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Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

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Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#131

Post by alephnerd »

myth_drannon wrote: post #129
alephnerd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses... That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent. Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise). Canadian…

Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago, there is a reason it was called Silicon Valley North. RIM, Nortel, Celestica, QNX... I can't explain what exactly happened. A simple explanation would be Liberals prioritized real estate growth, unlimited immigration to artificially boost GDP but I suspect the problem is more complex.

> Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago...

Moreso 20 years ago, but more to that in a bit.

> I suspect the problem is more complex

Yes. The answer is the absolute growth of the US economy over the last 20 years compared to Canada.

In 2006, the market cap of the TSX and NYSE+NASDAQ was roughly US$1T versus US$26T respectively.

In 2025, the market cap of the TSX and NYSE+NASDAQ was around US$4.8T versus US$87T.

Additionally, from 2006 to 2026 the Canada's GDP grew from around $1.3T to $2.42T whereas America's GDP grew from around $13T to $31T.

Basically, there was always a US-Canada gap, but the gap turned into a chasm over the last 20 years, especially as Canada's GDP growth wasn't able to keep up to the US [0] and was tied to energy markets.

The brutal reality is Canada's economy is significantly less complex that the ambitions on Canadian HNers. Canada's export bundle is roughly as economically complex [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2].

Real estate and immigration is the easy boogeyman, but it's never been a serious consideration for institutional investors in Canada.

Institutional investors with a Canada thesis primarily wish to invest in ONG, Energy, and Construction associated to those industries, yet bipartisan bickering such as BC+Quebec blocking pipelines and Alberta blocking renewables projects wiped out tens of billions of dollars worth of projects and dealflow, and played a role in US$1T in capital leaving Canada [3] over the past decade. Additionally, Canada's major differentiator against the US in the 2000s was it's ONG sector, but by the 2010s the US was able to take advantage of shale fracking and NatGas in order to completely upend Canada's leverage on the American energy market. Heck, fracking was subsidized by a Democrat (Obama) and green energy was subsidized by Republicans (eg. TX wind/solar and Perry or Solar Panel manufacturing in Georgia and Arizona). Meanwhile, in Canada liberal leaning parties would undermine fossil fuel dealflow and conservative parties would undermine renewable dealflow.

With such a diverge, Canadian capital basically left for the US and even Canadian companies like RIM and OpenText shifted much of their leadership and core IP to their US divisions.

[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/124/export-complexit...

[2] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/100/export-complexit...

[3] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/688/export-complexit...

[4] - https://www.rbc.com/en/thought-leadership/the-growth-project...

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#132

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #116
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, ever the same since the Hudsons Bay Company and the Northwest Company ran the whole place. Now it's just the Westons and Rogers and Bell instead. Some years ago when I first moved to my farm out here in the Hamilton area there was a meeting about zoning bylaws, as the city was finally -- after 20 years -- harmonizing the rural zoning laws after the municipal amalgamation that Mike Harris had forced on them back…

The wild thing is that Canada is absolutely not alone in having this sort of insanely restrictive land use regulatory environment, as you hear similar stories from the UK (see: Clarkson's Farm) and even the USA (see: restrictive SF zoning). So the question for me is how the USA and other countries with similar regulatory regimes do well in spite of these things. With the USA a possible answer is that the scale and di…

It's true having 10x the population just makes so many things 10x better.

Some things also get 10x worse though :-)

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#133

Post by throwawayk7h »

tistoon wrote: post #119

I guess canadians get what they voted for... :)

in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#134

Post by slopinthebag »

llm_nerd wrote: post #130
slopinthebag wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per-capita GDP rose mainly because of what you said, declining immigration growth. The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years, increasing the population dramatically masked that at, least in nominal GDP, and as population growth declines it reveals the weaknesses that were previously obscured. Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years. Immigration was and is never the p…

>The issue is that our economy has been in decline for years Yup. We had a housing and immigration based economy. >Simply reducing population growth is not enough to fix the last 10 years. Ah, so damned if they do, damned if they don't. Yes, getting unchecked immigration under control was absolutely a problem that needed to be fixed (they still aren't there, and the TFW and "student" pipelines are a major remaining p…

I’m not sure why you’re so eager to blame immigration for the economy doing poorly. Cutting immigration only makes the economy worse unless you offset that by creating growth elsewhere, which hasn’t seemed to happen in the last 10 years, nor the last ~350 days.

C-22 is not a tiny, minor thing. It has massive repercussions for people’s privacy and security, as well as for the economy. If it was some minor thing, why so much effort to push it through despite immense backlash? It’s clearly a top priority for the government for some reason.

The liberals were literally reelected on the basis that Mark Carney is a master economist and he is our only saviour against Trump.

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#135

Post by alephnerd »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #100
tw85 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succ…

Dude, these problems predate the Liberal government(s) we've had by decades. It's a problem endemic to Canada's colonial background and existence as a resource extraction zone, and both mainstream political parties have made it happen, and both have sets of friends which benefit from their different flavours of patronage. Frankly the conservatives were worse when in power on doubling down on turning Canada into a pur…

This. It's the exact same problem Australia faces as well, except Australia is basically a bizarro version of Canada where Harper won.

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#136

Post by int_19h »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #101
tamimio wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because US has far better opportunities and more money. My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will h…

Yep, ever the same since the Hudsons Bay Company and the Northwest Company ran the whole place. Now it's just the Westons and Rogers and Bell instead. Some years ago when I first moved to my farm out here in the Hamilton area there was a meeting about zoning bylaws, as the city was finally -- after 20 years -- harmonizing the rural zoning laws after the municipal amalgamation that Mike Harris had forced on them back…

> It's for some reason just the default Canadian mindset to create an environment to often favour the already entrenched, and to explicitly put gates in front of any upstarts.

"Peace, order, and good government" is easiest to achieve when things basically don't change.

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#137

Post by int_19h »

alephnerd wrote: post #5
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #2

There is not enough noise about this bill. It's horrific. If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real…

[flagged]

> but even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".

You should look up the origin of that phrase...

Re: Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22

#138

Post by int_19h »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #72
hylaride wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a coup. That's an illegal protest. They were all a bunch of self-centred idiots, but let's not give them credit for something that it wasn't.

Illegal protest that involves the dissolution of an elected government, and the leader of the opposition hob-knobbing with them? Maybe not technically a coup if there's an election held right after, fair. Let's just agree to call it "tried to overthrow the government."

If that is your yardstick, I take it you don't have a problem with what e.g. Russian street cops do to opposition protests either?
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