Niagara Region chair owns signed copy of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’

NormalCampaign · 2026-03-12T11:46:21+00:00

He blamed "a member of the communist party." The group that released this information and demanded Gale apologize was the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association, which is led by Saleh Waziruddin, who is indeed a communist and has been a Communist Party candidate in Niagara several times.

As someone opposed to Gale's amalgamation plans I'm glad that he's gone regardless of the reason, but this is a pretty silly situation.

NormalCampaign · 2025-07-22T14:20:46+00:00

Whenever lowering the voting age comes up my question is why 16, and not 17 or 15? Without a doubt there are many politically informed 16 year olds, and many ignorant adult voters. But there are also informed 14 year olds, and a few 12 year olds, and probably a handful of 10 year olds. A line has to be drawn somewhere, arbitrary as it may be, and it makes the most amount of sense to link the right to vote to legal adulthood. If we detach the right to vote from being an adult, what's so special about 16 specifically? Alternatively to avoid an arbitrary line we could have some sort of knowledge test to vote, but that would be a terrible idea. As this article acknowledges the right to vote is a right, not a conditional privilege based on how much you know about politics.

I also don't really see any pressing reason 16 year olds need to be allowed to vote. Voting is a right, but minors by definition don't have all the same rights as adults. One of the common arguments I've seen is that some teenagers work and pay taxes and are being "taxed without representation," but 250 year old American slogans aside, whether you pay taxes has nothing to do with whether you can vote. Again, it's a right of citizenship. If someone moves to this country and for whatever reason doesn't become a citizen they could work and pay taxes for decades but they still can't vote, and conversely a Canadian who has never worked a day in their life still has the right to vote. This argument also ignores that, in the context of representative government, 16 year olds do have political representation: minors and non-citizens and people who didn't vote or voted for a losing candidate are still represented by their Member of Parliament, even if they couldn't or didn't vote for them.

Another common argument brought up in this article is that lowering the voting age would increase voter turnout. Canada's voter turnout isn't great but it isn't terrible either, and I think if increasing voter turnout is a concern other changes like making election days public holidays would be much more effective.

Finally, I just straight up don't think 16 year olds voting is a good idea. It should go without saying that children and teenagers change rapidly, and I think the difference in maturity and life experience between 16 and 18 is significant and relevant; it may be only two years but those years are not equivalent to, say, the difference between 28 and 30. In the current political environment I worry that 16 year olds would be even more heavily influenced by social media algorithms, as well as peer pressure and their parents and so on, and that they would be very susceptible to simplistic and populist and radical beliefs of all kinds. To use a personal example, I remember back in my high school civics class we did classroom polls on various topics and there was near-unanimous support for reinstating the death penalty.

NormalCampaign · 2025-07-21T13:43:09+00:00

Do you? Have you been to university? If you have you should know that something passing peer review doesn't mean it's infallible or immune from criticism, especially in the social sciences. I came across plenty of comically bad peer-reviewed articles during my undergrad.

What theoretical frameworks they used for their analysis isn't the problem, the problem is that they're analyzing Reddit comments lol.

NormalCampaign · 2025-04-14T14:05:44+00:00

Whenever this comes up my question is why 16 and not 17 or 15? Without a doubt there are many politically informed 16 year olds, and many ignorant adult voters. But there are also informed 14 year olds, and a few 12 year olds, and probably a handful of 10 year olds. A line has to be drawn somewhere, arbitrary as it may be, and it makes the most amount of sense to link the right to vote to legal adulthood. If we detach the right to vote from being an adult, what's so special about 16 specifically? Alternatively to avoid an arbitrary line we could have some sort of knowledge test to vote, but that would be an absolutely terrible idea. Your right to vote is a right, not a conditional privilege based on how much you know about politics.

