But Wait! There's More!

Often, there is ...




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

According to recent reports, the Prime Minister’s Office is using a partisan tool to seek Liberal party diehards for judicial appointment candidates.

The tool, called Liberalist, is described as a “voter identification and relationship management system” for the Liberal Party of Canada. It’s intended purpose is to track and catalogue Liberal supporters and potential voters.

Documents obtained by the Globe and Mail show that members of the PMO were querying candidates for judicial appointments in the database to check if they were listed as recent Liberal party “supporters”.

Also:

When Trudeau went on a 10-day world tour last November, the food bill was $143,000.

The entourage ran up a booze bill of $1,000, with 53 bottles of wine sipped and another 53 cans of beer chugged!

When Trudeau went to Buenos Aires to the G20 meetings, he rang up and in-flight food bill of $103,000. Liquor cost for that trip totaled $923, with 57 bottles of wine and 38 cans of beer.

Over 200 bottles of wine and 250 cans of beer were consumed on just five Airbus flights between July and December totaling $4,039.36

The taxpayer also covered $381,814.05 for gourmet food for the Prime Minister and associates.

And:

Following a Globe & Mail report that Ian Jenkins – the CEO of a U.S. cannabis company – somehow got a ticket to a $1600 per person Trudeau fundraiser – the party has refunded the ticket price.

What? Canadian pot-sellers aren't good enough? Only Americans will do?

Oh, I guess so.




Manitoba has filed a separate challenge against the federally-mandated carbon tax:

The Manitoba government has filed its own court challenge of the federal government's carbon tax, following similar moves by Ontario and Saskatchewan.

In documents filed in Federal Court on Wednesday, the Manitoba government seeks a judicial review to quash the federal tax on the grounds it exceeds Ottawa's constitutional authority.

"The (federal carbon-tax law) falls outside of Parliament's jurisdiction," says the notice of application.

Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick — all provinces led by conservative governments — have refused federal Liberal demands to enact their own carbon levies. That prompted Ottawa to impose its own tax in those provinces, which started April 1 at $20 per tonne and will rise to $50 per tonne by 2022.

"The conduct by the federal government is unfair to Manitobans. It threatens jobs and economic growth throughout our province," Manitoba Justice Minister Cliff Cullen said in a statement Wednesday.

A date has not been set for the hearing.

Also:

And:

While British Columbians mutter profanities as they watch gas prices soaring as high as $1.79 a litre, carbon-tax advocates who should be popping champagne are instead quietly avoiding eye contact.

Anyone who wonders if gas prices matter to ordinary people should spend an afternoon watching a busy border crossing. British Columbians are flocking to Washington State to fill up, where, even after the exchange rate, they’re saving about 50 cents per litre.

For a vehicle with a 70-litre fuel tank, that works out to saving $35 per fill up. Multiply that by two fill ups a weeks for the average commuter family in Langley (not a lot of people can afford to live downtown with outrageously high housing costs) and suddenly you’re looking at either spending in Canada or saving in the States $70 extra per week — or $3,600 per year. ...

Some carbon-tax backers immediately pounced on the argument, noting that B.C. has had a carbon tax for over a decade and that B.C.’s high prices didn’t have anything to do with the new federal tax. They’re actually missing the point.

It’s true that taxes are not the only factor that determines gas prices, but they are among the biggest. In B.C., different types of taxes accounted for about a third of the entire price, including the provincial carbon tax that works out to 9.8 cents per litre with GST.

Carbon-tax advocates should be very happy about this state of affairs. Based on the logic of carbon taxes, The causes of higher fuel prices are irrelevant; it only matters that prices are high enough to discourage consumption. Carbon taxes are just meant to ensure that prices stay higher, even when the market price is lower. So you’d think such high gas prices would deliver the punishment carbon-tax advocates keep saying is necessary to reduce emissions. They should be cheering themselves hoarse.

