Enough whataboutism, please. The Government has hundreds of MPs; it doesn’t make sense for all of them to spend all their time on the same small subset of issues, even if they’re critical. Like, it’s literally impossible to have that many people at a literal table.

Daylight in the morning is critical for circadian rhythm.

I want an English-language Taskmaster Canada made. That’s not an existing show, though, so not sure if that’s what you’re going for.

Taskmaster UK, NZ, and AU are great, but I need more Taskmaster!

Exactly. People are being abducted off the street by plainclothes “officers” (who’s to know?), put in the back of unmarked cars, and disappeared. A Canadian died in detainment from being denied access to live-saving prescription medication.

Tariffs are so far down my list of reasons for not traveling to the US.

Poilievre said the Sovereignty Act would also include his campaign promise to exempt people from capital gains tax when they reinvest the proceeds of an investment in a Canadian company.

This one is insane. The 1% would accumulate so much more wealth, tax free, with this. JFC.

Even if the score is kept off, there’s the angle of the Sun and cloud cover. There’s just less sunlight to be had, even if the panels are kept clear of snow.

Hell, Vancouver Island gets practically no snow at all in many areas, and solar does much worse in its cloudy/rainy season (winter).

Liquid fluoride thorium reactors are designed to be meltdown proof. A fusible plug at the bottom of the reactor melts in the event of a power failure or if temperatures exceed a set limit, draining the fuel into an underground tank for safe storage.

Source

Nuclear waste is way overblown as a concern. The total volume of waste is miniscule, relative to the power generated. Nuclear also uses almost no land for the reactor, compared with solar, and is essentially 100% dependable 24/7/365.

Solar is great, and costs are diminishing incredibly rapidly. And if the news of sodium-based batteries at ~9% the cost of lithium batteries plays out, then storing solar becomes cheap. Still not dependable for Canadian winters, of course. Solar also uses lots of land, and lots of mass of semiconductors (which of course has its own climate impacts to produce, ship, and recycle/dispose of).

I’m not super looped in to the technology specifics, but I understand that some modern nuclear designs are meltdown proof, too, so there isn’t really any rational NIMBY case to be made against them.

Having read the whole article, they don’t have any specifics that justify their concerns. They quote the price of nuclear facility construction, but don’t contrast those costs against any competing technologies, so the numbers are effectively meaningless. They complain about nuclear waste, but their only evidence is quoting NIMBYs who don’t want a facility put in close to them.

I’m open to being convinced that nuclear isn’t in Canada’s interests, but this article did not make a compelling case.

Right, but if the beans they roast come through the US, then locally roasted beans will still have American tariffs applied, and it’s often not worth applying to get a refund. The goods were not for final sale in the US, the tariffs don’t apply, but the paperwork is more onerous than the refund, for smaller businesses. That’s the point.

Yeah, it’s owned by Burger King, and the new owners accelerated the reduction in quality that had started a decade before the buyout.

The reason for my particular gripes with Tim Horton’s is their over-the-top Canadian branding of an American company. It should be illegal, as clearly false marketing.

They’re also franchises, and are notorious for most franchise owners being borderline abusive to their largely teenage and immigrant staff, who may not know better or have the resources to fight back against illegal labour practices.

And the food is terrible, and the coffee is the second worst in the Canadian fast food industry (after A&W).

What is there not to hate about Tom Horton’s?

A lot of those same students would vote responsibly, if given the chance.

As a former high school teacher, I was very impressed with the political engagement of Gen Z. They are aware of issues and largely feel hopeless and ignored. If students could vote, schools would be an excellent place to teach students how to make an informed vote, and then take a field trip to voting centres to show them how easy it is to vote, too.

As it is, you’re partly correct that 16 y.o.s largely don’t pay close attention to party platforms, despite generally good awareness about local and global issues, but it’s because it seems useless to them since they can’t vote.

