Monday Post: On the Eve of the Eve of All Hallows

 

 
Yep.



Lots to talk about ...



Mary Dawson - this Mary Dawson - :

The federal ethics watchdog has never proactively checked whether public office holders with potential conflicts of interests are actually recusing themselves from decisions that could place them in an actual conflict, HuffPost Canada has learned.

In her 10 years in office, Mary Dawson, the House of Commons' conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, has only once investigated whether an MP failed to do so because of a conflict — and that was after a complaint was lodged by another MP, her spokesperson told HuffPost.

"You asked whether the Commissioner has investigated a member for not recusing himself or herself formally (by filling a recusal) or informally (by not showing up to votes or debates) because of a conflict," Margot Booth, the communications and outreach manager for Dawson's office wrote in an email to HuffPost. "The Commissioner has undertaken one inquiry in relation to a failure to recuse, the Thibault Inquiry in 2008."

Dawson has never investigated a cabinet minister.

- claims that many cabinet ministers, not just the slippery Bill Morneau, have retained control over assets that they would expect greedy farmers, waitresses and small business owners claim for tax purposes:

A number of other Trudeau cabinet ministers are in the same situation as Finance Minister Bill Morneau and have managed to retain control of assets they would be required to divest if this wealth wasn't being held indirectly through a holding company or similar mechanism.

Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson's office declines to identify the ministers, citing confidentiality rules, but confirms that a handful hold these assets indirectly and therefore aren't required to sell them or place them beyond reach.

The office would only say "fewer than five cabinet ministers currently hold controlled assets indirectly.

"This means that under the Conflict of Interest Act, they are not required to divest."

When asked whether the Prime Minister's Office believes these ministers should divest these assets, PMO spokesperson Cameron Ahmad responded, "We expect all Members of Parliament to work with the Commissioner and structure their affairs according to her guidance."

Controlled assets in federal ethics law are those whose value could be directly or indirectly affected by decisions taken by the government, including publicly traded stocks, stock options and bonds.

(Sidebar: like this.) 

Conflict-of-interest law in Canada requires cabinet ministers to divest assets such as publicly traded shares by selling them in an arms-length transaction or putting them in a blind trust beyond reach until they leave office.

The exception, according to the Ethics Commissioner's office, is if these shares or similar assets are held indirectly through a holding company or similar mechanism.

This is how "transparent" and "co-operative" Mary Dawson's bosses have been:

At least four other federal departments and agencies have ongoing contracts with Morneau Shepell, the human resources firm formerly run by Finance Minister Bill Morneau.

Given Mary Dawson's "impartiality" and "forthrightness", can anyone expect her to be an objective rudder in the muddy waters of the House of Commons?


She is a yes-man, an errand-boy, and, soon, a speed bump for a bus:

What we have heard now is that a number of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers have taken advantage of the same loophole that Morneau used to maintain control of his wealth while deciding on the wealth of the country, and all are hiding behind the same skirt that Trudeau so loves to cite as their guidance counsellor — the skirt of Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson.

Now, two things should have happened by now, but haven’t.

One, Mary Dawson should no longer be the federal ethics commissioner, now working through her third extension.

And, secondly, Bill Morneau should no longer be finance minister, not flailing away to regain lost trust. ...

As Mary Dawson has confirmed, a number of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers — supposedly “fewer than five” — who watched Morneau get grilled in Question Period by Tory leader Andrew Scheer and NDP house leader Guy Caron on his dodge of inscrutable ethics were playing the same game with their own investments.

Instead of putting their assets in a blind trust, they retained control of their money by holding it indirectly in a numbered corporation, or some similar mechanism.

And these are people who have insider information that goes way beyond normal insider information.

They are legislators, and they are legislators who sit in on cabinet meetings that decide on financial policy.

They are the most powerful flies on the wall in the country, yet Mary Dawson obviously gave them the advice that did not prohibit them from doing a Morneau.

As PMO spokesman Cameron Ahmad told the Globe and Mail, “We expect all Members of Parliament to work with the Commissioner and structure their affairs according to her guidance.”

This, of course, has been Trudeau’s pitch since the outset of the Morneau Affair, capitalized here to because it is indeed a scandal.

It enabled Trudeau to stand up in the House of Commons and, with the sincerest of faces, tell Canadians that Morneau — and now a bunch of his cabinet ministers — were complying with the ethics commissioner, and that Canadians had nothing to fear because everything was above board.

