cannuck

The solution to the idiotic things we did would have been - and still COULD be to set actual standards that have to be met to enter our market. Things such as environmental, product safety, worker protection, etc. standards that WE have to meet whether we sell domestically or export.

The elephant in the corner of the room that the looney left media ignores is the total ineffectiveness of the UN. Putin (and Xi) simply giving them the raspberry and carrying on with his own agenda. There was a comment that there is no longer the ideological dogma of Communism that defines Russia and China's ambitions to "dominate the world", but in both cases it is/was not the ideology that drove these states to their extremes, it was/is the desire of absolute authoritarian dictatorships to do whatever they please to enact wild schemes hatched in the back rooms of their centers of power. Given good government ANY political ideology could work well for the people of a country and the world as neighbours. What seperates good government from bad (IMHO, of course) is that good government represents what is good for and desired by the people (within their borders and beyond) and bad government operates by giving a privileged few the power to do things in THEIR best interests or ambitions. On the "China wanting do dominate the world" front: that ship sailed long ago. One Road, One Belt is doing exactly that. And we were stupid and greedy enough to finance that expansionism through WalMart.

Agreed. As the world population explodes, it urbanizes. Urban populations tend to be dependent populations, so they vote left.

The confusion about what a Conservative is goes way back to the incredible jerk (pun words carefully chosen) to the left under PET - a genuine, card carrying Commie. Over the decades, as the LPC drifted further left to capture the NDP vote, some of the middle ground Libs drifted loosely into the Tory camp - resulting in genuine confusion at the CPC as to what the heck a Conservative in Cannuckistan really is. An effective leader doesn't have to BE from either or any end of the CPC spectrum, he or she simply needs to BE a leader, and electable.

About 20 years ago I did a lot of work in this area. What I have come to conclude is that the fixed compensation or political/idealogic bent of systems administration are road blocks to good sick care. I am reminded of a model I was taught at one of the largest medical universities in China, where at one time or in some areas a doctor was assigned a number of patients for life, and was then paid on the basis of who was healthy and alive. Not that I think we need to do that, but you can see there are indeed ways to shift the emphasis on how to reward for performance, vs. penalize for failure. Today medicine in North America is 100% about money (to most, I can tell you from experience NOT all) but it is the overall theme. What is IMHO THE most detrimental exclusion is information - i.e. revealing truth. This I believe is because we live in the shadow of the US LLL (Legal Liability Lottery) where admitting or being discovered to have failed at some function could open you, your employer and your insurers to massive liability. Read the rest of this thread and you can see from our small cross section of Canadiana that those "sue the bastards" attitudes come right through even though that is NOT the way we live for the most part in this country.

Our family home is in SK but my business locations are Wyoming and New York. We have very close friends in the US, China, MENA, UK and EU that we have been in business with for decades, and I have spent a LOT of time with them. BUT: there are few places on this planet that can compare with Canada overall. The sick care system in the USA is so expensive because lawyers use medical, transportation, food, etc. businesses as lottery centers to sue for the most ridiculous things you could imagine - and courts will award millions or even billions of dollars in settlements for ridiculous claims. The ratio of lawyers per capita in the USA is 30x what it is in Japan as an example. The result is that doctors, clinics and hospitals in the USA pay a ridiculous amount to insurance companies to fund the "LLL" (Legal Liability Lottery) - and you have to remember that the courts and judges are all lawyers - so they AND THE INSURANCE COMPANIES make literally trillions of dollars from the LLL and have no interest in fixing that problem. It is not just a medical problem. Try building a general aviation airplane or components in the USA and you will find the legal red tape from both insurance AND government regulatory requirements make if financially impossible - thus why much of that industry is now offshore. In summary: the opportunities and rewards in the US economy far, far outweigh those in Canada, but the risks of personal or corporate financial or health related disaster are also much higher. Do you feel lucky???? I must defer to those in Ontario to tell you about how far out from Toronto one can live and still exploit the economy that a large center brings. Personally, I would look at those areas a bit further out if you can avoid the need to commute into the city. My family home was the Niagara Peninsula (about 2.0 hours from Toronto by car) but I have been gone so long I can't give you an accurate reading on those outlying areas. What I CAN tell you is that there are some beautiful and very welcoming communities that are much lower cost than the big city itself.

Here we go again. It happens that SOME privately funded and operated long term care facilities far, far exceed ANYONE's idea of what is good care. I agree, though, that many of the "bottom end" private operations are absolutely horrible. But the idea that just because someone is being paid by the government and belong to a union is somehow going to magically insure a caring and capable staff is total BS. You need to do some critical thinking and when you do, you will learn to "follow the gold". What for the most part differentiates good care from lower standards of care is how much the service delivery staff is being paid and feels they are valued. Where government has failed miserably is not in allowing private care, but in not regulating and enforcing (the real role government SHOULD be providing) a standard of care that INCLUDES adequate compensation for employees. Invoking the "government and unions all good" vs. "private business all bad" BS is very divisive and dishonest.

