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Right on...keep fighting the good fight. You know they are desperate when they call you UN-CANADIAN for not towing the party line.

1.) Perhaps you don't pay attention to the formatting here? The header above your reply reads as follows: "On 8/14/2018 at 1:31 PM, turningrite said:" 2.) I think our political class will do everything it can to discredit the kind of views expressed by Bernier, particularly given that it's likely aware he's reflecting views widely if not vociferously held in the Canadian population, if the results of the 2016 CBC Angus Reid poll still hold, which I suspect they do. Our main political parties and politicians are for the most part bought and sold by powerful interests, and where that's not necessarily the case, as with the NDP, pixie dust and unicorns have obliterated rational analysis. 3.) We have at present a tri-party political monopoly that basically sets the parameters of policy discussion in Ottawa. These three parties garnered roughly 92% of the vote in the 2015 election. We have seen attempts to break out of this monopoly, particularly on the part of the BQ, but it could never attain power as it was/is a solely Quebec-based sovereignist outfit. The Reform Party also broke into the monopoly for a time, but it never evolved much beyond its roots as a Western-Canadian focused protest movement. Eventually, it reintegrated into the Conservative Party, taking it slightly further to the right. 4.) Governments absolutely have control over social outcomes they choose to impose. Some might well argue that the Canadian government has become a poster child for this. And perhaps you've never read Noam Chomsky's work about "manufacturing" consent? 5.) Trade deals in the globalist era contain the very seeds of de-democratization. As a student of economic history myself, I find it amusing when people think that trade deals merely involve trading goods. The NAFTA agreement's investor protection and dispute resolution mechanisms are classic examples of the kind of institutionalized language employed to undermine the sovereignty of democratically elected governments. The uproar in parts of Europe over the CETA deal (which now may be blocked by a populist coalition in Italty) has in large measure focused on these kinds the anti-democratic mechanisms. And the TPP was attacked over the use of similar language and provisions. Credible analysts, including I believe the Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, have pointed out that the TPP had/has little to do with actual trade and more to do with imposing a corporate agenda. Interestingly, the vacuous Trudeau is a proponent of the language and mechanisms of de-democratization while Trump, whom I dislike because of his offensive style and autocratic tendencies, clearly appears to understand the problemic aspects of globalization, at least insofar as its negative impact on labor markets is concerned. 6.) There are so many articles and analyses available online related to the risks posed by globalization to democracy that it's difficult to identify a singular critique. You can take a look at the Global Policy Forum piece on globalization, for an unabashedly negative assessment. But if you're interested in looking beyond your preconceptions and reading a very moderate take on the deleterious impacts of globalization you might want to read an analysis in the NY Times, written by Harvard professor Dani Rodrik, which notes that "...the elimination of barriers to trade and finance became an end in itself, rather than a means toward more fundamental economic and social goals. Societies were asked to subject domestic economies to the whims of global financial markets; sign investment treaties that created special rights for foreign companies; and reduce corporate and top income taxes to attract footloose corporations." And the writer is actually a fan of globalization - well, assuming it can be reined in and reformed! The article rather wistfully takes the position that globalization could be salvageable and put to work for the benefit of democracy, but to do so would mean isolating and excluding many countries that are now involved in the scheme, like China, Saudi Arabia and Russia. In other words, imagining a kinder, gentler and more democratic form of globalization is a pipe dream. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/put-globalization-to-work-for-democracies.html 7.) Well, there's a singular factor you're apparently ignoring, which is that the capitalist world faced ideological competition. You are aware that during WWII the CCF was gaining in the polls and a Communist, Fred Rose, was elected to Parliament, right. This set the stage for the release by the Liberal government in 1945 of the White Paper on Employment and Income' that laid the groundwork for the implementation of a social democratic agenda over the next three decades. A "mixed-market economy" was to provide benefits for ordinary people by means explicitly social democratic policies in order to bolster and sustain for, well, capitalism. This approach was adopted throughout throughout much of the developed West, although perhaps less wholeheartedly in the U.S., and led to the broadest form of equitable prosperity experienced in the modern era. The oil shock of the 1970s put an end to the party, and the emergence of post-industrial Western economies, exacerbated by emerging globalization, largely finished it off. It's now in its death throes. 8.) PET would probably be horrified by what multiculturalism has become. He loathed ethnic nationalism and tribalism but was open to the idea of a broader civic nationalism that could accommodate Canadians, including newcomers, of all backgrounds. He no doubt viewed multiculturalism in the traditional Canadian context of cultural integration rather than segregation. His position on aboriginal/indigenous claims, where he bluntly rejected victim-based tribalist ideology, provides insight into his real beliefs. He believed in a modest immigration program and was mindful of the threat posed by immigration to the interests of Canadian workers. Immigration numbers didn't really ramp up until the Mulroney era, where the program was turbocharged at the behest of the corporate class, and the dependency-based refugee scheme took off after the Singh decision in 1985, which followed PET's departure. It's a matter of conjecture as to whether he would have been supportive of many the Charter's more more problematic impacts, but there are clues that he probably would be alarmed at some of those impacts were he around today. The Charter is in some ways a theoretically good idea gone awry. By the way, should you respond further on this, please provide references to back up your assertions. You play a game where you ask others to substantiate their positions when you don't do so yourself.