If this is not hiding behind Mary Dawson’s skirt, what is?

Indeed.

When it gets too hot, Trudeau can claim that Mary Dawson is incompetent, blame her for everything and replace her with someone similarly as complacent.


We need a revolution.


Also:

The Liberal government is not always appointing judges from a pool of "highly recommended" candidates, raising questions about whether partisan political considerations or diversity concerns are trumping merit.

And (because it bears repeating):

“Did anyone really think that the Liberals could somehow force the Trump administration into enacting their agenda — union power, climate change, aboriginal claims, gender issues?” writes Harper. “But while the Canadian government was doing that, the Americans have been laying down their real demands.”

 
The "First Nations" had financial accountability for their band chiefs until a certain party did away with it:

Last October, dozens of community members marched through the snow-covered roads of Samson Cree Nation calling for a forensic audit to scrutinize band spending.

One year later, they're one step closer to getting their wish.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada confirmed that a complaint from the community, 100 kilometres south of Edmonton, has triggered what is called a "scoping exercise" — a federal-backed examination by an auditor of previous band spending.

"The purpose of the scoping exercise is to determine if the allegations have merit and if a forensic audit is required," INAC wrote in an emailed statement.

"It's the tip of the iceberg, but at the same time it's a start in a whole new direction," said Sherry Greene, who has been leading the fight for more financial accountability, transparency and consultation with membership at Samson Cree. "In our community, nothing like this has ever been done."

Also - what do you mean "you people"?

At these times, my colleagues sometimes would make sweeping remarks about all the horrors “we” had inflicted on First Nations, and the guilt “we” bore for the crimes of “our” ancestors. In these moments, I would politely remind everyone that my Russian father came to Canada (via China) as a 10-year-old, after his dispossessed family had been forced to flee not one but two communist revolutions. On my mother’s side, my Yiddish-speaking grandfather helped his own father peddle rags on the streets of Toronto’s Jewish ghetto — an occupation that left him scant time to build residential schools, or otherwise oppress Canada’s First Nations.

  
There is a possibility of a leak at one of North Korea's nuclear test sites:

Any future nuclear test by North Korea risks collapsing its mountain test site and triggering a radiation leak, South Korea's weather agency chief said Monday.

The head of the Korea Meteorological Administration, Nam Jae-Cheol, made the comments during a parliament committee meeting in response to a lawmaker's question about whether another North Korean test could lead to such an accident.

South Korea has detected several largely small-sized earthquakes near the northeastern nuclear test site the North used for its sixth and most powerful bomb explosion in September. Experts say the quakes suggest the area, which was also used for the North's previous underground nuclear tests, is now too unstable to conduct more tests there.

Lee Won-Jin, a Korea Meteorological Administration researcher, said the analysis of satellite photos indicated there were landslides around the Punggye-ri test site after the September test. He also said there now might be a hollow space inside Mount Mantap, the granite peak where the North's test site is located, citing studies of past underground nuclear tests by the United States.

Perhaps it's time to put North Korea back on the list of those who sponsor terrorism:

Chinese police arrested several North Koreans dispatched to Beijing on suspicion of plotting to murder Mr Kim Jong Un’s 22-year-old nephew, South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported.

Two of seven North Korean agents were arrested over the alleged plot to kill Mr Kim Han Sol, whose father Kim Jong Nam was assassinated in Malaysia earlier this year, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified person familiar with North Korean issues.

North Korean defector Thae Yong-Ho to testify at the House of Representatives:

His testimony comes at a time when Kim Jong-un appears to have slowed a stream of high-level defections that had threatened to start a preference cascade and expose the regime’s entire overseas financial network. In recent months — perhaps coincidentally, since approximately the time Moon Jae-in took power in South Korea and appointed a former pro-North Korean, anti-American activist as his Chief of Staff — we’ve read about fewer high-profile defections and heard less from Thae himself. Whether that surge of defections has halted or merely gone unreported isn’t clear.

It also comes at a time when the U.S. government is also downplaying the importance of human rights in North Korea, sending messages that North Korean refugees are unwelcome, and merging the position of Special Envoy for Human Rights into a full-time part-time job instead of using it as a global pulpit for a more humane, tough-love policy.

