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They're just jobs:

TransCanada Corp. has scrapped its Energy East Pipeline and Eastern Mainline projects, oil and natural gas conduits that have faced regulatory hurdles in Canada and stiff opposition from environmental groups.

As a result of the decision, TransCanada expects an estimated $1 billion after-tax, non-cash charge to be recorded in the fourth quarter, the company said in a statement Thursday. Because regulators failed to reach a decision on the projects, TransCanada expects “no recoveries of costs from third parties.” The Energy East link to Canada’s Atlantic Coast carried a $15.7 billion price tag.

Energy producers in Alberta had hoped the projects would help them diversify their markets, with most of the existing pipeline network linking the energy-rich province to the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast. Last month, TransCanada sought a 30-day suspension of the project applications for more time to review environmental assessment factors.

“TransCanada was forced to make the difficult decision to abandon its project, following years of hard work and millions of dollars in investment,” the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, an industry group, said in a statement. “The loss of this major project means the loss of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars for Canada, and will significantly impact our country’s ability to access markets for our oil and gas.”

Also:

The irony is that killing the project will increase net global GHG emissions. Oil transported by pipeline from Alberta would replace Saudi crude shipped by tanker up the St. Lawrence. Our exports to Europe and India would diminish higher emitting oil from countries with poorer environmental standards and appalling treatment of women, gays, minorities and political dissidents. Justin Trudeau wants labour and environment standards and gender equality protection included in NAFTA, although binding commitments are unlikely. Yet favouring foreign energy over Canadian energy shunts those concerns aside. All his virtue signalling is empty rhetoric when he can actually do something and decides not to.

Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr falsely claimed the previous Conservative government did not get any pipelines built (there were four). But he was going to change all that. Cater to intractable environmentalists by succumbing to their insatiable demands and objections would magically disappear. A costly national carbon tax, duplicative and politicized regulatory reviews, open-ended consultation with anyone with an axe to grind. How is that working out so far? What about a big goose egg. Naïveté is as solid a foundation for public policy as a belief in unicorns.

 


It's just money:

The federal government has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to survivors of the '60s Scoop for the harm suffered by Indigenous children who were robbed of their cultural identities by being placed with non-native families, The Canadian Press has learned.

The national settlement with an estimated 20,000 victims, to be announced Friday by Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, is aimed at resolving numerous related lawsuits, most notable among them a successful class action in Ontario.

Confidential details of the agreement include a payout of between $25,000 and $50,000 for each claimant, to a maximum of $750 million, sources said.

In addition, sources familiar with the deal said the government would set aside a further $50 million for a new Indigenous Healing Foundation, a key demand of the representative plaintiff in Ontario, Marcia Brown Martel.

What do you have to do to spend the rest of your life in prison?

Two brothers who raped a Grade 11 student for eight hours have led a "sad life" and "didn't stand a chance," according to their lawyers, who on Thursday addressed how much time each man should spend in prison for kidnapping and sexual assault.

"They didn't stand a chance from the minute they were born," said Cody Manyshots' lawyer, Alain Hepner, who proposed a nine-year sentence for his client.

The sentencing hearing continued Thursday for Corey Manyshots, 28, and Cody Manyshots, 24, who kidnapped and raped a 17-year-old girl.

Further tests done by forensic psychologists did not make available a defence of NCR (Not Criminally Responsible) despite the fact that both brothers have severe FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder),

Corey, who has an IQ of 45 and can barely read or write, functions at the level of a six-year-old child, said his lawyer, Mitch Stephensen, who proposed a prison term of six-and-a-half years.

This case has been described as "horrific" by the prosecution. It has been delayed several times over the past year as reports were prepared on the severeness of FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder) suffered by the brothers, their psychiatric states and their Aboriginal upbringing. 

There are serious concerns both will reoffend when they're released, and the public has  "reason to be concerned," said prosecutor Jonathan Hak. He described the brothers' actions as "predatory behaviour" when they kidnapped their victim.

In November 2014, the brothers grabbed their victim from a transit stop in Taradale, where she'd been waiting for a bus after watching a movie with a friend. For the next eight hours, she suffered repeated physical and sexual assaults — first in an alley near the bus stop and then at the brothers' nearby home.

The brothers' father and a friend were at the house, as well as Corey's baby and the child's mother. The sexual assaults continued overnight in different rooms of the home.

The girl was able to escape in the morning while they were sleeping.

A woman is suing the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority for removing her responsive husband's respirator:

Johnnie Frank Spence, 65, died Jan. 28, 2017, while a patient at Health Sciences Centre. 

"At no time did Johnnie express an intention to seek medical assistance in dying, to be euthanized, to commit suicide, or to be a party to an assisted suicide and at no time did he … consent to the forfeiture of his life," alleges a statement of claim filed in Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench Tuesday on behalf of Spence's widow, Doris Spence. ...

Spence had a history of medical ailments, including diabetes, hypertension and Kennedy's disease — a muscle-wasting disease — and had undergone a quadruple bypass.

By the next morning, Spence was unresponsive, placed on a ventilator and intubated, says the statement of  claim. A doctor told Doris that Johnnie "would not get any better" and should be taken off the ventilator and allowed to "pass away peacefully."

According to Doris Spence, "it was [the doctor's] intention to keep Johnnie intubated for a period of 24 hours to give the family the opportunity to attend the hospital to say their goodbyes," says the statement of claim.

Johnnie Spence's daughter was at his bedside the following morning when he woke up, gestured to his daughter to get him a scratch lottery ticket and wrote a note saying "phone mom," the statement of claim alleges.

