canadian politics

BC General Election 2024: Official results

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The final results of the 19 October 2024 BC General Election are in, and the losers are the voters of British Columbia. Congratulations!

Wait, what? Oh, you were expecting that I was going to celebrate the winner?! Nope, with every election we have I become more and more convinced that the electoral system we use in this province and country was designed by morons. I mean, on the face of it, winner takes all just makes sense, right? You and your friends are deciding where to go for dinner. It has long been my contention that the bigger the group, the more likely it is that you’re all going to end up at White Spot in this part of the world. (Probably Wetherspoons in the UK.) White Spot is a good, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road restaurant, with something to please just about everyone so, just as I said, the bigger the group the more likely it is that there are going to be people who reject a pizza place, a steak place, an “ethnic” place of one stripe or another, or whatever someone in the group will vote against. So someone in the group says, “What about White Spot?” “Yeah, OK, I guess,” grumbles just about everyone. The steak guy can get a half decent (but overdone) steak, the pizza guy can probably get a flatbread thing, the person who wanted something “ethnic” can probably get something resembling a curry or that has had some curry powder waved in its general direction, people can get burgers, and off you go. Ain’t majority rule great?!

Final 2024 BC general election voting results

And so here in British Columbia the NDP have just squeaked by with a 47-seat majority, an absolute bare minimum majority required in a 93-seat house. (And already the Conservatives are promising to bring down the government! Way to read the room guys!) The 46 seats they had until the recounts were completed over the weekend — actually, they weren’t really recounts, they were the counting of mail-in, out-of-district and other miscellaneous ballots — was one seat short of the majority, and they would have required at least one MLA from another party to pass legislation.

Of course, the NDP are happy! Phew! We can get our agenda done! But the fact is that 55.13% of the province voted against the NDP, the majority of voters! (Sound familiar?! 56.73% voted against the Conservatives.) Don’t get me wrong, of the two main parties in the contest I’d far prefer the NDP to win over the Conservatives who, as I said in my earlier post, are led by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who would be premier of the province had the Conservatives won! So thank the gods that they didn’t win, but the issue I have is that everyone seems to think that a minority government is “bad”, when in actual fact a minority government is the absolute best we can possibly hope for in a first-past-the-post system, where it’s usually one dictatorship after another! If you’re using a system where the majority of voters do not get what they voted for, how can you possibly think that that’s the best possible voting system?!

But I’m farting into the wind, because BC voters have twice (or maybe it’s three times, I’ve lost count) rejected some kind of proportional representation system because the maths were “too hard”!

Initial 2024 BC general election voting results

Let me go back to my White Spot example. Based on my own experience I’m not a big fan of the various food-delivery services out there, but here’s a possible variation on the example I gave: The majority of the group would probably vote against White Spot, not because White Spot is crap (I do love some of their dishes, so I don’t want you to think I have a hate on for them), but because the steak guy would kill for a good steak, and the pizza guy really wants a meat-lover’s pizza right now, and someone really wants a good goat curry. So head for some venue where you can have fun and that will allow you to call in a food delivery, and order from the places that specialise in those foods and eat what you actually want! Maybe it sounds a bit too “pie in the sky”, but you all get to vote on what you want to eat and you all get what you want! In PR, if 40% vote for the NDP, 40% vote for the Conservatives, 10% vote for the Greens, and 10% vote for the Rhinoceros Party, that’s exactly how the seats are divvied up in the legislature (or parliament).

If a group of friends can come up with an arrangement that suits all of them for dinner for the evening, how can a province or country not come up with an electoral system that actually pleases all of the voters all of the time?! I’m not so stupid that I think I know better than Abraham Lincoln but, my god, just about anything has to be better than this farcical first-past-the-post system in which we find ourselves every election cycle where (in this case) 55.13% of the electorate get told to suck it up for another four years. That won’t end well when the revolution happens.

I just wasted my vote in the 2024 British Columbia provincial general election

Oct 13th, 2024

by Craig.

