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Oh, boy ... :

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau underlined in Mumbai on Tuesday that the ties between his country and India will not move ahead only on the political front and that there there are “so many different ways you can engage”.

On a day-long visit to Mumbai, he said, “The close ties (between India and Canada) and the incredible opportunities is what this trip is about. It is not a trip for handshakes and photo-ops.”

That is why he fumbled when asked that question.


Of course.


That is why he spent half a day on official engagements and walked away with only $250 million of Indian investments in Canada and Canadian jobs sent to India.


And the "cultural ties" have nothing to do with an election in 2019. If one can't explain why now only forty-three percent of Canadians regard themselves as middle-class - a group Justin championed during the 2015 election - then he can at least regale everyone with family photos taken at the Taj Mahal (the site was closed to the huge numbers who waited to visit it).



Also:

The Telegraph of India noted that Modi was not there to greet Trudeau when he landed in India on the weekend, beginning an official trip accompanied by half a dozen of his government’s ministers. 

Instead, a junior minister of the Indian government met Trudeau at the airport. 

While the Telegraph says Modi’s diplomacy is “symbol-laden,” the prime minister has only actually ventured out to the airport to greet world leaders on six occasions, and usually for significant events, like Barack Obama’s final trip as U.S. President. However, the paper also points out that Modi has, so far, declined to send out a tweet welcoming Trudeau to the country.

The possibility of a snub is attracting international headlines — and, if it is a deliberate insult, observers have pointed to one possible motive in particular.

Canada is not on India's top fifteen trade partners list.




One must wonder if the Liberals, both provincial and federal, are sabotaging the economy out of incompetence or malice.


Discuss:

Lack of pipelines and massive discounts for Canadian heavy oil could cost the economy $15.6 billion this year, or three-fourths of a point from the country’s GDP, according to economists at Scotiabank.

“Reliance on the existing pipeline network and rail shipments to bring Canadian oil to market has a demonstrable impact on Canada’s well-being, with consequences that extend well beyond Alberta,” Scotiabank senior vice-president and chief economist Jean-Francois Perrault and commodity economist Rory Johnston wrote in a report released Tuesday.

**

This raises the question of how and why the Liberals could have developed a plausible story about the need to address middle-class anxieties and then decided that reducing taxes for those at the 90th percentile of the income distribution would help alleviate those middle-class anxieties. Did the Liberals simply aim their tax cut at the middle class and … miss somehow? Was it a game of bait-and switch for the benefit of the upper-middle class? (As I’ve written earlier, a good working definition for the upper-middle class is those between the 80th and 99th percentiles of the income distribution, earning between $70,000 and $225,000 a year; the maximum benefit from the Liberals’ tax cut is for those earning $90,000 a year.) I’ve been wrestling with this question for almost three years now.

But no more: the Liberals have clearly moved on with last week’s “supercluster” announcement: a billion dollars thrown at the usual gang of well-connected consultants and professional sitters-on-boards-of-directors. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the Liberals’ supercluster messaging is what it did not say: the announcement was not accompanied with the usual boilerplate verbiage about how this spending would help the middle class. It would seem that even the Liberals have recognized that there are limits past which that particular talking point cannot be pushed.

(Sidebar: you have wasted your time wrestling with anything the Liberals said, sir. That is on you.)

**

Over the next five years, Ottawa is going to “invest” nearly a billion of your tax dollars funding five centres around which innovative businesses and scientists are going to cluster to do super stuff. Okay, so that’s a weak description of what a “supercluster” is, but I’m not sure there is a good description.

When asked to explain, Bains told reporters, “It is a made-in-Canada Silicon Valley that will create tens of thousands of jobs – that’s what a supercluster is.”

No, that’s what you hope a supercluster will evolve into. But you can’t just go to a big-box store, plunk down an oversized subsidy cheque, and grab another Silicon Valley off the shelf. If it were that easy, every Tom, Dick or Navdeep would do it.

