If you want to equate doing illegal drugs with being homosexual, you can bugger off.
There is nothing unjust with drug laws, even if there is support and eventual repeal.
I'm not equating them?
I am using a visceral example of unjust laws that quite frankly never should have been on the books to illustrate my point that just because at one point the govt. decided a thing was illegal doesn't mean it's Right(tm). When society comes to it's senses and realizes that a law is unjust, those people punished by it should be given the respect of a pardon and clean record.
Again, I'm not equating the two actions, I am using one, more important and more impactful, example to show the failure of logic in another.
No dude, you are equating them. Your entire example here rests on the idea that the two are equivalent.
If I get a ticket for jaywalking today and tomorrow the city removes the bylaw against jaywalking, the fact that I still have to pay my ticket is not fucking equivalent to someone being thrown in jail for marrying someone of a different race.
These things are not equivalent and the reason for commutation of one sentence vs another rests on entirely different grounds. Because being able to grow and smoke marijuana is not, you know, a fundamental human right.
It's been a while since I've seen the G&M be the G&M so starkly but, this article arguing soaring home prices is a result of the 2006 Ontario Growth Plan and its environmental protection land-use plan in the golden horseshoe is pretty blatant. Even includes a few paragraphs from a homebuilder's association right at the end.
Honestly, I think people who make this argument need to, you know, fucking drive around a bit. There are massive swaths of undeveloped and underdeveloped land all over south of the Greenbelt (or... you know, on the lakeside of it). Half of Vaughan is low-density industrial, and then another 30% of it is low-density residential.
Hell, just the other day, I drove past Downsview subway station and there's like 5 maybe mid-rises built around there. Yes, some of that land is off-limits for development as part of Downsview Park, but the mid-rises could be higher and there are huge swaths of low-density suburb, some of it pretty rundown too. (There may be lingering zoning height restrictions due to the old Downsview Airfield.)
It's also kinda ridiculous given in the past like 20 years huge swaths of the Golden Horseshoe have gone from farmland or essentially nothing to massive subdivisions.
If you want to equate doing illegal drugs with being homosexual, you can bugger off.
There is nothing unjust with drug laws, even if there is support and eventual repeal.
I'm not equating them?
I am using a visceral example of unjust laws that quite frankly never should have been on the books to illustrate my point that just because at one point the govt. decided a thing was illegal doesn't mean it's Right(tm). When society comes to it's senses and realizes that a law is unjust, those people punished by it should be given the respect of a pardon and clean record.
Again, I'm not equating the two actions, I am using one, more important and more impactful, example to show the failure of logic in another.
No dude, you are equating them. Your entire example here rests on the idea that the two are equivalent.
If I get a ticket for jaywalking today and tomorrow the city removes the bylaw against jaywalking, the fact that I still have to pay my ticket is not fucking equivalent to someone being thrown in jail for marrying someone of a different race.
These things are not equivalent and the reason for commutation of one sentence vs another rests on entirely different grounds. Because being able to grow and smoke marijuana is not, you know, a fundamental human right.
I am not assigning some "badness" scale to either of them and I am not saying someone going to jail for being gay is equivalent to someone going to jail for possessing weed.
I am responding to Richy's point that X was illegal and they knew that therefore they need to own their punishment. I used an extreme example where a law was on the books that was unjust to show that Laws aren't handed down by some deity to be followed or else.
Laws don't change without resistance, they just don't. I'd love for you to speak to how legalization happens without the massive use of marijuanna occurring in the country. If everyone followed "The Law" as is being defended then the law would never change.
It's also laughable to say "They did the crime!" and then advocate for pardoning and expunging their records.
Just put em in jail for a bit then?
edit: the extreme example I used got exactly the intended response. It's UNTHINKABLE that it's OK people went to jail or had criminal records for their sexuality. But then you can go ahead and use the same Logic/Argument (not actions, the logic of the argument) to sit there and say "X is illegal, they knew it and still did it, therefore they're criminals".
Of course putting people in jail for their sexuality or race is worse than putting people in jail for drugs. All I'm asking is for some consistency in the logic.
It's been a while since I've seen the G&M be the G&M so starkly but, this article arguing soaring home prices is a result of the 2006 Ontario Growth Plan and its environmental protection land-use plan in the golden horseshoe is pretty blatant. Even includes a few paragraphs from a homebuilder's association right at the end.
