wampus

I don't disagree with you -- I believe their line of reasoning was along the lines of getting all the operating funds needed for the 'government' from revenue generated from tariffs. One reason for aggressively slashing social support systems could be that they want to shift people's dependency for those programs more directly to corporate interests such as Google and Apple -- many tech companies have 'interests' in the medical field after all. The one area they would likely still want to maintain govt functions in, are military in nature -- the theory is that they want what are essentially geo-distant corporate city states that are connected via the internet, and protected by orbital weaponry / nuclear arms. Setting up a few blocs of this nature, and having them constantly feign conflicts with each other, will help to keep people placated as well, in a sort of horribly Orwellian sense. That sort of concern isn't really something for the ultra wealthy to be bothered by though, which's one reason oligarchies are so dangerous.

Still looks like the USA is sorta heading in that direction a bit, though obviously any of my musings are just guesses based on conspiracy theories I find plausible -- so I doubt it'd play out that way any time soon or anything. If there were 'real' flags of that sort of thing being imminent, I imagine some people in the govt would be making even more noise to us commoners, hah.

And loss of trust / stability of the government makes the tech industry's push for corporate controlled 'freedom cities' much easier to get agreement on, allowing America's rich oligarchs to quite literally establish their own baronies ;P

In context of the Ops article, coming to a nation that's one "thread" seems to be "We're not THOSE guys"... when you're quite literally one of "THOSE" guys... is clearly grounds for concern.

And at a national level, to me as a local, having that be our main unifying thread concerns me.

I'm not as optimistic about Carney, though I do think he's the most practical choice in the running. I fully expect him to capitulate and sell out Canadians, and to take steps to appease the American administration -- he'll just do it with a sad face, compared to PP who'd do it with glee.

I seem to recall hearing Trump officials/project2025 sorts say they wanted to do away with income tax, replace it with tariffs. So, I mean, the IRS falling apart and not being able to collect income tax is sorta... on the roadmap, isnt it? Like issuing this warning is prolly just gonna be taken as a goal milestone achieved on the plan.... ??

The OPs article doesn't really touch on the difference of approach to multiculturalism -- and I think your take is frankly dated (though true, as I recall hearing it that way in grade school years ago). Trudeau/the Liberals declared Canada a "post national" country around 2015, celebrating that Canada doesn't really have a cultural identity of any sort, nor any specific 'thing' that unites us. So while I agree that minority groups are celebrated, I disagree that there's a thread connecting us. People are more entrenched in an idea of being part of that minority group, than they are of being part of Canada, or a greater set of ideals that Canada stands for.

For a personal example, it's true that in school, all minority cultures are praised and the negatives of those cultures are completely ignored/absolved. My Niece has previously come to her parents crying, because at the end of a school 'lesson' where they'd learned a bunch of the great things from all her classmates' cultural roots, there was nothing said about anything great related to third Generation "Canadians" that don't identify with a specific minority group -- or about Canada more broadly. She was just the oppressor / colonial person who was ignored / had nothing special. Other kids take pride, and gloat (as kids do), about their races achievements, looking down on the Canadian kid, which's why she was crying. As far as I know it wasn't a 'lasting' negativity, as kids move on to other things, but the situation left a definite impression on us adults and our view of the education system. Canadian values, are not a thing. We're post national.

Likewise our laws and legislation are increasingly skewing in the direction of siding with cultural minority ideals, over broader Canadian values. You can look at the criminal justice system as an easy example, with its mandatory race-based reviews, specifically brought in for FN people. In Vancouver, we had a case where a FN guy literally stabbed an old white guy stranger in an elevator, killing him, and fled the scene. This guy faced zero jail time, as a result of the racial review. Canada no longer adheres to a notion that everyone should be treated equally under the law -- we explicitly force the law to treat some groups differently. Cold blooded murder is excusable, so long as the races of victim and perp line up. And the person who implemented the requirement for race based reviews, Jody Wilson Raybould, is a member the groups getting preferential treatment.

This isn't the only example of racism being excused/defended by our government. Another prominent example is Harjit Sajjan. While our Minister of Defense, he used Canadian Special Forces during the pull out of Kabul, to specifically, and exclusively, target non-Canadian Sikhs for rescue and streamlined immigration to Canada. A Sikh guy, directed Canadian forces, to rescue just his minority group. Our government responded by saying that accusing him of racism, was racism, and would be considered a hate crime... because we wouldn't think him racist for rescuing just Sikhs, if he wasn't himself Sikh. It's an insane argument, as expanding it to other races would absolve all white supremacists from being thought of as racist. So again, the government does not treat people evenly.

