And the Rest of It

Like so ...




Uh-oh:

Fire officials say the winds continue to be favourable as crews battle a large wildfire burning a few kilometres from a northwestern Alberta town.

Nearly 5,000 people have cleared out of High Level and nearby First Nations with flames licking at the southern edge of the community, which is about 750 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

Winds are forecast to be out of the southeast for the next several days, pushing the fire away from homes and other building.

“The fire is actually burning on the southwest side of High Level headed northwest,” said Bruce Mayer, the assistant deputy minister of Alberta’s Agriculture and Forestry Department.

“The forecast for the next few days is the strong gusty winds will be from the southeast to east and northeast, which are all favourable from a High Level perspective.”

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

In the Senate Chamber, Senator Denise Batters delivers a speech opposing Trudeau “Independent” Senator Andre Pratte’s motion to create a “Special” Senate Committee studying academic and theoretical issues surrounding the SNC Lavalin scandal — but NOT the SNC Lavalin scandal itself! Incredibly, his motion does not even mention SNC Lavalin or Jody Wilson-Raybould.

In her speech, Senator Batters also outlines the merits of the Conservative Senate motion on this issue, which would bring the Trudeau government’s SNC Lavalin scandal before the Senate Legal Committee for investigation. Canadians deserve answers to determine whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his top officials attempted to interfere with the Attorney General of Canada to stop the criminal prosecution of SNC Lavalin.

The problem with that, however, is that people are playing a rigged game. The corruption in this country is so entrenched that people expect it.

**

Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains says the federal government will look to update the Privacy Act as part of an effort to build greater trust in the digital world.

Bains made the commitment at Toronto’s Empire Club of Canada as part of a rollout of a ten-point digital charter aimed at protecting privacy and personal control of data.

He says that only though a foundation of trust will society be able to reach its full innovative potential.

To reach that aim, Bains says the government will review private sector privacy laws and look to ensure the Competition Bureau has proper enforcement tools.

Ottawa's unnatural hatred of western Canada continues:

Conservative MPs say a Liberal-dominated committee’s half-hearted report on the burgeoning problem of rural crime is an insult to Canadians.

New Democrat MPs on the House of Commons public-safety committee say the report fails to take into account the troubling issues highlighted by witnesses.

The majority report of the committee, recently tabled in the Commons, acknowledges that crime in rural areas is a growing concern to people who live outside Canada’s cities.

It encourages provinces to spend more on emergency-response services and dispatch centres, and says the RCMP should look for ways to partner with other police agencies.

What did the veterans ask for this time?:

In 2006, with much fanfare, the Pension Act was replaced by the New Veterans Charter (NVC). Life long disability Pensions were replaced by Lump Sum Disability Awards. The system proved to be inneffective for the needs of Veterans and can be directly linked to Veterans Homelessness issues. Successive governments kept trying to rectify problems and address shortfalls but the system became ever more complex and unnavigable. It could best be described as a “frustrating, bureaucratic, inefficient uncomprehensible nightmare with more programs and acronyms then Carters got little Liver pills”.

Enter Justin Trudeau and his Liberal platform of 2015. To great fanfare Trudeau pledged to reinstate disability pensions.

This is were things go horribly of the rails. Rather than fulfill that promise, Seamus Oregan rolled out the New Pension for Life Option in the New Veterans Well Being Act. Given the very justifiable lack of trust by Disabled Veterans having been mired in battles with a broken system with a horrible track record, Veterans were Scared to death of what was coming. I mean given some of their previous stunts and Trudeau’s assertion that Veterans are “asking for more than we can afford to give” it is a very understandable fear.

Then comes the Announcement of the New Pension For Life (NPFL) OPTION. And with it Seamus Oregan pledged that not one veteran would get less than they are currently getting. Those this would effect then sat through 14 months of uncertainty until the rollout of this new fangled benefits suite that was to combine a bunch of benefits and make the system simpler. On the First of April, 2019 those affected finally found out what exactly was happening to their benefits they would be receiving 30 days later. If you do not think that this caused the stress and anxiety meters to peg across the disabled veterans land, then you were not plugged into those communities.