Honestly, I think people who make this argument need to, you know, fucking drive around a bit. There are massive swaths of undeveloped and underdeveloped land all over south of the Greenbelt (or... you know, on the lakeside of it). Half of Vaughan is low-density industrial, and then another 30% of it is low-density residential.
Hell, just the other day, I drove past Downsview subway station and there's like 5 maybe mid-rises built around there. Yes, some of that land is off-limits for development as part of Downsview Park, but the mid-rises could be higher and there are huge swaths of low-density suburb, some of it pretty rundown too. (There may be lingering zoning height restrictions due to the old Downsview Airfield.)
I wonder if this same thing is true here on the south island.
We had a massive explosion of population out west because they were plopping down hundred and thousands of detached single family homes but nearer in town it's 100% condo's (maybe the occasional townhouse development).
What's a city to do though? just go crazy with sprawl because that's what people want? Or let house prices get insane enought to where people compromise just to live in the city they want?
If you want to equate doing illegal drugs with being homosexual, you can bugger off.
There is nothing unjust with drug laws, even if there is support and eventual repeal.
I'm not equating them?
I am using a visceral example of unjust laws that quite frankly never should have been on the books to illustrate my point that just because at one point the govt. decided a thing was illegal doesn't mean it's Right(tm). When society comes to it's senses and realizes that a law is unjust, those people punished by it should be given the respect of a pardon and clean record.
Again, I'm not equating the two actions, I am using one, more important and more impactful, example to show the failure of logic in another.
They are very different. You could easily make an argument that the anti-gay-sex laws are a violation of charter rights, which is a very different thing than violating statute by using an illegal drug. There should never have been laws that criminalized homosexual relationships, full stop - so therefore people convicted under them are considered to have never committed any actual crime - and I don't think you can make a sensible argument to say that any given psychoactive recreational drug should never be able to be made illegal
You can make the argument that their sentences ought to be commuted, but that is a different thing
If you want to equate doing illegal drugs with being homosexual, you can bugger off.
There is nothing unjust with drug laws, even if there is support and eventual repeal.
I'm not equating them?
I am using a visceral example of unjust laws that quite frankly never should have been on the books to illustrate my point that just because at one point the govt. decided a thing was illegal doesn't mean it's Right(tm). When society comes to it's senses and realizes that a law is unjust, those people punished by it should be given the respect of a pardon and clean record.
Again, I'm not equating the two actions, I am using one, more important and more impactful, example to show the failure of logic in another.
They are very different. You could easily make an argument that the anti-gay-sex laws are a violation of charter rights, which is a very different thing than violating statute by using an illegal drug. There should never have been laws that criminalized homosexual relationships, full stop - so therefore people convicted under them are considered to have never committed any actual crime - and I don't think you can make a sensible argument to say that any given psychoactive recreational drug should never be able to be made illegal
You can make the argument that their sentences ought to be commuted, but that is a different thing
I agree I don't think I would make the argument that it was a violation of charter rights to make taking or having a substance illegal whereas it's a total violation and intolerable that someone was punished for their sexual orientation. I agree with all of that.
I am saying that now that we, as a country, have decided that this thing should now be legal it is "not right" to keep people, who pose no other threat, in jail for doing it before. We also shouldn't be continuing to put people away for it.
I think we have a lot of agreement on those points too. Get the people who aren't a danger to society back out to their families and stop taking people away from their families.
This whole tangent was to rail against the statement that because something is illegal that compliance is required and non-compliance, regardless of what happens later, comes with irrevocable penalties.
Should people have been arrested and put in jail before the govt. "spoke" to their intention to legalize? Yes.
Should people be arrested and put in jail or be kept in jail after the govt. "spoke" to their intention to legalize? No.
It's been a while since I've seen the G&M be the G&M so starkly but, this article arguing soaring home prices is a result of the 2006 Ontario Growth Plan and its environmental protection land-use plan in the golden horseshoe is pretty blatant. Even includes a few paragraphs from a homebuilder's association right at the end.
Honestly, I think people who make this argument need to, you know, fucking drive around a bit. There are massive swaths of undeveloped and underdeveloped land all over south of the Greenbelt (or... you know, on the lakeside of it). Half of Vaughan is low-density industrial, and then another 30% of it is low-density residential.
Hell, just the other day, I drove past Downsview subway station and there's like 5 maybe mid-rises built around there. Yes, some of that land is off-limits for development as part of Downsview Park, but the mid-rises could be higher and there are huge swaths of low-density suburb, some of it pretty rundown too. (There may be lingering zoning height restrictions due to the old Downsview Airfield.)
