Again, the OPs posted video literally admits that its an issue on all sides of the political spectrum at present.

As for why I use American politics as a foil, its because people in Canada are clearly aware of what’s going on down south. It’s an easy reference point. Plus, we have discussion quelling hate speech laws that make even openly questioning certain topics potentially a crime… a very ‘egalitarian’ and non authoritarian thing, yes? But people won’t care as much if you reference foreign situations.

Like you want some Canadian ones? Sure. Trudeau’s many ethics violations, which he was found guilty of and suffered basically no consequences because he’s of a privileged class. Trudeau dancing around in brown-face, and everyone excusing it. Rules for thee, but not for me! Catherine McKenna’s “If you repeat it, if you say it louder, that is your talking point, people will totally believe it” slip, which exposed the party’s approach – but she got clipped for saying the quiet part loud and on camera. How about the liberal’s approach to ‘consultations’, wherein they invite groups to participate, only to ignore their findings – causing many experts / climate scientists to quit things like pipeline reviews on moral grounds. They ‘consult’ for the optics, but still push ahead with authoritarian methods – its just more insidious how they do it.

Trudeau and the Liberals enacting heavy handed hate speech laws, that result in moderate questioning of certain narratives a potential crime: can’t discuss some topics openly, sounds a bit authoritarian. Reports/narratives requiring us to accept them as truth and enact recommendations without question, and without evidence, while being written by biased individuals and encouraging racial segregation / privileged systems. BC’s conservatives kicked one of their MLAs out just recently for broaching that subject – because her tone became increasingly disrespectful to the topic the more she was blasted for simply stating the facts. But to get back to the Liberals, that sort of ‘narrative’ is also how the Liberals suppressed the potential blow back about Harjit Sajjjan, a Sikh and then Minister of Defense, using Canadian Spec Ops to rescue non-Canadian Sikhs during the pullout from Kabul – the only group he targeted for rescuing / streamlined immigration to Canada was his own. He defends this action by claiming there was an approved govt policy to help minority groups, though the Sikhs (his own) was the only he directed spec ops to aid. The Liberals effectively shut down further coverage of this, by declaring it Racist to call out a Sikh Minister using Govt resources to singularly help Sikhs – because “you wouldn’t think it an issue if he wasn’t a Sikh”. Well duh, but so what. That lame ass excuse would also then shield all white supremacists – its an “acceptable” excuse for one, and not the other, by authoritarian decree. Continuing to report on it risked running afoul of hate speech laws, as our government decreed it racist to call minorities racist when they’re acting like racists – so the story disappeared from the cbc practically overnight. That was one where our intelligence agency had flagged it as a conflict/concern – but Trudeau, just like Trump down south, ‘knew better’.

The CBC also aligns very heavily with govt policy agendas – there are numerous ‘news’ stories that are heavily biased, like only interviewing one party in a dispute. For example, there was an alleged anti-trans hate crime at a kids track meet in BC’s interior, and the CBC only interviewed the parents of the victim – parents who had a history of showing up whenever there was a clash on trans rights / are pretty clearly politically driven in their actions, if you dug into them at all. The CBC didn’t bother to get any other witness reports from the event… as if there’d be no phone footage or objective third party witnesses, at an event with tons of parents recording their kids. They instead interviewed a bunch of government people, and university profs, who all went on about how trans rights are human rights, and people need to do better etc – but none of these experts were privy to what had happened, and were just being used to push the govts talking points through a supposedly ‘neutral’ news agency. Such heavily biased pieces are essentially government policy masquerading as journalism, and is one reason there are calls to defund the CBC. A captured news media is another one of those “hmm, sorta authoritarian, eh?” things.

