It’s pretty sad but he doesn’t even need much of a platform to excel in this election. Just a plan for some basic things, like housing, healthcare, direct investments in each province’s economy, as well as a general outline towards strengthening trade relations with existing partners to make up for US trade losses.
Show that he has a plan, not just some vague goals, and he’ll be a hundred times more appealing than PP.
This is entirely a non-starter. We simply do not have the technology to intercept ICBMs on anything but a local scale. Guarding thousands of km of our boarder isn’t feasible when you have literal seconds to intercept something that could land minutes away. I mean, ICBMs are hypersonic by definition since they fall at a rate of something like mach 20. It’s like trying to stop a bullet by throwing a BB at it. It can only work by placing ICBM interceptor sites every hundred KM or something across the entire boarder.
Imagine funding billion dollar interceptor missiles by the thousands. And that presumes that we have ones that work.
The Iron Dome works because it intercepts rockets that are technologically more similar to WWII Soviet weapons than modern day missiles. Against that, an ICBM is like comparing a hobby rocket to SpaceX’s Space Ship One.
Any serious talk about it is simply grifting, and Canada shouldn’t take part unless if the other side could provide evidence of it working without the projected costs being greater than our entire GDP. And even then, who are we going to use it against? The Russians? All evidence points to them not being able to get their existing ICBMs to work, let alone make new ones. And Canada isn’t in between China and the US, so that’s not a threat to us at all. And that presumes that China can lob an ICBM at several times the distance Russian needs to.
And all this presumes that we can trust anything that’s said regarding any kind of friendly cooperative from the south. First try ending your damn trade war with us, then we can start talking about some smaller low stakes cooperatives before ramping things up to things that has the potential to cripple our entire economy and autonomy.
While I’m not a fan of the fact that so much of Palestine is pro-terrorism, going as far as arresting someone for protesting for the lives of a population in an abuse of authority. Suppressing dissenting opinions in itself is a direct attack on the freedom of expression.
Everybody who’s trying to campaign for a leadership position should have a thorough background check for conflicts of interests and backing of foreign entities. I mean, apparently PP is part of the same conservative movement that Trump heads.
Copying policies that resonate with people isn’t plagiarism, it’s good politics. In fact, it’s real good politics if those policies are actually good, since no matter who wins, Canadians will win. PP is only complaining that he can’t come up with anything to distinguish himself beyond attacking anybody and everybody in the hopes that people will hate them more than they hate him.
Though I don’t think these policies are actually that amazing, that’s beside the point.
It’s not because they’re conservatives that they’re a problem. It’s that they are self-serving morons who constantly shift the blame and divert attention and made their entire careers around such actions rather than holding any real beliefs for the future of their provinces or doing any real good.
It’s not being conservative that makes them into bloated vampires, but that bloated vampires have taken over conservative parties with their superior powers of brainwashing.
To be honest, alternatives to cars is the solution to most issues that have to do with roads in cities. Public transit handles thousands of times the capacity possible via cars. A single bus when things are slow still is more than a dozen times more effecient at using road space, not to mention all the costs involved, including gas, insurance, road maintenance, etc. During rush hour, a single bus can do the same work a hundred cars easy.
Not to mention trains and street cars, as well as bikes and just plain being able to walk around by just having functional side walks that don’t get blocked off at the smallest little thing.
That presumes that they even got power. A bunch of people died in their homes because of the outage.
Tangible proof as to why regulations are important. Red tape might suck for day-to-day operations, but it is vital to prevent major disruptions caused by allowing market forces to do whatever it wants. Markets optimize for profits over all other considerations, while regulations (when done right) prevent industries from taking dangerous risk or work against the benefit of a population for the sake of pure profits.
This is also why we did so well during the 2008 financial meltdown. Unfortunately those regulations were removed since thanks to Harper, so we’re just as vulnerable to such a meltdown as the US was at the time.
Unfortunately for the US, they’ve already been removing protections all over the place, including several states that have legalized children working in factories like the sort of practice that was banned after the Victorian era. And now, entire swathes of regulations are being deleted wholesale due to Musk, and it will only take a small bump somewhere to make entire industries to crash taking actual lives with them, not to mention livelihoods.
I think the crash is inevitable. Auto sales has plummeted in the western world as people are driving less due to having less money to pay for it. Not to mention that so many eastern countries are building auto factories that can sell equal quality cars at a fraction of the price, it’s hard to see any future in the industry even if all this never happened.
We need to move on from auto manufacturing to some sort of higher tech product that is harder to brute force with cheap labour.
A nice little addition is that we control most of the raw resources that goes into producing almost everything we need in the first place, so a weakened dollar due to borrowing and printing for the sake of massive public investments into our own industries actually makes us more competitive on the world market, especially for high end manufacturing or low and medium end that has very little labour input.
And such build-up will benefit the country massively in the long term as well, presuming that we’re not neglectful in keeping them up to date as technology moves on. Not to mention all the employment opportunities this brings.
Canada is a superpower when it comes to energy, minerals, lumber, and agriculture. Not to mention that we’ve done surprisingly little in value added production of our raw resources, especially for selling oil without refining any of it. And delivering to the world market is easy, thanks to the build-up of the St Lawrence over the previous century, as well as BC’s harbours.
