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[Canadian Politics] Oops, the Cabinet Blew Up
Posts
This line of thinking right here is what leads me to hate the FPTP so. If FPTP keeps us having to endlessly strategically pick whoever the pollsters are saying is in second place in your riding so your first place bogey man doesn't take it all with the biggest minority of the 5 major parties in the riding, if the pollsters are wrong, you just split the party who you think would represent you best, and if they are right, you aren't actually voting for the party who you think would represent you best.
I've voted like that for 2 decades now, no matter which party I have picked that election cycle, I was accused of being a split vote 99% of the time. Reform? Split for the PC. Liberal? Split for the NDP. BC Conservative? Split for the BC Liberals. Green? Split for the NDP. NDP? Split for the Liberals ... do that for 2 decades and it sure starts to look like what is the fucking point in even voting any way with FPTP until the parties in Canada just form 2 parties ... but then we see how well that is going for the USA.
Its not fair to blame voters for the actions of those they did not vote for when they did vote for their convictions and perseverance in voting for who would represent them best in democracy. Its the kind of disenfranchisement that leads to record low voter turn out because you're damning them whether they participate in democracy or not, so why even waste their time, they never had a say it how it was going to turn out anyways because they are just a fucking split vote.
You want to blame someone for a despotic Conservative winning a seat majority with a minority popular vote? Blame Trudeau for not keeping his promise to get rid of FPTP for something that works better with Canadians voting for more than 2 parties and promotes sane Conservatives splitting off from the populist demagogues promising them undisputed, uncompromising power by uniting the right to the simple loyal to party identity above all else nonsense of "Well, he may not be a good guy, but he's our guy" mental gymnastics to justify not hurting their pride in their self image as the stalwart heroes of this country.
Blame Green and NDP voters for the Conservatives being in a minority or majority seat again, go ahead, see how far it actually gets you insulting their democratic determination and resolve by making the ballot decision process acrimonious.
And the other issues of fate of a province's enviroment (and the economy that relies upon it), its contribution to the fate of the world's human life support system, and the means by which the government retains the manpower and skill set with fair and reliable pay to effectively tackle these large issues (which includes abortion, muslims, minorities, LGBTQ, and media) is not small potatoes and fixing those does not mean you have to pick them over the others. Especially when you seem to be defending minorities in your statement, even while working against those opposed to the pipeline like the First Nations who never got a fair stake in the process to begin with and thus find themselves disapproving of Trudeau giving the oil pipeline execs a pay day on the public dime, sending every indication that they can make all the well reasoned submissions they want but this project is going ahead anyways, even if there are better ways that are more economically agile to get products to the Pacific market if BC's infrastructure capacity and technological level in other areas like rail, bridges, harbours, and the coast guard that circumvent and mitigate the enviromental issues were invested in. Its very much not small potatoes, it speaks right to the heart of the provinces' roles within Canada and the federal's level of responsibility to supporting it for the betterment of us all.
Sure it is. Because the system is quite clear about what it is when you engage in it. We all know it's FPTP. Vote accordingly. Anything else is just self-congratulatory nonsense. Prioritising some idea of "voting the way I felt deep down inside" over actual outcomes.
Please redirect your latent personal issues somewhere else. Just because a buncha people said some mean things about you in the past doesn't mean I want to be yelled at about it. And it definitely doesn't do anything to sway my opinion except away.
Re. the bolded, no, honestly, like... the provinces' role with Canada is not something that I give a shit about when held up in contrast with, "Do these people get to be Canadians?" Like... basic human rights for these people versus did these people have a fair stake in a process that's resulted in an outcome they don't agree with... that seems pretty much the definition of mountains vs molehills. Like, for native communities, it's that important to fight off this one pipeline, risking the justice reform, the reconciliation process, the increased government support for native communities, and all the other fucking pipelines that would be built by a Conservative government? Because that just strikes me as willfully blind or strategically foolish. At some point you have to defend what you've won. Why did you fight for it in the first place if you're not going to? Or are you just assuming that those gains won't ever be rolled back, not even by a Trumpesque government in an increasingly Trumpesque world?
