Federal Government & Politics II

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Build.It

Try me. I've never heard of this. A source would be appreciated.

You're a big boy. You can google EU Emissions Trading System.

Originally Posted by Build.It

I'm not disputing that demand for oil would drop at all. I'm disputing the assumption that it will convince more people to buy EVs. We don't know if that will be the result. All we know is that demand will go down.

More evidence you don't understand economics. Especially economic substitution here. The goal isn't to make everyone buy EVs per se. It's to reduce fossil fuel consumption. That can happen in many ways. If gas was $2/L, it doesn't mean every single person who has an ICEV would buy an EV. Some might choose to take transit more. Some might choose to walk. Some might choose to work from home more. The net effect would be lower oil consumption. And we exactly this behaviour literally every time gas prices go up n faster than inflation for any prolonged period of time.

I can understand that you don't like the carbon tax. That's fine. I can't stand you pushing economically illiterate arguments in service of ideology. It's like anti-vaxxers saying COVID isn't real because they don't want to take a needle.

[Build.It]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

You're a big boy. You can google EU Emissions Trading System.

More evidence you don't understand economics. Especially economic substitution here. The goal isn't to make everyone buy EVs per se. It's to reduce fossil fuel consumption. That can happen in many ways. If gas was $2/L, it doesn't mean every single person who has an ICEV would buy an EV. Some might choose to take transit more. Some might choose to walk. Some might choose to work from home more. The net effect would be lower oil consumption. And we exactly this behaviour literally every time gas prices go up n faster than inflation for any prolonged period of time.

I can understand that you don't like the carbon tax. That's fine. I can't stand you pushing economically illiterate arguments in service of ideology. It's like anti-vaxxers saying COVID isn't real because they don't want to take a needle.

I honestly don't know what else to tell you man.

Canada vs US - US emissions went down faster.

BC vs every other province - emissions went down faster in every other province.

And Molson just posted a study from Sweden which backs up what I said earlier (I think he was trying to help you, but he actually helped me lol) - Sweden's non-revenue-neutral carbon tax model is the only carbon tax model that has actually proven to reduce emissions faster than doing nothing - and yet you are vehemently against that and would rather use the experimental revenue-neutral model.

And to set the record straight I really don't care if they drop the carbon tax or not. It really has very little effect on me either way. But for the love of God, if you're going to tax people to reduce emissions, at the very least follow a proven model that has actually worked (Sweden), and let other countries be the guinea pigs for unproven experimental models (revenue-neutral).

[Dartguard]

Originally Posted by Acajack

Why would EVs have to have been towed? Whether you are in an EV or ICE if you are idling for heat in this situation you need to watch your energy consumption. ICE vehicles run out of gas all the time in mega traffic jams.

BTW it's extremely unlikely an EV will run out of juice in stop and go very slow traffic due to regenerative braking. Every time you slow down or stop, you're recharging a bit.

The vehicles were stopped on a very Cold night 890 Feet above Sea level in eight inches of Snow and no possible source of recharging.For 14 Hours. Turning my engine over every two hours for 15 minutes kept my Car warm enough for me not to freeze to death.The 1400 of us in our vehicles were stranded in sub zero conditions.32 Kilometres from Oxford NS in one direction and 28 from Masstown in the other. Dead battery's would have made any EV's non working junk.Are there portable EV rechargers out there?

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Dartguard

The vehicles were stopped on a very Cold night 890 Feet above Sea level in eight inches of Snow and no possible source of recharging.For 14 Hours. Turning my engine over every two hours for 15 minutes kept my Car warm enough for me not to freeze to death.The 1400 of us in our vehicles were stranded in sub zero conditions.32 Kilometres from Oxford NS in one direction and 28 from Masstown in the other. Dead battery's would have made any EV's non working junk.Are there portable EV rechargers out there?

EV batteries don't freeze like regular car batteries. They start up reliably and retain their charge in the cold really well when idle.

As I said how a vehicle would fare in this situation would depend on a) how full it was and b) how well the operator rationed the available energy. This would apply to an EV and an ICE.

Also note that EVs all have heated seats which consumes far less energy than running the blower.

ICEs also have electric seats but running them without the gas engine wears the smaller battery down quickly. And you need the battery to start the engine to run the blower so you need to mind that. EVs don't have this issue.

[theman23]

Justin Trudeau had a press conference today blaming the previous conservative government for the rising number of stolen cars.

Marc Miller, who is quite possibly the dullest tool in the Liberal cabinet not named Ahmed Hussen echoed the same sentiment...by retweeting a chart that showed that auto crime clearly dropped under the Harper government, only to rise again after the Liberals took power.

Do these people not realize they've been in power for 9 years now?

[lio45]

Originally Posted by O-tacular

“We protect every kid and we protect them right now.”