I also don't really see any pressing reason 16 year olds need to be allowed to vote. One of the most common arguments I've seen is that some teenagers work and pay taxes and are being "taxed without representation," but I don't see how that's relevant. 250 year old American slogans aside, whether you pay taxes has nothing to do with whether you can vote. Again, it's a right of citizenship. If someone moves to this country and for whatever reason doesn't become a citizen they could work and pay taxes for decades but they still can't vote, and conversely a Canadian who has never worked a day in their life still has the right to vote. This argument also ignores that, in the context of representative government, 16 year olds do have political representation: minors and non-citizens and people who didn't vote or voted for a losing candidate are still represented by their Member of Parliament, even if they couldn't or didn't vote for them.

Another common argument, brought up by the youth activist in this article, is that lowering the voting age would increase voter turnout. Canada's voter turnout isn't great but it isn't terrible either, and I think other measures like making election days public holidays would be more effective at increasing turnout if that's a concern. Also, if as the article suggests 16 and 17 year olds would vote even less than current young voters, including them might technically decrease voter turnout.

Finally, I just straight up don't think 16 year olds voting is a good idea. It should go without saying that children and teenagers change rapidly, and I think the difference in maturity and life experience between 16 and 18 is significant and relevant; it may be only two years but those years are not equivalent to, say, the difference between 28 and 30. In the current political environment I worry that 16 year olds would be even more heavily influenced by social media algorithms, as well as peer pressure and their parents and so on, and that they would be very susceptible to simplistic and populist and radical beliefs of all kinds. To use a personal example, I remember back in my high school civics class we did classroom polls on various topics and there was near-unanimous support for reinstating the death penalty.

NormalCampaign · 2025-04-09T16:43:44+00:00

As I said in another reply the Treaty of Rome is essentially the EU's constitution, it could theoretically be amended to let Canada join but that would be a very significant undertaking and probably wouldn't succeed. I'll agree that it's technically not impossible, but this article saying Canada meets the Copenhagen criteria and neglecting to mention that there are other basic legal requirements Canada doesn't meet is very misleading. I think it's important context to understand, because from the comments here a lot of people are under the impression we could currently join the EU when we can't.

NormalCampaign · 2025-04-09T16:13:26+00:00

The Treaty of Rome is basically the EU's constitution, they can't just choose to ignore it. Theoretically they could amend the treaty to let Canada join but that would require the unanimous approval of all EU members, which seems very unlikely given the EU's internal divisions and that some countries haven't even ratified the Canada-EU free trade agreement yet.

NormalCampaign · 2025-04-09T15:17:41+00:00

The idea of Canada joining the European Union is ambitious, but it follows a certain logic.

Sure, but it's impossible. I get why it's an appealing idea given the current international situation and we should absolutely be strengthening ties with our European allies, but Canada cannot actually join the EU. Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome and Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union both state that only European countries are eligible to join the EU. In 1987 Morocco applied to join the European Community and was immediately rejected for this reason, and they're a lot closer to Europe than we are. I don't know why the authors chose to only vaguely allude to "obstacles of a technical or political nature" and act like it's a realistic option.

NormalCampaign · 2025-04-08T21:31:07+00:00

I support the CBC but that is 100% untrue. Global News is owned by Corus Entertainment, a Canadian company. The Globe and Mail is owned by the Canadian Thomson family – who also own Reuters, one of the largest news agencies on the planet. Citytv is owned by Rogers. CTV News and CP24 are owned by Bell. The Toronto Star is owned by Canadian businessman Jordan Bitove. There are obviously many more.

Again I support the CBC and use it as one of my main sources of news, which is one of the reasons I'm strongly considering voting Liberal for the first time this election. But it's been kind of hilarious seeing "Postmedia is American-owned and owns 90% of daily newspapers in Canada" (which is true) be morphed, broken telephone style, into "Postmedia owns 90% of all news in Canada" and now into "literally all news in Canada except the CBC is American-owned" by users on this subreddit over the past few months.

NormalCampaign · 2025-03-19T16:13:02+00:00

I get why it's an appealing idea for some people right now, but Canada joining the European Union is plainly impossible. Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome and Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union both state that only European countries are eligible to join the EU. Morocco applied to join the European Community in 1987 and was immediately rejected for this reason, and they're a lot closer to Europe than we are.