If politicaly correct disappeared we'd be better off.

Your moniker @ work. Saudis, I note, WANT the F-35 bad...along with the Gulf States...Canadian pilots at Oshkosh seemed a bit envious in some interviews...lol.

Omarosa is one of those dogs that bites the hand that feeds her. Quite literally...

I AM CANADIAN. Will that now work for you? Just trying to show my disgust and displeasure as to where my country is headed. Dam right most Americans do not care about Canada. And why should they? Canadians care more about America than their own country. America appears to be always on their minds. And why are so many Canadians here so concerned about America all the time? What? Are most of them dual citizen's? If most Canadians do care about Canada then why don't they show it more often and show a lot less of their willingness to keep bashing America and Trump as much as they do. Trump is not hurting them. Trudeau is though. That is because Canadians and Americans watch more American TV and thus we all are always learning and know more about America than Canada. How many Canadians have traveled around the world but have not visited and seen all of their own country yet? Most would prefer to go to the states where there is more action and more excitement and fun going on and plus they have the better weather in winter to boot. I would personally like to see Canada become like Puerto Rico. Be American but not having to be all American and be able to use American currency rather that Canadian peso currency. I agree but that is the way things are. I think that Canadians and Americans are so much alike in everything we do that we do not see any difference between us and that Americans might not see Canada as much of a different country to want to go visit. There are no real problems between us. The only problems that Canadians have is that they are always trying to create problems between us by their constant attacks and bashing of Americans all the time. As if Canadians are the greatest people in the world or something and have no problems of their own. Of course thanks to our leftist liberal media they are the ones that are always trying to get Canadians all riled up over what America does or what Trump says or does. If the Canadian media kept their useless stupid mouths shut about America and Trump we would not be reading all that has been posted here. The leftist Canadian media is always trying to make us all hate America and Trump and it is working well for them. It's easy for someone to want to bash another than themselves. Canadians just need to stop reading and listening the Canadian media and their constant lies and bull chit about America and Trump. My opinion of course and I approve of this post.

Same as yours.... $15 billion for LAVs manufactured by General Dynamics Land Systems in Ontariario, Canada. $100 million from Saudi medical students and residents. $6 billion for SNC-Lavalin oil services contracts in Saudi Arabia (2017) Money.....get back I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack Money....it's a hit Don't give me that do goody good (human rights) bullshit

Well, according to Tucker on Fox news Omarosa is a liar and many who worked with her have stated this also. She has been fired from many jobs because she is a bitch. She cried for Trump to give her a job in his cabinet and Trump did so and now look at all the nasty lies that she has said about Trump. She got fired because she broke White house rules. Your sources for news are never reliable enough for anyone with any intelligence to want to listen too and believe as a source for real and honest news. She got what she deserved. But anyway she is writing a book and you can read all about her lies and bull chit about Trump. Enjoy.

