And this is why bribing foreign companies to set up shop here was a bad idea from the outset: they have no respect for us whatsoever.

Well, trees deserve protection too, but they’re unlikely to be on Snapchat in my experience. It just operates on the wrong timescale for them.

It might make a difference if it’s triggered right when he’s done something that’s caused his party’s popularity to dip.

It would look less suspicious if it hadn’t happened in Alberta.

. . . where the emergency departments are open at all. (Closures in Thessalon and Richard’s Landing, along the north shore of Lake Superior, often make the news where I am.)

That’s funny, every survey I’ve seen that ranks real quality-of-life (or some subset of it) for the inhabitants of various countries puts Canada ahead of the US.

So what’s your country’s excuse, Mr. Vance?

It allows the violation of certain individual clauses of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, not the entire Constitution, and its effect lapses after five years if whatever chucklefucks are in office at the provincial level at that time don’t care enough to reconfirm the violation. Not that that’s much better.

I doubt most of them could stick with the Gentoo installation procedure for long enough to make it to a usable system.

You keep them out of public schools to reduce the chance of them exposing other people as much as possible. Their co-religionists aren’t likely to press charges, and many of these extreme religious groups don’t want their kids in mainstream schools anyway.

In other words, you can use government-funded schools or you can refuse vaccination (and pay for your kids to attend a private school that allows unvaccinated students, or homeschool them and do the work yourself). You can’t have both. That’s how school vaccine mandates are supposed to work in the first place. We’ve just gotten way too lax about upholding and enforcing them.

“Us versus them” is a concept as old as time, and if you can twist your political rhetoric around to fit it, there’s always a segment of the population that will lap it up. That the current generation of politicians is making use of that is disgusting, but not at all surprising.

One of the smelters in the Greater Sudbury area has been creating public outcry recently because residents don’t like Mysterious Black Dust appearing all over town. Who’d’a thunk? But if the government’s even asked for a report, I haven’t heard about it. I’d be surprised if they did anything in Hamilton, either.

No one actually wants an election right now (not even the Conservatives, if they’re honest about it). I predict that several Opposition MPs are going to mysteriously come down with the flu on the day of the vote, so that it can be passed without anyone admitting why.

The problem with nuclear waste is that absolutely no one wants it. Chalk River, with its long history with the nuclear industry, is one of the places least likely to be subject to local protests, but it seems that even that wasn’t good enough.

Short of locking all interested parties in a room together and telling them they can’t leave until they select a disposal site for the waste (which already exists and has to end up somewhere) and sign documents stating they won’t interfere with the use of the site, I’m at a loss regarding what to do.

It’s possible to extract the article text by disallowing both Javascipt and CSS on the site. Relevant portion:

AWS is one of eight suppliers with agreements to provide cloud services to the government. Ottawa has more than 600 contracts with the company, and since 2020, has awarded it more than $220 million in cloud contracts, the review found. That makes AWS the second-largest cloud vendor to the government, though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the US$33 billion the firm reported Thursday in its third quarter earnings. AWS saw a 20-per-cent year-over-year sales growth this quarter, the largest since 2022, which the company credits to a boom in AI adoption and development.

Within Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), the cloud infrastructure provided by AWS includes several proprietary solutions for the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the Competition Bureau of Canada and Shared Travel Services, the portal that federal employees use to book and expense work travel.

Switching to a different provider for those services would take two or three years and require multiple teams of four to six full-time employees, the review found. “Alternative service providers with the infrastructure needed to handle ISED applications would almost certainly be other similar hyperscalers,” the analysis said.

“I’m sorry you were offended” is still an apology. We’ll never find out exactly what was said.

There’s a difference between hospitals being public and health care services being public. Drugs for chronic conditions. Dentistry. Optometry. Psychiatric services. Proper handling of transport costs for people not living in large cities who urgently need to see a specialist (Ontario’s reimbursement program for that is joke-worthy). Hospital equipment—constant fundraisers to replace things should not be required. There’s so much stuff that falls between the cracks under the current setup that really should be covered by the government.

So it’s going to be competing with the likes of Hart and Giant Tiger, at least in this neck of the woods. Not sure we need another one of those at the moment.

Canada does not have a monarchy and it is no longer a “dominion”.

Actually, we’re still a constitutional monarchy (the monarch is the de jure head-of-state, but does not wield absolute power), and the designation “Dominion of Canada” was never officially withdrawn as far as I know, it’s just that no one, even the government, uses it anymore. (“Dominion” is effectively meaningless in this context, anyway—it’s a word that was semi-randomly chosen back in the 19th century because people were afraid that “Kingdom of Canada” would give the Americans hives.)

But yeah, we have much better things to do with our time than worry about shenanigans by minor members of the royal family.

Except that that opens an even larger can of worms.

Currently, the GG is selected on the PM’s recommendation. We’ve gotten away with that so far because there’s a disinterested party staring over the PM’s shoulder in the form of the monarch (reducing the chance of really dodgy recommendations) and because no PM has yet run off the rails the way Trump is doing down south.

In every government decision except the selection of the GG, the GG is the disinterested person staring over the PM’s shoulder. Even if they don’t normally exercise any power, I don’t want a position that could act as a check for the PM being decided on by the PM. So we then have to move to some other method of selecting the GG. The most usual method in other countries is by holding a separate election, but that immediately pisses a huge amount of money down the drain. And that’s without dragging in the constitutional amendment considerations.

I’d rather just spend a trivial (on national budget scales) amount of money on the monarchy and keep the worms firmly enclosed in their cylindrical metal containers, thanks very much.

And that money would just be spent on the new head-of-state instead, if we decided to get rid of the monarchy.

(Don’t suggest making the Prime Minister the head-of-state, even as a joke. Combining the legislative and executive branches is Not A Good Idea.)