I have migrated from Canada to the USA and my metrics for wealth, ease of mind, actually working while at work, outgoingness, etc instantly improved. I don't plan on ever going back. I feel chagrin at seeing Canada fail. I'm glad to see Justin Trudeau pressured out, I know there won't be meaningful change associated with the decision, but I have hope.

Should've done it weeks ago. Utterly shameless.

I'm having trouble learning anything from this stream of disconnected, time-sorted tweetlike objects. I'm posting this on the off chance that a better article exists, and someone can point me to it. I assume it's too early for that though.

> Trudeau, who is now answering questions from reporters, said his one regret of his premiership has been his failure to introduce electoral reform.

Oh please, you had lots of time to address this and instead you've just handed us to the conservatives.

As a close watcher of Canadian politics, here's the best summary I can offer for those not familiar:

Overal Picture

Canada has seen gdp-per-capita decline for nearly every quarter over the past 3 years. Large stimulus spending during the pandemic fueled the housing crisis and added massive inflation. Stimulating the economy through similarly massive increases in Non-Permanent Residents has kept GDP afloat, but come at the cost of over-burdening public institutions and housing. Contiuing either policy is not possible and deeply unpopular. Canadians now pay more taxes than any US state, have housing more expensive than New York, but with productivity below that of the poorest state and our dollar running a major discount. This while our public instutions are struggling to meet demand.

1. Recurring themes in Canadian Politics

2. Recent history of the federal liberals

3. Current issues facing the government

Recurring Themes in Canadian Politics

- Unlike the U.S. where there are multiple strong centers of politics and commerce (East Cost, West Coast, Texas), Canada political power is centered largely along the St. Lawrence River where most of the country's population lives.

- Trends arising from this include: Quebec receiving, relative to its population, outsized benefits and influence in exchange for remaining part of the country and as result of French speaking requirements for the federal government. Quebec has nearly exited the country several times

- Canada is still largely a resource-based economy and possess an impressive amount of natural resources: oil, natural gas, largest uranium reserves in the world, more freshwater than all other countries combined, etc.

- The concentration of power in the East while most resource development happening in the West, creates a quasi-colonial between the Ontario/Quebec and the younger and resource heavy provinces, particularly the Prairies.

- Economically, Canada priviledges large incumbent businesses and most of its sectors are oligopolies. The reasoning for doing so historically has been to fend of larger, well funded US competitors.

Recent History of the federal liberals

- Liberals have historically have been centrist party, taking popular ideas from both socialist NDP (who have yet to win a federal election) and the federal Conservative party (itself a coaltion of social and fiscal conservatives created by Harper in the 90s).

- 2015 Justin Trudeau came in as the most popular Prime Minister in history with a majority government. Major legislation included legalizing weed and improvements to Child Benefits. The majority was lost in 2019 with Conservatives gaining the popular vote.

Overall Picture - In Detail

- Economic Issue #1: Lagging economy. Canada is still largely a resource based economy (see above) and business investment in that sector, and Canada overall, declined drastically starting in 2015, arguably due to increasing opportunities for resource development in the U.S. and the Canadian Federal Government stance towards non-reweables. Business investment is more a leading indicator, but still a major economic issue for Canada.

- Economic Issue #2: Increased cost of housing. Canadian housing costs in major cities has reached crisis levels even leading up to the pandemic. Our major cities like Toronto and Vancouver are some of the most unaffordable in the world. Most people who have been in Canada have seen housing in their cities go from achieveable-if-expensive (in major regions) to impossibly unaffordable. Most major cities now require 30+ of saving (at the average income) for a downpayment with a salary in the top 1% to purchase a home.

- Economic issue #3: Large inflation, combined with increased costs from consolidated markets with little competition. Not unlike other countries post-pandemic, but reports show major costs of living such as groceries have seen above-inflation levels of price increases due to industry consolidation. I.E. Many parts of Canada have one 2 major suppliers of grociers

- Immigration Issue #1: Non-permanent Residents. Canada has 2 classes of immigrants (aside from Refugees, whih make up a small number): Permanent Residents (PR's) and Non-permanent residents (NPR's). Our PR system is what is widely hailed as one of the best in the world and a point of Canadian pride. The NPR system has been substantially expanded under the Trudeau government and arguably exploited with millions of NPR's entering as temporary workers and university students. NPR's now consist of over 7% of the population (larger than then Indigenous population).

- Social Cohesion: most of Canada's public services (healthcare, teaching, even postal services, etc) have seen substantial degradation and a struggle to meet capacity.

- Lastly, it should be noted that Canada has tax system well above any US state. Historically, most Canadians have not have a problem with this because of the relative strength of our public institutions.

Current Issues facing the Goverment

- If the federal liberals have an election, they will lost most of their seats. They may even lose party status. They will likely avoid this at all costs.

- The federal NDP are not projected to lose seats, but will lose influence they gain by upholding the minority government. They gain little from a federal election.

- Given an early election is not likely and Trudeau is facing revolts internally (his key finance minister and deputy PM resigned publicly in the past few weeks), the choice is to stop parliment while they look for a new PM (trudeau may act as the interim). If they choose an existing MP for PM (maybe Freeland) they risk being associated with a deeply unpopular party. If they chose an outsider (like Mark Carney), they risk just as much backlash for an unelected PM.

This thread should be locked. It's unbelievable the BS being spewed by all sides of the political spectrum.

Ultimately, the Canadian democracy has wanted a new prime minister for years and it's abhorrent it has (and is) taking this long to let the citizens vote.

Nothing will change because no Canadian government will lower house prices and that's what absolutely needs to happen.

