Mid-Week Post

The axis upon which the work-week rests ...




At first, the Canadian popular press would not name the suspect who is responsible (allegedly) for the deaths of ten people. They waited for the Americans to do that:

CBS News sources identified the suspect as Alek Minassian, 25, and obtained a photo of him from social media Monday. Officials announced he's from Richmond Hill -- a town in Ontario, Canada. They said that the suspect was not previously known to police.

Then they rushed to find a non-Islamist reason for this act of terror, no matter how iffy:

 
(Sidebar: this Facebook.)


Now, the gelatin mayor of Toronto is insisting that the actions of a mentally affected suspect are an assault on the "inclusivity" of the city:

(Sidebar: okay, how is that supposed to make sense? Mentally ill people have irrational reasons, not politically motivated ones.)

By many accounts, Minassian acted deliberately but Canadian authorities were discounting terrorism and invoking mental illness as the motive. If the reporting was correct, and there was room for reasonable doubt, this was not a jihadist attack in the style of Sayfullo Saipov. 

Even so, Toronto mayor John Tory said “I hope that we will, as a city, remind ourselves of the fact that we are admired around the world for being inclusive and for being accepting and understanding and considerate.”

Butter that toast, John.

At the end of the day, the popular press has succeeded in obfuscation. All that needs to happen is for this to be swept under the rug and we can forget about this until something else like it happens again.




It's just an entire economy:

A new report by the National Observer quotes ‘government insiders’ alleging that the Trudeau government ‘rigged’ the federal approval process for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

According to the report, government insiders, “Speaking on the condition of anonymity with National Observer, they say a high-ranking public servant instructed them, at least one month before the pipeline was approved, “to give cabinet a legally-sound basis to say ‘yes’” to Trans Mountain. These instructions came at a time when the government claimed it was still consulting in good faith with First Nations and had not yet come to a final decision on the pipeline.”

The report also notes “Legal experts interviewed by National Observer say these instructions could be a significant matter reviewed by the courts to determine if the government’s approval of Trans Mountain was valid.”

**

According to the PBO report, Canada’s GDP will be $10 billion lower by 2022 than it would have been without the carbon tax.

The report also notes that public debt expenses will increase dramatically from the $24.1 billion recorded in 2016-2017, to $39.1 billion in 2021-2022.

So, that’s $10 billion less in GDP, and $15 billion more in debt as a result of Trudeau government policies.

**

The Saskatchewan government has launched its long-awaited constitutional challenge of the federal carbon price, arguing Ottawa is unfairly threatening to impose a tax on certain provinces.

The provincial government submitted a reference question to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal on Wednesday morning, asking the court to decide whether the federal Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act is “unconstitutional in whole or in part.”

 **

The world risks a full-blown oil shock within months as three geostrategic crises come to the boil and Saudi Arabia hints at US$100 crude, setting off a speculative scramble by commodity hedge funds. ...

U.S. shale output can no longer keep up with the global shortfall. Although U.S. production has rocketed by 800,000 b/d this year to a modern-era high of 10.5 million b/d in April, a lack of pipelines is increasingly leaving “stranded barrels” in the Permian basin of east Texas. The new infrastructure will not be in place until mid-2019. The logjams are even worse in Canada.

It's just the entire Dominion of Canada:

Trudeau’s father, Pierre, first tried to bring the constitution home from Britain unilaterally, without consulting the provinces.

Eight provinces appealed to the Supreme Court. They won. The constitution was patriated with heavy input from the provinces, except Quebec, which refused to accept it.

Horsman was there for all the meetings. They were intense, complex, emotional and hugely important. One thing that struck him was the acceptance of the final deal, both by politicians and the general public.

Quebec cried betrayal, of course. The separatists were then in power.

But it was remarkable — and quintessentially Canadian — to see how all parties generally respected the ground rules and tolerated key decisions.

Today, that respect is seriously eroded, both by parochial zealots and dithering, confusing politicians.

Spinning in their graves: these guys.

That son-of-a-b!#ch:

Officials now say we could see as many as 400 people a day crossing over the Roxham Road illegal border crossing. Justin Trudeau’s answer, blames the Conservatives.

Also:

Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel accused the government of simply throwing money at the problem of irregular migration rather than coming up with a demonstrable plan to make it stop.

"This is the second summer that we're going into a potential immigration crisis without a plan, and certainly we expect the government to do better."

Last year, RCMP intercepted a total of 20,493 people who crossed the border illegally. So far this year, 6,373 irregular migrants have arrived in Canada this way — more than double the 2,784 irregular migrants who arrived in Canada between January and April 2017.

Oh, dear. This just isn't going away:

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were aware far earlier than previously revealed that a man once convicted of attempted murder had been invited to a reception in India with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

In a document quietly tabled in Parliament Monday, the government said the RCMP first learned on Feb. 20 that Jaspal Atwal had been invited to two receptions during the prime minister's trip to India.

Why does this sound familiar?

(SEE: swords, falling on)




I would do it. Justin loves terrorists. The sooner you get out of Dodge, the better:

The future of the Canadian Forces counterterrorism base in Ottawa could be decided in the next several months as senior defence officials consider whether it makes sense to follow through on plans to move it out of the nation’s capital.

China scolds Canada for pointing out its war-mongering:

A nonbinding motion by Canada’s Senate calling for an end to Chinese actions in the disputed South China Sea is irresponsible and will “stir up troubles,” a Chinese embassy spokesman said on Wednesday. 

The Senate, whose members are not elected, passed the measure on Tuesday condemning China’s “hostile behavior” in the South China Sea, complicating efforts by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to improve relations with China. 

