Saturday Post

Aaahhh, the glorious week that was...



According to the RCMP, Aaron Driver had a more powerful bomb that did not explode:

Police now believe the blast in the cab was caused by the detonators and that the more powerful explosives never actually ignited, he said, although Cabana added the forensic investigation of the homemade bomb was still underway. 

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is a detestable, disgusting creature who continues to ruin Ontario day-by-day with the help of unions and mouth-breathing voters who are willing to ignore her destructive policies and corruption:

Just 16 per cent of Ontarians approve of Wynne’s job performance, according to a new Forum research poll. Lorne Bozinoff, the firm’s president, said in a statement: “It appears Premier Wynne’s chickens have finally come home to roost, and voters have started to notice the controversies surrounding her government.”

Expanding the hours of a harm-reduction site is not going to stop drug overdoses. If the proponents of those sites really felt that these sites did any really good, they should fund it all themselves:

Vancouver Coastal Health is launching a six-month pilot project that will see Insite operate round-the-clock on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday during weeks when social assistance cheques are issued.

Right now, it is open each day from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. PT.

There have been 433 overdose deaths in B.C. so far in 2016, which is nearly a 75 per cent increase over this time last year according to the B.C. Coroners Service.

The health authority says it monitored overdose rates on a week-by-week basis from January to May.

It noted an 80 per cent increase in opioid-related overdoses during weeks when welfare cheques were distributed.

"We're seeing a dramatic increase in the number of people overdosing at Insite as well as overdose visits to emergency departments during welfare-cheque week," said Dr. Ron Joe, the health authority's associate medical director of substance abuse services.

I'm sure personal responsibility and fracking might alleviate some of these problems:

A new report by Equifax Canada says that Canadians owe an average of $21,000 in consumer debt, not including mortgages.

New Brunswick's debt is even higher than the national average, at more than $22,500, a 5.1 per cent increase over last year. This is also the largest increase of all the provinces.

These debt levels have a significant impact on both the people that are struggling as well as on the economy as a whole. ...

Adults between 18 and 25 are also bearing a large share of the load. The Equifax study found that the delinquency rate for that group increased significantly as well. In other words, millenials are struggling to pay back their debts.

"Our current credit market just makes it very easy to get credit." says Larry Crandall. "We need to go back, we need to start saving, we need to start planning our money, we need to start budgeting."

John Eisner agrees, and believes that the issue is largely that young people aren't getting taught the skills they need in order to manage their money. 

"Why don't we teach this in school?" he asked. "This should be a part of the curriculum, because this is something everyone that has to contend with in their lives."

Does one really need to be told that spending too much and limiting one's opportunities are bad ideas? 

Really? 

A chief objects to a discount airline's creating a hub in Winnipeg:

Travellers may clear Canada Jetlines for landing, but an investment group of seven Manitoba First Nations wants the discount airline startup grounded before takeoff.

Canada Jetlines wants Transport Minister Marc Garneau to give the B.C.-based company an exemption on foreign investment rules for airlines. The current limit is 25 per cent. The company says it has an investor lined up from Europe and wants the cap raised to 49 per cent.

Canada Jetlines president and CEO Jim Scott says the company will bring new ultra low fares to Winnipeg, and 250 direct jobs and 1,200 total jobs, as well as inject $260 million into the local economy by the eighth year of operation.

The prairie city would become an east-west hub for the carrier, he said. ...

The group of seven Manitoba First Nations recently made a sizable investment in NewLeaf Travel. The Winnipeg-based ticket seller has partnered with Flair Airlines to offer discount flights, operating 60 flights a week since starting in July.

Speaking on behalf of the South Beach Capital Partners, Brokenhead Chief Jim Bear says the letter being sent to the federal minister on a rule change asks for a definite no.

"As First Nations we are always being told, 'Why don't you guys get into business? Why don't you work towards self-sufficiency?' Then when we do, to have the audacity of foreign ownership come into play," Bear told CBC News.

Bear says the partners are also writing to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett to lobby on their behalf against the exemption.

The group hopes to leverage its investment in NewLeaf into training partnerships with schools such as Red River College.

Bear noted that the port of Churchill and the rail line to the community are in the hands of foreign investors, and now the port is being closed and rail service has been cut in half.

It's called competition.

Get in the game.




Carbon taxes are scams and should not even exist let alone be raised:

The carbon tax was launched in 2008 as part of a Climate Action Plan which was considered one of former premier Gordon Campbell's signature achievements.

Clark froze the tax after she took over from Campbell as Liberal leader and premier in 2011.

Currently, the tax sits at $30 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions. The province's Climate Leadership Team review team had called for a $10 increase in the tax starting in 2018.

According to the review panel, greenhouse gas emissions in B.C. have risen since 2012, making it "extremely difficult" for the province to meet its own legislated target for 2020 of cutting emissions by one-third from 2007 levels.

Critics expressed dismay at Clark's refusal to increase the carbon tax even before she formally made the announcement.

"The commitments in the plan represent a piecemeal approach that the Climate Leadership team warned would prove economically and environmentally ineffective," said Joshua McNab, B.C. director of the Pembina Institute on Thursday.

That Pembina Institute.


