Jason2357

The debacle is the MPs and NDP falling for the populism carrot that is carve-outs. It won't be the last one either. It will always be framed as "helping the old lady keep the heat on" and not what is is - an oil subsidy that keeps people tied to a highly price-volatile and polluting heating source. You can also help that old lady by tweaking the rebate algorithm, but that wouldn't help out the oil industry near as well.

I think you mean the advent of car culture.

Our current system relies on the economic externality of relying on private vehicles and private transportation on local infrastructure to artificially lower the transportation costs for grocery logistics. It's much cheaper to run an 18-wheeler to a large grocery store on the edge of suburbia than running box trucks all over town. It doesn't actually lower food costs, because people pay a large fraction of their income to that private transportation so that they can access that super-grocer, and then the grocer seems to jack up the price of food anyway.

They also like to pretend they care about balanced budgets and monetary supply. Guess what? Taxes both balance the budget AND they evaporate money from circulation, reducing actual inflation. They ignore that because taxes are the ONLY lever that is progressive; where we can spread the pain equitably, asking the wealthy individuals and corporations to pay the largest share. That's a terrible idea /s

Every time CBC gets budgets cut, it hits CBC radio first and hardest. It's an extremely small portion of the Federal Government's budget. This has nothing to do with fiscal restraint, and is purely about neocons who don't like there being a public owned media source existing at all. They want 100% corporate media and nothing less.

My job getting a new CEO? Getting a new useless figurehead is supposed to scare me? Why? Youtube is going to block me? Why should I care? They either moderate hateful content, or they lose me and a great many others -voluntarily.

Like most people, I avoid companies that platform hate, and am perfectly contented being banned from them if they go that far. That's not a power they ever didn't have.

Rural and remote residents already get a slightly larger rebate, and as a city dweller, I think their share should be higher for exactly the reason you state. Also, keep in mind that at night time, which will typically be the only time people end up using resistive heat while on a heat pump, electricity is cheaper. Ontario's ultra-low off-peak option is even more extreme. It's probably cheaper to run resistive heat at night, than running the heat pump during peak times.

And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it's frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is "free" and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.

Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.

Agreed. The central example is a NDP member being censured by the party for her views. THAT IS WHAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS. She would have also been removed if she started arguing for tax cuts to the wealthy and restrictions on union activity. Even perfectly legitimate political opinions can make you totally unfit to be a representative of a political party. Words have consequences and political parties are social structures with social rules. Cry me a river, this isn't a free-speech issue.

Agreed. Fuck off with this "we have no free speech" bullshit, substack (and it's freedom of conscience in Canada in the first place, not free speech). All of the things listed are social consequences, not criminal prosecution or some other government persecution. Sarah was booted by her party, not the government, and the rest are employers and universities. If there is fault, it lies with those organizations.

It's also not protected speech, so if there is fault, those organizations will have to suffer social consequences themselves, as it doesn't seem that they broke any laws.

Because they are the party of oil and gas. And because the party of oil and gas has spent the last few decades tying every aspect of Albertan quality of life to O&G profits. The great circle of sludge.