I was taken aback by this random person’s statement, interviewed by the CBC about this. They were like “Well we all know that Poilievre is good, but Carney just seems better.” 🥹

I mean it’s possible that it may have fallen some due to the relentless campaign against it in thr US, coupled with the typical leakage of American propaganda into Canada. The support for gay marriage was never 100% so it’s conceivable that it may have dropped a bit but I don’t expect a dramatic change or anything approaching a majority against. Not coming off of 79% approval in 2023.

I really liked how Carney addressed the woke scare. He said that while America engages in a war on woke, Canadians will continue to value inclusiveness. Also he contrasted the US as a melting pot with Canada as a mosaic. Simple.

A quick look in Wikipedia shows in 2017 support for same sex marriage stood at 74% and in 2023 at 79%. Did it fall since then? To what?

Jaw dropped, I think the expectation was 55-65.

Insane. Now let’s see to what extent that translates to the general public.

Freeland has polled fairly poorly against Poilievre and this is what everyone i know voted on - who can defeat him. Then there’s some of the bad takes she made. She sounded austerity-ish, made some anti-woke statements which play right in the cons’ hands.

He plans to bring in more taxes if he can’t increase current sales taxes plus increase income taxes.

Not sure where you’re getting this from but it goes directly against what he’s been saying throughout his campaign.

Last time I checked the OTPP wasn’t a major BCE shareholder. This seems to agree

But that doesn’t invalidate the general pattern. I think the ownership of a large corporation by a labor union or its pension plan is an improvement over traditional ownership. Reason being that the negative externalities produced by such a corporation are felt much more by the union’s members who have much lower incomes than some fat cats. As a result these members have on one hand the incentive to extract value from this corporation, but on the other the incentive to not overextract.

Another related thought I had some time ago is that if union density is very high and union members manage to extract the lion’s share of the company profits, then they’ll be able to accumulate much bigger savings. In such a reality the economic equation flips from having a financial system extract the value of labor for your pension to workers getting that value right in their paycheque, every two weeks. Of course there are other issues like some workers perhaps still not making enough for a decent pension due to the generally lower pay in some sectors. That’s why I think if union density goes high enough, we’d likely move to a much stronger national pension system.

Oh damn, I didn’t notice. Thanks!

Yeah, it seems counterproductive to ditch FOSS in the name of self-sufficiency. If it were about that, assembling an army of software people to learn and contribute to important FOSS codebases would be much more productive in my opinion. It feels like Harmony Next is about something else. Perhaps some wholesale insurance. Or someone’s plans grandeur.

Yes. In this case I linked it on purpose because of their handlers.

Doug Ford spent much more on canceling various contracts on a whim. I say bail.

Sorry I didn’t mean we can’t of course we can given the people we have. I meant that I think we don’t have the benefit of our reactors producing fissile material suitable for weapons. Could be wrong.

I’m not sure we can. Our reactors don’t produce the right material, I think. We should buy from France, tomorrow.

If Mark Carney PM has any sense, he’ll invest significantly in CP, making it a universal letter and parcel carrier for Canada. Run it below cost, making every business shipping costs ultra low. Perhaps even get into an Amazon-like warehouse logistics where people can use their inventory management along with shipping. Eat Amazon’s lunch and allow every farmer and manufacturer ship direct to consumer without having to setup their own logistics operation. That’ll also undercut Big Grocer’s dominance bringing lower prices. Platforms like Amazon carry tremendous efficiencies but they should be run as national common infrastructure, not for profit.

Yeah we need deterrents. This shit ain’t funny anymore and there’s no guarantee Trump will be the last in the string of fascists.

Yeah I’m not sure what’s going on, I was simply highlighting that “an economist” doesn’t mean a rigid and consistent set of beliefs and economic policies, sinc economics isn’t a hard science and it’s got multiple schools of thought that lead to vastly different political positions. And if you just go by someone being an economist you may get badly surprised.

They would still be cheaper. Labor is a small part of the cost of a car. If I remember correctly it was about 15%. Many of the Chinese EVs are cheap because they’re designed to be. Simpler, lower cost designs instead of luxury high end vehicles. Then of course they have much lower costs in their inputs due to most of their supply chains not operating at max profit margins, along with having more vertical integration that avoids margin stacking. If you have a Canadian BYD assembly factory that imports batteries and motors from China, the cost of making these vehicles wouldn’t be dramatically higher than making them in China. If you wanted to have a complete supply chain in Canada, including building the batteries, the cost would be higher. How high? No idea. Probably still cheaper than the alternatives, given the designs themselves are cheaper, but perhaps not dramatically so. If I were the PM, I’d be talking with them to start on the former with a 5-year plan on transitioning to the latter. Just so that we have the capability of producing EVs from end to end in Canada, even if most are assembled from imports. If the US opts to kill our auto industry, I’d be on the phone with BYD the same day.

I don’t, I didn’t try listing all the good and bad achievements. I intended to say he did plenty of things to deserve people’s ire, not that he didn’t do anything good.

One caveat, there’s plenty of economists who think that PP has the right approach to manage the economy. Just because someone’s an economist doesn’t mean they believe what Carney believes. He seems to subscribe to some form of Keynesian economic thought while the majority of economists today are still Neoliberal (more free market, small government, unlimited free trade, trickle down).