cannuck

Hate to have to tell you this, but "western democaracies" are just as inept and corrupt - just for more sophisticated at hiding it. What is important to realize is that the role of government in almost every country is to dispense "privilege" - in ways that are 100% tied to "reward" - usually in more sophisticated places after leaving elected or appointed office. The #1 rule of good government is to ELIMINATE privilege - and precious few elected, appointed or inherited government have ever risen to that level

Thats not populism, that is first hand experience of someone who has participated in investigations.

Have done a LOT of work for them. DEEPLY involved in a lot of corruption for many decades. Wildly top heavy and ineffective bureaucracy. With 3.4 Billion in unaccountable revenue, a lot of million$$ leak out of the cracks from and to many sources.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/federal-election-2025/party-platforms/article/liberals-promise-to-build-nearly-500000-homes-per-year-create-new-housing-entity/ Thought I had seen it all when a Wall Street insider sits as an unelected Prime Minister of Canada. Then this guy moves so far over to the left he makes the NDP look middle of the road. There is not a government owned or run business (or even their own programmes) that is anything but totally screwed up because of the pork barreling, ineptitude and outright corruption that is 100% guaranteed to cause every such effort to end in total collapse and massive losses. Meanwhile the billions that the Little Turd paid to the media ensures the Carnival Side Show Carney gets by without so much as a whimper from the press. Sadly: the other candidates are so devoid of intellectual prowess they haven't called him out either.

Carney and his fellowship have already succeeded in doing the first thing he must set out to do: get the ignorant voters to squabble about who is more or less "left", "right", "woke", etc. Partisanship is the very thing that keeps democracy from actually working. People have been duped into thinking he has been a "public servant" but in reality he was schooled in the real world by the same people who control and run the US economy = Goldman SUCKS. The job of every Wall Street alumnus is to seek to effect legislative, regulatory and enforcement of finance within each economy. If Canadians are stupid enough to elect him (and they probably are) the Hill will be controlled by the same people who now run what is within the Beltway. You see: they really are now "too big to fail".

The Donald thinks he is another Herbert Hoover. We (i.e. the world) has been there in 1930s when Smoot Hawley Tariffs brought on retaliatory tariffs around the world, deepening the Great Depression. Welcome to the dirty thirties - 5 years early.

In many cases it is to be profitable at all - i.e. to survive. I look at this through the eyes of one of the companies I work with in aerospace. We will NEVER produce within the US since to do so - or even try to do so in our little sector all but one company in the last 30 years that has tried to enter "through the FAA front door" has burned through tens of millions EACH and ended up bankrupt. Between government, insurance and lawyers it is simply not a place we could ever likely make our product, and if we were to be that one in a dozen that DID succeed, our pricing would be (just as with our one and only successful competitor in this space) ridiculously uncompetitive due not only to cost - but also engineering features locked in by the certification process. Now that reality TV has arrived back in the White House, we can all see how ridiculous what normally goes on from the back room can actually get. Seems nobody down there ever did HS history class and are blissfully unaware of what Smoot-Hawley did to deepen the last Great Depression - so are bound to repeat it once more. Worth noting the 2025 economy looks very much like that of 1925 - where speculative gain drove massive re-distribution of wealth leading to a total collapse of Main Street (where ALL wealth is created) under the thumb of the greediest SOBs on the planet.

Let me take a wild guess that you have never owned or operated a manufacturing business that has to compete internationally? If you were to do so, you would know that the costs of compliance with the myriad of regulations, and the insurance to protect you from the massive army of ambulance chasers and the management compensation to compete with the incredibly distorted industry standards means you simply can't compete from a US base. Add to that that in some industries, the talent pool to be effective is no longer there.

Put me square into the "cut them some slack" camp. The US is $37 trillion in debt - a debt that has to be serviced by a very broken economy. Wall Street speculators have taken over the government and economy and pay next to nothing in tax for the trillions they pocket. The government mechanism has bloated to the point of sinking the ship. Many industries left the country long ago and those that remain must bear the burden of oppressive regulation and enforcement that results in an army of lawyers and insurance execs bleeding of what little profit is left. Wealth is not being and can not be created by redistribution - whether under socialist or casino capitalist mechanisms - it can only come from actually producing goods and required services. IMHO the first signal that the status quo of government-by-finance-and-banking is going wrong was when Brexit took place. Handing off the legislative, regulatory and enforcement to masses of bureaucrats simply doesn't work. Nations have national cultures that MUST be observed and respected to survive. The US has become much more like an EU and wokism, illegal immigration, bloat of government, runaway drug dependence, and on, and on it goes make for a powder keg - and Donald Trump is lighting the fuse. Always remember - he was actually elected - unlike his personal hero in Moscow.

