cannuck

Legal system? It is a joke. Civil courts act as illegal collection agencies for banks and financial institutions. Criminal courts are tied up with conflict between law and political expedience. I believe the reason is that we are just too close to the USA and believe that the legal system should look more like theirs than our original UK model. Sick care? Same as above: we are far too close to the US, and have adopted much of the practices used down there for business of sick care to participate in the legal and insurance factors associated with delivery of service. More to the US-like worship of drugs as the absolute solution to everything. The Yanks thing sick care is a business, the rest of the world knows it is a social service, and we are caught somewhere in between - paying US costs for insurance, legal and drug habits. Aboriginals? IMHO very simple: if we agree that we owe them something as a country, then we should cut a cheque every month to each and every treaty number out there. They need to be Canadians in every sense of the word, not some idiotic fantasy of being hundreds of sovereign nations within one state. Why pay the people in question? If there is ever to be some kind of accountable government at the band level, let the leaders get their funding by taxing their constituents, just as does every other government in Canada. As it is, the vast majority of the bux are paid through the Feds to "preferred consultants" of the "Indian Industry" before being placed unaccountably into the hands of chief and council, where precious little of it is ever delivered as a service to the community or band members. When hear pure BS such as "WE" should be providing them with better housing and drinking water - the truth is we have paid far, far more out to accomplish exactly these things, but nobody is delivering anything other than racking up more and more personal fortunes in the middle. Most reserves out here have 90% unemployment - so given a massive workforce, far, far more than adequate financial resources why is it that there is nobody within each community building homes and utilities, maintaining homes and utilities and generally doing all of those things that EVERY other Canadian community does? Oh, yeah, I forgot the Liberal/liberal answer: "it's all Whitey's fault".

That is sad to hear. Thank you for posting. We have two daughters with a half dozen grad and post grad degrees in science between them, that gives me a great appreciation of how much extra a female must achieve in many disciplines to be recognized. My thoughts are with her friends, family and students.

You ASSUME that because homes have 200A service, the local utility is capable of providing everyone connected with their rated panel capacity. It is not, not even close. BUT it should be able to handle one car at 240V, x 40A (7.7 kW) for a 8-10 hour overnight charge. There are about 2 cars per household in North America, but I doubt very much you could pull 80A out of each one (but you would also not be charging every car fully every day). If you did, in the USA that would require 2,000 GW of power JUST for charging the cars - in a country that is pretty much maxed out with its 1,000 GW capacity - much of which is dedicated to 24 hr. base loads of big industrial users. Not sure of Canada's numbers, but they will be comparable. Don't know where you live, but if doing off-peak charging in Toronto 'burbs to do your several full charge commute with a plugin (only excuse for an EV IMHO) that is costing you about $0.80 an hour for power, or maybe $6.00 for a daily commute energy cost (double that in daytime). Not bad at all. That compares favourably with a VW 3 litre Lupo for energy costs - which is about as good as it gets. Dirty coal plants are NOT cleaner than new cars, but a nice clean nuke sure as hell is. Just try building one these days. I would seriously argue that electric cars in ANY way are "superior technologically", but if you were actually anywhere near the electrical business, you would realize that the batteries have relatively short lives, cost a fortune to make, have an environmental cost that is staggering in manufacture, and have to be replaced several times over the assumed million mile life of the vehicle. The chargers, inverters, VFDs, circuit protection devices, etc. all have finite lives and very high cost bother to manufacture an to repair, and the whole load of shyte weighs a lot more than an internal combustion engine, driveline and fuel system - compromising vehicle safety (and let's not even go there when it comes to batteries in collisions). I happen to also have an 18HP Kohler on a compressor. Has been doing its job since 1975 and is a very crude bit of kit. I would need 3 phase power to get enough electric motor to match the old lump (10 HP electric MIGHT do what it does) and a half mile extension cord. I also have a 5 horse compressor in my shop at home that is now on its 3rd electric motor over the last 40 years. 3:1 in favour of the Kohler in the real world. SHOULDN'T be that way, but that is how it has worked out for me. Just a little point of technical note: you assume that just because electric motors have the theoretical capacity for very high torque near zero RPM, the POWER produced is a function torque x RPM for ANY rotating shaft, doesn't matter what rotates it. You will notice that a 1200 RPM (6 pole) 5 HP motor is HUGE compared with an 1800 (4 pole) RPM one, and most little compressors use a tiny 5HP motor that must turn 3600 RPM (2 pole) to make that power. Further, NO electric motor of normal design is able to delivery that very high low RPM torque for more than an extremely short time without frying itself due to cooling issues (EXTREMELY high amperage under those conditions).