Nenshi sounds totally stupid. Most people at first sight would instead insist on protecting the kids, thus disagreeing with Nenshi.

Kids can't be trusted (not fully developed brains; improperly-myelinated brain synapses) so they have to be protected against themselves:

To protect kids, we as society generally choose to:

- not let them drive and crash cars;
- not let them guzzle alcohol;
- not let them smoke tobacco;
- not let them smoke weed;
- not let them sniff coke;
- not let them shoot themselves opioids;
- not let them ingest weird chemicals;
- not let them cut off their dicks;
- not let them cut off their breasts;
- etc.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by theman23

Justin Trudeau had a press conference today blaming the previous conservative government for the rising number of stolen cars.

Marc Miller, who is quite possibly the dullest tool in the Liberal cabinet not named Ahmed Hussen echoed the same sentiment...by retweeting a chart that showed that auto crime clearly dropped under the Harper government, only to rise again after the Liberals took power.

Do these people not realize they've been in power for 9 years now?

Imagine for a second in the private sector, trying to convince your boss that the new major issues the company is currently having with stuff that YOU have been personally responsible for for the past 9 years, is in fact entirely the fault of your predecessor

[MonkeyRonin]

Another good piece from The Hub, this one touching on Canada's record-low fertility rates:

Sean Speer: The consequences of Canada’s housing-based inequality are immeasurable
What happens to Canada when only the elites can afford to have kids?

Eric Lombardi’s recent essay for The Hub on how Canada’s housing crisis risks transforming the country into a neofeudal society certainly touched a nerve. It reflects a growing (and compelling) view that one might describe as “the housing theory of everything” in which high housing prices have come to hold explanatory powers over various economic, social, and even psychological trends in modern Canada.

His basic thesis—the inability of many young Canadians to enter the housing market without familial financial support is creating a new source of social bifurcation—is straightforward and supported by evidence. Recent polls in British Columbia and Ontario for instance have found that 40 percent of first-time homebuyers in the two provinces have depended on financial support from their families.

These figures are consistent with new Statistics Canada research that shows that the homeownership rate for millennials and members of Generation Z whose parents themselves are homeowners is more than double those whose parents are not. Housing wealth, in other words, has increasingly come to beget more housing wealth.

The bigger point—housing-based inequality is an interpretive lens for understanding broader trends including the public’s general sense of malaise—is one that the Trudeau government has quite possibly come to understand too late for its own political survival and one that Canadian policymakers more generally have failed to understand to the detriment of current and future generations.

One of the indirect yet powerful ways in which these housing affordability challenges have manifested themselves is in the form of delayed family formation and declining fertility rates. The interrelationship between housing prices and family planning is somewhat intuitive. Housing costs—particularly in high-cost localities—are a major household expenditure and therefore necessarily influence our short- and long-term expectations including when to start a family and how many children that families ultimately ought to have.

A well-regarded 2014 economics article put it this way:

Rising home values have a negative impact on birth rates because they represent, on average, the largest component of the cost of raising a child: larger than food, childcare, or education. This implies that when the price of housing rises, the price of having children also rises. This price increase leads couples to delay childbearing or to have fewer children altogether.

This interplay between housing and family formation is having perverse effects in Canada. Unlike most peer jurisdictions, babies in Canada have become, in the words of demographer Lyman Stone, a “luxury good.” His research finds that higher-income Canadian families tend to have both higher desired and actual fertility rates. As he put it in a 2023 episode of Hub Dialogues: “Canada’s a place where fertility is uniquely, positively correlated with income, which is nerd speak for Canada’s a place where family is a sign of wealth and social class. If you’re rich, you can buy the right to have kids.”

Housing is a big part of this story—especially as it has become a leading indicator of income and wealth in Canadian society. Previous analysis for The Hub by Steve Lafleur for instance has shown that a household must now be among the top 10 percent of household income to even qualify for a mortgage in the City of Toronto. Similarly, research by TD Economics has found that wealth inequality in Canada is, by and large, a function of the differing outcomes between homeowners and non-homeowners, including both intra- and inter-generationally.

It’s not a complete coincidence therefore that Lombardi’s essay was published the same week as new data from Statistics Canada that the country’s fertility rate hit an all-time low in 2022. At 1.33 children per woman, the country is not only 0.6 percentage points below the replacement rate, but its year-over-year drop was among the largest in high-income countries and Canada’s own history. The same analysis found that the average age of first-time mothers has increased from 27.6 years in 1976 to 31.6 years in 2022.

Although these developments are undoubtedly multicausal, it’s notable that Canadian women tell consistently pollsters that there’s a gap between their desired and actual fertility rates. They’d actually prefer to have a number of children approximating the replacement rate, but there are different impediments standing in their way including high housing costs.

