SpankyMcFarland

I suspect that carbon taxes in some form aren’t going away forever. In the coming decades, the pressure to reduce emissions will only get stronger as the consequences come home to roost.

I would say that Mulroney’s sagging fortunes resembled JT’s situation which is why both ducked the election audit and made what is called in rugby a ‘hospital pass’ to a hapless player about to be crunched. The difference is in what happened next. Trump swooped in to save the Liberals from a shellacking. Whether they manage to win remains an open question. Maybe the anoraks can tells us but I don’t recall a similar foreign intervention on this scale in Canadian electoral history. By contrast, Poilievre looked like a shoo-in until a few weeks ago.

As in the Robert Menendez case, a corrupt Democrat was prosecuted. The only difference here is that Adams has thrown his lot in with Trump. The quid pro quo could not be more transparent.

Note that the charges have been dismissed without prejudice and can be refiled at any time if Adams displeases his benefactor.

I hope so. Russia’s campaign depends on one man. Ukraine has to be lucky just once.

If the cartels are terrorist organizations, then their financiers are all around us. Anybody buying cocaine here helps sustain mass murder in South and Central America. Time was when conservatives cared about personal responsibility rather than blaming everybody else.

A lot more nationalist than I was a few weeks ago.

What creates the cartels? Who pays for them? People who use illegal drugs do. Our neighbours do. Maybe some of us do. And does anybody here seriously believe that gangs in Canada have had a bigger role in creating the US opioid crisis than the US pharmaceutical industry, especially the makers of opioids like OxyContin who lied for years about its highly addictive nature despite being told of it by many doctors. Why isn’t Trump talking about that every day if he cares about addiction in his country? Why isn’t he questioning the fact that the major beneficiaries of OxyContin never went to jail. At least a few of the hoodlums involved in peddling SUBSYS did. Eventually. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/authorities-drugmaker-paid-off-doctors-lied-insurance-companies/story?id=61488372

No. Of course not. Who said any of that? Do I have to ritually reiterate that I don’t support Hamas every time I post here? For the umpteenth time, I am not a Hamas supporter. Theocratic death cults aren’t my thing. The practicalities of what can happen there are beyond our pay grade. What I object to is the way Trump talks about it. Notice how he uses the passive voice for that extraordinary level of destruction eg, things are demolished. The active agents of the destruction - the country that made the bombs and handed them over, the country that used the bombs - is often not spelled out. That’s one big problem with aerial warfare - its savagery is at a remove and those responsible can have difficulty seeing their role even if they would otherwise want to.

A crucial measure of prosperity is median income which isn’t much affected by a tiny few making billions. There’s nothing wrong with raising that in nearly every country.

He’s not even drunk when he comes out with this all stuff about Gaza, another crazy Asian war in the making. The leaders of Egypt and Jordan have three choices. 1. Publicly disagree with Trump and cease to be an ally. 2. Publicly agree with Trump and cease to be a living human in short order. 3. Pull a Chrétien, mutter incomprehensibly and pray the whole thing goes away da bedder da sooner. Option 3 looks wise.

Given that you and your closest ally did all that damage, yes.

SA doctors are excellent, by and large. Their preference for candour can be amusing to watch with Canadian administrators who aren’t used to that kind of thing. I believe the Indians could only apply to one med school in the ‘good old days’ of Apartheid which made it incredibly difficult to get into. Now the Africans keep them out so they can’t win.

They are the tariffs I was referring to. Trying to explain trade deficits to him would be like convincing Emperor Joseph II that Mozart’s works don’t have too many notes. The annexation talk is the same as before and at some point we are going to have to start believing him. PP better hope Trump finds another focus for his ire and just forgets about Canada for a while. Nobody in the West will seek to antagonize this ignorant thug by supporting us. The UK is in enough trouble already with its support of the ICC and other Israel-related matters.

Trump is the major factor. He can seriously damage Poilievre’s chances if he goes all out against us. In that case, there’ll be support for the Libs right across the political spectrum including from many who haven’t voted in a while and disillusioned Liberal voters who might have sat this one out. Plus Danielle Smith might be a little preoccupied with events closer to home to play at Trump whisperer again. Best case for PP is that this round of tariffs is the last, the whole disgraceful story peters out and he glides in on what’s left of his lead. Has anybody asked Trump about the political effect he is having up here?

Those vuvuzelas were fairly grim. Best thing? Mr. Tolkien.

Any Canadian who thinks this is just harmless fun is fooling themselves. Nobody forced the US president to make this highly offensive remark. It’s a display of power. At the very least, it helps normalize the many other transgressions he will commit.

I hope we can all agree that such discussions of sexuality should be age-appropriate. I don’t see any damage resulting from my nephews interacting with gay and trans-identifying kids at school in recent years or from the discussions about them by teachers. In my day, as they say, I was fearful of gays and never heard of transgender people - not a good attitude.

I don’t know any transgender people well so it’s really not an issue I can get worked up about or comment on knowledgeably. In my uneducated opinion, I would like to keep female sport for what they call cis-females. If there are enough trans-male or female athletes at an event then there should be separate categories for them in addition to the traditional two.

OK, these are still just allegations but Smith has been forced to deny them. It sounds like a very stupid way for a government to get into trouble if it did. https://calgary.citynews.ca/2025/02/08/alberta-premier-smith-claims-not-involved-health-contract-allegations/ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/02/07/Health-Care-Corruption-Allegations-Rock-Smith-Government/ Note Smith did not say there was absolutely nothing to these allegations at all, rather that she was not involved. Good news for Nenshi. He needed a boost.

One major question - when minors should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding gender-affirming care. It’s a tricky one. As with many other decisions, people are going to change their minds.

Like Putin, Trump still believes that power resides in geography - land, resources, canals - rather than technology. China is rapidly catching up with the US in critical areas like AI, batteries and missiles and all he can think of is Greenland and Panama.

Friends are suckers to be taken advantage of. They’re easy to push around. Vietnam had a trade deficit with the US of 123 billion last year, more than twice ours. And why hasn’t Trump gone after them? Because he knows they can always turn to China.

There’s a natural anxiety among parents about their children’s sexuality, how they will identify in terms of gender and whether this could be influenced in any way. On the other hand, many gay and transgender people point out they wouldn’t have chosen their lifestyle if they could have helped it given the stress and outright danger it brought. It’s a curious business because the left is often more associated with ‘nurture’ over ‘nature’ arguments but in this case conservatives seem to believe that exposing their children to such issues too soon, whatever that is in the smartphone era, may affect their ultimate sexual identity. I doubt that argument. The many accounts of gay and transgender people suggests to me that these orientations begin to solidify early in life, before puberty, and are fairly hard-wired.

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Canada needs a mixed private and public health care system. The key matter for politicians to understand is that the for-profit sector should not mean profits for them. If they fail to resist temptation and put their little paws in the honeypot they will seriously set back the cause of private care in this country.