This is the closest thing to a solution they will find. It’s too late to switch leaders. That might have worked a few months after the last election, especially if it had been coupled with a bit quicker action on the expansion of Medicare.

Now it’s their turn to take one for the team. We’ve been voting liberal instead of our true preference in order to keep the Conservatives from destroying our country. Now they have to go hat in hand to the NDP and hammer out a different voting system and put it in place before the next election. If they don’t, the Conservatives will take power and it will be their fault.

And the truly horrific part is that their advice further guts the civil service. That leaves us in a position where we have to hire fake experts as a substitute for the actual experts we used employ.

Forget all the “not actually first” and “misleading headline” stuff. If we can do this on donations, probably mostly from people only a paycheque away from needing a food bank themselves, imagine what we could do with an actual social system funded by properly taxing wealth, high income, and corporations. We could turn that headline into something approaching reality.

Yes, that too!

I agree. I’m also not a huge fan of rebranding “military conscription” as “national service”. There have been people talking about “national service” in ways that specifically excluded military service. This feels like yet another case of the right stealing a term from the left and redefining it to suit themselves. It’s something they have been doing with national and religious symbols and slogans forever as a way to hide their true intentions.

One thing I find particularly concerning is that military conscription has generally been reserved for invasion or active defense. What are they not telling us?

Maybe if the mandatory service were installing fiber to rural areas the way we managed to get copper out there or dealing with infrastructure (especially water and schools) in Indigenous and remote communities. Maybe health care or emergency response.

But guns and bombs? No thanks.

Also, I’m old enough to be exempt by any rational measure. If it came to a vote, my vote shouldn’t be counted.

I thought pensions and RRSPs were supposed to pay for retirement.

Housing is for living in. Maybe some small- and medium-sized business in rental housing because not everyone wants to own.

But investment commodity or retirement vehicle? Sounds dangerous!

No doubt, but this isn’t about the general population, but someone who is supposed to be trained in the ways of making sure that they’re not leading kids too far astray.

But a basic understanding of the Israel/ Palestine conflict doesn’t include being able to recognize the borders of Israel/Palestine from a child’s art project.

Why not? I have only a high school education and some trade school, all before 1980, and have what it takes to not screw up like this. Surely a university educated person charged with the responsibility to guide our children through complex issues should be held to at least that standard.

Or moving to SK

Same thing. (Or was that the joke?)

Lifelong SK resident.

My favourite was a report that showed a percentage increase in profit that was higher than the percentage increase in revenue. Is that not the very definition of “higher margin?”

Being an art teacher isn’t an excuse. Everyone should have a basic grasp of the issues and I would argue that being a teacher in any subject elevates that from “should” to “must.”

I would hope that art is in our schools not merely to promote a leisure activity but to examine different ways of viewing the world. Doing that requires more than just drawing counterfactual maps.

Too many people have no concept of how great the change is. We got married in the late 1970s. My wife’s high school education and receptionist job was enough to get us into a decent 2-bedroom apartment, buy her a brand new motorcycle, and pay for my schooling in a trade. My trade was enough to upgrade our apartment, pay for my hotrodding hobby, let her quit to stay home with our son, buy a camper for weekend trips around the province and vacation trips around Canada and USA, all while saving enough for a down payment on a house with double-digit mortgage rates.

A few financial setbacks (extended layoffs mostly) meant starting almost from scratch (we kept our home but lost all savings and investments) in the early 90s and completely from scratch (lost our home, too) in the early 2000s. It took both of us to barely afford the same apartment of our youth. We finally gave up in 2011, changed careers and moved into a 1968 mobile home on a leased lot in the middle of nowhere. We’re back to being able to afford leisure, although on a much, much smaller scale than in our youth.

We’re still in that 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. It has apparently quadrupled in value since 2011, so if we were forced to start over again, it would be out of reach. We’d be homeless.

Divorce? Fortunately, that has never been on the table, but it’s been at least 2 decades since we’d have been able to contemplate single life from a financial perspective.

I agree, but a big part of whatever problems there are with this program is that the various agencies aren’t actually holding up their end of the bargain.

The program really should be primarily true social housing, not this public-private partnership, but the checks and balances should at least work.

