Most of Canada's reserves are tar sands which are about as pleasant as the name describes - tar mixed with sand. There's a lot of it but it's expensive to extract. So for one thing these reserves are somewhat hypothetical based on the price of oil. The Saudis are profitable at almost any price while new oil sands projects have a break-even cost of somewhere around $90 per barrel. (http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/how-high-break...)
Even with the normal oil plus tar sands, oil is only Canada's #2 export behind vehicles, 16% of exports. Canada has a well-diversified economy quite unlike Venezuela, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Iran isn't terrible but oil is still 2/3rds of their exports.
Saudi oil comes out of the ground in a form that you can pretty much barrel and ship, they have it so easy. Canada's oil isn't even oil, it's more like ashphalt.
Canada is not a free society. There are various restrictions on pornography, just like the US for example. They have no problem with censorship.
Edit: to be clear, I am referring to written or drawn pornography depicting fictional minors engaged in sexual acts. Not photography or video of child abuse, or rape porn, or even bestiality (although I am against the lattermost item being illegal too).
>I can say with experience that access to pornography produced by consensual adults is largely unhindered here.
Then you're wrong. Drawn pornography that appears to show fictional characters who appear to be under the age of 18 is illegal, and there have been prosecutions under this law. Even such written material is illegal.
My definition of true freedom is anarchy (which is why I am an anarachist), but I accept that there is a different definition under the current liberal democracies of the world, and even by those standards, Canada is not free.
These cases are astonishingly rare in Canada. Meanwhile Australia makes large swaths of the internet illegal on the off chance cartoon pornography might show up.
Of all the 'freedoms' we can worry about, as a Canadian, not having the right to see 'hand drawn child porn' is not remotely one that I am concerned about.
The 'real' issue of freedom in Canada is that it's basically the only country in the world wherein it's illegal to pay a doctor to help you. That's actually pretty crazy when you start to think about it.
Ah, I replied to the wrong comment. "Canada is that it's basically the only country in the world wherein it's illegal to pay a doctor to help you" - this is factually untrue. There are private medical clinics in Canada. Doctors are not allowed to bill both provincial health systems as well as the patient at the same time.
So then because you're not affected, then it's not important? A precedent has been set for this kind of censorship. First governments start to censor the things that people fimd disgusting.
I don't really know what else to say. Most people value freedom, and that in my opinion ought to include the freedom to say things that are 'disgusting'.
Do you think it is right for someone to be imprisoned for it? I'm sure they care, and you would too if you were them.
> The 'real' issue of freedom in Canada is that it's basically the only country in the world wherein it's illegal to pay a doctor to help you. That's actually pretty crazy when you start to think about it.
It's illegal to privstely pay all kinds of people providing public services to help you all ocer the world; Canada defining medicine as that kind of public service is atypical, but I don't see how it's "crazy".
