If you’re referring to the NDP losing votes and the conservatives gaining them, I’m guessing that’s not very common. What would make more sense is for Liberals to move to Conservatives as NDP move to Liberals.

Poilievre knows people don’t want him. The only group that wants him are young MAGA types.

How do I know that he knows that? Because he has Harper out there campaigning for him to older conservative voters. He knows those folks would rather vote for Carney than him. That’s why he’s trying to trick them into thinking that he’s Harper’s buddy. It’s not gonna work.

The Conservatives are trying to pull together an impossible coalition of older centre-right Canadians and younger post-truth populists. I’m extremely doubtful that they’ll succeed. But they don’t have any other choice.

The way to train more docs is to build more medical schools, more hospitals. Gotta lay out the big money for that!

The other problem we have is the demographic bubble. The population is still aging. As the boomers approach their 80s the medical costs of caring for them will rise exponentially.

It’s self-consciousness (less charitably called hack writing or selling out). These are game developers trying to chase market trends rather than following their hearts.

Some are honestly trying to make games that they themselves would love. But it does have a bit of the feel of “I love ice cream and I love dill pickles, so why not dill pickle ice cream?!”

Yes! And we need to build out our rail networks. It should be really cheap to move stuff across country by rail on manifest trains. Additionally, we should have a high speed rail network connecting all of our major cities so that we can travel anywhere without flying, without driving, and without crossing the border.

I’ve always admired the parliamentary tradition of having to drag a new speaker of the house to their chair. Reluctance to have and to use power is such an important, admirable quality.

That said, I do believe our Canadian system is much better than the US one in one particular respect: parliamentary accountability. The leader of the executive, the prime minister, cannot remain in power if they lose the confidence of their own party. We witnessed this most recently with the resignation of Justin Trudeau after he had lost the confidence of his party.

In the US, the president has a lot more power simply because he is insulated from his own party by the separation of powers within the system. Trump is fully engaged in his destructive tariff campaign despite any opposition within his party because of this. The Republican Party, as bad as they are, are never as bad (or as good) as any individual within their ranks. This moderating effect does not extend to the White House due to the aforementioned insulation effect.

I do want chicken. Just not chicken nuggets which are made from mechanically separated chicken aka pink slime. If I’m having fried chicken, it’s gotta be whole muscle meat.

I don’t see the appeal. If I want vegan fried snack food / street food I’m going for falafel, pakora, tempura, or even beer-battered onion rings. Fried chickpeas, fried plantain chips, potato chips, fried tofu skins, vegan fried spring rolls, blooming onions, fried wonton nachos topped with vegan pulled pork (made with jackfruit), vegan empanadas, vegan pizza rolls, …

The list goes on and on and on. There is so much better stuff to eat than highly processed nuggets. Even if you aren’t vegan, there are much better things to eat than chicken nuggets.

Ahhh okay. It’s one of those things that has been debated for a long time. It’s kind of a Star Trek thing if you ask me. Captain Picard gets paid the same as Ensign Slacker from the lower decks (both 0). Well, except Ensign Slacker probably has a tiny apartment in NYC (when not on a tour of duty with the Enterprise) whereas Picard has his luxurious wine estate in the French countryside.

Are you asking or making a rhetorical point?

I don’t think any of these issues will wipe us out completely. Maybe they’ll reduce the population by 99% but that still leaves 80 million people, enough to raise a new society from the ashes of this one.

Anyway ignorance, greed, stupidity, and selfishness are not specialities of the human race. They’re common to all animals.

Our unique problem is that we’ve created an environment which is radically different to the one in which we evolved. Look at one simple dimension: food. We evolved to survive scarcity and famine. Our new extreme abundance of food is killing us with obesity. We’ve cracked the code on the molecules our brains used to detect nutritious food and used them to engineer fast food that is addictive like a drug.

Our collective humanity hasn’t grown at all in 100k years. It isn’t growing.

We have constantly evolving social norms and rules, but these things are now struggling to keep up with mass communications technology. Also people’s susceptibility to cognitive biases is really showing its ugly side these days.

No villain to fight? How about the orange demon and his Nazi-Apartheid emerald mine nepo baby henchman?

Used to be the opposite! These things seem to go in cycles.

Yeah. It turns out there are much nastier heads of state out there than good ol Charles III.

The technical problems are likely the most solvable ones, except for the skilled trades shortage. That problem is very difficult to solve because most people don’t want to do the work and the people who don’t have any other options tend to have personal / mental health problems that make them very unreliable as workers.

I have several friends who work in the skilled trades (drywall taping and finishing). It’s extremely tiring work that leads to chronic joint pain later in life. You’re also exposed to large amounts of dust so you’re wearing a lot of PPE which is quite sweaty and uncomfortable. Many of the other people they encounter in the trade have severe problems with alcoholism, drug addiction, and are very unreliable as workers.

You might suggest that these trades should pay more in order to attract higher quality workers but that means the cost of building housing goes up even more! Ultimately, the problem for skilled trades is the Baumol effect. The labour productivity of construction work has not risen to match the productivity of other industries (notably the tech industry). This problem has affected many industries in our society. It’s the hidden cost we all pay for the convenience of technology.

The political problem is even more difficult to solve. The issue there is that the middle class has grown rich on the back of their home. The rise in real estate value for people’s single family houses has been the main contributor to the wealth of the middle class. Building on this, the two main political parties in Canada (Liberals and Conservatives) target the middle class as their voting base. Thus they are both extremely reluctant to do anything that would lower the demand for housing which would cause real estate prices to fall, destroying the wealth of their voting base.

Milton Friedman has called this problem “middle class welfare.” Political parties target the middle income 51% of the population with social programs and policies that benefit them, not the bottom 51% as we might expect. The most obvious of these programs is government-supported higher education (which benefits the middle class at the expense of the working class), but that’s another discussion entirely.

I believe that the Liberal government’s pursuit of aggressive immigration policies was done deliberately to increase demand for housing (making the middle class rich) and to provide more working class taxpayers to support the education of the middle class.

What land is the government going to build all this housing on? Crown land? That’s mostly wilderness. Who wants to live out there?

Farmland? They’d have to buy it from farmers. Appropriating land from farmers is an extremely unpopular and regressive policy.

That leaves land in the city which is generally either occupied by houses or businesses already or it’s in the process of being developed but is caught up in regulatory hurdles or in various stages of construction. It’s actually a big problem that we don’t have enough skilled tradespeople to build houses at the speed we want them built.

The regulatory issues are a problem for municipal and provincial politics. The Canadian federal government doesn’t have any power to fix that stuff. The design of our federation gives most of the power to the provinces.

Private equity are the scavengers of the economy. They go after declining companies whose value is overly concentrated in illiquid assets.

The Bay has been rotting for decades as a company. The only people who regularly shop there are the non-price-conscious, non-fashionable white upper middle class (Karens, basically). They haven’t been viable for middle class or working class shoppers for many years now.

And yet Albertans will almost definitely support PP

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Carney is from Alberta. He knows what Albertans care about most (the economy, oil and gas, pipelines, and Alberta beef). He knows they hate carbon taxes and he’s moved very swiftly to axe the tax.

His decisiveness, his heritage, and his determination to stand up to Trump who is trying to tariff our economy into oblivion will make him very popular. I think he’ll take the same approach as Zelenskyy: position himself as a wartime leader who is the right choice for the fight ahead.

As a Canadian, I’m worried that this stoking of anti-Canadian sentiment among the right wing in the US is a pretext to an invasion to try to make good on the “51st state” promise.