Instead, carbon tax disciples don’t seem too keen to boast about high gas prices. It’s almost as if they’re afraid it will make carbon taxes even more unpopular.

 
Vaguely-related:

As swathes of the country face yet another year of spring flooding, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the extreme weather is the “new reality” of climate change. ...

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante says the city is looking at how it can become more resilient to floods but added that she and others worry encouraging people to leave their homes on floodplains will isolate residents who choose to stay the next time a disaster strikes.

This comes after Quebec Premier François Legault said on Monday the province will cap compensation for flood damage at $100,000 per home but will give residents up to $200,000 if they leave their homes on floodplains to move somewhere else.

I'm going to suggest something radical.

Do bear with me.

The reason why homeowners find themselves hip-deep in flood water is because they live on flood-plains and that this is spring, a season in which warmer air and more exposure to the sun causes ice-choked major rivers to flood over their banks.

What I suggest is insane, I know, but I might just be onto something.





A triumph for the working and middle-classes!:

New data from Zoocasa show you need to be among the country’s top 10 per cent of earners to afford Toronto’s $873,100 benchmark price. Only 2.5 per cent can swing Vancouver’s $1,441,000 price tag.

The study looked at the minimum income required to qualify for a 30 year, 3.75 per cent mortgage with a 20 per cent down payment in 13 pockets across the country. The findings were cross-referenced with income tax filings from Statistics Canada.

Even an entry-level home is unattainable for the bottom 75 per cent in the largest markets.

“While it may not come as a surprise that affording a single-family house is limited to the highest-income percentiles in the biggest cities, the numbers show even entry-level housing is out of reach for many in those markets,” said Penelope Graham, managing editor at Zoocasa, in the report.

A mouldy-oldie:

The Liberals have also promised to deliver a tax break to the middle class at the expense of the wealthy who will see their taxes hiked.

Cultural genocide suggests an actual effort to extinguish the Inuit culture from existence. Unless one is willing call the Indian Act a method of genocide and stamp out the francophone oligarchy (an equal-opportunity body of people who screw everybody over), this term is nothing but inflammatory. It would be better to address the real issues - the majority culture and language surrounds a minority culture and language (something not unheard of in human history), the failure of the minority culture to adapt and preserve something it holds dear and indifference - than sling around words just for attention:

Seated in the United Nations assembly hall, Nunavut's Aluki Kotierk told Indigenous leaders from around the world about the "devastating" loss of traditional languages that continues to plague Canada's Inuit people.

If Inuit languages, collectively known as Inuktut, disappear so too does traditional knowledge and teachings, said Kotierk, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., an organization that lobbies government to keep promises made to Indigenous people.

This linguicide, a form of cultural genocide, is the result of the federal government's continued investment and promotion of English and French in Nunavut at the expense of Inuktut, especially in schools, Kotierk said Monday at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The UN has declared 2019 the year of Indigenous languages.

"The current education system is failing our Indigenous Arctic children," she said. "Due to the interrelated, interdependent and invisible nature of our rights, such conditions can be devastating."

Education in mother tongues such as Inuktut is more important than students' socioeconomic conditions when it comes to them succeeding in school, Kotierk said.

(Sidebar: have you ever tried learning a language in poverty? In many places learning another language is tied to advancing financially and socially.)

In 2019, Canadian Heritage invested 39 times more money in French services than Inuktut services, despite close to 60 per cent of residents citing Inuit languages as their mother tongue, according to data from Nunavut's Office of The Languages Commissioner.

Canadian Heritage dedicated $4.5 million to French language services for 595 French speakers, more than $8,800 per person, and $5.1 million to Indigenous language services. With 22,565 Inuktut speakers, that's about $226 per person.

The Ministry of Canadian Heritage and Multiculturalism recognized Indigenous languages are endangered and disappearing as "a direct consequence of the government's past actions meant to destroy Indigenous cultures," said spokesperson Simon Ross.

(Sidebar: in all fairness ...) 

