NS Politics

Everything is politics, at least to someone.

Tag: politics

  • Canada Day 2025 – Not Like Them

    US vacations make you traitor.

    Having an enemy worse than you typically makes you look significantly better by comparison. Existential threats also force a certain amount of action. Most of the 20th century was in the shadow of communism, and since it was not as easy to get information out of a secretive anything as it is today you could argue it took a long time to confirm that the USSR had not figured out a good way to run an economy. The mood at the time forces some extent of negotiations with the working class, lest your state become the next theatre of a communist civil war. Cold War technological races pump up spending and invigorate a sense of needing highly educated people, especially in the US space race. Conflict, after all, does tend to get things done.

    Feel the patriotism burn in your soul. And hope it doesn’t eventually become malignant.

    And now as Canadians we border a country half filled with lunatics. To be a bit more fair only about two thirds of the eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2024 US election. So about a third of the country is confirmed lunatics, one third doesn’t care, and one third loves the status quo. This is hyperbole but I don’t feel like giving the US much credit right now.

    So today we are Canadians dammit! Better than the US because we haven’t fallen nearly as far. But this is going to be tough to maintain. We don’t have much choice but to negotiate with a lunatic. A lunatic that under modern trade and labour has a huge impact on our economy whether we like it or not. We just scrapped a cool tax idea on big tech who deserve to pay after they have gotten soft on the whole democracy and truth idea, if we don’t get a deal we should bring it back.

    Those tech companies don’t actually believe AI will set us free. You will not be getting money for nothing in that future.

    Make Them Hurt As Much As Possible

    It’s okay to start wishing harm on your enemies… right?

    They only know money, this American administration has no concept of soft power. That’s not great because boycotts are typically really hard to maintain if there’s anything you really like about a product of service. Bud Light might be easily replaceable by Coors, but is that Disney World vacation you promised you would take your kids on before they got old and jaded easily replaceable? I guarantee you neither that company or state deserves your money.

    I offer my condolences to the good people of Maine, but sort your own country out first before you ask for more tourists. Maine isn’t particularly Republican either but 45% for Trump is a good indication of how low things will go.

    Keep the American liquor imports out, find as many items like that with domestic and international supplies that can easily replace them.

    Republicans want their people to be poor. Their donors love it, and some of them are true believers that working people to death is the moral thing to do. We can’t chase them to the bottom, they are trying to dig deeper than we can possibly imagine. And if you actually talk to people about how they feel about the super wealthy you might get an idea that a more progressive stance on wealth is warranted. They’ll fight like hell to stop it though.

    Be proud of what we can accomplish as a nation, we are to some extent built on ideals that are worth holding onto. The introspection can be a little less this year.

  • Ramblings on Democracy

    A capitalist dictatorship will not improve your living conditions.

    Money in politics is proving to be a bit of a problem. The USA is the worst example, “corporations are people” and therefore can sling as much money as they want at campaigns. Probably one of the worst interpretations of free speech a court could have landed on. All that money results in politicians too used to the status quo to pitch something different, and too scared of potential economic consequences of chasing after bad actors. Like the companies that get to be incredibly profitable and pay no tax, neat.

    I also believe that democracy is not the default state of humanity. At least not at a high conceptual stage of a nation, the kind of thing that exists because we believe it exists and will it into being. A functional democracy is difficult to maintain, it requires a large amount of infrastructure on both the public and private ends to keep citizens engaged and holding existing powers to account. Limiting power into a few hands is far easier to do. Limiting information on what the government is doing and what alternative parties are saying is relatively easy as Hungary has proven in recent years. We are in an interesting point of time where pretending to be a democracy is a kind of public performance, only a handful of countries don’t call themselves democracies, but a lot of countries don’t really live up to the ideal.

    We love the idea of old Athenian and Roman democracies. Both failed for different reasons. I don’t think democracy will ever go away, but that doesn’t mean it can’t fail.

    I think to some degree we even understand that democracy is hard. President Zelenskyy is stuck in a war and hasn’t held an election since it started, for some context the UK did the same during WW2 holding no elections between 1935-1945. Canada and American democracy fared better during the world wars since the continent wasn’t being bombed, but democratic norms are usually put on hold. There’s a lot more secrecy expected of a government at war, and usually a rally behind the flag that boosts incumbents which arguably gave the USA its only four term president (while that was not illegal at the time this kind of break of convention needs a firm limit. Once your conventions start falling like dominoes your democracy won’t likely fair well). It is simply more efficient to be less democratic.

