cannuck

You will find all of that on the website. Their chief scientist is also their chief DONOR, not benefactor. His agenda is to teach the science. Made his money long ago - by being productive, not some kind of speculator.

I am adamantly opposed to wasting ANY time, money and effort on such things as electric vehicle conversion and a lot of other misguided, virtue signalling issues. What has technically bothered me for a decade or so, rise in atmospheric temperature FOLLOWS rise in atmospheric CO2 - and that make sense. BUT: it seems these factors are PRECEDED by rise in oceanic CO2 and then temp. I don't think anyone can dispute the fact that the oceans are THE major short-term variable in the carbon cycle (geological material being the most stable long term). Being very much a physical kind of guy - very weak on the bio side - it has always been a bit of a mystery how the aquatic side of the carbon cycle actually works. If finally found a very, VERY informative and highly credible explanation, that you can find cruising through the following link: https://www.goesfoundation.com/I often seem to be some sort of Forest Gump when it comes to technology and some other things - just seem to stumble into THE most interesting people. When working with one of my Euroweenie buddies, I had some questions about the filtration medium he was using in his work, and one thing led to another and we ended up on the phone for two hours with Dr. Dryden - the guy mostly responsible for the Goes Foundation. One of the participants was himself a celebrated and awarded bio scientist I have known for years, and he came away from that session stating he had learned more in that short session than from ANY single event in his career.So, if you take the time to read the few pages in the link, it should explain why we are chasing absolutely the WRONG thing in dealing with climate change and sustainability.

regarding her pension: Army Guy is right, she served her country and should be entitled to EXACTLY the same benefits as someone who had served in a senior rank for whatever number of years she was GG - tacked onto the end of her pension plan from years at CSA. Anything else should be wiped out along with the ridiculous office of GG. If we want to preserve the function, those duties can be tacked onto some other actual and useful government position as an honourarium. That way some deserving janitor on the Hill could enhance his or her pension.

This is not a step onto a slippery slope, this is a high dive into the deep end of the freedom of speech pool. There are already adequate laws in place to investigate, charge and convict people of conspiring to commit various crimes. Strengthen THOSE laws - especially the organized crime laws as these are GANGS - let's not let the gubmint stick their very unwelcome nose into any other part of our world. Worse yet: making the dotcom media moguls arbiters of freedoms of expression is right off the chart.

Greed will never disappear, nor will capitalism. Capitalism mere means that private entities put forward their capital to fund the means of production. It differs from "pure" communism in that under such a system, the state owns the means of production. Greed - that is ALWAYS a factor - exists under every economic and political model. It is greed -and the lack of control over it - that distorts and destroys where it persists. You will notice that no actual government that is truly full bore Communist nor even staunchly Marxist socialist has ever succeeded or survived. Mao's China with zero capitalism was Hell on Earth for its subjects - but the greedy CPC elite had a jammie go. Communist China succeeded only after Deng brought in capitalism. What is really needed is to put in place the mechanisms to control greed. Not sure how you do that in communism (which is why it ultimately turns into dictatorships that fail) but in capitalism, we have THE number 1 solution to greed - taxation. It is the ultimate tool to determine financial behaviour. In my own very long consideration of what works and what doesn't within capitalism, the answer is that captialism succeeds when it is used in the process of creating wealth. It fails when greed takes over and the greedy get into a position to bestow privilege to re-distribute wealth into their own back pocket by nothing but speculation. It crashed the world economy in 1929, and SHOULD have corrected with yet another crash in '08, but greed had become the religion of the world, and Casino Capitalists had taken control of governments everywhere and declared themselves "too big to fail" and were bailed out to the tune of TRILLION$$$$. That is a greed problem, not a capitalist problem.