2024 was a banner year for voting against the incumbent governments worldwide. Globally we have a cost-of-living crisis, a housing affordability crisis and a years-long decrease in the standard-of-living. Generally speaking, each country has 3 forces that are in play:

1. Progressives;

2. Neoliberals / centrists; and

3. Outright fascists.

The French election was a prime example of how this plyas out. Macron, a centrist, very much sided with the fascists rather than the progressives, such as who he picked to be Prime Minister after the snap election he called.

Some say the UK is an outlier with Labor winning a massive victory. It is not. The former Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was weakened by a divided electorate so he could be character-assassinated in a coordinated campaign alleging anti-semitism to be replaced by a neoliberal centrist (Keir Starmer). Starmer actually got significantly fewer votes than Corbyn did in his two elections. All that happened was the right-wing vote got split between Conservatives and Reform.

The US election played out similarly. Despite evidence of Biden's cognitive decline being apparent as early as of Spring 2021, he ran for reelection and was supported by the Democratic establishment right up until a disastrous debate performance made clear his position was untenable. Nancy Pelosi reportedly wanted an open primary at the convention. Instead Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democratic establishment feared a progressive candidate would win a primary.

So we got a Wall Street approved centrist neoliberal platform that disrupted nothing and gave absolutely nothing to working people and had a policy platform on many issues (eg the death penalty, Israel-Palestine, immigration, deregulation) with almost no daylight between it and the Trump platform.

Unsurprisingly that platform lost, badly. Predictably.

The point here is that in every election, neoliberals are way more comfortable with (and will side with) fascists than leftists or pgoressives.

Voters, eager for change, will choose populism because they aren't being offered any alternative. But nobody wants to address the root causes here: housing unaffordability and massive wealthy inequality.

Too many people are invested in their house as an investment, as their nest-egg. House prices absolutely have to come down and nobody wants to hear that. Canada is a real estate bubble, just like pretty much every other Western nation.

People will cling to their house prices as society crumbles around them.

The Zelensky curse strikes again.

For liberals to give up power in both Canada and US so hurriedly, there must something really bad brewing that they don't want to be blamed for.

I was expecting this to be a Beaverton article.

It's worth keeping in mind that truck strikes have been used to disrupt infrastructure to prepare for coups.

Trudeau has been unpopular for years and hideously unpopular for the past couple of months, mostly as a result of the current state of things being bad (and as they've been in power for nearly 10 years, they already cop the blame for that), not hypothetical future bad things.

No need to get conspiratorial.

The entire market is due for major correction. I’m delighted I get to blame it on conservatives when it happens. It was probably inevitable, no matter what party is in power. That’s just how it is when you get two standard deviations away from the mean.

https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...

It's that they were the party for the COVID money pump hangover / inflation. The conservatives lost power in the UK for the same reason.

Computer graphics software engineer.

Don't leave out the SNC-Lavalin ethics breaches!

Poll is about an individual, not direction of the country.

Since early 2023, Trudeau has been having a rough time - https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/sophie-gregoire-trudeau...

Don't worry it gets worse if you come to Ontario.

interesting, so if understand correctly; basically put, a side effect of the stimulus was that more people took out loans for homes, its that right?

You shouldn't be putting so much stock in memes.

The CBC doesn't have remotely the same pressure to expose eyeballs to advertising.

Almost? The proposed amendment that passed the House but failed in the Senate? If 3/4 of the states were going to pass an amendment then why wouldn't 2/3 call for a convention of the states?

Hanlon's Razor seems to fit too well IMHO. Assuming malice is a hard one to swallow when the evidence of bad decision-making is everywhere to see. To be on purpose for example you would have to assume that the hordes of people inside and outside the administration and the media all conspired to cover up Biden's deteriorating state, with the knowledge (or high probability) that he would lose in the first debate and step down without giving Harris enough time (or whatever theory you believe to explain why she lost). Just that portion alone is quite hard to believe IMHO.

"not a thing comes to mind!"

You can apply for a Green Card directly from TN status, although timing has been an issue recently.

> Genuinely curious whats better under Canadian system for the young and old.

The young, old, and those too unhealthy to work full-time. And to answer your question: a better social safety net, IMO.

Edit: Because this topic is flamebait, I'm preemptively declaring that I'm not going to argue about my opinion. YMMV.

As someone who is going to be 65 in a couple years and is researching Medicare options... it seems like a bit of a mess. The drug plans have been separated out so you have to buy those separately. If you get an "advantage" plan then you've got the same old "in-network" "out of network" BS to deal with and they can and do deny coverage. If you get plain old Medicare (probably what I'll opt for) you can theoretically see any doctor (but there are some that don't take Medicare) but you still have to buy a "Medigap" plan. Looking at the costs for my wife and I being on Medicare is still going to be something like $700/month so don't think that when you get to Medicare age that you won't have to pay any insurance premiums anymore. We're currently paying about $400/month for a silver plan and dental through the ACA so our premiums will actually go up under Medicare.

There are many places where it sucks much, much less.

I'll take Iceland or another Nordic social democracy for evidence that you're wrong there.

But at least in the US, if you can afford the treatment, you can get it.

No, it would be a landslide only in one sense, the first past the post sense. Not in any other sense. The majority of individuals would still not want the cons in power, but with FPTP the left vote gets split.

Would it be possible for it to not happen right away? They are in a minority government without a PM, I really wonder if there's a way the elections aren't triggered basically instantly.

> Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium

To be fair, that two-party equilibrium is the thing that keeps every minor political crisis from causing no-confidence votes and failed governments because all of the special interests involved break the coalition.

Other Parliamentary governments that don't have this kind of equilibrium end up with minor political parties holding massively outsized influence and concessions just to keep them in the coalition. See Denmark (this is pretty much the subject of every season of Borgen).

Australia is a good counter example.

