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So with the blockades of railroad crossings and entrances to government buildings across the country, we are seeing an alliance between radical environmentalists and unelected leaders of a tribe, the Wet’suwet’en. The protests are against a natural gas pipeline that has already been approved by the elected chiefs of the 20 bands in the contested area. These unelected chiefs who do not support Canadian law because they don’t recognize Canada are supported by anti-pipeline environmentalists. They do not recognize that transporting oil and natural gas by pipelines is safer and cleaner than doing it by rail or truck. They want to “shut down” Canada, yet there is no clear platform. No doubt they want severe restrictions on fossil fuels and extremely high carbon taxes, but not for the Wet’suwet’en people, who they think should pay no taxes and carry on living with all the comfy carbon-based amenities on a racially pure land, exclusive of non-Indigenous people and free of pipelines. Is this not part of the same trend we’re seeing in places like Hungary, where the Greens propose carbon taxes for the workers to pay for an exclusive, ethnically pure state? Thoughts?

At the end of the day a blockade is an act of war. The Mohawks claim they have a "right" to blockade, but that would be invoking UN Article 51, which is fair enough, but to invoke that is to invoke war. The problem for Canada is quite simply that Canada has dismantled its own army to the point that it cannot respond effectively to a widespread blockading operation. Thus, even if the army is called in, it's not going to do anything more than what the OPP is doing. Like, at Oka, it was a stalemate, we had to wait them out, and it took all summer before they gave up. So even if Canada were want to take a hard line with this sort of disruption at some point, they simply don't have enough boots to put on the ground to do it.

So Trudeau is off to Africa on a desperate quest to get a security council seat. He will meet with African leaders where a little 'quid pro quo' will be exchanged, mostly involving millions and millions of dollars in Canadian tax dollars. The Liberals have been campaigning desperately for this seat for years. It's not that it will do anything useful for Canada, of course. It's because the last time around the Conservatives put little effort into it, so the Liberals used it to accuse them of having outraged the world and alienated all sorts of important countries. So winning it this time would let Trudeau elevate his chin again and pose for pictures like a noble God as he says, yet again "Canada is back!" And if that costs tens or hundreds of millions in bribe money, that's well worth it as far as he's concerned. Of course, bribes wouldn't be necessary if Trudeau and his arrogant, obnoxious virtue signalling hadn't pissed off so many other countries. Arguably the five most influential countries in the world (US, Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia) all despise him and none have much, if any respect for Canada right now. Nor have we done much to match his sanctimonious 'we're back' rhetoric as we have no military to engage in peacekeeping and he's not inclined to give money to foreign countries unless it helps him look good at home. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/john-ivison-trudeaus-ill-timed-and-costly-quest-for-a-un-security-council-seat

I take my suspensions without complaint, I have other forums to go to in the meantime, but also it's just good to take a break from the internet at intervals anyways.

I love it when the environmental protestors break up camp, leaving mounds of plastic garbage behind.

It's called hyperbole, you silly man. Well given your idiotic characterizations of conservatives I really don't feel the need to be any more nuanced.

And the right is all about mischaracterizing people and associating completely irrelevant issues to avoid talking about the links between our economy and the environment.

Cite? Do you have any evidence of anyone anywhere actually saying we have to start living in grass huts? What's the difference between you believing that or something like Trudeau is instituting Sharia Law in Canada? Are you oblivious to how this affects your credibility or do you just not give a shit? I suspect the difference between how we define caring or sustainable is what's really vast. I also doubt if you'd be very interested in engaging in a process that tries to narrow those differences so that we can even begin to understand let alone appreciate one another's positions. Instead you'd rather just let your stupid Limbaugh-esque characterizations of environmentalists along with anything else that isn't overtly right-wing and conservative rule your thinking.

My question is, since we’re on the topic of natural gas, a much cleaner energy source than coal or oil, what makes any one group of people in this country so precious as to think that a pipeline conveying an essential service, heat, shouldn’t be allowed to run through their territory? Same goes for Quebec. It’s really about ethnic-nationalism, isn’t it? We pure Quebecers and tribes are above the riff raff who electrify and heat our homes. Work is for everyone else.

No I’m not. I’m saying that the US will act in her interests and Canada better sort out her priorities and fight for them. It’s hard enough with our best efforts.

