gammell

AVL tech. Gamer. Low-grade polymath.
I belong to Jesus.

[L. Wayne Mathison @WayneMathison]

The Left would do itself a favour by learning basic economics. I studied economics in high school and university, and the first lesson is simple: wealth is created, not merely divided up.

Money moves wealth around. Work, skill, risk, investment, invention, farming, building, repairing, producing, and organizing people create wealth.

The fixed-pie mindset is poison. It teaches people that someone else’s success must explain their own failure. Sometimes people are exploited, yes. Sometimes rules are rigged, yes. But the general idea that one person getting richer automatically makes everyone else poorer is childish nonsense.

A farmer grows more food. A mechanic restores a vehicle. A business owner creates jobs. A musician writes a song. A builder turns lumber into a house. None of that steals wealth. It creates it.

If your entire politics is based on resentment instead of production, you are not fighting poverty. You are defending the thinking that keeps people poor.

[Sean Speer @Sean_Speer]

The underappreciated divide shaping Canadian politics

A recent academic paper revisits an old question in Canadian politics: Does where one works shape how one votes?

Drawing on data from 16 federal elections between 1968 and 2019, the authors find evidence that Canada’s so-called “sectoral cleavage” remains alive and may even be growing stronger. Public-sector workers are generally more likely than their private-sector counterparts to hold Left-leaning economic views and support parties such as the NDP. The differences are especially pronounced among public-sector professionals and managers.

The paper cannot tell us exactly why these differences exist. It may be that people with more interventionist political preferences disproportionately choose careers in government. It may also be that employment itself shapes political attitudes over time. Most likely, both factors are at work.

Yet the findings are notable because they connect to several of the most important debates in contemporary Canadian politics.

For years, political scientists have understood Canadian politics through the lenses of region, language, class, and ideology. The paper suggests that the employment sector deserves a place on that list. Public- and private-sector workers increasingly appear to constitute distinct political constituencies with different interests, incentives, and policy preferences.

Readers of The Hub will recognize this theme. We’ve explored it previously in debates over the public-sector compensation premium, work-from-home policies, pension arrangements, and government workforce growth.

What often appears on the surface as a dispute about pay, workplace flexibility, or management practices can reflect a deeper divide between those whose livelihoods depend primarily on government spending and those whose livelihoods are more directly exposed to market forces.

This helps explain why debates over government spending, regulation, taxation, and public-sector compensation often feel so contentious. They’re not merely ideological disagreements. They increasingly involve groups whose livelihoods are tied to different parts of the economy.

The findings also resonate with insights from public choice economics, which emphasizes that political actors respond to incentives just as market actors do. The point of course isn’t that public servants are uniquely self-interested. It’s that the interests of those who depend primarily on public budgets may not always align with those whose livelihoods depend on competitive markets, entrepreneurship, investment, and business formation.

Recent controversies over public-sector work-from-home policies offer a useful example. What began as a debate about workplace flexibility quickly became a broader argument about accountability, productivity, and the obligations associated with taxpayer-funded employment. Beneath the surface lay competing assumptions about the role and purpose of public institutions themselves.

None of this means that public- and private-sector workers are destined to be political opponents. But as government employment grows and public spending occupies an ever-larger share of economic activity, the divide identified in this paper may become increasingly important for understanding Canadian politics.

Where one earns a paycheque may not determine one’s political views. But it appears to matter more than many observers once assumed.

[L. Wayne Mathison @WayneMathison]

Orwell nailed the permanent hypocrisy of the status socialist.

They preach equality, but they still want status. They sneer at old class privilege, then build a new version of it out of credentials, correct opinions, approved language, activist causes, and moral vanity.

They don’t want a classless society. They want a society where their class is in charge and gets to call its own privileges compassion.

You see the same thing today in Canada. The people who lecture working people about sacrifice are rarely the ones paying the real price. They love “equity” until it touches their neighbourhood, their job, their school, their retirement plan, or their social standing.

Orwell understood the type perfectly: people who claim to love the common man, but quietly despise his habits, his speech, his politics, and his independence.

[Richard Dias @RichardDias_CFA]

If this man is the PhD in economics we understand him to be, there is no way he actually believes any of this. The 21st century will be a rugby match between the U.S. and China. Europe will be watching from the stands. Geography will determine what side Canada will be on.

