Interesting perspective.Or a schizophrenic.
Canada, and Canadians have profited greatly from having a powerful and prosperous neighbour and ally. Not that very many Canadians like to admit that. We would not enjoy our current standard of living without this lopsided arrangement. Someone has to pay the utility bill for this planet. It is certainly not Canada. What percentage of the UN budget is borne by the US?
We may not have a full-blown culture war in Canada yet. But the storm clouds are on the horizon. The self-appointed intellectual elites in Canada have been pushing this country to the brink since the 1960s with their social agendas. It is slowing tearing the country apart, not that many Canadians are cognizant of the problems. Most are too busy watching reality TV on their iPhones to notice. :nuts:
"America Rant" from Newsroom...best show on American television?
- Thread starter jbertoglio
- Start date
Sparafucil3
Forum Guru
It seems we suffer from the same disease. I wish I could blame it on you, but alas I think it came from us. -- jim
aiabx
Same as it ever was
The culture war in Canada has been and gone for 10 to 20 years now.Or a schizophrenic.
We may not have a full-blown culture war in Canada yet. But the storm clouds are on the horizon. The self-appointed intellectual elites in Canada have been pushing this country to the brink since the 1960s with their social agendas. It is slowing tearing the country apart, not that many Canadians are cognizant of the problems. Most are too busy watching reality TV on their iPhones to notice. :nuts:
Did you notice last year when there looked like there was a crack in the gay marriage ruling and Harper was on his feet in an instant to assure us that there was no change to the status quo? Stephen Harper defending gay marriage? That's the conservative position now. It's been legal in Ontario since 2001. Abortion has been legal since 1988. An attempt to make Sharia Law a legal alternative was quashed, ensuring a secular legal system.
I don't know what your worried that the intellectual elites are bringing, but I'm afraid it's been here for years. Maybe you were watching reality TV on your old vacuum tube Electrohome when it happened.
BattleSchool
Elder Member
I promised myself that I would add my two cents and move on, but evidently I have to explain myself to someone sitting at ground zero of one of the main battlefronts. If you are unaware of the many cultural divides in the GTA, then take a drive around town some time.The culture war in Canada has been and gone for 10 to 20 years now.
Did you notice last year when there looked like there was a crack in the gay marriage ruling and Harper was on his feet in an instant to assure us that there was no change to the status quo? Stephen Harper defending gay marriage? That's the conservative position now. It's been legal in Ontario since 2001. Abortion has been legal since 1988. An attempt to make Sharia Law a legal alternative was quashed, ensuring a secular legal system.
I don't know what your worried that the intellectual elites are bringing, but I'm afraid it's been here for years. Maybe you were watching reality TV on your old vacuum tube Electrohome when it happened.
The small "c" cultural issues that you mention are minor compared with the what I am talking about. Moreover, the big "c" cultural issues are being exacerbated by a cohort of senior justices, academics, and politicians with misguided, utopic worldviews.
Besides, what makes you think that the Conservative Party is socially conservative? The party got elected on a conservative fiscal platform. Moreover, most of its younger supporters, the under 40 crowd, are fiscal conservatives with no conservative social agenda whatsoever. In fact, most would probably support the legalisation of marijuana--hardly a conservative position. That said, I am surprised that none of these folks seem to recognize the health-care costs associated with handing out free needles, tax-payer-funded injection sites, the pyschiatric impact of drug abuse, and so on. Or how about so-called therapeutic abortions. These procedures are neither therapeutic for the unborn child, nor therapeutic for the taxpayer who foots the bill. Does it make any sense from a fiscal point of view to allow a 30 year old woman to have her second or third abortion at taxpayers' expense? Yes, it happens. More often than you think. But I digress.
No, what I am really on about are the legacies of social engineering that began in the 1960s, especially with Trudeau and the Liberal Party. Policies such as multiculturalism, official bilingualism, and the protection of French language rights and culture at the expense of other languages and cultures. French language and culture are protected in Quebec and throughout Canada. However, English Canadian culture must bow before French culture in Quebec (and in many cases, also in New Brunswick, Canada's only officially bilingual province), and before multiculturalism everywhere else. These are complex issues and I will not attempt to explain them here. Suffice it to say that rather than bring various cultures together, we have instead driven them farther apart. (For the record, my father was Acadian. All of my relatives on his side of the family are Acadians, and most spoke, and in some cases still speak, French.)
