Canada faces a series of crises that will test it in the coming years, RCMP warn | Hacker News Reader

Canada faces a series of crises that will test it in the coming years, RCMP warn

cbc.ca

41 pointssilly_ninja49 comments

>the suggestion that law enforcement should "contribute to policy change"

nothing in this report sound especially novel or unexpected. these are all obvious problems - that's not to say the solutions are obvious, but the problems are. but the idea that the police should be involved in creating policy rather than following it is a pretty scary one. it sounds like they identified the rise or authoritarianism in their report as a trend to hop onto, rather than a threat to be aware of.

Canada has always seemed like a unique situation. We're a massive country with tiny population. This opens the door to cheap remote land. Lot of cottage land in northern Ontario goes for pennies and has acres. Infact a lot of it so rural that they don't belong to RMs and don't require building permits or inspections. Building a cottage is straight forward just building it.

I figured if you're living off grid and working online, you can just acorn and get way ahead. Moving to a major city for a job that pays 2x more usually isn't even worth it when you factor in cost of living. Obviously, you cannot have kids. This is for a young kid-less couple.

It's not ideal. Our parents many years ago would just buy a home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore. You will never get ahead doing that.

Working online really is a unique situation to get ahead now.

> home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore.

Enough should be what we want. A happy middle-class life avoiding the extremes of poverty or excess.

> You will never get ahead doing that.

Join the escalation against yourself (the joneses): a zero-sum ladder climbing game where everyone is a loser.

One oddity of modern society is that even the "winners" are often losers - become a sociopathic CEO or entrepreneur - win toys with more bling but lose other critical things. Being a country leader doesn't look like fun to me.

Weirdly enough modern society is pretty good at sharing: winners have there same phones as I have and commonly the same entertainment media.

And one important resource (time) has a hard upper limit for us all.

> This opens the door to cheap remote land. Lot of cottage land in northern Ontario goes for pennies and has acres.

Where do you look for this? Those don't typically show up on MLS/realtor.ca I'm guessing.

> you can just acorn and get way ahead.

autocorrect/typo?

A lot of it is private sales and there's a couple sites selling this land specifically.

Not a typo, I meant like acorn away your savings.

"Squirrel away" is a far more common metaphor for that concept.

Google search results for me turn up ~4k hits for "acorn away", vs. nearly a million for "squirrel away".

Similarly on Google Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acorn+away%2Cs...>

Though "acorn away" seems to have had some currency in the mid 19th century:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acorn+away%2Cs...>

Though not in the sense you are using it best I can tell.

"Squirrel away" seems to have gained in prevalence after the 1950s, for some reason.

That's fine for a single person. Fine you you can be off the grid, but at least to build a road it's already $100k.

RM is rural municipality I presume?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_municipality_(Canada)>

The solution to the affordability crisis shouldn’t have to be withdrawing from society and homesteading in the woods.

Humans are social animals and social connection is essential to our health [1]. This strikes me as trading one problem for several.

You lose access to quality food you don’t have to spend all summer growing yourself (too bad if you didn’t harvest enough for the long, long winter; you don’t have a passable road). Good luck raising children with no help, and no education beyond Kahn Academy. You must purchase a ton of equipment and learn how to use it and maintain it for self sufficiency. And on and on. It is not for the faint of heart.

[1] https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo....

I drove over the Columbia River last night in Castlegar, BC.

I could have done so without the bridge - there is almost no water flowing.

Many of the rivers and lakes in BC are severely, severely low to the point power generation is getting difficult and mills are closing. Of course, summer is just around the corner, and it seems exceptionally likely it will be a record fire season with record heat once again.

It's very hard to imagine things not getting worse.

And the band played on.

More concerning than the level of the Columbia River is the lack of snowpack in the West Kootenays and most of BC.

The level of the Columbia River in Castlegar varies so much (due to the Hugh Keenleyside Dam and other upstream dams on the Kootenay and Columbia rivers) that it's not a very good indicator of drought.

A quick look shows that the Arrow Reservoir is at about 426.1m, which historically is not that bad. However, with the lack of snowpack, the absence of snowmelt runoff is going to be a big problem.

Perhaps I'm jaded but I can't help seeing a subtext in reports like these which goes something like, "Large, institutional national policing agency in an era of historically positive trends in most significant crime metrics funds report forecasting alarming trends which will require increasing both funding and political influence of large national policing agency."