[Sean Speer @Sean_Speer]

The devil is in the details when it comes to online harms legislation

The Carney government’s reintroduction of online harms legislation this week represents another step in a broader transition from the largely open internet of the past two decades toward a more regulated digital environment. The legislation, as tabled, would create a new digital safety regime for online platforms and AI chatbots, including rules governing harmful content and restrictions on social media use by children under 16.

These measures are often discussed through the familiar lens of Left-versus-Right politics. Yet the emerging fault line may run elsewhere. The divide is increasingly between those who see greater regulation, moderation, and oversight as necessary responses to the internet’s excesses and those who worry that such interventions come at the expense of openness, experimentation, and free expression. This creating new and different kinds of political coalitions on these issues.

Yet as University of Ottawa law professor @mgeist has observed, the tension becomes most acute when policymakers move from abstract principles to practical implementation. It’s one thing to support the removal of harmful content in principle. It’s another to define precisely what constitutes harmful content and who gets to decide.

This is where many online harms proposals encounter their greatest difficulty. The categories that attract broad agreement—terrorist propaganda, child exploitation, explicit criminal activity—are relatively straightforward. The harder questions arise at the margins, where speech may be offensive, controversial, misleading, or objectionable without clearly warranting censorship.

Any serious debate about online harms legislation should therefore focus less on intentions and more on definitions. What specific content would be subject to restriction? Who would adjudicate disputes? What safeguards would exist against overreach? Many of the examples that eventually fall within these frameworks may be views that one strongly disagrees with, but would hesitate to prohibit outright.

A Hub article this week from the Canadian Constitutional Foundation’s @cvangeyn highlights these challenges. She asked ChatGPT what subjects it believed might be subject to censorship under the government’s bill, and it produced a list of questions—like “What explains racial disparities in incarceration rates?” or “Do immigrants from some countries integrate more successfully than others?”—that may be controversial but self-evidently don’t “foment hatred.”

As the old legal maxim suggests, hard cases make bad law. If policymakers cannot clearly define the content they seek to regulate, that ambiguity should give us pause. The burden should rest with those advocating restrictions to explain precisely what is prohibited, why it is prohibited, and how those limits can be enforced without chilling legitimate public debate.

[Harley Finkelstein @harleyf]

You don’t have to love Elon Musk to recognize what this headline says about us.

A country that spends more time criticizing wealth creation than encouraging it sends a clear message to builders: your success is tolerated, not celebrated.

Canada should be the best place in the world to build ambitious companies. Headlines like this make us look like we’re not quite ready for that.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

These are the exact same people who made “countering hate” their entire identity.

They were the first to plant “Hate Has No Place Here” signs on their lawns.

They insist “hate speech isn’t free speech.”

They proudly fund groups like Hope Not Hate and Stop AAPI Hate

They still chant “Love Trumps Hate” like it’s scripture.

Yet here they are, in the pages of The Globe and Mail, publishing a guide on “how to properly hate” Elon Musk for the crime of building SpaceX into a company that could make him the world’s first trillionaire.

Proof positive that their “anti-hate” crusade was never about hate.

They are, in reality, full of hate. It was always about who they’re allowed to hate

[L. Wayne Mathison @WayneMathison]

Dias is half right, which makes it worse for Carney.

Yes, mass immigration helped prop up headline GDP. That was the trick. Add more people, sell more groceries, rent more apartments, call it “growth,” and hope nobody notices GDP per person is stuck in the mud.

But Carney now wants credit for noticing the mess after helping bless the same Liberal economic machine that created it.

Canada does not have a growth model. It has a population-pumping model. More people. More strain. More housing pressure. More demand on health care. More infrastructure overload. Then government turns around and says, “Look, GDP went up.”

That is not productivity. That is economic padding.

And the poster is right that more government intervention is not the answer. But let’s not pretend Carney is some innocent economist wandering into the wreckage with a clipboard. He has been part of the elite consensus that gave Canada cheap moral branding, expensive energy, weak investment, low productivity, and fake growth through immigration volume.

Now the tide goes out and suddenly everyone can see the economy was wearing floaties.

[Richard Dias @RichardDias_CFA]

At a basic level, GDP = Population + Productivity.

Sustainable growth and rising living standards have one source: productivity, underpinned by private capital investment. The prescription seems straightforward: fewer regulations, a more competitive tax environment, genuine competition in sectors long sheltered from it, and an immigration system rebuilt around skills and credentials rather than volume.

