I am Groot

She needs to go. But what can you expect from her? She was an activist, and that's the only reason she was made governor general. Well, and being a native.

No, but they help deter attacks. Especially when a collective of nations are reasonably well-equipped with them so that warlords like Putin and Xi refrain from attacking. Canada has the lowest number of police per capita of any major western country. Far less than most of our European peers. And too little to control any sort of widespread civil disturbances or emergency situations posed by large, armed groups. Are you at one and the same time claiming there could be huge problems from global warming in the coming years, and no widespread civil disturbances or incidents? What about when AI begins to put a lot of young men out of work, especially young men with low skills such as the millions we've brought over from the third world? What happens when all the Uber and taxi drivers, all the truck and bus and taxi drivers, all the doordash drivers and even many of the retail and hospitality workers are replaced by AI and automated equipment? What do we do with all those young men? What are they going to do with us? No, it will not. You keep saying this as though it were inevitable. It's not. You think the US is going to launch nukes against Russia to preserve the territorial integrity of Norway, Denmark, Poland? Italy? Greece? I don't. Perhaps you should let all the Western governments who think otherwise know this. They don't seem to be aware. Oh, for Gods sakes! Listen to yourself! You haven't the slightest clue what sort of technology will be around in fifty years, never mind two hundred years! You don't know what science will be developed in terms of both energy production and global cooling systems. Especially with the aid of AI, which is soon going to grow more powerful at exponential rates. And in any event, nothing Canada does is going to make any sort of impact on world CO2 emissions. We're too small, and the developing world is too big.

Your own cites say they're protesting the government for not bringing the hostages back, not for being mean to Gazans. The last poll I saw said Israelis feel the government isn't bombing Gazans ENOUGH. The Oct 7 attack was the fears of all Israelis for the last seventy years brought out into the light. They've lived in a small country all their lives with the knowledge that every day there are people all along their borders in every direction willing to die to try to get over, under, around or through their defenses just to find a Jew and kill him or her. and Oct 7 wasn't just a couple of terrorists but thousands of people, some of them not even Hamas, but civilians who saw what was happening and eagerly joined in. There is little sympathy among them for Palestinians right now.

Probably very little Canada has 138 generals and admirals and... whatever the air force calls theirs, for about 50k people. The US Marines have 60 for 180k people. The IDF has 24 for 620k

First, according to the UN, which measures the damage potentially caused by global warming by economic losses, Canada's GDP could drop - or rise - by 1% or so by 2100, Not exactly a crisis. Second, there's nothing we can do to stop global warming. Third, that measure of us and other more northerly first world countries is based on how organized and wealthy we are, on our ability to deal with the impact of things like flooding and droughts. That takes a strong economy. Finally, if you're speculating that global warming could lead to a crisis in Canada, then it would be a good idea if we had a reasonably sized, well equipped military in order to handle the security issues, would it not? Lest we fall into chaos and disorder? In what? You're asking us to spend untold billions, hundreds of billions on climate change initiatives we know will make absolutely no difference. An army is used to deter attacks, to respond to emergencies like earthquakes and floods, and to control civil disorder. You're saying none of that is going to be of any value in the next hundred years?

The people in Jerusalem aren't protesting against the war or against Israel. They're protesting against the government. Entirely different.

It starts at the top. Chrystia Freeland has 46. Marc Miller has 25. Mark Holland has 25. Bill Blair has 21. Eisenhower, at the height of the Second World War, had 24. Personal staff. Why would Defence Minister Bill Blair, overseeing our tiny military during peacetime, need almost as many staff as Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allies in Europe in 1944? And this is in addition to the staff support Blair receives from his departmental and military officials. Johnson: Canada's federal ministers have far too many personal staff | Ottawa Citizen

Depends. Are you protesting alongside people whose goal in life is to destroy your country and then kill you? Then yes.

I do. And they're stupid to do so. They're protesting alongside people who despise them on behalf of people who want them dead against the only Jewish state in the world. And they're doing so as part of a propaganda campaign designed and funded by Iran. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202404158853

And I would say this is the case at the provincial and municipal and school board levels, too. We are drowning in bureaucracy and are so over-regulated it takes forever to get anything done at any level and usually winds up costing twice as much as it should. Why do the heads of hospitals, colleges and universities earn such high salaries? These are not specialized jobs that require massive education and experience. The head of one of Ottawa's hospitals was a former municipal councilor. The head of the University of Ottawa was the minister of Justice before being appointed to the job. If politicians can do it then why are the salaries approaching half a million a year, or in some cases passing that mark? Because when the boss makes $500k, the deputies have to be making close to $400k right? And then everyone around them gets slightly less munificent salaries. How many non-teachers at universities are pulling in considerably more than $100k? The administrative ranks have exploded at post-secondary institutions. And I see far too many at school boards, too. We need a guy with something like a hard-assed Mike Harris mentality that will go in and start laying people off and freezing promotions and hiring. Not to mention eliminating all those high-priced consultants.

