I’ve been quiet on this end as I work on a significant essay regarding AI and its impact on the industry. I’m writing that piece as a realist, as a long-time professional software developer1, and as a father of several children that are going to be impacted by changes in the industry. One is currently in a co-op term as he nears the end of his computer science education.

The release of the Artcraft clones of various products inspired me, especially seeing the delusional way many in the industry were dismissing what this all represents, many firmly in the denial phase.

Regardless, just wanted to touch on a couple of things.

On Alberta

Alberta voted on a variety of measures yesterday, notable including a separatist question about remaining within Canada.

The federalists won overwhelmingly.

And to fully put this into perspective, the question wasn’t “stay or leave”, it was simply “should we hold a vote on staying or leaving”2, and separatists3 tried to further massage the message into some sort of “this will give us negotiating power!” pablum. Voters still overwhelmingly rejected it.

LOL.

And just to be clear, Alberta has been screwed at many points in Canada’s history, most notably the Trudeau (both) government(s). Resentment is 100% justified4. Carney did come at the right time for Alberta anger to be quelled a bit.

On Quebec

Quebec elected a “separatist” government at the provincial level. It’s interesting seeing the far-right American chuds all salivating about this, because nothing makes a right wing American happier than someone else ending up worse off. They’ll happily get marched into doom if they think somehow it’s causing harm to The Others.

That Quebec government was elected with a whole 28% of the vote, courtesy of the fractured nature of vote splitting5. And even that means nothing because many voters weren’t voting for the separatist nonsense, they were instead voting for specific issues, change, etc.

It’s a non-starter. The US is far more likely to fracture6 than any province leaves Canada, however much kleptocrat garbage like Elon “Elizabeth Holmes v2” Musk might wish for it.

On Ranked Choice Voting

Donald “Rapist Shitheel” Trump hates ranked choice voting. He has repeatedly attacked it as “corrupt”7.

Which is weird, isn’t it? How is letting people express their will more accurately8 a bad thing? How is an objectively better democracy a problem?

The reason he hates it, of course, is that the right wing in the US has levered vote splitting for decades. It’s why they prop up garbage candidates like RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kanye West. This is a tried and true method of getting people to throw away their vote, and is useful if you know your own base isn’t likely to do this.

“MAGA” in the US is fanatical enough they’ll elect a pathological liar, simpleton, fascist, rapist, incompetent9 conman bag-of-shit to the highest office, while the other side is pouring over decades old tweets and studying whether their statement about a hate crime was forceful enough, or that they didn’t wipe all memory of their Harry Potter fandom from their timeline. In the US that mush-brained clown Tommy Tuberville10 somehow gets elected, because he’s for the right party and it doesn’t matter how utterly brainless one is to get that cult’s vote.

Our method of democracy is flawed, and is largely a relic of obsolete limits. When the PQ gets to threaten to pull Quebec to the abyss with a whole 28% mandate, something seriously needs to change.

The irony is that many prospective governments have promised changes to voting over the years, at least here in Canada, but the moment they gain power they feel aligned with the way things are and slow-walk promised changes, eventually just abandoning it altogether.

And to be clear, I don’t believe in proportional representation. It leads to fractured governments where every idiotic fringe party ends up making noise at the big boy and girl table. Some small percentage of our population are deplorables, and they don’t get to participate in normal society. Or they shouldn’t. You see that in Europe where everything turns into a noisy mess because idiot trolls end up with the adults.

We need ranked choice ballots. Vote with your heart and with intention, but without throwing away your vote and ending up with the opposite result11. I’ve never heard an argument against ranked choice voting that wasn’t hilariously corrupt or idiotic. The GOP/Trump’s arguments are both.

On Immigration

Canada has been seriously harmed by destructive mass immigration. This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this ↗. Every shitty, barely solvent business cries tears to a very gullible (or corrupt) media, and endless stories are written about how some roach-infested coffee shop can’t stay afloat unless they can sell residency to the developing world as their real business12.

Canada retreated from that disaster, but it is disheartening to see the government talking about opening the gates again. Canadian housing is still completely out of control, and every public service is massively over capacity13. Canada’s youth – of all backgrounds and ethnicities, because this is Canada – still have a grey and dire future ahead, where their job prospects are dim and they’ll be lifetime renters.

And just to be clear, the period where everyone was reporting on Canada’s imaginary population drop was actually all just a massive lie, and just demonstrates how out of control things really are. The flood never stopped.

In any case, the entire LMIA program, from top to bottom, is a laughable blatant scam. At this point everyone knows it’s just a vehicle for fraud, from almost all participants.

I will say that a lot of fearmongering from the right in Canada is panicked and misinformed. For instance, some Indian official said that Canada will need “15 million” foreign workers in a few years and the right wing careful reported this as a “diplomat said”, and the crowds reacted as if a Canadian official said this. Similarly, the government removed the restriction that only LMIA job offers get express entry points, widening it to other IRCC program for high-wage workers in some specialized fields. This doesn’t actually mean any new foreign workers, at least by itself, and if anything slightly corrects the mistake that participants in a fraud vehicle were unduly rewarded for their actions.

But the opposition had better stay on top of this like a hawk, and criticize in a fact-based, meaningful way when the disaster that befell us worsens again. It cannot start again. Everyone played along during the flood because we were in a morally indignant time when saying anything negative about mass immigration was racist and verboten. How incredibly stupid (and Europe is absolutely suffering the detriment of this right now).

