#elections canada

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Elections Canada is looking for a firm with the technical know-how to design a phone app that will allow blind and visually impaired voters to “independently verify the mark on their ballot.” Elections Canada’s tender for this job says they are looking for someone who can design, build, deliver and maintain a mobile application that will allow visually impaired and blind electors the ability to verify the mark on their own ballot. “At this time, the independent verification of a marked ballot remains a barrier for people who are blind and partially sighted.,” said Nathalie de Montigny, a spokesperson for Elections Canada.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[godbirdart]

since we're getting closer to canada's election year and i plan on doing my part to help educate voters, here are two exceedingly simplified graphics for my international viewers on what we're dealing with here. tldr: canada is tired of trudeau (the liberal party) and things are starting to lean a bit too right-wing for comfort.

i am compelled to remind canadians that the NDP is our leftmost leaning party and our best chance at getting some tangible, beneficial change for everyone and not just some people.

the NDP have been pushing for universal basic income and damn,, what a dream it would be to have it

also: instead of the "democrat vs republican" that the states has, we're dealing with "democrat vs liberal vs conservative vs french vs green vs alt right". we're playing chess with six players on the board and yes, it's a mess.

[jasondamien93]

Who agrees?

[violsva]

BC Election

Hey BC! You are probably sick of hearing about the American election by now. This is not about that!

The British Columbia provincial election is Saturday October 19th. That’s tomorrow. You need to vote.

If you received a Where to Vote card in the mail, your voter card will have your assigned voting location on it (but you can go to another one if it's easier). If you did not receive a Where to Vote card, or you’ve lost it, you can absolutely still vote. You can find voting locations HERE.

You will need to bring ID that has both your name and your address on it. Proof of address is important because the staff need to know you’re voting in the right district. There’s a list of ID you can use HERE.

The polls are open from 8AM to 8PM. Voting is quick and usually simple. What time they’re busy depends on what your neighbourhood is like.

Information for voters with disabilities is HERE. If you have feedback on accessibility, there are ways to provide that HERE.

Elections BC does not call voters - if someone called or texted you to say the time or location has changed, that’s fraud. Check the website for accurate information.

If you got a mail-in ballot and you have not sent it yet, you can drop it off in person at any polling place before 8pm.

More information here. Translations available here.

EVERYONE GO VOTE.

[thashining]

Accurate

[ari16bri]

I live in Texas. A Canadian couple came into my job today and told me they are worried for us and to take advantage of Canada's asylum program if we can.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2YV1GQn/

[deadpresidents]

"It's called rain, comes down from comes down from heaven. And they want to do, no water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens you're in the shower 10 times as long, you know. No water comes out of the faucet."

-- Exact transcript of President-elect Donald Trump complaining about shower heads with restricted water flow during a batshit crazy press conference at Mar-a-Lago, January 7, 2024.

President-elect Trump, who also pointed out during the press conference that "The windmills are driving the whales crazy", touched upon some more serious matters, as well, implying that the United States may take back control of the Panama Canal by force, potentially use force and/or economic coercion to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States (he will "tariff Denmark at a very high level" if they don't give us Greenland), and continued to suggest that Canada should become an American state. Oh, he also talked about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" because he's an asshole.

In case you forgot, over 77 million Americans -- including, undoubtedly, people you love and who say they love and care about you -- voted for this person to lead our country for the next four years, despite...well...despite fucking everything we have experienced since 2015.

I seriously don't know if I can do this again for another four years.

[krystal-prisms]

For my fellow Canadians, we all know well that Canada tends to follow America in whatever election results, so it is extra important that we DO NOT let the same thing that happened today in America to happen in Canada, we have to prepare for the 2025 election and make sure we do not also descend into fascism and it is EXTRA important that everyone votes

[originalleftist]

So This Happened:

Confirming what was already pretty obvious, particularly in Tucker's case, but it is striking to see the head of government of arguably America's closest ally say under oath that both a major Canadian author and a major American broadcaster are paid agents of the Russian government.

Also, we see again that the Canadian Right is no different from the American one- treasonous scum employed by Russia to use "culture wars" to destabilize the country leading to a fascist state.

