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I don't need to actually read the entire treaty to understand that a complete rewrite is more likely to be a failure of imagination and will, or perhaps a motivation to tick other boxes, than a "need". I can guess that there are provisions that can be retained without changing a word.

By accumulated observations, I figure that if you immediately present with an obvious problem or have a diagnosis in hand for a life-threatening problem, you will get a high standard of care. The failure of the system is in providing timely access through the gateways by which one gets to that...

"We can't do this ourselves" is a weak reason to support entangling ourselves with the EU's much greater laboratory of dysfunction. Canada doesn't need outside help to change its own rules, although external events can sometimes push countries to do things they should have been doing without...

I doubt such a "need" exists, although undoubtedly the opportunity would tempt a lot of people to pretend there is one for purposes of advancing various agendas right down to basic grifting. There is a rational path and an irrational path that could be taken. The rational path is to minimize...

His performance isn't the issue. His priors and ideologies are. An eyebrow-raising topic like "EU associate membership" dropped into public discourse suddenly and without the least attempt to provide any specifics, followed immediately by expressed confusion and ignorance on the parts of...

Ye of little faith. When crises which create opportunities for change do not present themselves, governments find ways to create their own.

Conceivably Trudeau was unpopular enough that Carney might have still made his move, dragging his European-influenced history and CV and connections with him. And that's still irrelevant to what "reality" is right now. "Why" the present is what it is, is at least a little bit interesting, but...

Either such a deal is going to require some non-zero amount of "you have to follow EU regulations in respect of..." or it's not. If it's not - if it's just some agreement to increase the percentage of stuff covered by CETA - then fine. No kind of special membership is needed for that, though...

An amusing aspect to all of this has been watching the general attitude in Canada flip from disapproval of "foreigners buying our country (infrastructure, corporations)" to "here, have anything you want".

See also: Hong Kong.

A decades-long general observation: when corporations screw up, politicians are quick to bring them (and individuals within, if any can be pegged) to account. Politicians are much less quick to bring accountability to either themselves or public services. I conclude that it is preferable...

Kind of odd to proclaim "the reality is" and then cite a hypothetical. The "reality" is the situation we are in, and the proposals the GoC and EU have advanced. "We wouldn't be here if..." is a deflection, and not useful.

What is it we need that existing trade agreements (and our exporters' voluntary compliance with EU trade regulations) don't already provide? Anything substantial? Anything at all? It would be funny to have spent months loudly reasserting our sovereignty in response to Trump's idiocies, only...

Fire drama is mainly a function of whether a fire lands on a community.

Suppose for the sake of argument the claims are true that privatized airports are often more cost-efficient and provide better service to users, and that these claims are based on empirical observation and comparison of privatized and non-privatized airports. Do random speculations and fears...

It is vital to understanding how the US government works and how and why things happen the way they do, as opposed to just ranting against the Trump Lives In My Head Outrage of the Day, to pay attention to the separations of powers and not pretend they have atrophied to the point of...

It doesn't matter which president it accumulates under. Congress does the budgeting; presidents just make budget requests. "Which president is responsible for the most debt" is one of the dumbest fucking games on the internet.

Sure, all things that have short time horizons, and thus not what I am writing about. Also, money is fungible and - as I have written repeatedly on this side for decades - Congress controls the money. Trump can promise a new benefit - to cut a $5K cheque to every adult citizen, or to give all...

Before proceeding to design new armouries, it'd be worth first fixing in place how the Res F is going to be trained. If more stuff is moved to long blocks of time (eg. mandatory annual concentrations at which all the individual and collective BTS stuff is rehearsed and tested), the need for a...

Bond buyers aren't demanding higher long-term yields ten and thirty years out because the Trump administration keeps shuffling goalposts that have impacts on a horizon of a few weeks or months. They're demanding higher long-term yields because they don't want to lose money to ham-fisted...