For a Tuesday

Quite a bit going on ...




It's an election year!:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has committed to a one-time legal aid top-up of nearly $26 million for refugee and immigration cases to compensate for cuts delivered by Ontario Premier Doug Ford in this year's budget.

But no one wants that:

More than three-quarters (76 per cent) of respondents to a survey by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue agreed that Canada should do more to encourage skilled labourers to immigrate to the country, while 57 per cent said Canada should not be accepting more refugees.

** 

More than 3,200 asylum seekers were spread across the Toronto shelter system as of June 20, Tory told the city’s MPs in an urgent bid for more federal and provincial cash and cooperation.

(Sidebar: that might explain the homelessness among the people who were allowed to just walk right into the country.) 



Justin is campaigning in the only non-Quebec city were the votes truly matter because this election will be tough. Dissatisfaction with his performance overshadows his last-minute fulfillment of a vague promise to fund legal aid for people whose claims to enter Canada are, at best, sketchy. Even his useless promise to tackle gun violence in Ontario's largest city seems tacked on (forget about dealing with gang violence - that would be actual work).


But if that influx of cash and hand-shaking doesn't work, there is always Tory-bashing.




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

Justin Trudeau says he’s received what he calls a “great” report from former Liberal cabinet minister Anne McLellan on the SNC-Lavalin affair.

But the prime minister won’t make it public until federal ethics commissioner Mario Dion releases his own report into the explosive affair that rocked the government last winter and sent Liberal popularity on a downward slide from which the party has not yet fully recovered.

A great report, eh? And I'm sure Jeffrey Epstein accidentally fell into a noose.

**

The Liberals now have a candidate in the British Columbia riding of Vancouver Granville, where their biggest rival will be someone they once called their own.

Taleeb Noormohamed, a 42-year-old tech entrepreneur, has been acclaimed as the Liberal vying to unseat Jody Wilson-Raybould, the former justice minister now seeking re-election as an Independent candidate.

Wilson-Raybould, who won the seat for the Liberals as a star candidate with about 44 per cent of the vote in 2015, rocked the Trudeau government earlier this year with allegations that she had been improperly pressured to end a criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

The controversy, which saw her resign from cabinet and ousted from the Liberal caucus, sent the party into a tailspin, from which its fortunes have not fully recovered.

Trudeau has maintained that no one did anything wrong in exploring a deferred prosecution agreement, as allowed by law, for the Montreal-based engineering firm.

Noormohamed says he wants to focus his campaign on local issues such as housing, transit and climate change, which he says he is hearing about a lot more than SNC-Lavalin.

Lie a little better, @$$hole.

**

The video shows Conservative MP Robert Sopuck asking environment minister Catherine McKenna “how much will Canada’s emissions be reduced under a $50 a tonne carbon tax?”

Sounds simple enough.

After all, the government must know those numbers if they’re going to claim the carbon tax is actually about the environment, right?


Well, turns out that McKenna couldn’t answer even that simple question ...

**

Maxime Bernier, leader of the breakaway conservative party the People’s Party of Canada, may be blocked from participating in the two official election debates unless he can show his party has a “legitimate chance” of electing more than one MP.

(Sidebar: no one expected that of Elizabeth May.)

**

Adam, this simply appalling.  This is not a photo of children anywhere in Canada.  You know that. You need to make that clear. #cdnpoli #lpc https://t.co/MQyW7GYfdj

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) August 13, 2019

When Justin proclaimed his "admiration" for China, no one batted an eyelid. The Third World communist dictatorship still brutally subjugates its people, killed its infant girls, traded in human organs and insinuated itself in the governments of others. None of this mattered until now:

According to a recent Nanos Poll, just 25% of Canadians say the Trudeau government’s handling of relations with China has been ‘good or very good.’ 27% say it’s been ‘average. The largest number (40%), say it’s been ‘poor or very poor.’

The poll also shows 52% of Canadians saying Huawei should be banned from our 5G networks, while just 19% are against a ban. 29% say they aren’t sure.

**

Behind closed doors, however, David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has not shied away from singling out China, according to copies of other speeches he has delivered that were obtained by the National Post.

In a presentation to Canada’s top university administrators in the spring of 2018, Vigneault said China represents “the most significant and clear” challenge when it comes to espionage targeting Canadian campuses.

Vigneault warned in the same speech that certain foreign intelligence services, “especially those in China and Russia” were engaged in the “monitoring and/or coercion” of students, faculty and university officials in an effort to further their political influence.

Later in the fall, Vigneault warned attendees of an international cyber security workshop in Ottawa that China’s building of 5G networks around the world was giving rise to “new espionage and disruption risks.” The text of his speech described China as “one of the biggest threats facing our countries” because of the wide range of its cyber targets — except the words “one of” were crossed out.

Asked if Vigneault said in his actual speech that China posed “the” biggest cyber threat, CSIS spokesman John Townsend declined to say.

