I love, absolutely love, this new short from Cara, on how the Scarborough committee of adjustment is rejecting perfectly legal housing projects due to vibes. Toronto's housing crisis in a nutshell.
something that always strikes me when I return from a backcountry hiking trip is how the experience of addressing one’s basic needs (toilet, water, shade, rest) can often be more difficult in a hostile urban environment than in nature.
Ontario just spent $4 billion building an LRT that was so poorly executed it is objectively worse than the bus it’s supposed to replace. You could get some pretty nice toilets for $4 billion.
We have money, we just love throwing it at unaccountable, incompetent bureaucrats and consultants.
Whenever you want to know why Canada doesn’t have X that is commonplace in other highly developed countries with similar tax burdens, look to what we do spend on.
White elephant infrastructure projects
Policing
Inefficient service delivery
Reinventing the wheel
Decades of consultations
Sure we may not have public toilets, consistent way-finding or well-maintained parks, but we have the BEST (funded) police. Do the Auckland Police have the latest black-on-black body armour for looking tacticool?
www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toron...
There are many places that lack running water or electricity yet can accurately sell a bottle of water. Only in this particular hellscape do we need AI data centres to fail at the most basic tasks.
Yesterday I went to one of those "automated" Amazon stores at LAX to buy a bottle of water. You take the item and walk out and "AI" determines what to charge you based on camera footage.
Well AI sucks and charged me twice. Amazon spent billions trying to replace cashiers and... utterly failed?
Should we build a stronger, richer Canada that compares more favourably to the US in employment opportunities? Absolutely! But when you neighbour the richest country on earth, you're also going to need to bring something else to the table to retain talent because we will never pay more than the US.
see: expat Canadians moaning about US politics making bank in SF. Nowadays offering tepid defences of a country they choose not to live in.
Liberal Americans (and Canadians!) admire our more egalitarian society with less income disparity and a stronger safety net.
However they very, very rarely can translate that into "I, a high income earner, am willing to earn less in Canada".
www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFi...
You did not have an encounter with a bottle of whiskey before you became drunk. Come on.
This is not accurate. The Vancouver Police killed Myles Gray. Why is matter for the public inquiry, but this phrasing is biased and purposefully obscures undisputed facts. Do better.
www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/vanco...
This is a bit like announcing that as part of the recent thaw with China, we now believe the two Michaels were just on an extended holiday. We can have rapprochement without rewriting history.
genuinely had to google the boundaries of North Cowichan, which might be more easily expressed by what isn't inside it than what is.
Canadians often believe we have the highest quality of life and that any change to sacred cows like trade protectionism threatens that. That comforting fiction is an immense obstacle to actually improving our country.
The trade upheaval with the US is putting Canadian auto manufacturing on the brink of irrelevance.
Politicians need to turn away from using protectionist policy to turn it into a second dairy cartel - producing expensive, mediocre products that are worthless for export.
www.tvo.org/article/anal...
Rather than demanding onshore auto investment as a quid pro quo, we should be buying whatever the best sub is and opening our auto market to any foreign-built product that meets comparable safety standards.
There's no future for a Canadian auto industry in a world without Canada-US free trade.
For those who don't follow BC politics, Penny Ballem is a celebrity doctor/management consultant who is perpetually being hired at CEO salaries to run some element of BC's healthcare system.
www.biv.com/news/rob-sha...
Maybe if we had just paid Penny Ballem another few million dollars to be special advisor on something or other, people outside Vancouver could have healthcare that isn't disrupted by a giant taxpayer funded party. Maybe next time.
If only someone could have predicted the effect this would have on essential services and planned for it.
New piece at the Hub! I drill into the numbers to show that GDP per capita is overstating Canada's quality of life, and a variety of other indicators show that we're falling behind our global peers... fast.
We're too complacent, and it's costing us.
Yeah but my boomer friends post AI generated complacency porn all day on social media about Canadians are taller than Americans or something so it's OK that we are lagging on healthcare, education, productivity, housing and basically anything compared to peer countries ex USA.
genuinely surprised to find this was not Powell River
In some provinces they actually make landfills into parks because they're the only hills they have.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beare_H...
In the Toronto Star I write about Toronto Police's violent corruption scandal. Will it move the needle on police reform? It's a dramatic escalation in a long history of police intimidation, bullying their critics & broken trust. I argue 3 big things have to happen, including firing this chief.
Canada joins the EU but the provinces don't agree to the required constitutional amendment. The frontier becomes the territories. We travel to Yellowknife annually for the butter.
Any degree of economic integration comes with compromise, however. We like Europe but would we open our telecom sector to European MVNOs? What about diary? There are powerful domestic interests that would need to be subdued for a "CETA 2" agreement that goes farther.
Agree with all of your points and would note that even for European countries, a more "a la carte" approach in establishing closer bilateral relations with the EU can make sense and is demonstrated by e.g. Switzerland and Norway.
fair! There's no easy solution. Penduluming between "we are legislating UNDRIP" and "wait do laws have consequences" isn't exactly grappling with the problem though. Reordering land use policy to incorporate Indigenous rights is a massive undertaking the NDP seem unaware they signed up for.
Politically unable to reform big programs like OAS, government belt-tightening inevitably becomes savage cuts around the fringes of our fiscal problems - libraries, parks and so on.
The same basic math that stymied Rob Ford.
