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Comment by cal5k | Hacker News Reader

People are cheering, but as a broader statement this is a small sample of how difficult it is to do business in Canada.

True, it's difficult to slash and burn through the political process with half-baked techie ideas and opaque data collection practices. Not to mention ones requiring huge taxpayer commitments for a project that is way beyond the bleeding edge (at best) or a priori only partially achievable "but let's try it and see" (at worst).

Bureaucracy and elaborate processes slow things down. Every so often, that's a great thing.

Not all business is good business.

>how difficult it is to do business in Canada.

Or, put differently, how difficult it is to exploit the public's privacy for financial gain in Canada?

I'm Canadian, and I'm glad that Google didn't get carte blanche to come in and build their surveillance dystopia.

I'm not even a fan of that project in particular, but this is a common problem in Canada - the goalpost constantly shifts, the process becomes a political hot potato, and the foreign investor eventually just says "fuck this" and pulls out of the market. It's happened in oil & gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and a whole host of other sectors.

Outside of retail, all of the rest of those have real national security implications.

And if by retail you're referring to burger joints or Target, I'm afraid that's just market effect.

Plus Target shot themselves in the foot with poor SAP integration among other blunders.

There's a big difference between considering national security issues and bungling foreign direct investment completely (except for real estate). It's also no excuse for the protection of oligopolies that don't act in the best interests of Canadians.

In that case I'll take the likely unpopular opinion that: it's better our assholes than someone else's.

And foreign direct investment in energy, food supplies, telecommunications absolutely has national security implications. I would be loathe to have a foreign entity become the major stateholder in our telecommunications infrastructure. I don't harbour any deep love of the Rogers family, but they are solidly Canadian at least.

We already have foreign investors taking a lease of the section hwy 407 in Toronto and wrestling ministry of transportation to not extend license plates of people who did not pay fee. The reason included not sending bills, false billings, denying plates after official bankruptcy etc. And those ever increasing tolls. Thank you very much for your business and corruption.

I'm not going to disagree that our governments tend to play political hot potato. You can downvote all you like but I don't feel any sympathy for abusive "investors" like Big Tech or Big Oil who all too often socialize the risks but privatize the profits. See for example Amazon trying to get billions in tax breaks for HQ2. See also the Keystone XL or Northern Gateway projects. The oil companies have excellent propaganda machines operating tirelessly to convince Albertans that the rest of the country is being unreasonable when they demand environmental controls and assurances.

Not all investment is beneficial to the citizenry. I'd much rather my government err towards overcautious than overpermissive.

There's probably a lot more merit to your comment than most people realize.

Absent from most of the media reports I've read today is that Sidewalk Labs was facing yet another approval decision on the project from Waterfront Toronto in less than two weeks (May 20, extended from an earlier March 31 deadline). My guess is that they heard through the grapevine that the decision was going to be highly conditional, and that the project was going to be saddled with yet another set of hoops to jump through, so Sidewalk Labs just decided to bail.

It's basically exactly the same pattern we saw in late February with the Teck Resources decision. The company bailed literally days before the deadline for approval.

Indeed. Everyone is spouting populist talking points (yeah! screw foreign money!) without explaining how Canada is going to fix its anemic productivity growth and compete globally, particularly as we're actively destroying our own resource industries.

The article says the issue is Corona not Canada?

It's not, CNBC says "Toronto was expected to make its final decision on whether or not to let the project move forward on May 20."

COVID has nothing to do with it.

Whether the final blow was due to COVID-19 or if it was just an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that it's been an uphill battle for over 3 years with very little progress.

Depends on what kind of business. "We the people" do not exist to feed corporations (at least in theory). As a business it is your own private headache.

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