Why Canada's economy is broken

 This is another of those posts were I was writing a response to something and just kept going. I need to clean this up before it's really presentable, but if I don't post a copy I'll forget parts : (oh and the prompt was "way are Canadian wages so low")

When our economy was strong, companies said they couldn't find people to work, and instead of allowing the inflationary pressure or rising wages, the government decided to allow an increase in the TFW program. ( To be clear it's not the workers fault, as they're getting fucked by the system too) 

It's political decisions. Inflation is bad when it means it costs capital more to hire labor, it's only a little bad when when it means workers pay more for essentials while companies make record profits.

And before you think this is about one party or another, there are differences between the parties, but they all know that elections are won through advertising, so they all respond to those who can contribute more to their campaigns.

Basically if they piss you off, you could maybe decide to vote for another party, but most likely you'll just not vote. So at worst they have to comeback with getting 2 votes elsewhere. So if it comes to voters vs donors, they choose donors interests. 

And then consider the "culture wars" and political parties can try to gain your vote entirely by how much or how little they say they want to further marginalize, marginalized groups. 

They all say they want to "create jobs" so what the voter gets to choose is based on social issues. And to be clear neither side cares much about the marginalized groups. We're just mascots in an advertising campaign. They care about as much as you care about the red M&M guy. 

There was a huge clearing out of the middle class that started around the Mulroney era. 

The classical Progressive Conservatives were cleared out after Brian brought in the GST.

So the Liberals became the go-to party for donations, making them even more focused only on the Monnied class. The new conservative movement was/is focused on removing any barriers to what any capital can do, and the Liberals only want to bolster their specific capital donors. The NDP has (probably  necessarily) decided they have to cater more to the center than the hard left they used to represent. But they have fallen for the culture war myth, and so are now focusing on those issues rather than actually being a voice for workers. 

Basically in Canada, the working class has no voice in politics. 

Canada economically speaking has always been a resource extraction country. We were an anomaly as in most of the world those countries are devastated. Think of most of the global South. 

But because of our being given a humungous territory that we didn't have to actually defend, and having basically no people, the massive amount of resources extracted from us meant that we had a high standard of living as those profits were being spread amongst a relatively small number of people. 

But since the mid Jean Chrétien years the rest of the world started realizing that we didn't need to be treated differently than the other extraction zones. And so the prices offered for our raw materials was put down to match the global South. During that time as our fisheries were becoming depleted removing one of our main products, we tried to focus on developing a higher manufacturing sector. The governments idea was to move from a raw goods economy, to  a "value add" one where the economic gains would come from labor put into the resources before we sold them rather than just the exact of extracting the goods from nature. 

Might have worked too, but then the USA decided to jump on globalization, meaning all the "value add" coming from labor was being done in places where that labor was dramatically lower than ours. 

Since then the only thing Canada has tried to do was slow the rate our wages fall. No actual plan form any party as to what a good Canadian economy would focus on. Just a constant stream of trying to slow how fast we crash. 

We can't compete in manufacturing because other places are willing to let people work for less with less safety laws, and now the knowledge of manufacturing has also been centered around South Asia and China. 

We have fossil fuels, but those are sold at a discounted rate because the USA is our only large customer, we have farmed goods, but commodities are always subject to the lower price of any good that can be easily substituted.

Our manufacturing is weak because anything we can make can be imported cheaper than we can make it paying Canadian wages. 

The idea of a "service economy" is so laughable. The service industries are dependent on the primary industries of extraction or manufacturing. We have to have exports to replace the money that we send off shore when we buy goods made elsewhere. With nothing really to export, we end up reducing the overall economy each time we buy an imported good. 

Harper and JT both relied on immigration as way to get around this. If we "export education" by collecting massive amounts of money from foreign students. And we collect huge sums of money from immigrants that we also import to make up for our negative birth rate. We can make it appear as though our economy is growing. 

But it hasn't. 

And once we collect the money from those immigrants, they become Canadians and we need to have some sort of industries for them to work in. Some system for them to be part of to make Canada profitable. 

And we don't. Once here we basically just drain their savings and any wealth they had in their country. 

They pay to come here they have to use their general wealth to buy homes and cars, after a decade or so once their pockets are empty they realize that they are now just as bad off as the rest of us.

Canadian wages don't ever increase more than inflation, meaning that each year your buying power goes down as you stay in any job. 

So what all of us do is try to get promotions to jump our individual earnings up over the inflation rate. But each job, is constantly getting paid less (in real buying power). 