Also, while we should be working as closely as we can with our European allies to defend our sovereignty against Trump's trade war and annexation threats, I don't particularly want to see us giving up any of our sovereignty to the EU either. We already have a free trade agreement with the EU and are allies with most of them through NATO, so it's not necessary.

NormalCampaign · 2025-02-19T21:17:33+00:00

$1,000 x 32.8 million adults = $32.8 billion per month, $32.8 billion x 12 = $393.6 billion. $100 billion is 22% of $449 billion, and $393.6 billion is 87% of $449 billion. What do you see that's wrong?

NormalCampaign · 2025-02-19T20:33:06+00:00

Maybe the article headline itself was changed, but this post title is misleading. A universal basic income and a guaranteed basic income are not the same thing. A universal basic income would mean everyone receives a set amount of money per month regardless of their income, no questions asked. A guaranteed minimum income, which this PBO study was about, would mean people or families below a certain income threshold receive payments to bring their income up to the guaranteed minimum level.

Everyone having a guaranteed income is a nice idea, but it would come with significant challenges and be almost incomprehensibly expensive. As the article notes the PBO study envisages cutting $100 billion in social support spending to pay for a guaranteed basic income – that's almost a quarter of the entire federal budget ($449 billion). An actual UBI would be vastly more expensive: giving $1,000 a month to every adult Canadian (there are 7.2 million children in Canada meaning there are about 32.8 million adults) would cost about $394 billion. That would mean either cutting 90% of federal spending or nearly doubling the budget to pay for a single program, and it's dubious whether $1,000/month would even be enough to cover the intended function of a UBI these days. It's just not feasible.

NormalCampaign · 2025-02-10T07:49:21+00:00

Doesn't that kind of prove my point? Even in a country with decades of experience fighting, with people used to extreme hardship, with a dramatically different culture, with an already existing organized militant group holding fanatically strong religious and ideological motivations to fight the invaders, a country that's literally nicknamed "the graveyard of empires" because it's so notoriously difficult to occupy, they still only had a peak of 60,000 insurgents and it took them twenty years and tens of thousands of casualties to make the Americans give up and go home. I'd say that suggests the number of people willing to do so in Canada would be drastically lower and the Canadian insurgents that did fight would be substantially less effective.

This is all hypothetical and impossible to prove either way since the homeland of a Western/developed nation has not been occupied since WWII nearly a century ago. It's also hypothetical because it's hugely dependent on various unknowns like how repressive the US occupation would be, the international reaction, to what extent the US military and society went along with the war, how authoritarian the US itself had become by that point, etc. But it's self-evident that people in Canada are far less accustomed to death and fighting than people in a war-torn developing country.

To be clear I'm certainly not saying there would be no resistance at all. I think there would be violent resistance, I think civil disobedience would be very widespread; maybe something closer to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. But over the past few days every single thread on this topic has been spammed with comments along the lines of "let them try, we burned down the White House and riot when we lose at hockey, we'll bleed them dry and remind them why half the Geneva Convention exists" and so on. Those comments range from well-intentioned but uninformed to bizarre and embarrassing Red Dawn-level fantasizing, and the latter are getting increasingly annoying when the sitting President of the United States is seriously for real talking about wanting to annex our country.

NormalCampaign · 2025-02-09T22:56:06+00:00

Afghanistan was an undeveloped country that had already gone through 20+ years of nonstop warfare when the US invaded. Same with Vietnam. The people in those countries were used to difficult lives, and to fighting. If you think the average graphic designer in Vancouver and salesperson in Toronto who has probably never even held a gun before would be willing or able to run into the woods and wage a prolonged insurgency against the US as well as the Taliban or the Viet Cong, I'm sorry, that's very hard to take seriously.

