900,000 students coming in…

[Scuba Steve]

I'd rather fund housing for 500 homeless. There are tons of non-addicted people that just can't afford housing. They are easy to help and shouldn't trash the accommodation provided.

From what I have seen those that want a place to stay can find one. I have never seen a homeless housing project that didn't get completely destroyed within a few weeks

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[d4rktrooper788]

The reason other Arabic countries won't accept Palestinians is because they are acutely aware that expungement of the Arab population from Gaza and the West Bank is the goal of Zionists within Israel. As the Palestinians expelled by Israel long ago discovered, right of return was never granted, land was stolen, and they were left stateless.

Don't believe the demonizing of Palestinians you read in much of the American media. It's largely a fabrication to justify brutality and theft of land, as for a variety of reasons, US and Israeli policy has overlapped. As someone who counts many Palestinians as friends (and who are, to a man, incredibly hard working and honest), and who knows a number of people who have done either disaster relief in Palestine via the UN or charity work in that part of the world via Amnesty International or Medecins Sans Frontiers, the bad guys in that part of the world are definitely not the ones you've been conditioned to 'other' over the past 40 years. They're also not the religious extremists. Those are the ones relentlessly stealing land people have lived on for thousands of years and building settlements because they believe they are God's chosen people and all others are mere obstacles.

Aside from sectarian differences, most Arab nations don't want any Palestinian refugees because wherever they go, terrorism of all varieties follows. See: Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanese refugee camps housing Al Qaeda and a variety of other groups. Hamas was created by the Muslim Brotherhood which also has several direct ties to 9/11. Polling of Palestinian residents shows strong support for Hamas as of this year -- we do not need these attitudes coming to Canada.

It's a fair point right back, but if you ask me who I'd rather offer someplace to live, someone who desperately needs it vs someone simply trying to get rich or someone wanting a business degree, I know my answer. We still need immigration after all, in the pyramid scheme that is our current national retirement planning. Just at the saner and more planned rates from before the crazed insanity of the current bunch of idiots.

Canada has a long history of integrating people needing someplace safe to life or escaping extreme poverty, from Irish to Italians to Eastern Europeans to Jamaicans to Sri Lankhans. There's plenty of need around the world, too. Not to mention, refusing to help the rest of the world results in them ending up on our doorstep uninvited. We're lucky with geography that we are isolated from this in ways that our southern neighbours and Europe aren't, but that doesn't mean we can abdicate our global responsibility and let Italy and the US soak up all the migrants.

Believe me, if Trump gets in and actually follows through with his stated plan to deport en masse, we're going to be feeling it then...

Yes those Sri Lankans who showed up here and started fundraising for the Tamil Tigers (a terrorist group), holding protests in support of them, and more. The "Palestinian Canadians" that were driving around on Oct 7 2023 celebrating told us everything we needed to know about accepting any of those refugees, thanks. Not to mention the sharp rise in anti-Semitic violence here since last year, I wonder why...

Also the Iranians dump millions into Hezbollah to destabilize the region and yet not a single refugee is resettled in Iran, but somehow it's Canada's responsibility to bring Palestinians here?

 

[Priller]

Aside from sectarian differences, most Arab nations don't want any Palestinian refugees because wherever they go, terrorism of all varieties follows. See: Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanese refugee camps housing Al Qaeda and a variety of other groups. Hamas was created by the Muslim Brotherhood which also has several direct ties to 9/11. Polling of Palestinian residents shows strong support for Hamas as of this year -- we do not need these attitudes coming to Canada.



Yes those Sri Lankans who showed up here and started fundraising for the Tamil Tigers (a terrorist group), holding protests in support of them, and more. The "Palestinian Canadians" that were driving around on Oct 7 2023 celebrating told us everything we needed to know about accepting any of those refugees, thanks. Not to mention the sharp rise in anti-Semitic violence here since last year, I wonder why...

Also the Iranians dump millions into Hezbollah to destabilize the region and yet not a single refugee is resettled in Iran, but somehow it's Canada's responsibility to bring Palestinians here?

