Basic Dictatorship

It certainly is:

China’s ambassador to Canada on Thursday visited the senior Huawei official fighting extradition to the United States.

In a statement on Friday, the Chinese embassy said Cong Peiwu made the visit and called on Canada to “to correct its mistake” and release Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei.

What happens if Canada doesn't "correct its mistake"?




When all else fails, play the "Orange Man bad" card:

Lawyers for Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou are opposing the broadcast of her extradition proceedings in Canada, saying it’d raise the risk of U.S. President Donald Trump muddying her case.

Meng is free on bail and living in one of her homes in Vancouver while awaiting the extradition hearings. She has denied any wrongdoing. Her lawyers argue her arrest and detention were unlawful.

This Huawei:

Lobby records show that Huawei Canada met with an official from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) on October 16th to discuss security and being included in the country’s 5G network. 

(Sidebar: it's like it's SNC-Lavalin all over again.)




If one of the biggest economies wants to screw with you and you show fear, what they are doing must be working:

China warned the United States on Thursday it would take “firm counter measures” in response to U.S. legislation backing anti-government protesters in Hong Kong, and said attempts to interfere in the Chinese-ruled city were doomed to fail.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed into law congressional legislation which supported the protesters, despite angry objections from Beijing, with which he is seeking a deal to end a damaging trade war.

Protesters in Hong Kong responded by staging a “Thanksgiving” rally, with thousands, some draped in U.S. flags, gathering in the heart of the city.

Chinese students display some appalling audacity:

A University of Guelph campus group recently released a statement calling for the Chinese flag to “fly high” over the university after students clashed over the Hong Kong protests.

On Sunday, pro-China supporters confronted pro-democracy students over a cannon which had been painted with the words “Stand with Hong Kong. Don’t take democracy for granted.” 

According to university tradition, the “Old Jeremiah” cannon is frequently painted by students. In response to the message, those siding with the Chinese government repainted the cannon red and yellow, to match the colours of the flag of China.

What about this flag?

The Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It's terrorism.


I see that the British have everything under control:

Two members of the public have reportedly been killed in an attack near London Bridge, in which police also shot dead a suspected terrorist wearing a fake suicide vest.

This terrorist:

U.K. police have identified the dead suspect in Friday’s knife attack near London Bridge as Usman Khan, 28, from Staffordshire.

**

British police named the man who stabbed two people to death in London on Friday in what the authorities called a terrorist attack as 28-year-old Usman Khan, who had been convicted of terrorism offences and was released from prison last year.

“This individual was known to authorities, having been convicted in 2012 for terrorism offences,” Britain’s top counter-terrorism police officer, Neil Basu, said in a statement.

Khan was held at bay not by the bobbies but by these guys:

One of the men who helped stop the Islamic terrorist who went on a stabbing spree yesterday on the London Bridge is a convicted murderer who was out of prison for the day on a release.

**

This makes me exceptionally proud to be British. pic.twitter.com/WS9W4s3H1z

— Martin Shapland (@MShapland) November 29, 2019

 

(Sidebar: that is boss.)


Then Khan was shot dead much to the horror and disappointment of his book-ended leftist and Islamist sympathisers. Now the authorities must craft some wily excuses to fool the public that this wasn't an Islamist terror attack and that the parole system works just fine.




Also in Europe:

Three youths were wounded in a stabbing on a shopping street in The Hague early Friday evening, Dutch police said, adding that they were seeking a suspect.

National broadcaster NOS said the attack could not immediately be attributed to terrorism.

Police launched a manhunt after the attack, which took place on a busy shopping street near the city's historic centre. The area was cordoned off and dozens of police and ambulances were on the scene.

All the victims were minors and were treated in hospital before being discharged, police said in a statement.

I'm sure it's nothing.




Oh, did they now?:

Canada’s national intelligence agency took an interest in the Danforth shooting for at least six months after the tragic event unfolded, new “top secret” documents obtained by the Toronto Sun confirm for the first time.

The heavily redacted documents show that CSIS produced their first SITREP – a situation report – at 7 a.m. the morning after the July 22, 2018 shooting that left three dead, including the gunman Faisal Hussain, and 13 others injured

Two subsequent SITREPs were then called for two hours later and a third at 3 p.m. that afternoon, along with what’s described in documents as a “table tour” meeting that took place that day.

