And the Rest of It

A lot happening ...




Legislation, needless and otherwise, postponed by our over-paid government:

Bills C-91

A bill that will create a commissioner for Indigenous languages and take other steps to save and revitalize those languages.
The Senate voted Thursday, after the House had adjourned, to decline to insist on its amendments, finalizing the bill. Bill C-92, clarifying the jurisdiction of Indigenous people over family and child services in their communities, also passed through the Senate Thursday.

Bill C-75

This bill will “hybridize” a series of offences so that they can now be prosecuted as either indictable or less-serious summary charges, and establish peremptory challenges of jurors. The bill was passed through the Senate with amendments, the House chose not to accept several of those, and the Senate Thursday decided not to insist on the remaining changes.

One mustn't overlook the multi-tiered legal system:

Eleven prominent human rights, legal and ethnic organizations have been granted special status in the government’s appeal of a “lenient” sentence of a black man in Toronto last year.

“As a general rule, interventions in criminal proceedings should be granted sparingly,” Ontario’s Chief Justice George Strathy wrote in a brief ruling on interveners released Tuesday.

“But the issues that arise in this appeal transcend the interests of the parties and are of significance to the administration of criminal justice. The proposed interveners are well-recognized organizations with experience and expertise in the issues raised in this appeal. They can offer perspectives that are different from those provided by the Crown and the respondent.”

How could this go wrong?


Also:

When the Charter was a child and Marie Henein was 21, the country was debating abortion, prostitution and gay marriage.

“Back then, the fights were cleaner,” Henein said in a speech Wednesday. “No one’s values systems or beliefs were under attack … but what happened to that? That fundamental democratic dialogue, the inherent decency of it, the inherent politeness of Canadian dialogue. Well overnight, it seemed to disappear as people become more strident.”

Those days are over. 

It's an election year!:

Renata Ford, the widow of former Toronto mayor Rob Ford and sister-in-law to Premier Doug Ford, will be running for Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. ...

Renata will be running in the federal riding of Etobicoke North, which is also the provincial riding held by the premier.

**

Premier Brian Pallister, saying he needs a new mandate from voters after fulfilling key promises from his last campaign, has moved up the provincial election by more than a year.

The next vote was scheduled for October 2020, but Pallister announced Wednesday it will be held Sept. 10.

“We’ve got over 90 per cent of the things we ran on done or in major progress right now,” he said outside the legislature where he was surrounded by his Progressive Conservative caucus.

“For the things that we’re going to be presenting to you, which I won’t give you today … we haven’t asked Manitobans for permission. And we need to.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford shuffled his cabinet in order to stave off negative press:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has unveiled a cabinet shuffle that moves several prominent ministers out of key roles after he faced fights over spending cuts, sagging poll numbers and loud boos at public events.

A year into his term, Mr. Ford demoted his finance minister, Vic Fedeli, two months after he delivered the government’s first budget in April. The budget contained targeted cuts to municipalities and other services that, since the details came to light, have dogged Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives.

The changes expand the cabinet table to 28 seats from 21, and make room for several newcomers.

They follow complaints in PC circles that the government has had trouble communicating its message, as some recent polls suggest that under Mr. Ford, the party has suffered as much as a 10-per-cent decline in support from the 40.5 per cent it won in last June’s election.

Mexico understands that Trump means business so it ratified the new NAFTA deal:

Mexico’s Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to ratify a new free trade agreement with the  United States and Canada, making it the first of the three countries to gain legislative approval.

Mexico’s upper chamber voted 114 to four with three abstentions in favor of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It will replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which U.S. President Donald Trump had threatened to withdraw the United States from if Washington did not get a better deal.

That is one way to put a dent in things:

What does it say when Russians, quite used to stringent government control, are willing to riot for their financial security and Canadians are too weak to do so?:

President Vladimir Putin told Russians on Thursday there were signs that years of falling real wages, which have dented his popularity, were drawing to an end and that a government program would deliver higher living standards.

Putin, 66, in power as president or prime minister since 1999, was re-elected by a landslide last year but his high ratings have slipped over pension reforms.

In his annual televised question and answer session, Putin said low living standards, low wages, poor healthcare and worries about how garbage was being disposed of were now the most acute problems for Russians.

One caller from the Samara region complained about the difficulty of raising a family on just 10,000 roubles ($209.67) a month. “When will life get better?,” the caller asked. ...

Though not put to Putin directly, some of those questions asked when he’d leave office, another what the point of his annual TV appearances was if nothing improved, while another complained Putin had been in power longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and yet Russians still lived in poverty.

The sharp tone reflects what pollsters say is deep disenchantment about the economy’s prospects.

Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin, now head of the Audit Chamber, said on Sunday he was concerned about the risk of “a social explosion” if poverty levels were not cut, a comment the Kremlin criticized at the time as emotional.

The Georgian president called Russia an enemy and an occupier. It's not like she is wrong:

Georgia’s president called Russia “an enemy and occupier” and suggested Moscow had helped trigger protests that rocked Tbilisi, but the Kremlin on Friday blamed radical Georgian politicians for what it called “an anti-Russian provocation.”

