Explain to me please why existing owners should subsidize the building of city infrastructure in new developments.
I don’t live in Toronto but building new sewers, water systems, roads, community centres etc. shouldn’t be funded by existing taxpayers who still have above ground utility cables and no sidewalks.
And yet, you’ll see many people posting elsewhere on social media that it shouldn’t be relevant.
Can’t imagine trying to share a life with someone who didn’t share my values, but there seems to be a contingent that think that other things should be more important.
I would argue that a lot of the computational based problem solving , from middle school through early undergraduate years, focused on topics historically oriented to boys’ interests, aren’t a good measure of innate math talent either.
But those have historically left a lot of female students behind.
Male or female, most students are really looking to get through math requirements with plug-and-chug replication of algorithms to get to an answer - not genuine problem solving or abstraction. However, being able to reproduce an answer on a very slightly different problem, or just one with different numbers to plug in, does very little towards using mathematical as a means to model problems independently and find solutions.
Garbage dumps are close to the grid and the users.
Many of the worst offenders are very old wells, as much as a century old. Their original owners are long gone which is how governments ended up being burdened with capping them.
Like many old toxic mines, the creators of the problems have evaded legal liability by going out of business. Legal frameworks may be more rigorous now but the old wells and mines remain.
Some of the oldest wells, like the ones near Petrolia in SW Ontario, might be economically viable for methane power generation. Others in Saskatchewan and Alberta are likely not.
You’re welcome. The Bjorkquist decision implications aren’t that well known. I wouldn’t be aware if we weren’t trying to help some extended family figure it out z
Yes, your Quebecois ancestors would be considered Canadian-born.
But this opportunity to seek citizenship may be time limited as it’s an interim measure in place until the government can pass legislation to amend the citizenship act to address the issues found in the Bjorkquist decision.
Your ancestors wouldn’t have birth certificates as there wasn’t civil registration of births at that time but there is a database of baptismal records (which are valid for proof of birth from that time).
That subreddit has several people who have applied based on great-great grandparents who were born in the 19th century.
Best to look at the FAQs there. The forms are on the IRCC site but the information isn’t easily navigated around the interim measure.
You may wish also to check out whether you may be able to claim citizenship by descent under an Interim measure related to the Bjornquist ‘Lost Canadians’ decision.
It requires one Canadian-born ancestor (not a child of other countries foreign service).
While I wouldn’t usually recommend Reddit, the r/CanadianCitizenship subreddit has a useful FAQ on the Interim Measure and people posting about their experiences with the process.
You absolutely are missing the point.
It doesn’t matter what we’d like it to be.
Claiming a statistical account measures chickens when it measures albatrosses and then making inferences about chickens, would be silly.
Likewise, using labour productivity figures from the national income accounts.
Nothing to say that the points you and others are raising aren’t both much more relevant and interesting.
But when the business press drags out labour productivity comparisons as if they have anything meaningful to say on the subject, it’s a non sequitur to the conversation you’d really like to have.
Whatever the problems with the old definitions, and they are numerous, they remain the way the national accounts are published in OECD countries.
But so are too the conventions of generally accepted accounting principles for financial accounting.
These are the way our data sources are framed so to do meaningful data analysis and interpretation we have to know them.
Business schools are not immune or exempt from understanding where the data comes from and how it’s constructed. Any good business school in whatever tradition will make sure its students understand that at least.
It’s one thing be such a pedant as to make students switch from conventional and do basic microeconomics with the P and Q axes reversed (as they logically should be), just to correct a deeply embedded error in the history of economic practice - and there are profs out there who do that.
It’s another thing to be insistent on what is actually in a measure that calls itself ‘labour productivity’ and is used by uninformed or deliberately misleading business press in Canada to beat on the labour force itself when the structural issues are completely different.
It would be worth discussing if the business press didn’t constantly misinterpret the meaning of measure.
Fair enough.
There are genuine questions about whether or not the federal government should have given in to the provinces and territories in the 1990s regarding vocational and labour market training.
Both of these, and post secondary, are federal jurisdiction or shared jurisdiction at best. (But accreditation of professional associations and credentials is provincial.)
The federal government did its best to continue to directly fund these kinds of programs but the provinces, especially but not exclusively Quebec, felt strongly that this was preventing them to set their own socioeconomic development priorities.
It sounds like both the CPC and LPC federal parties had platforms that look to have the federal government step back into this space.
One has to wonder if they view the agreements they made to transfer labour market training to the provinces and territories as something they can pull back or wind up…
On the agriculture point, let’s say I am more than qualified to speak to economic terminology.
So, it may be pedantic, but it’s important to understand where economics definitions come from.
Some like labour productivity and economic rents are irrevocably tied to their origins in agricultural economic concepts.
Which means that when applied to a manufacturing or service economy, peoples’ intuition about their meaning can be very wrong.
When we’re teaching economics, we talk about ‘developing economic intuition’ but it would be much easier for students if we didn’t have to counter so many counterintuitive terms.
I was absolutely dumbfounded at the time.
There was so much revealing racism and more in that statement, but also American Exceptionalism and willingness to do anything to get a gold medal.
Agricultural productivity is relevant insomuch as the economic definition of ‘labour productivity’ was developed for that context.
It’s a measure of return of labour to capital.
