Why can’t civilians be brought in to manage cops, especially at a time when things have gone so spectacularly wrong?

I’ve been hearing horror stories about Toronto police for as long as I’ve lived in Canada but the repeated call for “civilian” oversight is confusing. The cops are civilians. That’s foundational to the definition of a police force in this country, isn’t it? Rein them in, disband them, do something about the problem — but the idea that they aren’t themselves civilians seems like false consciousness straight out of the mind of a misguided cop.

That a carbon tax would work is pretty clear according to both conventional economics and common sense. It needed to be much higher to be effective enough to clearly demonstrate that. Persuading people to accept that is the kind of “leadership” I had in mind.

Who could’ve known that abolishing the carbon tax, supporting the auto industry, cancelling the electric vehicle mandate, and subsidizing the oil industry would not lead to success in meeting those targets? It’s not as if we’ve all had thirty years to find out that getting to “net zero” is a difficult challenge that would require actual leadership in the right direction.

I was thinking more force his plane to land and arrest him.

Meanwhile I’m reading about the system where “favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law” in a nearby country recently.

It’s true they wouldn’t exist in anything like the form they do today. For one thing they’d be a lot bigger.

Yep, we’re stuck with it. It’s just depressing.

Your logic is even worse than mine! It’s quite an achievement.

Once the clean energy transition gets going, people come to their senses, and not everyone continues to drive cars every single time they want to go anywhere, what will all the newly unemployed auto workers do? Build parts for Korean attack submarines, of course! Every hundred billion dollars spent will be repaid many times over in enemy ships sunk when Canada becomes the naval military power it was meant to be and the next great war can finally begin. Submarines: the way of the future.

There’s no need to resort to bluesky, @avilewis@mstdn.ca has a mastodon account.

I’m not a fan of having the government subsidizing new car purchases. It’s the last thing we need. The sale of cars that run on fossil fuels should be banned ten years ago or as soon as possible. If the government wants to spend more money it should go towards alternatives to cars, not to bribing the relatively wealthy people who shop for brand new cars to put even more of them on the roads.

Goodbye EV sales mandate. Hello purchase rebates.

Of all the politicians, only Mr. Carney has the expertise, foresight, and economic sophistication to do exactly the wrong thing with such precision.

Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, is very keen for Canada to become an “AI powerhouse,” calling this our “Gutenberg moment.”

Maybe it’s actually our Guttenberg moment, as in Steve Guttenberg in Police Academy (1984). AI plays the role of “Ax Murderer” of course. I’m keeping an eye out for the Michael Winslow character.

Can’t say I have a whole lot of faith in the accuracy and diligence of the Todayville espionage section, but for a moment it did have me wondering if whoever controls China’s foreign influence operations shares my view that a Liberal majority would be bad news for Canada. But no, they probably don’t care. More likely they perceive the Liberals as more of an annoyance to the USA than the current opposition would be.

$500 million in capital investment funding for food businesses, $20 million for food banks

What if we make that 500 for food banks (or something new) and 20 for capitalists?

Hard to believe anyone would say that in public but I guess being confidently wrong is his go-to move every time.

Little will change for the better so long as the Liberal-Conservative tag team holds such complete dominance.

The bill itself was full of maximally authoritarian bullshit, causing all the civil society groups to oppose it as loudly as they did. It remains around in some form, last I heard, still theoretically in the legislative process somewhere, a continuing threat to us all should the Liberals feel confident enough to try and pass any of the worst parts of it into law.

It might’ve been an attempt to appease Trump, or it might’ve been pushed by some Trumpist infiltrator within the party, I don’t know. Optimistically, we can hope that Carney wasn’t really aware of what was in it, and on a topic outside his areas of expertise he was simply misled by people he mistakenly chose to trust. In any case I’m sure he will have learned from the experience.

Him I took the time to answer. You I will block.

Read a few more words there and find out. He didn’t write that legislation, but he approved of it, has had the power to stop it all along, and has not renounced it.