Zeitgeist

Who cares? People don’t want to live in a world where the borders are closed after the population has already been extorted into taking needles, wearing masks, and staying home. If you don’t want freedom because your fully-vaccinated, masked self can’t handle the possibility that someone in your neighborhood might have “Omicron”, don’t make everyone else suffer to feed your neurosis.

Yet the Covid death rate remains low. One Omicron death so far. So much hype. I know how much you love restrictions and living in fear. Time to move on.

What the hell are you talking about? How is a fully vaccinated traveller who gets a negative test result less safe than another Canadian non-traveller coming through your neighborhood? You and people with your totalitarian mentality are ruining this country. Go get your third dose and hide in your basement. Forms of Covid — Delta, Omicron, or some other variant — can come from anywhere. We’re probably better off having Omicron become the dominant variant instead of Delta. You’re so manipulated and naïve.

So it looks like our government may go along with Dr. Tam’s idea that restricting Canadians from travelling, even vaccinated ones, is a good idea. Okay, it’s time to stop and question this. Most of our vulnerable population are fully vaccinated and the Omicron variant has milder symptoms than Delta. Those who don’t feel safe travelling can make the choice to stay home. Imposing additional restrictions on Canadian travellers is diabolical. They already have to show proof of vaccination AND negative test results upon entry to Canada using the ArriveCAN app that’s a total pain in the ass. Americans laugh at how our government hassles its own citizens. When I crossed into the US they asked for nothing but a passport. I think we need to start examining the international source of oppressive directives. I think it’s Beijing. In any event, our government needs to stop punishing its people for trying to have normal lives You pushed us to get vaccinated under threat of unemployment. Now almost all of us are vaxxed. You make us show vaccine passports to enjoy basic freedoms like eating in a restaurant. You continue to make us wear masks indoors, even if we’re vaccinated. Now you want to make Canadians take two sets of tests on return to Canada, one before arrival and one after? Oh and retuning travellers will be forced to quarantine. People who already made travel plans are screwed. They won’t get paid for missed work and they could lose their jobs. Thanks Trudeau for ruining the holidays. Fascists. Canada is losing freedom. Canadians are losing control of their destiny. https://apple.news/AJfe-ot2bQb-rN9ZvBmNIQg

Well our public should be well informed given our high education standards and international results, but I wonder if our standards have dropped these past few years. Too much blind faith in politicians and dubious media reports.

Well Canada has a mixed record in environmental protection and sustainable practices. I agree that we’re behind much of Northern Europe, but that’s probably because we haven’t faced the same pressing necessity to manage our land more carefully. Ever been to a crowded beach in Belgium? There are reasons why many European countries had much higher death rates from Covid, and it’s not just about public health policy. Our forest management has improved and, as we can see in BC, balancing land management with natural resource development can be very hard given radical voices from both sides. Our city planning in Ontario improved greatly with the Greenbelt and densification policies to prevent sprawl. The Great Lakes protections in place since the 80’s have helped. So did eliminating coal plants. The residential school business is much more complicated than at first glance it appears. The Canadian government had to deal with the reality of a scattered uneducated Indigenous population that on the most part couldn’t cope successfully in modern society. Free education was seen by progressives as a leg up, but providing it required residence for those from small communities, as it still does today in Indigenous run schools. It seems radical making kids leave their parents by today’s standards, and there were exemptions, but mandatory education for children is still seen as a social good. Not providing free public education would be seen as much worse. The reserve system and Indian Act have been attempts at preserving culture and providing support, but the truth is that one can’t be truly independent with so much outside intervention and so little Indigenous investment. Access to local resources has worked well in the sustainable areas. I believe in the ingenuity of Canadians and our institutions to solve our problems and achieve great things, but we have to stop apologizing and drawing attention to past imperfections that are water under the bridge and that seemed right at the time. I can’t think of any other country that apologizes and makes restitution as much as Canada. We need to drop the victim mentality and think about what we can do to make Canada better.

Well, I’d still rather live in Canada than the Netherlands, another overcrowded puppet of the EU. Canada is blessed with tremendous natural riches, strong democratic institutions, and remains one of the best countries in which to live and work, but that status is waning and in jeopardy. I look at a province like Ontario, where most of the population resides within 100 kilometres of the Lake Ontario shoreline, yet there’s another lake to the south, in Ontario, that has a small number of relatively small settlements and could absorb more people (Lake Erie). Eastern Ontario is still somewhat sparsely populated. Northern Ontario north of North Bay is about the size of England, but it’s a much less hospitable geography. We have some room for growth, even in our most populous province. It’s where and how we develop that counts. Are we preserving valuable farmland? Are we building a variety of settlement types that are built with walkable village centres, sustainable energy sources, and fine architecture and planning, for pedestrians rather than just motorists? There’s no need to turn the southern end of Canada into an ultra dense Hong Kong (vertical sprawl) or an endless sprawling Orange County (urban sprawl), and there’s no need to increase the population substantially. A certain amount of immigration is probably necessary to maintain our population. We could grow our population a bit beyond the current number, slowly, if we can do it in the right ways. I’m sceptical.

