canada
Out of context: Reply #287
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- i_monk-2
The country is falling behind, but it's hardly (just) Trudeau's fault:
1. Unopposed leadership. Our parliamentary system is deeply flawed, designed for a past age, and reliant on customs only some of the parties even both paying lip service to anymore. Under FPTP if you cross that minimum seat count, you can do whatever you want until the next election. The Opposition parties may as well go on vacation. Nearly every vote is whipped, so as long as you're even somewhat careful not to spark a rebellion among your own MPs, you will get 100% support for your agenda.
2. and 4. The BoC only has one level to pull and that's the interest rate. They have no other tools in their tool box. But more relevant is the over-dependence on and entanglement in the US economy, with the EU and China as distant considerations. Too many of our political and economic decision-makers put Wall Street's interests ahead of Bay Street's and certainly Main Street's.
3. True. Housing has become a retirement plan, most of our politicians are landlords, in the pocket of developers, or both, all creating a crippling fear of doing anything that might lower property values even slightly. If given a choice between paying a fine and building affordable housing, developers will pay the fine—see Montreal. But why are developers even given a choice? The notion of regulating industry for the common good has nearly evaporated here.
5. We do attract doctors and such, from a diverse number of cultures, then prevent them from working in those fields. If you want to be a doctor here you're required to re-certify and redo your residency in a Canadian hospital, which is expensive and the number of residency programs bottlenecks the entire thing. We've got immigrants coming from all over, but doubling down on a service-based economy means we're mainly going to get whover the most upwardly mobile are around the world – China for a while, then India, now I think it's Nigeria. We're also absolute shit at promoting our own culture because it competes with American imports.
6. I haven't noticed any change in pot use among anyone I know, but we already had lack of ambition nailed down before it was legalized.
- loleveryangle
- 3. Developers just won’t build if they’re forced to do ‘affordable housing’ — what ever that term meansGnash
- They will find other ways to make moneyGnash