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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.

It would be easier for AB to get policy goals accomplished were its people represented in the Federal government, something they haven't been for a long, long time now. Liberals don't listen to anyone outside of Toronto, and it shows.

But I don't think there's a future for Reform parties in this country and yet another CPC loss/Eastern aggression + economic cataclysm might start convincing people of that.

Eastern aggression What do you mean by that?

I think they're referring to the general disdain at the root of Liberal decisions. I can't point to any explicitly discriminatory laws, but the differences in impact are pretty clear.

  • COVID vaccines were distributed to the provinces proportional to (total) population. The Federal government is responsible for providing healthcare to Treaty Indians, while Provincial governments are responsible for providing healthcare to the rest of their residents. The feds assigned a larger-than-proportional number of the doses to go to them (which is probably appropriate given the risk factors) from their province's stock, and as a result non-Native Manitobans got worse access than non-Native Ontarians due to that province's larger Native population.
  • They wanted to increase affordability, so they cut the carbon tax for some home heating. Specifically, for home heating oil which is (almost) exclusively used in the East, while the West uses natural gas. When asked about it, a Liberal MP said that Westerners should elect more Liberals if they want to benefit from the government. This is the clearest example IMO. (Saskatchewan decided that it wanted that tax exemption too, so it stopped collecting/paying the carbon tax on all home heating. I just checked and haven't seen any news about it since then, so it sounds like it worked.)
  • Equalization payments are above 100% of "equal" because the Liberals maintained a Harper-era law that reduced equalization amounts (at the time. Then circumstances changed and the formula gives a different result). Instead of the "have" provinces mostly in the West bringing the "have-not" provinces up to their own level of economic prosperity and services, they're forced to push them above their own levels by a few billion dollars.

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