Rod Wuetherick 🇨🇦🇺🇦

There is no cult in the statistics of our country's economic performance over the past 20 years+. These numbers speak for themselves. A person, “not in a cult,” would be willing to look at all of the data from all over the world that expresses the economic damage of COVID-19 on the world's economies. They would not have a bizarre explanation for how stock and commodity markets crashed worldwide during COVID-19. If this were a “conspiracy,” it would have been one of history's most epically planned conspiracies. The sheer breadth, and when I mean breadth, to support all of you conspiracies, the number of actual “actors” that had to be in on the conspiracy is extraordinary. Nearly every doctor, biologist, and infectious disease expert in the world would have had to have been willing to play in this epic charade. Then we would have the millions of nurses and support staff worldwide; they, too, would have had to have been part of a vast conspiracy. The shutting down of the world's supply chain is now another epic conspiracy. There would have to be an extremely compelling reason for such damage to the world's population, for what control? You're all bonkers.. You don’t need any more control than being a billionaire in a modern world where most advanced countries in the world, other than the obvious, are some form of Liberal democracy. However, the US has fallen this year and is no longer considered a true democracy. I’ll leave it to those who don’t want to be willfully blind to check that out for themselves. Your idea of the power of modern democracies seems to misplace the concept of capitalism in our economies, which runs nearly laissez-faire. Perhaps not as much as neoliberals/libertarians might want, but a system that is so successful that every day, a new millionaire and billionaire are made. Only a person in some cult has been affected by places like X, True North, Rebel News and insufficient real information sources like The Economist, Financial Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, etc. There is a long list of organizations known to have balanced, objective and non-partisan reporting. All the publications I listed there are actually what you would call your side's publications, conservative think tanks, etc. So you will notice an absence of Mother Jones, The Nation, etc. I listed what is considered internationally conservative in economics and centrist in all other areas. These are real news sources; even Mother Jones and The Nation are excellent publications, even if you're not left-leaning. You should know the other side's arguments to be informed. No? In closing, one would have to assume that for COVID-19 to have been a successful global conspiracy, millions of people would have had to be in on the secret. It is statistically impossible that many people would continue to play their parts all these years later. It boggles my mind, and whether you give a shit or not, I have genuine sympathy for those who became so broken during lockdowns, being bombarded with one of the most extensive, most deceptive disinformation campaigns in history - maybe hyperbole, but not much. During the height of the lockdowns, Facebook, Twitter, etc., all of the major western social media companies were taking down millions of bots, hundreds of millions of posts a day of information traces directly back to Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, etc. @grok Please confirm the assertion that during the height of COVID-19, hundreds of millions of bots and posts were being taken down daily by North American social media companies. It wasn’t a conspiracy by North American interests or the WTO for world domination. It was a coordinated campaign to keep harmful information from being disseminated by adversarial foreign actors such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, etc. After all these years, still thinking your freedom is being taken away is nonsensical. Canada is considered a healthy democracy.

The most important contribution to humanity from Elon Musk and Donald Trump will be to show the world what you never want to become.

Moving to [email protected] Before Charlie Kirk I had already pretty much decided to leave here. After Charlie Kirk I realized the algorithms of this site’s main intent is to foment anger, bickering and hatred. This site is a reflection of its owners sick neuroses.

This is pretty funny. @PierrePoilievre's reign as the junkyard dog is coming to an end. I like @SeanFraserMP a lot. In fact, I think he should lead the Liberals after a couple of terms of Mark Carney. We need Carney to carry the tide, drowning @PierrePoilievre in it, and in a few terms, Sean Fraser would be ready to lead. @PierrePoilievre will never be PM. He doesn’t have what it takes to lead a nation. This is now obvious to everyone except the farthest right in Canada. We know who they are and they ain't conservatives, they aren’t even patriots.

Good call, Awkward indeed.

Calling Bexte a journalist carries as much weight as calling @PierrePoilievre a man of grace and wit.

