Barrhaven denizen

  • 12 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t really mind more frequent elections. If anything, the govt needs a shorter leash and more accountability. The population should be able to remove a bad govt almost instantly, say in 30 days, not in 3.5 years. Regardless of their success in the previous election.

    I’d be even more insistent on a low bar for recalls if the electoral contest was truly fair, ie the advantages of the wealthy in influencing outcomes were entirely removed. That seems very far away. The problems in the contest really seem to obscure the problems with choices of election systems like FPTP vs PR etc.







  • part of the idea is that clicking every ad presented destroys the ad system’s ability to do meaningful targetting. I’m happy about that. Without the data collection and analysis performed by Google, Amazon, and Meta, advertising through them is less attractive to advertisors.

    Most of the advertisors are lying garbage too. I have no sympathy for them.



  • China, India have tiny attempts and smaller successes at influence compared to the thousands of corporate lobbyists that meet with Canadian politicians every year.

    What about the influence of the construction industry? Property developers outright own provincial and municipal politics in Ontario. Big tech?

    Oil?!?

    How about all the huge military and consulting companies that place 50% of the labour in govt workplaces and suck a 25% margin off each one?

    Most of those aren’t domestically owned either.




  • The Canadian govt is the primary creator of Canadian dollars.

    When the federal govt runs a deficit of say $1B, that’s a surplus of $1B in the private sector. $1B more spent into industry than collected in taxes. Good times for the private sector.

    When the federal govt runs a surplus of $1B, that is a deficit of $1B in the private sector. $1B more collected in taxes than spent. This is an absolute disaster for the economy.

    When you consider the above, you can see how ridiculous it is for the federal govt to run a balanced budget or surplus. A balanced budget is a strongly recessionary position, choking off economic growth in the private sector.