The slowing of those defections also coincides with a campaign by the hard-left lawyers of Minbyun — a campaign largely ignored by the foreign press — to intimidate and expose refugees in the South. Pyongyang has also induced at least one high-profile defector into returning to Pyongyang and publicly renouncing the South, using means I can more easily guess based on past events than prove in this specific case. To gullible reporters, this campaign to publicize “re-defections” is evidence that North Koreans can’t adjust to life in a modern society. To more inquisitive journalists, and to the North Koreans themselves, the message will be the same one that Pyongyang’s assassins have delivered to refugees and Christian missionaries in China, to dissidents in South Korea, and at the airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur: “You can’t escape from us.” Perhaps Thae can better elucidate the reasons for this than I can.

Thae Yong-Ho also predicted that North Korea would collapse in five years. If the Moon administration is intimidating North Korean defectors, the South Korean electorate may wish to turn on him as they did the previous president. There can be no moral or legal defense for such a measure, nor can there be for anyone who would exercise this sort of unjust power over them.

Moon needs to go.


(Kamsahamnida)




American forces have captured someone they believe took part in the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi (Obama was mysteriously missing from his office at the time):

U.S. forces have captured a militant who is believed to have played a role in a 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, U.S. officials said on Monday.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that U.S. Special Operation Forces captured the militant in Libya in the past few days.

Two of the officials identified him as Mustafa al-Imam and said he had played a role in the attack and the ambassador's death.

The officials said the man was now in the custody of the Department of Justice and being transported back to the United States by the military.

They added that the operation was authorized by President Donald Trump and had notified the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord.

Proof that Trump was in his office (which is more than what one could say about his predecessor). 

Well, this must be embarrassing:

A former campaign adviser to President Donald Trump has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians, special counsel Robert Mueller said Monday, while Trump's former campaign manager and that official's business partner pleaded not guilty to felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and other counts.

There doesn't need to be any sort of dilemma. Just shoot the b@$#@rd:

Justice Department officials don’t believe they have enough evidence to bring charges against an American citizen and suspected member of ISIL who was captured in Syria last month, but the U.S. faces immediate legal challenges if he is not released and is detained without trial.

No one is scared of Napoleons:

A federal judge in Washington on Monday barred President Donald Trump’s administration from excluding transgender people from military service.

This isn't a victory. This is normalising lunacy.




The sludge from Hollywood just gets thicker:

House of Cards is coming to a close, with its upcoming sixth season set to be its last, reports Deadline.

The cancellation announcement comes after actor Anthony Rapp revealed, on Sunday, that series star Kevin Spacey once made sexual advances toward him when he was 14 years old. Following the allegations, Spacey released a statement saying he could not remember the incident and that it would’ve been due to “deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour.” He then chose this moment to come out as gay, leading many on social media to accuse him of lumping sexual assault together with sexual identity, a stigma the gay community has been fighting for years.

Oh - being gay and drunk is an excuse now?




God bless his heart:

Auschwitz survivor Ron Jones, who turned 100 this year, admits he has become "a bit of a celebrity" after more than three decades as a poppy seller.

The world needs more like him.


And now, some Japanese ghost stories to get one in the mood, like this one.




(Merci beaucoup)

Saturday Night Special

 

Why, I'm stunned:

The federal ethics watchdog has never proactively checked whether public office holders with potential conflicts of interests are actually recusing themselves from decisions that could place them in an actual conflict, HuffPost Canada has learned.

In her 10 years in office, Mary Dawson, the House of Commons' conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, has only once investigated whether an MP failed to do so because of a conflict — and that was after a complaint was lodged by another MP, her spokesperson told HuffPost.

"You asked whether the Commissioner has investigated a member for not recusing himself or herself formally (by filling a recusal) or informally (by not showing up to votes or debates) because of a conflict," Margot Booth, the communications and outreach manager for Dawson's office wrote in an email to HuffPost. "The Commissioner has undertaken one inquiry in relation to a failure to recuse, the Thibault Inquiry in 2008."

Dawson has never investigated a cabinet minister.

It's like a pattern of covering up corruption and greed.


Like this:

McGuinty had just quit as premier of a minority government, dogged by a decision two years earlier to cancel unpopular gas-powered power plants in two vulnerable Liberal ridings during an election campaign. A legislative committee, driven by the opposition who held the balance of power, was digging into the $1-billion cancellation cost. So were journalists, who had been asking for government documents through Freedom of Information requests since the previous fall.

