Is Canada Broken?
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
Haven't heard a lot of white power fascist sentiment either. Sometime last year though I remember they had a rally planned, but there wasn't actually enough of them to have a rally so nobody showed up.
It really bugs me the media's trying to get Canadians to play the same stupid political games as America. Our election system doesn't even work the same here. You don't vote for the prime minister. You vote for the party representitive in your area. This bullshit started back when Trudeau was first running and it's just gotten worse. The political parties here haven't changed. A vote for NDP, liberal or conservative is still the same vote it would have been last election cycle. Their policies are all the same as they've ever been.
That's not quite right; the Conservative party is copying Republican tactics wholesale, the media didn't make them do that. Canada isn't broken, but the Conservative party definitely is.
So yes, it's broken. True conservatives in Canada long for a real party to represent us without looking stupid / evil, but every time one is tried it's beset by problems and waylaid early in the game. The People's Party is the latest incarnation of that, assassinated by the CPC punching right, castigated to look racist when it's not, and so forth. It will probably die after one more election with no results, and then we'll all have to wait for some new hope, which _at best_ will have policies lining up with what the CPC professes now, while they'll have moved on to what the Liberals profess now, in the ever-moving march leftwards.
The MPP in my riding gave that line when she came by. We got Ford, and this particular MPP is the least responsive in the entire provincial parliament. Whatever sympathy I had for that line of reasoning is now lost, the fact is your MP or MPP has very little individual power. Much less than a representative has in the USA.
Last federal election cycle, the riding debate had less than 500 views IIRC.
So while the original statement is factually true, I agree with slededit, my impression is we're currently in the state where most people vote for the leader, and the parties are set up in a way to pressure voting along party lines, or get kicked out.
Even people who were fairly reasonable before the last provincial election just lost their minds and starting parroting incoherent bullshit they heard from the radio. And it has only gotten worse with the federal election looming.
Alberta's always been like this.
Like many, you're confusing the map for the territory. What they've shown is that they want to vote for someone who has a realistic plan that will actually improve their day to day lives, by doing what they collectively believe is necessary to bring economic success back to the province.
Maybe you think they're wrong about the economic success; that's something that can and will be tested. Maybe you think there's a better way to get there; if so, that's a message that needs to be packaged and disseminated in a way that doesn't villainize the normal families in Alberta who simply want to be able to have good employment and purchasing power for the hard work they're willing to put in.
Maybe you think they're wrong because of the long-term environmental impact. You may be right, but it's very difficult to get people to act against their short-term interests in favour of their supposed long-term interests, especially when they disagree with you about the latter. The only path forward on this front if you strongly believe in the environmental aspects is to actually strategize a way forward economically that provides the same level of economic prosperity to people as oil did. I get that this is an extremely tall order, but when you're telling people that the only way forward is for them to get used to the idea that they're all going to be living in government housing and eating maggotburgers, don't be surprised when they reject your vision of the future in favour of someone else who promises something more appealing.
What if - gasp - someone started a right-wing green party? What if we capitalized on the sentiment of the right (rejecting communism, state-enforced equity / egalitarianism, being self-made and self-sufficient, etc) but channeled some of that into new, green projects that people can actually make money off of, like nuclear power?
Environmentalism has basically made itself into a left-only political idea, and this is a critical weakness which might doom us all.
The externalized costs of doing what we've been doing need to be forcibly returned to the people doing them, just like any time society has improved itself. From slavery to the environment and everything in between, externalizing costs will always be cheaper and therefore will always be the business friendly, right wing approved course of action.
> But just how widespread is this xenophobia? A relatively encouraging picture emerges from longitudinal studies by nonprofit research groups or universities. A 2018 global study from the Pew Research Center found 74 percent of Canadians support taking in refugees—a result that seems to fit with the stories of Canadians who banded together in 2015 and 2016 to sponsor Syrian refugee families
To measure xenophobia, the author sites a study on people's attitudes towards taking in more refugees. I'm sure xenophobes would almost certainly answer that the country should not allow more refugees, but it seems many mainstream media publications completely wrote off any legitimate reasons someone may have about migrants coming in from war torn countries. It seems like a very broad brush and doesn't help the situation.
