It’s not just that. There’s another way to look at these groups…

Something like feminist equality pushes are basically advocating for women’s rights/equality in areas that are advantageous to women. It makes perfect sense that they don’t advocate for something like equality in terms of life expectancy, or male access to traditionally female occupations, because it’s outside the scope of their mandate. They are not advocating for equality/egalitarian goals, they are advocating specifically to gain benefits (or remove impediments) for their niche group. They don’t totally hide this bias, they put it front and centre in most cases, but the public ‘reads’ it as pushing for equality because of marketing and the inability to question the narrative without being labelled as a misogynistic arse, basically. It’s not just feminist pushes, special interest rights movements in general are not about egalitarian goals / equality, but are explicitly about providing advantages to their special interest groups.

If you remove all the negatives from one side of an equation, without touching the other side, you don’t end up with equality.

“Lived experience” counts for other groups, why would you think it shouldn’t count for us? Plus, surprisingly perhaps, I have a bunch of friends that I don’t work with, where we discuss this stuff. Part of growing up local (though most of my friends from hs are minority folks, technically). I’ve not lilypadded much, so four of my five bosses historically have been women – the majority of most management in those orgs, women.

While I wouldn’t question your lived experiences, my own, and that of people around me in real life who I generally trust more than a rando online, support my viewpoint. This also includes a few managers in the federal government, who are pissed off with the demographic hoops they need to jump through for hiring/promoting people. Like there’ll be suitable local candidates, but the gov forces them to appoint people from the other side of the country to meet the racial quota.

No woman in my age range that I’ve encountered in real life has stories of being denied employment due to their race/gender – unless they’ve immigrated from another country. Many men in my friend circles do. I’ve literally seen women government regulators say to industry “I can’t work with these people”, and excuse almost every male from a board of directors.

I don’t deny that women were treated poorly in generations past when it came to the labour force. My point is that for the current generation that’s coming up, it has been almost completely flipped. The gender imbalance in the federal public service, is now more lopsided in favour of women, than it was in favour of men in the 1980s when this sort of legislation first came in. We reached relative ‘parity’ around 2000 – two decades, a whole generation of people, and we’re still preferencing women as though they’re this poor downtrodden minority, and we just watched that imbalance get more and more out of whack. But there’s no talk of relaxing those pro-woman hiring policies amongst politicians, let alone enacting pro-male hiring campaigns to sort out the “new” imbalance/reality. Just an authoritarian, discussion killing mantra of “Canada is DEI!!”.

DEI and woke stuff is not inherently Canadian. Framing the current issues and political issues with the states, as being “Canada is woke and DEI! And the states hates us for it!” is not helping things.

Eh, I see this guy around and hear his speeches now and then. I don’t really find his speaking points all that convincing, and some are not quite the ‘win’ that gets depicted.

Like saying we all support DEI is nice and all, but he acts like he doesn’t even know what it is or why there are a lot of guys (typically) who are pissed off about it. Like I’m an older millennial, who has memories of being explicitly denied employment with the government because I didn’t “Identify as an equity employment group” – which is defined as any non-male or non-caucasian person (so no cis white guys were allowed to get past round 1 of the application for the jobs I was applying for). I was also asked, and stupidly/naively agreed, to step aside for scholarships/bursaries so that women could win the awards and pad my highschools stats - something that meant I had to work all through university, while those awards went to 1%er women who were too busy vacationing in their summer homes to even bother going to the award ceremonies. Our government literally releases a report about hitting its DEI hiring and promotion quotas – it’s less about finding the best person for a position, and more about determining the minimum requirements, and then shortlisting people based on race. It’s not a meritocracy once implemented, even though its proponents like to claim as such. And from a white guys perspective, seeing a bunch of women and minorities in power, who block you from getting a job / benefits because there are… too many white guys who have privilege… ain’t gonna leave a positive perspective on the thing. Like imagine if everyone you interacted with was a white guy, and when you tried to work with them, they said “Nah man, too many women / minorities work here, go somewhere else” – that’d feel like blatant discrimination, but when the races are reversed its celebrated as DEI.

