For A Monday

Quite an exciting week and it's only Monday!



Disappointed that a Liberal-appointed judge -

(Sidebar: this judge.)

- ruled that the bloated size of Toronto's city council cannot be reduced to twenty-five from forty-seven, Premier Doug Ford threatens to use a notwithstanding clause:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford took the unprecedented step Monday of invoking the notwithstanding clause to push ahead with his plan to slash the size of Toronto's city council in the middle of an election, despite a court ruling that found the province's move unconstitutional.

Ford said his Progressive Conservative government would also appeal the judgment, which concluded the province's council-cutting legislation was hurriedly enacted and interfered with the right to freedom of expression for both candidates and voters.

"I believe the judge's decision is deeply, deeply concerning," Ford said hours after the scathing court ruling was released. "The result is unacceptable to the people of Ontario."

Ford said he'd be recalling the legislature this week to introduce legislation that will invoke the notwithstanding clause, which gives provincial legislatures or Parliament the ability, through the passage of a law, to override certain portions of the charter for a five-year term.

Of course, if people demanded term limits, reduced sizes and scope of governments and actually made them accountable, Ford wouldn't have to resort to this.

But one simply cannot reason with ticks when there are fresh hosts available.


Also:

Ontario lost more than 80,000 net jobs last month – a recession-like statistic – and the Tory government blames the Liberals.

Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey released Friday shows while there was a slight increase in full-time positions in August over the previous month, the province was down almost 81,000 part-time positions over that same time period.

The number of part-time jobs decreased by 93,000 over a one-year period ending in August.

Statistics Canada suggested that such a drop in part-time employment “in general” can occur when employees move to full-time work, younger or older workers move in and out of the labour force, or when an industry with a lot of part-time positions undergoes change.

Economic Development Minister Jim Wilson said the province experienced 15 years of waste, scandal and mismanagement when managed by the Ontario Liberals.

“Under the (Kathleen) Wynne Liberals, job creation, economic growth and investment stagnated,” Wilson said in a statement. “While the NDP stood by and propped up the Liberals, the PCs stood up for the people and put forward a plan to get Ontario back on track. We will create and protect jobs by sending the message that ‘Ontario is Open for Business.’”

To quote: "... diversity is our strength ...":

(Sidebar: whatever you say, Entropy-Boy.)

A man has been arrested and charged in the death of Burnaby teen Marrisa Shen.

Ibrahim Ali, 28, is charged with first-degree murder of Shen,  the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team said Monday.

The 13-year-old Burnaby girl was reported missing after she failed to return home by 11 p.m. on July 18, 2017. Police launched a search, using GPS to track her phone. Early on July 19, 2017, Shen’s body was found in Burnaby’s Central Park. ...

Ali came to Canada 17 months ago from Syria as a refugee, according to IHIT.

"Unconscionable" is what the Liberals do best:

But with news the government will formally apologize for Canada’s 1939 decision to turn away the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 907 German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime, Trudeau has gone beyond merely apologizing for things that happened long before he was born.

This particular apology is being used to justify and exonerate current (failing) government policy on migrants crossing into Canada from the U.S

Also:

In his tweet, Neuer quotes the late Charles Krauthammer, an extraordinarily insightful medical doctor and Conservative-Zionist pundit.  Neuer schools Trudeau, laying into him that mourning dead Jews is easy and cheap.

Neuer suggests that the Canadian Prime Minister should get his act together, help the living six million Jews in Israel, and apologize for abstaining on the United Nations General Assembly’s June 13th decision to condemn Israel for the nation’s self-defence against Hamas terror.

It gets worse:

As soon as North Koreans enter South Korea, they are granted citizenship, but that makes them ineligible to apply for asylum in Canada since South Korea is considered a safe country. Which is why they end up applying for refugee status as North Koreans without declaring their South Korean citizenship.

Around 135 North Koreans were in the process of removal as of July although it was unclear how many of those held South Korean citizenship, according to the Canada Border Security Agency (CBSA).

Since 2013, Canada has received 171 refugee claims from individuals and families of North Korean descent and deported 217 North Koreans.

(Sidebar: the United States is considered a safe country but I digress ...)

From the same government that would rather chew off its legs than help the Yazidis.

These ones:

Four years ago, when Isis fighters swept into the furthest reaches of Iraq, images of desperate people stranded on a mountainside in the Yazidi heartland, dying of dehydration and hunger, sparked alarm and compassion for an ancient culture few had heard of. Helicopters were dispatched to drop food and water on the barren slopes of Mount Sinjar and to pull to safety the small number of people who managed to scramble on board.

Now a stubborn scar stains the cluster of towns and villages in the foothills of the Yazidis’ sacred mountain. Streets lie in ghostly silence, broken hulks of houses are still peppered with the bombs and booby-traps laid by Isis before they were pushed out of this area three years ago by Kurdish forces backed by US-led airstrikes. Hundreds of thousands of Yazidis are now scattered in displacement camps across this northern region, unable and unwilling to go home, and uncertain where to turn for help.

Few aid agencies are on the ground here and Yazidis are left in limbo, caught in disputes between the local Kurdish administration and the central government in Baghdad. That affects the delivery of aid as well as security for a population still profoundly fearful that Isis will return.

