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Hubbert posted:Some of my family served in the Wolseley Expedition, I really wanna read that book now. I think it will be a good book. Which is a problem, in a way. Ripping yarns of Victorian high adventure were a staple of past Canadian literature. Many of the books are genuinely enjoyable reads, like The Great Adventure : How the Mounties Conquered the West. The complication is in the title: our (English Canada's) great adventure did not take place in a vacuum. Beyond the problems of the time, we can't dismiss it all by saying, "Oh, well you know, we can celebrate our heroic fights against indigenous people then, because things are better now" when the basic facts of Canada's inequality remain. To a much lesser degree, this is why Quebec is obviously less-than-enthusiastic about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and why Wolfe has basically disappeared as a popularly promoted national hero. When we turned to America instead of the UK after the 1960's, the same thing happened with Brock. In the latter case there's a lot more going on ideologically, but when it comes to British military figures that didn't fight the Americans, the tension is simple - they fought people within our society. Actually, the discomfort is a little more complicated, because they fought people that are supposed to be within our society, aren't really, and of course they fought to create the social order we are pretending doesn't exist. At the national-political level, obviously people ITT are not glad the Militia and RCMP went west "to keep the British in, the Americans out, and the Indians down." We don't want to be reminded that people fought to establish a social order of English > French > Indian and ≠ American, but at the same time, we benefit from the structure they created and fought for. Which I know sounds like "you dislike capitalism and yet you own an iPhone" but I think it speaks to English Canada wanting to preserve the economic and social relations that existed before 1967, without talking about them. Everybody is happy and self congratulatory that "Racism is over", as long as the racial hierarchy remains. It's de facto instead of de jure, and so you can feel good about fighting racism in your professional workplace while reservations don't have clean drinking water. This isn't unique to Canada, I think it's a feature of liberal capitalist democracies. That's a bit clunky, but my point is that in a vacuum, having things named after Wolseley and Dennison would not be the worst thing in the world, if we were actually distant from the things that make them distasteful. Ideally, we would live in a society so equal, so fair to native people, that had made such amends that their racism was unrelatable to our society, and we could appreciate them as national heroes with a quaint and distant peculiarity, like Isaac Newton's occult studies. In Canada, we have the problem that we want to say that our national heroes were "products of their time", but that's not really true, is it? They were the Empire Builders, and we live in the resource extraction colony they secured, first from a rival imperial power, then from rebellion, finally from indigenous people. The ownership and smooth extraction of resources today still takes place in the basic arrangement they set up. It's an inherent problem with Canada's past, and why John A MacDonald so usefully serves the purpose of a sort of scapegoat? Sin eater? He was a white settler colonialist. We live, I hate to break the news, in a white settler colony. His greatest legacy, the thing that actually matters, Canadian confederation arranged the way it is, with land ownership and everything else the way it is, is sacrosanct, so his statues don't really matter. We're willing to dismantle everything related to him except what actually had the greatest impact then and the greatest relevance now. So we can symbolically distance ourselves from the man, without any of his work facing any challenge whatsoever. Louis Riel is still controversial in the way even the most despicable Confederate generals aren't in the States. I think people know elevating him to the level of "noble defeated enemy", like Americans did with Tecumseh, like English Canada used to do with Montcalm (arguably one of the most skilled military leaders of his day), too difficult. Even admitting Riel's grievances - for the first rebellion, you can't dismiss that one as religious mania - is tricky when so many remain today. For Christ's sake, Mtis still aren't in the Indian Act! You tell me it's a coincidence that his Heritage Minute is bar none the least coherent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fLnJp-Rjow "I struggled not only for myself, but for the rights of my people" "Louis Riel led our Mtis nation and he gave us hope, and strength and pride" Notice that the rights are unspecified, as are any material concerns. We can frown sadly about the fighting, reassured that Mtis people today have hope, and strength and pride. A tragic episode from our past, but nothing we need worry about too much today. Which means we can't sing "Pork, Beans, and Hard Tack" about chasing Mtis on the plain, or whatever else, anymore. We can't really celebrate the battles of the rebellions, or the expedition, or have a national cinema obsessed with Mounties in the Northwest. We can't sneer at Riel as a traitor or Mtis as "half breeds" (and for the record, nor should we) because we realize we're supposed to halfway acknowledge legitimate grievances and racial equality, but at the same time, we're not telling stories celebrating the rebellions from a Mtis point of view because on a basic level it's clear we (as a nation) are not really the inheritors of their legacy - we're still the heirs (culturally, if not literally) of the people who fought them. So, while fighting Riel was a hell of an adventure, nobody knows how to process that, because we're not going to give Mtis people more than unspecified rights (not in the Indian Act), and their hope, strength and pride. It's a fundamental tension, you see? English Canada has lost another episode of our mythological origin, one of many that have added up, so that for all intents and purposes we lack any coherent national story, but in exchange we get to keep all the spoils. That's the tradeoff. We lose the Victorian pulp adventures and the national songs, and the paintings  and we keep the continent. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 00:09 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 25, 2024 23:50
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Right so it's all quite simple, in order to fix Canada we should be racist against the French again. Works for me
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Feb 26, 2024 00:02
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Every time I see this emote for a split second I think it's  More similar in spirit than in form though. Showing Canada's rear end in a top hat to the world.