There’re very real, historical issues that some of us have with these programs and the way they’re implemented. Similar story for being ‘woke’, and how adherence to some ‘woke’ principles means denying science/evidence – Canada implementing legislation that makes it criminal to discuss non-scientific/subjective-based things, like blind adherence to a narrative about history, is an easy example. Rich old white guys pretending like its not an issue, aren’t speaking to the “young” (under 50) disenfranchised male voters who’ve been negatively impacted by it on a personal level. Charlie/the left acting like it’s “Support DEI or else you don’t support Canada!” is nonsense. Politicians / white guys like Charlie, who did well and avoided all the negative stuff about these sorts of programs, aren’t great spokespeople – let’s see some guys who have lived through the negatives of DEI up there supporting it, guys who’ve lost job opportunities / career paths due to its implementation and their gender/race, doubt you’ll find too many who’d cheer it on. Like bring out Erin Weir, the guy who Jagmeet Singh kicked outta the NDP due to an unfounded accusation of misconduct – when investigated, the most they found was that he raised his voice when talking about the carbon tax, and that he stood a bit too close in the elevator sometimes. Get him to explain how his getting kicked out for BS reasons is actually “good” and “Canadian”.

The liberals will likely win this round, but its more because of anti-american sentiment, than a sudden embracing of this sort of nonsense – sorta like ford riding a patriotic wave back into office, despite his policies / history. If the left/progressives don’t pay attention to these sorts of concerns, things’ll just fester. Asking men to vote against their interests didn’t work in the USA. Some areas in the states have realised this and are trying to do better – NBC just had a piece highlighting whitmer and moore attempting to build more programs to support young men. Let’s hope it doesn’t take similar circumstances for the Canadian left to do better.

Issue proper travel advisories, blocking insurance for people visiting the states. An official travel advisory would cut tourist volumes down by quite a bit. No one wants to pay US medical rates.

Very unlikely to happen though.

In context of the Ops article, coming to a nation that’s one “thread” seems to be “We’re not THOSE guys”… when you’re quite literally one of “THOSE” guys… is clearly grounds for concern.

And at a national level, to me as a local, having that be our main unifying thread concerns me.

I’m not as optimistic about Carney, though I do think he’s the most practical choice in the running. I fully expect him to capitulate and sell out Canadians, and to take steps to appease the American administration – he’ll just do it with a sad face, compared to PP who’d do it with glee.

The OPs article doesn’t really touch on the difference of approach to multiculturalism – and I think your take is frankly dated (though true, as I recall hearing it that way in grade school years ago). Trudeau/the Liberals declared Canada a “post national” country around 2015, celebrating that Canada doesn’t really have a cultural identity of any sort, nor any specific ‘thing’ that unites us. So while I agree that minority groups are celebrated, I disagree that there’s a thread connecting us. People are more entrenched in an idea of being part of that minority group, than they are of being part of Canada, or a greater set of ideals that Canada stands for.

For a personal example, it’s true that in school, all minority cultures are praised and the negatives of those cultures are completely ignored/absolved. My Niece has previously come to her parents crying, because at the end of a school ‘lesson’ where they’d learned a bunch of the great things from all her classmates’ cultural roots, there was nothing said about anything great related to third Generation “Canadians” that don’t identify with a specific minority group – or about Canada more broadly. She was just the oppressor / colonial person who was ignored / had nothing special. Other kids take pride, and gloat (as kids do), about their races achievements, looking down on the Canadian kid, which’s why she was crying. As far as I know it wasn’t a ‘lasting’ negativity, as kids move on to other things, but the situation left a definite impression on us adults and our view of the education system. Canadian values, are not a thing. We’re post national.