We use preferential voting and haven't had a minority government, that is a government formed by coalition as the result of an election since 2010. We still typically have 2 major parties and 3-4 minor parties that can (but by no means always) hold the balance of power, particularly in the senate. It means that the govt has to compromise more often to get bills passed, but the minority parties rarely hold legislation hostage (barring things like the Housing Future Fund, which was a dog's breakfast).

>You said Trudeau was unpopular for years and yet only now he's leaving.

There's unpopular and then there's unpopular.

His approval rating has dropped off a cliff over the past year. His cabinet ministers have been resigning and/or openly criticizing him / asking for him to step down to save their own political careers.

This article is from last September - 4 months ago.

>> Darrell Bricker, a political scientist and pollster with Ipsos, compared the current moment in Canadian politics to this summer’s historic defeat of the UK Tories, who lost 251 seats in British parliament.

>>“It’s basically over,” said Mr Bricker of Trudeau’s government in an interview with the BBC.

>>“All that is happening is sands sliding out of the sand dial, and we’re working our way towards an inevitable conclusion.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrdrnxp74wo

And then this article is from October:

>>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada faced the stiffest challenge to his leadership from fellow elected Liberal Party members on Wednesday during a closed-door meeting where he was urged to resign to avoid torpedoing the party’s chances in the next election.

>>For more than a year, the Liberals under Mr. Trudeau have trailed the Conservative Party by double digits in polls, suggesting that the Liberal Party could face a crushing defeat in the next election, which must be held by next October.

>>Panic within the party intensified after the Liberals recently lost two special parliamentary elections in districts that had been considered their strongholds.

>>The growing dissatisfaction played out on Wednesday, when most of the 153 Liberal members of Parliament gathered in Ottawa for a scheduled caucus meeting.

>>While caucus proceedings are typically secret, Mr. Trudeau, according to Canadian news media citing unnamed sources, was presented with a letter signed by about two dozen caucus members calling on him to step down.

>>The letter has been circulating for several days, but has been a closely held secret.

>>About 20 Liberal members criticized Mr. Trudeau’s leadership after the letter was read aloud during the three-hour-and-17-minute meeting, according to Canadian news outlets.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/world/canada/trudeau-vote...

Why do you insist that having a 23% approval rating and half of your party begging you to resign isn't a good enough reason?

Seriously, if you're not familiar with the internal politics of another country, why would you make up conspiracies about them?

My toddler had active shooter drills in day care.....I sometimes think about leaving US.

The Prime Ministership is by convention and not defined in a constitution

Elections have a deadline after which a new election can be called, but there's no number of terms served that then stops a re-elected leader from taking office if they win another election. It's not the case that people can just stay in office without holding elections forever.

Does this type of role have a term limit anywhere? e.g. US house speaker doesn't have a term limit.

Ranked choice isn't the only alternative voting system that encourages moderation. Approval voting is vastly simpler to understand and implement and also accomplishes many of the same benefits.

Simplicity is an underrated value when it comes to elections. People are more likely to trust that which they can easily understand. And ranked choice, fairly or not tends to cause a lot of confusion.

> This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views

It pisses off people who don’t understand compromise.

The Duchess of Alaska is a "moderate" only insofar as her first and overriding loyalty is to the what the permanent Federal Civil Service in DC wants. She'll agree with anyone of any ideological stripe so long as she knows the will of the bureaucracy is being carried out.

There's far fewer walk-in clinics today than 20 years ago. And a total of zero in the town I relocated to.

> and a single right party

No longer true. Canada now also has the PPC - the People's Part of Canada (see: https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/).

> even though the majority of the population may not agree with them

Well that certainly won't be true for the upcoming election.

So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.

If the situation is as you describe, what really needs to change is that the two left parties need to merge, or one of them needs to become such a marginal player that it doesn't matter. If the leaders of those parties can't or won't do that, well, then you get the situation that you have.

I beg to differ, the polls say otherwise regarding who the population wants and more importantly, the unhealthy coalition of NDP / Liberals have been preventing the parliament from functioning, we would have had an election by now had NDP stopped propping the Liberal party by preventing the non confidence vote.

They will ask the Governor General for a prorogation during the leader selection process so Parliament will not be resuming any time soon.

Your perception of Finland is stuck in the 20th century. Today's Finland is roughly 10% immigrants. If the current trend continues, the fraction should increase to ~15% by 2030. That would be comparable to the US.

As for the Swedish-speaking minority, it's mostly a result of colonization in the middle ages. Swedish became the dominant language in some coastal areas, while the rest of present-day Finland spoke a variety of Finnic languages. During both Swedish and Russian rule, Swedish was used as the administrative language, and the elites used it among themselves. But even among the elites, Swedish was often not their native language.

> Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.

Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..

Did you miss the part about it being a Federal park?

Months? Well, only if you mean 120 months. The guy managed to destroy the best country in the world, leaving it with no foreseeable way back. Maybe joining the US is the only option now.

Metro Vancouver

that is true, but in the countries with a prime minister i know about, as far as i am aware, noone has that kind of power. in other countries the concept of an executive order appears not to even exist. in my brief search i only found something comparable in france can be issued by the council of ministers. everywhere else only parliament can do that. nevertheless in those countries the prime minister is the most powerful person running the country, and the president is a figurehead.

You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.

The social services are better in Canada though. The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.

That seems a misunderstanding of their argument. I suggest using an LLM, quoting the comment, and discussing with it till your comprehension matches that of the machine. They’re usually pretty good at it, and it appears better than you in this instance.

H1-B and L-1 are both dual intent [0]. TN isn't.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent

The problem isn't the non-existence of a social safety net per se, the problem is our taxation rate is as high as countries with a functional social safety net, but we don't actually receive those services.

Both the US and European models are valid IMO. But in Canada we get the worst of both.

