You are correct, but some dolls are styled, “action figures.” I attempted a bit of humour by calling it an “inaction figure,” though rereading my remark, I could perhaps have worded it better.
Don’t blame me; I voted for Kodos! 
I seem to recall Tony Blair being featured in an episode too, and I believe he even provided his own voice.
Trudeau’s numbers are now far worse than Donald Trump’s.
49% of the country disapproves of the current government. Only 33% approve.
When asked about Justin Trudeau himself, 47% of Canadians have a negative impression of him, and only 33% have a positive impression. When he was elected, it was 57% positive and only 24% negative.
Trudeau is now a liability to the liberals, and there are rumors that the liberals are thinking of ways to replace him before the election.
I mean you can object to Trudeau’s policies and handling of issues but I’m not sure how you can compare an Abacus Data poll on Canadian politics and politicians with American polling on Donald Trump. Seems a reach.
So I looked at the “Reputation of Leaders” portion of the poll and found it odd they arrange the Trudeau numbers positive/negative and the Sheer numbers negative/positive. So I’l list the actual numbers here. It’s not nearly the liability you seem to be making it out as Sam
Trudeau 33% positive, 47% negative (unchanged from last review)
Sheer 29% positive, 35% negative (down 2 positive, up 4 negative)
Singh 23% positive, 27% negative (unchanged from last review)
May 32% positive, 17% negative (up 5 positive, down 0 negative)
So the next election will be tight and hing on a number of things like SNC, China, NAFAT 2.0 etc. I’d bet though that Canadian will take their typical approach consider “voting out a government” instead of “voting in an opposition”.
His latest stammering response to how he and his family cut down on plastics while defending his poorly thought out “plastic ban” is just… embarrassing really.
How could he not have been prepared for this question? Any intelligent person would have just said "I just don't use plastic water bottles"... except apparently the Trudeau family spends [$300/month on bottled water](https://www.therebel.media/justin-trudeau-single-use-plastic-ban-household-spends-300-dollars-monthly-bottled-water).Secondly, any “drink box water” would contain more unrecyclable waste in foil, plastic, and waxed paper, and straw than a a regular water bottle.
He also missed the opportunity to emphasize that we spend billions in building and upgrading facilities, treating, testing and regulation to ensure safe drinking water throughout the country so that bottled water is largely unnecessary in most of Canada.
Do you hate the guy personally or something? That stuff isn’t important.
What is important is being a role model for others and finding workable solutions to the Earth’s health problems. Maybe the plastic ban won’t be perfect immediately, but you need to start somewhere.
It’s important to me. I have yet to live any place where I find the tap water palatable. I use tap water for cooking and most other things, but I’m a huge consumer of bottled spring water for drinking – actual spring water, not filtered stuff. I practically live on the stuff. We’re fortunate to live in a part of the world where pure clean spring water is abundantly available, and I would consider being forced to drink evil-tasting tap water by some ill-conceived government policy to be a personal affront. And if I’m going to be forced to buy and maintain an expensive high-quality filtration system as an inferior alternative to bottled spring water I expect Trudeau Junior to pay for it.
A good place to start is making rational decisions, not feel-good virtue signaling. I understand that plastics can be an environmental problem, and that microplastics in the oceans are a serious concern. But plastic water bottles are fully recyclable, and mine are invariably recycled. Not only are they recyclable, but the brand I buy uses bottles that are themselves made from 100% recycled plastic, so when they go in the recycling bin, they’re going in for at least a second round of recycling. How is this an environmental problem deserving a ban?
The proper course of action here is to make sure that recycling systems are effective and properly managed and that everyone participates, not banning useful and important products.
I hate to say it because I was a big fan of Trudeau, but this sort of misguided idealism is part of a recent trend that is really pissing me off.
Yep. One way to tell if something is readily recyclable is if people are willing to pay you for it. Around here, empty plastic water bottles are worth 10-25 cents each. That makes them one of the plastic materials that aren’t being shipped to Asia to be burned or dumped in the ocean.
Plastic water bottles are not the problem. In fact, the biggest problem may be misguided recycling programs that simply ship containers full of garbage to Asia, where they are increasingly being disposed of in terrible ways due to the expense of sorting and recycling the stuff.
A couple of easy solutions to not having single use water bottles but not liking tap water:
(1) use multi use water bottles that are returnable with a very hefty deposit,
(2) use 18.9 litre (50 US gal) bottles that are returnable with a very hefty deposit and dispense into multi use water bottles or mugs. This is what I do, given the water in the ground where I live is skanky.