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Vote (cropped, Alan Cleaver CC BY 2.0).

Yesterday I went to the District Electoral Office in my area and voted in an advance poll. I did it there and early because I expected an issue with my ID, but thankfully I didn’t have one. (At least that part of the provincial government was working properly, as opposed to the part responsible for my ID.) Anyway, since we’re still using the FPTP voting system inherited from middle ages England, I knew that my vote would be wasted because I voted for the Green Party headed by Sonia Furstenau instead of one of the two main parties, one of which is headed by a mentally and socially deficient anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist.

But oh well. I’ll just consider myself on the vanguard of proportional representation in a province that has its head buried firmly in its ass, having rejected PR in two referenda!

Some random musings, mostly about morons apparently

Mar 3rd, 2024

by Craig.

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Some bonehead named trump

I’ve had a note for several weeks to address the moronic comment some idiot named donald trump made about NATO members who don’t spend 2% of their GDP on defence spending. He seems to think that NATO members can simply be evicted from the alliance like delinquent tenants in one of his run-down tenement buildings. One of those countries is Canada. I’m not defending Canada’s apparent lack of spending on defence, especially in this day and age of increased Russian aggression, but here’s the thing, don: If Russia attacks and takes over Canada — we’re the country that is largely between you and Russia — as you have explicitly encouraged them to do, your problems on your southern border would look like a walk in the park compared to the problems you will have on your northern border!

Fucking moron.

Twitter/X

I know, I’m the last to note this, but Twitter feeds used to feature regularly in the search results for various things I look up online on a daily basis. But since that no-name idiot — Musk I think he calls himself — took it over, said results are less and less useful. For starters, you only get the one tweet, and Twitter refuses to display any replies. Given how often in the past I’ve spent way more time on reading replies that I should have, in some ways this is a good thing. But I’m sure my buddy Elon wasn’t worried about how much time Craig is wasting on Twitter. I don’t know what Musk is worried about, but maybe it’s his bandwidth bill. Or maybe he’s actually doing what he seemed to be setting out to do, which is kill Twitter. I wish I had so much money that I could literally piss $44 billion down the drain.

I also note now that when you try to load a Twitter feed you are often/usually forced to log in. You can no longer simply go to a Twitter feed (e.g., twitter.com/ninernet) and peruse the posts. If you can, the posts are all in random order rather than chronologically. Yeah, that’s exactly how you generate interest in your service, by restricting people from even viewing it and confusing them!

Dilbert / Scott Adams

Speaking of Twitter and rich people who can piss away their wealth, Dilbert came back up on my radar recently. I used to read Dilbert daily, but one day it disappeared. Turns out it was unceremoniously dumped by its distributor after the author, Scott Adams, made what some people described as racist comments. Whatever. Now he continues his comic but you have to pay him US$7 a month for the privilege of reading it, or you can follow him on Twitter for US$3 a month. (I note that I can load his Twitter feed without being forced to log in! I don’t know why or how Twitter differentiates between one feed and another in that regard.)

But on his Twitter feed I note that he’s re-Tweeting Tucker Carlson and videos of teenagers fighting. Seriously? Teenagers fighting?! If that’s what this idiot considers to be “entertainment”, no thanks. I’ll pocket my hard-earned cash and not support some idiot who supports trump and considers teenagers beating each other up as entertainment.

Charities and their begging calls

I’ve just blocked the fourth number I’ve added to a list of Red Cross numbers that call us constantly. Why do they call us? Because we give them money every month! So we give them hundreds of dollars a year but they still want more! And they’re willing to call us many times a month/year for that purpose, and continue calling even though their calls don’t go through. I don’t get it. Maybe I should answer the next call and get them to cancel our monthly donation.

