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The same government that has a federal budget deficit of  $19.4 billion, a trade deficit of $2.7 billion, a business-averse sector and funded people who stopped the Kinder Morgan pipeline from proceeding has now bought the Trans-Mountain project for $4.5 billion.

What could possibly go wrong? :

Michael Ferguson’s report found there were fundamental failures of project management and oversight in implementing the Phoenix pay system; that Indigenous people had been let down yet again by their government; and that delays in decision-making by the public-private partnership building the Champlain Bridge replacement in Montreal had cost $500 million — money that, it turns out, could have been spent buying roughly 127 km of pipeline for the government.

Ferguson’s conclusion was that Canada has a “broken government system.” Yikes. These are the same people who have just agreed to spend $4.5 billion to buy Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain project — the existing pipeline, the terminal assets, the current management team and workforce and the right to build an expansion that will triple daily capacity to 890,000 barrels.

That price doesn’t include the construction costs — which finance minister Bill Morneau refused to reveal at Tuesday morning’s press conference but which one investor estimated at $6 billion — or the loan guarantees to get the project back up and running during this construction season.

On the additional costs, the government’s logic was that not talking about estimates Tuesday was good for taxpayers, because future investors in Trans Mountain would use them to beat down the price of any potential purchase. But the lack of transparency on the sticker price will make it harder to sell to Canadians dubious about any government getting involved in a business it knows nothing about — far less a government so recently accused of systemic “incomprehensible failures.”

Not that the pipeline will actually get built:

Do you really expect that Justin Trudeau will order the RCMP or military to protect the pipeline and arrest protesters that lay down in the path of construction equipment?

No, as soon as people like that show up, flanked by one of the First Nations groups that opposed this pipeline, Trudeau will cave.

By the way, ever notice that to most of the media, the dozens of First Nations groups that agree with this pipeline and will benefit don’t count?

Why should they? Veterans don't count, either:

When Justin Trudeau told Canadian Veteran Brock Blaszczyk – who lost a leg serving our nation in Afghanistan – that Canadian Veterans are “asking for more than we’re able to give right now,” there was massive outrage across our country.

After Trudeau had spent money so freely, it was absurd for him to all of a sudden get tight-fisted when it comes to helping our Veterans.

After all, Trudeau seems fine spending tons of money on payouts to terrorists, so why would he have a problem giving our brave Veterans what they deserve?

His broken set of priorities and rampant dishonesty is a big part of why he’s losing support in the polls.

And now, more questions are being asked after Trudeau’s decision to Nationalize the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Justin Trudeau expects Canadians to believe that he could somehow afford to spend $4.5 billion taxpayer dollars (the final cost will be many billions higher) to buy a pipeline, but he couldn’t afford to help our Veterans?

Bullshit.

Even worse, the fact that the government had to bail out Texas-based Kinder Morgan is due to the Trudeau government’s failed policies in the first place. Their ‘social license’ lie has been totally exposed, and their failure to support the energy industry and create a good environment for investment is now costing taxpayers billions.

Yet, Trudeau magically (actually massive debt increases) found the money for a Nationalization, yet refused to find the money to help our Veterans.

Also:

Because instead of having the private sector do it, Canadian taxpayers are now the owners of the Trans Mountain, for an initial outlay of $4.5 billion, with the final cost likely to be around $7.5 billion.

Canadian taxpayers, conscripted by Trudeau, have now assumed all of the risk from Houston-based Kinder Morgan, which halted work on the pipeline last month, threatening to abandon the project by May 31, because it was too financially risky to proceed.

This given the court challenges to stop the pipeline by B.C. Premier John Horgan’s NDP government and Indigenous opponents, along with protests by environmental radicals who want to kill it at all costs. ...


The Trudeau government said it will sell the pipeline back to the private sector once it’s completed and economically advantageous to do so. Right. We’ll see.

In fact, will it even be possible, given this precedent, to build any future inter-provincial pipelines in Canada without federal ownership, as opposed to the United States, where Barack Obama boasted during his presidency that his administration had approved enough pipelines to more than encircle the earth? ...


What all this shows is the abject failure of Trudeau’s and Notley’s superficial and absurd belief that imposing a national carbon price on Canadians would give them the  “social licence” to build the Trans Mountain pipeline, with the blessings of B.C.’s anti-oil government, Indigenous objectors and radical environmentalists.

Exactly none of that has happened, the future of the pipeline is still in doubt and billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money are now at risk.

But ... but ... two stocky white guys! :

One of two suspects wanted in connection with an explosion that injured 15 people at a restaurant west of Toronto may be a woman, contrary to earlier reports, police said Tuesday.

Investigators originally said both suspects wanted in Thursday night’s blast at the Bombay Bhel restaurant in Mississauga, Ont., were men, but new video evidence and witness input suggests at least one of the suspects could be female, said Peel regional police Supt. Rob Ryan.

Police have finished their work at the scene of the blast and are now analysing a collection of evidence that includes fingerprints, DNA, surveillance video, interviews with people present at the restaurant that night and remnants of the explosive device itself, Ryan said.

