The Do Not Call List does not apply to political parties or charities:

The Do Not Call List exempts Canadian registered charities, political parties, riding associations, candidates, pollsters and newspapers of general circulation for the purpose of soliciting subscriptions.

At federal election time all parties get a list of all voters, and their contact information from Elections Canada. I assume it’s true in Ontario as well.

You’re seeing messages from the Conservatives because they’re reasonably well organized and they’re doing a decent job at fundraising.

The other parties could do it as well, but aren’t. I assume it’s because they don’t have a decent election committee/budget, but I have no evidence of that.

Why bother?

• If he’d said it front of the media, it would have been a headline.
• The two stories I’ve seen about this bury the hot mic part after the national sovereignty bit.
• There isn’t any level of protection that he’d get by saying it to a room of millionaires and billionaires instead of the media.
• Googling for “hot mic accident” shows a surprising number of results.

Without evidence to the contrary, Occam’s razor (and a backhand with Hanlon’s razor) both suggest it was a goof by the sound tech rather than unnecessary theatrics.

“Mr. Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing. In my conversations with him on…,” Trudeau said, before the microphone cut out.

…

After the opening address, media were ushered out of the room, when a microphone that was left on picked up on what was only meant to be heard behind closed doors.

This is wild:

1. Trudeau didn’t want to say that in front of the media (even though at least one of the people in the room was going to leak it after).

2. We’re still having hot mic accidents.

Internal Trade Minister Anita Anand was asked during a news conference on Wednesday if “interprovincial trade barriers [could] be dealt with, wiped away in 30 days?”

“The short answer to your question is yes,” she responded.

We’re down to 25 days. Is the answer still yes?

Trolling aside, that sounds like an excellent goal. I’ve seen news articles about Canada’s internal trade barriers since the 1980s, but this is the first time I’ve seen anything approaching movement on the issue.

If I’m reading that right, all three groups traveled from the US to the Canadian side.

Ugh. Go after the proceeds by hitting money laundering. Like BC said we need to:

• Unexplained Wealth Orders could add a valuable new anti-money laundering tool. Civil forfeiture is already used much more readily than criminal prosecution but still requires a link to criminal activity, which may be hard to establish, especially where international transfers are involved. Unexplained Wealth Orders could be used to confiscate property where there is no evident legitimate source of funds, providing another civil process tool that does not rely on criminal prosecution or evidence of a crime.

• Core federal anti-money laundering legislation and practice are in urgent need of reform. Improvements should be made by the federal government to the ability of FINTRAC to collect and analyze reports of suspicious transactions from all those involved in real estate, to provide information to those who can and will use it, including regulators, to provide feedback to reporting entities and to collect and report statistically on the full range of AML activities and their effectiveness

etc

Ottawa also lacks the authority to impose cheap daycare and zoning improvements for cities. But they offered incentives, and the jurisdictions fell into line.

Yea, we don’t know what happened in the phone call.

True, but it’s weird that Mexico got the exact same deal.

The important part is that all of us don’t forget what happened.

You’re totally right. We need to remove barriers to interprovincial trade and start looking for other trading partners. I hear the EU doesn’t buy much of our aluminum. Maybe it’s time for the feds to encourage that kind of export.

I feel like Trump is grandstanding.

He shot his mouth off, Canada did some stuff (mostly in the fall fiscal update), he looked tough for his base, but relented at the 11th hour.

That last minute save means Trump doesn’t have to deal with the sustained economic impact of tariffs. He got to stir the pot and see how much he can get away with.

Coincidentally, Mexico got the exact same deal. We’re gonna go through the same song and dance next month.

But it’s a good wakeup call for US allies: it’s time to start looking for other markets and building trade deals with less volatile partners.

But we’re still buying Canadian, right?

That is epic Canadiana. Props for including Cyril Sneer in the background.

Relevant, but not cancon. You’re on lemmynsfw, so maybe you could find something on the Canadian owned PornHub?

We allow the jailbreakers to distribute their hacks and even sell them.

I understand that. The target market for those jailbreaks is outside Canada, so distribution of our product would be limited by foreign laws. Foreign buyers would be dissuaded by stuff like the DMCA.

It works for Canadians, but it wouldn’t really affect anyone outside Canada. Given the size of our market, it would have a minimal effect on the sellers of locked products.

even if it’s just for John Deer farm equipment it’s a huge boon to consumers.

Canadian farmers who aren’t part of supply management schemes are in rough shape. As much as it might help them, they aren’t a large market, and (if John Deer cares) the sellers will probably use other monopolistic practices to discourage it.

Sure, Apple and Google will try to make this impossible…

Android app builders regularly complain that their apps are heavily pirated by alternate app stores in China. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t really changed Google policy. If Google is willing to ignore an app market the size of China, I don’t think there will be any real effect from Canada doing the same.

I like the idea behind the proposal, but unless it hurts US corporations, it seems like a small tweak to help Canadian consumers, rather than meaningful retaliation in a trade war.

That seems less targeted than I had expected.

Fitting.

I thought that was the gist of it.

Did Trudeau propose tariff supports?

I was really pleasantly surprised to hear him and the journalists switch from English to French and back to English seamlessly and without drama.

That is (happily) common in Canadian politics. Bilingual politicians are happy to reach a larger audience, just as journalists prefer to have quotes in their target language.

If Trump catalyzes good things in Canada, then Trump will have done something good in his life, against all odds.