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Feb 26, 2024 00:07
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DaysBefore posted:Right so it's all quite simple, in order to fix Canada we should be racist against the French again. Works for me again? did we stop at some point?
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Feb 26, 2024 00:10
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We can't have a satisfying history, on some level, because liberalism assumes that society is the way that it is because everyone is a rational actor in a marketplace that starts with equal resources. That is so obviously not the case in Canada, that it creates a real problem. We can talk about "everyone starting on an equal footing" but we have to live in an eternal present where how much everyone starts with is just how things are instead of the product of anything. Do you know what I mean? There's a professor at USask who developed a boardgame for undergrad students about the Canadian prairie, 1880-1940. Players run a family farm, and work to collect resources or whatever. But the game is, to put it mildly, asymmetrical. See, students start out by assuming the game works like they expect it to, and history played out like they expected it to. Everyone starts off the same, you make smart plays and roll good dice, and you accumulate resources. Your outcome is the result of your work plus some luck, the basic ideology of capitalism and Protestantism in Canada. There are events like the Great Depression, you get it. Some of the players' starts and special event cards correspond with other founding myths. Ukrainians, Germans, I think there's an American start. Same deal, leaving the old country, taking the train, building a sod house, hard work blah blah blah now we're middle class Canadians. This fits in with the idea that that wave of immigrants are "third founders" of Canada by making an "untamed wilderness" into a breadbasket. But there's a Mtis player too. And here's the thing, no matter how well you run your farm and everything else, you'll get hosed. Your access to cards that give you resources is limited. Resources might be taken away from you. Things that are supposed to affect everyone, like the Great Depression, hurt you worse. You can do everything "right" and still not win. More than in Life or Monopoly, it's blatantly unfair. Well, apparently the undergrads playing over a semester initially really loving hate this game - when they're the Mtis character. It doesn't make sense. The game shouldn't work the way it does, because it's supposed to teach them Canadian history. They learned Canadian history in high school, and so they know they're supposed to draw harvest cards, and put savings tokens in the bank, and whatever whatever, so why aren't they getting ahead? I know the professor is still working on it, but I'm curious if and how they're able to get from "students are resentful at the game" to, "students understand that the economic order does not begin every day fresh with equal opportunities" and that receiving equal "access to" is bullshit 40 turns in, after you've been getting robbed to that point.
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Feb 26, 2024 00:18
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Fidelitious posted:Apropos of nothing except street names: There's a Bolton St in Ottawa named after Major Bolton who took over supervision of the Rideau Canal engineering after England got real mad at Colonel By for how much it was costing. Same Major that Major's Hill is named for as well. Our Major BoUlton was a racist who helped put down the North West Rebellion. Apparently the Metis captured him after he attacked them with "volunteers" at Portage la Prairie but released him because they were decent people. Unlike the British Canadians. Karach posted:Theres a Wolseley Ave which runs through a neighbourhood of the same name in Winnipeg. It's quite a nice area of the city, situated along the Red River, lots of mature Dutch Elm everywhere, easy pedestrian access, adjacent to a few good parks. It's populated by "alternative"-type people who also happen to have very good professional incomes. They're very good activisty libs for the most part, so there's been noise over the years about changing the name of the neighborhood to something more inclusive. Are they really renaming Bishop Grandin? I was down there last summer to show my eldest the university and didn't notice.