Maybe Macron can call his good buddy Trudeau and ask if he'll hop on over to France and explain to the people how diversity can be their strength too. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12850/emmanuel-macron-rise-fall

Sorry. Cant' take that site seriously. Yooo-hoooo? Am I DoP or BC? Anyway, I'm not going to rely on your words alone. Lol. You're the one who mostly misunderstand what's being said. I don't know what you're on about. You're also not getting this, I can see that. What's this? Your trademark? FYI, I don't care whether KSA looked like a spoiled brat. That undiplomatic tweet still costs us - that's what matters. --- See? You got it all wrong again.

Good advice....if I was a concerned pothead, I would only straw purchase through another buyer to avoid government/commercial data collection. This will create a new kind of illegal dealer network....how ironic.

Diversity is our strength is the new 2 + 2 = 5 from 1984. You must say it and nod with approval at all times, or else feel the wrath of the state and the state-run/supporting media complex. Somebody needs to tell Justin that diversity isn't our strength, freedom is. Without freedom, diversity would be meaningless.

Doing identity politics means trying to drum up support by appealing to specific groups on the basis of their ethnicity, religion, language, sexuality or other characteristics, instead of speaking to them as Canadians interested in the wellbeing of our country as a whole. In actuality, all Maxime Bernier is doing, is fighting against identity politics. .

Alot from all sides. But the most virulants were liberals. One in particular that I try to remember his name. I did not see him posting recently. I have been absent from this forum few years and my memory is failing me about who said what. Liberals did not change much about that topic, but the conservatives did. They realize more how much toxic is the multiculturalism than before. Bernier added more precisions to his thoughts and I must say that I agree with most of what he said. I do not remember I ever agreed with him before on any other subjects.

You are mistaken. Canadian media and politics simply ignore those people, regardless of their numbers, who do not agree with the cultural values of the small bubble of media/academic/political elites. If the Liberals had gone ahead and given us proportional representation and those voices found political parties to support their grievances you would see a different story.

If the protection of human rights was so important to Canada, it would not have such a terrible record of continuing genocide and abuse of native people and land, foreign policy atrocities (e.g. Haiti), or political and economic support of global mining operations that destroy people's lives and their environment. The "human rights" and "Responsibility to Protect®" scam has been honed with great skill by Liberal Canadian governments to justify interventions and wars far across the ocean; they are the thin veneer that a weak "middle power" needs to bolster its status in the world and pursue its national interests. Such pablum works for many, but not all Canadians. You are relatively new to this forum and do not understand the long running, cross-border, cultural dominance game I like to play....any opportunity to point out Canadian embrace of American culture, especially at the highest levels of government, will be exploited. American social media dominates Canada, and now Canada's foreign minister has her tits in the wringer after carelessly using Twitter to attack an allied nation...made funnier because she was suppose to know better than a tweeting President Trump. Yes, we are very dangerous and will seek out future opportunities to mock such smugness, especially when it is practiced by NATO deadbeats like Canada who want others to cash the checks that Ottawa writes with its big mouth. Enjoy the Saudi oil imports...and keep building those LAVs for the Royal Saudi Land Forces...the Liberals need the votes in Ontario.