Android 12

I think I’ve made reference to Android 12 a couple of times on here. Actually, once. But goddammit, the idiots who made it are stupid. I know, I’m probably the only person in the world who plugs their phone in at night when they’re in bed, next to their bed (there are reasons), and I’m the only person in the world who crawls into bed with an already sleeping partner; so forgive me for thinking that I’m so special that developers should think of me. I’ve gone to great lengths to try and turn off just about every stupid, unnecessary bleep and bloop that my fucking phone makes, and yet, occasionally and for no obvious reason (but not every time!), my phone decides to let me, my sleeping partner and the fucking neighbours know that I’ve plugged in my phone! Hooray! Craig has plugged in his phone successfully! I can’t tell you how much my partner loves being woken up by this news. I have “Charging sounds and vibration” turned off, so I don’t know why Android ignores that directive … but only sometimes!

And while I’m on a rant about Android 12, let me give a special shout out to the 3CX app. For years I’ve had that running on this and previous phones and it never once “broke through” the do-not-disturb setting, but now it does. I don’t know whether or not I should blame Android or 3CX, but my money is on Android; after all, it’s the operating system, and that should control the installed apps, not the other way around. So now I have to remember to shut down that app so that it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night, as it did twice in one night a few nights ago!

RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) vaccine worth its weight in gold

In case any of you think that the communist government of Canada pays for all things medical, let me tell you that relatives, pensioners, just plonked down $540 for the two of them to each get the RSV vaccine. Wow! And I’m on the verge of plonking down $350 for the Shingrix shingles vaccine. One thing I can tell you though is that I won’t be getting the Shingrix vaccine at Shoppers Drug Mart. I have not been happy with the fact that they have virtually eliminated staffed check-out cash registers at their stores. I’m not a Luddite (says the guy writing a blog), but society needs to deal with the fact that we still have unemployment to deal with, and you don’t deal with it by bringing in machines to replace humans without a plan. They were also in the news recently for billing the Ontario government for unnecessary medical checks on patients.

In other news in Canada

Turkeys terrorize residents of small Quebec town. Sorry, apparently there was a serious aspect to this, as they were becoming aggressive and that was a danger to children, not to mention adults who don’t like to be scratched by sharp claws. But this video had me cracking up, as well as the woman shooting the video! 🙂

Brian Mulroney

Brian Mulroney died on Thursday, 29 February. As one would expect for a former Prime Minister, this was big news in Canada. It reminded me of the fact that he was the first and last Conservative Prime Minister for whom I voted, in the first election in which I could vote. As many people have said over the last few days, politics have changed since then and the Conservative Party itself has also changed since then. Now they have a leader who used to be known as a pit bull in Stephen Harper’s government, who caters to his “base” of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti everything! Now you couldn’t make me vote for that party even if you put a gun to my head. Sadly, as Canadian politics go, he will be Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre in 2025. 🙁

Updated, 2024-03-08: Added the fact that Twitter/X posts are now all in random order rather than chronological.

Far-right business hacks at the “National Post” / “Financial Post”

Feb 16th, 2024

by Craig.

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The National Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” (No author.)

With respect to my comment on Eby on Tuesday, I noted a piece in the “National Post” (apparently in the “Financial Post” section) by some nameless entity (see screenshot above) — perhaps the Post itself, or perhaps an individual named “Corcoran” (see second screenshot) — but not marked as “opinion” (see first screenshot) even though it clearly is, titled “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” It’s hilarious that anyone who disagrees with the almighty Bell is considered a “fool” or an “ignoramus”. That’s what’s called an ad hominem attack; if you can’t explain why you disagree with someone, call them a name. The words “fool” and “ignoramus” work. And if you run short of names to call people, just pull up a recent campaign speech (or any speech) by a guy named donald trump to get some more words … although not that many, since the guy has a very limited vocabulary.

But hey, I get it, people disagree! So I’ll raise the bar a little and respond intelligently instead of calling the “National Post” (or Corcoran) “fools”.

