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This nihilist doomer shit is both highly speculative, and just as bad as denialism for why we can’t have nice things. In fact, they are just 2 stages of the exact same mentality. It’s not real, it’s not human caused, and we can’t do anything about it anyway. All the same picture; all the same motivation.
Add to this that he was suspended (not jailed) and the country’s major public broadcaster posted this very article questioning the appropriateness of his suspension. He has a voice in the public media and also an opportunity to avail himself of the court system and seek damages. Are we still a democracy? Yeah, sounds like it to me.
“We’re not middle and lower class, we’re all working class”
Most home owners, if they cash out their home, and either rent or downsize, will still absolutely need to work to eat, and if they don’t they will find themselves homeless before long.
For that small portion that could actually live on the equity from downsizing their housing, yeah, they are upper class, but there are a lot fewer of those than you would think. For a single person, a million in equity (50k a year) might get you by, but not luxuriously and not safely, and most houses are owned by couples though (so cut that in half), and many have dependents.
The carbon tax is currently 14.31cents per litre, that’s about 10%. It’s an incentive. To fully wipe out that cost, you don’t need to buy an EV, you could drive 10% less, or buy an ICE vehicle that is 10% more efficient (or some combination). That’s very easy to do in a country where most of us drive large vehicles, and make too many un-combined trips. Drop one trip in 10, or combine it with one of the other 9 and you get to spend your rebate money on beer instead of gasoline.
Subsidies and special taxes are super in-efficient. Besides requiring a whole slew of bureaucracy to administer it, it never applies to everything fairly. That tax you suggest on new ICE vehicles doesn’t dissuade anyone from parking their jacked up f150 one day a week, and it doesn’t reward the person who buys a used car for their commute instead of a used SUV. All those little decisions get incentivized, and they allow people to make their own decisions about how to pollute less, instead of doing the 1 thing some government has decided to be the official, subsidized solution.
That list shows why the carbon taxes will be the target. Those first 5 account for basically all of the increased cost of living, but they are HARD problems. Not one of those presents a simple policy change that could even make a meaningful dent, and no one agrees on even the general approach governments could take to chip away at those.
However, for the last one, politicians can promise to scrap it or carve it up like a thanksgiving turkey and, despite that having almost no effect on the overall cost of living for the average Canadian, it seems like an easy solution.
The debacle is the MPs and NDP falling for the populism carrot that is carve-outs. It won’t be the last one either. It will always be framed as “helping the old lady keep the heat on” and not what is is - an oil subsidy that keeps people tied to a highly price-volatile and polluting heating source. You can also help that old lady by tweaking the rebate algorithm, but that wouldn’t help out the oil industry near as well.
I think you mean the advent of car culture.
Our current system relies on the economic externality of relying on private vehicles and private transportation on local infrastructure to artificially lower the transportation costs for grocery logistics. It’s much cheaper to run an 18-wheeler to a large grocery store on the edge of suburbia than running box trucks all over town. It doesn’t actually lower food costs, because people pay a large fraction of their income to that private transportation so that they can access that super-grocer, and then the grocer seems to jack up the price of food anyway.
They also like to pretend they care about balanced budgets and monetary supply. Guess what? Taxes both balance the budget AND they evaporate money from circulation, reducing actual inflation. They ignore that because taxes are the ONLY lever that is progressive; where we can spread the pain equitably, asking the wealthy individuals and corporations to pay the largest share. That’s a terrible idea /s
Every time CBC gets budgets cut, it hits CBC radio first and hardest. It’s an extremely small portion of the Federal Government’s budget. This has nothing to do with fiscal restraint, and is purely about neocons who don’t like there being a public owned media source existing at all. They want 100% corporate media and nothing less.
Rural and remote residents already get a slightly larger rebate, and as a city dweller, I think their share should be higher for exactly the reason you state. Also, keep in mind that at night time, which will typically be the only time people end up using resistive heat while on a heat pump, electricity is cheaper. Ontario’s ultra-low off-peak option is even more extreme. It’s probably cheaper to run resistive heat at night, than running the heat pump during peak times.
And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it’s frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is “free” and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.
Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.
Agreed. The central example is a NDP member being censured by the party for her views. THAT IS WHAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS. She would have also been removed if she started arguing for tax cuts to the wealthy and restrictions on union activity. Even perfectly legitimate political opinions can make you totally unfit to be a representative of a political party. Words have consequences and political parties are social structures with social rules. Cry me a river, this isn’t a free-speech issue.
Agreed. Fuck off with this “we have no free speech” bullshit, substack (and it’s freedom of conscience in Canada in the first place, not free speech). All of the things listed are social consequences, not criminal prosecution or some other government persecution. Sarah was booted by her party, not the government, and the rest are employers and universities. If there is fault, it lies with those organizations.
It’s also not protected speech, so if there is fault, those organizations will have to suffer social consequences themselves, as it doesn’t seem that they broke any laws.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[ ] Climate change isn’t real. [ ] Climate change is part of a natural cycle and not related to humans. [x] Climate change is caused by humans, but we can’t do anything about it for whatever reasons. Note how all 3 lead to the same actual behaviour, and that benefits the very same people, but the first one works on conservatives and the third one works on liberals. You’ve fallen for the same gambit. There’s a big-ass sliding scale between “fuck it” and “techno utopia” both on climate mitigation and adaptation. The next 100 years are going to be hard, yeah, but those 3 propoganda tacts are designed to just make some rich twits richer before we all hit the wall.