Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week calisthenics routine ...




The devastation in the Bahamas is great:

The storm parked itself over the Caribbean islands for nearly two days, ripping away at thousands of homes, crippling infrastructure and trapping families.

As of Wednesday, at least seven deaths were reported, but officials warned that the number would likely rise as aid mobilizes and reaches badly hit areas.

Hong Kong's Carrie Lam must admit defeat:

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam will announce on Wednesday the formal withdrawal of an extradition bill that triggered months of unrest and has thrown the Chinese-controlled city into its worst crisis in decades, Cable TV and other media said.

The months of unrest is due to one extradition bill.

Imagine what citizens of Hong Kong would have to do for free elections.

We need to stop relying on China for our economy or for anything else:

Since Ottawa arrested Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou at the Vancouver International Airport last December on an extradition request from the United States, China has stopped buying Canadian canola seed and soybeans and banned Canadian pork and beef.

“China’s ban on major Canadian agriproducts has opened a new chapter in its habitual deployment of economic coercion against countries whose lawful actions it finds offensive,” Dr. Chen writes.

She said Canada needs to use this crisis to restructure its relationship with China, noting that key Asian nations have withstood the same kind of coercion from China by diversifying trade away from China.

Not restructure. Stop. 

This is infuriating. ISIS rapists are allowed to return with impunity but if one North Korean defector asks for clemency, he is thrown out:

“We have to do something. We cannot keep silent.”

That’s how Rocky Kim describes the moment when he knew the North Korean regime he was living under was seriously flawed and that he was determined to bring about change.

That set in motion a series of events that saw him go from student activist to victim of torture to escapee on the run and, finally, a refugee in Canada. Yet, now the federal government plans to deport him.

And Kim is hoping Canadians will hear his story — and those of dozens of other North Korean defectors living here — and agree that he should be allowed to stay.


“My father died from hunger,” Kim says during a meeting at his lawyer’s office in midtown Toronto. “I was studying in university. My major was physics.”

It wasn’t just his father who perished. North Korea has always suffered from food shortages, but the late 1990s saw a particularly bad famine. Kim watched as bodies piled up on the streets. ...

He travelled north and crossed into China, via the Tumen River, in 2002. But after wandering around for awhile, he was caught by Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea.

Then the torture began. Daily interrogations. No food and water. Being hung from the ceiling.

They’d make him hold a table above his head for as long as possible and when he fainted from exhaustion, they poured water on him. He moves back his hair to reveal scarring on his forehead, where guards hit him with the back of a rifle.

Kim endured six months and escaped again, but this time he wasn’t caught. Instead, he eventually made his way to Canada and was granted refugee status.

When he arrived here, he took ESL classes, learned English and enrolled at George Brown College. He apprenticed in heating and air conditioning repair and now runs his own HVAC company. The well-dressed Kim proudly states that he pays his taxes and employs several workers.

It sounds like the ultimate Canadian immigrant success story. But Kim is slated for deportation.

He’s currently in the process of a pre-removal risk assessment, which is a type of appeal those earmarked for deportation can make if they believe being sent back will put them in harm’s way.

Also - the Liberal government is embarrassed that an Israeli newspaper reported what a sham the Canadian immigration ministry is:

The Liberal government is calling for corrections from The Jerusalem Post, an Israel-based broadsheet publication, over a story about Canadian immigration that they’re labelling “misinformation”.

A recent news story in the mainstream publication claimed that “there is an understanding between the United States and Canada for Canada to receive 100,000 Palestinians (40,000 from Lebanon and another 60,000 from Syria”). Their source was an Arabic language publication that was in turning quoting an apparent official from a Palestinian faction.

Canada’s immigration department says the story is completely false. “We have contacted the Jerusalem Post to request a correction to the story,” Mathieu Genest, press secretary for Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, told the Sun in a statement. “Canada does not have such an agreement with the United States and there are no special programs currently being considered to resettle people from Lebanon or Syria.”

