cannuck

be careful with that one. The US's largest export - and one of its top foreign exchange earners - is entertainment.

Priceless. I may not stop laughing today. Yeah, sorry for feeding the troll, but it's a boring night on a remote site.

Segal has a well known personal relationship with Uncle Vlad. I think it was very wise for the Trump administration to open a back channel of communications.

I think you meant to say: "it cannot survive WITH this cycle of consumerism and endless financing". No economy is sustainable if it does not produce goods and create wealth. No economy can sustain itself by nothing but consumption and speculation. The only thing that allows the US to survive this long is hegemony of the Greenback and motivation by the world of finance to continue to skim the cream of the country by owning the central bank (and the last many administrations - lock stock and barrel).

You can call them "racialists". I will stick with the same name as the last bodily orifice your dinner sees.

There ARE: Trudeau, his top advisors and cabinet

and that is EXACTLY what it is all about - that and racking up debt that our great-grandchildren will not be able to retire.

The only reason the Castro regime could feed, employ and educate its population for the many decades under Communist rule was the endless aid provided by Moscow to maintain this outpost (and listening post) on the American doorstep. When Gorbachev dumped them, they were in deep, deep doo doo.

The only thing "strong" surrounding the little Tur....I mean TRUdeau is the stench.

that may be the most twisted bit of logic I have ever encountered. By your standard, when aboriginals of Canada become so aggressive in their assertion that all of Canada is "theirs" to the point that young Mothers have to be armed to prevent the frequent rapes and murders of themselves and their children, they should give their homes to the nearest Indian??????? I now know for certain you are not related to Gerald Stanley.

Yes, he worships Communist leaders since his Father was a card carrying member of the Communist Party (of France IIRC) and a personal friend of Fidel Castro. As I said: Idiot child.

Yes, there are many here who would and do call out Israel for killing palestinian women and children, Palestinians for killing Israeli women and children, Saudis for persecuting Shiites at home and abroad, and the Yanks not for "shit treating" aboriginals, but for their acts of genocide in dealing with the "Indian problem" many years ago. Our PM is a frigging idiot child. His government can, will and did tweet about many things they have no moral high ground for or understanding of. None of those things fixes the human rights violations in KSA or Canada for that matter. Sadly, the Kingdom has chosen to punish all Canadians for our crime of electing a totally incompetent government - but fortunately, we can change that come next election. If KSA gets a bad ruler, they are simply stuck with him for life.

My mentor and since then good friend when I entered the business I would remain for many years was a coloured South African married to an Afrikaner. Life was so difficult for them there - not accepted by the blacks and not accepted by the whites - they fled to Canada in the late '60s. I was raised in a military family, and we were so accustomed to being around other races or living in their countries, I could not begin to comprehend how anyone could be so hateful towards a couple very much in love - both incredibly competent professionals who gave would be a great asset to ANY company or country. It has been a fucked up place for a long time. BTW: those white farmers being slaughtered now are Afrikaners - some of whom are from families that have been there since the 17th century.

You would think so, but it seems to be more about making some kind of politically correct statement and bringing in people who are more likely to vote Liberal. Gerrymandering on a grand scale.

There seems to be some idea that this started recently. One of my best friend's brothers immigrated from Ireland to Rhodesia, and went through this exact experience there. He fled to the relative safety of RSA. When my friend's youngest son finished commerce degree at University here, he went to Empangeni (near Durban) to learn about business from a different perspective with his Uncle. A decade later he returned to Canada to work in the family business, and as it happens, court a certain young lady who was a med student. Now students for the most part are short enough on life experience to be a little bit further to the left than makes sense to those with a bit of life experience, and she made no secret of how she thought her fiancee, his family and their friends were a bunch of racists because of how they spoke about black Africans and apartheid in general. Shortly before their wedding, the family took her on a trip to meet her future Uncle in RSA, and when she observed cousins and strangers pushing prams with handguns and AK47s in the diaper bags, she got a really good understanding of WHY whites in RSA had some very blunt and distinct opinions about the entire ANC and black population. That was 15 years ago.

