Thanks for this thoughtful piece on a large topic. One doesn’t have to agree on everything in the piece to appreciate that.
Dion is a thoughtful person – perhaps not the most exciting speaker, and perhaps not the most skillful politician. And that’s not necessarily a criticism of him as a person. He may be in the right place at a difficult time.
Your switch from big picture thinking to Polish politics and the use of division and resentment is a big jarring - and the suggestion that, even in Canada, someone will eventually conclude that “I don’t have the luxury of fighting fair”. As we have seen, it has already happened in Manitoba. We can be grateful that it didn't work – and that the winner had the good grace to note that optimism and unity won over attempts to divide, without describing the content of that attempt. The best way to overcome this kind of low behaviour is to overcome it, with grace, and move on.
As with the people at the Warsaw Conference, we can only hope that our good luck continues to hold. But we need to be aware that it might not.
I think the people who think one of the biggest challenges in the world is the fight between authoritarianism vs democracy are a bit stuck in their ivory tower. I’ll talk about Canada here. We are a country where housing (including renting apartments )in most of the country is responsible for a bigger part of people’s salary. On top of that, millions of people dont even have access to a family doctor. Wages seem to be stagnating forcing some people to supplement through gig work. On top of that, groceries keep getting more expensive and inflation keeps taking a bigger part of our monthly budget. So you have a situation where people’s standard of living is either stagnating or declining and the politicians in charge dont seem to care enough to fix this problem.
So yeah, A LOT of people are ANGRY at this happening. So they are going to be more susceptible to so called authoritarian figures who claim will solve the problem. So the fix here would be for politicians who are worried about authoritarianism to try to solve the challenges we face today and to meet some of the expectations citizens have from government.
There used to be a time where homes and renting apartments used to be affordable. If it can be done in the 1950s, it certainly should be doable today. If the current system can improve people’s standard of living, then people will stick with it. If not, then people may shop around for a new one. The response to this shouldn’t be “we need to communicate the benefits of democracy harder” but should be “let’s actually fix the big problems and show people why democracy is still capable of delivering “.
I'm not an ivory-tower guy. I may never be able to afford a home, and I've lived in poverty. I don't have a family doctor. My rent now costs about four times what it cost twenty years ago, and I used to be able to eat for a week on what a Tim Horton's iced capp costs now.
I think a couple of things have changed since the '50s. Canada's population has tripled, for one thing. Corporate greed is off the charts. But as simple as it would supposedly be to solve the problems, I simply haven't heard, from anyone, how the problem can be solved
Absolutely agree: our current government does not seem to care or seem to be doing anything. But I honestly don't know what they could or should be doing. Poilievre is skyrocketing in the polls because he's mad and voters are mad, but what constructive solution is going to come of this anger? What is this guy going to do differently that's going to make things better? Do people genuinely think this guy's going to walk into the PMO and say, "No more wokeness!", and your landlord is going to say, "Well, this leaves me no choice but to cut rent back to 2003 levels", and grocery CEOs are going to say, "Wow, with all this money I can save on DEI initiatives, I can cut my prices, and a big turkey's going to cost a nickel now"? Is that the plan? Because it's not actually going to work.
I have a few ideas that ive read over the years about more affordable housing but im not sure if them will work:
1. Properly implement a publicly accessible records of beneficial ownership for real estate in canada to make it more difficult for people to launder money through canadian real estate
2. Remove the capital gains expenditure for people selling their primary residence.
3. Implement some sort of a land value tax (no idea if the federal govt can actually do this) to disincentivize people from hoarding property and/or land and cut income taxes to make it revenue neutral.
4. Ban short term renting platforms like airbnb or tax them and landlords who do short term renting very aggressively to make it unprofitable.
5. Ban people who arent canadian citizens, PR holders and people who dont live in canada from owning residential real estate.
6. Create new tax incentives and/or provide low interest loans to developers to build purpose built rental units. Perhaps they could also create a crown corporation responsible for creating PBRU all over canada.