> make US level money while living in the EU, that's a great situation

Have you considered Canada?

I am happy for you. May I ask which country?

> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.

So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?

Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.

> For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province.

Jesus. I've got more MRI machines than that within walking distance of my house.

It does seem to have improved significantly, as in 2020 Ontario had 124 (which made it the best provisioned province at the time). When were you there?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/821422/number-of-mri-uni...

Is that not two different tradeoffs? One is first come first serve and the other is purely if you have the resources at the time? The only people I see that praise the "guarantee if you can afford it", are indeed, the ones that can afford it.

They are categorically not, see the above comment on dual intent.

You can get a TN visa cancelled for expressing desire to stay permanently

Life expectancy is, perhaps counterintuitively, not highly connected to health care. The major factors contributing to the gap between US and Canadian life expectancy are car accidents, homicides, and cardiovascular disease, and CVD differs wildly depending where you are in the country; there are states that lead the G7 in CVD outcomes, and others (like Mississippi and Alabama) that look like developing-world countries.

None of this is to defend the US system in particular, which wildly overspends on the outcomes it achieves. But generally, when it comes to managing chronic and acute health conditions, those outcomes are very good.

If you're going to use the GTA @ 7M (6.2 according to wikipedia[0]) you should perhaps use Metro NYC @ 23.5M[1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.

You are incorrect and cite no sources. Even Immigration Lawyer Peter Roberts has commented on HN about the pathway to a GC from TN.

We agree on one thing however, consult a lawyer (you will have to anyway if you are pursuing a GC). A good lawyer will tell you the same thing.

It's a pathway thousands of Canadians have taken and will continue to take. Don't delay your life over the broken H1-B system.

Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)

so that's the thing right

people who are geniuses at one thing may be completely out of their depth in other areas

I think this is sadly a demonstration of one of those

> Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system.

Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.

It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)

It shows.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics

> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point

> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone

Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?

"I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone."

- Wow, for no reason you're glad to see him gone?

As somebody who lived in Ottawa at the time, this was not good coverage. Neither was DHH's. It was incredibly rage-inducing to read in real time as it was happening too. My takeaway from this is that one should minimize the confidence in one's opinion of foreign events.

This seems a bit confused.

Canada is not the US. Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?

i.e. When there is Parliamentary sovereignty/supremacy?

An inferior authority can never legally overrule a superior authority by definition.

Well, I'm disappointed in Patio11 now. I sort of looked-up at him.

> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.

Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?

Trudeau is like the Obama of Canada. His only redeeming quality is that he has now resigned.

I, for 1 sec, thought you said press Crtl F to pay respects.

If they blocked travel arteries like highways and bridges for more than a hour or two.

> Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.

Nobody went after anyone's family.

If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.

People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.

Actually the Harper gov't passed laws when in power that enabled them to treat such protests against fossil fuels as terrorist or threat-to-national-security events.

And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...

I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.

I've seen it used countless times before, but I thought it was something somehow being injected into the page by a search engine (especially when it comes from custom site searches on forums), rather than a browser feature.

Gentlemen you can't discuss web protocols tips on here, this is a tech forum!

It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)

Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.

I mean, are we really nth-handed? The sad thing about, as they say "Sleeping with the Elephant" is you get first hand experience of the elephant's ... movements ... even if they never notice yours.

Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns

like Jade Helm and a lot of other agit-prop it was beamed at certain markets.

no one out of red states in the mid-west or south heard jack about "jade helm" but it stirred the pot for a while.

that's the whole point of ad-driven social media: you can target exact demographics at exact times. and it works, even here on HN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theori...

That's the rhetoric but I'm not sure it's the reality. At least not where I live. It's a big country so ymmv. In a neighbourhood with a scam college bringing in lots of students yeah sure maybe some distortions of the market were more noticeable as rental vacancy plunged and rents increased.

In Vancouver housing prices were already going into their exponential curve in 2014 before this government was even elected or immigration numbers were fiddled with. In the last two years while immigration was increased home prices have been flat. You can have a look at BC Assessment as home values are updated every year. The biggest change comes with 2021 due to ultra low interest rates. As interest rates rose home prices stagnated as expected.

Personally I don't see any connection at all between home prices and immigration though I can imagine rental vacancy and rent prices were impacted in some places (particularly smaller town Ontario) due to the reluctance of municpalities and the province to build more homes and the prevalence of exploitative scam colleges).

Yes, but that was a very unusual time and can be attributed to the US financial crisis. In addition to money fleeing the US, the Canadian and US interest rates diverged to strengthen the Canadian dollar.

That's actually bad for the economy. Canadian companies benefit from the lower dollar as goods are often sold in USD, but wages are paid in CAD. 0.75 to 0.8 is the historical benchmark for the exchange rate.

Does immigration make these things worse? Yes. But it's only a very small part of the problem. You can't blame the entire problem on a minor cause.

Here's a very good 55 point plan to fix housing: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force...

BC implemented far more of those points than Ontario has, and succeeded in changing Vancouver's housing costs from ~2X Toronto's to 1X Toronto's.

And P.S. the immigration surge was mostly in student visa's, driven by Colleges under provincial jurisdiction.

After 2008 we also "benefited" from very high oil prices which drove the dollar higher

That high dollar didn't do any positive things for Ontario & Quebec's export oriented manufacturing sector though, which is why I put "benefited" in quotes.

Easy? You've lived in each of those places for more than a year around 2015 and around now? Physically impossible.

My second homebase is in one of the countries you named. I can tell you that not even 10% of the population would agree with you. Across the political spectrum. No idea that you're basing it on. Crumbling infrastructure, housing worse than Canada, ever increasing problems with immigration.

The US I could potentially agree with, it is the outlier, though debatable.

Ireland I talked about.

