Tuesday, June 11, 2019

For Tuesday

A lot going on ...




When Pierre Elliott Trudeau ran Canada, he not only ruined a perfectly good economy, he devised a system to isolate and ultimately destroy a natural resource sector and alienated half of the country doing it.

Today, Justin is repeating the same mistake because he has no imagination:

Six premiers asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday to change or bury two pieces of federal legislation that critics of both bills say could hurt Canada’s energy and natural resources sectors.

The two bills are C-69, legislation that would change the way regulatory authorities evaluate and assess proposed new major resources projects, and C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which, if passed, would turn into law into what has been practised for years: the prohibition of any oil tankers off of Canada’s northern B.C. coast.

Both bills have cleared third reading in the House of Commons, where the Liberals have the majority, and have just been scrutinized by the Senate, where the Independent Senators Group has the majority. 
The Senate drastically rewrote C-69 before returning it to the House of Commons. As for C-48, the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications recommended that the legislation be spiked, but the full Senate rejected that recommendation on June 6 by a vote of 53-38.

C-48 now awaits the third and final reading, which would send it to the Governor General for royal assent to become law. The bill is on the Senate’s order paper and is scheduled for a vote Monday evening.

“Bill C-69, as originally drafted, would make it virtually impossible to develop critical infrastructure, depriving Canada of much-needed investment,” says an “urgent letter” signed by the five premiers.

Then again, that is the point.


Also:




(Merci)




Just like Maurice Strong:

Jean Chrétien is willing to go to China to negotiate an end to Canada's diplomatic impasse with Beijing if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asks him, according to the former prime minister's spokesman.

"If the Prime Minister asks Mr. Chrétien, he would be prepared to go to China to serve Canada at this difficult time to help our farmers and bring our two Canadians home," Bruce Hartley tells CBC News.

Out of the goodness of his heart, I am sure. 




The scandal that will never die:

Major shake-up this morning at beleaguered and battered Montreal engineering and construction company SNC-Lavalin Group Inc., which appointed a new interim president and CEO Ian Edwards, to take over from Neil Bruce who is said to be retiring and moving back to the U.K.

I wonder why. 




Quelle surprise:

This year’s rebates were paid up front, before the revenues were collected. It means the rebates were only based on estimates, not actual amounts of carbon tax collected.

When announcing the carbon-tax rebate program, the federal government estimated the average payment would be $248 in New Brunswick, $300 in Ontario, $336 in Manitoba and $598 in Saskatchewan.

As of June 3, CRA says, the average payment was less than those amounts: $174 in New Brunswick, $203 in Ontario, $231 in Manitoba and $422 in Saskatchewan.
It's just money:

A skilled labour shortage, high taxes, strict regulations and navigating three levels of government are just some of the challenges businesses face in Canada, Darby said.

“What it seems to be, anecdotally, is dollar-wise Canadian companies are investing more outside of Canada than global companies are investing in Canada, and that’s a trend that we haven’t seen for a long time, so that’s alarming,” Darby said.

(Sidebar: slave labour much?)

There’s also been a lot of uncertainty lately because the U.S. still hasn’t ratified the changes to NAFTA, making businesses unsure of where to invest, he said.

While these are some of the most significant pressure points for small businesses, Darby thinks Canada’s long history of innovation, quick adoption of technology and trade deals with Europe and the Pacific Rim still make it a good place to do business.

(Sidebar: yes, about that ... ) 

**
Canadians are spending most of their household income on imputed rental fees for housing, followed by food and then paid rental fees for housing. Food and non-alcoholic beverages services, such as money spent on restaurants, rounds out the top expenditures, based on current price estimates, seasonally adjusted for the first quarter of 2019.

Total household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) at current prices increased from $310,152 million in the first quarter of 2018 to $321, 424 million in Q1 2019, according to the Detailed Housing Final Consumption Expenditure quarterly report breakdown, released by Statistics Canada. The total HFCE for 2018 was $1, 257, 675 million. In 2017 that number was $1, 208, 432 million.


Somewhat related: 

Vietnamese officials have accused China of using illegal “Made in Vietnam” labels to dodge US tariffs.

Chinese firms import goods including textiles, fisheries, farm products, tiles, honey, iron, steel and plywood through Vietnam where they are relabelled and then shipped on to another country, customs officials said on Monday.

Hoang Thi Thuy, a Vietnamese Customs Department official, told state-run media that “dozens” of types of products have been identified as being subject to the fraud.

