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Canada and the World

The different names can get a little confusing. It's an Airbus A330. Then MRTT when converted for military use. Then Canada has its own designation, CC-330 Husky.

What was truly ridiculous and bizarre was given the type the same name as the squadron's callsign.

"Tower this is Husky Husky 15, request overshoot."
 
New policy:


Mostly disappointing. The personnel stuff is good though.
 
Speaking of the True North Strong and Free, April 9th marks the beginning of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, 107 years ago. If your family has roots in Canada dating to the early 1900’s, chances are you have a family connection somewhere. For those feeling light on details, or simply wondering why this matters, there are a myriad of books and documentaries detailing the subject. Begin with Pierre Berton and work from there.

I try to imagine my underage grandfather who was there with the Machine Gun Regiment, and fail.
IMG_0390.jpeg
 
New policy:


Mostly disappointing. The personnel stuff is good though.
An edited version of the funding table in Appendix A. Am I the only person who thinks this is very backloaded?
ONSF Funds.png

The current government doesn't want to fund it, and the next government will cancel everything anyways. That's my read on this situation.

Can't say I'm impressed with this (again, my own editing):

Housing Funds CAF.png
 
It's not even that it's back loaded. It's that they have no sense of urgency on the long term stuff. They could have easily said, we will have options ready to present in 4 years for our exploratory lines. They couldn't even do that. And that wouldn't even have cost much.

This is even true in issues they are supposedly ideologically aligned with. Imagine not even funding the start of a housing study for 2 years.

This is a ridiculously poor piece for 2 years of supposed work. It's the kind of thing where a student has a month for a paper and types it up the night before. It's a C effort. And that's obvious.
 
Maher has been getting increasingly out of touch. He has been drifting to the right, and seems to be settling into the smug, self-satisfied, incurious old person trope.

I found the shot at air quality to be kind of random. The fact that they were almost all clustered in BC/AB makes me think it is related to wildfire smoke.
 
I found the shot at air quality to be kind of random. The fact that they were almost all clustered in BC/AB makes me think it is related to wildfire smoke.

It is.

Maher has been getting increasingly out of touch. He has been drifting to the right, and seems to be settling into the smug, self-satisfied, incurious old person trope.

Sure. But there's more than an element of truth in there. In the past there was the implicit idea that we gave up some economic freedom to have certain really good universal services (healthcare, education, transit, rec centres and libraries, etc) relative to the US. But increasingly that deal is falling apart. We get crappy services and poor economics. We are starting to lag the US more across many more metrics. I wouldn't say that is all on the Liberals. But Trudeau has not helped. And if Trudeau was happy to be seen as the poster boy for Western progressives, he's going to have to wear being the cautionary tale too.

And heck, so many Canadians love feeling smug about the US. I'd say turnabout is fair play.
 
I guess, it felt badly and lazily researched. If one of their two knocks against Canada is that we have wildfires, I think they missed a bunch more pertinent issues and policy failures they could have called out. The other being that our unemployment rate is higher misses the point that is always has been, and at least in part because they are different measures of unemployment that are not directly comparable. Our unemployment rate is near a 50 year low. Hardly a sign of recent failure.


He does mention more important issues such as uncontrolled immigration, housing availability, access to and public cost of health care which are valid criticisms, but he suggests they are the result of 'wokeism' and not bad policy.

It's all just very lazy. It is the wrong diagnosis for the problems Canada is facing.
 
Maher has been getting increasingly out of touch. He has been drifting to the right, and seems to be settling into the smug, self-satisfied, incurious old person trope.

I found the shot at air quality to be kind of random. The fact that they were almost all clustered in BC/AB makes me think it is related to wildfire smoke.

Access to health care is certainly an issue; but cost vis-a-vis the US (and relative to overall coverage)? We are spending what, 12-13% of our GDP vs what 16-18% in the US. It's a weird take.

AoD
 
Access to health care is certainly an issue; but cost vis-a-vis the US (and relative to overall coverage)? We are spending what, 12-13% of our GDP vs what 16-18% in the US. It's a weird take.

AoD
Cost is an issue vs other industrialized countries with single payer systems. We pay a lot for mediocre results.
 
Cost is an issue vs other industrialized countries with single payer systems. We pay a lot for mediocre results.

We hear that a lot, and I do think there's certainly some truth to that, but that statement can be deceptive.

Here's the OECD data:

1713114360184.png


So, important to note here is the darker blue bard is gov't healthcare spending, the light blue is out of pocket/private.

On that basis, Canada spends 8% of GDP on healthcare, which is less than the U.S. spends on its public systems (Medicaid, Medicare, CHIRP and the V.A.)

In fact you have to go down to the number 12 spender on the list, Portugal to find a country spending less of its GDP on public healthcare.
The private costs are driven by prescriptions, for which we pay among the highest prices in the world after the U.S. and dental.

****

This, I think might be our most problematic outcome:

1713115207082.png



No other stat in the list, off hand, jumps out at me as that negative, with results that under perform the OECD average by the much.
 

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