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Feb 26, 2024 07:40
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hadji murad posted:. Yep it's a done deal. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-city-council-bishop-grandin-renaming-1.6788886 But won't somebody think of the deeply retarded? quote:North Kildonan Coun. Jeff Browaty voted with his colleagues in favour of the name change at Thursday's council meeting, reversing his vote against the proposal at last week's executive policy committee meeting. Can't imagine why somebody would want to dethrone bishop Vital Justin-Grandin: quote:The 2015 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada states that he had "led the campaign for residential schooling" and that he was convinced that parents would willingly give their children to boarding schools. He wrote, “The poor Indians wish nothing more than the happiness of their children. They foresee well enough the future which awaits them and often beg of us to take them so that we can prepare them for a better prospect.” In a letter to Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, Grandin stressed the "success" that had been achieved at the missionary boarding schools, and reported, “The children whom we have brought up are no longer Indians & at the time of leaving our Establishments, the boys at least, do not wish to receive even the ordinary grants made to Indians, they wish to live like the whites and they are able to do so.” He proposed for the government to “make a trial of letting us have children of five years old and leaving them in our Orphan Asylums & Industrial schools until the time of their marriage or the age of 21 years.” For that cause, he made the trip to the nation's capital city, Ottawa, to lobby the government and upper echelons of the Catholic bureaucracy directly. His efforts were later described by commentators in 2021 as an implementation of cultural genocide. The neighborhood of St Vital in Winnipeg is named for Justin-Grandin as well, or at least for his namesake saint, Vitalis. I don't think there's any movement to rename it, but while you're taking out the trash... https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/our-communities/correspondents/2020/10/06/the-origin-of-the-st-vital-name quote:After Seven Oaks, St. Vital is the oldest settled area of Winnipeg. quote:Vitalis was a second century Christian citizen of Milan, Italy, and father of twin boys and future martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius. Vitalis is the principal patron of Ravenna, where he was martyred in 171 when he was buried alive for voicing criticism of the beheading of Christian physician Ursicinus.
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Feb 26, 2024 10:10
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DaysBefore posted:*Joker voice* Lmao wanna know how i got these helocs? my father, was a landlord, and an mp. one night he goes off crazier than usual. mommy gets a reverse mortgage to fund her own small business. he doesn't like that. not. one. bit.
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Feb 26, 2024 13:11
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I often think of Winnipeg as Canada's Ravenna.
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Feb 26, 2024 13:26
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Puppy Burner posted:wanna know how i got these helocs? my father, was a landlord, and an mp. one night he goes off crazier than usual. mommy gets a reverse mortgage to fund her own small business. he doesn't like that. not. one. bit.
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Feb 26, 2024 13:34
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Today is eviction day for homeless camps around downtown Hali (and one out in the suburbs where they're theoretically building a Pallet Shelter village maybe, at some point, after they get delivered from Oregon [lmao]). Last time this happened was 2021, where cops beat the gently caress out of people and peppersprayed bystanders. I imagine it will go the exact same way here. I know there's a protest planned but can't find details of the time, presumably it'll be reactive to whenever the city shows up to start moving people. The city assures people there is enough shelter space, volunteers say there isn't, but it doesn't matter. The point isn't to get people inside (the shelters are awful anyway), the point is to get them out of sight of the suburban commute workers who sometimes have to see a homeless person while getting a coffee after the 9:00am Wellness Meeting. Also the Junos are in town in a couple weeks so it seems pretty obvious why they'd clear the camps now, can't look bad in front of the celebrities *Joker face*. Anyway here's an article detailing how the affordable housing supply has cratered in the last few years somehow. Odd, that makes no sense, developers have built thousands of condos and luxury apartments downtown why oh why would landlords raise rents on the vacated units that would have logically stayed cheap and affordable for the working class when the six-figgies moved into their newly-built homes. The supply of market housing should have fixed this?? quote:COMMENTARY: Halifax losing 31 affordable housing units a week to speculative investors https://www.saltwire.com/halifax/business/commentary-halifax-losing-31-affordable-housing-units-a-week-to-speculative-investors-100941170/ All this to say, please stop moving here from Toronto 
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Feb 26, 2024 14:50
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Tighclops posted:I've learned more about canadian history from FF's phoneposts than I recall from any year of public school and I want to pick his brain
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Feb 26, 2024 15:27
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Puppy Burner posted:wanna know how i got these helocs? my father, was a landlord, and an mp. one night he goes off crazier than usual. mommy gets a reverse mortgage to fund her own small business. he doesn't like that. not. one. bit.