And how much did we throw away during the great Covid money splurge? Trudeau has been promising tens of billions in new spending this year on housing, on dental plans, on natives, on the environment - whenever he decides he wants to spend money he has no difficulty just doing it. Cut other programs. I'm sure the Tories won't have trouble finding a lot of those that can go. The Liberals have hired a hundred thousand more public servants in the last eight years in order to administer all their new vote buying programs. Get rid of some of those programs, get rid of the horrific bureaucracy that surrounds doing ANYTHING in this country, and you'll save a mint. While we're at it, stop funding activists. Every activist group seems to be getting its money from the government. No money to any of them! If you want to complain or lobby about something you pay for it! And if it requires a tax increase, as well, then so be it.

And then there are the penalties exacted on that human body for going to those extremes. Even though she was a standout Bowdoin athlete and could bench press 145 pounds and squat 200 pounds, was ranked 4th out of a class of 52 in Officer Candidate School and excelled at Marine Corps fitness tests, Petronio's deployment in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan took a brutal toll on her 5-foot-3-inch body. "By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change,” she wrote. “My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability. It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions.” She lost 17 pounds on an already lean body. It's not about small frames. It's about the anatomical differences between male and females. A smaller framed male can still carry more, move faster, will have more endurance, lung capacity, muscle mass, etc., than a female of comparable size. https://mcgazette.blogspot.com/2012/07/get-over-it-we-are-not-all-created.html

So you're saying sanctions are a waste of time. But that it's all Biden's fault for canceling sanctions. have I got that right? Maybe if you hit them hard enough they'll think twice about shooting at you again.

The problems in recruitment and retention are due mainly to the incompetence of the recruitment and training process, and the rusted out, and obsolete if not entirely missing equipment that leaves those who join feeling no real pride in their organization. People who join shouldn't need to wait a year or two to get a phone call to come for training. Nor should it take ten or fifteen years just to sign a contract to acquire new equipment. Properly equip the military and fix the problem with its training/recruitment and you'll be able to recruit up easily enough. As for being willing to pay. I have never seen any groundswell of protest at ANY spending initiative. Ever. Sure, the opposition will whine and complain about any large contract. But that doesn't really represent public concern or anger. The Liberals campaigned vigorously against buying the F15 while they were in opposition, but it was never much of a concern in the election that followed. And almost everyone acknowledges that the military is in terrible shape and has to be brought up to speed. I don't see a lot of opposition to doing so. Quite the contrary. Sure, the Liberals will whine and complain once they're in opposition, but few will care. The military is an insurance policy. And most Canadians understand the need for insurance. The problems with these can be solved by cutting red tape, regulations, and legions of bureaucrats. Education is most certainly not under-funded. It is over bureacratized. And too much healthcare spending goes to bureaucrats not doctors. Housing is an immigration problem. Slash immigration, migration, and foreign workers (and families) and foreign students (and families) and the housing crisis will shrink to a very manageable level. What happened in Israel was that they forgot to keep their military strong enough along the borders with their enemies to deter an attack or hold it in check if they were attacked. And I see no way their enemies are stronger now than they were before. Certainly Hamas is not.

Yes, this, absolutely. It is mind-boggling that Canadians who trained as doctors and nurses in the US, who have been working in that capacity in the US, can't come to Canada and work without an enormous amount of time-consuming paperwork, testing, and mandatory training. Doctors can't even more between provinces and set up shop! And the people in the way are all doctors. It is the doctors associations, the CMA and provincial medical licensing groups that are steadfast in demanding processes that take years and years before foreign-trained doctors can work here. Even if they're from the US, UK, or other 1st world countries. And it's not much easier for nurses. Maybe set up one national licensing group for doctors as a privately operated organization but operating under federal government guidelines and oversight to license a doctor to practice anywhere in Canada. How many provinces will object to such doctors practicing in their province? It isn't the provincial governments right now that license doctors and nurses, after all. It's their own associations but backed by law. I don't think Ontario, for one, would object, and would probably amend their law to allow for such people to practice. medicine there.

