Yeah, he’s also a raging alcoholic – like town drunk levels in one of the communities he’s got one of his houses in. He’s got at least four homes around the world, and jets back and forth no doubt. He’s got 5 kids of his own, yet preaches that people shouldn’t have so many kids. He lives a very high-polluting lifestyle for someone that built a brand on being green.

No western country is likely to step up at this point, in my view at least. The conservative leaning folks are going hard into authoritarian xenophobic trends, and the left leaning folks consider anything that alters the existing culture of an area to be genocide.

The latter is really kinda tragically hilarious, cause we see countries like Canada declaring themselves genocidal and shaming their non-indigenous population as though they’re monsters, while simultaneously defending Israel’s actions in regards to Gaza. There’s even talk of making it a crime to question how horribly genocidal Canadians are, and also to make it a crime to say anything bad about Israel. If we see a religion-backed school, we’re to think “genocide! You’re attempting to subvert the student’s cultural religion and norms under the guise of teaching people to read and write! Their traditional culture doesn’t have reading or writing, you’re genociding their oral traditions too!!”; and when we see a mass grave filled with civilians, we’re to think “Totally justified, those bulldozers are just defending themselves against the toddler / journalist / civilian corpses, and mass graves are just practical! No moral issues or crimes here! Definitely not a genocide”. These things were brought forward by our left-leaning government parties. Not sure if those’ve passed yet, but they’ve definitely been on the table.

The first time I heard Bowinn Ma’s name, it was in relation to basically flirting (implied sleeping) her way up the political chain. I think she was even flirting heavily with a married liberal politician (her opposition, then the party in power) to get insider details on what the other party was up to – pretty sure one of the guys was rich coleman. A dude who was like two or three times her age, and overtly corrupt (he’s the guy who had a special investigator team of anti-money launderer dudes come to him and say “stuffs getting laundered like crazy in BC!”, and his response was to dissolve that team and ignore it).

It’s like she was intentionally flirting with Jabba the Hut. Or purposely trying to get Harvey Weinstein alone in a hotel room cause you know if you fuck him he’ll give you a movie role. I really can’t take her seriously as a politician or in any leadership position.

Strange semi related old person story – back in highschool, one of our teachers had the class write essays on whether nationalism was good or bad. We were then given an option to either present our papers, or do a debate exercise with a kind of round robin pro or con. So you’d partner with 1 other person, debate if it was good or bad, then groups of 4 doing the same, until it was the whole class. In my paper and in my discussions, I had used a similar approach as this comic – basically just establishing what nationalism was vs patriotism, and drawing nazi’s in as an example too. No one in those discussions contested that Nazi’s were nationalists – but they still argued in favour of it.

By the end, I was the only person who thought nationalism was overall ‘bad’. The tide had turned in the groups of 8 stage. Because a hot girl had declared her support for nationalism. That’s all it took for people to like/excuse nazis, even back in the early 2000s. An excuse.

If people paid attention to his history, yeah, they’d see it. What Carney did at the Bank of Canada and his various comments there are pretty telling.

The 2008 financial crisis, we avoided the worst of it because Carney and them were ‘slower’ to roll out the same dangerous lending practices that we saw down south, but they were still going forward with them – we just had less exposure at the time the US popped, so they were able to quietly prop up the big banks (and just the big banks, they let the smaller ones figure it out themselves) using the CMHC. Canada’s small FIs, Credit Unions and such, got through it without a scratch, because they weren’t in to risky convoluted mortgage block trading, and had various safeguards in place already like a shared liquidity pool. Carney’s reaction to Canada doing so well in 2008, was to demand that the industry align more with the international standards which had allowed for those issues to occur. Things like the shared liquidity pool were dismantled as a result. Fast forward, and Thiel and his buddies pop SVB – and suddenly regulators are making noise like “Maybe banks and FIs should have some kind of shared liquidity pool for this sort of issue!”. Carney’s comments at various events also displayed a blatant lack of understanding for the smaller financial industry players in Canada – likening Canada’s credit unions to spain’s private banks (which were run by oligarch-ish families, with zero underwriting due diligence).

The guy trusted the international community hierarchy / structure, more than the Canadian system. He trusted that hierarchy even after it had failed, while the Canadian approach had more success. He forced Canada’s FI’s to align with worse-practices, just because it aligned to international norms. He is not pro-Canada, nor is he pro-small business.

He’s still likely better than PP would’ve been.

In this case, it makes sense though. The recent techbro crypto bank announcement, a bank created by the same tech billionaires that intentionally crashed/destroyed SVB, is basically a play to shift the American financial system into stablecoins / cryptocurrencies entirely, as it’s something that the tech bro class figures they can control for their own benefit.

That’s all moving ahead on schedule, and is in line with Curtis Yarvin’s whole techno fascist monarchy dream for how democracies need to die. They really only need to appease Trump for so long as it takes to get control of those purse strings. Egging on destruction / chaos for things like social services also feeds this pattern, it’s easier to convince someone they need to make drastic changes to their home, if that home is currently on fire.

