China, India have tiny attempts and smaller successes at influence compared to the thousands of corporate lobbyists that meet with Canadian politicians every year.

What about the influence of the construction industry? Property developers outright own provincial and municipal politics in Ontario. Big tech?

Oil?!?

How about all the huge military and consulting companies that place 50% of the labour in govt workplaces and suck a 25% margin off each one?

Most of those aren’t domestically owned either.

enjoy the recessions that come with balanced budgets and surpluses… everyone will be sending in extra taxes to balance that budget.

The Canadian govt is the primary creator of Canadian dollars.

When the federal govt runs a deficit of say $1B, that’s a surplus of $1B in the private sector. $1B more spent into industry than collected in taxes. Good times for the private sector.

When the federal govt runs a surplus of $1B, that is a deficit of $1B in the private sector. $1B more collected in taxes than spent. This is an absolute disaster for the economy.

When you consider the above, you can see how ridiculous it is for the federal govt to run a balanced budget or surplus. A balanced budget is a strongly recessionary position, choking off economic growth in the private sector.

instead of a long complicated process to pre-empt corruption, just have an automatic and detailed post-award review for corruption. Corruption discovered in the review is referred for criminal prosecution.

After the first 500 or so corporate CEOs and executives are jailed, the rest will get the point. Offer your best price, compete with your competitors, sell your offer on its merits in the open bid, and stay away from the bid evaluators and other potential or actual bidders.

it’s to stop attempts to leave and commit terrorism from lawless jurisdictions. I think it’s fairly new and related to the short period of time when ISIS held territory in Syria & Iraq. Odd to see it used for the US, but why not.

from every possible thing that can happen to you while smoking…

cancer while smoking COVID while smoking caught in fascist riots while smoking hit by bus while smoking bear attack while smoking container dropped from a plane while smoking etc

Smoking puts you out in the world which increases a lot of risks you wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m hoping for a What We Do In The Shadows / Star Trek crossover.

Baron Afanas and Saru surely have some weird dreams? The Baron also faces a series of extreme transformations.

Mitch has done more to ensure those mistakes are repeated than almost anyone else. Does he have no memory of his actions over the past 20 years?

guy has been up there quite a while, nobody wants to land with a big bag of turds rattling around

Brian Lilley can fuck off. 6 pages of text for a a veiled anti-immigrant attack.

Far from his worst too.

Rae would advise on the options and consequences. I expect he did a good job advising Trudeau.

You don’t just suddenly hork in your friend’s face at a party. You try to work things out and move them in a direction and keeping it mutually acceptable.

it’s a terrible system, paying the wealthy elevated interest on risk-free govt bonds to bribe them into not hiring people.

404

Canada’s not as enthusiastic about that military spending because little of that money goes to Canadian companies. Even for things like shipbuilding, the rules are unfavorable to Canadian industry and a lot of the industrial benefits go to US companies. Canada tried to negotiate industrial benefits on the F-35 program, but it didn’t go well, and Canada entirely withdrew for many years.

A GOP Senator is just a mouthpiece for US industry, they just want more Canadian spend, they don’t GAF about actual defense of Canada.

it was obsolete as a shelter by 1960, it’s just buried under a bunch of dirt.

Later shelters like for NORAD in North Bay were deeper, and in hard rock. But they aren’t expected to survive a large h-bomb either, and those shelter locations are well known.

seems like it will continue to be slow-rolled. The Conservatives will promise to do both the same, and the opposite.

very recently Industry Canada was trumpeting Canada’s advantages in AI. Many key researchers were at Canadian universities, so there was a pretty good R & D lead at one point.

Canada even has a “Scale AI” industrial supercluster.

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/global-innovation-clusters/en/innovation-superclusters-initiative-economic-analysis-final-report#4.4

Doesn’t really seem to be stimulating much public noise.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

The Nature of Things also had an episode on it.

smells like another attack on sugar substitutes from the sugar industry via the WHO.

Sugar in the quantities that the sugar industry would like to sell is extremely unhealthy.

it’s not even CEOs as a class. It’s a tiny percentage of the CEOs of the largest companies, and even the richest Canadian CEOs are chump change compared to the “globally wealthy” that have real power. The richest Canadians, who don’t work as CEOs, aren’t in the top 2000 global wealth.

CEO is a job. Rich people don’t have jobs. They make their money by being rich, raking it in under ALL economic scenarios.