There’s a political concept south of the border called IOKIYAR (It’s okay if you are a Republican).
The same is at play here: Corruption and nepotism? It’s okay if you’re a conservative. Wasting public funds? Okay if you’re a conservative? Drawing a pension? Being a shameless hypocrite? You get the idea.
One of the nice things about Costco is that, because you scan your membership when you buy, they’ll know if you bought these and you’ll get a personal letter very shortly.
I’m not a fan of Canadian grocery in general, but they’re the best by a wiiiiiiide margin.
Compared to almost anyone.
Canada rolled over and allowed the one sector it had any hope in–resource extraction–to be sold off to foreign investors, first from government control and then from domestic hands. Then it allowed rampant consolidation in the “captive” industries it does have (telecomm, food). Other countries did the same, but Canada rolled over faster and harder than any other western nation.
Now we’re at the stage where our primary industry is skimming the cream off of the housing market. After that, what? Strip-mining south Asian immigrants for value? Whoops, we’re already doing that, too.
It’s a sad tale of governments, Liberal or Conservative, selling everything not nailed down in hopes that the magical market fairy would make it better, and then steadfastly refusing to do anything at all, sacrificing current donors’ profits for everyone’s future. Everyone saw this as an issue at least as far back as 1995, but no one was willing to admit that the Reagan/Thatcher (and in our case, Mulroney and Chretien) era of neoliberalism would eventually present a bill. So it was more tax cuts, more service cuts, more selling assets, more emphasis on cash hoarding and more disincentives for investing in business.
Been banned twice for almost exactly this, so yes.
If you’re lucky. You could have a Sun parent.
Well, they are owned by the richest family in Canada.
Removed by mod
Unemployed young people who despair for the future.
That always works out well.
Labour makes up about 15-20% of the cost of a vehicle. Curiously, that number doesn’t change all that much between jurisdictions.
And while ~18% is as lot, materials makes up most of the rest, and those costs don’t change with jurisdiction. So the OEMs relocate to save a few percent, but mostly they relocate because the overall supply chain is more cost effective. This is why China (and now Vietnam, and Thailand, and before China, Japan and South Korea) are able to do what they do: the government and industry are willing to think long-term and make huge investments to make it happen: slapping down power plants and steel mills and making trade deals with, eg, Africa or the middle east to secure resources at scale.
You’re falling for the modern version of blaming the working class–even in a roundabout way–for the capitalists’ failure to plan.
Companies seek out cheaper labour, sure, but you’re taking a very simplistic view of it:
Canada, the US and Western Europe is a big reason we farm stuff out to cheaper places (like Mexico and China) that don’t have pesky things like high safety standards or employee benefits.
This isn’t nearly the case any more, and hasn’t been since the 1970s. They actually do have roughly similar safety standards. Replacing workers is expensive, and churn costs a lot, and you really do want to run a plant as efficiently as possible, which means not burning people out. We’re not in the triangle shirtwaist era any more.
Workers don’t really have much of an impact on the cost or quality of the product because it’s cheaper to engineer your plant such that they don’t. Mistakes are expensive. Waste is expensive. Re-work is expensive.
If you had said environmental standards, yes, you’d be right. Those can be more lax. That’s something different, and also not nearly the gap it used to be.
the fact the huge disparity in labour costs between the two countries is reason the TFW program even works
Slinging donuts at Tim Hortons, answering support calls and/or writing shitty front-end web code is a different thing entirely, and yes the TFW program is a problem, but that’s not the issue with heavy industry.
In the 1980s, faced with a crisis of their own making, Harley went crying to Ronald Reagan for tariffs on imported bikes. Reagan, free-market champion that he was, obliged.
This resulted in
Basically, it set Harley up for failure and nutured mediocrity.
Tariffs, if they don’t come with government pressure on the industry being protected, are basically corporate welfare that helps in the short term but results in long-term pain.
EVs will be similar. Protecting the North American industry in the short term isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would require the American and Canadian government to bust the balls of Ford, GM and Stellantis, as well as the domestic-produced imports: you get the tariffs and you get tax breaks, but in turn you have three years to produce a cheap, capable EV or, eg, we’ll make it happen without you.