I don't think you're jaded, i think that's a pretty accurate description of this report. I'd summarize it as "the RCMP thinks the world is terrible, and the only solution is more cops."

It's good to read this report in the context of this HN link from a couple weeks ago: "Institutions tend to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863

What do you know, another police message that implies they need a larger budget ad infinitum. Things are getting worse they say, please give us a larger stick.

Giving the police expanded powers won't backfire the next time an authoritarian-adjacent party wins an election, will it? After all, look how well the enabling act turned out for the lawmakers who passed it.

Like the current one? It is definitely the most authoritarian (Canadian) government I've witnessed in my lifetime and this article is completely in line with what they've been working towards (the CBC is known to be in bed with the government) but apparently accusing conservatives of what they're doing fools a good amount of people.

Direct link to the nine-page report, heavily redacted as the CBC's reporting notes:

<https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/24467543-rcmp-5-ye...> (Embed)

<https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24467543/rcmp-5-year-...> (Downloadable PDF)

Any bets on what is on those two redacted pages with the picture of a globe?

Geopolitical topics for sure

One thing that I believe democracies have to beware of is Muslim immigrants forming isolated, self-contained communities that avoid connection with outsiders.

If that makes me an Islamaphobe, then so be it.

A major reason people form isolated communities is because they are rejected by the wider community in the first place. Phobia of people different than oneself needs to be actively addressed, and positive cross cultural interactions need to be actively encouraged.

Diasphora enclaves form when you let in enough people of one group to organically form large self contained communities in the first place. Can't integrate when there's no pressure / reason to integrate. But this applies to all cultures, which Canada takes in large numbers, and self organize in the few cities where immigrants can feasibly start a new life. Their kids will integrate better. I don't have an issue with multiculturalism / enclaves, but the number and calibre of immigrants we've been taking on has been diminishing, which is not on the immigrants, but it's looking like policy failure.

> A major reason people form isolated communities is because they are rejected by the wider community in the first place

It it though? Or is it just easier for immigrants to just not assimilate / integrate, which is no doubt a lot of effort? That hypothesis is equally compatible with the evidence, but somehow people always seem to immediately jump to the native population being racist as the primary reason, without evidence.

Why don’t you say the same about Hasidic Jewish communities? Or you wouldn’t be so okay to be labeled antisemitic?

And the RCMP will be there to squash (physically if necessary) and infiltrate any organized resistance to the regime that brought Canada to this state

"The regime"

You probably consume too much right wing nonsense. I'd check my media diet were I you.

Our government constantly warns us of the dangers of Islamaphobia while Jews are harassed daily going to pray in synagogues. That's the same RCMP that paid $10mil to suspected terrorist Maher Arar for his unjust detention in Syrian jail and now he goes around calling for the extermination of Jews...

This issue is the biggest one I believe:

"For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live. The fallout from this decline in living standards will be exacerbated by the fact that the difference between the extremes of wealth is greater now in developed countries than it has been at any time in several generations."

It applies to Canada and the UK. This changes things massively. Inheritance matters more than hard work. Of course there will be some who excel more than others, become millionaires etc and will be fine, but it's still a fundamental shift when the average/median person cannot.

“New information technologies, including AI deepfakes, quantum computing and blockchain, could also present challenges, says the report.

"Law enforcement should anticipate that criminals will leverage technological innovations to gain profit and influence," the report says. "Law enforcement should also continue to contribute to policy change related to the privacy of personal information, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, digital ledger technology and more."”

The loss of the arctic passage to the US is inevitable as Canada - the country and the provinces - are not competent, clear-eyed. More importantly, no one is going to die to prevent northern navigation because you never feel like the country has your back.

When I was in Tokyo during the 2011 earthquakes, the French government offered evacuation trips. At the time we thought it was an overreaction by France (but not really [1]). I always felt a bit jealous though, even though I never planned on evacuating; their country was looking out for them.

I did get to see the emails my wife got from the Japanese embassy during COVID-19. The emails were tailored to the location she was in (Calgary in this case) and had full translations of important information (lockdown measures, where to get vaccinations, etc..). This went on for months. The country felt her being well-informed was worth the effort they put in tailoring the communication they sent out.

However, as a Canadian, in Japan, during the earthquake in 2011, I got a generic email telling me to "observe local media". While I read / speak Japanese, that was absolutely not common at the time, and disinformation in the foreign press was RAMPANT.

