Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Canada Should Join the EU

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 823 posts

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#571

Post by mardifoufs »

skissane wrote: post #65
mardifoufs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Morocco has a lot to win by joining europe, whereas Canada doesn't.

Canadian GDP per capita is 15 times that of Morocco. The EU would much rather admit a wealthy country than a relatively poor one. So there are clear economic reasons to treat the two differently. Canada is a longstanding liberal democracy with a distant and purely symbolic constitutional monarchy. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which (until recently at least) the monarch played an active political role, ther…

Yes, but why would Canada want the EU? it's just a complete fantasy from the economist, I don't see why a country that's already wealthy would want to join the EU, especially when it's a country that basically is completely dependent to the US. It makes as much sense as Norway wanting to join NAFTA when most of its trade is in Europe.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#572

Post by dragonwriter »

mardifoufs wrote: post #571
skissane wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian GDP per capita is 15 times that of Morocco. The EU would much rather admit a wealthy country than a relatively poor one. So there are clear economic reasons to treat the two differently. Canada is a longstanding liberal democracy with a distant and purely symbolic constitutional monarchy. Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which (until recently at least) the monarch played an active political role, ther…

Yes, but why would Canada want the EU? it's just a complete fantasy from the economist, I don't see why a country that's already wealthy would want to join the EU, especially when it's a country that basically is completely dependent to the US. It makes as much sense as Norway wanting to join NAFTA when most of its trade is in Europe.

> I don't see why a country that's already wealthy would want to join the EU, especially when it's a country that basically is completely dependent to the US.

Reducing the degree of dependency on the US would be one obvious reason.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#573

Post by KPGv2 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #6

> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists) I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most popula…

> So who are they talking about?

Maybe the Irish, who were genocided by the English up into the 20th century.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#574

Post by KPGv2 »

genman wrote: post #534
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of Europe has ethnic strife and tensions. Bosnian / Serbian. Czech / Slovak (until recently). Spain has its breakaway ethnic movements. Ireland like others mentioned is a close analogue.

Nothing like that is even by slightest similar to indigenous people of Canada. Nothing. Also while Canada my want people, so does EU.

The English colonized, ruled, and conducted a deliberate genocide against the Irish people. It's pretty analogous.

The English starved them to death. The English forcibly displaced them. The English stole their resources.

The English even forbade them from speaking their language.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#575

Post by OccamsMirror »

roncesvalles wrote: post #460
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Frayed” is an understatement though: Canada has swung clearly in the anti-immigration camp over the last 4 or so years, maybe longer? It is to the point that Trump might actually be popular in Canada now just because of anti immigration sentiment alone.

Online, hate appears far more amplified than it is in the outside world. In the real world, yes there are places teeming with immigrants and international students, but you drive a block and turn a corner, and "it's Canada again". You lose that nuance in the online world where all you see is 10 seconds of a 120 degree window into some parking lot somewhere where immigrants happened to have gathered. If you watch a vi…

I think you'll find it's the very real housing crisis that is causing the anti-immigration sentiment.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#576

Post by rayiner »

kypro wrote: post #483
rayiner wrote: post #385

Does the economist know what time it is? Nationalism is resurgent: nationalist parties now control the U.S. and Italy. Canada seems poised to Poilievre, who has made impassioned appeals to Canadian nationalism. And in Germany, France, and the U.K., nationalist parties have effectively rendered the governing coalitions impotent, even if they cannot yet command a majority. What a time to suggest that Canadians cede the…

The left-wing party in the UK has only just won its largest majority in history and we don't have another election for 5 years. That is largely because the right has split into populist right and centre-right parties though.

Labour won the election, but Starmer’s approval rating is already down to 27% after just six months. https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/dissatisfaction-starmer-reaches-.... That’s not surprising given that Labour got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019, when it lost in a landslide, but won anyway because of infighting among the right wing.

That’s what I meant when I said nationalists have rendered ruling parties impotent even when they can’t outright win the election. Similar things have happened in Germany and France. In Germany, it took the right splitting and a stoplight coalition of greens, neoliberals, and socialists to cobble together a majority. In France, it took a coalition of communists, socialists, and centrists. It’s hard to actually govern when the winning side has little in common other than opposition to nationalism.

And any leftist/centrist coalition is fragile, relying on infighting among the right. If Tories became a strongly nationalist, anti-immigration party, they could probably win. Same thing for CDU. That’s already happened in the U.S. GOP.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#577

Post by xqt40 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #530
lazyasciiart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the few tribal populations in Northern Europe generally were and certainly are today treated at least as fairly as anything in Canada. Really? The Sami populations don't have any sovereignty that I know of.

You have to shoehorn the Sami into this comparison because they really only colonized the Nordic countries contemporary with the majority "European" populations. They weren't, in the same sense, indigenous, just... less western.

No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#578

Post by rayiner »

zeckalpha wrote: post #527
rayiner wrote: post #385

Does the economist know what time it is? Nationalism is resurgent: nationalist parties now control the U.S. and Italy. Canada seems poised to Poilievre, who has made impassioned appeals to Canadian nationalism. And in Germany, France, and the U.K., nationalist parties have effectively rendered the governing coalitions impotent, even if they cannot yet command a majority. What a time to suggest that Canadians cede the…

This could be seen as a EU-nationalist framing. Just like the United States has shifted from being a federation of states toward being a singular entity.

You need a common culture to govern a country, and that culture needs to be deeper than watching the same movies and consuming the same flow of cheap Chinese products. If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.

The U.S. suffers greatly from the demise of federalism and it’s insane that anybody would want to copy it. People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.

Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#579

Post by brandur »

AlexandrB wrote: post #467
brandur wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you my doppelganger? I made almost this exact comment word-for-word to a friend of mine a few weeks ago. Trudeau's immigration video from December [1] was one of the most dishonest, condescending productions that I've ever seen, basically amounting to, "Yes, we destroyed our previous internationally respected immigration system and imported five million low skilled laborers over a couple years without adding any…

The most shocking thing to me is the heavy involvement of McKinsey consulting in all this[1]. Feels anti-democratic to let a foreign consulting firm set immigration targets. [1] https://thewalrus.ca/shadow-government/

That's absolutely bananas. $3 million for a _report_ about suggestions for possible immigration reform (to speed it up of course). In the hole $62 billion a year, and a sizable chunk is going to overpriced MBA grads right out of school to produce PDF documents. How the hell do we reign these people in.

Re: Why Canada Should Join the EU

#580

Post by sandworm101 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #6

> Canada’s inclusive treatment of its indigenous peoples, at least in recent decades, could be emulated by Europeans (though First Nations Canadians might fairly object to closer ties with ex-colonists) I really wonder what the author meant with this line. There's very few populations in Europe that bear any similarity whatsoever with the relationship between First Nations people and most Canadians, since most popula…

The irish. The scots. Basically everyone who wasnt related to the vikings after 1066. The welsh trying to protect thier language are basically quebec. The scots talking about leaving, but never actually doing it, are basically alberta. And thats just similarities in the british isles. Then there are all the little counties bordering giant countries (finland) that see parallels to the canada-us relationship.
Post reply on HN