Monday Post

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

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould will be permitted to speak publicly about some of the details of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Trudeau is telling the House of Commons that the government will waive some of the solicitor-client privilege and cabinet confidences that have so far kept Wilson-Raybould silent.

(Sidebar: oh, just some details? And yourself, Justin? Will you testify now that Gerald Butts is gone and Katie Telford is being sued? What will you do without a fresh script?)

(Merci)

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Canada's top civil servant insists there was no inappropriate pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould to override a decision to prosecute SNC-Lavalin, but says he warned her about the dire economic "consequences" of criminal proceedings.

(Sidebar: this top civil servant and his ridiculous and inflammatory paranoid comments.)

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Democracy Watch, a Canadian advocacy group, believes Trudeau broke two sections of the Conflict of Interest Act by failing to abstain from a vote held last week in the House of Commons over whether or not to hold a public inquiry into the growing scandal. The Liberals defeated the motion with 159 against and 133 in favour.

**

More than eight months after the investigation into MP Kent Hehr’s improper conduct in the Alberta legislature concluded, neither of Hehr’s accusers nor Hehr himself have seen the entirety of the resulting report.

The Prime Minister’s Office, which commissioned law firm Rubin Thomlinson LLP to conduct the third-party investigation, told Global News on Friday the report isn’t being released to either party because of privacy concerns.

“The findings of the investigation are not made public due to privacy considerations and to protect the integrity of the process,” the PMO said in a statement.

Also:

Lawyers for Vice-Admiral Mark Norman are zeroing in on five top government officials — including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his former top aide Gerald Butts — as they prepare a motion to have the criminal case tossed out of court next month.

The cancellation of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project cost 8,000 jobs in one day alone. From the beginning of 2018, 63,500 jobs were lost.  The unemployment rate for the resource sector in Canada was 6.8 %.  The cancellation of pipeline projects has cost Canada $15.6 billion this year. SNC-Lavalin has a total of 10,000 workers, most of whom are in Quebec:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose office is under fire for allegedly pressuring his former justice minister to try to ensure a major construction company avoided a corruption trial, on Friday said he had been concerned about possible job losses. 

Priorities.




In 2015, Justin Trudeau called the prioritisation of Yazidis and Iraqi Christians as refugees disgusting:

Elite SAS troops found the severed heads of 50 sex slaves murdered by merciless Islamic State fighters as they led the assault on the terror group's last stronghold, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The barbaric jihadis had beheaded dozens of Yazidi women before dumping their heads in dustbins.

British Special Forces made the grisly discovery when they entered Baghuz, the besieged town on the banks of the Euphrates in eastern Syria where IS is making its last desperate stand.

Also - why bother?:

The commander of Canada’s special forces says officials are watching closely to see what impact U.S. plans to withdraw hundreds of soldiers from Syria could have on Canada’s mission in neighbouring Iraq.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Maj.-Gen. Peter Dawe said the planned U.S. withdrawal from Syria has not yet had any material impact on his soldiers’ mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is up for renewal at the end of March.

“We are tracking it all very closely, the entire coalition is waiting to see ultimately how that plays out and what the timelines are and what subsequent plans might look like,” said Dawe. “Because from a coalition perspective, there are sort of broader implications.”

Was it something they said or did?:

Education Minister Dominic Cardy is getting rid of a Chinese culture and language program operating in schools because of concerns that teachers are blacklisting topics that cast China in a bad light and only teach what the Chinese Communist Party approves.

The non-profit Confucius Institute has been operating in 28 New Brunswick schools, with more than 5,441 students taking part in 2016, according to the organization's website.

It is largely funded by the Chinese government and was introduced to New Brunswick in 2008, when Shawn Graham was the Liberal premier.

At the time, the New Brunswick government said the mandate was to teach and promote Chinese language and culture.

But Cardy said it's clear to him the program's real mandate is to present a "one-dimensional" view of China and to influence students to only perceive the country in a positive light.   "Their job is to create a friendly, cheerful, face for a government that is responsible for more deaths than nearly any other in the history of our species," Cardy said Thursday.

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The chief financial officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei had barely been arrested last December — triggering a diplomatic scrap of historic scale between China and Canada — when an obscure B.C.-based group called an unusual Vancouver press conference.

With most Canadians still digesting the news of Meng Wanzhou’s detention, and the U.S. extradition request behind it, the United Association of Women and Children of Canada appeared before the cameras to demand the executive’s immediate release.