Having a constant tech-fascist publicly whispering these sorts of things in Trump’s senile ears helps to keep up the facade within the maga-bubble that it’s a “broadly accepted” approach to benefit everyone, that’s been agreed upon by a bunch of “data driven” science types, when it’s absolutely not. It’s tech oligarchs looking to dismantle and own most western democracies.

It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.

Bill C-5 is a lot of nodding and ‘trust me’ type arguments that get made by a liberal party that’s designed the legislation to be ‘reviewed’ after 5 years, meaning its highly likely that it’ll get used by another party - which could happen quite quickly even, given the minority govt status. Also, for its nation building projects clauses, ask yourself whose rights/interests are getting suppressed, and which nation owns the businesses that will be building those projects. It’s generally American owned / head quartered companies, getting assurances that the pesky locals rights won’t get in the way, from our own government. It is quite explicitly selling us out to foreign business interests.

Like even the reactors that Ontario (in partnership with a couple other provinces, I think) is building, are American made from GE and rely on Uranium that we ship down to the USA, they then enrich it and ship it back to us to power those plants. Or the Avro Arrow that Ford trumpets all the time, which was always a concept car / “platform” to sell component contracts to foreign companies. They put cheaper EV’s for everyone in Canada on hold, because Ford wanted to try and appease American car dealers. They’re aggressively pushing things like OpenBanking, even though practically every Canadian financial institution is outsourcing that functionality outside the country (even most “local” CUs now have their websites hosted by an Indian company) – some even “disclose” all their member information to India/US-based AI companies, because I guess there’s a low risk of it being regulated by the Carney govt: he’s very bullish on trusting big tech to be country agnostic, despite countless examples to the contrary. Suppressing privacy rights would be an easy way to green light large government AI integration, particularly with foreign company involvement/control. These things are not nation building, nor are pipelines owned by US interests. But those are the sorts of ‘projects’ that this kind of legislation will most likely target.

The original commentor’s note seemed to imply Carney was playing some sort of ‘4d chess’ bullshit, dangling keys and then ditching something we’d always intended to ditch as a ‘show’ to appease the orange guy. Your response noted that the tax was put in fairly recently, and was set to kick in officially this month – basically questioning the original guys narrative. You add in the question about wheat, which I’m still not sure where he got that.

So yes, I agree with your skepticism related to this being some fancy political footwork that’s actually in our best interests, and the implication from the OP that we were ditching a tax that we’d never intended to bring in.

Your response even supports the comment that the move is objectively against our interests, and pro-US tech giant. Your optimism and “wait and see, mayyybeee”, are naive. We’ve already conceded that tax, without getting anything in return for it, as well as any other area of internal domestic policy as there’s a clear precedent now – if it were part of negotiations, it would be getting discussed as part of negotiations, setting up an exemption for US companies or whatnot. We just handed them that item on ‘good faith’, with a dictator. Heck, during the election, I’m fairly sure I heard a quote from Carney about how he wouldn’t commit to anything publicly prior to negotiations, because it’s a weak approach where you basically give stuff away - but they did just that in this case.

The questionable bills, and general de-regulation / removal of environmental reviews, are in line with US interests at present, which are backed by tech giants wanting to take more control / have more autonomy. The continued (over) reliance on US tech services is also clearly not in Canada’s best interests, given how the US has been leveraging their near monopolistic status in that realm. Many of our newly elected government officials got in on a promise of standing up to America’s authoritarian bullshit, but once in power have basically complied and made similar authoritarian steps.

*if your MP is a liberal.

My MP is a useless NDP, has been for decades now. She’s gotten my riding pretty much zero dollars of federal investment / business. She only cares about women and immigrant issues. If you write to her, she’ll literally respond with shit like “I’m not sure, but women don’t make up the majority of board members in private industry yet, so we gotta keep funding more women’s only issues and initiatives! Donate to my re-election campaign!”.

Anyone in a party-‘lock’ riding, especially if it’s locked to a party that never gets a majority, is just unrepresented.

I agree with your skepticism on this one.

Especially given what we can see with regards to US tech companies being complicit with a bunch of the authoritarian stuff going on down south, moves to disrupt their monopolies and try and foster a more local industry makes a ton of sense. Many of Carney’s decisions lately align with US interests more so than Canada. It’s not overly surprising, he’s not pro-Canadian companies / people, but pro-business and international trade (at the expense of locals if need be), in a fairly generic neo-liberal way.

Also, bending over right before Canada day is just such a dick thing to do as PM. He should be trying to lead / inspire national pride, not appeasing foreign interests, for at least like 1 week of his term.

Still prolly better than PP would’ve been though. With PP we would’ve had Elon here Musking up the place.

Dude should license some Basil Poledouris theme music. Get some wizardy guy to do a new intro – maybe ask Bernie for a hand. “Let me tell you of a time of EQUIIITABLE treaatment!!”

