Your middle-of-the-week sewing circle ...
New Brunswick wards off further ruin:
New Brunswick’s Progressive Conservatives won a majority government on Monday, concluding a highly unusual election race — the first in Canada since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
With all votes counted, the Tories were elected or leading in 27 ridings, the Liberals in 17, the Green party in three and the People’s Alliance in two. At least 25 seats were needed for a majority in the 49-seat house.
It was a disappointing night for the Liberals, whose leader Kevin Vickers lost his bid for a seat in the riding of Miramichi. People’s Alliance candidate Michelle Conroy was re-elected in the riding comfortably.
Perhaps Mr Vickers should not have allowed himself to be used as vote-bait by the Liberals who will promise anything no matter how impossible or outlandish, smear anyone and just be plain incompetent and corrupt.
Also:
Leslyn Lewis, who emerged out of political obscurity this year to put up a surprisingly strong fight for the Conservative leadership, has decided she will seek the party’s nomination in Haldimand-Norfolk.
**
Like Peterson, Horgan does not have to face the voters for another year. But Horgan has a similarly healthy lead in the polls, and he is giving every indication of triggering a snap election call, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Canadians' hatred of Americans is knee-jerk, undeserved, childish, petty and vile.
The US has every right to refuse any Canadian metal and Canada should regard itself fortunate that their longest and most table trading partner is not as petty as it:
In a surprise move on Tuesday, the U.S. removed tariffs on Canadian aluminum only hours before Canada was to retaliate with its own levies against its southern neighbour.
While Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland quickly signalled the move was a win for Canada, other observers noted that new U.S-imposed quotas on aluminum exports could trigger another round of retaliatory tariffs between the two countries.
Jesse Goldman, a lawyer at Borden Ladner Gervais, said the Canadian government’s position on Tuesday could even be seen as an agreement with the U.S. to limit Canada’s aluminum export market.
“It’s pretty evident to me that Canada has agreed to quotas on unwrought aluminum without telling the public,” he said, adding that public intervention might be required to avoid future tariffs.
(Sidebar: who is better than the Americans now, I wonder.)
Would this app work as well as the COVID app or the warning system that costs a lot but doesn't work?:
MPs could be voting by smartphone app later this fall under a new Liberal proposal to bring the House of Commons back fully.
The Liberal proposal was sent to opposition parties last week and obtained by the National Post. It suggests when MPs come back next week for a throne speech they could initially hold votes with a roll call system. MPs would cast their votes either in person in the chamber or via video conference.
This way, Justin doesn't have to answer tough in-person questions or face any opposition and - given how well anything government-run works - it can always lose votes.
Oh, yes:
A trio of federal cabinet ministers is warning COVID-19 researchers to take additional precautions to protect their efforts from thieves and vandals.
The statement Monday says the federal government is concerned about “hostile actors” targeting pandemic-related research in this country and urges government scientists, academics and private-sector workers to double- and triple-check their security measures.
Signed by Industry Minister Navdeep Bains, Health Minister Patty Hajdu and Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, the statement recommends strong cyber- and physical-security protocols.
(Sidebar: this Patty Hajdu.)
Also:
Toronto Pearson, one of only four Canadian Airports where international flights are allowed to operate, is seeing the most arrivals with cases of the coronavirus.
Health Canada’s transportation case tracking database says that since August 31st, 21 international flights with passengers infected with COVID-19 landed at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.
Some of the flights that had infected passengers include three Air Canada flights and one HiFly flight from Delhi, as well as three flights from Jamaica, Frankfurt and Istanbul. Two flights from the following cities; Chicago, Mexico City, Zurich, Munich, Cairo, Ethiopia, and Warsaw, also had passengers who tested positive for COVID-19, according to The Toronto Sun.
**
Provinces are looking to expand COVID-19 testing as many Canadians wait long hours to be swabbed or can't get in for testing at all.
Demand for testing surged in much of the country in recent days, as schools and universities reopened and the number of identified cases began to rise.
