Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week intermission ...


 
Inventing bogey-men - like blaming Donald Trump or Doug Ford  - can only work if every single person living in Canada doesn't remember failed companies being bailed out with taxpayer money, failure to innovate, loan write-offs, fat, selfish, greedy unions swaying elections, slave labour, high corporate tax rates, a crushed resources sector, "green" energy laws that chased businesses away and a corrupt plutocracy favouring failed businesses:

Quebec Premier Francois Legault said Tuesday "it makes no sense" for the federal government to let Via Rail award a major contract without ensuring any jobs are created in Canada.

Reacting to a report that the German firm Siemens AG has beaten out Bombardier Transportation for a $1-billion contract to build new Via Rail trains, Legault said Ottawa should have included a 25 per cent local content requirement — at a minimum.

"I can't get over seeing (Marc) Garneau throw in the towel," Legault told reporters in Quebec City, referring to the federal transport minister.

Garneau told reporters earlier Tuesday that free trade agreements with Europe and the United States prevent the federal Crown corporation from favouring Bombardier in the awarding of contracts.

"We are competing around the world," Garneau said. "At the federal level, we don't have the right to impose rules that favour Canadian companies when we believe in free trade deals."

But the federal government doesn't believe in free trade: 

With roughly three hours to go before boarding a flight to Argentina for a meeting of G20 leaders, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this afternoon Canada is "still in discussions with the Americans" about signing the revised North American trade agreement at the summit.

He simply will not accept that he was outclassed by Trump in a matter that normally wouldn't bother him (after all, he still gets his pension no matter how incompetent he is). His ego just won't allow it. 

Justin has done his level best to tank this economy, from preventing pipelines from being built (meaning more oil on trains) to aiding people against the Canadian oil sector to implementing a tax that could be disastrous all around (oops). Canadians who are more than willing to let this decline continue deserve to freeze in the dark.

Also:

Unifor head Jerry Dias (AKA Biased Dias) wants to shut down all GM plants in North America in an effort to stop the closure of the Oshawa plant.

(Sidebar: as I said, selfish and greedy.) 

**

Big Canadian oil and gas companies face downgrades in their credit scores if current steep price discounts for their products continue, warns credit rating agency DBRS Ltd. in a report released Wednesday.

Such rating cuts could affect the companies' ability to access credit to fund future growth and potentially increase what they pay to service their debt.

**

A federal trade tribunal has ordered the government to put a $60-billion program to buy a new fleet of warships on hold while it investigates claims the vessel selected doesn’t meet the military’s needs.

Justin's favourite trading partner is a communist. But don't take my word for it:

Jack Ma, co-founder of China’s most valuable company, was officially confirmed as a member of the Communist Party in a state-backed newspaper recognizing business leaders for their contributions to the country’s development.

(Insert own expression of non-shock here):

The Trudeau Liberals seem to be once again ignoring their ‘most open and transparent government of all time’ promise.

And the resignation of Liberal MP Raj Grewal is still leaving lots of unanswered questions.

Remember, the Liberals first said Grewal was leaving because of ‘health’ and ‘personal’ issues.

Then – after muzzling their MPs – they said it was because of a ‘gambling problem’ and lots of debt – presumably from the gambling.


And now, it turns out that when he was on the House of Commons Finance Committee, Grewal was very interested in how the RCMP investigated money laundering and large financial transactions.

According to the Globe & Mail, “Transcripts of the committee’s hearings show that he was particularly interested in the testimony of members of law-enforcement agencies such as the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency or the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), which collects data on financial transactions of more than $10,000 at financial institutions and casinos.”

Additionally, “Mr. Grewal was interested in the ability of federal agencies to investigate and prosecute money-laundering activities, asking how many convictions were obtained in a given year.”

How could this go wrong?:

Prison needle-exchange programs that guards say will endanger their health and safety could get another look with an eye to changes, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale signalled Tuesday.

This sounds like a poor attempt to silence free debate:

Alberta’s top court will hear a case on Wednesday that could help determine the power of the “heckler’s veto” on Canadian campuses after a university handed a $17,500 security bill to students who wanted to hold an anti-abortion rally.

If the bill is such a concern, let's have no more publicly funded universities.

For some reason, no one found this guy plausible (or so they say):

A Federal Court judge has sided with government officials who argued a B.C. man who posted pro-Islamic State propaganda online had faked a conversion to Christianity when he came to Canada as a refugee.

While Othman Ayed Hamdan was accepted as a refugee based on his claim that his abandonment of Islam had put him at risk at home in Jordan, the government argued his “conversion to Christianity was bogus.”

Also:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the accused pair — Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, 27 — carried out an international hacking and extortion scheme that targeted more than 200 organizations, including municipalities (Newark, N.J., and Atlanta, Ga.), public institutions (Port of San Diego, Calif., and Colorado Department of Transportation), health-care facilities (Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles and Kansas Heart Hospital in Wichita) and schools (University of Calgary).