“I cannot go back to my own village,” Bafrin says as we sit in the farmyard in the baking heat, a dark blue scarf with a sparkling trim framing her broad face. She chooses not to hide her face, or her name, as she tells a story which, like the accounts of many Yazidi women, is beyond anyone’s imagination. “There is no hope there will ever be life in my village. There are only bones of the dead.”

Also:

Beijing city authorities have banned one of the largest unofficial Protestant churches in the city and confiscated "illegal promotional materials", amid a deepening crackdown on China's "underground" churches.

The Zion church had for years operated with relative freedoms, hosting hundreds of worshippers every weekend in an expansive specially renovated hall in north Beijing.

But since April, after they rejected requests from authorities to install closed-circuit television cameras in the building, the church has faced growing pressure from the authorities and has been threatened with eviction.

(Paws up)



Justin's moral and political failures are many and his achievements very few:

He’s done little but legalize pot.

It’s a criticism of Justin Trudeau I hear again and again.

Is it true?

Not in any literal sense. He’s also screwed up NAFTA talks, bought a pipeline that can’t be built, angered our Pacific rim partners over his handling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, bought old jets for our airforce while delaying purchasing new ones and he’s raised taxes several times.

That said, Trudeau’s legislative record is actually pretty thin.

He never did pass a bill on electoral reform, breaking his promise that 2015 would be the last one decided by a first-past-the-post system. He never restored mail delivery to a single household that stopped getting it. And his promise to be open and transparent, something he promoted in virtually every campaign speech, has failed to come to pass.

On that front, Trudeau’s government is increasingly becoming less open to Canadians, especially through tools like access-to-information requests.

It is things like these that affirm people's belief that universities should be relieved of private funding and that unions are fat and scabby bodies of malice:

University campuses have increasingly become a focal point of Canada’s anti-abortion movement, prompting a fresh debate over free speech and questions about what critics call misleading tactics.

“On campuses across the country we have seen a rise in anti-choice groups,” said Trina James of the Canadian Federation of Students.

(Sidebar: right there, she should be disqualified not only from any body representing students but from the debate itself.)

Crisis pregnancy centres often set up near university campuses, targeting students through ads, information campaigns and free pregnancy tests. They present themselves as non-judgmental clinics, a support service for people facing an unplanned pregnancy.

But students say they have received misleading anti-abortion information, including that ending a pregnancy could cause breast cancer and warnings about so-called post-abortion stress syndrome, prompting a backlash by student unions.

Yes, about that:

Two Japanese studies showed a positive association between induced  abortion  and  breast  cancer:  a  1957  study  reported  a statistically  significant  relative  risk  of  2.61,   and  a  1968  study found a relative risk of 1.51.

A  landmark  1970  study  by  MacMahon  et  al.  showed that childbearing was helpful in reducing breast cancer risk. The study estimated that women having their first child when aged under 18 years have only about one-third the breast cancer risk of those whose first birth is delayed until the age of 35 years or more. Their findings indicated that abortion might  be  an  independent  risk factor for the disease. Results suggested increased risk associated with abortion contrary to the reduction in risk associated with full-term births.

Soon after legalization, abortion became a common elective procedure and created a new field of medical research. Thirty-eight epidemiological studies exploring an independent link with breast cancer have been published.

Twenty-nine report risk elevations. Thirteen out of 15 American studies found risk elevations. Seventeen studies are statistically significant, 16 of which report increased risk.

Biological evidence provides a plausible mechanism for this statistical association. Most medical organizations were silent about this research, but there was still enough concern about a causal  relationship to lead scientists to publish another 36 studies after 1973, the year abortion was legalized. In 1973, the incidence of the disease was 82.6 per 100,000,  and  breast  cancer  was  considered  a  disease  of  elderly women. By 1998, female breast cancer incidence increased more than 40 percent to 118.1 per 100,000,   and breast cancer became a young woman's disease.

** 

Researchers from Anhui Medical College in China used a sample of 6,887 women oh which 3,264 had an abortion. It was found that women were 49% more likely to experience depression and 114% more likely to experience anxiety in the first trimester of a pregnancy when compared to the women who had not experienced abortion.

So there's that.

 

**

“Meet the scabs,” declares the one-minute video on the union’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. The text is followed by a montage of photos of workers hired by D-J Composites, a U.S.-based aerospace company, to replace 30 employees it locked out almost two years ago in a wage dispute.

Selfies and snapshots grabbed from the workers’ public Facebook profiles, with their names as captions, fade into surreptitiously taken images of them driving cars, walking across parking lots and sitting at picnic tables on what appear to be their lunch breaks.

“Is crossing the picket line really worth it? We have been locked out 21 months,” the video asks.

If she did rely on the "wisdom" of a stylised council, she would walk away with nothing:

Now, the wealthy Six Nations resident is fighting to hold on to more of his hard-earned cash. He’s taking a family law dispute with the mother of his nine-year-old son to Ontario’s highest court to fight to have his child support payments determined by Indigenous laws.

Hill’s lawyers argue Haudenosaunee laws should trump Ontario family law when it comes to Indigenous families. The repercussions of this case, to be heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal on Sept. 11, could reverberate across the province, and perhaps more broadly, by diverting Indigenous women from the family court system into a system based on Indigenous traditions.

Needless to say, there exists a multi-tiered legal system but I digress ...



What? Could Sweden just be tired of all those car-b-ques?:

Sweden has become the latest European country to have its political order shaken by a backlash against large-scale immigration, with voters giving a boost to a far-right party and weakening the more established ones.