Having spent a considerable portion of my life in the transportation business, and with much of that overlapping energy businesses, I have to say that the end of internal combustion engines is a long way off. What navel gazers who believe we can wave a magic wand and just have plugin EVs getting a bunch of power pulled out of some unicorn's ass have no concept of the scale of infrastructure required to transmit and distribute power to charge all of those vehicles. Then, there is the further need for generating capacity. There is simply not that kind of flexibility and capacity available in North America, far, far less in Europe and don't even get me started on developing nations. Sadly, we have shifted our entire culture in the developed world to something far left of reason, and legislators, regulators and financial people (who actually run business now instead of the business people that SHOULD be doing so) have got on board this very, very leaky ship. Somewhere earlier in this thread, there was mention of how electric vehicles could have million mile lifespan. I actually HAVE some million + mile vehicles, and several with more than half that. ALL are diesels. Two things usually stop one of them: rusted out bodywork and failure of electrical and electronic components (which every EV also will require). We will see large fleets of EV cars and trucks the day we can see a fleet of plug-in Boeing jets doing international travel. Until then, the world will waste a staggering amount of time and money diddling around with really stupid concepts and ideologies. I will add: I believe there IS a place for plugin EVs in urban environments. That is not for any good reason, quite the opposite. We are spending all of this time and money to find alternative ways to do more of what is getting us into hot water, instead of taking a serious look at how we live and build cities to STOP doing the stupid things we do that piss away resources for no good reason at all.

That megalomaniac is truly a Joe Stalin wannabe, but the reward he seeks is not to further the cause of Marx and Engels, but to make more money for Uncle Vlad himself. The US is simply a business competitor to him, and he uses politics to inflict economic damage. Most of the stuff in Syria, for instance, is about blocking Qatari gas from going into a pipeline and straight to Europe, where he has a monopoly on compressed methane (LNG much more costly to move). The US gas market being in the toilet is another major threat to him, as US priced gas can make LNG very profitable for the US to export - and that include potentially to Europe. Same with what is going on in Venezuela: Russia is bailing out Maduro as it allows him to grab de facto control of PDVSA in the future. He is hardly allied with Maduro and Asad because he agrees with their politics. Russians respect on thing: strong man, and Putin knows that very, very well. A benefit of calling out and facing down Uncle Sam is simply preserving the control of the resource business that has made him probably THE most wealthy person on Earth. Putin will spar with the US, but he will not destroy it - since that brings down the economy of the world, hardly does him any good. It's all about the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules. Follow the money.

IMP strike is a genuine threat, but not to the extent you might think. Let me start by saying I do not know the threshold level of device that it would take to completely cover the whole continent, but I believe it is far greater than a 120KT device. Yes, we have had some troubles on the grid with EMP strikes from solar events, but what is very true is that power transformers are very well protected from high overvoltage line conditions. Ever see a thunderstorm? Well, that lightning strikes power lines with great regularity, and the resultant voltage in the line is many times what the transformer is designed to tolerate. The little poletop transformer in your back lane that may be fed from a 15kV local distribution circuit will have a BIL (Basic Insulation Level) over 100kV, so it is able to take SOME of the surge, but a very close by lightning strike will probably take it out. It is important to realize that the electric grid is HUGE and has a lot of capacitance and resistance, so can store a tremendous amount of energy from lighting strikes, mitigating the voltage at the millions of places it is dissipated through loads. Hold these thoughts. Where an EMP strike is different, it is inducing its voltage and current into the entire grid, or at least a very large area at one time. BUT: large transformers are the issue. Old ones have (or had) archaic protection devices that can see the rise of line voltage above BIL of the device being protected, but can not respond fast enough to protect from causing an insulation breakdown (end of life for the transformer). Bank in those "good old days", EEs knew that, so pretty much ALL large transformers have surge arrestors - essentially a big leak-to-ground device that will bleed off any and all charge at a level safely below the BIL of the device. Next: newer equipment is no longer protected by electro-mechanical devices that take many cycles to open, but electronically measured and triggered circuit breakers that are open in a few cycles. Most will be off line before damage can occur. I think the EMP pulse would be grounded adequately by bonding on the steel case before it could induce enough into the windings (that I will query our EEs about today). What is really at risk is that the EMP will trip out several devices at one time (not necessarily destroying them) taking down the entire grid - at least to the critical grid tie points. This happened several years back with around Lake Erie and took down much of the region on both sides of the border for weeks. Reliability committees have worked overtime ever since to figure out how to handle these kinds of events (still a way to go to find ultimate solutions and implement broadly). The upside is there is a good chance to be able to bring regional segments back fairly quickly (but hardly the little blip we see with reclosures taking place). Sorry for the long post, but it is something I deal with (high voltage devices) but now will investigate the system reliability implications since this post brought it up.