A conservative literally went and shot a sitting democrat politician and her husband dead. It was a news story for about 10 seconds before being replaced by the latest Trump shenanigans. They’re literally assassinating / murdering democrats in their homes man, and no one in America seems to care all that much.

And you think something’ll happen if they deport a dude who is just… in the running for mayor?

Yeah, ok, sure.

Totally misses the point. I don’t think anyone I know started avoiding US products to try and “hurt” the USA, we’re not idiots thinking our tiny population is gonna have a huge impact on their economy or anything.

We avoided their products, cause they started making threats / acting hostile towards us, and we’d rather our money go to support either local Canadians, or to support companies from countries that aren’t threatening us / acting hostile. We didn’t/don’t want to be in any way reliant on someone that views us as an enemy, nor do we want to support the fascist crap that’s going on down there currently.

Most likely it was a move primarily about getting senior level execs at those companies into the military machine – and into the chain of command of that machine. It makes those companies ‘disclosing’ data to the military much more likely, as well as tweaking apps to aid in military operations.

Like havin the CTO of meta “in the circle”, likely gives them complete access to meta’s tracking data for any target they want, in a more efficient way than previous.

Such a wimpy style of governance from the look of all these proceedings. Even if there are legitimate complaints, the person ‘getting grilled’ could practically sit there singing the alphabet, and the outcome would be the same.

It’s like those odd sport interviews where the person just responds “I’m just here to not get fined” to every question – ie. I’m forced to be here for pageantry/contract reasons, but there’s no real point to any of it. Both the questions, and the answers, are ultimately pretty meaningless.

I laughed when I first saw those two UK-ancestry Indian girls who’s mother had them ‘identify’ as First Nations in order to get tons of free grants / govt support, which they used to setup businesses and such… and the news was like “Why would someone do this?!?”. For the money and govt perks, obviously.

One thing I didn’t see much of in the article, were options to resolve the issue aside from a brief note about there not being many options currently. So what options do we realistically have to address the issue?

Do FN not keep a registry of their people, and/or do they not have established processes for third party’s to verify identity claims via a simple form? Like do businesses have an option, sorta like running a background check with law enforcement, to check an identity?

I’d personally vote to remove the incentive for the frauds. Race-based benefits that are so lopsided you have people committing fraud to get those perks, a situation that seems antithetical to what the Charter and democratic nations are built on: that all races are equal. Remove individual govt incentives based on race – no bursaries, grants, funding, tax breaks, etc. Have the fed gov supports be based exclusively on nation-to-nation type supports, sorta like they do with the provinces in terms of fund transfers, and base those transfers on the division of responsibility between FN and Canada, tied to the treaties where possible. Instead of having oblique benefits paid out to individuals spread across the entire country via tax breaks etc, have the funds be directly applied to ‘nations’ to fix things like drinking water availability. If an FN has no one living in their area, or if they free-ride off of colonial infrastructure that’s been built, they get less ‘national’ funding – sorta like if a foreign country came in and built a port for Canada to use, and we had free use of it, it’d be nuts for the govt to then up our taxes to pay for a new port… cause it’s already there and available.

There’s no particular reason they couldn’t. Even a simple dirty bomb detonated in a high population area could wreak havoc – and any country with centrifuges can basically make one of those in no time.

Basically every sovereign state now has a very clear risk calculation supporting the development of nuclear arms and for ignoring all the UN’s attempts for international cooperation / non-proliferation. Iran was compliant, from all accounts, with the vast majority of requirements that had been set out for it – something that Israel’s nuclear program is seemingly not required to adhere to (it’s still “unofficial” that they have between 90 and 400 functional warheads).

Opening yourselves to international inspectors just gives the USA a very clear target list + floor plans. Further, not having a nuclear option means the USA will potentially attack you. Even if rules of engagement say they shouldn’t attack civilian power plant infrastructure, the USA, Israel and Russia do it without hesitation. North Korea, China, and Russia have shown that having a nuclear deterrent will keep the USA away. It’ll even make the USA suck up to you / praise you, and let you attack/invade your neighbours without the USA taking action.

What Trump and the States have done, in my view, essentially translates to destroying any semblance of international cooperation between nations (cause why bother trying to appease the EU, if the USA is gonna ignore international norms and bomb whoever they want anyway), and has made it so that every nation should now pursue weapons of mass destruction as a “deterrent”, which will no doubt lead to catastrophe in time. But there aren’t really many ways I can see it playing out otherwise.

Like that 5% NATO military spending… should prolly be every NATO country building a nuclear / WMD program of their own, unbeholden to US constraints, “just in case”.

The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is… interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren’t, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to “just trust us”, while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.

idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I’d avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn’t matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn’t have ‘bet’ on like a decade ago, but here we are.

Personally, I don’t mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that’s ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there’s a likely bias in the audience.

What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren’t in line with that narrative.