I think the Canadian government can get out of contracts since I believe Microsoft has already told our government they cannot guarantee that our data is not going through US infrastructure. Based on this reason alone I think are grounds to terminate a contract. But hey, I’m no lawyer.

Absolutely agree with this. Politicians and those that are in the management position to make real changes have been having it too good for too long and they just want to take the easy way out by saying “it’s too hard/too expensive” and spending OUR taxpayer dollars. It’s BULLSHIT.

Look around you and see what software these government managers entities actually use? Email/chat clients, MS Word, Excel. What? Why are we still on Microsoft’s ecosystem if at all if that’s what they use most of the time? The cloud infrastructure isn’t even handled by 99% of these politicians and managers. Let the IT people handle it. Any serious IT team should know their in-and-outs of open source software and operating systems.

A lot of other legacy IT mainframes aren’t even compatible with Windows and they’ve only created an UI to ‘talk’ to the underlying system. There’s no reason why it cannot be recreated, if not improved, during the switch. Hell, don’t even switch right way, run the systems in parallel. At the end of the day, the real underlying information are just stored in tables - absolutely no reason why it cannot be ported.

The only expense that would be on-going maintenance, improvements and updates as legislation changes over time. We need data sovereignty otherwise we’re just cucks to US big tech.

I think everyone has the wrong take on this. If this happened to someone on the left, most people will just twiddles their thumbs on their keyboards and goes on about their lives.

What people need to realize is his actions and what he has promoted has consequences.

I’ll leave it at that.

There is no ‘debate’. The program is federal. A premier’s jurisdiction is provincial. He is telling the federal government to fix the problem because the current wording of the law and how it has been executed has allowed these large corporations to abuse it over and over again.

Instead of letting the market decide what a job at Tim Horton’s supposed to be, they have instead allowed them to hire these so called ‘temporary foreign workers’ en masse over the years through a revolving door from poorer countries. It has resulted in stagnant wages, record profits for these companies and now they’re crying foul?

What should be happening is to lower the bar to running a business anywhere in Canada. As of right now, running a small business to compete requires nearly insurmountable levels of red tape (licenses for not only the business, but also signage license, over-the-top fire safety requirements [go ask about how much it will cost to just have a kitchen installed + getting inspected etc. etc.], beyond basic food safe certifications where you’ll have to provide nutritional charts, washroom requirements and more…). Anything that you probably see out there that isn’t looking like this is either grandfathered in or they have deep pockets. This is also why you see places that are renovated and seemingly ready to go, but can’t open because they have to jump through the hoops. This is also why you won’t ever have authentic night markets like the ones in Asia anywhere in Canada. Many large cities themselves are anti-small business on default when you dig into the policies of what you can and can’t do.

Trying to stay relevant much? Humanity as a whole needs to realize that religion is a mental crutch. The community aspect of it is good, but it isn’t exclusive to religion.

Exactly. A logical fallacy.

Sounds like a grace period. However, the union should still threaten to strike if they drag this out otherwise Air Canada is going to do the typical lip service move and see how long they can ‘flip the narrative’ to their advantage.

The correct terminology is people want to be able to express themselves and explore the world without being judged. Finding a purpose in what they want to do in and with their life. After all, no one was chosen to be born.

To ‘spell it out’ for those who still can’t wrap their heads around it:

What Israel is trying to claim (which is a logical fallacy): Any attack/criticism on Israel = attacking Jewish people = attack on Jewish/Judaism religion

The reality: Any criticism Attack on Israel =/= attacking Jewish people =/= attack Jewish/Judaism religion

So what about those that practice Judaism in Gaza? What about those that practice Judaism that has no roots in Israel at all?

Layman’s observation…to anyone who’s been inside old growth forests (forests with trees that are 800+ years old) and it’s surrounding lesser old growth forests, the humidity is on a different level than the ones that these so called ‘reforested’ areas are like. The forestry industry is not sustainable at the amount that we consume at. We will continue to see ‘wildfires’ because we’ve effectively destroyed the ecosystem in the last 100-200 years with mass deforestation and thought that replanting them would be ‘fine’. Turns out these artificially replanted forests aren’t so resilient after all…huh.

The orange juice coming from the US has been unpalatable for the last decade or so. They’ve all turned into generic standard artificially recomposed but still marketed as 100% orange juice. They used to taste different depending on the seasons and now they’re all the same across the board. Instead, I just eat fruits and water. Plus, orange juice is high in sugar - so it’s not as healthy as people think.

How about we talk about making it mandatory for young adults no matter their background and wealth to work in some form of retail or food industry?

The very question of asking them to be a public service to be prepared for war only means that the adults in the room have failed absolutely miserably that we have to go back to that point again in human history. What an absolute disgrace.

Why is this being pushed as news? There are already been statements direct right out of Premier Eby’s mouth that we’re not going back to shoebox sized condo markets (press conference in July I believe). Albeit that was a response to a reporter’s question in regards to scrapping foreign buyer’s tax, but at least you know that they are aware of the situation.

Without a publicly run developer, the government can only deal with private developers to make housing happen. Any push to drive down prices direct from any level of government is still political suicide given the types of people that vote. Look at the last provincial election results - the right leaning electorate is alive and well and the right leaning voters tend to be all about short term gains and their own pockets. Until that shifts, don’t expect outright statements from the province.

