I’m hesitant on solar in the first place. It’s marginally economical in Southern Ontario, but far worse so anywhere else and will require quite a lot of land clearing to make work even before considering the usual issues with it. Wind is good, but I’m with you on nuclear. That’s the way to go, and Canada is making good progress on new nuclear projects. We’re one of the tops in the world for nuclear technology and have one of the world’s largest uranium reserves.

That said, I think it’s only the prairies that even have coal plants anymore? Ontario hasn’t had coal in two decades, and Quebec is virtually a hydro superpower. If I remember right, for electricity generation, 70% is already non-carbon emitting. The real problems I believe are the vehicles and heating homes with natural gas. Oh, and apparently resource extraction is the second greatest source of CO2 in Canada.

But really, 20% comes from cars and trucks and is the single greatest source of CO2 in Canada by a massive margin apparently. And we just scrapped the only effective way to fight that source.

While as stupid as separation is when the biggest Albertan customer is already gouging the province in oil prices, I really think it’s the scandals we should really be concentrating on.

This is all just a distraction, and Albertans need to call for a public inquiry on all the corruption allegations, the healthcare scandal, her bribery charges, etc. A ten second search and the number of scandals and allegations regarding this person is staggering and makes Doug Ford look like he’s just stealing cookies from the public in comparison.

While true, quite a few provinces have massively reduced traffic at the border. Ontario’s the lowest at 40% reduction, but some provinces are as high as 80%.

Of course, that doesn’t include air since the most uncancellable trips are those done by air, but unlike air traffic, ground traffic is a greater combination of Canadian and American traffic, while I think air is more purely Canadians going to the US, with US business in Canada making up a smaller portion.

An 80% drop in traffic is even worse than it sounds when you realize that there’s a ton of Americans coming over to grab cheap medicine and other small things that won’t change much just because of all the Tariff stuff that’s going on.

Frankly, I’ve been growing to care less about news related to Alberta separatism and other absurd stuff coming out of the province, especially after I heard a particular opinion on it: that it’s just deadcatting. Smith’s got a bunch of lawsuits and corruption investigations going on that she’s been doing tons of shady things to push back these last few years, and is doing everything she can to avoid public attention so that Albertans don’t start rallying for a public inquiry.

She’s literally diverting public attention at things that could get her arrested for life with all this separation talk, because no matter how corrupt and unethical her behaviour is on this issue, it’s not illegal so nobody can do much about it beyond booting her on the next election.

Rather than the shitty laws she’s putting in place and calls regarding separation, people should be calling her out for all the investigations she’s under and calls to make such investigations public rather than to confidentially report to her own party and even block federal investigators.

For me the second 50% was so that we get a leader that wasn’t calling specifically to erode Canadian rights and services while giving billions in handouts to the rich.

Frankly, while it’s early on, it is impressive how Carney really is focusing on Canada first over parties or personal interest. Even if I don’t agree with many of his views of how to fix the country, so far he’s shown to have integrity and the right heart, and that’s enough for me to respect him, something I don’t do for PP or Singh.

Honestly, I think every successful meeting with him is basically just this. It’s what Russia did until he started to realize they’ve been fucking with him for the last few months. Zalinsky too, until Trump said some stuff he couldn’t let go.

Carney’s two for two on this one for sure.

I wasn’t the one you originally responded to, but I do appreciate the acknowledgement.

And yea, I wish more people in Saskatchewan thought for themselves and the alignment of their interests verses those around them. Especially when Alberta keeps treating your province like their little brother and drags you guys through all their shit. I mean, they keep going “Oil Oil Oil” and yet Saskatchewan isn’t even a major producer. The province has completely different strengths yet so many are content blindly following Alberta, and Alberta taking that sentiment entirely for granted.

I get that you guys have the same “not being heard” issues, and can feel it since I hear so little being an Ontarian myself. Just wish that sometimes when I hear anything about Saskatchewan, Alberta isn’t in the same sentence.

I return the same words. What about the Uyghurs, or the Tibetans?

That still doesn’t account for the roughly 40% of votes that went to him during the election.

I think foreign interference was real and quite pervasive, but people didn’t realise it was foreign interference because it was so blatant. I mean, most of the big social media companies are owned by far right US companies, and all private Canadian news outlets are owned by far rights as well. And every single one of those touted far right rhetoric constantly with almost no left representation.

Hell, just ask the average Canadian where they get their Canadian news, and I’ll bet a third will say Facebook, despite Meta banning Canadian news from the platform because they didn’t want to pay taxes.

