They Came For the Charter Schools

 Because I did not send my kids to a charter school ... :

An apathetic approach to charter schools, however, would overlook a clear-cut and evidence-based solution to advancing the stated goals of the Biden campaign. With strong support for charter schools, the new administration has the opportunity to attack the worst failures of our education system, a system that systematically disadvantages some of the most vulnerable members of our society. To break through the cycle of generational poverty and boost wealth for racial minorities and low-income families, charter schools are a great step in the right direction.

 

Charter schools represent a viable option for parents tired of the public education system. People should be wary of any move to enhance the latter at the expense of the former.

No One Believes That Canada Knows What It Is Doing

Really:

Canada ranks 61st in the world in a set of rankings on how countries are handling the COVID-19 pandemic, a think tank survey shows.

The study was done by the Lowy Institute and ranked “average performance over time of countries in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the 36 weeks following their hundredth confirmed case of the virus.”

In total, 98 countries were evaluated.

Canada ranked behind such countries as Belarus, Latvia, Namibia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and even Kazakhstan.

The study gave top ranking to New Zealand, followed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

China was not included due to a lack of publicly available data on testing.

 

Let's hear the idiots who think Hiding Justin is doing a great job!

 

Also:

On Friday the Government of Canada announced a new program prescribing mandatory supervised hotel quarantines for all travellers entering the country. It’s one of the strictest measures yet imposed in the fight against COVID-19, but it’s a measure with good precedent: New Zealand, one of the most enthusiastic adopters of mandatory hotel quarantines, has been ranked the best performing county in an index of almost 100 countries based on their containment of the coronavirus.

As we here in Canada undertake the grim task of reviewing our ICU triage protocols, New Zealanders are packing into stadiums without masks and celebrating New Year’s Eve in dense crowds just like the old days. COVID-19 has killed 18,000 Canadians and counting, while New Zealand is at 25 deaths. The Pacific Island nation had a breach this week, with a couple of positive cases of the South African COVID variant, all linked to the same quarantine facility in Auckland. While New Zealand has been lucky, it largely has itself to credit for its success.

 

 

 

We Don't Have to Trade With China

 It all sounds like science fiction until someone gets a designer soldier:

BGI has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co, the company’s subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.

But top U.S. security officials have warned American labs against using Chinese tests because of concern China was seeking to gather foreign genetic data for its own research. BGI has denied that.

The documents reviewed by Reuters neither contradict nor support that U.S. suspicion. Still, the material shows that the links between the Chinese military and BGI run deeper than previously understood, illustrating how China has moved to integrate private technology companies into military-related research under President Xi Jinping.

 

Extortion

And what will you do if Canada doesn't play ball, Facebook?:

Representatives of Facebook Canada warned Ottawa against the hasty introduction of rules that would force social media giants to pay for news content shared on their platforms, after Australia took an overly “loud and aggressive” tack on the same issue. ...

“I was personally a bit troubled that those conversations had not happened before we heard very loud and aggressive commentary about us stealing content — which was false,” Chan said. “And I think that if we had had conversations, and productive ones, earlier, if we had actually talked to each other, we probably would be in a much better situation than we are today.”

His comments come as Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has signalled an intention to introduce similar rules in Canada. France has also promised similar policies, which call on web giants like Facebook and Google to pay publishers for the content shared or curated on their platforms.

Facebook has called the new rules unworkable, and has threatened to pull its news service in retaliation. Google also disputes the regulations, and on Jan. 22 threatened to withdraw its search engine service in Australia.

 

This Steven Guilbeault: 

Guilbeault was the first to testify during a new study of the relationship between Facebook and the federal government by the Canadian Heritage committee, as requested by the NDP.

The issue is of concern to opposition parties as Heritage Canada is currently co-leading efforts to create new legislation that will regulate a host of web companies’ activities (such as Facebook’s), including managing online hate speech and taxing their digital products and services.

 

It sounds like two censorious parties trying to justify their online tyranny but then butting heads when neither can make a profit.

Actually, that's exactly what it is.

 

We Don't Have to Trade With China

We don't:

China toughened its language towards Taiwan on Thursday, warning after recent stepped up military activities near the island that “independence means war” and that its armed forces were acting in response to provocation and foreign interference.

