Someone overreacted here, but it wasn’t just the police. Who calls the cops over a water gun, for crying out loud?!

Even if Singh were just in it for the pension (which I don’t believe), he has never shown an interest in dismantling public health care or building unnecessary additional highways, which makes him a better person than Ford. I wish Ford were just in it for the pension.

The issue is how to rejigger the universities’ income streams so that they can keep themselves afloat without that. We can start by looking into why some seem to be having more trouble than others.

Problem is that the prices were originally arranged to that first-class lettermail subsidized the rest of the services. Then the amount of lettermail tanked, and the pricing structure never quite straightened itself out afterwards. Someone has to sit down and rethink it from scratch, and so far no one’s been willing to do that.

We still need the postal service, though—it serves smaller and remote communities that the couriers would prefer not to deal with.

Loss of consciousness is not a normal symptom of migraine or cluster headaches (even if some sufferers wish it would be). The moment the ambulance brought him in unconscious, the doctors should have started testing for meningitis, tumours, etc. The fact that they apparently didn’t suggests that they were either incompetent . . . or severely overworked and so exhausted that they couldn’t tell a zebra from a horse even when it shoved its stripy butt in their faces. This kid is lucky that his mom kept fighting for him, and lucky that they were close enough to a major city that “bring him straight down” was only a matter of a couple of hours of driving.

If by that you mean “headquartered in Canada and manufacturing in Canada for the Canadian market” then the answer is no, I’m pretty sure the last ones vanished no later than the middle of the 20th century. Some US and other foreign companies do have manufacturing and assembly plants here, but I wouldn’t call them Canadian. (Ford Canada used to be semi-independent and produced some own-model vehicles early on, but they’re nothing more than a subsidiary of the US company now.)

Mostly T and T-adjacent, to be exact—some of the other letters seem to have become too mainstream to generate enough hate to be useful to them.

Short-term vs long-term. People are currently worried about short-term costs to the exclusion of long-term ones. You’re correct that not investing in green solutions has a high long-term cost, but people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table don’t have the mental resources to worry about the condition of the world and its influence on prices a year or a decade or a century from now. And that may not be right, but it’s the way things are.

Hopefully we at least took away his passport after he pulled this.

Certain provincial governments have developed a tendency to scream “but jurisdiction!” about any federal policy that might affect them, whether or not it’s useful or justified to do so and regardless of what other stimuli are applied.

You don’t have to be a company in order to advertise something. Charities, unions, lobbyists, and governments all put out ads for various purposes. (Note that I’m not saying anything about the content of this particular video, or the value of proportional representation, just that an advertisement doesn’t necessarily have to be pushing you to exchange money for specific goods or services so that the advertiser can profit.) You’re still welcome to claim that the video isn’t an advertisement, but you’ll need a better reason.

There’s a difference between ignorance—even willful ignorance—and active malice.

If the Peruvian government lied about why it wanted the weapons, and our government believed them, then our government is guilty of ignorance and stupidity, but not malice.

If the Peruvian government lied about why it wanted the weapons, and our government knew there was a possible issue but sold them the weapons anyway, that’s willful ignorance, but still not malice. Consider the following scenario: Your neighbour borrows a kitchen knife from you, saying he needs to chop some vegetables. Instead, he uses it to kill his wife. You knew that he and his wife had a bad relationship, and you’ve told him off when you’ve seen her with suspicious bruises, but you weren’t expecting anything like this. Still, you provided the weapon, and you didn’t try to step between them. To what degree are you guilty? Should you have interfered in their relationship? That’s where I suspect we’re at: our government not agreeing with or encouraging the Peruvian government’s behaviour, but not shunning the perpetrator or making any real attempt to stop what’s going on. Like it or not (and I don’t like it), this is really common in international relations. If the original headline had used “ignores” in place of “supports”, I would agree with it 100%.

If the Peruvian government told the truth: “We want these weapons to kill and maim our own people,” and our government still sold them, then that’s malice and would make the headline accurate as it stands. But I doubt that’s what actually happened.

