lol, you don’t know me, The Guardian.
To people who keeps thinking that Carney’s playing along with realpolitik given the situation we’re in, I for one don’t buy that playing according to these realities and trying to move the country away from fossil fuel is mutually exclusive. You can play along with Smith, Poilievre, Trump, but you also have so many other provinces where you could be pushing towards that greener future. You’re governing a nation, not a city state with extremely limited resources and a small monocultural population.
Now, I’m not saying that nothing is done by Carney’s gov. They’ve been doing some stuff, but they’re mostly financial instruments aimed at industries. The approaches so far have been largely crticized as insufficient to highly insufficient. The theme from the government seems to be this: they want both green and fossil fuel industries to thrive. I find that grossly naive: green industries are young and budding and it’s difficult for them to survive, whereas fossil fuel industries are established and have the space and resources to keep finding ways to kill green industries to prevent them green industries from eating their pie.
To clarify, one of the things Carney’s gov is doing in the green space is to offer grants for companies looking to go into green battery tech. This is a pretty important piece of technology that’s still quite the question mark to be fair: as in, what even is this? Many look to hydrogen and I know a professor who’s actively working on hydrogen batteries, but it’s gonna take a good while to get that to a place where we as end consumers see it in our day-to-day. Meanwhile, it seems like we’re building a gigefactory to produce EV batteries in St Thomas, Ontario, with Volkswagen, but that’s likely using tech we already know, i.e. lithium-ion. It also seems like the planned primary supplier of lithium is going to be from a company in Quebec, which uses mines around North America.
Now, I’m not saying Carney’s recent O&G-friendly posture is not abhorrent to see; I’m actually appalled by it. There’s a part of me that hopes that this is the feds trying to throw Alberta a lifeline to get them out of the O&G hellhole by trying to push them towards so-called “Blue Hydrogens” (which I know isn’t a great resource given the reliance on O&G still and having to rely on these industries in making sure harmful emissions like methane are properly contained), which will later bring them to green once they have more infra to support a less carbonated society, but the way Carney’s gov has handled the messaging does not stoke any confidence in that being the case. I mean, if that is the goal, why aren’t they saying it, right? And from what we know about Smith, there’s no guarantee that Alberta will going to work towards Blue Hydrogens, and we’d just be giving O&G companies freebies to continue tearing our lives apart.
It sucks that we had no realistic (as in actually able to win) alternative. Not exactly thrilled with him, but he is clearly better than the other possible leader we could have been stuck with.
Honestly, dude, fuck off. Carney and the Liberals are barely better than the Conservatives. They’re basically the same party at this point except the LPC won’t outlaw gay marriage.
I’m getting so fucking tired of this “no realistic alternative” bullshit being followed up with directed weakening of it. People will ignore and downplay and not support the NDP and then go “see, no one voted for them!”, often times looking at seats and ignoring total votes cast, too. 2021 election had them get over half the votes of the Liberals but the way people talked you’d think they had ten supporters, tops.
This is a country of cowards who are just handing our rights over to conservatives whose only campaign practice for a decade has been to use their slightly worse counterpart as a boogeyman so we never elect anyone who can actually get shit done for us. The least you could do is not perpetuate this nonsense “no realistic alternative” line for them.
This is why we need ranked choice voting so that people can vote NDP without the risk
He’s Mark Harper. He would have led the PCs if they weren’t so many nutjobs in the party funded by the USA. He killed the carbon levy to get elected.
We can criticize politicians all we want, but Canadians don’t actually want green policies, because they vote against them, or they don’t give a shit enough to vote at all. So in the end, we got a government that formed a majority with PC MPs who sold out on some back door deal.
So much like the US, we now have a one party system. If he fucks up, the backlash will net a Fascist government in Canada that will make Donald Trump look like Che Guevara. This is because Canadians never vote for anyone, they vote angry against incumbents when their entitlement is threatened.
Yup yup yup. I was asked by a street corner CTV person about my opinion in the mayoral election and I said we needed to vote progressive, and that it’s all well and good to want to change, but it has to be real and positive change, not just change for the sake of it.
I’m just so tired of everyone refusing to treat the NDP with any damn respect. They have policies that are shown to work all over the world and yet they’re “dreamers” while the population at large just keeps chasing the same old conservative bullshit.
