Halloween Week: The Day of the Candies

It was never about the frights and we all know it.

From the most "transparent" and corrupt government ever re-elected:

 

A journalist asks the Department of Finance for a copy of a ministerial briefing note. The topic: recommendations made by the panel of experts that looked at how to implement new federal money for journalists.

The response: sorry, it's all redacted. All 27 pages. #cdnfoi pic.twitter.com/9kiMslQQn0

— Nick Taylor-Vaisey (@TaylorVaisey) October 28, 2019

**

The head of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. says he is not expecting a plea deal on criminal charges against the engineering firm in the wake of the Liberal election victory.

“We kind of remain focused on defending ourselves through a court process,” said Ian Edwards, regarding an upcoming trial on bribery and corruption charges linked to SNC-Lavalin’s alleged dealings in Libya between 2001 and 2011.

“Obviously if there were opportunities for settling this in another way, we’d be open to that. But we don’t expect it,” he said on a conference call with investors Thursday.

 A sitting prime minister stopped a criminal investigation in which he was heavily involved. There was no transparency or co-operation beforehand and people were forced to resign or were removed from office over this.  That the head of the SNC-Lavalin Group is not worried indicates that this is a show trial and nothing more.

**

Initial filings from Elections Canada submitted one week before the election show that unions spent close to $2.5 million — and counting — to either ensure a Trudeau victory or a Conservative defeat.

Break. Them. Up.




Peter McKay verbally thrashes Andrew Scheer and then insists that he does not want his job:

“I’ve repeatedly said I support @AndrewScheer + I worked v hard to help him in the campaign. Reports of me organizing r false. Recent comments r about our Party’s shortcomings & making the necessary improvements w modern policies + better coms so we can win the next election.”

Nice unified front there.

Scheer wasn't going to defend his own beliefs. Why should anyone expect that he would defend theirs?




It's just an economy:

Canada’s beleaguered energy sector suffered another morale blow as Encana Corp. — one of its marquee companies that was born out of the 19th-century railway boom — announced plans to move its headquarters to the U.S. and drop the link to Canada from its name.

The Calgary-based company said Thursday that it will establish a corporate domicile in the U.S. early next year, pending various approvals, and rebrand under the name Ovintiv Inc. The shares fell as much as 9.3 per cent in Toronto, the biggest intraday drop in a year.

The move is likely to intensify the gloom already hanging over the Canadian energy industry, which has suffered from a lack of pipeline space that has choked off prospects for growth, prompting foreign companies to ditch more than US$30 billion of assets in the past three years. Encana joins pipeline owner TransCanada Corp., which changed its name to TC Energy Corp. earlier this year.

This is what happens when people don't hold their legal system to account:

The tribunal responsible for disciplining lawyers in Ontario has asked the courts whether Canada’s refugee board is in contempt for failing to produce certain documents.

The request comes in the case of Toronto immigration lawyer, Richard Odeleye, accused by three former clients of sexual harassment. They allege he made unwelcome sexual advances and comments, or touched them inappropriately, prompting professional misconduct allegations and a disciplinary hearing.

As part of his defence, Odeleye asked the federal Immigration and Refugee Board for records related to his accusers’ refugee claims. The Law Society Tribunal agreed it should be given the records for review and possible disclosure to the lawyer, but the board has balked.

Disgrace? That's a Canadian value!:

Obviously, the Trudeau government should have boycotted the event, considering China’s kidnapping of Canadian Citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

But instead, Trudeau sent a Canadian delegation anyway.


And now, as reported by the Globe & Mail, China is using Canada’s participation as a propaganda win:

“Beijing’s embassy in Canada says the fact the Canadian military just sent a “big delegation” to a sporting competition in China is more evidence the Asian power is not losing friends.”

China attacked a Globe & Mail column that had pointed out how China is losing support around the world, and used Canada’s participation as part of the push-back:

“In the future, we will have more and more friends in various fields.”It highlighted the presence of Canada and other nations in the World Military Games, held in China from Oct. 18 to 27. International participation in the games, which attracted “9,308 military athletes from 109 countries, including a big delegation from Canada, speaks volumes in this regard,” the embassy said.”

So, not only has Justin Trudeau failed to stand up to Communist China, and not only has he failed to show strength in defense of Canada’s interests, he’s now giving China propaganda wins that make it easier for the brutal authoritarian state to mistreat Canadian Citizens and mistreat their own citizens.