You realize you just described our entire cabinet over the last decade.? Trump's game has always been to play the media like a fiddle. It's slight of hand. We are all babbling about 51 state BS while he gets on with his real agenda.

Which is exactly not accepting the 2 state model.

I was what you describe as a "moderate" at the start of Gaza war but seeing Hamas continue to hide behind the civilian families of Gaza - using images of their losses for propaganda effect - and watching them hijack most of the aid supplies and hold those citizens hostage to pay for "aid" to fund their war made me a lot lest tolerant of Iran's interference. I still can't condone much of how Israel has rejected the 2 state model either.

government should be taxing speculative gain almost 100% to pay the bills from inflation. Any attempt or even ability of government to "stimulate" anything would be #1 a total screwup in result and #2 open yet another pathway for corrupt to direct the flow. The business of government should be limited to governing - that means legislate regulate and control to ALLOW enterprise (not choose winners and losers) Also to enforce and protection through civil and military authorities. Instead of striving for a level playing field we (globally) have allowed government to evolve to do little more than dispense privilege to entities willing to pay to play.

Here is a 10 year old assessment of the economy of Gaza https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/MNA/Factsheet_Gaza_ENG.pdf Until the current war, I don't think anything changed. Essentially this place (and all of Palestine) lived on handouts from other countries as it produced next to nothing. The world simply paid the residents to produce more residents and then shelled out billions a year to house, feed and service them. They were a prime target for Iran to control, as they did, but what is the path forward to make this place truly sustainable????

No wings at all, so it should not be able to fly. The partisan political process survives because it keeps the ignorant population occupied thinking one or the other can do something or wants to do something that neither has ever done: find and fix the real problems. Our problem is similar to what has happened around the globe: we have given Bay Street/Wall Street/Casino Capitalism free reign to re-distribute wealth without adding any value - thus de-funding Main Street. How is that? Why would you want to take the risk of investing capital in developing new products and services that takes a lot of time and skill when you can instead take a bunch of "market money" and inflate the value of an equity by purchasing control and cashing in on an M&A deal in just a short time with near zero risk?

bitcoin or any other crypto is literally worth nothing. It is the geek world's invasion into the finance world's "synthetic instruments" and are little different from derivatives. The real question should be why are "we" allowing any of the above to exist, never mind be traded?

IMHO it is important to remember that ethnic cleansing happened to the Jews of Israel 2000 years ago, and once again 80 years ago, so this pendulum swings both ways. One thing that has come to bother me is the Iranian terrorists of Hamas celebrating their victory with 100:1 ration of released prisoners and restoration of a full stream of foreign aid that will once again enrich Hamas as it uses that windfall to re-equip. Gazans could have stopped this war dead in its tracks by turning their back on Hamas in December of '23 - instead they chose to shelter terrorists within their communities protecting them from detection and earning endless international sympathy for their "civilian" losses. I am not saying I agree with ethnic "cleansing" of Palestinians or Israelis - just bringing up how the situation on the ground is not one sided as portrayed by each side.

There is of course a constant change in climate, and based on us building economies that expected no change you might call it a "crisis". But that is a problem far, far less that the REAL crisis about which few people ever speak: pollution of our water. In my first forray into resource recovery going back nearly 40 years we learned that Germany alone was dumping about 150,000 tonnes/month of high level industrial waste into the North Sea. MANY countries did/do any better. What we also found was that national governments worked hand in hand with organized crime to make toxic and hazardous waste "go away". The criminal enterprises "owned" their political benefactors. Ever wonder why it has been endlessly studied but never really DONE anything about?? Follow the gold. Top of the list is to fix the problem that has killed of about 25% of the phytoplankton - mostly due to the chemistry of plastics and physical presence of microplastics. THIS is what absorbs far, far more CO2 than any forest or swamp - but without the biota the capacity to remove carbon from the water - that absorbs if from the atmosphere - and then release the oxygen we need - simply will not happen. Emitting less CO2 by villifying carbon is only for the benefit of those who would take a paycheque from trying to tell you this, or moreso those who make billions selling you BEVs so you can keep on doing more of the things that screwed up our environment in the first place.

Why would you want to "get immigrants"????? The place is totally screwed up from the irresponsible and mindless flood of inappropriate and incompatible cultures over the last decade.

