Manager at a big tech company here. I’ve been fortunate to have been WFH since 2012, and my team is a diverse set of amazing developers from all across North America. Our company has started taking the position that new hires should be in office, and anyone close enough to an office should be in office — so I’ve informed my staff that if any of them gets any sort of demand they return to office to let me know so I can help void that as quickly as possible. I won’t be in their office (I don’t even live in a city that has an office…), and neither will any of their coworkers, so having any of them report to an office would be purely performative.

We’re developers. Many are somewhat introverted, and all are amazing with technology and already know how to use online technologies to work and collaborate together. I’ll continue to fight tooth-and-nail to keep them from having to return to an office (unless they want to).

Fortunately I have the support of my VPs above me. They know my team is very high performance with tons of institutional knowledge and don’t want to upset the apple cart.

There are those of us out there with some power who are doing what we can to fight the good fight!

There is virtually no evidence that anyone who has voted in a riding with a “longest ballot” was ever confused.

Bruce Fanjoy won in the Carleton riding with 50.9% of the vote — a majority. The highest vote count for the any of the independent candidates was a whopping 57 votes — out of 86 060 total votes. That’s a whopping 0.06% of the vote.

In fact if you count only those candidates running either as an independent OR as “Not Affiliated” (so taking out anyone running for a party, including the Rhino Party and Marijuana Party candidates who did worse than a handful of the independent candidates), the longest ballot candidates IN TOTAL had a massive 0.99% of the vote. They didn’t even crack 1%.

Honestly, there are no electoral shenanigans to get worked up over here. The outcome was overwhelming, and Bruce Fanjoy (Liberal) didn’t seem to have any problems getting a plurality of votes to win.

Yup — which also means you can’t just pander to an extremist base and win by having the other parties “split the vote”. And you can vote the party you actually support most, and not worry about vote splitting by ranking other parties with policies close to your leanings higher, and parties you despise lower or not at all.

I hope this goes through — in so many ways ranked ballot is the best system for Canada as a whole:

1. No need to change tidings or riding structure.
2. Still just one representative per riding
3. No need to modify or change the seat count in Parliament (or the Legislatures)
4. …all of which means only the most minimal of legal changes, as little else changes.
5. In particular, this won’t require any messy Constitutional changes to implement.
6. Ridings get the candidate most acceptable to the most people in a given riding — you need wide support to win, meaning all winners will wind up with a plurality of votes.
7. No “party lists” filled wIth party ‘hacks’ who get seats without being directly selected by the electorate.
8. Particularly if you’re a supporter of MMP or some other more proportional system — ranked choice ballets is a much better starting point for passing MMP and the like than FPTP, as it’s much less of a cognitive leap for voters. Baby steps, instead of a giant leap (which IMO is one big reason why all attempts to change the voting system have so far failed).

So I hope this goes through, and I hope they can show Canada a better way to run elections.

I live out on Vancouver Island these days (although have previously lived in Toronto and Montreal — so I know what summers there are like!), and we don’t get -25C weather. Snow is a bit of a rarity as well (we do tend to get snow a few times every winter — but it often doesn’t stick around or accumulate for long). As such, so far I haven’t even bothered to put winter tires on the car — I have M+S tire, the car is heavy, and “snow mode” (which you get by holding down the “Drive Mode” button on the steering wheel) does a great job of ensuring traction is maintained in the snow. For the maybe three times we get a bit of snow each year it more than suffices.

Fortunately I learned to drive in Southern Ontario with lake effect snowfall. It’s amazing how many people on the island just have no freaking clue how to deal with the tiniest dusting of snow 🤣.

The toll that fast charging puts on the battery tends to mostly be a problem either in very hot climates, or in instances where you’re charging to 100% a lot. But if you’re using fast charging mostly to get up to 80% here in Canada you’re likely not going to run into a significant decrease in battery life.

(Unfortunately, we can’t say much about this from real world experience, as vehicles that can handle 350kW+ charging are still somewhat rare, and those that do exist (like vehicles built upon Hyundai’s E-GMP platform) aren’t even 5 years old yet).

I drive an AWD IONIQ 5 (Ultimate Edition FWIW) — and the most trouble I’ve had at chargers has simply been lining up when it’s been too busy, and having to wait for much slower charging vehicles to finish up at fast chargers. But that has also been rare, and is more common through the BC interior where there are long distances between towns/cities through the mountains and EVERYONE stops at them to top up. But I’ve certainly heard my share of stories. Indeed, just last week I was helping a friend who is taking a road trip out to Alberta find suitable charging near his hotel — and it turns out that in that area there has been a significant problem with people chopping off the cables repeatedly.

It’s only getting better — but where things are improving is pretty uneven. But this is where the EVSE installation credit for car manufacturers is so important — and why we can’t back down on the 2035 phase-out of sales of purely gasoline powered vehicles (recall, PHEVs are permitted for sale after 2035 by the current rules). If the automakers can’t make the 2026 sales targets they can start building out the EVSEs we need to convince people it’s safe to buy more EVs.