I’d translate that as “We’re too lazy to do any actual checking, so we’re going to dump the responsibility on you in the hope that you’ll go away.”

“Supports” is stretching things way out of shape. “Ignores” or “does not attempt to prevent” might be accurate, depending on what’s actually taking place in Peru (about which I have no idea, nor do most Canadians), but to what degree is it acceptable to interfere in another country’s politics? Do they expect Canada to enact a trade embargo with Peru to get mining companies headquartered here to stop investing there? This is not stuff we do casually, nor should we.

So tell me, if the choice is between having the safe consumption site close to your kids’ school and having people doing their drugs in the open near your kids’ school and leaving their used needles lying on the playground, which are you going to pick? Often, these places are where they are because that’s where their clients already are.

You may also want to measure out the radius of 200m from every school or daycare in your town or city on a map and see how many places are left where they can park SCSs. I admit I haven’t actually done this, but my bet is that the options will be considerably reduced.

It’s just about inevitable that some SCSs are going to end up in someone’s backyard. Figuring out where they’ll do more good than harm is more important than enforcing arbitrary limits. This is typical right-wing “think of the children” rhetoric. Don’t fall for it.

You would think, but the NDP are seen as “unelectable”.

And even then, most people are still choosing to go to the three cities and immediate outlying areas where the most economic influence and possible social connections are - Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal.

This is the real issue. Having grown up in a dot on the map in the middle of the Ontario boreal forest on the arctic watershed side of the Shield, I can tell you that it isn’t all that much harder to build infrastructure there than it is further south (sometimes takes a little longer because of longer winters, that’s all). It isn’t even horrible land agriculturally as long as you take the shorter growing season into account when you’re choosing what to plant. So more of the land is usable than you might think. However, people want to go to the places where people already are.

Fewer homes are built -> municipality receives less money -> municipality can’t afford to build out infrastructure like water, sewers, and roads because they can barely afford to maintain the existing stuff -> even fewer homes are built. My cat can figure that out, so either PP is dumber than my cat (possible), or his goal isn’t what he claims it is (likely).

I know, and it’s terrifying.

You can’t really blame them. It’ll be a lot easier to pick up the pieces without a bunch of lookie-loos getting in the way (and they don’t need even the occasional would-be looter, either). The visitors can wait until residents have settled back in and surviving shops and services are back up.

Only the first few words of this title were necessary: any Ontarian with a functioning brain is upset with Ford at this point.

Thing is, there’s still what you might call a stagnation space between “line goes up” and “must declare bankruptcy”, one in which even a publically traded company can ride for a year or so without the shareholders getting too anxious while they wait for the line to start going up again. Yes, you’ll get the occasional company cratering by doubling down on a bad decision made in pursuit of line-goes-up, but 240 of them suggests that there’s something more going on here.

It may be that the issue is the “higher borrowing costs” that the article alludes to, and the way these companies have been conditioned to do business causes them to overextend themselves by borrowing too much. That means that the ones that stay afloat will be the ones that can correctly balance the risks inherent in taking out loans.

Today, the cost of residential construction is 81-per-cent higher across Canada’s major cities compared to 2017 and more than double – up 107 per cent – in the Toronto region, according to Statscan data.

And part of that’s inflation, and the rest of it is . . . what? Higher property costs for unbuilt land? New environmental regulations? Increased municipal permitting and red tape? Companies driving the expenses up by building large detached houses no one can afford? A knock-on effect from industries producing building supplies?

Are the costs being driven up at a similar rate outside major cities?

Trust? No. But all they actually need is resignation.

I suppose it just seems incredible to me that the airline didn’t even try to come up with another excuse after they were caught out on the first one. Maybe it really was an executive recreational jaunt to Palm Springs.

