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A hypothetical such party would also have to walk a tightrope since it would have factions in nearly all provinces (except perhaps Atlantic Canada) yet the regional differences would still be stark for a party holding itself together by anti-elitist policies, and they would be far from a majority in any province. I'm not too familiar with the western provinces, although Alberta has had a noticeable divide over climate policies and farm issues, not sure how it has developed in the other provinces? |
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Make no mistake, I do not support that position. It is just an observation. Likewise, I would think every province (except maybe in the Atlantic region) would see such unfold, but nowhere would they be anywhere near governing... |
In terms of accepting refugees, most polls I see have the greatest support in Ontario and British Columbia (heavily due to near-unanimous support in the Toronto and Vancouver regions), and Atlantic Canada. It is lower in Quebec and the Prairies.
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Atlantic Canada is also a liberal place in most ways even though that's not how it usually gets presented nationally. This is particularly true when you account for the fact that a higher proportion of people there live in small towns and rural areas. |
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During the Industrial Revolution, many people in Europe became economically useless thanks to automation and mechanization. The paper suggested that Europe solved this problem by getting rid of these extra people through emigration.. sending massive amounts of people to the Americas and Australia. The UK alone sent off some 15 million emigrants in the 19th century; this is pretty insane given that the population of the UK in 1850 was only about 25 million total. European colonialism thus served not as only as a source of materials for the colonial empires, but as a place for dumping their excess people, which helped Europe avoid the massive problem associated with having tens of millions of economically useless people sitting around. So... will the solution to having tens of millions of people across the West made useless by automation be to send them off to colonize space? |
But isn't a "problem" for Canada our low birth rate? Immigration isn't going to balance out the estimated workforce shortage.
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Compare that with today, when countries like Japan and Germany are facing contracting population numbers and almost no developed country has a fertility rate capable of even maintaining its current population, let alone grow it. I haven't read enough about the topic of job automation to know exactly what that means (does a stable/shrinking population mean that people can work elsewhere or that there will be even fewer required services?), but it's worth pointing out that the demographic situation is markedly different from that of the first and second industrial revolutions. |
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Space exploration not as a scientific endeavour but as a giant, Keynesian make-work experiment! I support the idea, although the big challenge will be that it will be decades before we can shoot millions of people into outer space, or well beyond the timeframe of the looming problem. |
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I am in the camp that believes that job losses from automation will be a big social problem and that we haven't found a plausible solution yet in Canada; tweaks of 1980's policies aren't going to cut it. I also think that hard times are when it gets real with issues like immigration. Canada has not seen that yet and hopefully it never will but I'm not optimistic. The framing of 19th century European working class outmigration as the continent or country getting rid of excess labour is interesting. I think that is exactly the kind of thinking that societies will need to abandon if they are to do well in the future. The economy really exists to serve people and give them a good standard of living. With modern technology it is possible to do that for everybody in a country like Canada even if many people aren't working, and by definition if automation improves in the future it will be even more realistic. The problem is one of distribution, as it was in 19th century Europe where many people saw their standard of living fall as their land was taken away from them. There were lots of people in 19th century Europe who did not work and did not leave. They were the landed gentry who lived richly off of rental income. Generally speaking I don't think they added much economic value in the sense of, by their participation, increasing the amount of overall prosperity. So there was a double standard as far as some people needing to be "economically viable" to stick around and others not. In the future, everyone could be like the landed gentry to a small degree, or we could still have a small number of people who collect a disproportionate amount of the income. Where countries fall along that continuum, I think, will partially determine how well they'll do in the future. Quote:
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For starters, our societies (even the more individualist "meritocracies") are significantly less ''sink or swim" than Industrial Revolution societies were. High numbers of job losses are seen as societal problems that must be addressed (even if the measures are not satisfactory), whereas before it was more of a ''sucks to be you'' situation. Go knock on the church's door if you need help, or better still emigrate. What this leads to is retraining and changes to education programs to adapt to the new economy. It can still be painful for some but nothing like it was 100-150 years ago. Things might not be perfect but the modern workforce is more nimble than people give it credit for. The information technology revolution killed a bunch of jobs but also give rise to millions of IT jobs that did not exist before, to develop, implement and maintain those new thingamajigs that everyone wanted and are now indispensable. |
Good topic.
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I say "almost," because sure, there really are certainly cultural qualities in our British legacy favouring ideals of fair play and decorum that seemed to have overridden any tendency toward producing an Attila the Hun or Gengis Khan (which is not to suggest that the British have never meted out brutality upon others, of course). But still, as kool puts it: Quote:
"Well, you know, like, be nice to people and stuff." Cue glazed eyes as Irish and American kids surreptitiously search the room for escape routes. Quote:
He's a loose cannon. He's banging on about the US's "depleted military," fer crissakes. The country that spends more on its military than the next seven (or eleven?) countries on the list combined. He blathers endlessly about needing to "solve" the "problem" of radical Islam, which obviously means more American bombs killing more Muslims in the Middle East and radicalizing the ones who survive. As per Yeats's poem cited in that article linked to in the OP: “Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold” and “The best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Talk about being eerily prescient! Thing is, though, we're not living in the 1930s again. That was a time characterized by the rise of militant fascism that would go on to shed blood in the quest to conquer the intranational and international political competition. But that's not what's really happening now. If anything, we're probably going to skip past the 1930s and 40s and go right to the 1950s and 60s, this time with China as the global power that we bump up against. Having said all that, I really wonder if this dark foreboding of impending doom we're getting from the commentariat isn't part and parcel of the dizziness we are experiencing as the ground teeters beneath us in the massive communications paradigm shift of the dawning of the internet age (someone called it the most epic invention the world has seen so far). So many fondly-held truisms related to how access to information works to broaden the mind and ennoble the spirit are falling by the wayside, and we're finding that the narrative free-for-all is a lot more dystopian than we thought it would be. |
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Just like any other politicien who's on a campaign, he's creating expectations. People will expect him to follow through in some way on what he said. And if you look at the type of people he's attracting, I'd be kinda scared about pissing off too many of them. |
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It's the nastier or lost souls among us finding out how to make bombs, or learning about how someone at the far reaches of the globe felt the same way they did, and went out with bang. Now there's an idea to copy... |
Interesting topic! :)
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It's a classic case of the scenario where the betrayer gets rewarded while the best case by far for the average is "no one betrays anyone". The very best case for anyone, of course, is "you betray, while the others don't betray you". The name -- if it even has a name -- of this experiment/situation escapes me, but it's pretty classic. In practice, people rarely manage to all be loyal, so it starts a spiral. The most inequal countries will likely be the ones draining all the brains and mobile/portable wealth toward them; in an increasingly multicultural "global village" where you're able to chat anytime with relatives on the other side of the world like they were sitting in front of you, it's likely going to be easier and easier for people to decide to move for such reasons. Countries who decide to "stop playing" the global game for whatever reason (Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela would be semi-decent examples) end up generally lagging the ones who do on nearly every metric, so it's not much of an incentive to join that list... |
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(I have read it aloud in my head, of course ;)) |
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