I am Groot

About 15 or 16 years ago I had no car, so I regularly had my groceries delivered by an actual Canadian with a truck and a hand cart. It couldn't have cost much because we didn't have that much money back then. See, if you go to the grocery store and pick up dozens of boxes for people around the area, then you can make some money driving around and delivering them. But if you just go for one person's groceries and drive them to their home you make nothing. It's not quite as convenient for the customer since he only makes one or two trips while now you can pick what hour of the day you want your groceries delivered. But it works. Gee, thanks! Yes, but I didn't WANT to. Besides, you're subsidizing me!

I'm not sure you understand what I wrote. We're letting people use us as a springboard to the US. They come in on some pretext and then head for the US border. If we were more careful about who we let in we wouldn't have these people going to the border. In terms of drugs - we have no real law enforcement in this country, especially if you' 're a minority. You get arrested, and you get released same day. Poilievre can handle debats. We've seen that in the House. And he can handle questions from the media if he wants to.

Actually, when you're as far out front as he is that IS by far the most likely tactic. Why provide the other parties with ammunition to use against you? That is not a tactic developed by Trump either. Trudeau's father used it himself. Carney is a distant, lofty technocrat whose fixation on climate change would bankrupt us as it's currently doing to places like the UK and Germany.

I looked into the price of a Generac for my place last summer. It was about $20k installed, and I'm not willing to go that route just yet. Too much money for too little reward. What is Green policy? Other than declaring war on Israel, expelling all our Jews, and bringing in as many Palestinians as we can?

Canadians will never support a policy that will cost them literally TRILLIONS of dollars (as per reports) and achieve virtually NOTHING other than driving our industries offshore and hugely impoverishing us.

It most definitely IS our fault in the outrageous lack of interest, care or screening we give to the millions of third world people flooding across the borders. We don't even do criminal background checks on the students, a million of whom we've let in, nor ensure they're legitimate students. Masses of foreign workers with few job skills who we also know very little about. Hundreds of thousands of 'refugees' many of whom just step off a plane with no papers, having destroyed them en route. And we've done nothing about any of it. So yes, it is our fault. That's moronic. If by 'closest' you mean closest as in Newfoundland is closest to Europe. There's one helluva distance between them tho.

Every opposition leader follows the same basic behavioural pattern. They call out the government for everything they can but rarely offer solutions until election time (and sometimes not even then) for fear the government will actually take their advice and fix the problem - which helps the government and not the opposition.

You want them to do what exactly? Yell insults across the border? Think that's going to do much good? Poilievre will do better than Trudeau, I'm sure.

Couldn't get to the grocery store so ordered online and a slave brought it to my door this morning. You know what it costs to have him drive to the store, get my groceries, and drive here? Five bucks. And I'm pretty sure Doordash takes a hunk of that. Of course, since a lot of us don't like slaves parking in our pristine, perfectly plowed driveways he parked at the end of the driveway and made multiple trips up it to my door. But hey, that's what slaves are for. Mind you, the plastic covering on a 12 pack of drinks broke so I did have to call his masters and have him whipped for his incompetence. What do their drivers get? Four bucks? Of course, he couldn't speak English very well so I wasn't able to engage him in any deep, philosophical discussions. But anyway, if we're going to import slaves shouldn't they be young, attractive females (Yes, I'm male and irredeemably sexist and straight)? But should we actually be importing slave workers?

She DID have the credentials, but she forgot why she was given the job in the first place. All she had to do was be the mouthpiece of the PMO, do what she was told, say what she was told. That's all the qualifications you need to be in the PMO. Essentially, like Marc Garneau, she forgot that she was supposed to be a ventriloquist CENSORED with no opinions or views of her own. But like Garneau, when her senior people told her the orders she was being given by the PMO were CENSORED, she dared to question them, thinking she was important or something. Not allowed. Not in this government. This is a government of 1. No one else gets to have opinions.

Have you got a mirror in your place?

When governments agreed to let these organizations license professionals neither the governments of the day nor the organizations would dream of intruding into the lives of members to the extent they do today. He'll have no difficulty getting licensed in Florida. If you think they'd challenge him because he doesn't go along with everything the Left says about transgenderism you aren't familiar with that state or its government.

I'm betting JP was a member long before the psychologists got taken over by far left ideologues who eschew science in favour of whatever is the politically correct flavour of the month.

