Category: Great Moments In Socialism

Money For Nothing

It’s all well and good to end the requirements for useless ingredients for streaming services, but why turn around and pay streamers directly for stuff no one watches?

The federal government will “eliminate” the financial contribution requirement for streamers set by the CRTC and replace it with government funding, it said in a court document.

Nonetheless, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether this will actually happen or not.

The office of Culture Minister Marc Miller did not immediately respond when asked to clarify the government’s stance or state whether the government plans to eliminate the contribution requirement permanently or temporarily.

 

I Couldn’t Help Noticing The Shouting And Crying

On racist gardening, and the somewhat doubtful benefits of polyamory:

And we mustn’t forget the tale, via New York magazine, of the Brooklynite comedian and podcaster named Billy, his girlfriend Megan, and his girlfriend Megan’s other boyfriend Kyle. An exhaustingly self-consciousness three-way entanglement resulting in a series of grimly farcical situations that were framed, rather coyly, as “relationship difficulties.”

The above, I should add, was one of several attempts by New York magazine to portray unfaithfulness and cuckoldry, and the consequent anxieties, as the very zenith of a progressive lifestyle.

As when a betrayed husband, Michael Sonmore, boasted, unconvincingly, that he “finally became a feminist” thanks to his wife’s nocturnal sexual adventures with a chap named Paulo. A wife who was “embracing herself” and becoming empowered, we were told, while her children, aged six and three, wondered where their Mommy was.

All this and more.

Define “Everything”

Well, maybe everything except for an end to supply mismanagement and the US booze ban. It never occurs to our political masters that concessions on those items would actually be a win/win for everyone. David Eby needs to be reminded that Canada is like the guy at the poker table holding deuce-seven off suit. An all-in bet probably wouldn’t be a wise choice.

Ford called for tit-for-tat tariffs on Tuesday and suggested the provinces could “dismantle the U.S. if we wanted to” by exerting pressure through energy exports.

“If you need cards to get the agreement that we need on softwood lumber, to get the agreement that we need on growing prosperity for Americans and for Canadians again … then British Columbia will be there,” Eby said.

Canadian Exceptionalism

When your currency starts to outpace the Japanese Yen in the race to get to the bottom of the dirty laundry pile, you just know that’s not a good outcome.

Net short Canadian dollar positions held by non-commercial accounts stood at $12.5 billion in the latest weekly data from the ‌Commodity Futures Trading Commission that was released on Friday….

It was the ​highest net short position for a second straight week of any currency traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the largest in the loonie since December 2024.

Manitoba Grifters

What’s the phrase “I’m willing to entertain…” supposed to mean anyway? That he’s going to hold the project ransom at some point? It would be nice to hear “I enthusiastically endorse…” instead, but that would probably land him in hot water with the greenies.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew says he’s open to a west-east pipeline being pitched by his counterparts in Alberta and Ontario.

But he says major projects like pipelines need to be built the right way, by addressing environmental concerns and bringing Indigenous governments on board.

Is Canada A Suicide Pact?

Apparently most provincial premiers cannot grasp that these tactics have the same chance of success as an economy sedan playing chicken with a bus. Wiser leaders would know enough to concede before it’s too late.

British Columbia Premier David Eby delivered ​the ​starkest message: “There is not a chance in hell that U.S. alcohol is going back on the ​shelves in British Columbia.”

On Competence And Other Sins

From the clown quarter of academia:

According to Dr Donna Riley, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.

As Dr Riley complains that expectations of rigour generate both inequality and “white male heterosexual privilege,” presumably she would rather we erased distinctions more broadly, between ability and mediocrity, and between diligence and half-arsedness. Though her own so-called scholarship, and indeed her employment, suggest that these wishes may already be coming true.

One of these.

Canadian Exceptionalism

If opposition to concrete buildings full of computers is this intense, that leads me to believe that a pipeline from Alberta to Sarnia is never going to happen. It beggars belief that Wab Kinew would kill the idea of a data center in Manitoba, yet propose a pipeline to Churchill. The bad economics of that aside, does he think that the greenies will sign off on a pipeline crossing the tundra?

Olds residents have been rallying against a proposal for a 10-building campus with a total of 1.4 gigawatts of gas-fired power generation. In June, opponents held a protest in Vancouver to demonstrate against the opening of AI data centres. In Hamilton, a proposal to put a data centre campus on the harbourfront has sparked fierce pushback.

 

Strangled Assets

I can identify another problem with supply mismanagement: if it were to end, your assets may suddenly be worth a lot less than they used to be, maybe even less than your debts.

A company that earns guaranteed margins because a regulation, exclusive contract or closed market keeps competitors out tends to stop doing the things that keep a business sharp. It stops scrutinizing its cost structure, investing in efficiency or asking how it would cope or what it would charge if its customers had somewhere else to go. The protection may feel like a moat. In practice, it is closer to an anaesthetic.

We Demand That Atlas Shrugs!

It seems that New York is taking a cue from Manitoba: let’s make up phony reasons to reject private sector investment. God forbid that industrial infrastructure should use energy….

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday imposing the country’s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers, which house thousands of computer servers and require massive amounts of energy and a steady supply of water to keep cool.

His Rampant Manliness

On competitively progressive parenting advice; on academics whose paycheque depends on propagating failure; and a lecturer in “critical whiteness studies” apologising, at length, for his heterosexuality:

Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.”

One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of lecturers in “critical whiteness studies.”

All this and more.

Passing The Buck

It’s not hard to see in who’s favor this dispute is going to be resolved once it gets kicked upstairs to the Feds.

A lobster fishing group in Nova Scotia has failed in its bid to persuade a judge that a First Nation does not have the treaty right to commercially fish for lobster out of season and without a licence.

In a decision released Wednesday, Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Ann Smith says the Unified Fisheries Conservation Alliance could not proceed with its claim against the Sipekne’katik First Nation because the court lacked jurisdiction.

Where Doing The Obvious Is Out Of The Question

On radical flouncing; on the self-induced panic attacks of an empowered feminist; on being bare-arsed in a terribly radical way; and how to deter muggers with tiny bits of cardboard:

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.

You see, by issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

All this, and other progressive wonders.

The Part I Like Best

About harm reduction programs, is the way they build success upon success.

Alberta just shut its supervised drug consumption site down. Vancouver, the city that pioneered this model in Canada, is pulling back from it too. And right now, in 2026, Wab Kinew’s NDP government is moving ahead with a new one in Manitoba. When the two jurisdictions that ran this experiment the longest are both walking away from it, Winnipeg doubling down should worry every homeowner, renter, and parent in this city.

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