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Lots going on ...




How could this go wrong?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is appointing Bob Rae as Canada's special envoy to Myanmar, two months into a growing crisis that has left 600,000 Rohingya Muslim people displaced.

This Bob Rae:

Regrets? Bob Rae has a few.

But unpaid leave for public-sector workers – or "Rae Days" – is not one of them.

And these Rohingya:

The Myanmar authorities have accused Muslim Rohingya militants of killing 28 Hindu villagers whose bodies were allegedly found in a mass grave.

The army says the bodies of 20 women and eight men and boys were found in two pits in northern Rakhine state.

The state has been in turmoil since 25 August when Rohingya militants launched deadly attacks on police posts.

Now imagine a new voters block of them just before the 2019 election.




That's the sound of desperation:

The federal government will announce plans to boost payments made to families under the Canada child benefit program on Tuesday, CBC News has learned.

Multiple sources, speaking to CBC News and Radio-Canada on the condition of anonymity, said the government will foreshadow the increase in the fall economic update, which will be tabled tomorrow, and provide more details later this week.

The benefit was introduced in 2016 and gives most families with children under the age of 18 a monthly cheque.

The benefit offers a maximum $533.33 a month for each child under six — and $450 for each child aged six to 17 — in a family earning less than $30,000 annually, and is adjusted downward as a family's net income increases.

The payment is not currently indexed to inflation, something the Liberal government said it would do starting in 2020, if re-elected. Indexation could be one of the levers the government uses to boost payouts.

The Liberal government said a lot of things, like making farmers pay their "fair share". 

Also in "desperate for votes" news:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marked the third anniversary of the terrorist attack at the National War Memorial by calling on Canadians to pay tribute to the soldier who was killed.

This is a departure from last year when nothing was done.




Did one get away?

An undercover FBI agent who helped convict two men of plotting to derail a Via Rail passenger train in Canada did not see the arrests as a triumph, because he feared another extremist had eluded his grasp.

In a new book published under his cover name from the operation, Tamer Elnoury reveals how gaining the confidence of the would-be rail saboteurs led to knowledge of an apparent al-Qaeda sleeper terrorist in the United States.

Elnoury is still haunted by the thought of the jihadi who got away.

"Every time I hear about someone committing a terrorist act on U.S. soil, I wonder if that was the American sleeper," he writes. "My biggest regret is that I couldn't find him."

Nothing has to be a problem. Simply disallow it in public and deport accordingly:

The Quebec Liberal government’s bill banning face veils is somewhat rightly seen as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. There aren’t all that many women walking about the streets of Montreal in full niqab and burka coverings. For now.

But according to Statistics Canada, the Muslim population is going to double in 20 years to make up 7.2% of the nation, clocking in at more than 2.5 million people.

Will this demographic become increasingly liberalized and integrated, less likely to cling to intolerant old country ways? Don’t count on it.

Agree with us and nobody gets hurt:

Just a few years ago, Yahya Mohamid was living in a northern Israeli town controlled by the Islamic movement and like everyone else in Umm el-Fahm, had been indoctrinated to hate Israel.

Today, the 20-year-old, calling himself a Muslim Zionist, has made his home in Jerusalem and is dedicated to getting the truth out about his life as an Arab Israeli and giving back to his country.

He hopes to join the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in March and get into one of the elite combat units — a precedent for an Arab Israeli.

But Mohamid’s pro-Israel activism has come at a huge price.

The brave, articulate, handsome man — who seems wise beyond his years — has been subject to assaults, more death threats than he can count and has been forced to break ties with his mother and sister, both of whom still live in Umm el-Fahm.

“They live in a constant situation of fear,” he says.

 
Over seventy percent of Canadians are fine with China's human rights record, exploited work-force, currency-fixing, shoddy workmanship and supplanting Canadian workers for their cheaper and more compliant counterparts:

Almost 70 per cent of Canadians support a free trade deal with China, a new University of British Columbia poll finds, showing “pragmatism” is on the rise in the age of Trump. 

(Sidebar: this is what happens when both parents and schools fail to teach critical thinking, ie, not listening to the same popular press that predicted Clinton in a landslide.)
 

In the next decade, Canadians also predict China will be a bigger economic power, “doing more to maintain peace,” “more stable and predictable” and “doing more to address environmental issues” than the United States — perceptions likely fuelled by President Donald Trump’s administration, according to researchers. 

Yes, about that: 

Zhou Xiaochuan, the long-serving and respected governor of the People's Bank of China, raised eyebrows last week when he cautioned that the country could have a "Minsky Moment" if "we are too optimistic when things go smoothly."

Although he was right to warn against policy complacency and general economic overconfidence, particularly in the context of a growth model that still relies too heavily on credit and debt, the Minsky threat of a financial crisis per se is lower than the risk of generalized downward pressures on economic growth should the policy effort falter.

The "Minsky Moment," a term coined by my former colleague Paul McCulley at Pacific Investment Management Co., refers to a tipping point when a prolonged period of stability leads to unsettling financial volatility. It is the culmination of what the economist Hyman Minsky labelled a period of "Ponzi finance," as risk-taking and economic activity are financed overwhelmingly by credit and higher leverage. It is fuelled by booming debt encouraged by both lender and borrower overconfidence in continued financial stability. Coming at the end of the multistage Minsky cycle, it engenders dislocations, including a sudden destabilizing collapse in asset prices and markets. ...

Mr. Zhou is right to point to the growing risks associated with the rapid rise in total debt in China and, more generally, financial risk-taking by Chinese households, corporations and local governments. Indeed, some of the numbers are truly striking, including a near doubling in debt to gross domestic product in the past 10 years during a period of declining, albeit still high, economic growth.