Faist, who tried to install the White Canyon erasure program on Miller’s computer, failed. To use the software, he needed what are called “administrative rights,” a special login and password usually restricted to IT staff.

Thus was born “Pete’s Project,” as Miller called it, which early the next month saw Faist spend three days in the offices of McGuinty, wiping the computers of 21 senior staff, some of whom weren’t told what he was doing.

The information — and the claim that it was Miller who set the wheels in motion — is contained in a previously sealed “production order” from Ontario Court Judge Jonathan Brunet. The Ontario Provincial Police sought the order to force the Ontario government to turn over the relevant records. ...

Both Miller and Livingston told police that they only wanted to delete personal files, not gas plant documents. Miller said Faist was hired because it would have been an inappropriate use of government resources to delete personal or political data.

In what industry would this activity not only be tolerable but legal?


Also:

The Liberals also defend skyrocketing electricity rates by citing their elimination of dirty, coal-fired, electricity. 

The problem is they didn’t do that with wind and solar power but with nuclear power and natural gas.

In fact, their multi-billion-dollar green energy boondoggle, featuring financial disaster after financial disaster, caused electricity prices to increase much faster than they otherwise would have.

 And:

When everyday taxpayers have to drive their car for work purposes, they’re often reimbursed 30-40 cents per kilometre. Yet when politicians and government employees drive their car for work they often receive 50 cents per kilometre.

And when government employees arrive at work, they also get paid more. Many studies show bureaucrats are often paid 10 per cent or more than the someone doing similar work outside of government.

Plus, while most people working outside government don’t have a workplace pension plan, almost everyone who works for the government has the costliest type of pension plan out there; a defined benefit plan. Imagine if your employer contributed $8,000 or so every year towards your retirement. ...

The Trudeau government also just gave a student from McGill University $48,923 to examine “The arts against postracialism: Strengthening resistance against contemporary Canadian Blackface.”

Is there a blackface epidemic plaguing our country that has somehow gone under the radar?

An elderly couple in Cobourg, Ontario have been shot dead:

A husband and wife in their 70s are dead after an incident at an Ontario hospital that ended in a police shooting late Friday night, the province's police watchdog says.

The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has taken over the investigation into the man's death, while the Ontario Provincial Police are probing the death of the woman.

SIU spokesperson Jason Gennaro told CBC Toronto that police in Cobourg were initially called to the Northumberland Hills Hospital emergency room for sounds of gunshots at about 11 p.m. ET.

Cobourg is about 115 kilometres east of Toronto.

When police arrived, they encountered a 70-year-old man. Two officers then fired their weapons, Gennaro said. 

The man was struck by bullets and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Officers then found a 76-year-old woman dead. She had suffered a head wound, Gennaro said.

Despite speculation that the woman had been shot, Gennaro would not confirm that, and would not confirm whether the man had a weapon.

"That is something that our investigation is looking to determine," he said.

How could subsidising people's incredibly poor choices ever be bad?

A facility in Lethbridge will become North America’s first supervised inhalation site when it opens early next year amid a drug death epidemic that has devastated families across the province.

**

On Friday, one British Columbia city saw five people die of a drug overdose within a nine-hour period.

It's time to hide one's money so that it could never be spent on this.


Also, it shouldn't be given to this guy:

Morneau Shepell Inc (MSI.TO), the human resources management company at the heart of conflict-of-interest allegations against Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau, said on Friday it would not benefit from pension or tax legislation proposed by the Liberal government.

Or this guy:

Manitoba is planning to introduce a carbon tax of $25 a tonne, half the price of the federal benchmark. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Ottawa will ensure all provinces apply the price of $50 a tonne by 2022.

 But ... but ... diversity is strength somehow!

Sixty-eight percent of Canadians are in favour of similar legislation to Bill 62, passed earlier this year in Quebec.

And:

At a community development meeting last week, the committee heard that $20-million extra will be needed to be added to the $135-million hostel budget to house and feed the surge of refugee claimants that have already come and are anticipated to arrive in this city — from the beginning of next month to the end of next year.

According to the city report, the number of refugees accessing city-run shelters (motels/hotels) has increased from 11.2% in February of 2016 to 25% last month. In terms of numbers, city spokesman Jennifer Wing told me in 2017 alone the shelter system has helped 16,500 clients this year, 4,000 of them refugees. ...

