I am Groot

The problem is almost no one can get elected outside the party. And so your political career ends if you annoy the party. Unlike in places like the UK the PM gets to decide whether you run again under your party banner. The only way they'd get brave would be in a situation where the government had a very slim majority and several or half a dozen of its MPs got together to make demands and negotiate.

That 'social construct' has all kinds of rules, laws and regulations built around it designed to protect smaller, weaker females and allow them to live an equal existence with males. There are female sports leagues, for example, in recognition of the physical differences between males and females. There are positions set aside at universities for females. There are female schools and dorms. Female prisons. There are various grants and scholarships. There are male and female showers, and other female only spaces in recognition of the anatomical/biological differences. The differences between male and female don't go away because a man declares himself a woman, nor even if they take hormones. And the trans activists' insist that trans women be recognized not merely as women but as females - which they are not. Gender dysmorphia is a real thing. But the fanaticism of trans activists allows for no nuance and no questioning. Their absurd view that a man is a woman the instant he says he is goes against all logic. You call yourself a woman? Get therapy, then get treatment. Have yourself castrated. Have your body altered. If you were really certain you were born in the wrong body and hate being in that body then have it surgically altered. If you're not prepared to do that then don't intrude into female spaces. Don't give me any bullshit about your 'female penis'. Don't tell me you just decided last Tuesday you're a woman (the day you were convicted of raping women).

These are the words you can't use:

I wouldn't be except he is such a proponent of cancel culture himself, always quick to hurl insults questioning others' commitment to antiracism and other identity war commitments. Ethics issues are not something he could use to fire someone, given his own repeated transgressions. Besides, she's Asian. The standards are different for racialized people. Which is why brainless fools like Sajjan are still in cabinet.

Oh come on. Even one such instance has been known to destroy careers. And for someone as sanctimonious as Trudeau to have done it multiple times, including with a banana in his pants, and pay no political prices is pretty wild. I have no doubt that if it had been one of Trudeau's MPs with the same history he'd have booted him from caucus and sternly spoken of the need to call our racism and punish it wherever it is found.

The RCMP commissioner is a diversity hire who knows who's buttering her bread and does as she's told.

He hasn't acquiesced. He's throwing out smoke and mirrors to try to pretend he's acquiescing. There is no independent or public investigation. And what do I not really know? All I said was the Liberal majority on that committee will make all the decisions, including terms of reference, witnesses, and what is made public.

All members of this committee have to swear an oath of secrecy under the official secrets act, too. So even the opposition members won't be able to say anything publicly.

It's also not an official committee of parliament and thus has no power to demand information from the government. It was created by ... Justin Trudeau, in fact. It not only can't subpoena information, it can't appeal if cabinet says no. What witnesses it calls will be decided by the Liberal majority. What terms of investigation it chooses to use will be set by the Liberal majority. And you can be sure that will NOT include the principle questions Canadians want answered: What did the Liberals know about these alleged Chinese agents, when were they informed, and what, if anything did they then do?

This is simply not true. Canada's system is based on Cuba's. No one else in the world uses it but us and North Korea. Of course, it works well for Cuba because they can set the prices and salaries and it's not that easy to leave. It does not work in Canada.

It's amusing that you point out the enormous flaw in your lunatic belief in equal treatment even as you pretend it doesn't matter. Yes indeed, the rich do trot off to the US to get treatment. They also have special clinics that don't use public healthcare dollars in Canada. None of your 'no one can buy better healthcare here' bullshit works with the rich. They do get better healthcare. Of course, they do! The people who don't are the middle class. The middle-class guy who is in constant pain for a year and a half being treated with opioids, who would certainly rather put money into getting a knee or hip replacement than buying a new sofa or taking a vacation down south, but can't because the communists won't let him. You're devoted to a principle which has never worked and will never work. But that doesn't seem to bother you. You'll screw everyone else in your determination to somehow make the impossible dream come true.

