I am Groot

Granted. But while the majority of ordinary people supported such a view, even then, I think more would now, and would believe it more strongly. Recent events have shown the downside of allowing millions of people come here from countries with ancient hatreds, often supported by religion, without doing a thing to screen them for those hatreds. I just had lunch the other day with a very, middle class Liberal woman, still a strong supporter of Justin Trudeau. Yes, there are such people, and still a strong supporter of immigration. But we got to talking about other things and she said nothing on Earth would ever persuade her to visit India given its treatment of women and the way women are looked down on and endangered there. Same goes for most of the Muslim world. I pointed out we were bringing millions of people from those countries here and that gave her pause. As it should. Now I grant you there is no way to do this with 500k people coming over every year. But that number has no economic or even demographic logic behind it. We should cut the number to 150k for now, and just look for the cream of the crop. And they should be interviewed and given a version of a personality test and marked according to how adaptable and open they are to our values and ideas. We should also stop just taking whoever applies. We know who we want. Support industries and associations to go out and look for them. We want highly skilled people who will add to our GDP per person, not lower it. There are unhappy doctors and nurses in Ireland and the UK, and unemployed tradesmen in Portugal, Spain and Italy - places that supplied a ton of such people to us in the 1950s. Why aren't we trying to recruit?

I'm not sure why you think that's relevant, but I have come to understand that logic does not play a major role in your adversarial discussions with people of different viewpoints. Canada is, for the most part, a country a hundred miles wide by thirty-four hundred miles long with a big back yard we can raid for resources. Having access to that big backyard does not make it less economical to sustain an economy, but MORE.

Fortress America's walls are crumbling and it's quite conceivable it will draw them in tighter, as in just around their own borders if it becomes Fortress Trump. He's already made clear he'd give up on Ukraine, and wouldn't even defend Europe. We can take from that he wouldn't bother to defend Japan or Taiwan either. I don't think we can rely on a fortress Trump to defend us from his friend Putin.

There are few perfect men. Or women. We could get into the background of Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King Junior, if you so desire. Nelson was a heroic figure who accomplished much in his life. You can question his sexual morality but his knowledge of and impact on the British navy at the time, including its tactics and ships, is petulant and silly.

Oh, I don't either. I just brought up the carriers as an example of how wildly prices have gotten out of control for these frigates. I don't doubt they'll be great and capable ships, almost destroyers, but they're not five times better than the Constitution class the US are building for a fifth the price. But whatever we buy/build we need them today. The original contract for the Type 26 was supposed to start putting ships in the water last year. Now it won't be until the end of this decade, at best. That can be rushed, though I shudder at what the ships would be like if Irving was rushed given the lack of quality of the sips they take their time on. We also need submarines, a dozen or so, but this government will never buy them. I don't know that a Poilievre government would, either. He seems more focused on cutting the deficit and I haven't heard him say much of anything about defense. There's so much our military needs, from portable anti-air/armor missiles for the infantry to armored vehicles - not to mention socks and uniforms - armed helicopters, and either some way to arm those crappy AOP ships, or junk them and build better ones.

There's no need to compare the cost to American supercarriers. The cost we're paying for one frigate is roughly the same as the British paid for their new aircraft carriers a few years back. Which suggests we could buy a number of them. Finding people to operate them would be something else again. And we'd have to spend ten years on a bidding process to get any aircraft for them.

That's a childish response that dodges the question again. You insist we're too small in population but you can't explain why smaller countries are doing fine. I think you just don't like anyone opposing mass immigration out of a rigid ideological belief that any system that brings in mainly non-white people has to be defended at all costs.