As the report shows, the city’s shelter, support and housing division has  gone $10.3-million over budget to date, which included an extra $4.3-million allocated to provide 200 rooms and food for refugee families at undisclosed Quality Hotel and Suites and Radisson Hotel locations. The Toronto Plaza Hotel on Wilson Ave. is also providing 70 rooms for refugee claimants.

That $10.3-million overage and the $20-million needed until December 2018 does not in any way cover the Ontario Works payments for which both claimants and refugees are eligible. Predictably, city officials informed me they “do not track” what percentage refugee claimants comprise of the total OW caseload.

How right Mr. Murphy is:

But still, it is curious that whenever something scandalous and really big consumes a whole nation’s attention, it always intersects with a storyline about the Clintons.

There is no story bigger than the saga on alleged Russian influence in the American presidential campaign. For a whole year now it’s been Trump and the Russians. Did Trump collude with the Kremlin? Did Moscow deviously intervene to sink Hillary? Was Trump a “real” Manchurian candidate? A special counsel has been appointed to investigate the scandal. Congress is holding hearings.  The newspapers and panel shows are saturated with the story. Hillary herself, out on the post-campaign trail — even in Canada, Britain and Australia — summons all her rage on the Russians (well, most of it, there is a fragment for James Comey and WikiLeaks).

And yet, as we should have known, in a story this large, this conspiratorial, this serpentine, there would eventually come a day when all that had been speculated would turn on itself, when all the fingers so joyously pointing at Trump would do the 180 and return to Clinton Inc. 

The New York Times, The Hill, The Wall Street Journal (to name but a few that are not, to understate things, Trump boosters) have been running blockbuster revelations that link the sale of a uranium company to Russia to a donation to the Clinton Foundation; Bill Clinton accepting extravagant fees to speak to high-level Russians; the Clinton campaign helping to fund the infamous “dossier” compiled against Trump by the British spook who gathered specious info from ex-Russian KGB types. 

I guess there was a new Red Scare but not in the way Hillary Clinton had hoped.

Friday Freakout

Your festive freak-out before Halloween ...



A bit of mood music.



Some reading material to get into:

CHARLOTTE RIDDELL

For great Victorian-era ghost stories, look no further than Charlotte Riddell. Scholar E.F. Bleiler once called her "the Victorian ghost novelist par excellence," and her stories are both extraordinarily spooky and subtly snarky. Born in Ireland in 1832, she was a prolific writer of supernatural tales—haunted house stories in particular. Though she and her husband often struggled financially, Riddell—who initially wrote under the masculine pen names F.G. Trafford and R.V.M. Sparling—was a popular writer in her time, publishing classic short stories like "The Open Door" and "Nut Bush Farm" along with four supernatural novellas. Today, Riddell's stories feel old-fashioned in the best possible way—they're full of dusty, deserted mansions and ghosts with unfinished business.

**

The Open Door by Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, 1885

When the narrator’s young son begins raving about an unbearable noise he hears at night outside their Victorian country mansion, everyone thinks the boy is going mad. Except his father, who believes his boy is neither crazy nor lying. Lying in wait at night, he too hears the noise, the most soul-wrenching piteous crying he’s ever heard. It’s coming from the abandoned ruins of the old servant’s quarters. It isn’t easy to recruit friends and servants to track down the source of the horrible noise, but if he’s to save his son from “brain-fever,” he must uncover the secret of the abandoned cottage.

Thar she blows!

Fireship of Chaleur Bay 

According to the city of Bathurst, in New Brunswick, Canada, tens of thousands of people have seen the apparition of a ship that appears to be on fire cruising Chaleur Bay, located between New Brunswick and Quebec. The apparition usually appears at night, sometimes hovering for hours in a single spot and other times skimming across the waves. Viewing it by telescope brings out no details. Scientists have explained the sight, which continues to be seen today, as being caused by St. Elmo's Fire (an electricity phenomenon), inflammable gas released beneath the sea, or phosphorescent marine life. Locals have connected the story to various shipwrecks in the region, including the story of a Portuguese captain who abused local Indians. One woman on Heron Island, a Mrs. Pettigrew, even reported being approached by the specter of a burned sailor who came to her farm house for help. When she turned to rush inside, it brushed past her and she discovered the figure was legless.