This is where the line between "left" and "right" gets very blurry. Those are most conveniently called "capitalists" and "socialists", but that is not how I see it at all. In my perfect (but at this time completely theoretic and invisible) world, one would note that those on the "left" are wealth re-distributors while those on the "right" employ capital to create wealth. Sadly, the mechanisms of capitalism have been taken over by those who worship nothing but greed, and we see capital markets and financial business focusing their great privilege to speculate and re-distribute wealth from speculative gain while ignoring the genuine capitalist function of providing equity to run productive business. This has happened by allowing financial entities to operate virtually without boundaries and taxation - thus the obliteration of the traditional "left-right" division. As you may recall, I call this greedy, opportunistic, non-productive and predatory thing "Casino Capitalism" that does little different from the political left where wealth is redistributed according to privilege, not production.

Sadly, that applies to either side of the 49th.

Good for you, but nothing very good anywhere in this mess for taxpayers. What Joe Lunchbucked doesn't understand (nor apparently does Joe Economist) is that expanding the money supply results in a DIRECT liability to the taxpayer. All of those trillion$$$ pumping into the economy are either current or pent-up inflationary forces - expressed by increasing money supply. And ( I hope ) you realize WHO is ultimately responsible for the results.

You are presenting a defeatist excuse to do nothing when there is a very large problem to solve. Reality is: when you provide subsidies, those given the privilege to exploit it will do so. True in ag, industry and of course - information. State-owned media ANYWHERE on this planet ranges from a little bit biased (BBC, al Jazeera) to somewhere in the middle (CBC) to the absolute extreme (Pravda...now VGTRK and CCTV - plus most of everything else in China). Just because we haven't reached the extreme of genuine dictatorships there is no excuse for us to tolerate this half-measure that pukes away tax dollars at a staggering rate. I agree as to the issue of other lobbies being able to control information. The whole dotcom billionaire into social media information gateways is a perfectly good example. The solution to that has far more to do with how we manage our economy (the economic ability to GET into this position is a result of believing the wealth re-distribution of speculative gain is a legitimate way to manage an economy...and it is very much NOT and results in concentrations of unearned wealth into idle, non-productive - in fact predatory - hands).

You should be worried about it. The states are collectively WAY of another trillion in debt. Same taxpayers have to retire/service it as the Fed. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/11/23/states-with-the-most-and-least-debt-in-2020/?sh=70e76c2578a3

1. Pretty much EXACTLY how the Communist Broadcasting Corporation works now. Before you get all wound up over the semantics: it is state owned and spews endless propaganda and pure BS. Glasnost and Perestroika have not touched it at all, yet. 2. The alternative is obvious: an actual free and independent press, 100% prevented from taking ANY kind of revenue from government sources. Easy thing to do. Report of public service announcements, interview politicians, but ZERO funding in ANY form allowed. Yes, that starts with disbanding the CBC or trying to sell it off to an independent buyer. I am still PO'd big time that Harper did not do this. I will grant you that the Post the the Glob and Knob once in a while gets things right, but I have also been deeply involved with a very important story decades ago that they got 100% wrong (most by listening to the Manchester Guardian instead of bothering to verify the facts of the story). I blame that more on the Toronto elitist attitude that discounts the ROC completely.

They may not pay conscious attention to the news or politics (the mere existence of our government being proof) but the media is about their only source of information. Since LPC scavenged $2.5 billion from the taxpayers to bribe the sole source, (along with hundred$ of billion$ in direct payments to their target audience) the outcome was and is secure.

Thanks for the link. Geez, what a downer. When I though the little tur...uh...TRUdeau had screwed up everything he possibly could, I find he has taken his incompetence, arrogance and corruption to a new low. Oh, Canada! eh?

Surely, you already know the answer to that! One has proven to be a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent and passionate individual in putting fourth his arguments. The other has proven himself to be a totally arrogant idiot quite content to break every possible rule when it comes to ethics and legality when executing his privilege.