    The allure of authoritarianism is usually that “our” people win. And maybe initially they do, but an eternal need for enemies doesn’t fulfill that desire forever. The circle must either expand to an external threat, or contract the definition of the enemy within. Is the MAGA movement happy to call the crusade done at illegal immigrants when they don’t seem to care on proving if they actually are illegal already? How tight can the circle be?

    I think Bernie Sanders and AOC are correct in viewing the larger shift to be an oligarchy. Corporations already have more influence than individuals, because money buys influence.That is a fake democracy we could end up with. Where the people are so limited in power that an election doesn’t matter, the decisions are all the same no matter who wins. All that matters is that enough of the population thinks the people won. Class repression dressed up as a culture war.

    US Republicans don’t really pitch policy ideas that help, it’s a capitalist free-for-all wrapped in a Christian rule of law veneer. And any belief the Republicans had in their democracy went out the window after Trump proved to have enough of a following to attempt a coup. Allowing him to run again is not rule of law, it’s self preservation. But the Democrats don’t fare much better, turns out if you pull out the populist messaging you aren’t left with much to run on besides the status quo. They at least seem to still believe in the husk of their democracy. And yes having a leader that can look competent to sell your message helps a lot, it should have been knives out for Biden the moment it was clear he wasn’t in a position to run again. Biden as a human being might not have deserved it, but if you believed there was a threat against your democracy the sacrifice would have been worth it.

    From CBS. There might not have been a bigger failure in democratic ideals than the 2024 debate of two people too old to be coherent. Trump never sounds smart but he can pull funny and quippy, Biden had nothing in him at this point.

    Canadian elections are still based on some ideals. Carney at least had a pitch for national building in the headwinds of outside economic threats. Put up against Poilievre’s “cut it all” policy it seemed to work to build a bigger coalition. Then again “cut it all” looked better before Trump and still built a coalition that normally wins elections. Lets just hope they all keep believing in democracy.

    We are losing news in this tech money future, it’s too expensive to produce good reporting. The news we get the easiest access to (like an internet blog, heyo) has no kind of accountability if it turns out to be false. The algorithms demand good profitable content, preferably AI based so no one gets paid. The end result I fear is one where we give up everything to make job numbers look good, but 100% employment does not mean those jobs are good.

  • Untax and Spend.

    I’m the last registered socialist.

    Today Prime Minister Carney announced that Canada will hit the NATO 2% of GDP target for military spending within the next year. This was inevitable, or at least moving in this direction was. It’s as close to a bipartisan issue within the NATO countries you could hope to find. It will help Canada’s credibility if we try to shore up defence agreements with Europe, as the USA starts indicating it doesn’t want to include us (or Europe based on the leaked signal chats) anymore.

    As much as I might dream morally of a world with no need for military and war, we don’t live in that world. All evidence points to humanity being too confrontational for that message to hold long. Coca-Cola and Pokemon Go only brought us together for so long.

    From the Coca-Cola website themselves, “I’d like to buy the world a coke” Ad from 1971. At least Pokemon Go brought us together a bit more organically.

    So defence spending will have benefits in certain places and to certain people. Like any government spending that isn’t just sent to the shadow realm.

    But turning government spending into more government revenue is a trick only a tax collection agency can pull. So this spending will either increase the deficit, require new taxes, or require cuts elsewhere. Carney indicated cuts elsewhere were likely. After all, he has just cut taxes. Everyone is cutting taxes. Because cost of living is rapidly reaching levels of unbearable and a large cohort of people might revolt if nothing happens to bring it down.

    In the short term this is fine. In the long term we might be kicking a debt crisis down the road where tough decisions will be made at the expense of a lot of people. Again. Recessions are cyclical. Hurrah.

    What seems to baffle us about the economy we created is how to fairly tax income, sales, investments, and corporations. As long as we don’t pull a Romney and get people and corporations confused the answer to this seems to depend entirely on what you hold. Income and sales taxes impact the lower wealth bracket of working age people, most which seems to be the driver of all the recent tax cuts. Capital gains on investments were pitched to be raised, but that was a different Prime Minister so that has since been scraped. Investments do benefit people besides the rich, if you have parents thinking about retirement they are probably relying on them at least partially. Like the cost of housing, once you own them you don’t really want the price to go down or taxes to go up. And I doubt most economic analysts would recommend raising taxes on corporations during a trade war against an American president trying to get them to leave our country for the USA.

