posted
It has annoyed me to no end how complacent the Liberals are, and disgusts me how with so many problems in our country that nothing is being done to fix it. And infuriates me that America has the guts to walk up to us and tell us what kind of plane we are not allowed to design!
Problems in Canada:
Indian rights: Native Americans in Canada were treated horribly, they are NOLONGER allowed to travel via iceflows to Green land to visit relatives they have to get a 5000$ plane ticket and a super expensive visa to do it when they could do a safe trip during winter for free. And they're arrested if they get caught trying to go their anyways if they try to do it illegally. Also, we don't let them live as they want to live green peace made it illegal to hunt whales, illegal to hunt carribu and etc, we force them to live our lifestyle but we don't let them do it in a way that they could be content in and then we end up "civilizing" them by taking away their children and do god knows what to them. Hell! Back during the time of PM Trudau a school apparently had the right to EXPELL an indian girl who spoke her MOTHER TONGUE (cherikee) on the bus, do we expell people who speak German? Nein.
NAFTA: The North American Free Trade Agreement, sure fine helps some of our industry, helps some of theirs all well and good it buisness. But oh wait there is a claus saying that a government is not allowed to infringe on a companies profit. Meh whatever *shrug* but oh wait a American company walks right in and decides to start bottling water ILLEGALI! So we take them to court and wow, THEY WON! Becuase under NAFTA we are not alloweed to infringe on their profit. Does that mean all the drug lords can trade coccain between Canada and the States? Since after all under NAFTA we couldn't stop them now can we?
Then there's the education system that Mr Card has pointed out is JUST BABY SITTING! My 5 year High School could be compressed to only THREE YEARS at the MOST! We don't need 3-4 introductory years of Physical sciences, we need only 2 terms of it then maybe 1 year of advanced sciences. 2 years AT THE MOST of Math becuase we don't need to keep repeating the same darn things every year. Gym? Should be an optional after school thingy. Also more computer science oriented courses should be availiable in high school to prep you for college and not just GW BASIC BLAH! Teachers? FIRED! They should be replaced with robots excpet from the few very good ones. A more challenging and faster paced education plan will allow for more students to graduate faster and with a better handle on what they are capable of rather then being wasted in 5 years of complete hogwash.
Heck one doesn't even need the 6 years of elementary school people home schooled can do sooooo much better, I see the results all the time. SHould be reduced to only 2-3 years and challenged more so that once they "master" whatever skills their supposed to have graduate them. No "marking" system is pefect. Preferable a pannel of judges/teachers should debate and decide which student has done and learned all that could be taught and learned in elementary school. So what if once in a while you'll have a 8 year old genious among 15 year olds? His skills will be availiable to the world several years sooner.
We should spend 5-10 years examining and reorganizing our government programs to be more effieicnt and save money, and channel that money to paying off debts and developing alternative sources of energy. We should be aggressivly following a nationwide economic plan on par with the Kyoto Accord that should not only make Canada enviroment friendly but also efficient and save ourselves money (Its possible!) which as I said can be redirected to paying off debts.
There should also be a serious and agressive inquiry to see how the hell is getting kickbacks for the crappy roads in Quebec. C'mon 500,000$ for a freaking bridge that shouldn't have costed more than 100,000! (two girders and aspfault?).
Canada should begin diversifying our trade with other nations and build up relations with China, but also slowly going into islolationism. Our military should still be availiable for peace keeping missions but ONLY WITH THE INVITATION OF SAID NATION, no more invasion, no more ignoring the rights ands territorial soverignty of another nation. Politics is Politics and nothing will change that.
More rights should be given to Indians and even a nation should be created for them where the pop density allows it like in SotG, our economy should be analysized for problems and a solution delecoped, our government programs like welfare, and unemployment ensurance should be reavaluated to find abuses and to make things more efficient. Our education system reworked, the voting age lowered and the enviroment taken care of.