Sure. How? Oh, we can't. So, don't ask for the impossible. And don't reject the possible because we can't do the impossible. I don't give a damn what the Palestinians think or want or do or say. That argument has been on for a thousand years. Let it stay over there. The problem I have is people bringing it here. They weren't nearly as different from what we were back then as the Arabs are now. How many Irish, Italians, Portuguese, and Greeks back then would have gleefully chopped off a woman's breast while raping her and then toss it to their laughing buddies to play catch with? How many would have cut off a child's limbs and laughed with delight at their screams? Even the Nazis didn't behave so gleefully when they were slaughtering Jews and Slavs. And none of them were Muslims. And none of them came here at a time when there was such a small world they could easily jet back home to visit relatives, could be in daily communication with those back home, could read the papers, watch TV from back home, could stay immersed in the culture from back home and ensure their children and children's children did too? None of them would say "I am a Muslim first, and a Canadian or whatever second." And even if they would say "I am a Catholic first and a Canadian second" so what? Our culture wasn't at war with Catholicism. Not the Western version, anyway. No Catholics were hoping to establish a worldwide religious theocracy. No Catholics prayed for the death and destruction of the West. My neighbor was born here. His parents came here and had a life here, but never integrated. On retirement, they returned to their old country to live with their Canadian pensions. When he retires, soon, he will return to the old country too. He was born here but he's not a Canadian even though he has a passport that says that. But he has a second passport and that's what holds his loyalty. There are a LOT of such immigrants and children of immigrants here from the middle east. And a growing number from Asia, too. They don't see Canada as a land to hold their loyalties, just a place to make money. Because, you see, we never ask. We don't screen people. We don't ask them any questions. We don't try to select people who would be the best fit for us, maybe people tired of the old ways, tired of the small mindedness and religious based cultures and looking for a different way. We could. But we don't.

And that's all they do. That needs to change.

Not yet they're not. And while the Brits seem to be moving along well there are a lot of complaints about the Aussies as they try to build their version. Someone recently called it the most expensive, least armed large vessel ever produced.

All that is nice in theory. But largely unworkable in reality. A lot of businesses find cooperation better than competition, thus price fixing and oligopolies. Who is going to take down Google anyway, or Microsoft? Who is going to challenge the big banks, either here or in the US? And stop them from doing stupid things. That includes stupid things done by greedy CEOs who know what they're doing will ultimately be bad for their companies in the future but want to maximize their bonuses today. Way back in the dawn of time, when we still recorded history on stone bl\ocks with chisels, one of my teachers in one of my business courses - I don't even remember which or who - told me that perfect Capitalism would be as dreadful for ordinary people to live under as any other economic system. Thus it has to be tempered by government.

Well now is your chance to enlighten me, oh wise one! Explain how the other 130 odd countries with smaller populations than ours survive. With many of them thriving. And yet we can't. I'm not the one ranting about Capitalism. If you want specific policies implemented within this flawed Capitalist system, other than having a microphone up the ass of every politician and senior bureaucrat, please let me know and we can discuss how that would work.

Nice rant. Of course, it completely fails to address the points I made. But then... you can't, can you?

Again, the people who we most want to keep out tend not to be terribly sophisticated. Else we'd not hear of cases where they're denied citizenship in European countries for refusing to shake hands with their interviewer. And as I've already written, you don't ask straight out, bald faced questions about what they think of Jews or women. A written test would be best. They're supposed to know enough English to want to immigrate here, after all. In fact, we should be increasing the English/French requirements of immigrants like Australia did. Don't be a fool. I've always been nuts. That's got nothing to do with politics.

Ah, so you actually ARE putting a few more conditions on who you want here.

Granted. But what system do you think would be free of the effects of human greed, ambition, and lust for power?

Shhhhh! You're not supposed to mention that!

Absolutely! But I hate Jews and homos and all infidels who don't worship God as I do and want them to DIE! I hate their guts and everything about their lack of morals and their filthy whore women who are only fit to be raped and used by godly men like me! I also have no intention of getting a job since your degenerate society will pay me money to stay home and have many children I will teach to believe as I do in the new world Caliphate where all who think and worship differently will be executed! Where's my passport, you infidel swine!?

Okay. But even if we accept that do you believe it's wise to implement similar policies today? I mean, it was dumb to apply to minorities but it's even dumber to apply to the majority. I thought I had explained it clearly. The vast majority of racialized people in Canada (exempting indigenous people) are immigrants or their children. Why are all our policies designed to benefit them at the expense of white people? Just a minor point of clarification to say that at the time when slavery was legal there was no Canada. This was British colonialism. The number is roughly accurate tho

Do you want a cookie? Weren't people raped in all kinds of settings? Wasn't sexual assault and molestation something society didn't take much interest in? Even date rape was a concept we didn't pay much attention to back in the day. Much less something within the family. There were abuses in every institutional and residential setting, from boy scout campgrounds to boarding schools for the elites, from institutions for the mentally retarded (that used to be a word) to prisons, juvenile detention centres, and even ordinary schools and churches. A responsibility they did to whom? There are 1.5 million blacks in Canada. In the 1971 census there were 30k. Which means something like 95% of blacks in Canada are immigrants or their kids. What 'responsibility' do we have to them? The same rough figures would be applied to Asians. Why do we have 'responsibility' to them? I mean, you can make an argument about indigenous people but no one else.