** 

At a time when the United States is worried about North Korea developing a nuclear weapons program, “The Coming Collapse of China” author Gordon Chang tells FOX Business China is equipping the country with weapons.

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping has been kind of fueling North Korea, transferring very important weapons and equipment and technology to the North Koreans, especially their ballistic missile program… They are weaponizing the North,” ...

**

China may have just dodged a major bullet for now. “We had a senior official, [Liu Shiyu] on the sidelines of the Communist Party’s 19th National Congress in Beijing, saying that President Xi Jinping foiled a coup. A group of officials, Liu said, had ‘plotted to usurp the party’s leadership and seize state power,’” explained Gordon Chang, best-selling author of Nuclear Showdown and a columnist for the Daily Beast. While Chang personally does not think a coup took place, he does see it as a very bad sign. Liu’s loaded charge suggests China is heading into a period of turbulence, likely one reminiscent of the Maoist era, Chang said. “Xi Jingping is characterizing his political adversaries as traitors to the State, and that is something we have not heard in a long time. [W]e can see China tearing itself apart as the political struggles become more intense and that’s why I’m concerned about political stability. Maybe not this month…but they will be more vicious than we have seen in the past couple of decades,”

How stable can China possibly be?



Also:

The return of rising interest rates is leaving Canadians anxious as they come to grips with the reality of historically high consumer debt.

Nearly half of Canadians are now concerned about repaying their debts, while four in 10 say that further rate increases may leave them "in financial trouble," according to a poll released Monday morning by insolvency firm MNP Ltd. In September, Canadian households' credit-market-debt-to-disposable-income ratio hit 167.8 per cent, the latest in a string of national indebtedness records.

When did we last see this?

Pierre Trudeau took office at a moment when commodity prices were rising worldwide. Then as now, rising commodity prices buoyed the Canadian economy. Good policymakers recognize that commodity prices fall as well as rise. A wise government does not make permanent commitments based on temporary revenues. Yet between 1969 and 1979 – through two majority governments and one minority – Trudeau tripled federal spending.

Nemesis followed hubris. Commodity prices dropped. Predictably, Canada tumbled into recession and the worst federal budget deficits in peacetime history.

Trudeau’s Conservative successor Brian Mulroney balanced Canada’s operating budget after 1984. But to squeeze out Trudeau-era inflation, the Bank of Canada had raised real interest rates very high. Mulroney could not keep up with the debt payments. The debt compounded, the deficits grew, the Bank hiked rates again – and Canada toppled into an even worse recession in 1992. By 1993, default on Trudeau’s debt loomed as a real possibility. Trudeau’s next successors, Liberals this time, squeezed even tighter, raising taxes, and leaving Canadians through the 1990s working harder and harder with no real increase in their standard of living.

It's a proud Trudeau tradition that continues today:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on track to increase Canada’ federal debt at a record pace, says a new study by the Fraser Institute.

“According to his own government’s projections,” the study concludes, Trudeau “will increase per person federal debt by 5% from 2015 to 2019 — the largest increase of any prime minister whose time in office didn’t include a world war or economic recession.”

“The fact is, Justin Trudeau is the only prime minister in the last 120 years who has increased the federal per person debt burden without a world war or recession to justify it,” said Charles Lammam, the Fraser Institute’s director of fiscal studies. ...

The inevitable result of Trudeau’s record pace of debt accumulation will be more federal tax dollars diverted to pay interest on government debt, meaning less money for programs like health care and post-secondary education, along with higher taxes.

As the Fraser study observes: “A key part of any prime minister’s legacy is whether they have left the federal government more or less indebted than when they took office.

“Government debt matters,” said Lammam. “Higher debt means more tax dollars are diverted away from important public programs in order to pay interest, and it leaves future generations on the hook to pay for today’s spending through higher taxes.”

It's just money.




Fresh from hearing of Shinzo Abe's handy victory, Kim Jong-Un plays the tired and unsubstantiated "Japanese imperialism" card:

North Korea on Monday blasted “Japanese reactionaries” for working to “pave the groundwork for a reinvasion of the Korean peninsula” after Sunday’s Lower House election that saw Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling bloc secure a sweeping victory.

Abe dissolved the Diet on Sept. 28, forcing the election, as he sought a fresh mandate amid improving poll numbers and his handling of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

In a statement carried Monday by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, a spokesman from the country’s Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee lambasted the move, calling it reminiscent of Imperial Japan’s march across Asia before and during World War II.

“What the Japanese reactionaries seek in deliberately linking their step to dissolve the House of Representatives with the DPRK is to gratify their ambition for staying in power and pave the groundwork for reinvasion of the Korean peninsula in order to realize the old dream of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ taking advantage of the nuclear war moves of the U.S.,” the spokesman said, using the North’s formal name and referring to the Co-Prosperity Sphere, a pseudo-political and economic union of Japanese-dominated Asian and Pacific territories during the war.

“This is well proven by the fact that Japan examined a plan for giving logistic support to the U.S. troops and putting down ‘armed refugees’ with mobilization of the ‘Self-Defense Forces’ in contingency on the Korean peninsula, while loudly trumpeting about the U.S. military attack on the DPRK,” the spokesman added.

It's high-time that the North Koreans called him out on his total bullsh--.




Britain so generously offers Parks Canada the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror one hundred and seventy-two years after they sank:

Britain will give Canada the shipwrecks of British explorer John Franklin, who tried to chart the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic in 1845.

The Ministry Of Defence said in a statement it would transfer the ownership of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to Parks Canada, but retain a small sample of artifacts.

Thanks, guys.