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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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I lost interest in Canadian politics after I saw this article. I cannot say for certain that the election was rigged. But if you were going to rig the election, this is what it would look like.

https://torontosun.com/news/national/elections-canada-205000-mail-in-ballots-were-not-counted/wcm/fc92a391-61f2-4da2-9104-e402ca4f2639/amp/

(February 2022)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6499013

Almost 100,000 mail ballots not counted in federal election: Elections Canada (June 2022)

Even when you are caught, claiming it's a mistake is perfect plausible deniability.

That it happened twice in a row, I find completely unconscionable.

The Canadian government's actions against political dissidents over the last two years leave it a non-democracy regardless of election procedures. You can't have free, fair elections if huge swaths of political opinion are the target of state violence. After the use of the emergencies act against people protesting vaccine mandates, how certain can we be that Trudeau won't engage in similar attacks on his other political opponents when expedient?

"You can have protests as long as they are inconsequential enough for us to safely ignore" is not all that different than "you can't have protests".

We were literally told that the protest was inconsequential and not even a real thing that rises to the level of something worth ignoring for the first two weeks as it gathered steam travelling across the country -- you may have missed this due to living on the wrong side of the continent, but the swing in media coverage from "not a real protest, there's only like twenty trucks" to "OMG this is a threat to national security" once people actually showed up in Ottawa was extremely noticeable to those who watched it unfold.