I’m curious – I’ve looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn’t feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there’s a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service… ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can’t get tracked through a payment?
Lots of people seem to think it’s either or, and it really shouldn’t be, in my view. (I’ll note I’m canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).
The argument that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other ‘regular’ forms of expression I’m totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.
But we’ve also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of “peaceful protests”/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We’ve seen large, organized groups of Indian students – their messages of “go get free food” being amplified by foreign controlled social media – draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We’ve seen ‘protests’ leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.
And that’s really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They’ll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They’ll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both “Hamas is bad” and “Israel’s genocidal actions in gaza are bad”, but somehow it’s always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you’re on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we’re accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren’t the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.
So I’m fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person’s involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they’re a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some ‘student’ groups in Canada) they’re actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I’d also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don’t renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn’t be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.
And again, similar to the note about ‘one side or the other’, in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a ‘right’ for most sane people – at least, not one that wouldn’t come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he’s free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.
Yes.
I haven’t really spoken to any of my green reps before, in terms of them running for the seat. I have had interactions with my NDP MLA and MP, and have been left thoroughly disappointed with the results.
I don’t think a whip position is really that big a deal for a party, until they have enough people elected to make it matter.
So the argument is what, that the white people who had a ‘role model’ for their kids shouldn’t be annoyed that the industry is removing that role model, because race shouldn’t matter. But also that race representation matters, and that it’s important for other races to have representation by taking over the roles of those figures.
It doesn’t upset me, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Like I accept that parents want to have positive role models that ‘look like’ their kids, as it helps kids development. So it makes sense that minority groups want to see themselves represented as such in media, and that they’d celebrate established characters being swapped over to be their race/gender. However, that same line of thinking explains why white people are annoyed that their kids are ‘losing’ role models that ‘look like them’. If you assert that ‘race matters’ (and I accept that it does for kids), then it seems reasonable to be annoyed that those characters are being ‘taken away’ for practically the same reason that it seems reasonable for minority groups to be happy to see themselves represented. If race representation matters for the character and kids having positive role models, than its arguably worse to disenfranchise the larger group of kids.
I mean, we’re busy watching young guys flock to alpha dumbass influencer bros, in part because there are fewer and fewer positive role models for them to look up to.
In Canada its termed EDI https://www.canada.ca/en/research-coordinating-committee/priorities/equity-diversity-inclusion-research.html
We do see requirements for people to state whether they’re an Employment Equity group – or rather, options to positively identify as an employment equity group so that you can get passed that ‘check’ on the hiring process. The government of Canada will literally send you a note saying you’ve been kicked out of the application pool for ‘not’ identifying as such on their forms, for example. And the only group that isn’t an employment equity group, are cis white men. The checkboxes to identify as FN are also “optional”, but generally translate into more benefits/privileges in hiring and so on.
The Employment equity act is a derived document that changes the Charter’s general assertions in 15(1)(2) into specific groups which, the verbiage of which excludes only cis white men. The Charter says “no discrimination based on race/gender”, the EEA says “you can positively discriminate in favour of any group except cis white guys”.
No, I’m not surprised in the slightest by either of these, seeing as I’ve known about these things for decades, and seeing as I’ve received “You didn’t identify as an Equity Employment Group” rejection letters from the federal government in the past.
Scarlet Johansen as the Major in Ghost in the Shell Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Dr Strange Controversy around characters like Iron Fist etc
Asian fictional characters often get white washed. Results in protests from minority groups who feel they’re being denied representation in their own culture’s created artwork, and roles in movies/shows – just like how replacing caucasian fictional characters results in protests from groups who feel they’re having their cultural representation in media suppressed by minority interests. But whatever man. Guess those dont count.
The people who cheer for the replacement of historically caucasian/male gender roles with minority actors/women, are the same people who protest the replacement of historically minority/women roles with caucasian/male actors. And they wonder why there’s push back.
Eh, good luck to them. I find it hard to take them seriously at this point, though I’ve historically voted green in most elections. Their leadership fiasco recently was an absolute embarrassment, and honestly a huge blow against the DEI policies they encourage. Having May there again is also a bit of a flag, as going back to the previous leader who wanted out makes it seem like there’s a real lack of leadership options / sustainability in the party’s gov structure.
Their candidates are pretty clearly still heavily fringe oriented, with very hard left leaning stances when you read through bios. This time around it seems like my local candidate has very questionable qualifications, basically just being a FN grandmother with five kids of her own at ~45. I don’t see how that’d represent me/my interests locally or nationally in the house, especially as a non FN. They’re still beating that demographic politics marching drum, but it cuts both ways. You can’t realistically put a candidate forward saying they’re all about their own demographic interests, and supporting their own demographic slice, without alienating people who aren’t part of that slice. Especially if there’s no other substance to the candidate.
The party’s ‘platform’/position on topics isn’t really costed out from what I could see on their site. Tons of spending, main thing they seem to note for generating revenue is the ever nebulous ‘closing business tax loop holes’ type thing. They seem to imply they’re going to create redundancies in some areas of gov, whole new agencies, make good on every costly suggestion of the MMIWG, and on and on. Feels hollow to me, especially seeing where the markets are currently.