I wonder if this same thing is true here on the south island.
We had a massive explosion of population out west because they were plopping down hundred and thousands of detached single family homes but nearer in town it's 100% condo's (maybe the occasional townhouse development).
What's a city to do though? just go crazy with sprawl because that's what people want? Or let house prices get insane enought to where people compromise just to live in the city they want?
Solving the problem is hard. Condo redevelopment projects are legitimately difficult projects. First you have to buy up all the land, and you know there's going to be some intransigent property owner that refuses to sell and then becomes an emblematic social media rallying cry against gentrification and big development. Then you need to wrangle the permits and such, and you know the entire community's going to be wargle-bargling with NIMBYism the entire fucking time, whether it's because they hate condos ("We want to preserve the nature of our community") or hate construction ("Our business can't survive like this") or are just entitled ("But all the traffic's going to kill all our children every day!")*. And you have to revamp all the utility infrastructure in the area, develop a traffic plan, deal with the problems of urban construction, etc, etc.. As much as the OMB's a buncha bullshit in the way it constantly overrides Toronto's official development plan, if it were entirely up to Toronto, nothing would ever get built.
Like, it's pretty obvious why developers would desperately prefer to just drop a condominium on unused land, right? And if we're doing that anyways, we might as well just drop a suburban tract rather than a condo, which is more expensive, takes longer to build, and provides less return.
I dunno. I think there's probably a role for government to play in guiding development, rather than just passively regulating it. Maybe the government can take on much of the early administrative load and the risks of initiating a development project, contract a developer, and then either manage the development or sell it after completion. This would open the door for a lot of corruption/mismanagement though, and it doesn't remotely solve the political problem of everybody always wanting everything around them to stay exactly the way it is forever.
N.b. Anti-development protesters can have legitimate complaints. I'm just focusing on the inevitable illegitimate ones.
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Well, there's no reason why a government would have to renege on the previous government's development plans. Of course, the politicized nature of development would induce politicians to run against them, and then revoke the plans despite the costs, like with the Mississauga power plant debacle, because their voters are fanatics who don't care about the costs getting amortized to the entire electorate.
But there's no reason, for example, that Toronto couldn't point at an area of Scarborough and say, we're buying out all those property owners and expropriating anybody who doesn't sell (like they're doing for the subway already), and then coming up with their own development plan for that area, and then putting out tenders to developers to build it. The depth of government action in that could vary, from government-owned community housing on one end to just a rough sketch of a private development requires that developers could meet however they want on the other, but I think this would be more effective than just waiting on our asses for a developer to try it. (And then throwing up 17 different hurdles for the developer to clamber over before they even get to put a shovel in the ground.)
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Well, there's no reason why a government would have to renege on the previous government's development plans. Of course, the politicized nature of development would induce politicians to run against them, and then revoke the plans despite the costs, like with the Mississauga power plant debacle, because their voters are fanatics who don't care about the costs getting amortized to the entire electorate.
But there's no reason, for example, that Toronto couldn't point at an area of Scarborough and say, we're buying out all those property owners and expropriating anybody who doesn't sell (like they're doing for the subway already), and then coming up with their own development plan for that area, and then putting out tenders to developers to build it. The depth of government action in that could vary, from government-owned community housing on one end to just a rough sketch of a private development requires that developers could meet however they want on the other, but I think this would be more effective than just waiting on our asses for a developer to try it. (And then throwing up 17 different hurdles for the developer to clamber over before they even get to put a shovel in the ground.)
I'm with you but I think we'd be in the minority.
Anti-govt. sentiment is pretty bad here.
Even if something is demonstrably good people will rail against it because politicians are bad!
edit: the extreme example I used got exactly the intended response. It's UNTHINKABLE that it's OK people went to jail or had criminal records for their sexuality. But then you can go ahead and use the same Logic/Argument (not actions, the logic of the argument) to sit there and say "X is illegal, they knew it and still did it, therefore they're criminals".
Of course putting people in jail for their sexuality or race is worse than putting people in jail for drugs. All I'm asking is for some consistency in the logic.
Your sexuality and your recreational drug usage are not the same thing. You cannot make an argument involving one, substitute in the other one without changing anything else, and claim you have the same argument with consistent logic.
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Well, there's no reason why a government would have to renege on the previous government's development plans. Of course, the politicized nature of development would induce politicians to run against them, and then revoke the plans despite the costs, like with the Mississauga power plant debacle, because their voters are fanatics who don't care about the costs getting amortized to the entire electorate.