Yes

An article worth reading. “The Weaponized World Economy - Surviving the New Age of Economic Coercion” by Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman in September-October edition of Foreign Affairs. An excerpt, the opening paragraphs. “When Washington announced a “framework deal” with China in June, it marked a silent shifting of gears in the global political economy. This was not the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s imagined epoch of “liberation” under unilateral American greatness or a return to the Biden administration’s dream of managed great-power rivalry. Instead, it was the true opening of the age of weaponized interdependence, in which the United States is discovering what it is like to have others do unto it as it has eagerly done unto others. This new era will be shaped by weapons of economic and technological coercion—sanctions, supply chain attacks, and export measures—that repurpose the many points of control in the infrastructure that underpins the interdependent global economy. For over two decades, the United States has unilaterally weaponized these chokepoints in finance, information flows, and technology for strategic advantage. But market exchange has become hopelessly entangled with national security, and the United States must now defend its interests in a world in which other powers can leverage chokepoints of their own.”

Great post. Hear hear! 🇨🇦 Henry A 🇨🇦

It’s startling how few Canadians can see the recent past. Rising unemployment in Canada is a function of capitalism. Our central banks have immense power over our monetary systems, and the interest rates they set drive the rest of our economy. Canada, not long ago, even after a global financial crisis, a global pandemic that shut down the world, we were growing so fast we didn't have enough workers for jobs - the other way around that many conservatives bemoan now. Right? The U.S. central bank is enduring immense political pressure to reduce interest rates. As soon as the government uses political power to affect monetary policy, it destroys the value of its debt. Why? Because monetary policy should never be driven by public sentiment — that would be reckless. To tame Canada’s overheated economy, which is the opposite of struggling but running too hot, the central bank raised interest rates, slowing the economy. You may not like it, and I may not, but if we followed public sentiment, inflation would spin out of control, and every dollar extra you thought you had in your hand could be worth several times less, depending on the inflation rate. So here I hope even common sense and grounded conservatives understand that Canada was engaging in a remarkable recovery before the US attack on the entire world's economy. Unemployment rose before these tariffs, not because of a failing economy but because of sound economic policy. •From January 1 to April 1, 2025, Canada’s population increased by 20,107 people, bringing the total to 41,548,787 — a reported growth rate of +0.0%, due to rounding. •This marks the second-slowest quarterly growth rate on record (since 1946), behind only Q3 2020 during the pandemic, and tied with Q4 2014. We can see from the above data that immigration has already plummeted to the lowest levels since 1946. So, you see nothing but sound macroeconomic policy (interest rates) and sound fiscal policy (immigration rates). A related tangent. Some cities, like Abbotsford, BC, have a large visible minority. Here’s the thing. Most cities in Canada are still overwhelmingly white. It would seem odd, really, that those haters would care that some cities have become a majority of one or another race of people. Shouldn’t that be a plus for these people? Places to avoid? Those of Indian descent still represent less than 1% of Canada’s population — but these over-the-top videos are used to feed a panicked narrative. But I digress here. The right's panicking banana king 👑 behaviour is just silly and over the top. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. They often end up causing peripheral violence, secondary violence in our societies. These rallies being organized; you can see from the data above that they, like the convoy, are bizarre and unnecessary, as a few months later, like COVID, they will claim that the statistics that they are suddenly willing to acknowledge are because of what they did — their protest over nothing. We were trending that way or already there well before these protests. And yet another angle in the tangent. Canada is a mighty nation for its size. We weather the ebbs and flows of the international marketplace with relative ease. With unity, we have always been unstoppable. This over-the-top panicking over nothing is not strengthening our country; it weakens it. So tired of fear, fabrication, and culture wars being driven by the Conservatives and Republicans. We have never witnessed reality being so distorted by powerful political and economic lobbies, like the International Democratic Union (IDU), in our lifetimes. This isn't Liberals against Conservatives, this is democracy against autocracy and neoliberalism. The lies and distortions need to stop so we can move forward as a nation. r.