This is a stupid made up wedge issue. The real question should be - what is sports and what exactly are athletes competing for?

Why is it the default in sports male and female categories? Is it because they are physically different? Is it because one has a uterus? is it because of hormones so males and females develop differently? We have managed, through scientific breakthroughs, hormone replacement therapy to be able to transform our own bodies into what we want and that in itself is an achievement - albeit it isn’t perfect yet - but that’s another topic.

If the goal is to compete and display human physical prowess and strategy in a regulated environment then male/female/other/etc. categories shouldn’t exist. It should only be rated as ‘where do I stand as a human being among my peers in X sport?’

Trying to fit a gender into a flawed categorical system of sports is bound to cause friction.

Do you need to pay to access Steam and play games? The answer is no - there are free games on Steam and also forum features that allow you to post media content too. From that standpoint they’re in the same boat. The difference is the platform’s intended use.

I think the real issue isn’t about Visa and MasterCard trying to gatekeep/censor this. The talk should be about we as a society haven’t matured enough to be willing to talk about our own bodies as humans and human nature with our own kids. If you look at what’s shown on mainstream TV around the world, off the top of my head, Europe seems to be a lot more mature about it than many parts elsewhere.

Nothing but hypocrisy from Visa and MasterCard - there are far more NSFW content on Xitter than in games and yet I don’t see a peep of them banning payment towards that little blue checkmark.

Definitely not crypto banks. I mean more of - people being able to do the transactions themselves straight from their phones or whatnot without the middleman (the banks). That’s how crypto is supposed to work - and people just pay a transaction fee (“gas fees”) to get the transaction done. There’s a lot of work that’s already been done to bring down the cost of gas fees too. Staking is like lending out your money and pooling it together while whoever borrows it has to pay you interest instead of paying the bank interest. There’s a lot of shitcoins and corrupt things with crypto for sure, but that’s a problem people collectively also need to solve - maybe don’t “stake”/lend out your money to shady coins is a start and don’t chase after this big marketed bullshit (FTX scam anyone)? There’s a reason why techbros, wall street etc got in and it’s because they’re circumventing regulation - so looks like the bank even in this current state despite being regulated still do tons of shady shit. The penalties are just the cost of doing business.

It’s a dual edged knife. Want to be free from the middleman banks? Current regulation standards don’t even hold a candle against crypto. Crypto is community driven, decentralized and possibly even anti-inflationary. There are a lot of advantages but also in its current form easily perverted. Anyways, going to stop here as we’re off topic.

Oh of course there’s always pain and big tech has always been hard to block or even tax (our government is extremely slow on figuring out tech) - just look at our very own big telecoms - we can’t even get them to behave. Canada has positioned itself into a weak position because we collectively keep voting for these spineless or clueless people believing they are doing good or for private interests. I am sure there is still a large portion of people thinking that politics don’t affect them or they think that their vote won’t matter etc etc. These reasons are all excuses - voting is the just the bare minimum.

Canada should have its own GDPR like the EU. Our personal data and things that we put online - one should have sovereignty over it. We have nothing in place that backs our own citizens and this in itself costs Canada nothing. It is pure and simple legislation and can cause pain to big tech without even changing any operating system.

Canada got turned into the US’s “little bitch” wasn’t a mistake overnight. Go look at the past 30 years of policies and who voted for what - it’s clear there’s a trend and one political part is almost blatant in bed with the US. There are many other ways to cause pain beyond just digital taxes.

Banking wise, I look forward to a day when banks are obsolete via crypto, but this requires a large public understanding of what crypto is all about. I’d argue that the Canadian government has no real way of governing crypto given its nature of how it works. But that’s another discussion.

And it’s possible to push for change much more easily at this level instead of the federal overnight. TBH - microsoft is used because of the history of how computers were introduced in the NA market. If you look to China for example, they skipped the entire PC generation and went straight to mobile. Windows is not big player but rather things like ‘superapps’ that act more like an OS than an app. That’s only scratching the surface because these apps are much more because they even have financialization (see WePay, AliPay). The other big alternative is MacOS which seems to be catching on in the post-secondary and consumer market this may lead to a change in the business playing field as the older generation retires and younger people move into the workforce.

The media can keep bashing the Canadian government scrapping the tax. The last minute “capitulation” as many in the media is framing it as, while true, is also disingenuous on how Canada has to deal with the US given the cards it has in hand. Canada right now still relies heavily on exporting things to the US and keeping the US at the table talking is the best it can do right now until it can secure other trade deals around the world. Proximity matters and even more so when they are still is a superpower.

Canada still has many options despite this digital tax. What about banning US big tech? What about changing the rules about tech companies entering Canadian job space (and it doesn’t have to be a tax)? Other countries have managed (eg. China, Denmark), so why can’t Canada? The government can fight on one front, but Canadians themselves also have to. The boycott of travel to the US and of US goods clearly has made impact, but Canadians can do more. Support open source software like Linux, move away from Adobe and so forth. There are alternatives and some even Canadian ones. If we are to truly give the Canadian government good tools to fight, we too must do our jobs individually.