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A lot going on ...



From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

Apparently without vetting the names, the PMO added Atwal and hundreds of others to a guest list.

“On February 10, PMO added an additional 423 names to the list of invitees,” the newly issued report states.

He should have been flagged as problematic but wasn’t.

After escaping the lack of vetting by PMO staffers, Atwal was flagged by the RCMP E Division in British Columbia.

This was on February 13, the same day the PM’s national security advisor was in India to discuss … well, security, and the same day there was a briefing within the government on Sikh extremism.

None of that raised flags about Atwal.

Instead, an RCMP official looking at the list and checking it against criminal databases flagged Atwal’s name.

“That information caused RCMP personnel to search criminal databases, revealing information that should have triggered the notification of the Prime Minister’s Protective Detail and the briefing of senior officials,” the report states.

The next day RCMP HQ in Ottawa was informed but did nothing with it.

A week later, after the story of a terrorist being with the PM’s entourage at a politically sensitive event had broken in the media, an RCMP officer charged with looking into this after the fact stated the obvious.

“A name check even on Google would have identified and flagged this individual if the guest list would have been accessible to security,” the officer wrote.

This report was completed by the committee months ago. It was handed to the PMO on May 31.

What changes were made since then, we will never know.

What is clear is that with what has been redacted the Trudeau PMO wants the RCMP to be the fall guys for this.

More:

Redacting testimony that is already in the public domain would seem somewhat overzealous for a new committee intent on persuading Canadians about its integrity.

Indeed, but here we are.

(source)

Also - Justin's favourite country is embedding itself as tick does a deer:

A wealthy Toronto developer with close ties to Beijing’s ruling Communist Party has become a donor to federal, provincial and municipal politicians – raising concerns among security experts about the influence he may be wielding in Canadian politics.

Ted Jiancheng Zhou, who has condominium projects in China and Canada, has risen to prominence within the Chinese-Canadian community in the Greater Toronto area only five years after his family’s arrival in Canada in 2013. He boasts of connections to high-level Communist Party officials in Fujian province, where he was born.

The Globe and Mail reported in November that Mr. Zhou, who is a permanent resident, recently set up 10 non-profit organizations aimed at helping the federal Conservatives win support within the Chinese-Canadian community before next year’s general election. The Liberals and New Democrats have asked federal Election Commissioner Yves Côté to investigate the relationship between the Conservative Party and Mr. Zhou’s organizations for possible breaches of election spending laws. 

Requests from MPs usually trigger an inquiry, former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley said.

Mr. Zhou denies his organizations were set up to raise money and help elect Conservatives, saying their purpose is to promote conservative values.

In 2016, Mr. Zhou was among the wealthy members of the Chinese community in Canada making the maximum donations to the Liberal Party to attend private cash-for-access dinners with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has since focused at the federal level on the Conservative Party, which under leader Andrew Scheer has drawn the ire of Beijing’s Communist Party by opposing free-trade negotiations with China.

The Conservative Leader and 10 other Conservative MPs and senators as well as Ontario Tory MPPs and municipal politicians attended a rally and dinner on Nov. 9 that Mr. Zhou organized for the inauguration of the Federation of Chinese Canadian Conservatives (FCCC), one of the 10 groups he founded, in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill.

A Globe investigation has found that Mr. Zhou has assisted candidates at all levels of government. Earlier this year, Mr. Zhou was a senior campaign adviser to Ontario Progressive Conservative Vincent Ke, now MPP for Toronto’s Don Valley North riding. Last year, he donated $400 to the Don Valley riding association of Liberal MP Geng Tan in May, 2017, as well as $1,476 to the federal Liberals and $1,028 to the Markham-Unionville Federal Liberal Association in 2015. Only two years after settling here, he also began donating to Ontario provincial politics. Elections Ontario records show close to $3,000 in donations under his name since 2015. Contribution lists from the 2018 municipal elections are not available yet, but financial records show Mr. Zhou donated $500 in 2016 to Ward 21 by-election candidate Jack Wang.

