In their defence, after meeting with Danielle Smith and Kevin O’Leary… can we really blame the Americans for thinking we were dumber than a sack of hammers and would fall for it?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Canadian MPs vote very consistently along party lines – so with few exceptions I don’t believe choosing based on your local representative is the most rational choice. This is why I stress the party leadership here. However, you aren’t a robot and you don’t have to go with what some asshole keyboard warrior like me thinks is a rational choice. If you have a strong belief in a particular local candidate, they can be where the next generation of leadership comes from.

So what you’re saying is, the NDP is your preferred party, but you’re voting Liberal because you think Carney has better political clout than Jagmeet Singh.

I feel like this is willful misrepresentation of what I was saying here. Instead I am saying that Singh has not demonstrated the specific leadership skills that I believe are essential for success in the coming years, nor has the policy priorities indicated a good path forward. And that while he seems to be a genuine and kind man with good intentions, that he is not a good choice in the here and now – not in policy and not in personality.

The NDP is not my preferred political party, but a version of it might be. An NDP that didn’t play for the centre with half-measure solutions, but instead an NDP that was authentic and said fuck galen weston if he steals from us by price fixing bread we take his company and put it up for auction and let someone else try. And if that person can’t figure out how to sell bread than the government can hire some canadians to bake bread and sell it at cost from the ruined husk of HBC stores. And if no one can figure out how to unfuck the housing market than they can just step in and make homes themselves.

And they can expand Canada Post to deliver packages cheaply from coast to coast to enable small businesses to thrive. And they can seize factories owned by Americans when they tariff us and make our own shit in them with our steel and aluminum. They can nationalize industries like fibre internet which tend towards monopolies, and they can break apart companies that have consolidated into oblivion. And they can hire Canadians to write open-source software to replace expensive american consultants contracts that drain money from our governments at all levels. They could apply an export levy to unprocessed raw material exports, especially non-renewable ones because we don’t fucking need to sell a limited resource on the cheap.

And they can hire people to maintain national parks, and hire bus drivers to connect communities. And have sharply progressive income tax and throw in some wealth taxes and land value taxes and seize assets of companies using tax havens. And we can throw out policies the Americans pressured us into such as insanely long copyright laws which stifle culture and free expressive. We could ban foreign ownership of our media institutions. We could levy significant taxes on the techbro companies that got into a position of monopoly by using venture capital and if they refuse to pay we can block them and canadians can find new platforms. We could radically expand the CBC to make it a glowing showcase of Canadian culture both for independent and commercial content. And I could go on and on for fucking ever.

If the NDP had even a fraction of that, and Carney drops the ball with his market-based approach, then I’m fucking there for it. Because even though I’m a market-oriented person like Carney is – if people like me drop the ball, we need the ball to be picked up by someone who can use it.

But that’s not the reality we have right now. The NDP of right now is playing at being centrist and in my opinion is doing a relatively lousy job of it. And maybe that’s because the things I suggested are too radical for Canadians? But I see the enthusiasm for the optimism of someone like Charlie Angus here or Bernie Sanders or AOC in the US and I have to think maybe we could fucking try? Because it was ever gonna work it’s got to be when Canadians feel like the system has beaten them down.

Sorry if this seems too aggressive. My intended tone is inspirational, not a negative attack on your question. Because I think the core of what you’re saying is correct. I want those things and think Canada needs that energy, but also I don’t want the current version of what the NDP is offering.

I am fully aware that openly supporting the person who is currently leading in the pools is hardly a daring or provocative take. I don’t expect this to change the world, I find personal value in structuring my thoughts in an organized way and sharing them with people. If you read it, thanks for reading, if not I’m not offended. Cheers.

Any short-term cooperation must not derail the urgent need to sever our economic and defensive dependencies on that nation.

It’s not simply that Trump is unreliable — American voters are as well.

So yes if we can ease some short-term pains felt by our workers and industries that is fine. But that’s where it ends.

So let’s take the renouned intellectual Joe Rogan as an example.

