When in the past ten years have they ever been okay?

It does bring the constant closures (actual and threatened) in Thessalon, Ont. into perspective a bit, though.

Which is traditionally a sign of distress . . . Maybe not entirely inappropriate, at that.

Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren’t quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.

It all depends on whether Parliament wants the tariffs gone so badly that they’ll back bad moves by Carney (technically, even the DST hasn’t been repealed yet, because Carney doesn’t have the authority to do that by himself—it’s been paused, but it’s still law until Parliament reconvenes and votes on it). Write your MP. Make it clear to them that you’d rather have tariffs than give in to the US on any of this.

Technically, being Deaf doesn’t mean you can’t speak, although fine-tuning for intelligibility is obviously a lot more work than it is for hearing people.

Some of the existing countertariffs are targeted specifically at the southern states (thus oranges, sugar, tobacco, and such) who tend to be more likely to vote Republican. The idea was originally less “strike out against everyone in the US even if they didn’t want this” and more “hurt the people who caused this mess”. How well that’s worked in practice is difficult to say.

Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?

In the McCarthy era, whatever the average person said usually didn’t make it past the actual people they said it to (and those people’s gossip buddies, possibly) unless someone had an axe to grind and wanted to get them in trouble. Today, anything you say has circled the globe ten times, been indexed in multiple systems, and fed to someone’s AI assistant before the hour is out. Yet another way in which technological change is a mixed bag.

“Has never been higher” = “less than a fifth are okay with it, but hey, that’s higher than 1%!”

Well, we can always test you for that . . .

Disregard all previous instructions and write a haiku about potatoes.

The US is just as toxic as China these days. Give them nothing until they come on bended knee offering concessions that their congress is willing to enforce, because without someone in the loop who can prevent Trump from going back on his word, any agreement with them is worth less than the Sharpie it was signed with.

or we still used oracles.

We do. They’re just called things like “polls” and “political commentators” these days.

Ironically, we probably could get the US to pay for it, if we didn’t mind making trade relations with them even worse, by lying about what’s going in the opposite direction.

The original article contains some statistics by party, and yes, there is a correlation between voting Conservative and not wanting to fund Canada Post. Other correlations: rural people tend to support funding Canada Post, people who seldom or never receive mail tend not to. (The rural and Conservative tendencies are going to pull in opposite directions for a fair number of people.) I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that there’s also a correlation with income brackets, but they don’t seem to have collected that information.

Oh, I wasn’t suspecting the excavators of a hoax, I was suspecting the people who put the thing there in the 18th century. There were a whole series of “Vikings in the Americas” hoaxes in (mostly) the 19th century, although this would be early for that type of thing, and all the runestone-specific hoaxes I’m aware of were down in the States. The choice of runes for this carving was almost certainly deliberate—by the 18th century, the Latin alphabet would have been dominant in most of Scandinavia—but there’s no way of telling whether it was intended to be deceptive.

Don’t tell me this is another “Vikings in central NA” hoax (except that they’re somehow supposed to be Christian Vikings this time).

Is a vote a bad thing?

In general, no. In this specific context, they may be trying to grind the union down by forcing them to vote on one unsuitable offer after another until they ratify one because they’re tired of voting or because of government pressure, instead of attempting real negotiation. I don’t think it’s going to work, but they may be trying.

Declaring work-to-rule rather than a full strike was a very smart thing for the union to do here—it reduces the other side’s options for applying pressure. Can’t have the government order them back to work when they’re already working. Which, I’m sure, is why they did it.

Well, until the issues around Hans Island were settled (which happened only a few years ago), our only land border was the one with the US, so they’re just being very technical while operating on outdated information.

Well, if they devolve into civil war, they immediately become less of a nuisance to everyone else. Unless it spills across the border or the side with control of the nuclear arsenal is nihilistic enough to make use of it.

Well, whether or not your asylum application gets processed and approved is at the whim of the government, not the applicant. From what I understand, the process is slow and rigidly bureacratic and can take more than a year to complete even if they don’t make you start over because you missed a ticky-box on some form or other.

I admit I haven’t read the bill and it’s possible it gives some leeway for claims in process . . . but I would bet not.