(Also, I am thinking of the years I spent working in a bookstore, and feeling disgust at the number of copies of Jordan Peterson's misogynist propaganda my job entailed selling over the years.)

[voidzphere]

please stay safe. i love you

keep going just out of spite, never give in. stay determined

[rosecrawley]

ALERT: EARLY ELECTION HAS BEEN CALLED FOR ONTARIO PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT. DO NOT FUCK THIS UP. GO AND VOTE.

x

[allthecanadianpolitics]

As federal parties battle in court to avoid privacy rules for voter data, an overwhelming majority of Canadians want more oversight according to recent polling for Elections Canada.

There are virtually no rules and zero oversight into how Canada’s federal political parties collect, store and exploit Canadian voters’ personal information – an increasingly important tool in modern electioneering.

While parties are now required to post privacy policies on their websites, there is no oversight into how they actually use the data they collect, meaning Canadians essentially have to take the parties at their word

The current wild west approach to political privacy is at odds with overwhelming public sentiment, according to recent polling data commissioned by Elections Canada.

“More than nine in 10 (96 per cent of) respondents agreed that laws should regulate how political parties collect and use Canadians’ personal information, including 78 per cent who strongly agreed,” reads an Election Canada survey of voters after the 2021 general election. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[godbirdart]

I get that Shit's Fucked but i need the other canadians in the room to start paying attention to our own upcoming problem

we're so wrapped up in american politics we barely know our own

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkscrump Linkdump

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Well, Saturday's come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn't fit into this week's newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I'm days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:

https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I'm appearing at Boskone, the city's venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:

https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/

Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I'm regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's Lawfare article about how Musk's seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Farrell and Newman's point isn't merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation's digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they're seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I'm gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea's autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls

But not everyone is taking Musk's bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:

https://gizmodo.com/americas-unions-sue-doge-launch-the-department-of-people-who-work-for-a-living-2000559998

And they've launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of "The Department of People Who Work for a Living":

https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/

It's nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they're fucking up all over the place.

Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden's CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can't be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What's more, any "violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act," which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn't apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/shutting-down-cfpb-is-not-like-shutting-down-usaid.html

That isn't the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off

Before last week, Justin Trudeau's political legacy seemed assured. His many leadership failures, along with a billionaire-funded dark-money hate-machine that targeted him with culture-war nonsense and climate denial all added up to record low approval ratings. It was so bad that Trudeau actually sent Parliament home (recklessly leaving Canada without a legislature on the eve of Trump's presidency) and resigned as Liberal Party leader.

A week ago, pretty much everyone in Canada figured that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was about to romp to victory with a Ba'ath-style Parliamentary majority. Poilievre was and is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a guy who has literally never had a job except for "politician," who nevertheless ran as a political outsider, leading a coalition of racists, climate exterminationists, xenophobes, forced-birth militants, and other cryptofascists and low-tax brain-worm victims. The threat of a Poilievre government with a commanding majority was frankly terrifying. Think of him as someone with Trump's agenda and Mitch McConnell's ruthless administrative competence. Trump is bad enough – but smart Trump? Nightmare.

Then came the Trump tariffs and the annexation threats, and overnight, the Tories' 20-point lead narrowed to a two-point lead, which continues to shrink. Poilievre's brand boils down to "Make Canada America Again" – dismantle medicare, smash unions, punish immigrants, ban abortion. With Canadians booing the American anthem at NFL and NBA games and Quebecois demonstrators waving maple-leaf flags, this is not a good time to be running as the America guy.

Don't get me wrong. Trudeau is terrible. Bill Clinton terrible, say. But Poilievre? A fucking monster. Canada's political future may just have been rescued by Trump's big, stupid mouth. Thanks, eh?

Meanwhile, south of the border, our American cousins keep getting fed into the corporate woodchipper. It's been just over a year since Mainers went to the polls and voted in a Right to Repair law with an 83% majority. But a year later, the law is foundering, amid a corporate legal blitz led by the automakers, who have also put Massachusetts' massive popular 2020 Right to Repair law on ice with endless lawfare. :

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/automakers-sue-to-kill-maines-hugely-popular-right-to-repair-law/

This is the status quo in America. As a highly influential, widely cited 2014 peer-reviewed study found:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

In other words, the only time the American people get what they demand is when giant corporations and oligarchs want it too. But when the plutes want something that the people despise, they almost always get their way.