Wow. It's bad when one's own university thinks that one has crossed the line:

He Jiankui, a researcher in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, said Monday that he altered the genes of a pair of twin girls while they were embryos to try to make the babies resistant to infection by the virus that causes AIDS.

He, a virtual unknown in the world of gene-editing who crossed the boundaries of the scientific community’s self-imposed ethical lines, will make the project’s data public Wednesday at an international genetics conference in Hong Kong, according to a representative. Before even publishing proof of the results, he faces condemnation from his university, other scientists, and even a government official, who said that any gene editing for fertility purposes was unlawful.”I understand my work will be controversial, but I believe families need this technology, and I’m willing to take the criticism for them,” He said in a video posted Nov. 25 on YouTube.

Monday Post

The thing with throwing taxpayer money at a problem is that, sooner or later, the money will run out, the opportunity to either innovate or otherwise turn the business around has been squandered and the stupidity of the ruling government can no longer be hidden from the public. Canada has a history of bailing out failed businesses (and equally crushing them) and entrenching the power of fat, greedy and corrupt unions that vote according to their fat tummies (pick an instance). Now, it's the end of the road.

Just before Christmas:

Hundreds of workers walked off the job and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed "deep disappointment" after General Motors Co on Monday announced the closure of its Oshawa plant, catching governments and employees by surprise.

(Sidebar: yeah, I'll bet he did.)

Canadian officials, briefed on the plan on Sunday, promised to aid those affected by the December 2019 closure, part of a wider restructuring plan that will cut production of slow-selling models and slash its North American workforce.

GM said the closure affects 2,973 assembly line jobs in the Ontario city, out of a Canadian workforce of 8,150.

Choke on it.


Also - good:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says the closure of the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ont., is “done” and there’s nothing the government can do to change the automaker’s plan.

Ford says he asked GM in a phone call on Sunday whether there was anything the province could do to keep the plant open, and was told it could not.

He says instead, the province will immediately bolster unemployment insurance and retraining measures to help the nearly 3,000 workers who will lose their jobs.

This isn't a major victory, CBC hookers:

Unlike his predecessors as premier of Ontario, Doug Ford is not providing the media with a daily itinerary of his public events. So CBC News sought and obtained Ford's appointment schedule, using the province's freedom of information laws.

Seeing as one could just as easily look up the schedule on Queen's Park website, this is looking very much like making a mountain out of a molehill.




In other gong-show news:

Senators are to resume a special sitting today to examine a back-to-work bill that would force an end to rotating strikes at Canada Post as the walkouts enter their sixth week.

Patronising is putting it mildly, sir. Justin is being his usual @$$hole self:

If the prime minister had been speaking to a grade five class in Ontario, or some other province where oil isn’t part of the local lifeblood, his remarks might have made sense. But he was speaking Calgary, centre of the Canadian energy business. It’s a fair guess his audience contained quite a few executives who have spent a lifetime finding, extracting and shipping oil and gas. Their job requires a high level of expertise in negotiating the hoops and high jumps set up for them by regulators at various levels of government, which are regularly changed as new figures arrive on the federal and provincial stage.

Oh, sure. Come on in. Why not?:

The Syrian refugee who spent seven months living in limbo at a Malaysia airport has announced on social media that he is on his way to Canada. 

Why don't I have a good feeling about this?:

A Chinese scientist has rocked the world of genetics with claims Monday that he used gene-editing technology to alter the DNA of embryos that have now produced twin girls. The experiment to try to make the babies resistant to HIV infection has been widely condemned as unethical, and underlines the controversy surrounding this cutting-edge science.

Alberta and Ontario may engage in a beer war:

The Alberta government is opening a new front in the Canadian beer war by targeting Ontario for what it says are its unfair trade barriers to Alberta suds and other alcoholic products.

For a Friday

 A Black Friday, in fact ...




A free and independent press does not take a bribe:

The government is pledging nearly $600 million over the next five years to help news organizations struggling to adapt to a digital age that has disrupted traditional business models.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau said the government wants to protect the “vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in our communities.

Like the one that does not forget Liberal "generosity" and neglects to point out how the current government has tanked a once vital industry? That vital role?




Speaking of which:

Really a case of big hat, no cattle.

You’d find more substance in an old Seinfeld script than in the repeated tiresome talking points of Trudeau while he rolled out his shtick to Calgary at the boiling point.

In fact, the only thing of substance this day are the pro-pipeline protesters outside Calgary’s Hyatt Regency.

Them and all the cops and all the security guards inside the hotel, an impressive offensive line for the prime minister who was speaking to a business crowd in a ballroom up a couple floors.