What made Canada great was her freedoms, democratic institutions, and openness to new and better ways. At its core was the Protestant Work Ethic, the wisdom of old Rome (the Vatican through New France), the expansiveness of the British Navy, the ultra-modern cosmopolitanism of modern media (McLuhan, Bell, Nortel), the tremendous work to protect freedom through world wars (Mackenzie King, St. Laurent), peacekeeping (Pearson), universal health care (Douglas), and international aid (Trudeau Senior, Mulroney, Harper, Bethune). The best of them could stick handle the Americans by finding common cause (Mulroney, Chrétien, Harper). Trudeau Junior overspends and undermines our history of industriousness and pride by catering to victimhood and constantly apologizing for the founding forces that are the foundation of one of the most successful countries on Earth Kowtowing to foreign powers and letting both spending and immigration escalate without a clear sense of what is worth protecting and supplementing is selling out the country. I’m not sure any mainstream party has the honesty and courage to call out the identity politics nonsense and get us back on track.

Don’t dare close the borders. Some of us want to travel and have lives. Put on your space suit and hide in your basement.

It’s not an oxymoron if some of the growth involves removing asphalt from former industrial sites to restore former green fields, retrofitting buildings with insulation, installing wind, solar, geothermal, and deep water cooling, adding green roofs, building hydro plants and mini reactors. We can grow by utilizing existing footprints, using infill developments, and building up, repurposing commercial and office buildings for residential, etc.

I hear what you’re saying, but then we’ll have to shift to a low growth model. Our economy is built on the idea that by locking in today’s prices, for example by buying a house right now and taking on a mortgage, over time, as wages and the economy grow, that mortgage payment becomes a smaller portion of your income. You get wealthier. The inflation that goes with this growth also means that when you sell your home 20 years later, it will be worth far more than you paid for it. This is the story of how most Canadians have built their nest eggs and moved up financially for the last century. Much of that growth and inflation depends on a steady increase in development, which comes through settlement, mainly immigration, since our birth rate is close to negative. A world in which your asset values and wages are essentially stagnant would require a more modest lifestyle and slower accumulation of wealth than we’ve had in many decades. Doable but difficult. There may be little cheats we can make as a society, such as letting automation do more work and giving money to people, but these measures likely have modest impact. Basically we’d end up living in small apartments and living on essentials. It jibes with efforts to slash greenhouse gasses and recent totalitarian restrictions on movement and surveillance to control the “pandemic”. Be careful what you wish for, because the old Chinese and Soviet lifestyles were pretty dull. I think we have to find sustainable forms of modest growth.

Yes it’s true. Generally French immigrants go to Montreal and most English speaking immigrants go to Toronto. At the current growth rate, by 2050 the GTA will look more like one giant Orange County stretching from Niagara to Peterborough to Barrie/Orillia and Kitchener, approximately 13-14 million people. Vancouver will be very similar to Hong Kong. Half of our remaining richest farmland will be paved over. The far north, Maritime provinces, and Saskatchewan, will have slightly more people than today. How is this an improvement on our current social and environmental conditions? If a certain amount of net population increase is necessary, the focus should be on making northern communities with the potential to be sustainable the focus for future growth. It would provide the necessary workforce to tap national resources and decrease regional economic disparities between the big population centres and everywhere else.

The problem for Canada is that only 20% of the country’s land is arable, which is also the land where our biggest cities are located, and all of it is along the southern end of the country. Already without the lakes Canada’s land mass is smaller than the US’s. When you then look at how much of our land is drained and has some kind of transportation connection to other settlements, our areas available for settlement are even further reduced. 100 million is far too many people, especially if most of the new immigrants join the southern end of the country, which they will. I think the key is to incentivize northern settlement and to build up the population just high enough that we can have the economy of scale that makes it possible to be fully independent militarily and in terms of providing a domestic market for our production. I don’t know the magic number. 70 million? It would give us the scale of Britain or France.

I think there’s a segment of society, the paranoid and controlling, who like such measures, but I think the majority of people look at such measures and think, I’d never want to live in such a place where policies like that are enacted.

We should all admire Florida’s resolve to protect the American way of life. It has come at a cost, but it’s a relief to know that at least a few governments are fighting to protect freedom. They are characterized as reckless and ignorant in much mainstream media, but imagine where we’d be without these holdouts? I’ve lost a certain amount of faith in Canadian democracy, because the people are dangerously impressionable to alarmist narratives from media and international organizations that are heavily influenced by totalitarian ideology.