And why would you deny me the choice of being forced to accept one model of care delivery over another????? What we have that IMHO we need to keep is a bit of a health care system, in which information and programmes are delivered to help us be, remain or become healthy. That is very much in the best interest of our government, as it also provides the insurance that must pay for our ignorance of health when we are sick or when tragedy results in injury. Government here and in many countries does a decent job of funding both health and sick care. Where government fails miserably is in service delivery. What we allow only on an extremely limited basis other countries allow far more private business to deliver sick care services. In most of Canada, you can only do that if the treatment falls outside of what has been determined to be "in scope" for our state funded and administered service delivery network. Raising this socialist "politics of envy" and very divisive attitude that if I have been fortunate or skilled enough to have some resources available that I should be denied the ability to provide for myself and my family to the best of my ability. That IN NO WAY denies anything to anyone else, but what you suggest would be denying ME and my family that which we SHOULD be entitled to pursue. In fact, letting private diagnostic and treatment service delivery stand side-by-side with publicly operated service REDUCES the load causing backlogs. In such an arrangement, ANY service provided should be paid to either the public or private delivery system at the same rate, and the private ones should be free to charge the consumer whatever premium they need to provide service as a competing business.

When we moved out of the North our target was prairies or the most suitable part of USA. We had been to Wisconsin quite often (Oshkosh - largest experimental airplane gathering in the world - 10,000 airplanes and over half million people). No two places could be much different from MOST of WI (i.e. outside of the strip of towns and cities along W shore of Lake Michigan - which are essentially an extension of Chicago). The East strip along the lake is mostly industrial, with a lot of dying heavy industry to the North and small more modern and solvent South towards Chicago. BUT: once you get into the rest of the state, it is a very Germanic, beautiful and friendly place. One particular high school in the South center has consistently the highest test scores in the country. USA and Canada are very much alike in one important way: big cities are essentially A-hole factories but rural areas and smaller centers are extremely welcoming places with a very different lifestyle. BIG difference between any place in USA and Canada is of course the sick care system. If you don't have a gold standard insurance plan (VERY expensive) it can be pretty shaky. The largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is medical costs. Sick care insurance in Canada is all funded by government and service delivery is a mix of private clinics and government hospitals. While it may not be perfect, it gets far better results overall than the US at less than half the cost. If you are a big city person, then Toronto could suit you well. It is very diverse ethnically and has some of pretty much anything one could want. But a very expensive place to live (typical of any major city, but competing with Vancouver for highest costs in Canada). Our final choice for US living was Appleton WI, but since too small for a good University (we were going to raise kids and wanted them to be able to stay home when studying) we ended up near Saskatoon SK (small enough city to avoid much of the crime, drugs, etc. of really big cities). We have a business in WY and would be happy to live there, but not a place we would want to raise our kids (again, they would have to leave to finish education).

OK, we have heard from the city folk, now maybe consider what someone who has lived and worked with indigenous communities thinks when they hear this BS. Take a family with enough problems to force social services to take their child or children away for safety reasons then throw $40k, $80k or $120k or more at them and you will now likely have very well financed version of MORE of the same problems that caused the ruckus in the first place.

Morocco just signed onto the One Belt, One Road programme - the first in Africa to officially capitulate. To be fair, the battle for the resources of the Dark Continent began a very long time ago when the head of the KGB declared that: "the future of Mother Russia lies in the breadbasket of Southern Africa" or some translated words to that effect (Mikhail Gorbachev - who is actually a pretty good guy). All of the Angolan and such wars in the Maghreb with lots of Cuban participation, etc. were part of the Communist version of globalization. A VERY bright Deng Xiaoping (educated in France) knew enough of how the world works to free China from the horrible constraints of Maoism and use CCP authority to exploit the useful concepts of a Capitalist economy to unleash the massive productive capacity of the Chinese people. CCP simply went back to the old school Communist ambitions and used capitalism as the ultimate weapon against capitalism - while the capitalist world greedily shifted their focus from adding value and creating wealth to Casino Capitalism where the aim is to redistribute wealth and increase the money supply without the bother of having to create any value.