**

From the available evidence, China’s actions in Xinjiang lack the targeted mass-murder that characterized genocides such as the Holocaust or the Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s engineered starvation of several million Ukrainians. The United Nations Convention on Genocide, drafted only months after the liberation of Nazi death and forced labour camps, characterized genocide as any deliberate attempt to inflict “physical destruction” on a people. In this, the convention’s framers saw fit to also characterize a genocidal regime as one “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

An AP investigation last year found that China’s Xinjiang crackdown has been accompanied by a wave of forced sterilization, birth control and abortion. The Xinjiang birth rate is now indeed in freefall, with population growth in some regions falling by more than 80 per cent.

(Sidebar: China has been murdering people within its borders for decades. Why did the world sleep when Tiananmen bled?)

**

According to senior research director at Open Doors USA Dr. Ron Boyd-MacMillan, the Chinese government is fearful as the country’s Christian population continues to grow despite immense persecution.

Boyd-MacMillan recently told UK’s Express newspaper there is reason to believe the increase in persecutions in recent years is because the communist state fears the church’s growth.

“We think the evidence as to why the Chinese Church is so targeted, is that the leaders are scared of the size of the Church, and the growth of the Church,” he said.

“And if it grows, at the rate that it has done, since 1980 and that’s about between seven and 8 percent a year, then you’re looking at a group of people that will be 300 million strong, nearly by 2030.”

China’s population is expected to peak at 1.44 billion in 2029, meaning that in nine years Christians may make up 21% of the total Chinese population.

The Chinese government claims there are 44 million Christians in the country, but as most Christians practice in secret, estimates have put the true number at over 100 million.

It's Not What Is Done But Who Does It

Consider two cases - one a socially conservative independent and one an accused criminal and a huge Liberal donor:

If social conservatives are considered the best-organized faction of the party, the firearms community, colloquially known in party circles as “the gunnies,” come in a close second.

Charles Zach, the executive director of the National Firearms Association, said he had no specific comment on Sloan’s situation.

But he said O’Toole’s move does raise concerns: if he was willing to sideline Sloan, what about the gunnies?

“If that’s the way that the next election campaign is going to be run by the CPC, yeah, we’re worried that our expectations are not going to be on the radar,” he said.

“And where does that leave us?”

**

Peter Nygard will remain in jail for another week despite his lawyers laying out an updated bail plan for the Canadian fashion king who faces sex trafficking and racketeering charges in the United States.

Nygard, 79, was arrested last month in Winnipeg under the Extradition Act and faces nine counts in the Southern District of New York.

Guess which one Canadians consider to be worse.

Just guess.

It's Just Heat In the Winter Time

 If Michigan succeeds in shutting down the Line 5 crude oil pipeline the impact on Sarnia will be devastating, a union leader says.

Sarnia’s three refineries would be at risk of shutting down as well as many related industries in the Chemical Valley, said Scott Archer, business agent with the UA Local 663 Pipefitters Union.

“Basically, it would kick the legs out from under every refinery in town. It would have a devastating effect on employment in Sarnia. There would be tumbleweeds rolling down Christina Street, I guarantee it.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has ordered Canada’s Enbridge Energy to stop using the pipeline by May, claiming it places the Great Lakes at risk of a catastrophic oil spill.

Well, thank God we don't build pipelines or refine our oil!

Also:

Michigan’s environmental agency said Friday it has approved construction of an underground tunnel to house a replacement for a controversial oil pipeline in a channel linking two of the Great Lakes.

The decision, a victory for Enbridge Inc., comes as the Canadian company resists Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s demand to shut down its 68-year-old line in the Straits of Mackinac.

Canada Became A Country in 1867

Take a close look:

“Elections Canada does not use Dominion Voting Systems,” the tweet said. “We use paper ballots counted by hand in front of scrutineers and have never used voting machines or electronic tabulators to count votes in our 100-year history.”

“THIS SAYS IT ALL,” Trump said in his retweet. 

Yep.

Out-Stasi-ing the Stasi

This Stasi.

From which this current government takes its cues:

A new report from a government-funded think tank recommends that parliament create new laws to police the internet and punish Canadians for “harmful communications.”

The report, Harms Reduction: A Six-Step Program To Protect Democratic Expression Online, recommends extensive new laters to protect against the “social harms” offensive internet speech brings.

The creator of the report was the Public Policy Forum, an Ottawa think tank that has received $2,848,329 in federal funding since 2019 according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

**

Canada's spy agency needs a warrant when using a secretive type of technology that could help them "learn about an individual's private activities and personal choices" as part of its foreign intelligence gathering mandate, according to a recent Federal Court decision.