“Investigators spent hundreds of hours over the weekend combing the scene for every fine detail that might help them to understand what happened that night,” he said.

“What led the two suspects to detonate this device is still not clear,” he added. “We do not have clear motive and no one has claimed responsibility.”

I am willing to wager that, though incompetence is a factor here, the police are disseminating and then withholding all manner of information so that the public will not really know what the truth is.


Also - is he insane enough yet? :

A bail hearing for former Afghanistan hostage Joshua Boyle, who faces several assault charges, will stretch into a second day.

The Ontario court proceedings — likely to conclude Tuesday — are subject to a publication ban.

As a result, Boyle's lawyers declined to comment as they filed out of the provincial courthouse Monday. ...

Lawrence Greenspon, a lawyer for Boyle, told the court in January that an initial evaluation found his client fit to stand trial, but added that he would benefit from a fuller assessment at a mental health centre in Brockville, Ont.

(Sidebar: this Lawrence Greenspon.)




Someone else whose motive may never be known (according to some):

A suspected terrorist on day release from prison executed two female police officers with their own guns and shot dead a trainee teacher before he was killed in a shootout after taking two women hostage at a school in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege.

The bloody rampage on Tuesday morning, which left another four officers wounded, was captured on videos on social media, which showed the black clad man waving a pistol in each hand and shouting “Allahu Akbar” before he was gunned down by elite officers. Belgium's federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the attack.

The “lone wolf” attacker, 36, was named locally as Benjamin Herman, who was well-known to police for a string of crimes including robbery, assault and drug-dealing and was from Rochefort, a city about an hour from Liege.

One officer was named in local media reports as Soraya Belkacemi, 45, a widowed mother of twins, who are now orphaned. The other was Lucile Garcia, 53, who was described by fellow officers as a "fantastic colleague" who had married her partner a month ago.  

Herman was granted temporary release from prison on Monday night until Tuesday, despite a prison service assessment that judged him “ultra-violent” and that he was on a terror watchlist over suspicions he had become radicalised in 2017.

A mortar fired from Gaza hits a garden outside an Israeli kindergarten:

At least 25 mortar shells have been fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, in the largest single barrage from the Palestinian territory since the war between Hamas and Israel in 2014.

Emergency sirens sounded to urge residents to take cover as Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system engaged the projectiles, destroying some in mid-air, Reuters reported.

Several shells evaded Iron Dome rockets and landed in Israeli communities on Tuesday morning, including one that exploded in the yard of a kindergarten.

Poland is willing to pay the US big bucks to have a permanent base:

Russia threatened retaliation Monday after news that Poland wants a permanent U.S. military base within its borders and is willing to pay up to $2 billion for the facility.

The proposal for an American base touched off a rhetorical firestorm between Moscow and Warsaw, as leaders from both sides traded threats and cast a fresh spotlight on simmering tensions in Eastern Europe.

U.S. officials had no immediate comment on the Polish plan, but Moscow seized the opportunity Monday — on an otherwise quiet Memorial Day in Washington — to push back hard against potential attempts by the Trump administration to bolster the U.S. military presence in the region.

But ... but ... sanctions!:

As preparations continue for a summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, a hardline North Korean general targeted for sanctions by both the United States and South Korea for acts including terrorism is heading Tuesday to the U.S. on Tuesday.

Seoul’s Yonhap news agency reported that Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), was in Beijing, en route to New York.

It is quite possible that Sir John A. Macdonald was a difficult man. It is also quite possible that without him, we would be America now:

The main association of Canadian history scholars has voted to remove Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from a prestigious prize, joining a movement to stop celebrating the country’s first prime minister as a hero.

The decision to rename the 40-year-old prize the “CHA prize for Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History” came Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in Regina. Members voted overwhelmingly in favour of the change.

Well, then. God bless America.

Never ask a Canadian literati to wave the flag, even a little. That would be beneath her or him.


Also:

Conservatives do not just tolerate the dynamism of open societies, including staggering nonsense from political quackery to pet rocks. We genuinely foster it, whereas liberalism being perfectionist is liable to veer into stifling political correctness that chants about diversity in grim grey unison.

Given their reaction to it in practice, liberal praise for diversity in theory seems to me to muddy the waters. It diverts debate away from whether things they seek to enforce everywhere are indeed right in principle to who’s the closed-minded jerk.

It might not be who you think.

Oh, how awful.

I'm sure whoever this was never thought that the last thing he would ever see on this planet was a stone hurtling at his head a million kilometres an hour:

Officials at the Pompeii archaeological site have announced a dramatic new discovery, the skeleton of a man crushed by an enormous stone while trying to flee the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

Pompeii officials on Tuesday released a photograph showing the skeleton protruding from beneath a large block of stone that may have been a door jamb that had been “violently thrown by the volcanic cloud.”

The victim, who was over 30, had his thorax crushed. Archaeologists have not found the victim’s head. Officials said the man suffered an infection of the tibia, which may have caused walking difficulties, impeding his escape.