7. Reduce levels of permanent and non permanent residents to canada to a level where canada can reasonably absorb them without negatively impacting existing infrastructure and govt services that people rely on.
8. Make it so people dont have to rely on real estate as a nest egg for retirement. This creates an incentive for voters to vote for politicians that implicitly promise to implement policies that wont harm real estate prices. This creates an incentive for policy makers to support increasing real estate prices, making it more expensive. Remember, every dollar spent in real estate is a dollar that isnt going to the “real economy” (eg shopping, entertainment, restaurant, vacations, creating new businesses etc).
And regarding corporate greed. Corporations have always been greedy. I just dont think theyve gotten greedier in the last few years.
A big part of the problem is labour shortages to actually get the housing built. Immigration is supposed to help this but that’s a catch 22- where will the immigrants live. Another problem is how long it takes for an health care provider to get registered in Canada if they didn’t train here.
How much of a problem with housing is a problem of labour shortage or just excess demand for housing or some combination of the 2? When you are in a hole, the first thing you ought to do is stop digging. I think last year and this year, we let in more than 1 million people into the country. As you said, all of them need housing. Adding so many people in such a short amount of time increases demand for housing and puts severe strain on the housing infrastructure. It also lets landlords increase rent as they have more people who want to rent their units. It seems reasonable to me to reduce the number of people coming into canada to a more manageable level. We must also understand that the people who end up coming here also run into the same problems with affordable housing that we suffer from. Is it ethical to let them come in such s crappy situation?
I also wonder, if the govt of canada tracks how many immigrants (permanent and non permanent residents) who come in directly work in the housing sector. They keep claiming that we need more immigrants to build housing but im not sure if they’ve ever produced hard numbers of how many (if any) actually work in housing. And when i say who work in the housing sector, i mean ones that directly help in building houses (eg contractor, labourer, civil engineer, architect, etc).
As for the labour shortage argument that i see, if we do acknowledge that there is a labour shortage that’s preventing us from building enough housing, then it’s incumbent on the govt to ensure that the existing labour is used as efficiently as possible to alleviate the housing crisis. In this case, it would make sense to reduce the incentives on developers in building more condos and on housing speculators buying real estate property to make a quick buck and increase incentives in getting more purpose built rental units getting built. One of the big problems i see here in toronto is that we have too many damn TINY condos and not enough rental units created specifically for renting. Not everyone can afford to buy a house.
All right, full points - I like some of these more than others, but at least they're constructive ideas that might help the crisis. We need more of this from all sides.
One thing that confuses me is the lack of rent control in several provinces run by conservatives. When rent control was a big help to renters there was little discussion of affordability. Yet none of these premiers ever discuss reimplementing those controls but blame the federal govt for the affordability issues. Here in Ontario everyone now knows that Ford is corrupt and in bed with big developers. The idea they won't build with rent controls in place is clearly bogus and a sop to them. To solve the issue fairly newly constructed buildings could be exempt from rent control for a few years as they pay down their mortgages etc.
-Speaking as a guy who wrote his Masters' thesis on comparing Stéphane Dion's views on federalism to Pierre Trudeau's views on federalism, I wonder whether Dion was both too ahead of his time and almost a Quebecois Robert Stanfield-someone who had lots of good ideas but wasn't a great communicator.
Dion was well ahead of the pack on the Green Shift and the push towards electric vehicles-just look at everything from the rise of Tesla to how even conservatives like Jack Mintz and Preston Manning have touted carbon pricing. Unfortunately, his awkward English skills and "know it all" approach (I studied at the Campus Saint-Jean, and some of the professors who knew him from his academic days in Quebec told me about how prickly he could get with people who disagreed with him) both stunted his ability to convince Canadians to go along with them. Stephen Harper wasn't the greatest communicator either, but he was still good enough to beat Dion.
-Speaking of Harper, the reference Mr. Wells makes to the partisan spending outside the election cycle by Poland's governing party reminds me of the attack ads the Conservatives wielded against Dion, Michael Ignatieff and (less successfully) Justin Trudeau. The leading questions Mr. Wells cites also remind me of the questions that pro-oilsands groups sometimes ask in their online ads. So I think it's a rare case of Mr. Wells being wrong in that nobody's tried these sorts of things in Canada. If anything, the Polish governing party is just plagiarizing the Canadian right's playbook.