Regardless, I don't know how I can weigh possible marginal benefits to people who will only exist centuries from now against real harms caused to people who exist now. This is, of course, the somewhat irrational future discount at work here, but I don't know how I can tell a friend who's getting deported, sorry bro, but climate change. That'd weigh heavy on my soul.
Also, re. electoral reform, blame Trudeau? What the fuck? Trudeau's the closest we've gotten to electoral reform at the federal level. I don't really give a shit if you feel personally betrayed by him, not when it comes to my vote; I mean shit, the NDP could have just gotten on board with STV too, but they insisted on MMR, and now we're stuck with FPTP. Regardless, voting out Trudeau isn't going to send the message that if only Trudeau followed through on electoral reform, he'd have kept his job. The message is going to be, don't ever fucking touch electoral reform with a 20-foot pole ever again. If you actually want electoral reform, voting out Trudeau and replacing him with Scheer would be the best way to NOT get that.
The Harper government wanted three pipelines. The Trudeau government wants one. An NDP government would, presumably, want zero. So the hard math of this is that unless the NDP have twice the likelihood of being elected over the Conservatives, E(# pipelines) is probably minimized by voting Liberal. This is the world I live in. Yelling at me that we should be in a better world doesn't change that, nor does it change the problems I have to work out in my head. Yelling that the world would be better if Jack Layton had won, well yeah, it probably would be, but how does that help me now? How does that help Singh's electoral chances? Missing the forests from the trees entirely does nothing to convince me that I can hope for that better world to come to be either.
I don't ever want to be that progressive that goes, "Ooop, here's good enough," or "Got mine, fuck all y'all," but shit, this world is a scary one nowadays, and the risks feel bigger and realer than ever before, much more than with Harper. And I don't know, we vote in Trudeau for four more years or Singh for four years, and I'm not even sure we're any safer on the other side with either of them. I don't know that either of them have a plan that would actually stop the crazies from just coming back four years later. I don't even know if Trudeau's whatever-ness or Singh's brownness would galvanize them even more.
Hippofant has a set of priorities that are pretty much the inverse of my own, and that is my favorite thing about this country. A good bunch of you cats are completely assimilated into a culture that thinks murder is newsworthy, cannibalism isn't just an unfortunate consequence of the daily grind, and witchcraft with the intent to deceive is odd.
I feel a deep kinship for Samwise of The Gods Must Be Crazy fame. You are the best Gods ever.
...Even if you can't vote in a straight line.
My tongue is firmly in cheek, but for real, Canada is some promised land shit to every African I've ever spoken to hereabouts. I love you guys.
I dont know about the rest of you but I just cant start the day without a hot mug of Joe.
Progressive voters in the US allowed the perfect be the enemy of the good in 2018, and look what they ended up with. When Clinton won the primary they splintered off into never-Clintons and Berniecrats or whateverthefuck and split the progressive vote by voting for independents who had absolutely no chance of winning. Now they're stuck with Cheeto Benito.
We lose our two days paid annual sick pay (okaayyy....)
And, doctor's notes are allowed to be mandated for absences (FUCKING REALLY?)
Did you really need to do that Doug? It feel so petty.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Doctor's notes are among the most arcane "Employees can't be trusted" bullshit in the modern age. Like, motherfucker ... if someone is already underpaid and struggling, it's fucking inhuman to ask them to probably take transit on their own dime to some overburdened medical clinic (lolfamilydoctor?) where they wait for hours to procure a note saying, "Yes, this person is sick." The cost balance of how many bad employees this stops from taking fake sick days VS the obstacles it presents to people who are actually sick just cannot add up ... =_=
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
It's part of an effort to keep wages low. If you can fire people for calling in sick, then you get to keep hiring people at the lowest possible wage point. It's about the continued concentration of wealth.
That being said, BC just failed in an attempt to enact proportional voting. That failure will send a message for the foreseeable future that FPTP is what the voters want.
The BC events do really suck, but they aren't unique. The Liberals get to say "Well we tried, but nobody would agree, so shrug." and it generally weakens electoral reform as a political promise going forward.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I've also just not felt that strategic voting is the answer - some truly great NDP MPs got washed aside in the last election because of how badly we wanted Harper out. I really don't want those people to still be sitting out of the main government body because of PC bullshit. But I certainly cannot fault you for having your priorities as such.
Perhaps I can interest you in my meager selection of pins?
