cannuck

The governments of Canada have never perpetrated anything "against" indigenous peoples. What many have done is make with their very best intentions what they THOUGHT was helping the indigenous community. While almost everything they have done is about as inept as the current idiocy of the LPC and their Prime Mistake, none, not even the little twit himself have intended any harm to aboriginals. Judging by the standards of today what was done in decades and centuries past is one perfect example of pure stupidity.

To be fair, NO mega billion dollar project is going to just get rubber stamped in ANY developed nation these days. Of the nearly $200 Bn claimed, a huge chunk is Athabasca Sands projects that at this time/price are not practical, not to mention once you build them, there is no way to get the oil to tidewater to market. Look at Sunshine, and realize that the bloat in "business geniuses" who could plan mega projects on $100 oil can't make it economically viable with $40 well head prices for heavy sours of any kind. Amazing when you consider the "tipping point" for Athabasca oil came about 18 years ago when the price of WTI passed $17/bbl and everything in Ft. Mac came off of hold and charged ahead. The same is true for LNG projects. Gas is trading at about $2.50, sliding there from $5 over the last decade. All of the excitement in that market came about 15 years ago when gas almost hit $20 and averaged well over $10. The proponents lost a lot of their interest in putting billions at stake when the price "collapsed" (returned to historical normal that real O&G people have lived with for many decades. A lot of this happened because of the frac'ing technologies developed in the Bakken shales that work equally well for releasing gas - giving many of the principals more production than they had planned from existing and new completions of their domestic properties. Note that you can add a LOT of value to that gas by liquifying it, and $40 Bn of the list in question has been approved to bring gas from AB/BC border to Kitimat LNG facility. So 20% of the report's value has proven to be a done deal already. Much of the rest will come when prices improve and someone figures out how to get AB heavy oil out of the Athabasca Sands economically and reliably.

Dougie: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It was elegant and I feel extremely accurate. The end of the Army (etc.) happened long before your recollection, though. I was unfortunate enough to experience it when Paul Hellyer stuck his whack-job nose into it (under PET with full approval no doubt of his Communist masters, of course). I am a Canadian citizen, but most of my businesses are in the USA. Have shifted lately to align more with China as that is where the real action is - without having to deal with an army of ambulance chasers and petitfoggers playing the LLL (Legal Liability Lottery). I will always keep primary residence here, as our kids and grandkids are nearby, and I will continue to try to demonstrate to my family and my fellow countrymen how to add value and create wealth instead of merely redistributing wealth skimmed from our resources. Not feeling like abandoning my country, even though as you say it would make far more sense.

Often missing from climate change discussion is cosmic contribution. As we move in and out of parts of the Milky Way, there is a subtle but substantial energy contribution that seems to go ignored from models. Also, instant catastrophic risks such as impacts that caused mass extinctions are there. From what I understand, during eruptions and large forest fires, nature far surpasses anthro output but those events are not continuous (nor predictable). I am deep in tech research for commercial reasons, so appologize I have no time to research what I think is the real key to how much carbon contribution is avoidable and how much we can not change (i.e. oceanic CO2 release), and if I can get a break I will cite what I can once again hopefully find. While I can agree, there is not much we do that does not contribute to the problem, but I am still not sure that our best efforts will avoid what nature is going to throw at us anyhow. Of course, if we were under 2 bn and holding instead of past 7 bn and heading for genuine unsustainable population levels, this would all be moot.

Dougie, I agree with you for the most part about the members of various US military forces (wife and I grew up in Canforces as civilian dependents and later civilian support around several foreign powers, served for some time as arty reserve and my Son-in-law is infantry DCO now and was officer co-ordinating with US in Afgan). It is the political use of Canadians by the US, not to mention diplomatic and trade use...abuse mostly where we are literally lap dogs to the Imperial powers to our South. They simply replaced the British after WWII. Sometimes you/we need to differentiate between those giving the orders and those taking them.

Well, since the US is the Imperial power, we do this simply because we are your lap dog. Problem is: by hitching our wagon to your star, we have learned how to scorn the act of actually doing any work to ride on the yankee bandwagon of casino capitalism - but only because we have the massive resources right now to pay for those who think we can run our economy by lifting ourselves up by our own bootlaces. What they fail to realize is that the Loonie does not enjoy hegemony that allows the greenback to carry Wall Street.

Of course, I would disagree strongly with that. This is no different from how we practice medicine these days...attack the symptom instead of the disease - because you can make a lot of money attacking symptoms without killing off the cause of the problem. Smart people would have figured out how to limit the number of people emitting carbon instead of trying to make some bucks scaring the WEALTHY part of the world into giving them money to chase down unicorn farts.