China’s construction of islands and military facilities in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion in trade passes annually, has sparked concerns that Beijing is seeking to restrict free movement and extend its strategic reach. 

Canadian Conservative Senator Thanh Hai Ngo, who sponsored the motion, said he wants Trudeau’s Liberal government to take a lead role in urging all parties in the dispute to recognize international laws and cease all activities that would escalate the dispute. 

“The government cannot afford to ignore the emerging realities of the South China Sea disputes. It must take an active role supporting its diplomatic allies,” Ngo said in a statement. 

(Sidebar: that is not going to happen, Mr. Ngo.)

No, Canada! That's a bad Canada!"

It's just a fraudulent deficit:

Ontario’s auditor general says the Liberal government’s statements on the province’s finances understate its deficit by billions.

In a pre-election report released today, Bonnie Lysyk also says the government has not accurately reflected the true cost of its borrowing plan to cut hydro rates by 25 per cent, and is raising questions about the way it accounts for revenues related to two teacher pension plans.

As a result, Lysyk says the government’s deficit projections are off by 75 per cent in 2018-2019, jumping to 92 per cent in 2020-2021.

How could this go wrong? :

The Ontario Liberals are poised to scrap provincewide EQAO tests for Grade 3 and Grade 9 students if they get re-elected.

They’re also proposing to eliminate mandatory requirements for high school students to pass a literacy test to graduate.

And they’d water down provincewide tests for Grade 6 and Grade 9 students, according to the Ontario: A Learning Province report commissioned by Premier Kathleen Wynne and quietly released Tuesday by Education Minister Indira Naidoo-Harris.

 
If students are going to be functionally useless, shouldn't we fire all the teachers?




In case one still thinks that Putin is an anecdote to any other moron in the West:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed new legislation allowing authorities to block websites that publish defamatory information about public figures.

The Internet libel bill swiftly passed the State Duma this month, two years after high-profile court cases ordering news outlets and opposition figures to remove corruption investigations from their websites, although Duma deputies have not explicitly linked the two.

To wit:

According to a recent media report, Trudeau met with top executives at Facebook and told them to fix their algorithms to prevent the spread of so-called fake news.

He didn’t simply ask Facebook to investigate the supposed problem, he threatened action – including stricter regulations from Ottawa – if the social media giant failed to comply with his demands.

If South Korea is utterly convinced that Kim Jong-Un means peace and there will eventually be a glorious reunification of the two Koreas, why shut people up? :

President Moon Jae-in on Monday called for a complete stop to political disputes at home at least until the end of his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un this week.

"Now the South-North Korea summit has come to be just four days away. We are standing at a crossroad to denuclearization not by military measures but through peaceful means and permanent peace," the president said in a meeting with his top aides at his office Cheong Wa Dae.

"The entire world is watching and the entire world is hoping for its success. I ask that our political circles too will halt their political warfare at least during the summit," he added.

**

In a public letter addressed to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) denounced two incidents in which South Korean government agents prevented North Korean defectors Thae Yong-ho and Lee Min-bok from exercising their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association. Thae was forcibly prevented from giving an interview to South Korean cable TV network Channel A, and Lee was prevented, again with the use of the state police power, from launching balloons over the DMZ, a form of activism he has carried out since 2003. HRF urges the South Korean government to uphold the country’s democratic principles and refrain from curtailing fundamental rights.

**

The end state of Moon’s plans isn’t even hidden anymore: a “new economic community on the Korean peninsula” that would necessarily involve massive tax increases and South-to-North subsidies, and a one-country, two-systems confederation with the world’s most tyrannical system of government. Whether all of this would precede the verification of the North’s disarmament is argued too vaguely and inconsistently to be inadvertently vague and inconsistent. Thus, it’s hard to say one way or another whether this would amount to a proposal to violate U.N. and U.S. sanctions on a massive scale, the expression of Moon’s aspiration to lift sanctions before the North fully disarms, an economic inducement for His Porcine Majesty to disarm, or yet another case of the great legal minds in this Blue House not bothering to read U.N. Security Council resolutions before making policy and promises. To be sure, Moon has paid lip service to sanctions, pressure, and denuclearization, but his mentor, Moon Chung-in, has revealed that under his vision, denuclearization would not necessarily precede sanctions-busting subsidies that would make denuclearization an effective impossibility, and guarantee that Pyongyang would retain nuclear hegemony over Seoul—to say nothing of its conventional, chemical, and biological threats. In any confederation in which one side has everything to lose and the other side has the means at hand to destroy that everything, it is easy to predict which side will emerge dominant. That’s why the sequencing of Pyongyang’s disarmament is everything.

Moon eventually tells Abe that he will mention Japanese abductees during the summit:

South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Tuesday told Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that he will raise the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea decades ago at his historic summit with the North’s leader later this week. ...

Moon is expected to meet with Kim on Friday on the southern side of the border truce village of Panmunjeom. The meeting is to be followed by the first-ever U.S-North Korean leaders’ summit by early June.

This Kim:

The Xi-Kim Summit confirms that people’s basic and fundamental human rights are in even more peril. Both regimes mercilessly repress human rights, and it doesn’t take much more than an internet search–not to be taken for granted in China–to read news about China’s “re-education” camps for Uyghurs, for example.These camps are aimed at squashing political dissent for a leader who has, in effect, already removed voting rights from the people of China. The fact that Xi has clear influence over Kim, who traveled outside of his comfort zone of North Korea, means that human rights considerations are nonexistent, except for a policy of human rights denial, coined by North Korean leadership expert Robert Collins for HRNK.

 (Merci beaucoup and Kamsahamnida)