Moonbox

Sort of the point. None of the above was achieved by "pulling back" from international involvement. It only took a couple of coups (failed or otherwise), a few US-led wars and billions in foreign aid/financing to achieve the beautiful and fully-functioning harmony of current Middle-East politics. Totally agree. Yeah...right. Here! Numbers! Proof! What do those numbers say? Do they hold up to any scrutiny? In your case, not at all. Regardless, those numbers are about to get really bad, really fast. We're going to be looking at worst-ever earnings growth, worst-ever employment numbers, worst-ever deficits. Obviously those aren't Trump's fault, but the markets were overheating before the crisis and he was feeding them unnecessary and unwarranted stimulus anyways. We''re now seeing the shitty results of those policies with a bigger fall from the top, amplified debt and tons of uncertainty on top of the uncertainty and instability he was already creating. As for the steel and aluminum tariffs, those haven't hurt Canada - don't worry. Those are commodities and they trade on the open market fine. We can sell it to whoever and if the US wants to artificially make theirs more expensive, it's only themselves they hurt. Even with the tariffs our aluminum was still competitive in the US, so all Trump did was make downstream domestic manufacturing more expensive and cost those companies an estimated 75,000 jobs. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/steel-tariffs-hurt-manufacturers-downstream-data-shows If the goal was to have a slogan to parade around with (US STEEL IS BACK!), then mission accomplished. If the goal was sound economic policy, it's been a resounding failure, because even US Steel has collapsed on itself since then.

You provided a link that debunks what you are claiming, goof. This is just like the nothing-burger story Trump and Giuliani tried to conjure up over Hunter's involvement in Ukraine. There's DEFINITELY cronyism involved and the optics are poor, but this seems to be something that the House seems determined to maintain. Corruption and cronyism in the US government is rampant (political insider trading is legal FFS), but if Joe Biden is compromised because of Hunter, what can we say about Trump himself with Russia, and let's not even get started with Jared Kushner, who's absolute scum.

Trump tries to take credit for everything he can, but that doesn't mean it's deserved. "Not" getting yourself involved in a war is obviously better than going out and looking for one, like Bush, but we pretty much have to go back to Vietnam to find examples like him. Of course America can choose to pull back. Nobody can stop them. The point is that's not really going to happen. The USA has too many fingers in too many different pies and they've shaped large parts of the world under their influence to suit them. Truly "pulling back" means giving that up, but Trump will never acknowledge or say that. He'll tell you America can have its cake and eat it too. and how's the "regime change" been going? 40+ years of sanctions and isolation and the Ayatollah still reigns Supreme. It's convenient to forget how the Islamic Republic was founded in the first place though, isn't it? American foreign policy in the area has been a long-running comedy of debacles going back that far. I agree that Obama overstepped and his policies contributed to Trump's election, but walking away from that nuclear deal wasn't just returning to the status-quo. It made things worse than they ever were. Regime change is now less likely than ever because as far as the Iranians know, their leadership made big good-faith concessions to the USA and shortly thereafter they had their faces spat in. Yes, Canadian policy can swing back and forth, though the Westminster system has mechanisms to avoid the absurd deadlocks and fillibusters you end up with in the USA. Another thing of obvious note is that Canada's policies have next to no geopolitical consequence or influence. Domestic policy reversal is a very different thing than a foreign policy reversal, and the consequences are more out of your control and thus require additional consideration. That's a rubbish hack-job of an article that cherry-picks and misuses the the data. The comparison uses 2007-2017 as the timeline to compare Obama with Trump's post-2017 economic growth. A few things of obvious note are: 1) Obama wasn't elected until 2008 and Trump was elected in 2016 2) It runs Obama through the worst recession in 80 years - a recession he did nothing to cause. 3) Trump inherited a booming economy nearing the end of a cycle of expansion and then injected steroids into it with tax cuts etc. Why don't we run this comparison in 8 months? That'd be fair according to you I suppose? Actually why don't we run Obama's numbers from the bottom of the recession to when he left office? Regardless, nothing in that article addressed Trump's poor trade policy, which saw manufacturing shrink in the USA for the first time in 10 years despite everything else looking great. Rust-belt manufacturing jobs have been LOST since the steel and aluminum tariffs were implemented. His economic policies suck, though he is good at framing them as "great" successes.