Exactly my point. Our brilliant leadership had the right thing handed to them for our country to survive. Instead of embracing it they decided to empty the slums and jails of third world because "growth is good". China is the only country with the collective intelligence to actually do something about it.

Once again those same government regulations merely facilitate doing business as usual that is not in any way sustainable. Problem #1 that nobody seems to have the brains or balls to deal with is population. We live on a nice couple billion supportable planet that we have allowed to bloat to 8.2 Bn and counting ever faster by each day. Regardless of what we as a species do or do not contribute to pollution of our environment it is the explosion in our numbers that will soon make life miserable and unsustainable for us on this tiny planet. Instead of implementing population controls what do we do? Build millions of BEVs to run back and fourth between the dowtown office, urban home and cottages at the lake and spend trillions towards sending a probe to Mars to see how we can screw that place up too.

That is a valid question. The answer is: "politics" = but not so much regional as on a global scale. There is no question that climate is changing - as it has done for billions of years - but there is an opportunity for an economically competitive advantage by replacing nuclear fears with the carbon bugaboo. It was so easy as media has been (often correctly) exposing the horrible track record on environmental damage of the oil production and petrochem industry so the dirty work (sorry for the pun) was mostly done. Once the Euroweenie realized they had used up their easy oil and uncle Vlad had them by the balls to keep on keeping on it was an easy play to demonize the industries they were beholden to and move the market into a new space where there was no massive advantage to oil producing competitive nations. Once left leaning and thoughtless governments started playing off the UN led book and primed the "climate science" pump with a bit of cash, every basket weaving student could switch from inclusive studies to the even more lucrative "climate science" field with ultra low barriers of entry. What the truly ignorant "climate scientists" completely miss is that the path to sustainability can only come by doing LESS of what is causing our very real sustainability crisis, not devising more elaborate, more costly and more polluting ways to do more of what is the real problem. No question that the wrong approach is "drill baby drill" but anyone with a half a brain could easily realize the using massive amounts of immature and inappropriate technology to flood our streets and landfills with un-recyclable wind generator blades to charge incredibly polluting and not yet recyclable toxic batteries is equally inept. What is far, far worse is the shifting our attention to the so easy target of carbon from Big Oil means we are giving a pass to the plastic industries that are poisoning the very biota that extracts and fixes carbon and releases the oxygen that feed the start of the entire food chain and provide us with the oxygen we breathe. THAT is where our very existence will very soon come to an end.

It's not unique to USA as Canada and the rest of the world have as much addiction to alcohol and other drugs - a cultural acceptance that goes back centuries. It is a responsibility to each and ever nation and person. Countries try to limit some of their addictions by making it illegal to import and trade in such substances - and the US has indeed done that. Where they have failed is in securing their borders - and we have been complicit in providing a welcome and unimpeded road for entry of people and drugs into their country. They have every right to do whatever they think is appropriate to stem this flow, and that is what they seem to think they are doing.

I for one am delighted to see Trump's tariffs. To start with: he is responsible for the US economy, not ours. We have been too lazy, stupid, greedy and/or ignorant to revert from a diverse manufacturing economy (70 years ago) to hewers of wood and drawers of water (and oil) that we sell with no value added into the US economy. Outside of the US auto industry in ON, we have let our industries go from independent to branch plant to closed. Instead of investing in Main Street we have put our meager money and trust in Bay Street as Wall Street had instructed. I am insulted daily when I leave the counter of my primary industrial supplier when the person on the other side bids me farewell with "thank you for buying Canadian", and I have to remind him that almost everything in their massive catalogue was made in China, USA or Mexico, not Canada. Instead of developing an economy that exploits our resource wealth to fund value added businesses within our borders, Instead of promoting Canadian entrepreneurs to create wealth we instead scrape the very bottom of the international barrier and bring in millions of people who have absolutely no other purpose in life except to provide cheap labour to those who import products and services that prey upon Canadian consumers. Those same NACs are here because they know they can bring over the rest of their family to enjoy a free ride on our sick care and social services or play the games to exploit their student visa status to enter the USA. The truly ignorant and arrogant new US President is doing us a potentially great service if it will make us look at where we came from, where we are and where we are going as a result of being passive dolts along for the ride.

Evert time government decides to do something...A.NYTHING to choose winners and losers in the business world you can count on two guaranteed things: they will totally f*ck up anything they touch and the kickbacks will be at least 10% of what flows out of our bank....oops, our grandchildrens' tax accounts.