Canadian Politics

...That IS good news, surprisingly. In a horrible reversal, the Republican Conservatives want masks illegal in rallies, which more or less makes Occupy and Anonymous illegal now.

I was busy so I couldn't post here for a few days.

In new news, Harper wants to sell off CMHC and back out of the mortgage business. That means that around 700 billion dollars in mortgages will no longer be secured by the government. What this would mean is hard to say. The Bank of Canada tasked a group with studying the effects of privatizing the mortgage security business in Australia, a country which had sold off their equivalent crown corporation in the manner proposed by the Tories. However, as is usual with this government, all access to the results of that study have so far been blocked to journalists despite the Access to Information Act.

Wait... they want to deregulate the housing industry?! That's exactly what got the United States into such shit... Are the Tories outright immune to common sense?

Well no, that's not the same as deregulating the housing industry. They are actually tightening up regulations. Granted, they are simply tightening up the rules they themselves loosened... essentially doing un-legislation I guess.

They are taking away the securitisation of mortgages, that is, banks will no longer have mortgages whose value is guaranteed by the government. Likewise, consumers are on the hook completely if they default. Riskier both ways.

In more obvious news, the world is turning into Greece.

If we don't rein in the banks now over their mass securitisation of assets, we're pretty screwed in 5-10 years. The Tories are too damn slow and too damn loose about this crap. They're trying to let it slide.

Although for some hiliarity... early this week the governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney, was hit by a harsh tirade by CEO of JP Morgan Chase. The investment banker leader used highly... offensive terms to describe Carney's argument that banks and financial firms need to have a higher ratio of safe assets to loans. In fact, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase said that regulation was much too tight as is.

Two days later, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase announced they had a surprise loss of 2 billion dollars in their hedge funds due to risky investments that turned sour. Hurr.

• wallbangs*

Freaking self-preservational Bennett Administration...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/05/13/pol-rcmp-watchdog-report-g8-g20-toronto-2010.html

Surprise, the RCMP's watchdog has found no wrongdoing for the RCMP's actions in the g8/g20 summit in Toronto. It only calls the tactic of "kettling" questionable.

More questionable is how the RCMP started making arrests of troublemakers, and managed to arrest undercover cops by accident. So what were these cops doing that got them arrested? Moreover, how is that not evidence of "agent provocateurs"? I feel like civil rights is dying a horrible death here.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/05/14/quebec-education-minister-beauchamp-quits-politics.html

Quebec education minister quits over the impasse with the student strikes.

You know, I really don't care for everyone who attacks the student strikes and the people involved in it because "they're just entitled brats" or "they have the lowest tuition in Canada anyway" or "their tactics are foul!". Look, it's a question of where we want our government to spend its tax dollars. Do we want education to be properly funded or do we want it dumped into tax cuts for the rich? I think it's a giant failure of foresight on the part of all of Canada to ignore these students (also the BC teacher strike) as being "yet another bunch of entitled people". Is education an entitlement?

It's like people want to live in a shithole. Oh, they have the lowest tuition fees, therefore they should have it higher. Okay, well North Korea has a lot of starvation, Canada can take more starvation right? Why are we arguing to have all of Canada to be just as garbage as the worst parts?

edited 14th May '12 9:29:06 PM by breadloaf

Because the only reason we complain is because we want our government to give us free money for absolutely no reason for our entire lives when they can't bear it anymore?

Encouraging news for the F-35s we're buying...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18081936

Basically, they're likely to run out of oxygen. Can you imagine we can't even fight Sukhoi-27 old generation craft because our pilots freaking run out of oxygen during combat? Useless.

Breathing isn't a problem... the pilots will crash before they can suffocate since wings will be too iced over because apparently Harper and co forgot what hemisphere we live in. That or the Russians/Americans do whatever the hell they want while we are flying over from British Columbia.