The strong statement from President Salome Zurabishvili followed violent scenes in the Georgian capital, where police late on Thursday used tear gas and fired rubber bullets to stop crowds angered by the visit of a Russian lawmaker from storming the parliament building.

Hundreds of people, both protesters and police officers, were injured in the clashes, some of them seriously, as demonstrators pushed against lines of riot police, threw bottles and stones, and grabbed riot shields, drawing a tough response.

The speaker of parliament, Irakli Kobakhidze, resigned on Friday, satisfying one of the protesters’ demands.

“Russia is our enemy and occupier. The fifth column it manages may be more dangerous than open aggression,” Zurabishvili posted on her Facebook page after the unrest.

“Only Russia benefits from a split in the country and society and internal confrontation, and it’s the most powerful weapon today.”

Couple this with Putin's potentially explosive problems at home, he might hope that the army is still on his side to do some crushing.




Speaking of countries that benefit from division:

Xi arrived in Pyongyang on Thursday for a two-day visit, the first by a Chinese leader in 14 years, and received a lavish welcome that included a performance of the song “I Love Thee, China” and thousands of people holding up placards that formed a picture of Xi’s face and the Chinese flag.

China is the North’s only major ally and Xi’s visit is aimed at bolstering Pyongyang against pressure from U.N. sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs and a breakdown in denuclearization talks with the United States. ...

One sign in Chinese read: “Happy to see you Grandpa Xi.”

A photo released by KCNA showed thousands of people holding placards to form a giant picture of Xi’s face and the Chinese flag at the mass gymnastics and arts performance.

Other KCNA photos showed Xi and Kim smiling and laughing at the airport, on the red carpet, gazing at cheering children and sitting with their wives.

The ruling party’s main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, ran a special expanded edition on Friday, with eight of 10 pages devoted to photos and text about Xi’s visit.

In some circles, this is called "re-grouping".


Also:

Thae came face to face with the hypocrisy of the regime he was serving, and had been taught to revere. North Korean delegates arrived in Denmark to buy cows, for the special use of the Kim family. This would keep the Kims in dairy products and beef. Other delegates arrived to buy beer for the North Korean elites. These things were a far cry from the equality of man.

Thae began to experience “doublethink,” in Orwell’s immortal and useful coinage. Part of him held on to the true faith, the North Korean Communist faith; another part of him had plain doubts.

He was later posted to Britain. One of his duties was to speak to Communist and socialist groups, to whom he sang the praises of North Korea, knowing, already, it was a false song. These British leftists were true believers, as he had once been. He felt sorry for them.

Thae is wasting his sympathies on people who should know better but will not accept the truth. 


And - if Kim is beloved by his people, why does he use them for slave labour?:

The United States appears to be concerned the most about the possibility of North Korea diverting workers' wages when it comes to the issue of whether an inter-Korean industrial complex in the communist nation should reopen, factory owners said Tuesday.

(Kamsahamnida)




I would just chuck Netflix because the premise of an unjust God planning to destroy the world only to be thwarted by the Devil (the guy who gave us Hitler) is a stupid one:

More than 20,000 Christians have signed a petition demanding Netflix to cancel Amazon Prime’s Good Omens, a television series adapted from Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel.

Don't give Netflix the attention it doesn't deserve. Just cancel one's subscription. Then one will see what Netflix truly believes in: money. 




Someone owes Leah Remini an apology:

An unidentified woman is suing the Church of Scientology, along with its chairman David Miscavige and the organization’s intellectual property owner, the Religious Technology Center, for harassment after she claims the church targeted her for appearing on the A&E investigative series Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath.

It's called grooming and it has no place in civilised society:

The continually expanded plethora of “identities” recently constructed and provided with legal status thus consist of empty terms which (1) do not provide those who claim them with any real social role or direction; (2) confuse all who must deal with the narcissism of the claimant, as the only rule that can exist in the absence of painstakingly, voluntarily and mutually negotiated social role is “it’s morally wrong to say or do anything that hurts my feelings”; (3) risks generating psychological chaos among the vast majority of individuals exposed to the doctrines that insist that identity is essentially fluid and self-generating (and here I’m primarily concerned about children and adolescents whose standard or normative identity has now merely become one personal choice among a near-infinite array of ideologically and legally defined modes of being), and (4) poses a further and unacceptably dangerous threat to the stability of the nuclear family, which consists, at minimum, of a dyad, male and female, coming together primarily for the purposes of raising children in what appears to be the minimal viable social unit (given the vast and incontrovertible body of evidence that fatherlessness, in particular, is associated with heightened risk for criminality, substance abuse, and poorly regulated sexual behaviour among children, adolescents and the adults that they eventually become).

Why should anyone accept junk science or the make-believe identity of someone who cannot accept him or herself (two reflexive pronouns)?




Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Mark Warawa:

Conservative MP Mark Warawa has died after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year.

The 69-year-old B.C. politician represented the riding of Langley — Aldergrove, outside Vancouver. His family issued a statement on his Facebook page with a final message to constituents, saying it was an incredible honour to serve his community since being elected in 2004.

Warawa was a devout Christian and his family says his “new address is in heaven.”

“Mark hopes that one day he will see you in heaven too,” the statement said.