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What did Canada do? (startrek.website)
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[-] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 212 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Canada's Hundred Days. Aka the last 100 days of WW1.

Functionally, Canada won WW1 for the allies.

Being under 10% of the WW1 force, in that period they tackled defences everyone else thought impregnable and shattered them, like the Hindenburg Line, and in the process paved the way for the allied advance. They also took out a quarter of the German forces in that time.

While they did arguably use proto-blitzkrieg tactics of using lots of machine guns, and then also using vehicles to move troops even quicker while using said machine guns, one of the biggest factors was a prodigious use of chemical weapons.

To the point that in the interwar period, Canada had the largest capacity and stores of chemical weapons. During WW2, said stockpile is one of the reasons Hitler refused to use chemical weapons on the allies.

Edit: And a lot of the rules on fair treatment of POWs and rules on capturing surrendered soldiers also stems of Canadian soldiers behaviours during WW1.

[-] charliespider@lemmy.world 94 points 1 year ago

It was totally justifiable! We had to end the war cuz hockey season was about to start.

[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 42 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To be fair, French Canadians were overrepresented and didn't want to be there so they figured if they were super good at it they could go back home ASAP.

[-] Narrrz@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago

so the French are cowards, Canadians are teddy bears, but somehow when you combine the two they not only cancel our but hyperamplify the opposite?

[-] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 99 points 1 year ago

The French will riot for weeks if you raise their retirement age. Americans will just complain online if you take away their human rights.

The French are not the cowards.

[-] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 year ago

The French shut the entire country down when the government tried to raise the diesel tax by 10 cents, don't fuck with French labor

[-] Narrrz@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago

good point 🤔

[-] rovingnothing29@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Hydrogen and Oxygen are extremely flammable. When combined they make water.

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[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

It's like Civ Gandhi with nuclear weapons. Aggression goes negative and wraps around to the max.

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[-] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Fun fact, numbers to numbers for personnel, vehicles, equipment, air force and navy, France has more stuff than Britain in every category.

I don't know too much of how good their stuff is other than the Rafale being a fine piece of tech.

[-] ech@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago

Two incredibly dumb generalizations proven wrong in this very thread, but people like you are still perpetuating them.

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[-] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 year ago

In our defense we were jonesing for maple syrup.

[-] spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 year ago

We're a simple people, enjoying quiet lives and good standard of living. But threaten our maple syrup - even from afar - and we will give you a reason for the Geneva convention!

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[-] dangblingus@lemmy.world 174 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Genocide of our indigenous population mostly. The worst of it ended in 1996 when the last residential school closed. Basically, the Catholic Church under the authorization of the Canadian Federal Government in the 1800s and onwards, abducted children from indigenous communities, took them to boarding schools where they attempted to assimilate them into Eurocentric culture by punishing them for speaking their own language and practicing their own culture. Beatings, sexual abuse, and neglect were commonplace, with many children dying of illness, exposure, or violence. Many children survived the schools and are still alive today to tell us about it. There are also mass graves at several of these schools where children's corpses were dumped and hidden from public view, until ground x-ray technology came around and we found the graves.

Also, random weird fact: women weren't allowed to have bank accounts in Canada until like 1964.

[-] ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 31 points 1 year ago

Other random weird fact: Women weren't allowed to have a bank account in the USA until 1974.

[-] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 27 points 1 year ago

Women weren’t allowed to have a bank account in the USA until 1974.

You know that isn't true, right?

[-] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 26 points 1 year ago

Except it was effectively true, because banks were allowed to consider marital status as a risk factor. That was made illegal in 1974. It's in your own article.

[-] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 year ago

The article says the 1974 law concerns credit applications, not bank accounts

I'm going need a 90 minute documentary and a giant bowl of popcorn to absorb all this

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[-] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago

Except it was effectively true,

Only in the same way it was true that men couldn't vote in the US until shortly before the Civil War. Because before that most states didn't have state laws mandating that all free male citizens be allowed to vote.

[-] ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

I don't know what to tell you. At least one of my grandmothers needed their husband's signature to open a bank account in the 60's, and it wasn't because she didn't have assets in her name.

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[-] Gestrid@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

For me, in the US, Canada is like that child where, if things are quiet, you know they're doing something bad. Because we in the US rarely ever actually hear anything bad about Canada.

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[-] lauha@lemmy.one 20 points 1 year ago

So this is really not about what Canada alone did, but what Catholic church and Canada did.