The NDP treatment of Erin Weir – especially in comparison to their treatment of someone like Christine Moore (the leader’s selective application of ‘rules’ so that it disadvantages people they don’t like, and supports people they do, is pretty authoritarian). The provincial NDP here in BC, sending out letters that have tracking components, so that they can catch/punish leakers (one I saw, had replaced the character for “.” with a tiny number). A previous mayor here in BC, Kennedy Stewart, a former federal NDP MP, using the federal NDP’s database / private information to help target voters for his mayoral debut – or more broadly, how all the political parties exempt themselves from having to follow the privacy regulations that the government makes the rest of us abide by. For both NDP and Liberal – the maintenance of “equity employment group” privileges in almost all areas, despite data showing that white men (the only group that doesn’t count as an equity employment group) are doing poorly in many areas (third bottom demo for education, like 30% off from the top groups, for example). Questioning the narrative on that front, is not allowed… even though the current approach can lead to a severe backlash, as we’re seeing in the states with DEI programs. My NDP MP has indicated that broad preferential treatment of women/minorities, must continue until there is equity in all areas, including the boardrooms – doesn’t matter if women’ve been the majority in the public service since 2000, nor that its now more skewed in women’s favour than it was previously in favour of men when the legislation first came in, they still maintain anti-male policies draped in the verbiage of ‘pro equity employment’. So they move the goal posts, and continue to maintain discriminatory practices, even if those policies are disproportionately impacting the ‘poor/middle class’ people in one demographic group, a group shown in stats to be near the bottom by many metrics.

A whole lot of the censorship tools on sites like Reddit, were built for ‘left-leaning’ censorship; now they’re being used for ‘right-leaning’ censorship, so they’re ‘bad’. Both like censorship/authoritarian methods, they just disagree on who to target.

Tankies… what utterly moronic slang.

It isn’t disingenuous to call out authoritarian practices, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they’re on. What’s disingenuous is the left/progressive failure to recognise/take action on their own failings in this regard, as failing to do so calls into question the legitimacy of their convictions and the validity of their arguments, and ultimately alienates some moderates. It makes it easier to poke holes and demonstrate that the left isn’t serious about the issue being a ‘problem’, because the left engages in the same behaviour – just to a lesser extent, or in a different format, arguably. Even in the clip linked by the Op – it’s all “BOO CONS SO BAD FOR THIS!” and then the admission “Yeah, everyone does this”, subverts the message. How can people be annoyed at the cons for doing X, if the analysts openly admit (once you’re past the click bait), that everyone does X?

In some ways, what the ‘left’ does is more insidious. They present themselves as the alternative to the republicans, but then people like Pelosi abuse the system to acquire giant fortunes, while maintaining laws and tax systems that benefit themselves / their rich benefactors. They pit the poors against one another by pushing demographic conflicts, to keep the commoners ire away from their bank accounts. Both sides of the political spectrum are moving increasingly towards authoritarian ideals – turning a blind eye to the faults of the ‘left’, just because you feel the ‘right’ is more egregious, doesn’t make it any better - it just green lights the moral decay on the left. The heavy-handed/forced tactics of the DNC in the states, would be hard to call anything other than a dangerous “authoritarian” trend, which arguably cost them two recent elections. Excusing that sort of ‘trend towards authoritarianism’ just because the right-wing is going harder towards the same steaming pile of feces, doesn’t make things any better. So yes, I’ll “both sides” things all I want in this context. The freedom for an individual to call out bs on both sides is egalitarian at its core, I’d argue: I can hate all politicians equally.

Trying to rail road me into a single, left/progressive approved, narrative… using the tired old cry of “both sidesing!”, is a very authoritarian thing to do.

Not entirely opposed to it, though it needs transparency and some ‘post implementation’ checks imo. Emergency responses, especially to international things, are usually better organised at the federal level too… I’m not too keen on provincial leaders acting with an international scope. That sort of thing leads to situations like Alberta licking Republican taint, with people accepting it as normal for provincial leaders to do that sort of international “diplomatic” blowie.

In some ways, the more concerning bit is hearing that they get 50% of their electricity via the columbia river treaty. So BC isn’t ‘sovereign’ in its power generation, despite generally presenting that image to the public for a long time. You’re not really in control, if a ton of your stuff requires the Americans to follow through on paper agreements.

We likely ought to also diversify our power generation methods, given climate change can potentially hoop hydro. Nuclear power takes years to get built, so they ought to start talking to the prairies about gettin some reactors goin in BC – I think it was like Ontario, Man and Sask that were working on mini reactor options, which’d make sense for us to position in areas further away from the border. There are also micro power generators that can be setup on smaller rivers fairly easily, with less impact than the current massive hydroelectric dams we’ve built – those likely have a far shorter lead time to get built, and would be “Canada”-centric in nature, so also worth exploring.

So… at about 9m16s, he admits that it’s not just the conservatives that do this sort of thing / have authoritarian undertones. And he’s right… but it’s a point that’s downplayed. Most political parties are marching to an authoritarian drum at this point.