So here is another example of how the Left is destroying Canada. From the Globe and Mail, a leftist reporter speaks happily about how the teaching of history in Canadian schoolrooms now focuses on grievances and abuses, encouraging separate ethnic groups to look at only their own grievance history and wallow in being victims while hating the evil oppressor majority. It's important to indoctrinate children with the information that Canada is a terrible country, after all. Canadian history was overdue for a rewrite Charlotte Gray is a biographer and historian who won the Pierre Berton Award in 2003. The Governor-General of Canada usually chooses her words with careful, unsmiling deliberation. But her anger at the way that Canadian history has, until recently, been taught in our schools was unmistakable. “It has been uneven and it is unfair,” Mary Simon said. “This country is so diverse, but for the longest time our history didn’t reflect the richness of that diversity. Indigenous people were misrepresented. This was racism presented as fact – as history – something to teach children.” Last November, I met Ms. Simon in the Citadelle, the head of state’s official residence in Quebec City. Outside the window, way below the 18th century stone ramparts, the wide St. Lawrence River glimmered in the winter sunlight. Generations of Canadian children learned in school how European explorers – first the French, then the English – laboriously made their way up that river to claim for their monarchs this “empty” patch of a vast continent that they had recently discovered. The story evolved, according to their textbooks, as Canada unshackled itself from European empires and established first a federation of “two founding peoples,” then complete independence. High-minded statesmen replaced the swashbuckling adventurers, and established “peace, order and good government” (POGG) for the settler society. It was a grand narrative, designed to explain how the modern state grew and to build a sense of nationalism. Except that it was often based on dubious scholarship and, as the Governor-General pointed out, it excluded so many other stories: “We have glossed over and denied events or policies or truths that are hard to face,” she said. The histories of Indigenous peoples, non-European immigrants and women were invisible. Ms. Simon, who grew up in the Arctic with an Inuk mother and a father of English origin, was an adult, slowly emerging as a forceful Northern voice in constitutional debates, before she realized the ignorance of most Canadians about life beyond the strip of settlement near the U.S. border. “I was always astonished at how non-Indigenous people had no knowledge of Indigenous people. They just lumped us all together as ‘Aboriginal people.’ They didn’t know anything about who we were, or our lives, or what residential schools were.” However, that was Canada up to the late 20th century. Ms. Simon’s presence in the Citadelle, as Canada’s first Indigenous head of state, symbolizes the way that this country is struggling to make its history and its politics more inclusive. Today, the Governor-General speaks frequently and forcefully about the need to “seek out the truth of our history,” as she put it in the Queen’s University Tom Courchene Lecture last year. But if the demolition of the old self-serving narrative of Canadian history, focused on all those POGG white guys, was overdue, what are students in public and high schools across the country learning in its stead? While scholars within universities argue about historicism versus presentism, and angry crowds pull down statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, what is happening in classrooms? I had heard some answers to such questions earlier in the day, at the presentation of the prestigious Governor-General’s History Awards to 13 teachers in the Citadelle’s ballroom. The teachers had been selected by Canada’s National History Society, the Winnipeg-based organization that wants citizens today to understand their country’s past better. The range of these teachers’ projects was astonishing for anybody who had not set foot in a history classroom in the past 15 years. For example, Cynthia Bettio, who taught a class of Grade 10 high achievers in a large Richmond Hill, Ont., high school, explained with pride, “In my classroom, we don’t just learn history, we do history.” The curriculum required the class to study Canadian history from 1914 to the present day, and Ms. Bettio designed a course in which those years were seen from the perspective of traditionally under-represented groups, including Indigenous people, racialized communities and women. The students, a large number from non-European backgrounds who typify urban diversity in today’s Canada, learned what questions to ask of any historical narrative, and how to assess and evaluate different sources. Ms. Bettio told me that she “really wanted to ensure that my students could see themselves in the history of the country they call their own.” For example, Sikh students realized that there were events in the past that were relevant to their community, such as the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. Students whose families had fled the war in Syria glimpsed parallels with that conflict and what happened in Holland during the Second World War. Ms. Bettio described how “they saw the connections between past events and the realities they have as Canadians.” By the end of the year, the students had learned to think about the ethical dimensions of what has happened in the past, and how events are remembered. More than a 1,000 kilometres away, in the small Manitoba town of Hartney (population 462), teachers Carla Cooke and Tracey Salamondra had taken an entirely different approach to the same challenge: Showing their Grade 11 students “how to do history.” Rural teenagers rarely see themselves reflected in large, national narratives, but their teachers developed a course that had little to do with Confederation or the Charter of Rights and everything to do, in Ms. Salamondra’s words, with “history that exists outside the textbooks and the cities.” These teenagers were invited to produce interpretive panels for a trail through a local park. They visited the local museum to do artifact research, scoured online newspaper archives, conducted interviews with local historians and volunteers, and constructed a narrative about Prairie settlement. Ms. Salamondra stopped worrying that her students could not afford to attend well-publicized school trips to the Vimy battleground and enjoyed seeing how enthusiasm for a local history project spread through the whole school. “When kids know their community,” Ms. Salamondra said, “they know part of themselves.” The students also realized how one-sided historical accounts can be. They noticed that their local museum had disproportionally few Indigenous artifacts and sources. The teachers I met in Quebec City came from seven of Canada’s 10 provinces, and were as likely to work in small elementary schools as high schools. In Halifax, for example, a group of 22 students in Grade 1 chose to research a little-known Black doctor, Dr. Clement Ligoure, who had played a key role in helping the injured after the 1917 Halifax Explosion. Their teacher, Natasha Camacho, showed them how to find materials in local museums and archives. “They were thrilled to discover for themselves that Dr. Ligoure lived and practised just a few steps from their school,” she said. The class, which