Our economy should be converted to a complete online "credit" system where everything is connected to a central computer database. All transaction could be done with a credit card and the following transactions done in virtual in the database. All of our information could also be kept in such a database so that we would nolonger cheat our taxes because we COULDNT cheat. The IRS or RC or whatever your wallet intelligence agency is would no longer have to sort through your information every year to make sure your not cheating or making mistakes becuase they would automatically HAVE your information.
Thus a complete computerization of say Canada but of society in general could make all of our lives safer and more efficient, and happier. This would be a result of say having a computer in every home and possibly a high speed connection to every home .
This is my Rant about some of the problems in Canada and how they should be fixed, if any of you know any other problems post it and give a solution. Maybe we can user this as a platform someday.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
A lot of your rants seem to be a bit over the top and I wonder if you're joking. However, I decided that you probably weren't and decided to address the one area in which I feel a least the tiniest bit qualfied; education.
Although I do not think Canadian education is the best it can be I do not think that it is merely "babysitting".
However, elementary school does serve a purpose to allow both parents to work if necessary. This is the case not just in Canada but it most other countries. If parents wish to homeschool their children for the first few years they are certainly free to do so. Contrary to that, if parents need somewhere to put their children who they cannot watch during the day they may enroll their children in a school which will give them the companionship of other children as well as a basic if not excellent education.
Continuing from that, parents should not expect schools to provide their children with the perfect education; that sort of thing comes from the parent in the form of spending time, maybe half an hour, each day teaching their kindergartener and pre-kindergartener to read.
That said, schools and teachers vary immensly. Some teachers will see a reading child and give them things to do, others will ignore them and make them do whatever the rest of the class is doing.
Even though this is the case in the elementry school system, I believe that Canadian schools could perform better than they do, especially and most crucially in the five first grades, from kindergarten to grade four. Students must be able to read by grade two. Students must be able to write understandably and possibly in joined-up-handwriting, by grade four.
Aside from academics, schools seem to suffer from the sticky effects of a rigid bureaucracy. I believe that doing things outside the school is as important as academics. Teachers should take their students out to places, local walking trips are fine, and they should not have to jump through hoops to do so (or they should not be able to use those hoops as an excuse as to why they do not). If more adult help is required they should apply to the local highschool and whatever parents may be available.
Concerning high school, I'm glad that you are doing so well, Sid. Where do you attend? Aren't most places squished down into four years now? I thought that was now uniform across Canada with the possible exception of Quebec which I know nothing about.
Once again, high schools vary, and you will see the results once you attend university. Some people will not be able to write very well at all, others, like those who graduated from my high school, will be able to do so much better. Unfortunately, a lot of this relies on the place of the school and perhaps down into a single teacher who raises the standards of that one school.
I'm assuming you're joking about the teachers.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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I have a novella's worth of things to say about this. Much of your post, Sid, I disagree with pretty fundamentally. If I have time at work this afternoon I'll write the aforementioned novella, if not I'll try to write it between hardware failures at home tonight. If I haven't posted to this thread in a couple of days, bump it or email me. I will, eventually, post a reply.
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posted
I want to know more about travelling via iceflow. Is it really hopping on a floating chunk of ice and hoping it takes you to the right place? That's what it sounds like. I suppose currents are pretty predictable, so you'd have a reasonable chance of getting where you're goinhg. How do you get back?
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posted
I find it amusing that of all the possible issues relating to aboriginal rights, that is the one you focused on.
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posted
It was the one of the few I heard and that struck me as horribly wrong. A family in point A should be able to visit family at point B.
And yes I am half joking about the teachers, but only half, I've seen some of the worst teachers I have even seen robots might do better. schools I think it would be cool to be turned into a dumbed down battle school *grin*.
*bump* twinki sid_meier@hotmail.com send me what you think Canadain problems are and what you think should be done to fix it, and also if you disagree with me, well its a democracy kind of ague with me.
I don't actually know how they travel I assume its during winter when its all frozen and snowy and they use a snowmaboggen and travel or the now nature made land bridge. I just know that they travel over these to get to Greenland.