The Lake Superior municipal water (@ p. 6-7) water where I work is very good compared to many other municipalities – the chlorine is barely noticable, but still I’d rather drink the divine rather than the almost imperceptibly tinged. It helps that the source is relatively clean compared to most lakes. More importantly, when in town I do not want to ingest lead even if only in miniscule amounts. Older buildings and the downstream end of municipal delivery often still have lead piping, so although the municipality ph balances the water (acidic water increases corrosivity of lead), I’d rather go with the bottled spring water that leaves its treatment at deionization and reverse osmosis, without sodium hypochlorite (chlorine) and the possibility of lead.
But bottled water comes with its own concerns. In my area there are two wells that sell bottled water. Only one of them has never had a problem (significant bacteria led to the the other being closed down for a while, which led to the a bit of quid pro quo – the closed supplier delivered the open supplier’s bottled water to the closed supplier’s thirsty customers, which was a marketing coup for the open supplier).
There are several non-local brands of bottled water available in chain grocery stores, but up here they are either water from a municipal supply that has been further filtered to remove the trace chlorine, or they are from non-local out-of-basin aquifers that would not be replenished with the same water once it is used, which is a concern for the folks in southwestern Ontario near Elora who’s water is being taken out of basin by Nestle, and is a concern for folks on Superior which is being eyed by Ogallala region (although Superior is huge, it’s flow only only averages 2,100 cms (at the St. Mary’s River discharge); by comparison, the average flow of Niagara Falls is 2,400 cms).
Non-local brands also have a greater environment cost due to the increased pollution incurred through gas/diesel transport, albeit bottle water transport is only a small portion of consumer goods shipped about. All these little things add up.
Assuming that you can find a local producer with a good track records, the final thing to keep in mind is to not use a plastic drinking bottle that contains BPA, BPS or phthalates (some plastic Nalgenes are free of all these). Ironically, the ultra-light and easily crushed disposable plastic water bottles usually do not contain BPA, BPS or phthalates.
So ya pays yer penny and ya takes yer chance. I’d much rather the penny be paid by way of a little more effort (returning bottles) than by way of trashing the environment that we share with all other living things.
A few comments to that, though I don’t want to sidetrack the Trudeau thread too much into either this plastics ban or the water bottle thing specifically.
It’s undoubtedly true that in some general sense bottled water may be riskier than tap water simply because it tends to be subject to fewer regulations – though most of us remember the Walkerton (Ontario) disaster where E. coli in the municipal water supply sickened two thousand people and six of them died. But there are trusted choices of great bottled spring water, some of them originating in northern Ontario but surprisingly close to the Greater Toronto Area, hence cases of 24 of this wondrous elixir often sell for as little as $1.99.
Buying the big 18.8-liter jugs instead may be an option, but I find the 500-ml bottles super convenient and a pleasant way to consume the water. In fact when I’m stressed I find it comforting in the same way that an infant might when sucking on its bottle – maybe there’s some deep subliminal connection there!! And from a more pragmatic perspective, re-usable bottles aren’t sanitary because of bacterial growth in there after the first use, unless they’re thoroughly washed. And glasses are no good for water. Glasses are made in appropriate forms for rum, Caesars, Coke, martinis, and wine. There is no glass that is the right shape and size for spring water, end of story. I have spoken. 
But here’s the pertinent political point that this is all leading up to. Bottled water is a major target for witless do-gooders like young Trudeau because it’s perceived to have not just one, but multiple aspects of the kinds of things that naive witless do-gooders consider to be Pure Evil and The Devil Incarnate. One, it uses plastic – never mind that they’re made from 100% recycled post-consumer plastic and will mostly get recycled again. Two, it’s perceived by do-gooders to be frivolous and not necessary, never mind that many of us find it very necessary indeed. Three, it undermines the narrative that municipal government are fond of advancing about how terrific their local water supplies are. So is it any surprise that the ultra-liberal holier-than-thou Toronto City Council banned bottled water from City Hall? No, it is not. It absolutely is not. Fuck those sanctimonious do-gooders.
To be fair, the feds are still vague on exactly what they will ban, but for the above reason I think it’s highly likely that Trudeau Junior will ban bottled water, at least in single-serving plastic bottles, despite there being no reason whatsoever to do so. If he does that, then on top of a bunch of other things that are pissing me off, the youngster has lost my vote.
The above post can be taken as confirmation of a previous statement of mine, that wolfpup sometimes does indeed vote Conservative, at least in the Canadian context.
While I agree about bottled water, I’d also like to point out that plastic is not all bad. I don’t know if any of you remember back when, but when plastic bags and bottles showed up there were serious health reasons why they were a good thing, and environmentalists actually thought they were good because paper and cardboard was supposed to be causing deforestation, which was the cause du jure back then.