Norway is laughable to bring up, sorry. Might as well bring up Saudi Arabia.

If you'd been to Poland and Greece you'd know they're nowhere near "similarly wealthy" countries wrt Canada, entirely different tier. This reveals you haven't really spent time there.

Singapore is a city-state. I'm sure we can find a city in Canada that's doing better. And from what I know, Singaporeans too are majority unhappy with their country compared to 2015, so not sure what you're basing it on.

Agreed. I'm in the minority I'm sure, but I think this is an anti-feature. In addition to your good points, it's also very fragile as a small change in the text of the page can break the link. It also leads to monstrous URLs that are quite hard to read for people who don't know about this feature.

Armed hostage-taker? It’s unfortunate you feel the need to misrepresent my position rather than address the real issue.

This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.

It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.

For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.

I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.

The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.

There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.

Switzerland has direct democracy and seems to go fine with it.

its a much less severe response than there would gave been, compared to say, ottawabs torching the trucks along with anyone in them

Is he not?

Cheers!

As a Canadian I can say that most people I know have opinions about the protests and the government's response, but that whole affair is about 1,000th on the list of grievances we have with our current federal government.

It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.

The protests lasted quite a long time and I think the public's opinion on it changed over time.

At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event

After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!

There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.

I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.

The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.

What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.

> Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics.

Not necessarily always far-right, but almost obsessively anti-establishment.

Criticizing someone during their funeral is in pretty poor taste regardless of your political leanings.

See, you were not supposed to say the quiet part out loud

95dB air-horn for 16 to 20 hours per day is not non-violent.

The show of power - that even a democratic government will target your families - is far worse than the relatively small number of people it hit.

If I'm reading this thread correctly, it sounds like truckers staged a protest in Canada blockading roads. The government couldn't move the trucks because the cops sympathized with the protestors. So the government debanked the truckers as well as anyone caught donating more than $20 to them. Damn.

Except it wasn't a labour strike.

The recent postal strikes in Canada are an example of the situation you're describing. Eventually the federal government had to step in and break the strike to get the mail system moving again - if the workers refused to comply, against the orders of the government, I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.

Now we're getting into the real meat of the questions. I love Kraft Dinner, in a somewhat ironic way. The best way to eat it is to add hot dog slices while cooking the pasta, then top it with ketchup. You can also have it with hot dogs and beans on the side (as my dad would call it, "beans and wieners and Kraft Dinner") It sounds disgusting, but its comfort food. Not sure if I would like it if I hadn't grown up eating it.

It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.

In the US some psychopath straight up shot and killed a climate activist who was in the way of his car. It’s a miracle something similar didn’t happen there.

Yeah are we forgetting Alberta truckers who were planning to murder RCMP officers, and were straight-up terrorists?

From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-first-bi...

"The bitterness and rivalries seen in the partisan 1796 campaign got worse in the 1800 rematch between Adams and Jefferson. At one point in that race, Jefferson’s supporter, notorious pamphleteer James Calendar, claimed that Adams was a hermaphrodite, while Adams’ people said Jefferson would openly promote prostitution, incest, and adultery..."

We do, broadly, have a problem in Canada with people blaming the federal govt for things that are not under its jurisdiction. We have a very federal system, and the provinces have a lot of power.

But in this case, yes, I think federal policy is directly implicated.

The Feds also lifted the caps for international students to work full-time hours off-campus ("temporarily" but repeatedly extended), among other things.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

In what way is immigration not definitionally a federal problem? If you're referring to programs like OINP, note that

> The OINP recognizes and nominates people for permanent residence who have the skills and experience the Ontario economy needs, and the Government of Canada makes the final decision to approve applications for permanent residence.

(https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-immigrant-nominee-progra...)

The approval rating seems like an unhelpful metric here if the actual resulting election is such a landslide.

Also I think there is a bit of a different here between Harpers Conservatives and Tredeaus Liberals.

In 2015 people were actually really excited and hopeful about Justin Trudeau (sounds weird to say but it is true). He was voted in "positively" based on legalizing cannabis & election reform.

2025 is a very different spot, Pollieve is not a particularly popular politician. The singular reason they will win in a land slide is that people HATE Trudeau in a way I haven't seen in my life.

The liberals really should take a long hard look at themselves and re-evaluate. On a more local level the Ontario Liberals actually just collapsed a while ago and haven't even been relevant in politics ever since.

This isn't just the normal trend.

Rolling on laughing floor

It seems like every other week I hear a news article about a joint announcement between BC & the federal government having to do with housing or health care. It takes 2 to co-operate.

It's more complicated than that. Technically healthcare is a provincial responsibility in the constitution but the feds bought their way into healthcare and regulate it through the Canada Health Act. The Feds cannot legally compel provinces to comply with the CHA but if they don't comply with it, they won't receive the federal health transfers which would essentially bankrupt the province. The province would still be getting taxed at the high federal rates, but without getting it back, to the tune of ~12% of total Provincial revenues.

Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users, despite having totally different geographies, economies, even languages, run by all kinds of different provincial parties across the extremes of the political spectrum. The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.

It certainly is a finding of innocence when the presumption is innocent until proven guilty.

It's almost as if raising the minimum wage is reflected as wage inflation when you're already in a condition where a large fraction of workers are near the wage floor. Adding labour supply isn't going to do anything about that unless it's biased towards higher skill.

(But honestly, I'd say a lot of these businesses deserve to fail if they can't afford to pay minimum wage workers.)

> a residential area

Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.

Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.

Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.

South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.

Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.

You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.

Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.

That stopped after the judge gave an injunction. That judge also said the protest could otherwise continue as was a Charter right.

The Police Chief lost his job over it. What other consequences would you think appropriate?

People don’t seem to understand that the government rules based on enough popular support.

