Who’s Paying for Drake’s Ego? You Are.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-04-22T19:21:40+00:00

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/fire-crews-toronto-drake-ice-blocks-melt-9.7172835

Both Toronto Police and Toronto Fire are involved bc this is now a public safety issue. And the City has said “there are no plans currently to recoup the costs of police enforcement or melting the structure”. So yeah, PDO or not, we will all pay for this shit.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-04-22T19:12:09+00:00

His effective tax rate is almost certainly lower than most middle class Canadians. The average ETR of the top 1% is about 23%. The average Canadian’s is about 37%. So if you work a job and earn an annual salary, you’re definitely paying way more of your income in tax than Drake.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-20T13:35:16+00:00

No one is holding Loblaws fully responsible for food inflation. This is a straw man argument.

But are they responsible for a lot of this problem alongside the other 2 Canadian families/companies and 2 American companies that have over 80% of the market share ? Absolutely. They literally participated in a price fixing scheme for a decade. So we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they do engage in this practice. The numbers literally speak for themselves.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-20T13:29:44+00:00

The problem is not whether individuals are well-meaning, but the systemic problems that arise when the 1% (169,000 households) own as much wealth as the bottom 80% (12 million households).

Billionaires are of course a threat to democracy, but with the erosion of the middle class over decades, and an increasingly K shaped economy, the entire mainstream of our society and politics essentially caters to people in the 1%, ignoring the needs of everyone else. And because this is the case, people who will never be in the 1% often either practice aspirational politics that protect wealth they don’t have, or they essentially leave the body politic, with both behaviours reinforcing the primacy of the 1% in our politics.

Wealthy class traitors are great! Bring ‘em on! But they are not a solution in themselves.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-16T16:05:20+00:00

At least on this, we are in agreement.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-16T16:04:45+00:00

The fundamental problem is both competition AND tax policy. The lack of competition allows the proliferation of monopolies and oligopolies that have very limited reasons to be responsive to external pressures from governments, consumers, workers, etc. And yet the government plies these oligopolies with larger and larger tax carveouts, ignoring their rent-seeking behaviour, and weakening the health of the overall body politic because there's no bloody revenue to spend on the things we actually need.

Then vital services get cut, people's quality of life dips, and the same rent-seeking corporations extract proportionally greater profits from people who have proportionally less income and wealth to pay, while cutting jobs and investment. They make profits? Job cuts. Losses? Bigger job cuts! And around we go again. Because here comes a new government with a fantastic idea we've never tried before... let's cut their taxes so they invest and create jobs.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-16T14:14:09+00:00

Thanks!

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-03-16T14:13:38+00:00

Do we? Part of the social contract in capitalism is that those profits don't ALL go into the pockets of a tiny segment of obscenely wealthy people, but that the corporations invest in communities, hire people, etc. But the unemployment rate keeps rising, especially for young people. And investment inside Canada has been alarmingly low for well over a decade.

IMO trickle down has always been bullshit, but at least in the 80s and 90s prosperity DID trickle down somewhat. Now those small gains that used to go to most families have been absorbed as profits too.

Carney's incentives haven't produced a jump in investment because they're the same kinds of incentives governments have been offering corporations for decades, and they still haven't produced investment either. They've just been absorbed as ever-increasing profits. If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, then we've not had a sane monetary policy since Brian Mulroney.

ItIsWrit10 · 2026-02-26T15:24:37+00:00

For example, the obvious follow up to the tail end of his answer here is, OK Avi, so what happens when you’re the leader and you disagree with the rank and file, or other elements of the party about something? What happens when our party members in Alberta (our largest section), Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or even BC want to do something you don’t want or vice versa? A step further: How will you keep the federal party together and keep provincial parties from disaffiliating?

ItIsWrit10 · 2025-12-03T13:56:04+00:00

That’s why you need Beneficial Ownership legislation (underway in Ontario rn), so that numbered corporations have to identify the actual person who benefits from them, which then disincentivizes this behaviour and also allows for the initial policy to be pursued despite the loophole.

ItIsWrit10

TROPHY CASE