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Exactly. Plus you wouldn't have homeless people begging you for money on the streets all the time. It's annoying. I'm skeptical that the benefits would outweight the costs relative to other options. I'm open to the idea but it would have to be demonstrated to me that it makes sense relative to other options. A guaranteed income system is simpler and has less bureaucratic cost. Also, I forgot one point: 5. Drug addicts may use their card to buy food and essentials and then trade them for drugs. Okay, now which bureaucrat or politician is defining what is and what isn't a super market. Do we have to hire a bunch of supermarket inspectors to ensure that a place counts as a supermarket? Does this definition have loop holes that allow things that aren't really supermarkets to claim to be supermarkets? Now what prevents a drug addict from giving an IOU to the mafia to give them this locked investment in 5 years for drugs?

Well many young males are simply opting out altogether. Thus MGTOW and soshoku danshi.

Even if you did this, there are 4 issues: 1. A person could simply use this card to buy essentials and then use money that they were intending to spend on essentials on drugs. So there is a substitution effect that is difficult to avoid. 2. It would still be somewhat more expensive to set up because then you would need someone to ensure no one is buying drugs or someone to decide which institutions are acceptable or not for using the money on. 3. You have the potential of some control-freak politician trying to impose their belief system about what is acceptable or not. Such as banning the usage of that money on reproductive health products. 4. Doing this may prevent the possibility of saving the money, thus would reduce Canada's savings rate.

It's too costly (bureaucratically) to try to prevent them from buying drugs via some sort of coupon system. It would be more effective to spread awareness campaigns to discourage drug use or put more money into law enforcement. Just have a guaranteed income system and be done with it.

No but if you are concerned about absolute poverty, then addressing absolute poverty will help.

As much as I disagree with relative measures used to define poverty, Cybercoma was referring to a relative difference in reading ability, so that suggests that absolute poverty affects reading ability.

Teaching kids actual math would be far preferable to discovery math. Yes.

You don't need to. You just need enough to babysit kids so that parents are not disgruntled during the strike. It's not like kids are learning much of value these days anyway with the politicization of our education system. Just give them some app to learn from on their smart phone / tablet.

I said gradually. You don't think people use simplified characters occasionally in Taiwan or Singapore?

Sorry I meant 'if the domestic teachers are no good'. But yes, you need to beat them at their own game.

You forget the option of just having teachers teach literacy instead of using our education system to spread their ideology be it social justice, environmental radicalism, religion, or ethnic pride. I don't think it requires an international agreement. Just have the Canadian government accept an alternate form of English; it would gradually spill over to other countries.

Wow, that might work. Replace domestic teachers with foreign teachers if the domestic teachers are no good. And if the unions complain, call them xenophobic racists. The unions will be politically and ideologically neutralized.

Right to work laws would be a good idea. Maybe passing a law to limit the union's role away from encouraging certain types of teaching or from being political. A more extreme option is to declare teaching an essential service and make teachers unions illegal.

Yet children of immigrants without English or French do well or even excel in our school systems. National or provincial, the ultimate issue is cultural (i.e. not enough emphasis on competition, science, math, etc.), so even if we had a national education system it would still perform terribly. The teaching culture in Canada needs to be addressed, which most likely means taking on the teaching unions which are entrenched in the current teaching culture.

Maybe that's the problem. Perhaps it would be better if the reserve system were eliminated and the children received provincial education similar to their peers elsewhere in the country.

Getting rid of discovery math would be a good start. Teach science/math instead of trying to brainwash kids with activism, social justice, etc. Schools should be about learning useful skills, not indoctrinating kids into a certain ideology. I don't think it's a matter of funding or private vs public. It's a matter of culture of the teachers and how they approach teaching and the 'consensus' beliefs about teaching that they form. Competition needs to be increased in schools. We've reached a point where you can't fail anyone, teachers that fail kids get fired, everyone gets a participation ribbon, etc. Perhaps all high schools should adopt international standards such as the international baccalaureate program. http://www.ibo.org/

Yep, repeat criminals are a major problem. I hear them on the bus occasionally chatting about how they just got out of jail, how they intend to steal or peddle drugs, how they have stabbed people, etc. They just don't care about harming systems or our justice system. Personally I was mugged and assaulted by repeat criminals on probation and suffered brain damage.

Yep. Raise the minimum wage by an arbitrary amount and claim that you are defending the poor, even though you are increasing unemployment. But never actually try to deal with the issue as to why people don't have the skills to earn a higher wage in the first place. -Politician Logic

This made me laugh. Very true.

There are still differences, but even on issues where the parties differ, all the parties still have terrible positions. For example, with respect to consumption tax vs income tax. It would make sense to tax shift to relatively more consumption tax. But we see the conservatives want to lower the consumption tax, where as the NDP wants to keep the consumption tax as is and raise income tax or corporate tax. Tax policies get dumbed down to low-tax = bad, high-tax = good and none of the parties care about which type of tax is more efficient. I hate all the parties so I just spoil my ballot. Maybe if more people spoiled their ballot rather than voting for the least bad option, parties would respond to that or new parties would form to try to appeal to the ballot-spoilers. Although with our first-past-the-post system, it is difficult for new parties to form. Ultimately I think we need new political parties. Because our current political parties are terrible from the foundation up.

One of the problems is the belief in the political spectrum being 1-dimensional (right vs left), when there are so many other dimensions to political positions.

In the case of Canada, I think that Canadian politics have this bad case of 'it's conventional wisdom, and you can't go against conventional wisdom'. And this applies to all parties. With respect to the GST, it's 'conventional wisdom' that Canadians don't like the GST, therefore no party wants to raise the GST. With respect to the Healthcare system, it's 'conventional wisdom' that Canadians like their healthcare system, and that only two healthcare systems exist (the USA or Canada; apparently European healthcare systems don't exist in the minds of North American politicians), so no party wants to change the healthcare system because doing so will be seen as American, unpatriotic and treason. With respect to supply management, it's 'conventional wisdom' that any party that wants to eliminate supply management will lose more votes than they will gain, therefore no party wants to eliminate it. The same thing is seen with Catholic school systems and the LCBO in Ontario. It becomes 'conventional wisdom', so nothing gets changed.

I think a lot of this has to do with the history of the country. A lot of the far left's mentality in many countries is that whatever is on the right = evil therefore whatever is the opposite = good. In the case of Sweden, which was neutral during WW2, historically nationalist parties in Europe have been protectionist so protectionism in Europe is seem as xenophobic and therefore only an evil nazi would support protectionism in Sweden. Also, having open trade helps make Sweden more 'diverse'. In North America, we never had nationalistic governments that were protectionist. USA and Canada have always been relatively open to trade. So nationalism and the far right is not associated with protectionism in Canada. Instead, free-trade is associated with capitalism and libertarianism here, so is more associated with being far right. Because of this, the NDP and the Democrats in the USA are more anti-trade since free-trade = right-wing = bad. So in Europe, protectionism = nationalistic = right-wing = bad. And in North America, free-trade = laisse-faire capitalism = right-wing = bad.

Sweden's system isn't sustainable. They are going through demographic collapse due to a culture of self hatred and are replacing themselves with Islamists. Look at Malmo. Also, look at the wonderful children's programming enlightened Sweden has:

Australia Foreign born population: 25.0% Canada Foreign born population: 20.1% We are number 2 (excluding small city states). Australia beats us. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/1370.0~2010~Chapter~Overseas%20born%20population%20%283.6%29