The burden is on people who understand what the notwithstanding clause means to explain to the less educated how dangerous this game is.
Do any of your friends and family know what this clause means? Every time I bring up the topic outside of politically active circles, I get a blank stare.
This proposal is illustrative to what’s at stake here. I’ll write an opinion piece on this later today.
It’s important to the world to drop the “quietly” bit.
The US administration is behaving erratically and irrationally. This isn’t a punchline to some smug joke, it has important repercussions for world trade and defence needs.
Let’s cut the conspiracy theories about how they are doing this for graft, and the unfounded “4d chess” approaches. Some people in the administration may be trying to steer the government in these ways, but the captain of the ship is an unleashed chaos monkey surrounded by sycophantic yes-men.
The tariffs could double tomorrow or be gone tomorrow. The US could invade Greenland with a military force tomorrow or drop it completely move onto some shiny new idiocy.
We in the rest of the world need to move with urgency in order to be prepared for the worst. This is a tall task, so the longer we keep these admissions quiet the longer we are vulnerable
If it was just the Byrne one I’d give it a pass as a bad joke.
But the notion of the CPC undermining the electoral process here — a real threat, considering their maga ideology — is not a joke. We need to discourage those elements who seek to discredit the vote outcome, not stoke those elements for some short-term media cycle.
It’s an irresponsibility dangerous game. If this story is true, those partisans should be immediately fired and permanently barred from political involvement going forward by the party.
I have repeatedly and consistently agreed that Israel uses human shields, because it is true.
You know just as well as I do that Hamas uses their own people as human shields. Their entire operation is to hide amongst their civilian population and infrastructure and use that as cover to attack and kill.
The difference is that you agree with the objectives of Hamas, and so you don’t want to acknowledge the horrors of the tactics they use. Seeing the situation as black and white with “your side” as the unassailable heroes and the “other side” as villains.
But I reject this childish outlook, because it’s not a movie it’s real life. The govt of Israel are indeed villains, but so are Hamas.
I disagree, I believe that both have well-intentioned people both amongst supporters and candidates. Many of these feel disenfranchised by the CPC and LPC, and have opposing interests and preferences which would otherwise go unheard.
But FPTP frames the voting process as a zero-sum game. In the current system they are incentivized to either abandon hope in an alternative to these or split the vote. They didn’t create the system to be how it is, and they both would very much prefer the system to be different.
So I reject the casual and dismissive nature of your reply here. May is using a cynical political calculus here to get what she wants — and it feels wrong to blame her for this in isolation when you can find the same types of behaviour from other leaders. Hell, even how Carney removed a carbon pricing policy that he assuredly still knew was the best policy — something I just endorsed in the parent comment — is the same sort of political calculus.
Do I wish that May wouldn’t be disengenous here for short-term political gains? Yes. Do I wish that Singh wouldn’t regurgitate CPC talking points he knows to be false? Again, yes. I hate that they are doing this, but it’s not because they are part of some conspiracy it’s because that’s what I assume they feel is the necessary evil to advance the causes they believe in.
TLDR can we just fucking kill FPTP please for just about anything else?
The conservatives successfully poisoned public perception of carbon pricing via willful lies, framing the (real) inflationary pressures felt around the world as being a locally Canadian issue and specially blamed on “the carbon tax”. This was aided by Trudeau’s lack of focus and his failing to ensure that the policy was a success, but PP and his legion of brain rotted influencers are the primary culprits.
Without ending the “carbon tax”, it was almost certainly inevitable that the CPC would win this election. It sucks, but it’s extremely difficult to paint a picture otherwise.
Carbon pricing is good policy. More than that, it’s the best “neoliberal” approach to controlling carbon emissions. Carney knows this as well as do, he argues for it quite persuasively in his book.
But it had to go, because letting PP win and sell the county to foreign oil extractors would be multiple orders of magnitude worse. And we will still get good carbon policy implemented by focusing on the industrial polluters with the stick and end consumers with the carrot. This doesn’t have the same market efficiency as carbon pricing, but it can be effective and will hopefully be more resilient against the attacks by the brain-rot peddlers.
