brutally blunt but there it is. Most people honestly never question where their own supposed ideology comes from or what it is about. They follow stereotypes, follow talking points and propaganda, and leaders who would probably feed them into a furnace if there was any advantage to doing it.
Write a hundred page essay if you want. Won’t change the fact the liberal clowns are destined for defeat. Canadians are fed up, me included.Well, I have always refused to buy into that "If you hate Poillievre you must be a fan of Trudeau" BS. Nope. There are just different degrees of bad, and I do not want Canada to go from mediocre to absolute disaster.
The Liberals should have got rid of Trudeau after he failed in the last election, definitely. Normally one disappointing result would be curtains for a political leader, let alone two. The problem is not a policy one, nor management of day to day life issues. They got Canada through COVID with far less deaths and economic damage, after all.
As for the Conservatives, O'Toole was not nearly so much an asshole, and if the party had stuck to some sort of realism and decency as a party, instead of turning into a bunch of deceitful conspiracy thugs, maybe even I would consider them over certain issues.
But that "consider" from me died when I saw what the CPC was up to during COVID and afterwards - to me they are wedded to the idea of being assholes, absolutely disloyal to Canada and its people, and it looks like there is ZERO chance of that ever changing. Every time a conservative anywhere in Canada looks like they might be a non-asshole, some backroom institute in Calgary (or Washington?) waves its magic wand and that guy's career gets kicked into the gutter. The party zeitgeist is to have only MAGA-like assholes in charge, who will lie their asses off over literally any issue, and make nutcase thinking the basis of their party. To that effect, they dumped O'Toole for the biggest asshole they could find.
That fact might be the only actual chance the Libs have, because even if they have better policies overall, the Libs have done nothing but fuck up on communicating and delivering them. People are clearly tired of the current PM, and his way of ineffectually flailing around. Never have I seen someone who thinks chickening out on good polices somehow gives him political capital to press ahead on bad ones. They are committed to being wishy-washy - anti-decisive, and they actually think that works for them. They are their own worst enemy, and if they get defeated, it will be a testament to their mistakes, not their policies.
Carbon taxes, lowering GHG emissions, this should be easy issue to win - after Harper and his 9 years of backwards anti-science tyranny, after forest fires, floods, drought. They actually take action? Great. But then come the stupid give-backs to the other side of the argument (which has zero scientific credibility). "Oh we'll also spend $45 billion on the TMX pipeline; we'll also keep approving oil and LNG projects; oh we'll make an exemption for heating oil but only for these guys; oh we'll give rebates because people only understand getting a bonus cheque". What the fuck? I don't know exactly how much carbon taxes take in for them, but anyone can see that shelling out $45 or 50 billion to emission-creating industries just makes it ineffective.
The policy would be much clearer and 100% winnable if they just acted consistently and did not pussy out at the first sign of pushback. Guys like Guilbeault have the balls to do the right thing, but he's more abrasive because he is not a life-long Liberal; they recuited him, but then they always hang the guy out to dry (like with Jody Wilson Raybould). There is no "nice" way to take on snakes like Scott Moe or kooks like Danielle Smith, but Guilbeault is charging those enemy trenches basically alone. He might win a Victoria Cross for political bravery, but posthumously thanks to a PMO that's either too dumb or too timid to explain how carbon taxes actually work.
Same goes for the guns issue - the ONLY crime-related issue on which the Liberals had any credibility. They announce an assault weapon ban and a pistol ban, but once again, they let the disinfomation guys tell lies about it, they do not understand their own policy enough to counter-argue effectively, so then under pressure, they pussied out. Once again, god forbif you actually do something effective - your own PM and his staffers will undermine you with their mealy mouthed narratives that play into enemy hands.
Same goes on the military procurement issues, where the problem is not what they decide, but that they do not really decide anything for years, and even then might reverse it unexpectedly, while the expense just goes up and the world or war keeps changing. Not that their decisions are in the end any worse than their Con predecessors, but the dithering makes it seem like the system is deciding procurements for them, not the other way around.
Do not even get me started on how they promised electoral reform, said they would get rid of First Past The Post and actually had the power to do so, and then dithered the idea right into the grave. Now we're stuck with a system that forces politics to be worse than it ever needs to be, and (the way things are going) is going to be the demise of their party as some rat-faced scumbag laughs his way into absolute power which he does not deserve. It was an unforgivable fuck-up by the Liberals, and I guess they reap what they sow, but why does all of Canada have to reap it with them? We're the ones who need an electoral system that actually works, not the well-connected wankers who succeed at the dirty way politics are now.
