Mid-Week Post

Five more shopping days before Thanksgiving ... 




Were they asking for too much healthcare?:

The federal government has quietly rolled back what it pays hospitals to take care of military members, according to multiple sources.

Global News has confirmed with sources within the military, provincial and federal governments that the federal government made major changes this spring to the fees it reimburses to hospitals when they provide health care to military members — and that’s leading to fears some members could be denied health care services.

Under the Canada Health Act and provincial health acts, members of the military are not eligible for public health coverage under provincial plans.

Instead, the federal government is constitutionally responsible for providing comparable medical care to all members, although more advanced medical care like surgery or MRIs is provided at the same hospitals used by civilians.

The military then reimburses the cost of providing those services to the hospital.

It’s effectively the same model used for treating out-of-province patients.

But sources tell Global News that the Department of National Defence ordered a cut to military healthcare spending earlier this year, and the fees reimbursed to hospitals for seeing military patients was one of the first items on the chopping block.

Are the Liberals incapable of restraining their spite or do they really want to blow this election?




Speaking of blowing an election, is Ontario Premier Doug Ford for the Liberals a peak distraction for four years of bad governance or will there be something even skeevier down the road?:

If Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is determined to demolish Ontario’s education system as the education unions insist, he continues to go about it in a strange way.

The tentative contract reached Sunday between Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce and 55,000 educational support workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which averted a province-wide strike on Monday, is a case in point.

Even CUPE’s head bargainer, Laura Walton, thanked Lecce for “opening up the piggy bank” to reach a settlement.

The Ford government settled for fiscal stability on salaries for three years, with workers receiving a 1% hike annually. ...

Under the previous decade of Liberal government mismanagement, enrolment dropped by 110,000 students, or 5.2%, while the number of teachers increased by 14,000, or 12.5%.

That’s not financially sustainable and even here the government has earmarked $1.6 billion to boards so the system can be right-sized through attrition and retirements, rather than mass layoffs.

Before there was blackface, there was the SNC-Lavalin affair. Before there was SNC-Lavalin, there was the was the Omar Khadr affair. Before Omar Khadr, there was the Aga Khan affair. Before there was the Aga Khan affair, there was the undying love for China affair. Before China ...:

When the SNC-Lavalin affair first broke in the pages of the Globe and Mail on Feb. 7, Justin Trudeau was unequivocal in his denial.

“The allegations in the Globe story this morning are false,” he said. “Neither the current nor the previous attorney general was ever directed by me nor anyone in my office to take a decision in this matter.”

That denial was about as emphatic as they come and Liberals will still make the lawyerly case that former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould wasn’t technically “directed” to offer a deferred prosecution agreement to SNC-Lavalin. But then, that was never the allegation. Canadians soon learned, through Wilson-Raybould’s testimony and a subsequent report from Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion, that the attorney general was subjected to months of questions, suggestions and pressure about the case.

The months of meetings and phone calls involved Trudeau himself, his top advisers and other staffers and even Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his advisers.

It all culminated in a late-December phone call in which then-Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick said Trudeau “is going to find a way to get it done one way or another” and told Wilson-Raybould that Trudeau “is in that kinda mood, and I wanted you to be aware of that.”

It took months for Trudeau to acknowledge that Wilson-Raybould had raised the alarm bell to him personally. Despite what he said at the leaders’ debate Monday, of late when SNC is raised Trudeau simply says that he’ll never apologize for sticking up for Canadian jobs.

Because Rex Murphy:

Is this not a question that deserves its own debate, in the province most to be affected?” If all the leaders so invested in climate change believe what they are saying, should they not at least leave Ottawa and go out to the province they intend to shut down and hear from the people there? If there are two “national” debates for, and held in, Quebec, should there not be at least one for, and held in, Alberta? I would like to hear one good reason — good, I said — why there cannot.

Similarly for the North and all of the particular, endemic concerns of Canada’s northern peoples. Why not an all leaders’ debate in Whitehorse? Why not more than one held in primarily rural areas, in front of loggers or farmers or fishermen? British Columbia has a dynamic and diverse political culture. Why should we discuss, or more accurately skip over, British Columbia’s interests from within a museum in Ottawa?

I could go on (except I have a wise editor) but I’ll summarize the points. Monday night’s debate was not a debate. It was tokenism, and pretty feeble tokenism at that. The issues of this vast and highly differentiated country cannot be shoehorned into a two-hour shout fest, chopped down to 40-second nuggets, in front of a very select audience in no way representative of the nature of our country.

Why can't there be a debate in the centre or north of the country?