They weren’t giving him the love.

We have the right to be angry.

Still no pipeline in the ground while we still pay a carbon tax. Selling our oil at bargain basement prices. High unemployment. One in four downtown offices empty. Investment drying up.

**

(source)

**

Canada's oil industry is facing record-low prices for its exports, a glaring lack of infrastructure to bring its product to market, and an uncertain long-term outlook.

But none of that is stopping the oil patch from increasing production. And as one pipeline project after another fails to launch, the industry is relying more heavily than ever to ship its oil by rail. 

According to Statistics Canada, the volume of oil on Canada's railroads has soared by 64.6 per cent in just the past year. And in the past seven years, the number of rail cars carrying oil across Canada has quadrupled.

When is that trade with China going to result in a sweet pay-off?:

Despite the federal government’s promise of access to lucrative infrastructure projects in Asia, so far not a single Canadian business or investor has actually benefitted from Canada’s involvement with a China-led development bank, the government says.

I guess not.


Also:

Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui announced this week he is creating a $100 million fund to aid the victims of Chinese communist repression under current leader Xi Jinping.

Guo announced the creation of the fund, which will also be used to finance investigations into Chinese government financial activities and those of its supporters in the West, at press conference in New York City on Tuesday.

The former Chinese insider also revealed in a presentation for reporters details on the disappearance, imprisonment, or death of 56 prominent Chinese nationals, including the mysterious death in July of Wang Jian, one of China's wealthiest business leaders.

"A lot of people lost their freedom, a lot of people disappeared," Guo said through an interpreter. "What we see here is the tip of the iceberg."

Rule number one about resignation club is that you don't talk about resignation club:

The chief government whip is telling Liberal MPs not to publicly discuss outgoing MP Raj Grewal’s resignation.

“I would ask that you please refrain from speculating or commenting publicly about Raj’s announcement,” reads an internal memo sent by chief government whip Mark Holland. “You can also refer any media questions to my office.”

(Sidebar: this Raj Grewal.)

Apparently, it's a gambling problem, or so they say.


Also - I'll bet he won't screw up the way a certain snowboard instructor did:

Premier Scott Moe is gearing up for his first trip to India to promote Saskatchewan.

"Saskatchewan is a world-leading producer of sustainable food, fuel and fertilizer, which gives us the unique ability to work with India to enhance its food and energy security," Moe said.

"India's economy and population are booming and Saskatchewan has what India needs to support that growth."

Moe said the trip is being led by the Saskatchewan business community, who share interests here and in India. 

"The mark of success of this would be measured over time," Moe said, pointing to potential future gains in exports and investment in Saskatchewan products. 

Moe said potash, uranium and pulse tariffs are among the items on the agenda. Officials from Cameco will be attending some meetings, as will representatives from Saskatchewan Polytechnic and the University of Regina.

Earlier this year India slapped import tariffs on Canadian pulse crops including chickpeas, peas and lentils. In 2016, Saskatchewan accounted for 90 per cent of Canadian chickpea crop land.

I doubt that the government will destroy its voters blocks in its literal infancy:

It appears the federal government has been undercounting the number of ‘birth tourism’ births.

According to Statistics Canada, 313 non-residents gave birth in Canadian hospitals in 2016.

However, according to data researcher Andrew Griffith compiled from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, there were over 3,200 non-residents who gave birth in Canadian hospitals.

Unsurprisingly, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen only said the government would look into the issue more, the usual non-answer given when politicians don’t want to do something about it.

Also:

The federal government has paid nearly $2.3 million to house asylum seekers in Toronto hotels from August to the end of October, after the city complained earlier this year that its shelter system was overflowing from the influx of refugee claimants.

Ottawa will continue to rent some hotel rooms until Jan. 4 for asylum seekers for whom longer-term housing hasn’t yet been found, despite an initial plan to pay for accommodations only until the end of September. However, the number of refugee claimants on the federal government’s tab is far lower than it was in August, when Ottawa said it would rent rooms for about 450 irregular asylum seekers who had been staying in two college dormitories.

Is it "daunting and intimidating" to personally pay for baby-killing pills that may eventually result in gynecological problems or to get others to pay for them?:

Advocates say Nova Scotians’ access to the abortion pill remains a major issue, with one student saying she had to wait nearly three weeks because of barriers including finding a doctor to prescribe the drug, testing delays and billing issues.

The woman, from the Toronto area, says she was five weeks pregnant when she took a home pregnancy test.

But she was almost eight weeks by the time she obtained the abortion pill Mifegymiso — a wait she describes as excruciating, and advocates say fails to realize the potential of the two-drug combination used to terminate early pregnancy. ...

Meanwhile, the CBU student called the Halifax clinic as directed by the university health clinic, and she says she was then referred to a prescriber in Sydney.

