Halloween Week: Mid-Week Post

Happy Halloween!




A truly frightening experience:

Justin Trudeau has a message for you if you don’t like the idea of Statistics Canada seizing all of your banking information.

You aren’t very Canadian and you don’t like data.

That was effectively his reaction when pressed on the shocking move from StatsCan by the opposition Conservatives in the House of Commons.

“What we are seeing is the Conservative Party of Canada learned nothing from Canadians in the 2015 election,” Trudeau said.

“When we restored the long-form census as the very first thing we did, Canadians from coast to coast to coast cheered!” Trudeau gleefully boasted.

It’s an odd defence but one Trudeau has used two days in a row, invoke the long-form census and accuse those that don’t like the government seizing all of your banking records as being against science and data.

How much money did Chinese businessmen give to your dad's foundation and how much of it is went into offshore accounts, Justin?




Andy needs Ford in his corner:

Scheer faced pointed questions about Doug Ford’s political influence after meeting with the Progressive Conservative premier at Ontario’s legislature, where the pair discussed issues including their opposition to the federal Liberal carbon pricing plan.

Ford has been a strong critic of the tax, launching a court challenge against it and raising his opposition to it during recent trips to meet with Conservative political leaders in Saskatchewan and Alberta.

(Sidebar: this carbon tax plan. The one where some are more equal than others.)

Scheer, when asked whose brand was stronger, said he and Ford were both working toward improving life for Canadians.

“The issue here is who’s on the right side of the people of Ontario and the right side of Canadians,” Scheer said. “The brand I’m closely associated with is the brand of lowering costs for Canadians, making life more affordable and standing up to new taxes.”

Also:

Canadians would be better off taking advice from a Nobel Prize winner who supports carbon taxation than listening to “ideologues and politicians who deny there’s a problem in the first place,” Trudeau told high school students in Ottawa on Monday. ...

Aside from the twisted problems embedded in the Trudeau-Butts carbon-price scheme, there’s another niggling issue. Any reading of Nordhaus’s work on carbon taxation cannot avoid the conclusion that Canada’s half-baked, go-it-alone deployment of such a regime is doomed.

As I mentioned in a recent column on Nordhaus, the Nobel economist reached a “bottom line” conclusion in a 2014 paper that a carbon tax would require “clubs” of participating nations that would impose “penalties and sanctions on non-participants” to enforce international climate agreements. Unless most or at least a large number of major countries adopted a similar carbon tax and imposed direct tariffs of up to 10 per cent on all imports from non-carbon-tax countries (so-called free riders) then the carbon tax idea will fail — just like the Kyoto protocol, which set out to reduce greenhouse gas emissions back in 1997.

In other words, based on Nordhaus’s own writing on the subject, the Nobel Laureate would have to assess Canada’s carbon tax plan as dysfunctional and ineffectual.

Oops.




(SEE: WINNING):

The deficit-plagued Ontario government still plans to go ahead with a tax credit for minimum wage workers, Premier Doug Ford says.

“So anyone earning minimum wages will be paying zero tax,” Ford said Monday.

The Premier confirmed the plan had been to make it effective January 1, but then said he would need to confirm the details with his Finance Minister Vic Fedeli.

Iqra Khalid would consider Asia Bibi Islamophobic:

Pakistan’s highest court has spared the life of a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy in a long-awaited ruling Wednesday, prompting celebration among human rights activists and protest among far-right Islamists. She had spent eight years seeking mercy from appeals courts while imprisoned on death row.

Asia Bibi was acquitted of making “derogatory remarks” about the Muslim prophet Muhammad after the judges ruled the evidence against appeared fabricated.

Had the judges not ruled in her favor, and without presidential clemency, Bibi would have become the first woman and first non-Muslim hanged under Pakistan’s strict anti-blasphemy law, which carries a mandatory penalty of death.

It's stuff like this that ruins things for everyone else:

A small truck was overturned and five people were arrested for alleged groping or similar offenses over the weekend, police said, as scores of people clad in Halloween costumes gathered in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo — a hub for the celebrations.

History is quite frightening at times:

The small party of Inuit camped at the southern end of King William Island around 1850 could count themselves as one of the most isolated people on earth: They had never met white people, they had never met Dene and they barely encountered other Inuit. So it was a uniquely terrifying experience for them to hear the sound of footsteps outside their igloo and find themselves facing a crowd of lurching figures with eyes vacant, skin blue, unable to talk and barely alive. These were the last remnants of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, the 1845 British voyage of Arctic exploration that ended with the death of all aboard. As ragged bands of expedition survivors split up and trudged south in a desperate bid to flee the Arctic on foot, Inuit throughout the region faced a real-life invasion of the walking dead. They saw men raving wildly, they saw camps strewn with emaciated corpses and they saw the Europeans begin to eat their dead. “They’re not Inuit; they’re not human,” was how one witness described their arrival, according to Inuit oral history.

Oh, the humanity!:

Murray Morrison noticed chewed holes in some pumpkins at the edge of his two-and-half-hectare pumpkin patch. Maybe chipmunks. Definitely not deer. Likely, it is the squirrels, sneaky as they are with their sharp little teeth.