As a result, low-effort bureaucracy is what I associate with Canada. I see it all the time. Do you want to sponsor your partner? It took 2-3 weeks in Japan, 6-12 months in Canada. You want to vaccinate your kids? My friend in Ottawa had to take a trip to Calgarhy to get his infant child vaccinated, because he didn't have a family doctor. Need to get your passport renewed? Windows-only PDF forms. Wait in line for 8 hours (!!), and be grateful.

(The CRA site is great though, I wonder why.)

These are the real life interfaces between government and citizen, not statements in the press. This is the sorts of interface where you decide whether your country loves you or not. I'm only talking about upper and middle class stuff; imagine being in the lower economic classes and navigating this for help; it's even worse. There is no love for them, and no helping hand other than the kindness of other people.

The thing about low-effort bureaucracies is that you aren't going to die for them. The Arctic ocean is going to belong to the US and the sooner our local elite understands, the better they can negotiate and get their cut.

[1] Years after the fact we found out that the Japanese government had considered the possibility that it might have been necessary to evacuate Tokyo.

> The Arctic ocean is going to belong to the US and the sooner our local elite understands, the better they can negotiate and get their cut.

I don't know about that, the Russians are way ahead of everybody in developing their Arctic and ability to protect their interests there. As a Canadian, I, personally, would like us to join the Belt & Road. Going forward, my belief is that our interests are more aligned with Russia and China and the growing Global South. Let us get rid of our colonial shackles once and for all, eh?!

>The Arctic ocean is going to belong to the US and the sooner our local elite understands, the better they can negotiate and get their cut.

What cut, US wants to treat northwest passage as international strait not internal Canadian waters with Canadian jurisdiction, there's no cut to be had under that arrangement. Canada can't even hold anyone liable for potential enviromental disasters if concede to US definition.

I’m a US citizen who lived in Canada for a while. I am nothing but glad I got out.

1. Economic growth is anemic, and despite Canada’s vaunted environmentalism liberalism and environmentalism, is still highly dependent on resource extraction and de-facto government-sponsored monopolies like Rogers and Bombardier. https://twitter.com/mikalskuterud/status/1763207065135464872

2. Health care is an absolute mess, and I know this from personal experience, living with a paramedic. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/primary-care-canada-10-000-...

3. Housing is beyond an absolute mess—it’s broken beyond all repair. Which is, in part, because there are basically 5–6 real metro areas in Canada, and the government is utterly reliant on immigration to keep the population and workforce growing, so everyone wants to move to the GTA. https://financialpost.com/news/canada-housing-gap-bigger-tha...

4. Canadian are…I’ll be blunt, I don’t have a citation for this…complacent. They don’t have the hustle of Americans. They had a good 50 or so years there we they’ve basically been a protectorate of the US, and could coast on our military spending and corporate R&D development, with trickle-down benefits because their dollar has generally been 70% of the US dollar, and we could plonk some key assets north of the border as a tax dodge. But if Trump comes back into power, and the overall increasing skepticism of globalism, that is coming to an end.

I would add a bit of nuance to Canada USA question. Canada can not have proper companies or even industry because of the USA. The only legitimately Canadian industries are those that are highly protected from US market capital. Canada just became good at the only thing that the US allowed it to be.

>1. Economic growth is anemic, and despite Canada’s vaunted environmentalism liberalism and environmentalism, is still highly dependent on resource extraction and de-facto government-sponsored monopolies like Rogers and Bombardier.

I've heard Canada described as three mining companies standing on each other wearing an overcoat.

>2. Health care is an absolute mess, and I know this from personal experience, living with a paramedic.

As the article says, an amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor <https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>. In Atlantic Canada it is impossible, repeat impossible, to get a family doctor if you don't have one <https://web.archive.org/web/20190226051406/https://www.thete...>. It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too, and the article indicates that this is a nationwide problem.

>3. Housing is beyond an absolute mess—it’s broken beyond all repair. Which is, in part, because there are basically 5–6 real metro areas in Canada, and the government is utterly reliant on immigration to keep the population and workforce growing, so everyone wants to move to the GTA.

To a first degree of approximation, there are no jobs outside Montreal and Toronto, except mining/O&G in Edmonton/Calgary and some tech in Vancouver. Alabama is more productive on a GDP/per capita basis than BC. <https://np.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/17oostz/the_...>

>4. Canadian are…I’ll be blunt, I don’t have a citation for this…complacent.

The one thing Canada has always outstripped the US on is production of smug sneering across the border.

... just like every other country, especially whole Europe

Government controlled media outlet fear mongering in support of more government power. Shocking.

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