Canadian Federal Politics

Pierre Poilievre wants to subvert democracy by invoking the notwithstanding clause of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms  in order to advance a draconian, unconstitutional, law-and-order agenda. I know that the Liberals aren’t perfect and that the vastly-increased capital gains tax will affect a lot of people, including people who think they’re a lot further away from the top 1% than they are. However, there’s no way this joker’s party is better. Despite protestations of speaking and acting for “the people,” the Conservatives will probably get a majority in 2025 with only around 38% of the popular vote. The people want dental care, pharmacare, affordable housing, and a lower cost of living, but Poilievre has no useful plans whatsoever and won’t be able to deliver anything that most people actually want.

The Canadian Federal Budget

CBC News Network is constantly interrupted by ads telling me that my government health insurance doesn’t cover enough and Kurt Browning telling me that as a homeowner 55 or older (only one of those things is true for me) I should get a reverse mortgage to help pay for things.

A federal budget is always going to be a compromise, but increasing funding for the CBC, keeping on track with moves towards universal dental care and pharmacare, improving the situation of affordable housing, and paying for various things by increasing taxes on the wealthiest 1% seem perfectly sensible to me.

I’m not completely happy with the Liberal government, and it is the NDP that has helped get certain things done. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are being totally disingenuous about addressing affordability. Yes, the carbon tax is a challenging scenario, but please do not let them make that the only election issue. We’ll be very sick of hearing about it long before the fall of 2025.

Postal Carrying Update

I’m in the middle of a two-week vacation fill-in on a nearby rural route. It pays for 5.5 hours per day, but there are so many flyers (which have to be collated with the letter mail) that it’s averaging 7.5 hours, which also includes parcels. Then, I found out yesterday that I won’t be back on my usual 4-hour suburban route next week, and I was supposed to be on that one until August. They apparently want me to “reach out” to other post offices to find more assignments. I have no idea what they’re doing, have been doing this for about ten months, and still have no permanent status, benefits, pension, or route of my own.

Meta Plow

Hilariously, these several plow-dudes plowed their way to work this morning in their snow-plow-fitted pickup trucks and then switched over to their industrial-strength snow plows.

“Meta Plow, that’s their name; that name again is Meta Plow.”

Flight 752

One or more individuals at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and/or Iranian Civil Aviation Organization have committed criminal acts by shooting down (and/or allowing to be shot down) a civilian, commercial airplane full of 176 Iranians, Iranian-Canadians, and others with surface-to-air missiles. Was it done intentionally, or was it somehow a horrible mistake?

A rescue worker shows pictures of a girl that were recovered from the crash site southwest of Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020. The crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 killed all 176 people on board. (Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press)

Con Air: The 2018 Ontario Election

UPDATED on June 18th, 2018: Under the forthcoming “Progressive” Conservative majority government in Ontario, taxes will basically only be saved by corporations and rich people, the salaries of the CEO and board of directors of now-non-public Hydro One will somehow be magically adjusted (instead of returning the agency to public hands and actually fixing it), and Doug Ford’s first-promised measure as Premier–getting rid of the cap-and-trade environmental measures–pretty much guarantees that the province will end up instead having an actual carbon tax assessed upon it by the federal government. Those are just for starters.

It will not take very long for the Conservative government to find that, in order to save the money it vaguely has in mind, it will also have to make drastic cuts to health, education, infrastructure, other social services, and so on. No “little guy” will benefit from any of that. Research also shows that the PCs, despite their presumed status as financially prudent, seem to have had the worst fiscal/deficit projections from among the three main parties (NDP, Liberal, PC). In addition, Doug Ford is a millionaire businessman who took over a company from his father, did not run the business very well, is intolerant and inelegant, has said and done numerous stupid things, has associated with questionable people (most of whom support him), and has no political experience (at this level). Does that sound familiar? It should!

The PCs got 60% of the seats (76 of 124) with only 40% of the votes, which just provides yet another example that some kind of fairer, run-off or proportional, voting system needs to be implemented in this province and this country. The NDP will now form the official opposition (with 40 seats), and the incumbent Liberals have now lost official party status (with only seven seats). On the other hand, the Green Party of Ontario elected its party leader as its first MPP.