Of course there are some who believe that these new fighters have nothing to do with domestic defense and everything to do with getting involved in more NATO/coalition bullshit.

edited 15th May '12 8:14:59 PM by Rationalinsanity

Well don't worry, they can't get in the air anyway because our 150 million dollar purchase price doesn't even include f-ing engines.

Not sure if that beats out the fact that our submarine fleet has been unable to actually shoot anything for over a decade. Plus there was that one serviceman who was killed in that electrical fire quite a few years back...

Liberals dropped the ball on the submarine purchase, but apparently there was some corruption involved that blindsided them and they didn't want to admit it. It's basically the same thing happening to the Tories right now, where there was so much corruption surrounding the F-35 purchase (one of the Tory M Ps is in fact one of the lobbyists for Lockheed-Martin) but they don't want to admit it. Given that the technical specs of the plan don't even match what military said they want at this point, even the corrupt military officials are having trouble with the line "it's the best plan that meets the requirements".

Where's our Canadian Barkey to bitch about the guys at the top?

I don't know, everyone is just too mellow.

You know I've been looking at the tuition fee increases in Quebec and I think that politics in Canada have become nearly as poisoned as America. In general the discussion over education funding has gone like this:

• I'm going to slash education funding and hike tuition fees by a lot
• Students protest this action
• Government goes, okay, I'll only slash and hike it over a longer period of time then but essentially nothing is different
• Media demonises the protests for not compromising when the government has done so
• (Not yet happened) Tuition fee hikes go through

In fact, I even saw one guy say that they should go all g8/g20 on their asses. Even more ironically, say "I fear for democracy as we let these protests continue". Huh?

edited 16th May '12 11:42:24 AM by breadloaf

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/05/16/pol-un-canada-food-security.html

UN official visits Canada about food security. The Tories blasted the UN and said it was a discredit to the organisation for them to visit Canada about food security, further saying that the billions Canada spends on food aid is being wasted by the UN visit.

The UN estimates that there are over 800 000 households in Canada that are "food insecure". Additionally, this estimate says that roughly 1 million natives in Canada live in abject poverty where they cannot afford a proper diet.

(I don't use CBC or linking)

The auditors and watchdogs are going to attempt a crackdown on G20 and maybe accuse Blair.

There's one big difference between Canadians and Americans. Canadians are largely apathetic to politics, so when they see protests or criticism on a specific party, they're suspicious. Americans are less apathetic than they are cynical, but they protest in droves because they know the establishment is Always Chaotic Evil. However, both are complacent - Canada was the lesser evil compared to America, so they believe that they can't get much worse than Americans, even as Harper drives their country into an ultra-conservative hole. It's the same belief as the American Democrats - if the Reps have a side, Dems feel like they must take that side to seem moderate, while the Reps always push further to the right in order to get what they want quicker.

On the other hand, Americans have all sorts of entertainment (and a belief that they're untouchable) to keep most from doing much at all about their predicament; they need to have personal stakes in order to do something.

edited 17th May '12 9:06:40 AM by Sledgesaul

• Takes breath for angry rant*

Well one of the biggest problems with respect to Canadians looking at problems in our country is that we consistently compare our metrics with the USA. Which is... pointless.

Like, comparing our healthcare to USA? What the heck is the point of that?

Or comparing environmental policy with USA? Even more pointless.

Look our prison population. Tories and their supporters say "We're not America, we don't have a war on drugs, our sentences are much lighter, our prisons are much safer and we don't have over-population". We don't? BC has 130% usage of their prison capacity. Ontario is less screwed but close to 100% and we already do double-bunking, which was declared to be unconstitutional already. We mix our petty criminals with our hard criminals because we don't have enough room. Most of our sentences are multiples of what you'd get in Europe. Rape and other crimes, such as drugs, are rampant in Canadian prisons. Because murder isn't as rampant as US prisons means absolutely nothing.

A native individual is so much more likely to be arrested and take up so much of the proportion of our prisons, they're actually something on the order of 5-6x worse off than the American black population.