But there's no reason, for example, that Toronto couldn't point at an area of Scarborough and say, we're buying out all those property owners and expropriating anybody who doesn't sell (like they're doing for the subway already), and then coming up with their own development plan for that area, and then putting out tenders to developers to build it. The depth of government action in that could vary, from government-owned community housing on one end to just a rough sketch of a private development requires that developers could meet however they want on the other, but I think this would be more effective than just waiting on our asses for a developer to try it. (And then throwing up 17 different hurdles for the developer to clamber over before they even get to put a shovel in the ground.)
I'm with you but I think we'd be in the minority.
Anti-govt. sentiment is pretty bad here.
Even if something is demonstrably good people will rail against it because politicians are bad!
I don't think "hey we're going to throw you out of your home so it can be someone else's home" would just attract the generic anti gov sentiment..
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Vancouver does this and has done so since 1929. In the late 70s, it undertook a large planning project that created a new growth plan for the city and a bylaw was passed to give the planning department a long-term advisory body.
With the passing of by-law 5064, the Commission made the transition to an advisory body to Council on matters of civic planning policy as seen from an overall, city-wide context, with a mandate to engage in long-range planning issues, and to prepare a set of goals for the city. Reference was made to the advice given in the Hartland Bartholomew Report:
"...only such a Commission can give continuing attention to long-range problems; only through use of such a Commission can the long-range view-point take precedence over political and departmental expediency."
By and large, since the city and neighbourhood plans have a high level of public involvement in their creation they tend to remain fairly apolitical. Vancouver elects its civic politicians through an at-large system which may have some role in reducing the amount of one region getting played off against another region.
There's obviously a lot of viewpoints on how effective the planning commission has been with regards to the ongoing question of affordability, but with regards to the question of can long-term planning be done, I would say the answer is yes.
I appear to not have made my message clear. What I was trying to get across, is that there are long-term city planning initiatives/commissions already in existence. They are capable of executing long-term city planning that does not all get thrown out as soon as a new party takes power. Whether or not they've been successful, taken the right approach, or have had their long-term plans thrown into disarray by outside forces is a separate issue. The capability for long-term planning can exist, but its one of those things that falls under the bureaucracy and requires all political parties who hold power to respect it's importance.
Provincially in BC, the BC Agricultural Land Commission is a land-use planning/protection group under the provincial government. The idea is to establish lands that are designated for agriculture and disallow development of the land for non-agricultural use. It's an important role for a government to take, but unfortunately its the type of thing that the political parties who gain power have only ever paid lip-service to and has constantly been under attack.
Sadly, in the rising political tribalism and partisanship, these long-term planning commissions are something I fear will become more and more degraded in their capability of executing long term plans.
IRT pot legalization and prior convictions, I think the appropriate comparison would be how the government (or other governments) dealt with alcohol prohibition being lifted.
If the process was to enforce standing laws up until prohibition was lifted, then so be it. I'd be in favor of programs that expedite pardons or commutations for convictions that wouldn't be given criminal charges after legalization.
While it would also be nice if it was ALSO an automatic program that would immediately begin the review, I imagine due to bureaucratic complications it would have to be by application by default.
If you want to equate doing illegal drugs with being homosexual, you can bugger off.
There is nothing unjust with drug laws, even if there is support and eventual repeal.
I'm not equating them?
I am using a visceral example of unjust laws that quite frankly never should have been on the books to illustrate my point that just because at one point the govt. decided a thing was illegal doesn't mean it's Right(tm). When society comes to it's senses and realizes that a law is unjust, those people punished by it should be given the respect of a pardon and clean record.
Again, I'm not equating the two actions, I am using one, more important and more impactful, example to show the failure of logic in another.
They are very different. You could easily make an argument that the anti-gay-sex laws are a violation of charter rights, which is a very different thing than violating statute by using an illegal drug. There should never have been laws that criminalized homosexual relationships, full stop - so therefore people convicted under them are considered to have never committed any actual crime - and I don't think you can make a sensible argument to say that any given psychoactive recreational drug should never be able to be made illegal
You can make the argument that their sentences ought to be commuted, but that is a different thing
I agree I don't think I would make the argument that it was a violation of charter rights to make taking or having a substance illegal whereas it's a total violation and intolerable that someone was punished for their sexual orientation. I agree with all of that.
