SpankyMcFarland

He’s not our most senior foreign worker though although ‘worker’ is putting it a bit strong. Charlie has that role.

What I’m getting from all that is that you live nowhere near a remote community in Canada, don't know what it’s like and don’t care either. So why should I take what you and PP say seriously? You see problems with TFW in large urban centres and simplistically extrapolate that to the whole country. I would really love to see some detail on your suggestions for this. How exactly can this be done? Will black magic be involved? Putting it in block capitals doesn't give me any clues. I can tell you one thing. If this cunning little populist plan ever sees the light of day our cities will be burdened with internal migrants with nowhere else to go.

Antagonizing India, Brazil and South Africa was just plain stupid. All three had difficult enough relationships with the US before Trump came along but he’s making it far worse. America needs friends. It cannot take on the authoritarian club headed by Xi on its own.

From what I read some do not - lacing is a common problem - but its potency is also attractive to users.

Virtually none of that applies to me. I have no problem listening to suggestions for reform of this program, especially in large cities. But please address the remarks made by restaurateur John Farrell from Prince Rupert who is speaking for businesses in the area. They jibe with what I am seeing in rural Newfoundland. Better yet, contact John Farrell directly. I’m sure that is easy to do. Somehow I doubt he sees himself as a leftist.

How many posters on this issue are more than 200 km from a town of 50,000 or more? I can understand someone living beside Vancouver etc being unhappy with the results of the TFW program but that’s not the reality out here. Axing it entirely is too drastic a response.

That’s certainly one factor. We’ve watched these problems growing for decades.

Our country is not a hostile desert and we are not a developing nation. Decades of governmental inertia have allowed our population to skew the way it has.

For years China was unable to compete on internal combustion engines but saw early on that electric vehicles presented an opportunity to change the game. Drones may be another paradigm-shifter, enabling Xi to bypass the problem of a sclerotic, corrupt and inexperienced army in one neat move. Perhaps one day wars will be conducted by simulation, hopefully without the disintegration chambers, as predicted on Star Trek? I suppose the war gaming that helped convince the Soviets the game was up was a primitive version of this.

How in the name of thundering Jaysus can any right-thinking person say that? Russian invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is merely trying to defend itself. The bad guy here could not be clearer.

Can we agree on what isn’t antisemitism here? Criticism of the Israeli government and its policies, for example?

In the end, those among us who use illegal drugs fund the cartels which would not exist otherwise. I would expect proper conservatives to mention this every time the subject comes up. In addition, we North Americans have to figure out why we are so fond of an appalling poison like fentanyl, far more than, say, the British. It is a deeply disturbing reality that we’re barely beginning to get to grips with.

Policies take years to bear fruit and rarely has our country had to battle such external challenges. Even if Zhou En Lai was talking about 1968 rather than 1789 when he told Kissinger it was too early to say about the significance of events in France, that was still four years later. https://mediamythalert.com/2011/06/14/too-early-to-say-zhou-was-speaking-about-1968-not-1789/ Many successful administrations start badly, eg Thatcher. I will give Carney two years.

I think the intent there was that climate change will be beneficial overall to Canada, big picture stuff and surely a consolation in those final moments when a mighty holocaust engulfs us and our homes. Indeed I might put something like that on my tombstone - a casualty of change that was beneficial overall.

People joke that Canada has too much geography and not enough history. An awkward truth resides there. We have a deep problem with the country we live in, speaking of our love for the subcontinent while cramming preposterously into a few cities along the American border. My former line of work was notorious for such ambivalence. Many a med school applicant can’t wait to hop on one of those helicopters and save lives in the Great White North. Fast forward ten years and they’re somehow living in Vaughan doing shifts at the local ER with no wish whatsoever to explore the personal odyssey that brought them there. If Southern Ontario and the Lower Mainland are our collective future let’s at least talk about it first.