I don’t believe anybody — Eby, Trudeau or anyone else — is suggesting that BCE should subsidise their subsidiaries until the end of time. But big business(es), and those on the right in general, are big on the fact that people should take responsibility for their own actions. What a concept! But that only applies to poor people on skid row and drug addicts, not big business. It’s completely unreasonable, foolish even, for us idiots that don’t run BCE and other massive companies to think that BCE should take responsibility for their own misguided, stupid and even foolish decision to attempt to buy up the media industry, and their own foolish decision to run said media industry into the ground with their ignorance! It’s foolish for us to believe that BCE should pay back various levels of government the money that they/us — Canadian taxpayers! — will pay in (un)employment insurance to the unemployed journalists, cameramen, teleprompter readers and various other human beings that will become unemployed.

Of course not! It’s their own fault they’re unemployed! The fools! And if it’s not their fault it’s the big bad government’s fault for forcing us to work within the confines of decent, modern, civilised Canadian society!

“Bullshit”, as described by the “Financial Post”, is quite clearly the domain of big business press releases (viz. “moving forward”, at least for the employees that won’t be moving backwards in lifestyle) … and the fools at the “Financial/National Post”. I hereby award the “Harry G. Frankfurt Award for Demagogic Bullshit” jointly to Corcoran, their shitty newspaper and BCE Inc.!

The Financial Post: “Who’s the biggest fool, Eby or Trudeau?” Corcoran?

Updated, 17 February 2024: Made notes about the possible author of the article in the captions of the screenshots.

Encrapification: My vote for word of the year, even though it’s only February

Feb 13th, 2024

by Craig.

1 comment

David Eby. (Picture courtesy of BC NDP. CC BY 2.0 Deed. Cropped.)

The frustration of David Eby, premier of British Columbia, was palpable in his “2½-minute tirade” on Thursday (8 February 2024) against BCE Inc., parent company of Bell Media and therefore CTV News and all of its many holdings. But it was his invention of the word “encrapification” that stole the show for me. My web search for the word turned up the above CBC report as the first search result on Friday.

The great thing about the English language is that it is constantly evolving, and that it has building blocks to create words like this. I can’t speak for other languages, of course; I’ve studied several over the years, for which I’m grateful (especially Latin), but besides English there’s only one other (French) that I can say I could speak reasonably well in a pinch, but I don’t know it well enough to invent words in this way.

But Eby is completely right. I used to be all in favour of companies like BCE doing whatever they reasonably could to make more and more money but, as we’ve seen over the years with the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft (remember them?!), Amazon, etc., real people are hurt when companies become too big to care about both the people they employ and the people to whom they sell their products and services. I don’t imagine that the CEO of BCE woke up one day and decided to gut the media landscape in Canada, but he has. Eby’s characterisation of what BCE has done reminds me of what Canada Post did on a much smaller scale years ago: When I left college I expected to be quite movious — another great addition to the English language courtesy of Zambian English meaning to move around a lot — and so I rented a post office box. I rented it at the Vancouver International Airport because, working in the aviation business, I expected to be there often and so it would be convenient to be able to collect my mail there when I happened to be at that airport. It was going to become my “permanent” address.

Canada Post had other ideas, of course. They stopped renting new mail boxes at the “Airport Postal Outlet” (as it was known) and then, in a remarkable turns of events that nobody without an MBA could ever have predicted, they then claimed that there was not enough mail going there to support the existence of said outlet! Despite my attempts to “Save the APO“, it was taken away, and thus began my never-ending quest to set up new “permanent addresses”. What a gong show. I have had no fewer than seven “permanent addresses” in thirty-three years, when really, I should have had ONE!

A few random logos of the involved entities. Trademarks of the respective corporations.

Anyway, back to BCE. The day after Eby made headlines there was another politician who was evidently jealous of the attention that he wasn’t getting, so Justin Trudeau got on the horn (apologies to those of you for whom that phrase has a more lurid meaning!) and called it a “garbage decision” and said he was “pissed off”. Good effort Justin, but not nearly as cool as Eby! 🙂

At least CTV’s newly unemployed former employees will be able to count on Canadians’ thoughts and prayers for a day each year when Bell does their annual “Let’s Talk Day“. Thoughts and prayers certainly helped Lisa LaFlamme a lot when they fired her for letting her hair go grey, just as they helped me when Bell ripped me off for $11.27 for a one-minute phone call!