Details of what exactly that technology is and how it's used were redacted in the June 2020 court ruling, which was posted online today.

The Federal Court's findings would only say it concerns technology that allows the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to collect certain information from mobile devices.

The ruling grew out of a 2017 application for warrants to gather foreign intelligence on an undisclosed entity. 

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Clive Staples Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

 

Also in "we know what's best for you" news:

A national broadcast ombudsman yesterday cited CTV National News for inaccurate reporting on Donald Trump. The network apologized for what it called an inadvertent error, adding “there was no intent to ‘spin’ the news.”

**

Two Canada Post workers in Regina were temporarily suspended earlier this month after they refused to deliver the latest sample edition of the Epoch Times.

Sir John A. Macdonald Helped Develop the Dominion of Canada

I can't say the same for the perpetually aggrieved:

P.E.I.'s First Nations are taking issue with the way the City of Charlottetown is planning to deal with the controversial statue of Sir John A. Macdonald.

The Epekwitk Assembly of Councils, a joint forum that governs organizations that act in the shared interest of Abegweit First Nation and Lennox Island First Nation, issued a statement on Thursday, signed by Lennox Island Chief Darlene Bernard and Chief Junior Gould from Abegweit First Nation.

"We understood when we were asked for input following the City's decision to keep the statue last summer, that we were to provide recommendations on how that statue could be offset to address the situation in keeping with reconciliation objectives. What was not made clear was that the only intent to engage us was to assist in rewriting the existing plaque," the chiefs said in the statement.

They say recent correspondence from the city indicated the city planned only to change the plaque and nothing else.

I won't bother with the recommendations. Read further if one wishes. The emotional extortion is just insulting.

Canadian Citizenship Is Like A Post-It Note ...

 ... it falls away at some point because it is not properly fixed to anything solid:

The Bloc Québécois last night protested a rewrite of the citizenship oath to include the word “constitution.” A cabinet bill revising the oath will be opposed, an MP told the Commons Indigenous affairs committee: “Did this come from the government, this idea to include the word?”

 

Did They Tell Them That Their PM Wore Blackface?

That counts, right?:

An audit yesterday confirmed proportionately fewer Black jobseekers are hired by federal managers though reasons were unclear. The Public Service Commission audit reviewed jobs posted prior to 2020 Black Lives Matter protests: “There are likely other issues at play.”

"Shut Up, You Peon!" She Explained

Justin's affirmative action distraction rather irked by her RCMP detail's presence at her workplace review:

Former Gov. Gen. Julie Payette was frustrated that officers in her RCMP protective detail were offered the chance to give testimony in the third-party workplace review released in redacted form on Wednesday, sources have told the National Post.

Payette felt the Privy Council Office should have kept the review to staff working at Rideau Hall, and that it was a grievous breach of her privacy and her relationship with her protective detail — officers mandated to protect Payette around the clock, including on her personal time — that they were included in the review’s scope. The review team conducted 92 interviews between Oct. 12 and Nov. 23, 2020 for the report, including 22 with non-Rideau Hall staff.

Also:

 The RCMP has seen “erosion” of public confidence in its leadership since the appointment of Brenda Lucki as $368,000-a year Commissioner, says in-house research. “We’re not a perfect organization,” Lucki earlier testified at the Commons public safety committee.

From the Most Corrupt Government Ever Re-Elected

Yep:

SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. was awarded a $150 million pandemic contract despite former executives being cited for bid-rigging, fraud, bribery and illegal campaign contributions, records show. Opposition MPs have questioned why the Québec engineering firm is not blacklisted as a federal contractor: “We look like a banana republic.”

**

Liberal, Conservative and NDP members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs debated whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was justified in his decision to shut down Parliament for five weeks this summer, just as his government was reeling from the WE scandal.

**

Opposition MPs are urging the Canadian government to stop contracting out the work of processing visa applications, saying they are concerned that one of China’s largest state-owned investment funds is among the biggest backers of a company the Canadian government currently entrusts with this task.

It's Just Money

Budgets balance themselves and money springs up from everywhere and so on ... :

Parliament’s Budget Officer yesterday said CERB payments to high schoolers will be investigated. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not comment on $635.9 million in relief cheques to children, but called the pandemic “potentially scarring” for young people: “That is why we moved forward with unprecedented measures, with the CERB for students for example.”