Hanoi vowed this week to crackdown on the practice which ministers say is damaging Vietnam’s reputation.


And: 

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday Mexico’s government had reached a deal with the United States to avert a tariff war by pledging to take “strong measures” to contain the migration of mostly Central Americans crossing the southern U.S. border.

Trump had threatened to impose 5% import tariffs on all Mexican goods from Monday if Mexico did not agree to his demands to tighten its borders. His announcement of a deal came after three days of Mexico-U.S. negotiations in Washington.

“The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended,” Trump said on Twitter on Friday evening.

“Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border. This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States,” Trump added.



Issues are always tied to sketchy environmental scams: 

Climate change affects all parts of life in the North and any plan to deal with it must be just as wide-ranging, says a strategy document released Friday by Canada's Inuit.

"This is something that isn't just a policy area for us," said Natan Obed, head of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which wrote the strategy. "It also is a life-and-death situation for people who are still inextricably linked to the environment."

The Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet and that means the Inuit need their own plan to deal with it, Obed said.

Accompanied by federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in Inuvik, N.W.T., Obed released a 48-page outline that says climate change can't be tackled without addressing many of the other problems Inuit face.

Like the inaccurate and inflammatory claim of genocide, for example? Or not addressing the disastrous legacy of the Indian Act, an exclusionary and woefully expensive form of apartheid?




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

The law firm of Richmond Liberal MP Joe Peschisolido facilitated a secretive financial transaction that might have helped an alleged Chinese cartel “drug boss” launder his unexplained wealth through a Metro Vancouver condo development, a Global News investigation reveals.

The service that Peschisolido’s firm completed is a so-called “bare trust” joint venture.

This type of deal is legal, but a client involved in this case who is a convicted drug-trafficker should have raised “huge red flags” for the Canadian politician’s firm, according to financial crime experts that reviewed documents obtained by Global News.

**

The Toronto Star is reporting that the Federal Liberals solicited donations in the United States and the United Kingdom:

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party ran a series of fundraising ads targeting American and U.K. audiences on Facebook despite it being illegal to accept donations from foreign citizens. 

The party used its official Facebook account, as well as Trudeau’s, to solicit donations from the U.S. and U.K. for a week in March — advertising party official Braeden Caley says was an error. Caley said no money was collected from foreign citizens through the ad campaign.”

(Sidebar: Justin already gets Chinese money, so ...)

**  
“I think it’s obvious that Twitter is not taking this issue seriously. Otherwise, they would have acted in a faster way, “she said Thursday, adding that time is running out.

Ms. Gould blames the US social network for not having adhered to Canada’s Declaration on Online Electoral Integrity presented by Ottawa more than a week ago. 

This statement, which Facebook, Microsoft and Google are committed to respect, urges web platforms to fight misinformation and eliminate false accounts.

Asked how Ottawa could crack down on social networks that do not seem to collaborate, the minister did not dismiss the idea of ​​temporarily closing them. She added, however, that this is not the preferred path for now.”

**
Canada’s military spies can collect and share information about Canadian citizens — including material gathered by chance — as long as it supports a legitimate investigation, says a newly disclosed federal directive.

Also:

Most websites from free countries are blocked in Communist China, particularly news/media sites.
A few exceptions to that had been the Washington Post and the Guardian.

But now, both of those sites are blocked as well.

Additionally, Wikipedia has been blocked in the Communist State since May.

Wow. Even the Guardian?





Sunny ways for a clean campaign and all that:

This being the case, one wonders at an advertising campaign launched by a union-backed organization calling itself Engage Canada that aims to take down Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer before the official election period begins. It depicts Scheer as a bobble-headed stooge of corporate interests, nodding mindlessly at a package of goodies for “the richest Canadians” and “big business.”

“He’ll say yes to big tax cuts for the rich, paid for by massive cuts to health care,” according to a website linked to the ads.

It’s fairly standard left-wing stuff, and a bit silly, to be honest. Scheer may not be the most dynamic personality in Ottawa, but if he has a weakness it’s that very lack of definition. He doesn’t have a high profile, isn’t widely known among voters, and has yet to define himself with any degree of certainty despite having just passed his second anniversary as Tory leader.

Obviously the people behind Engage Canada hope to fix him in the public consciousness before he manages to do that for himself. The organization behind the ad is coy about where it gets its money, but Unifor president Jerry Dias is a big fan. He once boasted that Canada’s biggest private-sector union was “a major supporter” that contributed “significant money” for a similar campaign against Stephen Harper in 2015. ...