“Canadian industry and academic institutions are world leaders in various economic, technological and research sectors that are of interest to multiple foreign states,” he wrote in an email.

“These states seek to acquire Canadian technology and expertise by utilizing a range of traditional and non-traditional intelligence collection tradecraft.”

Invited to respond to the allegations, the press office of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa told the Post in a statement: “If some Canadian individuals try to accuse China of (conducting) espionage activities or cyber attacks against Canada, they should produce tangible evidence, rather than making malicious attacks out of nothing.”

Alright then:

China was involved in 90 percent of all economic espionage cases handled by the Department of Justice over the last seven years, according to a report submitted Wednesday to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

**

Judd said his agency is charged with monitoring foreign efforts to collect information, both public and private; to meddle in Canadian affairs; or to foment trouble within ethnic communities China has been accused of all three activities in the past and has steadfastly denied it has spies in Canada.

Earlier this month, a Chinese-language TV station demanded the expulsion of a Chinese diplomat for allegedly trying to block its licence approval.

New Tang Dynasty TV said diplomat Huang Huikang tried to orchestrate a campaign to keep it from getting a broadcast licence from the CRTC.

The station said the Chinese embassy has also tried to sabotage the station by urging Chinese-Canadians to boycott various activities.

(Sidebar: kind of like this guy.)

Two years ago a pair of Chinese officials who defected and sought asylum in Australia said China was running hundreds of spies and informants in Canada, mainly in Vancouver and Toronto.

** 

China on Thursday formally levelled grave espionage charges against two detained Canadians, raising the prospect of harsh punishment for the men caught in a spiralling three-way feud over Trump administration’s treatment of the technology company Huawei.

**

China's efforts to establish regional hegemony were highlighted recently by a Wall Street Journal report claiming that Beijing signed a secret deal in the spring with Phnom Penh, giving the Chinese armed forces access to Cambodia's Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, "not far from a large airport now being constructed by a Chinese company."

The carbon tax is truly a detriment to the low-income families and individuals in this country but nary a sound has been made from people who want subsidised Internet usage (which is not a human right, one might add):

Ms. Naismith has been volunteering with anti-poverty group ACORN Canada and helped orchestrate a national survey of 472 of its members that was released on Tuesday showing almost half pay more than $70 a month for internet. More than 35 per cent of respondents, who hailed from 21 cities across five provinces, said paying for an internet connection came at the expense of basic necessities such as food, clothing or transit. The survey targeting the working poor and those on social assistance was completed face-to-face, over the phone and online, with 55 per cent of respondents stating they earned $30,000 or less.

“The high cost of internet in Canada is a well-documented problem that disproportionally impacts low- and moderate-income households,” the study stated.

Blame the blinkered CRTC then.




It's like Phoenix Sinclair all over again:

The Alberta Crown has stayed charges against two caregivers in the death of a four-year-old Indigenous girl.

Relatives of the girl known as Serenity were each charged in 2017 of failing to provide the necessaries of life.

The Crown says it came to the decision after reassessing evidence called at a preliminary hearing and determined there was no reasonable likelihood of getting convictions.

Serenity had a severe brain injury when she was taken to hospital in September 2014 where doctors noticed she was underweight and had multiple bruises.

She remained on life support for about a week before she died.

Alberta Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer says the United Conservative government was not involved in the decision to stay the charges.

“This is an agonizing case,” Schweitzer said in an email Tuesday.

What is agonising is that no one will get punished. There is the multi-tiered legal system for one.




In Canada, the prime minister would simply be allowed to carry on to abuse women another day:

Video footage of a Russian police officer punching a young woman in the stomach has stirred anger among many Russians who believe the authorities have used excessive force to disperse weeks of political demonstrations in Moscow.

But one must keep in mind political violence has been a staple of Russia since Boris Gudonov, so ...


Also:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed a decree on Tuesday offering citizenship to Russians suffering political persecution, and also to foreigners who fought on Kiev’s side in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

There clearly is a core of truth in "Little Red Riding Hood":

Russ Fee thought the panicked voices rising from the campsite next to his were from parents whose child had gone missing — until he heard both a man and a woman desperately scream, "Help!"

Panicked himself, Fee fumbled with the zipper on his tent, finally got the mesh door open and rushed over with a lantern in hand.

At the neighbouring campsite, the Calgary man saw a wolf trying to drag something from a destroyed tent, like a dog yanking at a bone. 

"It was just so much larger than any dog I've ever seen," Fee told the Calgary Eyeopener on Tuesday. 

Inside the tent was a family of four visiting Banff, Alta., from New Jersey — two young boys and their mom and dad. The father's arm was clamped in the animal's jaws as he tried to fend off the wolf.

Fee made a snap decision on how to help.

"I had a good run going at the time ... and it was just so quick and the screams were so intense, that I knew it was obviously a terrible situation, so I just kind of kept running at it and I just kicked it sort of in the back hip area."