That really makes the rest of us in the world happy to hear that the country bombing everyone and trying to intimidate allies is full of citizens who are utterly fucking useless.

Ya’ll would do well to remember that, unless you actually do something, we don’t give a shit about how upset you are. You are a citizen of the US and I have some sympathy for that but when try to deflect like this that sympathy quickly evaporates. It reads loud and clear like you care more for your personal reputation than anything else.

I mean, a bit of a strange question to ask because yes, a non-conservative government would be seeking to do foundational overhauls because our foundation is fully just rotted away at this point and we desperately need to stop pretending anything is ok.

Things like the local grocery stores you brought up aren’t connected to real estate like that. Real-estate speculation requires a lot of buying and selling, and doing so with the express purpuse of trying to make money without actually doing anything of value. These grocery stores are smaller options to put pressure on the larger chains to lower the prices, similar to how Vienna’s 40% “market rate housing”(social housing but with a different name so people who can’t think so well aren’t afraid of it) keeps rent prices low because there’s sizeable competition. It’s a good way to push policies aimed at helping society at large while existing in a capitalist system. I imagine they would also exist like Canada Post, where they would serve places that large chains don’t deem profitable enough. Canada Post and Radio Canada make sure that remote communities stay connected in ways that FedEx and other radio stations completely fail at because they’re seeking to serve communities, not take money from them.

Zoning laws are big, sure, and absolutely need an overhaul, but they’re not the reason why Loblaws does shit like price-fixing. That’s just pure greed with no consequences because the centrists and the conservatives have very little interest in truly punishing them.

Except that what your comment misses is that the right thinks that the left wants to use the government to control their lives and the left in places like the US and Canada is not authoritarian just because they want the most basic government regulations on the practices that we can all see are screwing us over. The problem with your comment is that it acts as if both are operating within the same reality but we can see very fucking clearly that that simply isn’t true.

Conservative ideology is historically always authoritarian, it has to be. It is an ideology which exists to protect the system of a few people on top who own everything else, with a good bit of hating anyone who isn’t a straight, cis man because that helps get the voting base riled up.

It’s not that extreme, that’s the thing. This stuff isn’t that complicated, we as Canadians are just overwhelmingly terrified of doing anything of substance. An extreme views are those which lack nuance, but that’s it. Asking for us to have a few more very basic protections for the working class and to not have a government which serves only the rich is not extreme. In many instances we already had these things and we weakened them.

I’m really not asking for a lot, here, and the alternative is continuing down this path of “just let the corporations and owner class do whatever they want” which is far more extreme than what I’m suggesting.

Yea, I am the type that wants evidence based solutions to our problems and who doesn’t want to keep doing the same tired bullshit that has never worked.

Look, I was trying to have a conversation, and you were doing so well there, but if you just want to be racist about it while on your knees for the people who are robbing you in broad daylight with smiles on their faces then say it with your whole fucking chest or shut your cowardly mouth.

I’m not going to say that the wealthy don’t benefit from immigration but we can see that the bigger issue is how laissez-faire these centrist and conservative governments(functionally the same for all it really matters) are when it comes to protecting our rights. The minimum wage comstantly dragging behind, shipping our money out of the country(foreign aid and stuff is fine, though), and refusing to tax the wealthy so that the tax burden is on the working class are far bigger issues that can all be address without a need to physically build up stock of things like housing, which we could have a lot more of very quickly if we built more sensibly.

I work in the architectural field and obviously have a fire for good urban planning and can comfortably say that this isn’t an improvement that needs to be measured in decades if we actually tried at all. It would also be a huge boon for jobs, and with better workers’ rights we could see a lot more people willing to do said jobs, too. I’m having a hard time at the moment and one thing keeping me out of looking towards a trade is how poorly those fields are often treated(the pay isn’t as good as it looks, either, fyi).

And going off that point, the wage pressure thing is tricky because it doesn’t matter if their are a trillion people in the country if only ten of them can operate a crane or do surgery. Those ten people would still have the ability to apply immense pressure, right? The immigrants we bring come with a huge variety of skills and often need to take equivalency courses so much of the pressure they apply in their first few years is on manual labour jobs and the like, even if they come with a bunch of other skills.

Everything is highly nuanced, but the one certain thing is that our Liberal/Conservative government see-saw has not been serving us on the simple things like a wealth tax and a real minimum wage increase. Our local governments are also screwing renters and commuters(zoning and transport, namely). We moan about not being able to afford things and then shoot ourselves in both feet when presented with opportunities to actually address those issues directly and man, honestly, I’m getting so tired of it.

Here’s an article about vacant land, and another about vacant homes. Do you know why diamonds are expensive? It’s an artificially inflated market, where the diamonds are held in warehouses and hoarded there, forcing a lower supply. It doesn’t actually cost that much to just hold onto these places, especially since they’re assets which only only ever really go up in value, and 1% is a pathetically low tax compared to the money they get by jacking up the prices of their other properties.

Infrastructure definitely can keep up, but it involves building sensibly, and doing the things we already know work instead of barrelling forward with the same old bad decisions because we’re all scared of change. It means we have to start seeing more cities in Canada being built like Montréal and finally just admit that cities built like Ottawa are inefficient. You yourself just said that that Canada has a lot of single-family homes and yea, especially when it’s just single-use zoning that fucking blows!