The anti-Scheer spots seem similarly to miss their target. The Conservative leader is anything but a looming, scary presence. Should he fail to displace Trudeau in October, he may be the first prime ministerial candidate condemned by an inability to cease looking cheery. If Harper gave the impression optimism could cause pain, Scheer has trouble transmitting the sort of sober determination one expects, at least occasionally, of a national leader. His recent series of policy speeches on issues likely to be key elements in the fall campaign may have succeeded in winning him a bit of gravitas, though an observer still can’t help feeling he could break out any moment in a dance number from La La Land.

But a shill for corporate Canada? Hardly. It’s always been the Liberals who have proved far more adept at squeezing money out of big business. The dark decade the party underwent following Paul Martin’s defeat in 2006 was not least the result of finance reforms that closed the spigot on their fan club of CEOs and Bay Street backers. Justin Trudeau has a trust fund and a $2-million Mercedes; his finance minister heads a family firm valued at $1.5 billion. Scheer’s mother was a nurse, his father a librarian. He delivered newspapers, worked as a waiter and sold insurance before becoming a member of Parliament at age 25. Morneau earns more in dividends every two months than Scheer makes in a year as opposition leader.

But it's not about popularity, is it, Justin?

Go and stutter some more:






That's the "success" of political multiculturalism for you:

Since 2017, Canada’s government under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals has conducted foreign policy with an explicitly “feminist” approach, especially as it relates to sexual and reproductive health rights.

Part of that has involved trying to eradicate child marriage overseas. Canada is a leader and key funder of United Nations efforts to end child marriage, which is regarded as a revealing measure of a country’s development.

But there is a curious blind spot.

“There’s been absolutely no reflection on the fact that it remains legal in Canada,” said Alissa Koski, who researches child marriage in Canada as an assistant professor at McGill University’s Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health.

The bizarre result is that Canada legally permits the very practices it condemns and combats in the developing world.

Child marriage in Canada “is legal and ongoing,” Koski concludes, and not as a rare legal quirk in niche communities of religious extremists, as media coverage often suggests.

Provinces have, in fact, issued marriage licences for 3,382 children over the last 18 years, according to Koski’s presentation to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Vancouver.

In absolute numbers, Ontario sanctioned the most child marriages with 1,353 since 2000, then Alberta with 791, Quebec with 590 and British Columbia with 429. She adds that her results likely “underestimate the true extent of the practice.”



A juxtaposition:

The 84-year-old sister of a New Brunswick soldier killed on D-Day was in Normandy on Friday to see an elementary school renamed after her brother.

Jeannine Mercier (née Roy) was nine when her 21-year-old brother, Pte. Louis Valmont Roy, was killed on the night of June 6, 1944 in the village of Anguerny. ...
Known to family and friends as Valmont, the soldier from the Régiment de la Chaudière’s A Company was shot during a gunfight after German troops broke through a Canadian perimeter set up about seven kilometres inland. ...
A plaque commemorating Roy and six other soldiers from the Régiment de la Chaudière was erected close to the school in 1990, but Mayor Jean-Luc Guillouard wanted to do something special for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

“It was more important for us to name a regular soldier than one who was an officer,” he said.

**

Victoria City Councillor Ben Isitt is facing a massive backlash from the justifiably-outraged Canadian People, following his horrendous proposal that the military be billed for Remembrance Day events.

Apparently, Isitt thinks that remembering our fallen heroes is too big a cost for the city to pay for.

One story is about a local man being honoured for his service. The other is about a total douchebag.




No, Doug Ford is not a eugenicist nor did he come up with the idea for socialised medicine. He does, however, live, work and pay taxes in Canada:

Canadian actor, producer and director Kiefer Sutherland lashed out at Premier Doug Ford and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod on Monday for using his grandfather Tommy Douglas’ name to support the Ontario government’s agenda.

On May 31, MacLeod wrote an op-ed in the Financial Post with the headline “Tommy Douglas knew runaway debt was immoral. Conservatives couldn’t agree more.” In the op-ed, MacLeod evoked the memory of Douglas, former premier of Saskatchewan and leader of the NDP, to justify the government’s fiscal policies and criticize the NDP. ...
Sutherland wraps up his statement with a pointed message to the premier: “After all, I knew Tommy Douglas and you Sir, are no Tommy Douglas. P.S. You’re lucky my mum’s not active on Twitter.”


You got that right, Kief. 




This is the ideology that people are not willing to mention let alone challenge: 


"So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them." 