There will be a day when we may regret not nuking Turkey from orbit and I fear that day is soon:

Turkey is open to allowing captured Canadian ISIS members to transit through the country so they can return to Canada for prosecution, a Turkish official said in an interview.

If the OPSEU is against him, he must be doing something right:

The union that represents over 155,000 public service employees across Ontario is demanding Premier Doug Ford kick Niagara West MPP Sam Oosterhoff out of PC caucus after remarks he made in regards to abortion.

In a release issued Tuesday morning,  OPSEU President Warren (Smokey) Thomas said: “If there was ever an argument to have a mechanism to recall politicians in Ontario, Oosterhoff is a perfect example.”

On May 9, Oosterhoff appeared on stage at an anti-abortion protest at Queen's Park pledging to demonstrators "to fight to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime."

They're called opinions. People have them. Men fought so that people could say them openly. No one fought in overseas battles so that overpaid fat @$$holes who help drive industries from countries could make demands on freedom of speech.

People have every right to question the broad rape exceptions to abortion, especially people who are products of rape. People have every right to call out the toothless UN (the same UN that considers Israel an aggressive state and stands idly by while North Korean women are raped by Chinese men) on their insistence that abortion is a human right and no sovereign nation should restrict it. People have every right to say that Canadian politicians who don't take a stand are cowards and those who bring it up to deflect attention from their crappy records are dolts and wimps.

It's called freedom of speech and adults should be able to exercise it as they see fit.


Also:

Just hours after doctors stopped artificially feeding and hydrating a 42-year-old Frenchman who has spent more than a decade in a vegetative state, a French court ruled late Monday night that he must be put back on life support.

It was a stunning twist in the case of the man, Vincent Lambert, a nurse who was left in a vegetative state after a motor vehicle crash in 2008 and whose situation has bitterly divided his family and put him at the center of a right-to-die debate in France.

Earlier Monday, doctors at a hospital in the northeastern city of Reims had stopped artificially feeding and hydrating him and began administering strong doses of sedation.

The decision to remove Lambert from life support was announced this month after a series of rulings, despite staunch opposition from his parents. Lambert’s wife, Rachel Lambert, has maintained that her husband had verbally expressed that he did not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state.

While euthanasia is illegal in France, the law allows for what has been called “passive euthanasia,” in which terminally ill or injured patients with no chances of recovery are taken off life support and put into heavy sedation until their death, after extensive consultation with their families and medical staff.

So not feeding him failed to kill him, eh?




Where were those doctors we were promised?:

For Bessma Momani, professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the relatively poor performance of the Syrian refugees in finding work is entirely understandable given their profile. “Canada did a good job of targeting the most vulnerable people,” she says. “This group includes semi-skilled and mostly uneducated people. Some were also injured.” It makes sense that a group chosen for humanitarian reasons would take longer to find their footing in a new country than migrants selected for their employability, she says. Plus, it’s still early days. Many of the Syrian refugees had been in Canada for only a few weeks or months when the census was taken. It would be a supreme accomplishment for anyone to have found a job and learned a new language in such a short time.

I would ask for those pre-conditions, Mr. Abe:

Around 61 percent of voters support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stance of seeking talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a guarantee of progress on the issue of Japanese nationals abducted decades ago, a Kyodo News survey showed Sunday.

In the nationwide telephone poll conducted Saturday and Sunday, the approval rate for Abe’s Cabinet stood at 50.5 percent, down from 51.9 percent in the previous survey conducted in early May. The disapproval rate was 36.2 percent, up from 31.3 percent.

Abe has recently softened his stance toward Pyongyang amid a continuing lack of progress over the past abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents. He has been reaching out to Kim by proposing a meeting “without preconditions,” a shift from his previous position that any summit should yield progress on the abduction issue.

In the survey, 61.2 percent said they welcomed Abe’s idea of meeting with Kim without preconditions, while 30.2 percent did not.