Overall, 47 per cent said it should be illegal for Canadians to serve in the military of any foreign government. Thirty per cent disagreed and 23 per cent said they were unsure.
Pretty close to the universal opinion. Lots of “don’t know” as well. I haven’t thought through the ins and outs of it but on the surface I tend to agree it should be illegal.
Comrade, socialism isn’t about reducing wealth inequality within the classes who get paid for their labour. Whether that’s labour done for a decent salary or minimum hourly wage. Socialism is about people getting paid what the businesd owners withold above what people get paid. Tackling intra-working class wealth equality is a misc matter for socialism or perhaps a communist matter that is counterproductive to tackle before we’ve gotten our surplus value back.
E: But I do understand your point about how algo pricing can provide more product to wider parts of society by essentially flattening their purchase power and therefore real incomes. That’s actually a very interesting perspective. If we didn’t have the other problem I mentioned this could be interesting to consider as a way to distribute produced goods and services.
It doesn’t provide direct relief to people without cars.
For sure. Hence mentioning car-dependency. I don’t drive but everywhere outside of metro areas is car-country and there’s no alternative.
Either way a shortage is impending and distributing based on price means the wealthier get more for often less than necessary purposes. Which is why I’d look for a different distribution mechanism, a need-based mechanism. E.g. rural transportation and farming should get more/cheap fuel, F150/RAM1500 commuters in the GTA should get less/more expensive fuel.
The country is very car-dependent.
The removal of the tax provides immediate relief. That said they could achieve even better result with a price control with the same to avoid firms jacking up prices to compensate.
With that said this should be coupled with immediate subsidy and price reductions in public transit in metro areas. Along with removal of RTO mandates for pub employees. Among other practical steps. The fact there’s nothing abt that tell is abt their priorities.
Longer term there’s a lot more to be done, including appropriating those windfall O&G profits.
That’s not quite true. A firm wants to sell at a higher price to a customer who can afford it but also sell at a lower price (above cost) to one who can’t afford the “regular price” but would buy it cheaper, thus maximizing profit both via margin and volume. There’s nothing socialist about it.
Will store in my wiki. Merci!
True, which is why lobbying in Canada works through different channels. Like cushy pre/post-political jobs in the private sector. Supplying gov’ts with “experts” to hire for various roles. We already have a few of those around Carney. But one my fav examples, since I’ve been active in the net neuteality / independent ISP wars since 2007, is Ian Scott who chaired the CRTC, after working as gov’t lobbyist at Telus. But I’ll paste his foray from Wiki because it illustrates the point perfectly:
Scott was born in Montreal, Quebec. After graduating from the McGill University with an honours BA in political science in 1980, Scott joined the Competition Bureau. From 1990 to 1994, Scott worked in the telecom directorate at the CRTC.[4][5] Scott then joined the private sector, working for Call-Net Enterprises (now part of Rogers Telecom), the Canadian Cable Television Association, and Telus as a lobbyist with the title of vice-president of federal government relations.[6] Between 2007 and 2008, Scott also served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Chairman at the CRTC.[5] Prior to his appointment to CRTC, Scott was serving as the executive director of government and regulatory affairs at Telesat.[6][7]
In July 2017, Scott’s appointment as the Chairperson of CRTC was announced.[4] The announcement and Scott’s background drew concerns from consumer advocacy group OpenMedia.ca.[6][1] Scott’s five-year term began on September 5, 2017,[6] succeeding Jean-Pierre Blais in the role.[1] He was succeeded by Vicky Eatrides.[8]
In December 2019, Scott was caught drinking beer with Bell executive Mirko Bibic (then COO of Bell, currently CEO) at D’Arcy McGee’s pub in Ottawa.[9][10] This meeting took place just one week after Bell filed their appeal of the CRTC’s 2019 wholesale rates.
In February 2022, Scott faced calls to recuse from files related to internet competition due to alleged bias, after the meeting with Bell executive resurfaced.[11] The call for recusal was refused by CRTC.
Just farcical.
That’s not to say that corpos don’t organize individual financial contributions to parties too. They do that. They also pay for attending “dinners” and whatnot. But the revolving door method is just as, if not more important.
E: This process is also involved in what policies politicians propose to voters. These days they rately come from union leadership’s laundry list. Instead they come from sets of policies corpos have the capital to develop and … suggest to politicians. Often via corporate-funded think tanks, if not via lobbyists.