It is pretty much luck of the draw when it comes to dealing with rare or exceptional cases. You either get a specialist and facility that can do it well and figure out how to get it under in-scope coverage or you don't. If the latter, you either have to do it out of pocket (and out of country) or do without. If you have routine illness or injury, you will get adequate, if slow care in most places. BUT: if you don't get decent practitioners, your access will be poor or denied. It isn't that much different in the US: if you don't have a gold plated benefits package (and decent sick care premiums alone can be several thousand $$$ per month per family). You may be in rural bum frick nowhere and if the local hospital tries diagnosis and treatment of difficult cases, the results are no different from an indifferent Ontario. Patient ends up dead. Even if you can get to a really good specialist, you may not get coverage, especially when managed by an HMO.

I was not trolling for you, but I DID know that would raise you eyebrows - or hackles. Yes, not personally, but both within family and close friends and both in Canada and the US. I watched my racing team mate - a loyal follower of the socialist party (unionized teacher) die because of slow access to diagnose cancer that metasticized to liver when he was in early 40s. Watched my best friend - who's wife teaches integrative medicine - have a big run in with the big C - but due to their deep links into the sick care system, and even deeper pockets - he went South and bought service simply not available here. On the other side of the border, one of our key employees has a wife with very serious illness - and we keep that company running since if we close down (as we should) he will NEVER get adequate or equivalent coverage from a new insurer. Our system is flawed, that is for sure. In all other G7 countries public insurance can coexist with private delivery both publicly and privately paid. We have a fair bit of skill and quality in care overall, but IMHO, when there is a need for fast and heavy intervention, in many places we just don't respond appropriately. It seems we have put medicine on some kind of plateau, and pay a lot for sick care without demanding accountability for results, but the whole thing is so distorted by Big Pharma and the LLL (Legal Liability Lottery) from South of the border, that time and money is wasted doing things that do not need to be done - at the cost of things that really need to be done. Add to that up here of trying to maintain the government/CP&S monopoly on service delivery of in scope insured procedures and we are on the wrong track. We already HAVE the benefits according to contributions that you propose. IF you have the financial wherewithall, you can simply go outside of the Canadian system and pay for the very best of diagnostics (Mayo, for instance) and very best of service delivery (several centers in the USA). Even though I am otherwise somewhere right of Ghenghis Khan on most issues, I can NOT imagine scrapping the whole universal sick care system we have - just improving it tow work as well as it does in most of the rest of the former G7 world. The key is to realize the sick care is not (or SHOULD NOT BE) a business, but a social service. That cost(s) we taxpayers a pile and I strongly object to throwing the doors open to hundreds of thousands or even more than a million people who did not in any way contribute to it, and in many cases will never do so. It is, for example, a HUGE benefit to small business startup NEVER to have to worry about the cost of sick care insurance for employees - and important to realize that small business is by far the greatest contribution to job growth and wealth creation - and it won't exist without appropriate framework to facilitate startups. Finally, the is the issue of health care. We have only a tiny bit of it. For instance: one of the most critical things we need to know is what, why and how to eat - and in Canada the Food Guide is a really good resource - but a really small and poorly promoted one. It is vastly more cost effective to pay to keep people healthy than to let the medical, drug, insurance and legal business cash in on our collective ignorance of health care and wellness.

