Saturday Night Special

Oh, dear:

Hurricane Irma pounded Cuba’s northern coast on Saturday and barreled toward Florida’s Gulf Coast as authorities scrambled to complete an unprecedented evacuation of millions of residents hours before the storm lashes the state. 

(Sidebar: cue the blame game of the impossible.)



Don't worry! Justin will help!



He will help Cuba as surely as he will "help" the economy:

Justin Trudeau insisted Wednesday that his government won’t back down on a controversial plan to end tax provisions that it says give some wealthy small business owners an unfair advantage.

**

Under the ruse of “closing a loophole,” the government is initiating a new way to tax entrepreneurs and professionals like doctors and lawyers who self-incorporate.

This tax hike disproportionately harms young female business owners.

Women who start businesses don’t qualify for EI and therefore need to put money aside for their own maternity leave — savings our feminist prime minister now wants to claw back.

Trudeau’s small business tax hike shows he doesn’t understand what it takes to start a business.

The hard work, costs and the risks only make sense if there is a reward.

But to Trudeau, these are just rich Canadians taking advantage of the system.

Recall another of Trudeau’s infamous zingers: “A large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes,” he said in 2015.

Trudeau has demonstrated time and again he doesn’t know the first thing about small businesses, the economy, or how to balance a budget.

Amigos in hell.

I'm sure he'll get around to that:

The prime minister is facing increasing pressure to revoke the honorary Canadian citizenship given to Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's de facto leader and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, over her failure to protect her country's Rohingya minority population.

When asked whether or not his government would take back Canada's special recognition of Suu Kyi on Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau skirted the question by calling the humanitarian situation "terrible" and "extremely preoccupying."

"I think we need to continue to work with the government in Myanmar with Aung San Suu Kyi with all people in the region to make sure that the people affected by this conflict are kept safe," Trudeau said from the Liberal party's caucus retreat in Kelowna.

Asked if Canada would welcome asylum claims from Rohingya Muslims, the prime minister reiterated a familiar welcoming message.

"We will always remain the open and compassionate country we are. We have ongoing processes and rules of law that apply to our refugee process," Trudeau said. "But as always, Canadians stand ready to help."

(Sidebar: naturally.) 




And his pollsters will take a biassed note of it:

At $12.5 million, federal government spending on public opinion research has reached its highest point in nearly a decade, according to a new report posted quietly on the Public Services and Procurement Canada website.

It's like they're trying to convince someone.




This:

TransCanada Corp (TRP.TO) seeks to suspend the application for its Energy East pipeline for 30 days and may abandon the project, the company said on Thursday, weeks after Canada’s National Energy Board (NEB) announced a tougher review process. 

And this:

The National Energy Board’s unprecedented decision to widen its study of the Energy East pipeline to include much broader climate change impacts suggests that the fix is in to kill the proposed $15.7 billion project.

The politically savvy have been saying for a while that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants the Alberta-to-New Brunswick project gone because it’s too politically risky in Quebec and Ontario, where he needs votes to get re-elected.

One of them is Dan Tsubouchi, chief market strategist at Stream Asset Financial Management LP in Calgary, who said back in May that “Energy East is not likely to get done, primarily due to the social opposition to the pipeline in Ontario and more so in Quebec … We can’t see the Liberals fighting against Quebec firstly and Ontario secondly on Energy East, especially if Keystone XL and Trans Mountain expansion proceed, or even if they don’t.”

On the other hand, the narrative goes, Trudeau is expected to keep on backing the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion from Alberta to the British Columbia coast because it would cost fewer votes, regardless of the new B.C. NDP government’s multiple ploys to get it stopped.

By delivering Trans Mountain, Trudeau would be able to say that he kept his promise to get Alberta oil to tidewater.

It's just a pipeline, right?




Canada already has an unspoken DACA program and it is not working out now:

Sen. Ratna Omidvar thinks we should take in up to 30,000 of these young people who now have an uncertain future.

Should we take them in? It sounds like a good idea until you consider this.

Canada has exactly the same problem.

