Yea, I’m not in favour of crypto banks in any way shape or form. Over the past five years, almost every crypto coin has been blatantly used at some point for large scale fraud, and direct bribes – Trump’s a great case in point there. Even more, shifting monetary control into a crypto-verse, is overtly giving all authority and power to tech bros, who are proving in very overt fashion that they cannot be trusted these days.

Just look at SVB. Thiel and his buddies looked at SVB’s balance sheet, said “We have so much money in this bank, if we all pulled out at once we could kill the bank and trigger a regulatory fiasco” … followed by Palmer Luckey, one of that crowd, putting forward a Crypto-first bank with his billionaire buddies backing. So the guys that caused the latest banking collapses, are wanting us to trust them to handle all the monetary stuff. Crypto being beyond government control is a nonstarter, and as soon as govt is involved is basically the same as regular currencies. But even worse the main proponents of it are completely untrustworthy, and are entirely hell bent on dismantling things like democracy. They want the power to mint their own “zuck bucks” to function as official currencies in their little tech fascist fiefdoms. So fuck that noise.

You’ll never see Canada block big tech at this point I’m afraid. All the talk of sovereignty is just that, talk. None of our different government agencies is prepared to abandon Microsoft. All of our financial regulators are completely in bed with Microsoft. Most of our banks are in bed with Microsoft. Our ATMs run on Windows due to Payments Canada being in bed with Microsoft and mandating it. All of your banking data is accessible by Microsoft. Every government agency runs on Microsoft.

Every time there’s an announcement about ditching US providers, ask your MP/MLA if that includes Microsoft / big tech. There’s always an “out” in those announcements to allow them to dodge that one – like “It’s too expensive to change”, or “too difficult to change quickly” or whatever.

I mean, look at all these “nation-building” projects that they’re itching to suppress Canadian’s rights to “get moving” – they’re all projects that’re gonna be lead by Big US companies to extract resources from Canada. They put on a good show, but the reality is that Trump / America was right that Canada is basically a little bitch at this point. Our politicians have proven that time and again this year.

I think the most bizarre thing about this story, is that it’s not ‘new’ to hear that traffic cams / automation can catch a ton of people speeding. Like I recall them setting these systems up in various cities two decades ago, and the number of people caught in the early stages of the programs was huge then too. It’s “normal” for people to drive ~10mph over the speed limit, though that varies based on things like school zones (where you dont go over at all). It’s also normal for drivers to align to the speed of surrounding traffic flows. The public pushback that resulted, killed many of the initiatives. Cams were still installed, but many cities that used them tended to have restrictive conditions. This isn’t ‘new’ tech by any stretch, nor is it a ‘new’ idea to be tried.

The article hints that they’re allowing a 10mph wiggle room this time, but the main thing that’s changed, is the public has been beaten into submission by authoritarians – it’s unlikely there’ll be any civil action against it.

If you believe there were mass graves in a similar vein as you see in Israel, Nazi Germany, or other similar genocides, you haven’t looked into it all that much. There was no mass execution of First Nations. They had a higher rate of death among children as a demographic over a roughly 150 year period during the operation of the Residential schools. There were children that died while at residential schools – some who were buried in unmarked graves and/or buried in places their next of kin didn’t know. Even the headlines that get posted generally highlights that they’re “unmarked” graves, not “mass” graves in recognition of this fact. This was mostly during the earlier parts of that time line, where things like “phones” were less common (so you couldn’t call their parents), the older generation couldn’t read/write (so a letter to notify parents may’ve been sent but would be less effective), and moving a corpse across the country to a small remote community was incredibly expensive. The times journalists try to sensationalize it and claim it as a ‘mass grave’, they’re generally referring to an area with multiple unmarked graves, where the children were laid to rest by the church (individually) – basically a big graveyard without headstones, that formed over the 100+ year period, as the church buried kids incrementally one by one over that period.