This has the effect of making each job a lower and lower class job every year. 

If we assume those jobs need to be done, this system means that we are ever increasing the lower class at the expense of everyone else.

Only the true capital class who can move their capital around the world and so can increase it more than the inflation each year escapes this.

A good candidate for a branch in human evolutionary tree

 So I started a response and it kinda spiralled.

And I don't want to post this on social media as I'm sure some asshole will try and use this to argue for eugenic type bill shit. 

But Ii typed alot so I'm positing it here because there's some ideas in here that I want to play with again in the future: 

(For context the question was if creatures that live shorter lives evolve faster than others) 

Yes because evolution only happens at the moments of new generations. 

So we as humans can see so many generations of fruit flies in our 80 or so years of life, where we're likely only able to witness 3 or 4 generations of our own species. The fact that mutations have to randomly happen in a generation, and that mutation has to be non-detrimental to the survival of the newborn. And then the mutation has to also not be detrimental for the chance of that individual reproducing itself. And then for actual evolutionary steps, the environment has to trigger a situation where that mutation actually assists the individual in surviving and reproducing. 

We're never going to see evolutionary change in slower life forms like ourselves or horses or even dogs or cats. Like it only takes a year or so for a dog to reach reproduction age, and we've been able to create breads by selective breading. But we're still looking at dogs. 

This can show environmental selection. But we can't trigger random mutations in each generation. So we don't encounter the evolutionary steps. 

Smaller dogs that have the environmental advantage that people find them fashionable and feed and house them. They are well adapted to the environment.

But they are still dogs. If humans were snapped out of existence, for the most part the onset that survived after a few generations would probably trend back to the larger size that has a better advantage in the wilderness. Maybe one would develop a mutation that gave it a new advantage. And so a new species would branch off. 

Even with fruit flies that reproduce every 24 hours, and us manipulating and controlling every aspect of their environment haven't shown any major jumps yet in our tests. 

We see adaption. But again mutations are quite rare, and when they happen they are often disadvantageous. As they are born into environments that their parents generation were well suited to.

Like it doesn't happen in huge steps, but imagine if a baby was born the same year as you, but had mutated fully working gills. 

 This wouldn't have helped them as they went to the same school as you and sat next to you in every class. Like even if your school had a pool or is near an ocean they could turn it into an advantage in some ways, but ultimately we live in an environment where visual appearance is of utmost importance, so even if he could turn that evolution into a good job, his odds of reproduction would be almost nil. So even a macro mutation that would give advantages, would be a failed mutation, as it happens at a time where the environment leads it to fail.

Mutation happens typically when 2 of the molecules in the DNA sting get flipped. Most of the changes happen in areas of the DNA that don't play a role in our bodies actual development, and when it does happen to that area it's usually bad. Cancers are in part caused by the part of the DNA that tells the cell to stop reproducing is damaged and the cells continue creating tumors. And kill the host.

Or we can look at Downs syndrome. 

It's a relatively common mutation where we have an extra set of the 18th chromosomes (I think that's where it happens, it was years since I was learning about that) 

On the whole it's not a detrimental mutation. As people born that way can live full healthy lives. 

( I just realized I don't know if they often pass on the extra chromosome set to their children) 

Assuming they had a 1 in 4 chance of passing it on, they could represent a likely branch for the human evolutionary path. 

But where I live it was common practice to sterilize these people ( as horrible as that  sounds, the law wasn't changed until the early 70's). So again the environmental conditions were detrimental to the change being passed on. 

I want to be clear, Downs Syndrome in no way makes a person "not human". I'm saying that it's a genetic mutation that has the opportunity to lead to a branch in the evolutionary  tree. 

It's a hanger that doesn't threaten survival, and maybe possible on to their offspring ,(again I dont know that part but seems likely).

What would be required for them to start a new branch, would be for a change to our environment that would give them a comparative advantage. If obtaining food became harder for a few generations and it turned out that those people were able to better deal with that it could lead to them becoming its own community and survival in their own different way from the others. 

Carrying a different genetic makeup would leave the group with its own opportunities for further mutations and its own adaptations to stem from it. 

after a few hundred  generations, if we lived in separate environments and communities, we would be considered different animals.

Evolution doesn't have a goal. Its only a process of describing how changes and reproduction can lead to large changes.

Successful adoration and mutation are successful if they lead to the survival of the creatures carrying those genes.