this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
45 points (90.9% liked)

Canada

7203 readers
176 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Universities


💵 Finance / Shopping


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is pledging that a future government would cut what he calls 'wasteful foreign aid' and would not allow funding to go to 'dictators, terrorists and multi-national bureaucracies.'

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

Why is Justin Trudeau Bad - he will often point out SOMETHING JUSTIN TRUDEAU HAS ACTUALLY DONE THAT IS BAD.

Pollievre is not unique in this, but a major pitfall of opposition leaders is they spend all their time saying the current party leader is bad, but they never actually say what they'd do different. Mulcair was awful for this as well.

What does set Pollievre and the conservatives apart lately is what qualifies as a national scandal to them. Lately there's been a lot of Trudeau took a vacation scandals, which turn out to be Trudeau spent time with people he's spent time with for his whole privileged life. The bar the PC's set for scandal is moronic.

On the list of things Trudeau has been called evil for, I find most to be bullshit. Even pinning the WE scandal on hims was bullshit, as the recommendation was made by public servants and Trudeau asked them to try again because the optics were bad, to which they returned with the same plan. You can call me a Trudeau simp for that or whatever but I don't particularly like him and I would be happier if they ran someone else instead of throwing the next election to a Conservative majority out of pride and hubris like Kathleen Wynn did.

He actually has talked about how to get more housing being built. He has actually talked about things to cut - and why to cut them (like the Carbon tax that has had pretty much zero benefit, but has inflated the cost of heating, transportation, and food in this countries at a time we have an affordability crisis).

What's actually wrong with the carbon tax other than it being the conservative boogeyman for 5 years running? It's actually a conservative idea. The heating oil exemption is entirely a shitshow of an idea.

On housing, I think we all agree that there needs to be more done. I actually have listened to what Pollievre has said and it's not terrible.

I do think playing strong man and calling every barrier to housing NIMBYism will result in a lot side effects like the Ontario greenbelt getting destroyed and houses built on cheap floodplains or other unsuitable land because cities are in a financial bind.

Block Chain being out of control of the Government, means the Government can’t devalue the currency

Pollievre was the finance critic at the time he proposed this! 1 month after he made those comments bitcoin dropped 57%.

If Bitcoin was such a great hedge against inflation, it should be inversely correlated with inflation these last few years. In late 2021 inflation started rising above guidance levels, Bitcoin was jumping between $60k and $30k and back. 2022 we reached peak inflation, and BTC started the year with a drop. Then BoC and US Fed announced rate hikes starting in 2022, and Bitcoin dropped 57%. Now that interest rates are flat and expected to decrease, BTC has been increasing again. Bitcoin isn't actually an inflation hedge, it is entirely purchased by speculators because it has no utility except for speculation. In theory, sure inflation hedge, in practice, it's a speculate asset.

Gold hasn't even had standout performance since inflation started. I think the idea of an inflation free currency sounds great but isn't possible because inflation was largely driven by supply shortages, government handouts, and speculative greed. Increases in the money supply do play a part, but a Gold standard assumes all inflation is due to monetary inflation, and not fluctuations in demand or supply or assets. The price of gold also jumps a lot, so if we used the gold standard, the price of gold is always fixed, but those fluctuations result in the prices of every other good jumping around inversely, which would make prices a lot less predictable. The value of the dollar would decrease any time anyone mines gold so there'd by inflation anyways, and if China or India decided to dump their gold reserves they could tank our economies whenever they wanted.

Central banking and managing the money supply are incredibly powerful tools. They can be used poorly, or well. After the financial crisis of 2008 when trillions of dollars of value were lost (or rather, it came out they never existed in the first place), managing interest rates and the money supply were the only things that actually caused economies to recover.

Slowing down immigration is really important. We are adding more people than jobs being added to the economy, and more people than houses can be built. We also have an issue with Doctors. If a person already owns a house here - whatever. But we need to slow down on immigration.

I agree that we should require an immigration plan when we set immigration targets.

No. But you have to make sure your Outfit provides a sense of you being competent. I don’t think he has ever said “fellow poor people” But he has certainly pointed out the policies and situations that have driven more people into poverty.

My point here was they had him drop the glasses and tie as part of a makeover because he looked like a dweeb, but he is a dweeb and I don't think he really relates to the average Canadian.

Car thefts are up

This is 100% the fault of car manufacturers making cars that can be trivially stolen. Car thefts aren't even at a historically high level if you actually look at the numbers, the only differences now are cars are more expensive and easier to steal than they ever have been.

We have had more Scandals in the last 8 years than in the rest of my lifetime - and they all fall on Trudeau’s Shoulders

Citation needed. As I mentioned earlier, what qualifies for a scandal these days is pathetic and driven largely by conservative owned media.