It's an election year!:

NDP fortunes in New Brunswick ahead of the October federal election took another hit Tuesday with a wave of defections to the Greens.

One of the defectors was Jonathan Richardson, the federal NDP’s executive member for Atlantic Canada, who said his former party doesn’t have a path to victory in any of New Brunswick’s 10 ridings.

The NDP has so far failed to nominate a single candidate in New Brunswick with the federal election less than 50 days away. Richardson said racism is a major reason the party can’t find candidates.

The former NDP executive member said he travelled around the province often to meet members, and “the racism card came up a lot — especially in the northern part of the province.” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is a practising Sikh and he wears a turban.

“I knew this was going to be a major issue and I did bring that to the election planning committee. That, you know, there is going to have to be a some discussion about race. Because it wasn’t going well,” Richardson said in an interview Tuesday.

That is too easy and convenient a total delusion.

Singh has no charisma, no sound policies and his party is a dying joke.

This report is the Occam's Razor of politics:  rats leave sinking ships.




I'm sure this is nothing to worry about:

Canada posted a wider-than-expected trade deficit in July as imports rose and exports declined, data from Statistics Canada showed on Wednesday, a sign that the boost to the domestic economy from trade in the second quarter may not be repeated. 

Canada’s trade deficit was C$1.12 billion ($0.84 billion) in July, while the prior month’s surplus was revised to show a C$0.06 billion deficit. Analysts had forecast a deficit of C$0.40 billion in July.

Still? Really?:

Fire officials in Halifax say investigators have been unable to identify the cause of a fire that killed seven children in their family home in February.

In the first significant update since the tragic blaze, Chief Ken Stuebing of Halifax Regional Fire & Emergency said today investigators were able to determine only that the fire started in the main-floor living room near a couch.

Stuebing says nothing leads investigators to believe the fire was suspicious, and they have ruled out smoking materials, kitchen activities and electrical faults as possible causes.

Ebraheim Barho and his wife Kawthar survived the Feb. 19 fire that destroyed their new rental home in the Halifax suburb of Spryfield, although Ebraheim Barho suffered severe burns.

The couple’s seven children, who ranged in age from three months to mid-teens, perished inside the home.

 The legal system will ensure that these women get off with a slap on the wrist:

When the babysitter arrived at the home around 11:30 p.m. she noticed a large dresser blocking the basement door.

After a while, she heard small knocks coming from downstairs.

After the babysitter moved the heavy dresser aside, two little girls emerged, asking for food and water.

On Tuesday, the girls’ mother and another woman pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and forcible confinement in a shocking child abuse case.   

The women — both in their 20s — appeared in custody before Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Juliana Topolniski. They did not react as the Crown prosecutor read an agreed statement of facts into the record detailing the horrifying ordeal the children suffered.

 

What could have been:

In a declassified 1982 Cold War memo, the Privy Council Office predicted that all-out nuclear attacks from Soviet Russia would annihilate much of the major populaces in Canada, sparing only Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. ...

The “Discussion Paper On Public Protection” guesstimated the number of mass casualties for major cities would be:

      • 40,900 killed in Halifax area;

      • 62,600 killed in Winnipeg;

      • 79,300 killed in Edmonton and Calgary;

      • 125,000 killed in Fredericton and Moncton;

      • 237,800 killed in Vancouver, Victoria and B.C.’s Lower Mainland;

      • 468,100 killed in Montreal and Quebec City;

      • 1,033,700 killed in Ottawa, Toronto, Mississauga, Hamilton and southern Ontario.

Bureaucrats also predicted southern Saskatchewan would have 400 casualties from radioactive fallout of nuclear attacks on Winnipeg and U.S. missile bases in neighbouring states, and Charlottetown would incur 3,600 deaths as a result of a nuclear strike in Halifax.

The civil servants’ total body count for a Soviet nuclear barrage of Canada was 6,923,700 people, over a quarter of the country’s then population of 24.3 million.

Why not just nuke Ottawa when the House of Commons is in session?