Earlier on he said “why are we picking on Canada”, and now he’s switched his tune to “I won’t go to Canada”. Because when they get pushback it doesn’t feel nice, and they side with their own because that’s easier and that’s what the propaganda machines are pushing.

This is example of how not only will not they wake up, their attitudes will continue to worsen. Right now white Democrats are thinking “oh phew, they aren’t coming for us right now, we are safe” even if they don’t admit it to even themselves.

I know this because this was me, when the targets were Muslims and Mexicans and Haitians what did I do besides fret my brow and say “golly gee that’s too bad” but didn’t do anything. The difference is that now Canadians are getting lumped in with the bad guys now and holy shit does it look a lot different when the barrel is pointed at you.

Sorry this is a long rant and not entirely directed at you.

Canada’s retaliation will not hurt the fascists — it will help them.

The fascists paint us as villains, as scapegoats to distract the American public from their actual societal problems and keep them angry and engaged at an external target.

When they hit us and we hit back, we will cause them harm. The fascists will spin this harm as justification for the pre-existing vilification. They had already established the narrative that we were the cause of their problems and now they’ve turned that lie into the truth.

The fascists do not care that American people will be harmed. They are wealthy and powerful and will be able to live lives of luxury and privilege. Musk could lose 99% of his wealth and still live a life of comfort that goes beyond what anyone reading this would likely ever have.

So no, we will not hurt them with our tariffs or our boycotts. But we don’t do it for them we do it for us. We do it to help build strength and support the industries and workers in our own country and in the countries who like us are fighting back against this.

We do this because we want to feel like our actions have meaning to ourselves, to make us feel like we are part of the process of fighting back and saying that no, we will not acquiesce to the fascists.

There’s a decent percentage of Canadians who aren’t taking this seriously or even the 20% of right wingers who are pro-American. Plus friend and family ties, and practical issues like saving money on shopping or flights with a US layovers.

But yeah especially as the antagonism relating to tangible impacts from the trade war escalates, i expect it will naturally continue to decline.

Good start, now let’s push that to 90%

Reset your expectations.

Not only is this real, he also went on to say that the threat was only valid if PP didn’t win. This is public record and you can verify with a web search on multiple media outlets.

This is who Danielle Smith pals around with at taxpayer expense.

Our debt-to-GDP ratio is unconcerning despite the excesses of the Harper and Trudeau deficits.

So thanks to Martin and Cretien’s work in the 90 and early 2000s we have runway to increase spending and cut taxes. This is important to stimulate demand under these conditions, because we do not want capital locked away in savings or invested abroad during a time we need to build new infrastructure and industries.

As a mostly irrelevant aside, Corporations are not people in Canada — that is a quirk of American law and in general it doesn’t mean as much as people sometimes imply it does.

Wealth inequality must be addressed. Closing tax haven loopholes feels like it should be part of that. I’m not sure if corporate taxes would be more effective than wealth taxes or sharply progressive income taxes. It might be. Perhaps a progressive corporate tax would be useful? The specifics are way outside of my wheelhouse though — but it is Carney’s wheelhouse.

Capital gains should be considered a distinct issue from the use of offshore tax havens.

There is an argument to be made that a low capital gains tax increases investment which is something Canada needs as we rebuild our economy. There’s also an argument against it, that the market has failed and the government needs to take a more active role in areas like providing housing and distributing food.

However there is no such duality of arguments with tax havens. This would be an excellent issue for Carney to show leadership on, especially given his status as an insider and his participation in these schemes.

Would love to see this addressed in a debate or press conference Q&A.

Absolutely.

I have an unfinished bonkers-length ramble in my draft folder about how I failed to see how this was unfolding in real time. It was so easy to just assume the best would happen, that someone would wave a magic wand and make it all better, that they’d wake up before going too far.

At least we are paying attention now!

Did you write that?

Either way I’m a proponent of trying to do what is right regardless of what is the most likely to help.

By sharing or writing that you
can’t control if anyone who reads it or if it would change any minds. But by spreading the message you’re being active and engaged in what may be the most impactful election in our lifetimes. Even if it doesn’t change anyone else this can change you.

So yeah, hell yes it helps.

Carney is not a stupid man. He knows that Spraytan will not call him.