I keep a couple of AWD cars for daily drivers and switch one to studless snows and the other to some REALLY aggressive studs for winter, but have a 4x4 truck for farm and work - as do tens of thousands of Canadians thinking they are somehow "better" in snow. Truth is: the most dangerous thing on the road in the winter is a pickup truck with no load and in 2WD (really bad weight distribution leaving the drive axle to easily break traction). Sadly, since there is no center differential, switching them to 4WD can get you going in deep snow but is far worse for turning and stopping. Another problem with trucks as the weight goes up is that the tire compounds get hard and the tread blocks larger - making them far, far poorer performers on ice and compacted snow. Ideally, genuine AWD is king, but the low-buck "automatic" 4WD systems (GM in particular) that only engage the front axle when rear breaks loose do a fair job of addressing that problem. There is a lot more to winter tire selection and driving than you will ever learn from most "normal" sources. If you want to learn the real details, find someone who has raced in the "rubber-to-ice" classes in sports car clubs. Then see if you can get some instruction (some clubs offer that) to learn car control and your limits. The vast majority of "common knowledge" is really old wives' tales when it comes to winter driving.

Sadly, I must agree. The real question is when will Canadians stop being completely ignorant of the real issues and continue to elect virtue signaling morons who buy their votes with our grandchildren's money. Then there is the obvious follow-on question: when will the so-called Conservatives put together a slate of conservative candidates instead of trying to out liberal the Liberals???

Partisan BS all put aside: If getting government completely out of the sick care process worked, then the US would have costs similar to ours instead of double and their results would be better, not the dismally worse that they are. Trying to treat medicine (a social service) as a business simply doesn't work all that well - except for the minority that can afford good sick care. I think you will find the COVID experience in the US was little different for other patients from what it was here. AND, they had and continue to have far higher mortality results. Really sad that people on waiting lists died or deteriorated into untreatable status, but you could say the same thing about putting them in the place of someone who would have died without the ability of the available facilities to treat their Wuhan Virus.

My Father died on his 50th birthday from medical incompetence and we got to bury him on Christmas Eve, so I genuinely understand your feelings. However, bankrupting the country and tens of thousands of Canadians a year by introducing US style sick care is exactly the wrong thing to do, and will solve nothing. Maybe you should look into WHY medical professionals feel so disconnected as to become error prone and seemingly uncaring. I also agree with your efforts to point out the error rate and consequences. Punishment IMHO is not the solution, but making it a public issue should help. I have a number of very close friends who are MDs, DVMs or specialists in a number of countries, and I can tell the one thing they have in common is EXTREME efforts to be good at their job and they are literally the most compassionate individuals I have ever known. One actually builds and operates hospitals over a 10 year period and GIVES them to their host countries. Another (pediatric surgeon) even designs and builds his own surgical tools as the world doesn't exactly cater to the highly specialized small size equipment required. I also see another peds guy study and develop a procedure for WEEKS before putting together the team and equipment for difficult operations. These are not slap-happy "git-er done" cowboys, but I also listen to my daughter (veterinary emerg and trauma) about how quickly she has to make life-and-death decisions when presented with a case. I wish is was a simple as just get government (the den of total incompetence) to "change things" but the problem is far more complicated and needs the profession fully involved and committed to fixing the problems to make it work. Don't give up the fight, but please try to understand and seek a realistic and workable solution.

This is a wild oversimplification of the situation. First of all, why would you assume that some kind of privatization would make any difference to the frequency or severity of "medical mistakes"?? Secondly: people who do things make mistakes. All day, every day, every profession, trade and category of labour, people make mistakes. Finally: we don't have to wonder how privatized medicine works, we can just look straight South and see that such a system costs more that twice as much $$$$ as what we have and delivers outcomes far down the scale from what we get. You need to separate out what function is what function, who can best do those functions and finally what factors keep them from working as intended and remove those "problem" components. To begin with: medical doctors do NOT deliver much in the line of "health care", they mostly provide "sick care". to understand this: as with anything else, follow the gold. There is very little money in medicine until someone gets sick or injured. The drug business is a perfect example of how and why sick care is done the we it is - it is how the big bux flow into the picture. To my mind: the best way to make GPs switch from pill pushers for Big Pharma into health care providers is assign each one "X" patients and pay them for the ones who are healthy and alive. This was once done in China (so I was told when we worked out of a medical university campus in Guangzhou). What needs to be publicly funded is just that: HEALTH care. Moving some of the resources from sick care to health care would be critical to delivery. What needs to be 100% publicly funded is the insurance side (funding) as it more-or-less is now in Canada. What can be (and to some extent already is here) privately owned is service delivery. BUT: look at what happens in the US when you do that with Big Legal, Big Insurance and Big Pharma having carte blanche to exploit the system. Most of US sick care costs are based on the insurance component of the LLL (Legal Liability Lottery). One of the very few economic advantages we have in Canadian business over our Southern competing neighbours is our sick care system. It is far from perfect, but it allows business a free hand to be business instead of wasting billions (here) and TRILLIONS (in the US) on an army of blood sucking lawyers, insurers, administrators, risk managers, etc. We just need to tweek our delivery schemes to be more cost and medically effective. The idea that you can wave a magic wand and take the risk out of making split second decisions in care delivery of people in highly compromised and critical situations is ludicrous.

