And the Rest of It

Five hours before Pi Day ...




Windbags tend to lose their arrogance when resource-rich provinces cut them off: 

It’s impossible to say what fate awaits Albertans this time. Premier Jason Kenney said on Monday that the province is in uncharted territory. The combination of a global energy slowdown as a result of the coronavirus, combined with the bizarre decision by Saudi Arabia to flood the market with oil at the same time, has led to a price decline not seen in ages.

No one is sure where things go from here.

Unfortunately, governments in Alberta have rarely learned from these events in the past. Instead, they have plodded along the same path afterward, plundering their oil riches until the next great fall. Sadly, they are likely to do the same thing again this time, racking up debt to unheard-of levels in the process.

Equalisation payments come from these "oil riches", idiot. 

Oh, that was nice of Iran:

Iran’s aviation authority has agreed to send black boxes from a downed Ukrainian jetliner to Kiev for analysis, Iran’s representative at the United Nations’ aviation agency told Reuters.

How is that coronavirus coming along, Iran?

That's the plan:

First Nations leaders who are pro-resource development say their voices are being drowned out by environmental activists who have co-opted a protest movement started by anti-pipeline hereditary chiefs. They’re also raising questions about who should speak for the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.

“We feel like we’ve been hijacked by the protesters who have their own agenda on this,” said Theresa Tait Day, whose hereditary name is Wi’haliy’te. “They’ve used our people to advance their agenda.”

It's just money:

The Department of Finance spent an undisclosed amount of taxpayer dollars to build a “wellness room” in the final hours of the last fiscal year.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, bureaucrats wanted to build the room as quickly as possible as the 2018-2019 fiscal year came to a close.

“Let’s get this in place as soon as possible,” wrote Alexandre Emard, department facility support officer in an email to coworkers.

His email was sent on March 29, 2019, at 11:53 a.m., with five hours and seven minutes left before the fiscal year ended.

Emard also suggested paying a personal trainer to do a photoshoot for instructional posters in the wellness room.

**

Parliament pocketed more than a hundred million in tariff revenue that was promised to compensate industry, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Finance Minister Bill Morneau repeatedly said the treasury would not profit from special tariffs imposed in 2018: “These surtaxes are generating significant revenues, yes.”

"Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

Karahalios’s letter, which was sent out both in hard copy and electronically, comes with the subject line: “Say NO to Shariah Law. STOP Erin O’Toole.” It targets O’Toole’s campaign chair Walied Soliman, a Toronto corporate lawyer who is Muslim. ...

Asked for comment, the Karahalios campaign responded that they are seen as a threat by other campaigns because they are “less than $100,000 away” from qualifying for the final ballot.

“Red Tories behave like Liberals, when you disagree with them they persecute you,” said an emailed statement.

If any government in Canada has to declare that violence against Sikhs is wrong then I demand every Sikh politician openly and explicitly declare that the Sikh extremists who took down Air India 182 were monsters who have no place in the civilised world.

Or we can just Indian politics to the Indians:

The emotionally fraught politics of India are poised to again engulf the Ontario legislature, as opposing Indo-Canadian factions pressure lawmakers over a contentious private member’s bill commemorating a 36-year-old massacre.

The legislation to create a “Sikh genocide week,” introduced by the MPP brother of federal New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, marks riots in 1984 that saw thousands of Sikhs killed in New Delhi and elsewhere in India.

It was never about class sizes:

Ontario’s English Catholic teachers announced Thursday that they reached a tentative contract with the province, the first of the four major unions to get a deal in a highly contentious round of bargaining.

The Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association said details of the deal will remain confidential until it is ratified. Its members are set to vote April 7 and 8.