Typically, we are discussing one tiny aspect of a much, much larger problem that never seems to be understood. EVERY country has some degree of social policy and programmes. So, let's start by realizing that they are a necessary part of a humane society. The question is: how much social programme spending can any particular country afford? THAT depends upon just how wealthy and wealth creating the economy of any country in question might be. Canada is a VERY resource rich country, but, outside of the automobile industry, it is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to adding value to those resources. Let me give you a fundamental rule I have derived that SHOULD be axiomatic: the only ways one can create wealth is by adding value to a resource or delivering a service necessary in doing so. You might say that we just need to sell resources to create wealth - but that wealth was already created by forming a country and economy that already owns those resources, so producing them is creating no wealth, just re-distributing it from our descendant's "resource" account to our current "cash" account. If we look at countries that add value, we can see how less important having resources is compared with adding value to them. Germany, the USA, Japan, S Korea and most recently China - none of which outside of the US really having much of a resource base all became economic powerhouses because they add a LOT of value by their productive business activity. China is by far the best example, as they have been able to come from a completely failed state to what I believe is already the world's #1 economy in less than 30 years - dragging fully 1/4 of the world's entire population up the incline with them. All with next to no resources (except for a fair bit of coal). The lesson here is that it is not the coal in China that made it incredibly wealthy, it was what they DID by using that coal to add a great deal of value to resources they bought from everyone else - selling back the manufactured goods. We simply don't do nearly enough of that to afford the lifestyle to which we think we are entitled. Now, let's consider how many people ARE involved in a productive endeavour - since it is they and ONLY they who create any wealth. It is not just the "welfare bums" who consume without creating, it is almost the entire world of finance (the part that participates in speculative activity), those who provide services we really don't need (includes a large part of government). IMHO, the idea of having a "service economy" is economic suicide. See paragraph above. Try some very rough numbers. Of our nearly 37 million people, about 8mm are too young to work, and 8mm are too old. ( https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000501 ). Take away a few million who are infirm, incapable, etc. and we would be well under 20mm "workers". This correlates well with our workforce of some 17.5mm ( https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1410001801 ). So, fewer than half of the people are even employed. Now, take away those who work in jobs that don't actually produce anything - and I can only estimate (from being in business for a half century) that this is AT LEAST half of the workforce. So, at the very best, one in four people must create the wealth that has to pay for the redistribution by the other 3 or more. AND, I am being generous with that estimate (see previous paragraph and think about that). Here is a simple example - remember that I excepted the auto trade? Something like 70% of our trade is under the auto pact, and it takes an estimated 500,000 people to do that ( https://www.cvma.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Website-WP-Important-Facts-Pdf-March-23-2017.pdf ). Take ALL of ag and food production/distribution and let's give that another million ( https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2011000/chap/ag/ag-eng.htm ). Then give another 500k (same as automotive industry accounting for 70% of all of our trade) and you have only 2mm plus some other businesses that could be included. Notice I allowed zero for resource workers, but that is not completely true as we do process SOME of our resources a little bit (but seldom to finished goods - same story in ag and food). So you can see my one in four is not far off, and probably quite optimistic (I have in some cases calculated one in five - and others one in six). Bottom line is: we simply can NOT afford the level of government waste, massive debt and cost of being some kind of dumping station for the displaced of the world. We need to get our house in order and start not just "working", but working productively - something few seem to understand. We can not just keep frittering away our children's future by squandering natural resources. The social safety net in this country is at a level that would be considered in many places as living very high on the hog. Heck, with our fairly good sick care system, even the #2 economy in the world has probably less than half of its population that can afford to get anything even close to what we get in medical benefits (worth mentioning that most of the rest of the old G7 are at least as well off as we are for sick care). I think Ford is being very astute in backing out of the grand social experiment. When we have no more federal and provincial debt, THEN we might be able to consider such folly (as then it would not necessarily BE folly).

That I believe is a great oversimplification. You are right, the World Bank was there on day one (I happen to have known the "first man in" - now deceased - quite well and visited him in Moscow during the '90s). While it is true the USSR was stable under communism, those days were already gone as it was essentially bankrupt. THAT was partly due to the US - simply the Star Wars bluff - but there were a lot of other problems that contributed. Those "brutal IMF reforms" were needed because in the words of my WB friend whose job was to "supervise World Bank loans" but really to advise the Gorbachev administration how to set up a market economy: we have about $4Bn a month of FDI and WB loans coming into Moscow, but they are taking out about $5Bn into their offshore accounts". There was a complete vacuum when communism collapsed, and there was absolutely NO culture of business (outside of the black market) and no law and no systems of regulation for banking to conduct commercial business. The only people with any command structure, communication or any idea at all how the world outside of USSR worked was the military and the KGB. With no system of registration for personal or public property, these elements (loosely known as the "Russian Mafia" but not in any way connected to the Mafia) simply did what anyone raised in a communist state would do and grabbed for themselves everything and anything they could lay their hands on - and that included the resources and productive capacity of the entire country. Unlike China that had Deng and "Four Pillars of Modern Reform" for a template and millions of offshore families with a century of international business experience and literally hundreds of billions of liquid capital to rush in and set up a functional market economy, Russia had no such seeds to be planted. Only the "criminals" who rose rapidly in the situation of total anarchy. Whether the IMF, World Bank, UN, etc. did the right thing or not is hard to say. There was simply no precedent as to how to walk into a disfunctional and bankrupt Super Power and put it on its feet.

