psvrh
As we’re seeing in the US now, and the in the UK with the ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn, the owners of the mainstream media are not interested in covering actual left-wing values. Singh isn’t great–I preferred Angus–but anything progressive he says will either get laundered by the media, or ignored completely
What just happened with the LA Times and the Washington Post vis a vis endorsing Harris should be a warning sign to progressives everywhere: the media, or at least it’s owners, are already in the tank for the political right. It doesn’t matter how much you try to be serious or sensible: the mass media will ignore or belittle you, while they throw softballs to the Conservatives.
It’s especially an issue in Canada, where media ownership consolidation is worse than it is in the US.
This isn’t to let the NDP off the hook: they need someone like Bernie Sanders, someone willing to bang the class-war drum, but what they’re getting are consensus-builders who aren’t much better than Trudeau et al.
He won’t, but only because the point of bike lane removal in the Act isn’t bikes or traffic.
The point of the bike lane removal in the Act is to keep people talking about bike lanes, instead of how the Act also has provisions for skipping the environmental assessment of the 413, as well as bypassing the requirement for civil engineers, who are on strike and will be for a bit.
The Act is all about getting the 413 built. The nonsense about bike lanes is to keep people from paying attention to the land grab and payoff to Ford’s developer buddies.
Ford doesn’t give a shit about bike lanes in Toronto, or traffic in Toronto. He cares very much about getting the 413 built so that his donors can realized their real estate investments.
It would have to be an outsider candidate, and the LPC party structure does not do well with outsiders.
If you’ve ever experienced dealing with the LPC, you can see why: they’re primary composed of compulsive board-of-directors members. Every Liberal representative and most of the party and riding executives are all from the same incestuous BoD members. They encounter each other all the time in their professional circles: they’re on the committee for this, the board for that, the council for something else, the executive director for fill in the blank. They know each other because they’re each other’s lawyers, estate agents, consultants and so forth.
They’re so socially inbred that it’s incredibly difficult for an outsider to break in.
And before you say “All politicians are like this”, they aren’t:
- the NDP is getting this way, but they’re not there yet; with the weakening of organized labour, more of them are from the Director class, but a lot are still union folk and a few are student radicals. They’re nowhere near as institutionalized as the Liberals
- the Cons are composed of a mix of small-business douchebags and grifter-ideologues (sometimes in the same body!). It’s actually pretty easy to break into the CPC: just have money and be a loud, obnoxious dick; support is something you can buy.
- the Greens are pretty much split between true-believers that don’t like the NDP’s professionalism, and grifters that are working a green angle for their next scam. Again, easy to break into if you’re loud enough. (side note, it’s scary how many failed Green candidates pivot to the Conservatives).
Compared to the above, the Liberals place a much, much higher value on consensus and favour-trading, and have a visceral reaction against outsiders.
By Liberal standards, Trudeau is an outsider candidate. What the LPC wanted was a Dionne or Ignatieff.
I really would like a patty that doesn’t pretend to be meat. Something like old-school veggie patties from the pre-Yves, pre-Beyond era. More of a veggie fritter, I suppose.
I know people want the meat-burger experience, and that’s fine. I’d like an option that doesn’t resemble meat.
A guilty pleasure of mine is the Ikea veggie dog with cabbage and fried onions and mustard. Kinda like that.
Just so you know, this appears to be cover for some other goodies in the same bill:
- Ford’s turbo’ing past the environmental assessment for Highway 413
- He’s also bypassing the need to use (striking) civil engineers for the 413
The 413 will make his developer cronies a lot of money; everything else is identity politics garbage to get the bill through.
This is Greenbelt 2.0.
I think this is what’s called a “Gereg”.
As a side note, there’s an excellent song by the Mongolian metal band, The Hu, called “The Gereg” that I highly recommend
It doesn’t look like it’ll matter: the Canadian economy is too dependent on real estate developers getting rich, and that’s who has the ear of our leaders.
I’d love to see property prices collapse and corporate landlords take it on the chin. Maybe it would result in more owner-owned businesses and fewer corporate and franchisees? Maybe it would mean more and more affordable housing instead of shoebox condos on top of a Starbucks+Winners+Bank+Loblaw