**

This time, Mothercorp’s CEO Catherine Tait has requested the regulator require — wait for it —less oversight of their expenditures, specifically regarding the CBC’s beefed-up digital offerings, where the CBC needs greater “flexibility,” according to Tait. “She is asking the CRTC to renew its licences for five years with slimmed-down regulatory scrutiny of its digital content compared to its radio and television programs,”the CBC itself reportedon January 11. That sounds fair.

Clearly it’s unreasonable for us taxpayers, if CBC’s spending $1.2 billion per year of our money, to demand more accountability and transparency. Such amounts are, after all, known in Ottawa as “rounding errors”. But let’s stand on principle and have a look.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly easy for the average taxpayer, despite the immense horsepower of the internet, to investigate the financial workings of the CBC, determine ratings statistics, etc., simply by Googling. The broadcaster produces typically turgid annual reports, a mixture of corporate boilerplate and boosterism rendered in splashy, obviously costly graphics. Independent audits merely check whether the financial reporting is up to snuff, and don’t evaluate mandate fulfilment or performance.  

**

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s family vacation to Costa Rica in 2019 cost taxpayers nearly $200,000, according to records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

According to one of the federation’s blog posts, the PM billed $196,137 for the trip that began on Dec. 20, 2019 and lasted 16 days. The majority of costs are attributed to multiple Canadian Forces business jet flights. ...

Records show six Challenger 604 jet flights were in the air during the trip for about 34 hours. According to a National Defence Cost Factors Manual: Air Chapter from 2018-2019, it costs $5,543 an hour to operate such an aircraft.

The normal flight time for a round trip between Ottawa and San Jose, Costa Rica, is about 11 hours. The total flight cost, according to the federation, was $187,353.

The total cost climbed to $196,137, according to the CTF, after accounting for the costs of the flight crews staying at the San Jose Marriott and $1,235 in flight food bills.

**

An ongoing anti-racist campaign launched late last year has cost taxpayers approximately $70,000 so far, according to the office of BC’s Human Rights Commissioner (BCOHRC) Kasari Govender.

“We have a legislative mandate to provide education to the province of B.C. on anti-racism and anti-discrimination. It is one of our core functions,” the Office’s Acting Director of Communications Elaine O’Connor told True North. 

I can do that for free.

Racism is bad!

**

Canada is already awash in trees:

The tree-planting spree, spread over a decade, is supposed to start in the spring and cost $3.16 billion over that time, based on federal estimates.

Getting to the 2030 target means planting about 200 million trees a year more than the usual 600 million or so.

The spending watchdog's analysis suggests getting there is also going to require more money, about $2.78 billion more, bringing the overall cost closer to $5.94 billion.

The budget officer's report is based on a similar program the Ontario government ran, using the average per-tree cost and adjusting for inflation over the 10-year planting period.

It's Only Racist When SOME People Do It

To wit:

Jan. 29: Canada now has three cases. Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer,on Twitter: “I am concerned about the growing number of reports of racism and stigmatizing comments on social media directed to people of Chinese and Asian descent related to 2019-nCoV coronavirus… Everyone has a part to play in preventing the spread of the virus. The Chinese community and all travellers from affected areas are a key part of these efforts….Racism, discrimination and stigmatizing language are unacceptable and very hurtful. These actions create a divide of Us Vs Them. Canada is a country built on the deep-rooted values of respect, diversity and inclusion.” ...

 Jan. 29: Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski, a doctor from Thunder Bay, Ont., questions Dr. TheresaTam at the Parliamentary Health Committee: “The BBC was reporting today that their ministry of health was asking all people coming from China to voluntarily self-isolate for two weeks upon returning to the country, I think because the idea is that it got out of Wuhan. When you look at the numbers and what’s happening in China, it’s not isolated to Wuhan. It would seem to me to be a fairly feasible thing for us to do, and a precautionary thing, to have anyone coming from China self-isolate for two weeks. Have you considered making that recommendation, potentially under the Quarantine Act? I don’t know if there’s a means to enforce that.”

Tam replies, defending the policy of voluntary self-isolation of only those travellers showing clear symptoms: “Right now, we have protocols in place, together with the provinces and territories, on isolating cases. Certainly, doing rigorous contact tracing and monitoring is the key to preventing any spread from a case in Canada. That, I think, is of primary importance. For other completely asymptomatic people, currently there’s no evidence that we should be quarantining them.”