The solution for our healthcare crisis has to start with more doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. Nothing else, no changes to how the system functions will work well with the existing shortage. And that shortage is created by government. There are far more qualified applicants for medical and nursing schools than those schools can accommodate. The number of nursing/medical school spaces was frozen by governments for decades. They were only recently increased in Ontario. But from what I have read they can only be increased so fast so far due to the lack of instructors, classrooms, and then on the far end, the number of supervising doctors and nurses for the mandatory hands-on coop period for nurses and residency periods at hospitals for doctors. I don't know if the number of spaces has been increased in other provinces. I would suggest the numbers be increased nationwide as fast and far as possible. To this end they should be actively recruiting RNs and doctors who have retired or left the profession to help as instructors. The lack of family physicians can be remedied by increasing their fees or lowering tuition for those who elect to take family medicine or both. Doctors should not be forced to be businessmen. It's a waste of time which could be devoted to seeing patients. Family doctors prefer to work in team setting where there are colleagues in both family medicine and varied specialties to consult with. More of these organizations should be set up.

You again reduce your options to those that are the most pessimistic. There is the option to be strong, and for NATO to be strong. Which would deter a war just as it did in the cold war.

They would have crushed Ukraine a year and a half ago were it not for Western countries feeding hundreds of billions in cash and armaments to Ukraine. And many countries, like Canada, have depleted their supplies of missiles and artillery shells and will need years to replenish them. The US has depleted its own supply of missiles, as well, and is trying to increase production so it doesn't have to wait years to replenish. Russia can increase its arms production much faster than Western countries because they have fewer lawyers.

Upper management is EXTREMELY risk-averse. I've said it before, but if it costs $100 to monitor how spending is being done in order to avoid $1 being misspent senior management will approve that in an instant. In addition, to avoid ever being blamed for anything, any new project of whatever size has to have massive buy-in from as many 'clients and interested groups within the public service as possible. This requires innumerable reports, documentation, meetings, and time-consuming changes and alterations before anything sees the light of day. All of which is designed to shield management from blame, not to make sure the eventual project works. Witness Phoenix, which is a disaster and has been for years. No one was ever disciplined for it either.

Assuming the Americans didn't stay home. The Russians are not the Soviets. But they are led by a man who said the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century was the breakup o the Soviet Union. Note, not WW2 or WW1, but the breakup of the Soviet Union. He wants to put it back together again. And while Russia is not as powerful as it was then NATO is far less powerful than it used to be. The state of the German military is almost worse than Canada's, for example. The British military is in deplorable state. And Russia is rapidly expanding its arms manufacturing while countries like Germany are still busy fighting lawsuits about the contracts to build up their arms manufacturing. They devoted billions to it years ago and none has yet even been spent.

I disagree. That is far from certain. The US, UK and France will not nuke Russia if it decides to gulp down the Baltics, for example. That's especially so if Trump becomes President. He's already given strong indications the US wouldn't fight for the Baltics at all. With that done, Russia might decide to gulp down a couple more ex-Russian republics to its south. Then it could officially incorporate Belarus back into the fold and then take back Georgia. Then maybe declare some disputed waters up north to be Russian and start drilling for oil. Those would be waters Canada claims, btw. It really depends on how patient Putin is and how far he goes. He could wait a few years, then have another go at Ukraine - once Trump gives his official blessing to his ownership of the lands Russia already occupies. A slow, incremental move west would not require or cause the response of nuclear weapons. It's not a stalemate if they have such things and you do not.

Only if they already have those defenses. It certainly doesn't give you time to whistle up the construction of warships or tanks or fighter planes or anti-aircraft or anti-armor missiles or, for that matter, trained soldiers, sailors and airmen. If you don't have it then it really doesn't matter that you can see an enemy massing their troops for attack.

How much weight could those women in the air force carry and how far could they carry it?

But anyone can't hump eighty or a hundred pounds of gear for days on end on field operations. And women who can do it when superbly fit are few and far between and face all kinds of physical issues if they try. US Marine Captain Katie Petronio wrote about this a decade ago. There are basic issues with trying to make females infantry, starting with them having less muscle mass, thinner bones, smaller frames, and lower lung capacity. They take physical damage more easily, recover more slowly, and don't have the speed or stamina of men.