That's been the plan since 2015.




If you want to reduce wait times, start privatising the system:

The Saskatchewan government says it will spend $10 million to help reduce wait times for some surgeries.

The province says the cash will go toward 1,700 additional surgeries that will be performed before the end of March 2020.

The procedures affected include cataracts, hip and knee replacements, gynecological, dental, and ear, nose and throat surgeries.

Health Minister Jim Reiter says the additional money will also help increase the number of some cardiac procedures.

Reiter says the government is listening to people who have been waiting for surgery.

The Saskatchewan Health Authority says it will increase surgical hours in hospitals and increase the number of procedures done in third-party facilities.

"I assure you that reducing the length of time people wait for their procedures is a priority for our government," Reiter said Wednesday in a release.

I'll just leave this here:

Similar conversions were ordered as the Muslim conquests expanded across Africa and Europe. The Grand Mosque of Damascus, also known as the Umayyad Mosque, was converted from a church dedicated to John the Baptist in 705. The world-renown Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was a thousand year-old Christian church before being transformed into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It was only converted into a museum in 1935 by ultra-secularist and Turkish founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Over the long history of Muslim territorial advance, thousands of mosques, from Spain to India, were built on sites of important religious or political value to their defeated foes.

**

When residents north of Montreal learned of a plan to transform a local church into a mosque and Islamic cultural centre, the reaction was so strong that parish leaders invoked the 2017 mass shooting of Muslims in Quebec City to justify putting the project on hold.

Members of the diocese of Trois-Rivières, Que., located along the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Quebec City, sent a litany of angry and threatening emails to the parish. Others spoke out during public consultations held earlier in October.

René Beaudoin, a parish member leading a committee on the future of the region’s churches, said the outcry made diocesan Bishop Luc Bouchard think of the six Muslim men shot dead in a Quebec City mosque in 2017. The Bishop decided to stop the sale.

“He absolutely didn’t want something like that happening in Trois-Rivières,” Beaudoin said in a recent interview. While no one threatened outright violence, he said, the parish wanted to be prudent.

“We got emails saying: ‘The sale is not going to happen’ and other things like that,” Beaudoin said. “So the Bishop stopped the sale. He said he wanted to put out the fire.”

The saga highlights the simmering tension in Quebec as the province confronts social and demographic upheaval.

Quebec’s aging population and the fiercely secular identity among the francophone majority are driving churches across the province into bankruptcy. At the same time, ongoing immigration brings waves of newcomers whose diverse beliefs and perspectives assert an increasing influence over the province’s identity.

When Quebeckers bucked the Church for socialism and childlessness, what did they expect when something pernicious filled the void?




For men who honour-kill girls and women to protect their precious egos, they're really quite traitorous:

U.S. commandos zeroed in on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s final hideout with the help of an extraordinarily well-placed informant, an ISIL operative who facilitated the terrorist leader’s movements around Syria and even helped oversee construction work on his Syrian safe house, according to U.S. and Middle East-based officials knowledgeable about the operation.

The mole’s detailed knowledge of Baghdadi’s whereabouts as well as the room-by-room layout of his sanctuary proved to be critical in the Oct. 26 raid that ended with the death of the world’s most-wanted terrorist, the officials said.

I'm sorry, Miss Murad, but the American left doesn't care about your years of rape and torture at the hands of ISIS:

The fight for justice for victims of Islamic State militants does not end with the death of leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Nobel laureate Nadia Murad said on Wednesday, asking: "How about those that raped us?"

Murad, who won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, is an Iraqi Yazidi woman who was enslaved and raped by Islamic State (ISIS)fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. Several of her brothers were killed by Islamic State and their wives also held captive.

Since 2010, Baghdadi led the jihadist group. U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Baghdadi killed himself by detonating a suicide vest after fleeing into a dead-end tunnel during a raid by U.S. special forces in northwest Syria.

"At first I talked to my sisters-in-law," Murad told reporters at the United Nations. "Everyone was saying: 'OK, but this is just Baghdadi, how about all these ISIS?'"

"How about those that raped us? They sold us, they still have our girls, they still have our children - about 300,000 Yazidis still missing, we don't know anything about them," she said.

As it stands, ISIS (in whatever form it is in now) has a new leader.

Destroy the ideology, destroy the movement.




And now, a frightening lullaby for a rainy Halloween: