Honestly, the government doesn't have to do anything more than pass the bill. There's no need to put on pressure, as if they don't want to pony up the cash, they can just go on without the goods.
I will say that it will make an interesting experiment in regards to news dissemination if various sites stop stealing all the articles and don't replace it with anything at all.
That's right. Most likely this is only going to be a sale of public land wholesale on the premise that the buyer will build homes on it. No way anybody short of one of the huge corporations can afford to buy a thousand pieces of land at a time. The land'll be resold at an exorbitant price once they're done in the end.
Frankly speaking, some of those proposals won't work I think, and others are little more than bandage solutions.
Increasing the size of cities won't work, as if you look at satellite photos, you can see that Toronto (as an example) is entirely urbanized about 40km from the lakeshore north, the entire coast westward to Niagra, and eastwards for almost 100km. The urban areas attached to Toronto is basically massive enough that you could spend 4+ hours on the highway just to get from your home to downtown Toronto, and that's not taking into consideration that in Toronto, it's actually faster to walk than drive in certain parts during rush hour due to all the traffic already in downtown.
No, what we need is to be allowed to grow upwards, not outwards. We don't need more houses that are 3+ hours away from work and daily necessities, but places that are in walking distance from at least one of them, and no more than 30 minutes from the other. This can either be done by building 30 floor office buildings out in the suburbs, with a few square kilometers of parking dedicated to those buildings, or we can build up the major cities and tear down the single and two story detached houses. If you make it easy to build low and mid-rise buildings along with other high density mixed-use housing, home prices will naturally fall, making other big changes unnecessary.
I just don't feel like 50% faster is enough. People are just so attached to their cars that they'll just rent one if they can't afford to own one. People in Canada compare things against planes if they talk about riding, so I think 200km/h is still a bit low unless if it's a short trip, which I doubt it would be. Most likely it'll be something like between Toronto and Ottawa, or Ottawa and Montreal.
200km/h isn't quite enough to make the trip feel short. I think you'd have to be closing in on 300km/h before people take high speed rail seriously, as then you'd be doing less than 2 hours including boarding for a trip like that, where boarding on a plane alone would take much of those 2 hours, though the flight itself would be quite a bit faster.
Yes, because the RCMP does investigations based on complaints and not because several institutes found problems that lead to one of the people resigning.
This investigation better go, because it will find problems. Maybe not any severe enough to press serious charges, but it will find problems.
It's not the drilling that's the issue, it's the refining. The prices of crude isn't so high on the market itself, but the post-refined products themselves. American refineries are at capacity and have been for at least a decade now, yet they aren't doing anything to increase production.
And as for Canada, we don't have much when it comes to refining capacity in the first place.
Local farmers, sure. But from what I know, industrial farmers all use pesticides unless if it's grown indoors. And a lot of the organic pesticides are more dangerous than artificial ones. Especially since the farmers need to use more.
I suppose that's true. Harper specifically is a good example of that after all, as you say.
Try saying that when your commute involves spending an hour in rush hour going a single kilometer that a subway does in five minutes. Your situation isn't an argument against public transit, but for making decent public transit. Of course you're going to chose a car if there's no good public transit where you live. But what if there's a bus terminal five minute walk from where you live, or a subway station in ten minutes by bike with parking, and the rest of the trip takes half as long as it does by car, at a fraction of the yearly cost (gas, insurance, maintenance, licensing), and you can even sleep on the trip because you're not the one driving. Not to mention never having to worry about finding parking near your destination if you're not paying for a dedicated spot.
This is the reality for those of us who are able to use transit on a regular basis, and we only pay like 15 minutes a day from our wages for this service, not a week's worth every month to own a car. It's even better in the EU, like in Germany or Spain, since high speed rail means that you can go pretty much anywhere you want, even on vacation, without a car. And for cheap. One guy ran the numbers, and for 10% the cost of owning a car, he was able to get a yearly pass for both high speed rail and city transit in two different cities for the cost of owning and operating a car for a year.
I'm not arguing that it's not difficult and expensive. Nuclear power plants are basically megaprojects. But they're megaprojects that have dividends that last a good half century, and Canada is basically 100% self sufficient when it comes to nuclear operations making it not only up to us if it's green or not, but energy security is guaranteed.
Of course excluding events like the cascade failure of the entire east or west coast power grids.
The issue is that we've had few governments strong enough to actually get shit done this last decade. And of them, the only one squandered that power (IMO) and made the country worse.
I've never seen security gates (at least anything more than the basic magnetic beeping ones), but locking shopping carts are a must. Hundreds or even thousand dollar equipment get stolen even a few times a year can seriously hurt a store's viability, and I used to see stolen carts everywhere before locking wheels were invented. Half the time, it wasn't even to be used personally, but because someone just wanted to use the cart to carry their groceries all the way home, then dumped the cart on the side of the road to rot afterwards, only to do it again the next week. This extreme was not common, but I did see it as a child.
And at my store, security guards have become mandatory, if only to protect against stealing beer. I think the guards catch a dozen people trying every week. When they were fired hired, I heard a story that most of the people they caught weren't even homeless. One of them was a pensioner who was doing it only for fun. Some old woman who wanted the adrenaline rush because she was plenty wealthy, but bored.
On the flip side, they generally ignore regular shoplifting as long as the product isn't expensive, and I've heard one guy who grabbed a shoplifter, only to take out the beer and leave the food in the guy's bag after kicking him out of the store.
There are serious issues going around, but putting the blame purely on corporate greed is unfair, as they're not the reason why there's so many desperate people about these last few years.
Interesting they're blaming the Liberals when this decline's been going on for at last two decades now, at least relative to global wealth. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised to see that relative standard of living compared to the rest of the world, we've been declining the entire 40 years on average.
And looking at the trends, we're headed right towards another recession on top of a housing bubble burst, so no matter what anybody tries, we're looking at another decade of decline before there's even a chance of things getting better. The moment the housing bubble crashes, we're looking at a similar situation to Japan's lost decades, and we can only hope to ride it out half as well as they have.