Yep. “Oh it’s so shameful to take all this money, we need to tell the West to get fucked some more! It’s their fault that we need to take all this money!! We’ll just keep taking it for a few more decades, while also making more demands and getting preferential treatment. Oh, no, how insulting for us, we just keep taking more and more of that money! We don’t need this money for all the social programs that Quebec boasts about to others, even though without the money we’d run deficits!”

I get that the regular folks in Quebec are generally ‘normal’. That’s one reason the lopsided crap on the political level is so infuriating for us westerners. I mean, I gotta wait 3 f’ing weeks to see my family GP out here in Vancouver. I sure hope you all took my tax money to get equally stellar treatment back east.

Not knowledgeable enough? Look up equalization payments then. Quebec gets the majority of equalization payments, and has gotten such for literally decades, because they’re considered a “have not” province. Like last year (2024) they got around $13 billion (52% of the total amount handed out) – from Western Canada, as the region that is historically termed “have” provinces (every province except BC, Alberta and Sask got money, those western provinces just ‘lost’ billions to support the rest of Canada). That money is no strings attached, which allows Quebec to do stuff like offer additional social supports, and then the people of Quebec get to look down their noses at the West, and say crap like “Why aren’t your education options cheaper? Peasants!”. Maybe they would be, if we could keep our tax revenue, rather than being forced to support Quebec.

Even more insulting, those payments are a result of the Constitution. If Quebec doesn’t want to sign, fine, don’t give them the Western province’s money. Or how bout those Bloc folks take a principled stance and just hand the money back to the West. They don’t agree with the constitution, but seem perfectly content to reap the benefits from it. They’re good with Canada so long as they can sponge.

This isn’t a new issue from the Western provinces. It’s been ongoing for decades. Even as recently as 2018, with Kenney and Moe in Alberta and Sask, when the formula was last renewed at the fed level, there were releases about how pissed the west was with it – the feds renewed it without consulting the provinces, and without any changes to address the issues the west has with it. I’m guessing you’re from back east, which makes it entirely fitting that you’re completely ignorant of the issues on this side of the country.

As for the resentment long term, imagine a bunch of kids at a party. One kid loses a game and throws a tantrum and refuses to play with the others any more. The other kids bend over backward to try and get that kid to calm the fuck down. The kid refuses, even after everyone’s tried bribing him / treating him better than every other kid there. He keeps disrupting things and being a pain in the arse. He takes other kids toys and plays with them, while mocking those kids. Who would want that kid back at the next party. Continuing to spoil them, just re-enforces their negative behaviour. Sure, there may be “reasons” to be a spoiled little shit, but at some point Quebec ought to grow up and look outside their own border. Resentment cuts both ways, and based on the realities of ‘today’, Quebec’s got a lot less to complain about than western provinces.

Like I listened to some of that debate yesterday. The gall of that Bloc guy being all “Carney hasn’t called me to consult on what’s best for Quebec, he can’t be trusted” is just lunacy. And that’s the sort of narcissitic self-centered dipshit that Quebec supports. Like if the fed was to consult anyone about Quebec’s provincial interests, it would be a meeting with the premiers, which is what happened. If some minority leader in the house, who refuses to treat national issues as national issues, wants to throw a hissy fit about how the people dealing with a crisis aren’t directly consulting with them in their self-aggrandized role… that leader should be tossed the hell out. Asking a national party, during a national crisis, with national support, to come bend the knee for some minority party with (quite literally) an anti-national agenda, is beyond ‘not helping’. And saying that stuff, and broadcasting it to the whole country, should be embarrassing for the people he represents. But people in Quebec are likely to be all “he stands up for us!”, similar to how dumbass Ford was able to get back in just by draping himself in a f’ing flag to distract people from the damage his govt does on the whole.

Sure, though that’s part of the problem that the States is whining about. US taxes paid for the service, which lots of other nations/foreign companies used.

Things like Libraries require taxes to operate. You’d likely be annoyed if you were struggling, and then found out your gov was using your taxes to pay for a bunch of foreign countries to have libraries. And then you find out that those foreigners are able to use those libraries to make good money, which they don’t use to support their libraries, cause the States is already covering it. So you’re paying taxes, and struggling to do so, so that EU companies can reap profits and live comfy.

And yes, charge a fee. That’s basically what I’ve said, no? That there’s a value add, and that there are ‘professionals’/companies using it who aren’t paying for that value add. So something like a fee for frequent pulls against the vuln feeds, to replace whatever funding the US gov was giving, would make sense to me. though I suppose this has now been kicked down the road till next year.

