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I can think of lots of things that are better in Europe. Our Employment Insurance is too stingy and punitive, especially for maternity/parental leave. . Too many public services are hanging by a thread. Transit is a joke. Severance pay upon termination of employment is insufficient and employers requiring job candidates to waive their legal right to sue for severance as a condition of employment should be illegal. University is too expensive. Vacation time is insufficient. CPP enhancements that Trudeau brought in are 20 years too late. Indian Act needs to he scrapped and our relationship with FN needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Municipalities are too financially dependent on goodwill from provincial governments and are cash-starved. Most European countries do at least most of these better (UK is a toss-up) and don’t have the FN issue although they have immigration/integration problems we don’t need to worry about. Nobody’s coming here on a raft. Plus, I don’t speak German (although my wife does).

   

I can think of lots of things that are better in Europe. Our Employment Insurance is too stingy and punitive, especially for maternity/parental leave. . Too many public services are hanging by a thread. Transit is a joke. Severance pay upon termination of employment is insufficient and employers requiring job candidates to waive their legal right to sue for severance as a condition of employment should be illegal. University is too expensive. Vacation time is insufficient. CPP enhancements that Trudeau brought in are 20 years too late. Indian Act needs to he scrapped and our relationship with FN needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Municipalities are too financially dependent on goodwill from provincial governments and are cash-starved. Most European countries do at least most of these better (UK is a toss-up) and don’t have the FN issue although they have immigration/integration problems we don’t need to worry about. Nobody’s coming here on a raft. Plus, I don’t speak German (although my wife does).

   

Many of those things are better in Europe because they have higher taxes and/or more density. Transit is great, but in huge spread out Canadian cities, it doesn't reap the rewards it does in denser, more compact European cities. Their significantly higher taxes - sales tax alone can be 20% or more in many western European countries (I'd have no problem with higher income taxes even though it would mean me paying more) - affords them the ability to pay for more social services.

Being packed into denser cities with few large rural/remote areas, they've had to learn to get along with their neighbours and as such have a more collective attitude overall when compared to North Americans, which has vast remote areas and low density generally.

The biggest difference is that they do not have the US next door, which puts the individual on a pedestal and for most of Canada's history has caused a brain drain by people seeking to pay less tax and earn more money. This has forced Canada to walk the line between the two dichotomies and it's hard to have your cake and eat it too.

   

Not a failed state but a divided one for sure. Class hasn’t mattered as much in a long time and now it’s all about the Benjamins, baby; you’ve basically got the struggling majority trying to make ends meet each week, the worried well-to-do and a few thousand oligarchs on top.

   

Sorry T, but the fool made three posts in this thread calling Canada a failed state, having a”fairy tale of greatness,” a third world country and being mediocre. ALL the blame of “central “Canada .
If you hate the place you live...MOVE AWAY!

   

   

There is a difference between “working for change” and hate.

   

That's FV's opinion. He has all the right in the world to it. If he's anything like hundreds of thousands or even millions of other Albertans who've endured the last five years of perpetual recession he has absolutely no reason to be grateful to the federal government. I know I don't. I owe the government of this country nothing in terms of loyalty. Whatever sop they're tossing to us during the epidemic is cold comfort to their actions on the regulatory front that helped put us into a practical economic depression long before COVID or the Saudi/Russia feud destroying the oil price. I said Trudeau's doing a good job with the coronavirus, certainly much better than that piece of shit in the White House is doing. I'll even go father and say right now that he's also doing better than that limp-dick Andrew Scheer would have if he'd become PM. But that's all I'm going to give him. He stepped up to do his job and he deserves credit for it. But that doesn't mean any of his detractors or opponents have to have some kind of come-to-Jesus moment and drink the Kool-Aid for the entire Liberal agenda. It ain't gonna happen.

And when a province pays more than it's fair share of the funds that build and maintain the federal system the people living there should not be scolded for not being grateful enough when something catastrophic happens and the feds have to prop up more of the country than they did before. What the hell is it with this country that so many think others should be on their hands and knees as fucking supplicants to get an "entitlement" that they've spent their entire lives paying into? This is just more proof that underneath all the cuddly crap there's a mean and ugly spirit residing in too many people in this country. It might not be the outright hatred that too many Americans have for each other but it sure as hell isn't a spirit of brotherhood and friendship with each other either.

   

I have never been a fan of the "love it or leave it" mantra. I remember hearing it a lot as a small kid growing up during the Vietnam war. Heard it in my own house. My dad was a hard right kind of guy. He served in the army during that era in Korea. My mom probably would have been a hippy had she not been living in the deep south where that shit did NOT fly. It was like a civil war in my house every night when Cronkite came on the tube for the evening news. The saying was mainly coming from older people and directed to younger people to get them to get in line. They were supposed to stop protesting the war, suit up and go fight it. No questions asked. The older generations had went off to fight foreign wars when asked to do so. The boomers needed to get with the program and do so as well.