** 

“Daesh or ISIS in Iraq or northeast Syria has been defeated in the sense that they are no longer a quasi-state,” said Keiver in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“They no longer hold any ground, but they are absolutely still alive and well in the background … seeking to expand their influence and undermine the governments of Iraq and other nations.”

Keiver points to the growth of the Daesh ideology in the Pacific, in Indonesia and in Mali. He said these aren’t individuals who have fled Iraq.

“This ideology resonates with certain people for certain reasons, and they latch onto it and they use it as a means to push their agenda and … the terrorism they’re doing,” he said.

“The ideology has in no way at all been defeated. We are a long ways away from the complete elimination of violent extremist organizations in the world.”



Heart disease and cancer will kill more women in North America than any other cause but this is the hill on which crusaders choose to die:

The governor of Maine signed a bill Monday that will expand access to abortions in the state by allowing health care professionals who are not physicians to perform the procedure.

Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a statement that the measure “will ensure that Maine women, especially those in rural areas, are able to access critical reproductive health care services when and where they need them from qualified providers they know and trust.”

The law will go into effect in September, and it will allow nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other qualified medical professionals to administer abortions involving oral medicine or in-clinic procedures.

Wow.


Also:

The number of newborns in Japan hit a record low of 918,397 in 2018, staying below the 1 million mark for the third year in a row, a government survey showed Friday.

The rapidly aging country posted the largest margin of decrease in its population at 444,085 since comparable data became available in 1899, with the number of births falling 27,668 from the previous year and the number of deaths rising 22,085 to 1,362,482, according to the health ministry.

The total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime — fell 0.01 point to 1.42, clouding prospects for the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to achieve its goal of increasing the rate to 1.8 by March 2026.

The total fertility rate has been hovering around 1.4 since 2012 after hitting a low of 1.26 in 2005. The rate fell below 2.00 in 1975, a large decline from 4.54 in 1947.

The average age for Japanese women to give birth to their first child stood at 30.7 for the fourth straight year. The number of babies born to women between ages 30 and 34 fell more than 10,000.

Okinawa was the only prefecture where births outpaced deaths. Among Japan’s 47 prefectures, it had the highest birth rate, 1.89, followed by Shimane’s 1.74 and Miyazaki’s 1.72. The lowest was in Tokyo, with 1.20.



Flags for lifestyle choices don't need to be waved about:

Vice President Mike Pence on Monday defended the Trump administration’s barring of rainbow flags from being flown on flagpoles outside U.S. embassies during LGBT Pride Month, calling it “the right decision.”

Pence made the remarks in an interview with NBC News, which first reported on the move last week.

“I’m aware that the State Department indicated that on the flagpole of our American embassies that one flag should fly, and that’s the American flag, and I support that,” Pence said.


Also:

Warning of a society “without sexual differences,” the Vatican on Monday dismissed the idea that a person’s gender can differ from the assigned sex at birth and said a fluid idea of identity was not “based on the truths of existence.”

The right to “choose one’s gender,” the Vatican said in an official document, is in “direct contradiction of the model of marriage as being between one man and one woman.”



How interesting:

Human remains found in Quebec’s Gaspe region in 2011 and 2016 are those of Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine who died in an 1847 shipwreck, according to Parks Canada.

The federal department confirmed the longstanding hypothesis that the bones from 21 skeletons discovered on the beach in Cap-des-Rosiers in recent years belong to victims from the Carricks of Whitehaven, an Irish ship that sank during a storm off the Gaspe coast while on its way to Quebec City over 170 years ago.

The bones of three children between the ages of seven and 12 washed up on the beach during a storm in 2011, Parks Canada said. In 2016, the department carried out an archaeological dig that found remains of 18 more people — which matched historical accounts of a mass grave on the beach.

An analysis by scientists at the Universite de Montreal found the deceased had followed a diet typical of Irish rural people, and many had suffered from diseases and malnutrition that were most likely caused by the famine.

Viveka Melki, who made a documentary about the shipwreck, said the discovery only confirms what local residents have long known to be true.

“They’ve known it, passed down from great-grandmothers to grandmothers,” Melki said in a phone interview from Cuba, where she’s working on her next film.

“They knew the story, whether I came into that story, whether Parks Canada came in and dug that up and found it, they were sure of the story.”

As part of her research, Melki spoke to descendants of the shipwreck’s survivors and discovered an obituary for a priest that tells the story of a mass grave dug on the beach and a shore strewn with bodies.

Some of the skeletons that were unearthed were found holding their children in their arms, she said.



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