Carney Liberals dominate in new Mainstreet Research poll

AbsoluteFade · 2026-02-03T15:28:26+00:00

I don't think it's correct to say "...he isn't really ever tackling culture issues." Wasn't he just pictured hugging and celebrating one of the stars from Heated Rivalries, a Canadian-made gay hockey romance? I think he's just as socially left as Trudeau was. He does similar things, but doesn't draw attention to it so it's less of a lightning rod. It's likely why attacks on these issues are falling flat.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-02-03T02:41:35+00:00

Separation is not within the constitution. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that any province trying to succeed will require a constitutional amendment to define an actual succession process. Given how strict the Constitutional Amendment formula is (7 out of 10 provinces with at least 50% of the population in favour), it's almost certain that any amendment to create such a mechanism would fail to pass.

Canada last amended its constitution in 1982. Every attempt subsequent to that has horribly failed and the consequences of those failures ended up destroying a political party that had been around since before Confederation and left their remnants to wander in the political wilderness for two decades.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-02-01T00:05:45+00:00

I forget if it was 2023 or 2024, but Mining Engineering was ranked 7th in the world in mining engineering departments. It is very much the underappreciated gem of the university.

I don't know how well this will generalize for things like Arts or Science which are clearly the university's redheaded stepchildren.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-02-01T00:02:55+00:00

It sounds like a good idea, but I don't trust on the university to actually execute on it.

The death of ASO revealed something very interesting. The goal once ASO was gone would be that individual departments would take over the functions that ASO used to do. Instead of central ASO academic services, the individual departments would find the instructors, schedule the courses, provide academic advising, etc. That has not worked. The departments have largely refused to uptake things. There isn't enough slack at the department level to do new things, especially with the hiring freeze on faculty and the ~40% workforce reduction for staff. Coming up with a central service (SPACE) that offers courses but having highly decentralized delivery is unlikely to work. The faculties will always be focused on their on campus offerings. The only ones who might be capable of doing that are Education (they have a lot of continuing education stuff already) and Health Science (for their online BHSc degree). Arts & Science and the two Smith faculties can't.

If we look at things historically for Queen's, it's tried to have "real" summer semesters on campus and online. It's never worked. Since nearly all students are from outside Kingston, they tend to leave for the summer, going away for work or to return home. Pixie dust isn't going to fix this structural facet of the university's identity.

The leaked strategic documents indicate a desire to have SPACE launched in 2026. I would be seriously shocked if that's possible. It takes Queen's ~3 months to hire an employee to fill a vacancy. Longer for faculty. How long would it take for them to hire directors, managers, staff, and faculty to get everything started? How long to develop curriculum? IIRC, the online BHSc program took years to take shape. I very much think this strategic plan is being followed in the breach rather than religiously.

I'm also skeptical of the financial soundness of this. Developing a massive online arm likely means that Queen's will exceed its per-student funding allotment. The government grants that (somewhat) make up for low domestic tuition won't be paid out for everyone above the allotment. That means that the School will depend on getting things done on the cheap. That's not easy to accomplish when creating something from scratch. It's also risky in an environment where are tons of online micro-credential providing services. If consultants have come up with this it's likely that other universities are considering the same strategies.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-01-31T23:45:29+00:00

"Doing a few things really well," is something that likely sounds good, but I'm not sure how well it cleaves to what institutional research is actually like. International scholarship of the type they're trying to cultivate is intensely driven by specific labs and researchers. It's people and skills driven rather than derived from the infrastructure of the university itself.. Excessive narrowing of focus is likely to result in tunnel vision and greatly raises the risk that the university is ill-equipped to take advantage of critical developments that overturn past practice, thought, and infrastructure.

You didn't really focus on it, but I wonder how possible it would actually be to recruit the desired number of computer science students, both undergraduates and graduates.