included five Black students, reported their findings in writing and art projects, and produced a documentary. They were shocked to learn that their families and neighbours had not heard of this important figure, because he seldom appears in most accounts of the 1917 disaster. They sent petitions to the mayor requesting a heritage plaque in front of Dr. Ligoure’s house; this gave them “a sense of their own agency,” Ms. Camacho said. Even six-year-olds can reshape history. Luisa Fracassi, who teaches in an east end Toronto school where nine out of 10 students come from minority groups, developed a course for her Grade 10 history class that she called “Immigrant Voices” and involved changes in Canadian immigration policy from the 1960s. The students participated in two virtual tours of the Pier 21 Museum in Halifax, on Jewish and Asian immigration, looking at primary sources such as photos and letters. Next, they attended a workshop on how to conduct oral history interviews. Then each student conducted one, often with a grandparent, which they then had to transcribe and shape into a story. Ms. Fracassi explained how the project helped students see how their stories connected them “to the broader history of Canadian immigration.” These days, there is little Canadian history in Canadian classrooms – only one mandatory high-school course in most provinces, and no compulsory courses elsewhere. That gives teachers only a small window to instill an interest in our collective past. And most teachers are facing students who have already learned not to take anything on trust, and who frequently come from families who have been in this country for less than two or three generations. So the past two decades have seen a revolution in history teaching in schools, as educators rewrote the curriculum so it might resonate with today’s students. The focus today is on acquisition of history skills, rather than assimilation of facts, so students can see how to “do” history for themselves. Layered on top of this is the new attention to Indigenous history – one of the “calls to action” in the 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many of the educators in Quebec City had put the spotlight on Indigenous history. Barbara Giroux’s Grade 1 class in Ottawa had tracked news stories about Indigenous people today, then formulated the question, “Do all Canadian children have the same rights? If not, why not?” Jen Maxwell’s Grade 12 class in Abbotsford, B.C., researched the TRC’s 94 calls to action, then developed their own ideas about how to take concrete action on those calls. In Winnipeg, elementary teacher Jacqueline Cleave’s students explored the TRC’s calls to action, then researched the issues of colonization they address through meetings with Indigenous elders and visits to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. The book that the students produced, featuring the calls to action in child-friendly language, is now in local schools and libraries. In some cases, students themselves selected their topic. In Manitoba, a group of students at Winnipeg’s Westwood Collegiate came up with a project on the Holocaust, then educator Kelly Hiebert organized an extracurricular history society to help them pursue it. The teenagers produced a documentary featuring interviews with nine Holocaust survivors in the city about the hatred and antisemitism they had encountered in Europe and Canada. But before they embarked on the interviews, the students had consulted historians and educators including officials at the United States Holocaust Museum. Production of the video involved a specially composed soundtrack, plus archival film interspersed through the interviews. The documentary, titled, Truth Against Distortion: Survivors Speak Out Against the Rise of Hate, has been entered into several film festivals, widely distributed, and is available on YouTube. “A big part of the documentary was the parallels between the past and Canada today,” Mr. Hiebert explained. The students themselves were unsettled by the passionate media debates about mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Making the documentary, he said, showed them “how history has to be told truthfully, with evidence from experts and primary sources, not just websites and Twitter. They became very critical consumers of social media.” The teachers knew that their approaches were controversial. I heard several of their anecdotes about angry parents asking, “When are you going to stop this propaganda?” or “When are you going to start teaching proper history?” The various projects might get students to engage with history, but even some of the teachers’ own colleagues asked why there was no overarching theme to explain the “big picture” of this country – the historical development of today’s Canada that might give students a coherent sense of national identity. Rose Fine-Meyer, a curriculum expert at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and one of the National History Society’s judges for the awards, is as impatient as the Governor-General with that argument: “The old ‘master narrative’ of Canadian history was always a false construct,” she said. “Why do you need a dominant narrative? There is no single story – except our interrelationship with each other on this land.” Civics and social-studies classes teach how government works and the requirements of citizenship. Today’s history classes highlight a diverse, multicultural and fragmented history, in which Jacques Cartier, Mackenzie King or Lester Pearson may or may not have walk-on parts. The best teachers, in Ms. Fine-Meyer’s view, introduced the craft of the history profession to their students, then encouraged them to take those skills outside the classroom and use them in hands-on experiences to explore multiple and diverse perspectives on their topic. At the Governor-General’s History Awards ceremony, Ms. Simon encouraged the teachers to keep building “platforms for inclusivity,” and for addressing head on “inequality, diversity and inclusion.” She said that those who bemoaned “what they call a ‘rewriting’ of history or questioning historical figures from our country’s past” were missing the point. “We are telling a fuller history.” It is certainly a larger history, and I would be happy to see any child taught by the teachers I met. But it is also a radically different approach to history than the one I absorbed in my own education, during which teachers drew on the past to shape national pride and literary skills. Today’s history educators in Canada put the emphasis on “critical thinking skills”: They teach students to gather, analyze, interpret and assess diverse historical evidence. These are skills essential for an informed citizenry in the age of social media, conspiracy theories and polarized politics. The narratives I was taught certainly had a propaganda element, but the Canadian history being taught today has abandoned any attempt at a modern, integrated narrative that encompasses a far wider range of experiences. Perhaps such a narrative is impossible in a sprawling, diverse country like Canada, with a demographic churn that transforms communities from one generation to the next. Yet there are distinct, common values that have persisted and evolved through the years – support for gun control, bodily autonomy, compromise rather than conflict, health care as a common good. The roots of those shared values, which make Canada the country it is, lie in the past – back to Confederation and beyond.