YVR has more snowploughs! Just as the climate is warming!

Dec 21st, 2023

by Craig.

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I noted, in a recent news report to which I don’t have a link, that Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has learned from their mistakes last year at this time and now has more snow ploughs than they can handle. If “snowmaggedon” happens again, they’ll be ploughing their little hearts out to save the day!

Except, Tamara Vrooman, CEO of YVR, apparently didn’t get the memo that the climate is warming! Talk about the former CEO of a bank (err, sorry, credit union) making misplaced investments! One wonders if she actually hired drivers for all of the snowploughs!

Listen, I’m probably no better a climate scientist than Vrooman, but winter does happen in Vancouver. I know the statistics all point to a warming climate, but I suspect that Vancouver hasn’t yet seen its last snowflake.

In other YVR news (YVR and Canadian airports rank in bottom third of global airports list), YVR sucks! I find this surprising, actually. Despite the fact that the local Mounted thugs murdered a passenger there in 2007, YVR has significantly improved the international arrivals area (where Robert Dziekański was killed) and, really, the place is quite nice. Canadian airlines, though, are probably dragging down people’s perceptions of the airport; considering all the stories in the news these days about handicapped passengers being forced to drag themselves (literally in one case!) off of their planes, some of them at YVR, it’s not surprising that perhaps those experiences have sullied the ratings of YVR in particular. Of course, the airlines will point their fingers at the airports and the airports will point their fingers at the airlines, but that doesn’t help anyone when their disability means they can’t disembark an aircraft like all of the able-bodied passengers.

Of all people, Vrooman, former CEO of the “we love people more than you do” credit union Vancity should know that. But she has seemingly gained all of her kudos over the years by suckling the public tit, or (as in the case of YVR) working at a private organisation that is essentially a privatised arm of Transport Canada. I have very little respect for her considering her legacy that I deal with at Vancity.

A note about the “mainstream media”

Feb 18th, 2022

by Craig.

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What does “mainstream” mean? Here’s the definition according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary:

mainstream
n. (the mainstream) normal or conventional ideas, attitudes, or activities.
adj. belonging to or characteristic of the mainstream.

Here’s an example: Bob and Sue have a disagreement over something. They have 20 mutual friends, and 15 of them agree with Sue and 5 agree with Bob. The “mainstream” of their mutual friends agree with Sue, but under the logic of the anti-vaxxers Bob is right because the “mainstream” can’t be trusted!

This is the logic under which the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-mandates people operate, when they call for everything from the de-funding of the “mainstream media” (MSM) to their execution.

I get it. I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I have a mob of reporters banging on my door for one reason or another, but the media does have a job to do. Part of that job, sadly, is to bang on certain peoples’ doors! Do they make mistakes? Sure they do, and one would hope that they would own up to those mistakes when they make them. There are ways to (at least) try and hold the media responsible for their mistakes.

I know that the media is biased. Everyone on this planet is biased, and it’s nigh on impossible to create an organisation that is one hundred percent neutral. As long as you’re aware of the biases of where you’re getting your news, you can read that news through that filter, and get the story from other sources as well and then decided for yourself where the truth likely lies. I’ve read stories from different sources that describe the same event in very different terms. But it’s up to me (and you) to seek out other reliable news sources and collate that information to determine what you believe to be the most likely version of the truth. However, those sources need to be reliable, and the Twitter feed of some left- or right-wing nut — or even my blog! — is not a reliable news source.

With respect to the so-called Freedom/Trucker Convoy, the fact that they bash the media, don’t invite them to their so-called press conferences, and walk out of said press conferences without answering any of the questions they would find difficult, is clear evidence to me that they don’t have the courage of their convictions.

A summary of where I stand

Feb 17th, 2022

by Craig.

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I unintentionally did a series of posts last weekend, prompted by the idiots occupying Ottawa, so I suppose I should come clean on why I think they are idiots.