I am trying to keep invectives out of this but you've clearly made your assumptions and felt it was somehow on the level to direct personal attacks into this political conversation, while continuing to make false equivalences that somehow protecting the enviroment means that we have to accept treating refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants poorly, all the while insultingly insinuating that I am yelling at you when I didn't type in all caps or use exclamation points even. This will be the last time I will be replying to you if you can't be civil and polite in your arguments.
The bizarre nature of this is that I don't want a Trumpesque government in an increasingly Trumpesque world either but I can't carry on a conversation where you are claiming my position on how divisive and disenfranchising the status quo of strategic voting is for those who do not want Trumpland politics is only on the merit of personal issues, a not so subtle nod to saying I am mentally ill, rather than admitting there are larger bodies of politic that I was pointing out who are much more involved in the protesting of Trudeau's politics than I in BC. This is as polite as I could come up with to your rude and condescending approach to this conversation, so I say good day to you sir or madame.
That's the fallacy in the process of Strategic Anyone But Conservative voting though, you don't really know who has the best chance of winning. The inaccuracies of sample polls before the results come in on election night are highlights we talk about every time, the reputations of the pollsters to some degree hinge on how close they get to the actual results of the election, especially at the individual riding level. The process itself is prone to error and thus can not be very strategic at all, especially when it backfires.
Swallowing idealism seems a rather dubious prospect for continued participation when representative democracy is in itself an act of idealism over the practicality of the past forms of governance. Lack of participation seems to favour the Conservatives, so...
Uh what? The hell it is. Democracy is no impractical as compared to the things it replaced.
Pragmatically, its a lot easier to support the status quo than to protest it and replace the establishment with an electoral process, especially previous status quos that had operated for many generations. The House of Commons which we base our government off of was not always in charge and taking its current position which we now take for granted where our right to a vote was not without unrest between the Crown and the Lords and elected representatives. It was not always a foregone conclusion that it was more or less practical than just continuing to acquiesce our collective political power to the established Crown and Lords.
The also idealism springs from that we believe the person we vote for will represent the riding faithfully, that our participation in casting a ballot is an act that is enacting our political will as a group adequately is in itself idealistic.
Hell, on occasion, we've even suspended the civil liberties of representative democracy for practicality, for good or ill, like enacting the War Measures Act during the October Crisis in 1970, a decision by Trudeau that was widely criticized.
Widely criticized in retrospect. At the time, a majority of people were in favour of it, I believe.
Yeah, none of this tracks with your assertion. Democracy is not an act of idealism. It's a more representative form of government then what it replaced because being more representative was the goal.
Democracy is not an act of idealism and your vote shouldn't be one either. That turns your vote into some sort of ridiculous assertion of personal identity rather then what it actually is: a way to shape governmental policy towards the outcomes you want.
You're coming across as really confusing here, you're saying its not an expression of personal identity of the voter, then saying "you want" in the very next part of that sentence...
Bolded the part that is pretty much being idealistic / visionary (to use a word that has less negative connotations). Your asserting that I am somehow saying that isn't what it actually is, like as if you're just taking the negative meaning in the use of the word idealism. Of course that is what it is, but to say that placing a vote is not an act of picking your idealistic outcome and seeing if that pans with the rest of everyone else's idealistic outcome in your riding is ... just as ridiculous as saying democracy isn't asserting idealism for the common man. Like we wouldn't have Universal Healthcare today and be continuing to try to improve it if someone hadn't been idealistic in the past, any more than we would even be able to vote or later improve that vote with things like Women's Suffrage.
And overtimes still at 44hours
The liberals took forever for that reform and gave concessions only for the cons to rip it all away like they always do
Its a shame really, incremental eh progress or a party that just destorys everything that isnt beneficial for the captial owners
She was handcuffed for not holding an escalator's handrail. Ten years later, she's headed to Canada's Supreme Court
And I am just fucking stunned that Kosoian lost her civil suit at both the Quebec Court and the Quebec Court of Appeal. The Quebec Court of Appeals ruled that...
WHAT?! And Laval is arguing that...
I dunno, maybe it'd be about the same amount of chaos as if every Laval cop decided to arrest everybody who doesn't hold the fucking handrail on the escalator?!
