EagleSmack said:
You would also never hear of a Texan saying that he Texan over American. I was in the Marines with many Texans and never heard that once.
Reverend Blair said:
I've heard Texans say that very thing, that's why I used it as an example. I've also heard people from your deep south say similar things...like they've never accepted losing the Civil War. Politically the US is presently more divided than Canada.
EagleSmack said:
At one time I would have agreed with you but after reading the posts of some Canadians about the issue on separatism and Quebec I have learned that things are much more divided than some people on this board try to portray.
Please, EagleSnack. You're on a web chat board not sitting in the House of Commons of Canada or Quebec or any other provincial legislature or even quoting real news or tabloid news and most Americans don't know the difference around "Canadian news."
There's a "big important" Republic of Alberta web site too! Full of propaganda (disinformation, misinformation, outright lies, not that it matters around some web site). You kinda need a provincial government, at minimum, that will vote to throw a worthless referendum for no apparent reason and Alberta's isn't interested and has made it quite clear to avoid screwing up investment like Quebec has. But you'd never know it if you could find the "Republic of Alberta" web site. Any realities that go against the conclusions of the one person who runs the site, is censored out as being "negative."
Like, "You have no land rights so how do you intend to claim land you don't own?" Irrelevant, negative, and negative input will not forward "the cause."
It could be run by a computer program as some marketing study to see how much idiocy people will swallow.
Anyone can set up a web site and/or chat board. So what? When I looked up this "Republic of Alberta" site on Google I found American chat boards and who knows who from where on them, swallowing it all, as though the Alberta government ran the site or something, when ONE GUY does. But they take it serously as though something that means something is behind the site. Ignorance is bliss and particularly when looking around for "something worse" than the U.S. around "political divisions" that amount to comparing World War II to Panama.
Who's been telling you that there are no economic and political divisions in the Canadas? I won't even call it "Canada" because it's BS. It's singular and there's nothing singular about Toronto let alone the Canadas.
But web chat boards aren't the best place to get "information" from. What's going on the the Canadas, on the surface, is nothing unusual. What's happend to the U.S. under the Dubya admin is unprecedented in its modern history. Sort of. The Olkahoma City bombing was the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history until 9/11. But Oklahoma was carried out by white, American, christian-raised males. It's a bit difficult to do racial profiling around that in the U.S. And nothing like it has ever happened in the Canadas. There are lots of examples but never has any president in American history (according to American political historians) created so much anti-Americanism (which has been researched and defined by the Pentagon but there's no need around the Canadas; it has nothing to do with the American people, just the president and maybe at best, one or two high-ranking officials in the Exec Branch, like Rumsfeld, Rice, it depends on the issue, but Americans get very personal around others having opinions about "their" president because it's much like the Queen of England, PM of the U.K. wrapped up into one. We don't "revere politicians for the most part. We see them as the snakes they are, do the same around all other politicians, alleged leaders, whatever, the Queen of nothing but lots of worthless expenses, and go ahead and chew out any/all Canadian politicians. If you have the facts straight, you'll be agreed with. If not you won't be but it's nothng personal. They're politicians, not this bizarre almost Theocracy the U.S. has, with more pomp and circmstance around a presidential inauguration than a new monarch of Britain.
And "Canada" is one of the most secular countries on the planet. I'd never heard any Canadian politician even say "god" until the bizarre cross between Jimmy Swaggart and the NDP came to the Ontario Conservative Party convention and was actually allowed to speak and ended with the obligatory around the U.S., "God Bless Canada."
First time I ever heard any "Canadian" politician say it and Harper missed his calling as a christian evangelical cub scout leader in Southern Alabama. But he'd have to be an ultra-socialist somehow without having a clue because he can't add.
No political divides in the Canadas? Toronto has 5.1 million people and 1/4 of the total GDP of the Canadas among many other things.
No state in the U.S. has 25% of the GDP. California has about 15%. Ontario has over 40%, Quebec has over 20%, it's only due to the knowledge-based economies in Southern Ontario (plural, always, Southern Ontarios, if I screw up on pluralism, like Toronto instead of the Torontos or one house; you find me one house in North America where everyone agrees on absolutely every single issue and when presses to find their limites/boundaries around each issue, end up with the exact same boundaries and you'lll have found the most worthless, boring household anywhere. There'd be no need to speak. Why bother when you already know that everyone in the household is going to agree? No need to ask about a new haircut/do, clothes, nothing, because everyone agrees about absolutely everything and to the exact same limits around everything. I guarantee I could get them into a good argument by finding out where their limits are on what they think they agree on -- let alone a whole city, let alone what? Political lines that can't even be seen? Farmer Joe's wheat farm is backed onto Farmer Jeb's rye farm and a state or provincial line happens to be in the fields somewhere and they're going to give a crap about that?
