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Listening to what everyone had to say, I most liked Tony McQuail and least liked Rob Ashton. Worst of all was whoever was in charge of handling sound for the voiceover translations, because that was horrendous. The rest were all fine, but nobody I found inspiring. All pretty likeable though, except for Ashton who came across as kind of caustic and a bit fake. I liked Tanille Johnston’s positive energy.

One thing that struck me watching it: I wish the NDP would speak the language of finance, tech, and economics with much more sophistication. It’s no good just talking about big business, billionaires, or the 99% in cartoonish ways. If you’re going to take on these huge challenges, you need to show you actually understand them at a really sophisticated level, otherwise you end up sounding like your ideas are all pie in the sky. Talk to NDP voters like they’re adults who understand economics, business, and tech, and who want a different way of dealing with them. If you’ve got a sophisticated plan, lay it out and educate us on it like adults, not undergrads who just read Graeber for the first time. It’s the working class you need to win back, and they’re not idiots. At the end of the debate, because they didn’t speak to these topics with sophistication, I was left feeling nobody on stage was really plugged in to a number of the most pressing challenges the party needs to be ahead of.

Wut? Dude could have just stayed in his job as a conservative MP if all he wanted was to fill a seat and collect a paycheck.

You mean by contacting my elected representative to express my views about the situation and the policy positions I would like her to take wrt this issue? Yes.

It’s taking too long, but at least it’s moving. There’s a proposed Commissioner for it now and the public consultation on draft regulations has wrapped up. If the process to appoint the Commissioner can get through all the mandated review processes soon, it will actually be in place. Hopefully in H1 2026.

It’s war, aimed at causing widespread suffering among civilians. We should be standing up against it. All indications so far are that we won’t do anything.

Shocking to absolutely nobody. Will the Conservatives hold press conferences about this foreign influence? I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on it.

Chinese emissions have plateaued and started falling. They actually dropped in 2025, including a 1% drop in Q4.

Cutting off Chinese manufacturing and bringing it all here, including cutting out Chinese inputs to Canadian manufacturing, would not be more efficient at all. It would not be better for the environment. This is a fantasy. We would need massive industrial expansion. We would be making the global situation less efficient and more harmful by reducing complementary systems, increasing redundancies, and increasing industrial inefficiencies.

In what way would ending imports from China reduce emissions? Giving up buying from the most efficient manufacturing ecosystem in the world that also happens to be electrifying and moving to nuclear and renewables at an unmatched pace is not going to increaseefficiency. What more efficient alternative would we switch to? Canada will not be more likely to hit goals by moving currently outsourced industrial manufacturing from an extremely effecient ecosystem with economies of scale to somewhere like here that has no comparable efficiencies of scale, grid development, or ecosystem development. We would need massive industrial expansion here, including with our grid. Dramatically expanding hydro is going to require huge new projects in places that are harder to develop than our existing hydro. Trying to build out solar while not buying from China? Let’s see how efficient that is. We should be taking advantage of China’s efficiencies to complement and build out our own systems, not cutting them off. It’s one planet we share, and efficiencies and harm reduction in the global manufacturing ecosystem is what we should aim for, which requires leveraging complimentarities, not reducing them.

The PM is just the leader of our government for a time, but the government has continuity. We are not under the rule of the whims of PMs. Policies are formed that have continuity with government and extend beyond whoever happens to be leader of the party with the most seats at a given time. The NOTAM for Russia is still in effect. It is a total and indefinite ban by the Canadian government, not a PM.

There is no NOTAM for Israel. The Carney government should act to correct this. The fact that Netanyahu is not under domestic sanctions in Canada and can freely traverse our airspace, as can any Israeli flight, should be corrected.

It is an obvious double standard that Canada’s government is responsible for. It’s made even more jarring in that Canadian airlines have been banned from the massive airspace of Russia, which is a substantial consequence, but the potential of being banned from Israeli airspace is trivial, and yet we haven’t done it.

If you want to say “the ban in 2022 wasn’t on Carney’s watch and maybe this issue hadn’t come to his attention before, so cut him some slack,” okay, sure. But, now that Netanyahu has flown through Canadian airspace under his watch, what’s he going to do?

Netanyahu should not be allowed to fly through Canadian airspace.