With all due respect, the Liberal government has made such an art of partisan spending outside the election cycle that it makes poor Harper seem like a piker.
How much does Trudeau spend of public money flying to events, week in week out, that are nothing more than Liberal party rallies in disguise?
And what about those incessant ads that show up every time I go to YouTube, paid for by the government of Canada, and which are nothing more than ads for the Liberal party?
But, of course, this is only to be expected from a leader who sees no distinction between party and country.
Ps. Forgive me for asking but why the apostrophe after Pierre Trudeau in your first sentence?
I was referring specifically to the attack ads Harper ran against the Liberal leaders, not government advertising in general, when I talked about the tactics the Polish governing party is copying.
And it's worth noting that the Harper government did the exact same thing in regards to partisan spending by playing up its own policies and achievements-they were the ones that started ending federal ads with the "O Canada" tune, which the Trudeau government's continued. So pretty much every part that forms government is guilty of this. And Conservative MPs like Tony Clement never met an infrastructure program they didn't try to make a photo-op out of, while Peter MacKay treated federal search and rescue planes like a damn taxi service.
Finally, regarding the apostrophe after "Pierre Trudeau", I meant to say that my grad thesis compared Dion's views on Canadian federalism to Trudeau's views on federalism. I'll edit this to make it clearer.
I agree with your comment. Conservatives everywhere know full well they are not the most popular parties in western democracies. So their strategies of political assassination, lots of advertising showing them to be the opposite of who they really are and the social conservatives who are the base of Canadian conservatism creating the disinformation that s now rampant are having some success. The rest of us need to wake up and take serious note of the way cons play democracy.
Is your thesis on line? Some days I wonder if we could use a few ‘poor politicians’ in the mix! Dion on the Clarity act May turn out to be essential, Stanfields record in Nova Scotia. Etc.
Yes it is, and I hope Mr. Wells will forgive my including a link to it. Please note that it's in French, though. Like I said, I went to the Campus Saint-Jean, the University of Alberta's Francophone faculty.
Out of all the things that could happen next -- full-out war between Israel & Hamas. Which nobody, certainly not the Israeli intelligence & defence systems, saw coming.
Superb account of the current state of affairs -- terrifying that political messaging is leading to a frightening embrace of authoritarianism. Discontent is being weaponized. Unfortunately it’s not being pursued in investigative mainstream journalism.
Wellll ...... I have to say, Sir, that this post is a fine example of why I subscribe, why I did subscribe and why I plan to continue to subscribe.
Now, having said that, I could not help myself as I read M. Dion's words: salad and a stopped clock, etc.
Clearly, there are many hazardous things in the world, most recently the attack by Hamas on Israel. I can only give thanks (particularly given that this is Thanksgiving weekend) that we don't have those same problems here, wherever "here" is in this country. That, of course, doesn't mean that those problems will not ultimately end up "here" but right now, at least for a little while, we have the luxury of thinking about "there" rather than "here" in the context of those problems. And it is a luxury.
The tall poppy rule, so beloved of the PMO, makes it dangerous to have a cerebral person like Dion as Minister of External Affairs. And therefore Dion was doomed from the first day with his relegation to obscurity being only a matter of time.
Much better to name someone with alleged experience in Slavic affairs whose grasp of history doesn't include the fact that Ukrainians fighting against the Russians in World War II were likely to be Nazis.
My parents were born in Poland, emigrating to Canada post WW2, in the early ‘50s. They left the country, each traumatized in their own way, by the brutality of the war. They did keep up with Polish politics through the Polish press, so I was able to remain informed for a long time, through them. They are both deceased now, therefore my connection with Poland is diminishing. It was lovely for me to read your latest piece about some of the history of Poland, its latest politics, and its key political players. Well done, thank you.