Canada’s a young enough country that there were still a bunch of bitter Quebecois who remembered losing against the British, and they had such giant rods up their arses that they decided to take it out on the rest of Canada by not signing a piece of paper, and having a militant separatist group go bombing English speaking people (and then whining about martial law when the govt took action to stop it). And to try and appease the pampered province, Ontario continues to compete in National “French Language” debates where each politician spends a TON of time trying to convince Quebec they’d give the best sloppy bj with tons of financial perks as lube. Financial lube that they take from Provinces in the West, who they ignore. Quebec then tells them all to get fucked and votes for the Bloc anyhow. And while telling everyone to get f’d, they still get more benefits than any other province. They’re a spoiled child in this sense.

I wonder why there’s often talk of Western alienation, hand in hand, with Quebec separatist movements. Like the last time the Bloc had a ‘real’ referendum, there were movements in BC/Alberta half-jokingly asking if we could vote them out.

Like here’s an Idea, we’re having a french language debate – that’s totally fine and Canadian. But that shouldn’t require it to be a whole debate focused almost entirely on Quebec and Quebecs local issues. The Bloc guy, despite his attestations, is not some king representing “Quebec”: they deserve to have a broader conversation, and Canada ought to treat the language’s reach as “National”, not “Just this one niche pocket”. Ask questions about how the politicians will help British Columbia during that French language debate. Ask another about Alberta. How will Canadians voting for the Bloc, benefit people back West? Make that Bloc guy stand there for 10-15 minutes explaining to voters that a vote for him, is a vote to tell every other Canadian to get fucked, because he has no real plan or care for Canada as a country. And then when he’s in power, treat ridings that go bloc like they treat most minority party ridings out west – shift funding to the provinces that actually support the federation. Or at the very least, let them keep their tax revenue, instead of sending it to Quebec as “equalization payments”.

The current format of those debates is divisive, and elevates the bloc more than it deserves.

Yawn. I think national parties should be highlighted on the national stage: I don’t think the metrics provided by the TV consortium for who gets to participate properly captures what a national party is. I think rules/requirements that specifically carve out a ‘system’ that enables one niche interest from one part of the country, to masquerade as a ‘national’ party, is disingenuous and insulting to everyone outside of that niche – especially as the ‘rules’ were clearly structured to preference/enable the blocs participation. That % threshold of the voting public is a lot easier for a separatist movement to hit in Quebec, than it is in the West due to population density – its basically tailor made for them, and provides a ‘structure’ to block other regions doing the same / getting the same preferential treatment for their ‘niche’ interest parties. At least the PPC and GPC are interested in the country as a national body, and in governing/contributing to the national interests.

They should just change the format. Do an hour long unedited interview with each candidate, with pre defined topics / identical questions, to allow leaders to get their talking points out in a more ‘user friendly’ conversational way. Allow as many leaders as they want to sit for an interview, post them all on third party news sites to allow them to generate some ad revenue for providing the interview services/hosting (with requirements to host all qualifying candidates to mitigate news agency bias). Let voters watch whichever clips they want. Hell, have local news agencies do similar with the local candidates, so that you can see your person speak on topics of import, and how they would represent your region on those fronts.

They all just try to say their sound bites anyway. And few voters are realistically going to suddenly support a different party based on a one night zinger.

Yeah, but that’s sort of the point I was making… it was a data repository used by “thousands and thousands” of security professionals and organizations. So people who were generating revenue off of the service. I mean, they’re professionals, not hobbyists / home users.

I’m not an American, but in terms of everything running like a company/for profit, I’d say that its best if things are sustainable / able to self-maintain. If the US cutting funding means this program can’t survive, that’s an issue. If it has value to a larger community, the larger community should be able to fund its operation. There’s clearly a cost to maintaining the program, and there are clearly people who haven’t contributed to paying that cost.

In terms of going back to whatever, the foundation involved is likely to sort out alternative funding, though potentially with decreased functionality (it sounds like they had agreements to pay for secondary vulnerability report reviews, which will likely need to get scaled back). Maybe they’ll need to add in a fee for frequent feed pulls, or something similar. I wouldn’t say it’s completely toast or anythin just yet.

That’s nice, but I don’t really care. They aren’t a national party, nor are they interested in being a “Canadian” national party. Giving them a platform to debate on the national level is in part why they’re able to maintain their seat count – it’s the same sort of pageantry that drives dictators to covet meetings with democratic leaders, to trick people into thinking “Oh, they’re basically the same”, when they’re very much not.

The peoples party, and the greens, even if they’re super fringe in nature, have more merit for being included in the debates in my view. I’d watch (well, listen to) those debates. I won’t bother watching the bloc get up and do its stupid bloc crap. There’s talk in the media again about western alienation / succession, and Quebec / Canada’s approach to Quebec compared to its handling of Western interests is a big part of what fuels that sort of resentment. The bloc is basically Quebec just giving the entire country a giant middle finger, which is a wonderful way to show support for the country as a whole…

I’m honestly not totally sure what to think about this one, though I recognise that it’s a big shift/likely a negative overall result.