The following day, an internal e-mail shows CSIS decided to “cease producing daily sitreps, and will revert to normal reporting protocols as new information is learned/obtained regarding this event.”

But then they stopped caring as though it was the Air India fiasco all over again.

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week turn-of-events ...




Someone ponied up the cash:

CN Rail service will begin again at 6 a.m. on Wednesday after Teamsters Canada, the union representing 3,200 rail workers, reached a tentative deal with the company.

The union said workers would be returning to work at 2 p.m. today in order to prepare for “normal operations” to resume on Wednesday morning. Union members walked off the job on Nov. 18.

The deal still must be ratified by union members and so details will not be made public until such time.

Teamsters Canada president Francois Laporte thanked the members “for their incredible courage and solidarity,” as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “for respecting workers’ right to strike”.

Who do you think you are fooling, Francois?




Weren't we all supposed to be drowning in melted ice after ruining Greta Thunberg's childhood or something?:

If 13-year-old Zoe Keary-Matzner could tell Ontario Premier Doug Ford anything, it would be that he and his government are failing to act on climate change. 

“I would ask him, ‘Do you know how much of an effect you’re having on my life and the world that I love?’” the Toronto climate activist told HuffPost Canada.

No, he doesn't, Miss Nobody. Why don't you take precious hours out his governance to let him know how you feel? Because it's always about you, isn't it? 

Congolese child being beaten while mining for cobalt, a metal used in "green energy". (source)

This is what happens when you don't make thirteen years old scrub hospital floors in Calcutta.

**

The French icebreaker L’Astrolabe was set to deliver supplies and a fresh batch of explorers to the Dumont d’Urville research station south of Australia, but on Nov. 15, France’s Polar Institute announced that the ship’s propeller had been damaged. “In the ice you have to take no risk with the security of the passengers and of the crew,” Capt. Celine Tuccelli told ABC News Australia this week.

A total of 42 researchers were stranded, possibly for weeks in a situation that the leader of France’s mission at Dumont d’Urville, Alain Quivoron told ABC was “frustrating.”

Wasn't that ice supposed to be melted?

**

The group says living in energy poverty can lead to spoiled food and disruptions from abrupt power outages, more respiratory illnesses in children and infants, poor mental health in adults and forgoing groceries or medicine to pay energy bills.

Overall, recent immigrants and racialized households felt the impact in almost every urban region measured in the review.

Of course they do.

Do migrants who sleep on the streets also have "energy poverty" (a thing just like "food insecurity")? What about people who live in northern ghettos? What is their "energy poverty" like? Could they be relieved of it if they didn't rely on governments that think carbon is a pollutant (which it isn't) or if reliable forms of energy like hydro-electricity or (dare one say it?) even natural gas was cheap, reliable and available?


Also - don't waste your time, Moe:

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says he had a more cordial meeting with Federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland than he did with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Moe and Freeland met for nearly two hours in his Regina office on Tuesday, but Moe said no commitments were made on his list of requests to the federal government — including cancelling the federal carbon tax and reworking equalization.

He said that wasn't the purpose of the meeting.

The visit was designed so Freeland could listen and get up to speed on what Moe said are challenges facing his province.

Moe described a meeting earlier this month with Trudeau in Ottawa as disappointing and said the province would be looking at ways to assert more autonomy.

He described his sit-down with Freeland differently.

"It was just a much more cordial meeting," Moe said.

She didn't cry yet? 

Kenney needs to remove Alberta from the CPP scheme ... to start:

The Western separatist movement arising out of anger and frustration with the Confederation may appear to be a made-in-Alberta initiative for some parts of Canada.

But the fanning of the flames of separatism goes beyond Wild Rose borders into Saskatchewan as well as some pockets of both Manitoba and British Columbia.

He had one job: 

Scheer gave a very poor audition. It is difficult to summon a single moment in the entire election campaign when Scheer took the reins, when a speech of his, a particular campaign rally, or some spontaneous response to the questioning press, gave him the moment.

The reason it is difficult to summon such a moment is there wasn’t one.

And Scheer made so little of either the scandals, the tangles, or the prime minister’s superbly annoying evasiveness. On the street when you mentioned his name, to those who did not want to vote Liberal — this is the punchline — you got little more than a sigh.

