Canadian Politics: more than a truck load of covidiots, eh?

[Fragile Bird]

Well fuck.

[JGP]

mmn hmn

[Yaya]

this here is a poem called: "this is why i hate my canada."
by YAYA- via & for westeros.org:

you know what?  i don't know enough.   
i haven't read through everything. 
i don't have the time. 
i work at least 8 hours a day to try & keep my life fun.    

why can't the world buy canadian gas/oil? 
the world will still need to have this product for some time.
cancel culture can't argue that.
here in canada, we make the greenest oil & gas & petrochemical products around.   

why won't our current federal government support the best interest of canada? 
why do the federal liberals keep getting elected?
why do the people of canada hold the people of canada back?

this is why i hate my canada.

 

[Fragile Bird]

2 minutes ago, Yaya said:

this here is a poem called: "this is why i hate my canada."
by YAYA- via & for westeros.org:

you know what?  i don't know enough.   
i haven't read through everything. 
i don't have the time. 
i work at least 8 hours a day to try & keep my life fun.    

why can't the world buy canadian gas/oil? 
the world will still need to have this product for some time.
cancel culture can't argue that.
here in canada, we make the greenest oil & gas & petrochemical products around.   

why won't our current federal government support the best interest of canada? 
why do the federal liberals keep getting elected?
why do the people of canada hold the people of canada back?

this is why i hate my canada.

 

Wow. Yaya, have you ever been brainwashed. Our oil is not the greenest in the world, it’s extracted from fucking tar sands. Getting the oil out of the ground is a filthy process and extracting it from the tar sands is a filthy process. That’s why we get paid half the amount, or less, than the price per barrel for West Texas crude.

There aren’t a lot of things you can see from the space station but the tailings ponds in Northern Alberta are one of them. I used to go out with a guy who was senior management at and a brilliant mining engineer for one of Canada’s biggest mining companies. He was sent to Alberta to look at the way they handled waste, and he was utterly appalled at what he saw. Mining companies are probably one of the most ethically challenged industries in the world, but even mining companies consider Syncrude’s tailing ponds unethical. There is no way a mining company would be allowed, anywhere in the world, to have tailings ponds as massive as the ones in Alberta. And the thing that horrified him most of all was the fact the person in charge of safety (back then) was an engineer just a few years out of school with no extensive industry experience.

And, doing a quick search just now, I see stories saying Syncrude is planning on releasing the contents of some of the ponds into the environment. For years and years Syncrude bragged about how they would do the right thing and clean up the tailings ponds. Hell no, not required in Alberta. That’s also why Alberta has more abandoned well heads and drilling sites than any oil drilling jurisdiction in North America. The Alberta government never required an appropriate amount of money be set aside for clean-up. One of the big things the federal government did for Alberta during Covid was give millions of dollars for orphan well clean-up. Alberta has thousands of orphan, abandoned drilling sites, while just south of the border US states literally have only a handful in each state, because drilling companies were required to clean up their shit

The idea Canadian oil is “the greenest in the world” is pure Alberta bullshit.

[JGP]

Plus, you know, the current eureka is to treat the tailings and let them go into the Athabasca. Weird science.

[TrueMetis]

It's also god damn hilarious how the current whining is about trying to develop a way to export oil eastward. The last Trudeau tried it, ya'll didn't like the idea then. What changed?

This shit with Alberta oil is a day late and dollar short. And the Federal Liberals have given it far to much support. Kill this nonsense and be done with it.

[Fragile Bird]

There’s another war going on, a potato chip war, between Loblaws and Frito Lay and their parent Pepsi. Loblaws has refused to comply with Frito Lay’s demand to raise prices, saying they are focused on keeping prices down. Frito Lay says costs have gone up and they need more money. So if you go to Loblaws and see empty shelves in the snack department, that’s why.

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

It's also god damn hilarious how the current whining is about trying to develop a way to export oil eastward. The last Trudeau tried it, ya'll didn't like the idea then. What changed?

This shit with Alberta oil is a day late and dollar short. And the Federal Liberals have given it far to much support. Kill this nonsense and be done with it.

This matter is part of this think piece (ya, I know, Intercept, that strange beast, that nevertheless still has some good writers, like Naomi Klein:

"Toxic Nostalgia, From Putin to Trump to the Trucker Convoys
War is reshaping our world. Will we harness that urgency for climate action or succumb to a final, deadly oil and gas boom?"

https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/war-climate-crisis-putin-trump-oil-gas/

Quote

 

. . . . The Canadian truckers, for their part, not only chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans as their protest symbols, but the leadership of the movement is also deeply rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Before it was the “freedom convoy,” many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known as United We Roll, a 2019 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.

Though petrodollars underwrite these players and forces, it’s critical to understand that oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview, a cosmology deeply entwined with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which ranked human as well as nonhuman life inside a rigid hierarchy, with white Christian men at the top. Oil, in this context, is the symbol of the extractivist mindset: not only a perceived God-given right to keep extracting fossil fuels, but also the right to keep taking whatever they want, leave poison behind, and never look back.

This is why the fast-moving climate crisis represents not just an economic threat to people invested in the extractive sectors but also a cosmological threat to the people invested in this worldview. Because climate change is the Earth telling us that nothing is free; that the age of (white, male) human “dominion” has ended; that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship comprised only of taking; that all actions have reactions. These centuries of digging and spewing are now unleashing forces that make even the sturdiest structures created by industrial societies — coastal cities, highways, oil rigs — look vulnerable and frail. And within the extractivist mindset, that is impossible to accept.