The way professional associations have expanded their role in supervising the lives of their membership has to be pruned back, or these associations themselves eliminated and their role taken over by elements of the public service. The problem with these groups is not a lot of people want to run them, but the zealots do since they can use them to influence society, to force people to think and act like they want. And we've seen takeovers in a whole lot of them by ideologues of the far left demanding all members support their own identitarian views. Since they have the power of government behind them it's nothing but censorship. If by "criticize and taunt ' trans people you mean 'mildly disagree with any element of their demands in any way shape or form ' then maybe. I've never seen an activist group that purports to be acting for human rights that is as vicious, as hateful, as intolerant, or as violent as the trans rights groups. A recent example being a soldier who died in Montreal last week in an accident. Apparently he spoke against the trans stuff online and some of those who had doxxed him found out. They inundated the funeral home's sympathy pages with jeers and contempt, saying they hope he rots in hell, that his family soon joins him, that he died in agony etc. These people are deeply emotionally and psychologically disturbed. Anyone who speaks out in public against anything related to trans rights gets attacked and gets death threats, even if they're lifelong leftists who speak sympathetically about transgender people but refuse to agree to things like sending male rapists who just 'discovered' they were female after their arrests to female prisons (like JK Rowling). But then you probably figure she's a talentless hack of no worth or value, I suppose. What ever made you think he could be a unifying figure when simply saying he didn't want to be compelled to use invented pronouns brought howls of hatred and death threats? Remember that girl who was a TA at an Ontario university who dared to show a couple of minutes of his TVO appearance to a communication class and got three hours of cultural revolution denunciation by professors and HR? Does that sound like he had the potential to be a unifying figure? And by the way, what do you mean by 'circus act". He gives lectures. He does interviews. That's it. It's not like there's a light show, music and dancers at his events.

The House and Senate both easily passed a law that the president can't pull out of NATO without their say so. They only introduced and passed it when it looked like Trump might become the candidate. And the Republicans helped the Democrats pass it. That seems to me to suggest even his own party is leery about what he might want to do to NATO.

Well aware of that. Then again, it was easy to get banned if you weren't like that. Including here. I still think covid shots were the proper thing to do. And if the bug hadn't mutated that would have pretty much ended things there and then. Because there is an absolute torrent of pro-carbon tax stories out there, a ton of stuff telling us how the world is going to end next month without it. ZERO stories about what the actual impact on global warming will be if we even meet our goals (which we won't). ZERO stories on how much this has all cost us and our economy. Where do you expect busy people to get their information from anyway if not the media? And when the media covers their own scientists or other 'experts' ordinary people are mostly going to believe them. I don't believe anyone in this country voted for it other than certain ethnic communities notorious for producing a lot of criminals. Have you ever had a job without an interview? What do you think a job interview is but an examination of your values? They already have your job history. They want to find out what kind of a person you are and how well you'll fit in. And there are all sorts of coaches and guides and example questions for job interviews, but you can't get hired in a fast-food restaurant without them. And if you think these tests are easy to fool you've never taken one. They don't just ask bald questions. They ask a series of questions that move around that bald question but still tell them what they want to know about you. Can they be fooled? Sure. So can job interviews. We still do them. Except not for immigrants. We conduct no interviews. We don't try to find out what kind of a person they are. People have missed out on citizenship and been deported in other countries for refusing to shake hands with an interviewer of the opposite sex. That's well-known, I would think. But people keep doing it. But we don't do interviews for citizenship either, of course. You get a 20 true/false and multiple-choice questions. No writing needed either. And you can do it over the internet. You sound old, like me, so you should know better. There was a time when our leaders were people, when they made jokes, when they showed their personality. Now it's all spin doctored into mush lest anyone cause offense. I don't think even those who voted for him knew just how many foreigners he would bring in, with how little scrutiny and preparation, or what the results of that would be. I knew in 2015 that he would never balance a budget and said so then. He never has and never will. The rest, I expected pretty much normal Liberal mush. I wasn't aware of the degree of DEI crap he would instill in every single area of government. Or how absolutely universally incompetent he and his cabinet and government would be.