If white nationalism is an enormous thing in Canada, so prevalent, in fact, that it permeates society nearly everywhere, why are white nationalist groups so few in number and not at all as dangerous as Islamists?:

North Americans were horrified last year when a white nationalist killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. There have also been lasting reverberations after a far-right activist drove his car into a crowd of protestors in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Hard-right terrorism has expanded in the West in the past decade, with the Global Terrorism Database reporting it was responsible for 92 domestic terrorism incidents between 2010 and 2017 in the U.S., compared with 38 in the U.S. by Muslim jihadists.

Still, white nationalist terrorism accounts for far fewer attacks than the jihadist variety in Europe. And far-right extremists make up just a tiny fraction of the terrorist threat on the global scale.

Why didn't brief biographies of the members of the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (or the OVP) not appear (as of this writing) on the website so that people may review and further understand who is conducting the studies and why?


Are these minuscule numbers of white supremacists responsible for murdering hundreds in Sri Lanka?:

With Sri Lanka already reeling from a series of coordinated bombings, the horror continued Sunday afternoon as police raided the home of Inshaf Ahmed Ibrahim and Ilham Ibrahim, two of the suspected leaders of the plot that killed 359 people.

As police entered the residence, the wife of one of the brothers, Fatima Ibrahim, detonated yet another bomb, killing herself, the child she was pregnant with, three other young children and three Sri Lankan police officers.

Police had established that the two brothers had taken part in the attacks, leading them to raid their family home in Dematagoda, a suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.

Inshaf and Ilham Ibrahim are the sons of Mohammed Yusuf Ibrahim, one of Sri Lanka’s most successful spice traders and a frequent political candidate for the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, a leftist party in Sri Lanka.

 Justin admires China's "basic dictatorship":

As a member of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government and a Toronto city councillor looked on, the new head of the Tibetan Association of Canada explained how China had improved Tibetans’ lives and bolstered their religious freedoms during “60 years of democratic reform.”

Those six decades date from when the People’s Liberation Army put down a Tibetan rebellion in 1959, beginning decades of what human-rights groups have called widespread oppression.

Established Tibetan organizations and activists — who consistently decry China’s actions in Tibet — charge that the new group is a front for the People’s Republic government, though they have no direct evidence of Beijing’s involvement. Regardless, it has already managed to attract politicians from three levels of Canadian government.

Letters of congratulations the group has touted from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen are not authentic, officials in the prime minister’s office and Hussen’s office told the National Post.

Why is it that I don't believe that?

Oh, you b@$#@rds ... :

The North Korean government presented the United States with a bill for $2 million for the hospital care of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was held as a prisoner by Pyongyang, and insisted the US sign a pledge to pay the bill before releasing him from their custody in 2017, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

There isn't even two million dollars worth of healthcare for anyone in North Korea let alone an errant American.

B@$#@rds.

Also:

Putin and Kim held a day of talks on an island off the Russian Pacific city of Vladivostok two months after Kim’s summit with U.S. President Donald Trump ended in disagreement, cooling hopes of a breakthrough in the decades-old nuclear row. 

The talks between Putin and Kim did not appear to have yielded any major breakthrough. 

But Putin, keen to use the summit to burnish Russia’s diplomatic credentials as a global player, said he believed any U.S. guarantees might need to be supported by the other nations involved in previous six-way talks on the nuclear issue. 

Is that so?:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is likely to seek Moscow’s help in easing those sanctions Thursday as he holds his first summit with President Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Pacific port city of Vladivostok.

Pyongyang is growing more bold in its sanctions evasion, in part because many countries — and their banks, insurers and commodities traders — have long failed to properly enforce the measures, North Korea experts said. And some sanctions specialists worry that mixed signals from the Trump administration may further undermine global enforcement.

“It’s anarchy,” Hugh Griffiths, the outgoing coordinator of the UN monitors, said in an interview. “These massive gaps in maritime and financial governance will provide Chairman Kim with an economic lifeline for months, if not years, to come.”

(Paws up)