That's because it's a manufactured problem. The media doesn't care to distinguish between a few classes of people, labelling them all white-supremacist facist nazi scum, when most of them really just have views that would have been totally acceptable to discuss in public or have as a part of an official party platform only a decade or so ago.
In reality, what we have are European-extraction nth-generation "old stock" Canadians who believe that they have, in fact, formed a new culture here in Canada that derives from a fusion of European cultures blended with the experiences of pioneering a new land. A few hundred years of working on this, even before Canada itself was a nation spanning the continent, resulted in a people who were starting to define themselves, ideally without resorting to comparison to the USA. This group of people has a latent belief that they deserve a chance to be a culture of shared values and heritage and should not necessarily just be overrun with immigrants who bring their own culture with them.
There's no implication here of "supremacy" or "fascism". I've never met someone who wanted a "fascist" government; 99% of people can't even differentiate between actual Italofascism (i.e. Mussolini's government) and some vague hand-waving idea about totalitarianism, anyhow. Nobody wants to have a government that controls all of our actions, where we can work, what businesses we can run, etc. which are all critical aspects of totalitarian regimes. Labelling people facist is just confusing; the idea that someone who supports the RCMP in their efforts to fight crime is a bootlicking fascist nut is just so absurd an idea to most Canadians that we can't even conceive of the idea that the Extremely Online folks out here are actually pushing this idea (look up "ACAB", "All Cops Are Bastards", for a disturbing look into a growing sentiment in the online left).
There's no implication here of "white power", either; the implication is actually "controlled immigration". We don't want illegal immigration, we don't want people skipping the process and bypassing the good compliant folks who are trying to come in properly. We don't want uncontrolled resettlement of refugees in ways that have demonstrable caused social unrest in European cities. This doesn't mean "only bring in white people" or "don't bring in anyone at all" - even the People's Party only wants to reduce immigration numbers by about a third. It's a function of carrying capacity more than anything else; it's clear to anyone that's being honest that there's some maximum rate you can bring new people in at before they dilute the host country's culture too much for it to be able to continue in any cohesive fashion. That is, if you consider culture to be more than mass media and chain restaurants.
The problem we face is that any attempt to elucidate the above is immediately met with people decrying one as racist, fascist, prejudiced, or as a white nationalist, which is largely an American phenomenon. The American media and online discourse spills over into Canada, and people act as though their problems are our problems, when in fact we face an entirely different set of issues, and have always had a more restrictive immigration policy anyhow. Attempts to come up with Canadian solutions to our problems, like the moderate immigration policy reforms of the Harper government or the reduction in numbers Bernier is proposing, end up being conflated with Trump's border wall and immigration bans, and the average Canadian conservative ends up being placed in the position to defend that sort of thing, rather than the entirely moderate sorts of solutions that are actually being proposed here.
The notion that this country can have its own culture is i think a concept that no longer exists, for at least half the country. After decades of all of our leaders of all stripes and media waving the flag of multiculturalism, we're all immigrants. Even the current prime minister is insistent that we're the first post national state - whatever that means, with core identity. As a result the perception for probably the majority of the population is that there is nothing to dilute, only to enrich. I hope Canadians learn sooner rather than later that the values that we believe are universal and take for granted as we are surrounded by them everyday, are a lot less universal than we think.
The Quebec has a long history with religions dating from the beginning of the colony. In the 20th century, we had a long period of conservatism that we called the Grande Noiceur (the great darkness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Noirceur) during which the religion and the government were acting together against the interest of the population (think about censorship, fear based policies, mandatory brain washing of children, etc). This resulted in an important delay in the economic and cultural development of the province. This period ended abruptly in the 60s with the Quiet Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution) where the Quebecers outright rejected the oppressive religion and conservatism that hold us back for so many years. We are now an open and very progressive society with strong values like woman/man equality. Now you can understand why everything related to religions is very sensitive as it brings bad collective memories from years of oppression and abuses. Some symbols (think burka) are seen as a threat to our collective values and we want to do something about it. Maybe our approach isn't perfect, but saying that we are just a bunch of racists is just acting in bad faith and it won't help us evolve as a society.
I mean, if we're going to get into "who runs the media" conspiracy theories, well, most people know what kind of dialogue that's going to lead to. Whether there's anything at the bottom that's worth delving down to is a good question, but ultimately the solution is to decentralize the control of media by personally moving away from the consumption of mass media entirely, ideally replacing it with a balanced consumption of voices that allow us to synthesize our own conclusions.