But the Church was never rounding up and executing children by the hundreds in a planned approach to snuff out the lives of an entire people. The root of the ‘genocide’ is/was that the Church and Canada was (arguably) intentionally and systematically using the residential school system to convert FN into more western ways of thinking and cultures (“killing” the culture, not the people – sorta more like how Russia abducted a bunch of Ukrainian kids, and is systematically indoctrinating them into Russia). That, coupled with an aggregate statistic over a century, is what’s used to call Canada genocidal and lump the country in with what’s going on in Israel currently.

No western country is likely to step up at this point, in my view at least. The conservative leaning folks are going hard into authoritarian xenophobic trends, and the left leaning folks consider anything that alters the existing culture of an area to be genocide.

The latter is really kinda tragically hilarious, cause we see countries like Canada declaring themselves genocidal and shaming their non-indigenous population as though they’re monsters, while simultaneously defending Israel’s actions in regards to Gaza. There’s even talk of making it a crime to question how horribly genocidal Canadians are, and also to make it a crime to say anything bad about Israel. If we see a religion-backed school, we’re to think “genocide! You’re attempting to subvert the student’s cultural religion and norms under the guise of teaching people to read and write! Their traditional culture doesn’t have reading or writing, you’re genociding their oral traditions too!!”; and when we see a mass grave filled with civilians, we’re to think “Totally justified, those bulldozers are just defending themselves against the toddler / journalist / civilian corpses, and mass graves are just practical! No moral issues or crimes here! Definitely not a genocide”. These things were brought forward by our left-leaning government parties. Not sure if those’ve passed yet, but they’ve definitely been on the table.

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Strange semi related old person story – back in highschool, one of our teachers had the class write essays on whether nationalism was good or bad. We were then given an option to either present our papers, or do a debate exercise with a kind of round robin pro or con. So you’d partner with 1 other person, debate if it was good or bad, then groups of 4 doing the same, until it was the whole class. In my paper and in my discussions, I had used a similar approach as this comic – basically just establishing what nationalism was vs patriotism, and drawing nazi’s in as an example too. No one in those discussions contested that Nazi’s were nationalists – but they still argued in favour of it.

By the end, I was the only person who thought nationalism was overall ‘bad’. The tide had turned in the groups of 8 stage. Because a hot girl had declared her support for nationalism. That’s all it took for people to like/excuse nazis, even back in the early 2000s. An excuse.

If people paid attention to his history, yeah, they’d see it. What Carney did at the Bank of Canada and his various comments there are pretty telling.

The 2008 financial crisis, we avoided the worst of it because Carney and them were ‘slower’ to roll out the same dangerous lending practices that we saw down south, but they were still going forward with them – we just had less exposure at the time the US popped, so they were able to quietly prop up the big banks (and just the big banks, they let the smaller ones figure it out themselves) using the CMHC. Canada’s small FIs, Credit Unions and such, got through it without a scratch, because they weren’t in to risky convoluted mortgage block trading, and had various safeguards in place already like a shared liquidity pool. Carney’s reaction to Canada doing so well in 2008, was to demand that the industry align more with the international standards which had allowed for those issues to occur. Things like the shared liquidity pool were dismantled as a result. Fast forward, and Thiel and his buddies pop SVB – and suddenly regulators are making noise like “Maybe banks and FIs should have some kind of shared liquidity pool for this sort of issue!”. Carney’s comments at various events also displayed a blatant lack of understanding for the smaller financial industry players in Canada – likening Canada’s credit unions to spain’s private banks (which were run by oligarch-ish families, with zero underwriting due diligence).

The guy trusted the international community hierarchy / structure, more than the Canadian system. He trusted that hierarchy even after it had failed, while the Canadian approach had more success. He forced Canada’s FI’s to align with worse-practices, just because it aligned to international norms. He is not pro-Canada, nor is he pro-small business.

He’s still likely better than PP would’ve been.

In this case, it makes sense though. The recent techbro crypto bank announcement, a bank created by the same tech billionaires that intentionally crashed/destroyed SVB, is basically a play to shift the American financial system into stablecoins / cryptocurrencies entirely, as it’s something that the tech bro class figures they can control for their own benefit.