I am saying that now that we, as a country, have decided that this thing should now be legal it is "not right" to keep people, who pose no other threat, in jail for doing it before. We also shouldn't be continuing to put people away for it.
I think we have a lot of agreement on those points too. Get the people who aren't a danger to society back out to their families and stop taking people away from their families.
This whole tangent was to rail against the statement that because something is illegal that compliance is required and non-compliance, regardless of what happens later, comes with irrevocable penalties.
Yes, and the whole point is that whether non-compliance with the law qualifies as protest or an assertion of fundamental rights rather then just criminality depends on the law in question. Hence there being a difference between not complying with an anti-miscegenation vs not complying with a traffic statute, to use two extremes. And "smoking pot" sits on the traffic end of the spectrum whereas "being gay" sits way over at the edge of the other.
If the govt took an active hand in guiding neighbourhoods/density plans on a 10-20+ year timescale it would help consumers and developers plan ahead but I don't see how you manage that with changing governments. The only way you'd get stability and consistency would be to offload it to the provincial level and I can't see how anyone would be good with that heh.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Well, there's no reason why a government would have to renege on the previous government's development plans. Of course, the politicized nature of development would induce politicians to run against them, and then revoke the plans despite the costs, like with the Mississauga power plant debacle, because their voters are fanatics who don't care about the costs getting amortized to the entire electorate.
But there's no reason, for example, that Toronto couldn't point at an area of Scarborough and say, we're buying out all those property owners and expropriating anybody who doesn't sell (like they're doing for the subway already), and then coming up with their own development plan for that area, and then putting out tenders to developers to build it. The depth of government action in that could vary, from government-owned community housing on one end to just a rough sketch of a private development requires that developers could meet however they want on the other, but I think this would be more effective than just waiting on our asses for a developer to try it. (And then throwing up 17 different hurdles for the developer to clamber over before they even get to put a shovel in the ground.)
I'm with you but I think we'd be in the minority.
Anti-govt. sentiment is pretty bad here.
Even if something is demonstrably good people will rail against it because politicians are bad!
I don't think "hey we're going to throw you out of your home so it can be someone else's home" would just attract the generic anti gov sentiment..
I'm not one to suggest that unlimited government expropriation is a great idea, but honestly, sometimes people's irrational attachments to their homes hold up meaningful progress that would benefit hundreds if not thousands of people. It's somewhat in vogue to side with the little guy against big government/developers, but when that attitude is proliferated, we have the complete stoppage of densification that we need. I don't know how exactly to strike the balance, but when people will refuse to move for any price because of whatever, they're breaking the free-market model that's supposed to be self-correcting this problem. (Not that I think free market economics really works on real estate anyways, but it's one more distortion.)
"We are setting the price and fuck you" is the exact opposite of free market.
No, that's just a bizarre straw man. "There is no finite price on this planet I'd ever be willing to sell my house for" is, however, a violation of the assumptions underlying free-market economic theories.
The theory of the self-regulating free market assumes that everything can be commoditized and that there exists an "true" market value for every commodity that people then approximate with their own personal utility functions. When people start turning down offers that are 3x, 4x, 10x markups on the estimated market value of their homes, these people are behaving irrationally - at least, as far as free market economic theories are concerned - and these distortions then break the ability of the free market to self-regulate.
Not that (again) I'm particularly convinced that the free market functions properly on real estate anyways.
I don't see any reason why you'd need to force people to sell their homes in the first place. The problem with buying properties and chopping them up into smaller properties or buying properties and replacing them with condos is usually the zoning laws and nothing more.
In places where it's not an issue, which is all over the place in Toronto btw, you see this shit happen. Although it's usually with commercial realestate, which is it's own kind of stupid.
I don't see any reason why you'd need to force people to sell their homes in the first place. The problem with buying properties and chopping them up into smaller properties or buying properties and replacing them with condos is usually the zoning laws and nothing more.
In places where it's not an issue, which is all over the place in Toronto btw, you see this shit happen. Although it's usually with commercial realestate, which is it's own kind of stupid.
I'm only ok with this in extreme public good cases (new highway, hospital etc...) and just to avoid the small portion of the right that would absolutely flip their shit if the goverment seizes homes.... to build more homes.
He has cited his failure to gain traction in Quebec and his poor French-language skills as reasons for dropping out of the leadership race.
Hey look, self-reflection.