But she faced further delays obtaining an ultrasound and blood work, and ran into billing issues as a student from out-of-province.

Although the abortion pill is publicly funded both in her home province of Ontario as well as in Nova Scotia, she found herself without any coverage for the abortion pill — which comes with a roughly $400 price tag.

Without money to pay for the drug, she scrambled to obtain private health insurance through the university and ended up still paying about $70 out-of-pocket. ...

Although still within the nine-week limit to take the drug, the student says by the time she took the abortion pill she was further along than she had hoped.

She says neither her doctor nor the pharmacist prepared her for the immense pain and nausea.

“My body went into shock, it was terrible,” she says. “They told me to have maxi pads and expect a lot of blood. But it was excruciating.”

The student says she was told that if she vomited, the medications wouldn’t work properly and she’d have to start the process again.

“I was alone and started to throw up and I had to keep swallowing it … I was curled up, my whole body was shaking for four hours.”

Also - oh, burn, trans-jargon-barkers:

A male Australian senator mockingly proclaimed himself to be a woman before parliament last week so that he, as a pro-life male, could speak against abortion.

Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week stroll ...




Petroleum is not just a fuel. Thousands of products are made from petroleum. Price fixes, a chief customer and no way to transport the oil quickly isn't just deleterious as a loss of fuel but of other things, as well. The estimated losses to the economy of oil exports, counting on-ground transportation, could be as high as $13 billion.

So, yes, $80 million per day is quite plausible:

When it comes to calculating the total economic damage caused by selling Canadian oil at rock bottom prices, the numbers are all over the place. Last month, GMP FirstEnergy analyst Michael Dunn estimated that the Canadian economy was taking a $100 million per day hit from the discount. A Scotiabank analysis from March, when the discount wasn’t as dramatic, was forecasting daily losses of $40 million. And, of course, the Alberta government is running with a figure of $80 million. However, a back of the envelope calculation by G. Kent Fellows at the University of Calgary determined that the damage is about $60 million per day — a figure he roughly got by taking the current discount and subtracting the “natural” discount. Say Alberta woke up tomorrow to a magical land where the Trans Mountain expansion, Keystone XL, Energy East, and even Northern Gateway were all built and operational. As mentioned, even under ideal conditions the average WCS barrel is still going to sell at a discount relative to most U.S. oil. However, that discount would only be about $15 — not $50 — and that extra $35 would all be in Albertan pockets. Notley may be highballing the number at $80 million per day, but even at lower estimates Alberta’s pipeline bottleneck is still causing the province to forego more than $2 million in oil revenue every single hour.

But this was all part of a plan:

There’s long been a view in Alberta that the Trudeau government is intentionally winding down Alberta’s oilsands, and ultimately the entire fossil fuel industry.

This belief has a basis in fact. Indeed, you could say it’s not a fake fact, but an honest-to-goodness fact fact.

It was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself who said in January 2017: “We can’t shut down the oilsands tomorrow. We need to phase them out. We need to manage the transition off of our dependence on fossil fuels.

“That is going to take time. And, in the meantime, we have to manage that transition.”

He said that to a friendly audience in Peterborough, Ont. A few days later he was in Calgary, where criticism had erupted.

Asked about his comments, he said, “um, I misspoke . . . I said something the way I shouldn’t have said it.”

But Trudeau didn’t say he’d been wrong. He just wished, it seemed, that he hadn’t made himself so obvious.

**

My belief in the importance of Canada-headquartered companies goes back to the early 1970s when, as a young engineer, I joined the Canadian subsidiary of a Nebraska-based oil and gas company. While I was treated well and given substantial responsibility, I yearned to work for a company where the decisions were made in Calgary, not Omaha. That opportunity came with a new startup called the Alberta Energy Company. I joined AEC to head the building of the oil and gas division.

The company grew quickly. But five years later, the entire oil and gas industry was struck a huge blow by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program that capped oil prices below world levels and slapped a confiscatory tax on the gross revenues of energy companies. Canada-headquartered companies were supposed to benefit from cash grants, provided we shifted our drilling to federally owned lands. But most of those lands were in the Arctic where drilling costs were prohibitive and access to pipelines non-existent. After the Mulroney Conservatives killed the Trudeau policies in 1985, AEC got back to the job of company building. ...

The past few years have been a nightmare for the Canadian industry, where every light at the end of the tunnel has turned out to be train driven by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau barrelling at us from the opposite direction. His oil tanker ban in northern B.C. and his refusal to allow a pipeline in the Great Bear Rainforest killed Northern Gateway. And his introduction of a post-regulatory hearing requirement to consider “upstream emissions” forced TransCanada to abandon its nation-building Energy East Pipeline that would have replaced foreign oil. Meanwhile, hundreds of tankers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia and other countries make their way up the St. Lawrence without any such emissions reviews.