We need the immigration, and like I’ve already said it’s god-awful planning and a complete unwillingness to actually take control of the situation that brings any difficulties. You’re asking a lot of questions but you seem to really not want to think about the fact that there are a bunch of people who don’t really have your best interests at heart, and those people are the wealthy and their mouth-breathing sycophants.

Ye.

I sorta get what you’re saying but you seriously need to change your angle, and yesterday. It’s not immigration that caused this, it was poor planning. We need immigration for a lot of reasons but governments being incredibly lazy about affordable housing projects, attacking workers’ rights, and allowing foreign companies like US-based energy companies to rat-fuck our environment just to siphon away our assets on the cheap are all way bigger issues making us poor.

The Liberal government is a conservative one, only margainally better than the Conservatives. They even tried to break the Air Canada strike and we are all lucky that those workers held their ground. They are allowing energy companies to rip out our resources without any environmental reviews for five years and they will, as usual, do nothing to punish them when they inevitably do awful, damaging shit in the process. They fired 40,000 people in time where getting a job is a hard enough when al’ they really needed to do was tax wealthy people and corporations. They won’t even let us have fair elections despite their promise from 2015 which they threw out upon learning that they’d probably never win again if we had real choice and they couldn’t bank on scare tactics anymore.

We have lots of empty housing which goes unfilled because it doesn’t help drive prices up if everyone has a place to live and there’s less competition. Weak or non-existent affordable housing programs also allow private developers to take money and land and do nothing truly valuable with it. The same thing works with jobs as companies would rather overwork who they have than risk taking on someone for higher wages and setting that precedent. This is what capitalism is, a society where capital is the goal, not the betterment of the society itself.

You’re mad, and you’ve got a big stick but for the love of god please stop hitting yourself with it.

Who’s gunna stop them, another sub-50% voter turnout because the Canadian electorate ranges from insane conservative morons to completely uninformed “moderates” with only a small amount of progressives who often get easily scared into letting the center and right get away with shit like this?

The funny thing is that that actually makes you very good for the job, or at least it’s major part of it. A leader of anything from a company to a small work team needs to be the kind of person who can assemble teams of experts and give them the resources they need to succeed.

And? Right now it’s basically what’s happening, except it also includes schools and infrastructure and hospitals. You’re saying they should just sit down and take it? The US has this problem with not understanding what a consequence is and it might be time they learned.

Do you think Iran cares? That girls school didn’t commit heinous crimes against Iranians but got obliterated all the same. The US has show quite clearly that it doesn’t matter, so why should their victims be held to a higher standard? Besides, the targets would be US tech which is a valid target.

That would involve actually doing something, and 90% of them are utterly useless.

What point are you trying to make? That rural areas which were once built as spots of closeness were eventually turned into sprawling towns? Or trying to saying things aren’t so different despite the fact that we can literally see, with our own eyes, how the differences are pretty bad? He’s not asserting anything in the sense that he’s not just talking out his ass, it’s video proof.

I agree with everything but the first paragraph, which unfortunately taints the rest. Communism can’t really be considered a failed system if it’s only ever existed in its infancy. Capitalism is a failed ideology specifically because it was given every possible advantage and has still completely and utterly failed to address the needs of any kind of remotely fair and just society. Any attempts to make the switch toward communism in this world are incredibly difficult undertakings because of how it is the antithesis of the existing structure, while capitalism only needed to make one easy step away from the feudalism is was created to replace. History is pretty clear on this if you look beyond the very surface level propaganda, to the point where you don’t even to “just google it bro” but can actually just see it all woth your own eyes.

I’m not a full-blown tankie communist, but I’m absolutely a socialist. My aims are toward the next step or two, not much further but certainly not so close as can be easily hand-waved by those with too much power.

Edit: For those getting here and seeing a removed comment, buddy here basically complained that I was mad about capitalism being imperfect and said that I was pulling a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. They completely blew past any nuance in my comment, especially the point where I indicated that the survival of capitalism is largely due to it’s proximity to the system before it and, I should add at this time, the amount of brutal violence it uses to keep itself around. They were going off about how they want to be objective in their telling of history but seem wholly uninterested in actually learning anything that challenges their worldview, even when it does so very gently.

Stay in school, kids, literacy is important.

Or coercion, or a bunch of other closely related things. All across history there have been “incentives” for women to lower their standards and to gaslight themselves into believing that their shitty situations were normal.

I had been paying for it a while ago since, to be fair, the service is free otherwise and often times it pays the creator more. Then Youtube decided to give about $45mil or so worth of energy toward making pro-Israel content and suddenly I didn’t mind the ads so much anymore. Now they’re making it a lot worse and my solution is going to need to be an adblocker.

I’m kinda jealous of GenZ in some ways. They never expected things to work out ever, but us 30+ folks had a hope that was taken away from us. And so many of us deserve it because we’re chasing “stability” in systems where stability means more of the same crap that took our hope away to begin with.

But they’re very correct that so many things aren’t needed. I mean, gender on a driver license? Really?