I had written a long response detailing rebuttals to many of your links etc., but realised halfway through that we're just contributing to the endless entrenchment of 'yeah, but...' garbage that pollutes the understanding of this situation, especially if you're on the outside and have lots of preconceived notions about what Islam is, what a terrorist vs a freedom fighter is, what kind of people you identify with, and your beliefs around how far back you draw the line for land taken, people ejected, and the victims of colonisation.

Instead, what I will tell you is what I know from people who have actually been there.

I know a number of Palestinians through work. While they may be people of faith, they are most definitely not people of extreme faith. They are hard working, honest, and care deeply about their families. They are extremely proud of their culture, but are acutely aware that they have been evicted from their land and are passionate about wanting to get it back, despite many having been born after they were expelled. Many have family in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and spread all over the world. The ones with family in Gaza have lost huge swathes of relatives, tragedies to them so big it's impossible to comprehend.

I am good friends with a woman who works for the UN, who has dealt occasionally with Palestine for many years. She is a good woman, a feminist, and non-religious. She has also worked in Rwanda, Afghanistan, and now works for the UN food program in Rome. She became passionately pro-Palestinian over the course of her work after seeing first-hand the struggles imposed on people both in the West Bank and Gaza.

Another friend who I met in Venice volunteered for Amnesty International to spend a year wherever they needed him. He is from Quebec, atheist and his passion is being outdoors and camping. They asked him to go to Ramallah, to help teach people construction skills. He ended up helping people try to rebuild their homes after being bulldozed by settlers. He saw farmers with crops rotting because they were refused permits to take them to market. He saw families with olive groves centuries old, who needed a permit to harvest the olives for oil. They would be given a permit for a single day, make all the preparations, and then have the permit revoked on the morning for no explained reason, meaning no harvest could be done that year. He watched settlements be built directly on top of the foundations of recently demolished homes, and later watched as the settlers simply evicted the Palestinians at gunpoint and simply took the homes. He left with an open mind, and came back extremely pro-Palestinian.

Yet another friend is a nurse who volunteered with Medecins Sans Frontieres. She went and worked in a hospital in Gaza, in a maternity ward. She says the people she worked and lived with from there were not slavering zealots, hell bent on death to all Jews. They were normal people trying to survive in what amounts to an open-air prison, with every aspect of life dictated by the whims of Israel. The sea is right there, but fishing will get you shot. Cancer treatment is minimal, and everything is done on the thinnest of shoestrings. But she also said the people have humour and warmth and are extremely generous despite having so little. She came back extremely pro-Palestinian and passionate about the cause of Gazans.

My logic is twofold. First, if all these people, non-religious and smart, passionate about justice and peace, come back with the same conclusion, then maybe the image painted of Palestinians as savage, fanatical warmongers isn't an accurate one. Maybe the fact that one already wealthy country receives billions in arms and support from the west while the other scraps and begs for a pittance of food aid shows this isn't a symmetrical conflict.

Second, unless Israel stops the settlements, stops evictions in Jerusalem, and starts returning stolen land, they have zero claim to the moral high ground. You can't simultaneously do that and claim to be the victim, and you can't do that while pretending to champion democracy and equal rights. It's impossible. Everything else is a distraction from that. Peace is impossible when the borders are redrawn daily. There is no 'yeah, but...' that can justify it. All you can do is recast history, lie about how Palestine has never existed, lie by saying it's all about self-defense, and claim that somehow two thousand year old borders should be respected all these years later. But nothing can change the fact that a huge chunk of Israel believes that God gave them that land, and that anything is justifiable in that light. Until they reverse that process, though, they can't have the peace and security they claim is their highest priority. Unless that priority is actually violent expansion, theft of land, and a belief that they are reclaiming what God gave his chosen people.

But what do I know, I've never been there. I can only take the word of people who have...

