Imma say it.

Drugs should be legalised. All of them.

People should be free to do as they want with their bodies so long as the substances are regulated. By legalising drugs, you accomplish endless positives:

• You ensure the product people buy is pure and not laced with unwanted substances (especially regarding heroin which is often laced with fentanyl)
• You take away demand from the black market, and thus also deal a blow to organised crime
• People that are curious in trying these drugs have the chance to do so with relative safety
• The government can regulate limits on how much can be sold at a time and the maximum quantities of packages/doses
• Additional cash flow in the economy much like we saw from legalising cannabis
• More direct assistance to those addicted to drugs by leading them to resources to kick their habits. A regulated market ensures those already under the influence can’t purchase until they’re sober, unlike the unregulated black market where addiction is seen as a positive due to repeat customers.
• Added freedom of bodily autonomy. If I want to try cocaine or heroin once assuming a relatively safe environment to do so, that should be my right.
• You can prevent the spread of bloodborne diseases by giving clean needles with the product for injected substances.

This is all a net positive. Where people see legalisation as the seeds of drug anarchy, it’d actually be the opposite, regulating the problem and thus decreasing the harms to the public caused by an unregulated market that faces a cruel cycle of addiction and incarceration.

Thank fuck they’ll still have the stripes around.

Not to applaud corporations, but my biggest worry hearing about HBC shuttering was the point blankets. Those things are a cultural staple and afaik HBC was the only major place to get them.

Un-fucking-believable.

Man has a Minister of AI, but no Minister of Labour? This isn’t just bad for worker’s rights, it’s also terrible optics that Conservatives will be easily able to latch to in order to appeal more to the working class they regularly screw over.

Okay but that 1.0 score in Quebec is fucking insane.

Funny you mention that. I’m down in Calgary now, but I was specifically thinking of how Millbourne Mall and other places would have the two publications next to one another with the newspaper boxes.

Think I remember hearing about that merge a while back, though that could be deja vu or whatnot as well. Was more than a few years ago now no?

Always hate how in many areas SUN is pretty much seen as a competitor to the bigger newspaper publications despite them being two of the same going back to the newspaper box days.

Makes me miss Metro and the Star Metro after that.

If I’m going to be completely fair, I’ve always mainly seen those as targeted for American audiences rather than towards Alberta.

Like you know what I mean, always thought of that as “oh, let’s make this out to be bigger than it is so we can sell it for a quick buck to the MAGA crowd” rather than as something they actually wanted to set a narrative on.

Guess those lines have kinda blurred since it’s become two of the same these days just about, so fair point.

Tell me you don’t know Alberta’s history of separatist sentiments without saying it explicitly.

Can we stop pretending this is a foreign astroturf? As someone living in Calgary, this is a very real thing here that people genuinely believe, with some having thought this for decades.

All the evidence is right in front of people’s eyes with Wexit parties being a not-so-distant memory to name the most recent example, and yet we jump to “Russia” or the U.S. as if they’re the main reasons these sentiments exist.

If someone talks about “foreign astroturfing” then give me evidence rather than hit me with this “hunch” people seem to purely base this off.

If the UCP splits, she especially risks handing an election over to the NDP. The only reason why the NDP ever won in 2015 to begin with was because the right-wing vote was split between the Wildrose and Progressive Conservatives. If there was proportional representation rather than first past the post, the NDP and Notley would have been handily beaten by Conservatives.

Mothers and fathers get a single day, but

2SLGBTQ+ folk have given me more care and support than either my mother or father ever have.

Now tell me, was it ever illegal to be a parent?

Ah yes.

Because people can only focus on one thing at a time, how could I forget?

Guess I oughta shut up and never think about the small things, right?

Writes out well-constructed post based on facts at hand and personal concerns

Downvoted immediately without any explanation.

One has to wonder if the people downvoting are even Canadian or bothered reading beyond the post title.

Discord has a much larger userbase tham KiwiFarms.

Discord’s admin team doesn’t condone or call for this type of stuff, it just so happens that people used their platform for bad things. It’s near impossible to manually keep an eye on things at their scale, and doing so would violate people’s privacy as it’s a messaging platform with plenty of private communities and chats.

The admin of KiwiFarms actively condones and engages in the harassment of people. It’s quite literally their founded purpose. Chris Chan isn’t a great person, but she doesn’t deserve harassment. The KiwiFarms community went after one socially-awkward person with a neurological condition, and then decided it wanted to go after anybody else who might be slightly socially awkward.

I was in a community one time with someone who was socially awkward, but genuinely a well-meaning person. I’m not naming names, but I eventually found out that people had a harassment campaign against her for the most mundane of reasons.

“Becoming associated” with “petty” harassers is misleading and you know that. They were founded to be an harassment campaign, and grew to harass others to the point of suicide, which they then continue to mock after death. All this because a bunch of sad individuals need to put others down in order to feel better about themselves when in actuality they’re worse than the people they harass to the point of killing themselves for an escape.

I hope you know that you and anybody else who uses that site will never amount to anything more than accessories to crime. If you really need to feel better about yourself, then howsabout you delete your KF account, go outside, and get a life?