I disagree, especially when focusing on Public Sector Unions. Making arguments about the cost of a service compared to the wage, is nonsensical when discussing public sector employment – 80-90% of the cost is the wage, and the ‘value add’ is nebulous and undefined, removed from regular market pressures. Trying to equate the job security provided by public sector unions to private sector business realities is also not convincing – in private sector, if business is stagnant/declining due to a recession, you fire people – doing so may allow you to increase wages for those who remain, though they may also need to increase efficiency/productivity. The OPs article is basically about unions wanting to ignore market realities… something that public sector unions do all the time, as they don’t need to look at the ‘cost’ side from a market perspective. They just yell at the government to tax us private sector workers more.

Unions have a purpose and a function, yes. But in public sector they are detached from market realities, and have skewed public sector employees into a position where they are the subject of private sector anger. It sets the stage for Republican style/Musk style cuts to gain support amongst the voting electorate – so regardless of whatever high horse pro-union people want to perch themselves on, its folly if they don’t take this disparity as a serious risk.

Even the Ops article belies that unions are no longer about ‘regular’ working class people – the letter is specifically saying that the unions are petitioning to provide better Employment Insurance options for “high earners”. So these salaries, that are well above the Canadian average need our government to increase the payouts to help protect those unionized workers from potential job losses? If their high pay is justified by high demand, they should be able to get other employment quickly in their field… but that whole letter sure isn’t about protecting the ‘regular’ common workers, and its the sort of statement that’s just going to antagonize private sector workers who earn “regular” wages. Why should even more of a waiters paycheque go to paying taxes, so that an Airplane Pilot can have an easier time if they lose their top 5% salary job?

pot -> kettle

That was the brits. People always say it was Canada, but it wasn’t. The guys in charge of that raid were in Canada for less then a year, and died later on in the same year they burned the WH - the leaders had spent most of their time on campaigns in EU / northern africa. The troops were all trained in the uk. Canada wasn’t even a ‘country’ for decades after that event – there’s no way we had our own trained army/generals involved. Hell, the (great?) granddaughter of one of the two generals who did it, is Olivia Wilde – from her scottish roots (Cockburn). So not even the guys kids/descendants were Canadian – they became US people in Hollywood.

Lotta Canadians like to take credit for it though, but realistically it wasn’t us.

It’s starting to seem like Canada should issue a travel advisory against going to the USA.

In some ways I hope it doesn’t come to that. In others … I mean, I’d win a friendly bet if it happened, so there’s that.

The states has been moving towards authoritarian corporate control for a long time though. The freedom cities controlled by big tech, setup in whatever country they want, operating outside ‘local’ regulations, with services via satellite and protection via US military, very much fits with what Starlink has done. Techs push for ‘rare earth’ (uranium) is likely about powering these sorts of cities, without needing to rely on a ‘countries’ power grid – to make them autonomous and impervious to local issues.

A few big military powers to allow for the “constant enemy” setup similar to 1984, with a corporate backend to prop up oligarchs that can act based on the whims of the oligarch without fear of repudiation.

Authoritarianism is on a big upswing lately, and egalitarian ideals are busy eating themselves alive – mired in demographic politics. And the conspiracy gremlin in me says it’s been intentional on the part of the democrats/progressive sorts, as they’re just as beholden to ‘rich’ authoritarian leaning tech people as the right wing/republican sorts.

I’d agree to some extent, but I honestly think it’s a bit more nuanced than a direct “He’s doing what Putin wants” situation – as it’s also what the various groups backing Trump in the states want (the folks who were all in on Project 2025). I find it easier to understand as a conflict between an “egalitarian” world view, and an “authoritarian” one. Putin, and Trump’s crowd, are clearly on the authoritarian side.

Someone recently pointed out to me that this view of it also aligns to the difference between the greek orthodox church and the roman catholics. In the latter, the translation of the bible into different languages meant individuals were encouraged to read the bible, and determine (in part on their own) how best to avoid hell; in the orthodox approach, it was entirely up to the priests to inform the masses what they had to do to avoid hell, as only the priests could read latin. Russia’s still very much of the orthodox approach – and in the US, many of those mega pastor sorts have pushed in this direction as well. So their interests line up.

That authoritarian mindset also lines up with big tech, and the whole Yarvin nonsense. It lines up with the blanket firing approach and terrorization of the federal work force, to make them more subserviant/compliant. And it generally lines up with the Russian view that the world should be cut up into like 4 blocks, with a ‘strong man’ leading each block. That division that was pushed forward by Dugin, generally “gives” north America to the US.