US direct cash farm subsidies are (or at least were, haven't done a recent comparo) something over 3/4 of the total Canadian ag GDP! At last count, there were over one thousand people inside of the beltway who received more than $1mm each annually in ag subsidies. Supply management doesn't exactly work, but neither do ag subsidies. Governments have no business picking winners and losers in ANY business - ag included. If we simply let genuine market forces alone, the right quantities at the right price of the right products will be produced. I am reminded of the total collapse of the New Zealand economy when they subsidized wool production heavily. When Douglas took over finance, he cut those subsidies immediately. Less than two years later, the ag business was back on its feet - and still raising lambs. The difference was that the wool subsidies were greater than the value of wool that nobody wanted. In a totally free market, the same farmers discovered that the real demand was for mutton, so that is what they produced and exported - profitably. Canada is famous for converting surplus milk into powder, and dumping that either by lowball sale, outright gift or simply throwing away powder, butter and eggs. It allows bureaucrats to play with and in the politics of food, but by a large, supply management does NOT work well at all.

The US economy looks to be very large because economists very incorrectly measure speculative activity. This creates no wealth, but is merely a measure of what wealth is being redistributed. A realistic and accurate example is that you own one house that you bought and can replace for $100k. In a real estate bubble, it may sell for $1m - and that transaction gets measured as economic activity and bloats the GDP. You still have only one house that serves the same purpose, creates the same revenue and can be replaced for $100k. But, your economy looks to have bloomed by 10x. Now replace your one house with one derivative - that you have fabricated on a computer at a cost of essentially nothing. It could trade for a billion or two. It is still worth its replacement cost - nothing. In any other country, this kind of nonsense would just devalue the currency, as the money supply would have to be increased to cover the settlements of 10x houses and trillionX derivatives, but at least for the time being, the Greenback printing gets covered by the panic of other central banks (such as China) who hold massive quantites of USD denominated instruments forcing them to rush into the marketplace and prop up the US currency - less it crash to its real value and wipe out the value of their instruments. This only works as long as the Greenback enjoys hegemony - and that is sustainable only because the central bank belongs to the very same private banks who get to benefit by sending the bill for their trillionX derivative settlements to the US taxpayer (as the money supply and currency are a liability to the state, not the banks). Yes, China increased their operating deficit to prop up the sagging economy as foolishly as did US "QE", but take a look at accumulated debt. At $20T+, the US is in deep, deep shyte. AND, there is no accounting for the pent up inflationary forces from the decades long run of uber-greed deals in the world of finance. Laugh if you will, but go and speak with someone who lived through the 1929 reality of letting banks, finance and speculative transactions run out of control. Oh (on edit), another thing I forgot to add: In China - NOBODY reports their accurate financial data to the government. Their GDP can not in any way be measured with any accuracy or even reasonable credibility. I don't mean a thousand dollar a year earner reports only $500, I mean that same person driving the new BMW is reporting $500. THAT kind of personal AND CORPORATE misrepresentation. China as a whole is a hell of a lot bigger and more robust an economy than what the Communist Party and its central government can or is willing to show to the world. Then there is the real world of Chinese families who have been offshore for a century or so, and are very much a part of China today - but show up on no Chinese economic radar. How do you think a near bankrupt Communist China came from zero to #1 hero in a mere 25 years? It was all about the overseas community FDI.

It's in the Liberal Playbook. You can't have a proper screw-up unless the WHOLE country suffers from it.

Yes, Victoria - the most British place in North America - has turned its back on the UK. I suppose it will be renamed "Camosack" (the Salish name given the site by the Songhees).

I think what you meant was "when you elect a mentally inadequate child to run a country and he selects a politically correct and ignorant band of morons for a cabinet".

Problem is, the US does NOT have "the best economy ever". The bubble is the result of speculative financial parlour tricks (Casino Capitalism) NOT productive endeavour within the economy (the actual Capitalist venue). See those endless parades of containers from China coming into every port and plugging up every road and railroad? See those Chinese goods on every shelf in WalMart, Harbour Freight, EVERY furniture store, etc.? THAT is where wealth is created - and it is no longer on Main Street in these here hewnauted staytes. Until the WORLD kicks Wall Street to the curb, inflation is the only growth in the US (and pent up inflationary forces). Meanwhile, China will continue to exploit its developing nation status and produce ever more products, steal every more technology, clobber every market they enter and continue to pull far, far ahead of the USA (you may know the place - the one with $20 Trillion of debt after bailing out Wall Street and trying to make Main Street think the government can prop up an economy with "quantitative easing".)