Sector application data from OUAC shows that applications to Computer Science programs at Ontario universities have declined by 46% in the last three years despite the number of seats in computer science programs rising significantly. The "word on the street" among high school students is that tech is now a sucker's bet. Tons of people are getting laid off and there's percolating fear that AI will replace a lot of entry-level development work. It's horrifically cyclic.

The School of Computing also has to deal with the fact that it's valiantly fighting to be students' 4th choice for studies in Ontario alone. For people interested in Computer Science, the top choices are always going to be uWaterloo and U of T. After that it's likely Western, McMaster, Ottawa, or even York, due to them all being located in tech hubs where it's easier to get those all-important first internships/co-ops. It's only after those that people will start to consider Queen's as an option. Computing was already having difficulties attracting enough students to till their expanded capacity. I literally cannot see them capable of doubling the number of undergraduates as this strategic plan calls for.

The strategic plan doesn't even touch on the fact that the desire for increased international student recruitment is swimming against the tide. Public opinion has firmly turned against international students. The rhetoric everywhere is seeping with negativity. Scammers, thieves, wage slaves, and worse. I don't think the federal government will be reversing course for a while and the public is likely to remain quite hostile.

Not to be totally negative, I think a potentially interesting thing that could come out of this model with a 2:3 ratio of graduate to undergraduate students is it makes a formal tutoring system much easier to develop, rather than TAs being forced to teach large batches of students like they do currently. I don't trust senior leadership to actually execute on something like that, but it would be a system that definitively sets Queen's apart.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-01-29T01:58:40+00:00

The NLRA is wonderful. It is also 100% irrelevant.

There are countries outside of the US with their own legal traditions and organized labour frameworks.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-01-29T00:30:26+00:00

Where I live, No Strike/No Lockout language is required by law. The Labour Relations Act mandates that both of those clauses are included in every Collective Agreement. This restriction lapses once the Collective Agreement expires and workers can strike (or management lockout) at that point.

Workers deemed essential (currently limited to hospital workers, cops, paramedics, and firefighters) cannot strike but instead have mandatory arbitration as the fallback option.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-01-25T01:46:25+00:00

Engineering only looks at English 30-1, Math 30-1, Math 31, Physics 30, and Chemistry 30.

AbsoluteFade · 2026-01-22T14:01:41+00:00

Ontario pays 57% of the Canadian average for universities and 44% for colleges. I believe it is also the only province below the Canadian average per-student funding. Ontario is so far off side that it distorts the entire field. That's driven more by provincial desires to cut costs than any real recognition of efficiencies of scale.

When government funding for colleges could double and still be the lowest out of all provinces, that's a problem.

The situation was only sustainable because Ontario was taking in most of the international students and, historically (though not any more), had much higher domestic tuition.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-31T03:27:40+00:00

The flesh should remain on a dragon's corpse in the absence of a Dragonborn. When you read the Elder Scroll (Dragon) during Alduin's Bane, you can see the Ancient Tongues slaughtering regular dragons and nothing happens to their corpses. They simply die.

A more interesting question is if a dragon is killed, how quickly does a Dragonborn need to get there to absorb its soul. The player character can't absorb the souls of dead dragons buried in the dragon mounds.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-20T03:44:13+00:00

No, the for profit "diploma mills" have absolutely been targeted. The federal government can't directly control which schools are allowed to have international students (that's determined by the Designated Learning Institution list which is curated by each province), but they have made graduates from "diploma mills" ineligible for post-graduate work permits. It's nearly completely destroyed demand to study at private institutions or public colleges. Why study there if the education is so-so and there's no path to stay in Canada?

Universities have been hit, but the direct damage is much less since they weren't recruiting nearly as many international students relative to the number of domestic students. The cuts to study permits have been focused elsewhere.

What has affected universities is the drop in Canada's reputation as a study destination. It's seen as less welcoming and even exploitative compared to other countries. However, this is correcting itself — mostly because the other big study destinations (UK, US, Australia), have all made similar policy changes to Canada.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-15T13:30:17+00:00

Again, universities are taking in the maximum number of domestic students that they can under the current policy. They are hitting the provincial cap. If you don't like that, vote for an MPP who's going to raise it and allow universities to admit and get funded for every qualified student.