“Canada should stay out of it,” a spokeswoman declared in Mandarin, her translated comments generating a number of stories in local media. “This is supposed to be a serious matter but looks like a joke between the two countries.”

Leaders of the United Association insisted they had no connection to the Chinese government, which had been making similar pronouncements.

But a closer look reveals a more complicated story, one that seems to point to Beijing’s long reach into Canadian affairs.

Behind the event were two women with clear ties to China, generous donations to political parties here and, in one case, a colourful history in Canadian law and municipal politics.

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Some 5.5 million people were barred from buying train tickets, according to the National Public Credit Information Centre. In an annual report, it said 128 people were blocked from leaving China because they were behind on their taxes.

The ruling party says penalties and rewards under “social credit” will improve order in a fast-changing society. Three decades of economic reform have shaken up social structures. Markets are rife with counterfeit goods and fraud.

The system is part of efforts by President Xi Jinping’s government to use technology from data processing to genetic sequencing and facial recognition to tighten control.

And - what? No one wants to be arrested in China while attending school?:

Sarah Taylor, the director-general of the north-Asia bureau at Global Affairs Canada, made the pitch for the 45-year-old Canada-China Scholarship Exchange Program during a Dec. 18 event at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.

“My department is proud to support the CCSEP and is eager to see a broader representation of Canadians from across the country, at the university and college level,” Taylor said in prepared remarks released under Canada’s access-to-information law.

The government continues to promote the lucrative exchange program, which has a final application deadline of next Friday, even though it has elevated its travel advisory to China with a warning that Canadians are at “risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”

Also - if your father was a communist, I am sure he is not in heaven:

The daughter of a Chinese Communist Party veteran boycotted his funeral Wednesday, calling it an improper tribute to a man who once worked for Mao Zedong but later became a fierce critic of the regime.

Li Rui's memorial was held at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, where many high-ranking former officials are buried. His daughter Li Nanyang said the ceremony was against her father's wishes, which according to her were: to not have a memorial, to not be brought to Babaoshan, and to not be draped with the party flag.

Li was 101 years old when he died of organ failure in Beijing last Saturday.

He was "completely disappointed" by the party, his daughter said in a phone interview from her home in the U.S. He felt that China was devoid of freedom of speech and that corruption was rampant in a system which allowed Communist officials to get rich while ordinary people's lives stagnated, she said.

"I believe that if my father's soul is in heaven, he will be crying at the sight" of his body covered by a party flag, Li Nanyang wrote in a statement to supporters. She said she chose not to attend the funeral in order to make her father's stance clear.

Veterans are asking for far too much, quoth Justin:

The federal government now faces four proposed class-action lawsuits over a $165 million accounting error at Veterans Affairs that shortchanged more than 250,000 former soldiers, sailors and aircrew, CBC News has learned.

The latest claim was filed this week by the Ottawa law firm headed by retired colonel Michel Drapeau. It joins similar cases launched by lawyers with Koskie-Minsky of Toronto, McInnis-Cooper of Halifax and the Kelowna office of Murphy-Battista.

The court actions, which have not yet been certified, relate to a bungled calculation of disability awards and pensions at Veterans Affairs — an oversight that started in 2002 and ran undetected for almost eight years.

It happened because of an ideology. You would be just as crippled or dead with a van:

Speaking at a news conference at the Danforth Music Hall, Samiei read an open letter to Justin Trudeau that urges the prime minister and his government to emulate “like-minded” countries such as Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom in moving to restrict individual possession of these weapons.

“We think we could have had better odds had attitudes toward handgun ownership been different before that night,” Samiei said as she read the letter aloud.

“In our case, a handgun that was imported through legal channels made its way into the hands of the perpetrator of our trauma and loss,” she added later. “Why did this need to happen?”

It's an election year!: 

Several relatives of Kawthar Barho have obtained visitor visas and are arriving in Nova Scotia today to support her and her husband after their seven children died in a Halifax house fire last week. 

Also - what? Another one?:

A fire has pushed a Syrian family of eight from their home on Fredericton's north side.

No one was hurt, according to Platoon Captain Mike Mizner with the Fredericton Fire Department. 

It comes just days after tragedy struck a Syrian family in Halifax, where a fire claimed the lives of all seven children from the Barho family. The funeral for the children was Saturday afternoon.

The Fredericton family is now in the care of the Fredericton Multicultural Association, which is setting up one the association's reception homes for the family.

 

How interesting:

A series of footprints found in May in P.E.I. National Park near Cavendish have been confirmed as those of the sail-backed Bathygnathus borealis, more commonly known as dimetrodon.