When the police start siding with protestors that’s a government problem, not police problem.

You mean the same external guarantor of the rights who gets picked by the same government?

Huh? What ‘external guarantor’?

Spend 5 minutes in Toronto Union Station during commuter hours and you'll never describe Canadians as polite again.

Please stop spreading lies and FUD. The pipeline buyout was too little too late after the government stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments. All in all, the projected cost of capital flight exceeds $30 billion CAD (the article is from 2019):

https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-30-billion-...

The government has openly committed to ending all funding for fossil fuels in 2024:

https://www.iisd.org/articles/insight/ending-canada-support-...

Not being a part of the states is our national identity. It’s just very fringe minority who dabbles with the idea of joining the USA.

No and he has seriously opposed this and takes the 'jokes' seriously, as he should

It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Opinion_pollin...

I don't know, but I live in the NCR, and few I know thought it was right.

The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.

Its very possible the next candidate inherits the overall sentiment and is indeed a 'sacrificial lamb'. The anti-Trudeau sentiment is high, but if he steps back its an open question if the left wing/ABC crowd and centrists revisit their support for the liberal party.

IMO Chrystia Freeland would be a great pick for the country. She was firm and capable during the NAFTA/USMCA renegotiations, and seems to have stood up against political games from the current administration to her eventual detriment of losing her cabinet position.

Marc Carney certainly has appeal, but I can't help but see him as Ignatief 2.0 and that didn't go well with many Canadians.

I don't remember a protestor shot by cops in the US? Searching, I see something happened in Atlanta?

And I remember a few motorist incidents, but numerous? Certainly more than I would prefer.

You’re right.

It's instructive to compare Vancouver to Toronto. 10 years ago in BC health care was in worse shape and housing was ~2X the cost of Toronto. In the past 10 years BC has had an NDP government and Ontario a Conservative one. Both housing & health care have gotten worse in BC, but at a much lower rate than in Ontario. Today health care in BC is in much better shape than Ontario, and the cost of housing in Vancouver is about the same as it is in Toronto.

I moved from a liberal province to a conservative province last year. My cost of living is 25% lower, gas is much cheaper and I was able to buy a new beautiful house which was an impossibility in my previous province.

Living in QC, I'm scared about the future of medical care and infrastructure. I wonder too what's the situations for other provinces.

Quebec has been led by the Conservative CAQ party since 2018.

There is no formal “next in line”. The closest potential successor would have been the deputy prime minister; Chrystia Freeland held that role until a few weeks ago when she dramatically resigned and sparked this chain of events.

Currently, this is “Working as Intended” in Canada’s political system.

Usually what happens when a party is not in power is that the leader will resign and an interim leader will be appointed until a new leader is elected through a leadership election. When a party is in power however, that interim leader would be an "interim Prime Minister" and is avoided because it's a lot of responsibility to give to an interim with no mandate from voters or the party.

There is no such thing as a "vice-PM" in Canada. There is no "next person in line", and parties choose leaders more or less independently of the election cycle, according to the party's needs.

Ding ding ding!

Yes! I find it interesting that the Federal government is getting the majority of the blame for these issues when in reality I feel like provinces should be at fault.

Not to say that the federal government is without blame, but I feel like given the current state of healthcare in many provinces, as well as the housing s** show, provincial governments should be primarily held at fault.

Zoning/housing, Healthcare, education... Obviously the immigration loop holes have been an issue as well, but these three are provincial.

Sure, but no province would take the political risk without an assurance of it happening simultaneously in other provinces.

Without looking up the specifics, by the time of the convoy, the vast majority of covid restrictions were gone. They liked to complain about vaccine passports, which Canada had, but by 2022 the vaccine passports were gone everywhere except the US border, by the request of the US government. So, from the outside, these guys were protesting and occupying Ottawa over actions of the US government. On the other hand, these guys don't really like being talked down to no matter what the elites say the real problem is. It started as a protest against vaccine passports but really turned into a ragefest against the establishment.

This isn't true. At the time the US required proof of vaccination at the border too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us-vaccine-mandate-frei...

This was implemented in October 2021 and wasn't removed AFAIK until May of 2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

A 43% increase in federal jobs sounds big until you realize it’s ~110,000 positions over 9 years. For this to be the ‘majority of industry growth,’ Canada would need to have added just ~200,000 jobs in total since 2015. That’s laughably off—Canada typically adds hundreds of thousands of jobs annually. For context, Canada’s employment grew by ~2.7M jobs between 2015[1] and the end of 2024[2]. Federal job growth is a drop in that bucket, not the bucket itself.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/437730/employment-in-can... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...

It's not unheard of to disband and reconstitute a police department. I would argue its the right move when the organization as a whole has effectively gone rogue.

The most significant example I'm aware of is Camden New Jersey.

The city’s crime rate was among the worst in the US. Within nine square miles and among nearly 75,000 residents, there were over 170 open-air drug markets reported in 2013, county officials told CNN. Violent crime abounded. Police corruption was at the core.

Lawsuits filed against the department uncovered that officers routinely planted evidence on suspects, fabricated reports and committed perjury. After the corruption was exposed, courts overturned the convictions of 88 people, the ACLU reported in 2013.

So in 2012, officials voted to completely disband the department – it was beyond reform.

And in 2013, the Camden County Police Department officially began its tenure. No other city of Camden’s size has done anything quite like it.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-...

Two things.

The link you posted doesn't agree with statcan's website

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...

Second it's hard to compare unemployment rates to 10 years ago with the rise of the gig economy. "Employment" ain't what it used to be

He increased size of Federal government by 43% since 2015 - from Grok: "By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."

That's 110,738 new people on pay roll - but not that are actually productive for the economy, they are counted but are not the same as free market jobs - they're actually the opposite and a negative to the economy.