Creating the next Silicon Valley can’t be planned. And it certainly can’t be planned by some government committee and a bunch of handout-seeking “innovators.”

**

Ontario’s governing Liberals are expected to introduce a bill to retaliate against any state that adopts Buy American provisions as the provincial legislature resumes sitting on Tuesday for the final session before a spring election.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said earlier this month that the first piece of legislation her government will pass is a bill aimed at countering protectionist measures put in place by some U.S. states.

The planned bill would reduce procurement opportunities for states that adopt Buy American provisions by allowing provincial officials to write regulations targeting individual states.

The opposition parties have said they would review the legislation when it is tabled, but have also called the move a reckless political gambit from the Liberals as they fight to remain in power.

**

The Trudeau CRA is launching a further crackdown on tips, taking even more money out of the pockets of Canadians even as the carbon tax adds to the growing financial burden on Canadians.

As noted by the Globe & Mail, “A surge of tax audits of staff at a prominent Prince Edward Island hospitality group illustrates the growing efficiency of the Canada Revenue Agency’s tools for tackling formerly hard-to-pin down tip income and the growing risk to those who don’t declare it.”

It’s  not just in PEI, the government is now cracking down and going after easier to track digital payments:

“When tips were mostly paid in cash, real figures were hard to confirm. But because of widespread debit and credit-card payments, exact tip figures can now be traced back through point-of-sales-machine records.”

(Sidebar: it is suggested, therefore, to leave actual cash tips for waiters and waitresses so that those dozy b@$#@rds in Ottawa can't grab it.)




But ... but ... global warming! :

Barely two years ago, after weeks of intense bargaining in Paris, leaders from 195 countries announced a global agreement that once had seemed impossible. For the first time, the nations of the world would band together to reduce humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels in an effort to hold off the most devastating effects of climate change.

“History will remember this day,” the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said amid a backdrop of diplomats cheering and hugging.

Two years later, the euphoria of Paris is colliding with the reality of the present.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide are rising again after several years of remaining flat. The United States, under President Donald Trump, is planning to withdraw from the Paris accord and is expected to see emissions increase by 1.8 percent this year, after a three-year string of declines. Other countries, too, are showing signs they might fail to live up to the pledges they made in Paris.

In short, the world is off target.

Also:

Delays in installation. Complaints of broken machines and bad customer service.

Two years after Ontario’s Liberal government introduced a province-wide program to expand electric vehicle use, the program is being called “a screw-up” by some users and “a failure” by those in the electric vehicle industry.

More on "dead but won't lie down":

Since Brown cannot usefully run for the PC leadership unless and until his name is cleared, what if accusations that prevent him from becoming Ontario premier turn out to have been false?

To be sure Brown, who I didn’t approve as Tory leader, might have lost the election anyway, died in a bus crash during it or otherwise failed to become premier. And he might later rebound politically. But the stars might well never align again.

What? The big-mouth justice minister is rolling back on a promise to lower the legal blood-alcohol limit? :

The federal government is easing its foot off the gas pedal on a proposal to lower the legal blood-alcohol limit.

Last spring Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould floated the idea of lowering the criminal limit to 50 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood from 80 milligrams and asked for input from her provincial and territorial counterparts as well as stakeholders, like MADD Canada and the hospitality industry.

At the time, she said the change would make it easier to fight drunk driving.

But her spokesperson said they're not moving forward.

"While we believe that lowering the federal limit would better respond to the danger posed by impaired drivers, by sending a strong message through the criminal law and by changing drivers' behaviour, there are no plans at this stage to introduce legislation to do so," David Taylor said in an email to CBC News.

He said they could circle back to the proposal in the future, but are concentrating on Bill C-46, the government's impaired driving bill introduced in tandem with its marijuana legalization legislation.

 
One also can't screw around with the dope-smoking drivers, as well. Bad for optics, I suppose.