We also have a very large population of foreigners in Canada who have no status. They brought kids who are now adults, live in fear and can’t get into university or pursue a career. We never gave them a Canadian version of DACA.

I have nothing but sympathy for those who are in the U.S. and fear what the future holds for them.

But my greater sympathies lie with the many kids I have told over the last 30 years that I’m unable to help them pursue their post-secondary studies or get a decent job without exposing them and their families to possible deportation from Canada.

Charity begins at home. Let’s ask our federal leaders to pass a Canadian DACA to help the kids who have spent most of their lives here and give them a pathway to permanent residence. Let’s tell them #WelcomeToCanada.

Perhaps the writer of this excremental should take in these "dreamers" and fund every aspect of their lives.




You knew what you were doing, New Brunswick:

Doctors in New Brunswick aren’t happy with a series of proposed federal tax changes that they say will force them to leave the province and degrade the current state of health care.

If Russians were rumoured to have been involved, people wouldn't stop talking about this:

In a Sudbury courtroom, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s former deputy chief of staff Patricia Sorbara, and Liberal bagman Gerry Lougheed, will go under the microscope.

They are being tried not under the Criminal Code, but under the Elections Act, on charges of bribery.

Bribery, in this context, is still a serious offence, which can, upon conviction and depending on whether it was done “knowingly”, result in not only heavy fines, but jail time.

You have to stretch your memory all the way back to 2014, when Wynne hand picked then federal NDP MP Glenn Thibeault, now her energy minister, to run for the Liberals in the February, 2015 Sudbury byelection.

This is a common occurrence. Party leaders often have a preferred candidate, especially if it is a near guaranteed win.

The problem was, there was another candidate who was going to seek the Liberal nomination.

Andrew Olivier had run, but lost, for the Liberals in the 2014 general election. He wanted another shot.

But Wynne wanted to be assured of the best possible chance of winning the seat back. In her mind, Thibeault was the candidate who best fit the bill.

And that’s all fair ball in politics, as distasteful or unfair as it may seem.

What this trial is about, however, is whether Sorbara and Lougheed offered Olivier an appointment or job to clear the path for Thibeault.

The Liberal party didn’t want to have a public nomination battle, and presumably, they didn’t want it to look as if they had bullied a potential Liberal candidate with a disability (Olivier happens to be a quadriplegic) out of going for the nomination.

According to recordings of their conversations made by Olivier, who taped them because he cannot physically take notes, both Sorbara and Lougheed claimed to be speaking on behalf of the premier.

Wynne also spoke to Olivier separately, although that conversation was not recorded.

When the OPP’s Anti-Rackets Squad originally investigated Olivier’s claims of a bribe, he told investigators Wynne did not make a direct job offer to him during their conversation.

Nonetheless, Det.-Constable Erin Thomas noted in OPP documents that: “I believe this reference to the premier’s authority threatens the appearance of the government’s integrity.”

Wynne, who is not charged, (nor is Thibeault) is set to testify Sept. 13 as a Crown witness.

What is said and done are two different things:

Across the country, the busiest courts and the ones that handle most criminal cases are the provincial courts; they now will have 18 months to get a case from charge to trial.

In the superior courts — each province and territory has one and though they have different names, they handle all jury trials and thus the most serious charges, such as murder — the upper limit will be 30 months. ...

Under R v Morin, only then would a judge find that the accused’s rights under Section 11(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom — essentially the right to a reasonably speedy trial — had been breached. ...

But the significance of chronically delayed trials is not only about “how much suffering an accused has endured,” the court said, but also about the damage a creakily moving system does to public confidence in the justice system.

“And public confidence is essential to the survival of the system itself, as a fair and balanced criminal justice system simply cannot exist without the support of the community,” the judges said.

But in the almost quarter-century since Morin, the court said, “the system has lost its way. The framework set out in Morin has given rise to both doctrinal and practical problems, contributing to a culture of delay and complacency towards it.”

**

Ontario’s highest court has ruled that an alleged killer must stand trial for first-degree murder in Ottawa, even though it took four years for his case to come near a jury. 

