I am Groot

In 2012, only 37 per cent of Canadians surveyed by Nanos thought that their children would have lower living standards than themselves. By 2022 a similar poll by Pew Research pegged the number at 75 per cent. An increasing number of Canadians seem resigned to believing that the next generation will be worse off than us. Gee. I uh... I wonder what could have happened in Canada between 2012 and now to crash Canadians' optimism and destroy their hopes.... This rapid decline in our prosperity is not something that has happened “to” us, it is a result of a series of policy actions by successive governments over the past 50 years. We have chosen to consistently reduce our investment in research and development (as a percentage of GDP). Spending on our immigration, education and entrepreneurial supports have not kept up with the increase in our population and we have not fully leveraged the potential of new technologies. Instead of investing in the future, our governments have spent on initiatives which do not increase our longer-term prosperity and provide our next generation with the platform to be better off than us. One example of this is the recent government decision to spend an additional $151-billion per year by increasing government employment by over 30 per cent. But rather than accepting a continuing slide in our standard of living, we can be world leaders in GDP growth per capita, be the No. 1 choice for the world’s most talented individuals to live and invest in, have the No. 1 ranking for infrastructure and stability, and be rated as the easiest country to do business in. To get there we need to focus investment in the four fundamental pillars of economic development that have existed since the beginning of time: Best People. We need to become the country of choice for the most talented individuals from around the world and develop the world’s most talented people. We need to encourage R&D, enhance our teaching of critical thinking and digital literacy in our schools, and simplify the assessment and recognition of professional credentials for new immigrants. Best Tools. We can move ideas and goods across the country and around the world with a much more comprehensive and lower-cost digital infrastructure, coupled with an improved physical infrastructure. Access to Materials and Resources. We can, in an environmentally sustainable way, increase access to the materials and resources we need to compete in the modern economy. This would include the abundance of natural resources and critical minerals we have, such as lithium for batteries. Access to Markets and Capital. Instead of depending on foreign investors – such as the now-defunct Silicon Valley Bank – to fund our new ventures, we can do so with the right framework and incentives from one of the most stable and admired banking systems in the world. But we should continue to be open to free trade and foreign direct investment. These four pillars must be supported by policies that reduce government bureaucracy, making it easier to create and commercialize businesses. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-next-generation-lower-living-standards/

And a lot more natives, who are responsible for the majority of crime that the Somali immigrants/refugees don't get up to.

Food banks are not really a reliable indicator of poverty in a city with almost half its population made up of immigrants. Most of those immigrants come from poor, hardscrabble countries where you take advantage of anything and everything you can. If you offer someone from Somalia or Afghanistan or even India free food they're going to take it, whether they need it or not. There are also videos on youtube informing Indian students how foodbanks are a great source of free food, and I imagine other foreign students are similarly benefiting.

I doubt most of them are even aware of it. She's just the most familiar name.

Barring something to change momentum, things tend to remain the same. And certainly the OECD says it will. I might add this government rarely ever even discusses economic expansion. Its priorities always seem to be income redistribution and culture war stuff.

There was one guy with a flag near the Chateau Laurier. That was certainly referenced all over the media. I have not seen or heard of any more. There was probably a confederate flag or two since for whatever odd reason that seemed to have become associated on the right with rebellion against the established order and states rights (or provincial here I suppose).

Steven Guilbeault has entered the conversation.

Can we not predict twenty years into the past? Can we not see that our productivity has lagged and its growth has lagged our peer countries and predict that will continue?

Trudeau says "No!" to that. Everything his government has done since taking office has been aimed at restricting and delaying any growth in the natural resources sector.

If there were Nazi and confederate flags 'everywhere' they'd have been all over the media.

Blacks represent about 3% of the population. So if you have 50 friends (anyone here have 50 friends?) then statistically 1.5 should be Black. If you have only twenty friends, then statistically none would likely be Black.

You also don't much care what happens to Canada, and have said so.

It would be nice to think Canada could simply stand aside and ignore all this, as Trudeau seems intent on doing. But there's absolutely zero reason to believe that will work. We know our economy is deteriorating, along with our standard of living, has been for years, and will for as far in the future as we can see. We know we're piling up mountains of debt, that our workd competitiveness is low and diminishing, and productivity per person is decreasing, and bureaucracy is growing everywhere. And it's not hard to see why. Writing in American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson cited across-the-board moves to socialism as the culprit for today’s malaise. He described the trend as, “The endless war against merit,” saying that, “Once socialism takes hold, every mediocrity, every ossified bureaucracy, every constipated careerist, every hack writer and nobody actor, comes out of the woodwork to find his socialist ‘fair share’ of what he lacked in talent or accomplishment. ” Gerard Baker offered an even grimmer assessment in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, saying the West “is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries,” as it is moving away from notions of “meritocracy and audacious dynamism,” to a new social order based more on virtue than ability. Baker contends that the West, notably the U.S., is not losing because the authoritarian or autocratic systems are superior but because “we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.” Canada is similarly undermined. The drug of deficit spending saps any sense of normalcy or prudence in public financing. Rampant funding of the pandemic response and the climate apocalypse are two examples, along with education and health care measures that may have superficial popularity but sidestep pressing needs for genuine reform. Western societies are becoming more cynical about their leaders and many of their institutions. The moral and spiritual fibre of religion is waning. Fundamental tenets of civilization are eroded in the U.S. by increasingly lawless behaviour, notably crime in major cities and a total breakdown of border controls. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/another-bipolar-world-order-is-upon-us-and-the-west-only-has-itself-to-blame