Banned pesticides and fertilizers are banned because they leave traces that are harmful to the human body. Otherwise they generally won’t be banned in the first place. So all they have to do is take random samples and do proper checks. If it was impossible to detect the presence of after effects of such banned substances, there would be no point in banning them since the end product would be no different from normally grown varieties, hence no reason to ban them.

That said, I don’t know how good our processes are, but I do think that more funding needs to be allocated now since the FDA won’t be doing any of their own testing. Turning cargo back at the inspection centers would be an easy way to ban US foods without changing a single law or policy in the country with a high degree of deniability that this was the intent in the first place.

Raise it’s people out of poverty, right after starving the entire country almost into oblivion you mean? Rural Chinese aren’t even that much better than where they were a hundred years ago. Hell, parts of rural China is far worse than it was back then since at least there wasn’t any government interference beyond taxation back during the previous government.

Emperor Xi is not doing a single thing for the benefit of the Chinese people. Every single metric that can be backed up with physical evidence shows that China is in a serious decline right now, and it’s entirely caused by their government. You say that China is justified in doing what it is doing, then you say that their aggression towards their neighbours in the South China Seas is justified? Ramming their fishing boats against coast guards? Sending thousands of fishing boats just outside of the EEZ of Argentina? Performing highly aggressive and potentially lethal stunts to harass neighbouring patrol planes doing completely legal and globally standard regional patrols because China decided to enact territorial laws that haven’t been enforced the entire time the CCP had existed?

You are making completely bad-faith arguments. I’m not the one being racist here. Especially since I am a pure-blooded East Asian myself.

I don’t think this is Carney’s intent at all. I think this is done fully expecting PP to be just as petulant as he’s been all this time. It’s to show that he’s just as terrible as everybody who voted against him knows him to be, and to make his supporters start to really think about who they voted for. Not to mention that PP will accomplish absolutely nothing as the official opposition leader, since Carney only needs three seats to vote for anything, and he can get that from the NDP that’s most closely aligned to the Liberals, or even the Bloc that have openly stated to form a ceasefire as long as Trump continues to attack Canada.

It’s far better than risking the Conservatives getting an actually competent leader that can rally their constituency when they’re already looking like they’re breaking at the seams. By allowing PP to have a seat and be official opposition leader, it makes it harder for the Conservatives to remove PP and put someone else in, which puts further strain on their cohesion.

I feel like Carney’s move is an attempt to make the Conservatives break apart with the realization that this election was the best chance they had at gaining power in a long time, and things will look worse because it’s almost impossible for Carney to screw up in ways that’ll make his support weaker the next election as long as he continues to play hardball against Trump.

At the very worst, he can treat the guy like a mild annoyance, since no matter how loudly he yells, it’s easy to ignore him when the Conservative vote means nothing in this virtual majority government.

To extend to this, the rest of the British Empire at the time did massive contributions. The Aussies did real work during the Africa Campaign, even holding a town that single-handedly crippled the Afrika Corps’s advance towards Egypt (also Egyptions doing some great work supporting Commonwealth troops as they prepared for the counterattack), countless Indian sacrifices all over the place despite Churchill causing more Indian deaths than the Germans at the same time, New Zealand giving a good show despite basically not having an economy or a population at the time. Frankly, you can point at almost any part of the commonwealth, and they all punched way above their weights for this war, and that doesn’t even start talking about the British homefront.

And outside of the colonies, Poland really carried hard on several ways, from volunteers flying during the Battle for Britain, to a single small destroyer soloing the Bismark for an entire hour screaming at the battleship dozens times larger than it (the full story of the Piorun is insane).

Either way, tons of recognition is deserved all around, not just pointing at the UK, Russia, and the US.

It certainly is possible. Most people have shitty memories for anything that they’re not passionate about, and very few people are passionate about politics or how things change around them. Just the latest outrage article more often than not.

But I do think that there is also a connection to the fact that the left is sorely underrepresented in social media as well. And I don’t just mean in terms of content creators, but platform owners as well. After all, even if most tech bros that started up all our favourite online media giants, once they reach the top, every single force in the capatalistic world that let them get on top is now a force that drives them hard to the right. Legislation makes it harder to earn more money when you’ve already squeezed out the easy and legal opportunities. The left is all about change and democratizing things, where the corporate giants have already consolidated so much of the economy that this is a legitimate threat to their power. Not to mention that making it easier for entrepreneurs to start up new companies without relying on venture capital influence to avoid the risk of personal bankruptcy is a direct threat that may topple their empire if they can’t buy them out (or will be bought by someone else who already is a direct threat).

And then there’s the fact that advertising money flock towards right wing content creators because not only are they more commercially safe since they are far less likely to call out corporations doing bad things, but they’re also more willing to take money from unethical sources. I mean, how often does right wing youtubers advertise energy drinks and protein powders? Or what about supplements or “muscle enhancers”?