As opposed to the ideologues who's response is always "Everything's great! Just add a tiny bit more money and we'll be fine! Nothing to see here!" There we have an example of the Communist belief that money must not influence anything about your treatment or how long it takes.

Germany's healthcare system largely works. Canada's often does not. It has the longest wait times of any country in the OECD. Millions of people can't find a family doctor because the government deliberately failed to allow enough to be trained for many years in a row. There's a severe shortage of nurses for the same reason. There is no private insurance or care in Canada (with a very few exeptions) except for things the healthcare system doesn't cover. Canadians have been led to believe anything but a Communist style system where all are completely equal and no one may pay to get better healthcare is the only alternative to the US and its lack of public healthcare. The media largely defends this principle and savagely attacks any suggestion of privately supplied care. Or indeed, any real change to the current system. Needless to say, you won't actually find the rich waiting ten or twenty hours at an emergency room or waiting months or years for an operation. Just as in the Soviet Union, not all pigs are equal. The rich have their own doctors, their own clinics, and will fly across the border to the US for quick surgery if it's needed.

Oh? Only then? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-hospital-levis-grandmother-1.6766057

Ukraine is not invited and has never been invited to join NATO. And it's not like Ukraine brings much to NATO anyway but trouble. How would a Ukraine in NATO be more dangerous to the Russians? Their military was crap until Russia started attacking them and NATO started arming and training them. The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is a paranoid delusion. But if it wanted to it has countries right next to Russia already, notably Estonia and Latvia, and soon Finland.

Here's a crazy idea. Let's charge a lot for birth control and make diapers and baby formula free...

Ukraine was not invited to join NATO, though it had been asking for twenty years. I don't know if Biden's hearing is good enough to meet face to face with Putin since Putin's meetings seem to take place across fifty-foot-wide tables these days.

Surrendering to the enemy does tend to keep the fighting down, yes. Trump did not challenge the world's warlords and left them free to increase both their soft and hard power. If Trump had still been president Putin would still have attacked Ukraine. But the US would have pulled out of NATO (His National Security advisor said that was what Putin was expecting) and refused to do anything to help Ukraine. So the war would have been quickly over. As for putting the word 'trump' in the same sentence as 'american values'... uh, lol. Have you forgotten how much wokism grew during Trump's term in office?

I don't mind the bad word filter so much as the lack of information about what the bad word is. I usually get in trouble over various uses of 'idi0t' or 'm0ron', though I don't direct such words at specific people. Is there a reason why there's no highlighting?

The China he did business with was not the China we have today. It was the pre-Xi China.

I'm confused about what this argument is. The TPP was designed as a trading group that EXCLUDES China. It is basically a carrot to Asian nations who want to have less reliance on China for trade. It's not pro-China. It's the reverse. Harper wanted nothing to do with China in 2006. It was only after the financial crisis brought us into recession and the gang of three tried to take over that he gave in to their demands for better trade and relationships with China.

There seems to have been a noted lack of enthusiasm on the part of the CBC to cover the story of Trudeau and his Chinese election helpers. Not a conspiracy. Just a predilection on the part of a largely progressive media to not do anything to harm 'their team' if they can get away with it.

It's not that simple once they've gotten to the point of forcing their students here to both volunteer for and vote for a candidate and are funneling money into the candidate's campaign. Not to mention they way they can flood local Chinese language media with whatever messages they want.

CSIS says the theory that Americans helped finance the convoy are untrue. And neither the Russians nor the Americans are passing money under the table to federal candidates, nor ordering their students here to illegally vote for them.