Canadian Federal Politics Thread v5

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Pretty much.

Budget deficits don’t matter because Canadians are no longer serious people. Our expectations of what government should deliver vastly exceeds our willingness to pay for it. And we blame everyone but ourselves.

This column captures the country’s current zeitgeist:

…It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning of the slide, but gradually over the course of the mid-2000s the list of policy failures began to strongly outweigh the list of successes. For instance, we allowed public services (both federal and provincial) to atrophy to the point where they were clearly inadequate to take on complex challenges like the pandemic. No effort was really made to try to bend the cost curve in health care, which was rising at 6 or 7% per year. Why bother, when provinces could blame the federal government for “underfunding” even though expenditures were rising far faster than inflation? Despite promising developments in post-secondary education and research, we chose to reduce real public funding to those sectors, freeze domestic tuition fees and rely instead on international student dollars to fund the system. And the less said about our attention to basic issues of adequate housing support and functioning public transport systems the better…

Why did it all happen?

Maybe it was because we grew tired of austerity. Maybe it was because the country wasn’t facing an existential threat from Quebec anymore. Or maybe it was because, in the mid-2000s, with wheat at $10/bushel, oil at $100/barrel and gold at $1000/ounce, money was pouring into government coffers and we all felt unimaginably rich (remember the summer of 2006, when the dollar was at $1.10 US and it felt like you were losing money every second you weren’t at a Nordstrom on the other side of the border? Good times, if brief). Whatever the cause, all the things that made us “cool Canada” started to go into reverse.

For many years, thanks to the commodity boom, we thought we were richer than we actually were. So we awarded ourselves tax cuts under Conservative governments — the most egregious of which by far was the two-point cut to the GST in 2006 — and higher levels of social benefits under Liberal ones. Always in the name of “affordability” or “middle-class living standards.” Little by little, the policy bias increasingly came to favour jam today over jam tomorrow, and individual pocket-books over the long-term health of systems and institutions.

Meanwhile, the commodity boom slipped away and we found we had not done the work to prepare for anything to come after it. Cue five years of flat-lining growth, followed by panicky multi-billion dollar subsidies for foreign battery plants to pretend we had a plan all along.

We now see where this has led us: dysfunctional government, unaffordable cities, economic stagnation, post-secondary institutions reliant on funding from India, and a foreign policy manifestly unfit for the increasingly dangerous world we now live in.

Twenty years ago, we were a serious country, which met challenges in a serious way. Today, we are but a shadow of that country…

We can blame politicians if we like. Lord knows there is enough blame to go around. But fundamentally the problem is us. Canadians. It’s not that we are incapable of dealing with big challenges: our return from the brink 30 years ago proves that we can. But instinctively, we seem to shirk from challenges and hard choices until is absolutely necessary to make them. We have come to dislike talking about trade-offs. And over time, we have come to reward the politicians who tell us that they do not exist.The politicians who know how much we love fleece…

https://paulwells.substack.com/p/com...elves-to-death

I’m not optimistic that any genuine systemic reform will happen until we’re waist-deep in a fiscal crisis. The health care capacity crunch earlier this year is just a taste of what we have in store for us.

[GGG]

C-69 being pulled is good news for Alberta. Make money, tax carbon, invest money into transition. The making money is important. But unfortunately we will piss away our last boom.

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by GGG

C-69 being pulled is good news for Alberta. Make money, tax carbon, invest money into transition. The making money is important. But unfortunately we will piss away our last boom.

Hahahaha yeah that ain’t happening.

[Yoho]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1713291279063261255

[Wormius]

Did you read past the headline?

[Yoho]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Did you read past the headline?

Yes.

[Wormius]

And do you have your own thoughts or are you going to just keep spamming the political threads with tweets?

[Yoho]

Originally Posted by Wormius

And do you have your own thoughts or are you going to just keep spamming the political threads with tweets?

It’s recent Canada politics news read it or don’t.
The article says everything.
Singh def losing votes in his own party.

[jayswin]

Originally Posted by Winsor_Pilates

They're the NDP; someone else will pay for it.

Hahahahahahaha, good one!

