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Politics has become so distant and professionally staged it is overwhelming our senses, leaving emotion – particularly fear – to play the role of reason. The cost of replacing community with floor-to-ceiling media is huge and will continue to take a greater toll until the voices we hear and the heads we see talking include those of members of our communities. Celebrity and representation are antithetical. Media-generated celebrity is good for selling hamburgers, not good for representing Canadians. We have the technology to fight back, we just need the will. The best defense we have against invasive technology is local control over the information delivery system. Fortunately, that capability is designed into internet protocols. A national network of independent communities with independent MPs would work equally well, be there 10,000 nodes or ten. Every riding has the talent to maintain a node. An opportunity to participate in such a learning project would be very welcome to people of all ages. It would be a great start to rebuilding community with the sense of purpose and contribution we have lost. Having politicians represent the riding to parliament rather than parties to the riding is just one of the benefits.

I see the "information age" as simply indoctrinating people. With a life long career in advertising I initially thought the juggernaut was aimed at youth but I'm observing weak and otherwise helpless adults falling for it. They don't even know how they're being bought and sold. Very sad.

Incredible that you don't even have the semblance of knowledge to at least realize whose side the former president was when he initiated Operation Warp Speed. You are just drinking the propaganda Kool-Aid, like a zombie needs brain to survive, the idiot needs his fake news to comfort himself.

A good politician knows everybody. Brian Mulroney is reported to have had the largest rolodex in Canada. (For you youngsters, a rolodex is a list of telephone numbers.) Before he won the leadership, he spent hours everyday on the phone, touching base with everyone he knew. John Diefenbaker was mainstreaming in a small Saskatchewan town when he shook hands with a man, called him by his first name and asked how his wife was doing, by name. I think he even knew their children's names. The Chief had only met the man once before about twenty years earlier. That is how you avoid disengagement. When I moved to Saskatoon, everybody I met knew the old Chief.

This is happening all over the western democracies. I don't quite understand why the question of trans people competing and what to do in washrooms is seen as such an upsetting issue to some. I think most people in the world, including the tiny percentage of trans people, can just move on with it.

Each MP/MPP would have the online referendum/plebiscite on their riding website. Perhaps there could be an annual or semi-annual opportunity for this. It may eventually make parties obsolete, at least for the votes themselves, as the member would be beholden to the will of the constituents and vote accordingly in parliament without threat of party whip.

How the graves became unmarked. Mostly through neglect. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/how-canada-forgot-about-more-than-1308-graves-at-former-residential-schools?utm_source=broadsheetcontentads&utm_medium=onnetwork&utm_campaign=on_network_boosting&utm_content=roncontentads

CBC is the worst, for pushing Chicken Little climate hysteria...with Global not far behind.

Biden can't keep up with vaccination targets, you say? Why not? What's wrong with him. He was gifted a vaccine when he took office. Is that what you mean by "cheering?" You occupants of the corporate media's pocket and your redefinitions of words...Man...we need weekly dictionary updates to keep up.

A functional democracy requires one critical element above all: attention, will and effort, where needed of the citizens. Everything else, rules, institutions, constitutions come distant second. No institution would be free of or resist corruption where there's no interest of citizens and/or will to make necessary changes. And that is a major problem in this country. When writing a line into a dusting paper becomes enormous "can of worms" nobody is willing to touch with a stick; then no change is possible; when the only way to effect change is to write a program, allocate no less than in billions budget and pass it on to the bureaucracy, so the only change possible is trivial fixes at ever rising cost. The country has been in this fixing mode for decades, or maybe since Confederation. Even much beaver - celebrated national healthcare was not anywhere near a breakthrough among the peers (takes a minute to check the history) and has been in a permanent near-crisis mode for decades. Where citizens went to sleep democracy ages and degrades.

Him and his whole family betrayed this country and got paid very well for doing it. And we as Canadians let them do it, with a few grunts and groans. And yet the vets that fought on behalf of this country are asking for more than we can give right now and are still fighting our government in courts today... well at least we have our priorities right

The male to female trans are threatening to WOMEN, not men. That's the issue, males invading female spaces.

I’ve found the party irrelevant. I mean, who doesn’t want a cleaner, more efficient world? We’ve been very sloppy over time but we’re getting better. Slowly yes, but it’s coming along. Edmonton is going to three bins now, the third for food waste as in composting material, which I assume will ultimately be used for fertilizer. Yes, we have a ways to go about education, behaviour and respect for the planet but a so minded political party is unnecessary and far too single focused.

There are only two parties in this country, red bureaucracy and blue bureaucracy, the rest is cheap political entertainment, in addition to hockey and stand-up comedy.

It seems it is OK for the CBC and aboriginals to constantly talk about race but if a white person were to even begin to do that, there would be a torrent of outrage by the media. But everyone accepts it as normal when an aboriginal or black person emphasizes his racial status and how it has negatively affected him in some way. We get a steady diet of this on mainstream media like the CBC. I wonder what this means for the future. Instead of working toward eliminating race as an important factor in life, the mainstream media and many politicians and others seem to be relishing and promoting differences in race as something to be exalted. How about we promote our shared humanity and stop emphasizing our racial differences as the central factor of life?