Honestly, for all of Polly- Fuckhead's useless rage-farming noise about the Carbon Tax, the real weakness for the Liberals has always been the issue of crime. Every time the courts or prisons fuck up and a criminal goes free, every time junkies take over a city park or "randomly" attack people, it falls heaviest on them, because they like to be the average between the NDP which protects the street criminals too much and the Conservatives who protect the high-up criminals too much. They will never touch that sheltered little world of the legal elite, or dare utter the words that the Charter is being over-stretched by special interests to the point of absurdity. Justice? On the streets, the people know real justice is dead & gone. That is the thing quietly pissing everyone off, costing every honest person money, making them feel like they do not matter. Attacks against honest people go un-avenged; society breaks down as honesty itself is punished instead of rewarded. A smart and ethical conservative leader would focus on that issue, and never mind the oil-funded MAGA-junior conspiracy loon stuff. Such a leader could win an election even more easily.
But no - we have to get offered an alternative PM that's even worse than the current PM people are sick of. Voters might hold their nose and give that miserable opposition shitlord a chance to be PM, and after he spends a few years raping Canada until it's in a coma, then the Canadian people will go "oopsie, I guess he was full of shit the whole time!" .
I would agree, the first past the post political system is well past its sell by date. Seeking to find solutions to huge Canadian problems like climate change demand intelligent and passionate people with differing views (like many on this thread) seeking consensus and working together. A sort of participatory democracy perhaps?
I am pointing out a fact that the Canadian government is spending more on Aboriginals than the Canadian military.
There is a war in Ukraine. World trade routes are being rerouted around South Africa because of the trouble around the entrance to the Red Sea.
Canadian stockpiles of ammo is over 30-50 years old (there is a shelf life for all ammo).
The American military is being stretched thin by actions all over the world.
When push comes to shove, Canadians do not have a military that could responds to anything like an armed conflict, because they lack infrastructure, equipment, training, and personnel.
The thinking today is that Canadians should just depend on the US military strength. The shit that is happening in the US now, indicated they are falling apart and losing the political will to be the "global policeman".
The person/country with the biggest stick makes the rules... Today Canada has given up resources to Ukraine, but those resources are not being replenished, because the Canadian military is getting a 1 billion dollar cut in budget.
The Canadian military does not have an adequate number of tanks, planes and ships with stores of ammo to go into any type of sustained conflict.
Europe has woken up to the threat Putin plays out for in Europe, European Countries are increasing their defense spending, while Canada is decreasing their defence spending.
Today in Canada the main consideration in politics is to promote woke politics and policies, and that includes the rights of Aboriginals and their say in environmental and political issues without the rest of Canadians voting on it. The politicians are giving Aboriginals "the bank" and shoving "Aboriginal Culture down Canadians throats" without a vote from the rest of Canadians.
Aboriginals should be like any other Canadian citizen. The ownership of their homes taxed, and income taxed (on all reservations too). Instead the Canadian government takes our tax money and pays Aboriginals money. The more they complain, the more money they get. Sqeaky wheel gets the cheeze....
The Aboriginals have problems and they have to fix those problems themselves. Their problems are not going to be solved by throwing money at them or reiterating what happened to them.
1. Drugs and Alcohol- Its a good bet the drug seller is not a white man selling drugs on a reservation. Is criminals within their own community.
2. Lack of Education- Even today Aboriginal children have problems graduating high school. Attendance is poor.
3. Highway of Tears (missing women)- Due to fear of RCMP, won't give out details to find the criminals which are most likely an Aboriginal Criminal, or member of their own community. Instead its a white serial killer trucker.
4. Misuse of Federal Funds- Way too much money is not being evenly distributed to all members of a Reservation- no accountability of federal funds going towards a reservation
5. Residential Schools- Last one closed over 25 years ago. The Simple act of putting Aboriginals on Reservations killed their culture, not the residential schools. Instead of concentrating about the bad things that happened at residential schools, the public should be informed of the good things about residential schools. Aboringinals learned to read and write and do math. Some learned enough to go on to colleges and universities to get further education. The Aboriginals learned about western culture too.
Compare what happened at orphanages vs a residential school in the 1880s. In the 70s, even white kids got the strap for misbehaving in school. It was a cultural assimilation, but even today immigrants to Canada have to assimilate to Canadian culture. They need to learn English, write, and be able to do math, to function in Canadian society. Education is the way for people to do well in a society.
5 Teenage Suicide- All of the above contribute to how a teenager (in a isolated community, where most of the adults are drugged/drunk), is going to look at their future, its bleak. They get an outside look at the world and wonder why their world is so fucked up.
As a Canadian I have a problem with other Canadians having more rights and privileges than other Canadians. This includes tax free status of Aboriginals and not paying PST/GST if you live on a reservation. Free Education for all Reservation Aboringinals, when every other Canadian has to pay their own way. The Aboriginals live in Canada and should pay their fair amount, just like other Canadians do.
Im getting the sense you have a hate on for one group in particular. The correct synopsis in BC is that aboriginals are letting you live on unceded lands witgout treaty and doing the *right thing* by using courts instead of violence to establish ownership. You think you would be as calm and downright friendly if someone stole your shit?
