It certainly is possible. Most people have shitty memories for anything that they’re not passionate about, and very few people are passionate about politics or how things change around them. Just the latest outrage article more often than not.

But I do think that there is also a connection to the fact that the left is sorely underrepresented in social media as well. And I don’t just mean in terms of content creators, but platform owners as well. After all, even if most tech bros that started up all our favourite online media giants, once they reach the top, every single force in the capatalistic world that let them get on top is now a force that drives them hard to the right. Legislation makes it harder to earn more money when you’ve already squeezed out the easy and legal opportunities. The left is all about change and democratizing things, where the corporate giants have already consolidated so much of the economy that this is a legitimate threat to their power. Not to mention that making it easier for entrepreneurs to start up new companies without relying on venture capital influence to avoid the risk of personal bankruptcy is a direct threat that may topple their empire if they can’t buy them out (or will be bought by someone else who already is a direct threat).

And then there’s the fact that advertising money flock towards right wing content creators because not only are they more commercially safe since they are far less likely to call out corporations doing bad things, but they’re also more willing to take money from unethical sources. I mean, how often does right wing youtubers advertise energy drinks and protein powders? Or what about supplements or “muscle enhancers”?

The double whammy of right wing media giants and right wing content creators make it really hard for the left to get their voice out at all, especially to the young who exclusively get their news from these sources.

I mean, imagine how many think that the stuff they hear on facebook is actual legitimate news despite them officially not allowing Canadian news to be advertised on their services?

As an Ontarian, I can list dozens of projects that suffered this way, from plan changes, alterations during construction, to outright cancellations right before being completed. We probably waste half our budget this way.

There’s hope that this might not have aged as badly as some think.

After all, PP might actually get fired as the Cons leader for not doing his job. (Though honestly, I’m rooting for the party to break up. A far right party and extreme right party splitting the votes will only show just how terrible each side is, and with a split, the animosity between them means that neither will gain traction for decades, and hopefully make Canadians realize just how terrible the parties they’ve been voting for really are)

Frankly I find it amazing that Albertans aren’t the most acutely aware how fragile their economy is. They’ve suffered several oil crashes, even two in the last decade or so, and yet they feel like they’ll do better without Ontario and Quebec to prevent a total economic crash any time oil prices dip?

And this is at a time when oil prices are already starting to fall, with pretty much every forecast blaring out that oil will become nearly worthless by the end of the century, if not within the next two decades?

Oh, and this is even before considering that the only other province that has a snowball’s chance in hell to give Alberta a hand once there’s no federal government to force the provinces to work together (even marginally), is Saskatchewan. I strongly doubt that BC would allow Albertan oil to pass through their province if the Feds wasn’t there to make them play nice together. Maybe natural gas, but definitely not oil. And in such a case, the only significant buyer of Albertan oil will be the the US, and I would bet actual money that the first thing they’d do would be to ask for a discount on oil, because they know it is litterally the only thing preventing Alberta from becoming a 3rd world economy.

These numbers are really encouraging. Voter participation has been a serious issue on all levels of government for a long time, and hopefully this is the beginning of a reverse in trends. Canadians need to at least pay a minimum of attention to what their leaders are doing or else they’ll just do whatever they think they can get away with.

So many Canadian leaders sneak in absurd laws and policies and Canadians just don’t notice or say anything, and I say this in regards to all parties. Not saying anything, especially during elections, is a tacit approval. Because showing disapproval is the only way to make governments know that they can’t get away with ignoring the public good in favour of personal agendas.

I think even worse than voting for fear and resentment, they voted for actual fascism. The guy openly stated that he was going to try to ignore Canadian rights and freedoms without any ambiguity. It’s not like him twisting turning Canada into a 3rd world resource economy as a great boost to the economy, or that saving the 1% billions in taxes as a way for the average Canadian to save their money.

One of PP’s mandates was to use the notwithstanding clause to bypass Canadian rights and freedoms to jail people without a trial. It was one of his platforms, and there was zero ambiguity that he intended to do it exactly as he stated.