I recognise the benefit and purpose of unions, but recently I have to admit I’ve been a bit conflicted over them.

We frequently see stories about pending cuts / budget shortfalls here in BC, for things like Teachers and Transit workers. The news releases always phrase the issue as the amounts the govt gives these orgs having ‘failed to keep up with inflationary pressures’. They’ll very rarely also note that a huge % of that budget goes directly to salaries… where we’ve heard unions in past years negotiate fairly huge wage increases. Leads to a fairly simple conclusion that the “inflationary pressures” that are causing things like after school programs to be cut, are the union’s negotiated salary increases.

The wage increases that they negotiate, are also way higher than most of the increases I’ve seen / heard of in the private sector. The economy’s so bad, some jobs have even been unable to provide regular CPI increases… yet union workers still get their ~20% increase over 3-4 years or whatnot. The bank of Canada had cautioned people not to setup high-multi year increases due to the market uncertainty around the time covid restrictions were easing – private sector generally listened, unions/public sector did not.

The public sector also now employs more people than ever before – skewing statistics significantly. A recent stat I saw placed it at about 1 in 4 workers in Canada work for the public sector, where these sorts of increases are more standard. As a result, lopsided increases in public sector wages skews national numbers in regards to aggregate stats on wages. However, public sector funding comes from private sector taxes – and without gains in the private sector / productivity to fuel increased tax revenue, how exactly do unions / govt think we’re going to pay for those “inflationary pressures”? The private sector workhorse can only survive so much flogging.

When I was younger, govt work was viewed as lower pay, but far greater job stability. Now, it’s higher pay and greater job stability. And the amount of govt workers has increased dramatically, making it all the more obvious that it’s a golden ticket. When interacting with govt workers, there’s also a sense of ‘waste’ from the private side – like seeing 6 workers at a govt dispensary just standing around with no customers for hours, as they collect higher pay cheques than regular retail + have better job security. This creates animosity towards what’s essentially a privileged worker class. Govt workers in the states faced a huge backlash from the public, in part because of this sort of disparity, I imagine. I hope that the progressive folks are keenly aware of that gap, and are mindful of what may result if they leave it to fester. It’s the sort of situation that makes people vote in favour of things like DOGE, and allows more extreme folks to co-opt that message for far more nefarious purposes / more extreme actions. There needs to be an alternative, or a shift to more practical budgetary sanity.

This is dumb. Only a small % of the goods in alaska are brought in via truck – the vast majority is via boat.

Meanwhile the ‘obvious’ response from the US would be to toll trucks carrying goods from Mexico to Canada. Which is a much bigger trade route.

Russia’s objective isn’t tariffs – it’s to splinter/decouple international coordination and cooperation amongst western nations.

So, yeah. The faster Trump can accelerate that, the happier his boss’ll be.

Like the buy[local] type campaigns are most likely getting a bit of a bump from Russian propaganda agents – even if they are ‘real’ sentiments to some extent too.

Many/most of Canada’s government agencies are entrenched in Microsoft products. Our financial regulators in many provinces have their data portals, to which Financial Institutions submit significant ‘customer specific’/private information, hosted in Microsoft365 sites. Payments Canada, a government org, requires that our ATMs run on Windows.

Many/most Financial Institutions also run their online banking on non-Canadian company products, hosted or managed by foreign actors. Central1, the primary trade association that previously hosted about 80% of Canada’s Credit Union websites, recently exited the hosting business – and transferred those sites over to a company from India. This company also provides the sites for a few of Canada’s Big Banks. The CEO of Central1, having failed to deliver on one of her 3 primary functions as the industry’s Trade association, was given a business award for it – in part, because Central1 has become largely x-banker run, as required by Canada’s regulators recently, and as a result C1 lost sight of what it means to be a cooperative. As part of their exit from hosting online banking, Central1 also indicated that they’ll support two other recommended options if people don’t want to use the default – one that’s in Microsoft365 (US controlled), and another from Portugal. No Canadian owned/accountable org was part of the short list that the majority of “small local” credit unions could go with. So even if you’re banking with a tiny credit union, you’re likely exposed to the risk of foreign manipulation / privacy issues, and your banking services are beholden to a foreign country’s whims. Some CU’s even run on Microsoft365 extensively internally on their back end, meaning their services are all totally down whenever Microsoft has an outage – which, given that Microsoft is beholden to the whims of the orange man as a US company, could mean that Donald and crew could effectively “turn off” your ‘small local’ CU.