You make some valid points. IMHO, the first level of the problem is in our inability to understand what government is and what it does (or, more to the point SHOULD do). The only things a government should be doing is to legislate, regulate, enforce and fund NECESSARY services - and do so without bestowing privileged access to benefits of any kind. What government should NOT be doing, and has proven consistently it is a HORRIBLE way of doing so - is delivering service. ANYTHING outside of the four functions above should be contracted out to private corporations and contractors...but ONLY if there is an extremely good reason to do whatever that might be. The reason is that a government employee and their union have the taxpayer firmly by the balls and will squeeze at every opportunity simply because there is no downside to them as they know they are untouchable (and, yes, you can interpret that word in several appropriate ways). The only way for a taxpayer to be protected is for the service provider to be REQUIRED to live up to standards set and enforced by government as the payee, with the clear understanding that if they don't measure up, they have a small number of opportunities to remediate and then they are out of the door. Everyone coming in would have to bid to get there. The other concern is that many, many things that government does simply don't need to BE done. Government unions to this very day still mutter in private about being Nielsenized. When Erik was Minister, he did a study and found something like more than 11,000 programmes and departments that spent money in the name of the FEDERAL taxpayer (and provinces can no doubt rack up a similar number). What he taught us is that the correct question about ANY government department (outside of the four essential functions above) is not how much more or less they can do with more or less money, but why they exist AT ALL in the first place. Now that the most incompetent administration in Canadian history has racked up the highest debt/GDP ratio of any major government on the planet, we can't just carry on pissing away our grandchildren's future for complete idiots to virtue signal themselves into a fat lifetime pension.

Again, as I said, a DEEPLY flawed individual...BUT: I have always believed we elect politicians in the hopes they will represent us, our concerns, our fears, our needs, etc. It would seem that Trump did indeed reflect his adopted constituents. I can only guess at what he really DID believe vs. what he said he believed.

I get your dislike for Trump. To me, ANYONE who is non-productive and especially someone who lives off of the avails of speculation is simply dog feces to scrape off of one's shoes. Property developers who build nothing productive are one short step above the bottom of that barrel. So, I am a long way from a Trump worshipper. However, you are trying to judge a deeply flawed individual with standards that could apply only to a completely sane and stable person. When you listen to what he said, and watch what he tried to do, I have to believe that there was SOME essence of intention to do something good behind at least some of it. What I really DID like about Trump is that he told everyone whatever he was thinking. I was probably his ego thinking he was beyond reproach, but it was so refreshing to simply hear what the leader of the most dangerous country on the planet was thinking - right or wrong, true of false, good or bad. While you may think (and you may be right) that he gave false hope to "middle Americans" what he did do was get them thinking about and involved in the political process. He put issues on the table that they actually DID discuss constantly among themselves - he just made the narrative very public. The Big Lie for the last many decades was that the USA was some kind of peaceful, happy bunch of left-of-center people coming together as one great melting pot singing Kumbaya in perfect harmony. Trump exposed that, and until the USA deals with this reality, it is doomed to go nowhere quietly.

You don't have to hate Trump to point out his obvious shortcomings as a human being. That said: he is the ONLY President in a very, very long time who had any real concern to the future of the USA. He just wasn't the best man to make his legitimate concerns work into policy and law. Bottom line: the swamp did not get drained and the alligator's puppets now run the entire country (into the ground).

One of the problems is that China is already so deep in our supply chain, there are a lot of necessary products that can only be bought from China. They have already killed vast swaths of the North American supply chain...and buried it under a pile of ever-more-expensive Chinese made replacements. I had to order some brass and bronze fittings for a project this week, and didn't matter WHERE on this continent I looked, they were all from Asia, mostly China (and no doubt the non-Chinese addresses are now Chinese owned).