And whats wrong with focusing on that one? There ar eothers I'm sure just that my brain is a little hazy and I don't quite remember all of the wrongs.
love me? hate me? email me your views and we'll debate this. I want Canada's problems fixed.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote: Thus a complete computerization of say Canada but of society in general could make all of our lives safer and more efficient, and happier. This would be a result of say having a computer in every home and possibly a high speed connection to every home.
Are you saying everyone must have an internet connection?
quote: Also, we don't let them live as they want to live. Green Peace made it illegal to hunt whales, illegal to hunt caribou and etc, we force them to live our lifestyle...
And if so, does that include the American Indians?
quote: A family in point A should be able to visit family at point B.
Although of course I believe that this is the case, I think you forget that lots of families are scarttered not only over a country but over the world and many of them cannot afford plane tickets, or maybe can afford them only once every two, five, ten, twenty years.
posted
Like BtL, I find that choice of Native issue somewhat amusing too, but at the same time it lets me (like Teshi) concentrate on an area of your post where I have some semblance of knowledge...
Firstly, Sartorius, I think Sid meant ice floe and not ice flow. In the winter, the water freezes entirely, and is safe to travel on by dogsled, snowmobile, or walking. It's more or less like snow/ice covered land. There are a few areas where there is still some water, but travelling on the sea ice is nothing like hopping on a little twenty foot slab of ice in a big expanse of water and hoping.
As for the problem of going to Greenland, I have never heard anything about this in all my Inuit studies of the last few years. Can you point me to a link or a book or more information on it anywhere, Sid? It's interesting. I hadn't thought of it before. However, I imagine there are very few families who wish to travel that way. Almost no one lives on Ellesmere Island (almost no traditional Inuit ever did either), which is the only one reasonably close to Greenland, and the distance between Baffin and Greenland is fairly formidable. You mentioned they want to visit relatives, but it's very unlikely any particular families would be spread over both continents, and if they are, it's more likely because they up and emigrated away from their traditional family homes in the E. Canadian Arctic. As you mention, most Inuit now live sedentary lifestyles in towns. Many Inuit likely prefer to take a plane if they can afford it. It takes much less time, and many can not afford the time such a journey would take away from home or their jobs, since most work in towns rather than hunt for a living now. (I'm not getting into why -- that's another can of worms -- but the point is that's a reason they wouldn't travel that way). As well, there is the issue of the extreme climate change taking place in the Arctic. Even over the last one or two decades, there has been noticable increases in winter temperatures, which makes ice travel much more dangerous and unpredictable. In some places, ice doesn't even form entirely anymore. It's not *only* the government that stops ice travel from occurring. It isn't necessarily a "safe trip for free".
As for the rest, the first thing that came to my mind about your schools comments is that gym class is probably actually more beneficial nowadays than ever before with obesity problems on the increase and all.
Edit: By the way, is it the Canadian Government or the Danish one that requires the Inuit have visas to go to Greenland? I would have thought it would be the government of the country people are *visiting* that would make that law, but you make it sound like it's a Canadian issue...?
Edit 2: And just to be clear, we do (present-tense) not expel people for speaking German, nor do we expel people for speaking any indigenous language now. Neither are there any longer residential schools which take away Native children from their homes. The period following the White Paper in 1969 was a turning point for Aboriginal-Government relations (the trend turned from a goal of assimilation to one of Native self-government, which is what people have been working slowly towards ever since). While there is still much to be done and desired, and there is still the underlying issue of Western thought and economy being the dominant force in Canadian society, focussing on problems occurring pre-1969 which no longer exist is pretty pointless ranting in my opinion.
Profile for Sid Meier Member Status: Member Member Number: 6965 Registered: October 24, 2004 Posts: 463 Email Address: sid_meier@hotmail.com Location: [b]Canada[/b] Occupation: College student Homepage: http://linux2-cs.johnabbott.qc.ca/~cs126F04_3 Interests: Reading, Gaming, DnD, Programming, and a tad if writing
posted
You know, there's something ironic about someone who is the product of public education arguing, in an essay filled with grammatical and spelling mistakes, that time spent in K-12 education should be drastically cut.
