For a Friday

On this, the first day of winter ...




Merry Christmas!:

An Alberta judge has denied former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr’s request to have his bail conditions loosened to allow him to see his sister and travel freely.

Justice June Ross gave her decision Friday saying there’s no evidence of hardship, or that the current bail conditions are needlessly onerous. She also said her decision is not “etched in stone” and that Khadr’s bail conditions could change in the future.

Which I'm sure she will alleviate some time after the 2019 election.

But until then ...


Also:

In photos posted on his Facebook page, the Abu Sayyaf Group militant believed to have beheaded two Canadians in 2016 wears a big self-satisfied smile, like he has nothing to worry about.

His name is Behn Tatuh.

And more than two years after he allegedly executed John Ridsdel and Robert Hall in the southern Philippines, he appears to be still on the loose and posting selfies online.

An investigation by the intelligence research group iBrabo has uncovered not only Tatuh’s Facebook page, but also a troubling possible explanation for his longevity: he may have been trained by the Philippine police.

Justin's propagandists have their work cut out for them:

The federal Finance Department doesn’t expect to have a balanced budget until 2040, but that’s five years earlier than the government predicted last year.

(Sidebar: don't budgets balance themselves?)

Long-term budgetary projections released Friday morning estimate that by the end of fiscal year 2040-2041, federal books will be in surplus by $1.7 billion.

The Trudeau Liberals promised during the 2015 election to balance the books by the end of their mandate — 2019 — after running small deficits.

The government’s February budget predicted a deficit of $18.1 billion for the current 2018-19 fiscal year, which ends in March.

**

Relatively high wages and a sense of security from resource-based jobs could be the number one thing keeping Canadian politics in equilibrium, according to new analysis from Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a public policy think tank in Ottawa.

That may be good news at the moment, but it also means that the struggling oil patch is the only thing standing between Justin Trudeau and a populist surge on the right.

Yes, about that:

In the aftermath of the Federal Court of Appeal’s horrendous decision to stop work on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, this is what one pipeliner told me that day:

“Eight thousand jobs disappeared this morning, and one of them was mine.”

**

STREETS ARE PACKED in downtown #yyc to send the message to Ottawa we need pipelines, not more barriers to construction.

RETWEET IF YOU ARE WITH THEM!!! pic.twitter.com/RC20FUuo69

— Energy Citizens 🇨🇦 (@Energy_Citizens) November 22, 2018

**

The 22-kilometre long truck convoy, which got underway at 11:30 a.m., made its way through the Nisku industrial area, where many oil and gas companies have been affected by the low price of Alberta crude.

(Sidebar: Global News forgot to mention the regulatory processes, Justin's hatred of Alberta, the shocking lack of pipelines, the carbon taxes ...)


Also:

Alberta’s United Conservative Party has opened up another front in its fight against the carbon tax, filing documents with the Ontario Court of Appeal on Thursday seeking intervener status in the Ontario government’s court case against the carbon tax.

 And:

Staff at O.J. Pipelines, a company working on the Enbridge Line 3 expansion in southwestern Saskatchewan, are donating $10,000 to Cheyanne Morrison to help with her post-secondary education.

 Morrison’s father Darrell was killed Nov. 21 when a passing semi struck him, while he was assisting at a crash site north of Rosetown.

“We heard about the tragedy … and we were working in the same area,” said Paul Stuckless, safety manager at O.J. Pipelines.

Justin hates these people.




There was a little matter of cost:

Saudi Arabia has fallen behind in making payments on its $15-billion arms deal with Canada, a contract that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he’s looking for ways to halt.

Total gong-show.



Throwing money at a problem always fixes it ... or so people say:

Blair held a joint media conference with Mayor John Tory in Toronto Thursday to announce $400,000 for neighbourhood policing and $6.8 million over five years for youth gang prevention programs.

**

After a two-year police ban, Pride Toronto appears to be dangerously close to insolvency with nearly a $700,000 deficit outstanding and not enough assets to cover its commitments.

Also - because Canadians are somehow better than those silly Bible-reading Americans:

The report, titled Generosity in Canada and the United States: The Generosity Index, gathered data from the 2016 tax year and found that only 20.4% of Canadian tax filers donated — a sharp drop compared to the 32.2% of Canadians who donated in 2006.

Manitobans were the most generous with close of a quarter (23.8%) reporting their donations in 2016, according to the study. They also gave the most based on average amount of income to charity among the provinces.

The data gathered from the report also found that Canadians aren’t as generous as our American counterparts. Almost a quarter of Americans (24.8%) claimed donations on their 2016 tax returns.

Ranked by North American jurisdictions, we appear to be the biggest Grinches with 12 of the 15 least-generous jurisdictions in North America being Canadian. Manitoba, the highest-ranked Canadian jurisdiction, came in at 42nd place among the 64 Canadian provinces and territories and U.S. states.

Perhaps my math is in error but how is sixteen hundred greater than thirty-five thousand?:

Out of roughly 1,600 submissions to the ForTheParents.ca website obtained through a freedom of information request, roughly two dozen supported the Progressive Conservative government’s decision to repeal the document and temporarily replace it with one based on the 1998 curriculum.

“Did certain groups flood it right at the beginning? (They) did,” he said, though he did not elaborate on the nature of those groups. “We’re going to run through the 35,000 responses ... and make a decision.”

A third Canadian has been kidnapped in China while the first kidnapping victim remains in dreadful isolation.

Advice: do not go to a communist country thinking that those in that tyrannical state actually like you and won't turn on you.


A terrible case in point:

A wrongful death lawsuit filed this year by the parents of U.S. college student Otto Warmbier against North Korea is now seeking more than $1 billion from the government the Warmbiers say tortured and killed their son.

Also - but ... but ... Singapore!:

North Korea will not give up its nuclear arms unless the “U.S. nuclear threat to Korea” is eliminated, North Korean state media said on Thursday.

The statement carried by North Korea’s official Korea Central News Agency is a particularly blunt indication that the two countries are still far apart on their ideas of what “denuclearization” means on the Korean Peninsula.”

If he had been a Canadian veteran, Justin would have told him to screw off by now:

After the Sunday launch, the military veteran’s crowdsourced campaign for construction of the border wall has raked in more than $11 million in donations from nearly 200,000 people as of Friday morning. Kolfage, a triple amputee who won a Purple Heart while serving in Iraq, is aiming to raise $1 billion for wall funding through the GoFundMe. He proposed on the GoFundMe page that if every one of the 63 million people who voted for Trump donated $80, they would get the wall that Trump promised them, echoing an idea included in a New York Post column over the weekend.

Why would anyone, let alone a pregnant woman, work for a baby-eating organisation?:

According to a devastating report in The New York Times, Planned Parenthood has been accused of discriminating against its pregnant employees. As The Daily Wire noted this week, the “women’s health” organization is accused of factoring pregnancy into employment decisions and denying breaks to pregnant women.