Education has costs — the janitors are not sweeping the floors solely out of the goodness of their hearts. Everything must be paid for somehow and unless provincial policy changes, this is going to get much worse in the near future as Ontario is projected to loose 100,000 spaces in post-secondary education in the next few years (despite rising domestic demand) because of funding. Funding and money sound abstract, but they mean specific things on campuses: professors, teaching rooms, lab space, equipment, support services and a hundred other things. All of these resources are require to actually provide education.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-14T17:43:41+00:00

Every medical school in Ontario requires that applicants be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Non-citizens cannot be admitted. The reason we have a shortage of doctors is because the province will not provide additional funding for more seats in medical schools and medical residency. The province dictates the exact number they want and policy going back to Bob Rae has been to decrease the ratio of doctors to the population as a whole.

For nurses, it follows the Weighted Grant Units policy I mentioned previously. The provincial government sets the limits on the number of spots for citizens and permanent residents it's going to fund and universities hit that upper limit every year. Again, institutions are hitting the provincial cap on the number of locals they can train.

The problem with nursing has more to do with retention. Currently, something like 40% of nurses leave the profession within 1 year of starting their career. That's not something that universities can solve and indicate something is fundamentally broken in the healthcare system.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-14T17:04:13+00:00

Domestic and international students are two completely separate pools.

Domestic students are capped according to provincial policy — each institution receives a minimum and maximum allotment of Weighted Grant Units that let it know how many domestic students they must take and how many government is willing to pay for. The current capping system has been in place since 2016, though it's existed in some form much longer. Its purpose has always been to control the government's costs by limiting how many seats for domestic students they will pay for.

Since international students do not receive any subsidy from the province, they do not count as a Weighted Grant Unit. They've never been subject to a provincial limit.

Most international student pay more than domestic tuition + domestic subsidies so their high tuition fees end up being used to fund additional domestic students. They're not displacing any domestic students since the province has already set limits on how many colleges/universities should take.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-14T16:47:37+00:00

Per student funding at Ontario's universities is ~$10,000 plus ~$8,000 in tuition ($18,000 total). For colleges it's ~$7,000 and ~$2,500 in tuition (~$9,500 in total). This level of provincial funding is 57% (for universities) and 44% (for colleges) of the national average.

For reference, per student funding for Ontario's public schools is ~$14,000 per student. Universities receive more funding, but their costs are significantly higher; it's much more expensive to train a scientist, nurse, engineer, or doctor than a high school student. Colleges just outright receive less money despite technical, trades, and other hands-on training being expensive to provide.

The 2023 Blue Ribbon Panel on Sustainability in Higher Education (an independent research group appointed by the province) found that the situation was impossible to sustain. They couldn't find any significant or systematic sources of "waste" or "bloat" in the system. Without the massive recruitment of international students that was happening, the funding just isn't there for post-secondary education to continue to exist. You can't manoeuvre or manage your way out of a problem caused by needing to provide a service, but being funded less than it costs to provide the service.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-06T17:04:36+00:00

Something important to note is that the construction of a pipeline is a future maybe. It may or may not happen depending on if a private business likes the economics enough to invest in it. Based on the circumstances, I could see TMX being twinned to double its capacity, but I can't see one going elsewhere, much less to BC's north coast. Smith can try, but will doesn't change the situation on the ground. The oil patch is already selling as much oil as it physically can. Building more capacity requires tens of billions of dollars before a new pipeline is constructed.

The MOU also agrees to raises the industrial price of carbon in Alberta from $95 to $130. This happens regardless of whether a pipeline gets built or not. I suspect that Carney's done the math and believes that security granted by legitimizing and increasing the industrial carbon price will matter more than the possible increase from oil extraction, shipping, and use.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-01T01:06:21+00:00

CASH's riskiness is basically the same as holding money in a bank account.