Ends up the Poles provide the moment of political stability needed - consistent with their ‘practicality trumps preening’ role in the EU’. The political catastrophe circus will need to move on to something else...
Adm Auchterlonie remarks are surprising. As the Commander of CJOC he is well aware of the true state of the RCN. He knows the RCN has fallen so far that it is reduced to providing defenseless Kingston Class Minesweepers to NATO because we can no longer put enough Frigates to sea. Until recently the same essentially unarmed vessels for patrols off Africa.
One of big sources of uncertainty not mentioned at this panel, unless I missed it, is the rising pressure of immigration into liberal democracies that are not able to absorb them. For Europeans, Africa's exploding population and the Middle East's instability have got to be pretty high on the list of priorities, certainly a little higher than climate change.
The author does mention the Polish referendum questions, one of which deals with immigration.
I wonder what the response would be in Canada if the people who can't get a doctor and live in terror of losing their place to live would say if asked if they are content to have half a million people come to this country, year in, year out.
But, of course, as this is Canada, and not Poland, there is no way grubby, ordinary people would be allowed to pronounce on this.
Those hysterical (in the not-funny sense of the term) survey questions remind me of the same tactic used by the Harper CPC in their 10 percenters. So I'm not sure if the tactic will come to us as it might have come from us.
I wonder if the IDU has been coaching the PiS, alongside Orban.
...and finally the terrible impacts of climate change. But not only climate change. We would have an environmental crisis even if it weren’t for climate change, [because] so much biodiversity is in danger.
I think that Ambassador Dion may be on to something.
I call on all readers to join me in writing to Little Minster Gilligan to demand he address the issues raised by Mr. Dion.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece on a large topic. One doesn’t have to agree on everything in the piece to appreciate that.
Dion is a thoughtful person – perhaps not the most exciting speaker, and perhaps not the most skillful politician. And that’s not necessarily a criticism of him as a person. He may be in the right place at a difficult time.
Your switch from big picture thinking to Polish politics and the use of division and resentment is a big jarring - and the suggestion that, even in Canada, someone will eventually conclude that “I don’t have the luxury of fighting fair”. As we have seen, it has already happened in Manitoba. We can be grateful that it didn't work – and that the winner had the good grace to note that optimism and unity won over attempts to divide, without describing the content of that attempt. The best way to overcome this kind of low behaviour is to overcome it, with grace, and move on.
As with the people at the Warsaw Conference, we can only hope that our good luck continues to hold. But we need to be aware that it might not.
I think the people who think one of the biggest challenges in the world is the fight between authoritarianism vs democracy are a bit stuck in their ivory tower. I’ll talk about Canada here. We are a country where housing (including renting apartments )in most of the country is responsible for a bigger part of people’s salary. On top of that, millions of people dont even have access to a family doctor. Wages seem to be stagnating forcing some people to supplement through gig work. On top of that, groceries keep getting more expensive and inflation keeps taking a bigger part of our monthly budget. So you have a situation where people’s standard of living is either stagnating or declining and the politicians in charge dont seem to care enough to fix this problem.
So yeah, A LOT of people are ANGRY at this happening. So they are going to be more susceptible to so called authoritarian figures who claim will solve the problem. So the fix here would be for politicians who are worried about authoritarianism to try to solve the challenges we face today and to meet some of the expectations citizens have from government.
There used to be a time where homes and renting apartments used to be affordable. If it can be done in the 1950s, it certainly should be doable today. If the current system can improve people’s standard of living, then people will stick with it. If not, then people may shop around for a new one. The response to this shouldn’t be “we need to communicate the benefits of democracy harder” but should be “let’s actually fix the big problems and show people why democracy is still capable of delivering “.
I'm not an ivory-tower guy. I may never be able to afford a home, and I've lived in poverty. I don't have a family doctor. My rent now costs about four times what it cost twenty years ago, and I used to be able to eat for a week on what a Tim Horton's iced capp costs now.