Likewise our laws and legislation are increasingly skewing in the direction of siding with cultural minority ideals, over broader Canadian values. You can look at the criminal justice system as an easy example, with its mandatory race-based reviews, specifically brought in for FN people. In Vancouver, we had a case where a FN guy literally stabbed an old white guy stranger in an elevator, killing him, and fled the scene. This guy faced zero jail time, as a result of the racial review. Canada no longer adheres to a notion that everyone should be treated equally under the law – we explicitly force the law to treat some groups differently. Cold blooded murder is excusable, so long as the races of victim and perp line up. And the person who implemented the requirement for race based reviews, Jody Wilson Raybould, is a member the groups getting preferential treatment.

This isn’t the only example of racism being excused/defended by our government. Another prominent example is Harjit Sajjan. While our Minister of Defense, he used Canadian Special Forces during the pull out of Kabul, to specifically, and exclusively, target non-Canadian Sikhs for rescue and streamlined immigration to Canada. A Sikh guy, directed Canadian forces, to rescue just his minority group. Our government responded by saying that accusing him of racism, was racism, and would be considered a hate crime… because we wouldn’t think him racist for rescuing just Sikhs, if he wasn’t himself Sikh. It’s an insane argument, as expanding it to other races would absolve all white supremacists from being thought of as racist. So again, the government does not treat people evenly.

Further, many companies are openly racist in the private sector of major Canadian cities. They’ll “hide” behind technicalities, like saying a specific language is required for a job posting – which they can use to filter out any non-conforming race from the list of applicants.

You also see increasing cross-border associations of Canadians with the ethnic identities of people from other regions, more so than with other Canadians. This is partly spurred on by things like the Internet making “staying in touch” with a persons roots, or keeping up to date with the culture of a foreign region, so much easier. For example, Canada doesn’t have a history of slavery (though our TFW program is sorta borderline imo): in Canada, slaves were outlawed long before BC and most provinces joined. In fact, that’s one of the things that we “colonized” out of the FN on the west coast, where ~25% of their population were slaves from other FN groups. And yet, many black Canadians still push a very strong message that we should feel guilty for what happened to them – even though we were literally where the underground railroad ‘went’ for them to have freedom/equal treatment. Drakes posturing as a ‘gangsta’ as an easy silly example. This is in part because of the saturation of our media with US black culture, where this sort of dialogue is far more pertinent. Calls for justice/antipathy related to racism is almost always directed at white people in Canada for a similar reason, as our media is often inundated with the US-centric view of the topic: even though actual events involving racism, such as the VPD cuffing a First Nations grandad for no good reason at a bank, are often committed by one minority group against another minority group.

In times past, if a person of a specific ethnicity, advanced legislation/laws that benefited their own ethnicity, that’d be considered racist / discrimination / wrong. Now it’s considered ‘reconciliation’, or excusable, so long as it’s a minority group promoting its own agenda – calling out such behaviour as racist, becomes a potential hate crime under current Liberal laws. Minority cultural groups are increasingly insular and antagonistic towards Canadian institutions – something like JWR’s legal changes, including the practical removal of Bail requirements for minority groups (which are what caused all the revolving door issues we’ve seen since COVID started), are the very real, and in your face result: it was quite literally a change done for the explicit benefit of a minority group, to the detriment of the general public, carried out by a person in the highest offices in the land, who was a member of the minority group getting privileged. Canada’s moved passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – Section 15(1)(2) were converted into equity employment groups that exclude “just one demographic” (who are increasingly shifting right-wing as a result), and elevated minority interests/group identity above Canadian interest/identity. Gone are our traditions of “Peace, Order and Good Government” that were set out in the Canadian constitution.

The OPs article writer is right to be pensive/nervous in my view. As an American, she/her husband likely won’t fit into one of the privileged minority groups in Canada. And there’s increasingly divisions and conflicts between all of those racialized clusters, who tend to promote their own groups interests over the broader public’s best interests. PP’s popularity isn’t a mirage – and the only reason he’s struggling in the polls at the moment is that pretty well everyone, everywhere in the world, is pissed off / amazed at the crap coming out of Trump’s mouth, which they associated with PP’s style of conservatism. But those issue still remain, festering under the surface – in fact, if the ‘backlash’ against Trump style conservatives causes progressives to go even further on the massively unpopular demographic style politics, as they may take it as a ‘mandate’ to do so, it’ll just make things worse.

