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.