Ghost stories from all fifty states:

In 1891, just a year after thousands of spectators converged on Pikeville to see the last hanging in the trial of the Hatfields and the McCoys, a newlywed named Octavia Hatcher died. Octavia had fallen into a depression shortly after her only child had died in infancy, and then slipped into a fatal coma. Since it was a hot spring, her husband wasted no time in burying her. But soon doctors began to notice a strange—but not lethal—sleeping sickness spreading through the town. Panicked, her husband exhumed her casket and found its inner lining shredded with claw marks and his wife’s face frozen in a mask of terror. Wracked with guilt, he reburied Octavia and had a tall stone statue of her placed above her grave. Locals say they can still hear Octavia crying, and that once a year—on the anniversary of her death—the statue rotates and turns its back on Pikeville.

Friday Post

Quickly now ...


The Harper has spoken:

The former prime minister says he was worried by what he heard during a recent trip to Washington, where he discussed NAFTA at an event but did not publicly share his misgivings about the Trudeau government.

"I came back alarmed," said the Oct. 25 letter signed by Harper, and sent to clients of his firm Harper & Associates.

"I fear that the NAFTA re-negotiation is going very badly. I also believe that President (Donald) Trump's threat to terminate NAFTA is not a bluff... I believe this threat is real. Therefore, Canada's government needs to get its head around this reality: it does not matter whether current American proposals are worse than what we have now. What matters in evaluating them is whether it is worth having a trade agreement with the Americans or not."

The current government was not pleased by the letter.

Officials in Ottawa accused the former prime minister of essentially negotiating in public — against the government of Canada. They called the release of the two-page note ill-timed and perplexing.

"This is a gift to the Americans," said one current Canadian official.

Shut your face-hole, unnamed official.

It is not a joke if Trump means to re-negotiate NAFTA or scrap it all together. When one's chief negotiator counts his hair conditioner as a rhetorical weapon, one should heed the words of a guy who actually studied economics (not drama) in college.

 

It's just money:

“We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms … when governments, regardless of which stripe, do not defend those rights, Canadians have to pay. I hope people take notice of this. I hope people are angered that governments violated people’s fundamental rights. And I hope people remember to demand of governments, this one and all future governments, that nobody ever has their fundamental rights violated.”

People aren't angered by those governments, Justin. 




But ... but ... Bill 62 is oppressive for women!

A Quebec man has been charged with allegedly assaulting his teenage daughter over a year in what police are calling “honour-based” violence.

Gatineau police say the level of violence escalated once the man discovered the girl was removing her hijab when she was away from the family home.

She decided to file a police complaint, which culminated in an arrest Wednesday.

Also:

While Justin Trudeau expressed his disapproval of the law, he has so far refrained from committing to spearheading a federal crusade against it, disappointing many of the law’s critics and deepening a sense of the party’s hypocrisy. This was the same Trudeau, after all, who’d shamed the Conservative government in 2015 for imposing a ban on face-coverings during citizenship ceremonies. But this time, with Bill 62 popular in Quebec, there are opportunistic reasons for the Liberals to not get involved, particularly since the party will be relying heavily on Quebeckers’ support in the next election.

Wasn't I saying?




We don't have a justice system:

The vast majority of sexual assaults that have been substantiated by police do not result in a criminal conviction or even make it to court, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

New research from the agency surveyed the number of sexual assault allegations that police ruled as founded between 2009 and 2014, noting that this figure is considerably lower than the number of such offences that likely took place.

 

Of those, StatCan said only 12 per cent, or about one in 10, resulted in a criminal conviction. Most cases never had a chance to attain one, as the research found only 49 per cent of substantiated sexual assault complaints made it to court in the first place.

This needs to be said: Communism doesn't work. Marx was all wrong. Things always end in bloodshed:

Many still regard Marxism as a good idea that fell into bad hands, notably Lenin’s and Stalin’s. I prefer the view of Martin Amis, expressed in The New York Times the other day: “It was not a good idea that somehow went wrong. It was a very bad idea from the outset, forced into life with barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism and horror.” It defied human nature, so humans accepted it only under threat of violence, which inevitably was applied. In the hands of bullies who wanted power, Marxism was a terrifying weapon.

