• 1 Post
  • 1.26K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle




  • The document which governs this in Canada is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act. The relevant portion is right at the beginning: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, rights are not absolute, which allows things like laws against hate speech to be passed. Among the rights guaranteed by the Charter is “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. Freedom of speech is a subset of that.

    ( Full text of the Charter )

    (In fact, even in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not quite absolute, as there are laws against libel and slander.)


  • Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US.

    Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.

    So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.




  • nyan@lemmy.cafetoCanada@lemmy.caBan Religion
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    9 days ago

    Some people seem to need the psychological crutch religion provides them with in order to function, and I’d no more take it away from them than I’d take a physical crutch away from someone in a leg cast. I have no issue with people who want to pray or carry out ceremonies in private or in a public building clearly marked out for the purpose. If you voluntarily enter a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. then you should expect religion.

    The problem is forcing religion on people who don’t need or want it, including children. In other words, the real issue is proselytization (trying to either encourage people to join your religion, or shame them into it) aimed at random members of the public. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it should be treated as much more impolite than it currently is.




  • Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.

    In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.