Plastics can be environmentally friendly for several reasons (although how they are disposed of/recycled makes a big difference). For one thing, plastic bottles and packages use very little material. They can be thinner and lighter than equivalent wood-based packaging. Single-use plastics help contain the spread of things like E. coli, which have been linked to the use of reusable cloth bags. The use of plastic utensils cuts down on the use of hot water and detergent for cleaning.
Now, there is no doubt that dumping plastic in the ocean, or in places where it can get to the ocean, is a really bad thing. This is mostly a problem in Asia, and part of the problem is that we have been shipping ‘recyclables’ to them so mixed in with other garbage that it’s not cost-effective to separate the plastic out, leading to it being simply burned or dumped. That’s generally the fault of various municipal recycling programs taking a shortcut, or taking in things to recycle for which there is no market. We should focus our energy on keeping plastics out of the Asian disposal stream, and not worry about a plastic water bottle in Toronto.
And the reason they are being vague about what they will actually ban is because once they start naming specific things, opposition will grow. If you ban all single use plastics, you will cause huge damages to the manufacturing industry. Almost every factory I’ve ever visited used single-use plastics for packaging, strapping, organizing, or in other ways in the production process. Those plastics are manipulated using very expensive machines, which will have to be scrapped and replaced with machines that can handle whatever packaging process they have to use instead.
Sometimes plastic packaging is used on food because it keeps the food from spoiling. Get rid of the plastic and substitute an inferior package, and food spoilage might go up, along with all the attendant economic and environmental damage that goes with it.
Tl;dr: The use of plastics in the economy is incredibly complex, and simple solutions from virtue-signalling politicians like Trudeau will bring a host of unintended consequences. There’s a reason why we consider the use of plastics to be a ‘revolution’. Plastics have lowered costs and improved quality of many goods and services. Any ban or restriction needs to be very carefully considered against the potential economic and environmental damage that could be caused by it.
Anyone else think it’s just a political manoeuvre to try and take votes back from the Green Party in order to win the next election? Pretty much the same as the carbon tax.
If they were going to do something like that solely for political ends, I think they’d target Conservative Party voters rather than Green Party voters. That would be twice as effective. I think they did it because it is the right thing to do.
As far as recycling goes, it’s hard for a general recycling business to make a go of it.
The greater the success of “reduce” and “re-use”, the more “re-cycle” will have to rely on subsidization. I would support a high tax on single use products for which there are non-single use alternatives that is dedicated to and sufficient to ensure a fair rate of return for recycling businesses.
In answer to the OP, the parliamentary Ethics Commissioner ruled today that Trudeau breached the federal Conflict of Interest Act by having his minions pit pressure on the Attorney General to intervene in the SNC-Lavalin prosecution for political reasons.
Trudeau simultaneously says he doesn’t accept the Ethics Commissioner’s findings, but takes full responsibility.
You seem to be implying that there’s some sort of contradiction here. Trudeau basically said, yes, he did the things mentioned in the report, but he doesn’t believe they were necessarily wrong. From the news story: “Even though I disagree with some of his conclusions, I fully accept this report and take responsibility for everything that happened,” he said. “Where I disagree with the commissioner, amongst others, is where he says, and takes a strong perspective, that any contact with the (attorney general) on this issue was improper.”
This was poor judgment on his part and the second time he’s been on the receiving end of an ethics commissioner’s report. Not good. But I do find Scheer’s political grandstanding to be annoying, probably because I find Scheer himself rather cynically opportunistic and annoying.
As much as I hope Trudeau stops stepping on his on crank with his golf shoes on (because I do not want a Conservative Prime Minister, like… ever) I am compelled to note that if a person goes to a parole hearing and says they accept responsibility but they don’t think they did anything wrong they will not be getting parole.
What annoys me about Scheer and the Conservatives is, they likely never would have pressured the Justice Minister, because they wouldn’t have had to pressure them. Their JM would have agreed with the PM and gone along with the plans willingly.
I don’t think that would have been better for the country overall.
wolfpup, all politicians come across as annoying when viewed through the media. I find they tend to be much better if you can catch them outside that framing. Still, their driver is vote getting so cynically opportunistic is almost a given.
That said I read http://ciec-ccie.parl.gc.ca/EN/ReportsAndPublications/Pages/TrudeauIIReport.aspx and I want future PMs to seriously deliberate before attempting the same kinds of actions and so there needs to be consequences. I’m fine with a Conservative, NDP or Green government so long as those governments fear to try the same kind of actions. In my view that kind of norm establishing is more important than having the Liberals in power.
For some reason Trudeau decided to go on the Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and got his ass handed to him on a variety of issues including climate change hypocrisy, arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Indigenous rights:
As I have said before, none of those things get better if there is a Conservative PM in office but damn Trudeau, stop trying to help yourself already.This just in:
The National Post still hates Trudeau, and wants you to hate him too.