I agree with you here. We've treated the native populations horribly, and their standard of living is significantly below that of Canada's non-native populations. Our treatment of them, at least, has improved dramatically over the last 20 or so years -- no more boarding schools, no more "you will speak English," et cetera. But there is some progress being made, at least up north, and at least in the area of education: native-language instruction is now gradually being introduced to some northern schools (having mostly or entirely native students), and some native linguists are working to expand the lexica of their languages to include terms for technologies and devices that previously only had English or French names.
I actually think that the biggest problem is reservations, and the only real solution I can think of to the widespread economic depression in and around reservations (leaving aside for now that the whole idea of natives living on specially parceled-off bits of land bothers me, because it smacks of Bantustans or cantons) is granting the natives total or near-total rights over their natural resources. This is happening, I believe, with things like diamond mines in the north. I'd like to see more of that, wherever it's possible.
NAFTA
You brought up the water issue, which in the coming years is going to be huge. America is only slowly beginning to realize the full extent of our natural resources (in particular petrochemicals and water), and they're going to want to lock us in to something that gets them rights to those resources -- preferably, from their perspective, even more rights than we ourselves have. In this regard, NAFTA has the potential to seriously hurt us, just as you say.
Education
I think you have some fundamental misconceptions about how people learn. School should not be an assembly line, and the problems with it now largely stem from attempting to treat it as one (for instance, standardized testing). The solution is not to move even further toward an assembly line model of learning -- that would be disastrous. But you seem to mix and match in your problem identification. On the one hand you suggest replacing teachers with robots (exaggeration, sure, but any sort of move in that kind of standardizing direction is, well, a bad idea), but on the other you suggest dispensing with marking (which comes part and parcel with the assembly line model) and having students assessed by panel (which would be great if it was feasible). Where I'm getting the impression that you advocate a more assembly line style of system is from your focus on preparing children, from a very early age, for the workforce. You talk about schooling in math and science and the mastery of skills but not once do you mention languages or social sciences. These things need to be in balance.
The education system is intended to prepare students to become citizens, not workers. You're doing better than most in that you're actually thinking about this stuff (and I mean all of the issues you cover in your opening post). That's awesome. But the emphasis on elementary school preparing you for junior high school preparing you for high school preparing you for university/community college preparing you for work is one of the reasons we aren't doing as well as other nations that take a more holistic (and the fact that "holistic" has become a bad word, sort of like "liberal," is telling) approach, like Norway, for instance, are more successful at "producing" citizens rather than workers at the other end of the "line:" their assembly line isn't an assembly line at all. It isn't a matter of making the system more "challenging" or "fast-paced." Consider for a moment that there are plenty of students who do find the system, as it stands, "challenging." There are plenty of students who struggle with trigonometry over the course of several years of math. There are fewer students, like you and I, who grasp basic high school trig in about two seconds and then spend the rest of the class spacing out. But that -- the spacing out -- is symptomatic of a larger problem: we (you, me, and "smart" students in general) become lazy after years of having an easy time at school. We become procrastinators. We wait to be told what to learn, learn it quickly, and then sit around waiting while everyone else catches up. We have been conditioned by the system to view learning as something that happens via transmission of knowledge from a teacher (that is to say, spoon-feeding). We won't take charge of our own learning.
And that's the key, really. You touched on the fact that you don't need to go to school to learn things, and that's true. So what is it, exactly, that keeps someone who is bored by school from exploring areas of interest outside of school? I taught myself a lot about computers by fooling around with my parents' machines (and, yes, breaking them on occasion) and, later, by reading everything about hardware that I could get my hands on. Later, in university, I pursued this interest by taking programming courses as extras, even though they weren't necessarily directly related to my major. I found something I was interested in and pursued it on my own terms, which I never did in, say, junior high. If we could get more students at lower levels (even late elementary, here) interested in taking charge of their own learning, we'd be a lot better off.