This also doesn't account for the economic harm and suffocation to local Canadians already here struggling to find work, much of the work instead going to the millions of temporary foreign workers and those on student visas.

They are also in the Wikipedia article, just further down. But what is really interesting is that the 66% source is dominantly cited in almost every single press article on the matter.

For anything even remotely controversial, I stick exclusively with primary sources and ignore Wikipedia. The site is clearly compromised by admins who only want left-leaning secondary sources summarized. If you come across a controversial topic with biased, or even faulty information, the admins will remove edits which don’t comply with their bias, ban persistent users, and eventually “protect” the article. Even one of the co-founders has railed against the current state of the site.

It really should. I'm a PhD student (which does not overly qualify me anyway) but the more I look into works with quantitative measuring methods, the more I have a hard time trusting polls and statistics in general. Even in academic papers, or at least the ones I reviewed, more often than not the data is massaged in some way and leaves a lot to be desired.

It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.

The legislation almost completely predates the current government. Much of it comes from the Harper government who had to rework environmental legislation because the courts forced them too.

ethnic canadians are still about 5% of the population, if you can believe it.

That's a great point; I'm glad you added that context and I'll take back that characterisation. I was mostly speaking through the lens of Farage's antics, and lacked the viewpoint of someone from the UK proper.

I forgot about the metric martyrs!

"Over politics" does some legwork for you here as does the singling out of you vs the entire cadre of EMS.

Consider it, instead, that the police, as a whole, joined the protest which also had a decent amount of support from the populous.

That's a far cry from one person refusing to do their job with very little (almost none) support from the populous, as your analogy would be.

If it was a single cop refusing to arrest a Nazi for a crime because they agreed with them, that cop would be fired.

One could endlessly go on about the economy/COL, immigration, crumbling healthcare, housing crisis, far-left ideology going mainstream, etc.

But I could frame it much simpler than that - Canada, at least in cities of modest sizes and up, is rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society.

An anecdote: my sister is more than 10 years younger than me, she's currently attending the same university as I did over a decade ago; in the span of less than half a year, she's got 2 bikes stolen - her original bike with front wheel removed to bypass the lock in late summer 2024, then the entire lock cut to steal her replacement bike in December; this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town.

The 90s were a demographic golden age for Canada but people get old. This is a problem true of most of the western world and is upstream from almost any other issue.

It means it is suspended.

(slightly off topic: I have no idea why tf my comment got down-voted. I'm not even expressing any personal opinions about Trudeau or politics. I'm just answering the question as factually as I can from the point of view of a Canadian who is observing what is going on.. I have data and sources for everything I said .. including how low Trudeau's approval rating is as well as the polling... the only thing I wasn't sure of is how his rating compares to that of previous PMs. Thing is, I even know people who have voted Liberal their entire lives, and plan to in the upcoming election regardless of who the leader is, and even they can't shut up about how much they despise him. So regardless of your partisan affiliation, I don't think I even said anything that most Canadians would find the least bit controversial).

Prorogued means parliament will not meet, and so cannot hold any votes. Right now it is purely being used to prevent such a vote since there is a majority in parliament that would now vote against the government in such a situation, which in turn provokes an election.

During his delusional ramblings (and that is no exaggeration) Trudeau said that the GG was persuaded to prorogue to the 25th March because of the no confidence vote held back in December which he survived because the NDP supported him. The NDP no longer will support the Trudeau gov (announced in writing about 10 days after the last vote), coincidentally just as their leader qualifies for a nice parliamentary pension scheme.

The whole thing is a horrible exercise in the worst stereotypes of champagne socialism.

> And the court of law later determined […]

And an Act-mandated commission said it was warranted:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Emergency_Commiss...

iirc the finding was that it was within the power of the province to handle the situation.

The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"

I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.

The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.

If you're going to talk about the law then words absolutely matter:

Abusing a law is not by itself unlawful. You always need to actually do something unlawful.

So a few of them had guns then?

low salaries in canada existed long before trudeau and will exist long after.

Lump of labor fallacy. The pie is not fixed.

Its interesting how as of late the working-class's totally self-sabatoging ways of protesting almost universally piss off their fellow men and women, rather than taking their grievances to the powers that support them.

Stories of harassment and assaults? Provide one source for any assault.

Not sure which town got the prominent coverage, but here in America a lot of the coverage we saw looked like a peaceful presence, organized to allow emergency passage, and frequently we saw what looked like a fair - lots of families strolling through, eating food, adults and kids dancing, buying random things from vendors. We saw interviews with drivers who told their stories and said they were there to peacefully protest, as was their right. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that the actions by Trudeau seemed so disproportionate.

> I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit

The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.

>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside

What exactly would you do if you were a trucker? i.e your livelihood has been denied for a long time?

>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau

I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".

Sorry I really should've added /s

I agree with you.

ABSOLUTELY! This is clearly what right-wing Americans know of Trudeau and nothing more.

came here to say the same thing.

Thing is that Canada already had the mandate delayed once by request to the US prior to it coming into effect, I believe it was 6 months delayed already.

The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.

Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.

The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)

The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.

You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source. In this context, Wikipedia would be a tertiary source. Yes, I get that this is their mission statement, but I find that when citing secondary sources as truth, you have to be even more careful.

A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.

A subordinate judiciary isn’t coëqual.

I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.

I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.

It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.

As a French Canadian this is unfortunately true the further north you go.

Im French, my anecdotal opinion is the same as the Canadian parent comment: they block and destroy, propose nothing realistic and end up pissing everyone off. I vote Macron as a result.

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.

"several people" is not singular

> If you know you know

And if you don't, you... don't deserve to know?

