China, India have tiny attempts and smaller successes at influence compared to the thousands of corporate lobbyists that meet with Canadian politicians every year.

What about the influence of the construction industry? Property developers outright own provincial and municipal politics in Ontario. Big tech?

Oil?!?

How about all the huge military and consulting companies that place 50% of the labour in govt workplaces and suck a 25% margin off each one?

Most of those aren’t domestically owned either.

enjoy the recessions that come with balanced budgets and surpluses… everyone will be sending in extra taxes to balance that budget.

The Canadian govt is the primary creator of Canadian dollars.

When the federal govt runs a deficit of say $1B, that’s a surplus of $1B in the private sector. $1B more spent into industry than collected in taxes. Good times for the private sector.

When the federal govt runs a surplus of $1B, that is a deficit of $1B in the private sector. $1B more collected in taxes than spent. This is an absolute disaster for the economy.

When you consider the above, you can see how ridiculous it is for the federal govt to run a balanced budget or surplus. A balanced budget is a strongly recessionary position, choking off economic growth in the private sector.

instead of a long complicated process to pre-empt corruption, just have an automatic and detailed post-award review for corruption. Corruption discovered in the review is referred for criminal prosecution.

After the first 500 or so corporate CEOs and executives are jailed, the rest will get the point. Offer your best price, compete with your competitors, sell your offer on its merits in the open bid, and stay away from the bid evaluators and other potential or actual bidders.

it’s to stop attempts to leave and commit terrorism from lawless jurisdictions. I think it’s fairly new and related to the short period of time when ISIS held territory in Syria & Iraq. Odd to see it used for the US, but why not.

car thieves aren’t slipping away in car chases. The car is in a box on a ship in the ocean before the cops know anything about it.

If the cops start digging a bit into longstanding organized crime groups, the judge will jail them for a long time. Police aren’t bringing those cases.

the problem with the 407 is that the Ontario taxpayer paid to build it and then gave it away for nothing when nobody really wanted to drive on it. The P3 model is shit.

maybe some business taxes need to increase to de-incentivize commercial overuse of public roads. Surely the free market can provide a solution like a profitably tolled tunnel running right under the Gardiner?

guy has been up there quite a while, nobody wants to land with a big bag of turds rattling around

Brian Lilley can fuck off. 6 pages of text for a a veiled anti-immigrant attack.

Far from his worst too.

Rae would advise on the options and consequences. I expect he did a good job advising Trudeau.

You don’t just suddenly hork in your friend’s face at a party. You try to work things out and move them in a direction and keeping it mutually acceptable.

never put salt in your eyes

it’s a terrible system, paying the wealthy elevated interest on risk-free govt bonds to bribe them into not hiring people.

Split the right, awesome 👍

if Lisa MacLeod votes against the PCs while part of the PC caucus, I’ll eat lemmy.ca.

MP and MPP independence from the parties is theatrical only. The parties own their future and they know better than to stand against them.

my MPP is Lisa MacLoud. Emailing her would be useless. The current PC wouldn’t listen to her since she repeatedly embarrassed them as a minister during the previous term.

eat shit Lecce

how many games left until the coaching staff gets fired?

A Place to Stand…A Place to Grow…Ontari-ari-ario-ooo

We already have a song.

I am fond of TWOTEF but it’s not much about Ontario

404