Some of the most horrible things said about China and the CPC are quite true. You either toe the line our you are out on you rear. Long before Xi, a fellow I know was the largest computer manufacturer in China. He stood beside his employees in Tiananmen Square in Deng's China of 1989. Believe it or not, there were actually private companies then (thanks to Deng) but if you did as he did and stood up for human rights in public, you were in for a nasty ride. They took his company, imprisoned him until his family could negotiate his exile and he ended up in Vancouver for some time. Xi seems to have embraced the four pillars of modern reform, but what is said and what is written is far, far away from what is reality. If you (GM, VW, etc.) want to be in business in the largest car market in the world, you give up all of your technology and business knowledge to the a 50% partner with some obscure Chinese company and your board will be made up of hand picked party faithful. If you are minding your own business in let's say South Africa, doing something as obscure as making coffins from wood you import from Canada, you could wake up one morning and find you have a competitor who is making coffins from other woods at far, far lower prices than your offerings, and that company is buying up your legacy competitors as they go tits up one by one. Today, that obscure Chinese company owns the market that charges top dollar for a coffin in RSA. And on it goes. ChIna is not here to be your/our friend, they are here to WIN at whatever they are doing. That means military, civil, trade, business, economic, strategic....whatever. They are PREDATORY in business, backed not only by the CPC, but also the wealth of 1/4 of the world's population who have been given the opportunity, encouragement, funding, stolen technology and whatever else it takes to WIN. I have tremendous respect for the CPC and China and what they have accomplished in 3 short decades, but I also have great fear as I am fully aware of their objectives and abilities to carry out the unwritten policies.

That is simply not true. Well, they may FEEL like they are progressing, but they are not. The only way for a person, company or country to "rise above their station" is by creating wealth. Just growing and inflating does not create any wealth, it just inflates the money supply and re-distributes it to those with the privilege of access - which is NOT Joe Lunchbucket in any way. You get ahead by being more productive, not just more populous. All that growth achieves is faster depletion of finite resources.

I work on both sides of the 49th, but by choice live on this side of the border. While I do most of our business down there, I constantly try to find competitive opportunities on this side. It isn't easy, because the way we as a government and business environment deal with cross border transactions hobbles the ability to be in business at all, never mind competing with US or others. The US prohibition on interstate barriers to trade means that to purchase supplies, one freely seeks out the best deal and it arrives on your doorstep for "$xx" in a day or two. American manufacturers and distributors add one full layer more in the supply chain by selling to Canadian distributors, who seem to feel they can do really silly things with the price since they often have an exclusive distribution agreement (that would be very hard to enforce in the USA). The inspiration today was looking for a cheap pipe tap for a one shot job. I found it in the USA for $141.00 from Home Depot ($180.00 Cdn) that would land it here for probably $220. When I tried a Canadian only search, the EXACT tool came up from WalMart for $300.00!!! That is pretty much what I see when I have to buy one specific tire that I get in the US for $250US retail, but have to pay $400 Cdn wholesale up here. And on it goes. Every time we take a piece of equipment from Canada to do work in the US, we encounter HUNDRED$$ in brokerage fees to do the border each way, not to mention the time it takes and the cost for shipping/receiving to administer and the risk of getting drivers, techs and/or engineers stranded at the border if some documentation isn't right. Bottom line: there is nothing at all "free" in our Free Trade agreement(s).

YURP, of course. Oz and NZ too...but we don't seem to be very attractive to most of them. I find Middle East and Chinese second gen to be very successful, and somewhat true for India, but could do without that particular country's first cycle people. My big bother is this mindless addiction to growth at any cost. We "need" immigration in ridiculous numbers from highly questionable sources like yet another hole in our collective head.

Yes, being fecetious to some extent, but: Having SOME immigrants (i.e. ones from compatible cultures and qualified to be productive) would set an embarrassing precedent for SOME reserves (there are some who actually DO work) because they will dig to the bottom of the earth (that's a mining pun) to find the best paying jobs and the most hours of work. Conversely, putting economic refugees from very incompatible cultures into the heart of "real Canada" would stem the tidal wave of people who genuinely would be better off (as will we) by them staying at home.