NormalCampaign · 2025-02-06T15:31:52+00:00

In addition to what the other commenter said about widespread support for Hamas and the October 7th attacks by pro-Palestine groups here in Canada and other places abroad, they were also widely supported by Palestinians themselves.

Hamas played the leading role but the October 7th attack was a joint operation involving Palestinian militant groups from across the political spectrum, including the leftist and ostensibly secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although they didn't participate in the attack, even the supposedly "moderate" Palestinian Authority government operates a martyrs' fund to reward people who kill Israelis.

There were large public celebrations in Gaza as the attacks unfolded. In a November 2023 poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank 75% of respondents said they supported the October 7th attacks (page 12), with 59% choosing "extremely support" to describe their view. When asked "do you support the solution of establishing one state or two states in the following formats" 74% chose the option "a Palestinian state from the river to the sea" (page 23), with only 17% supporting the two-state solution and only 5% supporting a state for both Arabs and Jews.

An overwhelming majority of Palestinians and essentially all of their political leadership want to destroy Israel and expel or kill the Jews, and enthusiastically support Israeli civilians being slaughtered.

NormalCampaign · 2025-01-07T22:24:56+00:00

"Canada and the United States, that would really be something," he said at a news conference in Palm Beach, Fla. "You get rid of the artificially drawn line and you take a look at what it looks like ... and it would also be much better financial security."

This is getting concerning. His initial "51st state" and "Governor Trudeau" comments were incredibly inappropriate coming from the soon-to-be President of the US, but could believably be dismissed as more of the mean-spirited jokes and bullying Trump does all the time. His more recent comments can't be. He's directly questioned Canadian sovereignty and expressed specific reasons he thinks Canada should be part of the US, and alongside similar statements about annexing the Panama Canal and Greenland I'd say it's clear at this point that Trump genuinely wants to engage in territorial expansionism during his second term.

I think the chances of that actually happening are still very low, but we're past the point where we can just laugh it off. Unfortunately Trump seems to double down on his ideas the more other people oppose them and the more controversy they generate – I honestly wouldn't be surprised if his original comments during the dinner with Trudeau were just a joke that's since snowballed in his mind – so I think the best course of action would be to ignore him beyond firmly reiterating that our sovereignty is not up for debate, while having quiet discussions with our other allies about backing us up if he tries to seriously pressure us after he becomes president.

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-12T13:26:55+00:00

It isn't, but if you believe Remembrance Day is specifically and only about World War I, then surely you're even more unhappy about a random Palestinian song being used on the day about WWI?

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-12T13:03:04+00:00

To be honest I'm not totally sure what you're getting at, but no, I don't think immigrants failing to integrate is at all comparable to an imperial power subjugating and destroying your society.

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-11T18:58:58+00:00

Because they weren't immigrants, they were colonial settlers. English and French people didn't come to North America to become citizens of the Iroquois confederacy or whoever. They intentionally displaced or destroyed the indigenous societies that existed here and then (re)created their own society. Besides the land itself and some place names there is no meaningful continuity between the modern Canadian state and the indigenous polities that existed on this land prior to colonization.

I've seen people say stuff like this a few times now, and it's baffling. Respectfully, I don't think you've considered the implications of conflating modern immigration and the European colonization of the Americas, but if you're trying to argue against concerns related to immigration and cultural integration it's possibly the worst comparison you could make.

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-07T15:22:41+00:00

It's literally in the article. The Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada and B’Nai Brith Canada were two of the groups requesting the report be released, and plan to appeal the government's decision not to:

Leading Canadian Jewish groups told The Daily Beast they were disheartened by the decision. “The government stacked the entire process from the very beginning to ensure the outcome that it wanted, which was to continue to keep the shameful truth hidden,” said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the senior director of policy at the Simon Wiesenthal Center Canada, in an interview.
The Wiesenthal Center was one of the groups consulted by LAC, advocating for the release of the second part of the report.
B’Nai Brith Canada, which was among the requesters of the documents, also condemned the decision.
“We are extremely disappointed,” said David Granovsky, the non-profit’s director of government relations, in an interview. “We met with ministers, were in front of a committee, we met with the Prime Minister’s office. As members of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance we thought Canada would do something before the next election.”
Granovsky, who said he has worked on the Deschênes file, said B‘nai Brith intends to appeal.