That’s all moving ahead on schedule, and is in line with Curtis Yarvin’s whole techno fascist monarchy dream for how democracies need to die. They really only need to appease Trump for so long as it takes to get control of those purse strings. Egging on destruction / chaos for things like social services also feeds this pattern, it’s easier to convince someone they need to make drastic changes to their home, if that home is currently on fire.

Having a constant tech-fascist publicly whispering these sorts of things in Trump’s senile ears helps to keep up the facade within the maga-bubble that it’s a “broadly accepted” approach to benefit everyone, that’s been agreed upon by a bunch of “data driven” science types, when it’s absolutely not. It’s tech oligarchs looking to dismantle and own most western democracies.

It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.

Bill C-5 is a lot of nodding and ‘trust me’ type arguments that get made by a liberal party that’s designed the legislation to be ‘reviewed’ after 5 years, meaning its highly likely that it’ll get used by another party - which could happen quite quickly even, given the minority govt status. Also, for its nation building projects clauses, ask yourself whose rights/interests are getting suppressed, and which nation owns the businesses that will be building those projects. It’s generally American owned / head quartered companies, getting assurances that the pesky locals rights won’t get in the way, from our own government. It is quite explicitly selling us out to foreign business interests.

Like even the reactors that Ontario (in partnership with a couple other provinces, I think) is building, are American made from GE and rely on Uranium that we ship down to the USA, they then enrich it and ship it back to us to power those plants. Or the Avro Arrow that Ford trumpets all the time, which was always a concept car / “platform” to sell component contracts to foreign companies. They put cheaper EV’s for everyone in Canada on hold, because Ford wanted to try and appease American car dealers. They’re aggressively pushing things like OpenBanking, even though practically every Canadian financial institution is outsourcing that functionality outside the country (even most “local” CUs now have their websites hosted by an Indian company) – some even “disclose” all their member information to India/US-based AI companies, because I guess there’s a low risk of it being regulated by the Carney govt: he’s very bullish on trusting big tech to be country agnostic, despite countless examples to the contrary. Suppressing privacy rights would be an easy way to green light large government AI integration, particularly with foreign company involvement/control. These things are not nation building, nor are pipelines owned by US interests. But those are the sorts of ‘projects’ that this kind of legislation will most likely target.

The original commentor’s note seemed to imply Carney was playing some sort of ‘4d chess’ bullshit, dangling keys and then ditching something we’d always intended to ditch as a ‘show’ to appease the orange guy. Your response noted that the tax was put in fairly recently, and was set to kick in officially this month – basically questioning the original guys narrative. You add in the question about wheat, which I’m still not sure where he got that.

So yes, I agree with your skepticism related to this being some fancy political footwork that’s actually in our best interests, and the implication from the OP that we were ditching a tax that we’d never intended to bring in.

Your response even supports the comment that the move is objectively against our interests, and pro-US tech giant. Your optimism and “wait and see, mayyybeee”, are naive. We’ve already conceded that tax, without getting anything in return for it, as well as any other area of internal domestic policy as there’s a clear precedent now – if it were part of negotiations, it would be getting discussed as part of negotiations, setting up an exemption for US companies or whatnot. We just handed them that item on ‘good faith’, with a dictator. Heck, during the election, I’m fairly sure I heard a quote from Carney about how he wouldn’t commit to anything publicly prior to negotiations, because it’s a weak approach where you basically give stuff away - but they did just that in this case.

The questionable bills, and general de-regulation / removal of environmental reviews, are in line with US interests at present, which are backed by tech giants wanting to take more control / have more autonomy. The continued (over) reliance on US tech services is also clearly not in Canada’s best interests, given how the US has been leveraging their near monopolistic status in that realm. Many of our newly elected government officials got in on a promise of standing up to America’s authoritarian bullshit, but once in power have basically complied and made similar authoritarian steps.

*if your MP is a liberal.

My MP is a useless NDP, has been for decades now. She’s gotten my riding pretty much zero dollars of federal investment / business. She only cares about women and immigrant issues. If you write to her, she’ll literally respond with shit like “I’m not sure, but women don’t make up the majority of board members in private industry yet, so we gotta keep funding more women’s only issues and initiatives! Donate to my re-election campaign!”.