    What about wealth? This would probably be the most popular among the general population if we can find a way to do it. Easier said then done I’m sure, since corporations with a lot of money have figured out ways to avoid paying taxes by moving country flags around like a cruise ship. I love a good race to the bottom. It would at least be worth figuring out a method to prevent rich people from taking out loans against their assets, which isn’t taxed since they never sell anything and loans aren’t taxed. Neat trick with Twitter Elon, I wish you nothing but the worst with your Trump breakup.

    So income and sales taxes went down and… nothing else really changed. So government income is lower… and spending is going to be higher. Unless we create growth.

    From halifaxharbourbridges.ca Removing the tolls on the harbour bridges has benefited me but it will cost the province, and thus all provincial taxpayers.

    How do we create that growth? Well resources tend to be taxed differently, companies can’t really bypass resource revenue but it isn’t stable since it depends on the price of the resource. But still, it’s a guaranteed winner for a government looking for more income. Thus the incentive to chase what’s in the ground.

    Do we need more investment? More entrepreneurs? I don’t know, I’m an idiot and would need some experts to advise on what’s possible and advisable. But as someone firmly within the working age that income matters, maybe we should have given the capital gains increase a try.

    And Now, An Aside on Marginal Income Tax Brackets

    If you aren’t aware of how income taxes work in Canada it’s worth knowing the basics of marginal income tax brackets. A salary increase is ALWAYS WORTH TAKING, your take home pay will go up no matter how close you are to the next bracket. There is an argument for some people to chose between overtime pay vs time off in lieu, but that’s a calculation of how much the extra time off is worth to you compared to the money.

    A flat tax is a scheme by the rich to make themselves richer.

    Notice how these are bands. If you made $300k in income, you only get taxed 33% on the last $43k of your income ($300k-$253k). Note this only federal tax rates, but provincial income taxes work the same way.

  • What Minerals Do To A Community

    Easy decisions rarely exist when it comes to natural resources. Shame since I feel like we are due for an easy one.

    As the NS provincial government tries to scope interest in minerals that may or may not be present within the province it might be worth thinking about the general impacts they have on an area.

    The dream.

    Hurry Up and Wait

    Considering this is at the exploration stage we have no confirmed projects to review at the moment. You might know there’s some oil or some uranium somewhere, but you have to figure out quality and cost to extract before you can even make a call if it’s worth getting. Thus exploration first.

    Environmentally, mining anything is never a beneficial activity for the local area. Best case you have no effects and just hold a healthy side of risk. And risks are never zero, there’s not enough money and tech in the world to reduce all risk to zero. The exact environmental risks will depend on what is found and how you extract and process it. The Fort McMurray oil sands for example is near the surface so not hard to find, but it is hard to process oil out of sand. It takes a lot of hot water which results in energy spent to heat it and tailing ponds to hold it. Containment is key and not perfect, Imperial Oil being the most recent large case of spillage.

    A community that’s not in hard times likely won’t want this kind of risk. The counterpoint is an argument for the collective, some risks are worth the benefits after all. So what do we get out of it.

    What We Get

    JOBS! This depends heavily on process. To get a lot of jobs you need something that’s very profitable but requires a lot of maintenance to keep running. Project construction is a lot of jobs initially, but it’s cyclical at best and I would caution against too much excitement to that kind of growth. Companies also love talking about how many indirect jobs they create. It is true in the case of long-term jobs, because if more people live in a place to work, more jobs will be induced by that population (more people need more teachers, more stores, etc). This assumes those workers live in local communities, the benefit will be way lower if remote work camps are built instead.

    Taken from Google Earth. Work camp north of Fort McMurray, AB. Beware, fly-in/fly-out workers don’t benefit the local community much.

    TAXES! Resource revenue is a hell of a drug, get enough of it and you can drop taxes to the floor. For those unaware, Alberta has no provincial sales tax (only the 5% federal tax rate applies) and income tax starts at 8% for the first $60k and only 10% up $151k. As a result the vast majority of government revenue is from oil and gas, so the provincial balance sheet is tied to the price of oil. A best case scenario is the model Norway took to build their oil investment fund now valued at over $1.7 Trillion USD, based on the true realization by their government that their oil will eventually run out. But boy a politician sure looks cool if they can lower taxes today.