And yet the CBC is explicitly reporting on Smith as threatening a National Unity crisis.

Look, it took a while for people to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump “meant it” when he said crap, because what he was saying sounded so far out there. There’s no reason to think differently of any politician, if they’re saying really dangerous shit. A national unity crisis is basically saying she wants out of Canada if her demands aren’t met And she has the support of ‘most’ Albertans, apparently, cause they voted her in, and her party still supports her and her actions. Like even if there’s no ‘recall’ option for her as an MLA, if her party didn’t want to follow the crap she’s saying they could all just stop voting for her crap. Albertans aren’t openly calling for her to get dethroned / booted. To think that they would not, potentially, vote to leave – and/or not stoop to the level of dirty tricks like what we see in the states (Elon’s reportedly paying people again in some election to skew the vote, and gettin away with it) – is naive in my view.

If someone had said 10 years ago that the USA would be talking about annexing Canada, we would have called that a fantasy / no way it’d ever happen. But here we are.

I disagree with this sentiment, to some extent.

For industries and areas considered critical to national security / functions, they ought to extend and enforce a Canadian content like requirement for the sector ownership structure. That is to say, you’d define news sources / papers as an area of national interest, and require that at least 51% (or some other percent) of that industry’s stakeholders are Canadian citizens / organizations.

Blocking all foreign ownership of media is not the direction I would want to go, though I would like it to be transparent about its ownership structure, so that readers can make an informed decision about potential ownership biases in the content they read.

I also wouldn’t be opposed to the Government keeping track of a formal list of licensed News Agencies / Papers, with their ownership structures and official sites. Not only would that make different smaller/local papers easier to find / add to feeds, but it would help in weeding out the “fake” (ie made by unknown/questionable sources) sites. Businesses have to get licenses to operate anyway, so I don’t imagine this would be something too difficult to sort out for the Govt IT folks. Any information they’d require to make it work could be added to the licensing process pretty easily I imagine, and they could theoretically provide options for businesses to update their information in the event of things like site/domain name changes etc (if they expand it beyond just news agencies). They could even tie this in to the ACSS system, or Interac E-Transfers, to flag vendors that have Canadian hosted online payments available, for people wanting to avoid US card networks like Mastercard/Visa. As many business licenses are handled at a municipal level, you’d have in person verification options for all of these items, which could help cut down on potential fraud and abuse. Main hurdle would likely be sorting out how to have the information presented to end users, but if it used a federated approach with clusters for each municipality, province, nation-wide, and international, allowing users to opt in to whichever lists they wanted to reference/search for products, I imagine that sort of an approach could work… ? And honestly, might even give better results for marketing/connecting businesses and customers than something like Google or the existing search engines.

I admit I haven’t really dug into what’s online related to business licences etc as part of this, though I’m fairly sure we don’t have something like that. If it exists I’d welcome some insight.

Frankly, I can’t take anything the conservatives say seriously given their close alignment with Trump-style conservatism. They use practically the same campaign slogans, court the same style of extremist bullshit, and PP even wore Trumps orange bronzer for a bit lately.

Trump’s overtly lying about things like trade deficits, cartels controlling Canada, fentanyl flowing over the northern border, and he overtly mislead people in the USA in regards to things like project 2025. they made it clear that they’d do/say anything they wanted to get elected, and then they enacted policies that they’d previously claimed they weren’t aware of. I don’t see why I would believe a single thing that comes out of the Trump-style conservative party that exists today.

Carney and his policies are honestly a lot more in line with ‘traditional’ conservative principles, along the same line as the Reform party under Manning, and the Cons under Harper. One reason he’s got potential to win a big majority, is that he can bring in many of the voters who normally go conservative, who are pissed off at PP’s bullshit machine and divisive rhetoric.

