I’m sure you’re aware that splitting the left is often seen as a win for the right, and reasonably so given FPTP and the political aversion in this country to what should be (and are in other parliamentary democracies) acceptable democratic political maneuvering, such as forming coalitions and crossing the floor unimpeded.

Now all those American players can go back to their Canadian teams and continue to suck in the playoffs and never win a cup.

This suggests your advice to everyone is that we should all just give up.

Is this meant to sound condescending towards me? Or am I misreading it?

Hey friend I, and many others here, may be sympathetic to the disrespect that the NDP gets, but your hyperpartisan and absolute rejection of other parties (and similarly- framed NDP boosting) comes across poorly.

Do you honestly believe the NDP is the only honest, principled and righteous party in the country? And you believe they would stay that way when they necessarily grew their tent in order to assume power?

There are very real reasons why someone would vote for Carney Liberals over Poilievre Conservatives, and indeed liberals over conservatives in general. It’s intellectually dishonest and frankly does a disservice to yourself to overlook or dismiss these simply because you don’t understand them.

For example, marginal harm matters. Even if both parties serve capital, they’re not identical in courts, rights, climate policy, labor enforcement, etc. Also, time horizons matter. “Build the NDP” is a long-term project; “prevent a worse 4 years” is a short-term project and there is little doubt that Carney is the best person for the short term project (and perhaps the best person for economic restructuring in general). Most people are capable of rationally doing both short term and long term planning and decision making. And also, finally, coalitions in our government are a reality. In Canada, minority/parliament dynamics make “vote + apply pressure” a real lever. Treating all “lesser evil” as pure self-sabotage ignores that. Many Liberal voters can acknowledge the value of the NDP while also acknowledging their shortcomings. Many Liberal voters have voted NDP in the past when it made sense strategically.

This seems decidedly abnormal…I would have thought private discussions between a US citizen and the US ambassador - likely conducted on US soil (embassy) in Israel - would be confidential and he should tell them they have no right to the content of their discussions and frankly they can suck his nuts from the back.

What’s your criticism here? Is it possible that your criticism is unfounded or missing some key considerations? What evidence would convince you?

Your original claim that having different understanding of things somehow taints criticisms of Canada implies that there’s a set of accepted views that cannot be challenged or diverged from. That’s a description of an echo chamber.

Yeah they’re called foundational values. I believe that people should be free to do as they wish as long as it doesn’t intrude on the right of others, for example. Foundational principles of a Western liberal democracy. I don’t believe you do, and so I don’t trust that you come to have a good faith discussion on anything related to the well being of Canada insomuch as it persists as a Western liberal democracy.

Oil & gas is highly productive per worker/hour, but it’s not “the whole economy,” and it’s not a magic lever that fixes Canada’s broad productivity slump. Diversification is about raising productivity across the rest of the economy and reducing concentrated risk. It takes time.

It sounds like you’re saying “Don’t diversify until you’ve already diversified.”

I’m saying that you and others in this thread are starting from wildly different fundamental beliefs and values, and, to put it kindly, they are divergent enough that they are effectively different realities.

Yes, we have to invest, which usually involves borrowing money to create the conditions for increased revenue.

Did you have another solution that also meets our increased security needs?

You’ll forgive some in this thread, I’m sure, for doubting that any good faith discussion with the OP can be had on the topic of Western values. Their post and comment history is clear. When your pro-socialists leanings have you defending Russia in Ukraine, it somewhat taints your criticisms of Canada’s standards when it comes to a nuanced diplomatic matter like this.

Federal Bureau of Ingratiation

These people have no choice now, they’ll do anything to protect him because they know it’s all over when he goes down.

Honestly if they somehow conduct an entire inquiry without bringing that up it will be inconceivably suspicious in its absence. I feel like that would make the Republican members appear MORE guilty, not less. If you’re a Republican who had nothing whatsoever to do with Epstein, you’ve gotta consider that avoiding the single largest and most disturbing cover up in (potentially global) political history is essentially going to drag you right into it.

I was referring to past treatment of elite financial crimes.

You’re right, we haven’t seen the fallout from the Epstein files yet. Not that I’m aware of.

So did Finland and Norway and not with the death penalty.

Again… To do that, you need to classify everyone accordingly as elite or not, which is subject to systematic error. Which is why we should just choose not to do it, since the death penalty is irreversible, and killing an innocent person runs counter to the way in which a liberal democracy chooses the values that structure its justice system - that is, that we prefer to run the risk that a guilty person go free to avoid, as much as possible, that an innocent person suffers.

If you prefer a justice system built on different fundamental values, maybe you prefer China, Russia or Saudi Arabia.

I think you’re making my point.

France was talking about systemic inequality, and he’s right: Systems claim to be fair and equal but they still make systematic errors. So why would we add an irreversible punishment, plus a vague ‘elite’ category that invites political targeting and misclassification?

You’re talking about programming control, I’m taking about macroeconomic control. Switching to crypto removes many of the levers of macroeconomic control, or it shifts the control over to exchanges, mediators (courts), miners, validators, whales, and - probably not what crypto boosters want to hear - governments, who remain the power brokers and can easily assume these roles. Moreover, if crypto boosters think banks won’t use their enormous capital, power and overall economics expertise to shift into one of these roles, they’re delusional. I feel like crypto boosters think that banks just “don’t get it”, and this is ludicrous…banks have hundreds of years of institutional economic knowledge and experience. Economics doesn’t just get invalidated by crypto.

All of this ignores the fact that crypto is highly susceptible to volatility and scamming overall. Crypto has a larger more complex attack surface at the application layer, and this makes it substantially more risky particularly as malicious technology advances in that domain and can quickly outpace the technology required to secure against it.

I don’t have much hope for the US. They seem to believe that anything other than unregulated crony capitalism is communism.