For a Thursday

 Quite a bit going on ...




Propaganda Elections Canada had already paid its mouthpieces before scrapping the campaign to use them:

Elections Canada had already paid the social media “influencers” it planned to use to get out the vote in the fall election prior to cancelling the campaign.

A spokesperson for the agency confirmed to Global News that it already gave out at least some of the $650,000 set aside to get the 13 influencers — musicians, athletes and YouTube stars among them — to feature in a promotional campaign aimed at increasing voter turnout.

“Yes, the influencers were paid,” the agency said in response to a question from Global News asking, “were any of the influencers already paid?”

“Most of that money has been spent already; we are working to recover some of it.”

 That comes on the heels of a report by the Canadian Press Thursday afternoon that the independent agency is scrapping the plan to use the influencers over concerns that some had been involved in activities that could be deemed partisan.

The party of gropers and other perverts is promising to re-introduce a bill meant to train judges on dealing with sexual assault cases after it was shelved for the summer break if they win the election:

The federal Liberals will re-introduce a bill set to die in the Senate that sought to mandate judicial sexual assault law training if they are re-elected this fall. ...

The pledge comes as a private member’s bill seeking to mandate the training, put forward by former interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose, is set to die in the Senate after being stalled by Conservative senators despite passing the House of Commons unanimously in 2017. 

This stall:

It and dozens of other private bills — including Bill C-262, which sought to put Canadian laws in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — will die on the order paper as the Senate wraps up its business this week before summer.

The apparent strategy by Conservative senators to prevent the passage of NDP MP Romeo Saganash’s UNDRIP bill, which Tories had also voted against in the House, has left the Senate unable to deal with a long list of bills proposed by individual MPs and senators, including one from the Senate one that would modernize the governance of the Girl Guides of Canada, and one from the House that would establish a “National Local Food Day.”

“Regrettably, I simply do not see a path forward,” the government’s representative in the Senate, Peter Harder, said during question period on Wednesday. “While it is disappointing that private members’ business has not been able to get to the finish line, those who have been here over the course of many parliaments would acknowledge that the situation we face is not unique at the end of any parliament.”

Surely some kind of wall is in order:

A years-long investigation by federal authorities has uncovered an elaborate “human smuggling network” that may have helped close to a thousand Chinese migrants cross the Canada-U.S. border via a public park just steps away from a busy B.C. port of entry, according to newly unsealed court documents obtained by the National Post.

A major part of the scheme saw Chinese nationals fly to the United States on valid travel visas, make their way to Seattle and then get dropped off by members of the network at or near Peace Arch Park — a 16-hectare park that straddles the international border between Surrey, B.C., and Blaine, Wash.

An email to would-be border jumpers, uncovered during the investigation and translated from Chinese, instructed them to “smile” and “be natural” when walking through the park and to pretend to take pictures. “If someone questions, the answer is, (I’m) only tourist … not going to Canada,” it said.

Quelle surprise:

In 1985, a group of kindergarten teachers in Quebec got together at the end of the school year and filled out a series of detailed questionnaires about their students.

They rated the five- and six-year-olds’ behaviour on a three-point scale on measures of attentiveness (Does this child have their head in the clouds all the time? Are they easily distracted?); hyperactivity (Is this kid a fidgeter? Are they always moving?); opposition and aggression (Do they refuse to share? Do they bite?); and anxiety (Do they worry about everything and cry all the time?). There were also questions about children’s “prosociality,” or, in layman’s terms, their ability to be good. The teachers reported whether kids intervened to break up fights, comforted children who were sad, or invited classmates who looked lonely to join in a game.

Now, researchers at the University of Montreal have pulled 2,850 of those kids’ tax returns to try to figure out if their incomes from age 33 to 35 had any relationship with what they were like back in the days of daily nap times. The  authors expected that kids who spent their school years pestering their classmates and ignoring their teachers would underperform in school and subsequently in the workplace.

And they were right: Even after accounting for IQ and some basic demographic and family information, they found that being a handful in kindergarten is a small, but significant risk factor for having a lower income as an adult.

It would also be helpful to bear in mind that children of that age are often inattentive or selfish and that parents and teachers should be doing their jobs at home and at school to weed this out.

But whatever.