That left the now-stymied Trans Mountain expansion as the only hope of getting Canadian oil to tidewater. As if this weren’t enough to deter investment in Canada’s oil and gas industry, Bill C-69, the so-called Impact Assessment Act, now before the Senate, will make the chances of accomplishing resource infrastructure projects seem near impossible to investors. And then there are carbon taxes that will hit the industry particularly hard. These are the disastrous actions that are killing what has long been Canada’s most economically important industry.

Justin is still stuck on dad and no one has seen fit to stop his Icarus complex from killing the country's industry.




Like you fought here, Doug?:

Opposition continues to grow towards the Trudeau government-controlled Stats Canada’s plan to invade the privacy of Canadians.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says it can’t be allowed, and an Ontario PC MPP is introducing a bill to defend the privacy of Ontario residents:

“The federal government wants to collect personal banking information from 500,000 Canadians. We can’t allow this outrageous invasion of privacy. @stcrawford2 has introduced a Bill to prevent the government from obtaining personal information from Ontarians without their consent.”

Also - so your excuse is incompetence?:

Navdeep Bains, the Trudeau cabinet minister responsible for Statistics Canada, said he first learned of the federal agency’s controversial plan to harvest the financial transaction data of potentially millions of Canadians as a result of media reports and not, as the law requires, in a written notification from the country’s chief statistician.

Justin and his useless cretin lackeys are protected and voted back in by people who don't care how corrupt the government is.

One must remember that before one criticises the Americans and how they vote.




Speaking of Americans:

A federal judge dismissed some charges Tuesday against eight people — including two doctors — in the genital mutilation of nine girls at a suburban Detroit clinic, finding it’s up to states rather than Congress to regulate the practice.

But ... but ... Singapore!:

The US expressed “strong support” for the two Koreas’ plan to conduct a joint study to connect railways across their border, a top South Korean official said Wednesday, after the first meeting of a South Korea-US working group on North Korea issues.

The US, however, reaffirmed its position that inter-Korean relations and the denuclearization of North Korea should progress in tandem, which analysts say shows Washington’s concerns over a potential difference with its ally.

I'm sure that will be as well-built as this:

Construction of a 30-story hotel on the North Korean border with China has been abruptly halted, allegedly because Beijing took issue with Pyongyang's plans to build a casino there, Radio Free Asia reported Monday.

One source in Dandong, China told RFA that construction was halted "suddenly" after more than 20 floors had been built, adding there are rumors that Chinese authorities belatedly found out about the casino plan.

The Chinese government is struggling to rein in rampant overseas gambling by its citizens and may not want a casino so close to its border.

The loss of coal and steel mines means certain death for most North Koreans in areas where it is the chief industry:

As early as June of 2017, the Daily NK reported that sanctions had put hundreds of coal miners out of work in South Pyongan, and that people were blaming Kim Jong-un’s missile tests for instigating the sanctions that cost them their jobs. There were also spillover effects on local markets. By March, a state trading company anticipated that the Kim-Moon summit would get sanctions lifted and imported conveyer belts, hard hats, and headlamps to restart shuttered coal mines. 

But China’s enforcement did not ease significantly, even after Kim Jong-un met Xi Jinping. By March, the children of unpaid miners were skipping school and hauling heavy sacks of unsold coal to make ends meet. By August, the Daily NK reported that the coal export ban had driven the price per ton from $16 to $6, and that the mines could only pay a few of their workers. At least one man in his 50s starved to death. There was rice for sale in the markets, but most people couldn’t afford it. Many food stalls were empty for lack of customers. People were taking their children and moving away. Amid an abundance of unsold coal, there were power shortages as the electricity was diverted to Pyongyang. Rimjin-gang could not report from the South Pyongan coal mines, but found evidence that the nearby markets were suffering a loss of business.  ...

By February, the iron export ban hit the Musan mine so hard that authorities begged local residents, who were down to two meals a day due in part to the 2016 floods, to contribute money to keep it running. Starting in the spring, miners began smuggling ore or finding other work. By August, Rimjin-gang reported that the mine only produced a small amount of ore for domestic steel mills. Rations stopped and absenteeism was rife. Miners punched in and left early to collect wild plants in the mountains. Others drifted away to find other jobs. Security forces threatened to send AWOL workers to labor camps, but they couldn’t keep the mines running.

Your population is graying. The children literally are your future. Give them the damn tablets:

Japan’s nuclear regulation body decided Wednesday to review the nation’s distribution system for iodine tablets against radiation exposure, with an eye on giving priority to children.

Current rules say iodine tablets should be in principle distributed in advance to all residents living within a 5-kilometer radius of 16 nuclear plants in 13 prefectures, where doing so is deemed difficult in emergency situations.