The part these automotive executives are conveniently not mentioning is that the EV mandate already allows auto manufacturers to get out of meeting the quotas if they build out charging infrastructure instead. They can get credits for building charging stations to go against current and future years where they miss their commitments.

AFAIK, in Canada there is currently only one auto manufacturer that is building out charging capacity, and that’s Tesla (who don’t even need that credit, as they only make EVs anyway!).

The Carney Government needs to tell these automakers that they need to get shovels in the ground and start building out that infrastructure. That will be good for Canadian jobs, and will increase the likelihood their customers will choose an EV in the future. The two Provinces where EV charging is easy and prevalent (BC and Quebec) already have the most EVs on the road (as a proportion of all vehicles) out of all the Provinces — so we know building more charging capacity leads to more sales. I’m no fan of Tesla (I drive a Hyundai IONIQ 5), but they realized early on they couldn’t just wait for others to build out charging capacity for them if they wanted to sell EVs — the other North American auto manufacturers need to realize that and get on to building out that capacity. Then they’ll sell cars, and then they’ll meet the mandates.

Shoves in ground, CEOs. And do us a favour and buy Canadian — we have several EVSE manufacturers in Canada making some really good kit to choose from.

The constant fast charging would also hammer my battery like crazy, and I total roughly 25,000 km in a year.

If you’re doing a 700km trip once a month, and if we assume you need to charge back up four times — that’s 4 full charge cycles per month, or 48 per year.

A typical EV battery is rated for 1000 to 2000 charge cycles. With an average range of roughly 450km per charge for many modern EVs, and assuming the lower bound of 1000 cycles, you’ll need to put 450 000 km on your vehicle before you have to worry much about battery degradation. Based on your own 25 000 km/year estimate, that’s 18 years of ownership.

Or if we look at it based on charge cycles per month (which we’ll round up to 6 to accommodate for other driving outside your 700km trip once a month), that’s 72 full cycles per year, which won’t get up to 1000 total cycles for nearly 14 years.

Considering the average ICE vehicle in Canada only lasts 10 to 12 years, you’re going to do way better in an EV than you would with ICE. Battery degradation for EVs is VASTLY overstated — estimates of modern EV batteries from the last few years is they should be able to get 1 million miles out of them — the rest of the car is likely to fall apart before the battery fails.

Now the lack of suitable charging infrastructure on your route is a real (and valid!) problem, and we can only hope that situation gets better for everyone (here in BC, BC Hydro has been building out fast charger infrastructure every 150km along all highways throughout the Province, so road trips here are NOT a big issue. I’m on such a trip now incidentally!). But myths about battery life, especially coming from EV enthusiasts has to die.

I’m going to be “that guy” and rain on your parade a bit. So my apologies for that.

A lot of modern cars recommend against being used as a jump point. Jumping another car can be bad for the electronics in your vehicle. In particular, most (all?) EVs very strongly recommend against being used to jump other peoples cars.

Jumper cables were great in the 70’s when you had virtually no electronics in cars, and before lithium batteries were a reality. Today you’re better off having a good lithium jump pack — they’re small, portable, are often USB rechargeable, and can pack one hell of a punch. Many tow truck drivers have switched to using jump packs — they’re portable, can tell you more information on the state of the battery via built-in electronic meters, and have a lot of other useful features built in. And it’s way cheaper to buy a new jump pack if something goes wrong than it is to fix your vehicles electronics.

I’ve been carrying jump packs for a few decades now, and like you I’ve jumped a bunch of strangers vehicles over the years. These days I’m rocking a NOCO GBX45 — with 1250A of boosting power @ 12V, USB-C PD rechargeable, automatic polarity warning circuitry, a built-in flashlight, and can be used to recharge other USB-C devices — all in a package that fits in one hand and weighs just under 1Kg. Way better IMO than jumper cables — it’s effectively safer to use for the user and the vehicle, you don’t have to get close enough to use it — and if you own one yourself you don’t need to rely on the kindness of strangers to get you out of a pickle.

There are/were cars with positive ground, in which case you would want to connect the negative terminals first and the positive to a grounding terminal. So maybe the last time he had to jump a car was a ‘55 Packard? 🤣

It reminds me of all of the “Fidel Castro is secretly close to death” news articles that showed up in the 80s and 90s. I suppose the predictions were eventually correct — but I’m not sure that predicting “sucks is gonna die” 30+ years out from his actual death was particularly useful.

No — the current housing troubles go back a long way. Back to at least the early 90s. A housing crisis like we’re seeing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been going on for a long, long time. But just like climate change people ignored it when it was a more superficial problem until we got to a point where it is close to intractable.

The early 90s was about when the NIMBYs took over in full force. Construction companies had by this time stopped building starter homes, and virtually nobody was building apartment buildings. Condos were suddenly where all of the vertical construction was going in Canada’s biggest cities.

