Okay, and? Like, the CBC isn’t exactly the height of journalism, but it does seem like this is trying to portray some kind of substantial decline in recent years. The cost of living plus rent has increased by 6.1% as of the start of 2026 (before the increase in oil prices and its reverberating effects). People are moving around Canada more because they can’t fucking afford to live here, so of course the prices in the most expensive places has changed. The cost of that has also been shifted to other parts of the country, it didn’t just decline. Many higher-demand, affordable units in Nova Scotia are up 18%. In Ontario, tenants rights were decreased to the point that you now have to pay your landlord to see them in court for non-payment hearings, and the grace period between non-payment and eviction was cut in half.

All of this and Liberals are still only considering neoliberal policies in response to the dire state of things here. This is not good fucking news, a general and marginal decrease in rent is not enough and has cost so much more than other options.

That’d be correct

Yeah but like, when something isn’t enough, people criticize it.

I think that the conclusion here is, “there’s basically no privacy left in the modern world,” speaks to the tech literacy crisis more than it does to the expanse and fortitude of surveillance infrastructure. Like, yes, there is an incredible lack of state regulation to limit the scope of data collection, but that doesn’t mean that this is unavoidable.

There are measures you can take to secure your home network against data collection and telemetry such as buying a managed, wired router and using wireless access points, as well as hosting a DNS so that you can better regulate the data that enters and exits your network. Your phone is definitely more difficult to prevent collection from by merit of the restrictive design of most operating systems and the fact that they literally transmit your location to function, but Android devices can take measures like installing GrapheneOS, which helps to severely limit the ability of apps to transmit that data without your knowledge. Even beyond that, phones themselves are not super expensive and performance has plateaued for about half a decade now (used devices are relatively cheap), so, you do not need to use a single device for everything and can disperse your usage data in a way that also works to obscure your identity. As you said, the information you provide to social media can be controlled by users, and their penetration into other services you use and its access to your user data in browsers can be limited similarly.

There certainly is still privacy in 2026, but the state benefits from making it as difficult as possible to restrict, and so there is now a skillset to ensure a level of privacy that was not required before. Our system feeds on precarity, so this is not even close to a new phenomenon. Think about the need to develop driving skills, finance literacy, workplace etiquette, consumer caution, knowledge on your rights, the fact that you do need a cellular device to participate in this system without punishment or that much of what I mentioned above requires some sort of income to execute effectively. All of these are consequences in the same way that the need to develop privacy skills are.

It is strange how under-discussed the senate reform has been over the past decade.

Lmao, oh, are they? Wow, I mean, at least the totally-not-white-supremacist-genocidal-settler-state Canada made it all the way to 2026 without white supremacy entering its media and politics.

I really hope someone writes a book about how selective Canadians have been about what constitutes imperialism. Alberta seperatism gained traction over ten years ago and can be attributed to US social media algos promoting fascism as much as it can be to the inherent inequities in Canada’s election system, extractivist economy, and settler-colonialism. It would be extremely difficult to argue that Canada has had any single election at any level without US intervention in some way over the past decade.

Is this a joke?

You can do whatever you want bud, just don’t come around me pretending that you give a shit about anything having to do with helping people.

That these are two equivalencies in your settler-brain is exactly what I am criticizing.

How you took “Canada is imperialist and imperialism is bad” as “I want Canada to exist but just spend money how I like” is something I can only take graciously if I attribute it to a genuine deficiency in your language and knowledge on these topics. “We don’t disagree that Canada should be pursuing a more activist role in the world, like it does for Ukrain and Cuba [lol],” yes, we do. I do not want Canada to fucking exist, I do not want Canada to colonize, “international law” does not apply to imperialists who have power over the institutions of “international law,” like the US (in large part because of Canadian subordination to the US). “Activism” does not apply here in any other way than as some lib-brained nonsense to moralize the different vectors of Canadian control as something distinct from settler-colonialism and imperialism. You do fucking care about morals, you just accept that yours are universally correct and should be what is enforced globally; wonder where you learned to think like that. If this violence isn’t fundamentally wrong on a moral basis for you, stop talking about, seriously.

Ukrainians are being attacked by Russia, which, unsurprisingly, is not as powerful as the EU and the US, which are exclusively responsible for the genocide against Palestinians; along with their significantly – overwhelmingly – longer list of targets for genocide. I wonder why Ukrainians were able to flee into Europe and Canada, but it is a “refugee crisis” when it is anyone fleeing from Euro-American imperialism, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Btw, yeah, I don’t fucking care if Nazis in Ukraine are “fighting for their country,” and you shouldn’t either if you knew a fucking thing about how Europe and the US opportunistically support more fascistic, oppressive groups in the countries they “save” from oppression. You a big Taliban supporter are you? Al-Qaeda? Nationalist Popular Front? You mentioned Cuba, have you ever learned why there is a communist state in Cuba? Maybe take a look, this shit is not new.