I think a couple of things have changed since the '50s. Canada's population has tripled, for one thing. Corporate greed is off the charts. But as simple as it would supposedly be to solve the problems, I simply haven't heard, from anyone, how the problem can be solved
Absolutely agree: our current government does not seem to care or seem to be doing anything. But I honestly don't know what they could or should be doing. Poilievre is skyrocketing in the polls because he's mad and voters are mad, but what constructive solution is going to come of this anger? What is this guy going to do differently that's going to make things better? Do people genuinely think this guy's going to walk into the PMO and say, "No more wokeness!", and your landlord is going to say, "Well, this leaves me no choice but to cut rent back to 2003 levels", and grocery CEOs are going to say, "Wow, with all this money I can save on DEI initiatives, I can cut my prices, and a big turkey's going to cost a nickel now"? Is that the plan? Because it's not actually going to work.
I have a few ideas that ive read over the years about more affordable housing but im not sure if them will work:
1. Properly implement a publicly accessible records of beneficial ownership for real estate in canada to make it more difficult for people to launder money through canadian real estate
2. Remove the capital gains expenditure for people selling their primary residence.
3. Implement some sort of a land value tax (no idea if the federal govt can actually do this) to disincentivize people from hoarding property and/or land and cut income taxes to make it revenue neutral.
4. Ban short term renting platforms like airbnb or tax them and landlords who do short term renting very aggressively to make it unprofitable.
5. Ban people who arent canadian citizens, PR holders and people who dont live in canada from owning residential real estate.
6. Create new tax incentives and/or provide low interest loans to developers to build purpose built rental units. Perhaps they could also create a crown corporation responsible for creating PBRU all over canada.
7. Reduce levels of permanent and non permanent residents to canada to a level where canada can reasonably absorb them without negatively impacting existing infrastructure and govt services that people rely on.
8. Make it so people dont have to rely on real estate as a nest egg for retirement. This creates an incentive for voters to vote for politicians that implicitly promise to implement policies that wont harm real estate prices. This creates an incentive for policy makers to support increasing real estate prices, making it more expensive. Remember, every dollar spent in real estate is a dollar that isnt going to the “real economy” (eg shopping, entertainment, restaurant, vacations, creating new businesses etc).
And regarding corporate greed. Corporations have always been greedy. I just dont think theyve gotten greedier in the last few years.
A big part of the problem is labour shortages to actually get the housing built. Immigration is supposed to help this but that’s a catch 22- where will the immigrants live. Another problem is how long it takes for an health care provider to get registered in Canada if they didn’t train here.
How much of a problem with housing is a problem of labour shortage or just excess demand for housing or some combination of the 2? When you are in a hole, the first thing you ought to do is stop digging. I think last year and this year, we let in more than 1 million people into the country. As you said, all of them need housing. Adding so many people in such a short amount of time increases demand for housing and puts severe strain on the housing infrastructure. It also lets landlords increase rent as they have more people who want to rent their units. It seems reasonable to me to reduce the number of people coming into canada to a more manageable level. We must also understand that the people who end up coming here also run into the same problems with affordable housing that we suffer from. Is it ethical to let them come in such s crappy situation?
I also wonder, if the govt of canada tracks how many immigrants (permanent and non permanent residents) who come in directly work in the housing sector. They keep claiming that we need more immigrants to build housing but im not sure if they’ve ever produced hard numbers of how many (if any) actually work in housing. And when i say who work in the housing sector, i mean ones that directly help in building houses (eg contractor, labourer, civil engineer, architect, etc).
As for the labour shortage argument that i see, if we do acknowledge that there is a labour shortage that’s preventing us from building enough housing, then it’s incumbent on the govt to ensure that the existing labour is used as efficiently as possible to alleviate the housing crisis. In this case, it would make sense to reduce the incentives on developers in building more condos and on housing speculators buying real estate property to make a quick buck and increase incentives in getting more purpose built rental units getting built. One of the big problems i see here in toronto is that we have too many damn TINY condos and not enough rental units created specifically for renting. Not everyone can afford to buy a house.
All right, full points - I like some of these more than others, but at least they're constructive ideas that might help the crisis. We need more of this from all sides.
