The "considerate culture" you are advocating for is only possible when the material conditions for poverty are absent. You need a really strong social safety net.
Poverty is more strongly correlated with criminality than any other factor. If you want a world where everyone can feel safe leaving their door unlocked then you need a world where no one is left behind.
The problem with liberalism is that it is an individualistic ideology and the further we have gone down that road (now, neo-liberalism) with austerity and cost-cutting measures, the social safety net is bad and only getting worse.
In Canada we have fiduciaries, but most people aren't that financially literate. If you walk into a bank and ask for a financial advisor they're just going to pass you to a sales rep. Enjoy your TD e-Series!
(Although, admittedly, mutual fund MERs have dropped substantially with the rise of low-cost ETFs...)
True, and absolutely the most crazy part of this whole debacle so far. Even if the old plates were launched by the previous Liberal government... so what? They were as neutral as possibly imaginable.
* FOIA is American, ATIP is Canadian. Anyhow, of course they aren't "free", no one said they were. It's (at best) incoherent to make straw-man arguments against the wrong thing...
* Just because there are worse things in the world doesn't mean we can't consider lesser ones. It's not like journalists are all only ever allowed to write about whatever you consider to be the single most pressing topic at the time.
* Just because this article doesn't interest you, personally (it obviously interests other HNers, considering it's on the front page) doesn't mean that it's a "Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article".
* Not all government spending is bad, as you seem to imply, and some oversight is absolutely necessary to prevent corruption.
* This ATIP request resulted in an interesting article that covered Canadian culture, geo-location games and trespassing issues, the health of the ATIP program, as well as humourous anecdotes on how military policy discovered and handled the issue of PokemonGo.
The U.S., through employer-provided private healthcare, has not just wage slavery, but pseudo medical-slavery. If you quit your job (In the U.S.), you lose health your employer-provided health insurance and could be stuck footing the $28k bill (or at least having to negotiate / deal with it) for a sore throat.
Canada does not have such a system. Canada has taxpayer-funded healthcare. Therefore you have the liberty to quit your job and find more favourable employment without having to deal with the risk of one surprise hospitalization from bankrupting you.
GP is saying Canada did that right. The confusion arises because GP said "here" right after praising Canada, possibly misleading you to think they were referring again to Canada, which they were not.
Or if you're "Japanese" but with Korean heritage... I've heard stories of people who had Korean ancestry and they had a deep terror of anyone ever finding out.
This is a bad analogy that makes it sound like you're defending flat-earthers.
It's like saying you use Hermeticism's Principle of Rhythm to build a pendulum-powered clock...
And unlike both Flat-Earth theory and Hermetics, Newton was actually demonstrably right. Flat-earthers and Hermeticists spin their theories out of whole cloth.
For whoever down-voted this: Finding a spouse is not specifically challenging due to having achieved your goals... it is, however, coloured by money. "Is she only dating me for my wealth?" is not something that occurs to someone who does not have wealth but has achieved their goals.
Poverty is more strongly correlated with criminality than any other factor. If you want a world where everyone can feel safe leaving their door unlocked then you need a world where no one is left behind.
The problem with liberalism is that it is an individualistic ideology and the further we have gone down that road (now, neo-liberalism) with austerity and cost-cutting measures, the social safety net is bad and only getting worse.
What we need is socialism.