Maybe, but probably not because of some imaginary line. Lots of neighbors don't get along in the same building. But there's some united "USA" thing and some united "Canada" thing that amount to what in real life? Marketing. Political and commercial, every word that comes out of everyone's mouth, everything everyone sees, and particularly religious marketing in the U.S. There's real separation of Church from State here though hicks from out west are trying to change that. And will fail.
There's a thing called the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. If you know where Detroit is, you know where Winsdor is; at the busiest border crossing point in the world across the Detroit River, with over 40% of all trade (in commerce not tonnages of $10/ton of whatever commodities from the Outer Canadas), outside the Windsor-Quebec City corridor and it's only one crossing point into/out of the industrial hearland of North America.
5.1 million people is the municipal area of Toronto, which includes a bunch of farms and whatnot. It means nothing other than the usual around censuses. The feds make up municipal areas for each city based on whatever, the equivalent of municipal areas of the U.S. in the Canadas but only 2.5 or so million people live in the City of Toronto proper. The six cities that used to make up Metropolitan Toronto but were forced to amalgamate by the Ontario feds (who park their asses on prime real estate in downtown Toronto, clogging up and wearing out our infrastruture and paying less than nothing into it as with the millions of other commuters into this city) and there are political and economic divides and downright hatred of this thing the Ontario feds created, it's what they act like, they're worse than the confederate feds, so it's what this city calls them, and they won't be here for long, but that's another book.
Merged up six cities into one city hall for easier tax pillaging in exchange for 6 times less representation. Now 2.5 million people or so, the residents of the City of Toronto, isn't a lot of people. The usual population of the city is over 5 million due to commuters who live in this new (1998) "Greater Toronto Area" thing, and I'm not speaking for 'all of the City of Toronto', just the mayor and everyone who means anything in this city -- we hate commuters.
We hate the Toronto area (outside the real Toronto city limits, off into Disneylands with more money than the richest anything in the country has to spend for some strange reason, which is part of the reason why we hate them), let alone Ontario, let alone the Canadas.
But that's intentional and is done by the Ontario feds with mssssive tax pillaging of the City of Toronto and now other areas of this "Greater Toronto" thing, and making their city halls pay money to Toronto city hall to keep us all bitching with each other and hating each other ...which gives the Ontario and confederate feds a free ride. We should be bitching at both of them over the tax pillaging but that's the whole idea. And they do it all over the Ontarios do keep municipal governments (and people) bitching at each other instead of the real cause of the problem -- 95% tax pillaging on top of the provincial and confederate feds downloading their own expenses onto us, so they can keep out of the bickering/wars and hand our taxes out to the rest of the Canadas (the Outer Canadas, which includes most of Ontario) to buy votes.
Others claim the same but others don't have the economies or industries or markets or anything else to even be capable of funding the City of Toronto let alone Southwest Quebec, Southern Ontario or the rest, what Southern Ontario and Southwest Quebec pay for; the debts and bills and handouts of everything outside the Windsor-Quebec City corridor and it is absolutely impossible, economically, for the third-"largest" economy, Alberta, with about 1/4 of the GDP of the Ontarios, to do much of anything but sometimes pay its own bills. But it doesn't have its own law enforcement. Ontario and Quebec are the only jurisdictions in the country with their own law enforcement from top to bottom, bottom to top. Everything else uses "federal-provincial/territorial" RCMP law enforcement, which has to change names.
There's the "FBI" end of the RCMP, the "SS" end, bodyguards for politicians and foreign dignitaries, national intelligence and truly federal and then there are "federal-state" (provincial/territorial) law enforcement, from general purpose traffic cops, marked cars with R.C.M.P. on the them, I'd never seen one until I moved to Vancouver a few years back (and left with an exodus over unemployment; but my contract was up) and had no clue what it was. I thought the Queen must have been in town or something. Marked cars with lights and uniformed cops in the with R.C.M.P. on the side? "What the hell was that? is the Queen in town or something?" My brother had moved there a couple of years earlier, had gotten used to also not going through, "Damn, I forgot to exchange my curency." Into American. Vancouver is owned by the U.S. It's quite unlike Toronto in all ways: particularly it's ultra-socialist Communism.
My brother's girlfriend got pregnant in San Francisco so they headed to Vancouver to have the baby "for free" and were told by all kinds of bums traveling around the world on welfare that Vancouver was the welfare haven of the world and if they wanted a free ride, that's where to go. My brother used to work and used to be conservative. Now he's an NDP welfare bum who hasn't worked (over the table) in 7 years, has 2 kids, and gets everything handed to him on a silver platter. And B.C. is back on "equalization" welfare handouts from Southern Ontario taxpayers and I've tried to turn my brother in, they've left the country to go on vacations at B.C. welfare's expense and you're not allowed to leave the jurisdiction without reporting it to your worker and he's also worked over the table and not reported income, got credit cards somehow, ran them up to the limit and didn't report that income, it's all quite easy to trace but they don't care in Vancouver.