They did eventually get around to mentioning in passing some of the reasons this particular program fails in some ways. It would have been a much better piece if they had started with the objective to compare and contrast programs that actually work (Medicine Hat, last time I looked) and those that don’t (this one, apparently).

My (counter) point was that much lesser crimes committed by an individual would have completely destroyed the life of the perpetrator and probably their family. Yet high fives all around when a corporation has to put up with a couple of years of lost growth just because a number is too big for an individual to properly comprehend.

An interesting contrast here. Air Canada is forced to honour an erroneous committment made by its service department. Government of Canada is not forced to honour a committment made by its service department.

I could understand it if the error was discovered and acted upon in a reasonable time, but over 30 years? That’s just not acceptable.

Counterpoint: a very large fraction of the population is one unexpected bill away from insolvency. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to impose a similar fear on corporations for actual criminal activity.

Yes, that’s me saying that a corporation breaking the law should have to legitimately consider closing it’s doors. In some cases, forced closure should be part of the actual penalty.

I don’t think it’s fair to lay current economic landscape squarely at Trudeau’s feet.

I agree. There is plenty of blame to go around. Trudeau, the other leaders, the MPs, and the very parties themselves going back to at least 1990 are to blame.

There is virtually nothing that can’t be traced back to changes in policy enacted by, supported by, and tacitly accepted by literally everyone involved.

Changes to EI that gutted the power of non-union employees.

Changes to business and labour policies such that “society owes me a business” and “nobody owes you a job” attitudes were fostered, then cemented.

Any subsidy or tax reduction or public funding of anything that generates private profit.

Complete dismantling of a world-leading social housing program.

Gutting civil service in favour of consultants and industry association advisors.

Allowing already weak anti-monopoly legislation to gather dust in a drawer.

The focus on the financial health of the stock market instead of the financial health and stability of the general public.

The idea that industry can self-regulate potentially damaging behaviours. It’s never happened. It never will.

And my favourite, running the country like a business. Every employer runs their business as a dictator. Who the hell thinks that’s the right model for running a country?

I’ve read a number of articles claiming to demonstrate how many of the negative things our governments and corporations foist upon us were first used in prisons. They were then rolled out to the general public, starting with disadvantaged and marginalized communities.

It’s time for organizations like the John Howard Society to get more support so that they can be more vocal and more active.

It was never sustainable right from the beginning. Food banks are supported and funded mostly by those just a paycheque or two from being a client themselves. If the actually well-off were doing their part, food banks would mostly disappear because wages and social assistance would be up to the task of making sure people can afford to eat.

There is a really easy fix for that. A proper training program instead of just expecting that people are born with the necessary skills. Having worked IT in a variety of capacities, including training and end-user support, I’m pretty sure cluelessness is a function of training and experience, not age.

I haven’t really followed that closely in recent years, but pretty much everything to do with guns is handled so badly, no matter who is in power. This is just one more in long line of screw ups.

The last few decades have been just a mess. Way too many emotions on every side. Way too many people with little grasp of guns and their legitimate, harmless uses. Way too many people who think that guns are some god-given totem of freedom as opposed to a tool or recreational skill. Way too many people who see a path to power by inflaming the passions of one side or the other.

Nobody seems interested in conducting actual research into what actually works for the safety of individuals and society. It’s all intuition, gut feelings, different versions of “common sense”, “just so” stories, and emotional attachment to an immovable opinion.

Government sources say they’re puzzled by Canada Post’s refusal to receive the weapons, since the corporation already delivers guns that are sold online.

Are those online sales from just random people or from shops that can be mostly trusted to ensure that the gun is safe to ship?

Holy crap, I missed the /s😠 off to fix it…

We’ve been trying to go EV for 20 years. The first obstacle was lack of workspace to convert our little Japanese mini-truck (apartment dwellers).

The next obstacle was cost. We moved to where we had workspace, but then we couldn’t afford either the conversion or an equivalently price used Leaf. It’s also still a charging desert, with the nearest charger 150 km away and it’s not even on the way to anywhere we go often enough to matter.