Even the easiest of rebuttals he did not make. Why could be not dispel the sillier characterizations the Liberals put out against him* — silliest being that this mildest of men was just “Harper with a smile?” And while a leader doesn’t have to be a Magus, or even a faith-healer, there has at least to be a spark of something special about him, some portion of an ability to project inspirational qualities and connect emotively with the citizenry.

Strangest of all, he neglected to speak on the looming crisis in Confederation, the tensions between provinces, the disenchantment in the West. These elements, not unfair tactics, not questions on faith which were not put to other leaders, not an unsympathetic press, left Trudeau still in control, though in a minority.

But ... but ... jobs!:

Three months after the city finally admitted SNC-Lavalin won the $1.6-billion contract to extend Ottawa's Trillium Line despite twice failing to meet the minimum technical score, the city's auditor general will release the findings of his probe into the matter.

Unelected judges hurt us all.

Cases in point:

Halima Alari sat before a Canadian refugee judge and tried to explain why her husband didn’t kill her.

“If he really wants you to be gone, why doesn’t he just kill you?” asked refugee judge Yonatan Rozenszajn during a hearing at Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) in April.

**

Newly unsealed court documents appear to shed new light on a deadly boat crash involving celebrity businessman Kevin O’Leary and his wife Linda, according to a report by the CBC.

Linda O’Leary, who was driving the couple’s boat when it slammed into the side of another vessel on a darkened cottage-country lake, registered an “alert” on a breath test, the network quotes the search warrant documents as saying.

The alert means she had consumed enough alcohol to have her licence temporarily pulled, but less than the legal limit. She told police the only drink she had was after the accident, the CBC report says.

Justin's brother helped produce propaganda for Iran:

Thousands of supporters of Iran‘s clerical establishment rallied in Tehran on Monday, accusing the United States and Israel of instigating the most violent anti-government protests in at least a decade in Iran.

We don't have to trade with China but we do:

Hong Kong pro-democracy activists are urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to find some “guts” and make like his American counterparts to hold China to account for ugly protests in the semi-autonomous region.

Who do you think he works for?

This China:

“The problem is that under the increasingly paranoid regime of Xi Jinping, even these internal reports have become much more geared toward what the leadership wants to hear. Reporting on a failed program can be painted as a sign of disloyalty,” Palmer writes. As a consequence, Beijing’s propagandists “appear to have sincerely believed that the establishment parties would win an overwhelming victory.”

I imagine it's like every other thing China would rather not talk about:

Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by claiming he had helped make the first gene-edited babies. One year later, mystery surrounds his fate as well as theirs.

He has not been seen publicly since January, his work has not been published and nothing is known about the health of the babies.

“That’s the story — it’s all cloaked in secrecy, which is not productive for the advance of understanding,” said Stanford bioethicist Dr. William Hurlbut.

Or, perhaps, like Hwang Woo-Sook, he is a fraud.

On a Monday

So much happening ...




Now that Justin has Chinese money, he doesn't care about your futile, gas-guzzling protest:

Quebec farmers have taken to the streets in Montreal again on Monday as the Canadian National Railway (CN) strike continues its seventh day across the country.

The Union des Producteurs Agricoles du Québec (UPA) is calling on officials to intervene as a propane shortage strikes the province. Farmers argue the situation is critical and that there needs to be a way for propane delivery to resume.

The convoy of tractors made its way to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s riding office in Montreal, where farmers dumped corn on the ground. The protest comes after farmers visited CN headquarters on Friday last week.

Quebec, it's time to pen a letter - in English - explaining to Alberta how much you love it and its oil. Do this because the government that you depend on to give you special status above all provinces and territories will bugger this up.

Alberta is tired of your antipathy and other bullsh-- and rightly so.

Karma isn't a French word but I'm sure you know what it means.


Also:

The federal government says the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will bring another $500 million a year in corporate tax revenue to be spent on fighting climate change, but the Liberals won’t say where they got that number.

It's just money:

Compared to the U.S., Canadians are also falling behind when it comes to other sources of income.

“Zooming in on gross personal income, just under one half of the widening in the gap is due to lower growth in rental and interest/dividend income in Canada, as well as faster growth in government transfers in the U.S.”

The veterans were asking for too much, too:

The federal government is fighting a recent Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling on Indigenous child welfare because it takes a “one-size-fits-all” approach and excludes many First Nations children who suffered from underfunding of child and family services, government lawyers argued Monday.