This is a problem we’ve had for something like 20 years. It’s not the fault of any one leader, but pretty much all of them for decades. I remember reading an article about immigrant doctors working as taxi drivers in the early 2000s, yet things have only gotten worse.
While I do think that there are issues that a certification gained in one country does not equate to one in another, if we’re working so hard to bring in such professionals, we should also set up systems to update their certifications to local standards. It makes no sense for a doctor to work a decade doing minimum wage when they could go through a six month recertification course then work at a local hospital instead.
Maybe it’s not that easy, but it makes no sense that such a thing is happening when we’ve had a shortage in such fields for decades. And it’s not like money is an issue. These people working high paying jobs would increase the government’s tax revenue by a massive margin, and such recertification wouldn’t even risk they emigrating out since the new certifications would only be good in Canada in the first place.
He refused federal funding years ago when it came with a clause that all the money had to go to public health care until Ontarians found out about this and he backed down and accepted the funding (something like 200 million I think), only to cut Ontario spending on public healthcare and redirect it to private hospitals a few years later.
Ford is Ontario’s greatest salesman ever, selling off the province one sector at a time to his oligarchic buddies, even all the while the courts get inundated with lawsuits due to the laws and contracts he signs. Hell, I think the greenbelt lawsuit is set to start a week after the provincial election. Why do you think he called it when it did?
Take anything a leader says seriously, and at full value. They represent a group, even if that group would rather they not do so, as they hold power to bring what they say at least a little closer to reality (or burn their constituency trying). Just because they say “oh, I’m just joking BTW” afterwards, doesn’t mean that they weren’t serious at the time and intended to do their best to make it reality before receiving backlash or something.
Anything Trump says should be treated as if he has already signed an executive order to make it happen. If he won’t take responsibility for his own words, he should be made to by others, because words, even the most absurd and casually said ones, carry the power of office, and reveals at least a part of the leader’s actual intent.
It is in not taking such words seriously that so many tragedies have happened over the course of history. These days, rhetoric is sounding eerily close to those said back in the 1930s, and I don’t mean only those from one southern madman. Many of our own leaders spend all their time and effort deflecting and blaming others for their own failings.
Fail to learn from history, and you fail to prevent its repetition.
I mean, it’s entirely a given considering that he can’t even remember the excuse he used the last time he complained. Every week he changes the reason and meanders all over the place. It’s not the reason he cares about, it’s the profits he things he can get, especially since he doesn’t pay an American penny to do so. It’s the US public that’s paying the entire way since the southern oligarchs are being paid out to cover their losses.
It’s even worse. The US hasn’t won against an insurgency ever in its entire history. And really, it hasn’t won a single conventional war since WWII either to be honest.
While one side would be forced to fight for its right to exist, the other would be forced to weigh the costs of doing an occupation for decades. Not to mention the hit to moral and public support, which in turn translates to support from your own military.
Frankly speaking, I think the US’s own military would refuse to move if ordered, and Trump’ll have to replace most of the leadership to make them comply. And even then, there’s the thought that most of the soldiers themselves wouldn’t want to raise arms against their longest standing ally.
To that I agree as well. Actually, several companies did that exactly when Trump first went to office and made his original threats. They already stopped taking new orders from the states due to the uncertainty.
That said, it still has no effect on already signed contracts, unless if the customer goes bankrupt while the deal is active or something (entirely possible considering the situation). Otherwise, the reliability of knowing you can renew your contracts is gone, which is why so much of Canadian products are being renegotiated to go to the EU or east Asia instead.
I’m of the opinion nearly the opposite. Frankly speaking, he doesn’t care how much the people suffer. Half the population could starve to death and he’d just shrug and say “skill issue”.
I do agree that what we do needs to hurt quickly, but the target are the oligarchs that Trump listens to, not the common people. I mean, unless if you’re trying to incite a civil war over there, but Jan6 couldn’t even be considered anything close to such a thing, and I doubt they’ll reach that point in 4 years no matter how badly they run things into the ground short of publicly executing entire protest marches.
Hell, we should be tariffing everything from Musk’s companies at this point considering he spends more time coming up with those executive orders than Trump does reading them.
Though many other American services would be more difficult since there’s a serious lack of alternatives to many of them, especially those not also from the US.
No, actually this is the benefit of collective bargaining. When you have a single entity that represents millions of customers, you can say “we’ll take this, but only if you drop the price by half and not raise it for ten years” versus an insurance company that is not only incentivized to take a cut, but often only represents thousands, with the biggest that represents hundreds of thousands being able to point at the little guys and say “we’re still cheaper than them” even if they still charge a hundred dollars a month for insulin.
This is one of the advantages of public healthcare, and why it’s so important we preserve it. Hell, it benefits those that go to private hospitals as well, as everybody benefits from the lower drug prices, not just those who go to public hospitals. Well, except those that sell the drugs, but that’s why so many conservative leaders try to cut public healthcare, because they’re in bed with somebody in the distribution chain, and even if they’re not, they’re easy to bait into taking such measures.