There’s also research supporting that people who vote when they are first eligible to vote are likely to become lifelong voters, and those who don’t will likely not. One of the biggest issues in Canadian politics is the demographic mismatch between voters, so “old people issues” are grossly over represented on party platforms—and fair enough that they are! They’re the only ones who consistently vote.

Lowering the voting age to 16 would be a statistical artifact on most election results, in how few ridings would actually change hands, but the knock-on effect of building civic engagement for life would be an amazing change for Canadian politics. You would be surprised with how mature 16 year olds can be when it matters.

This is what I came to recommend. Spruce pellets are cheap and locally sourced, and they disintegrate to sawdust when wet. (They’re compacted sawdust to begin with, so that makes sense.) You get a litter box with a tray full of holes over a bin, then when you school the poop, you just jostle it around a bit extra to encourage any lingering sawdust to fall through the holes.

We use puppy pads underneath to catch the sawdust, so the clean up takes no time. We empty and refill it every week or so, with 2 small cats.

Not all cats are happy to switch, apparently, but we didn’t run into that. Our cats were rescues, and they only use wood pellets at the SPCA to reduce costs and because it’s healthier for cats (they breathe in less dust).

Some wood pellets are treated with chemicals of some kind to affect how they burn, so we get ours from a horse supply shop since they only get animal-safe pellets.

That is incorrect:

The Agreement does not apply to US citizens or habitual residents of the US who are not citizens of any country (“stateless persons”).

I’m not a lawyer, but that website says that this treaty is about asylum seekers declaring themselves as refugees in the first country (out of the two) where they land. Refugees can’t pass through the US en route to Canada, and apply as a refugee in Canada (and vice versa).

Americans (citizens or habitual residents) can still apply as refugees in Canada, according to this treaty.

I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(

That’s a sweet setup.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit since I read it this morning, and I think the only reason they were able to get rid of STV is because it was only STV for Calgary and Edmonton. With a single party still able to sweep the rural ridings, they were given solid majority governments, which shouldn’t be the case with “real” STV.

I have no idea how we’ll get either half of the LPC/CPC to enact STV, when FPTP has them oscillating between consecutive usually majority governments, but I expect STV will be hard to get rid of once we’ve had a single election with it. Not much incentive for minority partners in a coalition government to accept moving back to FPTP, right?

Exactly right. Look what two generations of undermining public sector education has done for conservatives south of the border. The UCP is salivating at the prospect.

Signed: teacher who fled Alberta, largely for political reasons. I thought I was taking a pay cut to leave, but I just checked and I earn more in this province now, too. Alberta did not give raises at all close to covering inflation since I left!

Maybe I’m missing the article, but I think this is overblown. What’s changed is that financial firms can no longer make unsubstantiated claims about climate action, but the burden to do so opens them up to potential liability with no real upside. He even said that literally nothing has changed with how they plan to invest, but they don’t want to make a claim that they can’t support with strong evidence.

This makes sense. And it’s not a big deal.

Or that’s my reading of it, anyway.

STV is the GOAT. It’s the perfect system for Canada. How amazing would it be for left-leaving people in rural BC to have a local MP representing them? A 5-seat riding in rural BC might go something like 2 seats NDP/Green, 2 seats Cons, 1 seat whatever the BC Liberals call themselves.

STV brings roughly proportional representation, while not fracturing things too much (20%+ of the vote needed to get a seat), keeps representatives responsible to the electorate not the party (no “safe” ridings since another candidate from your party can be chosen over the incumbent, and no party list in MMP), and keeps representation tied to a geographic region.

I’m so ready for Canada to move to STV. The regulatory lurch that comes from (the inevitably polarized) FPTP has been terrible for Canada.

That was my thought. This gives plausible deniability that it’s not because of the Republicans and is, instead, about EV market fundamentals.

I might have said this before ICE started kidnapping people off the streets with no due process. If AB became American, how would BC connect with the rest of Canada? Ain’t no way anyone is going to drive around, and flying over is too expensive.

I’m not crossing the American border anytime soon; likely never again in my life.