Quebec already set a precedent that Provinces can theoretically vote to separate. The Bloc Quebecois in the 90s held votes, and the claim then was that a simple 51% majority on the referendum would’ve triggered Quebec into declaring independence from Canada. The blocs remained a staple in Canadian politics ever since, historically promoting “Quebec First” and separatist values the whole time, with tons of support from people in Quebec – one of the big surprises with the US rhetoric, is that Quebec is suddenly seeming more ‘pro Canada’, even while still electing a party who’s roots are separatist. Canada’s a federation of provinces, so it’s theoretically possible for provinces to leave.

If Quebec can do that, there’s no reason to think that other provinces can’t do the same. And if Alberta were to hold such a referendum, and the vote showed 51% in favour of ‘leaving’ – be it through semantic shenanigans on the phrasing of the question, or overt election manipulation aided by people like Musk – it’s unclear how the rest of Canada would react. Even more, if they did that, and Canada didn’t let them “leave”, the US could take that as a justification to help “free” the people and oil of Alberta.

Individual towns and regions might try to separate – in the Quebec referendum, there’d been talks of the northern parts of QB wanting to stay in Canada. Practically though I don’t imagine that’d happen. The division of powers between provinces and federal governments, and the authorities given them, are fairly clear cut. Towns and regions sorta just pop up at resource hubs within the province, and aren’t as clearly demarked in terms of self governance / “the big” items for a nation. Again, we’re a federation of provinces, but provinces aren’t a ‘federation’ of cities.

“This one thing won’t be a magic bullet that saves the environment, so we shouldn’t do it!” … huh?

They’re less damaging overall, and more sustainable.

If/when Alberta and Sask vote to defect, that’s not an invasion. After losing them, and east/west trade is disrupted, forcing BC to also defect, it’s not an invasion. If the US takes greenland, effectively fully encircling Canada and blocking most trade, causing the rest to ‘vote’ to defect, it’s not an invasion.

It’s crappy, and antagonistic/aggressive – but if they don’t move military troops in, and if the “choice” to defect is “voted for” by Canadians who are sick of being embargo’d and isolated etc, then… idk. I think “invasion” isn’t right, and annexation seems more accurate.

Western Canadian here (BC) – I agree with Moe on this one.

Tariffs on them imply they’re still generally safe to use / drive – it’s not a ‘ban’ after all, for being unfit for the road or a security risk. Tariffs make sense to some degree if/when there’s a local industry you’re protecting, especially if/when the good is a luxury.

In the case of EVs though, getting off of gas is a priority in terms of reducing emissions / combating climate change – it’s not so much a luxury even, given how many of our cities are designed for car-oriented travel. I’d rather we had $20k EV options from BYD, rather than we continued to push gas cars and/or EVs that are in the $40-50k from US manufacturers, as it’d mean faster adoption of EVs and faster exit from gas cars. We have literally had multiple cities burn to the ground due to climate change lately. You’d think we’d be above political nonsense on this subject.

I’ve been negative on what’s going on in Israel for a long time, but I admit I’m not overly motivated to go into the streets and clutch my pearls in dismay.

The Canadian govt and organisations in general, to my understanding, aren’t really giving a ton of weapons for use in this crap. And clearly, our government’s stance has basically zero weight with other countries at this point – especially with the USA trying to annex us / starting preparations to conduct a Russian style invasion (they’re listing ‘fentanyl’ as a WMD next, so that they can use the tiny amount that crosses their border as an excuse to invade their neighbours it seems).

The issue of the USA falling apart, given its historic central role in most western/democratic pushes, is a bigger issue for most of us, than the deterioration of an area that lacks democracy. I mean, the USA’s authoritarian trend is what’s enabling Israel to do these things in some ways. The states falling apart is also a lot more ‘directly’ impactful for citizens in western countries – we notice when the USA decides to wage an economic war against us, more than we notice the atrocities occurring on the other side of the world.

There’s also only so much time you can dedicate to ‘protesting’, in between working a regular job to provide for your basic necessities. People’re tired man, and focusing on the protests that mean the most to them.