Top that off with some of their positions being a bit vague, and potentially really authoritarian. Like saying they’re going to make online sites subject to the same regulation as publishers in regards to hate speech etc. Suddenly community forums like Lemmy would potentially be liable for anything anyone writes, if that’s implemented the way it’s described. And as a far left party, they’d uphold the most restrictive/authoritarian definitions of what constitutes hate speech I’m sure.
Saying we should have a Canadian made EV isn’t saying we should priortize cars. It’s a relatively marginal item, with low relative cost, that the guy is saying we shouldn’t do. Saying we shouldn’t do a low cost marginal thing, and should instead focus on spending huge amounts to re-orient city infrastructure so that bikes become the primary mode of transit, is a far bigger / more complex / more costly shift – and one that he argues should be made at the cost of relatively small changes in the existing industry. If you aren’t bothering to weed your garden (a low cost task to maintain your theoretical personal green space), because someone convinced you to build a trebuchet in your backyard because its a far more interesting thing to do than weed your garden, you’ve abandoned your garden. If in order to build that trebuchet, it needs to have large building materials strewn all over your yard, crushing your existing bushes, you’ve definitely given up on having that garden.
And if you get frustrated and abandon that trebuchet project part way, your garden is just toast. Prolly would’ve been better off just weeding it.
Like a third of the charter of rights and freedoms is about language laws and french/english. Even as a west coaster, I highly doubt there’s a scenario where Canada doesn’t side with Quebec on this front.
So option 2 it is – but that’s their endgame anyway, they’re just hunting for an excuse to do it anyhow. Thats been clear ever since he dredged up Fentanyl as a boogeyman. Just hurry up and diversify trade more – I’m fairly sure we can find other markets for most goods. Any business that’s just sitting there hoping this will blow over, and/or that the government will bail them out, and isn’t taking direct actions to mitigate this issue that’s been months and months in the making… deserves to fail.
Might work out, might not. It’ll be interesting to see more of the details.
One item I don’t see any of them talking about though, is addressing the regulatory hurdles around alternative banks offering more options when it comes to the underwriting and mortgage qualification. One common reason people are locked out of the housing market, is that they can’t qualify for a $1500/month mortgage, so they’re stuck paying $1700 rent instead, which is nuts. And the reason the banks – or more specifically smaller lenders who specialise in mid-market families (ie. Credit Unions) – can’t make these sorts of deals work, is that the regulatory bodies would smash them with huge penalties/fines due to it being considered “riskier” underwriting. Admittedly CUs are provincially regulated, but if we’re looking at it as a national issue then there should be broader discussion about these sorts of items amongst all tiers of govt – sorta like how health care is technically a provincial concern in segregation of power, but the feds have significant influence over it.
In times past, or more specifically in the 1980s where some of Carney’s ideas are coming from, there were more small Credit Unions doing mortgages outside the regular range of the federal banks – so if you were a ‘fringe’ borrower, you could still get your foot in the door, just with a different route than a traditional bank. This wasn’t a huge risk to the industry at large, as each of those CUs was small – if any had taken too many bad risks, it would be easy to let the organisation ‘fail’ and disperse its members over to new CUs. It’s less the case now, as the regulators have pushed CUs to merge into far larger organisations and shrunk the count of CUs industry-wide – meaning if something like Vancity went down, there’s no ‘safety net’ from other CUs able to absorb it and it’d inevitably hit the government books. And because of this, those same regulators force the system to be rigid and conform to explicit guidelines on their lending practices, with relatively minor wiggle room for boards/policies. Their efforts to minimize risk, choking the industry to death slowly, and removing financial supports from traditionally under-served demographic segments.
Like here’s an example that I know for a fact Credit Unions used to be able to offer to people, with some conditions/qualifiers: you could get a personal loan for a low rate to cover a big portion of the down payment on your mortgage. So if they felt like you could take on a bit more debt for the near term to get into a home, ie if they saw you paying $1700/month in rent and that your mortgage was gonna be just $1500, they could basically make that work with a far lower down payment.
You’d have to gender swap all the non Fry male characters into obsessed sex addicts wanting to jump Fry.
Ok look. Just because you’re part polar bear, likely covered in a thick coat of fur to withstand the frozen death tundra of the north, doesn’t mean us regular normies can do it.
An ‘ok’ video, but it misses a lot of the Canadian context of DEI and CRT stuff, much of which has been institutionalized for decades. It’s too focused on recent trends with influencers and US politics.
I’d typed up a big description of that missed context, references/links to the Charter/Employment equity act/supreme court rulings and all that, but it was just so, so long. And based on experience, pointless to explain in online discussions.