Show me those "facts". The steaming rubbish pile of qanon-style conspiracy theories loves to refer to "facts" and "confirmed/well-known" things that they never actually support. I'm willing to listen. Show me.

It's not an expectation. It's a defacto role that the US chose for itself. If Trump and the US choose to withdraw and turn insular, that's one thing, but then what does that even look like? Do they actually withdraw and back away from potential conflicts like Iran/Iraq vs Saudi Arabia? Doubtful. The fact that no new conflict has presented itself like Kuwait or Bosnia isn't really something you can give Trump credit for either. 40+ years, and to what end and to what purpose at this point? Let's look at the deal on its actual merits rather than just maintaining a status-quo from before I was even born. Judging by what we've seen over the last 20 years, it's going to be difficult to get any such deals done with how polarized things continue to be between the President and the House. Trump had ample support to dismantle basically anything Obama did during his term, simply because it was Obama. It follows the GOP's obstruction of Obama's presidency, which was comically absurd. Regardless, real damage has been done here. Whether a Treaty was ratified by Congress or not, Trump has set the precedent that any such agreements can be withdrawn at a moment's notice and on a whim. The fact that the President has the power to ram legislation through is a problem on its own, but now the world has been awakened to the fact that Americans are willing to elect a spiteful, ignorant and volatile personality like him to exercise those powers. Yikes. Well no doubt he's a brilliant manipulator of political currency. The problem is that his attack on globalism hasn't actually helped the people he's claiming to do it for. Part of the problem with his short-sighted brand of thinking is that just saying something is working "tremendously great" doesn't mean it actually did. Rather than adding manufacturing jobs, Trump's trade action has led to rust-belt job losses and huge uncertainty for US manufacturing. The Rust Belt continues to bleed jobs, and his policies have made it worse. Right, but then that doesn't really help anyone but Canada, does it? Both the US and Canada would have been better off continuing the status quo. It's one of the largest trade relationships in the world, but it's also one of the most even.

American foreign policy was different after the Iraq War, I agree. The "leadership" position, however, isn't a mantle bestowed on it by the Free World. Rather, it's a matter of circumstance. The US is, by far, the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world, and makes a point of sticking its nose in everything. Without any cooperation or support from the rest of the world (traditional so-called allies included), these sorts of activities are more likely to be viewed as bullying or worse. The Paris Climate Agreement is a joke and I can at least give credit to Trump to walking away from it. The Iran deal was something else entirely. Where the former was a vague and toothless promise that did little more than redistribute wealth away from the G7 etc, the Iran nuclear deal was a much more simple affair with some pretty clear give-and-take. It also had much more immediate and obvious consequences. US stops crippling Iran's economy, and in return they agree not to build nukes. Whether or not it was approved by Congress, the practicalities behind it are obvious. Future agreements like this are going to be hard to achieve because the US campaign trail and sloganeering is more important than the US honoring its treaties. It's not like Trump ever provided good rationale for ripping up that deal. It was Obama's, and terrible, so he scrapped it, and no effort was made to replace it or amend it. As you say, Trump's bellicose and off-the-cuff style does get "stuff" done. Folks laud him for that and it's understandable. There are consequences, however. Insulting and undermining traditional allies leads to them drifting away from you, and potentially towards your geo-political enemies if they're more reliable. Ripping up multi-lateral Treaties on a whim is even worse. Future foreign policy objectives will get increasingly difficult to negotiate, because nobody is going to consider the US as a steady or good-faith partner. With his trade dispute efforts, his accomplishments are grossly overstated. The idea that his COVID-19 is proof of concept for his tariff regime is ludicrous, though I agree that strategic production capacity is important. The tariffs themselves don't solve this. The US aluminum industry, for example, isn't coming back as a result. It can't. It doesn't have dirt-cheap hydro like Quebec does, which is one of the main input costs. If you wanted a base-line strategic capacity, pay to have that built and keep those companies in business. Blanket tariffs were a foolish response that accomplished nothing and cost American business billions. True, there were some real concessions that came out of it, but they were minor, and it made it clear to Canada that we need to diversify our exports substantially away from the US so as not to be vulnerable to American whimsy. There was a better way to get US milk in Canada, I'm sure.