Speaking of which, how's things going with Uber?

This week, Hubert Horan, the aviation industry analyst whose writings on Uber are the most important analysis of the company's business, investor scams, wage theft, and lobbying, published his long-awaited 34th research note on the company:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-four-tony-wests-calamitous-legacy-at-uber-and-with-the-kamala-harris-campaign.html

This edition is devoted to Tony West, Uber's Chief Legal Officer, and also brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, as well as manager of her disastrous failure of a 2024 election campaign. West may have run a Democratic presidential campaign, but he epitomizes the corporate corruption that gave rise to Trump. As Horan writes, West's first major accomplishment at Uber was to get the company exonerated for intimidating customers who were raped by Uber drivers. But his obituary will lead with the fact that he got Prop 22 passed in Calfornia, legalizing Uber's worker misclassification gambit, which allows the company to pay well below minimum wage and evade all workplace protection laws.

It was West who tapped Silicon Valley's tech oligarchs for large-dollar donations to the Harris campaign, which presumably played a substantial role in Harri's unwillingness to take a tough line on Big Tech while on the trail, creating the (correct) impression among voters that Harris would stand up for big business over their own interests.

It's an important read, and it's a reminder that the Democrats lost the last election every bit as much as Trump won it, and that their paralysis in the face of a national crisis is absolutely in character for the Democratic Party.

But on the other hand, the antitrust surge in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and China (!) over the past five years are all the more remarkable and heartening in light of the dismal and corrupt state of world governments. After all, there is no billionaire-backed dark money lobby whipping up support for smashing corporate power. The antitrust victories of the 2020s marked a turning point – the first time in my memory when extremely popular policies that the wealthy hated triumphed.

Decapitating the agencies that made those policies won't change the enormous political rage that led to the antitrust surge. If anything, it will only feed it. Enforcers like Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter did brilliant, important work – but they were only able to do it because of us. They're out of office, but we're still here. Don't ever forget that.

I certainly won't. This week, I turned in the edited manuscript for my next book, a nonfiction title called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The day I turned it in Ars Technica ran a huge package called "As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders," reeling off the most disgusting high-tech ripoffs trying to worm their way into your home and wallet:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

This sparked an epic Reddit thread on r/NoStupidQuestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1ij42yh/what_are_some_other_examples_of_enshittification/

I love to see how giving a name and a description to this phenomenon has captured and directed some of that rage. And for the record, it doesn't bother me at all that some of these people are using "enshittification" to mean "corporations fucking shit up" without regard to my formal definition of the process. As I wrote last October:

Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

And also: there's a lot of stuff that's just shitty right now, which is one of the reasons my word's putting up such great numbers. People are getting fed up with it, in ways large…and small. Take the post-pandemic trend of using your phone in speaker-mode in public places. I'm a prison abolitionist, but I'll make an exception for people who do this. Display 'em in stocks. Chain 'em up by their wrists. Or, you know, do what they do in France: fine them €150 for using a speakerphone on the train:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20250206/french-train-passenger-fined-e150-for-using-phone-on-speaker

Speaking of gruesome tortures, the essential Long Forgotten blog has posted its extensive, thoughtful review of the changes to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Very few people can write about built environment entertainment like Long Forgotten (the only other person who comes to mind is the excellent Foxx Nolte). Long Forgotten's verdict is "mostly good, but man, that new gift shop *suuuuucks:

https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2025/02/beyond-bride-other-changes-in-2025.html

OK, it's time for me to go and make my packing list for the tour. I'm going to leave you with a song. Last night, my pal Cynthia Hathaway turned me on to the Shotgun Jazz band, led by trumpeter/frontwoman Maria Dixon. If you like Louis Prima-style shout-singing, you'll love 'em – I bought everything they had on Bandcamp this morning:

https://www.shotgunjazzband.com/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/08/commixture/#petardhoists

Image: i ♥ happy!! (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Messy_storage_room_with_boxes.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[mapsontheweb]

January 6 Polls Canadian Election

[thashining]

Why is Trump really obsessed with Greenland and Canada?

Stay WOKE yall