Also:

Rieder and his Georgetown collaborators have a proposal, and the first thing they stress is that it’s not like China’s abusive one-child policy. It aims to persuade people to choose fewer children with a strategy that boils down to carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich.

Ethically, Rieder says poor nations get some slack because they’re still developing, and because their per capita emissions are a sliver of the developed world’s. Plus, it just doesn’t look good for rich, Western nations to tell people in poor ones not to have kids. He suggests things like paying poor women to refill their birth control and — something that’s had proven success — widespread media campaigns.

In the 1970s and ’80s, a wave of educational soap operas in Latin America, Asia and Africa wove family planning into their plot lines. Some countries did this when they faced economic crisis. The shows are credited with actually changing people’s opinions about family size.

For the sticks part of the plan, Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child.

Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids. He knows that sounds crazy.

Oh, someone is not happy:

The official Korean Central News Agency also accused Seoul of using the defection of Thae Yong Ho, formerly a minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, for propaganda aimed at insulting the North Korean leadership. It also denounced the British government for ignoring international protocol by rejecting what it said were demands to have Thae extradited back to the North and instead handing him over to the South.

KCNA didn't identify Thae by name, but said North Korea had ordered the "fugitive" who had worked at the embassy in Britain to return to the North in June to be investigated for a series of crimes, including embezzling government funds, leaking state secrets and sexually assaulting a minor.

It said that Thae "should have received legal punishment for the crimes he committed, but he discarded the fatherland that raised him and even his own parents and brothers by fleeing, thinking nothing but just saving himself, showing himself to be human scum who lacks even an elementary level of loyalty and even tiny bits of conscience and morality that are required for human beings."

In announcing the defection, Seoul's Unification Ministry said Wednesday that Thae was the second-highest North Korean official at the embassy and the most senior North Korean diplomat ever to defect to South Korea. In 1997, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt fled but resettled in the United States.

Don't talk about banning the burqa; do it:

Germany could impose a ban on women wearing burkas or full-face Islamic veils at schools and universities and while driving, under proposals announced by Angela Merkel’s party.

... says the party that allowed in so-called refugees.




Ukraine readies itself for more Putin aggression:

Vladimir Putin sought to ease tensions after Ukraine warned of a possible “full-scale” invasion by Russia, even as he convened a meeting in Crimea to demand heightened security measures on the peninsula he annexed in 2014.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump, fresh from his aid tour of flood-ridden Louisiana (Obama didn't go because golf supersedes any disaster and drama, according to this walking piece of sh--, just isn't his thing), strongly recommends black American voters to stop electing the same Democrats who keep them jobless and marginalised:

"Tonight, I'm asking for the vote of every single African American citizen in this country who wants to see a better future," the Guardian quoted Trump as saying.

He then presented the crowd with a start question, "What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?"

"You're living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?," he added.

Heavens to Betsy! He made sense!


Because Rex Murphy:

There are some who see the prospect of Hillary Clinton winning the U.S. presidency as a milestone for modern feminism and women in general. Yet Clinton’s decades-long march to the White House owes much of its success to her rapscallion, silver-tongued husband, Bill Clinton. She did not storm the citadel of male power and privilege from the outside; she was escorted in under the banner of one of its most flamboyant high achievers. She came into politics by the back door of her mate’s male prowess. She may be the first female presidential nominee for a major party, but it’s hard to say she shattered glass ceilings. She has always had Bill’s key to the penthouse.

And she has screwed over any number of people along the way.




Doctors in Ottawa want to study the link between folic acid intake and autism:

Two Ottawa-based researchers have been awarded a $9.8-million grant to study the link between taking high doses of folic acid during pregnancy and giving birth to a child with autism. 

Folic acid, the vitamin form of folate — a B vitamin naturally found in fruits and vegetables — is known to reduce certain types of birth defects, in particular spina bifida. 

Health Canada currently recommends that all pregnant women take 0.4 milligrams of folic acid per day. But a recent study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health linked excessively high levels of folic acid in pregnant women to an increase in children being born with autism.

Researchers found that women who had four times the "adequate" amount of folic acid had double the risk of their babies developing autism spectrum disorder. 

"We have long known that a folate deficiency in pregnant mothers is detrimental to her child's development. But what this tells us is that excessive amounts may also cause harm," said one of the study's authors, Dr. Daniele Fallin in a statement released in May. ...

Walker and his colleague Dr. Shi Wu Wen have been studying the effects of folic acid for 15 years. Their current work focuses on whether taking high doses of the supplement can help prevent preeclampsia — the leading cause of maternal death in the developed world — in pregnant women. 

In 2008 they published an observational study of 2,950 mothers in Ottawa and Kingston, Ont. They found taking folic acid in the early second trimester lowered a mother's risk of preeclampsia by 63 per cent.  

In 2011 the team recruited 2,464 mothers at risk of preeclampsia from five different countries around the world. Half of the mothers took a high dose of folic acid throughout their pregnancy, and the rest stopped taking it after the first trimester. The results of this study will be published next year. 

Now Walker and Wen intend to follow the children of those women and assess their neurological development. 

"We'll definitely have the answer in the best possible study designed to see the safety and long-term effects of higher dose folic acid," Walker said.

The last Tragically Hip concert ever.