I’ve often thought we should have continued burning the White House down every thirty years or so, just to keep 'em humble.

So what percentage of them would like Canada to annex the US?

Beyond weird. Dude tries to push this off on workmen who had scaffolding up against the building exterior, but what reason would they have had to make a tunnel between the units? This is just insane.

The document which governs this in Canada is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act. The relevant portion is right at the beginning: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, rights are not absolute, which allows things like laws against hate speech to be passed. Among the rights guaranteed by the Charter is “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. Freedom of speech is a subset of that.

( Full text of the Charter )

(In fact, even in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not quite absolute, as there are laws against libel and slander.)

Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US.

Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.

So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.

Some people seem to need the psychological crutch religion provides them with in order to function, and I’d no more take it away from them than I’d take a physical crutch away from someone in a leg cast. I have no issue with people who want to pray or carry out ceremonies in private or in a public building clearly marked out for the purpose. If you voluntarily enter a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. then you should expect religion.

The problem is forcing religion on people who don’t need or want it, including children. In other words, the real issue is proselytization (trying to either encourage people to join your religion, or shame them into it) aimed at random members of the public. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it should be treated as much more impolite than it currently is.

Sounds like the soil failure taking place was natural under those conditions, but the conditions themselves were not entirely natural. Situations like that make weasel-wording easy.

The page is reachable for me in a Javascriptless desktop browser window and does not throw the error you described, so it’s probably a broken script or embed. Or at least I hope it’s just broken and not malicious.

(What’s additionally weird is that 413 is an error you would normally see when uploading a file too large for the server . . .)

If I recall correctly, they’re diverting to Timmins instead of continuing north to Cochrane (although it’s been a little while since that part was in the news, so I’m not 100% sure). Still an improvement over the current state of public transport in the area.

Have you ever lived in any of the Northern Ontario ridings (or any other part of northern Canada, for that matter)? I have, and do, although I haven’t lived in Kap-Timmins-Mushkegowuk specifically since the 1990s. Still, I doubt it’s changed much.

To put it bluntly, it’s an area that’s used to being ignored if not outright mistreated by government at both the provincial and federal levels. Small and shrinking population with a high percentage of Indigenous and Francophone individuals, large tracts of land with limited transport options, little industry, few jobs, and no influence. Our MPs normally have no influence either, unless they somehow make it into Cabinet. It almost doesn’t matter what party they belong to.

Charlie, according to everything I’ve seen, heard, and read, tried. Dude worked his balls off for his constituents, and for Canada in general, with little in the way of result or recompense. I don’t know if he’s doing more for Canadians right now than he did when he was in Parliament, but his seat didn’t give him much more scope to accomplish anything than he has as a private citizen.

The US has health institutions? I thought they’d all been defunded.

Furthermore, we’re talking about exports. Does anyone really believe that other countries that haven’t banned plastic straws won’t just source them elsewhere instead? China’s usually willing to manufacture any random plastic object someone is willing to pay for. If plastic straws really are the hill someone wants to die on, environmental activism in the countries that still allow them seems like it would be more effective than an export ban here.

China is a lucrative enough market that some trade with them is inevitable, alas (and, to be honest, Canada as a whole probably can’t support itself if it limits international trade to countries that have had fairly clean human rights records for the last fifty years or so—it’s just too small a fraction of the world). We just have to be careful that we don’t get in so deep that we can’t easily pull out again.

Please let the people in positions of power in this country have learned something from the consequences of the current US administration’s antics. We can’t afford to put all of our eggs in one basket, no matter how large or tastefully decorated that basket is.

The record coldest temperature in North America of -63⁰C was recorded in the Yukon (specifically, at Snag, Yukon, in 1947). Brrr.

The right to arm bears might be more pertinent in this case. They become much less attractive targets if they’re shooting back.

(Seriously, though, how much longer do we have to wait before we can employ cloning/vat-grown tissue strategies to feed the insatiable demand of traditional Asian “medicine” markets, and stop killing animals for ineffective superstitious bullshit?)

It’s really just institutionalization by another name. While homeless people are in involuntary care, the people who don’t want them around will have their wish, and from their point of view, having the homeless cycle back into the system within a few months of release is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t actually do anything to curb substance abuse, but it isn’t really meant to.

If this involved any other province, I’d think it was a Beaverton headline.

Bagged dry beans require more prep before they can be eaten, though, and you have to have the clean water to rehydrate them on site, and the know-how to do it. There’s an energy cost (electricity in remote off-grid communities isn’t necessarily cheap either), and a time cost on the part of the people cooking, all of which has to be taken into consideration. That doesn’t mean that replacing canned foodstuffs with dried or freeze-dried can’t be part of the answer, but it may have to be supplemented with recipes or facilities or cooking classes or something.

If there’s a systemic issue here that goes beyond people in the supply chain profiteering, the solution may not be simple.

Sensible people had rather deal with ice than with ICE.

Being nabbed for dissent requires having a strong opinion on something that’s at odds with the preferences of the Powers That Be, and not being afraid to speak up about it. I would guess that that’s only a small percentage of social media enthusiasts—less than a third, and I’m being generous there.