*capital gains EXEMPTION
One thing that confuses me is the lack of rent control in several provinces run by conservatives. When rent control was a big help to renters there was little discussion of affordability. Yet none of these premiers ever discuss reimplementing those controls but blame the federal govt for the affordability issues. Here in Ontario everyone now knows that Ford is corrupt and in bed with big developers. The idea they won't build with rent controls in place is clearly bogus and a sop to them. To solve the issue fairly newly constructed buildings could be exempt from rent control for a few years as they pay down their mortgages etc.
Yeah, you mentioned it already but Ford is in bed with the developers. No way he’s going to put rent control back in.
-Speaking as a guy who wrote his Masters' thesis on comparing Stéphane Dion's views on federalism to Pierre Trudeau's views on federalism, I wonder whether Dion was both too ahead of his time and almost a Quebecois Robert Stanfield-someone who had lots of good ideas but wasn't a great communicator.
Dion was well ahead of the pack on the Green Shift and the push towards electric vehicles-just look at everything from the rise of Tesla to how even conservatives like Jack Mintz and Preston Manning have touted carbon pricing. Unfortunately, his awkward English skills and "know it all" approach (I studied at the Campus Saint-Jean, and some of the professors who knew him from his academic days in Quebec told me about how prickly he could get with people who disagreed with him) both stunted his ability to convince Canadians to go along with them. Stephen Harper wasn't the greatest communicator either, but he was still good enough to beat Dion.
-Speaking of Harper, the reference Mr. Wells makes to the partisan spending outside the election cycle by Poland's governing party reminds me of the attack ads the Conservatives wielded against Dion, Michael Ignatieff and (less successfully) Justin Trudeau. The leading questions Mr. Wells cites also remind me of the questions that pro-oilsands groups sometimes ask in their online ads. So I think it's a rare case of Mr. Wells being wrong in that nobody's tried these sorts of things in Canada. If anything, the Polish governing party is just plagiarizing the Canadian right's playbook.
With all due respect, the Liberal government has made such an art of partisan spending outside the election cycle that it makes poor Harper seem like a piker.
How much does Trudeau spend of public money flying to events, week in week out, that are nothing more than Liberal party rallies in disguise?
And what about those incessant ads that show up every time I go to YouTube, paid for by the government of Canada, and which are nothing more than ads for the Liberal party?
But, of course, this is only to be expected from a leader who sees no distinction between party and country.
Ps. Forgive me for asking but why the apostrophe after Pierre Trudeau in your first sentence?
I was referring specifically to the attack ads Harper ran against the Liberal leaders, not government advertising in general, when I talked about the tactics the Polish governing party is copying.
And it's worth noting that the Harper government did the exact same thing in regards to partisan spending by playing up its own policies and achievements-they were the ones that started ending federal ads with the "O Canada" tune, which the Trudeau government's continued. So pretty much every part that forms government is guilty of this. And Conservative MPs like Tony Clement never met an infrastructure program they didn't try to make a photo-op out of, while Peter MacKay treated federal search and rescue planes like a damn taxi service.
Finally, regarding the apostrophe after "Pierre Trudeau", I meant to say that my grad thesis compared Dion's views on Canadian federalism to Trudeau's views on federalism. I'll edit this to make it clearer.
I agree with your comment. Conservatives everywhere know full well they are not the most popular parties in western democracies. So their strategies of political assassination, lots of advertising showing them to be the opposite of who they really are and the social conservatives who are the base of Canadian conservatism creating the disinformation that s now rampant are having some success. The rest of us need to wake up and take serious note of the way cons play democracy.
Is your thesis on line? Some days I wonder if we could use a few ‘poor politicians’ in the mix! Dion on the Clarity act May turn out to be essential, Stanfields record in Nova Scotia. Etc.
Yes it is, and I hope Mr. Wells will forgive my including a link to it. Please note that it's in French, though. Like I said, I went to the Campus Saint-Jean, the University of Alberta's Francophone faculty.
https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/002/MR45736.PDF?is_thesis=1&oclc_number=702785934
Thanks!