The fact that this wasn’t a red flag for over 40% of Canadians and an immediate reason to distance themselves from him, it honestly scares me. Because this is how Hitler and Mussolini came into power, along with many other of history’s worst leaders. They sounded reasonable at first, with only one or two shady bits to their mandates, only for those shady bits to be the core that started the greatest evils in the world.

Okay, I had to double check, because I thought this was a Beaverton article for a sec.

I mean, seriously? “Anti-liberal wipes, now with extra logic”? “Anti-liberal rash cream”? I’m sorry, but do the Cons pay for their shit by selling overpriced weirdly labeled crap to their supporters like some pyramid scheme or something?

I really thought this was satire until I double checked the link address.

It’s pretty bad. I was talking to someone who voted Cons yesterday and he was saying how Trump was actually doing the US economy a ton of good and that all the numbers from the stock markets to the bonds, trade numbers and all else were either temporary bumps or unimportant.

While it’s true that stock numbers don’t reflect the actual markets, they do reflect market confidence and has a high tendency to match what the market actually ends up being several months down the line.

I’ve come to realize that Cons rely on the fact that their supporters simply listen to their messages without paying any attention to other signs of what’s going on, which is why they can flatly lie about whatever they want and people actually believe them. Because they don’t want to internalize anything that suggests that they are wrong.

As someone who voted Liberals this time, I do strongly believe Carney is wrong and misguided on many points, but voted for him anyways. Because someone who is wrong a part of the time is far better than someone who is wrong most of the time. That a partially bad direction is better than someone who will run full steam ahead into the biggest ditch he can find while running over the average Canadian on the way.

As much as I feel bad about Alberta getting ignored and shafted by the larger provinces, this is one of the few times I think they deserve it.

The damn guy so many Albertans are voting for is blatantly stating that he’s going to take away Canadian rights, funnel public money to the rich, remove services, casually lie about pretty much every subject, and countless other problematic things that are so obvious if you spend even five seconds thinking about it. And this is after successfully voting in a premier that is getting sued left and right for illegal practices and corruption, destroying their public services, and constantly fighting public inquiries by making them private or the results classified.

Albertans (especially rural Albertans) so consistently vote against their best interests in favour of giving their entire province to big oil that returns nothing (not even jobs) to the people living there that their leaders have stopped trying to hide just how terrible they are and are trying to see how much they can get away with while boasting about it out loud.

I know not all Albertans are this bad (hell, I’m Ontarian and we just voted in Ford, the second worst premier in the country for pretty much the same exact reasons), but whenever I see so much blue on a province, it’s hard not to get annoyed.

BTW, Saskatchewan is just as bad here, though maybe not the premier stuff.

My question is who is she running against. What have they done/not done, and if her opposition has a record as well, who is “less bad” in this case? It’s pretty difficult to honestly read this at this point in the election without a comparison and not see it as a smear piece.

This isn’t my riding, so I don’t know, but if it was, I’d like to know the dirt on the other candidates and get an honest comparison.

And all that is even before taking the greater national election into consideration and that PP is out to take out Canadian rights and freedoms while giving billions of tax dollars to rich corporations as hand-outs all the while throwing the most vulnerable to the curb all the while saying that it’s for the benefits of those he himself trampled on.

While I do agree that he did help, he wasn’t very instrumental in saving Canada from that meltdown. It was the policies that were already in place at the time that prevented Canadian banks from being overleveraged, which made fixing the issue in Canada far easier than it was in the states.

Carney did help prevent a major disaster, but he also started from a far better position when doing so.

Unfortunately Harper removed all the safeguards that prevented the 2008 meltdown, so we’re as vulnerable to it now as the US was back then.

This is just going to create a muddy hole in the middle of Toronto that’ll still be nothing but torn down buildings a billion dollar flaming money pile a decade from now.

Is there even any demand for a spa in this city? I almost never hear anybody talking about them, and the few I’ve seen were all run down and barely surviving.

There’s gotta be more efficient ways to donate billionaires Ontarian tax dollars.

