Mid-Week Post

Eighteen more shopping days until Easter ...




The scandal that just won't die:

Lawyers say Jody Wilson-Raybould may not have broken the law but her decision to tape a conversation with the privy council clerk may have crossed ethical lines.

(Sidebar: but pushing for a DPA and then lying about it wasn't unethical?)

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In a bid to unite the Liberal Party ahead of the 2019 election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ejected Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott from caucus for their public dissent over the government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin affair.

Finally?

What took Justin so long?

There is a reason why Justin took as long as he did and I am sure it is not because of any ethics-wrangling (he has none).


Not that this or Gerald Butts' recently found notes will derail either woman who could run as independents nor does this stop any investigation into the wrong-doing of a huge Liberal Party donor:

Export Development Canada has hired outside legal counsel to review some of its dealings with SNC-Lavalin. The review comes after a company insider told CBC News the engineering giant secured billions in loans from the Crown agency over the years, some of which he alleges was intended to pay bribes.

If true, it could mean taxpayers have unwittingly backed illegal payments.

(Sidebar: we unwittingly back a lot of things.)


But the street theatre doesn't end there.

Even after impassioned pleas to remain in the party of corruption and disappointment at having been booted from the party even after bringing in euthanasia, women, styling themselves the Daughters of the Vote, who had zero problems with Justin's gropings and Ahmed Hussen's steadfast refusal to condemn FGM, turned their backs on Justin when he opened his fool yap to deliver a rehearsed speech:

In silent protest over the ouster of two former cabinet ministers, as well as the Liberal government’s record on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, more than 40 young women stood and turned their backs as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed them in the House of Commons Wednesday.

The two former ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, had been in the gallery overlooking the Commons earlier Wednesday, offering standing ovations as young women from each of Canada’s 338 ridings — delegates in the Daughters of the Vote program, which encourages young women to get involved with politics — sat in the seats that would normally be occupied by their MPs and spoke about climate, electoral reform, equality, health, economic and Indigenous issues.

With Wilson-Raybould and Philpott was Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who quit the Liberal caucus recently in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, in which senior government figures are alleged to have put inappropriate pressure on then-attorney general Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the criminal prosecution of the Montreal engineering firm. “I was deeply moved by their passion, their enthusiasm, and the wisdom that was displayed,” Philpott said afterwards. “All these young women and young leaders, however they identify, have spoken truth about serious issues that are confronting our country, confronting politicians,” added Wilson-Raybould.

I can understand not wanting to hear that effeminate voice yammer on about empty platitudes but given that none of them gave a sh-- about the myriad of issues that are far graver than a criminal organisation booting a couple of its turncoats, this spectacle is just pathetic.




Canada's willingness to monitor terrorists has been on the margins since Air India 182 and the repeal of C-6:

Canada is only “on the margins” of having the resources needed to monitor radicalized fighters who have returned to Canada, says the former head of Canada’s spy agency.

Richard Fadden said in an interview that 60 to 75 so-called “foreign fighters” have returned to Canada and it’s not immediately clear in all cases what they were involved in overseas. That means they may need to be tracked upon their return and that requires a lot of resources.

“For the small group that we’ve decided are a risk, 24-7 surveillance — even with electronic support — is very manpower intensive,” said the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. “And even if CSIS uses the help of the RCMP and other police forces, it’s very tough to do.

I’d say we’re probably on the cusp of being able to do it effectively.”

To wit - how many returned ISIS terrorists are there, Ralph?:

On Monday, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel accused PM Justin Trudeau of hiding the number of fighters who have returned, asking for an exact count. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale stood up to offer the response: “in the order of 60.”

That was the number that hit the headlines and got Canadians talking. But it’s far from accurate. The first clue comes from reading Goodale’s full remark: “As the director of CSIS indicated before a parliamentary committee some months ago, the number of returns known to the Government of Canada is in the order of 60, and they are under very careful investigation.”

