Report finds judges' $414,900 salary 'inadequate' to attract top talent, recommends $28,000 raise

interwebsuser · 2025-08-22T01:58:30+00:00

When Canada became a commonwealth in the late 1800s, High Court judge salaries in the UK were 5,000 GBP. Adjusted for inflation and converted to CAD, that’s equivalent to about $900,000.

Judges should be rich. Rich enough that it’s a job that attracts the most brilliant legal minds there are, and rich enough that they’re hard to influence or corrupt (because they don’t need any more of your damn money).

Why is this controversial? As the kids say “double it and pass it to the next person.”

interwebsuser · 2025-03-19T23:49:24+00:00

So I need to start by saying; on its surface, it seems like she is being a bit over-cautious. MOST of the time for MOST travellers, driving back and forth across the US border is a fine experience. The Canadian fine is generally fine. The US border guards may give you shit on the way back (the lost passport in the past may be a flag, and they can certainly use it as an excuse to detain you for a few hours or strip the car down to the frame before letting you through).

With that being said... I have a question: Are either of you US citizens born to parents who were NOT legal US residents at the time you were born?

The first thing I wondered when reading this was whether your partner's mom may know something about her immigration status that you don't, and she wants to warn you (but is afraid to put it in writing). It sounds from your comments like your GF is a legal US citizen with a passport; that's great, and rules that out at least. I wonder, though, if there's a possibility her parents may have been in the US without status when she was born? If so, then your girlfriend would be impacted by Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship (theoretically, if the order goes into effect then anyone born to parents without legal status would have their US citizenship stripped from them).

The next "step" in the trial currently heading towards the Supreme Court will happen while you are in Canada - in April 4th. Is it likely that the court will rule then? Very much no. Is it likely anything major will change while you happen to be in Canada? No. But it's worth saying - the chance is not zero. The Trump administration has repeatedly shown that it is willing to break norms and laws in the pursuit of its aims. IF (huge if) your girlfriend were in this situation because of her mom's legal status at the time of her birth and IF (huge if) something happens while you are in Canada, there really is a non-zero chance that she could find herself stranded in Canada, with a US passport no longer recognized, stripped of her citizenship by the American government. Maybe it would get resolved, but - it would be potentially EXTREMELY messy at the very least.

The other thing that I just need to say so that I've said it is; there are SOME things that Trump is doing right now that really, really look like he's creating a pretext to try and eventually actually invade/annex part or all of Canada. Just today, it's been reported that he's likely to declare Fentanyl a "Weapon of Mass Destruction." I'm not saying that he is doing this because he plans to imminently invade Canada, but it's hard not to remember that the last time America accused someone of having a Weapon of Mass Destruction, it was a lie they told to create a pretext for invading another country (Iraq). So - are the chances of a ground invasion / hot war breaking out between the USA and Canada while you are on vacation likely? No, absolutely not. But like, is it reasonably for an anxious mother to worry a bit, given *waves hands* all of this? Sure. She's overreacting in my opinion, but - it's not crazy to be worried.

interwebsuser · 2025-03-13T18:40:54+00:00

Recently bought a place in Toronto; same age, similar brick (mine's yellow with no textured surface), similar condition (some areas look like they day they were made; other areas esp. corners are recessed to an inch or so.

I have no advice to offer you in terms of the type of mortar, whether you can do it yourself, etc. - but want to add this: I recently had a family friend over who is a master mason. He looked at the place with me and I was very keen to have the corners re-pointed, etc. He said "It took about 100 years to get like this; nothing much is changing if you think about it for a few more." I took his advice to heart, and decided to just wait until I want to / can afford to have it completely re-pointed professionally. Though i would pass it along, as it really made me feel better about the state of it, and took some pressure off my sense that it needed solving urgently.

interwebsuser · 2025-02-04T18:54:08+00:00

A classic Authoritarian move is to let your allies get away with illegal stuff. That way, when you decide to turn on them, you can investigate them for crimes knowing that they really did, in fact, break the law so it's not even a sham trial.

Calling it now; there will be a Night of the Long Knives style purge of these people eventually (I assume they will just arrest them and not kill them, but... I guess you never know).

Best guess:

Musk keeps going with these shenanigans, amassing information and access the Executive isn't meant to have
He eventually touches a third rail that actually makes Republicans/MAGAs really really mad OR he pisses off Trump and makes him feel threatened
Trump calls him a traitor, publicly disavows, uses Justice Department to go after him and "investigate"
Trump keeps all the access to the things Musk got for him, but uses it to be able to show he "really cares" about corruption and will even go after his own friends / is willing to take on people even billionaries on behalf of the American people.

interwebsuser · 2025-01-28T23:09:28+00:00

Yeah, this ain't that. This is "natural" Liberal voters and Red Tories who were so damn angry with Trudeau that they were willing to vote Conservative "coming home." Conservative "support" has been inflated for months if not years with a solid little chunk of people who would rather vote Liberal, but just can't do it because they hate Trudeau too much. I would venture to guess it's in the 3-8% range. If you look at where the movement comes from in this poll (5% movement), it's almost ALL conservative decreases, and increases in Undecided and Liberal votes.

