Justin over-estimates his importance and sway over his favourite country and his ability to convince everyone that he cares that and that everyone cares with him:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canadians and people around the world are “extremely disturbed” by China’s detention of Canadians.
Nope.
If each country of the world was a colour, Canada would be beige and under Justin, we are a washed-out, faded beige that people barely notice.
Just like this.
Justin has made it abundantly clear how he (and his father before him) admires the communist state of China so much that he emulates it, trades with it, takes money from its movers-and-shakers and refuses to see it as a threat. That he waited so long to issue this faux and inflated concern drips with the same disingenuous hammy acting he delivers at every turn.
Once a substitute drama teacher, always a substitute drama teacher.
Burning bridges - the Canadian way!:
If B.C. had gone 100 per cent for the Byzantine contortions of Proportional Representation, it would have been “democracy at its finest and most mature.” Likewise, if in some inconceivable universe, Albertans to a man and a woman voted to plug every oil well in the province, and henceforth to live under a giant dome fashioned of solar panels, there would be very many to applaud the wisdom of the common man and the beauty of Canadian democracy.
An energized citizenry is called populist when it challenges status quo politicians. A citizenry becomes energized when status quo politicians have abandoned listening to basic messages from the people they represent.
Populism has become a new dirty word meant to describe anyone tired of a central government's antipathy towards its people. The chattering classes can complain if they wish but they should probably consider real estate even farther away from those blue-collar neighbourhoods.
Why don't politicians agree to not accept pensions for poor performance, to be accountable for wasting taxpayer money, to lower taxes, to scrap carbon taxes and other schemes that serve only to line governmental coffers, to build economies instead of tanking them? I'm sure that would reduce poverty:
Newly released documents show the federal Liberals' anti-poverty plan isn't quite as bold as the experts they asked for advice hoped it would be.
A May 24 presentation from the panel noted the group of experts wanted the Liberals to recognize "freedom from poverty as a fundamental right" when the government finalized its poverty-reduction strategy.Taking a human-rights approach, the panel said, should guide "the development of goals, targets and measurements" to reduce poverty nationwide, according to the documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.The Liberals didn't do that, leaving such language out of the anti-poverty law they introduced before Parliament broke for Christmas.
Try a comb and not wasting everyone's time and money on Big Aboriginal. You might like it:
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett is calling for patience from jittery oilpatch proponents worried about the government's controversial overhaul of environmental legislation — telling them to embrace better relations with Indigenous peoples or risk seeing even more energy projects held up by the courts.In a year-end interview with CBC News, Bennett, who counts Bill C-69 as the fulfilment of part of her mandate from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said the bill is designed to do away with the "residue" of a system introduced by the former Harper government that cut regulatory red tape but paved the way for several court challenges.
(Sidebar: at this point, one should be reminded that it was the Liberals who scrapped the Harper government's law demanding financial accountability from band chiefs, one way for the average aboriginal to hold his or her bad chief to the same standards one would any other elected official. Now, any aboriginal wanting to benefit from oil can't even do that. Thanks, white government.)
"This shouldn't be frightening," Bennett said. "It's better and achieves the certainty proponents need."
While Mr. Lilley makes some good points, the thing that must be emphasized is that universities should already be places of free expression, not fascist black-holes:
“Colleges and universities should be places where students exchange different ideas and opinions in open and respectful debate,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said in August when he gave the schools the deadline.
The premier is right, that is what colleges and universities should be, unfortunately too many have been willing to shut out ideas they don’t like. Mostly conservative ones.
So far the schools, all 20 publicly funded universities and 24 colleges, appear to be on track for meeting the deadline.
That doesn’t mean everyone is happy.
Jim Turk, a professor at Ryerson University who heads up the schools Centre for Free Expression, hates the policy.
Turk calls the policy an “unprecedented abuse of university autonomy” and says Ford manufactured a crisis in claiming free speech is threatened on campus.
If these places of ostensibly higher learning were truly open to people of all opinions, no one would have to suggest that they develop free speech policies. Mr. Turk's complaint of "unprecedented abuse of university autonomy" sounds an awful lot like China's Xi bellowing how no one will change China.
Little Potato much, Mr. Turk?
Speaking of China:
It took less than 24 hours for all the Christmas trees, lights and bells to disappear from a 27-story shopping and office complex in the Chinese city of Nanyang.
Even the giant teddy bear at the mall entrance wasn’t spared, said Ma Jun, who works at a tutoring company in the building.
“Everything is gone and cleaned,” she said.
Christmas continues to be a shopping festival across most of China, with huge trees adorning shopping malls in Shanghai and Beijing, but a growing emphasis on traditional culture by the ruling Communist Party and the systematic suppression of religion under President Xi Jinping are imperiling Santa Claus’s position.
At least four Chinese cities and one county have ordered Christmas decorations banned this year, according to official notices and interviews. Students, teachers and parents from 10 schools around China said that Christmas celebrations have been curtailed.