But some municipal governments have yet to hand out the tablets to all residents, including children who are more vulnerable to radiation exposure.

(Kamsahamnida)

(Insert Title Here)

The artificial francophone oligarchy does not like Ford's treachery one bit and is not afraid to mislead everyone to get its way:

Quebec’s premier rolled into Ontario on Monday and complained Ontario isn’t treating their linguistic minority with enough respect.

I wish I was making this up.

The man who leads a province that has a law dictating English on business signs must be half the size of French is worried Ontario isn’t treating French speaking citizens with enough respect. ...

Yet for all the chest thumping by Legault now, worried about linguistic minorities, I don’t recall him speaking out for Montreal’s Anglos when he was part of a cabinet that merged the entire Island of Montreal into one city and reduced English services.

Neither did many of the Liberals now speaking out against Ford utter a word then.

Also:

Yes, it’s true that the French-language services will no longer have a standalone office to handle complaints. The commissioner will be let go and the work of the office will be rolled into that of the ombudsman’s operation. That’s a small symbolic change, but francophones will still have an avenue of complaint if they find services inadequate. The disbanded office received 200 or so legitimate complaints a year with a budget of $1.2 million. That’s something the ombudsman, a francophone, is quite capable of handling.

The 2017 Ontario Liberal promise to create a French-language university doesn’t stand up to logical examination. The number of post-secondary students in Ontario has been declining. That’s one of the reasons the new provincial government cancelled three other proposed university campuses. Why add universities when the ones we have are struggling to get enough students?

When it comes to French-language education, Ontario students are far from disadvantaged. The University of Ottawa is the largest bilingual university in the world and nearly 13,000 of its more than 40,000 students are French speakers. French language education is also offered at Laurentian University, the University of Sudbury, Université de Hearst, the Glendon Campus of York University and two community colleges. ...

Franco-Ontarians should be confident about their position in Ontario. They are still an important voting bloc, especially in eastern and northern ridings. The evidence of that is the number of political leaders rushing to score cheap political points by sucking up to them.

Again, how is this oligarchy being screwed over?


And - if Ford is backing down now, how different is he from the Liberals?:

“It came from the floor and it’s non-binding, so it’s done,” Premier Ford said on Monday when asked about the motion.

Since its passage the resolution has been riddled with controversy from both within and outside the party.

The Minister of Education, Lisa Thompson said that the resolution “has nothing at all to do with government policy”. Since the election, Thompson was put in charge of handling the public education sex-ed repeal which was a central policy promise in Doug Ford’s election campaign.

“I doubt that this is really from Doug Ford, but from his Chief of Staff, Dean French. Dean seems to be calling the shots in that government, for good or ill (mostly ill),” said Tanya Granic Allen.

Dean French has been somewhat of a trump card for the Ford government. Before he became Doug Ford’s Chief of Staff, French was a successful business man and a relatively unknown member in the party.

But a feature article by The Globe and Mail that interviewed 20 PC party insiders revealed a different side of Mr. French, suggesting he was “at least as outspoken and aggressive as Mr. Ford” when tabling meetings. According to the report, French rules staff appointments with an iron fist and has an uncomfortable amount of power at Queens Park.

 
Statistics Canada made $113 million selling others' personal data:

Also - something to think about.



Handing taxpayer money to the Liberals is like handing heroin over to a junkie, which the taxpayer also pays for:

The fleet only has 78 per cent of the number of technicians it needs, which means only 83 per cent of the aircraft needed are ready. That shortage has increased the number of hours of maintenance needed to keep the aging CF-18 fleet in the air to 24 for every one hour of flying time.

Let that number sink in. The CF-18s were bought in the early 1980s and were expected to be retired 20 years later. Current plans are to keep them flying until 2032, by which time they will be 50 years old — a bunch of rusted nuts, bolts, airframes and engines supplied by the lowest bidder.

**

Business groups are urging finance minister Bill Morneau to fully match U.S. tax reforms in his fall economic statement Wednesday, saying that a failure to maximize capital cost write-offs will leave Canadian firms at a profound disadvantage to their rivals.

(Sidebar: never going to happen.)




If Canada was truly bothered by anything the UN did, it would withdraw from the godawful organisation today:

Conservative MP & Opposition Immigration Shadow Minister Michelle Rempel says a Conservative government would pull Canada from the UN Global Compact on Migration.

Rempel says Canada shouldn’t sign the agreement.

Here’s how Rempel explained it:

“By allowing nearly 38,000 people to enter Canada illegally from the safety of upstate New York then claim asylum, Trudeau has undermined the integrity of Canada’s borders. Canada’s borders should not be compromised by abuses of our asylum system, and should not sign this compact.”