It's always had an impact. It's just that it's become impossible for even the media to ignore. I'm fairly sure the large number of newcomers since the Mulroney government has had an impact on our wage stagnation and even the behaviour of employers. Ie, why train university grads up when you can just hire one of the flood of newcomers who's got lots of experience and will work cheaper? There's always been opposition, too. But that opposition had nowhere to go since all parties fully supported heavy immigration and none were willing to even suggest lowering it. Then, too, just because someone wants immigration lower doesn't mean that alone is going to guide their vote. People have lots of priorities in elections. I've never seen a poll that didn't have substantial opposition to heavy immigration. Usually close to half the population opposed it, often going over. Never seen an editorial criticizing immigration itself (as opposed to refugees, foreign workers and students). It's like it's a third rail. Even Postmedia only criticizes the latter, never the former. They all show a growing sense of discomfort with the levels of very foreign people filling the cities and not doing much to integrate. And some of them DO explicitly say immigration is too high, like the Angus Reid poll in 2018. No, man. It's not that easy. A bigger economy doesn't make it better. Bringing in lots of people gives us a higher GDP but if they're the wrong kind (low skilled) it lowers GDP per person and decreases government revenue (which requires them to tax higher income, ie, middle-income people more). That doesn't make the economy better at all. It makes it harder for young, inexperienced people here to find work and it pushes higher income people to go elsewhere. Lot of software people are working in the US because they pay better. They're replaced here by imports from India who will work cheap. But we don't have a more productive economy but a less productive economy. We have more people doing work cheaply which discourages employers from investing in new, modern equipment which would require fewer employees. We have a major productivity problem in this country because of a lack of proper creative destruction. Too much government interference keeping bad companies alive and flooding us with cheap labour so no one has to innovate. If I didn't say it here I said it the other day on another topic. Sure, employers will always seek to get the cheapest, meekest, most easily cowed employees. There's no reason the government should help them in this other than corruption. It's not good for the country or society. It might be good for certain members of that government when they retire or are booted out, though. I'd be interested to know where these people wind up working and for how much money and how that might relate to some of the policies they pushed while in office.

You're trying to choose trees and ignoring the forest. There are a lot of reasons to feel pride in Canada. In this huge, beautiful land that we occupy, in the great cities that we built, in being one of the most prosperous, peaceful, secure and tolerant countries in the world - and in history. There are REASONS millions of people want to come and live here. Starting with it's WAY better than where they are, way better than the places they and their ancestors built in almost every conceivable way. And our attitude - excluding immigrants - the attitude Canadians were raised in right up through my generation, was always one of a quieter kind of patriotism, which always seemed more confident to me. And it's likely that confidence that we've lost in the last generation or so. We were secure in who we were as a people, but now our cities are clogged with foreigners who have never integrated and have no desire to do so, foreigners who disdain our values, cultures and belief, yet wave their Canadian passport while our prime minister says they have more right to be Canadians than we do. The attitude of the cultural relativists has permeated liberal society for a generation, seeping into academia and taking it over, as well as the media and popular entertainment. All cultures are equal. We have no right to judge others as inferior and ours better. This smug, nonsensical belief is what people like Trudeau go by when they embrace the world and bring them here, then tell them to not adapt, to retain their cultures which we respect so much. This could just be a passing thing if we had a strong enough backlash. Boot out the anti-Canadian, anti-Western cultural relativists and academics and clean up the curriculums of our universities. Get rid of all the grievance and ethnic studies. Fire the teachers who have let themselves become indoctrinated and who seek to indoctrinate children. Stop giving ANY grants to the arts if their work is seen as denigrating Canada in any way. The CBC shouldn't be defunded. It should be disinfected. The Rosie O'Donnell types booted out the door along with all the producers who give us nonsensical, unentertaining garbage. The CBC ought to be an organ to encourage pride in Canada. As Abraham Lincoln said "The philosophy of the classroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next." We need to take back the classrooms from the hateful narcissists in charge today and turn them back to their original purpose of educating, not indoctrinating. And while we're at it, halt immigration except for specifically needed highly skilled jobs, and turn our hands to integrating the millions who have already arrived. Either they integrate or they leave. We don't need separate ethnic enclaves here full of people whose loyalty is to other lands and other cultures.