When Doris arrived, Johnnie "waved to her, gave 'thumbs-up' and … wrote notes to her."

The doctor arrived and told Doris that Johnnie would be taken off the ventilator later that day, alleges the statement of claim. Doris asked Johnnie if he wanted to live and he "responded by nodding his head affirmatively."

"The plaintiff [Doris] claims that Johnnie had capacity to make health care decisions and had the ability to communicate with [the doctor]," alleges the statement of claim, adding the doctor "disregarded Johnnie's capacity, ability and wishes  concerning [the doctor's] proposed treatment."

If euthanasia was meant only for those who requested it in a state of competence, then what would excuse this?

Nothing, really.



Today in "the Liberals will censor anything and everything" news:

With Parliament’s passage in late March of Motion 103, which condemned “Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination,” the Canadian Heritage Committee was tasked with a study to determine “what Canadians have to say” on the motion. Now underway, formal hearings are revealing what polls have already made clear: many Canadians find M-103 disturbing. ...

Hearings began in June. Anti-M-103 activists, noting that the Liberals were allowed to call 36 witnesses, the NDP 12 and the Conservative Party 24, wondered if the fix was in for M-103 opposers. 

They were not heartened by Heritage Committee chairperson Hedy Fry’s on-record comment: “There is no guarantee that radical voices won’t speak at M-103 hearings.” So far, pro-M-103 voices predictably toe the Liberal party line that racism and Islamophobia are serious problems in Canada. What Fry might call “radical voices” have raised sensible, compelling challenges to this assumption, and have expressed concerns this kind of motion could eventually lead to politicians creating laws that further limit free speech.

On Sept 20, Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah (himself a victim of oppressive speech codes in his native Pakistan) testified that discouraging or limiting criticism of Islam would, in effect, most harm those secular or free-thinking Muslims who came to Canada precisely for the freedom to speak their mind to Islamic authority figures as they could not do in their countries of origin. In any case, “You cannot define (Islamophobia),” he charged, “because the word is a fraud.” According to Fatah, these bold challenges earned him such frosty treatment from “the phalanx of Liberal MPs” and “haranguing” from Fry that one MP contacted him later to apologize for the “intimidation and bullying” he had experienced.

 
**

I am explicitly not saying this controversy has anything to do with the Liberals’ recent decline in the polls, which predates it in any event. But the sense of moral entitlement it reveals, the intolerance of differences of opinion, the demonization of opposition, the insufferable smugness? Yeah, it just might.

**

This is the same NDP that one short month ago complained Justin Trudeau was trying to dictate which New Democrat would sit on the new committee on national security and intelligence. Tom Mulcair, the former NDP leader, wanted to appoint MP Murray Rankin. Instead, Trudeau insisted Mulcair submit four names for consideration, from which he would pick one that would best reflect Canada’s regions, gender and culture.

Mulcair told him to get stuffed, accusing the prime minister of abusing his position by choosing who could represent the NDP at committee. Now, his party is complicit in helping the Liberals do just that with the status of women committee.

**

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now failed twice, in 20 months, to mention Jews in commemorating the Holocaust.

The latest omission was brought to light by Conservative MP David Sweet Tuesday, when he noted during Question Period that a plaque on Ottawa’s new Holocaust memorial omits any mention of Jews.

The first time this happened was on Jan. 27, 2016, when, in issuing a statement commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Week, Trudeau failed to mention that six million Jews died in it.

At the time, the Prime Minister’s Office assured me this was an honest mistake, and since it was subsequently corrected, I wrote that I took the PMO at its word.

Now it has made exactly the same blunder 20 months later at Trudeau's inauguration of the Holocaust memorial's plaque on Sept. 27, 2017, which it has since removed in order to correct it.

I love how francophones - who insist that their culture consists solely of a language they bludgeon the public with - blow up over things like this:

Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly is one of the federal government’s most prominent Quebec members, a young dynamo who is supposed to shore up Liberal fortunes in the province.

But since her announcement last week of an agreement with Netflix that spares the American streaming service from being taxed and guarantees no funding for French-language content, she has been savaged in Quebec media, artistic and political circles.

That's not what they said before:

The Trudeau government is taking its time deciding how to protect Canada from ballistic missiles as part of a larger review of North American defences, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan revealed Wednesday.

"When we look at what BMD (ballistic missile defence) is, what the threats are, we need to actually spend more time to making sure that we do get this right," Sajjan said outside the House of Commons.

A look at ethnic conflicts in South Korea:

Despite their vast number here -- some say there are up to 700,000 -- ethnic Korean-Chinese people are one of the most stigmatized minorities, often associated with heinous crimes as depicted in local media.

According to a 2015 survey on 248 Koreans in their 20s and 30s by Korea Research Center, 59 percent of the respondents had negative perceptions about them. Some 70 percent admitted that Korean society discriminated against Joseon-jok. 

 
Maybe there are no wrong answers here but only more delicious ones:

Apparently the federal government does not want you to know your granola was made with love.

In a warning letter issued to the Nashoba Brook Bakery in West Concord, Mass., on Sept. 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration scolded the small bakery for including an unconventional ingredient on its label, reports legal blog Law360.

"Your Nashoba Granola label lists ingredient 'Love'. Ingredients required to be declared on the label or labeling of food must be listed by their common or usual name," the FDA says in the letter.

"'Love' is not a common or usual name of an ingredient, and is considered to be intervening material because it is not part of the common or usual name of the ingredient."

Well, not with that attitude.