AGREED, you clearly don't get much outside of the loonie left talking papers.

If you actually gave a flying purple fuck about actual sustainability you and the rest of the mindless woke masses would not jump aboard the pure STUPIDITY of protesting pipelines. lt IS 100% about the method of transportation as the one you idiots protest is by far the safest that results in increased use of by far THE most dangerous and polluting way of meeting your endless needs to consume (your REAL needs, not your virtue signaling BS crap).. Pull your collective heads out of your asses and you will see that the problem is not immigration, it is population. The loonie left seldom if EVER points out the exceedingly obvious: people use things and damage the environment but at 7 going on 8 billion we are long past the level where this planet is sustainable. Devising more totally ridiculous ways of doing more of the same thing (Li ion battery electric vehicles - THE most polluting way of moving people and things around as a perfect example) not only delays but ACCERATES our trip to the end of sustainability. The first thing to do, but the last thing the so-called "environmentalist" movement seems to be barely capable of understanding is to do LESS. What really needs to be discussed is how to have SIGNIFICANTLY less population AND DO IT NOW. Your ilk have neither the brains nor the balls to deal with any real issues in an effective way.

And putting the oil and fuel you WILL use onto a rail or highway driven by an illegal, untrained, forced work driver - each with HORRIBLE safety records - is an improvement over pipelines (with overall reasonable safety records, HUGE level of oversight and resources to respond to safety needs)?????

As an engineering student with ice racing as a hobby at that time, this thread reminds me of going to a certain short link between Northbound Pembina Hwy East to Main St. in Winnipeg on first snow in the late '60s. Four lanes of traffic coming off of Pembina and turned gradually to the left, still 4 lanes then slowed to a sharp right with 2 traffic lanes and parking lanes on either side. Anyone careless enough to park on the outside of that corner was guaranteed to be crashed from behind on the first mornings of fresh snow this time of year. They long ago changed that route, but it was worth the wait to see how predictably incompetent drivers are. Decades later, in business with a guy who lived in a nice neighbourhood in North York who would bundle up in a parka and take his morning coffee and newspaper out onto the summer porch to watch the...uh...."Newly Arrived Canadians" back their new Mercedes down the steep driveways on his street and crash into each other at the bottom during their first snow day. I can also remember a trip to his place in the '90s on a fall snow day and was stunned to see some complete IDIOT driving a BMTrouble-you motorcycle down the 401 in slush 6" deep, both feet down, 60/70 kph and slithering between the usual bunch of semis. Yeah, we are pretty stupid when it comes to driving.

My Grammar was English and she corrected me often until her dying day.

Why would I put money in the hands of some else's company?????? ESPECIALLY one that is predatory in its business practice. What do I tell my shareholders? "I trust some scumbag bankster with my money, not our company in which you have placed YOUR money???" I NEVER gamble on something I can't control nor do anything to give credence to illegitimate and unethical business. I should add: I was trained by the Royal Bank and the knowledge of how they work and what they did gave me the skillset to stop illegal and highly unethical business practices regarding farm foreclosures in the '90s. We also once owned a risk management business that found extreme corruption at the highest levels of another major Canadian chartered bank. You have no idea how bad a corporate citizen banks are.

That is exactly how bank oligopolies work. You have no say in the costs or benefits for the services, and they are all nearly identical from bank to bank. You can walk out one door, but since bank accounts are pretty much a requirement now (ESPECIALLY for a business) you will have to walk into another "competing" door and get screwed over to exactly the same extent. Government, on the other hand, CAN be defeated. Unfortunately, we are so ignorant and greedy we just vote for the one who promises to plunder our grandchildren's bank accounts more than the next one.

You are spending all of your effort tilting at the windmill of the morons elected by the morons who vote them in and are totally ignorant of how a government, how and economy and how a country can and should work. Worse yet, the ultimate perpetrators of this gong show you are giving a complete pass!!!!! For every buck a politician puts in his pocket bankers are taking a thousand, or more like a million. The "essential services" that banks provide use money from the public who are either paid next to nothing or more likely charged through the nose for the privilege of providing banks billions to use for their own gain. Then, there is the whole game beyond the "essential services" in which banksters and their finance bretheren do the "money for nothing" thing by manipulating business and finance for their personal benefit - while creating very little value - just inflationary speculative gains.