I notice of the few media outlets (which are mostly small and underground) in Canada that report you know.. just basic government corruption and on Canada's declining standard of living are discredited as ''leftist'' and ''false''. If any one of these outlets mentions that Canada has the LOWEST wages of all OECD nations adjusted to inflation and housing costs and how workers rights are falling right into the toilet the article is immediately dismissed or shadow banned from social media sites.
This is definitely a phenomenon we should all take note of. Don't forget, it was one of these small indie news outlets that in 2013 spilled the beans on Scotia bank for firing their employees and replacing everyone with TFW's in order to cut down wages. The policy was overturned because they were exposed and called out.
Canada's media is almost entirely pro corporate (post media - which owns nearly everything). The few public outlets like CBC are the ''fake left'' and just another layer in the matrix to distract the public with WOKE bullshit and enough LGBT content to sink a ship. Yet provides no information about the inner working and corruption that have lead this country to rapidly go to shit in all but a decade (longer than that, but in the last decade it has been off the charts bad).
calling them leftist may or may not be entirely accurate; but I think a distinction should always be made from the old left, versus the new left (and can also be seen somewhat in the old ndp, vs the new ndp, though never been a fan regardless)
Whereas the old left was at least, in theory, more union oriented, more labour oriented, and concerned about worker's rights, and sometimes even pro tariff in many regards,
the new left seems to have largely traded the majority of that for culture war issues, woke points, immigration, "anti-racism", etc.
For example, Jagmeet Singh claiming the RCMP was racist, a Bloc member of parliament challenging that, not by saying he was wrong but simply stating that we would need to investigate that claim first, and said bloc member getting called a racist for deigning to say "wait a minute, you may be right, or maybe not, but we need to actually investigate before jumping to such bold conclusions".
I just think that its a pity that the grand distraction of identity politics is at the forefront of the new lefts mindset, and its basically damned the better part of the left (labor rights, imo) for the past decade to the point where people are grossly underemployed, employment is precarious, and almost noone can buy a home.
It is funny how the conservatives are the party to own this issue now, and not the NDP or other socialist parties.
Now then you mention it, with the shooting in Texas, talk about a strange coincidence for Justin to put more stricter gun laws?
This is just the liberals capitalizing on a culture war issue to give their voter base something insubstantiative, while ignoring labour concerns and other issues. Yeah, hand gun ban is, idek- I honestly don't really care about it. From what Im aware of, handguns aren't very common throughout Canada (the majority of guns are long rifles), handguns aren't really used in school shootings (its usually semi automatic weapons, or long guns), and are mostly a thing used in inner city crime, which is relatively low in Canada.
A
great victory over a very marginal issue, I guess.
The conservative equivalent would be like "we've banned abortion
a week before the third trimester" great victory, wooooo! Just, who gives a fuck other than people
looking for a cheap culture war victory.
would you even be surprised if our Elections were “fortified”
They're already largely fortified in the sense that the American elections are. "Fortified" just means that American media and social media work together to support a single Candidate in an obviously biased way. While social media (fb, twitter, and other similar sites) aren't involved in fortifying Canadian elections, the CBC 100% is and should be seen as an arm of the liberal party at this point.
Give Canada a couple more decades of crashing the value of labor, driving up real estate prices, and mass immigration. You'll be the guinea pig for the rise of neofeudalism in the West once the vast majority of the Canadian economy is owned by a small handful of players.
The Western guinea pig was basically Argentina. There used to be the phrase "Rich as an Argentine" at one point, and I may be a bit off, but I believe in the later 19th century, the average person was richer, per capita, than even in the United States (due to a smaller population I guess). Argentina is a mess of an economy now, constantly defaults, jobs have stagnated, people only have employment through government contracts, etc.
Canada won't follow the same path, because our unions aren't nearly as strong, but I have legitimate fears that Canada could someday be an Argentina of the North. Once prosperous, and later just bouncing from financial crisis to financial crisis amid record unemployment (we're already halfway there with youth unemployment and underemployment tbh).
Canada's version of neoliberalism derives economic growth from immigrants. This is also used as a tool to stall wages.
I don't have much hope on grand economic transformation because, if its not obvious to most, the federal government has basically abandoned the average blue collar worker in this country for decades now, and they don't factor into grand economic plans for the future, other than "let them eat welfare". The only gambit I can really think of is Canada investing in its oil sector, trying to utilize that for some sort of economic boom for a few decades, using that money to reinvest back into the economy and rebuild it in some sense (and to avoid dutch disease), but thats really just a desperate pipe dream.
The way its going, Canada is and will further become an economy catering to the upper middle class, tech & financial workers (in some sense anyways) and immigrants who fill in said tech worker role. Woe to anyone without programming skills, and that isn't the way that it should be, but that it actually is. I can definitely anticipate a brain drain in Canada occuring in the next few decades, relative to that.
We want to import high skilled labour from abroad, but imagine this- Canada is not addressing its other social issues (all those unemployed blue collar workers, ethnic tensions, a culture that is stagnating and in decline, gentrification, some cities turning into San Francisco with people being unable to afford to live in them any longer, homelessness rising, etc).
Suppose you're offered to work in Singapore, Korea, Switzerland, etc? Suppose you are offered a job in a comfier place in the US, with higher pay.
>But wait, don't you have any nationalistic pride? Don't you want to keep your labour within Canada?
What nationalistic pride? You've basically gutted the community I lived in, we have sex ed teaching kids that only fans is an alright thing for 18 year olds to do and a good way to fund their college (hate slippery slope arguments, but the chances of people moving from lewds to actual nudes is very, very high on that platform if they actually have money moving in), and we have all sorts of poverty issues being unaddressed. Why stay to be a tax bracket for "end racism, but also give millions in arms to the Saudi genocide in Yemen".
Condemn nationalism normally every day, except when it comes to
"but wait anon, you need to have nationalistic pride as a tax bracket".
In some way, it comes down to, am I a subject, or am I an equal partner in a political project/vision. If the state only wants to capitalize on native Canadian labour when it comes to taxes or "you can contribute to our economy with your tech skills" but otherwise doesn't give a fuck about the average Canadian worker, and has damned blue collar ones, you're more of a subject. If it was a case of the state investing in local communities, trying to give blue collar people working jobs at a livable wage, investing in a future other than importing more techies for taxation purposes, etc- a lot of what the government was currently doing on culture war issues would be
marginally more tolerable. As it currently is, we're in the worst of both worlds, and Canadians seem to be treated more as subjects, and less as equal partners in governance, save when it comes election time (but even then, we're still getting some of that "these rednecks are just deplorables" rhetoric with Trudeau and issues like the trucker's protest).
That's what we will and are starting to face at this point in time.