Another point about the "preparing students for the workforce" thing is that even with the accelerated curriculum you propose… well, to be blunt, most (if not all) young people simply aren't ready for the responsibility associated with many professional disciplines. I personally think that 23-24 is pushing it in my own field, engineering. A 20-year-old is not ready to be a professional engineer, I don't care how smart he or she is. Period. I'm not ready to be a professional engineer, but at 24 here I am in industry working toward that goal, and I've already signed off on things that could kill people if I'm wrong about how safe they are.
With respect to grading… well. I'd call grading a necessary evil, at least once you get to the junior high or high school level. And certainly in math where there are right answers and wrong answers it's less of an evil than in an English paper where things are somewhat more fuzzy. But teachers don't have time, largely, to give detailed feedback to both children and parents, so grades will have to do.
Speaking of which, your problem with teachers -- that they don't devote sufficient individual attention to students -- is not, in fact, their fault. The problem is class sizes. In a class of, say, 25 seven-year-olds, how exactly do you expect one teacher to find the time to sit down individually with each one on a daily or even weekly basis and have a talk about how things are going and whether there are any other areas of learning that haven't been covered in class that they'd like to explore? It isn't possible. I lived with such a teacher (my mother) for much of my life, and even with my dad going into her classroom to help her out after he retired (he was a professor of education, specifically childhood literacy) there were just too many children.
Fitness
Gym should not be an "optional after school thingy." 50% of Canadians are overweight as it is, and I believe that number to be higher among young Canadians, not lower. If this trend is not somehow reversed our medical system could well collapse under the burden as our overweight children get older.
There is a distinction between "overweight," "obese," and the ever-popular "fat," and I don't want this descending into the muck the way OSC's thread did when Irami got involved. You can be big and healthy at the same time. These are not mutually exclusive things. It's when you're carrying more weight than you need to -- i.e., in engineering terms, when your weight exceeds its nominal setpoint by a significant margin -- to the extent that you can begin to have weight-caused or weight-related health problems that you need to be concerned about it. For instance, one of my friends is close to twice my weight and is shorter than me, but I certainly wouldn't consider him unhealthy or overweight. He's big, yes, that's happens to be his body shape. Overweight, no. His nominal weight, as a result of his physiology, is simply higher than mine.
Another thing about weight. I'm skinny, but I need to watch my weight just as much as someone who weighs too much does. Earlier this year there was a medical crisis in my family and over the following two months I dropped ten pounds. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't really have ten pounds to lose. Certainly I have almost no fat on my body, so I was essentially losing muscle mass, and that's very hard to recover.
We need to put more emphasis on gym, not less.
Corruption
Corruption has always been a problem in Canadian politics and is likely to always be a problem. It is not restricted to the Liberal Party. I was pretty young when Brian Mulrooney was our Prime Minister, but I remember scandal after scandal (patronage appointments, mismanaged finances, et cetera)… just like now. Some things never change. You should also consider that $500,000 is less than a drop in the government's bucket. If you want to get up in arms over something, how about that $1 billion in the Human Resources Development Commission that was somehow mislaid? Even the sponsorship scandal is chicken feed, the only reason we're still talking about it is that Stephen Harper thinks he can worm his way into government by using it for political gain.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't work toward more transparency in government systems, but I think that when considering how to vote in an election, scandal should be pretty far down on the list of considerations. Scandals are invariably blown out of proportion by opposition parties regardless of who's in government.
Military
First, I have to point out that we haven't invaded anyone or ignored anyone's rights and territorial sovereignty. Canada doesn't generally deploy troops without UN backing. So I'm not sure who you're accusing of what here.
A discussion over at GreNME recently led to me reevaluating my opinion on what kind of military capabilities Canada needs. Over there, dbrown (who posted here, very briefly, as "mister boy") said:
quote: Well, what we want to avoid is a situation where the US feels that it has to enter Canada to protect its interests (e.g. terrorist threats to pipelines or water sources). So we need enough military capacity to police those resources, so they don't have an excuse. In this age of strategic weaponry, protecting nation borders is pointless for almost any nation. Troops aren't going to come over the hills to get us. Canada also needs enough capacity to participate fully in the very peacekeeping activities it advocates around the world.