Definitely. It’s incumbent on us to make that happen, though. Politicians haven’t prioritized it for the last fifty years - they’ll only do it if they receive pressure.

I really like the idea of opting out of IP agreements, but it’s unclear how effective it would be. AFAIU jail breaks are illegal in the US thanks to the DMCA - if Canada produces the kits, it’s still a risk to American farmers/Tesla owners to use them.

And:

But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.

This requires cooperation from the platforms we’re attacking. The EU had the clout to force Apple to open their platform, but would Canada? Would a bellicose US allow one of their most profitable and iconic companies to do that? Given a choice, I suspect Apple would happily make the “alternate app store” experience so user unfriendly that most users would avoid it.

Android has allowed side loading forever, and has a bunch of non-Google app stores, but they have only gained traction in limited circles.

It’s a fun idea, and it’d be interesting to see how it works out, but I’m not sure it would have a significant impact.

Yeah. I’m not clear what the tariffs are on. But I guess we’ll find out.

It’s “funny” because people have been decrying these barriers since the 1990s. It’d be amazing if we actually saw progress, but I’m not optimistic.

We’ll see. I think this is the opening salvo in the USMCA negotiations, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it continued until that was renegotiated.

Or it could end next week. 🤷‍♂️

Lol. Yes he did.

Ottawa should enforce the law limiting foreign ownership of newspapers

…

Our limit on foreign ownership was imposed in the 1960s after US chains threatened to take over newspapers here. A 1999 study of coverage in Canadian-owned US newspapers of the Québec independence referendum noted that most countries prohibited or limited foreign media ownership “at least partly out of fear that foreign owners would use those outlets to manipulate public opinion in times of national crisis.” It indeed found evidence that foreign ownership “influences newspaper coverage and editorial commentary about key political issues in the parent company’s home country.”

That’s true for most Canadians: they receive more from the rebate than they pay in the tax.

Can’t you just pay it ahead of time?

That would make sense. I don’t believe that’s how it was implemented.

I think the most reasonable complaint against direct carbon pricing is that people who are living in poverty can’t afford to wait for the next rebate to come in.

It sounds like Carney is just proposing incentives (which seems kinda ineffective for consumers), which wouldn’t have that drawback.

Canadian governments have been able to pass significant legislation since repatriation. We’re fine.

Centralizing power with the PMO just means the prime minister can make more partisan changes by fiat. We usually go to the polls every four years, so that’s a long time to wait for accountability.

And of course, there’s the problem that the PMO is responsible for so many appointments that they don’t appoint judges in a timely manner:

“It is imperative for the Prime Minister’s Office to give this issue the importance it deserves and for appointments to be made in a timely manner …The government’s inertia regarding vacancies and the absence of satisfactory explanations for these delays are disconcerting.”

…

“In some cases it may be that all relevant vacancies must be filled, as where serious crimes are not prosecuted in a timely way such that victims, the public and accused are denied justice,” Brown said.

The prime minister has been acquiring more power for decades. Canada doesn’t function better now than it did, it just functions differently.

In doing so, the rest of Parliament and the government is weakened. It becomes harder to limit what the prime minister can do.

Eventually, in 1955, one province — Manitoba — decided to experiment, and handed over the redistricting process to an independent commission. Its members were the province’s chief justice, its chief electoral officer, and the University of Manitoba president. The new policy became popular, and within a decade, it was backed by both major national parties, and signed into law.

The trick is to appoint nonpartisan commissioners…

That’s a long list of astroturfing orgs.

Such a weird refusal.

I initially thought there was something weird he didn’t want to tell the RCMP, but he held top secret clearance as a minister, so I guess he’s just being obstinant.

Attack dog is an unofficial role in political parties:

An “attack dog” in politics is a person, usually a politician or a political operative, who is designated to aggressively challenge and criticize the opposition.

…

They are often tasked with the responsibility of delivering negative messages or criticisms that a candidate or party leader may not want to deliver personally, in order to maintain a more positive public image.

He has done this in the past and been effective at it. His successful (unjustified) criticism of the Liberals carbon tax implementation is a great example of that: he managed to frame public perception of the rebate, despite heaps of evidence to the contrary.

Shitting on Poilievre is fine and fun, but it ignores the reality that his party has successfully framed a number of debates in the past. Assuming Carney wins the Liberal leadership, it’s a significant obstacle to him winning the next federal election.

His actions are the stuff we need to examine and prosecute.

Any family and personal connections to Nazism has become inarguably relevant.

Sure. They’re worth talking about. But the bit that matters are his words and deeds. Like you said, he did sieg heil, and he has been doing weird shit with Twitter’s algorithm. He probably has more creepy stuff going on that I’m not aware of.

The official opposition is a part of the government.

From the House of Commons website:

• The leader of the party having the support of the majority of the Members of the House of Commons is asked by the Governor General to form a government and becomes the Prime Minister;
• The party, or parties, opposed to the government is called the opposition (the largest of these parties is referred to as the “official” opposition);

Yeah. Sorry. I know it’s nitpicky, but there’s a lot of almost true stuff bouncing around Reddit right now. I want Lemmy to be better than that. So I’m being picky.

TIL

When referring to MPs, “in government” refers to being part of the governing party. He is a career politician, landlord, and attack dog, but the Canadian electorate has only chosen his party to lead three times. He has spent a majority of his career yelling from the sidelines.