Sunday Post

 

Justin must really believe his own hype.

Case in point:

But notably, for the first time since he was elected prime minister, Trudeau didn’t venture down to the Stampede grounds, opting for smaller events in front of friendly crowds instead. Prior to this year, Trudeau had managed to visit the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth every year since 2014, when he was running to become Liberal leader.

The Prime Minister’s Office said Trudeau was happy to be back again this year, noting this is his 14th visit to Alberta since 2015 and his 23rd time in Calgary.

(Sidebar: this Alberta.)

Trudeau opened his day at the Sunalta pancake breakfast where he shook hands, kissed babies, took selfies and flipped many a pancake as a few hundred gathered. Soon after, he spoke to members of the Laurier Club, a Liberal funding group at the Mob Squad Café in the Edison building downtown.

“We recognize Alberta has faced a number of difficult years,” he said to the 50-odd people gathered on the 21st floor. “Albertans, particularly Calgarians, have been hard hit by the challenges we face in the oil sector. That is something right across the country people recognize. ...

(Sidebar: these hardships.)

During this faux sympathy tour, he said this:

With only 100 days left until the election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau likes his chances of picking up seats in Alberta. 

"We are going to, not just bring back our MPs, but bring back more MPs to Ottawa," he told a crowd of supporters in Calgary on Saturday.

Justin's sentiments towards Alberta reflected his father's sentiments.

This was not a secret during the 2015 election.

He has systematically derailed the oil sector upon which all Canadians rely for fuel and most Albertans rely for jobs.

He screamed at western premiers who pointed out that his actions threaten Canada's unity.

Justin didn't even show up on the Stampede grounds.

And he thinks he is going to sweep Alberta in October?

Drugs are bad, kids.




What an SOB:

Some MPs are warning the high-stress, high-stakes environment of politics coupled with relentless work schedules and bouts of politically motivated marathon voting and debating sessions are one day going to kill someone.

Winnipeg MP Kevin Lamoureux, who has been an MP for nine years and served as the Liberal's deputy house leader since the last election, says all parties should figure out a better way for opposition parties to make themselves effective than triggering 30-hour voting marathons like one that occurred in March.

"I believe it's only a question of time before someone will in fact die from it," Lamoureux says. "It's insane and completely irresponsible."

Justin took sixteen personal days in 2018 alone. In fact, he is always taking personal days.

With a gruelling schedule like this, I can totally see Lamoureux's point.




Because Quebec is special:

The majority of the premiers at the Council of the Federation were silent on the issue. Instead, they focused heavily on internal trade, pipeline politics and the carbon tax.

While a handful of premiers criticized the law, no joint statement was made on the subject in the meeting’s final press conference, and there was little appetite to discuss it at the table.

The Post contacted each premier in attendance at the meetings, asking for comment on the law, which is the subject of a court challenge in Quebec.

The legislation covers all religious symbols that might be worn by teachers, police, judges and other public servants, but it has been criticized for targeting Muslims, Jews and Sikhs.

Only Quebec could get away with this. As the premiers are parts of a whole of a country a Quebecker is sinking into the ground, they are probably more worried about survival than the hijab as a thumb-in-the-eye to the Canadian population.

**

I don’t lament the removal of the crucifix. The empty space above the speaker’s throne is a better representation of Quebec’s public culture today, and much of what transpires in the chamber is at odds with Quebec’s Catholic history in any case. Yet the confusions about the crucifix also illustrate why the Quebec government is floundering on its secularism law.

The premise of the secularism law is that somehow to be in the presence of a visibly religious person acting in a public capacity is cause for offence. If that’s the case with a teacher or police officer wearing religious garb, then the same logic would apparently apply to the National Assembly. So the crucifix had to go.

But the premise is wrong. The religious identity of another is not a cause for offence; there is no right not to be in the presence of religious people. Good manners and genuine pluralism mean that we can even be in the presence of others offering public prayers that we don’t give internal assent to. That happens at city councils where prayers are offered, in parliamentary chambers or, increasingly, at public events when Indigenous invocations are offered, some of which are Christian and some of which are pantheistic.

It is not impossible to have genuine pluralism that also acknowledges the religious component of the culture and heritage of a particular people. Thus the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodations” was wrong to recommend 10 years ago that the crucifix be removed on its own merits. However, if religious expressions in public life are being banned more generally, then it would be inconsistent to keep the crucifix.

Quebec abandoned God years ago. The secularism law now is a stop-gap measure to prevent very pervasive cultures from swallowing the graying province whole.




How could this go wrong?:

The Liberal government is launching a new three-year immigration experiment that aims to help fill labour shortages in Canada’s agri-food sector.

Over the last several years, industries such as meat processing and mushroom farming have relied on seasonal temporary foreign workers due to labour shortages, even though the work is not seasonal.

This new pilot program, which is to begin in 2020, aims to attract and retain migrant workers by giving them an opportunity to become permanent residents.

Currently, migrant farm workers who come to Canada through the program for seasonal agricultural workers are only given limited-term work permits and do not have a pathway to permanent residency.

Under this new pilot, temporary foreign farm workers will be able to apply for permanent residency after 12 months and, if they’re approved, will also be allowed to bring their families to Canada.

Ooorrrr ....

Send them back and develop a workfare program for out-of-work Canadians. Impress upon them that this is their only chance to eat and be housed.