The big problem here is that big projects like these take time — and the lack of focus in the 90s on these types of housing really started to manifest itself around 10 years later. If you lived in one of Canada’s big cities at the time complaints about how hard it was getting to buy a home weren’t a lot different than today (smaller centres didn’t quite have the same problem, although it slowly started to spill over into them as people moved to the peripheries to avoid the soaring costs in the major centres). Projects that can take 10 years from start to finish in the “missing middle” had been ignored, and you can’t go back in time to correct that.

It isn’t as if we didn’t have immigration before. In fact, the previous record number of immigrants into Canada was in 1921, at 22.3%. And the record highest per capita immigration rate Canada ever saw was in 1913, when Canada (with a population of only 7.6 million people) let in 400 900 newcomers — or nearly 5.3% of our population. It didn’t cause Canada to collapse.

It may feel like the Feds just decided to bring in all these people and dump the problem on the Provinces to deal with, but that’s not how the system works. Here is what Chris Alexander, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration under Prime Minister Steven Harper says about the process:

Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), as adopted in 2001 and amended and updated regularly by successive governments ever since, the federal government must consult with its provincial counterparts on three issues: the number of permanent residents to be admitted in a given year; their “distribution in Canada taking into account regional economic and demographic requirements”; and what we call settlement issues, namely “the measures to be undertaken to facilitate their integration into Canadian society.”

In concrete terms, this means federal and provincial officials are in touch constantly, with the minister meeting his or her provincial and territorial counterparts regularly, as well as many other groups with an abiding interest in immigration.

So it isn’t as if the Provinces didn’t know and weren’t part of the conversation, and didn’t help come up with the numbers. The Feds numbers are typically the summation of what the Provinces want/need (all except Quebec have their own Provincial Nomination Programmes). But by and large, the Provinces still did fuck all about housing, even after asking for all these new immigrants (including international students).

You shouldn’t blame the immigrants or the Feds for that cockup. That is ENTIRELY on the Provinces.

We need more people, especially young, working professionals who produce high-value products. We have an aging population that is barely having babies at replacement level, and we need younger taxpayers coming into the system to help keep it propped up. We’re currently top-heavy in terms of demographics (thanks to the Boomer generation being the largest generation in at least the last two centuries), so we need those people otherwise the shit is going to hit the fan WAY worse than a housing crisis.

The Provinces knew the Feds were going to bring in more people. They knew we needed more housing. But many of them listened to the NIMBY’s of this world (or thought they could stick it to the Feds and make them look bad) and so did little to nothing to improve the housing situation.

Housing is nearly 100% a Provincial affair in Canada. You should absolutely be angry about the situation — but the bad guys here aren’t the Federal Government, and it isn’t the immigrants themselves. It’s the Provinces (and through their jurisdiction the Municipalities) who have been ham-stringing housing development.

Oddly enough, the situation will eventually work itself out as more of the Boomer generation die off (or downsize). Although I suspect it’s going to be a long, slow ramp-up with a smaller cliff at the end (unless immigration is raised again to match the death rate).

As far as the DST. I find it interesting that a tax we never collected is being framed as a loss we deserve compensation for.

I can explain that. While on the one hand I don’t really have a problem with attempting to level the playing field between international tech companies that don’t pay any corporate taxes in Canada and local Canadian companies who do, the big problem is that ultimately the pocket that those taxes will come from is “all of us” (at least those of us who use American online services). The companies weren’t going to take a loss — they were just going to jack up the prices they charge to Canadians.

And because the payment was intended to be retroactive to 2022, we’ve likely already been paying it. Again, big tech companies weren’t going to take a loss, and they’ve known about the payment date for years now, so they’ve been collecting it from us in the form of higher subscription fees and rates. And now that the DST is cancelled — they get to keep it. Oh, and as we’re now all used to paying the higher rates, they get to keep that too.

So that’s where the loss is. IMO the DST wasn’t all that great an idea to start with (taxing those companies sounds great until you realize they’re just jacking their prices up on us to pay for it), but having told companies to plan for it all these years and then yank it back has just put a ton of Canadian dollars into their coffers they don’t have to give back. And they’ll keep charging us the jacked-up rates we’re now used to and keep that as well.

I truly hope Prime Minister Carney doesn’t drop the mandate.

There are two very important parts of the enabling legislation that too many people just don’t seem to know, and it’s skewing the online discussions everywhere:

1. PHEV’s are still going to be allowed after 2035. So if you are so enamoured with giving your hard earned money to the oil and gas companies you’ll still be able to do so for decades to come;
2. The mandate doesn’t affect used vehicles at all;
3. Companies that miss the legislated targets can instead get credits by building out EVSE (charging) infrastructure. So for all those online pundits who think we should drop the mandate because we don’t have enough charging infrastructure, we get that infrastructure by keeping the mandates, and it gets paid for by the companies selling too many gas powered cars (and not taxpayers).

PM Carney needs to tell the automotive executives who say they can’t sell enough EVs/PHEVs to start building out infrastructure. It may be worthwhile to re-balance some of the timelines and how much the infrastructure credits are worth, but dumping them entirely is bad for Canada as a whole.