Are we sure he said that, or did he move his mouth while a trained ventriloquist said the words offstage
Because I am pretty sure O'Leary is incapable of noticing his own shortcomings
Apparently he gave an interview to the G&M with many more quotes than the CBC article:
“It’s for the sake of the party that I do this, and the country. Because I can’t deliver Quebec. I can’t win. That’s my opinion. I wish it was different,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail at his downtown Toronto office.
...
Mr. O’Leary said he first met with Mr. Bernier at his cottage in June, when Mr. Bernier asked for his endorsement, and the two have worked on policies together.
“He was consistent in his belief that I could not garner major support in Quebec and I didn’t believe him. I felt that because I was born in Montreal I could get up to 25 per cent in Quebec. That I could deliver 20 seats, maybe. That’s clear it’s not going to happen,” Mr. O’Leary said.
...
When asked if he had low support in Quebec because he doesn’t speak fluent French, Mr. O’Leary said, “Defining Quebec is…they’re the Florida of Canada. They often decide who wins an election.”
So who is left in this race that actually has a chance. What other stupid shit has Bernier done other than Red Pill and being a Libertarian "Free Market will save us all" crackpot.
Heh - must have been REALLY spur of the moment as he sent out an email soliciting funds around 10 am this morning. :P
Nah. He just didn't tell his campaign team beforehand. (Or the Conservative Party, apparently.) SUCKERS! Maybe they should have run their own leadership campaigns! Then they would have gotten to call all the shots!
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BouwsTWanna come to a super soft birthday party?Registered Userregular
edited April 2017
Christy Clark issues letter to Trudeau in response to softwood lumber dispute.
Tl;dr - The USA has been using Canadian west coast ports to bolster their lacking west coast shipping capacity for thermal coal (icky/dirty electricity coal). We'd like to choke them out, thereby freeing up additional port capacity for more environmentally friendly metallurgical coal (used to produce long lasting steel) we produce locally. Please support us.
I like it.
BouwsT on
Between you and me, Peggy, I smoked this Juul and it did UNTHINKABLE things to my mind and body...
Posts
No dude, you are equating them. Your entire example here rests on the idea that the two are equivalent.
If I get a ticket for jaywalking today and tomorrow the city removes the bylaw against jaywalking, the fact that I still have to pay my ticket is not fucking equivalent to someone being thrown in jail for marrying someone of a different race.
These things are not equivalent and the reason for commutation of one sentence vs another rests on entirely different grounds. Because being able to grow and smoke marijuana is not, you know, a fundamental human right.
It's also kinda ridiculous given in the past like 20 years huge swaths of the Golden Horseshoe have gone from farmland or essentially nothing to massive subdivisions.
I am not assigning some "badness" scale to either of them and I am not saying someone going to jail for being gay is equivalent to someone going to jail for possessing weed.
I am responding to Richy's point that X was illegal and they knew that therefore they need to own their punishment. I used an extreme example where a law was on the books that was unjust to show that Laws aren't handed down by some deity to be followed or else.
Laws don't change without resistance, they just don't. I'd love for you to speak to how legalization happens without the massive use of marijuanna occurring in the country. If everyone followed "The Law" as is being defended then the law would never change.
It's also laughable to say "They did the crime!" and then advocate for pardoning and expunging their records.
Just put em in jail for a bit then?
edit: the extreme example I used got exactly the intended response. It's UNTHINKABLE that it's OK people went to jail or had criminal records for their sexuality. But then you can go ahead and use the same Logic/Argument (not actions, the logic of the argument) to sit there and say "X is illegal, they knew it and still did it, therefore they're criminals".
Of course putting people in jail for their sexuality or race is worse than putting people in jail for drugs. All I'm asking is for some consistency in the logic.
I wonder if this same thing is true here on the south island.
We had a massive explosion of population out west because they were plopping down hundred and thousands of detached single family homes but nearer in town it's 100% condo's (maybe the occasional townhouse development).
What's a city to do though? just go crazy with sprawl because that's what people want? Or let house prices get insane enought to where people compromise just to live in the city they want?
I mean, unless you are coming from China.
They are very different. You could easily make an argument that the anti-gay-sex laws are a violation of charter rights, which is a very different thing than violating statute by using an illegal drug. There should never have been laws that criminalized homosexual relationships, full stop - so therefore people convicted under them are considered to have never committed any actual crime - and I don't think you can make a sensible argument to say that any given psychoactive recreational drug should never be able to be made illegal
You can make the argument that their sentences ought to be commuted, but that is a different thing
I agree I don't think I would make the argument that it was a violation of charter rights to make taking or having a substance illegal whereas it's a total violation and intolerable that someone was punished for their sexual orientation. I agree with all of that.