When raising questions about the US’s access to Microsoft’s cloud data through their “National Security Letter” approach previously, I’ve heard lawyers comment that it’s not an issue, because realistically we’d hand the data over anyway if it was requested – so it just cuts out some bureaucracy. Admittedly, this was at a time when trade relations were more amicable – but it implies heavily that, frankly, yes, most of the data that’s held in US cloud products is already accessible to US interests/government agencies. And yes, that continues to apply even if the physical servers are located in Canada, as per government regulations – the Control centre is still foreign. Extending the cloud act just makes it more official, in my view.

The solution, if we Canadians want ‘real’ autonomy on this front, is that you need companies that will be wholly accountable to Canadian laws and regulations, and not interests owned by foreign adversaries. Any “Critical” service, such as our Banking Infrastructure and Government Agencies, should be required to use Canadian made products / host assets within Canada, with control of those assets also being within Canada. The EU’s GDPR blocks them from using US cloud services on security/privacy reasons, for certain areas of the economy/government. Countries like China use Linux as their official govt operating system. There’s no specific reason we couldn’t do the same, we just need the govt to recognize the risk and take some action on it.

I’d disagree. I know it’s often interpreted along those lines, but it seems a misread on the situation to me. There are quite a few literary critiques on Hamlet that view him and his dilemma as existential angst – a hero torn between ‘duty and doubt’. I think that reading is far more apt than viewing Hamlet as a suicidal emo fop. The very next lines after the famous intro are literally:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them

So… Whether it’s nobler to sit there and get fucked by ‘chance’, or to take up arms and oppose the status quo/issue. That opening clearly establishes the two sides of his deliberations: to suffer the situation, or to take up arms and opposed it – neither of these is equated to dying until the next part, which pivots to death, because he was opposing the king / considering killing his usurper uncle. Not only would that potentially result in his death, but the act of killing in the ‘christian’ mindset would result in his soul being damned in the next life. He spends a huge amount of the play humming and hawing about this sort of stuff, like when he has an opportunity to top the guy, but stops because his uncle is mid prayer – and he doesn’t want to kill him in a way that might accidentally send him on to heaven, if such a thing existed.

Anyhow, the next part supports my read, I think, where he goes through a list of “mundane” offenses. Thees offenses are basically all sleights that someone would be ‘suffering’ as a result of actions of another - they have an external locus, and there’s no explicit reason to think that the ‘response’ with a bare bodkin (dagger) would be directed internally: the oppressor’s wrong (tyrants), the proud man’s boasting (we hear alot of boasting from certain folks…who are blind to the impact on others), the pain of being shunned romantically, the slowness of the law to achieve justice, the insolence of office (putting up with an idiot in a position of power), and the general pain of generally having to put up with those ‘unworthy’ of your efforts. His bridging line there is to finish the list with a note that you could fix most of those situations with a dagger, before finishing it off with:

Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death,

That’s pretty explicitly saying “why would anyone ‘suffer these slings and arrows’ (mundane offenses) if it weren’t for a fear of death by ‘taking up arms against them’ with a dagger?” (to reference it back to the earlier start for cohesion in the reading, which works just fine).

In the speech he also equates inaction to cowardice, and that to effectively being dead. Near the end:

And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Ie our fear of dying, the uncertainty of what’s next, makes us bear those problems / put up with a lot of crap – it makes us into cowards. Our resolve is diminished by the thought of the challenge / potential death, and the possibility of going to hell if you murder the source of these troubles, to the point that we lose the ability to take action.

And again, a huge amount of the play is literally all about Hamlet, trying to sort out the morality of whether he should kill his usurper uncle – an act which he knows would put his own life in jeopardy and cause potential chaos - let alone put his own ‘immortal soul’ in jeopardy of going to hell, if he accepts the idea of heaven/hell. Not so much Hamlet debating if he should kill himself, but rather if he should kill his uncle. He’s out for revenge, he’s not out to be an emo baby.

Reddit’s seeing membership outflows resulting from their more draconian policies. Reddit boss restarts a competitor platform so that he can try and recapture users by owning his own competition, while trying to pretend like there’s no conflict.

idk. Seems pretty suspect to me. Lemmy seems ‘ok’ for news aggregation, and it has a more community / local vibe to it. For example, I can have more confidence that the feeds I see on Lemmy.ca are more controlled / accountable to Canadians, rather than the heavily Americanized subs that exist in Reddit. And I can pick and choose which other subs to see, with better understanding of the likely biases that I’ll encounter. This sort of end user transparency is really refreshing, especially given the burbling propaganda war being waged by the Americans at present against Canada.

