Pixel

All governments everywhere frame their decisions in a way that is akin to gaslighting. If the majority of Canadians disapprove of Pierre's actions, or we lose the trade war with the US in a meaningful way that deteriorates our standard of living, then they will lose the next election. It's that simple.

People blame Trudeau now for all of their ills, as though that he has the power to magically make the economy go up and down with a snap of his fingers. The Liberals made investments in key sectors all the time, including housing starts, climate change and social justice, many of which are never going to be meaningfully acknowledged by people that debate politics online. Pierre is ultimately subject to the same political pressures.

Democracy's success isn't measured by how one person feels about an incoming government - it's based on the strength of democratic institutions, and liberal democracies are further characterized by strong civil societies and human rights regimes. If the majority of Canadians want a Conservative government in power - why do you feel that preference shouldn't be accepted?

It doesn't sound like you even want a democracy, you just want a one-party autocracy, given that you feel that people shouldn't be allowed to have fluid political preferences. That's a failure of democracy - a one party state with all decisions made by someone on Lemmy.

I'm not happy about an incoming Conservative majority government either, but my gut reaction isn't to start claiming that democracy in Canada has failed. I'm able to calmly acknowledge that there's a party right now that is probably going to win a plurality of votes and ridings because the majority of voters align with their messaging. That's not a failure of democracy, that's a success of democracy.

A Liberal leadership convention would require ~4-5 months. The Liberals would name an interim leader elected by caucus if JT steps down.

This is entirely a large factor. The NDP is now viable in former Liberal ridings such as Toronto—St. Paul's, LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, and Ottawa-Centre. Why would the NDP keep propping the Liberals up in power when a Conservative majority is essentially guaranteed (and that's not going to change in 10 months), and they have a chance to exploit Liberal weaknesses? People that want to stall the inevitable are deluding themselves if they think things will massively turn around in the span of half a year when so many Canadians have lost confidence in the governing party.

So you're saying that if a viable parliamentary democracy is functioning as intended, it has failed?

The Conservatives will win either way. There's nothing in the next 10 months that would prevent the Conservatives from winning short of PP beating up children.

Voting no confidence now allows the NDP to viably compete for seats like Ottawa Centre where the liberals are weak and rebuild their influence and standing in the house. I don't see why it's the duty of every left-leaning party to prop up the Liberals as the natural governing party. Waiting 10 months isn't going to cause the NDP to sweep into government, it might at best just delay the inevitable if they're lucky, but more likely delaying will catastrophically wipe out their party by making them look like Liberal stage props.

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It's important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn't going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that's just good practice. You're far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There's only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you're just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don't really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

Wouldn't that still leak your DNS? I guess that's not a big deal if you don't care about timing correlation attacks.

Trudeau doesn't push strongly for the status quo, it's that people see him as synonymous with the status quo. He can push out some pretty radical policies and people would still blame him for the economy, woke-ism and whatever bogeyman is of the day.

Yes, they do. People were already going to pharmacists for years in Ontario to get prescription refills for non-controlled substances. Sometimes you know that you just need a drug to treat your problem or you need a contraceptive. You know that there's a specific acne cream that works for you, or you need a NSAID for your joint pain. There's no point clogging up the already backlogged healthcare system for In demand healthcare professions such as physicians and nurse practitioners when you have another oversaturated health profession (pharmacy) that you can leverage.

100%. I learnt the numbers 0-9 in Mandarin Chinese and I know how to cuss in Chinese to Chinese robocall scammers.

I also have a social sciences research background so I have no disincentive or misguided desire to respond with wrong data to polls either.