“The ongoing local reaction against Christmas is part of the wider sentiment since Xi took power,” said Zi Yang, a China expert at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Maxime Bernier is officially up and running:
The People's Party of Canada says it has reached its goal of setting up 338 riding associations as it sets its sights on being a competitive force in the upcoming federal election.
In an email to supporters, leader Maxime Bernier says the move amounts to a "gift of hope" for Canadians seeking to bring back freedom, responsibility, fairness and respect to the country.
A French judicial official says the alleged gunman who shot and killed five people in a Christmas market attack this month in Strasbourg had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
One hundred years ago, Canada was being ravaged by the worst single disaster in its history. In the space of a few months, 50,000 Canadians were struck down by Spanish influenza — roughly the same number as the country’s entire First World War military deaths. If such an outbreak were to strike modern Canada in equal proportions, it would kill at least 221,000.
Incredibly, the trauma of the Spanish influenza has been almost completely forgotten. The disaster has few memorials, no dedicated museum and in most Canadian history books it receives only the barest mention.
But the Canadians of 1918 did not experience the 1918 pandemic as a forgettable footnote to the First World War. They saw, smelled and experienced the disease for what it was: The fastest and most violent loss of civilian life in modern times. ...
By late 1918, the Saskatchewan government was receiving reports of abandoned homesteads populated only by the frozen corpses of dead families. Whole bunkhouses of farmhands died in their beds as livestock starved. In her 1983 book The Silent Enemy, author Eileen Pettigrew described a traveling salesman entering Paradise Hill, Sask. only to find a town littered with death: A store empty except for the bodies of the proprietor and his wife, a young man digging graves for his entire family, a tent filled with three dead Indigenous men. “The number of families without anyone to help them, persons dying and others ill and unfed beside them — is frightful … it is a frightful plague rampant all over the world,” reads a 1918 diary entry by future prime minister Mackenzie King.
At least one airport in Italy has been closed after Mount Etna sent black clouds of smoke and ash into the air following an eruption this past weekend, with the latest plumes spewing forth on Monday.
The latest eruption is a result of a new fracture on the based of the southeastern crater of Etna, according to Italy's official Ansa news agency.
On Saturday night, lava could be seen erupting into the air before flowing down the mountain, with seismic activity continuing well into Monday.
By midday on Dec. 24, about 130 tremors had been recorded, with a magnitude-4.0 even being detected, the National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology said.
Catania airport on Sicily's eastern coast has closed as a result of the eruption, as ash can impact plane engines and even lead to them stalling or failing in some cases ...
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No lost and found box for that.
The Philippines on Friday honored Takayama Ukon, a Japanese feudal warlord who was exiled to the Southeast Asian country 404 years ago because he was Christian.In marking the anniversary of the daimyo’s arrival in the Philippines on Dec. 21, 1614, the municipal government of Manila declared Dec. 21 as Takayama Ukon Day in his honor.
An agency of the Department of Tourism launched a walking tour featuring areas related to Ukon in the historic area of Intramuros, situated within modern-day Manila.
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the archbishop of Manila, blessed a newly carved wooden statue of Ukon, who is just a step away from sainthood following his beatification in February last year.
Born into a samurai-class family in Osaka in 1552, a time of political upheaval and civil warfare, Ukon went on to become the lord of Takatsuki Castle and to participate in various battles under preeminent warlords Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
However, during the reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which outlawed Christianity, the aging Ukon was exiled to the Philippines for holding on to his faith amid the persecution of its followers.
Arriving with his wife, a married daughter and five grandsons, as well as some 350 other Japanese Christian exiles, Ukon was warmly welcomed in what was then a colony of Spain, and given the honor of a parade-in-review of Spanish troops in recognition of his military standing.
During his brief time in the country, Ukon devoted his time to prayer and the evangelization of 3,000 non-Christian Japanese in what is now the city’s Paco district. He succumbed to a tropical ailment on Feb. 3, 1615, just 45 days after his arrival. His remains are buried in Manila.
Two hundred years ago, two Austrian priests played a carol that had been written a few years prior and was played one evening in 1818, strumming it softly on a guitar:
Austria has something special to celebrate this festive period as it marks 200 years since the first performance of one of the world’s most beloved Christmas carols, “Silent Night.Celebrations of the anniversary will culminate with a special Dec. 24 performance of “Stille Nacht” at the chapel in Oberndorf village, near Salzburg, where it was first performed 200 years ago to the day. ...
It was originally written as a poem by priest Joseph Mohr in 1816, a time of great suffering in the wake of Europe’s Napoleonic wars.
Two years later, Mohr asked his friend, the organist, choirmaster and schoolteacher Franz Xaver Gruber, to compose a melody.
The carol was first performed to a modest church congregation of ship laborers and their families. Years after its premiere, Gruber wrote that it had met with “general approval by all” among the congregation.
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