In the days of the original round of tariffs; our then-PM acted with some degree of panic, flooding Washington and Florida with attempts to negotiate and make an agreement.

Carney is saying that has ended. We aren’t pursuing them, we aren’t playing this game anymore.

Until they respect our sovereignty we will refuse to deal with them. They rip up treaties? Fine. Block trade? Fine. We can respond with policy actions and don’t need to discuss it with them.

If the Americans want to talk about how to stop the trade war escalation or fucking anything else, they permanently cease the 51st state and invasion threats. Period.

You are not dealing with a fool.

You can replicate this on your own, by looking at the past results of your riding and using that to colour your selection based on your preferences. You can find this history by looking at elections Canada or Wikipedia.

If the party you support hasn’t been competitive and isn’t running a super high profile local candidate, and if you have strong opposition to one of the parties that has been competitive — then consider supporting the alternative competitive party.

Being active and looking at the details yourself might help you feel more engaged and active in the democratic processes than just following what it says on some website.

Don’t get me wrong, if this helps you that’s great. Just trying to encourage folks to take some time to look at the details on their own. This election has a lot on the line, and the future of our country is worth it — especially at this critical juncture.

The rapid expansion of immigration isn’t a mystery, it was explicitly done to combat the perceived labour shortage coming out of the covid era.

The failure to account for how that would impact our already-tight housing market be attributed to mismanagement and lack of focus, or to malice as you suggest. But the housing crisis they created didn’t aid the liberals, and is no small factor in why they have seen their support plummet until so recently.

So if what you describe was actually the plan, it was a stupid plan. Instead I believe that Trudeau had good intentions and was trying to be everything to everyone and moving from hot issue to hot issue without dedicating the appropriate follow through to how the policies were actually doing. I can’t prove this; or prove that your idea is wrong.

But I will say that our crisis and the urgency we need to move can give us an opportunity to address some of the trades issues you bring up. Is there a better way to do these things? Is there another way to accomplish the same functionality of drywall without the causing the suffering you describe? Sure this is hard when the obstacle is to do this for one bespoke home, but what if you had the opportunity to invent a new method for 10000 homes? For 100000 homes? Because we need 3 million homes, so if someone can do this better and we can standardize on that; we can justify factories to make the products we need to make that work.

I’m not say it it’s easy. I’m not even saying my idea is best. I’m saying that this is the time to try something big and bold and new, because we have every reason to try and no reason not to.

Let’s stop pretending these are unsolvable problems.

You’ve identified some real obstacles – a lack of tradespeople and opposition from local groups blocking. We need the federal government to work with the provinces to push them to do what we need to do, using the carrot or stick or a combination of the two.

Here’s how I would do it. Make designs for a small number of standard plans for buildings that are designed around the principles of efficient building. Across these sets of plans, you standardize building materials so that the parts can be sourced by a variety of Canadian suppliers using Canadian-sourced materials. Then work with the provinces to ensure that the homes meeting these specifications can be built anywhere it’s safe to do so – be it a quiet suburb of Vancouver who fights against any change to the “character of their neighbourhood” or a depressed town in rural Newfoundland or anywhere in between. If the provinces have conservatives who want to rely on the private sector, let the markets build em.

If the provinces are run by leftists, have the government build em. And yes, we need to train people to build. But this is where the standardization comes in – because we aren’t just building bespoke homes, we are implementing well-understood designs and can share in each others knowledge and experience as we build them. And with the economy in turmoil due to the American-led trade war, there will be people eager to be retrained.

We have the materials, we have the people, we have the money, and we have the will. What I’ve outlined is one path – and I have absolutely zero delusion that it’s the only possible path. Maybe someone smarter than me will come up with a better one, and well hey by sheer coincidence we just got a new PM who is in fact smarter than me.

You’re right that it’s not the same intensity of stupid. But it’s still the same kind of stupid, one that says that we are eager to break commitments for short-term benefits.

Because while we may be in good company in having slow progress towards Paris, if we speed in the opposite direction from the people we need to be allied with — they will not stand with us.

Appreciate the confirmation.