For a Friday

Aaahhh, the glorious week-end ...




It's just an economy:

Fear over the economic fallout from the spreading coronavirus tightened its grip on global markets, which have lost almost US$6 trillion so far this week and sent U.S. equities to a seventh straight loss.

The S&P 500 plunged more than 3 per cent Friday and is now down over 15 per cent from its record.

The index is mired in its longest slump in over three years and careening toward its worst week since the financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has shed more than 4,000 points this week. Treasury yields sank to all-time lows, with the two-year tumbling through 1 per cent and 30-year rates under 1.7 per cent. Crude slid toward $44 a barrel, while gold lost 2 per cent. European shares headed for August lows and Asian equities fell more than 2.5 per cent.

Canadian stocks plunged Friday morning, playing catchup to the rout in global markets after a technical glitch closed the main exchange two hours early in the midst of Thursday’s meltdown.

It's a good thing, therefore, that the government, in all of its blinkered wisdom, might decide to, maybe, warn others (or not) about maybe, possibly not going to hot-zone countries.

Possibly.

(SEE: horse, barn, run out of, too late)




The country is broken, you say? You fear your loss of standard of living?

Suck it up. You voted for it:

In the wake of regional discontent from the western provinces and blockades jamming up the country’s rail network, a towering majority of Canadians agree with the statement, “Right now, Canada is broken.”

Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians agree with the statement, rising to 83% in Alberta, found a DART & Maru/Blue poll conducted for the National Post.

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Teck pulled the plug because Canada is now an untenable political risk. It no longer matters who does or doesn’t approve resource and infrastructure projects. They simply cannot be finished.

Canada, in other words, is not worth the risk. And that means living standards will fall, capital and jobs will continue to leave, and the country’s million-strong and restive Indigenous people, among other Canadians, face diminishing opportunities. 

Put another way, even if Ottawa approved the project, Teck had no political cover. For the past five years, Trudeau and British Columbia’s NDP-Green regime have piled on obstructions, permitted endless court challenges, allowed illegal railway or road barricades, acceded to NGO and Indigenous misbehavior, and frightened away billions of dollars’ worth of investment.

Also:

Indeed. You hew closer to mob rule, or cancel culture, or whatever passes for consensus-building these days. It’s where the loudest voices — the radical environmentalists, anarchists and anti-capitalists successfully piling on to Indigenous protests — call the tune, and the prime minister dances as fast as he can. As for the silent majority, desperately trying to take the last functioning GO train home to pick up their kid from daycare, or hoping to get a job at one of the projects now on the scrap heap, they’re out of luck.

I believe that is the point:

A frustrated auditor general of Canada says a lack of government funding has created significant technological, cybersecurity and staffing issues for his office, hampering his ability to fulfil his mandate.

“Our main IT system is running on DOS. That creates all sorts of issues for us, both in a security perspective and an operational perspective because they’re not supported anymore. You can’t turn to a supplier and get updates, because they don’t exist. That’s our reality,” interim auditor general Sylvain Ricard told MPs during a meeting of the Public Accounts committee Thursday.

Also - why appeasing people is pointless. They hate you already and nothing will change that:

The Senate has voted to suspend Sen. Lynn Beyak a second time over derogatory letters about Indigenous Peoples posted on her website.

Senators have approved a report from the upper house’s ethics committee, which recommended Beyak be suspended without pay for the duration of the current parliamentary session.

The report was adopted “on division” — meaning with some opposition, though there was no recorded vote.

Shrinking spending is what people have to do when their previous governments make a total hash of the economy:

The Alberta government is expecting an economic rebound in coming years, it said in releasing its budget on Thursday, predicting that the upswing for the beleaguered province will get unemployed Albertans back to work and help stabilize the province’s finances. At the same time, the government made it clear that it does not see more government spending as a way to help boost the economy and instead will continue to shrink public expenditures.

Terrorism is the new normal in Canada.

But don't take my word for it:

Saad Akhtar, the Toronto man who allegedly beat a woman to death with a hammer in a terrorist attack last week, sparked a bomb scare and evacuation at the police station as he surrendered, Toronto police confirm.

**

Life has been disorienting for Khalid Awan since he was deported to Canada from the United States, where he served a 14-year sentence for transferring money to a Sikh extremist group in Pakistan.

Cell phones confound him. Police cars frighten him. Although pushing 60, he had to go back to college to make himself employable again. And where have all the video stores gone?

“It’s very hard,” he said.

Awan is among a handful of Canadians who’ve come home after having been imprisoned abroad for terrorism-related offences — in his case “providing money and financial services” to the Khalistan Commando Force.

Canadians actually believe that there is an abortion law in this country, that it is impossible to figure out if a pregnant woman is carrying a boy or a girl and that even a long overdue discussion on sex-selection abortions is unreasonable and will lead to Canada's becoming a Christo-fascist theocracy as opposed to haven for selfish parents-to-be or misogynist cultures that have a dim view of women.

Read the comments and prove me wrong:

Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay once called social-conservative causes a “stinking albatross” thrust onto the election agenda that hung around leader Andrew Scheer’s neck and kept the party from winning a majority last fall.

But though MacKay blamed the Liberals for forcing the issue then, a Conservative MP put them back on the agenda just as the deadline arrived Thursday to register in the party’s leadership race.

Saskatchewan MP Cathay Wagantall put forward a private member’s bill this week that would ban sex-selective abortions, the practice of terminating a pregnancy in order to choose a child’s sex.

Wow. People totally have a handle on this coronavirus thing:

A seventh person in Ontario has tested positive for coronavirus, the province's ministry of health said Friday.

The man in his 50s recently travelled to Iran and is now at home in self-isolation, the ministry said in a statement.

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The World Health Organization on Friday increased its coronavirus risk assessment to "very high" as cases outside of China continue to increase. But officials caution the virus can still be contained if the chain of transmission can be broken.

... says the organisation that once praised North Korea's healthcare system and said that we had nothing to worry about.