I didn't brand them innocent but ignorant. And it was rarely ordinary people who engaged in insults and ridicule. It was the media, the politicians, the academics, all part of that incestuous circle of Laurentian Elites. Or, of late, the adherents to the cult of antiracism indoctrinated by the postmodernists and cultural relativists at universities. Employers will always seek cheap, obedient employees. It's the government's job to ensure they don't cheat while doing so, that the government doesn't cooperate in helping them cheat Canadians. An excellent example of the difference was when Kellie Leitch proposed a 'values test' for potential immigrants during the 2017 Conservative leadership contest. Every politician and media personality condemned the idea, including every other Tory candidate. Some were scandalized, outraged at the very idea. Yet polls at the time showed the great majority of Canadians, including 80% of Conservative party voters supported the idea. How do the leaders of a party where 80% support a proposal reject it out of hand with contempt? It is the difference between our leaders and us. They have a different culture, different values. We saw the same thing back at the tail end of Harper's reign when they proposed banning women who wouldn't show their faces from being sworn in as Canadian citizens. The media were outraged, furious, heaping condemnation upon condemnation on the very idea. But the great majority of Canadians supported the idea. Same thing with Quebec's proposal to ban burquas and hijabs. The great majority of Canadians supported it and wished their own province would put in such a law. Not the media, though. The TFW system has been abused for decades. Though never more so than now. And of course, the larger IMP is even more abused because unlike the TFW employers don't even need to do a fake job ad or submit any evidence to the government that it couldn't find people for those jobs. The government encourages this because it helps keep wages down and thus makes the Liberals look better. That it harms Canadian workers is irrelevant.

The problem is, only those in charge can change the system, and they don't want to. They're quite happy that this system keeps almost all smart, capable, accomplished people out of politics.

The mainstream media (and I used to think people who used that term pejoratively were conspiracy theorists) have been united in supporting mass immigration for decades. There were almost no stories criticizing any aspect of immigration prior to the last year or so. That includes the supposedly 'far right' Postmedia papers. So it's very easy to believe, with the constant cheerleading from the media, that Canadians have always been fully supportive of immigration. They haven't been. Every now and then a poll comes out that gets limited coverage, and if you're a news junkie you might just spot it. But even this year the criticism is couched in talk about housing and healthcare, and usually talks about foreign students and foreign workers, and to some degree, asylum seekers. Not a single mainstream media organization or even columnist in English Canada that I'm aware of has called for immigration to be reduced, let alone heavily reduced. Nor has any politician in English Canada. In 2018, a government survey found 65% felt immigrants wanted too much special accommodation. An Angus Reid poll in 2016 said 68% of Canadians thought immigrants should be doing more to fit in instead of keeping their old customs and languages. Another by AR in 2018 showed 49% felt immigration was too high. Another by Ipsos had 54% of those who answered saying Canada was too welcoming to immigrants, 58% felt immigration was putting too much strain on public services, 48% agreed or strongly agreed that immigration was changing Canada in ways they didn't like (vs 26% who disagree). An environics survey in 2019 had 65% of Canadians saying immigrants were not doing enough to adopt Canadian values. The message I keep reading in the media is there was a 'consensus' about how much we all approved of immigration. But what they meant was a consensus among 'the people who count', ie, the close little circle of people in academia, media and government from urban Canada.

We now effectively HAVE an open border in Canada. Anyone who comes and says they're a refugee stays. The government accepts 85% and the other 15% just stay anyway. Uhm, we all do this constantly. Every employer judges the quality of those who apply. Every university does too. We judge the quality of people we meet fairly quickly and deduce whether we want to know them further, either as friends, business acquaintances, lovers, etc. What kind of a person would think we shouldn't apply such judgment to those who wish to come and live here? And by the way, you judge people constantly, in this topic and others. Say, how about we bring in millions of Trump supporters from America's deep south? You okay with that? How dare you judge people!!!!

This is an interesting position to take. By their very nature those who come here as refugees tend to be from the third world. Thus statistically they'll have less applicable skills (including language) and education than immigrants Also, according to the stats refugees are the worst performing group in Canada, economically by a goodly margin. So they are worse for Canada than skilled immigrants. Also, most of them aren't really refugees. They're economic migrants who have lied/cheated to get in. That doesn't suggest anything good about the moral quality of these people (mostly young men). Nor is there any evidence they dislike oppression - except when applied to THEM. I'm quite sure a lot of those marching in our streets screaming for us to kill Jews came here as refugees. This is a group which the police try to keep any and all counter-protesters - or visible Jews - or anyone carrying a Canadian flag - away from lest the very sight of them incite the mob to violence. Want more of them? Congratulations! The government is doing its best to bring in more Palestinians and Syrians.

For some reason this topic and others on governance reminds me of Polybius' anacyclocis cycle. Because if it does we seem to be in the waning days of the age of democracy with the rise of demagogues and heading towards the days of collapse, then anarchy and then the rise of 'strong leaders'.