And I want a pony.
I got my first sunburn of the year looking at cherry blossoms in High Park in Toronto. It was just me, my wife, and a zillion other people.
As I continue to read the book I mentioned earlier, I’m wondering something - is there still a perception in Eastern Canada that the original provinces bought the West, and as such you still own us (or should still own us)? Somebody in the Canadope thread said something to that effect within the last year or so - is this still a thing in Eastern Canada?
It’s premised on a public service model that seems to have been eroded, the more American we become. From what I’ve been told, the BBC radio is still revered in England, and people for the most part dutifully pay their TV licenses still. The more Canadians bitch about not having Hulu and spotify, the more it seems they want to move to a purely private model.
If sill in the area I’ll come out for a dopefest. And I’m sure I have a set of clubs hidingsomewhere.
My job-hunt is starting to focus out west though. Plus a lot of my family is now split between BC/Alberta so my ties to Ontario are getting pretty loose.
Huh? No. 
Strange thing to ask.
The problem is that in this particular area the public service model is premised on a state of telecommunications that is simply obsolete.
Put it this way - it makes more sense for the government to run a TV station where there are only three channels available, then when there are 500 - or increasingly people simply ordering up whatever programs they want “on demand”, and not bothering with particular stations at all.
This has nothing to do with us Canadians abandoning our distinctive Canadian-ness to join the Yanks, it is simply a function of the tech.
This is the first time I have ever heard of such a thing. Conspiracy theory nuttiness.
Never heard of that at all - I can only speak for Southern/Eastern Ontario and Montreal areas.
Do you have a link to this post? I’d like to see it for myself!
I was just looking for it - danged middle-aged memory. It was sometime in the last two years, I’d say, and it made my eyes bug out when I saw it - it had never occurred to me that there were modern Canadians with that attitude. I have to go out now, but I’ll search more later.
In completely different news, set your calendar to watch the NLL Championship Game this Saturday! The game can be watched on the CBS Sports Network. The game starts at 4:00 pm BC time. Although there are no Canadian teams still in the playoff (after Calgary’s extremely close and hard-fought loss last weekend), there are still tons of Canadians playing, since we make up most of the NLL players. 
As Cat Whisperer was writing this post, out of curiosity I had a scan through the rosters of the Washington Stealth and Rochester Knighthawks and I found only four Americans among them out of 46 players, so the indoor game is unequivocally dominated by Canadians. And those Canadians are almost exclusively from either Ontario or BC; there’s only one Albertan and one Québecois between the two teams. There are also four First Nations players represented in the game, including Cody Jamieson, who led the Knighthawks in scoring for the second straight year.
Heh - going back through the threads, I found this post from Northern Piper -
I hope the reminder that they’ve had snow for seven months now doesn’t push him over the edge.
[[twitch, twitch]]
I just checked the Weather Network… they said that it was warm and sunny in Regina.
30 c 86 f for Monday for you, unless the snow we’re due to get Saturday moves west.
Okay, I found it - here.
Followed up with this -
Doing some research, I see that Alberta was given control of its own resources in 1929, like the other provinces; the oil in Alberta was discovered in 1947.
I guess the better question is, is there still a perception in provinces outside of Alberta that Alberta’s resources should belong to all of Canada, not Alberta (in spite of all the provinces owning their own resources)?
Not a large one. I would imagine if you asked any person in Canada if all provinces should have equal powers you’d get a large majority saying “Yes.”.
If you also asked them if Canadian resources should benefit all Canadians they would also say yes.
So you can see where FlyingDutchman’s weird desire to go back a 100 years and disenfranchise western provinces could possibly come from. If you were generous you could call it a fringe view I suppose.
Honestly, not really. The BBC is still clearly a big benefit to the UK, and for that matter, PBS does quality-before-entertainment stuff, notably in kids’ programming and in news coverage, that private stations do not. The real problem with the CBC is that they just aren’t much different from a private station. I gather that their radio programming is much better (and the little I listen to confirms that), so maybe the one part is more worth defending than the other.
ETA: Cat Whisperer, that’s the first I’ve heard of that attitude, either. Honestly, West-East relations are a classical case of an uneven relationship: since the East is so much bigger than the West (and contains the capital), the West pays a lot more attention to the East than vice versa. That means the West notices every slight, whereas the East wonders why there’s so much resentment, since, after all, the East doesn’t very often notice or care about the West.