Vaguely-related:

While authors can reasonably claim a defence of artistic licence, Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Secret Path are being presented to school kids as documentary evidence. An entire generation of Canadian children will thus grow up believing Chanie was sexually abused by Catholic priests, just as Australian kids now believe their government mass-abducted Aborigine children to genetically cleanse the country. No one could claim either country’s record of colonial native relations has been blameless or praiseworthy. But why manipulate the past in such a calculated manner?

Windschuttle has a theory. The urge to blacken one’s own history is as old as the Bible, he says: “It is a sin and redemption narrative, plain and simple.” The farther the fall from grace, the greater the eventual salvation. By making past sins more horrible through the invention of new atrocity stories, the ultimate process of catharsis becomes more elevating and redemptive. “A literary trope has thus been co-opted for Aboriginal history,” he says. Such a process runs parallel to the political need for constant and abject apologies from Ottawa.

This is why the objectively sad tale of Chanie Wenjack has been made worse through the imaginative addition of Roman Catholic pedophiles, in the same way the remarkable experience of Molly and her sisters has been made more horrible by the creation of a monstrous genetic conspiracy. And while Australia had a head start in this imaginative shame-fest, we’re rapidly gaining ground. Much of what is said and done in the name of native reconciliation in Canada today amounts to a troubling misrepresentation of historical facts — from last year’s scrubbing of Sir Hector-Louis Langevin’s name from a prominent building in Ottawa because he was “an architect” of Canada’s residential school system (he was the minister of Public Works responsible for constructing the necessary buildings, he did not create the policy) to the recent removal of Edward Cornwallis’ statue in Halifax because the first governor of Nova Scotia once offered a cash bounty for Mi’kmaq scalps (in response to Mi’kmaq warriors scalping English settlers, paid for by the government of New France).

History is no longer the collection of facts bequeathed to us by those who went before. Today it is whatever story satisfies current sensitivities, regardless of what actually happened.

Because the Victim Industry (Big Victim, if one will) isn't geared towards truthful reflection and resolution. Not when there is money to be made and power to be had.





Cambodia, too, is experiencing the negative effects of the Chinese octopus:

Cambodia is not alone in weighing the mixed blessings of Chinese investment, which elsewhere has been welcomed for its scale and relative lack of conditions attached but criticised for leaving construction and other jobs in Chinese hands. 

What is unusual about Sihanoukville’s transformation is that tension in the town has coalesced into a public backlash — unusual in a country where personal freedoms are fading — and drawn a stern response from Cambodian authorities as well as from China’s ambassador.

To wit:

How much Beijing knew about the atrocities as they were being committed has been the subject of much debate among academics and military analysts. China has said nothing about the airstrip or its support of the Khmer Rouge, except to say the tribunal and prosecution of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders was an internal matter for Cambodians to resolve.

At the time, China also had its problems. Back in the 1970s, the Cultural Revolution was at its peak, and the leadership in Beijing was in disarray following the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976.

The one man considered powerful enough to intervene, Deng Xiaoping, had been exiled to the countryside. Deng returned and took control of China in December 1978, the same month Vietnam invaded and ousted Pol Pot from power. Beijing, in support of the Khmer Rouge, retaliated by launching a cross border incursion into northern Vietnam.

The airstrip would have allowed the Chinese to stage short-range bombing raids over southern Vietnam and its near-completed status, some military analysts have argued, was also likely in Hanoi’s thinking and partially responsible for its invasion of Cambodia.

Ey Sarih says the reason the airstrip was constructed is a matter for the Extraordinary Chambers for the Courts in Cambodia (ECCC) to establish, although he adds that “Chinese people came here to build the airport for fighting.”

Academics have argued that at least 5,000 Chinese people were classified as technicians and working in the then-Democratic Kampuchea as advisors to Pol Pot and his Standing Committee. China was the only country to have any substantial presence here, and critics argue this is a national embarrassment.

History repeats itself, after a fashion.