Alberta; Canada’s Texas.
I think we’ve got pretty much all the American products here in Alberta, but what puzzles me is why the list composer leans so heavily towards President’s Choice(*)/No Name as a Canadian alternative. The composer has no interest in Sobey’s or Metro house brands, or he or she pretty much only shops at Loblaws and subsidaries?
Either way, it was an odd place to post such a list. I went to the book’s bulletin board looking for future odds on the Kentucky Derby, and this is what I found. No complaints from me; I only hope that the same list is posted in churches, schools, and supermarkets.
(*) “President’s Choice” is the elite house brand of Loblaw’s and its subsidiary supermarkets. It is called that because back in the 1970s, when it started, any product branded as “President’s Choice” was the favourite of then Loblaw’s president Dave Nichol. These products thus have nothing to do with the US President.
I’ve seen that same list making the rounds on my local neighbourhood facebook group, so it’s quite likely it wasn’t compiled by whoever posted it.
PC/NoName is easy to add to such lists because it’s an option for virtually every category. Probably all there is to it.
[quote=“PhillyGuy, post:379, topic:1013734, full:true”]
Trump does not want Canada’s natural resources so the residents of the ten provinces can sell at market prices with zero tariffs. They can do that now. [/quote]
They can’t do that now. Alberta sells a large portion of its oil to the US at a discount from world prices. The reason is that we can’t get to other markets easily due to the ROC blocking access.
With some Idaho thrown for good measure.
And the heavy bitumen isn’t worth as much as light crude is. That’s most of the reason.
Nation spends tens of billions of dollars building you guys a pipeline to the Pacific and you just can’t stop whining.
[quote=“Gorsnak, post:386, topic:1013734, full:true”]
And the heavy bitumen isn’t worth as much as light crude is. That’s most of the reason.[/quote]
That’s part of the reason. Access to markets is another.
Maybe the ‘Nation’ should have removed the continuous roadblocks and let the pipeline be built by Kinder Morgan. As it was, the costs increased upwards of $25B to over $30B (from an initial $4.7B) once the government got its incompetent hands on it. So, thanks, Canada (thumbs up!)
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/trans-mountain-pipelines-soaring-cost-provides-more-proof-government-failure
Please, Boo, we Albertans are not all like that. Heck, the more Ontarians and Newfoundlanders and BC’ers move here, we’re becoming less and less like that.
And I do still prefer PEI potatoes over Idaho spuds. Much better for baking.
Back in the day, Dave Nichol used to say that nothing would carry the President’s Choice label unless it was something he would proudly have in his own home. Speaking as a gourmet who traveled the world in search of new product ideas for the Loblaws family of supermarkets – originally and famously exotic sauces, but gradually expanding to a broad product base – that claim meant a lot. With Nichols now long gone, it’s not the same, but still, yes, PC is the premium store brand (“No Name” is the economy line) and is often – but not always – better than top national brands.
One exception is pasta sauce, but I’m very picky about that. There’s almost no common supermarket pasta sauce that I can tolerate, with the exception of Stefano (hey, made in Montreal, how can it not be great!) and Rao. Rao is American, so fuck them from now on. But the best pasta sauces of all are the store-made ones from Pusateri’s or from my local deli, both of which are – needless to say – Italian owned!
I may have left Ontario years ago, but I do still miss Pusateri’s. It was in my Toronto neighbourhood, and our family patronized it. So many deli delights that were unavailable elsewhere! You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, as Joni Mitchell famously sang. I’ve left Ontario, but there is nothing like Pusateri’s here in Alberta, to my regret. @wolfpup any chance you can send a care package out here?
A friend of mine once owned a house on a street directly across from Pusateri’s. It was a T-intersection with Avenue Road, and if you drove straight through instead of turning, you’d end up in the Pusateri’s parking lot! When he put the house up for sale, “walking distance to Pusateri’s” was part of the ad.
Dave Nichol, mentioned before, once cited Pusateri’s as “one of the ten best places in the world to shop for food”, and compared it favourably to Fauchon in Paris.
I know that part of Toronto, and yes, Pusateri’s was within walking distance. Let’s just say that Lawrence Park CI was within a five-minute walk of my house, and that was my high school; and so Pusateri’s was …
Yeah, well. How are you on the North Toronto Medical Building, on Lawrence Avenue? Both my dentist and my doctor were there.