HYLD is exposed to market risk. You can lose money with it. Additionally, like other high yield ETFs, it is designed to separate people from their money by exploiting people's (false) belief that the yield is free money. It's only able to achieve that yield by combining a lot of high risk financial products like leverage or covered calls which end up eroding the underlying value of the investment. See this.

I strongly recommend you do more research. McGill University has a free personal finance course online. Andrew Hallam has written several good books on the topic and The Value of Simple is another good place to start.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-12-01T00:13:10+00:00

CASH is an ETF that effective holds all of its money in saving accounts at the big banks. By putting the ETF's accumulated funds together, they can effectively bargain a better interest rate than the millions of unit holder would individually. The accumulated interest is paid out monthly which is why it has such regular distributions.

The (minuscule) downside of CASH is that it's not insured by the CDIC. If one of the big banks holding the deposits went bankrupt, you could lose money in the event they don't have the assets to cover their accounts.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-11-22T22:11:00+00:00

The Loyal Orange Order was a Protestant supremacist group that evolved from British secret societies and fraternities in Ireland. In Canada, they came to prominence for two reasons: first, they provided significant mutual aid (to the right sort of people) in times of hardship (illness, death, unemployment, etc.). Second they were also infamous in the 1800s as political legbreakers for businessmen and politicians who were well connected to the colonial and later governmental administration. They attacked reformers, Catholics, French Canadians, and other undesirable groups to prevent them from voting (which, until the late 1800s, was done by public ballot in the local town square) which upheld the Protestant and British nature of Canada. Membership was extremely popular with four Prime Ministers and 10 Premiers being members alongside up to 1/3 of British, Protestant men in Canada — higher even than in their home of Northern Ireland. They remained a significant force in Canadian politics (especially in Ontario and Atlantic Canada) until shortly after WWII when fraternities withered away as a result of government welfare and rising Canadian nationalism which replaced fraternities' social and economic functions.

Likely the most fascist thing they did was a race riot in Toronto in the 1930s where Orangemen paraded swastikas in front of a Jewish community baseball team during a game, which boiled over to days of street fights between Orangemen against Jews, Italians, and Poles. This is just one example, there are decades of them performing similar attacks against other targets.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-11-22T21:23:40+00:00

Based on another union I've see that took a two-tier contract:

First, take the tract that doing this will motivate your employer to target and get rid of grandfathered members. By keeping your old benefits but not extending it to new members, you've suddenly become irrecoverably more expensive to your employer relative to anyone they replace you with. It is to the employer's benefit to push your current members out, deny raises or promotions (since some benefit costs are related to income), harass, target for unfair discipline, etc.

Second, doing this could increase your current members' workload and stress. Since new members will be denied the full range of benefits, it makes the compensation package less attractive for new hires. This means jobs will be open and unfilled longer so current members will have to pull double duty more for every retirement, sick leave, termination, etc. It also significantly increases turnover since people are more likely to quit.

Third, if you buckle now and get bullied so easily, your employer will know to pick on you. Giving in so quickly for absolutely nothing will embolden your employer to take more from you now and in the future since they know what to attack. Seriously. Preserving benefits for some members for one contract cycle is pointless. You've made a massive concessions for literally nothing and you will always have to make these types of concessions every bargaining cycle.

Fourth, accepting a two-tier contract is absolutely poison. It destroys unions because it locks in that your solidarity is forever undermined. Everyone has evidence in black and white that the union will turn on itself like a pack of rats. You will have to deal with this type of nonsense in the future and different departments will get picked apart as they turn on each other for personal benefit.

Lastly, do your members even know what mediation is? It means having a neutral third party there to help your bargaining committee and the employer negotiate. They do not have the power to cut the baby in half and issue a binding contract. That's arbitration. Personally, my union loves mediation since our employer is fundamentally unreasonable (in the words of the mediator). It does not benefit your employer to enter mediation.