Ottawa public health officials said they'd seen record demand at testing sites since the weekend, and many people were turned away both Monday and Tuesday because the sites had reached capacity.
In London, Ont., two testing sites hit capacity in the afternoon Tuesday.
New testing centres have opened in Laval, Que., and Edmonton in the last week to accommodate rising demand. Quebec Premier Francois Legault said his province is trying to expand sites in regions that previously weren't seeing much call for swabbings, as well as adding capacity to labs to do the actual tests, but he said getting equipment is taking time.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Tuesday the lineups for testing are "ridiculous" and he is trying to see if pharmacies can be used to test some asymptomatic people to take pressure off overloaded COVID-19 assessment centres.
(Sidebar: what is ridiculous is that none of this was done before.)
**
When asked where the deadly virus that has killed more than 900,000 around the globe comes from, Yan — speaking via video chat from a secret location — replied, “It comes from the lab — the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.”
She insisted that widespread reports that the virus originated last year from a wet market in Wuhan are “a smoke screen.”
“The first thing is the [meat] market in Wuhan … is a smoke screen and this virus is not from nature,” Yan claimed, explaining that she got “her intelligence from the CDC in China, from the local doctors.”
Again, why do we trade with China?
**
The coronavirus microbe is 0.1 microns and can easily pass through the cloth masks that people hastily craft and now wear as a sign of social piety in this age of planned paranoia. At best, they will protect others from droplets that may be expressed while speaking or sneezing.
That said, a private business can do what it wants, so ... whatever:
Fabricland has a mandatory mask policy, which is similar to the City of Calgary’s bylaw aimed at mitigating the spread of the coronavirus in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the video, a woman with blond hair wearing pink glasses is seen speaking to an employee who is out of the frame, saying she is “sick and tired of your sickened rules.”
The CBC isn't bribed to not look the other way:
Disgraced former Liberal MP Raj Grewal was charged with four counts of breach of trust and one count of fraud over $5,000 by RCMP. This was reported widely and was the major Canadian political news of the day on Friday, but CBC's The National failed to cover the story on their nightly broadcast according to Senator Denise Batters.
One eyewitness says greeting the party-crashers, was Brampton, Ont., MP Raj Grewal and at least one of his assistants.
The eyewitness, who was near the front of the line and knows Grewal by sight, said the MP was arguing with an RCMP officer, who grew visibly upset as Grewal apparently insisted the men be let in.
I'm sure this sort of thing is unnerving:
Video footage shared on social media shows RCMP officers being surrounded and harassed by a large group of kids and adults earlier this week in Surrey, B.C.
Officers were responding to a report of an unattended child in the Newton neighbourhood around 5:30 p.m. on Monday, police said.
Surrey RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Elenore Sturko said a group of about 10 to 15 minors and adults had a “very hostile and oppositional reaction” to officers attending the area.
The officers were the subject of attacks with rocks and other objects and physically assaulted, according to RCMP.
Oh, my! Not special enough, apparently:
First Nations people have no right to insist Indigenous judges hear their legal claims, says an Alberta court. The legal system would collapse if all judges were suspected of bias based on their ancestry, said a Provincial Court judge in Red Deer: “What would the result be?”
Also:
The overall theme is that Indigenous peoples traditionally lived their lives in harmony with the land and its creatures, and so their land-use demands transcend the realm of politics, and represent quasi-oracular revealed truths. As has been pointed out by others, this mythology now has a severe, and likely negative, distorting effect on public policy, one that hurts Indigenous peoples themselves. In recent years, Indigenous groups have finally gotten a fair cut of the proceeds of industrial-development and commodity-extraction revenues originating on their lands. And increasingly, they are telling white policy makers to stop listening to those activists who seek to portray them as perpetual children of the forest.
Budgets, I am told, balance themselves. That is as elementary as money growing in vast orchards somewhere:
Trudeau's plan to plant two billion trees over ten years was announced just under a year ago when the election campaign was in full swing. To this date, zero trees have been planted under this initiative, La Presse reports.