It is not so hidden. A well-functioning housing market results in the market price of housing being close to the feasible cost of constructing it. If prices persistently exceed this construction cost, it is often due to barriers that inhibit new construction. These barriers often stem from excessive regulations. We estimate that, because of the barriers to building more single-family houses, homebuyers in the eight most restrictive cities paid an extra $229,000 per new house between 2007 and 2016. In Vancouver, the cost of housing restrictions is by far the largest in Canada, at $600,000 for the average new house, and ranks among the largest internationally as a share of market costs. Why are housing costs so high? We find that restrictions and extra costs on building new housing – such as zoning regulations, development charges, and limits on housing development on both Greenbelt land and land between urban areas and the Greenbelt – are dramatically increasing the price of housing. The extra costs on new and existing homes are over $100,000 in some Ontario municipalities. https://www.cdhowe.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/Friday Commentary_513.pdf

Is it? Says who? Like, if we cut immigration in half would our population fall? Well? No, actually. It would continue to rise. And maybe if houses were a little more affordable and people had better-paying jobs, and more hope for the future they'd have more kids.

When you have a federal government determined to flood the country with immigrants, refugees, temporary foreign workers, and foreign students. https://betterdwelling.com/canada-didnt-have-a-real-estate-supply-shortage-but-its-gov-may-create-one-bmo/ https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/trudeaus-immigration-policy-worsening-housing-174006902.html https://cibccm.com/en/insights/articles/in-focus-housing-demand-from-newcomers-even-stronger-than-perceived/

“This is code-word information,” said a U.S. official familiar with the matter, using terminology that refers to one of the highest classification levels used by American spy agencies. Trump “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” Fox News confirms Trump mocked US troops as ‘suckers’; Trump Has Mocked the U.S. Military His Whole Life New Report Alleges Trump Didn't Want 'Wounded Guys' in a Military Parade: 'Doesn't Look Good For Me' “we have a woke military that can’t fight or win, as proven in Afghanistan.” The problem with the drooling trumptard set like yourself is you presume people who accurately judge his lack of charter, intelligence, morality, honesty, and ability to be far too low to qualify for any public position presume we admire the guy who holds it now or the opponent he defeated. But your fanatic worship of a guy who bought his degree, whose money came from daddy, and whose own former cabinet mocks, jeers and ridicules him reveals only your own pathetic moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Boot lickers like you have always puzzled me, ever ready to defend indefensible people in pursuit of some frenzied ideological goal the sane world can't comprehend.

Uh these people do not make chips that are remotely cutting edge. These chips are slow and inefficient and good only for routine tasks. You're not going to switch to another supplier of batteries when China's are cheap and plentiful and when they control the rare earths needed (and prices charged) to battery makers outside China. China controls 80% of the market for many solar panel components. Have 'other' sources popped up in the last twenty years? No, they're disappearing. Hell, even our own country can't produce plywood - PLYWOOD - as cheaply as China! They now have over half the market here in Canada and are growing it through dumping and harvesting wood anywhere and everywhere, as well as government subsidies. Not only can't we make manufactured or technology products now we can't even do WOOD. They have a billion home grown consumers to support them. And they need not cut off everyone at once. They can just cut off Canada to make us bow (even more than we already bow) to their will. And they are in the process of buying out or running foreign competition out of business elsewhere, too.

Canada and other Western nations are on a suicidal road to bankruptcy and conquest by China. Their pursuit of CO2 emissions reductions at literally any cost has transferred massive wealth from their own countries to China and the third world. Their new promises to do away with the sale of gasoline-powered cars at a ridiculously early date is going to crash their auto industries and hand yet another entire industry to China, which has been using profits from relocated Western factories to modernize their military, bribe western politicians, and buy up natural resources around the world, especially rare earth minerals needed for the EV market. They already control over 60% of battery production and that number is growing every year. They're producing a growing number of EV vehicles and will probably push aside the western automakers by supplying consumers in the west with EV cars much cheaper than can be built in the energy-expensive West. And there's only so long Western leaders can go on hiding this by borrowing vast sums of money. China already controls most of the solar panel and wind turbine production) consumer goods manufacturing, including everything from clothing to TVs to refrigerators, supplies most of our medicines or the raw materials that go into making them, supplies a growing number of computers and computer parts and communications devices and systems. And the West is set to hand them production of our transportation as well. China won't need to conquer us militarily. They will only have to threaten to cut back on its supplies of goods to bring any western government to its knees. And meanwhile western leaders are frantically trying to decide on policies for pronouns and diversity.