So in regards to payment cards etc… the CC’s basically have three primary benefits to them: 1. They can do ‘quick’ settlements for in person POS services. 2. They are generally accepted for online payments far more than other methods. 3. They provide access to credit / funds that the customer/user may not normally have access to, in exchange for a high interest rate on amounts owing each month. This also allows people to make larger purchases periodically, and pay off the purchase price over a slightly longer period.

For item 1, the physical cards are not that different than the regular debit cards that get used. There’s nothing ‘technically’ stopping a debit card from being mapped to a line of credit account on a banking system – such a card would be able to get used anywhere debit cards can get used, so pretty good market penetration off the bat. Only thing potentially stopping the tech side would be ‘paper’ agreements with interac etc… but those are ‘easy’ to change with enough demand. So you’d potentially need some adjustments from industry to accommodate this, across the payment switch providers and back end orgs.

For item 3, the availability of credit on those cards / accounts is entirely do-able through a small FI – historically, they offered lines of credit based on ‘signatures’ / ‘a promise to pay’ and good general payment standing at a credit bureau. Canada’s regulators changed much of that, forcing industry to heavily preference real estate backed loans – debt servicing risks for cc ‘personal’ locs are generally offloaded onto the credit card company directly. So the govt would likely need to relax their regulations on this front, otherwise its untenable for a small FI to provide credit based on signatures. In some ways this would likely be better for the end user, in terms of rates and limits, as a smaller FI, especially one that’s cooperative in nature, is less likely to push exploitative rates/conditions.

To clarify how that’s controlled by regulators: in BC as an example, the BC FSA regulates Credit Unions, and it also oversees the Credit Union Deposit Insurance Corporation – the thing that insures the CU’s deposits. Credit Unions pay premiums to CUDIC based on the “risk assessment” of the FSA. The FSA rates you very risky if you do signature loans / stuff not backed by RE or other ‘fully funded’ types of securities (eg. a $5k line of credit, ‘secured’ by a $5k term deposit). The annual cost difference can eat up like 30% of the small FI’s profit, if they’re deemed risky. Unless there was some way to ‘make up’ that loss via the ‘risky loans’, it’s not a viable business decision for CUs to take – especially when you add in the need for slightly increased monitoring for more ‘fluid’ payment accounts. Best to keep the regulators happy, to keep your insurance costs as low as possible. So you’d need govt to change its approach.

For item 2, there are lots of viable options for online payments already – the issue is mostly user adoption and business standardization / app availability. For purchases that aren’t ‘in person’, having a slightly longer settlement time isn’t a big issue – if you’re buying a thing online, in general, who cares if the payment is ‘instant’, or if it takes 15 mins to clear. Things like the interac e-transfers are able to route payments to people in this fashion, and are heavily used in some areas currently – paying trades, paying rent, paying kids extracurricular, and anything where ‘cheques’ use to be a norm. AFTs are also still used for many ‘bigger’ bills/companies, but they’re decreasing in popularity – there are fewer millenials/genZ who are using AFTs for payments, and fewer businesses that go through the process of getting it setup on their end to allow for it. That last parts a similar impediment to adoption of etransfers more broadly – you see CC payment options for most online purchases, but you almost never see e-transfer options… even though they’re functional for regular person to person payments. Having a business email setup with an auto deposit isn’t too difficult – as noted, many small contractors go this route – but its not common at larger businesses… for no particular reason.

All that on item 2, is basically to say you need to get most businesses to adopt a ‘standard’ method for online payments. If every shop you went to had a different ‘payment app’ you had to download, create an account, transfer money to the account, to use the account… it wouldn’t have general end user appeal due to its burden. Credit cards have a simple, ubiquitous standard that’s got a ton of apps and plugins to accommodate – we’d need similar embracing of a, general industry/economy/nation wide approach.

