Exactly this! A great example is when the Alberta UCP flat out told renewable energy companies that they just were not allowed to do business in Alberta. Straight up, in your face central planning. Free market indeed...

I am not far left enough to say communism is the right goal, yet, but I am further left than saying we need socialist reforms. I am from Saskatchewan so I can see the benefits of psuedo-socialized markets (think phone and internet with Sasktel sticking it to the big 3) I just wish the rest of the province could see it to. If Saskatchewan can see it and really start celebrating it maybe the rest of Canada could as well.

I'm 100% behind you with this.

And every time I mentioned how it was a bad idea to vote for Carney and how bad he is, I kept being downvoted and then people comment "yeah but we would've has Poilievre otherwise."

No we wouldn't. A lot of NDP ridings turned red because of this. But people should have voted for the NDP. With them as a strong opposition, we would still be in a better position in a minority big C Conservative government than we are right now with a majority small c conservative government.

Carney is a corporatist. He knows how to sweet talk investors to gain their trust like any CEO can bullshit people into buying their stock. And he's done that with all of Canada.

Many jobs SHOULD be public sector jobs. Like water utilities, garbage collection, electrical utilities, teaching, college teacher.

These public sector jobs should be 4 days a week, with a 5th day of retraining/training. So people keep gaining more skills encase technology changes the workforce, and make peoples' lives more meaningful.

This this this. So much this. Canadians do not understand just how catastrophic of a fuckup that was. The consequences of that have not yet been truly felt but it will be horrendous when they are. Canada's electoral system is a goddamn joke and, in my opinion, is barely even a democracy at all because of it.

Just like the US, we are one 51% vote away from a bad actor gaining absolute power and tearing down everything Canadians have known and loved. Hell, even right now we have a majority government that the people did not vote for.

Yeah he might've fucked the whole country on that one, but now he's exclusive with Katy Perry so I guess he learned his lesson. /s

Trudeau did not fail to bring in proportional representation. He campaigned with the intention of bringing in ranked balloting. Instead of forcing it through when he could, he sent it to committee where no consensus was reached. Instead of compromising with a small improvement the NDP flat out refused anything but proportional representation. With ranked balloting the NDP would consistently win more seats than they do now and we would have more minority governments where compromising would result in more progressive legislation.

Their healthcare is not tied to their jobs.

sure, if you dont care about your teeth, eyes, mental health, physiotherapy....

All tied to employment...

And before anyone jumps in here with "at least not as bad as america!!!".... thats exactly the kind of low bar thinking that landed us in this situation..

So I can tell you haven't been poor recently.

No, but it is tied to politics. What treatments Canadians have access to is determined by unaccountable appointed bureaucrats at the ministries of health.

As an example, GLP-1 is only available to Canadians who are diagnosed with diabetes. It is not available for general weight loss.

The 'Wild West' wasn't all that wild or lawless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR7EBBXcQUg it was probably safer than life today in Canada. Don't let all the dumb Hollywood movies fool you.

What turned out so bad?

I voted Pierre because the current government intends to criminalize nearly a million people, myself included, for firearms we purchased legally and have been available to the Canadian market since the 70’s.

Say what you want about firearms, the money put into Bill C21 could’ve gone into mental health awareness or increased the budget to the firearms program & RCMP detachments performing background checks, hell I think an improved Canadian Firearms Safety Course is about due with stricter requirements.

Overall, I supported Carney as well, last election (but voted Green). But I said at the time, here in this community, that although I completely agreed with his economic and fiscal policies, the jury was still out regarding his social and humanitarian policies. If you think back, Carney ran almost entirely on his financial policies, and remained silent on social policies.

While you are correct, I kinda hate this argument because it ascribes equal blame on both sides as if giving up on human rights is a reasonable political position. The better way to describe it is that the Nazis are too comfortable taking their masks off

The polarization is a product, a symptom, not a cause. Look at the economic processes affecting everyone. They drive the political processes, part of which is polarization. Simple example - if I can't find a job as a young guy, see no feasible way to move out of my parents' basement, therefore have little chance to court a girl and have a family of my own, I'd be pretty angry and looking for the cause of my misery. Seeing all these new people on the street that weren't here a few years ago would be an obvious candidate. The axes on which polarizarion occurs aren't new and unnatural, and people have found the same explanations for their misery in the past, way in the past. Not all of those explanations are valid of course, but the economic misery driving to them is real and the march towards polarization won't stop until the misery recedes.

Not a new thing even remotely. That isn't the "single factor," these are the inevitable conditions that liberal-capitalist systems produce. They are fundamentally organized around the subordination of othered groups of people to the benefit of a privileged group(s), which means the value of human life or any life is not a real consideration. Polarization like this appeared in the late nineteenth century as well (Progressives and Populists), and similarly people looked at that as the cause of problems and not the result of a system that will never adopt an idealized form of democracy as that would inevitably mean a group of exploited people have power within that system.

