But the mega-rich don’t want to make their concessions. So they spend billions trying to convince average persons like you and me that the transition will be too burdensome FOR US, so we should be opposed to it. For example, the villainification of “carbon tax”.
You forgot the part where they will make us pay the sacrifice for them if we press the issue. In blood, without the least bit of shame or scruples.
I know, but a different dialect is still one language. We are mutually intelligible to each other. There’s less variation between us than there is within the UK, so I don’t think we can argue it isn’t the same language even if they are sloppier with it.
Shhh… we don’t talk about the atrocities… the fact that “Cajun” is just “Acadian” said with a very heavy accent is a happy accident.
Remember the motto. “It’s not a war crime the first time.”
They are in no condition to physically fight anyone. Neither are we for that matter, however we have time to figure that out before the SHTF.
There’s nuance, but it’s a distinction of degrees, not of kinds.
-Canadian football is actually more challenging than American football, but it’s always had some… overtones.
-We call soccer football because the sport is called football. I was never entirely sure why they called the other game football since 95% of the time the ball is in your hands. They also have tried to learn hockey. It’s very kind of all our best players to go down there and help them not embarrass themselves.
-We both have rather eclectic food tastes (a brown English gravy on cheese curds and fries? Les Parisiens sont choqués et alarmés), although I will grant we don’t stick corn and/or corn syrup in everything and are less obsessed with tacos. We’re rather fond of maple anything and a good donair is lovely though.
-Their Cajuns speak something vaguely resembling French (let’s not get into the reason for that too deeply) and the rest of them speak something vaguely resembling English. It’s not polite to make fun of them just because they can’t spell or speak clearly, their education systems are deeply backward.
Many, but I’m afraid you don’t speak for all. There are plenty outside the cities that would be more than happy to hate us and everything we represent. It’s why more than any other belief system, there’s no one more hated by the religious than the apostate. The idea that “One of Us” can, in fact, live quite happily believing in something else entirely is a direct threat to your neighbours core identity and if God won’t punish us directly for this heresy, then they will do it for him.
To get some local hands-on experience, it might be easier to start with more local government.
That’s not how government works in Canada. Provinces set the rules for the municipal level. Everything. Starts. With provinces.
No, it’s not top of mind, but it is a root of many of our ills. If how we solve problems is rooted in politics, and politics is rooted in our electoral system, then how we even move toward fixing our top-of-mind issues has to start with a system that produces the best possible outcome. The incentives of how our political system works are WHY there’s never any movement on our biggest challenges. This is not just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. This is addressing the insanity of continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Now, there’s nothing that says we can’t treat the symptoms while we work to cure the disease, but we also need to make it clear to people, this is part of the underlying reason bad decisions made on bad incentives keep making their kitchen-table issues worse.
While I understand and even co-sign people’s instinct to cling to the status quo without exceptional evidence that a change will benefit us, I also recognize that reflex can be detrimental to our well-being if what we have truly makes us weaker, and a less free and just nation. The fact is there have been many examples of PR, some successful, others less so, and there are models that are clearly superior in making sure everyone’s perspective is heard and given fair consideration. Unfortunately that’s difficult to explain to people. Truthfully very few Canadians have a strong grasp of how our electoral systems work now, let alone the case for why it should be changed. You would not believe the number of misconceptions people have about the system we currently use and how often people confuse it for other systems they’ve heard about in other countries. I blame our media environment for that more than our education system, but that’s a tangent.
For this reason, it is necessary to continue to keep trying to explain, persuade, and re-engage people on this issue. The fact is people have not been making fully informed decisions, so trying again to explain it, and then asking them again is simply part of the process. Democracy only works when we’re all well informed. That’s why Plato hated democracy, because he considered the problem of getting everyone fully informed and on the same page too daunting in his opinion.
It’s our obligation as citizens to work together for a better nation. Some truths are found in the wisdom of the crowd, but many are objective, regardless of whether people believe in it. Many people hated the idea of public healthcare… until they experienced it, and changed their minds. Now you will pry it from our cold dead hands. Our implementation could definitely be better, but even deeply flawed it’s better than anything south of the border and the overwhelming majority will stand by that. Lived experience is a pretty good argument, no?
Our existence is a refutation of the idea that the whole world aspires to be American. We speak the same language, eat the same food, play the same sports, and have more opportunity to voluntarily become American than any other group of people on Earth. The fact that we’d rather “Freeze in the Dark” than pledge allegiance to their flag contradicts the foundation of their ideology. Of course they hate us, because we are a threat to their national myth. This was inevitable. The question is, do we have the courage we need to respond to this threat?
Some of us do. I fear that far too many of my fellow Albertans are cowards who would rather squander our fiscal leadership whining than actually build a nation. The fawning over the boots of foreign owners is really sad. We were raised better than this. A fact we might remember if we hadn’t accumulated the trash that washed out of every other province for decades now.
I want the system to be honest about what it is. Not dragging my name through the mud with people who turned their backs on their neighbors. Nor will I be run off from my home. I know who my people are. These monsters aren’t it.
Edit: and no, I can’t go to a town hall. They’re invite only around these parts.
But an MP doesn’t want to ignore a thousand people in their riding
BS. I live in a riding where a third of the population is never represented, either federally or provincially, where thousands of us routinely are disenfranchised, and our needs and perspectives are utterly ignored by the conservative majority for partisan purposes. Your claim that naked partisanship in our riding based system is inhibited is objectively and demonstrably BS. Empty fields of cattle are given more political weight than human beings. At least a PR system is open about partisanship. This farcical pretence at enlightened compromise is smoke and mirrors.
You say that like the Tories were anti US out of some high minded principles. They just had a different empire they were cozying up to before. They were anti US because they were monarchists. They bent the knee to Britain, and when Britain went down they found new boots to kiss. The Tories never believed in Canada.
Let us never forget that it was the Conservatives that shut down our own military development and sold our defence contracts to the US.
Oh thank goodness I’m not the only one that sees it. I know everyone employed in US exports is terrified of not having that market, and they should be it’s going to cost us a lot of jobs, jobs that will only be partially replaced by domestic production and diversification, but we really, REALLY have no choice, and the upside is it’ll mean a lot of new jobs in other fields if we do it right. We need to leverage the crown corps to get the ball rolling, same as we’ve always done. It’s not an if, it’s a how and a when, and the sooner we reach that conclusion the better.
Normally I would agree with that position, but in the unique case of Trump, I’m fairly certain it’s actually legitimate malice. Stupid malice, but malice.
Nope. Learn when to keep your mouth shut Mark. This, is not working to unite Canada.
We also are their biggest export market. If we start “eating our own dog food” then those overseas exports will be enough to make up most of the difference, but we have to double down on the effort to build and buy anything but American.
I keep hoping one day someone somewhere will adopt Carbon Engineering’s synthetic methane (syn gas) production from air capture technology. They’re a company out of BC. If we overbuilt on renewable and converted the excess power into SynGas we could easily make up the last sticky 5% of situations we still need hydrocarbon fuel for with carbon neutral fuel. You can liquefy SynGas the same way you make LNG so we could even still export it. It would take some retrofitting, but converting those DilBit pipes to SynGas pipes is actually not that hard.
History is repeating itself at ever grander scales. It really is a shame that we always end up led by sociopaths (governments and businesses alike) because humans are terrible about misidentifying confidence as competence, only to discover the guy with zero shame has no idea what he’s doing and is happily marching us into the fires of hell.