In a closely watched decision issued Thursday, the Court of Appeal for Ontario re-instated the murder charge against former soldier Adam Picard, ruling that the delays in his case fell within exceptions set down by the Supreme Court in R. v. Jordan.

The appeal court said the trial judge should have considered the seriousness of the case, among other things, in making her ruling.

“First degree murder is the most serious offence in the Criminal Code. Given the serious nature of the alleged crime, there is a heightened societal interest in a trial on the merits,” Justice Paul Rouleau said in writing for the three-member appeal panel.

The court overturned the judge’s decision to toss out the murder case on the eve of Picard’s six-week trial due to excessive delays.

Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon said Thursday he intends to review the decision to determine if there’s the basis for an appeal to the Supreme Court.

“It’s obviously a disappointment,” he said.

It was expected that Picard would be re-arrested Thursday on a first-degree murder charge.

Last November, in a case that sent shock waves through the province’s legal system, Ontario Superior Court Justice Julianne Parfett stunned an Ottawa courtroom by staying the murder charge against Picard because of unreasonable delay. 

“I cannot but emphasize that the more serious the charges, the more the justice system has to work to ensure that the matter is tried within a reasonable time,” Parfett said in handing down her ruling. “The thread that runs through the present case is the culture of complacency that the Supreme Court condemned in Jordan.”

In July 2016, the Supreme Court said that even the most serious criminal cases must be concluded within 30 months of charges being laid. 

But Ontario’s appeal court disagreed with Parfett’s interpretation of the Jordan decision.

The panel said the Picard case deserved more latitude since charges were laid well before the release of Jordan, and that the delays incurred would have been acceptable under the previous legal regime.

It's a gong show. 

Why ever doesn't Canada belong to a missile defense coalition?

Conservative foreign affairs critic Erin O’Toole says Canada should be part of any coalition that seeks to defend against missiles from North Korea — and it shouldn’t be afraid to put money on the table. 

“I don’t think any Canadian would want us to be a free rider,” O’Toole said on the margins of the Conservative Party’s caucus retreat in Winnipeg Thursday. 

“We have to work with the United States, with South Korea, with Japan, to make sure that we play a clear partnership role. And that could mean some funding, depending on what is to be done in a collectivist coalition.”

No, China will not give up North Korea but it will still take the South China Sea:

Without any doubt, China can stop Kim Jong-un’s missile tests.  Once and for all, and save a lot of trouble for America and its allies—and for Asian market investors.

But to do that, China needs a big prize, the South China Sea. All of it, so Beijing can write its own navigation rules, exploit all the riches that are hidden beneath, and satisfy the nationalistic sentiment it has nurtured.

 Yes, that's because it's Buzzfeed:

Hey, I’m no human polygraph, but I know what bullshit smells like. A 30-second Google search yields this New York Times article (I know) noting that “[s]uccessive American administrations have privately raised the issue of North Korea in talks with Cairo, but with little success.” Suddenly?

Egypt makes up a very small part of the value of North Korea’s total trade — but it attracted headlines in 2008 when Orascom, an Egyptian telecom firm, set up the first North Korean 3G network. And Egypt is a well-known buyer of North Korean missiles and other weapons.

Again, Buzzfeed is out of its depth, leaving out revelations by better reporters that Orascom’s venture in North Korea was a likely violation of U.S. law, a fiasco for its shareholders, and a career-discriminating event for its CEO, Naguib Sawiris. All of which also goes unmentioned.

(Kamsahamnida)





And people have such faith in the public education system:

Teachers union leaders hoping to discount the runaway academic success of charter schools have claimed charters lure the best-performing kids, leaving traditional, union-run public schools to handle poor-performing and struggling students. In its statement launching the anti-charter "Kids Not Profits" campaign, for instance, the California Teachers Association claimed that charters "cherry-pick the students...weeding out and turning down students with special needs."

Now a series of reports in California and elsewhere show the opposite is true. In one case, educators in the San Diego Unified School District have been counseling their students with low grade-point averages to transfer into charter schools, especially online charters, according to a Voice of San Diego report last month.

And now, the battle to the strong ... or puffy:

(Merci)