The time to worry about this stuff was BEFORE Canadians elected some snot nosed, silver spoon brat with far less than half a brain. What you sew, so shall ye reap.

I can't argue with that.

The right wing agenda is simply for greater personal freedoms. Freedom of choice, freedom of association, property rights, right to life, etc. Along with that goes personal responsibility. The left wing agenda is to have collective rights and freedoms that override personal rights and freedoms. Responsibility to the left is collective and/or that of the state. Both profess to try to obtain equitable distribution of wealth and privilege for the benefit of all. Right believes you need to earn it, left believes you are automatically entitled. The national (and now seems worldwide) religion of greed has little to do with "right wing" or "left wing" politics. The greedy simply use whatever political system they can rent or buy to achieve uneven distribution of privilege - and thus resources. No different from any other religion.

I think you need a harsh dose of reality. The financial crisis started when the last piece of legislation left over the last market crash was repealed....Galss-Steagal. If you bother to think about that, you would realize that was the liberals under Klinton that did that. Even so, deregulation went on by the Uniparty for decades...lead by the fact that Goldman Sucks has owned every one of the past 10 or so administrations lock, stock and barrel. If only Dimples had the balls Trump has shown, I could get excited by the prospect of him as PM. My concern is that Scheer is a politician (never really done anything else) and Trump's appeal is that he is very much an outsider to the political process.

I am more than a little amused by THAT presumption!!!!!!!! Trudeau is simply a complete idiot. I don't think he has any idea at all what the politics of the right or the left are, he just draws from either as it suits his perception of the PCLL should be. His habit of following traditional Liberal corrupt practices of being directed by and protection of the backroom boys from Power Corp, SNC, Irving, etc. is just the structure left in place by others. He is too stupid to realize it is not even vaguely legal (and we as a nation are too stupid to realize it should be and can be prosecuted), and it sure as hell is not there to serve any "right wing" political agenda.

I can not say I have the little twit, just pity his profound stupidity. What I do hate is what he and the LPC have done to Canada.

Yes, as a matter of fact. It was the case when olf Fuddle-Duddle himself asked why he should sell our wheat. I am doing a project on a remote, very union site in Western Canada this month. I was a bit surprised when our crane driver finished his day and put his street clothes on, topped by a hat with boldly embroidered FxCK TRUDEAU written across the front. When he has pissed off the union guys so much, no surprise at all that the rest of Western Canada is a lot further down that road.

China is NOT wanting any more scrap plastic these days. This is why the CN proposal to ship solid bitumen back to China by encasing it in "pucks" made from waste plastic will never fly.

If that is what you really are, you have my undying respect.

I know your reading comprehension is a lot better than that, it's just that being a socialist zealot seems to prevent you from seeing things.

We Stop trying to spin this. You said: "The problem is that partisans are reluctant to having their own team subjected to that. All it will take is one political party to agree to it and the rest will have no choice but to follow and compete over who opens themselves up the most to accountability." I simply told you that it HAS been done - by Conservatives, not by socialists. Had the socialists not intervened to save their own crooked ass, the investigation would have continued swimming upstream to the real problems - shared by both the NDP and Conservatives. I can say this because I was there doing my part to try to bring the problem to an end. It's a little different from bitching and moaning on the internet from your Mother's basement. BTW: it is all public record at the courthouse.

The old SK conservatives did this in SK at the end of the Devine era. The REAL deal got buried ... by the NDP when they came to power, and most of the convictions ended up being for cheating on expenses. Some of the really big crimes were shared or paralleled by the Romanow crowd, so they ramped down the whole deal before they had to put themselves under the microscope. Bottom line is the Conservatives put their own people in jail - pretty much wiping out the party for years to come. The NDP just continued with the same criminal activities behind the scenes as if nothing had happened.

What you are seeing is the Canadian version of "too big to fail" - and I strongly expect for all of the same reasons. What Canadians (and Americans) need to learn is how "rule-by-special-interest" works. What everyone needs to learn (and see in court) is how the financial side of RBSI plays out.

