Housing is Canada’s biggest problem and this announcement is half what the oil industry gets every year, not counting the $100B+ in recently announced subsidies.

this has been happening for decades in Canadian and other western countries. Canada’s financial sector firms are a c-suite, reserve accounts at the BoC, and a giant pile of services purchased from the US, India, Colombia etc.

The cancelled digital services tax was the lightest of scratches at the fixing the problems of trade in services.

All the noise about resources and goods tarrifs? Trade in services is larger, and services are a vastly larger share of the non-trade economy.

even for schools, some have pointed out that the protest laws would ban the teacher’s unions from picketing their own school.

So it has to be done carefully to permit reasonable protests like labour action and prohibit unreasonable protests and intimidation.

a bit thin. pretty short. kinda dumb. kinda poor. youngish. single. no pets. far right. unemployed. illiterate. bad with computers. homeless. lesbian woman. shoeless. naked. long hair and pretty much zero body hair.

Doesn’t sound great but I could make it work.

I’d be less disappointed if the companies building cars in Canada were Canadian and building cars for the Canadian or global market. They aren’t. They are US companies building cars for export to the US. Why should every Canadian be paying to protect them while the US tarrifs its own companies?

the Conservatives are not a solution, especially under Poilievre.

there’s a big strategic hole in this article.

The federal govt. spends first, taxes later. So spending isn’t constrained by taxes collected.

The debt/deficit argument is ONLY used against social spending. When it comes to pro-capital spending, the argument vanishes. $40B for pipelines? $150B in military spending? $80B in annual subsidies to give big investors risk-free bonds to buy? These are also all deficit spending.

Progessives should avoid reinforcing the debt/deficit spending myth, since it’s only used against progressive spending.

Haven’t been back since the coop was deliberately bankrupted. No plans to.

Is there more context for this?

It didn’t cost “us” anything. Citizens aren’t respsible for the Fed govt’s spending, deficit, or debt. Private individuals and companies don’t pay it. Taxes never need to be raised to run surpluses to “pay off the debt”.

The money spent on elections or anything else is received by private individuals and firms, and they go on to spend it on other things. Some of it is returned in taxes.

If the govt were to run austere spending and high taxes, producing enough surpluses to pay off the debt…how much money would remain in private hands? ZERO!

Something to keep in mind any time someone complains about how expensive elections or other useful govt spending is.

Why is the cost a concern? It mostly goes to low income temp workers. Even a general election is a microscopic component of govt spending. Democracy and elections should be among the highest spending priorities.

If you want to complain about spending, complain about something wasteful, like $60B in annual subsidies for the US-owned oil industry that produces 70% of AB oil. Shave that by 1% and you’d pay for every by-election since 1867

Sounds good to me.

Totally agree about electoral reforms of most kinds.

Sadly the NDP has drifted far from their socialist root, and doesn’t really talk about any kind of major reform to capitalism. They offer a lot of marginal policy change, but don’t talk about alternatives that would reverse the 50 year trend. When Mulcair was leader, h3me wanted to eliminate the federal deficit.

I think everyone can get behind interprovincial trade. Not much else that’s positive in there. Build pipelines faster, and double down on the fraud of carbon-capture. Nothing about any systemic changes that will help Canadians find housing or secure stable, increasing incomes. Nothing about shifting the share of economic growth from capital to workers. The inflation adjusted incomes of Canadians have be flat since the 1970s, and we are much less secure and have inferior services like health and education.

there’s a saying “if it can be done, you can afford it”…it means that money is never the problem for currency-issuing entities, like “Europe”. They always have enough Euros.

What is needed are the resources to do the thing - labour, material, organization.

A state can gently steer the resources using money as an inducement. Or it can just do it with power and laws.

Of course, creating Euros in this way means that the Euros aren’t being created in the same way they are now - which is by paying them to those who already hold Euro bonds, and that makes them upset, and that’s why it will take a while to happen.

Ax the Ax the Tax

Sounds good to me. No point leaving a bunch of open senate seats for some future govt to fill.

I look forward to Trudeau’s many non-partisan senators to blocking a future attempt by Poilievre to bypass the charter of rights using the notwithstanding clause federally. The senate would be right to reject that when conservatives try to advance attacks on whatever marginalized group they want blame for their own failings (probably transgendered people).

The senate would be right to reject that.

family farms are a tiny part of the ag industry. In the US it was under 10%. The image of a pastoral low-intensity 19th century family farm has been drilled into peoples’ minds by food industry advertising for 100 years. People like that image but it’s not real.

Ag is big business. Loans and leases for land, equipment, inputs, most of the labour isn’t from the business operator.

There’s probably under 10k family farms in Canada that would be impacted by a transfer to family and they can easily be exempted, it’s chump change for tax revenue.

“cures” involving immunosuppression have been around for a long time. It’s not a good outcome for most, the side effects of immunosuppression are worse than taking insulin.

The main patient discussed uses immunosuppression but later in the article they discuss some progress that doesn’t involve halting the immune system. That’s the potential breakthrough.

the increases they’re asking for probably don’t make up for the high inflation in the recent past. Particularly if inflation, as measured for consumers at that income level, doesn’t stay at 2% or less for the next 4 years.