The donations to parties and candidates were within the legal limit.

The Globe has also learned that Mr. Zhou travelled to China last year with Conservative senators Victor Oh, Don Plett and Leo Housakos and their spouses on an all-expense-paid trip that the Senate ethics watchdog is investigating. The politicians were introduced to senior Chinese Communist Party officials and fêted, including at a lavish dinner at the five-star St. Regis Hotel in Beijing.

Fiscal responsibility is simply not important in Justin's government:

The disastrous cap-and-trade policy brought in by the province did nothing to reduce greenhouse gases, raised the cost of business for small and medium businesses (while often giving large businesses a break), and made energy more expensive for the customer.

All of this while transferring large sums of money to California.

The federal carbon tax will do more of the same. Canadians are being promised a rebate cheque – but as with cap-and-trade, the money will come from our pockets in the form of higher energy prices and higher consumer goods prices (because again small business and industry has to foot the bill).

The carbon tax that is doing this:

The average Canadian family will pay about $400 more for groceries and roughly $150 more for dining out next year, an annual food price report predicts.

Yes, the last time you threw down a gauntlet, a Tory picked up a seat. You should probably shut up, Justin:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is suggesting Quebec should rethink its plan to cut back on the number of immigrants it accepts each year.

This plan:

The new Coalition Avenir Quebec government says it will cut immigration to the province by roughly 20 cent next year.

Just get the dead or illegal migrants to vote for you, Justin.




The system we pay for:

Defenders of the status quo often waive away concerns about wait times, suggesting they’re simply the price Canadians must pay for universal access to care, pointing to the perpetual bogeyman of “American-style” health care as the only alternative.

In reality, there’s evidence from all over the world that it’ possible to maintain universal health care without the long wait times that plague our system.

For example, countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia all share Canada’s goal of universal access to care, and dedicate roughly the same portion of GDP to that cause (on an age-adjusted basis).

However, they all generally have more medical resources and significantly shorter wait times than Canada.

But ... but ... Singapore!:

U.S. President Donald Trump's top diplomat promised on Tuesday a new democratic world order in which Washington will strengthen or jettison international agreements as it sees fit to stop "bad actors" such as Russia, China and Iran from gaining.

Except for North Korea, right?:

U.S. President Donald Trump supports a visit from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to South Korea, President Moon Jae-in said Sunday. Moon and Trump met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina.

This North Korea:

The only way to make sure the trip is a success is to achieve concrete progress in denuclearization. But at present North Korea is merely pretending. Pyongyang has rejected all proposed meetings to initiate the process and continues to bolster its nuclear weapons and missiles. At the same time, it is intent on publicity events like another summit with Trump. Kim probably hopes to sign another hollow joint statement like the one that came out of their first summit, while benefiting from more concessions. Trump is also addicted to photo ops and told reporters that a second summit could take place in January or February of next year. It is fortunate that Trump is so far continuing sanctions, but there is no telling how things will change. A repeat of the Singapore fiasco is not impossible.

 

**

 

Children who performed in North Korea's mass games this year have suffered a host of chronic ailments such as arthritis, bladder infection and neuralgia, and many required hospitalization, Radio Free Asia said Friday.

The North revived the mass calisthenics for the first time in five years to mark its 70th anniversary.

RFA quoted a source as saying the spectacle's 100,000 participants included children as young as five and six who had to rehearse and perform in temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius. They had to bring their own lunch and leave home at 7 a.m. and return at 10 p.m. daily.

The North's forced mobilization of children for the mass games is seen as a human rights violation worldwide, though some foreign visitors appear to enjoy the spectacle of thousands hopping about and throwing shapes in unison to extol collective virtues.

Meanwhile, North Korea's State Security Department in April punished people who secretly watched the performance of a visiting South Korean art troupe in Pyongyang. They were sentenced to three months of hard labor at a construction site in the Wonsan-Kalma coastal area. 