Look, I really don’t want to come off the wrong way here and look like a jerk, but just with how people always seem to be so quick to associate things with Russian interference, in my mind it just feels like a repainted version of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories where “the Jews” are pulling the strings on everything. Like it feels like the more we immediately jump on the idea of Russian interference being involved, the less it feels like we separate Russians from the Russian government.

Like this isn’t to say “Russia good” or that Russia’s government isn’t doing disinformation campaigns, but the connection of Smith’s thoughts on Ukraine being tied to Alberta’s separatist movement is iffy at best. She’s stated she feels backed into a corner of needing to make this move, and while it seems stupid at first, it actually checks out with the landscape of Alberta politics.

I made a comment on another post few days ago outlining things here. It just seems weird that Russia would target Smith and Albertans specifically? It’s more likely the case that her thoughts on Ukraine are completely separate from the separatism stuff and just a result of her consumption of American conservative media outlets more likely to have disinformation campaigns on like the Daily Wire and FOX News, which she seems to enjoy based on her meeting Carlson and Shapiro.

Russia this, Russia that, it always magically comes down to Russia.

People have been talking about this here for years now? Why is it just now when this stuff hits the national news that people suddenly start shouting “RUSSIA!” like people would yell “WITCH” in the dark ages?

This isn’t a brand new thing that’s come from nowhere. It’s literally been in discussion for decades. William Aberhart was premier way back in the 30’s with the Social Credit Party and people wanted to separate from Canada since he wanted to roll out what was basically a UBI program to assist people during the Depression, only to have the Mackenzie King Liberals state they’d refuse to give unemployment assistance to non-Liberal provincial governments in response, causing people to call for it.

Since then there’s been plenty of people calling for this, mainly starting from the 70s with Pierre Trudeau. There was the Western Canada Concept (WCC), West-Fed, the Alberta Party was pro-separatist for decades, the Separation Party, Alberta First, the Freedom Conservative Party, Wexit Alberta, there’s the Wildrose Independence Party which formed from the previous two merging, hell, even the Alberta Republicans have been around now for what, three years?

Even federally there was a big Wexit movement the last election or two before this one. Before that this went back to the Reform Party days when a notable amount of separatist-minded folk voted for Manning’s party.

Edit: Crazy stuff getting downvoted on my comments for basing what I say on facts at hand, the original comment literally admits they have “no evidence or indication”, and yet y’all still flock to the idea. That’s just sad.

“We don’t need anything from Canada”

Proceeds to table bill to get our sweet, sweet tourism dollars

Just so everyone knows, OP has made comments undermining what’s happening to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, stating that China has nothing against them and freed them to live a peaceful life.

This guy’s takes are genuinely unhinged, stating that Amnesty International can’t be trusted on their stances on China because of their association to the Vatican and how everything they say goes directly through the Pope (???) and how the Catholic church is fascist somehow:

https://lemmy.ca/post/42811242/16382728

So yeah, wouldn’t trust a word from this guy’s mouth on anything he says in regards to China.

Wish I followed Brexit more as it was happening, think me being in school at the time had something to do with me not doing so.

However at the same time, I don’t think the majority of people would vote for this. IIrc, support is polling between 20 and 30 percent currently, much higher than I’m comfortable with, but not enough to actually win a vote if it was held today (not to say polls vote btw).

Also worth noting is that last week Smith and Carney had a meeting, to which Smith stated that it was a positive one, so fingers crossed that’s a sign of things in the right direction: https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/smith-describes-first-meeting-with-carney-after-the-election-positive/

This is actually really interesting.

So like, on the one hand, this sucks because in catering to the separatist movement, she moves the Overton window further to the right, but on the other hand, Smith’s main goal is for Alberta to follow Conservative values, but not so far as others in the UCP and their supporters.

Strategically, in terms of her end goals, this move she’s made makes sense. The UCP is quite literally the United Conservative Party, brought together by a merger of the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose after they and right-wing policies lost the election to what was for the most part, a united left-wing with the NDP if you ignore the Alberta Liberals.

Now when the NDP won in Alberta under Notley, right-wing parties actually gained a higher percentage of the vote, just they were split between the Wildrose headed by Brian Jean, and the Progressive Conservatives, who at that point had several years of controversy between Jim Prentice and Allison Redford. Danielle Smith, as the former leader for the Wildrose who ran against Redford’s Progressive Conservatives in 2012, is seeing a risk factor for a “united right” to fall apart, potentially handing over another win to left-wing politics in the province, which she likely sees as a greater threat since the possibility of an NDP government is statistically higher than Alberta leaving Canada.

No matter what she loses here, either she risks a party split leading to a split right-wing vote in the upcoming election and possibly handing her political opponents a win, or she loses more centre-right votes to the NDP (who are arguably moving more to the centre) by appealing to the fringes of the party with a referendum.

I hate to say it since I’m no Conservative, but frankly this could all be avoided if the province instills proportional representation in it’s elections. As much as I love the NDP, we quite literally should have never had them in power like we did as they won a minority 40% of the vote.

That’s the thing too, people that are pro-separatism are already on the roll with their efforts to make this a legitimate thing. Just the other day I received a call from the Alberta Republicans with a survey asking if I’d vote yes on a referendum to split from Canada.