I really don’t see why Solomon is in that position apart from being Carney’s buddy. It has never made sense to me as an appointment for such a critical role, and it makes less and less sense as time goes by.

This is at US instruction. Go back and listen to Hegseth’s speech a year ago. Read the strategic documents around burden sharing. The US identified their own lack of sufficient industrial capacity to produce enough arms for war on all the fronts they plan to fight on, so they have pushed for Europe and Canada to revitalize their defense industries. The US essentially needs vassals to arm themselves to be the frontlines that get expended while the US retains more of its own capacity so they end up on top in the end.

I’ve known two people who used MAID to end their lives. Both had terminal illnesses that were heading towards protracted, painful, debilitating ends. They used MAID ro end their lives on their terms and because they didn’t want to live through that or to put their families through it.

To me, their access to MAID absolutely provided more humane, dignified, caring treatment than they would have had in being forced to live through what they were facing.

Their cases were pretty clear cut imo, but I understand there are much less clear cut circumstances and situations where concerns over mental health and necessity of MAID vs alternatives requires much more challenging judgment. It’s not straightforward and clear cut in all circumstances. You never want to throw the baby out with the bathwater on either side of this issue, be it needlessly enforcing suffering or needlessly ending a life.

What that indicates to me is MAID is a good thing to have, but we just really need to invest in quality research and policy development, and that includes research and investment into ensuring the system of administration is well-designed and well-maintained in accordance with the research and humane ethics. As long as we keep doing that, we’re taking the right approach to do the best we can.

Everything about this is tragic. I really hope the majority discourse around this in Canada can handle it with empathy and not get swept up in US-style culture wars about it.

To some extent, I’m kind of glad the provincial Conservatives in BC are so openly nuts and awful. It’s kind of amazing that they so openly say the dumbest stuff, and it’s wild that they still win their local ridings, but at least they let everyone see who they are.

Yep. The empire is not one of nation states. It’s not the US government on top. The empire is one of money, and the empire owns the nation states. The US government is just the empire’s most powerful tool.

No. I don’t think it’s a good thing to start getting involved in violations of sovereign immunity of overseas assets. There are reasons the EU didn’t go through with this, because it’s damaging to the international law and financial systems. This is Canada and Japan just making up that the law needs to “evolve,” which is basically saying “we known it’s not legal but we don’t care and we’re going to pretend it’s just an update to the law because it suits us.”

I don’t think things like the US stealing Afghanistan’s treasury funds was okay either. I don’t think the UK stealing Venezuelan funds was okay. I don’t think engineering a crash of Iran’s currency to cause chaos and suffering in the country to facilitate regime change was okay. I don’t think unilateral sanctions being used as tools of warfare is a good thing. And, I don’t think Canada should be getting involved in leveraging seized funds belonging to another nation in order to fund war against that nation in violation of sovereign immunity of state funds. All of these are bad precedents. The fact that they’re obviously applied selectively makes it worse, because it’s not even a new norm. It’s just transparent “we support this when it suits us” behaviour.

It makes the world more dangerous. Who is Canada going to turn to when some other country identifies us as being on the wrong side and decides it’s okay to seize Canadian assets? It’s not like anyone is intimidated by us, so if we’ve abandoned international law we shouldn’t be surprised when that is reciprocated in future disagreements.  Maybe some country sees fit to seize assets invested by the Canadian pension fund, or the assets of Canadian companies in their jurisdiction. And, we should certainly expect countries to feel more risk in investing or holding assets in Canada than they did before.

It’s opening an international financial Pandora’s box, and we’re just a middle power with no leverage to exert by ourselves over any of th big countries we need to do business with and which all want leverage over us.

Nope, don’t like this. One violation of international law should not justify another. The fact that Canada will engage in this towards a country like Russia while not doing the same to a country like Israel is just further contributing to the breakdown in international law. This is just making shit up to do what you want. Law needs to be applied equally for it to have any meaning. If Canada, Japan and other nations want to apply this to everyone engaged in wars of aggression, then that would at least be something. If not, it’s just more damage to international law. This is an escalation in a series of bad precedents. Carney cannot simultaneously maintain the image of Canada as a reliable partner while also yoloing into the post-rules based order by throwing international law out the window to suit geopolitical interests.

False dichotomy, and both are bad ideas.