Mid-Week Post

We stole Greta Thunberg's childhood. (source)

A time-wasting exercise on a well-known declaration of love for a dictatorship that does this and will have no punitive effects is still a time-wasting exercise and it will cost us money:

A motion by the Conservatives calling for an all-party special committee to address Canada-China relations has passed.

The vote was 171-148.

It’s the first time the Liberals are really seeing the consequence of their huge loss of votes and seats in the election, as the motion passed even with all the Liberals trying to block it.

(Sidebar: consequences? What consequences?)

**

Jazexhi says the university rector told him only that the decision on his teaching work was out of her hands. In a country that has grown increasingly close to China, and where his university also has ties to Beijing, he believes he is being punished for the Uyghur exposés.

“I don’t have any proof … but I see with concern the great influence (the Chinese) are having in my university, and other universities in Albania,” he said in an interview. “There was no reason for them to reject me.”

Charles Burton, a China expert at Ontario’s Brock University who spoke alongside Jazexhi at campus talks in Montreal and Hamilton recently, said he has no direct knowledge of the history PhD’s employment record.

But he said it’s more than plausible the academic is facing retribution.

“It seems like a likely scenario to me,” said Burton. “Olsi has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of the situation in Xinjiang.”

What makes this farce even more asinine is that people gladly let this menace in:

Canada has nothing like the Kennan Telegram – the now famous document drafted in 1946 by American foreign service officer George Kennan. That telegram articulated – for the first time – who the Soviets really were, what they wanted and how the U.S. could respond. The current U.S. administration is now involved in drafting something similar for China, called the Committee on the Present Danger.

(Sidebar: this George Kennan.)

If Canada finally decides to get its act together and begins a public reckoning on this topic, our first stop should be to revisit a disturbing document from April 2013, the beginning of current leader Xi Jinping’s tenure. It was circulated among Chinese Communist officials and is now known as Document Number 9.

Here’s how policy expert Elizabeth C. Economy describes the document in her latest must-read book, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State: “The document painted the [Chinese Communist Party] as in the midst of an intense struggle with Western liberal values that had begun to take hold in certain sectors of Chinese society. These values included constitutionalism, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism and market economics, freedom of the press, reassessing China’s history, and suggesting that China’s reform and opening up should be evaluated according to Western standards.”

Economy continues: “Over time, Document 9 has become known as advancing the seven no’s or seven perils: universal values, press freedom, civil society, citizens’ rights, the party’s historical aberrations, the “privileged capitalistic class”, and the independence of the judiciary.”

That last one is key to understanding the two Michaels situation. China’s leadership does not believe in a justice system that’s separate from the whims of the governing party and will punish anyone who tries to reform their system. (Speaking of which, China imprisoned a 71-year-old journalist for leaking Document 9.)

The idea that we and our allies simply need to press our case with China based on appeals to rules or laws misunderstands everything about the Xi Jinping era. They are fully aware of how we do things over here. They just reject it wholesale. Document 9 explicitly mocks the very notion of “rule of law”.

Tienanmen Square and the one-child policy weren't secret events just come to light. China's use of North Korea as a buffer state and its cruel treatment of North Koreans isn't a sudden revelation. Not even the Trudeaus' undying love for this tyrannical state was unknown.

Canadians just didn't care. They still don't.

So their feelings and unwillingness to respond to China's encroachments on one of the last of our freedoms is irrelevant. What is anyone going to do to stop it? Nothing?


(Paws up)




The deal Justin couldn't work out will still hang over him:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says his government is currently weighing whether to reintroduce a bill to ratify the CUSMA trade deal before the holidays.

But no decision has yet been reached even as the parliamentary calendar ticks down to when MPs depart for their winter break at the end of this week.

**

Final terms in the trade deal that the U.S. agreed to on Tuesday remove a provision that would have increased protections to 10 years around a generally more expensive category of drugs called biologics.

It means Canada, which had come under some criticism for agreeing to the previous increase, will instead keep its existing eight years of exclusivity for the drugs before generics can enter the market.

The carbon tax is theft by the government but one already knows that:

As part of its national plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the federal Liberals require every province to have a minimum price on carbon — $20 a tonne now rising to $50 by 2022 — or have a federal levy imposed.

New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs was among the conservative premiers challenging that policy in court.

But he changed his mind after nearly two-thirds of New Brunswick voters picked a party supportive of a carbon tax in October’s federal election.

In late November, the province gave Ottawa a carbon pricing proposal based on systems the federal government previously approved in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

This partly explains why Canadians voted for a trustifarian:

Following on the heels of Canada’s devastating jobs report in which over 70,000 jobs were lost, there’s more signs of serous trouble for Canada’s economy.

According to TransUnion Canada, credit delinquencies are on the rise.

As reported by BNNBloomberg, “The credit reporting firm said Monday 5.54 per cent of consumers were 90 or more days past due on at least one non-mortgage credit product in the third quarter, compared with 5.25 per cent in the same period in 2018. The 29 basis point increase is the largest since 2012, and comes after several years of declining or little changed delinquency rates.”

Watch the decline.




Why don't teachers strike during the summer holidays?:

According to the government, that is the price tag of the demands from the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) expanded across the entire education sector.

And sadly, most contracts in the education sector have what are called “me-too” clauses.

Unlike the “me-too” movement that swept Hollywood a couple of years back, this one doesn’t get you fired — it gets you a raise.

Under the current system, if one education union negotiates a higher raise than another union, then they all get the higher raise.

That’s something Education Minister Stephen Lecce confirmed as he laid out the full cost of the demands from the teachers’ unions.

“If the compensation of 1% which they agreed to went to 2% then the ‘me-too’ clause would kick in,” Lecce said.

Oh, and pay-cut for the children and so forth.




Some people are special:

An Alberta man who was spared a lengthy jail sentence after robbing a liquor store so he could focus on rehabilitation and, in the judge’s words, “restore his place in the eyes of the community,” was arrested days later and charged with several offences, including robbery.

Upon learning of this turn of events Tuesday, the liquor store owner, who had supported the original sentence and believed the offender showed genuine remorse, said she was heartbroken by the outcome.

“My faith in humanity is crushed,” said Karen Rempel, owner of the Millet Liquor store in Millet, Alta.

Rod Clark, the offender’s lawyer, said the case “speaks to the tragedy” of his client’s life. ...

Devlin also took into account a pre-sentence report, known as a Gladue report, that documented Dennehy’s troubled past. He cited the fact that Dennehy, a Cree man who was born and raised in Maskwacis, came from two generations of residential school survivors for whom tragedy and trauma were rampant.

Snow melts in the summer sun. I was surprised to read about this:

The Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid and unmitigated shift into a new climate state, one that is greener, features far less ice, and is a net source of greenhouse gas emissions from melting permafrost, according to a major new federal assessment of the region released Tuesday.

The consequences of these climate shifts will be felt far outside the Arctic in the form of altered weather patterns, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers.

The findings are contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and unfamiliar climate state.