BC I agree with some of what you're saying. Contrary to most Trump critics, I also think Obama was a pretty bad president. People get their panties twisted when I say this, but the reality is that Trump being elected probably wasn't even a possibility if not for the continued collapse of bi-lateral cooperation that didn't start with Obama, but certainly hit a new low with him. I'm not really sure how that gets solved. That being said, Trump scrapped the Iran nuclear deal and it's hard to see it as anything but a spiteful reversal of the previous administration's policies. It deeply undermines the trust that other countries have in American diplomacy and treaties. As for what the world "did" listen to Trump on, I think you give him too much credit. While some of his criticism on defense spending may have paid off (short-term), it's also happening with the backdrop of increased Russian aggression. We're talking 5-10% increases on budgets which were only 1-1.5% of GDP in the first place. Most of the bigger increases were on the Eastern end of Europe and in Scandinavia, for obvious reasons. As for his implementation of tariffs, that's been a hot mess. While doing something about China etc is probably a fine idea in the long run, there's a good way and a bad way to do it. In Trump's case, he's just firing from the hip and by most measurements it's done more harm than good. The steel and aluminum tariffs from 2019 apparently "created/saved" ~12,000 jobs, but led to $11B in new metal input-costs. Congratulations, each one of those extra jobs cost the US economy about $1M. Canada's aluminum imports were apparently a threat to national security or something... As for immigration, Europe didn't need Trump for what's going on there. That's been a point of contention in the UK for a long time and in countries like Hungary, Austria and France, they needed no encouragement.

I don't think we disagree on much on this matter then. Even with the niqab, however, it can be a choice. I can't imagine many women would choose it without buying into some sort of strict religion, but it could still be a choice. With regards to women being forced to do anything, there's precious little Canada can do about Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or even Russia when it comes to women's rights. There's very little we can do even here when it comes to a parent and their children and what they make them do. If a parent wants to dress their kid up in liederhosen and send them to school, we pretty much just have to feel sorry for that kid. Mind you there aren't many parents who would do that, and hardly any in Canada that force their daughters to go to highschool wearing a niqab, though I guess there are some. Even so, there are legal limits to what a parent could do to force their daughter to wear it anyways. She has to go to school, and if she takes the niqab off at school, what then? Grounding over the weekend? If she's forced to wear the niqab I very much doubt that her weekends were exciting anyways. No, in Canada there's very, very little adherence to the niqab, though I suppose there are some areas where it's more common. One of the few things that I've loved from the Trudeau government so far was taking in Rahaf al-quun when she fled her parents in Saudi Arabia. That Trudeau finally taking a visible, clear stance for something, and it was really easy to get behind.

We can choose neither. Just because Trump is standing up to China doesn't mean he isn't a disaster of a human being and an even worse president. If Trump hadn't burned so many bridges around the world leading up to this, he wouldn't be such a pariah and folks in Canada, Europe etc might actually listen to him. International leaders can't trust him or his intentions. He's so dishonest, petty and mercurial that all anyone can hope to do is stay out of his way and not provoke a tantrum. Donald Trump has thrown American diplomacy back decades and China's influence will have grown immensely after his presidency is done (hopefully this year). The vacuum that US has left behind on rational world leadership is going to get filled somewhere.

Biden is compromised? Oh boy. D-E-E-P-S-T-A-T-E again? Your only criticism of Trump is that he's not hawkish enough on China? Nevermind the fact that he's basically leading the charge against complacency with China (one of the few areas I agree with him on), you don't find any other reasons to be criticizing him?

No doubt there are some people like coming to Canada. There are also white anglo deadbeat dads who abuse their daughters and wives and they're just as bad or worse. Honestly though it seems weird to me that some people in the West get themselves so twisted up over what some Muslim women where on their heads. Most of them don't even know what a hjab is. That word is just a rallying cry for the same old tired anti-Muslim rhetoric. Do you really find headscarves threatening? No doubt you're more concerned with the niqab, and while I at least understand the suspicion around that (not agree, mind you), there's a bit more to it than just a barbaric repression of womanhood. As a secular person, I don't really like it and DO agree that it's silly and backwards and totally impractical, but then from what I've read not every woman who wears it resents it.