On reflection, I have to say that I agree. And getting there definitely requires an increased investment in our military. The Liberal government just began making that investement. So rather than being annoyed that they're spending money on guns (which I was when they released the budget), I am now cautiously hopeful that they're actually doing the right thing.
Computerization of money
The cost of doing this is giving both government and private industry a record of every single thing you buy. That raises huge privacy concerns, in addition to the obvious security concerns of having no paper trail and storing everything in inherently insecure online databases. Basically, I just don't think it's a good idea. We're going to need paper money for some time to come.
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posted
I think you're reading more cynicism into it than is there, actually. It wouldn't, in his scenario, turn into an invasion or even necessarily an occupation. It's simply a (symbolic?) loss of sovereignty that we should work to avoid.
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posted
Don't Canadian baddies import illegal handguns and cocaine from the US, and export pot to US baddies?
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posted
For example, there is talk going on now about pumping water from Lake of the Woods, which is on the Canada/US border, into a US river with the intent of releaving drought in North Dakota. Canada has suggested that should go through the international committee that oversees such things. (I heard the news item last week, I'm sorry but I don't remember the details.) The story was a little unclear, but it seemed like we (the US) had been planning on just doing it without consulting Canada at all. This is a -large- lake we're talking about, and both Canada and Minnesota get a lot of tourist traffic based on fishing on it. The border goes right through the middle, and last I checked there was no way to only take water from our side.
Added: This is a slightly different issue, I guess, as it's a shared resource rather than water exports.
posted
I don't think he's being cynical - it bothers me that we would hypothetically deploy US forces into Canada to protect US interests.
With Canadian permission, it doesn't seem nearly as offensive but I find it difficult to believe the Canadian military isn't capable of providing adequate internal security measures - and while I'm not that familiar with the Canadian legal system, wouldn't such domestic operations be covered under law enforcement rather than military operations?
Although I will confess the second point about "contributing to advocated UN missions" has my complete and cheerful endorsement.
posted
It's sort of a mixture, because our Coast "Guard" is actually unarmed. To physically do anything about protecting our coasts (from, say, illegal fishing operations), we'd have to deploy a Navy boat.
I'm not clear on why it's called the "Coast Guard" at all, really.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Isn't Social Security already and invasion of our privacy? There was an Asimov article about this but I don't quite remember the details, the rest...
quote: You know, there's something ironic about someone who is the product of public education arguing, in an essay filled with grammatical and spelling mistakes, that time spent in K-12 education should be drastically cut.
Its not an essay its a rant. and ummm I'm used to spell check so I rarely both to make sure that their aren't any spelling or grammarical mistakes.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Isn't Social Security already and invasion of our privacy?
No. This is why you are never obligated to give your Social Insurance Number out to any private company. Even though your bank will invariably ask you for it, you are under no obligation to give it to them and they can't refuse to give you an account because of that.
quote:The education system is designed to baby sit us and prevent us from joining the workforce years ealier then we could.
No, it isn't. It's designed to give you the tools you need to become a citizen. Not a worker.
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posted
Which is certainly your choice. But you'll probably find that people stop reading and responding to your posts if they stay as difficult to slog through as they are. Consequences to your actions, and all that. It doesn't take all that long to proofread and fix the most egregious errors.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote: No. This is why you are never obligated to give your Social Insurance Number out to any private company. Even though your bank will invariably ask you for it, you are under no obligation to give it to them and they can't refuse to give you an account because of that.
Not entirely true.
If you earn more than $600 per year in interest, then you are legally obligated to provide the bank with your social insurance number as they are legally obligated to issue you income tax related slips.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:If you earn more than $600 per year in interest, then you are legally obligated to provide the bank with your social insurance number as they are legally obligated to issue you income tax related slips.
Is that so? I didn't know that. Huh.
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and ummm I'm used to spell check so I rarely both to make sure that their aren't any spelling or grammarical mistakes.
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