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Feb 26, 2024 15:34
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Man I don't even know where to place myself politically in the country anymore. Can't stand the way the Libs act like they have a divine right to rule, lol at the NDP's delusions and gently caress the Tories with a rusty tailpipe. Unfortunately my disillusionment doesn't have a place to align itself politically because anarchy is a nonstarter so I feel like I'm just resigning myself to being a self-hating liberal voting for mediocrity over madness or a nihilist who doesn't vote at all letting the psychos win power and use it to hurt people I care about.
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Feb 26, 2024 15:51
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Join one of the communist parties between the two of them there;s like a 40% chance they have a candidate in your riding. Maybe yopu can be the one who pushes them into triple-digit votes ion the next election
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Feb 26, 2024 15:53
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betray the country and help china
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Feb 26, 2024 16:20
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DaysBefore posted:Join one of the communist parties between the two of them there;s like a 40% chance they have a candidate in your riding. Maybe yopu can be the one who pushes them into triple-digit votes ion the next election hell yeah let's all vote for keffals or somebody similar to her
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Feb 26, 2024 16:23
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:hell yeah let's all vote for keffals or somebody similar to her Lmao I didn't know this that rules
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Feb 26, 2024 16:26
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Arc Hammer posted:Man I don't even know where to place myself politically in the country anymore. Can't stand the way the Libs act like they have a divine right to rule, lol at the NDP's delusions and gently caress the Tories with a rusty tailpipe. Unfortunately my disillusionment doesn't have a place to align itself politically because anarchy is a nonstarter so I feel like I'm just resigning myself to being a self-hating liberal voting for mediocrity over madness or a nihilist who doesn't vote at all letting the psychos win power and use it to hurt people I care about. It's probably more possible to organize a membership driven takeover of the broke and unpopular NDP a la Corbyn than anything else, but the Tammany Hall character of the party membership vis a vis the Sikh community is an obstacle to getting Singh out. If there was a socialist Sikh leadership candidate, I think it could be done. Nationally, the existing new Sikh members that got Singh in are in the key Toronto suburbs, which would be fantastic electorally, they just don't vote NDP in federal elections. So, I don't have a resolution for that. I was hoping there was a Sikh socialist tradition, but a lot of it historically is really small farmer poo poo, which is... less than ideal.    The other problem is that, due to the points system, demographically the Sikhs that come to Canada are generally middle class or better. This obviously means that their ideological outlook here, where they came with dreams of starting a small business and at least a fair chunk of change,  is probably not conducive to being the vanguard for a leftward turn in the NDP. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 16:37 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 26, 2024 16:29
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bvj191jgl7bBsqF5m posted:hell yeah let's all vote for keffals or somebody similar to her uh
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Feb 26, 2024 17:01
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Puppy Burner posted:wanna know how i got these helocs? my father, was a landlord, and an mp. one night he goes off crazier than usual. mommy gets a reverse mortgage to fund her own small business. he doesn't like that. not. one. bit.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:02
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:It's probably more possible to organize a membership driven takeover of the broke and unpopular NDP a la Corbyn than anything else, but the Tammany Hall character of the party membership vis a vis the Sikh community is an obstacle to getting Singh out. If there was a socialist Sikh leadership candidate, I think it could be done. I'm sure an injection of 200k Ukrainians into Canada will move the needle in the right direction 
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Feb 26, 2024 17:06
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Karach posted:But won't somebody think of the deeply retarded?] could you not with this please, being a sack of poo poo has nothing to do with being developmentally disabled and I find the association really upsetting
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Feb 26, 2024 17:07
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Karach posted:I'm sure an injection of 200k Ukrainians into Canada will move the needle in the right direction There was a badass article aboit some British lady who had Ukranian refugees stay with her, they were insanely racist and went back to Ukraine because there were too many brown people around. I'm surprised I haven't seen anything similar for our Ukranians lol
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Feb 26, 2024 17:12
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DaysBefore posted:There was a badass article aboit some British lady who had Ukranian refugees stay with her, they were insanely racist and went back to Ukraine because there were too many brown people around. I'm surprised I haven't seen anything similar for our Ukranians lol iirc they're mostly going to Manitoba
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Feb 26, 2024 17:18