Some months ago? Try more than a year and a half ago. Goodale appears to be referring to CSIS director Michel Coulombe’s March, 2016, testimony before the standing Senate committee on national security and defence. It was there that Coulombe offered the 60 count.

However, when Postmedia asked Goodale’s office where it got that number from, it cited a government report compiled as of year-end 2015. This tells us two things: 1) That Coulombe offered Senators a figure that was four months stale; 2) That Goodale answered Rempel’s question with a figure that’s a full two years old.

In response to a question on this seeming discrepancy, Goodale’s spokesperson Scott Bardsley told Postmedia on Wednesday that “the figures haven’t changed.” Likewise, multiple media requests made to CSIS by Postmedia over the past two years requesting updates on the figure have either referred to these same figures or have simply gone unanswered.

Also:

The U.S. Department of State has designated Canada a “major money laundering country” where foreign drug-trafficking gangs are exploiting weak law enforcement and soft laws.

The March 2019 report, which places Canada on a short list of countries vulnerable to significant drug money laundering transactions — such as Afghanistan, the British Virgin Islands, China, Colombia and Macau — underlines a number of threats reported over the past year in Global News investigations, such as the laundering of fentanyl-trafficking proceeds from China through British Columbia casinos, real estate and underground banks.

Oh, dear:

Atlantic Canada was where the first domino of the SNC-Lavalin affair toppled in public — when Nova Scotia cabinet minister Scott Brison decided to resign his post. It's also where the Liberals have taken the biggest hit from the scandal's fallout.

What was once the party's most formidable electoral stronghold has now become one of its key regions of vulnerability.

(Sidebar: I'll just leave this right here.)

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Trudeau's message that he was worried about potential job losses initially played well in his home province of Quebec, where the Liberals hold 40 of the 78 seats in the 338-seat federal House of Commons.

His officials say Quebec media has been much less critical of the affair than elsewhere in Canada. But amid relentless news coverage, recent polls show the Liberals' lead over the official opposition Conservatives is shrinking. 

"He (Trudeau) has lost some ground in Quebec ... people have questions about the way this file was handled," said Daniel Beland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montreal. ...

Liberals, who had once predicted the party could win an extra 20 seats in Quebec, now say that 15 is the most likely maximum gain. In a tight election, that could make all the difference.

Philippe Fournier, a poll analyst for 338canada.com, said the Liberals were now hovering between 36 to 38 percent support in Quebec as opposed to 44 or 45 percent before the scandal.

And let's not forget this little bone of contention:

Albertan workers contribute far more to the Canada Pension Plan than its retirees take out, says a new Fraser Institute study, suggesting the rest of the country benefits greatly from the prosperity in Wild Rose Country.

The report comes at a time when Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party is planning, if it wins the election on April 16, to pick a fight over equalization payments, another federal program to which Albertans contribute disproportionately.

Squirrel!:

Environment Commissioner Julie Gelfand says Canada is not doing enough to combat climate change.

Gelfand delivered her final audits Tuesday before her five-year term expires, looking at fossil-fuel subsidies, invasive aquatic species and mining pollution.

But her final conclusions as the country’s environmental watchdog say it is Canada’s slow action to deal with the warming planet that is most “disturbing” to her.

Yes, about that:

The second half of the 20^th century had a solar magnetic field strength that was 50% higher than that of the last 60 years of the Little Ice Age. That ended in 2006. We are now back to the solar activity levels of the 19^th century and that may bring the sort of climate our forbears had then.

And so it has come to pass. January-February had record cold over North America. Seemingly the polar vortex was everywhere because Japan also had record cold.

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NASA research shows that Jakobshavn Glacier, which has been Greenland’s fastest-flowing and fastest-thinning glacier for the last 20 years, has made an unexpected about-face. Jakobshavn is now flowing more slowly, thickening, and advancing toward the ocean instead of retreating farther inland. The glacier is still adding to global sea level rise – it continues to lose more ice to the ocean than it gains from snow accumulation – but at a slower rate.