Federal Court is hearing arguments this week in the Liberal government’s bid to put the tribunal’s decision on hold, as Ottawa grapples with how best to compensate Indigenous children who were unnecessarily removed from their families and communities.

Just before the hearing got underway on Monday morning, federal ministers announced that although they are challenging the tribunal’s ruling, they are planning to negotiate compensation through a separate class-action lawsuit that covers a larger number of people.

“The Government of Canada is committed to seeking a comprehensive settlement on compensation that will ensure long-term benefits for individuals and families and enable community healing,” Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller and Justice Minister David Lametti said in a statement.

It's called haggling with Big Aboriginal.

Let them fight.




I'm sure the US knows exactly how it can deal with the Liberals on this:

James Bezan, Conservative MP for Selkirk–Interlake–Eastman, says the United States has fired a “warning shot” with a diplomatic letter strongly critical of the Canadian government’s failure to hit agreed-upon international targets for defence spending increases — and that it must be taken seriously.

Bezan, who served as the Conservative defence critic in the most recent session of Parliament, said the letter delivered from the U.S. government to the Department of National Defence, bluntly criticizing Canadian defence spending, should make it clear to Ottawa that it needs to step up its game if it wants to protect both itself and its core alliances in an increasingly restive world.

In case people weren't sure,  the Liberals work for China and you voted for that:

Trudeau’s defence minister Harjit Sajjan, commenting at a security forum in Halifax, had this to say about Communist China:

“We don’t consider China as an adversary. Some of the things that China from a security perspective have been doing is concerning, and we need to be mindful of that. But it’s only through the appropriate discussions that we are able to get back into a rules-based order.”

**

Canada’s new foreign affairs minister hit the ground running this weekend, spending an hour in face-to-face talks with his Chinese counterpart over the fate of two Canadian men that the Trudeau government maintains are being arbitrarily detained.

Ahem: 

Former diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor have been imprisoned for almost a year since the diplomatic dispute between China and Canada erupted in early December of last year when the RCMP arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the request of the United States on an extradition warrant.

The emergence Sunday of a leaked Chinese government blueprint for imprisoning one million Muslim Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang province is focusing attention on another Canadian detainee. Huseyin Celil, who settled in southern Ontario after becoming a Canadian citizen, is a former Uighur activist who has been imprisoned in China for 13 years.

Is Champagne pressing  the Chinese about him, too?

These Chinese:

Pro-Democracy forces have won a massive landslide in the local elections, flipping a huge amount of seats and crushing pro-Beijing candidates.

In total, pro-Democracy candidates won 388 seats, up from 262 in the 2015 election.

Meanwhile, the pro-Beijing camp went from 236 seats to just 62.

Was it something they said?





The horse has long since ran out of the barn, the same barn that has allowed ISIS welfare recipients to return:

A concerted crackdown on the Islamic State’s online propaganda machine has dealt a serious blow to the extremist group’s official news agency and communications channels, European law enforcement officials said Monday.A four-day operation took down thousands of items, including accounts and information linked to the Amaqagency, which spreads IS propaganda and news, the officials said.

Conan, the dog who helped take down ISIS leader, al Baghdadi, is enjoying a tour of the White House:

U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed an unusual guest to the White House on Monday — Conan, the military service dog who helped hunt down Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“This is Conan, right now probably the world’s most famous dog,” said Trump, flanked by his wife Melania, Vice President Mike Pence, Conan and a handler.

“We’re very honored to have had Conan here and to have given Conan a certificate and an award that we’re going to put up in the White House,” Trump told reporters on the steps facing the White House garden.

Baghdadi, an Iraqi who rose from obscurity to declare himself “caliph” of all Muslims as the leader of Islamic State, died last month by detonating a suicide vest after he fled into a dead-end tunnel as elite U.S. special forces closed in.

Also - this good boy:

Many are calling this stray dog a hero after it was found cuddling five orphaned kittens that were stuck in the snow during a chilly night in Chatham-Kent, Ontario.

The animals were found in the cold last weekend by a passerby who then brought the animals to the Pet and Wildlife Rescue shelter.

The shelter shared a photo of the animals safely indoors and added the caption, “Our stray sweetheart is keeping her ‘babies’ safe at the shelter tonight!”

(source)