    What To Expect When You’re Expecting (a Mine)

    Construction pains. Big projects require a lot of people for the build, and in a rural town they’ll need places to stay. Hotels will be full and it can make the local housing market go crazy if the construction phase is measured in years as temporary people look for apartments to rent. A good time to sell for residents, not a good time to buy for newcomers.

    It’s raining men. Gender parity has not hit construction or trade jobs. If a lot of jobs are created expect a lot of men. I highly recommend the graphical novel Ducks by Kate Beaton for a female perspective on working in the oil sands and its human costs.

    Potential for pretty large wage disparities. This depends entirely on how desperate a worksite is to attract the workers it needs but the market will continue to pay the lowest rate. Resource jobs have tended to pay well for remote and difficult work which might not follow to the rest of the economy. People with too much money and not enough to do don’t always make the best neighbours.

    Giving our grandchildren another ghost town. Resources are limited, markets change, nothing is forever. Something will have to be cleaned up eventually. We have a bad tendency to ignore it when we know we won’t have to deal with it ourselves due to our inevitable death.

    Final Stuff

    None of this is guaranteed. It is so dependant on if anything is found and the specifics. But politicians have to pitch growth (I guess), and resources are an exciting low investment possibility for a government so long as approvals don’t get in the way. After all, industry hates uncertainty, exploration is already gambling so why also gamble with approvals. Politicians need to signal we are open for business to get interest and take the backlash later.

    Bring attention to concerns, ask the hard questions, get mitigation in legislation. Don’t believe a company that tells you they’ll do something in the approval stage when no one writes the regulation. Complacency and cost effectiveness will win out in a few years time.

  • Liberal Death and Liberal Resurrection

    General thoughts on a provincial and federal election.

    The Nova Scotia provincial election of November 2024 was boring. Which is probably good since all the exciting elections recently have been about someone losing the plot.  But Tim Houston has held it together, “A good man you might disagree with” to paraphrase John McCain. Houston was only one term in and had a deeply unpopular federal Liberal party holding the provincial Liberals back. My absence will have to excuse my unfamiliarity with Zach Churchill and if they were doomed from the start. Calling an early election after promising not to is a class move, but no one likes keeping promises when it’s hard.

    We were getting electoral reform at some point, right Trudeau?

    Conservatism Rising

    Economic issues have been eating at the general public for a couple years now. I’m still convinced the federal liberals lose the 2021 election to a conservative minority if they didn’t seize on several conservative premiers looking stupid with how they were handling ongoing COVID measures. Needless to say, everyone be pitching tax cuts in 2024-2025. But even pitching more tax savings couldn’t save the NS Liberals. I don’t think what came next could have given them a win but it might have saved their party status.

    By Matthew McMullin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154461541

    Die Libs!

    The federal liberals were destined to a similar fate. But bizarrely didn’t seem able to boot Justin Trudeau to attempt to cut the bleeding. I was sure no one wanted to take the fall, until that fateful day.

    Et Tu, Chrystia?

    It’s likely impossible to know all the motivations involved, was this a mistake on Trudeau’s part, was he given bad advice, was Freeland waiting for an opportunity? But to cut to the chase Freeland stabbing Trudeau saved the Liberal party. (My Caesar metaphor breaks down a bit on that point, but Freeland held to the rule that you probably don’t want to hold the knife that stabs.) Mark Carney becomes the new leader and PM and gives to the inevitable election call.

    Milhouse Loses The Trump Card

    But before I give all credit to Carney, who generally seems like the boring centrist dad a lot of people crave right now, we can’t discount how effective Trump was at getting him elected and how ineffective Pierre Poilievre was at pivoting the message. To avoid a long digression, Trump is an idiot and the willingness of half the US population to follow him off a cliff is the swan song of this dying age. With that much of a following, behind that much stupid, it is a huge national and global risk. And with all those chips down we had Poilievre, who up to this point only had a real strength at messaging (the guy was an MP for 20 years with no bills)… fail to message. Except enough to scare NDP supporters to back a more centrist Liberal party.

    Centre-right leaning provincial conservatives didn’t seem to care if Poilievre lost which is notable. A glimpse perhaps that they see too much of Alberta’s Danielle Smith brand of “break the government to own the Libs” in him. That might be projection on my part, and a certain Elon Musk owns that crown now.

    The analysis that given a couple more weeks we likely would have seen the Conservative win seems possible given how close we got to a two party system in that election and the direction of the polls. NDP losing ground to a central banker who at least isn’t as bad as the other guy, and more populist economic messaging on the right. There’s a lot of data with none of it being easy to solve.