I have seen the boomers take a lot of shit on this forum lately. A lot of personal insults as well. I can say that no generation has changed the world more than the boomers. They said "hell no we won't go!!!" They were willing to fuck up their lives with felony convictions, and serve time in prison to not fight a war that they felt was immoral. Just imagine if Germany had millions of people that felt that way in 1939. The boomers ended the draft. The boomers ended the war. We would still be fighting there today if everyone just suited up and went along. We had no strategy to win, and the Vietnamese were not going to quit. They were in it for the long haul. They had been fighting for a very long time before we came on the scene. The boomers got the voting age lowered. The boomers fought for equal rights for minorities. The boomers were sitting in at lunch counters. The boomers were marching in segregated cities to end Jim Crow laws. The boomers (who are sitting on the courts today) got rights for gay marriage approved.

The boomers were told to love it or leave it. The vast majority of them did not leave. They stayed and fought to change things they did not agree with. They had had police dogs sicced on them. They had fire hoses turned on them. They were brutally beaten, teargassed, and arrested by police departments. They served lengthy prison sentences for minor offences like John Sinclair who got 10 years for 2 joints. They were stripped of their livelihood like Muhammed Ali.

The boomers were told to love it or leave it. They chose to ignore that advise. They stayed and fought to change things they did not like. The U.S. is a better country today because they chose to ignore that advise. The world is a better place because they chose to ignore that advise. People have a right to fight to change the things that they do not agree with. They do not have to leave. No one should ask them to.

   

   

Exactly, how are a much a weak and complacent pinheads from the Windsor-Quebec City Corridor entitled to the allegiance of the entire nation? Beave and Fife exemplify why Canadians deserve to be sneered at for their incompetence and delusions of grandeur. Had the Liberals they voted for displayed an inkling of intelligence they would have not run as large deficits as they had for the last four years (the same applies to the Cons before them) and set that money aside as they had lectured Albertans to do for years. Lo and behold, the knuckle-draggers from the 416 and 905 believed that the good times would never end and lavished their money on boondoggles like their failed green energy initiates. Well done, Cletus. Maybe you could get back to ogling your cousin with your hand in your pants.

I have reserved on my opinion on Trudeau's response to the pandemic because I am more interested in his response to the aftermath once it passes. If anyone believes that things are going back to the way they were before, then they really are dumber than they look. Strap in because the ride isn't over yet. COVID-19 revealed the glaring weaknesses in the western world as a whole (not just the United States and Canada) and this is a reckoning. Of course, Canadians being as self-absorbed as they are will want their Starbucks and cheap goods from China rather than face the harsh realities outside GTA city limits.

   

+5

Right now, there are lots of people on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook are talking about their plans to move out of Alberta because of the destructive policies of the UCP.

As much as I understand that sentiment, I'd prefer they stay and fight against these incompetent bozos and try and win the next election (or at least reduce the UCP to a minority government).

Running away like a little bitch just ensures that the UCP will win the next election.

   

Would prefer Alberta had the same economy as New Brunswick or PEI then? Because that's what it sounds like - you wish that Albertans didn't earn good wages and therefore pay lots of taxes. Then our tax dollars wouldn't go to pay into equalization.

Don't worry, that day is coming - with our current government tripling down on O&G with billions of dollars in tax cuts for multi-national oil companies (who take the bonus and don't hire anyone), to billions of dollar more invested in pipelines, and cutting subsidies for tech companies and movie productions, we're well on our way to becoming a have not province.

And if you think that makes me happy one bit, you're deluded.

I live here. My family lives here. My friends live here (that includes people like you too). And all of them are going to pay the price of a government that insists on propping up 20th century industries instead of adapting with the times. Fuck, why not support the typewriter and VCR-making industries while we're at it?

Our day of reckoning is coming, and despite you and others in this province bitching about how the federal Liberals handicapped Alberta with regulations and cancelling pipelines, the sad fact is Alberta pissed away THREE fucking oil/gas booms (1970s, 1998-2007, 2010-2014) all on its own. Instead of socking money away in our provincial RRSP (the Heritage Trust Fund), we chose low taxes and profligate spending on vanity projects and boondoggles. The HTF today is worth the same (adjusted for inflation) as it was in 1991, and successive governments have withdrawn $43 BILLION over its lifetime to prop up general revenue!

The conservative provincial governments elected by Albertans during all of those booms were the ones who chose those priorities, so as Jim Prentice once said, "We only have to look in the mirror at who's to blame for our financial situation."

   

If Albertans had voted Liberal all those years, like you sort of suggested recently in a similar discussion, then right now we'd have a provincial economy exactly like NB, NS, or NFLD. Instead of becoming a primary part of the country and a massive economic engine we'd have ended up as another backwater, all due to the thorough looting the federal Liberals would have done that would have been entirely abetted by any Alberta Liberal MP's. There would have been no need for a NEP imposed from the top-down on a hostile province because the Liberal agents and operatives here would have ensured that instead of a percentage of the revenue from the NEP going to Ottawa would have been instead a multi-decade long orgy of sending ALL the money to Ottawa.

   

Actually, my area code is 306 and has been for 43 years. Stay awake in class guy!

   

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