I am saying that now that we, as a country, have decided that this thing should now be legal it is "not right" to keep people, who pose no other threat, in jail for doing it before. We also shouldn't be continuing to put people away for it.
I think we have a lot of agreement on those points too. Get the people who aren't a danger to society back out to their families and stop taking people away from their families.
This whole tangent was to rail against the statement that because something is illegal that compliance is required and non-compliance, regardless of what happens later, comes with irrevocable penalties.
Should people have been arrested and put in jail before the govt. "spoke" to their intention to legalize? Yes.
Should people be arrested and put in jail or be kept in jail after the govt. "spoke" to their intention to legalize? No.
Solving the problem is hard. Condo redevelopment projects are legitimately difficult projects. First you have to buy up all the land, and you know there's going to be some intransigent property owner that refuses to sell and then becomes an emblematic social media rallying cry against gentrification and big development. Then you need to wrangle the permits and such, and you know the entire community's going to be wargle-bargling with NIMBYism the entire fucking time, whether it's because they hate condos ("We want to preserve the nature of our community") or hate construction ("Our business can't survive like this") or are just entitled ("But all the traffic's going to kill all our children every day!")*. And you have to revamp all the utility infrastructure in the area, develop a traffic plan, deal with the problems of urban construction, etc, etc.. As much as the OMB's a buncha bullshit in the way it constantly overrides Toronto's official development plan, if it were entirely up to Toronto, nothing would ever get built.
Like, it's pretty obvious why developers would desperately prefer to just drop a condominium on unused land, right? And if we're doing that anyways, we might as well just drop a suburban tract rather than a condo, which is more expensive, takes longer to build, and provides less return.
I dunno. I think there's probably a role for government to play in guiding development, rather than just passively regulating it. Maybe the government can take on much of the early administrative load and the risks of initiating a development project, contract a developer, and then either manage the development or sell it after completion. This would open the door for a lot of corruption/mismanagement though, and it doesn't remotely solve the political problem of everybody always wanting everything around them to stay exactly the way it is forever.
N.b. Anti-development protesters can have legitimate complaints. I'm just focusing on the inevitable illegitimate ones.
Housing sure seems like one of those issues where there are so many different viewpoints and challenges that it's hard to even wrap your head around.
Well, there's no reason why a government would have to renege on the previous government's development plans. Of course, the politicized nature of development would induce politicians to run against them, and then revoke the plans despite the costs, like with the Mississauga power plant debacle, because their voters are fanatics who don't care about the costs getting amortized to the entire electorate.
But there's no reason, for example, that Toronto couldn't point at an area of Scarborough and say, we're buying out all those property owners and expropriating anybody who doesn't sell (like they're doing for the subway already), and then coming up with their own development plan for that area, and then putting out tenders to developers to build it. The depth of government action in that could vary, from government-owned community housing on one end to just a rough sketch of a private development requires that developers could meet however they want on the other, but I think this would be more effective than just waiting on our asses for a developer to try it. (And then throwing up 17 different hurdles for the developer to clamber over before they even get to put a shovel in the ground.)
I'm with you but I think we'd be in the minority.
Anti-govt. sentiment is pretty bad here.
Even if something is demonstrably good people will rail against it because politicians are bad!
Your sexuality and your recreational drug usage are not the same thing. You cannot make an argument involving one, substitute in the other one without changing anything else, and claim you have the same argument with consistent logic.
I don't think "hey we're going to throw you out of your home so it can be someone else's home" would just attract the generic anti gov sentiment..
Vancouver does this and has done so since 1929. In the late 70s, it undertook a large planning project that created a new growth plan for the city and a bylaw was passed to give the planning department a long-term advisory body.
http://www.vancouverplanning.ca/about/history
Current stuff:
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/major-planning-projects.aspx
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/neighbourhood-planning-projects.aspx
By and large, since the city and neighbourhood plans have a high level of public involvement in their creation they tend to remain fairly apolitical. Vancouver elects its civic politicians through an at-large system which may have some role in reducing the amount of one region getting played off against another region.
There's obviously a lot of viewpoints on how effective the planning commission has been with regards to the ongoing question of affordability, but with regards to the question of can long-term planning be done, I would say the answer is yes.
The collapse will be crippling and in the meantime a whole generation is cut out from ever owning a home and paying exorbitant rent.