Further, many companies are openly racist in the private sector of major Canadian cities. They'll "hide" behind technicalities, like saying a specific language is required for a job posting -- which they can use to filter out any non-conforming race from the list of applicants.

You also see increasing cross-border associations of Canadians with the ethnic identities of people from other regions, more so than with other Canadians. This is partly spurred on by things like the Internet making "staying in touch" with a persons roots, or keeping up to date with the culture of a foreign region, so much easier. For example, Canada doesn't have a history of slavery (though our TFW program is sorta borderline imo): in Canada, slaves were outlawed long before BC and most provinces joined. In fact, that's one of the things that we "colonized" out of the FN on the west coast, where ~25% of their population were slaves from other FN groups. And yet, many black Canadians still push a very strong message that we should feel guilty for what happened to them -- even though we were literally where the underground railroad 'went' for them to have freedom/equal treatment. Drakes posturing as a 'gangsta' as an easy silly example. This is in part because of the saturation of our media with US black culture, where this sort of dialogue is far more pertinent. Calls for justice/antipathy related to racism is almost always directed at white people in Canada for a similar reason, as our media is often inundated with the US-centric view of the topic: even though actual events involving racism, such as the VPD cuffing a First Nations grandad for no good reason at a bank, are often committed by one minority group against another minority group.

In times past, if a person of a specific ethnicity, advanced legislation/laws that benefited their own ethnicity, that'd be considered racist / discrimination / wrong. Now it's considered 'reconciliation', or excusable, so long as it's a minority group promoting its own agenda -- calling out such behaviour as racist, becomes a potential hate crime under current Liberal laws. Minority cultural groups are increasingly insular and antagonistic towards Canadian institutions -- something like JWR's legal changes, including the practical removal of Bail requirements for minority groups (which are what caused all the revolving door issues we've seen since COVID started), are the very real, and in your face result: it was quite literally a change done for the explicit benefit of a minority group, to the detriment of the general public, carried out by a person in the highest offices in the land, who was a member of the minority group getting privileged. Canada's moved passed the Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- Section 15(1)(2) were converted into equity employment groups that exclude "just one demographic" (who are increasingly shifting right-wing as a result), and elevated minority interests/group identity above Canadian interest/identity. Gone are our traditions of "Peace, Order and Good Government" that were set out in the Canadian constitution.

The OPs article writer is right to be pensive/nervous in my view. As an American, she/her husband likely won't fit into one of the privileged minority groups in Canada. And there's increasingly divisions and conflicts between all of those racialized clusters, who tend to promote their own groups interests over the broader public's best interests. PP's popularity isn't a mirage -- and the only reason he's struggling in the polls at the moment is that pretty well everyone, everywhere in the world, is pissed off / amazed at the crap coming out of Trump's mouth, which they associated with PP's style of conservatism. But those issue still remain, festering under the surface -- in fact, if the 'backlash' against Trump style conservatives causes progressives to go even further on the massively unpopular demographic style politics, as they may take it as a 'mandate' to do so, it'll just make things worse.

Musks Tesla stock holdings make it so that even if he were kicked out as CEO, the company would continue to be viewed as his personal piggy bank, and likely continue to face backlash for the stuff Musk is doing. Him liquidating his stock position would crater the stock price. It's pretty well cooked.

And yet the CBC is explicitly reporting on Smith as threatening a National Unity crisis.

Look, it took a while for people to wake up to the fact that Donald Trump "meant it" when he said crap, because what he was saying sounded so far out there. There's no reason to think differently of any politician, if they're saying really dangerous shit. A national unity crisis is basically saying she wants out of Canada if her demands aren't met And she has the support of 'most' Albertans, apparently, cause they voted her in, and her party still supports her and her actions. Like even if there's no 'recall' option for her as an MLA, if her party didn't want to follow the crap she's saying they could all just stop voting for her crap. Albertans aren't openly calling for her to get dethroned / booted. To think that they would not, potentially, vote to leave -- and/or not stoop to the level of dirty tricks like what we see in the states (Elon's reportedly paying people again in some election to skew the vote, and gettin away with it) -- is naive in my view.

If someone had said 10 years ago that the USA would be talking about annexing Canada, we would have called that a fantasy / no way it'd ever happen. But here we are.

I disagree with this sentiment, to some extent.

For industries and areas considered critical to national security / functions, they ought to extend and enforce a Canadian content like requirement for the sector ownership structure. That is to say, you'd define news sources / papers as an area of national interest, and require that at least 51% (or some other percent) of that industry's stakeholders are Canadian citizens / organizations.