 

[GreyGhost]

I had written a long response detailing rebuttals to many of your links etc., but realised halfway through that we're just contributing to the endless entrenchment of 'yeah, but...' garbage that pollutes the understanding of this situation, especially if you're on the outside and have lots of preconceived notions about what Islam is, what a terrorist vs a freedom fighter is, what kind of people you identify with, and your beliefs around how far back you draw the line for land taken, people ejected, and the victims of colonisation.

Instead, what I will tell you is what I know from people who have actually been there.

I know a number of Palestinians through work. While they may be people of faith, they are most definitely not people of extreme faith. They are hard working, honest, and care deeply about their families. They are extremely proud of their culture, but are acutely aware that they have been evicted from their land and are passionate about wanting to get it back, despite many having been born after they were expelled. Many have family in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and spread all over the world. The ones with family in Gaza have lost huge swathes of relatives, tragedies to them so big it's impossible to comprehend.

I am good friends with a woman who works for the UN, who has dealt occasionally with Palestine for many years. She is a good woman, a feminist, and non-religious. She has also worked in Rwanda, Afghanistan, and now works for the UN food program in Rome. She became passionately pro-Palestinian over the course of her work after seeing first-hand the struggles imposed on people both in the West Bank and Gaza.

Another friend who I met in Venice volunteered for Amnesty International to spend a year wherever they needed him. He is from Quebec, atheist and his passion is being outdoors and camping. They asked him to go to Ramallah, to help teach people construction skills. He ended up helping people try to rebuild their homes after being bulldozed by settlers. He saw farmers with crops rotting because they were refused permits to take them to market. He saw families with olive groves centuries old, who needed a permit to harvest the olives for oil. They would be given a permit for a single day, make all the preparations, and then have the permit revoked on the morning for no explained reason, meaning no harvest could be done that year. He watched settlements be built directly on top of the foundations of recently demolished homes, and later watched as the settlers simply evicted the Palestinians at gunpoint and simply took the homes. He left with an open mind, and came back extremely pro-Palestinian.

Yet another friend is a nurse who volunteered with Medecins Sans Frontieres. She went and worked in a hospital in Gaza, in a maternity ward. She says the people she worked and lived with from there were not slavering zealots, hell bent on death to all Jews. They were normal people trying to survive in what amounts to an open-air prison, with every aspect of life dictated by the whims of Israel. The sea is right there, but fishing will get you shot. Cancer treatment is minimal, and everything is done on the thinnest of shoestrings. But she also said the people have humour and warmth and are extremely generous despite having so little. She came back extremely pro-Palestinian and passionate about the cause of Gazans.

My logic is twofold. First, if all these people, non-religious and smart, passionate about justice and peace, come back with the same conclusion, then maybe the image painted of Palestinians as savage, fanatical warmongers isn't an accurate one. Maybe the fact that one already wealthy country receives billions in arms and support from the west while the other scraps and begs for a pittance of food aid shows this isn't a symmetrical conflict.

Second, unless Israel stops the settlements, stops evictions in Jerusalem, and starts returning stolen land, they have zero claim to the moral high ground. You can't simultaneously do that and claim to be the victim, and you can't do that while pretending to champion democracy and equal rights. It's impossible. Everything else is a distraction from that. Peace is impossible when the borders are redrawn daily. There is no 'yeah, but...' that can justify it. All you can do is recast history, lie about how Palestine has never existed, lie by saying it's all about self-defense, and claim that somehow two thousand year old borders should be respected all these years later. But nothing can change the fact that a huge chunk of Israel believes that God gave them that land, and that anything is justifiable in that light. Until they reverse that process, though, they can't have the peace and security they claim is their highest priority. Unless that priority is actually violent expansion, theft of land, and a belief that they are reclaiming what God gave his chosen people.

But what do I know, I've never been there. I can only take the word of people who have...

Great post. You are trying to apply logic to what is by definition an irrational situation though. If your core belief is your sky being granted you that land, there is no end to the fight nor limit to the number of people that can die in the quest to reinstate the sky beings wishes. Of course, even that path is perverted by power and money hungry aholes that use religion as a screen to allow personal enrichment.