Then there's talk about how our immigration is so free, that our borders are just wide open, that immigrants just waste our money, that the Indians/Chinese soak up our welfare or the most annoying "we let in the most refugees".

The most refugees? The most? Really? Anybody ever ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE NUMBER? We're actually ridiculous low on the list and with one of the most inconsistent refugee hearing boards ever. If you get a Tory-appointed refugee official, they have (and this is not a made up number) a 0% acceptance rate. If you get a Liberal-appointed one, you get a 100% acceptance rate... but only if they hear your case. So basically we're playing politics on refugees. By a per capita rate, Canada is nowhere near the top of the list for refugees. Guess who is? Pakistan. They've somewhere on the order of 25% of the world's refugee population in their country. Then we bitch they're an evil country of terrorists :P

Then "paper Canadians". Apparently you must live in Canada to be, oorah, Canadian! Why? "They cost us so much money!" Really, what money? They don't get any government service whatsoever and any interaction between them and a Canadian consulate/embassy... guess what, costs money. So if I understand correctly, Mexicans or Jamaicans or whatever going to Canada sucks our money out of our country by living in our country but Canadians living abroad... sucks our money out of our country. Hurr... I've figured it out. Everything just sucks money out of our country but our country somehow magically started with this crazy pile of gold that we've been whittling down over the last 140 years.

In short, Canada practices Double Think - they believe they're not like Americans, but they constantly compare themselves to, and model their policies off, America.

The most horrible place of all to model your policies from. We should be rotating who we look at as we develop policies to the succeeding nations of the world. And right now, the nordic countries are doing the best.

• Our oil wealth needs to be nationalised, I don't give a crap what Albertans think about the NEP. They didn't bitch and moan when Ontario set up the equalisation program and gave them billions every year for decades, now when it's their turn to give somehow it's "attacking" Alberta? Get over yourself. All the oil money goes into an investment fund, no more tax cuts to the rich.
• Our healthcare needs to cut costs, not by cutting staff or reducing service levels like Harper is doing, but by employing better strategies. Combination clinics (with mid-tier specialists working along side general docs), specialised hospitals (we don't waste money replicating technology and technical staff at each location in a city), home/preventative care (this one can save us upward to 10 dollars on each preventative dollar spent, meaning we could have several times our service level with the same money)
• Our military needs to be redesigned for the modern world. First off, we should listen more to the general military population with respect to what they actually need. Second, can corrupt military officials who are buying into the American military-industrial complex, this is Canada, we don't need to give our money to foreign corporations (as far as safety goes, buying fighter-jets from America because they're a NATO ally and not China isn't even more secure, they built back-doors into our CF-18 fleet and disabled functionality on them). Third, we do peacekeeping, not war. That means more support personnel, more funding for military services (disability benefits, psychological support, family support), (unfortunately) more lawyers and actually a far better navy.

Actually for the military, I was thinking that a small portion of equipment funds goes toward "personnel personal requests" and based on these requests we figure out standard equipment. Like, if they're going into Afghanistan and what we give them isn't good enough, I don't want soldiers dying because it took 6 months for a request to go through and be approved by the Defence Minister. They should have some options in the time they wait. It's similar to the concept of "outcome betting", where the CIA found that people's betting behaviour closely matched the outcome of a given situation so long as the people betting had nothing to do with the event. Soldiers will buy things that closely match what they actually need at any given time (this will require approval one chain up the command to make it fast basically). It also matches what high-salary corporations do for employees, employees make a purchase request and needs only an approval from zero to three links up the chain of command.

edited 17th May '12 9:31:38 AM by breadloaf

I'm sure Australia isn't any better than America, Britain or Canada.

I have to say, you guys have good PR because the world sees Canada as a box of roses. Except in the EU's institutions, where we're seeing the whole thing over the Alberta tar sands be a literal battleground.

Hope you guys win. The tar sands are a boondoggle.