The double whammy of right wing media giants and right wing content creators make it really hard for the left to get their voice out at all, especially to the young who exclusively get their news from these sources.

I mean, imagine how many think that the stuff they hear on facebook is actual legitimate news despite them officially not allowing Canadian news to be advertised on their services?

Frankly I find it amazing that Albertans aren’t the most acutely aware how fragile their economy is. They’ve suffered several oil crashes, even two in the last decade or so, and yet they feel like they’ll do better without Ontario and Quebec to prevent a total economic crash any time oil prices dip?

And this is at a time when oil prices are already starting to fall, with pretty much every forecast blaring out that oil will become nearly worthless by the end of the century, if not within the next two decades?

Oh, and this is even before considering that the only other province that has a snowball’s chance in hell to give Alberta a hand once there’s no federal government to force the provinces to work together (even marginally), is Saskatchewan. I strongly doubt that BC would allow Albertan oil to pass through their province if the Feds wasn’t there to make them play nice together. Maybe natural gas, but definitely not oil. And in such a case, the only significant buyer of Albertan oil will be the the US, and I would bet actual money that the first thing they’d do would be to ask for a discount on oil, because they know it is litterally the only thing preventing Alberta from becoming a 3rd world economy.

These numbers are really encouraging. Voter participation has been a serious issue on all levels of government for a long time, and hopefully this is the beginning of a reverse in trends. Canadians need to at least pay a minimum of attention to what their leaders are doing or else they’ll just do whatever they think they can get away with.

So many Canadian leaders sneak in absurd laws and policies and Canadians just don’t notice or say anything, and I say this in regards to all parties. Not saying anything, especially during elections, is a tacit approval. Because showing disapproval is the only way to make governments know that they can’t get away with ignoring the public good in favour of personal agendas.

I think even worse than voting for fear and resentment, they voted for actual fascism. The guy openly stated that he was going to try to ignore Canadian rights and freedoms without any ambiguity. It’s not like him twisting turning Canada into a 3rd world resource economy as a great boost to the economy, or that saving the 1% billions in taxes as a way for the average Canadian to save their money.

One of PP’s mandates was to use the notwithstanding clause to bypass Canadian rights and freedoms to jail people without a trial. It was one of his platforms, and there was zero ambiguity that he intended to do it exactly as he stated.

The fact that this wasn’t a red flag for over 40% of Canadians and an immediate reason to distance themselves from him, it honestly scares me. Because this is how Hitler and Mussolini came into power, along with many other of history’s worst leaders. They sounded reasonable at first, with only one or two shady bits to their mandates, only for those shady bits to be the core that started the greatest evils in the world.

This is simply history. You can read about it in normal everyday history books of any sort regardless of affiliation or background.

I’m not trying to give a one-sided impression of what happened, but simply counter-arguments to your statements, which is why I didn’t bother to reiterate your own points. I’m not saying that what you said was all wrong, but that it was only half the story. I provided the other half. If you consider it illiterate propaganda, then I suppose all hail the Han dynasty and all of Earth awaits the day they overthrow the whites in Confucius glory or something.

This is extremely narrow and one-sided. This problem went both ways.

For example, when western diplomats went to China to negotiate trade, they were often thrown out for not bringing convoys of gold and silver as tribute just to talk to the Emperor, since in those days China was such a local superpower that the very concept that a foreign nation wouldn’t kowtow and beg for scraps at the Emperor’s feet didn’t exist. They thought that diplomats daring to stand without groveling in front of the Emperor was a direct insult and verging on a declaration of war.

This is why so many western diplomats simply went around the Imperial court, which is also a significant reason why the opium wars happened (though not exclusively. The west is heavily to blame for escalating and taking advantage).

Both sides refused to back down, so it both underhanded means as well as military force was utilized. Neither side accepted to consider the other as an equal, so when a clash of needs and desires came about, physical domination was the only possible result. Nowadays, China is still using the same principals that the Emperors of eld held, but is trying to use the west’s old methods back against them.

I wont say that the west isn’t at fault at any point along the way, but China’s means and motivations are equally as bad and there is no justification aside from greed, pride, and envy for what they are doing. People complain about all the stuff the CIA’s been doing, but you have to ask yourselves, how do you justify China sending thousands of fishing boats just outside of Argentina’s EEZ? You know, in Atlantic waters, not even Pacific ones.

And this isn’t even starting on how China keeps making artificial islands in the south China seas to extend their claims on territorial waters, boxing in the Philippines, Indonesia, and the other local powers that are still so poor that the Halifax-class is more like a battleship compared to what their navies have.