It's not like we live in a vacuum. Many of the people coming over are joining family that already live here. You don't think they'd give a bit of a warning if things weren't actually better than whatever disaster they came from?

Just like the Catholic Church in Europe, many Islamic countries use the Sunni faith as a tool for control. Information doesn't flow as freely in these places and is in fact actively suppressed. They don't make popular uprisings like they used to either. Simply put, it's not as easy to revolt as it was when soldiers could only fire one shot before they were engaged in hand-to-hand. Ask how the Syrians are doing with their uprising.

That's the thing. We're not afraid of being judged, especially not by fools and hypocrites. There's a reason why over 20% of our population is foreign-born and we're one of the largest per-capita destinations for immigrants in the world. Clearly folks feel they're better off coming here than staying where they were.

Well maybe you can explain what your point is, then? What are you trying to say about J&F, or neighborhoods like it (or potentially worse - like the DTES)? It's easy to fling examples of bad neighborhoods out there, but what about them? What do they prove? How do they compare to other countries? You can quote Jane and Finch, but then I can quote the svalka in Moscow and show you it's worse...but so what?

You're not really talking facts though. You're talking rhetoric and hyberbole, and arguing a straw-man. Nobody here said, as far as I can tell, that there's no racism in Canada, either overt or structural. You'd be a fool to argue that socio-economic factors aren't at play and that the "University Heights" neighborhood isn't in sore need of overdue attention. As Shades said, however, you can't just cherry-pick J&F or the DTES as representative samples of Canada. They're pretty much the worst neighborhoods we have. There's plenty of racism in Canada, but I don't think you're going to find many places more tolerant than here.

I can sort of relate to that. I was a French immersion student all through highschool, but I wouldn't call myself fluent. I can read French fluently. I can speak French with good grammar and be understood in France or Quebec. I'd struggle to have a business or political conversation because we never really learned the vocabulary for it and without constant practice you start to forget even simple words. I was in Montreal last year and had trouble asking for an iron to press my shirt at my hotel. The word for it completely escaped me. On the other hand, my buddy and I ended up spending a week in Mexico with 2 girls from Germany and 2 girls from Marseille, and the only language we had in common was French. It wasn't a problem, and the words start coming back to you quickly when you start using the language again. I disagree that the Conservatives need a Quebec leader to garner representation in Quebec. Harper managed something like 12-14 seats IIRC, and his French made me cringe. He sort of put together a Mulroney-style minority in the beginning. Of course it didn't last, but he showed that it could be done. A properly educated French speaking Anglo, who's developed or maintained his vocabularly, no doubt could manage appeal in the more conservative Quebec ridings. Much of the province, however, would be shut out to him, but then much of it is shut out to the Conservatives anyways. Your point about sacrificing talent and suitability in exchange for limited bi-lingualism is fair. There's no point in putting a schmuck on the ticket just because he can speak French poorly. All things being equal, however, Quebec WILL vote for an Anglo that speaks French under the right circumstances. If it was a tie or close, I'd still choose the FSL candidate over the strictly English speaker.

Hello Dr. Neil. I have something that I know could help you. It's now widely know that the Coronavirus was developed by the D-E-E-P-S-T-A-T-E vampire pedophile cult (led by the Rothschild family). The Wuhan lab is a deliberate red-herring. The reasoning behind the coronavirus outbreak is clear though. The Rothschilds and MIC have managed to bring their quantum computers online, and it's only a matter of time before they take control of the world's computer networks, thereby the flow of information, thereby POWER. Q-anon, however, has been working diligently in the shadows, and they've located the source of the vampire's power - a portal in Siberia to Zeta Reticuli. Of course you're familiar with Zeta Reticuli, with it being the homeworld of the little grey men, and the links between them and the vampires are obvious. The groundwork for our Siberian expedition is already done. We just need 9.9M to finance it and ultimately save humanity.

because our being in the TPP complicates more important trade agreements with the USA. If we're importing cheap components from Vietnam and China and assembling it here for less than the Americans can, that becomes a thorn for our bi-lateral trade.