In my riding the NDP got 3.5% of the vote. I would absolutely prefer an NDP government but they were never going to win in my riding.
Yea, and I’m sure a lot of people thought the same thing and also didn’t vote for them. Vote for what you believe in or don’t show up. Again, the least you could do is not actively support the people making life worse. Don’t give them your votes, they don’t give a shit about your reason and in fact the LPC relies on your belief that they’re the only valid alternative. They do not care that you don’t like them as long they don’t actually face any consequences for the shit they do.
The LPC straight-up denied us election reform so they could keep winning. Anti-democratic as fuck, should have disqualified them from being an option and yet.
Canada has very similar issues to the Untied States. One party of fascists and another party of people who don’t try very hard because they’re running on “at least we’re not the fascists”
And a third party, with good policies, which everyone desperately wants to pretend has zero chance. The US has a real two-party system; ours is by choice. It’s stupid as hell that we just keep letting it happen.
What we need is ranked choice voting so people can vote NDP without the risk of it leading to conservatives winning
Yea, and the LPC has already shown us that they refuse to make that happen because they know what would mean. The Conservatives would never, but the LPC literally ran on it and then through away any changes because it would mean denocracy would destroy them. They don’t give a flying fuck about what we think, they only want power, and they’re certainly not going to make things better if we keep electing them.
This. He’s not a climate guy. But the alternatives would destroy the environment to spite people who want to protect it.
At least Carney can be reasoned with.
From what I understand, he used to be greener. But there’s a lot at stake to play ball with… and Trump is volatile. So is Danielle Smith…
I was expecting his leadership to reflect his book values more, but the complexity of geopolitics, or some other factor, has put that aside.
Agreed. There’s definitely an element of Realpolitik at play. The USA is creating a power vacuum and Canada needs to fill enough of that void in the short term to maintain leverage long term.
I don’t know much about China or Russia but I’m going to assume their billionaire oligarchs as equally soulless as the cretins that rule western nations.
Did anyone ever think he was a climate guy? He was voted for mostly being neither Trudeau nor Poilievre. It’s been a big positive otherwise that he’s a true statesman, but I can’t imagine what would have made anyone think he was a climate guy.
First thing he did was kill the carbon levy, misbranded by our US owned media as a “tax”.
Oh has he been? Like the attacking unions and workers strikes, fucking around with pipelines, helping private O&G companies take our stuff, or floating the idea of privatizing airports? Or his sovereign wealth fund that doesn’t actually work the way one of those should? There are all the ads I see about how the government is supposedly saving me money but the net effect if their actions is doing worse for me than before. Oh, and let us not forget about how he’s giving over $8bil in 50% off development fee funding to Ontario so that private home builders can pocket some extra money while they continue to raise prices, all paid for by us because he won’t tax rich people.
Yea, real statesmanlike behaviour. He’s just another piece of shit conservative whose only positive is that he doesn’t seem to hate gay people.
The people who appointed him UN special envoy for climate action probably thought he was a climate guy. The people who read his book (not me) seemed to think he was a climate guy. The people who believed his election campaign promises might’ve thought he was a climate guy. He probably still thinks he’s a climate guy.
He talks a lot about the importance of climate change, so it comes as a surprise to quite a few people that he doesn’t seem to be in favour of doing anything about it.
I read his book. My impression was he’d stop the orphan grinding machine… not make it solar powered.
What kbal said, but also, let’s be real here: nobody who’s not taking the climate emergency seriously is a “true statesman”. It’s just plain unserious and irresponsible, like calling a junkie who says “oh I’ll just have one shot of heroin this Friday and I’m going to check myself into rehab Monday” committed to getting clean. That’s not statesmanship, it’s just profound luck of seriousness in the face of overwhelming evidence. Any politician who’s not “a climate guy” is by definition a clown.
Exactly! The climate is a major issue facing the entire planet, even the fucking US army considers it a threat, so to act like it’s not important is immediate disqualification from being able to say you care about the country.
Besides, it’s not like he’s actually done anything else statesmanlike, either.
This is my third attempt to comment without relaying my disgust at all these stupid questions.
Fuck off you nitwits!
No one who understands what bankers stand for ever thought he would be a climate guy.
Woooow really? Who woulda thunk that the ultra capitalist establishment guy would do such things?