**

The intensity of this conversion in part explains the legions of Westerners who refused to credit the concrete evidence of communist tyranny that began under Lenin. In 1908, Lenin threatened “real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country,” and fulfilled that threat a few years after the revolution in the “merciless war,” as he put it, against the Kulaks, the more prosperous peasants. When someone protested, Lenin answered, “Do you think we can be victors without the most severe revolutionary terror?” The horrors of Stalin were just expansions of Lenin’s brutal practices already well documented before Stalin came into power. As French historian François Furet has written, “Those who wanted to know, could have known. The problem was that few people really wanted to.” Only a cult-like blind faith can explain such a resistance to facts, one obvious in the comment of Europe’s most famous Marxist, Georg Lukács, who said, “Even if every empirical prediction of Marxism were invalidated, he would still hold Marxism to be true.”

The patent failure of Marx’s theoretical “predictions,” the proven record of mass murder and imprisonment, the pollution of social and family life by an infrastructure of surveillance and lies, the 1939 pact with Hitler that laid bare the true aims of an amoral gangster regime––none has been able to shake the faith of Western communists and fellow-travelers, who today still practice such willful blindness, whether it’s Bernie Sanders honeymooning in the old Soviet Union, Sean Penn shilling for a brutal thug in Venezuela, or Barack Obama cavorting with the Castro brothers in Cuba.

**

What are we to make of this? Are we merely to deduce that the life of a young and, apparently, attractive woman behind the Iron Curtain was not completely devoid of pleasure? No. The article is explicit in stating that "communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined."

This is unadulterated rubbish. I grew up under communism, and here is what I recall.

First, all communist countries were run by men; female leaders, like Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, would have been unthinkable. Women who rose to prominence, like Raisa Gorbachev and Elena Ceausescu, did so purely as appendages of their powerful husbands.

Second, the author concedes that "gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and...the communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy." I would say so. In a typical Eastern European family, the woman, in addition to having a day job at a factory, was expected to clean the apartment, shop for food, cook dinner, and raise the children. The Western sexual revolution passed the communist bloc by, and ex-communist countries remain much more patriarchal than their Western counterparts to this day.

Third, communist societies were socially uber-conservative. As such, pornography and prostitution were strictly prohibited, divorces were discouraged and divorced people ostracized, and prophylactics and the pill were hard to obtain. (Think about it for one hot second. Why would economies unable to produce enough bread and toilet paper generate a plentiful and regular supply of condoms? This makes no sense!) The reason why we refer to communist countries as "totalitarian" is because the state wanted to control every aspect of human existence. Sexual autonomy was, well, autonomous. 

Being outside the control of the all-powerful state, it was treated with suspicion and suppressed.

But don't take my word for it. You can still visit a few communist countries, including Cuba and North Korea, and compare the social status and empowerment of their women with those in the West. 

Had the esteemed editors of the Times done so, they would have, I hope, thought twice about publishing a series of pro-communist excreta.

**

Newly released satellite images offer a never-before-seen glimpse of North Korea’s “brutal and inhumane” network of political prisons, including secret labor camps. 

In an accompanying report from the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) published Thursday, David Hawk, former executive director of Amnesty International USA and a former U.N. human rights official, describes the harrowing conditions inside the regime’s “system of arbitrary detention and severe repression.”

Pyongyang denies the existence of its political penal labor camps, known as kwan-li-so, and says prisoners in its long-term “re-education” penitentiaries, termed kyo-hwa-so and run by a police force known as the Ministry of People’s Security, are treated with “warm love and consideration.” 

In stark contrast to such unfounded claims, humanitarian workers and investigators like Hawk detail horrific treatment, including “grossly inadequate food rations” that leave prisoners “in a persistent state of hunger and malnutrition.”

I'm glad we had this talk.

A Word on the Yazidis

 

The Yazidis, a little understood and cared-about minority in the Middle East, should have very little reason to consider Canada a sanctuary from the brutality hurled at them from ISIS, yet another incarnation of abusers in the Islamic world. When one reads articles like this, one is baffled by the moral posturing of an antipathetic Western government that constantly proclaims itself to be a beacon for other nations (read: the United States. These United States.) to follow:

Canada is on track to resettle 1,200 survivors of ISIS atrocities by year's end, and the vast majority of those who have arrived so far are Yazidis.

Critics have accused the Liberal government of hiding details about the special program.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen recently announced that 800 survivors had been brought to Canada but did not specify at the time how many of them were Yazidi.