Nice graphic. What it is showing me is that the average in Canada is 40%ish, and the average in the US is 4% ish - and with 10:1 population ratio, it means the average American is about as dependent on Can/US reciprocal trade as the average Canadian adjusted for population density *(i.e. trade is close to in balance, we just have fewer people) But, you were very right: Trudeau is pretty much useless and totally ineffective at doing anything except screwing up Canada.

If you want to be a dairy farmer, you have to buy a cream quota. That is a huge barrier to entry. If you were a dairy farmer and had to survive in the real world, you would have no idea how the market works - since it is "supply managed" by the government. Dairy farmers who HAVE a cream quota think it is just dandy (you might notice that the majority of said privilege to be able to farm dairy is granted to Quebec). Under supply management (yet another government bureaucracy that costs us billions just to screw up marketplaces) the Feds determine prices and production. They never even come close to getting it right, so skim milk, butter, eggs, powdered milk are are regularly dumped in the tens of thousands of tons. Guess who picks up the tab? Yeah, you and I. Same people paying double to triple what our American counterparts are for milk. As I said: the business of government should be to govern, regulate and enforce. It totally fricks up at anything else it does, and doesn't do a great job of the former either.

Yes. Consumers pay more money for products, but if you ever bother to research, you would find that butter and milk powder are hoarded by the government, mostly to be dumped at a massive cost to taxpayers. Producers are removed from the marketplace (as prairie farmers were under the CWB) thus there were barriers to entry, barriers to free markets developing, barriers to developing the knowledge and investment base to participate effectively in free and productive markets. ANY time that government sticks its inept, bungling nose into ANY market, it will screw it up - and EVERYONE stands to lose. It is all about dispensing privelege: government instead of regulating and enforcing becomes the distributor of privilege, and only those chosen by the government to be the privileged individual or class benefits, and all at the expense of the rest of their industry or the country.

I was once invited to be the token real business person at a ministerial announcement of something or another. The 6 bureaucrats and lawyers at our table had the horrible misfortune of sitting with two business guys who did NOT take or seek any government money. You should have seen the look on their faces when we explained to them how we could make their jobs accountable and performance based for remuneration (mostly NRC types). It actually IS possible, but you would need someone on the government side who had the balls and brains to pull it off - and Eric was the last person I can think of who fit that requirement.

There are hundreds of examples, but let me deal with things I know very well: What about the CWB? This was done to farmers in the West to screw them out of the marketplace so that politicians and bureaucrats could play politics with food. Yeah, that was what Canadians needed. No need to get into supply management, as Canadians are DELIGHTED to spend $6 for four litres of milk when you can buy 3.89 in Chicago for $1.62US. We needed that. We needed to mine uranium, drill for oil, build airplanes. We "NEED" the effing buggerup dumbass development bank to come into the marketplace and steal tax dollars from us to set up competitors in our marketplace based on political expedience. The list just goes on and on. The business of government should be to govern - regulate and enforce. Our government does far, far more things that IMHO it has absolutely no business doing - and it is particularly inept and doing them. You are not part of the solution, you were part of the problem.

I think of that more like Erik Nielsen did: there are more than 1,100 programmes and departments of the Federal government, and I forget how many employees, but the vast majority of things that these people do are hardly "NEEDED" by people, but often wanted by many groups of freeloaders. If you happen to be one of the very few who do some of the the work for the very few departments that really ARE "needed", that could be true. But the odds aren't very high that that would be the case.

I keep looking for that kind of position, but what I see is not quite the same. Sorry...just realized this is the protester thread, not the immigration one. Have not had much time to catch up.