Blocking all foreign ownership of media is not the direction I would want to go, though I would like it to be transparent about its ownership structure, so that readers can make an informed decision about potential ownership biases in the content they read.

I also wouldn't be opposed to the Government keeping track of a formal list of licensed News Agencies / Papers, with their ownership structures and official sites. Not only would that make different smaller/local papers easier to find / add to feeds, but it would help in weeding out the "fake" (ie made by unknown/questionable sources) sites. Businesses have to get licenses to operate anyway, so I don't imagine this would be something too difficult to sort out for the Govt IT folks. Any information they'd require to make it work could be added to the licensing process pretty easily I imagine, and they could theoretically provide options for businesses to update their information in the event of things like site/domain name changes etc (if they expand it beyond just news agencies). They could even tie this in to the ACSS system, or Interac E-Transfers, to flag vendors that have Canadian hosted online payments available, for people wanting to avoid US card networks like Mastercard/Visa. As many business licenses are handled at a municipal level, you'd have in person verification options for all of these items, which could help cut down on potential fraud and abuse. Main hurdle would likely be sorting out how to have the information presented to end users, but if it used a federated approach with clusters for each municipality, province, nation-wide, and international, allowing users to opt in to whichever lists they wanted to reference/search for products, I imagine that sort of an approach could work... ? And honestly, might even give better results for marketing/connecting businesses and customers than something like Google or the existing search engines.

I admit I haven't really dug into what's online related to business licences etc as part of this, though I'm fairly sure we don't have something like that. If it exists I'd welcome some insight.

Frankly, I can't take anything the conservatives say seriously given their close alignment with Trump-style conservatism. They use practically the same campaign slogans, court the same style of extremist bullshit, and PP even wore Trumps orange bronzer for a bit lately.

Trump's overtly lying about things like trade deficits, cartels controlling Canada, fentanyl flowing over the northern border, and he overtly mislead people in the USA in regards to things like project 2025. they made it clear that they'd do/say anything they wanted to get elected, and then they enacted policies that they'd previously claimed they weren't aware of. I don't see why I would believe a single thing that comes out of the Trump-style conservative party that exists today.

Carney and his policies are honestly a lot more in line with 'traditional' conservative principles, along the same line as the Reform party under Manning, and the Cons under Harper. One reason he's got potential to win a big majority, is that he can bring in many of the voters who normally go conservative, who are pissed off at PP's bullshit machine and divisive rhetoric.

Quebec already set a precedent that Provinces can theoretically vote to separate. The Bloc Quebecois in the 90s held votes, and the claim then was that a simple 51% majority on the referendum would've triggered Quebec into declaring independence from Canada. The blocs remained a staple in Canadian politics ever since, historically promoting "Quebec First" and separatist values the whole time, with tons of support from people in Quebec -- one of the big surprises with the US rhetoric, is that Quebec is suddenly seeming more 'pro Canada', even while still electing a party who's roots are separatist. Canada's a federation of provinces, so it's theoretically possible for provinces to leave.

If Quebec can do that, there's no reason to think that other provinces can't do the same. And if Alberta were to hold such a referendum, and the vote showed 51% in favour of 'leaving' -- be it through semantic shenanigans on the phrasing of the question, or overt election manipulation aided by people like Musk -- it's unclear how the rest of Canada would react. Even more, if they did that, and Canada didn't let them "leave", the US could take that as a justification to help "free" the people and oil of Alberta.

Individual towns and regions might try to separate -- in the Quebec referendum, there'd been talks of the northern parts of QB wanting to stay in Canada. Practically though I don't imagine that'd happen. The division of powers between provinces and federal governments, and the authorities given them, are fairly clear cut. Towns and regions sorta just pop up at resource hubs within the province, and aren't as clearly demarked in terms of self governance / "the big" items for a nation. Again, we're a federation of provinces, but provinces aren't a 'federation' of cities.

"This one thing won't be a magic bullet that saves the environment, so we shouldn't do it!" .... huh?

They're less damaging overall, and more sustainable.

If/when Alberta and Sask vote to defect, that's not an invasion. After losing them, and east/west trade is disrupted, forcing BC to also defect, it's not an invasion. If the US takes greenland, effectively fully encircling Canada and blocking most trade, causing the rest to 'vote' to defect, it's not an invasion.

It's crappy, and antagonistic/aggressive -- but if they don't move military troops in, and if the "choice" to defect is "voted for" by Canadians who are sick of being embargo'd and isolated etc, then... idk. I think "invasion" isn't right, and annexation seems more accurate.