It is NOT measure of how productive the human capital of a population is.
You and others here are mistakenly confusing human capital which includes investments in
with labour productivity.
Also, you are very far off the mark if you think that Canada’s education and skills training is in any way inferior to that of the United States. On every possible measure from literacy to cognitive skills and abilities, the Canadian adult population is better than the US in international comparisons such as by the OECD.
Skilled trades programs are arguably better in Europe but not in the USA.
Two thoughts.
Most Canadians view changing your administration as a collective responsibility of all US citizens. Kind thoughts are appreciated but most of us are increasingly impatient.
Second, have you considered that, like many other Americans, you may be a Canadian by descent? And if so, any children you may have also?
At present, due to a 2023 Superior Court Bjorkquist decision on Lost Canadians in Ontario (unchallenged by the federal government), there is an exceptional situation where people born outside Canada who are descendants of people born in Canada can apply to claim citizenship.
See this page - the flag at the top gives the latest extension of the interim provisions (that override the existing law that the Court stayed).
While I wouldn’t normally direct anyone to Reddit, the CanadianCitizenship subreddit has a lot of information on people’s experiences in navigating the process.
See the FAQ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/s/rHN4JVQwQO
We need to let go of the rule of thumb that Canada is 1/10th the US in population.
It’s not just a nitpick to say that’s off now.
Canada has had a more rapidly growing population such that it’s been 1/9th that of the United States for most of a decade.
A quick calculation on current population estimates puts it as 347.5 / 41.5 million = ~ 8.4.
That said, Canada still has more manufacturing jobs per capita even with the correction.
I appreciate that you recognize that so-called ‘labour productivity’* is primarily a measure of the quality and technological level of the capital that the labour is working with.
Too often, comparative measures of labour productivity and discussion focuses on hours worked, vacation days etc.
These are very much second-order.
Education levels are not second-order but Canadian workers are more literate and better educated across the board than the US manufacturing workers.
So, the real question in manufacturing (as it is in housing construction), “Why is the Canadian private sector so unwilling to invest in ongoing technological upgrading let alone innovation?”
This really is a great piece.
Interesting first-person perspective on Carney as a fellow graduate student at Oxford.
But it was the latter half of the piece, that reflects on how Canadians who study in the UK or US are constantly subjected to overly aggressive declarations that deny Canada as a nation, which really hit home for me.
As a Canadian who attended graduate school in the US, I experienced almost verbatim every denial and put down in this piece.
And so many more constant and dumbfoundingly bizarre nonsequitur microaggressions. (One of the American I shared office space with lashed out that Canadians didn’t have any ‘real’ Black people so we had to borrow them from Jamaica to compete as athletes in Track and Field.)
So many of these offensive remarks were self contradictory - e.g.,
Canada doesn’t exist as a nation or culture but at the same time Canadian students are vocally criticized for being ‘so nationalistic’
there’s no need to include Canada in a listing of macroeconomic indicators of major economies because it’s ‘just a regional economy in in North America’ but only the US indicators are included. Meanwhile, California is profiled and discussed as a separate economy because it’s ‘so large’.
or a renowned professor who I worked for as a research assistant observing at some random point when he realized where I had done my undergraduate degree ‘Oh, you went to a real place’ - which given how difficult it was to get into that school and program, should never have been a question.
Actually, most campaigns send out a collection team in the day after election day to take down the big sign as well as signs put up on public property. They also typically pick them up from lawns as requested.
Some will wait a day or two to celebrate the win but sign pickup
Most candidates keep the signs from one campaign to another. It takes a while for new signs to be printed at the beginning of a campaign. So, using old signs means getting signs up in the early days before your opponents and saving costs.
Can we talk about deaths per capita and military and civilians contributing to war effort per capita for a country that was NOT itself attacked?
Yes, there were U-Boats attacking merchant marines on the east coast and Japanese balloons flying in on the west. But the societal contribution to a war not in our soil was and is astonishing.
Perhaps because there’s a big dose of misogyny intertwined with the critique of American Exceptionalism.
Think about how the song would play with genders reversed.
Actually, they did not get subsidized by prior generations of owners - unless you’re talking about people in their 90s.
That’s what the development fees and taxes were put in place for - especially in places where extending services out across greenbelts into suburbs was incredibly costly.
Having crumbling roads and community infrastructure in the core and polished, higher quality infrastructure in the burbs was an equity issue that was taken on in the 1970s, long before my generation was anywhere near buying homes.
I do think it’s fair to have lower development fees where there’s densification - that bringing more people to use and support existing infrastructure.
But subsidizing sprawl remains as problematic as it was in the 1960s.
Last thought, Intergenerational Inequity wa ma first recognized and discussed in the 1990s regarding GenX.
GenX remains the most ignored generation but the fact is that the generation suffered two very deep recessions in 1983 and 1987-1991 plus faced incredibly high (18%) interest rates and inflation in the 1980s. This meant that none of them were buying homes before their 40s without the help of parents. While Canadian GenX ducked the US mortgage-backed securities disaster in 2008, it’s really a false narrative to suggest they are or have been in the ‘I’m all right Jack, devil take the hindmost’ frame of mind. If anything, they know the social safety nets and equity provisions were the only thing that made things possible for them.