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

While the Harper Government certainly had a strained relationship with the biased left-wing press, it turns out that the press was more free under the Conservatives than under the Liberals.

As reported by The Post Millennial, Canada has fallen a full 10 points on the World Press Freedom Index.


In 2015, we were in 8th place. Now, we are in 18th.

Of course, we recently saw this anti-press freedom event on display, when Chrystia Freeland – ironically attending a ‘Defend Media Freedom’ conference, tried to block two Canadian journalists from asking questions:

“When reporters Andrew Lawton of the True North Centre, and Sheila Gunn Reid of The Rebel sought to ask Freeland a question, it appears that she tried to exclude them, only relenting when (to their credit) other reporters refused to hold a scrum unless Reid and Lawton were included.”

While the Trudeau Liberals are eroding press freedom, they’re also rigging the system in their favour for the upcoming election, by restricting ads on social media and with Liberal John McCallum calling for China to interfere in our election.

Just like China:

China’s investigative reporters once provided rare voices of accountability and criticism in a society tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party, exposing scandals about babies sickened by tainted formula and blood-selling schemes backed by the government.

But under President Xi Jinping, such journalists have all but disappeared, as the authorities have harassed and imprisoned dozens of reporters and as news outlets have cut back on in-depth reporting. One of the most glaring consequences of Xi’s revival of strongman politics is that the Chinese press is now almost entirely devoid of critical reporting, filled instead with upbeat portrayals of life in China under Xi.

This China:

Police in Hong Kong fought with protesters on Sunday as they broke up a demonstration by thousands of people demanding the resignation of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory’s chief executive and an investigation into complaints of police violence.

** 

“The perversion of some of the members of these Chinese security institutions has no limits, according to torture survivors,” the organization says on its website.

Amnesty International reports that sexual torture has been used against Uighur Muslim political prisoners in the Xinjiang region of northwest China for years. 

“Some have been tortured with particularly cruel methods which, to Amnesty International’s knowledge, are not being used elsewhere in China. This includes the insertion of horse hair into the penis, or a special wire with small spikes which fold flat when inserted but extend when it is pulled out.”

Amnesty has also reported that Tibetan women have been sexually tortured, including a group of nuns who were stripped, brutally beaten, and sexually assaulted with electric batons—all while male prisoners looked on.

The use of sexual torture on Falun Dafa prisoners of conscience is especially rampant. According to Minghui.org, there have been thousands of cases of sexual torture among Falun Dafa prisoners of conscience, both male and female. Minghui documents the campaign of persecution launched by the Chinese Communist Party against Falun Dafa practitioners in 1999.

Well-known human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who travelled to several provinces around the mid-2000s to investigate abuses against practitioners while they were detained, said almost all Falun Dafa prisoners, male and female, have been sexually tortured.

And:

Chinese President Xi Jinping urged U.S. President Donald Trump last month to show flexibility in dealings with North Korea and ease sanctions on the country "in due course," China's Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

A senior U.S. official said U.S. policy continued to be to maintain sanctions on North Korea until it gives up its nuclear weapons and the State Department reiterated that it expected countries around the world to fully implement and enforce them.

China signed up for strict U.N. sanctions following repeated North Korean nuclear and missile tests but also has suggested they could be eased as a reward for good behavior.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters that Xi briefed Trump on China's position on North Korea when they met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka.

"President Xi ... pushed the U.S. side to show flexibility and meet the North Koreans half way, including easing sanctions in due course," Geng said.

These North Koreans: 

"There is one most pressing issue involving #China: stop the forcible repatriation of North Korean #refugees, mostly women who are trapped as sex slaves" #HRNKUS ExecDirector Greg Scarlatoiu speaks w/ @RepGilCisneros, @RepBrianBabin, and Joseph Kim #humanrights #NorthKorea (2/2) pic.twitter.com/XYhfWWJohD

— HRNK (@committeehrnk) July 11, 2019

  Also:

The U.S. criminal indictment against Canadian Ishiang Shih grabs attention. It is not everyday, after all, that a professor at a prestigious university is charged with illegally exporting advanced technology to China.

But the now-retired McGill faculty member is just one among numerous scientists of Chinese descent caught up recently in a controversial American dragnet, its goal to combat economic espionage by Beijing.

Researchers for private companies and universities have been charged with various crimes, as well as non-Chinese intelligence agents and civil servants. Others have been fired summarily. One Washington, D.C. lawyer says he represents three-dozen Chinese-American scientists who have been charged or put under suspicion by federal authorities.

If true, this is big:

The office of President Moon Jae-in on Friday bristled at Japan's accusations that South Korea might have leaked sensitive industrial materials to North Korea or third countries, demanding that Tokyo agree to have an international panel look into the issue.

Cheong Wa Dae urged the Japanese government to apologize and retract its recent export control against Seoul if its assertion turns out to be false.

In a statement, Kim You-geun, deputy chief of Cheong Wa Dae's national security office, emphasized that South Korea, a signatory to four major multilateral export control regimes, has thoroughly curbed the illicit shipment of dual-use and strategic materials from its shores.

If South Korea is found to have done anything wrong, the government will immediately apology and address the problem, he said.

I'll bet it will.
 

(Kamsahamnida)




Yet another Chernobyl/Kursk:

Norway has discovered that a Soviet-era submarine that sank in the Norwegian Sea three decades ago is leaking radiation at levels up to 800,000 times higher than what is normal.

But Canada needs a carbon tax.