All of these things are do-able, if there’s political will. But only if there’s political will. If you look at the financial industry, they’re generally in bed with US/foreign tech companies these days. Even our govt is run on Microsoft. Getting people to move away from American options would require clear messaging from regulators of “critical infrastructure” industries (like banking), and potentially options for government support as part of those tech migrations (tax breaks to hire specialists/retrain people/develop different apps). Like a positive step would be seeing the BC FSA charge huge “insurance” premiums for Credit Unions which are almost entirely in Microsoft’s cloud / US controlled infrastructure. We don’t see any of that currently – instead, we see regulators like the BC FSA shrugging as the industry debates whether online banking portals should be outsourced to a company in Portugal, one in India, or one in the USA (the Canadian CU Trade association, central1, recently walked away from this service area – with their CEO even getting a bloody business in vancouver award for abandoning it). We likely won’t see anything ‘material’ on this front until after the next election at the very earliest, is my guess. But even then, I doubt they’ll put the kind of urgency on it to avoid this sort of thing becoming a potential issue in trade talks.

Should pivot into being Amazon like, with the current dept stores shrunk in number and converted into primarily distribution / fulfillment centres. Block/tax Amazon to allow local options to compete/enter the market.

Ride the pro Canada / anti American wave.

Not entirely opposed to it, though it needs transparency and some ‘post implementation’ checks imo. Emergency responses, especially to international things, are usually better organised at the federal level too… I’m not too keen on provincial leaders acting with an international scope. That sort of thing leads to situations like Alberta licking Republican taint, with people accepting it as normal for provincial leaders to do that sort of international “diplomatic” blowie.

In some ways, the more concerning bit is hearing that they get 50% of their electricity via the columbia river treaty. So BC isn’t ‘sovereign’ in its power generation, despite generally presenting that image to the public for a long time. You’re not really in control, if a ton of your stuff requires the Americans to follow through on paper agreements.

We likely ought to also diversify our power generation methods, given climate change can potentially hoop hydro. Nuclear power takes years to get built, so they ought to start talking to the prairies about gettin some reactors goin in BC – I think it was like Ontario, Man and Sask that were working on mini reactor options, which’d make sense for us to position in areas further away from the border. There are also micro power generators that can be setup on smaller rivers fairly easily, with less impact than the current massive hydroelectric dams we’ve built – those likely have a far shorter lead time to get built, and would be “Canada”-centric in nature, so also worth exploring.

So… at about 9m16s, he admits that it’s not just the conservatives that do this sort of thing / have authoritarian undertones. And he’s right… but it’s a point that’s downplayed. Most political parties are marching to an authoritarian drum at this point.

I disagree, especially when focusing on Public Sector Unions. Making arguments about the cost of a service compared to the wage, is nonsensical when discussing public sector employment – 80-90% of the cost is the wage, and the ‘value add’ is nebulous and undefined, removed from regular market pressures. Trying to equate the job security provided by public sector unions to private sector business realities is also not convincing – in private sector, if business is stagnant/declining due to a recession, you fire people – doing so may allow you to increase wages for those who remain, though they may also need to increase efficiency/productivity. The OPs article is basically about unions wanting to ignore market realities… something that public sector unions do all the time, as they don’t need to look at the ‘cost’ side from a market perspective. They just yell at the government to tax us private sector workers more.

Unions have a purpose and a function, yes. But in public sector they are detached from market realities, and have skewed public sector employees into a position where they are the subject of private sector anger. It sets the stage for Republican style/Musk style cuts to gain support amongst the voting electorate – so regardless of whatever high horse pro-union people want to perch themselves on, its folly if they don’t take this disparity as a serious risk.

Even the Ops article belies that unions are no longer about ‘regular’ working class people – the letter is specifically saying that the unions are petitioning to provide better Employment Insurance options for “high earners”. So these salaries, that are well above the Canadian average need our government to increase the payouts to help protect those unionized workers from potential job losses? If their high pay is justified by high demand, they should be able to get other employment quickly in their field… but that whole letter sure isn’t about protecting the ‘regular’ common workers, and its the sort of statement that’s just going to antagonize private sector workers who earn “regular” wages. Why should even more of a waiters paycheque go to paying taxes, so that an Airplane Pilot can have an easier time if they lose their top 5% salary job?