As Stone has previously written:

If young people are stuck in smaller houses than in the past, or in more unstable or expensive housing situations, it could reduce fertility…There is some good suggestive evidence that this may be happening… at every stage, the housing situation for young people disfavours childbearing more than in the past, which is almost certainly a major driver of low fertility today.

Even if one accepts that Lombardi’s claims about neofeudalism may seem a bit provocative, his characterization of Canada’s socioeconomic context in which homeownership and child-rearing are increasingly expressions of (hereditary) wealth clearly resonates with a lot of young people (including members of The Hub’s staff) who are seeing both become the purview of their wealthier and more advantaged peers.

Setting aside the economic and social costs of high housing prices and their effects on fertility rates for a minute, there’s something conceptually incompatible with the egalitarian promise of Canadian society for the “haves” to be able to own homes and have children and the “have nots” to have neither. These basic milestones of what has traditionally been understood as the “good life” shouldn’t be treated as luxury goods. A society in which they are—in which the aspirations to own a home or become a parent are understood as signs of wealth or social class—can persuasively be defined as neofeudal.

As for the costs themselves, they can never be fully measurable. A full accounting of the opportunity costs of the births and lives that never come into being or the social costs of growing stratification will ultimately be greater than we can ever understand.

https://thehub.ca/2024-02-08/sean-sp...ed-inequality/

[Truenorth00]

^ To be fair, the first reaction will be voting out the government in power. I wonder what happens when we find out the next government is only marginally better on the file.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

^ To be fair, the first reaction will be voting out the government in power. I wonder what happens when we find out the next government is only marginally better on the file.

Either left wing or right wing populists threatening to blow up the whole system will rise in popularity (see Argentina for example).

[Truenorth00]

For the "Government should build more transit" crowd. This is what the $13B GO Expansion project (currently underway) is going to achieve:

Pretty striking how big the benefits of GO Expansion will be! (Chart from Metrolinx fare integration IBC)

https://twitter.com/EnglishRail/stat...QLbToW_nQ&s=19

Some of you seem ignorant to what is actually being built and what the effect will end up being.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

If you think about it for a second, this scenario, in which the “have” class has offspring while the “have nots” don’t, quickly (a few decades) “fixes itself” as by then all Canadians will be rich (the poor Canadians that used to exist left no descendants) and we can then rely either on robots or masses of imported temporary slave labor.

[Truenorth00]

I find it interesting how parties on the other side of the political spectrum face the same problem. It's not the "far left" in the UK.

The UK’s Conservative party is on the brink of a generational wipeout. The single most important factor driving this is the dramatic breakdown of upward social mobility.

https://x.com/FT/status/1755925035284320433?s=20

[Build.It]

^^
I've noticed that as well. The next few years are going to be an extremely important part of history, with different countries doing opposite extreme things to solve similar problems.

In a way, the direction each country goes will partially have to do with which unlucky party happened to be in power (and therefore booted by voters) when the crisis came.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Build.It

^^
I've noticed that as well. The next few years are going to be an extremely important part of history, with different countries doing opposite extreme things to solve similar problems.

In a way, the direction each country goes will partially have to do with which unlucky party happened to be in power (and therefore booted by voters) when the crisis came.

This is true and as a result it's tempting to say it's not their faut.

But the reality is that is their fault: the fault of incompetent political classes. Regardless of ideology.

[lio45]

True, and the obvious result could be the interesting fact of seeing British Labour and Poilievre Tories sharing some priorities and policies, as they would likely both be aware they got elected with a very clear mandate to stop massive continuous yearly housing appreciation.

That’s quite logical though: some things transcend traditional party lines. If the voters elect someone in a landslide because of one issue, they’ll expect action on that issue, regardless of the classic position of the elected party. You elect Danielle Smith or Donald Trump or Jagmeet Singh or Bernie to tackle that ONE thing, I expect all four will have the modicum of brains needed to know they need to!

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I find it interesting how parties on the other side of the political spectrum face the same problem. It's not the "far left" in the UK.


https://x.com/FT/status/1755925035284320433?s=20

I wonder what Canada would look like on that graph!

[kool maudit]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Either left wing or right wing populists threatening to blow up the whole system will rise in popularity (see Argentina for example).

This will likely be co-opted, though. Factions of the existing elite will likely rearrange themselves and inhabit these idea-spaces, gradually moving them towards a new centre, a new synthesis. The big fortunes are very resilient, en masse, to even the most extreme apparent shifts.

Many of the big dynasties in 2100 will have been big in 1900 as well.

[kool maudit]

I am not even sure if the thing that is dying now is even the post-1945 order. It might just be the post-1989 construction.

It might be the '30s, sure, but it might just be the '70s.

[Build.It]

Originally Posted by kool maudit

I am not even sure if the thing that is dying now is even the post-1945 order. It might just be the post-1989 construction.

It might be the '30s, sure, but it might just be the '70s.

Thats what I got out of the big interview as well.