6 ms·

I expect Canada to become a police state (its already on the way) and the brain drain to accelerate. Bill C-10 and C-36 are horrific China emulating policies,

• lucasyvas 5y ago
  Am Canadian. No offense to my southern neighbours, but if it ever comes time to move because of this, my direction won't be south. I'll probably play twister and hope the direction it lands is a good one. North American trends have not been great lately in general. Maybe I'll finally get that European passport I've been putting off.
  • takenpilot 5y ago
    Same. Am Canadian, already south. This is not the place. I'm looking at Northern Europe (good privacy laws) or Singapore (the rules are draconian, but very clear).
    • type0 5y ago
      Netherlands, although not perfect still has some classical liberal ideals. Singapore is a "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", who in their right mind would go there.
      • weiliddat 5y ago
        And the death penalty is applicable to a tiny proportion of the population (disproportionately drug smugglers). It might not be your ideal, but please refrain from implying someone else is crazy for living there.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • curation 5y ago
        I lived in Eindhoven for three years. I found it very uncomfortable.
        • todd8 5y ago
          In what ways if I may ask?
    • weiliddat 5y ago
      Singapore would be a toss up in terms of privacy, but it is excellent and friendly for work-focused, law-abiding, norm-conforming kind of people. I don't mean it in a bad way.
      • uniqueid 5y ago
        Canada is 'becoming a police state' somehow, and the answer is to move to a bastion of freedom like Singapore. Just... I... ugh.
        • filoleg 5y ago
          Yeah, I found that pretty questionable of a move as well. On the opposite side of the political isle, you could observe the same thing, with a bunch of republicans loudly proclaiming on the internet their "plans" to move to Canada whenever Obama implemented Obamacare or tried to raise taxes on anything. Given that Canada has socialized healthcare and higher taxes, they looked just as ridiculous as people in this thread "planning" a move to Singapore due to Canada pushing anti-privacy laws. That's the taste of self-hating north americans for you. A good quote in relation to this comes to mind: "There is no geographical solution to personal problems." Note: it doesn't mean that moving to another country due to your current one becoming unlivable is bad idea. But it seems weird to want to leave your country due to poor internet laws for a country with even worse internet laws and privacy. Which is what you can see with those mentions of Singapore, they didn't quite think it through at all. That's the taste of a group of self-hating north americans for you.
  • Mikeb85 5y ago
    Yup I'm applying for an EU country passport myself (via family ties). Canada is a terrible place if you want to start a business, now house prices are getting insane and the recent encroachment on freedoms as well as lack of pushback from the population is pretty much the last straw for me. You can make more money and pay less taxes while having more affordable housing and better healthcare and education in a number of countries.
    • barbazoo 5y ago
      I wouldn't agree it's as bad as you make it sound. However, I'm also not sure which other first world country has lower taxes, more "freedoms", higher salaries and cheap housing though.
      • Mikeb85 5y ago
        The US is a very obvious example. Take a look at housing affordability indexes, Canada is behind the EU average and certainly behind the top EU destinations. Also behind Australia, the UK, the US. Toronto and Vancouver are literally 2 of the most unaffordable places on the planet. Also the US, UK and half the EU have lower taxes. The only places with comparable taxes have better healthcare and cheaper or free education. Honestly, go to the US, UK, Australia, nearly any EU country and you'll find housing prices more in line with local salaries, better infrastructure, better services, more bang for your tax dollar, etc... In what country can you give away 40% of your paycheck making less than 6 figures to then pay for dental work, prescriptions and education out of pocket while needing to make 3x the average salary to afford an average house?
        • Jordrok 5y ago
          > In what country can you give away 40% of your paycheck making less than 6 figures to then pay for dental work, prescriptions and education out of pocket while needing to make 3x the average salary to afford an average house? Yeah, I dunno... Maybe there's a little bit of the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" effect going on here, but as an American, if I hadn't read the rest of your post, I would have sworn you were giving a brutally accurate description of the US in that last sentence.
  • zo1 5y ago
    And when it gets worse there too, what then?
    • Mikeb85 5y ago
      There seems to be a lot more pushback against government overreach in most EU countries as well as the US. In Canada, most people applaud more government overreach. Just like everyone was more than happy to snitch on their neighbours during the pandemic.
      • totony 5y ago
        >Just like everyone was more than happy to snitch on their neighbours during the pandemic. This is what set me off the most in the start. Canada has an history of encouraging snitching (software piracy, zoning requirements, work permits, social gatherings). Hoe they think this is good for social cohesion is beyond me. I've only seen it fuel hatred between neighbors.
