Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

In fairness it wasn’t just adding bike lines in Paris that did it, as per the byline

Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic

Which just means in addition to adding more bike lines (rather than removing the ones we already have), we should also restrict car traffic in this city of Toronto to get ahold of the local air pollution problem here.

It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

Agreed. This isn’t the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

Not the OP but - I’d agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

Now, while it’s definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an “administrative error” of some sort, there’s no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

They’re doing everything by the book.

I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver’s license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn’t have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?

They’re following the law.

Never stated otherwise.

They never saw the vote. They can’t count it,

I get what you’re saying, but it’s still disturbing that EC can cause a mistake of this nature and not have the ability to rectify it.

Certainly this isn’t the worst case of disenfranchisement by Elections Canada (see for example https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/this-is-unacceptable-polling-station-problems-prompt-calls-for-investigation/ )

it has to go to court.

Thinking it over, there’s a good counterargument here. Even if EC could directly order a by-election in this case (or even was given the power to just outright count the vote), someone would contest this and it’d likely end up before a judge at some point anyways. So might as well just go direct.

Then make an application to a judge to challenge the result and they will have to count it.

I’m not sure that I’m eligible to do this…

Truly, it should be the BQ that does it. I’m guessing they will in the coming days.

Agreed. This isn’t so bad, at least there’s a way forward.

Agreed. What an unfortunate finding by EC. As a matter of principle I believe every vote should have a chance to get counted.

When we did drivers ed in Ontario, our class instructor introduced us to ratehub.ca for this sort of thing - that was for auto but it looks like they let you compare home insurance rates.

Agree 100%

I was having a discussion the other day with someone and it was pointed out that pp grew the number of seats for the CPC and strengthened their position in winning the next election. Thus, unlike Jagmeet Singh of the NDP or Peter Dutton of the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia (who oversaw massive losses in their party) Dutton deserves to win a seat back and remain the leader of the CPC as well as the opposition leader.

Actually, I’m looking for a good, well reasoned counterargument to this (for when I bring it up again tomorrow).

Love this idea. Yes, everyone should have a say and have representation of their choice!

This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.

Agree 100%, we definitely need to move to PR ASAP.

With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.

Elsewhere on the piefediverse I’ve seen the argument made that PR also generally leads to other benefits like better cooperation between candidates and less mudslinging.

The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.

I mean it does have it’s uses. The byelection for the two Georgia Senate seats back in 2020 (technically a pair of runoff elections) is what ensured the Dems senate majority back then.

Just going off the article alone, I’m not 100% sure if that’s the rule. But it sounds reasonable enough…

And it’s not clear that tariffs will be lifted on the UK as part of the agreement?

Will wait for the details to be finalized, but we shouldn’t sign a similar agreement unless it makes sense. And it’s hard to see a world where a trade agreement with tariffs would ever make sense, so…

If everyone who voted Liberal in your riding thought that, and decided not to vote for that reason, then I think the results would have been very different.

I sometimes wonder if something similar happened further south last November - too many voters were lukewarm on Harris and sat out instead of voting, figuring that Harris would win anyways. And we all know how that turned out.

No need. Interest and penalties on the unpaid taxes amount to significantly more than the float.

Hmm. Perhaps your right. I just dislike the idea of a rich dude essentially getting a loan from the gov’t by refusing to pay his share upfront. But if the math works out and it doesn’t hurt fundability then I’m sold.

UBI should be treated more like a dividend paid to a shareholder. The shareholder’s financial situation is irrelevant to what the shareholder is owed.

This is tied to the “entitlement vs charity” concept. So agreed on that point.

However, I also wrote earlier that,

Basically the rich are required to pay as part of their tax their own BI in advance, before the govt doles it back out to them.

Solely for that purpose the financial situation is kinda relevant. The rich, and perhaps the really high middle class, effectively have to self-fund their own UBI. Everyone else has it funded through a pool of money that the gov’t provides (which in turn comes from the usual taxation authority, including taxes on the rich).

As a concept, this shouldn’t be important to the ideal that is UBI. However, it’s an important wonky implementation detail - everyone still gets UBI and it’s still an entitlement not a charity, but this detail makes it affordable for governments to provide (the rich technically get it too, but it’s basically just an accounting gimmick).

No, thank you.

Dang, by just one vote. Never let it ever be said again that a single vote doesn’t make a difference.

Shout-out from a proud and satisfied Freedom Mobile user here!

I guess by that you were trying to explain the same idea as https://programming.dev/post/30075435/16842138 above. If that’s right then I agree - that resolves the float issue.

The “float” cost is minimal

But how many “rich” people are in Canada? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? It might be minimal for any individual rich person, but it can add up to a significant cost to Canada (or the relevant provincial government). That’s why we need it to get to zero.

Self-employed people are required to make quarterly installments, not annual.

So we can minimize this while still paying these their NIT quarterly.

The government constantly owes you 12 months worth of payments, and isnt paying you interest on your money.

But being paid these 12 monthly payments on a monthly basis has the potential to maximize the float issue.

AFAIK, taxes are withheld from wages and paid from every paycheck, not once a year.

This may not be accurate though. I’m thinking of BaristaFIRE types here - the part time coffee store worker earns such a low income from it, that they’d obviously qualify for the non-U BI or the NIT. But take into account their earnings from interest on their massive investment holdings, and that paints quite a different picture. Hence no BI or NIT until taxes are done. Which brings us to…

Indeed, I can eliminate it (and reverse it) merely by claiming the payments came out of the previous tax cycle, rather than the current one.

That is … brilliant!!! Yes, this solves the problem quite nicely. Basically the rich are required to pay as part of their tax their own BI in advance, before the govt doles it back out to them. Only thing I’d add is to make sure that, for those who make above a certain income (the “rich”), any tax owing must be paid in full before the UBI is paid out. This prevents the float issue from coming back for those who pay late.

When you die, your estate receives the remaining 12 payments owed to you.

And if you have no heirs, it goes back to the gov’t - where it can be redistributed to others. Again, brilliant!

But the biggest reason to apply it uniformly is, IMO, the social costs. Giving it to everyone, it is an entitlement. It is the dividend the citizen receives for their ownership share of their country.

Giving it only to the poor, it is a charity intended to help people who are unable to support themselves.

Agreed for the most part. I was writing earlier that a NIT should cover some middle class folks too. The idea is that we can be more efficient by excluding the rich from this scheme, but if everybody except the rich qualify, it’s still an entitlement rather than a charity, since only the rich lack the entitlement.

Think of SALT in the US - https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/the-deduction-for-state-and-local-taxes/ - my recollection is that President Obama tried to push for a reduction of SALT but had to back away due to the outcry. SALT benefitted mostly folks living in blue states, which is why it was only capped in Drumpf’s first term.

That said, if UBI is workable as per your idea above, then it’s academic, since giving it to the rich actually doesn’t cost anything anymore. I’m fine either way - the important part is to get it out there.