When you're the welfare haven of the world, the one of the most ultra-socialist jusisdictions on the planet, you don't care about things like that. They end up with a budget deficit due to their disgusting irresponsibility and it comes out of my taxes to pay for the budget deficit.
Alberta isn't much better, nothing is much better other than the cash cow, golden goose of the country--Toronto. And company now, being pillaged to death of taxes.
And you may have noticed that most "Canadians" think that "natural resources" are some ticket to wealth, heaven and endless bliss. And may even have noticed "Canadians" who can't figure out why, with all of the resources and "fewer people to feed" why the Canadas doesn't do better than the U.S., which has "more people to feed."
It's the ultimate in mental retardation. With more markets you make more sales and don't have to export either. More mouths to feed means higher profits for farmers. But to add to the mental retardation, just one example, about the most insane around; Alberta has the largest cattle industry in the Canadas and has all of 3 million people spread across over 255+ thousand miles of land.
3 million people, about the population of the City of Toronto (residents, not the real population), which is maybe 40 square miles. We have our own cows and are farily far south compared to the rest of the Canadas, like 14 states are or have land north of Southern Ontario, including California. The only thing that can't be grown here wthout greenhouses or whatever, are citrus fruits. And it costs less to import pineapples, organges, mangos, bananas from Banana Republics anyway; and doing another part around NAFTA, from FLA and CA, Hawaii. And Mexico and as long as it's in the Western Hemisphere and we're trying to get their economies going, from Chile or wherever, even around stuff we can grow ourselves, and do, they get in as competition for grapes and melons and peppers and tomatos and so on. We have sheep, we don't need imports from Alberta.
And we have these things called meat (food period) processing/packing plants and with the largest cattle industry in the Canadas and no population to speak of, which means exports, Alberta plum forgot to get the infrastructure/human capital/private investment lined up for meat processing/packing plants.
It exported live cattle (and jobs and taxes) on the hoof to American plants, then RE-IMPORTED, which is called selling low and buying high, along with handing jobs/spin-off jobs/markets/provincial taxes away for no apparent reason.
And then Alberta created a cow with BSE/mad cow disease. It's not a naturally occurring disease. Something broke federal laws and if that cow had come from the Ontarios, well a combination CIA/CSIS (Canadian equivalent) team would have moved the cow out of Ontario to anywhere because heads would still be rolling if "Ontario" had caused a ban, of live cattle imports to the U.S. and it'd be bankrupt by now paying out all the damages.
But Alberta and all of the Western Canadas were rewarded for their compounded stupidity. And now they're trying to get money out f the feds to build (possibly the feds are going to staff as well) meat processing/packing plants that they plum forgot about and the feds are asking them "very complicated" questions, like what markets they have lined up?
Aside from the fact that Southern Ontario and Southwest Quebec have had privately owned meat/food processing plants for over 100 years, which is a question I would have put to Alberta, "what's your brain damage, and what's wrong with your OWN money?" [they have over $10 billion stuffed away in a "rain day'heritage fund and it's raining mad cows, the first one in the U.S. came from Alberta and 2 more have turned up in Alberta, and "It never occurred to you in over a hundred years to get your own meat/food processing packing plants, or the last 50 years with all of those oil/gas revenues we let you keep tax-free with full equalization handouts for seven year?" let alone whether they'd considered MARKETS to sell to if Inner Canada taxpayers have to pay for meat processing/packing plants in Alberta of all places, and they were dumbfounded. "Markets? We need the plants before we can get markets." Uh huh. Build 50,000 bird houses while you're at it and then figure out if you can sell them, and where and for what price -- idiots.
They don't even know what business plans are. "Won't the Americans be upset if you take jobs off them, then import to their markets?" Oh no, well it's possible, we haven't reallly looked into that.
And they also think they can go after American foreign markets with the usual they use to pawn their commodities off with, in Japan, South Korea and the like. "OUR beef may be deadly but it costs LESS due tot all the handouts we get from "the feds" and the lower exchange rate!"
What country in its right mind is going to screw the U.S. over for Alberta or anything else in the Outer Canadas? We don't sell commodities in the Inner Canadas. Just high value manufactured goods and services.
Like instead of pawning off natural resources and buying manufactured products in return, buying high, selling low, handing jobs/spin-off jobs and industries/new markets/expanded tax bases away, we actually MAKE THINGS and look around the world first to make sure that nothing is making the same and can undercut us, and that we have markets and have ten year business plans, all the marketing, everything, the usual lined up before any private investor will give anything a second glance. But we have to deal with private investors. The Outer Canada has to deal with handouts and zero accountability. "Do you have markets?" Hmm. We never thought of that but we have to build the plants first (nope, no one out there has the skill, they'll have to call in something from Southern Ontario and/or Southwest Quebec to build everything and to train everyone -- as usual) and they weren't even asked if they have human-captal lined up to staff the plants.