That was NOT the charge. The charge was that Canada would become less united, with large groups of immigrants becoming large groups of insular communities whose values did not align with each other, much less with the Canadian 'mainstream'. and I think that this has happened and is continuing to happen. We have a prime minister, in fact, who says there IS no Canadian nation, and no central core identity. He is echoed by most of those on the political left (or at least, certainly not contradicted by them). Now as immigration numbers grow and a more substantial portion of them come from cultures which are even more different from Canada's in terms of values and beliefs, that disunity is likely to grow. And I would suggest that this lack of unity doesn't show itself much in good times, where most people are relatively content. Where a nation's unity and sense of mutual brotherhood comes into play is when there is a crisis. That's when nations without any sense of unity or 'core identity' shatter into their diverse elements who turn on each other. The concern is that in bringing in massive numbers of unskilled workers Canada is impoverishing itself.

The deplatforming of the right by the left continues, further illustrating the left's war on free speech. First, they ignore you. Then, they laugh at you. Then, they fight you. Then, you WIN.

You provide some interesting statistics and you definitely have challenged progressives on here to define and defend their thinking, but on this matter of Canada's legitimate and important criticism of Saudi Arabia on human rights abuses, there can be no equivocating. You may not like Freeland or Trudeau, but when you make your partisan anti-Trudeau position more important than protecting human rights and supporting an ally that is standing up for democratic freedom, you've lost me completely. Also, if you don't like the way Twitter has been used outside the U.S., take that up with Twitter. You don't own it. Trump has made Twitter his message board. It is a widely used medium for better or worse. You're complaining about the fact of its use just because some have used it to express views you don't like. Whatever happened to, "I may disagree with your opinion, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Hall re: Voltaire). You care more about your notion of Canadian "smugness" about defending democratic principles than you do about the importance of defending these principles. This is what makes your position and the people who agree with you dangerous to the future of democracy and freedom. Get your priorities straight.

London, Westminster 1960's. Not a stab vest, crash barrier or armed police officer to be seen.

I'll defer to Bernier here, who maintains that the promotion of tribal division is a political tactic on the part of the Trudeau government. But I think the fact that serious discussion of immigration and multicultural policies is generally not allowed is more a function of an elitist compact between the major mainstream federal parties. The Conservatives are somewhat more open to nibbling around the edges on these things but at the end of the day support large-scale immigration because that's what big business wants. But politics as does nature abhors a vacuum and it's impossible to imagine that the political compact that suppresses debate on immigration and multiculturalism policy can last forever. Maybe Bernier's commentary over the past few days suggests that there's a pent up willingness on the part of some politicians to open Canada's democracy to, well, actual democratic debate and perhaps Ford's concerns about financial implications of supporting the refugee influx will open another front relating to debating the real costs of our immigration and refugee programs.

My preference is irrelevant, as were the preferences of impacted Canadians it would seem. Irrespective of Freeland's grandstanding using American social media (an issue already being pursued via more discrete back channels), it was refreshing to see another sovereign nation blow that patented brand of Canadian "human rights" smugness right back into her political face.

Which of his views are far off centre?

I agree as I said earlier about multicult. Most people are fine with legal immigration but don't like offical/enforced multicult. which is the antithesis of nationalism as it highlights the differences while ignoring similarities. Why should we all be isolated from each other, each with their own tribal 'hearth' as this only fosters resentment and creates a divisive ethos. Maybe this is what Trudeau/Liberals want, a divided people which makes many Canadians uneasy even as discussion about immigration and culture is restriced as any serious critique of immigration is generally not allowed.

I believe Bernier's comments over the past few days reflect a growing if often politically unrecognized view held across a broad swath of the Canadian population that our immigration, integration and multicultural policies aren't working. A 2016 CBC Angus-Reid poll indicated that 68 percent of respondents believed that "...minorities should be doing more to fit in with mainstream society instead of keeping their own customs and languages." (See link below.) I suspect that our mainstream parties are aware of the high levels of discontent and will probably treat Bernier like a skunk at a garden party for breaking from their clique. But I think this topic must be addressed. If Bernier is turfed from the CPC caucus any new movement/party that might form should be called something like the Popular Action Party. I'd likely vote for it. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/poll-canadians-multiculturalism-immigrants-1.3784194

Very, very good question. I doubt Alberta has such a break...