[Harry Lime]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

We could try meeting our NATO obligations on defence spending. We could try not being the laughing-stock of the Western world when it comes to domestic security and intelligence.

Australia isn’t in NATO but it has the confidence of the U.S., UK, and other allies. It’s trusted in intelligence and military planning.

Canada has come to be regarded as a freeloader. We enjoy all of the benefits of belonging to the Western power bloc, but we won’t shoulder our share of the costs. What we mainly bring to the table is the ‘soft power’ of high-minded rhetoric.

So when a Canadian citizen is assassinated on our soil and we go to our allies about it, why should we expect them to offer anything more than “Yeah, that sucks… but whaddaya gonna do?”

We are always going to be a footnote to the Americans. That's why I don't understand why we don't pour money into intelligence, or drone R&D, or something where we could actually make a difference.

[Jacks]

Originally Posted by Wormius

And do you have your own thoughts or are you going to just keep spamming the political threads with tweets?

There is nothing wrong with posting a tweet to a story from a major news outlet, people post tweets all the time without commentary. By your rules Sureloss shouldn't be allowed to post.

Tweets from joe blow partisan crackpot are a different story obviously.

[Wormius]

Originally Posted by Jacks

There is nothing wrong with posting a tweet to a story from a major news outlet, people post tweets all the time without commentary. By your rules Sureloss shouldn't be allowed to post.

Tweets from joe blow partisan crackpot are a different story obviously.

I didn’t make any rules, but yes, there is an obvious difference between the two posting styles and how they contribute to the board. These aren’t exactly breaking news or even very newsworthy, so without even sharing a little bit of additional commentary, I don’t really see what the purpose.

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by Wormius

I didn’t make any rules, but yes, there is an obvious difference between the two posting styles and how they contribute to the board. These aren’t exactly breaking news or even very newsworthy, so without even sharing a little bit of additional commentary, I don’t really see what the purpose.

Disagree in this instance.


I didnt know he had lost delegate support which is very newsworthy (It's the lowest confidence vote for an NDP leader since Tom Mulcair, who was rejected by more than half of delegates at the party's 2016 convention in Edmonton) and i would expect to be one of the top stories on the 11 o clock news on CBC and CTV. Especially because the NDP have drawn a line in the sand to continue propping up the Liberals.

Would it not be newsworthy if it was Poilievre or Trudeau? Of course it would.

[Jacks]

Liberals are going to have to give the NDP pretty much whatever they ask for at this point. Every pollster is showing a 12-14pt lead for the Tories, Grits are in Dion territory, an election would be a disaster for them. Get ready for even bigger deficits.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by Yoho

It’s recent Canada politics news read it or don’t.
The article says everything.
Singh def losing votes in his own party.

A crushing blow going from 87% to 81%. Don't know how he'll survive.

I honestly can't decide if you're a troll, this god damn dumb, or just some geriatric ####### whose adult children try to avoid as much as possible.

[Yoho]

Originally Posted by rubecube

A crushing blow going from 87% to 81%. Don't know how he'll survive.

I honestly can't decide if you're a troll, this god damn dumb, or just some geriatric ####### whose adult children try to avoid as much as possible.

“ It's the lowest confidence vote for an NDP leader since Tom Mulcair, who was rejected by more than half of delegates at the party's 2016 convention in Edmonton.”

Just a heads up I’ve now added you to ignore. I honestly feel bad for you if that article triggered you so much.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Yoho

Just a heads up I’ve now added you to ignore. I honestly feel bad for you if that article triggered you so much.

Hahahahahahhahabaha

That’s rich coming from one of the most “triggered” posters on this sight.

[puffnstuff]

TIL that 81% is basically identical to less than half

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Yoho

“ It's the lowest confidence vote for an NDP leader since Tom Mulcair, who was rejected by more than half of delegates at the party's 2016 convention in Edmonton.”

Just a heads up I’ve now added you to ignore. I honestly feel bad for you if that article triggered you so much.

Is this like the time you pretended to put me on ignore and then kept responding to my posts?

[NinePack]

That was done kinda quietly, the gun buy back/amnesty was pushed back for 2 years.