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Let's make a deal: You go to Saudi Arabia and stay there and I'll stay in North America and promise never to visit the Kingdom. My life will be no less fulfilled for entering this bargain.

I think that, given time, and a cutoff from a continuing stream of tens of thousands of people from the middle east and other states which have extreme cultural and social views, and a cuttoff of money and imams coming from Saudi Arabia, North American Muslims can be come as moderate and secular as most Christians, and discount the violent and intolerent stuff. But right now almost all our Muslims came from the nations which have extremely intolerant views. And those views are reinforced every year with 100,000 fresh Muslim citizens coming in. The security situation in Israel has deteriorated as a result of the Muslim states refusing to accept that anyone but Muslims can rule anywhere in the middle east. Before the Intifada, lots and lots of Palestinians worked in Israel proper, and Israeli Muslims were freeer. But the need to crack down on terrorism has made things worse for both groups as well as Israeli Jews. And again, there is the cultural/religious issue of Muslims (in general) hating Jews. That doesn't come from the behaviour of Israel. It comes from their religious texts. Malaysia's 'liberal', 'moderate' president talks about Jews the way someone in the KKK does. Antisemitism is HUGE in Malaysia, and they don't even have any Jews!

I'm sure Saudi Arabia is a lovely place to visit. As a woman, I would not want to live there. It's one thing for men to take over all the power positions in society, but it's entirely another to despise women and inflict so much brutality and degradation on them. What sane species treats half of its members - the half who give birth to the very species - with such contempt and injustice? Women living as prisoners, unable to leave the house unless under the guardianship of a male. They have no role in determining their own lives - look at the pictures of the Women's Conference and Gender Equality awards - all men. They are nothing more than a commodity, property of men, to do with as they please. I'd rather live here in the frozen tundra and have the freedoms that women have in Canada, than in a beautiful, rich country that treats women like a sub-species. And just because some women "like" being treated that way - still does not make it right.

Saudi Arabia...

Saudi Arabia has over 32,9 million people living in it. Of course not all of them have shitty lives. Most of em do, though. And way worse than Canadians. Especially if you're female. Especially if you're not close to the Royal family. Saudis have no rights of freedom of expression whatsoever, have religiously zealot schools whose degrees are worthless internationally because they offer no substance and no real education, only indoctrination. The people are executed for daring to say something about the regime, one of the most oppressive on Earth. Music is not well seen in the Kingdom, nor is entertainment of any kind. Saudi Arabia is almost on par with North Korea when it comes to Human Rights, but I would give you that it is rich in oil. HURRAH!

Well, according to a 2014 PBO analysis, almost all the income gains over the recent past have gone to a small sliver of income earners at the very top. It's not a sustainable model. Living standards for ordinary citizens are quickly deteriorating, particularly in our largest cities, like Toronto and Vancouver. According to Stats Can, Toronto, once a solidly middle class city, is now largely poor, with the right to boast about having Canada's highest child poverty rate. And this is despite the massive subsidies now available to lower income families with children. Our housing market has been transferred into a casino for overseas wealth. Our basic infrastructure is inadequate and falling apart. It's no paradise, I can tell you that.

I'd love to start that by cutting ALL ties with Saudi Arabia, kicking out all their diplomats and closing their facilities and embassies in Canada.

Women's rights in Western society have been hard won. At the time, there were no other nations that could "set the example", so to say. That's not the case today - Islamic societies can see how women are treated in Western societies (which you are correct - still has some work to do) and still insist on women having an inferior role in society. That's what I don't understand. I think part of the issue is that with Islamic extremism taking the front stage and purporting to represent Islam - it skews the scale of what is considered extreme or moderate. Now, as long as Muslims aren't killing each other or driving trucks into crowds - we consider them "moderate" when the reality is, they are far from moderate in many of their beliefs. I don't think it's about feeling smug......The issue for me is that it is the Saudi Arabian version of Islam that is being promoted and funded in mosques and Islamic schools all over the world. To think that this is not affecting Muslims all over the world is to ignore the power that religious beliefs have over people. I don't think Muslims in Western countries are being radicalized so much because they don't fit in or because of Western influences in Islamic countries. They are being radicalized because we are allowing the Saudi version of Islam to reign. And Muslims themselves are allowing it, as well. Why are we doing this? I may be an ape but I know better than to eat a banana in front of men.

We call them "one way" drivers. When they arrive on site, you can tell from their use of the language that they haven't been here very long and did not exactly come from the higher casts of society at home. I have watched them crash into things, back a loaded tanker over an embankment, etc. because the people who first encountered them didn't realize to totally incompetent as drivers. The truth about Sidhu is coming out now. 72 violations (52 fed, 20 provincial) over the previous week, most to do with hours of service IF anyone had bothered to police the industry. Drove through not only a stop sign, but a stop sign with a flashing light! The idea that you can "train" this behaviour out is ludicrous. There will simply be a string of schools pop up across the country, owned by the same people running the trucking business these days, who will graduate "drivers" little or no different from what happens now. This is not a driver training issue, it is an open borders one. Precisely how PC will kill our country (and a lot more of our people on the road).