So where to begin with all the relentless criticism. Canada has been and is highly functional, exemplary in certain areas. Our education system, biomedical advances, work in AI, the tech sector in general, natural resource extraction, social policies, social cohesion. There’s much good to recognize. Google is investing heavily. Places like Kitchener-Waterloo are great places to live pretty much on all metrics. Our cities are always rated near the top in the world for quality of life. People want to be here and they’re coming by the thousands. Canada is safer and more accepting than the US, and I believe freer now too. Nevertheless, this isn’t the time for back-patting. The problem with maintaining such an open conciliatory society across a vast country with a limited civil defence is that we have to rely too heavily on trust. When Trudeau made it open season to slam Canada and lay blame for all that ails ya on every historic misstep and injustice, his government made the country vulnerable. Yes Canada was a colony, but it was run by absentee landlords who were eventually told not to return. Through reform rather than revolution, Canada made serious contributions as a strong independent country through two worlds wars. We could talk about many Canadian inventions and milestones, from insulin to the telephone to hockey and even basketball and football. The Yanks like to reclaim our success stories as their own and call everyone else commies in la la land. Yet we have come through our own crises and challenges, such as separatism and regional disparity. Now it’s the eco warriors vs. resource development and the narrative of the unelected leaders of an undefined area without title. It’s radical environmentalism meets race-based nationalism, extremists justifying their insurrection with claims like, “We don’t recognize your rule of law because we don’t recognize Canada.” Of course they have little support, no money, and no expertise on how to run a country or do much of anything, but they are loud, ignorant, and dangerous. The Liberals have to stop humouring these radicals who will never support any national projects. Dialogue with these people is inaction, but the government is playing it safe by going slow and talking it out. That probably won’t solve it, because you can’t reason with these people. You guys support the shoot ‘em up Manifest Destiny approach, which most Canadians don’t support, but our decency has a shelf life if things get desperate. We have Canadian approaches, chosen by our people for our people. I’d like to think that the Yanks respect that, but Canadians will embrace a strong arm approach if these stupid blockades continue. A strong Canada is good for everyone, including the Americans. But you’re right that a severely weakened federal government would create a void that could be filled by other powers and forces that do not represent the prevailing will of the people. No more endless apologies and consultations. Wake up to the realpolitik around you. The extreme left and radical Indigenous are in the business of extorting money and sabotaging business and government. It’s a terror and security threat, period. The Chinese are recreating the world order with their brand of authoritarian capitalism at the centre. The Americans are trying to shut down competition from our forestry and aerospace industries. Bombardier is literally selling off its entire airline business because of a bogus trade dispute, but as always, the Yanks will try to tie us up in court and seek unfair privilege. The US is basically transitioning to dictatorship-lite. The Department of Justice is altering sentences at the behest of the dear leader and the Supreme Court is stacked. As the US tightens its border, Canada is having to clean up the fallout, as we did during the Syrian refugee crisis. Yet we can’t blame other countries for our own vulnerabilities. Our military has been weakened to the point of dysfunction. Our police are afraid to enforce law. Their fear of offending has become pathological, based on the Trudeau Doctrine of boundless shame in a post-national state. We should be proud of what Canadians have achieved and fight hard to protect it.

It's like Zeitgeists bogey of the Reb Menace taking Canada over. America is not trying to take Canada over, what Americans who even notice Canada, are aware that Canada is a frozen socialist la-la-land and want to have nothing to do with running it. Even if they like Canada, they do not want to be responsible for trying to make it work. It is simply the case that entropy is the nature of the universe and Canada's phony made up "culture" and "history", issued from Ottawa in the 1960s, has for the most part failed to launch, because it's all bullshit, and the resulting void is simply being filled by America by default.

This is not the main event, this is just nascent. The sea change is that the Climate Doomsday Cult has discovered what the Mohawks already know. Canada cannot secure its lines of communications across such vast and remote territory with such a tiny army and security force. Thus Canada can be ground to a halt, relatively quickly and easily, by quite a small cohort of simply determined individuals. Because this a Doomsday Cult, as they progress along their narrative towards the Doomsday, they will no doubt become even more hysterical. This is just a taste of what is going to become a persistent threat with ever more insistent attempts to sabotage.

Thing's are declining out in the deeper water where I used to make a living too. Hard times in the past were usually good times for fishermen and when fishermen did good the towns they lived in did better than others but this time....there just won't be as much to base a recovery on I'm afraid. There's a reason why some economists regard fishing communities as being like canaries in a coal mine. When they suffer there's probably something wrong, when they keel over and don't recover things are probably really wrong and they're pretty much on the verge of keeling over everywhere you look around the planet. But like you say we're adaptable and we'll do just fine in a future that's dominated by weeds, invasive species and an ocean full of jellyfish - we're the weediest most invasive species on the planet and I'm sure we'll have no problem convincing people to eat jellyfish, they love low ph conditions, they're easy to catch and they'll probably make a good compliment to rats, Scotch broom (you can blame the Romans for spreading that) and whatever else adapts along with us.

Oh cry, cry little snowflake. Conservatives built the world. Conservatives are responsible for the greatest cut in world poverty in all history. And you people on the Left don't know a damn thing about economies except how to run them into the ground by taxing the hell out of all the productive people to incentivize the unproductive into staying unproductive.

The article says: They are out $2B in revenue over 12 years. It also says that the contract would have cost $4B. It sounds like Rogers overpaid and the CBC dodged a $2B loss. I posted this elsewhere and there was no response from the CBC haters. Also if you hate CBC but love Don Cherry, note that Rogers fired him after CBC gave him a pulpit for almost 40 years.

The epic failure here is on the part of government...provincial and federal. Clueless...leaderless...gutless.

Whenever I see Bernie, this starts playing in my head...

Their front runner is an 90 year old marxist who just had a heart attack and is shouting "Revolution!" into the microphone. All while promising free pie from the sky. Yeah, this is going to inspire mass voter turnout. </s>

Ease up their Patton-Rommel we live in what is called a democracy.

You just get home from a Trump rally or something? Too bad we don't have any 2nd Amendment folks eh? I'm curious about why you're so eager to empower the same dictatorship you otherwise spend all day warning people about? Send Alberta's oil east, south, refine it where it is or better yet leave it in the ground. But sending it to China just seems nuts on all counts. I doubt they'll process bitumen or burn the finished products in environmentally responsible ways and yeah, empowering the biggest most aggressive dictatorship on the planet, in the mood this world is in right now, just seems completely insane. I can't help but wonder if protesters were blocking oil pipelines for that reason that the government probably would unleash the scoops. There's a 'good' reason why dictators have enjoyed a renaissance in terms of acceptability and respectability in the west in recent years.

As far as I can tell Canada lost last time because we were considered too friendly to Israel by the Muslim block.

No need as he is sea-lioning. No amount of evidence would convince. What's amazing is how closely tied the War in the Middle East is to the Holocaust...via the Grand Mufti that none of the pro-Arab types like to mention...or like having mentioned. Or that Arafat was his nephew.