I’m all for disagreement, but all sides must be willing to take in all of the facts and then make the clear choice on the correct course of action. Now, this is easier said than done, I get it, especially on issues where choices are made and positions are set based on different guiding principles. (The abortion debate is a very clear example.) But under the pandemic there seems to be this undercurrent of denialism of science prevalent among a certain segment of the population. I’ve never seen any information from these people that stands up to scrutiny, whereas the information I’ve seen espoused by health and disease professionals — i.e., trained professionals, people who have studied the science for decades — is very persuasive to me. Combine misinformation with fatigue and you have a recipe for disaster, as people latch onto examples of misinformation that appeal to their biases and personal experiences, not to mention their wanting to get rid of the cause of their fatigue.

Further combine this with information siloing and you have a fatal combination. It’s the bane of our time. The likes of Facebook, Instagram (both owned by the same company) and Twitter won’t make money if you move off of their platforms — i.e., go to work, go to bed, have dinner, leave the computer or put down your phone — and while you’re on their platforms they make more money if they can keep you clicking. As has been made abundantly clear recently, as if it was hard to figure out intuitively, negative news results in more clicking and more sharing, and bigger profits for the likes of Facebook. And all of the Internet giants want you to feel good — it’s ironic that feeling angry apparently makes people feel good, but that’s a psychological debate for another day — and so if you show them that you love conspiracy theories, guess what? They’re going to feed you more conspiracy theories! Before you know it, you’re down the rabbit hole, getting all of your biases and prejudices confirmed, and the next thing you know you’re claiming that vaccines (which have been around for centuries) actually kill people. I have received a dozen or a couple of dozen vaccines against various diseases in my life, and none of them have killed me!

So that’s why, I believe, many people have succumbed to the false beliefs they now hold. These beliefs are complete and utter bullshit:

Vaccines will kill you.
All of us “sheep” — i.e., those of us who believe science and scientists — are all part of a huge conspiracy.
Cooperating with others in society to attempt to reduce the spread of disease is an abridgement of my “freedom”.
Trump won the 2020 US election.

I know the names of some of these idiots, and you might too: Jason Kenney, Scott Moe, Pierre Poilievre, Candice Bergen and Andrew Scheer … among others. I don’t actually know if these five believe the four points above specifically — I actually don’t believe they would — but they have sided with people who believe these things. Kenney in particular looked recently like he couldn’t comply with the truckers’ demands fast enough, falling all over himself to ignore the scientists advising him, to straddle the fence in a way that would hurt if he had any balls; Moe looked like a frightened or cowed child with his deer-in-the-headlights look as he started rolling back “mandates” as quickly as he could! As for Poilievre, Bergen and Scheer, well, the Conservative Party is so desperate right now to look relevant that they’d try anything, and that included (before they reversed course) supporting the occupation of Ottawa by anti-vaxxers and -maskers who do believe the above lies.

I’d suggest that the Ottawa Police Service better get their shit together by Friday.

It’s past time for electoral reform in Canada

Feb 13th, 2022

by Craig.

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I don’t want to draw too long a bow here, but the current protests in Canada highlight the fact that our electoral system is broken. The current government is in power despite not winning a majority of the votes in the last (2021) election. The Liberal Party won only 32.62% of the vote, while the Conservative Party won 34.34% of the vote. (And while the New Democratic Party won 15.98% of the vote, they won only 25 seats, while the Bloc Québécois [who only run for seats in one province!] won 32 seats with only 7.63% of the vote, less than half as many votes!) Anyone with a brain would tell you that a system which produces these numbers is flat out broken!

So while the majority of Canadians have been vaccinated, and understand short-term pain for long-term gain, it’s not rocket science to figure out how the noisy band of malcontents that have descended on Ottawa, Coutts, Emerson and Windsor (among a number of provincial capitals) have managed to attract such a following. I still believe that the majority of Canadians do not support them, and I also still believe that these protests are being driven by right-wing extremists from both Canada and the United States, but this doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Canadians, 67.38%, did not vote for the party currently in power.