I’m historically a green voter – but honestly, I get “the defectors” point on this one, and am a bit surprised that there’s so much drama over it.

Like the news stories about her saying there were no child bodies at one site – people comment how what she’s saying is disrespectful to survivors of the residential system, but they aren’t saying she’s factually incorrect. The articles highlight that even the first nation “revised” their wording over the years from “remains of 215 children”, to “potential burial sites”, to eventually just “anomalies”.

So she’s correct in her statement on that front, no?

This sort of situation alienates moderates. The extreme backlash against anyone who asks questions in this area makes it impossible for moderates to engage with it without being labelled in some way. When moderates are unable to even ask questions/discuss the topic openly, well, they tend to become less moderate. So her going from questioning / highlighting objective truths, to experiencing a huge backlash, to doing a stupid mocking voice on a podcast, isn’t really that surprising a trajectory. The federal government making it a “hate crime” to question this stuff, is just amazing to me – and it’d be a huge point against the Liberals staying in power, if the alternatives weren’t so gross.

I don’t condone wanton violence either, of course… but at the same time I recognise someone like Hamlet as a tragic hero. His most famous soliloquy, the “To be or not to be” one, is largely about whether you should stand up to tyranny, even though it may cost you dearly to oppose tyrants, or whether you should try and keep your head down and try to profit personally as a coward.

Yes, it’s better to achieve those goals through non violent means, but you need to draw a moral line. Luigi drew his.

The liberals have maintained preferential hiring for women in the public service for decades, even though they are not the minority, nor have they been the minority since the early 2000s. Their policies are often very heavily entrenched in DEI mentalities, with zero tolerance for discussion / debate. Their feminist and minority-centric policies have explicitly alienated a large number of young men, particularly young white men, as was highlighted even during the introduction of the Liberal speeches/presentations on the cbc coverage.

Running a woman for leader is introducing a wedge issue in terms of voter opinion, at a time when the election results are really critical. Pretending like there aren’t still a lot of voters who have some degree of sexism is not realistic – and it’s of utmost importance that the Liberals do everything they can to challenge PP. I would rather they ran a man, with a higher chance of winning, than pretended like Freeland could win while she was overtly continuing to alienate male voters right up to the end with the “Man eater” music. Like imagine if a male candidate came out grooving to a song about beating women… what a stupid, divisive move.

That sort of blindness to the reality of the voting public, is precisely why the NDP are sunk. They run an overtly Sikh guy, who cozies up to Sikh’s at every public event he goes to… pretending like this isn’t going to alienate a bunch of voters, and be a huge issue in places like Quebec (where they’ve banned overt religious symbols in the past). It’s blind demographic politics optimism, with little serious regard to winning. Same goes for the Greens, when they put in that Black Lesbian Jewish Pro Palestine lawyer lady, who crashed and burned.

Yeah, Google’s monopoly is a problem. Wonder if there’d be any real appetite for a (potentially govt supported) index for Canadian businesses, which could link through to those businesses public websites (if they have them) — and/or just serve as a host for a basic business brochure / info set.

I mean, businesses need to register within jurisdictions in order to operate – why not have those jurisdictions have a semi federated setup of sites to host indexes for consumers / b2b. Publicize it to the general public, and ensure that businesses let their own employees know about it (so that local workers, know there are local options to look up shops / businesses). You could connect the jurisdictional sites via federation to make it a “one stop site” for Canadians to go to for local business references/info, even as they move around to different areas.

If this lemmy site is legit in its costs being like $1.10/user/year, I imagine our govt could do similar for similarly low costs – and offset it by having some modest local advertising options on the sites. You’d basically setup a class of ‘business’ users that’d have a bit more of a portal, and a landing page associated with their brand, where they could post basic information up / connect with potential customers. Have the business registration process in different municipalities / jurisdictions be involved in administration of those business accounts. Regular consumers could either be left as read only, or could potentially have accounts setup for more engagement – perhaps with some method of checking the person’s general geo location to root out some malicious sorts / potential foreign influences.

I don’t think we have anything like this, but… I’d love to see it pushed by some politicians, personally.