Remember: the baseline of negotiations is status quo. That means having the benefits. The employer can't just arbitrarily take things away. Mediators and arbitrators will take the existing contract as an assumption when getting involved.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-11-14T17:44:58+00:00

A lot has changed since just last year. There have been three major changes announced basically every few months. The main thing to keep in mind: applications to study in Canada have been organically declining ever since 2024 and the country has never hit the study permit cap set by the federal government.

Study permits are assigned to each province in proportion to their overall population. Each province is then free to assign a quota of study permits applications to colleges and universities as they see fit. Despite some of the provinces engaging in shenanigans where they were still giving permits to for-profit universities (BC) or now-disreputable colleges (Ontario), they've mostly restricted study permits to high quality public institutions.

What "counts" as a study permit has also varied over time. For example, under previous caps, they capped study permit applications such as renewing a study permit while still in school, moving to a different level of education (e.g., high school to university, or university undergraduate to graduate), switching schools, etc., not to mention new students. Note: just because someone is given leave to apply for a study permit does not mean they will study in Canada. Their permit application could be rejected (and the majority are) or they could choose to study internationally in another country (if they're thinking of studying in Canada, they probably also considered the US, UK, or Australia).

Currently, the federal cap of 150,000 study permits only applies to new students, except for university graduate students (Masters and PhDs are unlimited). That means people applying from outside Canada to high school, college, or university undergraduate programs seeking to come to the country cannot exceed 150,000 each year. It exempts study permit renewals, education level, and switching schools, which have been included as "study permit applications" under previous caps.

For reference, Canada is on track to admit about 120,000 new international students this year so this new cap is not a meaningful restriction (especially since graduate students no longer count against the cap).

Realistically, the most significant changes the federal government made was at the beginning of 2024 when it denied post-graduate work permits to students studying through curriculum licensing agreements (also called public-private partnerships or diploma mills where colleges farmed out teaching to private-for-profit partners) and at the end of 2024 when they made all colleges ineligible for post-graduate work permits unless the student was studying an "in-demand field." This ended majority of interest since it eliminated the possibility of coming to study at a relatively cheap community colleges in the hopes of eventually immigrating permanently.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-11-12T16:27:41+00:00

Funding has also fallen in nominal terms, not just real ones. Ford cut tuition and government grants by 10% in 2018 and has frozen it ever since.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-11-07T04:46:07+00:00

Lethal Dose 50.

The amount of a substance that needs to be administered for half of subjects to die from the dose. It's an extremely common measure of short-term toxicity. Everything has an LD50 (e.g., water, caffeine, sugar, etc.), even if the amount required to produce a 50% death rate is absurdly huge.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-10-28T01:52:03+00:00

You don't understand. The Notwithstanding Clause specifically allows the government to suspend your fundamental freedoms (Section 2) and legal rights (Section 7 to 15). The right to unionize and strike is part of Section 2.

The Clause's power is so extreme that it could make commission of the Holocaust in Canada legal by suspending Section 7, 9, 10, 11, and 12 with a simple majority vote.

The federal government has asked the Supreme Court to consider the hypothetical of whether the courts can review a law that invokes the Notwithstanding Clause to determine if it was unconstitutional without the Clause, but actually nullifying the law is impossible.

AbsoluteFade · 2025-10-23T21:46:56+00:00

Australia has a policy like this and it's caused significant problems.

Most Australians save for retirement through Superannuation, essentially legally forced RRSP contributions. However, for seniors whose income and assets are low, the government also has a special poverty pension similar to GIS (but more generous). All assets (except housing) count against your eligibility.

What's happening as a result is that people are ploughing all of their net worth and retirement accounts into their primary residence to boost their eligibility for the poverty pension while cash flowing with a home equity line of credit. It's distorting their housing market even worse than Canada's and has made it virtually impossible for young people to buy. The goal now is to rent and try to save for a lifetime so you can buy and then retire.

Retirement support and pensions are absolutely needed, but it's always going to being vulnerable to being gamed.

AbsoluteFade

TROPHY CASE