So what was the actual reason for cancellation? Aircraft so undermaintained they didn’t have enough functional ones to cover all flights, and that one lost the coin flip? Multiple air crew down with COVID? Exec wanted the plane to take some friends golfing in Palm Springs? Seems like even the tribunal looking into this never did find out, although they did make the airline pay up.

'Twas ever thus. We’ve imposed conscription exactly twice since Confederation, during the two World Wars. During WWI, it caused riots because Francophones thought the way it was being imposed was inequitable. At neither time did any significant number of Canadian conscripts get shipped out to fight—instead, they took on domestic roles like guarding military posts to free up volunteers to be shipped out instead (I think a few did go overseas in the trailing months of WWII, but it was a pretty small percentage).

In other words, the draft has never been popular here, and likely never will be. And inequity in how it’s imposed has been an issue for more than a century. (The nature of the inequity is different this time, but I don’t think that matters so much.)

Sometimes it’s nature and not nurture. And we don’t know for certain that she had the primary responsibility for raising him, either. Families can be complicated.

Hopefully there are a bunch of programmers there right now standing in a circle around the desk of some manager and bombarding them with a continuous chant of “We told you so!” We knew in the 1990s not to trust stuff coming in off the Internet to be what it claims or reach its destination unmangled, and as I understand it, the software was blindly attempting to parse unverified threat definition files it had downloaded. Doing it all in ring 0 was just that extra crowning touch. This should have been caught before it even got to QA.

The judge is doing his job. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (sect. 24) forbids the use of evidence obtained by violating a Charter right in court. The right violated in this case would be “security of the person” in sect. 7. The cops knew this, or should have—“fruit of the poisonous tree” isn’t exactly an obscure legal concept, and is something they need to understand to do their jobs, so I assume it’s taught in law enforcement courses. So the evidence being thrown out is 100% the cops’ fault.

If there is a non-abusive way to use the notwithstanding clause, I’m not aware of it. It’s intended to be used to trample on citizens’ rights.

Can’t be mercury, since it’s liquid at room temperature and so wouldn’t form “fibres”. Americum . . . wouldn’t be impossible (and it’s still used in smoke detectors to this day, I believe), but the amount in a stack of smoke detectors isn’t quite the worst case—there would be more radioactive material in an orphaned radiotherapy or radiography source, which is also wildly improbable but not quite impossible as a multivitamin additive. At least it isn’t likely to be an abandoned Soviet radioisotope generator this time.

Could be copper. Or aluminum. Or titanium, for that matter. Lots of possibilities in “metal” that would allow the label to still be technically truthful.

Let’s just hope it isn’t lead.

Unfortunately, all utilities are kind of slippery that way. They have a funny habit of overestimating your usage, then refunding you when they finally get around to actually reading your meter. Guess what they did with the interest on their ill-gotten gains in the meanwhile? This case is utterly ridiculous, though—usually they’re skimming less than a third of the normal bill.

That’s like being a die-hard Wonderbread fan.

Terrifyingly, I’m told those also exist.

It seems she died for attracting RCMP attention while Indigenous, something that seems to happen far too often (even once in the history of the RCMP would be too often). Since disbanding the RCMP and starting over isn’t going to happen, how do we get this toxic racism out of them?

The Liberals are spineless and not willing to fight the status quo unless prodded by some other party that’s propping up their minority government.

The Conservatives are evil.

Neither are ideal choices, but I’ll take spineless over evil any day of the week.

Making a vaccine for lyme disease available will help immensely—I believe there’s one in clinical trials south of the border.

I suspect that Poilievre believes his supporters are more likely than average to cling to the outmoded belief that addiction is a moral failing rather than a medical issue, so it’s to his benefit to demonize any and all services directed at harm reduction. (In other words, I am disgusted but not at all surprised.)

Life is always much more difficult outside the box.

(Also, were these eels from New Hampshire? 'Cause it sounds like they were taking “Live free or die” to extremes.)

Seriously, though, shipping live eels in a poorly-secured box really seems like a bad idea, and rather torturous for the eels. To whom were these consigned, and what did they want them for?