Reason I’m humming and hawing, is that there are lots of expensive cybersecurity type ‘things’ that rely on the CVE system, without explicitly paying in to that system / supporting it directly, from what I recall / have seen. Take someone like Tenable security, who sell vulnerability scanners that extensively use/integrate with the CVE/NVD databases… companies pay Tenable huge amounts of money for those products. Has Tenable been paying anything into the ‘shared’ public resource pool? How about all those ‘audit’ companies, who charge like 10-30k per audit for doing ‘vulnerability / penetration tests’.

IT Security has been an expensive/profitable area for a long time, while also relying on generally public/shared resources to facilitate a lot of the work. Maybe an ‘industry’ funded consortium is the more appropriate way to go.

Those requirements are designed to allow Quebec’s provincial party a seat at the table, while impeding access for parties such as the Greens and Peoples. They’re basically an example of institutional discrimination that came in fairly recently, with a pretty explicit target/goal.

I have much less interest in sitting through a debate between 4 people, when 1/4 of the time will be dedicated to a guy talking about one province’s interests, and where that party doesn’t even run outside of that province. Guess I’ll just wait for my media bubbles to give me the highlights and hope that it’s not too biased.

Hilarious… so the req is to have someone in the house (or 4% vote share nationally), and run candidates in most ridings. They’re getting cut because the elections folks think they are in violation of the latter there.

While still allowing the Bloc to participate. A party that’s never run a candidate outside of Quebec. A party where every second of time they’re givin on a national stage, only speaks to one province’s interests, in a ‘national’ debate. Who’s been in pretty well every national debate for decades now.

It’s vaporware until its commercially available.

I’m curious – I’ve looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn’t feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there’s a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service… ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can’t get tracked through a payment?

Lots of people seem to think it’s either or, and it really shouldn’t be, in my view. (I’ll note I’m canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).

The argument that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other ‘regular’ forms of expression I’m totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.

But we’ve also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of “peaceful protests”/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We’ve seen large, organized groups of Indian students – their messages of “go get free food” being amplified by foreign controlled social media – draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We’ve seen ‘protests’ leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.

And that’s really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They’ll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They’ll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both “Hamas is bad” and “Israel’s genocidal actions in gaza are bad”, but somehow it’s always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you’re on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we’re accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren’t the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.

So I’m fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person’s involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they’re a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some ‘student’ groups in Canada) they’re actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I’d also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don’t renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn’t be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.

And again, similar to the note about ‘one side or the other’, in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a ‘right’ for most sane people – at least, not one that wouldn’t come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he’s free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.

Yes.

I haven’t really spoken to any of my green reps before, in terms of them running for the seat. I have had interactions with my NDP MLA and MP, and have been left thoroughly disappointed with the results.

I don’t think a whip position is really that big a deal for a party, until they have enough people elected to make it matter.

In Canada its termed EDI https://www.canada.ca/en/research-coordinating-committee/priorities/equity-diversity-inclusion-research.html

We do see requirements for people to state whether they’re an Employment Equity group – or rather, options to positively identify as an employment equity group so that you can get passed that ‘check’ on the hiring process. The government of Canada will literally send you a note saying you’ve been kicked out of the application pool for ‘not’ identifying as such on their forms, for example. And the only group that isn’t an employment equity group, are cis white men. The checkboxes to identify as FN are also “optional”, but generally translate into more benefits/privileges in hiring and so on.

The Employment equity act is a derived document that changes the Charter’s general assertions in 15(1)(2) into specific groups which, the verbiage of which excludes only cis white men. The Charter says “no discrimination based on race/gender”, the EEA says “you can positively discriminate in favour of any group except cis white guys”.

No, I’m not surprised in the slightest by either of these, seeing as I’ve known about these things for decades, and seeing as I’ve received “You didn’t identify as an Equity Employment Group” rejection letters from the federal government in the past.

Eh, good luck to them. I find it hard to take them seriously at this point, though I’ve historically voted green in most elections. Their leadership fiasco recently was an absolute embarrassment, and honestly a huge blow against the DEI policies they encourage. Having May there again is also a bit of a flag, as going back to the previous leader who wanted out makes it seem like there’s a real lack of leadership options / sustainability in the party’s gov structure.