Sharia, by the way, is not dead in the water. But the (first) attempt to establish it in Ontario does not bode well for the future. Quebec still retains its Napoleonic Civil Code, while the rest of Canadian law is drawn from English Common Law. I could go on about the kangaroo court that is the Human Rights Tribunal in Canada. Or I could cite two recent cases of so-called honour killings in Ottawa. But I imagine that you are better informed in these matters than I am.
Promoting separate identities and cultures is not nation building, but the deconstruction of confederation and the Canadian identity, something that used to be based on a fairly recognizable set of Canadian values.
As for watching TV, I don't have cable (or a cell phone, for that matter). The only channel that I receive is CBC (the taxpayer-funded Communist Broadcasting Corporation). Yet in spite of the broad, New-Democrat-Party bent of CBC, I am not oblivious to what is going in this country. And I suspect that neither are you.
Having said that, I sincerely hope that I am an alarmist.
aiabx
Same as it ever was
And it landed successfully.
That's America at its best. Rock on.
Paul_RS
Elder Member
Bit like a small child who finds out that Santa isn't real........
horseshoe
Senior Member
What?!?!?!?! Say it aint so !!!!!
tecatefil
Member
I’m truly jealous of you guys if that’s for real, Something like that would solve all my voting quandaries. We have the libertarians its close but still a little extreme some times plus there not allowed to really participate in our two party system (yet).
P
Sparafucil3
Forum Guru
My goal is for the Left to keep winning until the right jettisons it social agenda. I have said it time and again, a fiscally conservative socially libertarian platform would win in a land slide. The Left has no answer for what ails us. The Right has an answer (and I am a "mostly" Libertarian myself) but their social agenda (Taliban light) scares the hell out of me too. -- jimI’m truly jealous of you guys if that’s for real, Something like that would solve all my voting quandaries. We have the libertarians its close but still a little extreme some times plus there not allowed to really participate in our two party system (yet).
P
I agree 100%.
Morbii
Elder Member
Intersting. Would not have pegged you as such.
jbertoglio
Member
The traditional Left is a joke. The traditional and rational Right has some valid answers but they have become a powerless minority in their own party. But along with the Taliban elements, there is a stealth Calvinist streak in the new Right that is very comfortable with the concentration of wealth at the top. They really "get" the concept of the "Elect" (that is, you can tell who is going to big news in heaven by their status on earth). So if God favors his true "chosen people", the Elect, why should anyone care about the disabled and unlucky? Sorta: "If God doesn't care about these losers, why should I." America is on a slow march towards a society of the rich and the poor, aristocrats and peons.
In the American century (1900's), there were policies in place that slowly raised the poor to the middle class. In 1980, those policies were reversed and we saw the end of wage growth and the beginning of massive concentration of wealth. On a macro level, nothing has happened to reverse that trend. What changed? Lots of corporate welfare but the real killer was the rise of off-shore and electronic funds transfer. The rich began to opt out of the tax system leaving solid wage earners (say, 100-250k USD) left as the only folks paying taxes. I don't blame the people who founded the Tea Party...before it was co-opted by the radical right. Wage earners get hammered by local, state and federal taxes. The rich shelter there earnings and pay low tax when they pay at all. I have a good income but work on a corp-to-corp basis and have a junior version of the tax breaks of the truly wealth. Yeah, me and Mit have about the same net tax burden.
Your dream candidate might have a chance...but he would never be nominated because party leadership is always at the fringes and they will never vote for someone that challenges their emotional, non-rational beliefs. There will be blood in the streets before this shakes out.
Sparafucil3
Forum Guru
Interestingly enough, there are more people in the center than there is on either fringe. Its time to stop settling. It is time to wrest control from the parties and give it back to the people. -- jim