That Power and Politics interview was a telling moment. No politician deserves an easy ride. Michelle Rempel is a skilled performer and I imagine she thought she would breeze through that interview with her talking points. Instead David Cochrane had some personal insight on the issue and politely called her on it. Although he mentioned Labrador, his comments apply to rural Newfoundland just as well. The reality is that there are parts of this country where nowhere near enough locals are prepared to work in the services sector. In NL we had a notorious program of resettlement by the Smallwood government where people were forced to leave their fishing communities and settle in larger towns. In recent years the provincial government has been accused of resettlement by stealth, gradually pulling services from smaller communities until they predictably ask for resettlement themselves. PP’s proposal would have this effect and he needs to be honest about that. Where does he want us to go? Should realtors prepare for a Poilievre boom in the dowdier corners of St. John’s, Halifax and Southern Ontario? They’re all struggling to house the people they have already.

I know the situation in rural Newfoundland but I don’t know about other remote parts of the country. Here is somebody talking about Prince Rupert, Kitimat and Terrace. Is he wrong?

While I’m fine with modifying the program, completely getting rid of it would be a disaster for some communities in Canada. It’s a non-starter. I’m going to contact my local Conservative MP and see if he is willing to defend this proposal. He must know what it would mean in his riding.

I fear we are going to be talking about megafires every summer in Canada for the foreseeable future. For us the Pyrocene is well under way.

We’ll never completely eliminate arson as a cause of wildfires but the new factor is climate change. This summer the Avalon peninsula, normally a notoriously cold, foggy and damp place, was swept by fires. Some are suspected of being arson but the real problem was how they took hold once they started. Across the province, all we could do was hold our breath and pray for rain.

PP is a salesman like all politicians. In the real world the answers are never easy. Give us the hard truth you propose. Without a temporary foreign worker program, who is going to work in the the nursing homes, clean my house or make my sub sandwich and how much more is it going to cost if indeed somebody is prepared to do it? Before the recent group of foreign workers arrived our fast food restaurants were working severely reduced hours. Some were closed. In my town I see very few young Canadian adults around. Are you telling us Atlantic Canadians to move to where? Southern Ontario? Red Deer? I wouldn’t even dare suggest a southern BC city option.

With the Internet, Covid, Zoom and Sullivan’s Crossing, I thought some young Canadians would finally see the attraction of a virtually empty subcontinent over a million dollar troll life under the Gardiner but that’s not what happened. Bizarre.

Low-skilled immigration is a problem long-term but we have acute needs in Canada which are not being addressed. If we don’t import we will have to urbanize more intensely and hope inflation does not explode. Good news for realtors, landlords and elderly owners but very few else. And what about high-skilled immigration? There are problems there too, eg, China in a word. Let’s discuss them both from a technocratic view rather than politically and acknowledge our deep underlying social problems in this country.

As I have said before, if PP says something that helps rural Canada I’m in favour of it, eg, fast-tracking professional qualifications for foreigners. I went for a recent procedure in my local hospital and praised the Lord that an excellent foreign doctor I knew was still around to do it. We are not talking nearly enough about the brain drain WITHIN this country and the sociological factors there. It’s a delicate matter but we have to ask awkward questions, eg, where do single Christian Canadian females want to work? Or married Arab Muslim men? Or professional couples from the same or mixed traditions? We are basically seeing the answers before anybody has the gumption to formally ask the questions which is sad. One big confounding factor in medical recruitment and retention in Canada is the importance that interviews are given here. In my country entrance to medical school was based purely on academic scoring, but here the interview plays a big role and that creates a serious problem in determining the motivation of people and where they are going to go. When you talk to Canadian medical grads, they still have their med school interview face on a lot of the time and it’s hard to know what the truth is. Of course, in the end we know what the truth is when we see how careers turn out, but then it’s too late.

The least you expect from populists is that they are more in touch with what’s going on in Canada than the ‘elitists’ at CBC. I experienced the opposite when listening to Rempel the other night. She hadn’t a clue about life in rural Newfoundland whereas Cochrane did.