There is no Trump agenda but chaos. The point of Trump is to cause a crisis, as with crisis comes opportunity. If the Democrats somehow remove him from office, the Pence agenda kicks in. Now, Roe v. Wade is not my issue, but Pence is hyper limited government in comparison to Trump, so I like Mike, he's good to go. If the Democrats manage to remove Trump, I would expect a backlash inciting people to the polls against those who could not win the election and so staged a coup de tat.

You going to hit him with your bone spurs?

Capitalism thrives in those countries for the same reasons it thrives here: highly educated and highly skilled workforce with all basic health needs addressed. The majority of the population is well positioned to produce products and services that the world wants. The overall health and well-being of the society is the pay-off for economic success, not concentrated wealth in the hands of a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who have to gate themselves off from the wider impoverished society and hire armed guards. That’s been the old fascist South American model. Take your pick, rogue survival of the fittest capitalism or a rules based system that both creates and distributes wealth. The kleptocracy in Russia moved radically from false communism to false capitalism, resembling the South American model more than the Scandinavian one.

Canada’s challenge isn’t employing people in highly skilled jobs or creating successful businesses, it’s retaining the successful businesses once they reach a certain size. Waterloo and Ottawa are full of companies that eventually get snapped up by or merged with other firms. Yet some will say we need this capital investment. Apparently much of Huawei’s original telecom tech came from Nortel, which was acquired by American outfits. Think about Corel or Blackberry. Same kinds of stories. Interac is of course a huge player in digital payment. There’s social media like Kik and all of the entertainment and film work. We’ve got some of the best sound stages. In some ways government policy, however thoughtful or effective, is just tinkering around the edges. People want to be here and our cities are growing fast. If we can find ways to push settlement north, the country can really benefit from the wealth in the ground. As for your concerns about nanny social programs, taxation and government spending in general, Canadians actively elect for these policies. They speak to the quality of life that alll Canadians enjoy. Ask Scandinavians if they like their programs and generally the answer will be yes. These are some of the most successful countries in the world, like Canada.

It seems quite obvious that the media wanted to push an agenda. Now they've been caught they had to back track. So yes they did conspire to not do their due diligence and vet a story coming from Twitter. They wanted to pit the three groups against each other and allow that to carry over to the general public where they were duped to think a certain way. The media showed you FULL well what their agenda is and that is to create division among us so we fight with each other instead of taking the media and government to task. We are distracted by this because they want us to be distracted and not understand what is really going on. I've been saying this for a long time now and we get more evidence of media manipulation all the time. It's called propaganda for a reason.

1.) Educated Canadians are leaving because there aren't adequate opportunities in Canada, which over the past three decades has been transformed into a second-rate derivative economy. And the reason so many immigrants struggle isn't racism, it's that the country simply doesn't afford them the kind of opportunities they assume it should, just as our own skilled graduates aren't afforded these opportunities. And, if the government is truly worried about general labour shortages (although the PBO has noted they don't exist) and must then bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually, why is it making it necessary for our workers to emigrate? Healthy economies don't export their skilled and educated workers. 2.) I think you misread my post and the linked article. One-third of all visas issued to foreign workers by American authorities are issued to Canadians. It is astonishing that a country with one-half of one percent of the world's population (Canada) meets one-third of America's (legal) skilled foreign worker demand. Although I'd have to research the issue further, my guess is that probably 80 percent or more of Canadian raised and educated workers who leave the country for work go to the U.S. and far fewer to other countries. I believe that many of the Canadians who go to Asia to work are actually Asians who acquire Canadian citizenship and then return to Asia. It's possible that many of their offspring do so as well. 3.) The problem is that we're moving in the opposite direction. The middle class is declining and the government expects it to keep on doing so. According to Thomas Walkom's column in yesterday's generally pro-Lib Toronto Star, our foreign minister, Freeland, admits that the government is going to have to massively expand subsidies just to keep its increasingly marginalized labour force from rebelling against the corporate "liberal world order" (not my words, so don't accuse me of wearing a tinfoil hat) the Lib government is promoting. Please don't imagine that the taxes to pay for this fantasy will come from corporations or the rich. Instead they'll come from the ever-shrinking group of ordinary taxpayers just above the subsidy class. Eventually, there will be no money to pay for this deception but by then the rich and corporations will have their U.S. dollars safely stashed elsewhere and what remains of Canada will be left to cope as a poor, frozen economic wasteland. Freeland's dream is Canada's future nightmare.

There's been lots of serious discussion, much of it ignored by the likes of people who would rather nonsensically point at other people's morality, aka whataboutism, instead of attending to their own. There's a difference between virtue signalling and acting virtuously.

What happened today? CNN got a van one hour in front of Stone's house before the FBI raided it, capturing the event entirely. You can't make this shit up, there is a high level conspiracy at the highest levels of the Judiciary and the FBI departments of the US. The Deep State collaborates with CNN and almost every mainstream media, and it is disgusting.