Where we differ so greatly is that you seem to imply that people in the rest of the world have a certain set of rights to simply wander into Canada and live as THEY see fit, and the rest of us are supposed to be thrilled to accommodate them and pick up the tab. In my experience, that is simply not the case for people who do not live as dependents (i.e. liberals and Liberals) in this country. Makes me want to paraphrase from Churchill that a socialist is someone who will gladly give you the shirt off of their back...as long as it is not THEIR shirt.

think you are missing my point. We can base entry requirements on ANYTHING we wish, no need to be "fair" to anyone. Immigration is not some international human right, it is a very specific privilege to which we as a sovereign state can specify EXACTLY what we will and will not accept as it suits us...just as every other nation does.

The question is to whom do you wish to be fair? The taxpayers and citizens of THIS country, of someone from a different country who seeks to come here? and, yes, you wish to destroy the culture of this country as it stands. Inviting radical Islam, and for example Caribbean drug criminals galore for instance is a perfect example.

THIS is where those on one side of the political spectrum deviate so strongly from those on the other. What makes you think we as a country and society have ANY obligation or even reason to be "fair"???? This is OUR country, to define as WE see fit, but sadly the two polar opposite political ideologies have one side that wishes to protect the culture of Canadians and one that wishes to destroy it.

I believe our best bet would be to add NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION OR BELIEF to EVERY immigrant who can qualify otherwise as having skills and qualifications VERIFIED and enough cash to prove they are not losers. Everyone else should just stay at home a pray to their God for better luck in the next life.

It seems peculiar to me that on a political website, few seem to know what political terms mean and from where they are derived. "Left" vs. "Right" goes back to the French Revolution, when those who sat on the right of the house wanted to maintain the Monarchy, and those who sat to the left wanted to revise the political system. Those who would "conserve" and those who would change. Simple as that. BUT: once the house had been divided in seating, what ideologies and policies each side of the house favoured changed constantly. Now, fast forward another couple centuries, and shift the discussion to other parliaments, and you can really attribute anything to either "leaning", and pretty much choose your own definition. From an earlier part of this thread, for instance, Nazis (the National Socialist Workers' Party) could be labelled either "left" or "right" depending upon which part of Nazi policy one chooses to compare with our rather fluid definition of left and right today. Being both workers and socialist, it had strong elements of ;what we today usually call the left. Being based on the idea of the Herrenvolk, that is nothing but purely racist, but here the new left uses that to try to hang that on the "right". Nazis were totalitarianists, which is as far from what I believe we mean today by "right" OR "left", as conservatives on the right tend to believe in and wish to maintain democratic institutions. Communism - which I think we can all agree is "the LEFT" is usually a totalitarian state of government, even though most have some kind of shadow of representative body shoved up front. Over the years, the terms right and left have been offered up under this very flexible system of inclusion based on the political expedience of creating an "us vs. them" over-simplification of any issue. Reality is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle with an array of detail within policy that makes actual programmes acceptable to modern standards.

Predicably, your paranoia sees only "whitey the enemy" in a world full over people of every race who do all of the same things, all of the time. The answer would be roughly the same proportion of whites in MacDonald cabinet as blacks in Habyarimana cabinet, whites in Joe Stalin's inner circle, yellow in Mao's and on and on it goes. BTW: ALL of whom claiming the moral, religious and cultural high ground that excused their behaviour and deeds.

Once again, you demonstrate your pahtological racism.

IMHO, you have an extremely accurate view of what foreign aid is and does, vs. what is needed. Worth repeating your post. Ancedotally: my best friend has been wildly successful in business, and his wife feels obligated to distribute a significant proportion of their wealth to "disadvantaged" in other countries. She is no fool, and will not send money or food, but had prided herself in sending literally thousands of bicycles, most of which got distributed directly to those who could use them (we think). I carelessly made a disparaging comment while adding a pair brand new, multi-thousand dollar 3 wheelers to the mix while stuffing a container full of hundreds of bikes gleened from police auctions. They were shocked and it fell upon me to explain my disdain: the cost spent on way overpriced new bicycles in the container could have bought enough tooling to set up to manufacture their OWN bicycles. Giving them finished goods might have made my friends FEEL better, but they just fostered a society and culture of dependence. The now send tools, tubing, gearsets, etc.

That may be the most racist thing I have ever seen written on the internet. All of those things can be accredited to white people, red people, black people, brown people and yellow people. The ultimate racist view held by you is that white people committed these crimes BECAUSE they were white. You realize that you are exhibiting pathological behaviour - the kind that is exhibited and required by extremists who actually COMMIT these crimes!?

These statues are still part of the history of the US - for better or for worse. They are just statues, not people