Jason2357 @ Jason2357 @lemmy.ca

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239

Joined

2 yr. ago

It's not about how much it generated, but about nudging people who are already looking at doing something, to chose the lower carbon option. If people are suffering, the rebate should be increased.

Now that the Liberals have done this once, our next conservative government will be able to butcher it with vanity exemptions all over the place, just like Harper loved the vanity tax credits to buy various voter segments. It will be useless before long, and just a bunch of unnecessary administrative baggage. They won't even need to cancel it, because handing out exemptions will be so politically profitable.

The whole point with a carbon tax and rebate is that it doesn't come with all the administration and inefficiencies of picking and choosing things to subsidize and things to penalize. As soon as you start exempting this and that, you blow that out of the water.

The correct response is increasing the rebate to rural households, who statistically, rely more on oil heating, or increase the rebate across the board temporarily.

All this does is take away a very solid incentive for people who are currently looking at upgrading their home heating to chose a lower carbon option. It's also not fair to people who recently did upgrade their heating systems, based on the expected costs.

I actually think we should just start an old-school crown corp that directly competes with the grocery stores. That's what crown corps used to do -push the private sector to do better through competition aimed at serving an important public need.

The crown corp could sell basic foods; produce, bread, simple meats and dairy products, and at a very low margin. The private grocers would have to compete either by tapping into that mysterious private-sector-efficiency to beat those prices, or via luxury grocery products that draw in customers. The crown corp could either build it's own supply chain, or rely on auctions, as needed.

Good news. The consensus seems to be that we can solve all this with EVEN MORE!

Your political choices are "do very little" and "give the capitalists everything they ask for" and we are all done trying the first.

Yep. Profits, dividends, executive salaries, even the companies themselves are acquiring a nice stock portfolio of themselves: https://www.canadaland.com/loblaw-metro-empire-stock-buybacks/

mediabiasfactcheck.com is useful for it's "factual" measure of sources, but the right-left spectrum is based on what Americans consider "right" and "left" -so what they consider "far left," outside America is probably just "left." They label a lot of international centrist media sources as "left" too. What they consider "least biased" is going to be straight up capitalist.

Go ahead. Vent away.

There may be those who interpret the above as anti-democratic, and it absolutely is not. Constitutional democracy aims to create safeguards that protect minorities against majority will. They are weak safeguards, but they are not undemocratic.

Not just to prop up O&G company stock prices, but also to further their long-running process of tying absolutely every Albertan's financial well-being to O&G. Right now, if O&G drops, yeah, Albertans will lose jobs and the province's social services go unfunded, but they still have CPP to rely on. With this change, their retirement will also vanish.

The more they go "all in" on O&G, the more every voter in Alberta absolutely NEEDS the O&G industry to remain profitable. Keep that going, and the political party that is most pro-O&G will stay in power perpetually.

She references white phosphorous being used in the conflict. From what I've read, that was a propaganda piece on social media that actually used a picture from Ukraine. Spreading propaganda without verifying sources is a big line to cross. *edit: there are now somewhat more reputable accusations of white phosphorous being used, but not yet independently confirmed.

There's also the repeated references to settler colonialism, which is an over-simplification that deliberately chooses to ignore the long history of the region. That over-simplification goes beyond criticizing the government, and de-legitimizes the right of civilian people to live in the area in which they were born, and which they have a long history on the land. The quote goes way beyond just criticizing Israel's military actions.

That appreciation you have seen on your principle residence isn't really accessible though. You have to live somewhere. If you were hit with capital gains tax on your primary residence, it would impart a whole lot of financial friction on ever being able to move.

Let's say you need to re-locate, or upsize/downsize; the house you are moving too also has appreciated, but you have to buy that house at the new, appreciated price, and ALSO pay the capital gains on the 400k. That financial friction on being able to move is bad for everyone. It keeps people in inappropriate houses, or commuting long distances, and doesn't do anything to improve housing affordability.

It does effectively become a transfer of wealth (from lack of taxes) from young to old, as they downsize, and reap the financial windfall. However, that could be clawed back with estate taxes. If you penalize downsizing, you create an even bigger incentive to stay in oversized housing, as you mention. If anything, not being allergic to property tax increases is probably the only thing that would encourage people to rightsize.

Thank you for being so transparent about the fact that your position rests on children being property that are inevitably owned.

Anyone reading this thread can see which side of this issue is the one that cares about fundamental human rights.

Okay, now your argument has officially gone off the rails.

To clarify my point, governments don't have rights, they have powers. The charter grants people rights. The notwithstanding clause gives the province a power to override a charter right. Exercising that power only ever removes people's rights. And yes, the country can become less free if rights are overridden. Nothing necessarily "balances that out." Losing charter rights is often a very bad thing, and even if it's necessary in a particular case, everyone should be honest -it's a loss of rights.

That's a strange re-definition of a "right". I guess if you re-define the word to encompass any sort of government power. Too bad we live in a world where words mean things.

Hopefully, we don’t see any backsliding federally with Trudeau’s personal lack of popularity giving any inroads to Christofascists in the CPC.

It's hard to be optimistic here. I'd like to be. They don't even need to court the christofascists right now. That protest seemed to be rather integrated with the PPC, so maybe they still have enough steam to split the right vote a bit.

I'm not sure that helps. Here's my thinking: When it's done in bad faith, it's usually used for a populist cause, even though it's ultimately illegal. A snap election just lets them ride that popular support to another government, and as usual, the legal ruling comes much, much later. I don't really know the solution. The legal system is necessarily very slow, and that's a good thing, but it means that a politician can basically ignore whether a bill is legal or not, as they will never see any consequences.

Huh, I had suspected a lot of conservative types see everything as a zero-sum game, but it isn't usually presented so obviously.

Clearly, this isn't the case. Let's say we delete the right to freedom of religion in the Charter, and ban Christianity from our country. No one has gained any rights. In fact, we all lose a right, even non-Christians.

The Premier does not understand that there is a violation of rights.

If this was true, they could pass the legislation without the notwithstanding clause.

No, it doesn't take away or give rights to provincial or federal governments. They don't have charter rights in the first place, only individuals have charter rights.

The notwithstanding clause permits the province to override people's charter rights. That may be justified sometimes, but it shouldn't be framed as anything else. It's removing rights, not granting them.

Care to elaborate? Husband and father here, currently looking into an assessment.