Talk like that worries Toronto Coun. Gord Perks, who chairs the city’s planning and housing committee: “What happens to the city of Toronto if nurses can’t live here? If people working in your local grocery store can’t afford to live here? If the people who work in your local packing plant can’t afford to live here? What does Toronto become? It’s not a pretty picture. It’s a terrible, terrible future.”

From July 1, 2020-2021, the most recent year for which detailed migration data is available, 203,115 people left Toronto while 92,175 people relocated there from within Canada. Nearly 80 per cent of those who left the city stayed in Ontario while 20 per cent left the province for another part of the country. “I don’t think any community can thrive without a strong middle class and that’s essentially who’s leaving,” said Moffatt [senior director of policy and innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor in the business, economics and public policy group at Western University]. “It’s a massive problem.”

It’s a problem not just for Toronto but for the municipalities that these urbanites are flooding into that lack the infrastructure to support their new residents. [Moffatt] uses his own hometown of London, Ont., as an example. City council adopted its official plan in 2016, which projected a population of 458,000 on Canada Day in the year 2035. As of last Canada Day, the population is 474,000. “In a matter of seven years, it’s already had 20 years of growth,” he said.

Everybody should be worried about Toronto becoming the next San Francisco, said Moffatt, referring to a city now dominated by rich tech people with homes worth an awful lot of money, high rates of homelessness, and where schools now provide housing for teachers because there’s nowhere they can afford to live.

This is frightening, dystopian stuff, and i don’t understand how police and govt allow for this.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I see it as modern day colonialism (i.e., implicit and explicit attitudes that the ‘in-group’ has the right to displace, eradicate, and fabricate whatever it wants to establish the social order it desires in other parts of the world) with deep historical roots. As a white-skinned person of European ancestry living in the land commonly known as Canada, watching the global power brokers’ actions surrounding the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinian people has helped me better understand the colonialist genocide that the country I call home was founded on in terms of relations between Turtle Island/North American Indigenous Peoples and the European colonizers. I saw a great quote on Lemmy recently, something like, “those who don’t know their history will repeat it; those who seek to eliminate or rewrite history seek to recreate it.”

Right on!

I got the sense they were only seeking already-prepared foods, eg the doordash mention. Maybe there are no grocery stores that sell a plant-based milk or a soy-based burger near them, but I wouldn’t assume that to be the 100% case even if there are no vegan restaurants

It sounds like you don’t cook at home that much and that picking up more of those skills would solve all of your problems. It can be overwhelming if you’re in the newer stages! I sort of still am lol. But learn 1 dish you like at a time, maybe get a simple vegan cookbook for ideas, or crowdsource easy vegan at-home meals here. If you’re a newer vegan and are into faux meats more so than lentils, for example, then shop around a figure out which products you like. (That might also be an easy way of translating known non-vegan recipes/meal ideas to vegan ones)

I love Chantal Hébert. She’s one of my favourite parts of CBC election coverage. What a rad Canadian

CanadaLand is still on your list? https://www.readthemaple.com/i-went-to-jesse-browns-talk-on-the-slow-pogrom-in-media/

I hope you’re right! I have very little confidence in mainstream news media these day to do anything besides serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy. Recent examples: (coverage of) Colonialist genocide in Palestine, carbon ‘tax’, recent capital gains tax. This issue is compounded by how few Canadians read non-mainstream news. I know you do, but I think we’re clearly outliers since we’re on Lemmy

Called out in parliament, maybe, but not by anyone inclined to vote for him. I’ve never met a Conservative voter who thinks critically when it comes to voting (and I’ve met several with advanced degrees). Policy and performance don’t matter; they vote for ‘their team’ and based on beliefs - not evidence - that ‘conservatives are good with money’ and similar swill. It’s more like being a sports fan or a religious devotee than a rational elector, ime

The petition is open from April 10th to August 8th. So far, it’s received over 11,000 signatures. I just signed it. You need to provide an email address (in addition to name, postal code, etc.), which they send a link to, and by clicking that link your signature is added (this is a 1 signature per person safeguard). I looked at the collection/disclosure of personal info briefly. It looks like no info other than #s signed per province/territory will be disclosed and all personal info will be destroyed 6 months after the e-petition closes.