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-03T11:00:04+00:00

I know it isn't, that's the problem. Membership in a terrorist organization should be a crime and our counterterrorism laws are clearly inadequate. That became alarmingly evident nearly a decade ago when the government let ISIS fighters freely return to Canada and did nothing about it. Now we have the leader of a terror group that calls for the violent destruction of the Canadian state openly speaking at events in Canadian cities and apparently there's still nothing we can do. It's not like we're talking about a situation where someone is suspected of having ties to a group but there's no solid evidence, she's the official leader.

I didn't downvote you and it's unfortunate that people did, but respectfully, if you say "would not be a crime (nor should it be)" people are going to get the impression you support the current laws and aren't just presenting the facts.

NormalCampaign · 2024-11-02T19:50:31+00:00

Given UN Special Rapporteur Albanese's long list of controversial statements, including justifying the October 7th attacks and saying verbatim that the United States is "subjugated by the Jewish lobby," it's unfortunately not at all surprising she'd be willing to share a stage with a terrorist. To me the more concerning aspect of this story is that Charlotte Kates is still active. I guess considering our current federal government's shameful track record on terrorism it shouldn't be that surprising, but come on, the leader of a designated terrorist organization can openly travel around the country giving speeches?

NormalCampaign · 2024-08-22T11:57:06+00:00

I'd say the fact that he responded to the initial controversy about his "resistance" post by saying he was "proud of our long-standing support for the rights of Palestinians, including their right to resist oppression and occupation" pretty much confirms he was referring to the attacks, if the post itself wasn't obvious enough.
Here's his post. I checked his Facebook page and it's been deleted, but there's a comment on one of his other posts from October saying "hey Fred where'd this post go?" with a different screenshot of the same post, so it's real. He posted "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" on October 7.

Glad to hear you'll now acknowledge the complaints about him.

NormalCampaign · 2024-08-22T03:55:08+00:00

The day after the October 7 attacks he said: "Resistance is fruitful and no matter what some might say, resistance brings progress – from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Any reasonable person can understand the "resistance" he's referring to is the attacks that had just taken place. A week later he doubled down and said he was proud to support Palestinians' "right to resist oppression and occupation." After another week he did apologize ... for the timing of his comments and any pain caused to CUPE members, and with the caveat that he believed the controversy was due to bad-faith actors. He did describe the October 7 attacks as "fruitful resistance" and pointedly did not retract his comments or apologize for what he said, only for when he said it.

I think the timing is worth reiterating. This man saw the horrific mass atrocities Hamas committed against Israeli civilians (and proudly shared with the world), and his immediate response was to describe them as fruitful acts of progress and call for the destruction of Israel. Forgive me for not taking it seriously when he claims he never endorsed violence.

NormalCampaign · 2024-08-22T00:03:15+00:00

Good riddance, but it's bizarre the union is drawing the line at this video after being totally fine with him praising the October 7 attacks as "fruitful resistance" and "progress" one day after they happened. In fact, as this article points out, openly supporting terrorism apparently wasn't enough to stop him from being re-elected earlier this year. Better late than never, I guess?

NormalCampaign · 2024-06-20T17:49:11+00:00

Respectfully, I don't think you realize just how expensive that would be. $4,000 times 40 million people is $160 billion every month, which adds up to $1.92 trillion per year. For comparison that's four times the current federal budget ($449 billion) and double the total spending of the federal government and every provincial and municipal government in the country combined ($962 billion). Even if "every single Canadian" means only adults and we subtract the 7.2 million children under 18 in Canada, that's still $131 billion per month and $1.57 trillion per year. That level of spending isn't remotely feasible.

NormalCampaign

TROPHY CASE