    What’s Next?

    Having lived in a province with only viable NDP and Conservative parties, do I think the NS Liberals are dead? It’s a more interesting “what if” had the federal Liberal party died this year, but now I would say no. Not unless the NDP tries to choke them out of the centre, and that risks alienating their core supporters. The Alberta NDP happened into a situation in which the Liberal party was nonviable, right when the right split itself in half. They emerged as the only surviving alternative. I expect a return to the status quo in NS so long as there are no breaks in the PC party. But Houston is leading a very boring party so far (let’s see where the Uranium fights go, I’m living the coal on the rocky mountains all over again).

    As for the federal government, I think their task is impossible. Especially for a minority government. But if they can swerve around the on-again, off-again maniacs to the south to give us a bit more independence, I’ll take what I can get.

    Alberta politics weren’t boring, but that’s not necessarily good. I’m more bored now in my native land, but still not inspired.

  • Books! – Flamer by Mike Curato

    Let’s start Pride Month 2025 with a book about the big gay that Alberta doesn’t want kids to read. (Maybe, if the people agree, or a minimum age, unclear).

    Cover art is indicative of the art style, black and white with red to highlight certain scenes.

    First let’s talk about the graphic novel, because it’s good. It even deals with a few things I have some familiarity with; being a teenage boy, being at scout camp, and being gay.

    The novel follows 14 year old Aiden at scout summer camp, right before he moves from middle school to high school in the mid 1990s. He doesn’t fit the masculine ideal; short, fat, and not good at sports. Boys will 100% pick up on that as a vector for bullying. But he starts off having a history of liking scouts and camp since the boys there are nicer to him than at school, even if he can’t completely escape bullies.

    It’s what I would call “a coming out to yourself” story. Because if society only tells you bad things about being gay you probably won’t be thrilled to find that out about yourself initially. I sure didn’t have fun with that step and it was later than 14 that I was willing to examine it. As a result it deals with themes of depression and self-harm, but it ends on a hopeful note. Expect a lot of F-slurs, thankfully in my time and space growing up in school this wasn’t the case, it had been toned down to boys calling each other gay* all the time.

    *Pejorative

    I would highly recommend for gay teens since its the kind of character and story I wish I had when I was younger. Maybe even for teens that don’t fit the ideal societal image of what they should be, or really anyone, god knows we could use a dose of empathy. Someone more aware of the teens would know if this works for a general audience, at the back of my mind I always worry that pitching a book with a gay character to someone will be viewed as an insult.

    Why I’m Even Talking About It

    This book came out in 2020, but in 2025 the government of Alberta put it on it’s not age appropriate for schools list. The silver lining is that release made me aware of Flamer, which I had not happened across despite the overlaps with my life.

    The provincial government flagged four books, all graphic novels: Gender Queer (I was already aware conservatives have gone after this one a lot), Fun Home, Blankets, and Flamer. If you were to put a gun to my head I would guess they all skew to high school level, so yes, maybe they don’t need to be in elementary schools but the school boards would have likely moved them if notified. That’s taking the government’s word that they were physically found in certain schools.

    The personal connection and uncertainty about what exactly the problem with Flamer’s content made me pick it up. The reference material at the provincial government link above didn’t do a great a job of selling what was so controversial about it, especially compared to the other ones that do depict nudity and sex which the government happily provided examples of for concerned parents.

    So what gives.

    Maybe they had never talked to a teenage boy before, or the horror of watching them interact with each other?

    Is the topic of sex and masturbation an issue? The amount of jerking it required by the average teenage boy suggests that avoiding it is somewhere between impossible and likely not good for anyone.

    Do we say we can’t talk about homophobia? That’s not a good sign for certain peoples rights.

    Do we say we can’t talk about teen suicide? Probably not good for preventing teen suicide.

    This is very easily going to end up a witch hunt in which the people who show up to these discussions will want anything gay out of schools. See this CBC article for more on northern migration of the library wars.

    Why I’m Talking About It Outside Alberta

    This strategy will be tried elsewhere if it keeps working. They don’t even need to be the majority to have a profound impact. Alberta politicians are doing a good job of giving the social conservatives and conspiracy theorists what they want while telling the public they are doing it for reasonable reasons.

    It’s the just asking questions of policy.

    If they keep being allowed to ask those questions we have to keep fighting a culture war while everything else gets worse.