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If you feel depressed about who to vote for federally, instead get involved in the labour movement if your work is unionized (if your leadership sucks, work to replace them), or try to get it unionized if it isnt. This is more closely connected to your day to day living conditions, will have you feeling more empowered and then when it comes voting time, you vote your favourite choice and call it a day. We have so little power as individuals at the federal level, imo its only worth it to read/think about it as an almost academic/entertainment level.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:25
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it's just team sports lol don't get distracted
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Feb 26, 2024 17:29
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:iirc they're mostly going to Manitoba Poor bastards, wasn't a war bad enough
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Feb 26, 2024 17:33
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:I know the professor is still working on it, but I'm curious if and how they're able to get from "students are resentful at the game" to, "students understand that the economic order does not begin every day fresh with equal opportunities" and that receiving equal "access to" is bullshit 40 turns in, after you've been getting robbed to that point. A history teacher at my high school ran a game that would last a month (they 'played' for a few minutes every day) where students could pick stocks in the 20s and they'd track it all and they'd be trying to make big bucks playing the stock market. Then 1929 rolls around. I don't know if it 'worked' but you have to let students unpack the unfairness of the scenario and translate that to the present day and whether or not things should remain unfair or just shrug your shoulders and say "well that's capitalism!" A lot of people will do that because there doesn't appear to be any alternative. But it can be unsettling enough to get people to start asking good questions. DaysBefore posted:There was a badass article aboit some British lady who had Ukranian refugees stay with her, they were insanely racist and went back to Ukraine because there were too many brown people around. I'm surprised I haven't seen anything similar for our Ukranians lol The less awful version of that story was a Ukrainian from Kyiv who was a refugee in the US and ended up in Ohio and ended up moving back to Kyiv, which was being bombarded by Russian missiles at the time, because the US had worse infrastructure and quality of living for her than besieged Ukraine. Dreylad has issued a correction as of 17:50 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 26, 2024 17:44
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zero knowledge posted:Montreal has a recent regulation requiring new housing developments to include 20% social housing, 20% affordable, 20% family housing. Infrastructure Canada has published a document about how that's going: I wish anyone in government had the faintest grasp of political economy or economics. housing is a commodity, the fact that houses house people is only secondary to the point of the whole market. if anything threatens the profitability of the housing market, no private entity is going to be building more houses.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:58
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DJJIB-DJDCT posted:iirc they're mostly going to Manitoba it's literally been my lifelong dream to live anywhere else lmao
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Feb 26, 2024 18:26
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neongrey posted:could you not with this please, being a sack of poo poo has nothing to do with being developmentally disabled and I find the association really upsetting Fair enough. I think there's a pretty established history of using it on SA (especially in cspam) despite it not really being PC irl these days, but if it bothers you I can respect that.
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Feb 26, 2024 18:35
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neongrey posted:it's literally been my lifelong dream to live anywhere else lmao I have and then I came back like a, uh, *checks notes* foolish person, bereft of sense and good judgment.
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Feb 26, 2024 18:37
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Manitoba is the Nova Scotia of the west so big shoutout to you all, my siblings in suffering.
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Feb 26, 2024 19:17
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neongrey posted:it's literally been my lifelong dream to live anywhere else lmao one finger on the monkey's paw curls and you awaken in saskatchewan
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Feb 26, 2024 19:23
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worse places lol. you can still get a few hundred acres there for much less than 500k. if you can get some people to help build up a cabin, it'd be pretty great. plenty of room to hunt and fish and have a big-assed garden.
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Feb 26, 2024 19:38
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Where did all that cheap land come from, I wonder?
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Feb 26, 2024 19:40
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Developers built some new luxury land downtown and market forces drove down the cost of the newly opened up land
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Feb 26, 2024 19:41
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tuyop posted:Manitoba is the Nova Scotia of the west so big shoutout to you all, my siblings in suffering. I love to visit Manitoba and eat delicious lobster fresh from the sea at the beautiful revitalized waterfront district while staring at huge Irvine crude oil storage tanks across the bay 
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Feb 26, 2024 19:41
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*Extremely forced voice with occasional glances to someone offscreen* I love the Irvings. They do so much for the community. They really are pillars of the Maritimes
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Feb 26, 2024 19:43
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