 

[GreyGhost]

From what I have seen those that want a place to stay can find one. I have never seen a homeless housing project that didn't get completely destroyed within a few weeks

Sent from my Pixel 5 using Tapatalk

Not in barrie anyway. Quite a few elderly and/or retail workers living rough (vehicles or tents). Fixed income and needing to find a place at current market rate goes poorly.

 

[Scuba Steve]

Not in barrie anyway. Quite a few elderly and/or retail workers living rough (vehicles or tents). Fixed income and needing to find a place at current market rate goes poorly.

There is the option of a room instead of a apartment. I would love to see a dorm type setup with lots of small batchelor type apartments along a hall. But if government built it would be 1 mil per unit. If you make a mess or are a problem out you go.

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[raginduck]

From what I have seen those that want a place to stay can find one. I have never seen a homeless housing project that didn't get completely destroyed within a few weeks

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You're only seeing the tip of the ice berg.. A lot of "hidden homeless" around.

 

[Priller]

Great post. You are trying to apply logic to what is by definition an irrational situation though. If your core belief is your sky being granted you that land, there is no end to the fight nor limit to the number of people that can die in the quest to reinstate the sky beings wishes. Of course, even that path is perverted by power and money hungry aholes that use religion as a screen to allow personal enrichment.

All of this may be true. And people ask me how Palestine is different from Sudan, or the Uyghurs in China, or any of the endless other violent and unjust situations around the world. And the big difference is Western governments largely aren't sending eye-watering stacks of cash and arms to prop up those injustices.

Sometimes we claim to be on the side of 'freedom' and end up making things way, way worse, though belief in whether freedom or destabilization was the goal largely rests on your faith in the folks in charge (see the invasion of Iraq etc.) Knowing a number of Ukrainian-Canadians, I'm pretty passionate about support for them as well, but in that case we're helping the little guy against theft of their land, not supporting the theft of land by others.

The reality is we're still highly dependent on access to Middle Eastern oil, and so we can't ignore the region, much as the temptation is to throw up your hands and walk away. The West made this mess in the first place, first by arbitrary drawing of borders following the First World War that were more about Britain and France carving it up for the exploitation of each, which created all sorts of conflicts where previously many fewer existed. Second, by the hamfisted creation of Israel, understandably in response to the horrors of the Second World War. Britain especially holds responsibility for how they bungled things, mostly by simply walking away in frustration after becoming targets of Israeli terrorism, and abandoning their responsibility to enforce any sort of just organisation on the region. While I understand fatigue after many years of war, it simply destroyed any hope of cooperation, understanding, or peace in the region.

Which version of the Abrahamic God you believe in (or don't) is important in that it illustrates what assumptions you bring to the table, but in the end, conflict and land theft is unjust regardless of whether it's based on religious motives (Palestine) or greed (Ukraine) or both.

 

[Scuba Steve]

You're only seeing the tip of the ice berg.. A lot of "hidden homeless" around.

I know that but I also know multi generation welfare families that have never had a housing issue and have never worked. They seem to be doing just fine.

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[GreyGhost]

I know that but I also know multi generation welfare families that have never had a housing issue and have never worked. They seem to be doing just fine.

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That's a systemic problem. Knowledge of how to work the system leads to abuse. The silent homeless dont have that knowledge. We need to be kicking out the abusers and seeking out those that can benefit from help.

 

[FullMotoJacket]

Sorry, but if your invisible sky daddy says you have to throw gay people off the roofs of buildings or stone someone's wife because the husband wants a younger wife number 4 and accusing her of adultery is an easy work around, I have no use for you. And I don't care which invisible sky daddy you believe in, as they're all cooked up from the same plot outline..

 

[d4rktrooper788]

I had written a long response detailing rebuttals to many of your links etc., but realised halfway through that we're just contributing to the endless entrenchment of 'yeah, but...' garbage that pollutes the understanding of this situation, especially if you're on the outside and have lots of preconceived notions about what Islam is, what a terrorist vs a freedom fighter is, what kind of people you identify with, and your beliefs around how far back you draw the line for land taken, people ejected, and the victims of colonisation.