No, I dismissed your argument because it concluded with a gratuitously anti-intellectual assumption, thus failing the test of objectivity: i.e. "To assert that a law banning face veils is (or would be) based on caring about female equality and not merely government pandering to bigots is so "unwoke" as to make rational beings cringe" In other words, you dismiss the views of those who don't agree with you based on a preconceived moral construct (i.e. bigotry) rather than on rational discourse and/or evidence and to boot you throw in a personal attack against the commentator to whom you are responding. I made no slur whatsoever against you or your post(s) in the sentence you quote. I simply elaborated on a point you previously raised. You can't set up an argument, attack other commentators for responding to it and then go on to blithely describe their views as amounting to slurs. Based on my assessment of your argument in this string, you don't apparently understand rules of civil debate, unless of course your actual objective was to be seen as clever, which in my opinion you didn't achieve. My advice to you is to avoid the temptation to engage in gratuitously sarcastic 'ad hominem' attacks.

More Canadian FEAR of Trump....and admitted obsession with U.S. politics: Yes...it is too much to ask...U.S. political choices are for Americans to make, not foreign nationals.

The wrong folks were doing the attacking of said media. Pretty simple... Treated as a friendly fire incident.

One has to wonder whether young women who choose to wear face coverings in places like Canada are mainly doing so as a political statement rather than out of religious belief. Perhaps it's become a form of fashionable self-othering? But it also raises the question of whether these women truly understand the Islamist ideology they so openly appear to espouse? The most vocal critic of female Muslim religious wear I ever met was a women with whom I worked when volunteering a couple decades ago who'd fled post-revolutionary Iran. She vociferously criticized fundamentalism and its manifestations as being inherently inhumane. So, the fact that younger women in the West are choosing to adopt these habits, and that self-styled progressives are willing to champion this trend, seems even more problematic than many analysts seem willing to admit. To me it's not a manifestation of "freedom" but instead seems to represent a reactionary form of sentimentalist self-delusion. I guess we're all free to delude ourselves but to assert face covering as amounting to progressive accommodation is so 'unwoke' as to make rational beings cringe.

Really ? So one can wear complete KKK garb in public without fear of putting someone off ?

I think the most interesting aspect of Bernier's commentary relates to his assessment that Trudeau is promoting the creation of ethno-racial-religious political tribes that can be bought off with taxpayer dollars and special privileges. In other words, Trudeau is the ultimate political cynic, playing off the interests of varying groups against the broader interests of the Canadian population. And yet he dons a moralistic stance when sonorously condemning anybody who dares to criticize his diversity agenda when the inherent moral flaw is in his own program. The term hypocrisy barely touches on Trudeau's capacity for duplicity.

Fundamental Islam is incompatible with western culture. Why do you automatically assume I'm speaking about the entirety of Islam, where did i mention that I was on a crusade to erase Islam? Again, fundamental Islam is the issue here, which is why i brought up reform. The length of time it takes for an extremist to sort their views and behavior out is irrelevant to me. If they want to adopt a 7th century way of life and attack others for their beliefs then they can do that in heaven. I'm not in the business of reconciliation. I'm in the business of death. If they were serious about reform they wouldn't be advocating for violence as required by sharia law. Their extremist ideology played out on the streets of Raqqa and Aleppo for the world to see so don't pretend it won't happen when they take over the streets of London, New York and Toronto . Why would arguing against fundamental Islam automatically make you a white nationalist. This is the problem with identity politics that both right and left suffer from. The far right choose to adopt a identity of whiteys, as if that was a real identity. Same for the left, they chose to adopt a bi-lesbian trans-women identity, again as if that is an actually identity. You need to address the merit of the idea you are debating not the identity of said group or person. I will say that Canadians are generally better about this than Americans, which is why I like debating you canucks.

Spoken like a true lickspittle - economics trumps virtue. Presumably its what that douche-bag Jesus would do too.