General Updates and News

[Keith P.]

Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark

I'm tired of the rhetoric as well. Society in general is getting weird. While I'm generally in favour of better access for cyclists and 100% in favour of making the roads safer for them, when reasoning that borders on the ridiculous is used to justify the latest greatest project (like the Macdonald bridge flyover, for example), I get turned off. When I hear things that amount to "let's make life more difficult for the masses so they will be forced into following our agenda", I get turned off even more.

Frankly, as a society we seem to be pushed more into being followers of BS from people who like to use fear from over-inflated risks as reasoning to force us into a mindset that sometimes defies logic or reason. In general, it is starting to feel like we are less 'free' to follow our own thoughts than we've ever been in the past, and the concept of risk has been amplified to a point that it's actually starting to cause a decrease in quality of life for many.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues once Covid fatigue wears off.

I fully agree with all of your points, but you left out one other important one. There has been an abandonment of fiscal responsibility at the federal level due in part to Covid, in part to Junior Trudeau continually running for re-election in the Liberal Party way of buying votes with reckless spending, partly due to HRM being awash in cash due to explosive growth and not wanting to give taxpayers any sort of dividend from that, and instead funding every planning department crazy idea. So far the province has been somewhat resistant, but once the Fed largesse starts coming their way, look out. The result of it all will be a generation that will only ever see deficit spending, and ever-higher taxes.

We do not need govts trying to solve every perceived problem with no prioritization, nor with any regard for how massive the bureaucracy to try to do that would be. Once created, govt programs and jobs are very resistant to going away even if the problem is either solved or goes away on its own. We will be stuck paying for this expansion pretty much for the foreseeable future.