The researchers conclude that the slowdown of this glacier, known in the Greenlandic language as Sermeq Kujalleq, occurred because an ocean current that brings water to the glacier’s ocean face grew much cooler in 2016. Water temperatures in the vicinity of the glacier are now colder than they have been since the mid-1980s.

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The Health Effects Institute (HEI), a Boston-based non-profit organization that specializes in studying health effects as a result of pollution, recently published its “State of Global Air, 2017: A Special Report on Global Exposure to Air Pollution and its Disease Burden.” Based on extensive research conducted across 175 countries, HEI found that India and China face the deadliest air pollution in the world.

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(source)

Also - busted!:

Justin Trudeau recently tweeted an article with the following photo, in an effort to fear-monger Canadians into supporting his hated carbon tax scam. ...

The photo is attempting to make some sort of link between supporting Trudeau’s carbon tax scam, and avoiding forest fires, which is an astoundingly absurd argument.

And it’s even more absurd, once you realize where the photo is from:


This photo is from the Parry Sound 33 fire.

And:

Jim Hansen, Al Gore’s climate advisor and the scientist who literally started the global warming worry in 1988 puts it clearly: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

If people were at all honest, they would just call euthanasia "spare-parts drives":

Nova Scotia would become the first jurisdiction in North America to adopt presumed consent around organ donation under proposed legislation.

Under the Human Organ and Tissue Donation Act, all people in the province would be considered organ donors unless they opt out.

What happened to that organ cloning?

Cheaper to kill than to clone, I guess.




How students are educated and trained will have to be re-hauled eventually. The current system where students are piled into classrooms, taught watered-down subjects, not permitted to be failed and then returned home where (as is often the case) parents do not engage them in furthering their studies is simply not working. One must also consider the rights of parents to choose how they educate their children. Restrictions on home-schooling or any alternative form of education might be chalked up to the influence of teachers' unions who fear that too many students leaving their schools will result in unemployment:

Parents of home-schooled children say the Quebec government's plans to tighten rules around home-schooling would force their children to learn in the exact same way as their classroom-bound peers.

"Most families who home-school [do so] because either the school doesn't have the resources or the program isn't perfectly adapted to their child," said Noémi Berlus, who home-schools her eight-year-old and also serves as the director of the Quebec Association of Home Schooling.

She said the changes the government's proposing "defeat the purpose" of home-schooling.

Education Minister Jean-François Roberge tabled the proposed changes last week, saying they would ensure students are taught a full range of subjects, such as history and science, as outlined in the provincial curriculum.

Specifically, home-schooled children would be required to learn a subject in the same year as their peers attending school. Previously, as long as they learned the subject and passed testing, they could be taught it at any time.

Australian politicians bravely agree with each other that an overly frank senator is just a bad man:

Sen. Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation for blaming the attack in New Zealand on immigration policies. He faced more criticism later for physically striking a teenager who cracked a raw egg on his head in a viral incident in Melbourne.

On Parliament’s second sitting day since the March 15 attack in which 50 people died, government and opposition lawmakers moved the censure motion against Anning for divisive comments “seeking to attribute blame to victims of a horrific crime and to vilify people on the basis of religion, which do not reflect the opinions of the Australian Senate or the Australian people.”

“Sen. Anning’s comments were ugly and divisive. They were dangerous and unacceptable from anyone, let alone a member of this place,” Government Senate Leader Mathias Cormann told the Senate.

Anning dismissed the censure motion as an attack on free speech. “It is also an exercise in left-wing virtue signalling of the worst kind,” he told the Senate before the vote.

(Sidebar: Senator Anning's response to this.)

Hey, Australian government, you know what you're doing. (source)

You don't say!:

If Kim really intended to give up his nuclear weapons, he would have sought to start a new dialogue with the U.S. about his secret uranium-enrichment facilities. But instead he is resorting to the old brinkmanship and blackmail.

Why would anyone think that?

Oh, yes:

North Korea continues to ship coal despite sanctions and a South Korean ship has been held at port for nearly six months for suspected involvement in related activities, it was revealed Tuesday.