According to new information provided to CBC News by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 81 per cent are Yazidi. About 38 per cent have come from Iraq, another 36 per cent from Lebanon and 26 per cent from Turkey.

All remaining arrivals are expected to be from Iraq, and the government is "on track" to meet its commitment, said IRCC spokeswoman Nancy Caron.

(Sidebar: On track? How?)

From the beginning: 

Trudeau has long courted the Muslim vote and never once appeared interested in the plight of the Yazidis who were being driven out, abused, killed or used as sex slaves by ISIS.

When Yazidi children fled to Mount Sinjar, Trudeau flippantly suggested air-lifting them parkas:

Trudeau, who opposes Canada’s part in airstrikes on Islamic States targets in Iraq, says we’d be more helpful offering “cold winter” advice for victims of the militants.

“There’s a lot of people, refugees, displaced peoples, fleeing violence who are facing a very, very cold winter in the mountains. Something Canada has expertise on is how to face a winter in the mountains with the right kind of equipment," Trudeau said.

Parkas. For children fleeing rape and murder. He suggested that as though it was an amusing after-thought. That is how he approached a military and humanitarian crisis.


During the 2015 election, Trudeau referred to the Harper government's plan to prioritise Yazidis, Christians and even persecuted Muslims as "disgusting":

"And to know that somewhere in the Prime Minister's Office staffers were poring through their personal files to try and see … which families would be suitable for a photo-op for the prime minister's re-election campaign. That's disgusting."

Trudeau then appeared in several selfies with the thousands of Syrian migrants he brought in.

He did not do the same for the Yazidis he was embarrassed into letting in (more on that in a moment):

But unlike the thousands of refugees fleeing violence in Syria who were greeted by flashing cameras and intense public exposure, the Yazidis have been entering the country with no fanfare. That won't change, say government officials who are protecting the identity of the asylum seekers because of just how vulnerable they are. 

"Some of these women haven't even told their own families about what they experienced" at the hands of their persecutors, associate deputy immigration minister Dawn Edlund told a news conference alongside Hussen.

That paper-thin excuse is far too wretched to even comment on.

 
This Ahmed Hussen:

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said Thursday nearly 800 Yazidi women and girls and others who survived the cruelties of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have now arrived in Canada as refugees.

Over 40, 000 Syrian migrants at a cost of $9,055 per head were touted and invited in (selfies and all) and not even 800, let alone 1, 200, are Yazidis for whom parkas could be casually thrown.


On track?


But letting the Yazidis in was never a priority for Trudeau in the first place.


When a motion was put forward in the House of Commons to call ISIS' atrocities "genocide", Trudeau and his government steadfastly refused:

The Liberals aren't planning to vote in favour of a Conservative motion introduced in the House of Commons Thursday that condemns the Islamic State for genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims. Sadly, it's yet another indication of this government's soft approach to terror.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion called the motion "crass politics." He argued genocide is a legal term that only the courts can apply -- even though some of our allies, including the United States, already use the term.

Indeed, the motion was defeated 166-139. The majority of Liberals - especially Trudeau - voted against calling ISIS' atrocities genocide.


It wasn't until a Tory MP - Michelle Rempel - forced a debate that led Trudeau's government into an embarrassing position: either let the Yazidis in as refugees or let an optics situation get worse.


The Liberals did the bare minimum:

Michelle Rempel needs to get angry more often.

The 36-year-old former Conservative cabinet minister, now the Official Opposition critic for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, was the driving force behind Tuesday’s 313-0 House of Commons vote requiring Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to get its act together and open Canada’s doors to the persecuted Yazidi minority of Iraqi Kurdistan.

It took two years after clumsy grandstanding and antipathy before Trudeau's government let in a handful (compared to other migrants) of Yazidis just to appear on what has been vulgarly termed the "right side of history".


Even now, the government has withdrawn military aid to the Kurds, the same people who fought harder for the Yazidis than this country has.


One cannot expect any sort of moral or political leadership from a party that roots for a man in stupid socks. But one does question the motives of voting for such a party.


Willing masses saw no difficulty in voting for a nauseating mustachioed Austrian fascist who said the right things at the right time. Look how that turned out.


Yazidis, whether they remain in Canada or return to what was their home, must remember not only the government that ignored their plight but the people who put it there, too.