**
Canada is one of the world's top oil producers with the third-largest proven reserve of oil on the planet. Despite that, Canadians may find it surprising that the country imported nearly 241 million barrels of oil in 2019, with a value of nearly $19 billion.
(Sidebar: if only we could drill for this magical black elixir. Oh, wait!)
Also:
Cabinet will press ahead with new green fuel regulations, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said yesterday. The oil and gas industry had petitioned for a delay in the so-called Clean Fuel Standard due to recession job losses: “Canadians want their government to think about the future.”
**
Canadians have a government that reflect their own spending habits:
A large number of Canadians receiving emergency government assistance will turn to debt to meet their needs when those benefits run out, a new survey suggests.
Also:
Bank of Canada eases off Treasuries but will keep buying $5B/week of government bonds. How long can printing money pay the bills?https://t.co/rIZA8OlVir
— pierrepoilievre (@PierrePoilievre) September 15, 2020
You lying b@$#@rds:
The Department of Industry acknowledges its federal job creation claims are based purely on assumptions and estimates. The admission came in an audit of a program intended to create jobs through defence spending: “This was deemed not feasible.”
**
The Department of Foreign Affairs has announced that it will be constructing a $2,611,250 monument to itself, as staff explained that the monument would serve as a "lasting tribute" to their work, according to Blacklock's Reporter.
"Employees can find themselves separated from their families for extended periods while posted in distant locales," said Staff. "This involves sacrifices by spouses and children who leave family, friends and sometimes careers behind."
The statue will be placed on a 500 square-metre plot of land "to accommodate gatherings and small ceremonies" near the Foreign Affairs department headquarters on Sussex Drive in Ottawa.
Then the stupid SOBS will silence anyone pointing out what useless, self-congratulatory, lazy @$$holes they are.
Moving to mostly vegetarian diets will be crucial to save the natural world, the United Nations has warned.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posted a picture of himself from his hospital bed in Germany on Tuesday, looking gaunt but joking wryly about his condition and saying that he was enjoying the ability to finally breathe on his own after being poisoned with a nerve agent.
The Instagram post was the first image of the 44-year-old released since he was taken to Berlin’s Charite hospital two days after falling ill on a domestic flight in Russia on Aug. 20.
“Hi, this is Navalny,” he wrote in the Russian-language post. “I have been missing you. I still can’t do almost anything on my own, but yesterday I managed to breathe on my own for the entire day.”
Yoshihide Suga has replaced Shinzo Abe as prime minister of Japan:
Japan’s Yoshihide Suga was voted prime minister by parliament’s lower house on Wednesday, becoming the country’s first new leader in nearly eight years, as he readied a “continuity cabinet” expected to keep about half of predecessor Shinzo Abe’s lineup.
Suga, 71, Abe’s longtime right-hand man, has pledged to pursue many of Abe’s programmes, including his signature “Abenomics” economic strategy, and to forge ahead with structural reforms, including deregulation and streamlining bureaucracy.
Justin won't notice the change in leadership.
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed agreements on Tuesday to establish formal ties with Israel, becoming the first Arab states in a quarter century to break a longstanding taboo, in a strategic realignment of Middle East countries against Iran.
U.S. President Donald Trump hosted the White House ceremony, capping a dramatic month when first the UAE and then Bahrain agreed to reverse decades of ill will without a resolution of Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians.
Orcas are now the ocean's apex predator ... at least as far as sharks are concerned:
The team noted four encounters between orcas and the white sharks at Southeast Farallon Island in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. IT found that every time orcas showed up in the region, the sharks would flee the island “within minutes” and would not return until the following season, even if the orcas only stayed for an hour. Instead, the fleeing sharks would be found “crowded together” or at other elephant seal colonies farther along the coast, or headed into deeper waters.
“These are huge white sharks. Some are over 18 feet long (5.5 meters), and they usually rule the roost here,” Anderson said. “We’ve been observing some of these sharks for the past 15 to 20 years — and a few of them even longer than that.”
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