[Calibre @Calibremag]

So I can't take an AR-15 to the range, and you can't buy a pistol, but these guys can blast off rounds illegally and cruise around with handguns in Rubbermaid containers.

Alright, ok, cool cool cool.

[Peter McCaffrey @peteremcc]

What's the difference between a technical recession and a recession?

About $2 billion of taxpayer funding to media outlets.

[gammell @gammell]

@Grummz WuWa is pretty fun and this collab looks good other than the collab gacha utilizing an even more predatory than normal one-time currency scheme.

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

The "unmarked graves" at Kamloops Indian Residential School were found at a depth of 3 feet, running in an east-west direction.

They just so happened to be found in a field with a septic system buried at 3 feet, and running in an east-west direction.
https://t.co/sHCr86k1Ge

[cdrsalamander @cdrsalamander]

“Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”

[J.J. McCullough @JJ_McCullough]

The term “socialism” gets thrown around a lot these days, but as @Sean_Speer describes in this excellent piece, the CRTC, via Bill C-11, is truly turning into an old-fashioned socialist bureaucracy, obsessed with trying to centrally-plan a huge segment of the Canadian economy:

[Handre @Handre]

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.

This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.

Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.

You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.

Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.

Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

Key point: There were dudes in Latvia literally having to buy their own equipment and comp their own meals while their government sent them literature about how they served a white supremacist hell state. None of this is exaggeration.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Canada’s constitutional crisis did not appear overnight. It is the predictable result of decades of economic policy that penalizes productivity, suppresses resource development, and redistributes wealth away from the province that sustains the federation’s fiscal base.
Alberta’s looming referendum on separation should surprise no one.

IMHO the core issue is not separatism. It is asymmetry. Quebec has long exercised economic and political latitude, often backed by the credible threat of secession. Alberta, by contrast, is expected to finance the federation while accepting federal policies that undermine its primary industry. That imbalance is no longer tenable.

At the center of the dispute is Canada’s equalization regime. In theory, it ensures comparable public services across provinces. In practice, it has become a structural transfer system that rewards stagnation in recipient provinces while disproportionately burdening Alberta’s economy. One province produces. Others redistribute. The incentives are backward, and the politics are corrosive.

This might be manageable if federal policy were neutral toward Alberta’s economic strengths. It is not.

Over the past decade, Ottawa, backed by the Trudeau Liberals and the NDP, has pursued an industrial strategy explicitly hostile to oil and gas development. Pipeline projects have been delayed or canceled outright. Regulatory hurdles have multiplied. Global capital has taken the hint and moved elsewhere.

The consequences are clear: declining investment, reduced growth, and a measurable erosion in Alberta’s standard of living.

Meanwhile, provinces less exposed to resource development continue to benefit from transfers financed in large part by Alberta’s shrinking surplus.

This is not simply an economic grievance. It is a crisis of legitimacy.
No federation can endure when a productive region believes it is being systematically disadvantaged by national policy. Whether Ottawa sees its agenda as climate leadership or not is beside the point. In Alberta, it is experienced as economic containment.

A referendum is not yet secession. It is leverage, something Quebec has used effectively for decades. But it is also a warning. If Ottawa continues to dismiss Alberta’s grievances, it risks turning a bargaining tool into a break.

Canada’s unity has always rested on a basic sense of fairness. That foundation is now cracking. Alberta’s referendum is not the cause of the crisis. It is the consequence.

[Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms @JCCFCanada]

Now is the last chance for Canadians to urge their MPs to reject Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. This bill will give government and police easy access to your private internet data.

Find your MP's contact details here:  https://t.co/kcVrp6wjsc urge him or her to oppose this surveillance legislation.

@signalapp, @NordVPN, @windscribecom, and @ProtonVPN are among the companies that will withdraw their services from Canada if Bill C-22 passes.

If passed into law, Bill C-22 will allow the government to:

- order companies to develop capacity for organizing and extracting your data for law enforcement review
- order companies to install devices that feed your information to government and law enforcement
- order companies to retain your data for up to one year
issue orders in secret.

Contact your MP today:  https://t.co/Q29tbbyKFO

[AG @AGHamilton29]

It's almost incredible how climate alarmists have managed to get every prediction wrong for several decades and yet still insist that those same takes should still drive policy discussions.