JFC WTF? I am hoping, praying, that the SCC is going to sort out some of this goddamned nonsense, and since they're going to hear it, I assume that's at least a good sign, but hollllyyy shit it should not take this lady pushing this for ten years all the way to a hail mary SCC appeal for this shit to get sorted.
You can make an argument about abuse of authority, in the specific way those officers enforced an applicable regulation, but that's about it. Other than that, this is literally someone suing the government because the government enforced a regulation against them.
EDIT:
Put it another way: if the STM was in the wrong, then municipal governments cannot enforce any regulations, like noise limits, speed limits, or building permits.
I went and read the regulation directly, then edited.
Regardless, the fricking caution: hold the handrail pictogram now must be obeyed at all times? We gonna ticket people who don't avoid the sides now? People with full hands? If someone's lost their limbs, they're not allowed to take the escalator? Boy I sure hope Laval has elevators in all their stations. And apparently the stickers aren't even stuck on by agencies. They come like that from the vendor! It's not even a warning from Laval; it's the manufacturer's safety warning!
Laval admitted that she was literally the only person ever to be charged for this. She was targeted for her comment. And I find the arguments advanced in Laval's defense just ridiculous. It's a fricking $69 000 suit, and Laval's going to spend how much fighting this at the Supreme Court now? Ridiculous.
Edit: Oh shit, the stickers say "Passengers Only." If that cop rode the escalator himself, he violated the law!
So next are they going to arrest someone for slipping on a supermarket floor because there are slippery floor signs do not slip regulation markers?
Come on man. This is a blatant abuse of power.
There is a vast difference between viewing your vote as a way to shape policy and viewing your vote as an assertion of personal identity. Most specifically in that viewing as a way to shape policy means sometimes you are voting for your second or third choice because it's the best way to achieve the outcome you are after.
Isn't this the case where it turned out there was actually no regulation or law that the woman was breaking by not holding the handrail? The police officer just -thought- there was one, but there actually wasn't. The suit is not about whether the woman broke a law (the charge was dismissed due to not actually existing), but whether the police officer acted maliciously or not.
As usual, the RCMP is prioritizing corporate interests and weighing risk not in terms of Indigenous sovereignty or land rights, but rather in terms of how much public support and political attention the Wet'suwet'en can get--how much trouble it will be steamroll over them with pseudomilitary police action
From what I can tell, the elected band council signed off on the pipeline, but their right to make decisions about the land is in dispute, as the people who actually live there and their political leadership don't want the pipeline at all, and they maintain that they have control over their territory. And since legal disputes like this are expensive and time consuming, those people can't afford to fight it in court, so in come the police.
It never changes
I mean, their leadership did sign the deal. This strikes me as kinda changing the situation here.
And yet the people who actually live there don't want it, and their actual leaders in their community don't want it. Saying "well, your land isn't really your land; the folks who make the decisions are those ones over there, who happen to support our corporate interests" to Indigenous people is not a good look.
Sure, but at the same time: their leaders already signed off on this.
Like, this strikes me as being more an issue of internal tribal politics then a case of "hurr hurr corporate greed buying off the cops!"
Twitter
I need to read some articles, as I see stuff flying up on Facebook this morning too.
Exactly. Trying to frame this as an act of war or something is a little silly when what seems to be the tribes government signed off on the deal. It seems, at least from what little I've read, that this was at least ostensibly the appropriate channel for doing this. The dispute in question here is not between our government and theirs or the company in question and their government, it's between their government and their own people. Which is a pretty big difference.
Is there even a legitimate basis for the dispute? What's the basis for waiting?
Like, I hated Harper and basically everything he did and stood for but at the end of the day he was the legitimately elected PM and if he's cutting a trade deal with other nations there's not really any basis for me to demand he stop doing that till I stop protesting him.
I'm not saying they might not have legitimate grievances here that should be dealt with first. They might. But they might not. It is not necessarily true that just because there are people contesting the deal that there is actually a legitimate reason to stop and deal with that before proceeding.
That's just late-onset colonialism.
Except afaik we aren't saying who it belongs to. The company in question cut a deal with what seems to basically be the local government. No one in the Canadian government decided who was the appropriate authority for them as far as I can determine.
Like, nothing I've read about this whole story says anything like what you are suggesting.