Given their common cosmologies, it should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the “freedom convoys” are reaching toward one another across disparate geographies and wildly different circumstances. So Trump praises Canada’s “peaceful movement of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties”; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy’s loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that “Far more people have & will die from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russia/Ukraine war.” And how about the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials board the announcement that Putin “is not occupying Ukraine” but standing up to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and “fighting against the enslavement of humanity. . . . .

 

 

[Lord of Oop North]

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

There’s another war going on, a potato chip war, between Loblaws and Frito Lay and their parent Pepsi. Loblaws has refused to comply with Frito Lay’s demand to raise prices, saying they are focused on keeping prices down. Frito Lay says costs have gone up and they need more money. So if you go to Loblaws and see empty shelves in the snack department, that’s why.

The explains it 

I was at the grocery store the other day, assumed the hoarding had started again, and said to myself "Doritos, really? You fucks."

[JGP]

My 14 yo was the same about the cereal aisle, except she said frickin when it there was no Life cereal. 

Cereal aisles are nude, yo.

[Fragile Bird]

Kellogg has a strike going on. They’ve been brutal to their employees during the pandemic, lots of stories are out there on the internet. I think that’s why there are empty shelves in the cereal aisle.

[JGP]

Yeah, I knew.

We're cerealophiles in my house, I had a pantry shelf on par with Seinfeld's collection. Not no more. 

[sad kazoo sounds]

[Fragile Bird]

And in other news, Cameron Alexander won Canada’s first gold medal in a World Cup downhill race since 2014. He actually tied with a Swiss skier, a rare event in a downhill.

[maarsen]

So it seems that Christine Elliot and Randy Hillier are both deciding not to run in the June provincial election. Are the polls looking that bad?

[JGP]

Hillier is looking at possibly being charged, I think? Might be his way of mitigating that. 

---

What I'm wondering, is how Freeland is going to navigate her Ukrainian far right issues. I was reading yesterday or maybe last night about how a journalist who'd queried her office about some troubling photos was responded to, not by Freeland's office, but by the UCC directly, and whew... she needs to pony up with some mea culpa because it's [including her lauding of her grandfather] going to bite a great white sized chunk out of her ass without hardly mentioning gift wrapping ample fodder to RT propaganda. Like, it's just writing itself.

[Lord of Oop North]

1 hour ago, JEORDHl said:

Hillier is looking at possibly being charged, I think? Might be his way of mitigating that. 

---

What I'm wondering, is how Freeland is going to navigate her Ukrainian far right issues. I was reading yesterday or maybe last night about how a journalist who'd queried her office about some troubling photos was responded to, not by Freeland's office, but by the UCC directly, and whew... she needs to pony up with some mea culpa because it's [including her lauding of her grandfather] going to bite a great white sized chunk out of her ass without hardly mentioning gift wrapping ample fodder to RT propaganda. Like, it's just writing itself.

She should just own it and move on. If it comes up, denial will just hurt her.

I know first hand that is very hard, but for those of us with relatives in Europe during that time, it is what it is.

[JGP]

Totally agree, which is why it's so odd to me. I mean, she's  very  savvy. I'm not sure whose advice she's taking on this, but it's going to backfire is she doesn't change course.

[Lord of Oop North]

10 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

Totally agree, which is why it's so odd to me. I mean, she's  very  savvy. I'm not sure whose advice she's taking on this, but it's going to backfire is she doesn't change course.

Family is often the ultimate blind spot.

[Fragile Bird]

I have missed all this, what’s it about?

[JGP]

Well, it starts with her grandfather being a Nazi collaborator-- he ran a news paper that distributed propaganda for the regime. There's more, but that's where it starts [to which, she's never really confronted or admitted] Anyway.

The latest on this front was a parade that Freeland participated in not long ago, where she'd been photographed holding up an incriminating scarf [there were some other things in the background as well, apparently] None of it immediately offensive really, the black and red blood and soil imagery predates them, and even Stepan Bandera -but- it's also been appropriated by far right, white supremacist groups, most notably the Azov Battalion, so everything kind of loops back, especially given training that our military gave in Ukraine without discrimination-- the extremist elements weren't excluded [which was also remarked upon at the time] 

That's the abbreviated, not quite chronological gist [although there were also people present at said parade/rally representing fringe groups that the Dep PM shouldn't want to be anywhere near proximity] 

When the online backlash to said photos started to surmount, Freeland's team deleted the original photos, with no comment or acknowledgement [originally, they've since responded] and later reposted with new photos where offending associations were removed. Could've simply been a mistake, but no apology, and the oddest thing about it to me was the UCC responding directly to a journalists written query instead of her Office. That's just fucking weird.

I love her. I'm super impressed with her education, experience, and have high hopes she replaces JT. And yeah, the Russians may have a vested interest in undermining her, but there's plenty of people concerned about these types of far right associations that aren't sympathetic to Russia, and their concern is legitimate. So even if most of this -is- RT prop, her strategy seems similar to an aggressively swinging Zionist type defense-- which, honestly, doesn't help her cause at all.

That's the very brief break down and my stance on it.