You have taken for granted all of the values that have been taught to you, and believe that whatever is good must be good. If you actually care about people resisting oppression, you wouldn’t take the Canadian state at face value when they say the money they spend is going toward that. When I point out that Canada does not and will never support vulnerable groups in these other countries, I’m not doing so to advocate for its support, but to demonstrate that it does not and to spur you to question what is distinct about these instances. That isn’t because they’re doing it wrong, it’s because I know that if they’re sending money, it is exactly to prevent any challenge to this hegemony.

If there’s a lawsuit, it’s already a practice.

“no u” Get over yourself.

Yes; it is incredibly pompous to take a criticism of the Canadian state as an indicator that I’m some poor rube who is unaware of municipal politics or political activism. It isn’t the deduction of a person who is very experienced in that form of action or the people who participate in it, ironically enough. I meet dudes like this at the least challenging kinds of events, and they’re always the most self-rewarding.

It is also painfully liberal to try and stifle federal criticism by implying that someone is not already exercising the power they have in different ways. It calls on neoliberal virtues of individual responsibility as a means of dissuading systemic criticism. You think I don’t see people like this all the time dude? Get real.

Oh, is that so? Wow, first time I’ve heard of grassroots direct action. Love that you also directed it into politics specifically and not something more actionable, really pushing the liberal appropriation there.

One of the biggest blindspots for white Canadians is how Ukraine has been used to reassert white supremacy. Canada doesn’t send fucking money to Lebanon or Palestine, it doesn’t send any to Iran, to Venezuela, to any state that is victim to US and Canadian imperialism. Beyond that, the wealth that is extracted, taxed, and then transferred to Ukraine is in fact also a result of settler-colonialism within Canada’s borders, and it’s not like white Canadians have the same fervor to help indigenous peoples here fight imperialism.

So tired of this fake, performative claim that any of this money is out of altruism and not to secure Euro- and American-imperialist interests.

Edit: also, if you read my fucking comment, you’d have seen the reference to corporate subsidies (“tax breaks”), but obviously your addressing it here is more in service of some lib “elites are the problem” narrative and no concern for the systemic conditions that facilitate that “misuse” of wealth.

Well, I’m sure this is preferable to all of us over a cost of living subsidy, food and utilities price regulation, investment in sustainable infrastructure and public transit systems (that aren’t just for mining or logging), broader funding for crucial social welfare programs that have been consistently eroded at provincial levels, etc.

Edit: Really irritating to see the fake outrage about imperialism from Canadians when it comes to Ukraine. You people seriously think that you can’t criticize this shit when a neolib is in office and has actively and explicitly committed the admin to looting even more from this land? Unreal.

Remember, this is what they mean by economic “sovereignty” and “elbows up.” Canada is fundamentally a tool of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and it should be no surprise that its borders protect most of the world’s mining corporations.

Wow, more public money going to private companies, awesome, and it is to destroy the land? Sick. So happy.

The best thing for capitalists in this country was Trump, you can say shit is “for Canadians” and libs will just fucking eat it up.

Right, I get what it is saying it will do, what I’m asking is how this could even be enforced in a system that is so dependent on coerced and child labour. The Liberals want a closer tie with the Chinese state, so I can’t see how this could be passed and enforced effectively within even that context, let alone the fact that coerced labour exists in the US, has for decades, and is not even recognized as such by Canadians (exactly because it is racialized and formalized in a way that occludes the coercive nature of that carceral system). Those are big trading partners with Canada, so it isn’t surprising if it isn’t enforced there, but then if it is enforced, that would mean the countries it is enforced on would be subjected to this ban and increased scrutiny because of their position of power relative to Canada and other imperial forces, not because they are exceptional in their fostering of coerced and child labour.

Since S-211 already defined child and forced labour and mandated reporting by entities (and did so in a way that even applies to labour conditions in Canada and the US), why is this additional measure necessary and how is it effective in ways that S-211 is defficient? The specific thing about C-251 appears to be the introduction of the power to hold goods suspected to be from supply chains that make use of coerced and child labour and to preemptively identify certain goods and areas as suspect and restrict or ban importation on that merit. Coffee, chocolate, and oil all come from economies that make use of coerced and child labour, let alone the supply chains for precious metals required for computer manufacturing. Canada itself and corporations based within its borders play a large part in the maintainence of brutal working conditions that include coerced and child labour, which means that this law would set precedents for similar restrictions on Canadian goods in other countries if it is indeed meant to curb these practices globally.

So like, again, I’m curious how this is meant to work in a way that isn’t just the formalization of racist trade practices without it becoming a coercive tool to use on smaller, global south economies that the Canadian state wishes to exercise more power over.

They’re not gonna, a requirement for the direction they want Canada’s economy to go in is the continued exploitation of workers within the state’s borders. They’re going to respond with a number of neoliberalized subsidy programs at most to deflect criticism for a few years. If we’re lucky, some tax credits. Libs having a majority has basically left us on our own, start focusing on municipal and provincial politics and see what can be done at those levels (which is a lot).