It’s half an issue about messaging. The problem is that the Liberal messaging keeps sounding like things designed for older generations and not things that’ll help younger Canadians, while Cons messaging sounds like they re for younger Canadians rather than older ones.

Yes, Liberal plans on expanding housing while preserving healthcare are definitely things that are good for younger Canadians, but they both sound like things that are only for older generations. Like building more houses are only for rich Canadians to buy cottages and healthcare are for old people who can’t get out of bed because of their bad knees, not that housing means that first-time buyers finally have houses within their price ranges, or that getting sick and taking time off work doesn’t equate to being 20 years in debt because hospitals gouge you for everything you have because people are willing to mortgage the rest of their lives to get life-saving treatments.

On the other hand, the Cons keep saying they’ll create resource jobs and reduce taxes, making it sound like they’re opening up so everybody can become gold diggers and stop the government from taking their hard-earned pay, when it’s actually not even close to being true. That the jobs the Cons promise are only minimum wage jobs at best, in terrible conditions and far away from all convenience, or that the taxes reduced will save the rich millions while the poor still can’t afford to buy the houses and services that the taxes get saved on, making it so that they are actually subsidizing the rich even more than before. Not to mention that every $100 cut in taxes means that the average Canadian will pay thousands more for the services that they’ve been getting all their lives.

But no, the Cons are better at wording their platform to appeal to the worst off in Canada, yet those are the ones cheering for them the most. The Cons are really the world’s best conmen, and too many Canadians are too desperate to notice.

It’s as if by making it easier for people to drive instead of having viable alternatives, people would chose to drive more, causing even more cars to fill up the 401.

Induced demand is a terrifying demon that will make driving more miserable by taking away resources from solutions that actually work: trains and other alternative measures. A single train can move as many people as the entire 134km of new roads, and you can put more than one train on a single new rail track. You can run dozens of such trains a day, and instead of being a money sink hole, it can even operate at a profit that goes directly towards maintaining the remaining roads as long as it’s government owned rather than have private middlemen pocket the surplus cash.

Toronto and many other major cities already have wonderful and expansive rail infrastrucutre. We just need to upgrade the rail systems in between cities so that passenger and freight doesn’t have to compete for the same lines causing massive delays every single day.

It seems the courts have struck down 28 laws related to mandatory minimum sentencing that Harper put together.

As much as some people get annoyed by this, I think it’s actually a good form of peaceful protest. It brings awareness to the issue without disrupting the election process. Anybody who ends up having difficulty voting because of this simply hadn’t been thinking much about the election before picking up their ballot or hasn’t really thought voting was important.

First-past-the-post has definitely being a net detriment to Canadian democracy and perpetuates the two party system that are far-right and right-of-center. The fact that most governments manage to come into power without the even getting half the votes, much less the majority of Canadian support, is proof that the governments we elect haven’t been representing the will of the people.

I’m personally a fan of proportional representation as that means you can simply vote for your favourite candidate and ensure a greater mix of parties reach the table. This makes small parties and independents matter more, as they basically don’t matter at all right now. They’re just a formality since even if they can get a seat, they won’t be heard with such little representation. It does increase the number of seats by a large amount, but it almost guarantees smaller voices will reach the table unless if the support for a single party in a region is overwhelming, which in itself is democracy doing its job.

Ranked ballots aren’t bad either, just that I feel they’re weaker since they tend to strengthen whatever party that forms the government and makes it easier to ignore other voices. But this does mean that smaller parties are more likely to get seats if they align with district interests more. To not have to vote strategically and just let people vote for their favourite candidate makes it far easier on the voter and helps get their voice out.

Early polls have started as well! Never too early to vote against a wannabe dictator that tosses your rights away like a used candy wrapper!

As a streamer I’ve been enjoying has been saying a lot recently, “don’t give someone a power you don’t want your enemies to use on you”.

While the specifics are different, I think this was also tried by Harper, only to be shot down in the courts for being unconstitutional.

So PP’s trying to copy his senior’s old homework, forgetting that assignment got a failing grade.

Seriously, why are news outlets even allowed to push political ads during an election? This should count against the party’s donations, not be considered “volunteering”.