According to Seoul’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a South Korean ship suspected of transferring petroleum products to a North Korean vessel in a ship-to-ship transfer is currently being held in Busan. 

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Kim Chang-son, de facto chief of staff to Kim Jong-un, recently wrapped up his seven-day visit to Moscow and Vladivostok. On Monday, Oleg Melnichenko, head of a friendship group of lawmakers from the two countries, said Kim Jong-un may visit Russia in the near future.

The North told Kolokotsev on Tuesday that it will send delegations to international events held in Russia this year such as the Moscow Conference on International Security and the Eastern Economic Forum, according to TASS.

 

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North Korea is sending tens of thousands of workers to China on temporary visitor visas to make quick cash for the regime now international sanctions ban countries around the world from employing North Korean workers. 

The move seems to be a desperate attempt to raise hard currency for the increasingly cash-strapped dictatorship after February's summit with the U.S. collapsed.

A leopard does not change its spots, especially if it is a Kim dynasty leopard.

 

 

 

 

A new name for a new era:

In a much-awaited moment that heralded the approach of a new chapter in Japan’s history, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced Monday that the new Imperial era will be named Reiwa, in one of the final steps toward initiating the nation’s first Imperial succession in three decades.

Another chapter in "look after your own g-d- poor, India":

 

The mob, consisting of members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an ultra-nationalist Hindu paramilitary group, turned the school’s chapel upside down, beheading and toppling a statue of the Virgin Mary and savaging the altar with a pickaxe.

No part of the school building was spared, as the activists devastated classrooms, smashed desks and windows, and wreaked havoc on the auditorium. Four of the nuns and two other school staff members were hospitalized for injuries after the attack.

A recent report found that hate crimes and targeted violence against Christians had jumped by 57 percent in India during the first two months of 2019 as compared with the same period in 2018.

During January and February, 77 incidents of “hate and targeted violence against Christians” were documented in India as compared with the 49 cases recorded during the same period last year, according to the Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI).

 

 

 

For some reason, Taiwan doesn't trust China:

 

In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, Taiwan’s Deputy Minister of Mainland Affairs Chiu Chui-Cheng said the platforms would soon be blocked on grounds of national security amid fears that China will use them to spread communist propaganda.

“We are concerned that streaming media services that have close ties with Beijing could have cultural and political influences in Taiwan… and even affect Taiwan’s elections,” Chiu said.

Also:

Even so, it’s odd framing for a company embarking on a charm offensive to convince the public it’s not a national security threat. Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally for Huawei, which traditionally eschews media attention and vies to win customers on merit. But it feels forced to defend itself against suspicions it believes are based on its identity as a Chinese company, not evidence. The 5G stakes are high, and Huawei is straining to stay on top of its game.

It might help if Huawei wasn't spying on people.

 

And now, a feel-good story:

The state of Massachusetts took custody of Gisele when she was 3 months old and transferred her to Franciscan Children’s because her lungs needed specialized care, and she had a feeding tube. The baby did not have a single visitor in her five months at the hospital. 

Social service workers were trying to place her in foster care. 

"Gisele,” Smith told herself all the way home that evening. “Gisele.” It was at that moment, said Smith, that she knew: “I'm going to foster this baby. I'm going to be her mother.”

Cool:

An ancient Egyptian sarcophagus is set to be opened live on TV during a two-hour Discovery Channel show. The event, hosted by Chris Jacobs and explorer Josh Gates, will see the team traveling through an underground network of chambers and tunnels where it is thought 40 mummies once part of the noble elite were entombed. ...

The program, Expedition Unknown: Egypt Live, will air on April 7 at 8 p.m. ET on Discovery. It will also be shown on the Travel Channel and Science Channel at the same time. Joining Jacobs and Gates will be Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass and secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Mostafa Waziri.

During the live broadcast, viewers will be taken into the inner chambers of an excavation. At the site, which has not been disclosed, archaeologists recently found a network of vertical shafts that lead to tunnels and tombs that have been undisturbed for thousands of years.

(Merci beaucoup)