The subject is more complicated than that, though I'm not advocating for lax gun control. Bottom line is that for some people, having a gun provides a sense of security they'd otherwise not have and it's politically difficult to refuse them that right. If you live in a bad neighborhood, have been assaulted in the past (or your family has been) or perhaps you live remotely and far from law enforcement, NOT having a gun can leave you feeling helpless. I agree with the gun registry, and on strict penalties for illegal gun ownership or concealed weapons. I have more trouble, however, with the the prospect of preventing a young victim of assault from keeping a firearm in their house and giving them a feeling/measure of control. The biggest issue, obviously, is the mental health one. There should be VERY strict checks and balances on who has access to a firearm, and perhaps even occasional assessments that link back to the gun registry. Might not be possible, but I'm spitballing...

but that in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. We'll likely see less need for business travel and more web-conferencing as a result. Now that I've fully embraced it with my business, it's likely going to cut my travel expenses in half. Now instead of meeting some clients far away 2-3 times a year, maybe I only have to go once and we can web-chat. There will be good changes that come out of this, but also some painful ones.

Sorry, but you're missing the point. You're arguing as if anything has fixed value, and nothing does. The economy functions on perceived value. There's no such thing as objective intrinsic value for anything, and therefore no such measurement for adding value either. Every single exchange of money is a function of timing and circumstance, and every single one of those is a transfer of "wealth". While it's true that the most important determinant of an economy's success is its ability to somehow create or add value, you grossly oversimplify everything that happens around this activity and seem to misunderstand the concepts of which you're speaking. Speculation is not a distortion in the economy. That's a ridiculous idea and falls flat on its face. Take new home construction, for example. The difference in value-added for a new construction in Fort McMurray today is VERY different from what it was in 2014, and all that's changed are the circumstances. The interesting thing about that is that the input price for that new home is WAY cheaper today than it was in 2014 (folks are desperate for work), but someone who goes through the trouble will still lose money today, where they would have had a nice profit in 2014. By your logic, I don't even know what you'd suggest should have happened. Should there have been some sort of calculation on what the price of a home should have been in 2014, and that the price in 2019 should be a function of 2014 values + inflation +/- changed input costs? No. My argument isn't semantic. The issue with your line of reasoning is that you think you can boil these sorts of issues down to simple equations. That's not possible. The systems are far more complex and organic than you'd have us believe, and the speculation you deride is part of the supporting network of activity that allows for wealth-creating activity. That part you seem to understand, but then you characterize it as a somehow unhealthy part of the economy. It isn't. That sort of speculation is necessary for economic activity and growth. It's not a perfect system, and there are plenty of inefficiencies and even folks who take advantage of them in a less-than-wholesome way (90% of realtors). That much we'll agree on, but I'm not sure what you consider as the alternative.

My cousin has a $1M home in Waterloo sitting empty next door to him. It happens a LOT. Part of the problem with low fertility in the western world is economic uncertainty. We need immigrants for sure still, but unaffordable housing and lower fertility go hand in hand.

Economy IS speculation. If you're going to say you're spending lots of time with economists, you should at least understand that. Everything about every economy ever is speculative. Go back to cave man times and it's still true. In a way, I agree with you. There's little/no value in a purely speculative, self-propelling boom like we've seen in the Canadian housing market. Similarly you can see stupid crap like the Canadian Cannabis boom (and bust), Tesla's ridiculous valuation and examples like this go all the way back to the Dutch Tulip bubble. A booming and growing market is a good thing, to a point, but there often comes a time when the valuations are divert entirely from fundamentals and math. As the mania sets in, when prices are at their highest, there are still fools with FOMO that are going to be greedily buying. Eventually something gives and that sucks but fools get parted with their money. That's a simple fact. What we DON'T need is our governments encouraging and/or ignoring this stupidity on a systemic level. Stock market booms and busts are at least self-limiting. Credit-fueled ones are not. The time for stricter mortgage rules and foreign ownership taxes were apparent back 5-10 years ago, but Canadian governments dawdled on it and here we are now.

It's not really a black-or-white decision. There's a wide grey-area in between, but we know that both of these extremes (and everything in between) is prone to corruption, stupidity and short-term thinking. Frankly nothing is going to change until voters smarten up. Too few people actually care enough to read a newspaper and inform themselves, so nobody ever really sees or understands what's going wrong.