they should be presenting their forecasts in terms of dialectics.

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/what-happened-to-winter-so-far-in-canada-and-a-look-ahead-to-the-february-pattern

the kitchen was really pretty filthy. so i'm glad i've got a handle on it. that was kind of a major project.

now, i need to make some calls.

last year, i sent a letter to my mpp. nothing.

this year, i sent something to the finance minister & the prime minister. we'll see if i at least get a response.

as the credit is intended to offset inflation, it should be distributed in such a way that shields it from tax collectors. otherwise, it's the most vulnerable that are going to get squeezed by it, and i think what we have in front of us is ignorance rather than malice - they were too clueless to work it out, and the ndp were too weak to force them to.

if you could sit the fuckers down and force them to listen for roughly five minutes, i'm actually relatively confident that they'd agree they fucked up and promise to fix it. but that's not exactly easy to do.

so, how do you get awareness out?

they didn't fix it....

that means that i'm going to end up with a $224 refund from the carbon tax, but it will be used to pay down my $100,000 student loan debt (that is, vanish into thin air) instead of given to me to spend in the economy. it makes no sense. but that's what happens when you let entitled pricks write the budget.

it's not like it's my money in the sense that i paid into it, and i don't feel like i'm dealing with any real inflation in anything i actually buy, although you'd have to ask somebody with a car about that more directly. i don't feel ripped off. i'm not angry.

i'm just baffled, still - even if it's not coming out of my pocket, it's really just a dumb policy to take $200 away from the poorest people in society and give it to some faceless bankers to pay down a debt that shouldn't exist in the first place. so, it's actually more like that this is the least effective student loan forgiveness program of all time, and i'm scratching my head at how they could be so stupid.

and, the answer is that they purged the party of all of it's experience, so they don't have anybody around that knows how to do this kind of thing, anymore, and have written a lot of bad legislation due to not having the proper experience to avoid these mistakes.

they should have set up the climate refund in a special program, like they set up the gst rebate in. that way, you don't have people going through the absurdities that i'm going through with this.

*shrug*. that's $400 in interest to the banks from the government, now. i can't complain about that, exactly. but, it could have helped to create jobs in the local economy instead.....and i could have used it to have fun, rather than have it get wasted sitting in the bank.

i'm just about the poorest person you'll meet, and i've yet to see a dime from this supposed wealth redistribution scheme.

i have no real claim to the cash.

if they want to reduce my $100,000 student loan by $224, less than a month's interest, that strikes me as pointless. but, i wasn't planning around the money.

if inflation starts going up, i'm going to change my argument, but i don't even expect that to happen.

it was $154 last year and will be $225 this year.

as i stated before, this is petty and stupid. everybody would be better off if they sent me the money to spend; nobody benefits from sending it to the bank.

but, it's not worth wasting my time on.

i'm never going to pay that student loan debt down.

so, if they keep raising the tax, and they add a few hundred dollars to it every year, i'm going to end up with a nice little sum in a few years.

it's not worth my time now, but it will be when they have a $5000 check for me from withheld carbon tax payouts, and i can sue them for it.

let me just do the damned taxes...

...and my position, which i will restate here, is that i'm carbon-tax-neutral.

if it works as a money generating scheme for green infrastructure projects, and the government needs the accounting trick to sleep at night, then whatever. i'm not going to oppose taxing pollution.

but, i'm beyond skeptical of the actual efficacy of pigovian taxation schemes. the actual mechanism won't work - we need to print oodles of money and spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.

my tentative support is really as a first step in the absence of a better plan.

but, they couldn't even do it right....

yes, folks.

this government is so incompetent that it couldn't even figure out how to implement the carbon tax properly.

to be clear....

my student loan debt is pushing $100,000. the minimum payment, which i haven't paid in something like 12 or 13 years, would be over $1200, most of it interest.

my carbon tax credit was something like $300.

my gross income is less than $15,000/yr, or around $1260/month. my gross income is less than my minimum payment.

so, could i have used the $300? sure.

is it going to help me pay down my debt by withholding it? no....

i wonder if they still have it, though. i don't think they can actually apply it towards the debt, i think they can only hold it. with interest, i presume.

last year when i did my taxes, i was baffled to realize i couldn't access my carbon credits because i had a student loan debt. i'm able to access virtually every other tax credit. so, i decided that was an oversight.

let's see if they've fixed it or not.

have prices come up? i don't use a lot of fuel. i walk or bike everywhere, and the way the economy works in canada is that we all import most of our food. one of the few local crops i buy is soy milk, and it may have gone up a little, but it's hard to attribute that to the carbon tax by eyeballing it.

i sent out letters and stuff...

but, i decided at the time that it wasn't worth really thinking much about because it came out in the wash, anyways. i could use the check, sure. but, it wasn't hurting me to have the accounting come out the way it did.

as mentioned then and again right now, this is a mistake on their behalf. you can go through dozens of tax credits, and they all exempt people in debt. there wasn't a change in policy. they just fucked up...

let's hope they've fixed it; i'll find out in an hour, if i can stay awake that long.

so, i didn't want to sleep all day, but i did, and it's time to get up. i am awake. finally. i tried a few times and fell back over again...

i dunno. the headache last week, maybe? i didn't sleep a lot last week over all, though, either. maybe that big meal i had yesterday just pulled the general lack of sleep together and said "now". *shrug*.

i need to get some fruit, first, then do some taxes, then get back to cleaning.

then, i will need to make a number of calls in the morning before i get out for some errands. it'll at least be warmer out, maybe warm enough that i can avoid the face mask. 

i will need to call the divisional court first to figure out if they accepted the factum or not. when i talked to them on friday, they basically made it clear that there was no way they'd accept it. i'm not mailing a reply factum if they won't accept the factum. i'll also need to figure out what's going on with the motion.

i should also get a more detailed time listing for the oral presentation to send to the cops. i kind of dropped that on them.

maybe it's better that i'm wide awake...

something broke inside of the liberal party in the path between dion and trudeau.

they're ruining the country, apparently on purpose.

the kinds of resolutions that canada would be forced to support if placed on the security council could permanently destroy our international reputation.

we can't take these outside stands like the scandinavian countries do. we'll have to get our hands dirty.

look at the country's current venezuela policy, for an example. it's more than an embarrassment, it's unrecognizable.

what minimal attachment i have to the historical values of this country would evaporate as we become usa-lite, and i'd find myself wanting to move to europe to get out.

i don't want to be on the security council :(.

that was a good 14 hours or so of sleep.

i guess i needed it.

i have a big day today...