Yeah I think some Conservatives abstaining is the most likely path. Much as they’d like to I don’t think the NDP (or Elizabeth May) are going to want to be seen as enabling it.

If the Conservatives don’t make it happen, their party may just get its own chance to fail to pass their first budget very soon.

Yves-François Blanchet gave quite a speech about it, the gist of it was that he doesn’t like it. This may be a budget that fails to pass.

AI, fighter jets, economically unviable mining projects, attack submarines, oil pipelines, carbon capture boondoggles — Canada’s government sure does have a lot of money to spend on things that don’t look much like good investments.

It’s a giant money pit either way. Somehow pulling off a miraculous recovery for the Canadian ship-building industry is simply the one thing I can think of that could potentially be used to justify the enormous expense compared to other, better ways of spending that much money. No subs at all sounds fine to me. For intel-gathering purposes of the type so-far mentioned, patrolling around the coastline of Canada watching for the incoming invasion fleet or whatever, there isn’t a whole lot of advantage in trying to do it from a well-armed underwater platform and we’re already spending absurd amounts of money on brand new surface vessels.

The point of submarines is to sneak up on enemy ships and destroy them. That’s not something Canada has an urgent need to be doing. There are more cost-effective ways to defend the country. But it’s not about being cost-effective, it’s about spending as much money as possible — on building up someone else’s military-industrial complex, since they’re too impatient to build up Canada’s capacity to the point where that kind of hardware could be built here — in order to be able to look “strong” like people are clamouring for.

About time, Canada! Just think of all the glorious war fighting opportunities that the country has been missing out on for its entire history as a result of not spending a hundred billion dollars on a big fleet of attack submarines before now.

Opinion: The idea that the USA is making foreign policy decisions on the basis of Trump seeing that ad and being offended by it is absurd, and nobody should believe it. He’s stupid, but he’s not that stupid.

That was the problem all along: The management was out of alignment.

There is much confusion about such things. “Increased surveillance” is how many people understood the worst part of C-2, but it was much worse than just that. The stuff that remains (presumably; I haven’t read the new bills) could also be described as increased surveillance but isn’t the same thing as the completely over-the-top ill-considered lunge in the direction of “lawful access” that was in the original.

The cost estimate for Accessory Dwelling Unit 01 in Ontario is 250k

Huh. Based on estimates I happened to see 20 years ago you could’ve built three rather nice houses each one twice that size for less money then. Maybe the rate of inflation has been a wee bit under-reported over the years?

“There is no alternative.” — Ontario voters channelling Margaret Thatcher

If I’m reading these numbers correctly, that proposed $150 billion would be roughly 33% of last year’s estimated total federal government spending. More like 50% of what they were spending before the current era of massive deficits.

Not all Canadians will be worse off as a result. Some are shareholders of the giant American defence contractors.

Oil is great for climate change. Practically all oil is cracked to make naphtha, which goes into petrochemicals, which makes pharmaceutical drugs, which let me think straight, which enhances my willingness to drive an electric SUV, which takes me to work, where I can do things that are good for the climate.

Some warning that it’s a video would’ve been welcome.

Canada does need something radically different than what we have now, that’s for sure. It’s going to be Mamdani by a landslide btw.

It’s what passes for Chinatown in Montreal, if anyone was wondering. It doesn’t look much like the Chinatown I knew and loved.

It’s a real shock, I know. Who could ever have imagined that building loads of million-dollar condos and endless suburban sprawl would fail to be the answer to our housing problems?

Charge $5/month for each address to not deliver any junk mail.

Pretty expensive. If only they could come up with some way to count it as military spending it wouldn’t be a problem.

Instead of having a post office like a real country, let’s just put all our letters on a big table in the centre of Canada and everyone can go there and rummage around when they need to send or receive anything. This will allow us to afford the necessary financial bailout of the federal government by saving up to $4 a year per Canadian.

It sends a strong message to Israel: “Hurry up and finish your genocide, we’re not going to keep supporting it forever.”