Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week recess ...




Today in "why do they let Justin keep talking? Why? Do they want to fail?" news:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under fire in online circles for comments about low-income Canadians and the amount of taxes they pay.

“We see proof that the Conservatives simply don’t understand that low-income families don’t benefit from tax breaks because they don’t pay taxes,” Trudeau said in question period on Tuesday.

The statement was in response to a comment made by Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre criticizing the Liberals for eliminating the child fitness tax credit introduced by the previous Harper government.

It was not immediately clear what definition of low-income Trudeau was using, although observers noted that income taxes kick in at around $12,000 per year and that every income bracket shells out for other fees like sales taxes and the new carbon tax.

The Conservatives were quick to pounce on Trudeau’s statement, saying it’s an example of the PM being out of touch with regular Canadians.

If one follows Andrew Scheer's Twitter feed, one can see the trained seals defend the frat-boy's obviously erroneous statements with attacks on Scheer.

Any citizen of Canada has to file an income tax return if they pay into the CPP or if they want a refund, among other reasons.

Canadians pay 42.5% of their income in taxes, including provincial and territorial sales taxes. This is one of the reasons why things like carbon taxes are injurious. They will add another burden onto lower-income individuals and families.

But if lower-income persons and families don't benefit from tax breaks, why would the government offer them and even tout them?

I guess Justin doesn't have an answer for that.


 
Quebec is special:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau threw cold water on any idea his government would give in to the demand for a single tax form in Quebec.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault wants Ottawa to agree to amend the duplicate systems to collect federal and provincial incomes taxes in his province to instead create a single tax form for residents, administered by the provincial government.

The issue has become a possible ballot-box question for Quebec voters in the fall federal election, with Conservative leader Andrew Scheer promising to make it a priority to develop such an agreement if his party wins.

"Conservatives favour simplifying life for taxpayers and for tax filing," Pat Kelly, the party's national revenue critic, said Tuesday.

The Conservatives introduced a motion Tuesday morning calling on the House of Commons to unanimously endorse the idea, which the Liberals immediately rejected.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa has a responsibility to collect taxes everywhere in Canada.

"Listen, we are always ready to work to simplify the lives of Quebecers and all Canadians, but we are not aligned with the Quebec government on the idea of a single provincial form," he said in French before meeting with his cabinet on Parliament Hill.

Quebec is the only province in Canada where personal income taxes are collected separately by Ottawa and the provincial government. In every other province all personal income taxes are submitted to Ottawa and then the provincial portion sent back to the appropriate provincial government.

 
Why is Huawei important but not Canadian businesses?:

Carl Rodrigues recalls being thrilled in August 2017 to have a sitting prime minister visit him at a Toronto hotel to discuss the future of his burgeoning company.

Just one detail was different than what he was hoping for. The visiting prime minister was not Justin Trudeau, but Ireland’s Leo Varadkar, who made a point of making SOTI Inc. one of the few private-sector companies he visited during a summer trip to Canada.

SOTI had written to Trudeau seven months earlier, inviting him to attend the unveiling of its future headquarters in Mississauga, Ont., which will eventually support some 1,100 jobs focused on mobility and the Internet of Things technologies.

But Trudeau declined to visit the potentially important research facility, though he did find the time, in January 2018, to visit several foreign tech juggernauts in Silicon Valley, including Amazon.com Inc. chief executive Jeff Bezos.

Canadian executives roundly consider such mild snubs from the Trudeau government to be a familiar occurrence, saying it points to Ottawa’s ready embrace of foreign tech companies at the expense of domestic firms, making it hard for scrappy young tech firms to find the attention and affordable workers they need to grow to commercial scale.

How convenient:

Another top defence official who took part in RCMP meetings about Vice-Admiral Mark Norman has admitted to not taking any notes during those briefings.

Jody Thomas, the deputy minister at the Department of National Defence, took part in two RCMP briefings on the Norman case. But the DND has confirmed to Postmedia that, like Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance, Thomas took no notes about what was discussed during the meetings with police.

In an unprecedented move, Vance decided to suspend Norman, then the second-highest-ranking officer in the Canadian military, in January 2017 after senior RCMP officers alleged the naval officer had leaked information about the Liberal government’s decision to stall a project to lease a naval supply ship from a Quebec shipbuilding firm.

