Neither of those provinces were anywhere near as being off the rails as they are today. It wouldn't have been an easy time for the nation, Quebec, or any of the provinces, but we'd have got through it.

It wouldn't surprise me that, by now, the Maritimes would at least be trying to hook up with Quebec or the US. I have no basis for that beyond the likelihood that they would be very isolated otherwise.

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have written the "crank" bit. It seems my battle against stream of consciousness writing continues...

My apologies.

I have some sympathy for that point if view, but it's not that simple.

Nobody, not even the most libertarian, wants to find themselves holding the shitty end of the stick, yet our political and economic systems are operating in ways that leave only the shitty end to hang on to.

We vote for improvement and get either the status quo or degradation.

We're told to vote with our wallets, but that just means bigger wallets get more votes. And if it looks like maybe the collective size of wallets is getting too big, corporations, aided and abetted by the political class, just arrange for fewer choices and smaller wallets.

Unsurprisingly, those with the will are starting to vote with their feet. People are starting to walk away from bad situations in search of better ones. Whether those better situations exist may be an open question, but they are not being any more selfish than those who insist on skimming the cream off for themselves.

It's actually an easy fix, if only the political class realized it. Tax every dollar sent out of the country at 90%. Tax every stock buyback at 90%. Tax every corporate cash reserve at 80%. Limit total compensation of each executive to 10 times that of their lowest paid employee. For essential goods and services, tax away any rise in profits beyond, say, 1% above inflation. No person or company is allowed to own more than 1 rental property with multifamily units treated as one property.

Take all that tax money and pour it into public health care, starting with free tuition to any health related education. Foreign students accessing this free education must practice in Canada for 5 years after graduation or be returning to work in public health initiatives. And fix the definition of health care so that it means what it says (dental, vision, hearing, mental, vaccines, and prescriptions are all health care that is uncovered or poorly covered).

Any money left over from that can be spent on actual environmental protection and remediation, starting with the climate crisis.

If any of that needs to be adjusted based on actual negative outcomes, then it will be adjusted, but the political class has to start by showing the general public that they mean business.

And if that sounds like I've got brain damage, that's fine. What we're doing is obviously not working out, so continuing the path we're on is also a sign of brain damage. At least I'm pointing out a different path.

I don't know about the "marked... for legal reasons" part, but there are officially surveyed road allowances all over the place that have no actual roads or have "roads" that are impassable except with the right vehicle in the right conditions.

I live in rural Saskatchewan and my work as a school bus driver and my interactions with the municipality mean that I can point out lots of bad mapping. The official bus route mapping that comes from head office always has to be amended because it seems that they do not have the data to distinguish between all-season maintained gravel, seasonally maintained dirt, unmaintained path, and road allowances that a farmer is permitted to seed or a rancher is permitted to fence off. Google and others just lump them all together when displaying or routing.

I'm not sure how it works as a delaying tactic when the energy requirements of anything meaningful just delay migrating our grid, heating, and transportation off of fossil fuels.

By all means, divert some our energy into research projects, but I don't think we can expect to be in a position to do meaningful capture and storage for 2 or 3 decades.

I should have clarified that I know it can work, but not as the perpetual motion kind of system most people seem to envisage or that most projects I'm aware of seem to promote.

Everyone seems to think that carbon capture can be this little add-on when it actually needs to be a bare minimum of 1/3 our total energy production to have a meaningful impact over typical human time scales (a century or 2). Making things more complicated, none of that carbon capture energy can come from carbon fuels. I just don't see how we can do both at the same time, except as research projects to set the stage for when have gone a lot further in decarbonising our production for consumption.

That doesn't really sound wasted. Sometimes the most beneficial use of time is also the least productive.

Yeah, these ones don't look far removed from the ones I've seen on YouTube that people with plenty of options choose to live in.

Well, it would help a bit if the full markings were correct.

I would say that your comments were not wasted. Maybe I'm the only person who had never heard it framed as a battle over what can legitimately be called a mental illness, but at least one person has new insight into the issue.

Shore of Lake Diefenbaker. Ice is plentiful. Snow, not so much. We get a decent amount, then the wind and sun strips it off the hills before the next snowfall.

Heh, yeah. Shore of Lake Diefenbaker in SK.