To loop back to Alberta for a second, one of Alberta’s questions was about whether the province should take more control over immigration, which Quebec is demanding as well. Now while we should note that both provinces actually resisted federal immigration clawbacks, and both had leaders celebrating the world flooding in (including Danielle Smith), it is perverse how often I’m seeing the left in Canada calling this “racist”.

There is nothing racist about controlling immigration or making it work best for Canada and Canadians. The moment it serves special interests, or is corrupted into a vehicle of fraud, it needs to be crushed. And sure she’s a slippery traitorous eel that needs to be deported to Mar-a-Lago – she is always desperately scrabbling for disagreements with the federal government, not unlike separatist elements in Quebec – but it’s completely understandable that provinces want more of a voice at the table. Ontario should be front and center, given that migrants selected under various provincial nominee programs somehow always end up here in Ontario.

Footnotes

  1. I’ve been doing this for over three decades now, in a wide variety of industries, org and team sizes, across the gamut of technologies. ↩

  2. Where leaving is some imaginary “be Canadian but also a nation” notion. Quebec separatists ply the same scam. ↩

  3. A cadre that is overwhelming just a hive of villainy, scumbags, thieves and fraudsters. As with MAGA in the US, it’s just the absolute worst people that gravitate to the movement. I’m not talking about some random farmer who wants to send a message to Ottawa or the East or whatever, but the figureheads of the movement who are all just garbage people, generally with a long backstory of fraud and thievery. Sounds kind of like a movement South of the border, doesn’t it? ↩

  4. Though claims about equalization payments – a constant – are usually laughably ignorant and misleading. The bulk of the money that goes to equalization comes from Ontario and BC, even when Ontario is then a “beneficiary” of it. Similar misleading nonsense occur when separatists claim that Albertans own some absurdly high percentage of CPP investments, when following exactly the same formula Ontario not only would own 100% of it, Alberta would be left owing us money. ↩

  5. Quebec has some 20 recognized parties in provincial politics. ↩

  6. Seriously, though, polls about secession see higher positive responses in many American states than in any Canadian province. I mean, you people positively hate each other. ↩

  7. The modern Republican party, that weird Trump cult, hates democracy. This can’t be more obvious.

    In the case of Alaska the anger about ranked choice voting is that apparently the Republican voters there are such headstrong dipshits they’ll only vote for their preferred cultist and refuse to add any other ranks, purportedly despite the consequences of that choice.

    Or so the GOP claims. In reality, it’s probably that they like a particular candidate for positions and personality, who happens to be Republican, but if that guy doesn’t win they’d rather a Democrat than the various pedo-loving trashbags that Donald Trump endorses. ↩

  8. “I want this candidate to win, and if he can’t win I want my vote transferred to this person as the less bad alternative, etc.” ↩

  9. Trump’s few “wins” among a litany of losses is basically eating your seed corn and then heralding how great it is that everyone is temporarily fat and happy, all while the future is obliterated. The long-term damage that foolish imbecile has done to the United States is colossal, and so much advantage and privilege is gone and will never return. ↩

  10. As a white guy, man, we really aren’t making ourselves look good, at least in our representation in US politics. Abdul El-Sayed is an obviously smart, principled candidate, and the best the GOP has against him is disgusting racism. Mamdani is the best NYC mayor in recent history. I don’t agree with a lot of the things that AOC represents, but she’s clearly a brilliant woman who has sincere convictions.

    On the white guy front, we’ve got that self-serving bloviating rapist Trump, Pete “Incompetent War-Criminal Weakling” Kegsbreath, the disgusting greaseball Howard “Epstein Island” Lutnick14, and then legions of pudding-brained fools like Tommy Tuberville.

    The whole GOP is full of that sort of trash, and it really isn’t making us look good. That people can be white supremacist when looking at this cadre of barely human criminals is bizarre. ↩

  11. If there are five liberal parties and five conservative parties – ignoring that it is seldom so simple – you shouldn’t end up with a conservative government because that side centralized on one figure while the leftist votes were more evenly distributed. And the opposite is true. Both situations have happened in Canadian politics because of the way we elect governments. ↩

  12. A decent portion of Canada’s economy, from housing to education to small businesses, are just fronts for selling residency. There is a common trope that McDonald’s is really a real-estate company, and by that same sort of analysis all the barely solvent fringe small businesses that litter Canada have morphed into LMIA / points selling operations. Our entire housing industry relied upon an absolute torrent of arrivals. The whole country got sidetracked into being just a mass migration target. ↩

  13. If anyone wants to coin the trite “but we need the young workers!” justification that was used to push mass immigration, also be willing to fully prohibit their aged relatives from ever joining them here, whether sponsored or via the incredibly common “come to visit, wink wink, and never leave” ruse. This may come as a shock to some, but migrants from many countries are intended as a beachhead, and their settlement here is just the beginning of moving in exactly the wrong direction. Canada has seen this for decades, yet somehow the lie still sells to some people. ↩

  14. A recent expose detailed that the greaseball scumbag Howard “Epstein Island” Nutlick threatened military action against Canada if we didn’t bend the knee. If future US governments – after this pedophile crime spree is vanquished – don’t have this disgusting Epstein associate scumbag locked deep in a dungeon or up against the wall, after thoroughly being deprived of all ill-gained assets, justice will not be served. ↩

See Also