**

Of all the industries that North Korea should be prioritizing — agriculture (which isn’t sanctioned) comes to mind immediately; tourism (which isn’t sanctioned, yet) should not. If North Korea’s climate is no fun during the monsoon or the summer months, it’s bone-chillingly cold in the winter months. To be sure, there will always be a limitless supply of fools who’d rather forego a vacation in Ko Samui or Lisbon and risk getting arrested, shot, or put into an unexplained coma, though I suspect that the supply of these fools is as thin as it is long. Some Chinese tourists visit, but not without risks of their own. In April, a bus accident killed 32 of them who were on a Communist-themed Korean War nostalgia tour.

So who would be the prospective customer base for this obvious sanctions dodge? The government that is most recently inclined to help North Korea dodge sanctions, of course — our staunch “ally,” South Korea. (Park Wang-ja was not available for comment.) As the Masikryong experience taught us, tourism is an industry that can be built into a cash cow with little more than cheap concrete and cheaper labor, including child slave labor. As the Kumgang experience taught us, it also lends itself well to isolation from the local population. The lack of downstream economic entanglements with local folk means it’s also an industry whose hard currency proceeds are easily diverted to any use the regime prefers.

**

The complaint alleges that the defendants illegally laundered money for banks and companies that were previously designated under North Korea sanctions executive orders for proliferation financing, smuggling, and money laundering.

• The Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea, designated in 2013 for proliferation financing.
• Koryo Credit Development Bank, which is linked to North Korea’s state money laundering agency, Bureau 39.
• Dandong Chengtai, a/k/a Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Materials, or DZMM, a Chinese company first outed by C4ADS in June 2017, then designated by OFAC in August for buying coal and metals from North Korea in violation of U.S. sanctions. A prosecutor’s “damming warrant” to seize DZMM’s funds as they passed through U.S. correspondent banks was the first big test the NKSPEA passed in the courts. DOJ then sued to forfeit $4 million in funds seized from DZMM, which C4ADS called the largest single buyer of North Korean coal. DOJ later amended its complaint to tack on another $500,000. In September of this year, the District Court entered a default judgment against DZMM. DOJ’s actions against DZMM may have played a significant role in the grim predicament of North Korea’s mining industry, with some of North Korea’s largest mines now idled by the loss of their export markets. Today’s complaint alleges that some of the coal money DZMM laundered was used to buy “nuclear and missile components.”
• Velmur, an alleged North Korean front company based in Singapore that was designated in June of 2017 for smuggling oil to North Korea (previous DOJ forfeiture suit against $7 million in associated funds here).  
• JSC Independent Petroleum, a/k/a IPC, a Russian oil company designated by OFAC in June 2017 for illegally selling oil to North Korea.
• Wee Tiong, a Singaporean national indicted less than a month ago for laundering money for North Korea, and who is still at large.
• Chilbo Wood Company, an undesignated North Korean company that used slave labor to harvest timber in Equatorial Guinea, and whose workers the EG authorities told the UN they’ve since expelled pursuant to UNSCR 2375, paragraph 17.

And while there was no one looking:

A North Korean soldier on Saturday morning defected to the South by crossing the military demarcation line on the eastern frontline by sauntering past an unmanned guard post.

It was the first defection by a North Korean soldier since the two sides demolished or removed 11 guard posts each in the demilitarized zone under a September military agreement to ease tensions.

The defection took place near Goseong, Gangwon Province where the North demolished its guard post but the South decided to preserve one for its historical value but left it unmanned.

The South Korean military "found a North Korean soldier heading south after crossing the MDL... around 7:56 a.m. Saturday," the Joint Chiefs of Staff here said Sunday.

No shots were fired, nor was any unusual North Korean activity reported. The soldier "is presumed to be in late teens or early 20s," a government official here said.

 

Why, this bit of cultural idiocy sounds like a challenge to me:

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" is getting a chilly response from Canadian radio stations.

 

CBC Radio said Tuesday it's joining at least two other broadcasters in the country, Rogers Media and Bell Media, in pulling the controversial Christmas favourite out of their rotations this year.

(Merci and Kamsahamnida)