But I thought that the NDP and the unions both loved Venezuela's basic dictatorship, just as the Liberals did:

In the midst of public pressure, the federal NDP offered its clearest position yet on the evolving situation in Venezuela Tuesday, distancing itself from Canadian labour groups who appear sympathetic to authoritarian president Nicolas Maduro.

Foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere told the National Post that she speaks for her party when she says she’s “comfortable” with Canada recognizing a new, interim president in Juan Guaido. But it has proved a murky issue for the NDP to navigate.In the midst of public pressure, the federal NDP offered its clearest position yet on the evolving situation in Venezuela Tuesday, distancing itself from Canadian labour groups who appear sympathetic to authoritarian president Nicolas Maduro.

Foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere told the National Post that she speaks for her party when she says she’s “comfortable” with Canada recognizing a new, interim president in Juan Guaido. But it has proved a murky issue for the NDP to navigate.

Let them through and let someone else sort them out!:

The claim from the government is that Canadians don’t need to worry about the more than 40,000 people that have crossed the border illegally over the past two years because everyone is screened and vetted.

Well, it turns out that is only kinda true.

An internal government document released under access to information laws shows that as of a year ago, there was a backlog of nearly 30,000 people that had not been fully security screened.

“More than 40% of all backlog cases are refugee claimants who are already in Canada but have not been security screened,” the document from the Canada Border Services Agency said.

That 40% amounts to 11,745 refugee claimants.

Surely that number has grown since February 28, 2018.

And the government can’t deny that this is a direct result of the illegal border crossers coming across at Roxham Rd where Quebec and New York State meet, because the number of refugee claimants in the backlog has grown in lock-step with those arrivals.

Remember - the previous government didn't care about autistic children:

Ontario is overhauling its autism program, giving funding for treatment directly to families instead of regional service providers as the government attempts to clear a waiting list of 23,000 children.

Children, Community and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod announced Wednesday that families would get funding until their child turns 18.

With the North Korea-United States summit coming up later this month, will Trump leave behind human rights for expediency or will North Korea do that for him?:

The White House was lit with glowing Christmas trees when Ji Seong-ho arrived for a holiday reception in December, an opu­lence he could not have imagined as a boy in North Korea. In the Grand Foyer, to the strains of the U.S. Marine Band, Ji made a wish that his former countrymen would “be liberated one day” and witness such grandeur.

“I almost teared up,” he said in a recent interview.

It was a return to the pinnacle of political power for Ji, who rose to prominence as an activist after defecting to South Korea and played a key role in President Trump’s risky strategy to build the international pressure that helped bring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table over his nuclear weapons program.

A year ago, Trump shared Ji’s personal story during his State of the Union address to shine a light on the brutality of Kim’s regime and praise the human spirit to overcome tyranny in a bid for freedom. It was an emotional appeal to the world that, beyond the existential nuclear threat, North Korea’s authoritarian leader was enacting savagery on his own people every day. Watching from first lady Melania Trump’s box in the House chambers, Ji stood and raised a pair of crutches over his head — a reminder of his amputated leg — to a standing ovation from both political parties.

Yet so much had changed as Ji mingled at the White House reception.

Since Ji’s starring role in last year’s State of the Union, Trump has said almost nothing about the plight of the North Korean people, more than 100,000 of whom are estimated to be held in hard-labor prison camps.

Instead, the president has abruptly shifted from a “fire and fury” condemnation of the North to an unprecedented strategy of engagement with Kim, which led to their historic summit in Singapore last June. Their joint declaration after the meeting made no mention of human rights, and Trump has spoken warmly of Kim since then.

He has said Kim has shown “courage” in moving forward with negotiations and often speaks about the “beautiful” letters the North Korean leader has sent him. At a campaign rally last fall, Trump told the crowd that as the two men got to know each another they “fell in love.”

“We have a fantastic chemistry,” Trump said in an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday.

This shows both a naivety and moral failure on Trump's part.

Communism is immoral because it crushes the human body and spirit. How is a leader who starves his own people and forces them to confess to ideological impurities a compassionate and pragmatic one?

History will not be kind to this sort of soft-headedness.

(Kamsahamnida)