Anyone in a party-‘lock’ riding, especially if it’s locked to a party that never gets a majority, is just unrepresented.

I agree with your skepticism on this one.

Especially given what we can see with regards to US tech companies being complicit with a bunch of the authoritarian stuff going on down south, moves to disrupt their monopolies and try and foster a more local industry makes a ton of sense. Many of Carney’s decisions lately align with US interests more so than Canada. It’s not overly surprising, he’s not pro-Canadian companies / people, but pro-business and international trade (at the expense of locals if need be), in a fairly generic neo-liberal way.

Also, bending over right before Canada day is just such a dick thing to do as PM. He should be trying to lead / inspire national pride, not appeasing foreign interests, for at least like 1 week of his term.

Still prolly better than PP would’ve been though. With PP we would’ve had Elon here Musking up the place.

Dude should license some Basil Poledouris theme music. Get some wizardy guy to do a new intro – maybe ask Bernie for a hand. “Let me tell you of a time of EQUIIITABLE treaatment!!”

A conservative literally went and shot a sitting democrat politician and her husband dead. It was a news story for about 10 seconds before being replaced by the latest Trump shenanigans. They’re literally assassinating / murdering democrats in their homes man, and no one in America seems to care all that much.

And you think something’ll happen if they deport a dude who is just… in the running for mayor?

Yeah, ok, sure.

Totally misses the point. I don’t think anyone I know started avoiding US products to try and “hurt” the USA, we’re not idiots thinking our tiny population is gonna have a huge impact on their economy or anything.

We avoided their products, cause they started making threats / acting hostile towards us, and we’d rather our money go to support either local Canadians, or to support companies from countries that aren’t threatening us / acting hostile. We didn’t/don’t want to be in any way reliant on someone that views us as an enemy, nor do we want to support the fascist crap that’s going on down there currently.

Most likely it was a move primarily about getting senior level execs at those companies into the military machine – and into the chain of command of that machine. It makes those companies ‘disclosing’ data to the military much more likely, as well as tweaking apps to aid in military operations.

Like havin the CTO of meta “in the circle”, likely gives them complete access to meta’s tracking data for any target they want, in a more efficient way than previous.

Such a wimpy style of governance from the look of all these proceedings. Even if there are legitimate complaints, the person ‘getting grilled’ could practically sit there singing the alphabet, and the outcome would be the same.

It’s like those odd sport interviews where the person just responds “I’m just here to not get fined” to every question – ie. I’m forced to be here for pageantry/contract reasons, but there’s no real point to any of it. Both the questions, and the answers, are ultimately pretty meaningless.

I laughed when I first saw those two UK-ancestry Indian girls who’s mother had them ‘identify’ as First Nations in order to get tons of free grants / govt support, which they used to setup businesses and such… and the news was like “Why would someone do this?!?”. For the money and govt perks, obviously.

One thing I didn’t see much of in the article, were options to resolve the issue aside from a brief note about there not being many options currently. So what options do we realistically have to address the issue?

Do FN not keep a registry of their people, and/or do they not have established processes for third party’s to verify identity claims via a simple form? Like do businesses have an option, sorta like running a background check with law enforcement, to check an identity?

I’d personally vote to remove the incentive for the frauds. Race-based benefits that are so lopsided you have people committing fraud to get those perks, a situation that seems antithetical to what the Charter and democratic nations are built on: that all races are equal. Remove individual govt incentives based on race – no bursaries, grants, funding, tax breaks, etc. Have the fed gov supports be based exclusively on nation-to-nation type supports, sorta like they do with the provinces in terms of fund transfers, and base those transfers on the division of responsibility between FN and Canada, tied to the treaties where possible. Instead of having oblique benefits paid out to individuals spread across the entire country via tax breaks etc, have the funds be directly applied to ‘nations’ to fix things like drinking water availability. If an FN has no one living in their area, or if they free-ride off of colonial infrastructure that’s been built, they get less ‘national’ funding – sorta like if a foreign country came in and built a port for Canada to use, and we had free use of it, it’d be nuts for the govt to then up our taxes to pay for a new port… cause it’s already there and available.