We could build the things, with our own tax money, in the "richest province in the Canadas," Alberta (GDP, fake, and per capita with no capita to speak of.. Libya does better than Alberta does, with less, no handouts from Inner Canada, in what's otherwise a desert country and less money from about its only source of revenues, oil/natural gas exports, than Alberta does -- far better compared to the homelessness and poverty of the handful of people in Alberta, when they should all be living in castles) if they could figure anything out.
The divisions in the Canadas were the usual before the FTA/NAFTA's. No one really knew much about the Canadas or cared much, it was "deemed" to be united, aside from those pesky Quebeckers, but everything changed after the FTA. The NAFTA was between the U.S. and Mexico. We don't trade much with Mexico.
The economies of Toronto and Montreal, so Southern Ontario and Southwest Quebec, which means quite a lot, oriented themselves North-South almost entirely, leaving the rest to sort out their own messes around commodities.
But the feds keep trying to force East-West on us (which would land Toronto in Detroit, it's a long way north to get to the rest of the Canadas from Southern Ontario) and so does the rest of the Canadas while also proclaiming that their "economies" are oriented North-South, not East-West and no kidding, they have no markets to speak of other than Southwest Quebec, so why would we care about them? Supply is supply. But they care due to East-West tax handouts from Southern Ontario and Southwest Quebec because they can't survive without them.
The handouts were based on the Canadas, long before any FTA existed. It's been 20 years and our economies are oriened north-south, not east-west, other than betwen real markets, Southern Ontario trades with Southwest Quebec markets, around high value goods and services that actually show up on economic radar screens but nothing compared to the North-South orientation.
So why do these ridicilous East-West handouts still exist? They don't even have their own law enforcement. We're three separate countries and Soutern Ontario-Southwest Quebec have absolutely nothing in common, economically, socially, socio-economically so politically or fiscally with the Outer Canadas.
We can't exist with one fiscal policy and exchange rate anymore. They think that pawning off raw commodities means something, we know it means nothing but failure, they should know by looking at their own pathetic economies and markets/populations, and with Southern Ontario and Southwest Quebec pulled from the rest of the Ontarios and Quebecs, economically and politically, separate central banks and currencies/exchange rates, they can have their commodiies based fiscal policy and exchange rate going up and down and all over the place like ... the price of commodities and we can have our stable diverse economies dictating fiscal policy and exchange rates; which investors will find to be much easier to deal with.
And we ARE Canada in every way imaginable, so it matters not what the rest want. Aside from holding every card in the deck that matters, the entire federal government is sitting right on our land, along with the Ontario feds and Quebec feds.
We don't have to market to the 'confederation of' the Canadas; just to Southern Ontario via Toronto and then others, which has been going on for about 3 years, but keeps moving up another notch and is getting quite intense in Toronto, and Quebec is a no-brainer. They leave the problems of Outer Quebec behind, the native issues and get their own republic and an economic and political union with Southern Ontario, so that they can keep using Canadian currency, passports, etc., but we're out of each other's political hair. They get their government and we get ours. The rest get to beg, borrow and try to steal whatever they can.
So the next time a "Canadian" tells you that there is such a thing as "Canada" let alone that it's united, ask it whether it's from Inner or Outer Canada, Southern Ontario or Southwest Quebec.
S_lone is stuck in the 1960's around this "Quebecoisness" marketing crap. Quebec has no way out of the Canadas other than the above way and it won't be anywhere near all of Quebec and if Quebec City politicians put up a stink/start making demands then Montreal will become the capitol city of Southwest Quebec and the satellite market of Quebec City, with nothing important in it other than Quebecoisness, will be kicked into Outer Canada, with no population on Quebec to speak of and no revenues to speak of -- so irrelevant.
There's a huge divide in the Canadas that can't go on. Not with the rest of the Ontarios and Quebecs (other than around farming, they'll be in the Outer Canadas but will get four to five times the subsidies they get now to bring them up on par with the U.S.; OUR farmers, with co-ops that'll have to re-structure to produce everything we need and won't even have to export to sell to rapidly growing markets) while the rest can rot for all anyone around here cares.
And too much marketing has been done on it to turn back. It'll be starting this year, not in 2010-15. The ROC/rest of the Canadas/Outer Canada is in for a very large wake up call.
And Toronto is the most multicultural city on the planet. It doesn't need any advice about "unique cultures" from "Quebecois" or anyone else. And won't be taking any.