China has a rich culture and good people like everywhere else. It’s the level of state control and draconian limits on freedom that must be resisted. It’s a model that has a certain practicality for rulers of a vast empire, but it’s totalitarian and a lesser form of democracy than we had until March, 2020, when the Chinese modelled their well-choreographed “fix” for the pandemic on the world stage. Their influence over the WHO and even the CDC, Health Canada, NIH, and NRS is the preeminent influence right now. China is dictating social organization worldwide right now. Biden and Trudeau are naive and have played into this system. I’m just not sure that there’s enough of a challenge to remove the influence. Trudeau is following Washington and Britain, who both appear rather impotent.

Yes, because restrictions and mandates are about more than ending the pandemic. They’re about an internationalization of China’s totalitarian capitalism. The combination of surveillance, location tracking, digital passports, and “public health” puritanism have made it possible to limit access and movement for the most minor violations as defined by the state. There doesn’t have to be risk of death or hospitalization as justifications for these radical violations of human freedom. Environmental “concerns” or perceived political “threats” can be cited. We live under indefinite martial law. Anyone who calls this out is deemed an unsophisticated conspiracy type. Thinking, inquisitive, smart people have good reasons to question and oppose the mandates and restrictions, which are continuing despite the fact that around 90 percent of vulnerable Canadians are fully-vaccinated. Even though the new variant “Omicron” appears to have relatively mild symptoms, restrictions and mandates continue. The non-Covid costs to businesses, mental health, and our democracy are dismissed outright by our leaders, because there’s an international narrative that they’re afraid to challenge in a middle power country like Canada. Canada can’t afford to be an international pariah, which is why we need to find common cause with allied countries that understand what’s at stake. I don’t think most current western leaders see the gravity of what’s happened.

I think there’s a real likelihood that C-19 came from the Wuhan lab. I think our government knows it , which is why they’ve held back on sharing the details on the firing of that Chinese research couple from the Manitoba virology lab. I think the NIH was in deeper with funding “gain of function” experimentation in Wuhan than Fauci cares to admit. I also think the Chinese government knew what was being developed, perhaps at Beijing’s behest, because their pandemic response seemed very well rehearsed in the pandemic’s early days. https://apple.news/A9cVJSs4MSnyHeVq0P0P0qg

Caused by excessive government spending, carbon taxes, excessively high levels of immigration to the major cities, blind bidding on home purchase offers, and the high costs to businesses of trying to keep employees through harsh vaccine mandates and restrictions that drive up labour costs. These are extremely inflationary government policies. Just removing the 11 cent per litre carbon tax on fuel (set to rise again soon) would provide some immediate relief on food and transportation costs. Focusing on treatment and personal responsibility to fight the virus rather than maintaining restrictions and vaccine mandates would immediately reduce the labour shortage and inflation of wages. It means no longer treating Covid as some exceptional disease requiring tracking and tracing, but rather managing its impact as we manage the flu. Our high vaccination rate and the new milder variant that will likely become the dominant variant have helped make normalizing Covid possible. Blind bidding on home purchase offers should be immediately outlawed, so that prospective home buyers know exactly how much money other buyers are offering. People are put in the stressful position of offering far more than a home is worth just to get their offer accepted. These conditions favour the rich and reckless. It’s ending the possibility of home ownership for young families.

The biggest problem is that Trudeau doesn’t know what he stands for. Because he doesn’t know what makes Canada valuable, he thinks nothing of selling it out. There was a time not that long ago when Canada took principled stances. Our democracy is being traded for cheap offshore production and foreign investment. The steady flow of immigrants helps push up home prices, giving us an inflated sense of our value. I don’t care anymore about real estate. It’s not enough. I care about our freedom and social conditions, which are deteriorating because Trudeau is afraid of offending Beijing. https://apple.news/A6aR5F5lDQCi7tnQLvzUvCA

It doesn’t matter. Their immune systems are fighting the disease effectively, preventing illness, which is what immunity means.

Some people are immune to Covid: the asymptomatic.

Australia is unofficially under Chinese control. They’re locked in by trade deals and economic threat, not to mention the military threat. That’s what the Aussie security pact with the US is trying to fight. The playbook for world affairs became China’s after March 2020. Our totalitarian pandemic government is following a well promoted template. https://apple.news/AV_uGswhkQD6dQ9PfPi0Viw

I haven’t mentioned income. I don’t know what you’re referencing or its relevance. I do know that the rich and powerful, including government leaders, are best positioned to escape the impact of restrictions to movement and in the workplace. They’re the freest people in our society, though I just consider them high ranking slaves.

Stop trying to pin all of our pandemic problems on the tiny minority of anti-vaxxers. They’re just not a big factor anymore in the spread of Covid and the mandates and restrictions imposed to fight it. That’s a chimera or straw man at this point. Death and severe illness due to Covid are now a minor threat. Persistent government control is the bigger concern now.