The right person? Define 'right'? The primary purpose of appointing her was so Trudeau could raise his chin and make that smug smile as he notched up another diversity appointment. So yes, she is the right person to fulfill the primary purpose of the appointment.

Yes, Canada’s new passport really is that bad JEN GERSON SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2023UPDATED 1 HOUR AGO FOR SUBSCRIBERS It’s actually pretty rare for something to come along that manages to transform the nation from perfect indifference to utter pique in the course of one day, but somehow this government has managed it. I am talking, of course, about the most important news to emerge from this week – our passport redesign. Ottawa has managed to produce something so ugly, juvenile, and banal that I’m actually personally offended. The new documents are so ugly that they feel like an insult to Canadian identity and people. They reveal the inner psychology of a government that is so pathologically self-hating, it may risk dooming the very concept of nation itself. “Oh, come now, it could not be that bad!” I hear you objecting. Couldn’t it? Let’s divide our critique into two categories: the first, an examination of the internal visa pages, and the second of the cover itself. I take it for granted that a redesign is necessary, and that the passport’s new security features are all very fine and well and cool. So let’s look at the internal pages, in which all traces of history, all heroes, and all national monuments have been replaced with a bland cartoon of Canadiana that looks better suited to my toddler’s placemat. This style of graphic design resembles a school known as Corporate Memphis, which Wikipedia reliably tells me is “a flat, geometric art style, widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s.” For most of us, it looks like the inoffensive yet dystopian clip art that adorns uninspired PowerPoint presentations. By removing the gritty images of Vimy Ridge and Terry Fox, this government has managed, incredibly, to p1ss off both the Royal Canadian Legion and the mayor of Terry Fox’s hometown in the same day. They should have strangled a beaver in maple syrup and gone for the trifecta. Anyway, like a lot of people, I’m tempted to read too much into this. We are told that there is no political motivation behind erasing images of Canadian history from the passport: that this isn’t reflective of a government that sees itself leading a corporatist, post-national state; nor one that regards all expressions of nationalism as an embarrassing anachronism. There’s no deeper symbolic meaning to the fact that they have chosen to remove the rough edges, blood, sacrifice, and failure of the past and replace it with a two-dimensional cartoon version of the country. Of course, I’m tempted to say that these are the kinds of changes that demonstrate that Ottawa sees itself not as the living embodiment of a nation, but rather as nothing more than an administrative fiction, overseeing the transfer of funds between a bland and homogenized population. But then, I’ve also been around long enough to remember when the money mostly featured birds, and our fragile sense of national identity managed to survive. I’m just saying that bureaucrats in Ottawa could have spared me hours of hellish introspection about the nature of the modern state, and the role of Microsoft Word’s Clippy if they had chosen a passport that featured each province and territory’s official bird or flower or something. However, I can rise above this. I can forgive the inside pages. What I refuse to accept is the passport’s new cover. It’s an atrocity of design by committee. It’s as if the designers wanted to finally rid us of the colonial overtones implied by our noble heraldry, but lacked the courage of their convictions. Instead, our coat of arms has been sidelined to the left-hand corner, superimposed with a lazy, cartoonish maple leaf. The whole thing comes off as incoherent, juvenile, and uninspired. It’s the visual equivalent of watching King Charles trying to hold a coronation in a third-rate suburban Apple store. The redesign offends whatever lingering national pride and aesthetic sense I possess. Symbols matter. A shared sense of history and narrative matters. And if we’re going to live in a third-rate, rich-world country, at the very least we can get the design right. We deserve better than this passport. We, as a nation, cannot fix all that ails us, but we don’t have to be complacent about every single thing. We can do better than the forgotten archives of clip art lingering in Microsoft Word. We can aspire, at the very least, to be as good as the stuff on Etsy.

Well, it would have helped if he hadn't provided Russia's ambassador with secret information and hadn't acted like a wide-eyed gushing fanboy every time he heard Putin's name, and if he hadn't sneered at his own military, policing and security agencies in favor of whatever Putin said to him at any given point in time. It would have helped, in other words, if he hadn't done everything he could to make it obvious he was Putin's b1tch.

They could do worse.

There's a lot more antipathy between left and right, esp on social issues. This is all American-driven but it's been echoed by the Trudeau Liberals here, as well as a lot of other elements of the Left