Let me begin to apologize for guerilla posting...I have been away and now am even further away with only a few minutes of time and access to internet daily. So, I will make this post, but not sure when I can be back to defend/discuss. To start with: a country's economy needs to create wealth to survive and prosper. Adding value to a resource or delivery of a service in support of that are the ONLY ways wealth can be created: everything else one could do does nothing but re-distribute wealth. I make this statement because it is extremely relevant to the status of real estate within our economy. There are several things that cause housing to be expensive, but the greatest of all is the free ride on taxation that one can get from speculative gain. Yes, people need a place to live, but when housing was 1/4 of today's price, they already HAD a place to live. Homeowners love to buy real estate because they fantasize that the increase in price that is TAX FREE to a permanent, primary residence is somehow a great "investment" to them - never considering that they will have to pay the inflated price down the road to replace whatever they sell to cash in. Developers love to tear down existing housing and build as much new as they can, because they can get fabulous margins in a marketplace where their end buyer is looking for some kind of windfall, tax free profit from their not-so-humble new abode. The profits they make from this speculative gain is also given very special treatment by the tax system. BUT: all of this activity that is measured as good for the economy is in fact one of the worst things you can do. As I said: you had housing before, you get housing at the end, but you now have many orders of magnitude more money tied up for the thing you once already had. What that does is take people and capital OUT of the parts of the economy that create wealth and tie them up simply recycling housing over and over for the simple purpose of making more profit, without creating any more wealth...i.e. nothing but re-distribution. Government does its part to promote this not only by little or no taxation being incurred by speculative gains, but worst of all putting the bank rate down so low, developers can develop on much greater scale and homeowners (including landlords) can rack up stunning levels of debt that divert much of their total working efforts into paying for nothing but the same roof over their head that they had no so long ago a 1/4 of the value. Now: we have seen how individual homeowner fit in, but what about renters? All of this cheap money and low tax speculative gain means that investment dollars flee from productive endeavours (that might net them 5 or 10% a year in dividends earned from actual work) and throw money at rental properties. What we see is the row house built for $50 a sq. ft. 50 years ago being mostly paid out in a decade, then the landlord sees the value go up, so he cashes in on a sale to the next landlord, then the money gets dirt cheap and it happens again. Then it gets cheaper, and now the REITS and such rush in where others have already cashed out. In the end, same property now valued at $200 a sq. ft....and it is still exactly the same property as before at $50. Problem is: these things are occupied by real people on fixed or simply tied-to-the-overall-economy incomes who simply have no way of paying the ever increasing rent as the tax breaks and cheap money (and yes, fair to mention costs imposed by many levels of government on the landlord - who must collect that in rent). So, the answer to your question "why shouldn't he make as much money as he can?" is that his business activity is largely predatory and contributes nothing, but takes a great deal OUT of the economy that is robbed of investment for wealth creating business activities. BTW: you can lump the entire world of Bay Street/Wall Street casino capitalism into this whole discussion, as they do little different to and for the economy and the country. ALSO: there is a LOT of affordable housing in Canada - it is just not located in downtown asshole factories.

Anthro contribution is too small to be effective, especially when we are increasing population in areas that are not financially able to limit anthro carbon. EVERY developing economy will mimick the exact path of waste and pollution that we took to get to where we are. Only way to duck that is to stop population growth. Yes, it will be very hard, but it will be a hell of a lot easier than the world that will exist when we reach the absolute limit (that in many estimations is not much over 10Bn...and we are not that far from there). Not ignoring you, BTW, just haven't been in country and near communications for a while.

First problem: everyone seems to want to put everyone else clearly in one extreme camp or the other. Reality of the overall positions, as well as the facts around climate change lie somewhere in the middle. Yes, oxides of carbon as we have recorded in recent history is rising, and yes, in our idiotic pattern of letting population run wild and uncontrolled, we are using resources, clear cutting forests, and generally polluting the crap out of everything we touch. BUT: there should be two takeaways from this: #1 is that our real problem is population. By existing, and using technologies to make our life comfortable, we are going to pollute - and in particular release carbon. Now, the Earth has had some REALLY high carbon concentrations in the past - how do you think all of this limestone came to be? Yup, atmospheric carbon. #2 is that the biggest carbon sink is not forests, it is oceans by a long stretch. What gets ignored a lot, though, is the oceans RELEASE carbon as they warm. From what I have read, atmospheric carbon levels rise AFTER ocean temps increase, not the other way around. In the grand scheme of things. we are not nearly as significant in carbon contribution as Mamma Nature herself. Does that mean we should just pollute the planet at will?? Not IMHO. While going to electric cars, etc. is a really bad idea, being aware of our contribution - even though changing it will simply accelerate or delay the ultimate conclusion - is a pretty good idea, as is doing our best to minimize our impact. And, the real place to start is with population. We live on a nice 1Bn or so planet, but 10+ is right over the horizon. As with many extinctions that have gone on before us, we too will simply screw ourselves to death. Or kill ourselves off by forcing evolution of drug resistant strains of viri.

Diddle whoever you want in your own goddamn bedroom. Keep this shit they hell out of my view. Tolerance is one thing. Promoting deviance is another. Pissing away my tax dollar to do so is way over the top.