…while drunk.

The CMHC used to directly fund public housing and coops and just…stopped.

This was in the 1980s, and we were told that private lenders and mortgage assistance and P3 developments would be oh so much better. Well, all that did was transfer what little funds the CMHC did have into private hands while not really building much housing, and building functionall zero low-income housing at all.

Coincidentally, housing started to get out of control at about the same time all this happens. How fucking shocking.

Just to remind everyone: Layton pulled this same stunt, toppling Martin’s government.

The result was the loss of a number of progressive initiatives Martin’s people were working on, the election of fucking Stephen Harper and the most conservative Canadian political landscape since Borden. Science was suppressed, lslamophobia went from being a dogwhistle to a bullhorn, we narrowly avoided economic catastrophy. Harper even fucked with the Census in an attempt to remake Canada.

A lot of dippers really idolized Layton, but honestly he was a shameless opportunist and I don’t forgive him for giving us almost a decade of Harper.

And Singh is pulling the same fucking stunt.

Singh et al learned absolutely nothing from the Harper era

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines in full effect

Maybe, and this is just an idea, stop being so attractive to fascist rejects?

It makes sense when you realize Ford won’t do anything that returns private money to the public, but will do everything and anything that enriches the private sector.

Removing tolls from the 407 would be a public benefit, so he won’t do it. You’d be more likely to see him sell the east-of-Pickering chunk of 407 for a “tax break” and claim it’s a win.

You’d think this, but so far he just seems to keep damaging more things and rolling everything up into a kind of metastasizing grift that gets it’s tentacles into everything.

Crab-bucket economics to go with crab-bucket foreign policy

Post-Soviet Russia is such a fuck-up of a nation-state that they only way they can look good is by dragging everyone else down to their level.

What the age of consent in every legal jurisdiction.

The reason citizens feel this way is because they’ve seen the half-assed policy we have, where we don’t enforce drug laws, but don’t support addicts either, and the result is serious harm to just about any city of size in most of Canada.

The correct solution would be a) housing and comprehensive supports for addicts, so they have a roof over their head and can get clean, b) safe-supply, and c) actual enforcement of laws and bylaws so that the only place you can use your safe, free supply is the home from a) or the treatment centre in b).

All of this would cost money and political capital. The cheap solution was to just do a half-assed job enforcing laws about drug use, and a similarly half-assed approach to the crime caused by drug use, with a token few bucks thrown at safe-consumption. This looked wonderfully progressive, and it had the benefit of being cheap and keeping the riff-raff out of nice suburban spaces. Basically, we looked at Portugal’s solution, and did maybe 30-50% of it, and looked all shocked when it didn’t work.

Now we’re dealing with a situation where we didn’t address the causes of addiction, and piled on not addressing the impacts, either. And people–voters, people who live and work in downtowns scorched by addiction–are unhappy about it. And now it’s a more expensive problem then it was 10-15 years ago.

This is painfully typical of Canada: ignore a problem when it’s cheap to fix, half-ass a solution, and then cry poverty and powerlessness when the problem metastasizes into a crisis. See: healthcare, education or immigration

I’m old. That’s what I know them for.

Please do.

Especially American liberals. Please move to, eg, Alberta and Ontario specifically and knock the UCP and OCP off their perches.

No less than The Economist uses the BMI (“Big Mac Index”) to compare economies.

Cellebrite isn’t American.

Having seen Poillievre, I don’t think he will do this.

If he just shuts up about “the woke” and just talks about the price of milk, he’d have this in the bag, but he can’t shut up about “the woke” because the kind of people who vote in CPC conventions talk about “woke” all the goddamn time, and he knows that if doesn’t go on about “the woke” some opportunistic usurper will shiv him.

I sorely wish the CPC party members had voted for Chong or kept O’Toole. I’d be annoyed about austerity spending, but not worried about fascism.

Considering he’s in power purely as a result of catering to the whackjob right that thought O’Toole was too sane, I would not put faith in his ability to keep the whackjobs under control.

It’s the old “What’s the problem with riding a tiger? You can’t get off without getting eaten.” problem that comes from courting populism.

Ohio just voted for a convicted rapist and felon who ran the worst campaign in modern history.

I don’t have any faith in America at all and the US “heartland” specifically. If Trump told them to cut their own genitals off, they’d do it.

Because Ford needs you angry about bike lanes while he does his 413 land grab.

That’s why bike lanes are in this bill: Ford doesn’t care about them, they’re just a hail-mary to distract for the other measures in the bill meant to get his highway-to-nowhere built and his developer buddies their ROI.

When you realize that a huge amount of the small- and medium-size right-wing media ecosphere is funded by herbal boner pills, you’ll understand why this is a thing.