Our governments won’t do this because they’re neoliberal chickenshits who lost their spine forty years ago.
The result will be EVs that are too expensive, sold to the most profitable niche domestically, with collapsing sales abroad. Which is what we have now, and it will get worse if we insulate lazy OEMs from market pressure.
China’s hands are not clean, but one thing they have done is invest in the long term. The North American OEMs resolutely refuse to do that, and tariffs would make that situation worse.
What’s horrible is that Trump’s misunderstanding of how tariffs work is only forgotten by how much he doesn’t understand about how viruses and vaccines and health policy works.
Had it not been for the pandemic, he was well on his way to crashing the global economy, between the reckless tax cuts, deregulation and slapdash tariffs. Ironically, the stimulus spending necessitated by the pandemic probably saved him–and all of us–from the second great depression.
That’s not at all a bad idea; it certainly avoids Harley Davidson syndrome, which is what we’re looking down the tubes of right now.
The first two (labour and quality control) aren’t really what affect the MSRP. Labour makes a difference, but it’ materials cost that really drives price, and QA isn’t really the differentiator you might think.
But that last one–government support–that makes a massive difference. China has been, and continues to be, very strategic throughout the entire supply chain, from security raw materials at low cost, to building transport and energy infrastructure, to setting up hub-and-spoke centres for OEMs and suppliers, to securing a labour force. Non-Chinese OEMs, and especially Americans that depend on tax rebates little else, can’t compete.
It wouldn’t hurt the American and Canadian governments to twist the arm of industry and get them to think a little more long-term. They won’t, of course, because of neoliberal capture, but they could.
He’s going to get his wish as leftists sit the next one out.
All eyes are going to be on Harris, if she wins. That’ll set the tone: will it be more rainbow-painted wealth extraction, or are they going to try to actually help people who don’t have millions of dollars already.
It’s not embarrassing that they’re Nazis.
It’s probably embarrassing because they were brought over at the behest of powerful people who would rather it not be know than they patronized Nazis for political or monetary gain.
Werner von Braun was difficult enough, but you could make the case that they needed to keep him and scientists like him out of Soviet control. This is was probably just people that the Laurentian elite played wet towel tag with at Upper Canada College.
One way to stop the alt-right Russian propaganda campaigns from undermining trust in our institutions would be to improve those institutions
God, this is so succinctly put. Well done.
A huge, huge part of the problem is self-inflicted, with thirty years of neoliberal-induced decay providing fertile grounds full of resentment and disillusionment, ripe for protofascists to grow their poison fruit in.
You’d said the problem was voters. That’s an entirely wrong way to look at politics.
You can thank Mike Harris for that one.
Actually, if there’s something that’s broken in Ontario, you can almost always draw a line back to Harris about it. Drug epidemic? Harris’ closing of mental health facilities. Housing? Harris downloading public housing onto cities. Environmental assessment wait times? Harris gutting the MOE. Transport? Harris’ downloading again. Poor municipal road repair? You guessed it, Harris dumping provincial roads and services onto the cities then cutting their budgets.
It’s tempting to blame Ford for stuff–and I’m sure the booze-in-C-stores will be a gift that keeps giving, both in terms of social costs and the FOUR BILLION DOLLARS it will cut from government revenues–but he’s not done one-tenth the damage Harris did.
Pfft, of course not.
You’re asking if the government that couldn’t be asked to build housing while asking the feds for millions of immigrants to prop up the economy is planning when there’s money involved? Please, this is the same guy who:
This is palm-greasing to the small-business douchebags that vote PC, and a sop to large donors that wanted this to buttress weakening foodservice sales. It’s about doin’ bidness.
This is regrettably true, and driving a lot of the red meat for “tough on crime” talk from right-wing politicians.
Our saving grace is that being tough on crime takes effort and money, and the CPC is just as cheap and lazy as the LPC. They’ll just talk tougher and do nothing, as compared to the Liberals smiling and waving flags…and doing nothing.