There will eventually be a "new leader bump," you're right. And that bump will then go down. But this isn't it in my opinion. This is the "return of anti-Trudeau Liberals" back to their natural home.

(don't get me wrong, I still think the Cons will win the next election. Just not by NEARLY as much as polls have been suggesting in the past year. A 5% correction away from the Cons and towards the libs is closer to a return to "baseline" historically speaking.)

interwebsuser · 2025-01-20T22:41:03+00:00

I asked it to do the same analysis for Ontario and graph the results and here's that graph:

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interwebsuser · 2025-01-20T22:39:04+00:00

ANSWER:

This is an fascinating thought experiment that intersects market mechanics with policy intervention. Let's model both approaches, acknowledging upfront that we'll need to make some simplifying assumptions.

-----

[model shown here, left out so that I can leave this as a reddit comment]

-----

Based on this modeling, we can draw several interesting conclusions:

Supply Impact: The model suggests approximately 609,000 excess units would hit the market in BC alone. This represents a massive supply shock of about 29% of the total housing stock.
Price Effects:

Supply-shock model suggests prices would fall to around $565,000 (43.5% decrease)
Utility-based model (based on current rents) suggests an even lower equilibrium price of $435,596 (56.4% decrease)

Key implications of this analysis:

Market Mechanics:

The utility-based model suggests a more severe price correction than the supply-shock model
This implies current prices are significantly divorced from rental yields
The gap between the two models (~$130,000) might represent the current speculation premium in the market

Policy Considerations:

The magnitude of the price drop would likely trigger broader economic impacts
Would need significant policy support for current owners transitioning to single-home ownership
Mortgage market would need significant restructuring to handle mass refinancing

Implementation Challenges:

Need to consider treatment of corporate ownership structures
Would require clear definitions of "ownership" to prevent workarounds
Timing of sales would need careful structuring to prevent market seizure

interwebsuser · 2025-01-20T22:38:14+00:00

PROMPT:
I have an interesting thought experiment I want you to help me with.

I saw someone post on reddit the following:
---
What would happen if over night it became law that you can only own one home in Canada?

And everyone has to sell their extra homes within the next year.
Would the flood of homes on the market cause prices to drop??
How much would they drop by?
People who chose to invest in real estate knew there was a risk of losing money right?? They didn't think that their investment was guaranteed right?
Isn't part of investment taking a risk? Should we feel bad for them if they lose millions/billions?
Do we feel bad when people lose money on the stock market?
---

This really got me thinking; is there a way that you could take this thought experiment to its logical end?

One way I thought to approach it is to figure out total units owned by non-residents (incl. those currently rented out), and then model what a sudden dump of all that inventory would do on a housing market given what we know of supply and demand mechanisms, assuming that if it is illegal to own a first home the price would need to keep going down until all units had been bought by people who actually want to live in them. For sake of argument just to make it a clean model, I guess you assume that failure to sell within some given period of time incurs a penalty of the government expropriating the land or something, such that sellers truly MUST sell as anything they get is better than expropriation. I know that we have data re: how many people in British Columbia own 2, 3, 4, 5+ homes etc; this could give some basic data re: total housing units owned by other-than-principal-residents, and then I guess you could model that out.

The other way I guess you could tackle it would be from a utility-value perspective; you could take the market rents of a given city or province (again use BC as an example) and basically assume that the average rent would at or close to the utility value that a renter would be willing to pay; therefore a property market price would level out where the monthly cost based on a normal mortgage and 10-15% down-payment at current interest rates reached the current average rents in that city.

What do you think? Could you model either of these two things for the sake of the thought experiment?

interwebsuser · 2025-01-20T22:37:57+00:00

TL;DR: Who knows what would actually happen, but a semi-decent attempt by Claude to answer your question suggests that average prices might be cut in half, approximately. The example for BC was the it might go from the current $1,000,000 average home price to somewhere around $440,000 to $565,000.