> you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest

I think "willful ignorance" is a good description of accepting impossible-to-verify anecdotes of internet comments as evidence of societal change, personally. But I'm realizing we don't have the same goals in the conversation so I understand why it feels pointless to continue.

I think people are talking past each other. Some of these parties are "far left" on social issues while simultaneously being "moderate right" on economic issues. So you can label these parties either way, depending on what's convenient to your argument.

> the alternative is it's the most unbelievable happy coincidence

It's not though.The NDP were faced with two choices:

1) Support the Liberals and get some of their policies pushed through 2) Support the Conservatives wish to call an early election in which the Conservative are sure to win a majority leaving the NDP powerless

The reason why the NDP choose this moment to pull their support is that it's an election year, so there's little chance any more NDP policy would be passed. One person's pension (a relatively wealthy person at that) is just a fun partisan talking point for Conservatives.

If only more people A) asked this question and B) looked into what was (not) happening.

Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".

> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.

https://thewalrus.ca/freedom-convoy-the-prince/

The city or the province could have done that. They didn't. The Feds could only use federal reasons.

The mishandled response to the trucker protest should be blamed on the city and the province, not on Trudeau.

Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything. That's obviously by design and part of the demarcation of powers we expect from a democracy. The accusations of authoritarianism would have been just as drastic (I think?) if the PM had stood up and tried to call the RCMP or Ottawa police / OPP to task for their inaction and so on.

Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.

It was something like the Ottawa police said they were unable to and Ford said it was a local issue or not a priority. He was onboard with emergency act as it helped with Windsor too.

This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151

The President is technically the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the US. His opinion carries weight, fortunately or unfortunately.

There is no reason to annex Canada when it's economy can simply be bought and controlled.

Eg: Nexen was bought by CNOOC with a whole bunch of promises and broke lots of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNOOC_Petroleum_North_America

> those that have not drunk the kool-aid it is an utter joke of a concept

Problem is that they aren't the ones in power in the USA.

> This is what a protest is.

They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).

If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.

Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.

Not a Canadian, but no, a protest protests and gives voice to the disagreement. Blocking other people's rights is not just a protest and is likely to trigger action to protect others. That's how it goes everywhere that has rights. Normally, some effort is made to do it peacefully, but there are no countries where you can halt the economy whenever you want to force people to negotiate with you.

Speaking as someone who has been in dozens of protests in my life: yes, that is what protest is, and as a protester engaging in civil disobedience you expect the response from authorities. That is exactly the point. When I have been on the receiving end of tear gas, there was no surprise. Big duh.

Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.

Please, disagreeing on a topic and providing arguments is one thing, but suggesting somebody go live in another country because you don’t agree with them on something that happened in their country is disrespectful.

I mean, the South in the US waged a really big protest because they wanted slaves, and we murdered each other enough that they sort of changed their mind. Not every political grievance is on the right side of history.

US should take the areas below the 47 degree Lat N. The rest can remain Canada. And please Keep Quebec too.

Or maybe Canada should pull a Russia and sell the Northwest Territories and Yukon. That would generate a lot of interest and money.

There's a good summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_r...

At least one Canadian business magnate (Kevin O'Leary) has tried to position himself in on the deal and visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago to talk details.

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/kevin-oleary-donald-t...

Since December, Trump has repeatedly "joked" on social media about Canada being the 51st US state and Trudeau being a "Governor".

The whole thing is pretty stupid, but Trump is so chaotic that chances of bad things happening are feeling somewhat above zero.

Trump

I feel like a single word should explain it, but I know HN abhors single word responses. Trump has threatened tariffs and has mentioned annexing Canada. He's also mentioned buying Greenland, trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, and a bunch of other notions.

Here's the primary problem with your argument: the current front-runner to win the next election is the Conservative Party of Canada, with Pierre Poilievre as leader, and pretty much a shoo-in for the next Prime Minister.

Poilievre is a career politician who's only professional experience has been as a politician, has no work history to speak of (don't take my word for it, his wikipedia entry details only a job as a collection agent, and that he started a business in 2003 focused on political communications, and then was elected in 2004).

Poilievre has spent the last several years in the lead up to becoming the party leader for the CPC cozying up to the alt-right, supporting the anti-vax movement, and hasn't published any meaningful policy documentation.

Poilievre is basically the last man standing from Stephen Harpers administration (in terms of policies and practices), and has failed to drive or pass any meaningful legislation or policy changes in his 20 year career. His victory in the 2022 CPC leadership campaign was a landslide, but also suffered from allegations of foreign interference from India and China. There is still an outstanding report on foreign interference due on January 31st.

Trudeau's greatest mistake was not implementing the electoral change he campaigned on, which likely would have marked a long term shift toward more left leaning social policies along side centrist fiscal policies, which have typically characterized Canadian society. Unfortunately, unless a very compelling alternative to the CPC emerges in the next 3 months, we will most likely get a government lead by a sock-puppet who lacks any real strength to negotiate with a presumably hostile incoming US administration, and the official party line from other Conservative groups in Canada appears to be appeasement and concession.

It's gonna be a rough couple of years :/

(edited for shoe-in)

Daily traffic at Union is 300k according to a quick google.

So the most annoyed 1% of Canadians go through there every day.

Not the world’s most rigorous basis for a sweeping statement about an entire culture.

I don't agree with your last point. In a democracy, we have elections at a cadence. If you disagree with protest permits, you are welcome to stand up in the next election, or vote for a representative who will.

We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.

I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.

The monarch of Canada is the King of Canada. It's a completely separate role from the King of the UK even though it's the same person. Canada isn't ruled by the British King.

not necessarily, thats my point.

That's the bigger picture problem with Canada (and nearly every place else). Our laws assume the government is the good guy, when they should be assuming the government is public enemy number one.