Out of all the things that could happen next -- full-out war between Israel & Hamas. Which nobody, certainly not the Israeli intelligence & defence systems, saw coming.
Superb account of the current state of affairs -- terrifying that political messaging is leading to a frightening embrace of authoritarianism. Discontent is being weaponized. Unfortunately it’s not being pursued in investigative mainstream journalism.
Wellll ...... I have to say, Sir, that this post is a fine example of why I subscribe, why I did subscribe and why I plan to continue to subscribe.
Now, having said that, I could not help myself as I read M. Dion's words: salad and a stopped clock, etc.
Clearly, there are many hazardous things in the world, most recently the attack by Hamas on Israel. I can only give thanks (particularly given that this is Thanksgiving weekend) that we don't have those same problems here, wherever "here" is in this country. That, of course, doesn't mean that those problems will not ultimately end up "here" but right now, at least for a little while, we have the luxury of thinking about "there" rather than "here" in the context of those problems. And it is a luxury.
The tall poppy rule, so beloved of the PMO, makes it dangerous to have a cerebral person like Dion as Minister of External Affairs. And therefore Dion was doomed from the first day with his relegation to obscurity being only a matter of time.
Much better to name someone with alleged experience in Slavic affairs whose grasp of history doesn't include the fact that Ukrainians fighting against the Russians in World War II were likely to be Nazis.
We are truly in the best of hands!
All the things that could happen next are happening now.......Israel has declared war!
Have to wonder what Hamas' view is of gender studies and the people who teach it.
Not that our brave university professors taking sides for Hamas would ever ask themselves that question.
My parents were born in Poland, emigrating to Canada post WW2, in the early ‘50s. They left the country, each traumatized in their own way, by the brutality of the war. They did keep up with Polish politics through the Polish press, so I was able to remain informed for a long time, through them. They are both deceased now, therefore my connection with Poland is diminishing. It was lovely for me to read your latest piece about some of the history of Poland, its latest politics, and its key political players. Well done, thank you.
Ends up the Poles provide the moment of political stability needed - consistent with their ‘practicality trumps preening’ role in the EU’. The political catastrophe circus will need to move on to something else...
Adm Auchterlonie remarks are surprising. As the Commander of CJOC he is well aware of the true state of the RCN. He knows the RCN has fallen so far that it is reduced to providing defenseless Kingston Class Minesweepers to NATO because we can no longer put enough Frigates to sea. Until recently the same essentially unarmed vessels for patrols off Africa.
One of big sources of uncertainty not mentioned at this panel, unless I missed it, is the rising pressure of immigration into liberal democracies that are not able to absorb them. For Europeans, Africa's exploding population and the Middle East's instability have got to be pretty high on the list of priorities, certainly a little higher than climate change.
The author does mention the Polish referendum questions, one of which deals with immigration.
I wonder what the response would be in Canada if the people who can't get a doctor and live in terror of losing their place to live would say if asked if they are content to have half a million people come to this country, year in, year out.
But, of course, as this is Canada, and not Poland, there is no way grubby, ordinary people would be allowed to pronounce on this.
I recommend you read Terry Glavin’s take on Mr. Dion. Not closed at all just better informed then yourself.
Those hysterical (in the not-funny sense of the term) survey questions remind me of the same tactic used by the Harper CPC in their 10 percenters. So I'm not sure if the tactic will come to us as it might have come from us.
I wonder if the IDU has been coaching the PiS, alongside Orban.
Soon as I saw you were writing about Dion I stopped reading.
I suppose I'll just have to pick up the pieces of my shattered life and move on.
"I'm proud of my closed mind, and I want everybody to know it."
...and finally the terrible impacts of climate change. But not only climate change. We would have an environmental crisis even if it weren’t for climate change, [because] so much biodiversity is in danger.
I think that Ambassador Dion may be on to something.
I call on all readers to join me in writing to Little Minster Gilligan to demand he address the issues raised by Mr. Dion.
What about calling it the 'Green Shift'?