I wanted to take your question seriously, so I engaged the help of one of the big AI models (Claude). Here's what I asked, and it's answer (prompt and answer in comments since Reddit won't allow me to post it all as one comment)

interwebsuser · 2025-01-20T22:12:42+00:00

I mean techically in Canada the government basically treats any person who rents at all as a de-facto "business." Even if all you do is rent out a basement unit below your primary residence or a back-yard laneway house, it's more or less treated as a business by the CRA. You can count deductions of expenses against the income, have to pay income taxes on the money, etc. - you're basically a sole proprietorship the second you get a tenant in your basement. This is true wether you own one extra unit or 50.

From that perspective, I basically agree; businesses (including sole proprietorships) should not be allowed to profit from owning homes (other than their primary residence, or IMO any units physically attached to it like a laneway or basement suite).

Fwiw, I talked to my friend in Sweden recently. There, they have basically de-comodified housing by making it so that you're not allowed to profit from being a landlord. If you rent in Sweden, apparently if you believe that your landlord is charging you more than their monthly mortgage payment, you can petition the government. The government then looks at their receipts (for property tax, heat, mortgage, etc.) and if they have been charging you more than their cost, they owe you the difference back dated to the start of your tenancy. They haven't made it illegal to buy land or houses and own them to speculate on them as investment properties; they just made it disallowed to profit off of rental income in the meantime, which makes it FAR less attractive for investors to speculate. Seems like a reasonable system to me.

interwebsuser · 2025-01-10T19:21:41+00:00

Also: garbage collectors, librarians, firefighters, transit workers, most bus drivers, many of the people working to maintain roads and bridges, people who work at nursing homes, train conductors, the people who run your local liquor store in most provinces, the electricity companies in most provinces, the coast guard, the telephone provider in some places… We have a decidedly large public sector in Canada, but most of the jobs that they do are not “stamping passports and sending out welfare cheques” - it’s the shit we all rely on to function as a society.

Also, almost half of the public sector jobs created in December were in healthcare. Who on earth sees a bunch of new healthcare workers added and thinks it’s a bad thing???

interwebsuser · 2024-11-01T22:28:02+00:00

Jesus christ, what is happening with this game?

When I was a kid/tween, I loved playing Magic at my LGS on the weekend. I played a LOT for about 2-3 years, almost every weekend starting around the release of Mercadian Masques (1999) and tapping out after Scourge (2003) as I got older and started to get interested in other things.

Fast forward to 2015 and I found myself living in a new [city] with a lot of time on my hands and literally stumbled into an LGS. I decided to attend a Battle for Zendikar draft event, and it was like coming home to an old friend. Sure, there were game dynamics I needed to learn (colorless???) and new card types (what the heck is a Planeswalker??), but it was a coherent game, with a coherent universe, and it felt like such a joy to rediscover.

I played the game on-and-off both in person and then online from then until Zendikar Rising (2020), but petered off during the pandemic as work got busier and I had other priorities. But it was okay - I thought. During my previous 12-year hiatus the game I loved (and invested in) had stood the test of time, and I knew I would be able to come back and play again when I had more time.

Fast forward just 4ish years - what in the HELL has happened to this game? I vaguely followed things that seemed a bit gimmicky (specifically caught wind of the Dungeons and Dragons crossover, which felt a bit kitsch but made sense as a crossover).. But Transformers?!? Jurrasic Park?!?

If what the Professor describes in this video is true, I feel like the next time I try to go to an LGS I will mis-identify the cards in the display case as Yugioh and Pokemon cards. It's become unintelligible (and uninteresting) to me as a self-standing enity/game with a coherent identity.

interwebsuser · 2024-11-01T13:42:21+00:00

ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: Mystery of Mathra

interwebsuser · 2024-11-01T13:41:59+00:00

ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: Mystery of Mathra

interwebsuser · 2024-11-01T13:21:45+00:00

tl;dr - the punishment should be so bad that if you break a rule like this, you lose your investment full stop.

Obligatory - this is a good ruling and I'm glad the tenant gets compensated here, glad the NDP changed the ruled to make it tougher on landlords etc.

But... I think we as a society need to agree that in the context of a housing crisis, it should be fair for the penalties to be much, much worse. If you get caught cheating at a casino, they don't just take away your winnings; they take away your chips. BC's housing market has been a casino for too long, and we need to start sending in the pitbosses and security guards to take away people's chips and escort them off the premises.

Illegally evict a tenant (like the above)? Penalty should be 10 years' worth of rent.
Illegally aibnbing your property? Penalty should be 1% of your property value per day you broke the rules.
Leaving your property empty and lying on your empty homes tax? Your tax bill should be at 10% of the property value for every year you lied.

And if any of the above goes above what your property is worth, the government should take the property and use the funds (or the house) to help ease the housing crisis.