Then time became an obstacle. Our current vehicles will likely see us to an age where we have to stop driving. Does it make sense to live several years of our retirement as paupers to pay for a decent used EV? We’ve decided that it doesn’t. For our current driving patterns, getting 100km of winter range would cover 50-70 percent of our driving. 50km of winter range would cut that to 20-30 percent. I keep my eye out for something under CA$10k, but haven’t seen anything yet.

Making nearly disposable clothes in short runs at high volume. Originally and still primarily an online phenomenon of quick knock-offs of “runway” designs, it is finding its way into retail outlets and can actually drive novelty (trends) separate from the normal fashion creation pipeline.

Here is a pretty good article that includes a brief history: https://www.cnn.com/style/what-is-fast-fashion-sustainable-fashion/index.html

You can’t find these outlets on every street corner the way you can fast food, but pretty much every mall, department store, and supermarket will have something that comes out of the fast fashion pipeline.

In addition (my opinion), it seems to be driving a boom in clothing stores, most which seem to be speeding up their style turnover. It seems to me that the underlying model is bleeding over to other retail sectors like furniture.

Like fast food, it’s more about artificially created demand than true consumer demand. More and more, I see that what’s for sale is what someone wants you to buy rather than things you actively seek out.

What does multiculturalism have to do with anything? Multiculturalism is about acknowledging, accommodating, celebrating, and even drawing strength from the diversity of those who live here, no matter their heritage.

Immigration is about who gets to come here and how many. If we’re actually letting too many in, then that is something to deal with, but it’s completely separate from whether we celebrate what we have to offer each other.

Maybe? It just feels like that might be part of it…

Anything too big to fail is also too big to care. If they don’t care, why should we? Provide proper supports and retraining for everyone below the c-suite and let 'er rip.

Okay, everyone who actually cares about what’s going on and hasn’t listened to it yet need to put this on your playlist instead of that next musician or audio book.

Even if it’s shown to be a one-sided exaggeration, there can be no denying that there are deep, systemic problems with hockey culture and inside hockey organizations.

How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?

Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn’t even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I’d like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into “full time equivalent” for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into “unemployment equivalent” for inclusion in our statistics.

How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?

Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.

Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.

It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it’s being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.

I have no idea, but I’d like the powers that be to recognize that there are two economies and to prioritize the lived economy.

I first became aware of the difference when “the economy” was starting to boom in the 1980s even as we were busy returning to breadlines under the name of food banks.

I’m not sure we even need the finance economy. A pure stock market is one thing, but by the time you get to rents over profit on actual production, the financialization of housing, derivatives of derivatives and all the other distancing from actual production, it’s just shell games with no benefit to society.

Which economy? The lived economy of the general public or the artificial economy of finance?

Politicians are already on social media. What we need are government departments on social media. CRA and justice, at a bare minimum, should be on social media.

It also wouldn’t hurt my feelings to have a “lemmy.gov.ca” instance with communities for parties, politicians, and every government department and ministry.

The rulings against exclusion zones need to start including fines, remedial training for all staff from administrators to front-line enforcers, and easy access to fast-tracked injunctions.

Everything I’ve read makes me think that a scam is obvious only to those not taken in and those who get the benefit of reading a news story.

This particular scam is a relatively minor variation on the “bank examiner” scam that has been successfully operating pretty much since the invention of banking. With the right play, even people familiar with the scam can be taken in.

In the 1980s, I was listening to a news broadcast that contained 3 stories of note:

• national economy is doing fine
• Saskatchewan provincial economy is doing great
• Saskatoon gets its first food bank

From that, I concluded that there are two economies that are either completely separate or only very loosely connected: the lived economy of the vast majority of the workforce and the financial economy of trading in stocks, commodities, and financial instruments.

Over the next few years, it became obvious to me that reporters, journalists, politicians, pundits, think tanks, and business groups care only for the economy of the financial sector. I’ve seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

I’ve never heard of it. At home, we watched “Chez Hélène” (heh. I still remember the correct accents because they remind me of a surprised face). Anyway Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Hélène

It makes sense to make sure police officers aren’t forced into bankruptcy while charges are pending but ideally we’d rely on EI and social insurance for that.

Better yet, would be to leave it up to the union to provide suspension pay in the same way that many unions have strike funds to help their members survive strikes and lockouts.

I bet it wouldn’t take long for the unions to drop their support of these criminals. That, in turn, would make it easier to fire them.