How nice it is to hand wave ideological realities away with "they're just victims of colonization". There is a whole slew of countries in the world that were victims of colonization yet somehow managed to move on and make themselves stable productive nations without exporting hate and terror around the globe. The fact that we have homegrown Islamic terrorism in the west, from 2nd/3rd generation immigrants no less, tells me it's an ideological problem that goes well beyond "we want our land back".

Instead, what I will tell you is what I know from people who have actually been there.

I know a number of Palestinians through work. While they may be people of faith, they are most definitely not people of extreme faith. They are hard working, honest, and care deeply about their families. They are extremely proud of their culture, but are acutely aware that they have been evicted from their land and are passionate about wanting to get it back, despite many having been born after they were expelled. Many have family in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and spread all over the world. The ones with family in Gaza have lost huge swathes of relatives, tragedies to them so big it's impossible to comprehend.

I am good friends with a woman who works for the UN, who has dealt occasionally with Palestine for many years. She is a good woman, a feminist, and non-religious. She has also worked in Rwanda, Afghanistan, and now works for the UN food program in Rome. She became passionately pro-Palestinian over the course of her work after seeing first-hand the struggles imposed on people both in the West Bank and Gaza.

Another friend who I met in Venice volunteered for Amnesty International to spend a year wherever they needed him. He is from Quebec, atheist and his passion is being outdoors and camping. They asked him to go to Ramallah, to help teach people construction skills. He ended up helping people try to rebuild their homes after being bulldozed by settlers. He saw farmers with crops rotting because they were refused permits to take them to market. He saw families with olive groves centuries old, who needed a permit to harvest the olives for oil. They would be given a permit for a single day, make all the preparations, and then have the permit revoked on the morning for no explained reason, meaning no harvest could be done that year. He watched settlements be built directly on top of the foundations of recently demolished homes, and later watched as the settlers simply evicted the Palestinians at gunpoint and simply took the homes. He left with an open mind, and came back extremely pro-Palestinian.

That's nice, and I'm sure they are all lovely people.

Yet another friend is a nurse who volunteered with Medecins Sans Frontieres. She went and worked in a hospital in Gaza, in a maternity ward. She says the people she worked and lived with from there were not slavering zealots, hell bent on death to all Jews. They were normal people trying to survive in what amounts to an open-air prison, with every aspect of life dictated by the whims of Israel. The sea is right there, but fishing will get you shot. Cancer treatment is minimal, and everything is done on the thinnest of shoestrings. But she also said the people have humour and warmth and are extremely generous despite having so little. She came back extremely pro-Palestinian and passionate about the cause of Gazans.

My logic is twofold. First, if all these people, non-religious and smart, passionate about justice and peace, come back with the same conclusion, then maybe the image painted of Palestinians as savage, fanatical warmongers isn't an accurate one. Maybe the fact that one already wealthy country receives billions in arms and support from the west while the other scraps and begs for a pittance of food aid shows this isn't a symmetrical conflict.

Unfortunately the people you met are in a tiny minority. Would your Quebecer friend be able to openly embrace his atheism in Gaza? What about the feminist, do you think the average Palestinian in Gaza would tolerate her views?

Second, unless Israel stops the settlements, stops evictions in Jerusalem, and starts returning stolen land, they have zero claim to the moral high ground. You can't simultaneously do that and claim to be the victim, and you can't do that while pretending to champion democracy and equal rights. It's impossible. Everything else is a distraction from that. Peace is impossible when the borders are redrawn daily. There is no 'yeah, but...' that can justify it. All you can do is recast history, lie about how Palestine has never existed, lie by saying it's all about self-defense, and claim that somehow two thousand year old borders should be respected all these years later. But nothing can change the fact that a huge chunk of Israel believes that God gave them that land, and that anything is justifiable in that light. Until they reverse that process, though, they can't have the peace and security they claim is their highest priority. Unless that priority is actually violent expansion, theft of land, and a belief that they are reclaiming what God gave his chosen people.