E2: By capital I mean all sorts of capital, not just financial. Political, social capital, etc.
I have a better / easier to answer question:
Why do highly-profitable, large corporations qualify at all?
Answer:
Large corporations have lots more capital to deploy into the political system to ensure they qualify. And if one gets it done, the whole class benefits. The result is, even more money from people working for a wage (salary or hourly) are shifted towards large corporate owner. Beyond what they already get over what they pay us.
* When there’s no spare/idle capacity to produce more
Avoiding as much self-dox as possible:
It’s a well known American private (as-in non gov’t, but publicly traded) corpo with a Canadian sub. There’s this R&D tax credit/subsidy that’s supposed to fund novel R&D. You show novel work to the gov’t, the gov’t gives you money. I’m leading the design/dev of this software feature that’s just … a required feature for our system to do what it needs to do. It required some digging into AOSP to figure out how to do it. Something we regularly do since we develop an Android system component. We finish the feature. Lo and behold comes my boss with a corpo lawyer and says - hey look this lawyer here think this qualifies for this R&D program. We go over it. A month later the same conversation repeats before a gov’t lawyer who approves it. We did not discover an algorithm, or create something of any significant novelty, no value beyond saving cost for this corpo. We did something that many other teams do regularly. Turns out, the corpo has a whole team that asks managers regularly to submit “novel R&D work” to get subsidy money and this happens throughout the org like a clockwork. Again, this is a profitable corporation.
Of course it’s performative and the audience of the performance is potential NDP voters as well as LPC and CPC voters. Why do you think this performance is worse than any other campaing method? To me it’s Avi using whatever platform he’s got to beam the message we voted for, whch we think others would find compelling.
On the value of talking to people, I think building popular support for policy is very important. If you get 60-80% of Canadians to want a policy, whoever’s in power would be pressed into implementing it. I think the technocratic approach we’ve practiced over the last several decades where we outsource policy to politicians who we vote for every few years isn’t working too well. In some areas it’s even undermined democracy by creating wide disparities between what people want and what ends up being done by the elected politicians. Cough … voter reform … cough.
Focusing on laws alone did not work too well for the previous NDP. Avi’s looking to create a bottom-up approach where we get policy from people and socialize them to the ones who aren’t as engaged in order to create demand for this policy, offer ourselves as implementer of this policy. But if the demand we created is strong, it wouldn’t matter much if we’re the ones implementing it. Bottom-up democracy as opposed to top-down.
Neither am I. Now go on with your day, you have an hour left before dinner time, you can make a few more posts about China imprisoning its own citizens, who may hold another citizenship they do not recognize.
There are two ways to break a nation-crippling strike. Take an action that benefits the workers or take an action that benefits the corporation (exec/owner). The libs took actions that benefit the respective corporations. They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)
I’ve never made the argument that the libs are the same as the reformacons and I maxed out my contribution limits to help them take power instead of PP. That doesn’t change that on the labour file they don’t act in my general interest, instead they help my boss. I should tell you a story abt how I explained a Jira epic to a gov’t lawyer so that my employer could get a subsidy. We had record profits that year.
E:
They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)
BTW, given how popular such action tends to be if you’re not asking yourself why don’t they do it, you probably should. I began doing it over the last few years and it’s cleared up a lot of seemingly confusing things they do.
E2: Also have been on the Trudeau train almost till the end.
To anyone reading this thread, I implore you to read my posting history and then compare it to the posting history of these accounts, Scotty being one of them. The difference should be revealing.
The LPC consistently weighed on the side of corporations in the major labour disputes over the last few years. They’re friends of the working class insofar as - they improve conditions for corporations and … something good is supposed to happen to workers as a result. Which is just anti-worker trickle down economics that’s lead us to where we are today over the decades it’s been practiced. I hoped for some change in direction on labour diaputes with Carney but so far it’s been more of the same.
Didn’t Avi Lewis air this point recently?
You’re supposed to only lightly nudge the markets. These heavy-handed approaches you propose sound like communism.
/s
since they will jack taxes on everything to recoup the lost income
There’s always cutting services we rely on. Or wait, wait, replace them with AI!
Grab a server too then. 😆
Maybe I’d have thought different back then. After all I do believe people are largely shaped by their material conditions. Back then wars weren’t primarily proxy wars with large for-profit military industrial complexes dumping their production in them, which unnecesarily amplifies military and civilian death.