Is this more of Andy's "ambulance-chasing", Justin?:

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer unveiled a series of firearms policies Tuesday meant to curb gun violence — and slammed the Liberal government's plan to study a national handgun ban as a "lazy" effort that could punish lawful gun owners.

Watch this motion - whatever its merits - get voted down out of spite.



I'm sure it's nothing to be concerned about:

Beijing's municipal government will assign citizens and firms "personal trustworthiness points" by 2021, state media reported on Tuesday, pioneering China's controversial plan for a "social credit" system to monitor citizens and businesses.

We may never know their motives ... or something:

Police said on Tuesday they arrested three men who were allegedly preparing to attack a "mass gathering" in Melbourne, less than two weeks after a man was killed in Australia's second-largest city in what police said was an act of terrorism.

Australian federal and state police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and other agencies that form part of the Joint Counter Terrorism Team carried out the arrests on Tuesday morning.

Police said three men, Hanifi Halis, 21, Samed Erikioglu, 26 and Ertunc Erikioglu, 30, were taken into custody after they allegedly sought to acquire a semi-automatic gun to carry out an attack.

All three men were charged with planning a terrorist act, police said. They are all Australian citizens and their passports were canceled earlier this year.

(Merci beaucoup)

For a Sunday

Winter is coming ...



As of 2016, the amount of people who spoke French in and outside of the home was 29.8%. The English language, despite severe restrictions, was becoming more widely spoke in Quebec (which is not an officially bilingual province):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he's disconcerted by Ontario's decision to slash French services in the province.

"I was deeply disappointed by the decision of the Ontario government to cut services and protections for the francophone minorities in Ontario," he said at a press conference at the tail end of his trip to Papua New Guinea.

He said his reaction should come as no surprise, since protecting language is "extremely important" to him and his government.

(Sidebar: yes, Justin, we know.) 

The francophone oligarchy is artificially propped up at the expense of everyone else in Canada. The sooner this is dismantled and replaced with a realistic alternative to the diminishing handful who do speak French, the better off this country will be.

It's as though Doug Ford wants to win the next election and is on course for it:

Ontario's way out of a deep "fiscal hole" won't be easy, the Progressive Conservative government warned Thursday as it announced plans to eliminate three independent legislative watchdogs, end subsidies to political parties and halt the development of a French-language university, among other measures.

The cuts laid out in the government's Fall Economic Statement for 2018-2019 — its first major fiscal update since taking power in June — helped the Tories shave $500 million off the province's $15-billion deficit.

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The Ontario government announced in its fall economic statement Thursday afternoon that it would be closing the child advocate office, moving its responsibilities to an expanded Ombudsman's office, one of several cuts announced by a government that has said Ontario faces a $14.5-billion deficit.

** 

You will be able to buy alcohol in Ontario as late as 11 p.m. under the Ontario government’s newly-revamped sales policy, and maybe one day at your local corner store too.

The Liberals always leave the country in worse shape than when they found it, were strangely silent on Ben Levin and are strangely puritan over private businesses selling alcohol but are more than willing to make the taxpayer fund heroine users.

This entire country is a walking gong show.



Ignore social conservatives at one's peril. That sort of alienation splits the vote. Don't the Tories care about that?:

Prominent social conservatives within Ontario's Progressive Conservative party say their voices are being ignored at this weekend's policy convention, once again exposing cracks in a coalition that helped propel the party to a massive election win earlier this year.

Jack Fonseca of the social conservative group Campaign Life Coalition and Tanya Granic Allen, a parental rights advocate and former Tory leadership candidate, have both expressed frustration that dozens of policy resolutions with a social conservative bent were blocked from being debated by party members at the event in Etobicoke, Ont.

The exclusion of the proposals has rekindled fears amongst some social conservatives that their voices will once again be marginalized, as they said the party had done under former Tory leader Patrick Brown.

The same country that, for some reason, cannot produce its own experts or one that will remain after graduation and cannot import them needs them the most:

We know the co-op pipeline is crucial to employee recruitment. To take just a small example, a 2017 class profile of University of Waterloo systems design engineers showed that 65 per cent secured full-time jobs with the same companies they’d worked at as students. But Canadian firms typically only get student placements early on in their education, and this radically drops off as they get closer to graduation — when they aim for co-ops, and ultimately employment, in the United States.

This means taxpayers are supporting STEM education, but lose the talent necessary to stimulate economic growth in these sectors (and thus a return on our investment). Yet as the CEO of a 20-year-old tech company, I’ve often felt universities have been reluctant to make students aware of opportunities with Canadian companies. We need to be thinking on a bigger scale — collaboratively.

As usual, Canada is experiencing a brain-drain. Whatever skilled workers are produced will leave for greener pastures in the US or overseas and despite the insistence of the current government, the Canadian job market has yet to see illegal migrants with valid STEM degrees assume positions where the government says they are needed.