Much ink has been spilled on the assertion that the only ones to gain from a change in the electoral system to one that includes some form of proportional representation would be the NDP and the Greens. There’s no doubt about that, but (a) opposing electoral reform for that reason is short-sighted (and mean), and (b) that doesn’t imply that the two major parties (Liberals and Conservatives) can’t benefit themselves.

I also believe that Justin Trudeau and the Liberals don’t want to enact electoral reform, not because it would help the NDP and the Greens, but because they see how fractured the Conservative Party is, and that allowing proportional representation would allow the Conservative Party to split (the People’s Party of Canada already did), yet ultimately form government because two or more conservative-leaning parties could easily win a majority (or at least the biggest bloc of seats) and form a coalition government. So ironically, if the Conservative Party would just take their collective heads out of their ass and stop parroting the Liberal line that they can’t do electoral reform, they might actually gain from it … and significantly!

The beginning of civil war in Canada?

Feb 13th, 2022

by Craig.

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I’m not trying to be alarmist with this title, but the actions of a minority of Canadians are having very negative effects on their fellow Canadians. Some have gone as far as to refer to it as “terrorism”, and if you’re in Ottawa in the middle of it and you can’t sleep at night because of the blaring of horns, that adjective is all too real to you. It’s a classic torture technique to deprive your captive of sleep, and the residents of Ottawa in the vicinity of the occupiers of the city are indeed captives, as are the people being laid off because their employers can’t receive the deliveries they’re expecting across our borders.

So if your actions go beyond simple “peaceful” protest and start very negatively affecting the lives of your follow citizens — whether that effect is death or something slightly less drastic, like depriving them of sleep and income — how is that fundamentally different from an actual shooting civil war? The protestors make the point that if they don’t have this great an effect their point will be ignored. Well, they may be right. However, if you’re such a small minority and your demands are so great — as seems to be the case here — then your point, your demands, should be ignored! Every single one of us in a civilised society has to live within the confines of behaviour accepted by the majority. Anyone who has ever read Lord of the Flies learnt the alternative in high school!

How did we get here? As I said in my last post, this ostensibly started out as a trucker protest by people who opposed “vaccine mandates”. However, it has clearly morphed. The thousands of participants are clearly not the 10-15% of truckers who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Others have glommed onto their protest. Who are the others? That seems to be the biggest unanswered question here, and I sure don’t have the answer. The current federal government is a minority government, which means that most Canadians didn’t vote for them, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Personally speaking I am one of them, but as much as Justin Trudeau irks me, and as much as I have written against him and his leadership on my blog, I support his stance against this array of yobbos, and I think their calls for him to be jailed are abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous.

But why do these people honestly think that they can make this demand? Because they’re extremists who all talk to each other in their own little social-media bubbles. People on both sides of the political spectrum make this mistake and come to different extremist conclusions. In addition to coming to the conclusion that they can call for the overthrow of a duly elected government before the next scheduled election, they advocate for the jailing and execution of the politicians, and the “lying media”, the “fake news”. It’s just bizarre. No matter what beliefs you hold, you cannot reasonably come to the conclusion that you can effectively segregate the population and eliminate every last person who disagrees with you. That guy standing next to you on the protest line likely has a slightly different position to you on any number of issues, so should he/she be executed too? If you answer “yes”, who will be left standing next to you?! Nobody, that’s who.

I used to think that America was on the verge of civil war, and we reasonable people in Canada would be watching the refugees streaming across the border into our civilised country. However, it’s becoming clear that many Americans, mainstream politicians (e.g., Trump, Cruz) and underground right-wing extremists, are treating Canada as the fifty-first state. And we may actually be! The people behind the protests are the sheep of the American right-wing movement (and they even carry their flags!), and they are blindly (and very rapidly!) importing American civil-war politics into a country that simply doesn’t need that garbage!

canadian politics

BC General Election 2024: Official results

I just wasted my vote in the 2024 British Columbia provincial general election