As for the schools, lets try this thought experiment...as a kid, imagine you were sent to Chinese school with no english and got beaten for anything relating to english...food, language , dress , manerisms, etc. Obviously the experience was not the same as you had in school growing up, bit it is very similar to what aboriginals went through en-mass.
Why dont you become more like first nations people if you're so keen on assimilation then?
sell by date?
the system being proposed to replace is would look like what we got now
where the minority mob rules, where parties that don't represent even other provinces like the separatists could hold the balance of power
chaos, look where it's used, whatever other idiotic system, they never have majority gov'ts anymore, they never get anything done, usually
much like what we've gotten in the last 3 yrs
lots of announcements, like the last week, no real actions, regurgitating of past promises that failed, never worked, just to keep the house boy till he gets his pension
elections constantly, look at Israel
ethnic vote banks, that's what it would end up in, it's already partly happening with the current system, it would just get worse
Trudeau is governing by that right now, he's currently siding with the Terrorist sympathizers, cause there are more of them then Jews in the country
no, I'll take first past the post anytime, with elections every 4 yrs to get rid of the same idiots when you can
and the real issue is people not voting, being too stupid to vote because they can't be bothered to care
no system is going to solve that
Pierre Poilievre receives a coveted endorsement from a conspiracy theorist and school massacre denier.
Birds of a feather . . .
Birds of a feather . . .
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/we...-drug-users-desperate-b-c-hospital-nurses-say
how anyone in BC can still think voting for the NDP/Liberals is good for anyone is beyond me
how much more evidence do you need?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ge...sking-as-leadership-killed-the-canadian-dream
here's another good opinion from a former General of our armed forces
BC our federal gov't, applies to both right now
2 more yrs of this shit federally
and according to the polls in BC 4 more
how sad
how anyone in BC can still think voting for the NDP/Liberals is good for anyone is beyond me
how much more evidence do you need?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/ge...sking-as-leadership-killed-the-canadian-dream
here's another good opinion from a former General of our armed forces
BC our federal gov't, applies to both right now
2 more yrs of this shit federally
and according to the polls in BC 4 more
how sad
It's probably a mistake to base your beliefs on opinion pieces from a newspaper like the National Post which is owned by a Trump-supporting, American hedge fund.
Trudeau will win again. Poilievre is simply too immature and off-putting. The Liberals trotting out the abortion issue will finish the greasy bastard off.
Trudeau will win again. Poilievre is simply too immature and off-putting. The Liberals trotting out the abortion issue will finish the greasy bastard off.
Abortions are easily accessible in Canada and publicly funded.
So, it's a non issue.
Trudeau and the Liberals will trot out their usual lies about the Conservatives banning
abortions, but they've been lying for so long only the most diehard Liberal dimwits believe them.
Trudeau and the Liberals will be completely destroyed in the upcoming election.
Only delusional wingnuts like yourself think otherwise.
The prime minister’s six-day trip last September, accompanied by his son, to “strengthen ties” in the Indo-Pacific region cost taxpayers nearly $2 million, with nearly $200,000 spent on in-flight catering.
According to documents obtained through an access-to-information request, the total cost of the trip came to $1,908,243.
Costs for the trip included $190,000 on in-flight catering, $643,000 for aircraft handling and fuel fees, $422,000 for lodging, $129,000 for ground transportation and $427,000 for RCMP security costs. The numbers contained in the documents are not final, as invoices and claims are still being processed.
According to documents obtained through an access-to-information request, the total cost of the trip came to $1,908,243.
Costs for the trip included $190,000 on in-flight catering, $643,000 for aircraft handling and fuel fees, $422,000 for lodging, $129,000 for ground transportation and $427,000 for RCMP security costs. The numbers contained in the documents are not final, as invoices and claims are still being processed.
Golden spoon baby has grown to believe that he's entitled to whatever his position allows him to get. Born to be an Sob just like his dad
Lol...you went back 12 years for this one.
All governments waste money.
I'm sure that the Conservatives wasted millions while they were in power.
Trudeau and the Liberals have wasted BILLIONS.
They (and the NDP) have wasted more money, more quickly and in more ridiculous ways than any other government in history.
Why would you support that?
Stupidity?
Ignorance?
Mental illness?
Make it make sense.
I want to make a remark about the entitlement issue seen in these recent posts. It is a wide spread issue throughout the world, not just in Canada. I see it in all political parties once they are in power no matter what the level - federal, provincial and municipal. I also see it as a big problem in our private sector. As part of my job, I have made policies to my subordinates about having to be careful with expenses. I have also tried to push this to the wider company. And from what I have seen it doesn't matter their politics. I have seen left wingers try to stay in the most expensive hotels and right wingers guzzle down the most expensive wines. I do not approve those expenses when they come to me. And I think that in private business we need to respect the shareholders. And we very much need to hold not only our elected officials to standards but also any sort of public official or employee. All of us work too hard for our money to put up with this. But let me ask everyone, do you fight this sort of behaviour at work? Or do you just complain? I for one, at least, take a firm hand to control my reports and myself. We all need to do that.
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