I will say though that when I bring these sorts of things up, a big reason I think this is such an issue is that I do think there are inherent bias’s and issues in systems. However I’m more concerned with broader economic class disparities then racial ones – people with dental issues and low income have it rough and deserve a hand; it’s not helping to specifically target low income seniors support programs as though being a ‘senior’ makes you more worthy of help/govt funds. The implementation of DEI has basically been weaponised by the upper class to refocus the anger of the lower classes against one another, rather than against the super wealthy, and that men/white men have specifically been isolated “from the rest”. You can put out a corporate policy saying hiring needs to be done through an inclusivity lens, and it allows you to give jobs to just the upper class minorities and discriminate without hesitation against the lower class majority: a third generation millionaire trust fund minority race woman with barely passing skills, is more worthy of employment in the eyes of the govt than a higher skill lower class background white guy quite explicitly with how the govt handles its hiring. Putting a focus on supporting women and minority rights, gives the facade of permission to ignore inequalities that exist between economic classes of men, or people in the broader aggregate. The government/elites don’t need to fund / maintain safe third spaces for most of the unwashed masses, if they can sell the idea that only a minority of the population needs those sorts of privileges. They can fund woman specific outreach and support programs, and half ass the opioid crisis for a decade or two while its victims are 75% men. As long as you can get the lower classes focused on racial/gender issues, it’s a lot easier to cut the top income tax bracket from 70% down to 38%. It’d be interesting to see a study on the correlation between DEI/CRT programs and broader income inequalities between the top % earners in the country over the past few decades - they’ve definitely both been on an increasing trend since the 80s, when Canada started doing DEI due to the charter.
The videos note on Bernie – and Bernie’s comments post election about how the democratic party has become too mired in identity politics that it had turned its back on the working class of the country – are apt. But, by the guidelines that the Government of Canada puts out, expressing this sort of sentiment is racist – if you’re concerned more with broad economic inequality/class without respect to racial lenses, the guides say you’re racist. To me, it’s the same sort of insanity as the people who say you have to support what Israel’s doing in Gaza at the moment, or else you’re an anti-Semite/Nazi/terrorist. You can both condemn Hamas, and also condemn Israel’s genocidal actions: but the dominant power structure / elites set up the discussion as though there are only two teams/positions, then force people into one of the two camps, and proceed to make them fight one another. It’s unproductive in terms of getting a sane / human rights encouraging / life benefiting resolution to the conflict/discussion. It’s good in theory, but in practice it’s anti-progressive/anti-egalitarian. Sorta like how most people view communism – ok in theory, but in practice it’s pretty well always been a tragedy.
Shifting to a bike-centric cityscape is a huge shift in infrastructure, if you start mapping out all the components that need to come together for it to happen at this stage. Like I live in Vancouver, where our council has for a few decades put a heavy priority on building segregated bike lanes and connecting paths that are pretty well totally removed from cars. I happily ride my ebike around the seawall during the spring/summer/fall a couple times a week. The weather is mild, albeit rainy, pretty well all year. The terrain is generally pretty darn flat. We’ve had local e-bike vendors for a long time. We have bike share stations provided by Rogers (formerly Shaw) along most major transit routes. That’s still not enough to make vancouver into a bike-primary transportation city. Hell, with reports of ebike batteries exploding periodically, one thing you’d need to add in is mandatory secure ebike parking in condo buildings (we recently had an apt building go up because of it, causing something like 24 people to become homeless) – which’d mean all the older buildings would need to retrofit things. The list just goes on and on.
And again, in the context of “change all cities in the country to preference ebikes and alternative transport” vs “build EVs in Canada”, the former is far more drastic. So if someone wants to put it forward as a realistic/plausible option, beyond just fantasy, they need to really spell out how it’d function, the cost variances / savings they claim would occur, and all that jazz. I’d love to see how it’d be economical for tiny towns in northern BC/Alberta to switch to e-bikes as a primary mode of transport, I just don’t think it’s realistic. It’s the more extreme position to take, so someone should back it up. And, like I said earlier, if they can do that they ought to pitch it to the greens.
Women generally have enough advocates already. They have over 5 years more average life expectancy than men, yet the media is flooded with women’s health care needs/concerns. There are reasons why the right-wing message is appealing to so many men these days, and it isn’t because they’re doing great – just looking at the statscan info on university grad demographics, where white guys were around 20%, white girls were around 30%, and asians were around 50%, and I gotta wonder why we keep treating the white guys as a privileged group. The data doesn’t support it so much anymore. Just because one group was treated poorly in the past, it doesn’t justify treating others poorly in the present – especially as that generation has/had no say in the matter that they’re being punished for.
That said, yes, when an equity issue is raised that impacts women, I’m staunchly in favour of having it addressed. I mean, heck, I highlighted gay men as a group that was specifically screwed by the move, which isn’t ‘typical’ cis white right wing guy speech. I like to think myself more an egalitarian in that sense.
Out here on the west coast, I try to hit Blendz most times I’m caffiending, or a random non chain spot. The Blendz white mochas are delicious though. Pretty sure they’re Canadian based. The availability of alternatives is why I’m a bit surprised Starbucks hasn’t felt a pinch with the buy Canadian movements goin on.
I’ll need to keep an eye out for Cage Morgane if/when I’m next back east. Thanks for the tip.
It’s vaporware until its commercially available.