But what do I know, I've never been there. I can only take the word of people who have...

As a Canadian I don't really care who the land belongs to. Both sides believe they have a god given right to be there. My only point of interest is that the people coming here will be a net benefit to our society. Walking around downtown Toronto seeing people celebrating terrorism tells me we do not need anymore refugees from that part of the world.

 

[Mad Mike]

The reason other Arabic countries won't accept Palestinians is because they are acutely aware that expungement of the Arab population from Gaza and the West Bank is the goal of Zionists within Israel. As the Palestinians expelled by Israel long ago discovered, right of return was never granted, land was stolen, and they were left stateless.

That may be the stated reason, but it's only one of convenience. There are a few reasons:

Have Arab nations want nothing to do with have not Arabs. That's just the way it is - they corral them in camps rather than naturalize them.

Containing Palestinian violence inside immigrant communities has always been a challenge. Terror is engrained and accepted in the mindset of many Palestinians - there is no easy way to weed this out. That means every bad Palestinian hurts a good one.

Finally, Gaza and West Bank's Arab neighbors don't want Iranian proxies circulating among them intimidating and destabilizing their local populations. again, It's hard to filter out the bad guys.

Don't believe the demonizing of Palestinians you read in much of the American media. It's largely a fabrication to justify brutality and theft of land, as for a variety of reasons, US and Israeli policy has overlapped. As someone who counts many Palestinians as friends (and who are, to a man, incredibly hard working and honest), and who knows a number of people who have done either disaster relief in Palestine via the UN or charity work in that part of the world via Amnesty International or Medecins Sans Frontiers, the bad guys in that part of the world are definitely not the ones you've been conditioned to 'other' over the past 40 years. They're also not the religious extremists. Those are the ones relentlessly stealing land people have lived on for thousands of years and building settlements because they believe they are God's chosen people and all others are mere obstacles.

I would agree the average Palestinian is not inherently bad. But as a collective, they have made themselves very scary to others. You might blame the media for that, but it's pretty hard to refute the facts.

There were 2.2m Gazans at the time they first raided, 40k of them active Hamas fighters, and another 700K supporting them with financing, transport, logistics, shelter, and other military support services. 75% of Palestinians supported the October 7th terror attacks. Only 7% of Palestinians believe Hamas has anything to do with the Palestinian plight.

I have no dog in this fight, and I'm equally hard on Israel for their disproportional response. But today we have 2 nations choosing a deathmatch over co-existence.

At this moment, neither the Palestinian or Israeli people are holding up peace signs.

 

[FullMotoJacket]

Unfortunately the people you met are in a tiny minority. Would your Quebecer friend be able to openly embrace his atheism in Gaza? What about the feminist, do you think the average Palestinian in Gaza would tolerate her views?

Occam's Razor. Ask them.

 

[Dirty Frank]

Honest question how are those at home in need neglected. We have adequate support generous even for those that want it.

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For a start there is a multi year waiting list for affordable housing in pretty much every urban area in the country.

 

[Mad Mike]

For a start there is a multi year waiting list for affordable housing in pretty much every urban area in the country.

Maybe I’m missing the math, but at minimum 33% of gross income, a single full timer wage earner can afford the average room rent in Toronto. 2 people earning minimum wage can afford a 1br apt.

I can’t hire reliable unskilled workers for less than $20/hr. That makes $1200/mo available for rent, very doable with a roommate.

 

[timtune]

Occam's Razor. Ask them.

To be fair @Priller spoke of a feminist and the video asks about LGBT.

 

[timtune]

According to Nobel prize winner Steven Weinberg "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it , you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things it takes religion"

Blaise Pascal put it another way "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction"

I believe they are 100% correct.

 

[bitzz]

Occam's Razor. Ask them.

Now go ask the same questions in Utah

 

[FullMotoJacket]

Now go ask the same questions in Utah

I've never seen or heard of any gays being thrown off buildings in Utah.

Plenty of videos from Syria and Lebanon if you'd like me to dig some up for you.