Because Toronto and Montreal decide the fate of an entire country bigger than the US. That's why.




It's just an economy:

Canada is losing its competitive edge, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Index published this morning. The country slipped two places from last year’s survey to end as the world’s 14th most competitive economy, eclipsed by fellow developed nations United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Sweden and Japan — among others. Canada had slipped two places in last year’s survey, too.

“Canada’s economy has been hit by external shocks stemming from global trade tensions. The less favourable economic environment has been reflected in somewhat more negative business leaders’ views across several dimensions,” the WEF said. “For instance, Canadian business leaders have revised down their assessment on two important aspects of competition: competition in services (where it ranks 62nd, losing 2.5 points in score and falling 18 places in rank), and the labour market (it ranks 54th on internal labour mobility, falling 25 places over 2018 and losing almost 4 points in score).”

The WEF recommends improving ICT adoption, innovation capabilities if Canada is to emerge as a technological powerhouse.

**

And yet Alberta and Saskatchewan are being called upon to accept that they should be denied access to international markets for their oil and natural gas resources, costing their economy and Canada’s, up to $20 billion annually.

That’s because without ready access to tidewater and thus to global energy markets, Canada’s land-locked fossil fuel resources must be sold at huge discounts.

While it’s true Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has bungled the energy file, it’s also absurd for NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, for example, to sarcastically repeat the mindless phrase, “you bought an oil pipeline” whenever Trudeau talks about his efforts to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Trudeau’s problem isn’t that he’s trying to build a pipeline.

It’s that his heart isn’t in it, as revealed by his 2017 comment that Alberta’s oil sands needed to be “phased out.”

That caused such an uproar out west that within two months Trudeau had flip-flopped, proclaiming: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.”

I'll believe it when I see it, Andy:

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer is promising to end illegal border crossings by asylum seekers entering Canada outside official points, and says his government would focus on economic immigration and helping to protect the refugees in greatest danger.

Holding a campaign event this morning at Roxham Road in Quebec, an unofficial border crossing that has become a flashpoint in Canada's immigration debate, Scheer said the flow of people coming to Canada outside border points has led to a "crisis in confidence" in the immigration system.

Between January and August this year, RCMP intercepted 10,343 people entering the country from the U.S. outside legal border points, the vast majority of them at Roxham Road. That's down from 14,125 in the same period in 2018.

During a campaign event in Markham, Ont. ahead of Scheer's announcement, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said he's pleased that people will have an opportunity to see the infrastructure the Liberal government built to screen and process new arrivals. But he stressed there are no "shortcuts" in Canada's immigration system and everyone is subject to the same rules.

"There are no skipping steps with our immigration system. Everyone arriving in Canada goes through the same immigration system, a full, rigorous immigration system that is being applied," he said.

As I've said before, human rights tribunals are legalised vendettas:

Muhammad Haseeb, a university graduate in engineering, has been awarded over $120,000 by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario in a discrimination in employment application against Imperial Oil. What makes this case particularly interesting is that Haseeb never actually worked for Imperial Oil. The discrimination in question was the company’s reneging on a job offer.

The case involved a hiring policy requiring applicants to prove they were eligible to work in Canada on a permanent basis. Haseeb would have been eligible for a work permit for a job at Imperial Oil but he was neither a Canadian citizen nor permanent resident. In his application, he stated — falsely — that he was in fact eligible to work on a permanent basis. This led to a job offer. But when Imperial Oil asked for proof of citizenship or permanent residency, he could not provide it. As a result, Imperial Oil rescinded the offer.

Before the human rights tribunal the company argued that the offer was rescinded because of Haseeb’s dishonesty, not his lack of citizenship. The tribunal held that although Haseeb may have been dishonest, the discriminatory policy the company followed was enough to constitute a violation of Ontario’s Human Rights Code. What discriminatory policy is that, you may ask? The employer distinguished between candidates based on whether or not they were Canadian citizens. The tribunal ruled that this distinction was not a bona fide occupational requirement. Though it is legitimate not to hire someone because they lied, if the reason they lied was to avoid discriminatory treatment, the tribunal held, the lie is justified and the question illegal.

Under Ontario human rights law, successful applicants are put in the position they would have been in but for the discriminatory action. Haseeb successfully argued that he was entitled to be paid lost income for the four years — yes, four years — his case took to be heard and decided. On top of that, he was awarded $15,000 as compensation for injury to his dignity, feelings and self-respect.

He didn't have to argue anything because the money would have simply been given to him by force of law, the law that will not protect anyone from farces like this.