• mdp2021 5y ago
  An elephant in the room is worth noting: democracies were built to avoid dystopias, yet there are growing trends of "it is better to leave" in long established democracies - "Contact your representative then" increasingly seems to no longer be an established, working idea. Several factors may accompany this phenomenon: polarization; perceived failures in education¹; sometimes anti-centrism in the government; political (the purpose of the party) and societal (the affiliation of the citizen with peers) crisis of identity... -- ¹and Canada is the Country which promotes the relevant OECD studies
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    The path of least resistance in 2021 is different from that of 1951. It is much cheaper now to move to another country and you can stay in frequent online contact with your kin. Back then, only serious oppression or poverty would force people to emigrate. If the problems were more tractable, people stayed and attempted to solve them in situ
    • mdp2021 5y ago
      Yes, but unfortunately, this "impotence option" means the relevant problems will get increasingly radicated. Some of us are "on the run" in the hope for a better society like nomads looking for natural resources, while civilization was meant to be engineering a solution space in a collective plan, building, not staying someplace until it is spoilt. It is a huge failure if the terms and conditions of the social contract have come to include «[practically] intractable problems».
      • inglor_cz 5y ago
        You are probably right. For example, within the EU, there is free movement of people and workforce, which sucks out the best and the most talented people from the peripheries like Andalusia or Bulgaria and lands them in the very prosperous regions of the north-west where they can find good and well-paying jobs. This is a major problem that cannot be solved by spending extra money on building infrastructure in the peripheries. Infrastructure is fine, but a new highway won't heal anyone's cancer. Lack of doctors and engineers cannot be easily countered with development projects that tend to be mired in corruption. Not even immigration can help that, because highly qualified immigrants won't stay in the periphery, and unqualified immigrants cannot provide the necessary work.
• deleted 5y ago
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• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Bill C-10 and C-36 are horrific China emulating policies, loose definition of "hate speech", bypassing courts in favour of human rights tribunals with 100% conviction rates and no requirement of evidence, preventative enforcement by police. Didn't the current premier's father do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's for... dubious reasons to say the least? He was also the man who paved the way to normalize relations with China and Cuba, two nations known for their respect of human rights. > and the brain drain to accelerate. On the hiring side I can tell it's happening.
  • leereeves 5y ago
    > Didn't the current premier's father do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's Yes, it was called the October Crisis.[1] I don't think we should be judging Justin Trudeau for his father's actions, but we should judge him because when he was asked to apologize (on behalf of the government) for the October Crisis, he refused. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis
    • bbarnett 5y ago
      I think you both need to read a bit more, and also, listen to released (more than 50 years, such recordings must be released) recordings of private meetings at the time. While no PM is perfect, when the Premier of Quebec phones the PM, and says (paraphrasing here) that "the separatists are everywhere, I don't know who to trust in the police, my own staff, they're all around me", while little girls are being killed by bombs, diplomats are being kidnapped and slaughtered, maybe declaring martial law isn't a completely bad response. And when you see this at the start of the article: The Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, and the Mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, supported Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act Well, come on.... I personally find the current laws being passed to be highly dangerous, and very disturbing, but trying to compare it acts taken against domestic terrorists, and lunatics, is a little wonky.
      • bbarnett 5y ago
• Barrin92 5y ago
  There's a lot oF China comparison in that article too, but if you compare China to India, isn't it accurate to say that China's policies in this domain have actually prevented brain-drain and created a significant domestic industry, the exact opposite of what the author and your take suggests? looking at the globe I don't really see a strong correlation between the success of technology, even directly in social media and freedom of expression. Nowhere on the globe do 'digital sovereignty' style politics seem to benefit American companies. Just seems like an ideological take. I think it's pretty likely that a Canadian or European firewall would actually just promote Canadian or European operated business, because natives tend to have an edge when local values are baked into the system.
  • amscanne 5y ago
    Maybe I’m not understanding your comment — are you saying that China’s censorship programs are helping to drive the local tech industry? That doesn’t sound right to me.
    • Barrin92 5y ago
      Yes that's what I'm saying. Specific example: Project Dragonfly effectively forced Google to leave the Chinese market out of domestic pressure. Chinese companies are significantly more apt at navigating Chinese regulatory environment than foreign companies, whose models are hardly compatible with it. It's incentivized Chinese firms to built an entirely parallel ecosystem.
• uniqueid 5y ago
  I expect Canada to become a police state (its already on the way) The government added transgendered people as a protected class... it's the October Crisis all over again /s