Describe all systems. ALL. What Capitalism brings with it and Socialism fails, is a general level of economic comfort that allows the majority of people to have at least some disposable income and time.

You're free to move out onto the Arctic tundra if you want. But that's not where immigrants are going. They're going to Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. This whole nonsense about what a big, empty country we are has always been disingenuous since almost everyone lives in a dozen large, urban centres and virtually all immigrants go to those cities. As for our 'minimal internal market', which ignores our free trade agreement with the US, as well as one with the EU, forty million puts us among the largest countries in the world, population wise. There are 36 countries with larger populations and about 160 with smaller populations. And among those with smaller populations are nine out of ten of the world's best places to live.

Why do we need to speak about it? Were any of us there then? Have we not changed so that such behaviour patterns are now extremely unusual and rarely encountered? We don't even have the excuse the American Left is obsessed with, of 'making it up' to groups that suffered under racism. Well, except the natives. But everyone else was only in Canada in very minimal numbers back then. Explain to me the logic of giving institutional preferred admittance, hiring and promotion to immigrants or the children of immigrants in order to 'make it up' to their color group from back in the day when neither they nor their ancestors were even here to 'suffer'.

No. That's not how these screening tests work. Haven't you ever done one for a major company? They ask you a bunch of questions that lead in certain directions but reveal a lot about your personality, interests, and temperament. And the idea these people are so clever and will disguise themselves fails given how easily they lose out in other jurisdictions. Some of them just by refusing to shake hands with a person of the opposite sex. Or we could just give potential immigrants from certain parts of the world a far lower priority than from other parts of the world. That's a blunter tool but it would help a lot.

That we don't have one is because the elites long ago decided it was sinful to think our society, our culture, and values, were in any way superior to anyone else out there. That's what's behind the whole idea of multiculturalism, of telling immigrants not to bother changing or integrating but to retain and take pride in their homegrown culture and values. The problem with this silly-assed view is it has no resemblance to reality. It's the view of the elites who jet around the world but only stay in 5-star hotels, and so airily talk about how we're all equal. But we're not. The demonstrations in the streets should tell us that. Our belief in tolerance is not the general belief out there. Even what we consider bigotry or racism is laughably minor compared to the bigotry and racism that is mainstream in most of the countries that are our major sources of immigrants. The spirit of compromise is another strong Canadian cultural trait that many parts of the world don't have in their cultural fabric at all. In much of the world it's "I win, you lose" as much as possible. Between individuals and between groups. And the huge numbers of people coming here are coming from countries whose cultures are incredibly corrupt from top to bottom and everywhere in between. That's not something we really want or need to import either. Look at this story. This demonstrates the degree of blithe, unreasoning hatred for Jews in the Arab world, and the near complete lack of concern for what we in the West would consider civilized behavior. I know there are people here who hate to generalize on an entire people, and I'm sure there are Muslims out there in the wide world who don't hate Jews, but they appear to be a distinct minority. And even the ones not much inclined to rape and murder them seem to be comfortable with applauding those who do. And if you think the survey would be much different if it asked people in Pakistan or Indonesia or Malaysia, well, I have my doubts. So thanks, but no thanks. I don't want these people in my country. And I don't care if screening would fail to get many. It would get most. These are not terribly sophisticated people. And that's the beauty of it. The more sophisticated you are the less likely you'd be to have the kind of mentality we don't want. A recent survey of 8,000 Arabs across 16 Middle East and North African nations, including Jordan, showed overwhelming support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Around two-thirds of respondents said the terror attacks in southern Israel were a “legitimate resistance operation”; 19% said that the massacre was a “somewhat flawed but legitimate resistance operation.”