What you are identifying is a particularly energetic moment in political rhetoric that has been very effectively proliferated through corporatized media (not just social but yes, social media) and internet services. To suggest there are "two camps" depends on erasing the variability of people's material and social interests in politics, which just works to the benefit of privileged groups and their political interests. I'd hardly call Liberal voters the same thing as NDP voters or, god forbid, someone who understands the liberal legal and political system as only a part of our politics and not the entirety of it. The split I figure you're thinking about is between Liberals and Cons (which can be understood as "liberals and conservatives," "progressive and traditional," "fascists and republicans," but is really just oriented around party politics and not actual ideological differences) and, go figure, they happen to be ideologically aligned under neoliberalism. Their differences are a consequence of different marketing and rhetoric strategies based on target demographics and regions.

Cons do better in the counties with mostly white settlers who have poor political literacy, a lack of cultural diversity, and a high economic dependency on extractive industry and agriculture. So, they use rhetoric that enforces "traditional" values and relies on an elitist crisis narrative that constructs local economic decline or struggle as a consequence of decadent wealthy people in positions of power who have corrupted the country, i.e. the only other large party: Liberals. Liberals tend to do better in cities and suburbs, particularly affluent ones, and use rhetoric that evokes welfare liberal ideas of "progress" and a balance between private and public spending to address a crisis in market forces and bad actors within the system, namely Conservatives. They must produce certain outcomes to maintain that image, and of course their different interests means they attract different financial supporters with their own imperatives that factor into policy-making. So, they sometimes push different policies, but usually their motivations and outcomes are ideologically compatible.

The result is the construction of this adverserial narrative that really just refers to what the most privileged groups associated with voting trends in each party are concerned about. Fascists are particularly energetic, and both parties here in Canada have readily embraced that energy to their ends. PP pushes transphobia and racism, Carney plays on the anxiety caused by it to frame the same neoliberal policies as acts of self-reliance and sovereignty. To even suggest this system was democratic to begin with is also deeply ahistorical and difficult to defend rationally. You could certainly say there's "two teams" in that there really is just capitalism and its supporters and then people who are invested in the value of human life, but then the politics just melts into one team which is "capitalism's supporters." I'm sure you can understand how that would be reductive as well.

Please, do not buy into narratives that simply these issues; simplicity is easier for them to control.

Riding are too big, imagine if we had riding of 30,000 instead of 100,000. You'd get very local candidates making their way to Parliament, with very local issues to deal with. It would be less polarizing, and help solve local problems.

The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute and you think "it must be the Jews behind all of the problems"?

Can democracy survive a multicultural society, yes it can. Can it only exist in a homogeneous way, no. This is kind of the same question honestly.

A better question is, will powerful fascist elements use multicultural issues against democracy? The answer is yes.

Can a non-homogeneous democracy compete with a homogeneous? Do you think the US has competed successfully considering they have been non-homogeneous for awhile now.

I have never heard white elitism as the cause for the decline of democracy. I would say it has definitely created a two tired society where some white males get the benefits of other's work disportionally.

Honestly your question(s) seem kind of race baiting in a mild way. Like you are looking for an answer you already have and just need confirmation.

I see your reliance on path and destination as a metaphor for the status quo and change misplaced. Democracies can and do change and the fact that not every group has the exact same goal does not prevent democracy.

It may make it more complex and slower because the groups must find common ground and develop shared goals. Or perhaps one group will simply dominate the other as we see in the US. Obviously there will be conflict if the groups have polar opposite demands.

I find your distinction between one party and no party just silly. China is not a democracy at all. The supreme power is invested in a autocrat. Of course, you could argue the US is very similar and depending how this next election plays out it may to become a no-party/one party government. I am sure some would argue it already is one party when it comes to serving the wealthy's desires.

China is not driven by a singular goal as what the rural working class wants is completely different than the urban elites want. There is no way everyone in China can be a billionaire. This two-tired society is non-homogeneous by nature.

This new world is dominated by corporate interests. The wealthy are no longer bound by nations. I see us heading into an increasingly post-nation world for the wealthy with nations purely becoming a tool to control the populace and something that is ignored by the wealthy.

I think every large nation, including the US could be broken up and probably be better off. This concentration of power under the guise of the state in order to control the populace at the benefit of the wealthy is a problem that is happening all over the world as income gaps continue to increase dramatically.

Democracy in China is very alive and well, contrary to Western public opinion.

Bullshit. Xi Jinpeng is President for life now. There is Chinese Democracy I suppose... in Taiwan. Which is under threat by Xi, just as there was democracy in Hong Kong before Xi snuffed that out.

Also the Nazis valued racial homogeneity, did that result in more democracy and freedoms?

You're trying to make the facts fit a racist narrative. The reality is that cultural changes result from living in a free society. The culture doesn't change in the same way in all places. The only way to have homogeneity is under an authoritative regime that forces people to all live the same lives. That isn't freedom.

FFS there has been two languages in Canada for it's entire existence. We've never been homogenous.