I get it. May wants to pile on Carney because he’s winning and because there are scarce few voters who would be swayed from CPC to Green. But it sucks if these misleading messaging efforts take root — if they do, we all lose big.
Vulnerable groups find comfort in not being the group currently being targeted, and irrationally think their support will prevent them from being targeted in the future.
The burden is on us to keep underlining the point again and again, for all time, to all vulnerable groups: they will turn on you next.
I am not saying that Israel and the IDF have not used human shields. They absolutely do and you’re 100% correct to condemn this. And I join you in this condemnation.
What am also saying is that people should stop lying in order to defend Hamas. Because you can condemn the govt of Israel without doing that. And the condemnation is more compelling when it’s not accompanied with lies of convenience.
Your comment here being a good example of how that’s done properly. Everything you said is true and it paints a damning picture that is impossible to argue against.
Speaking of obvious falsehoods, I'm going to ask you to provide a single verifiable report of Hamas using human shields from anyone not directly tied to the Israeli state.
The part of your question that I bolder here shows that you’re well aware that as I stated, Hamas uses human shields frequently. You just think that’s it’s justifiable, and you’re free to do that.
But don’t say it doesn’t happen. It happens every day.
You can make an extremely compelling argument about the horrors that the govt of Israel and the IDF are doing without resorting to obvious falsehoods made in defence of Hamas.
I’m not saying we need to adopt some “all sides bad” enlightened centrism bullshit. If you want to focus only on the atrocities of the govt of Israel because that’s your passion: go for it. Call them out for what they are.
But please don’t defend Hamas or pretend they aren’t also committing atrocities. They do use human shields, constantly. And the atrocities done by Hamas do not take away from the absolute horrors of what the government of Israel is actively committing.
When these falsehoods emerge, it makes the argument against Israel appear delusional and undercuts your implied objective. And it’s not necessary! There is so much widespread harm that we can point to, we don’t need spread falsehoods for that.
For sure! We all live in these same bubbles to various extents.
I believe that the 51st state threats were a wake up call to many Canadians to the reality of what’s going on. That we couldn’t just coast in our bubbles and hope everything would be okay.
The maple maga don’t interact with any Liberals because their toxicity has pushed them away. They don’t get news or media from any sources that don’t tell them what they want to hear.
In the bubble they have created, they don’t hear many voices opposing their worldview and the few that do get through are shut down cold.
Time will tell if PP will stoke those flames after the election like his American president and hero did.
There is sufficient evidence to decisively conclude that no, it won’t work. It will result it severe crowding of jails based on inconsequential crimes. Period.
We need a story to handle repeat offenders. They aren’t wrong to say that the current approach isn’t working great. But they are massively wrong about the solution, and are again showing the dangers of having an incompetent populist run a major party.
There was a nascent calexit movement when I lived there but it had the stink of a Russian psyops campaign. This stifled a lot of interest in the issue of any existed in the first place.
Even if the absence of a strong “buy Canadian” mindset I think people would reward an alternative to the retail landscape of today.
People over-focus on Costco’s pricing and under-focus on how they provide a good customer experience. They don’t play the retail games of boosting prices and then cutting them for a “sale”. They promote generic otc medication instead of only pushing expensive brands. They have good quality products, not cheap crap that looks good but doesn’t or doesn’t last.
So yeah it could be a great outlet for quality Canadian products but I also still want quality imports from our allies in Europe and Mexico and Asia and beyond. HBC could be that, if I had a billion dollars that’s what I would do.
I'm pretty sure there are a LOT of voices for American states to disentangle themselves from the USA
When I lived in the US (left in 2018), there was zero appetite amongst politically active people to change this. If these feelings do exist now I’d expect them to be in their infancy.
Would love to have someone show me counter-indications though.
The burden is on people who understand what the notwithstanding clause means to explain to the less educated how dangerous this game is.
Do any of your friends and family know what this clause means? Every time I bring up the topic outside of politically active circles, I get a blank stare.
This proposal is illustrative to what’s at stake here. I’ll write an opinion piece on this later today.