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The usual rule of thumb applies: election victory is not guaranteed by simply being not-the-incumbent, especially for conservative parties. There must be policy aims that fit the top 3 to 5 concerns of Canadian voters. (Too many disparate items risks losing too many voters for whom one of the...

Didn't know that "possible extremes" was synonymous with "batshit crazy".

There are three common courses of action to defend public expenditures: defend each case rationally personalize the conflict highlight the most sympathetic cases in the media ("think of the children") CoA 1 is conspicuously absent. Defenders of status quo could probably preserve the useful...

That's a government problem. Private companies are regulated by governments, and also cannot run indefinite deficits. Governments literally make the rules, and can run near-indefinite deficits (absolutely indefinite if they are prepared to take any fiscal measures necessary). Either a venture...

These two things can simultaneously be true: the funding is congressionally approved, and the funding goes to activist organizations. DOGE is piggybacking on the USDS (US Digital Service). All the geeks without clearances need to do is provide tools that can analyze record trails and spit the...

Fighting over transparency is the wrong fight to choose. It's already evident that AI tools can be used to quickly trace relationships and flows in data in ways that would confound small armies of ordinary people. That has some people worried, but that shit isn't going back into the horse...

People 65 and over have experience that includes memories of Canadian politics and culture going back to PET's ascent. Most of their adult lives have been dominated by Liberal governments, and notwithstanding the difficult economic decade from roughly 1975 to 1985, dominated by opportunity...

People really ought to wait a few hours for Community Notes to have their say before posting provocative X tweets.

Surely Canada would never recruit foreign doctors into military medicine.

A rational approach to waste/fraud/abuse is to study the programs, identify those outside the "lane", and turn them off. However, this approach requires commitment to transparency and co-operation, because the burden of proof/work is on the cleanup crew. If program opponents have to wade...

Theoretically, yes. Not very practical due to size limitations. There are still risks of accidents, only they'd be happening in the waterway on the final leg rather than over land. If QC isn't going to stop obstructing a pipeline across QC, they can stop pretending to be part of "Team Canada"...

Carney. A "carnie" is a carnival worker, who distracts people from their real problems in order to separate them from some of their money.

As I've written before, established interests will tend to hold onto whatever they have and offer to sacrifice outside interests in answer to any change in the situation. The longer the tariff threat drags out without provinces actually changing their rules, the more certain we can be that they...

Canada's problem is that most of what matters is in a narrow strip adjacent to the southern Canada-US border. If conspiracy theorists really want something to worry about, worry that the US would grab much of the empty parts and leave the "strip" to stagger on trying to afford its social programs.

The main point of "Energy East" is to get product to eastern Canada, not to ship abroad from there. Emphasis for international export neither to nor through the US should be directed to west coast facilities.

A government agency can only be effectively run and maintained by people who care about its mission. If it becomes a grifting tap or a source of in-kind partisan political support and the people who care about the mission fail to fix it, the problem eventually falls to people who don't care...

His authority is, contrary to some worriers, not unlimited?

How easy it is to slide right up to the line at which ethnic cleansing begins.

Some people were upset that every FBI officer working parents who were unruly at school board meetings was one not working other crimes. So now with the same theme in a different frame, is it possible to understand the irritants on "both" sides and want to resolve all of them?

More useful than an on-again, off-again pier.