I am Groot

I still believe they have to get a majority or the other parties will support the Liberals.

Climate change isn't a globalist fantasy. And yes, we're all going to have to deal with local consequences. However, while I agree with the stated problem I don't agree with the prescription for solving it. That is, lowering global CO2 sounds right. It's just not doable with present technology. And I most definitely do not agree with damaging our economy by making energy and transportation more expensive while 80% of the world is building coal plants. China alone has increased its CO2 production by almost a thousand times the amount Canada has managed to decrease ours. They need to keep building more coal plants to power all those factories that are leaving Canada, the US and other western countries that are increasing the cost of CO2 production, you see. Those factories are setting up shop in places like China, India and Mexico, that don't have any carbon taxes.

The Liberals have redesigned Canada's passport to remove all traces of our history from its pages, continuing its policy of cultural genocide against English Canadians. The new passport features completely new imagery throughout its 37 pages, which are now printed on material similar to the new Canadian bank notes. Gone are the pictures of historic Canadian icons, locations and moments such as the Fathers of Confederation, explorer Samuel de Champlain, Niagara Falls and the Last Spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. Instead, the new passport’s visa pages depict sketches of Canada throughout the seasons, such as birds at a feeder, an Indigenous kayaker, narwhals with golden tusks breaching the water and a man raking leaves into a wheelbarrow in front of a home. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/federal-government-unveils-new-passport

The problems the Americans have are exactly the same as Canada, as the UK, as the EU. We are all a victim of laws and treaties signed in the days following WW2. Those treaties and laws were aimed at the few people able to escape from behind the iron curtain. No one put a lot of thought into the wider world since it was far away and it wasn't likely people from most of the world would be able to get to America or Europe anyway. But those treaties were signed and passed into law and have become a part of the law in each of our nations. Those who say that the US should just put up a wall and shoot those who cross it know nothing about their own country's laws. The US can no more refuse to admit people claiming asylum than Canada can. Or the EU. The courts take the signing of the treaties on refugees as part of law once confirmed by parliament (in Canada) or ratified by the senate (in the US). So everyone who shows up and says the magic words has to be admitted and given a proper hearing. The bureaucracy and legalisms in all of our western countries is complex and so bureaucratic that it takes years just to get a hearing. Which means, if you want to refuse people at the border you need to repudiate the treaties, enforce borders against illegal entry, and change a few laws. So far, no country has done any of these things. That includes the United States. For decades, business interests, including unpleasant places like meat packing plants, fish plants and the like, and especially agriculture, have profited from cheap, migrant labor from Mexico. So Republicans have not been much interested in stopping it. Democrats haven't either because they used to see all racial minorities as future Democratic voters once the periodic amnesties come out. Now they're gripped by this weird anti-nationalism and anti-racism that sees any attempt to stop the migration of 'brown people' as racism, and thus unforgivable. And the fact Democratic and Republican voters have wanted it stopped for decades has had zero impact on either party. When Trump came out and said he'd do it that was a big part of the reason a lot of people gave him a try. Only he didn't do anything about the laws - or much of anything for the first two years when Republicans had control of House and senate. He only started to complain about it after that because he could blame the Democratic House for not going along. You want to end the migrations, change the bloody laws. Or quit whining.

Maybe because it hollowed out America by sending all the manufacturing and industrial jobs to China and elsewhere? Sure, jobs flooded in, but they're knowledge jobs meant for people with IT degrees in big urban centres. Globalism has been very good for Seattle, San Francisco and New York. Not so good for Michigan, Ohio and Illinois (except for Chicago, of course). You think middle America has turned to meth because of how great globalism has been for them? By the way, the middle class in the US has shrunk from about 61% of the population to 51% over that period. In fact, the middle class is shrinking all across the western world, and their share of income is decreasing. https://qz.com/1592826/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-generation-by-generation

You mean like Desantis would run the country while Trump would sit in the back room getting in twitter fights with celebrities? Like that kind of team?

And larger ones. The narrative on climate change is so much bullshit, but Canadians, like Americans, like Europeans, tend to be fairly knowledge free. And their media, like ours, is all on the same page and won't tolerate dissent. The whole effort at making energy and transportation cleaner is making it more expensive. It's punishing the poor and middle class. And that punishment will get worse over time. This is something the media and politicians are refusing to tell them. The upper class pushing this is making out like bandits. The upper middle class, esp in urban areas, which most major media, academia and politicians belong to will be able to ride it out without too much trouble. The country as a whole, ours and everyone else in the West, will get poorer. There will be fewer jobs, less money for things like healthcare, roads, bridges and other infrastructure, as well as social and other government services. None of this will harm the rich, who are heavily invested in the 'green revolution'. The people it will harm the most, aside from the poor, are rural people who need to use a lot of energy, or whose jobs are in natural resource industries that use a lot of energy. Farmers might be heavily subsidized but this is hurting them already, which is why you see farmer revolts in a number of European countries and one starting to brew here. And they will all get worse as government, pandering to the frightened urbanites who have been almost deliberately misinformed by scientific bodies eager for grants and subsidies and a media that loves scary stories, continue to tighten the screws on energy intensive industries.