It starts out with a bit about the importance of dialogue and how bad polarization is.
Then immediately switches to automatically, and totally assuming that anyone who opposes current immigration levels is simply a "racist". No discussion.
Clearly the author thinks the problem isn't polarization. The author thinks the problem is the other side, and uses words literally synonymous with evil to refer to them.
This kind of journalism isn't discussing the problem; it is the problem.
This line spoke to me:
> The more complexity there is in our mental frames, the more of it we are willing to tolerate in others.
This leads me to think: the better read a society is, the more balance it is.
Perhaps the recent issues of intolerance can be solved by, reading more?
I’d like to mention that I’m utterly out of my depth here, I dont even know what the field of study is called that tries to understand this phenomena.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/503127
"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals."
The statement resonates, as it's simple, pithy, and no counterexample is obvious.
On the topic of asbestos, it’s up to those countries to ban it. If Canada stopped exporting it, those countries would just get it from somewhere else.
But there is very little anomalous about the Canadian seal hunt. First, it goes without saying that "clubbing animals" accounts for a vanishingly tiny portion of the seal hunt. The traditional hakapik is not very efficient and is typically only used by a small number of indigenous Canadians who engage in small-scale subsistence hunting. Anti-hunt groups routinely publicize the hakapik because hunting in this manner produces the visually stunning image of red blood on white ice. Mostly, the seal hunt uses the same tools that any other commercial hunt does. Side note: Anti-hunt groups have also in the past commercially engaged hunters to hunt "white coat" seals (juvenile seals), a practice which is illegal and not economical. If your perception is coloured by the notion that Canadians are clubbing baby seals, that is not by and large accurate.
Second, "for fur" is reductive. It is true that seal pelts are used -- to make boots, gloves, jackets, and everything else you imagine. But in fact the seal is used more efficiently than most hunted animals. Seal fat ("blubber") is used for vitamins and oil; the entire seal meat is eaten; and seal bones are used for tools and carvings. In recent years, Indigenous art has been seen as one way to bring economic growth to the rural north, and carved bone sculpture is one of the main mediums used. This is not comparable to, for example, poaching big game for their horns and leaving the carcasses to rot. Seals are used efficiently.
Third, I wanted to speak a little bit to the ecological component of the seal hunt. There are millions of seals, millions more than there are people in the areas that hunt. Seals eat cod; the Atlantic Cod population has been severely depleted and there has been a full legal moratorium on the Atlantic Cod fishery for over 20 years to help replenish stocks. Currently, there are more seals than the carrying capacity of the ecosystem allows. This has bad knock-on effects. When they can't find cod to eat, they eat capelin; capelin are otherwise a food source for cod, and so seals contribute in a direct way to the ecological imbalance that is harming cod replenishment. Of course if you oppose killing animals at any time for any reason, then, clearly you would oppose this. But there are scientific and ecological reasons to intervene and cull the seal population.
Finally, I wanted to speak a little bit about the economics, and about your attribution of the seal hunt to "Canada". In fact, the seal hunt is an economic feature of only Labrador, northern Quebec, northern Ontario, Nunavut, and the NWT. When the European Union considered barring the import of seal products, these provinces and territories implored the federal government to be an aggressive advocate of their economic interests. Largely, the federal government demurred. The result was that Europe -- a continent which still allows bullfighting and at the time, allowed fox hunting -- banned the import of Canadian seal products. This caused a decrease in the price of seal by over 80% due to a decline in demand. All's fair in love and capitalism, no doubt, but this has hurt a largely poor largely rural population of seal hunters, and also inhibited the above ecologically-motivated interventions.
So, again... to the extent that you believe killing animals or consuming meat is unethical across the board, I hear you and I have nothing to say in defence. I do think we will look back on our treatment of animals in shame. But to the extent we allow and recognize the killing and eating of animals, I would hate for you to come away with the idea that those "stupid fat-cat Canucks club baby seals to death and leave them to rot". These misperceptions are harmful to our ability to discuss the overall point and stem largely from well-moneyed interest groups deliberately distorting reality. We could all use a little charity and kindness when engaging with one another, and that is sometimes lost when we go for pith.