Provincially in BC, the BC Agricultural Land Commission is a land-use planning/protection group under the provincial government. The idea is to establish lands that are designated for agriculture and disallow development of the land for non-agricultural use. It's an important role for a government to take, but unfortunately its the type of thing that the political parties who gain power have only ever paid lip-service to and has constantly been under attack.
Sadly, in the rising political tribalism and partisanship, these long-term planning commissions are something I fear will become more and more degraded in their capability of executing long term plans.
If the process was to enforce standing laws up until prohibition was lifted, then so be it. I'd be in favor of programs that expedite pardons or commutations for convictions that wouldn't be given criminal charges after legalization.
While it would also be nice if it was ALSO an automatic program that would immediately begin the review, I imagine due to bureaucratic complications it would have to be by application by default.
Mmmmm....toasty.
Yes, and the whole point is that whether non-compliance with the law qualifies as protest or an assertion of fundamental rights rather then just criminality depends on the law in question. Hence there being a difference between not complying with an anti-miscegenation vs not complying with a traffic statute, to use two extremes. And "smoking pot" sits on the traffic end of the spectrum whereas "being gay" sits way over at the edge of the other.
I'm not one to suggest that unlimited government expropriation is a great idea, but honestly, sometimes people's irrational attachments to their homes hold up meaningful progress that would benefit hundreds if not thousands of people. It's somewhat in vogue to side with the little guy against big government/developers, but when that attitude is proliferated, we have the complete stoppage of densification that we need. I don't know how exactly to strike the balance, but when people will refuse to move for any price because of whatever, they're breaking the free-market model that's supposed to be self-correcting this problem. (Not that I think free market economics really works on real estate anyways, but it's one more distortion.)
No, that's just a bizarre straw man. "There is no finite price on this planet I'd ever be willing to sell my house for" is, however, a violation of the assumptions underlying free-market economic theories.
The theory of the self-regulating free market assumes that everything can be commoditized and that there exists an "true" market value for every commodity that people then approximate with their own personal utility functions. When people start turning down offers that are 3x, 4x, 10x markups on the estimated market value of their homes, these people are behaving irrationally - at least, as far as free market economic theories are concerned - and these distortions then break the ability of the free market to self-regulate.
Not that (again) I'm particularly convinced that the free market functions properly on real estate anyways.
BC election video. I thought it was a pretty good superficial overview of the different party positions.
Your Guide to the BC Election: Who's Promising What?
In places where it's not an issue, which is all over the place in Toronto btw, you see this shit happen. Although it's usually with commercial realestate, which is it's own kind of stupid.
I'm only ok with this in extreme public good cases (new highway, hospital etc...) and just to avoid the small portion of the right that would absolutely flip their shit if the goverment seizes homes.... to build more homes.
Bye Bye Kevin!
Good
too bad Bernier still is a turd.
Hey look, self-reflection.
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Are we sure he said that, or did he move his mouth while a trained ventriloquist said the words offstage
Because I am pretty sure O'Leary is incapable of noticing his own shortcomings
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Apparently he gave an interview to the G&M with many more quotes than the CBC article:
Okay, so a few steps back from self-reflection.
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And from the CBC article: In that one is a cute hero and the other is a horrifying and destructive monstrosity, I must say I have to agree.
I'd say it would be like a chess master playing against an incontinent chimpanzee.
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Heh - must have been REALLY spur of the moment as he sent out an email soliciting funds around 10 am this morning. :P
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I'm not willing to call Trudeau a chess master... He's been adequate but nothing extraordinary in his dealing with Trump.
As I try to evaluate the appropriateness of this analogy, it is unclear to me whether Trump is capable of playing chess.
(There are multiple interpretations of that claim. I may be engaging in all of them, honestly.)
Also, moving chess pieces, no matter how masterfully, is a poor defense against a chimpanzee flinging poo around.
Now I want to see how many votes he gets.
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Nah. He just didn't tell his campaign team beforehand. (Or the Conservative Party, apparently.) SUCKERS! Maybe they should have run their own leadership campaigns! Then they would have gotten to call all the shots!
Tl;dr - The USA has been using Canadian west coast ports to bolster their lacking west coast shipping capacity for thermal coal (icky/dirty electricity coal). We'd like to choke them out, thereby freeing up additional port capacity for more environmentally friendly metallurgical coal (used to produce long lasting steel) we produce locally. Please support us.
I like it.