It makes sense from THEIR perspective. Which tends to be narrow and narcissistic.

de·men·tia noun a condition characterized by progressive or persistent loss of intellectual functioning, especially with impairment of memory and abstract thinking, and often with personality change, resulting from organic disease of the brain.

ob·liv·i·ous adjective not aware of or not concerned about what is happening around one. "she became absorbed, oblivious to the passage of time"

You think Trudeau is the entirety of government? Every institution is filled with people at the top who are pushing rules, regulations and behaviour that is sent down from the PMO

We don't have an identity. Your leader even said so. Rather proudly, I might add. Having done a good job, along with his father, of ethnic cleansing.

Imagine, conservatives caring about history, traditions and national institutions! Good liberals care nothing for such things! They know Canada has no core identity, no sense of shared unity, no past and no future! It's not like we're even a nation! Which is a good thing since we're systemically racist and genocidal. Live for today, and worry about the debt some other day!

Well, to start with, you can't exist in rural areas without a car, or, usually, multiple cars. And you use a LOT of fuel. They used to. According to the article that's being reversed now in an era of WFH and ridiculous costs of living in the city. What they also don't like is being taxed in a way which disproportionately harms them as compared to city dwellers. Not to mention having their industries shut down Not everyone who lives outside the cities is a farmer.

You mean all those city dwellers with public transit when there is none outside the cities, right? All those people living in condos whose heating costs are low compared to places exposed to the wind and cold on all five sides?

That's unrealistic. The economy has never run that way - anywhere, as far as I'm aware. No matter what the political or economic system. I do find it concerning about this talk of hollowing out urban areas to leave only the well healed and the poor as the middle class flees to suburbia, or the exurbs or rural areas. We see that happening here, in no small measure due to the high cost of real estate in urban areas. It's also much easier for people who live downtown (public transit) and in condos to support ideas about taxing fuel and shutting down resource industries when it doesn't impact them nearly as much as those who live outside the cities. They also don't have to see the forests of windmills cluttering up the skyline.

I thought this article resonated with Canada's own politics, as well as the US and Europe, particularly on climate change, which is being urged on by urban dwellers oblivious or uncaring that so much of the expense will be borne by those in more rural areas. The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts. Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades. https://unherd.com/2023/05/what-really-divides-america-2/

And I'm sure you get my point. It's not done today because the US is restrained by its freed media, independent courts and opposition politicians. China faces no such restraints. It does not care what anyone thinks of how it treats countries or the people within those countries its voracious demand for resources is virtually colonizing. Chinese people will never hear of it if China decided to start using its ever-growing navy to harass and intimidate countries it has lured into debt bondage. No opposition politicians exist, nor any independent courts to stop them.

When was the last time the US did that?

They've won before without many of them. I think the recurring problem in Canada is that too many of us want the government to do everything but blow our nose when we sneeze. We don't like to pay high taxes, though. So the government borrows money. Then as the bills mount some people start to get nervous about the enthusiasm the Liberal government has for borrowing money. So we turn to the conservatives to pay it off. Then we get tired of the cuts and hard-nosed government and want the 'kind and gentle' nanny-style government again to sooth all our hurts and tell us nothing is our fault. Or at least try. Or at least, as with the current government, pretend to try. The thing is, the conservatives can't BE conservatives and be THAT kind of government.

Disagree. The way a superpower China would/will behave is a lot more brutal than what the US is capable of. They, at least, have a free press, voters, and laws to contend with. None of this restrains China.

He's still got a lot of nukes, but his military has turned out to be something of a paper tiger, probably because of decades of corruption and appointing officers for their loyalty and not on merit. They've been reduced to flinging Iranian made drones at the Ukrainians for want of anything else. Can you imagine the US begging a third world country for modern weapons it can use against an enemy?

Supported what? Pride in Canada and in its traditions, institutions, history and values? That is a conservative thing, after all. They don't need to boycott them. They just need to stop being pussies. You ever watch British interviews and interview shows? They're not nearly as polite as our reporters when a politician won't answer the question.

The urban areas are where those most disposed towards big government live, including millions of public sector workers and their famiies, all the graduates of liberal arts programs and the various xxx studies programs, and most of those on various welfare programs. It's where people expect a government to take care of everything for them, including transport them around, supply them with water and sewage, and provide them with sport and entertainment. People in the more rural areas take care of all this themselves. They rarely have much contact with government and like it that way.