If the matter is so "polarizing", do not approve the matter in the first place and don't expect tax dollars for it:

On behalf of the pro-life Alberta March for Life Association (AMLA), the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms filed a lawsuit against the City of Edmonton on Friday. The suit claims that an application by AMLA’s vice-chairman Jerry Pasternak requesting the city light the bridge pink, blue and white on the day of the organization’s anti-abortion march was approved by a city official on March 7, 2019, then rescinded the following day.

The suit alleges the city cancelled the application “due to the polarizing nature of the subject matter.” The court document goes on to argue  the city’s decision to rescind approval for the lighting violates the AMLA’s freedom of expression.

The AMLA say it’s the second time this has happened, with a similar event taking place when the pro-life group applied to have the bridge lit up for their 2017 march.

Through their ‘Light the Bridge’ program, the city lights up the High Level Bridge every day, usually corresponding to a special event. For instance, last Wednesday the bridge was lit in orange and blue to commemorate the Edmonton Oilers home opener.

The city accepts applications from community members for specific lighting requests but “reserves the right to deny requests that do not merit public support or are mainly personal, private, political, polarizing or commercial in nature,” according to its website.

Why would a hockey game be of great municipal importance?




China's tentacles have a long reach:

A talk-show host on a major Chinese-language radio station in Ontario says he was fired because of his on-air treatment of a pro-Beijing community leader, adding to concerns about bias in Chinese-Canadian media outlets.

Kenneth Yau said Fairchild Radio’s AM1430 station let him go as an unpaid guest host last Friday, telling him his on-air style was “too loud.”

Yau alleged the dismissal really stems from the critical stance he sometimes took toward China, which he said made him unique among the station’s commentators.

Also - fire them. It's that simple:

A New York venue has cancelled an encore screening for Jordan Peterson’s new movie, stating that the film made some of their staff uncomfortable. 

In an email circulated to customers who had bought tickets to the show, The Rise of Jordan Peterson, at the Shapeshifters Lab in Brooklyn, filmmakers explained that it was cancelled at the last minute, “due to some staff feeling uncomfortable during the first screening.” 

“If we had more notice, we would have made alternative arrangements, but we were informed of the cancellation last night at 11 pm,” they wrote in the email. 

Customers will be refunded, the filmmakers added.

This is the second time a public venue has cancelled a screening of the movie. In September, the Carleton Cinema in Toronto cancelled what was supposed to be a weeklong run of the documentary due to complaints brought forward by theatre employees. 

Put it on Youtube for free.




No country can occupy another permanently nor can one wedge themselves into ages-old ethnic or cultural conflicts but leaving a helpful (even erstwhile) ally to be slaughtered will only make one an untrustworthy party in later conflicts:

Turkey launched a military operation against Kurdish fighters in northeast Syria on Wednesday, with airstrikes hitting the border town of Ras al Ain.

President Tayyip Erdogan, announcing the start of the action, said the aim was to eliminate what he called a “terror corridor” on Turkey‘s southern border.

Turkey had been poised to advance into northeast Syria since U.S. troops began vacating the area in an abrupt policy shift by U.S. President Donald Trump, widely criticized in Washington as a betrayal of America’s Kurdish militia allies.

**

Germany's foreign minister is condemning Turkey's offensive in northern Syria and called on Ankara to end the military action, saying it threatened "a further humanitarian catastrophe and further displacement of persons."

**

The Kurdish people are currently seeing exactly how much Canadian allyship is worth.

On Sunday, American President Donald Trump announced — via a tweet — that he would be withdrawing U.S. forces from northern Syria. Such a move had been rumoured for months, but it was nevertheless jarring. As the drawdown began on Monday, there were already unconfirmed reports that Turkish fighter jets had hit targets in the Kurdish-controlled area.

On the campaign trail, Canadian leaders offered little more than handwringing in response to the looming military campaign against the vulnerable population — our close military and political ally.

(Sidebar: Canada abandoned these people long ago.)


But at least the US is ready to screw over ISIS thugs so that is something:

The U.S. military has no plans to intervene if Syrian Kurdish forces abandon a constellation of Islamic State prisons in Syria to confront a possible Turkish invasion, officials said Tuesday.

Kurdish officials said that guards were still in place at the more than 20 prisons and camps under their control but were prepared to move, raising the possibility that about 11,000 militants and their families could escape.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the evolving U.S. strategy in Syria, said the Pentagon did not have enough forces to oversee the prisons if those facilities were left unguarded, nor a mandate to do so.