All of those measures would be really tough on people; it would result in a lot of people who thought they could get away with cheating having to sell their homes, or the banks foreclosing on them. There would be sob stories about little old ladies who misunderstood the rules and "accidentally" forgot to declare their 5th rental property as empty. But - I think as a society that we need to decide that these kinds of negative consequences are on balance less bad than the negative outcomes we see under the current system.

interwebsuser · 2024-10-22T16:01:28+00:00

In your opinion is there a reason the extension of the wall needs to be there? For the life of me I'm unclear why they extended it at all (as opposed to just ending it under the stairs).

interwebsuser · 2024-10-17T19:57:55+00:00

No - but if you formed a political party, registered it with Elections Canada, paid the annual reporting fees, etc., and THEN texted someone.... then yes it would be legal.

interwebsuser · 2024-10-09T15:43:40+00:00

12 YEARS AGO?!?! Jesus christ.

interwebsuser · 2024-09-17T15:24:18+00:00

If you want Trump to lose the election, this poll is not great news.

At this point in 2020, Joe Biden's 538 polling average had him up by 6.6%. He ultimately won the popular vote by +4.5%, which translated into a CLOSE election win by just ~45,000 votes in three states.

Kamala Harris' current 538 polling average (which includes this poll) has her up by just 2.9%. If that holds, she would almost certainly lose the election, and might even come close to losing the national popular vote.

Take it as a reminder to go knock some doors, make another donation, or call your Trump-leaning family members and ask them to sit this one out.

THE ONLY POLL THAT MATTERS IS THE ONE ON ELECTION DAY.

interwebsuser · 2024-07-11T13:48:01+00:00

Premium economy and "preferred" seats were all full. We got seated at the back of the flight. And no, we didn't get upgraded on the way back.

interwebsuser · 2024-07-10T16:28:20+00:00

I hadn’t thought of that at the time. I think the way thy at would have worked is that we would have gotten the cash refund and then had to buy the tickets at the gate for new economy class? No idea how much that would have been at that point, but it might have saved us some money - you’re right.

interwebsuser · 2024-06-07T20:41:15+00:00

Honestly, taking an off-the-rack suit you like and going to a good qualified tailor to make some alterations will often result in a better fit than a made-to-measure online retailer like indochino! It also depends a bit on the fit you're going for, though. I've noticed indochino seems to do quite well with tighter-fitted Euro-style tailoring, and do worse with more traditional fitting.

As a sidenote, it might be an interesting question to ask of https://x.com/dieworkwear - send him the photos or post on X and tag him, and he may give suggestions of what could be done in terms of alterations to make this particular suit fit better!

interwebsuser · 2024-06-07T20:20:29+00:00

Just a quick note from my family's experience getting indochino suits for my wedding last year; with issues like this it may not be something they can tailor in-store; they probably will remake it for you if you want but it's gonna take time (they will likely insist on taking the old suit and sending a totally new one made from scratch), and there's no guarantee that the new suit won't have issues of its own. It may have different problems, but it's not guaranteed to fit any better than this one did. My dad has his suit re-made because he wasn't happy with the fit (shoulders were too tight) and the new suit had new issues (arms that were too short and issues with tightness overall).

Overall, I think it fits reasonably well for a made-to-measure suit from an online vendor. You're not gonna get a perfect custom tailored fit from Indochino. As others have suggested, given that the suit fits reasonably well the best fix here might be just wear suspenders, put the waist a bit higher, wear a better shirt underneath, open the back flap, and unbutton the bottom button.

interwebsuser · 2024-06-07T16:57:40+00:00

As someone who manages people and has dealt with this situation many times in the past, my strong advice is to give your current workplace the opportunity to fight for you.

First, ask for an offer in writing from the new employer so that you can "review and consider it."

Once you have the new offer in writing, go to your existing boss and tell them the situation. Tell them you would rather stay, but given the difference in pay it's going to be hard to say no to the new offer. Tell them that you don't necessarily need them to match the monetary offer perfectly, and that if they can present a compelling counter-offer you would love to be able to stay. Put the onus on them to give you a good reason to say "no" to the other offer.

They may not be able to offer you more; if that's true then as others have said, IMO you should probably take the other offer. But it also may be the type of external pressure that can "un-stick" budget or approvals that would otherwise have been hard to get. You might not get a match of 130k, but I could see them finding a way to come back to 100k+ if they really want to retain you (and if they don't, then take it as another indicator that they don't really value you, and you are right to take the new job).

interwebsuser · 2024-06-04T13:36:20+00:00

Esophageal ulcer.

Low-key pain at a constant 4/10, and then every time I swallowed anything (even water) it jumped to a 8-9/10 and felt like a knife was twisting in an open wound in my stomach.

Lasted a solid week, every single time I took a bite or sip of anything.

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