Also:

Canada is on track to receive its highest number of refugee claims since record-keeping began nearly three decades ago, the latest data shows, as the government's handling of immigration comes under scrutiny ahead of next year's federal election.

Despite cooler weather, the number of refugee claimants jumped past 6,000 in October, the highest monthly tally this year, the data released on Thursday showed.

That takes total claims in the first 10 months of 2018 to 46,245, putting the country on track to surpass last year's record even as the quasi-judicial body that adjudicates claims struggles to work through a 64,000-person backlog.

Where were these poverty-rights activists when Justin threatened to make things more expensive for low-income families with an unnecessary and expensive carbon tax?:

Protesters including OCAP protested outside Deco Labels, owned by Premier Doug Ford, after the recent repeal of the The Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act (Bill 148) that brought minimum wage up to $14, vacation entitlements, & two paid sick days annually.

Raising the spectre of the American elections because this one could go pear-shaped:

With a federal election less than a year away, Canada's defence minister is warning voters they will be targeted by online cyber-attacks and fake news as Russia steps up its efforts to undermine western democracies.

Yes, Harjit, about that:

According to Elections Canada, about 207,000 voter information cards were sent out in the last election to people that were already dead. Another 57,500 went to people that were not citizens.

With the Trudeau government set to allow voter information cards to be used as identification in the next election we should all be worried.

 

Are dead people going to vote? Did they vote in the last election?

What about non-citizens?

The scary thing is that Elections Canada recently admitted that they have no way of tracking whether a someone is a citizen before voting, describing the process as an honour system.

It's just an economy:

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says the low price of western Canadian crude has become a serious problem for the country's economy, adding her government is "furiously" seeking solutions.

But while the province and the oilpatch explore their options, Notley said there's a lack of agreement around the sector on the controversial call for her government to mandate temporary production cuts.

Anything for a laugh:

Justin Trudeau promised to restore Canadian leadership in the world. He pledged that the “proud tradition” that saw Canada help create the United Nations and champion the international treaty to ban land-mines would be revived on his watch.

The reality has been underwhelming.

Trudeau’s crusade to change the world has been more symbolic than substantive. Canada’s progressive trade agenda has been rebuffed by its trading partners; its peacekeeping mission to Mali — eight helicopters and 250 military members — has been welcomed by the United Nations but comes to an end next July.

Yet there is one area where Canada could become the “essential country” that foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland said it would be in her major 2017 foreign policy speech — as an interlocutor on trade relations between the United States and China.

This trade war:

Leaders from the world’s two biggest economies exchanged tough language at this summit of Pacific Rim countries as their trade war showed no signs of abating amidst a larger struggle for influence in the region.

United States Vice-President Mike Pence told a gathering of business leaders at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit that there would be no backing down from tariffs until China changed its ways.

“China has taken advantage of the United States for many, many years and those days are over,” Pence said.

The China that backs this guy:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has inspected a newly developed “ultramodern tactical weapon,” state media said Friday without specifying what kind of weapon was tested.

Normally Canadian lawyers are helping terrorists and war criminals:

A Vancouver lawyer who helped prosecute two of the Khmer Rouge’s most senior surviving leaders is breathing a little easier after a tribunal this week found the two elderly Cambodian men guilty of genocide and other crimes.

Dale Lysak says he has been waiting more than a year for the joint UN-Cambodian tribunal’s ruling against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, and that the verdict ensures some accountability for one of recent history’s worst atrocities.

“I’m very satisfied,” Lysak said in an interview. “I’ve been waiting for over a year to get the judgment on this trial and it feels great.”

An estimated two million Cambodians were killed during a bloody four-year period after the Communist-inspired movement known as the Khmer Rouge took over the poor Southeast Asian country in 1975.

Lysak was one of several prosecutors during the nearly decade-long tribunal hearings, and he told The Canadian Press he felt the weight of responsibility for all those affected by the murderous regime during his eight years working on the tribunal.

That included when he led the prosecution’s cross-examination of Nuon Chea, who served as second in command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who died in 1998. There were also daily reminders as survivors sat in the courtroom to listen to the trial.

Oh, good Lord:

Millions of children around the world live in orphanages, but child rights experts say most are not orphans.

Orphanages have become a lucrative business in developing countries, attracting generous funding. This has led to the trafficking of children to fill them, according to charities Forget Me Not and Lumos.

Oops:

Scot Peterson, the disgraced Florida cop who failed to act when a gunman shot and killed multiple people the February shooting in Parkland, is likely disappointed if he expected generous donors to flock to his GoFundMe page.

The fundraiser, created to collect funds so Peterson can “hire counsel to defend him against any spurious claims of criminal liability,” has a $150,000 goal. The page, however, appeared to be deactivated Friday night.