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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

    Agreed. This isn’t the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

    You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

    Not the OP but - I’d agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

    Now, while it’s definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an “administrative error” of some sort, there’s no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

    If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

    They’re doing everything by the book.

    I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

    This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver’s license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

    I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn’t have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

    So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?








  • This is another reason why proportional representation is a better system. One vote wouldn’t matter because one vote wouldn’t flip a riding or change the number and type of representatives who become MPs. After all, the percentage of MPs elected in the riding wouldn’t change significantly enough with one vote.

    Agree 100%, we definitely need to move to PR ASAP.

    With proportional representation, we would have the same or fewer elections than we have now.

    Elsewhere on the piefediverse I’ve seen the argument made that PR also generally leads to other benefits like better cooperation between candidates and less mudslinging.

    The money and resources used for this one vote, along with court time and a potential byelection, make a mockery of our democratic process.

    I mean it does have it’s uses. The byelection for the two Georgia Senate seats back in 2020 (technically a pair of runoff elections) is what ensured the Dems senate majority back then.






  • No need. Interest and penalties on the unpaid taxes amount to significantly more than the float.

    Hmm. Perhaps your right. I just dislike the idea of a rich dude essentially getting a loan from the gov’t by refusing to pay his share upfront. But if the math works out and it doesn’t hurt fundability then I’m sold.

    UBI should be treated more like a dividend paid to a shareholder. The shareholder’s financial situation is irrelevant to what the shareholder is owed.

    This is tied to the “entitlement vs charity” concept. So agreed on that point.

    However, I also wrote earlier that,

    Basically the rich are required to pay as part of their tax their own BI in advance, before the govt doles it back out to them.

    Solely for that purpose the financial situation is kinda relevant. The rich, and perhaps the really high middle class, effectively have to self-fund their own UBI. Everyone else has it funded through a pool of money that the gov’t provides (which in turn comes from the usual taxation authority, including taxes on the rich).

    As a concept, this shouldn’t be important to the ideal that is UBI. However, it’s an important wonky implementation detail - everyone still gets UBI and it’s still an entitlement not a charity, but this detail makes it affordable for governments to provide (the rich technically get it too, but it’s basically just an accounting gimmick).