[-] LostWon@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The US called their residential schools "boarding schools," but I don't know if those had the same kind of lasting legacy Canada has, based on the schools they had in the US.

[-] Stanwich@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Really. We found the Graves of dumped children? So we finally have a body?

[-] Tavarin@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago
[-] earthquake@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you're wondering why Stanwich here is acting weird, it's a common right-wing conspiracy in Canada that these unmarked graves are "unproven" because they were discovered with ground-radar instead of dug up. They won't accept that there were deaths at these schools until they're dug up and the remains positively identified, at which point, one assumes, they'll accept that the attempt at cultural genocide that went on at these schools also had a side effect of mass graves.

[-] Snowpix@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Or they'll do some mental gymnastics and claim it's all a conspiracy to make the Church look bad or that it wasn't as bad as it is. Can't trust conservatives to ever admit being wrong, because they almost never do.

[-] Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago

Wait… it didn’t close until 1996?

[-] Tekchip@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Canadian Federal Government? So Britain then? /S

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[-] TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 113 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Nazi's got the term, and concept, 'final solution' from a Canadian:

"It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem."

"…the system was open to criticism. Insufficient care was exercised in the admission of children to the schools. The well-known predisposition of Indians to tuberculosis resulted in a very large percentage of deaths among the pupils. They were housed in buildings not carefully designed for school purposes, and these buildings became infected and dangerous to the inmates. It is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein."

(This is why there was a fair bit of anger in Canada when Civ 6 added Wilfred Laurier as Canada's leader.

EDIT: I transposed Laurier and MacDonald here, as someone pointed out. The above quotes are from Duncan Campbell Scott, as Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs under MacDonald. Laurier was a key architect of the Residential School system. TLDR; MacDonald started the genocide, Laurier built upon it.)

[-] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I’m not disputing any of your points, but Civ 6 has Wilfred Laurier as Canada’s leader

[-] TSG_Asmodeus@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Thank you for pointing that out, I switched Laurier and MacDonald after quoting MacDonald's Deputy. Cheers!

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 87 points 1 year ago
[-] TheMightyCanuck@sh.itjust.works 66 points 1 year ago

"Good" at war : ✅️

Human rights : ❌️

Supporting catholic genocide : ✅️

We have a really weird history that isn't really something to be proud of..

[-] at_an_angle@lemmy.one 23 points 1 year ago

To be fair, that's in line with every country.

[-] dx1@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago
[-] Smoogs@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

And There in lies what annoys me with Trudeau. He is the epitome of the morally pompous kid that shows up in the middle of the fight and decides right then who is the bully and the victim without getting the full story of how the fight started and just doesn’t care. Cringefully and willfully naive with an unhealthy side of ego. The worst kind of Canadian.

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[-] Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz 28 points 1 year ago

Never ask a woman her age

Never ask a man his salary

Never ask Canada what the “indigenous boarding schools” were for

Never ask Russia, America, Hamas or Israel why they all see the Geneva Convention as a to-do list

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There were also jewish refugees that were not allowed into Canada. Afair, the bigger arsehole in that story was the UK, that panicked and decided that everyone who fled Germany during some 193x–194x must certainly be a german spy. They forcefully moved people to camps, and also to foreign territories, but it didn't work terribly well with Canada, too.

I though this to be the article I first heard this story from, but it doesn't seem to address that. Here I found some more details, e.g. on how refugees were in prisoner of war camps along with actual nazis.

Edit: But those are likely not related to the question of what Canada did to become example of how Geneva convention should be, so maybe an unnecessary info ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[-] Epicurus0319@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago

Least racist treatment of Jews in 20th-century Europe

[-] thelazywriter@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago

To add to the list: internment of Hungarian and Ukrainian Canadians in WWI in Canada (some other Eastern Europeans too); internment of Japanese Canadians in WWII in Canada.

[-] K0W4LSK1@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 year ago

Ignorance aint so bliss anymore lmao

[-] little_hermit@lemmus.org 9 points 1 year ago

So like non-francophones in Quebec, but without the beatings.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well Justin Trudeau basically had an "Aww shucks" attitude to churches being burnt down because it took focus off of his grandpa's "residential schools"

And then he filled MAID full of loopholes to encourage mass genocide of the poor.

[-] RIP_Cheems@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Add Canada to the list of countries not to mess with.

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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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