Their candidates are pretty clearly still heavily fringe oriented, with very hard left leaning stances when you read through bios. This time around it seems like my local candidate has very questionable qualifications, basically just being a FN grandmother with five kids of her own at ~45. I don’t see how that’d represent me/my interests locally or nationally in the house, especially as a non FN. They’re still beating that demographic politics marching drum, but it cuts both ways. You can’t realistically put a candidate forward saying they’re all about their own demographic interests, and supporting their own demographic slice, without alienating people who aren’t part of that slice. Especially if there’s no other substance to the candidate.

The party’s ‘platform’/position on topics isn’t really costed out from what I could see on their site. Tons of spending, main thing they seem to note for generating revenue is the ever nebulous ‘closing business tax loop holes’ type thing. They seem to imply they’re going to create redundancies in some areas of gov, whole new agencies, make good on every costly suggestion of the MMIWG, and on and on. Feels hollow to me, especially seeing where the markets are currently.

Top that off with some of their positions being a bit vague, and potentially really authoritarian. Like saying they’re going to make online sites subject to the same regulation as publishers in regards to hate speech etc. Suddenly community forums like Lemmy would potentially be liable for anything anyone writes, if that’s implemented the way it’s described. And as a far left party, they’d uphold the most restrictive/authoritarian definitions of what constitutes hate speech I’m sure.

Saying we should have a Canadian made EV isn’t saying we should priortize cars. It’s a relatively marginal item, with low relative cost, that the guy is saying we shouldn’t do. Saying we shouldn’t do a low cost marginal thing, and should instead focus on spending huge amounts to re-orient city infrastructure so that bikes become the primary mode of transit, is a far bigger / more complex / more costly shift – and one that he argues should be made at the cost of relatively small changes in the existing industry. If you aren’t bothering to weed your garden (a low cost task to maintain your theoretical personal green space), because someone convinced you to build a trebuchet in your backyard because its a far more interesting thing to do than weed your garden, you’ve abandoned your garden. If in order to build that trebuchet, it needs to have large building materials strewn all over your yard, crushing your existing bushes, you’ve definitely given up on having that garden.

And if you get frustrated and abandon that trebuchet project part way, your garden is just toast. Prolly would’ve been better off just weeding it.

Like a third of the charter of rights and freedoms is about language laws and french/english. Even as a west coaster, I highly doubt there’s a scenario where Canada doesn’t side with Quebec on this front.

So option 2 it is – but that’s their endgame anyway, they’re just hunting for an excuse to do it anyhow. Thats been clear ever since he dredged up Fentanyl as a boogeyman. Just hurry up and diversify trade more – I’m fairly sure we can find other markets for most goods. Any business that’s just sitting there hoping this will blow over, and/or that the government will bail them out, and isn’t taking direct actions to mitigate this issue that’s been months and months in the making… deserves to fail.

Might work out, might not. It’ll be interesting to see more of the details.

One item I don’t see any of them talking about though, is addressing the regulatory hurdles around alternative banks offering more options when it comes to the underwriting and mortgage qualification. One common reason people are locked out of the housing market, is that they can’t qualify for a $1500/month mortgage, so they’re stuck paying $1700 rent instead, which is nuts. And the reason the banks – or more specifically smaller lenders who specialise in mid-market families (ie. Credit Unions) – can’t make these sorts of deals work, is that the regulatory bodies would smash them with huge penalties/fines due to it being considered “riskier” underwriting. Admittedly CUs are provincially regulated, but if we’re looking at it as a national issue then there should be broader discussion about these sorts of items amongst all tiers of govt – sorta like how health care is technically a provincial concern in segregation of power, but the feds have significant influence over it.

In times past, or more specifically in the 1980s where some of Carney’s ideas are coming from, there were more small Credit Unions doing mortgages outside the regular range of the federal banks – so if you were a ‘fringe’ borrower, you could still get your foot in the door, just with a different route than a traditional bank. This wasn’t a huge risk to the industry at large, as each of those CUs was small – if any had taken too many bad risks, it would be easy to let the organisation ‘fail’ and disperse its members over to new CUs. It’s less the case now, as the regulators have pushed CUs to merge into far larger organisations and shrunk the count of CUs industry-wide – meaning if something like Vancity went down, there’s no ‘safety net’ from other CUs able to absorb it and it’d inevitably hit the government books. And because of this, those same regulators force the system to be rigid and conform to explicit guidelines on their lending practices, with relatively minor wiggle room for boards/policies. Their efforts to minimize risk, choking the industry to death slowly, and removing financial supports from traditionally under-served demographic segments.

Like here’s an example that I know for a fact Credit Unions used to be able to offer to people, with some conditions/qualifiers: you could get a personal loan for a low rate to cover a big portion of the down payment on your mortgage. So if they felt like you could take on a bit more debt for the near term to get into a home, ie if they saw you paying $1700/month in rent and that your mortgage was gonna be just $1500, they could basically make that work with a far lower down payment.