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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   29089 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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If you take a look at the top posts on /r/Canada right now, we have:

I didn't cherry-pick these. That's what's at front of mind for a lot of Canadians right now, as best I can tell, and I think people have already updated. If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.

/r/canada is not at all representative of the typical Canadian. It has the standard bias of most subreddits in being predominantly young, male, and left-wing, but it's also selected for being strongly anti-immigration. In fact, it's been absolutely obsessed with the issues of housing and immigration for the last few years. This goes back way before the pandemic or the housing crisis.

Years ago, it came out that one of the mods of /r/canada had some sympathy for white nationalism, and there was a big protest resulting in him and some other mods resigning and the creation of /r/onguardforthee, to which everyone who thought /r/canada was irredeemably racist fled, It's pretty popular and is now a more left-wing version of /r/canada that is much less opposed to immigration.

If you look at the top six posts there you have:

Only one about housing and not one about immigration. Some Canadians are definitely thinking about this, but that's not new for most of them, and as often as you see people on /r/canada blame immigrants, they'll blame things like foreign and corporate homebuyers and AirBnb.

If you look at the polls, the Conservative party has shot up to a clear projected majority starting in about September of this year.

The Conservatives have not said they would reduce immigration rate. Their support is due to something else. One cannot overstate how much of a bubble /r/canada is.

A couple months ago I took this screenshot of the-then top posts for that day in /r/canada. Was an effective summary of the malaise we're in

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