Ninja’d by Cervaise. Obviously Uzi, as are all of us, is welcome to his/her own opinions, though I strongly disagree with Uzi on this. As an Ontarian (if that’s the word) who also lived in Quebec for 15 years and Nova Scotia for 12, I would definitely say that we are more socialist than Americans (and Americans who knee-jerk hate socialism in all respects and think that “socialist” is a dirty word, better give up their freeways, public schools, fire depts and police forces etc). I am not going to say that we are necessarily better or worse except for the fucking guns thing (someone please explain the worship aspect to me) and the resurfaced manifest destiny idea, which I’ve heard more times in day-to-day life in the last month than I’ve heard in my entire life, except during a US history course I took in university.
Right now, I fear the US for the chaos it may unleash upon the planet, including a possible take-over (military or otherwise) of Canada. But, to some extent, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Canada has brought some of this on ourselves in the area of national defence (our governments have been fucking lazy and extremely inefficient on this for at least the last 40 or 50 years).
On another, but related, note, I was thinking about the “Trump is Hitler” trope lately, while starting a book about WW I, and it occurred to me that maybe Trump is a lot more Kaiser Wilhelm than Hitler, and that his brashness and illogic, while enabled by smarter people, could be the real danger.
If you could get Trump to believe that, he would consider it a feature, not a bug.
DJT is smarter than some here believe, but I’m sure he doesn’t know what ROC (rest of Canada) means. He no more wants to help the people of Alberta than he wants to help the people of Greenland or the Canal Zone.
Maybe you will agree with most of this, but, if so, I would consider drawing different conclusions.
Right. We should have just steamrolled over the opposition from the indigenous people who owned the land needed for the pipeline, like back in the old days.
As this is not the pit, I cannot adequately reply to such a view.
That’s the one that always killed me. Trudeau took an action clearly in Alberta’s favour, which cost him with his own supporters, and the Albertans never even budged an inch on their hatred for him. And then they wonder why he never stuck his neck out for them again?!?
I hope that at the next session of Parliament there will be a major defence spending bill brought in, with plans to focus particularly on the land and air forces.
To bring us up to the NATO spending level, of course.
What defense spending over the last 50 years do you think we could have done, that would have had any major impact on our current situation? And do you think any Canadian, no matter the political persuasion, would have supported that?
Presume for a moment that Canada had always considered US invasion as a realistic threat. To have any chance our countering them, we’d need forces of roughly comparable size and capability. But we’re about 1/10 their size. Would Canada ever realistically spend 10 times the amount per capita that the US spends?
And that’s in the fantasy world where US/Canada relations are more like Russia/Ukraine.
In the real world, what would you do? If anyone had called for massive investments in Canadian forces positioned so as to effectively combat an invasion along most of the US border, they’d have been laughed out of the country. Even ten years ago, the idea that the US would invade us was at best War of 1812 fan fiction. No one took it seriously. And what other threat in the world would replace that threat to justify these plans? Even if you’re thinking that Russia or China might ever even try invading us, that would require a very different mixture of, and deployment of, our resources. A lot more Navy and Airforce, not so many tanks and infantry, and the middle of the county (Alberta to Ontario, roughly) would be last on the list for investments, not first.
I just can’t see any realistic scenario in which increased funding decades ago would have much impact on our current reality.
Is this “I hate your province” crap doing Canada any favors?
This isn’t the right way to look at it.
Canada, to defend itself from the Americans, needs to approach it from the perspective of making it too difficult to be worth it. There are two ways of going about this, militarily speaking, and assuming no weapons of mass destruction. One is a conventional defense likely to bog down the invaders and kill many of their soldiers, something we presently have pretty much zero of; we aren’t prepared to defend ourselves at all. The other is the capability to transition into large scale insurgency warfare, thereby assuring the invader of a long quagmire, something we also don’t have at all.
Neither of this requires we have an armed forces as big as the USA. It requires a lot more than our currently pathetic investment and may require transitioning existing spending to different priorities, but certainly not ten times as much.
It’s also worth noting that thinking we’d need equivalent spending commits the fallacy of thinking the entire US military budget is effectively usable in invading Canada. Obviously that is not the case. Huge portions of the American military budget are expended on things not relevant to such a scenario - nuclear weapons, bases in faraway places, most of their navy, so on and so forth.
But of course you are correct that Canada couldn’t have prepared for this because no one would have supported it. We seem politically unable to execute rudimentary military spending programs at all; the saga of how the government couldn’t even buy new handguns, was literally incapable of cutting a purchase order for a bunch of pistols, is an illustrative point.