At least the department was open. There are some hospitals in Ontario that have to close theirs a couple of times a month because they can’t scrounge up even one doctor to cover a shift.

That’s caused (at least in part) by assigning timezones according to politics rather than longitude. Some places have gotten really skewed.

Anyway, most of us just want the government to pick one thing and stick with it. We don’t care whether they pick DST, ST, or create a new half-hour timezone to split the difference so long as the changing back and forth stops.

Trump Is Spoiling for a Fight over Canadian Potash

Let’s be honest here: he’ll take any excuse, and if he can’t find one, he’ll manufacture it.

And really, Belarus doesn’t produce enough potash to cover that 12 million tons even if they sent their entire production to the US.

If I recall correctly, last year’s cacao crop failed pretty hard too, although I don’t remember whether or not the reason was related to climate change.

Don’t spread your legs for the cash.

Sex work is at least honest commerce. Don’t denigrate it by comparing it to the US’s political circus.

Artisan basketweaving likely has a sunnier future than, say, auto manufacturing, under current circumstances.

Always the same excuse—when will someone in a position to do something finally call them on this?

Probably because “physical education” is itself bullshit. It neither provides enough activity for the students who are already active and athletic, nor encourages the students who are not active to change their ways (in my experience, it does exactly the opposite). I was overjoyed to be able to drop it after my first year of high school.

Well, the US government isn’t openly and directly supporting Russia’s invasion, and there’s bound to be some goodwill left over from previous administrations. Plus, some individual Americans and US-based charities are probably still trying to be helpful. We can’t be sure exactly what respondants to the poll took into account when answering it.

Probably not a deliberate effort on the part of foreign actors or domestic terrorists, but I question whether this would have happened without examples from the US. Remember, the last school shooting of any sort in Canada was the Ecole Polytechnique—which took place before the likely perpetrator here was born.

Perhaps it waz supposed to extend an invitation to join the EU, and got lost on the way to Ottawa.

I’d assumed that they were following some sort of extremely stupid weapons-related rule. At least that would have been kind of understandable. But no, the complaint was about “decorum”—in other words, someone thought it was impolite by whatever idiosyncratic and culturally specific standard they wanted to apply. This is shameful.

Cracking down on this stuff on Facebook can reduce the number of instances of this kind of thing by reducing the scammers’ reach (so still worth doing), but not make it vanish. Snake oil has a very long history, after all. It plays to a common element of human nature: the desire for a quick and easy fix where none exists. The only complete solution is to produce smarter humans, which, well, good luck.

The supply chain for most “local” vehicle manufacture in North America winds back and forth between Canada, the US, and Mexico. None of those countries can assemble a finished car without parts coming from both of the others. Trump hates this and has been doing his utmost to torpedo the system.

The risk with Chinese cars has less to do with the cars themselves and more with getting too deeply enmeshed in, and dependant upon, trade with China. ~50000 cars a year isn’t going to do that in Canada, though, since at the moment we’re wary of putting too many eggs into any basket.

when there’s currently a tyrant in charge in the US, nobody’s doing anything.

Because anyone who’s realistic enough to want that guy out of office is also realistic enough to know that a gun, or even a few thousand guns, won’t do much against rocket-armed aircraft and exploding drones, even if they were willing to escalate to violence. The last time a group of citizens with ordinary firearms had a real chance against an army was around 1880 (just before the invention of the automatic machine gun). It kinda-sorta-almost sometimes appears to work in spats in the developing world because the objective there is to get the army to decide holding the area isn’t worth the resources and it should go home. That ain’t gonna happen in a civil war in the States.

Of course, the fact that the American “right to bear arms” is a joke just makes it all the more infuriating.

Unusually, though, these ones were being bastards even to other cops. So they might actually get punished.

Yeah, but he does that randomly anyway, so why even bother paying attention?

Besides just ignorance and Fear of the Different? In my experience, there’s a tendency for small-c conservatives to have a high degree of emotional attachment to traditional gender roles (especially toxic masculinity). LGBTQ+ people don’t adhere to those roles, and show kids that it’s okay not to adhere to those roles. End result: conservatives blame LGBTQ+ people for eroding one of their beloved shibboleths, because the alternative is admitting that they’re wrong.

The thing is, the science points toward harm reduction and related strategies as the most effective. But those strategies are not politically popular, so getting them implemented is an uphill battle. It’s the same all over the country.

Sounds like a good reason to open a credit union.