Link to sign the e-petition: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4922

I’m sorry to hear that. Do you ever eat for pleasure if you can’t taste anything?

Indeed! They also need to observe the tax’s effect on the availability of rental units for multiple years to evaluate how it’s working. Data after 1 year aren’t that meaningful in this case

If the tax brings in twice the expected revenue, maybe the vacancy’s more of an issue than the city realized

If you’re representing wealth, you get a microphone in the mainstream media, regardless of the quality of your ideas

Keto BS.

A high-meat low-carb diet is a pseudo-self-starvation method to lose weight if that works for you. But no one needs that amount of cholesterol and saturated fat, and where are you getting your fibre and micronutrients from? Getting that many calories from protein could be problematic too, and would certainly be off the table for anyone with kidney issues.

Not to mention all the other reasons why meat isn’t great: inefficient use of land/food resources (1:10 conversion of calories), environmental pollution, non-human animal suffering.

Advocating for a high meat diet is absurd and exemplifying all of the confusion peddled by the animal agriculture industry to disguise the obvious solution to eating for health: reduce animal products, and eat a whole food plant-based diet.

If I learned 1 thing from the COVID pandemic, it’s that science doesn’t matter when it’s at odds with established big money continuing to make big money.

Per the WHO, processed meat is in the same category of carcinogen as cigarette smoking. That’s the science. In my locale of Toronto, they sell dollar hotdogs weekly at the ballpark of the professional men’s baseball team. They dump tons of money into advertising and fetishizing binge meat-eating. They try to increase the stadium’s consumption that day well past 40,000 ‘dogs’. Last I checked, colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in men and second in women. These dollar hotdogs certainly keep colonoscopists in business.

More money talk. 2/3rds of animal biomass on this planet is ‘livestock’, which is given three-quarters of the antibiotics we produce. A healthy vegan is very unlikely to need diabetes, cholesterol-lowering, or heart disease meds. Most people on North American-ish omnivore diets will be on multiple prescription meds of these classes for decades of their life. They will need colonoscopies every year or two, starting around age 50. They will need hospitalization and maybe surgery after their first angina attack, heart attack, or stroke. They’re essentially a different kind of livestock.

It’s amazing how much taxpayer money goes into preserving this extremely-dettached-from-reality status quo that benefits pharmaceutical companies, the medical industry, and Big Meat. It’s not serving the people who eat North American-ish omnivore diets, the healthcare system, the tortured non-human animals, or the low-paid humans that are probably stuck in those barbaric industries for lack of access to better work

It’s understandable that this person has this much influence, even though it’s not an elected position.

Unelected parliamentary bodies are supposed to support transparency, fairness, and debate - they’re not supposed to take a prominent role in shaping policy and communicating it to the public. I think it’s good that the PBO issues reports from a supposedly non-partisan perspective, but I don’t think it’s good how little oversight they themselves receive, as this incident reveals. The Government and Opposition (or all parties) should get advance copies of the PBO’s reports for public consumption, and the published reports should include that commentary from the Government, Opposition, and/or all parties

That an unelected person or department that’s part of our federal services has had and will have such a huge effect on this country’s politics for several years, the next federal election, and this country’s ability to respond to the growing climate crisis is a cause for concern regarding the integrity of our democracy. An investigation is warranted

And they’d also count towards enabling

Apologies, corrected to national. More importantly, how do you feel about the incumbent party in your country planning to introduce soft conscription?

The incumbent (Tory) party in the UK has included national service in their campaign leading up to next month’s federal [edit: national] election.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c988jdxl02vo

The proposed new scheme would not be conscription, where people are legally required to join the armed forces for a period. But it would compel people by law to complete a community programme over a 12-month period, or enrol in a year-long military training scheme, when they turn 18.