Tam stresses the need to work to have affected communities work with everyone else. “Otherwise, they’ll be stigmatized. They will be asked to take measures beyond what is currently the public health evidence. It is a matter of balance when you’re restricting someone’s freedom, essentially, to move about in the community after return. I think that is not something that we would take lightly.”

But now:

Travellers coming into Canada will be forced into mandatory hotel quarantines, part of a suite of measures designed to keep Canadians at home as the government grows increasingly concerned about the risk of new COVID variants that appear to be more transmissible.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the quarantines and several other restrictions on Friday outside Rideau Cottage.

(Sidebar: where he is hiding and has been for the past week.)

Isn't this measure draconian or even necessary as many have suggested for well over a year?

Yes, and the people who could have done something about it didn't:

The data shows that, as of the time of writing, 33 flights landed at Montreal’s Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Airport between January 12 and January 23 carrying passengers with confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The flights arrived from 12 countries including the U.S., Morocco, Mexico, and France.

Oh, how things have changed!

The truth of the matter is that no installed or appointed seat-warmer has any idea what he or she is doing, never has and has no intention of fixing a clearly broken system but what is known is that history (or China - take one's pick) has presented a rare opportunity to make the gullible public follow stickers on the floor because it is flat-out scared of thinking for one's self and would rather have anyone, even a total moron like Justin and his merry band of contrary "experts", do the thinking around here.

That is a zero-sum game.

The appearance of doing something solid, however, is good enough to fool the ovine voter, even one who might be questioning how long he or she can live in Cheetos and paper towels in this the second lockdown that, once again, has achieved absolutely nothing.

But science or something ...:

FTS can become, at the extreme, an ideology. Canada has already seen that in effect, in the refusal to exempt homeless people from Quebec’s curfew order. Quebec’s premier argued that if the gendarmerie were prohibited from ticketing homeless people from being on the street at quarter past eight, then other people would pretend to be homeless, thus weakening the FTS-mandated curfew. But FTS does not mandate a curfew in the first place, and certainly does not tell you if Quebecers are inclined to fake homelessness in the dead of winter. That is the premier’s psychological and moral assessment of his fellow citizens, which is not physics.

Also - science is different in other parts of the country:

The Ontario government routinely assures us that everything it does is based on science. If so, science in Ontario must be unique, because every other province has opened schools, even provinces with higher per-capita case rates than Ontario.

**

Andrew Cuomo is a son-of-a-b!#ch:

New York’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 may be more than 50 percent higher than officials claim — because Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration hasn’t revealed how many of those residents died in hospitals, state Attorney General Letitia James announced Thursday.

In a damning, 76-page report, James also said that some unidentified nursing homes apparently underreported resident fatalities to the state Department of Health and failed to enforce infection-control measures — with more than 20 currently under investigation.

The bombshell findings could push the current DOH tally of 8,711 deaths to more than 13,000, based on a survey of 62 nursing homes that found the state undercounted the fatalities there by an average of 56 percent.

The report further notes that at least 4,000 residents died after the state issued a controversial, March 25 Cuomo administration mandate for nursing homes to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients — which James said “may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities.”

**

But everyone kept saying that is was so safe!:

“While pregnancy puts women at a higher risk of severe COVID-19, the use of this vaccine in pregnant women is currently not recommended, unless they are at risk of high exposure,” the official WHO status report released Tuesday reads.

Experts now advise people who are pregnant to avoid receiving the Moderna vaccine unless they are health care workers in a facility treating coronavirus patients, or if they have a medical condition that would put them at a higher risk of COVID-19 fatality.

**

They wouldn't be poor if they could work:

The world’s third-largest economy has seen a relatively small coronavirus outbreak so far, with a four-figure death toll and largely without the drastic lockdowns seen in other countries.

With an unemployment rate below 3% and a reputation for a strong social safety net, Japan also appears well placed to weather the pandemic’s economic fallout.

But campaigners say the most vulnerable have still been hit hard, with statistics masking the high rate of underemployment and poorly paid temporary work.

“The pandemic, rising joblessness and falling wages have directly hit the working poor, people who were barely getting by before,” said Ren Ohnishi, who heads the Moyai Support Centre for Independent Living, an anti-poverty group.

Lockdowns have consequences.

Mid-Week Post

 

... we haven't learnt the lessons. ...

 

Damn right about that:

United Nations human rights experts are alarmed by what they see as a growing trend to enact legislation allowing medical assistance in dying for people suffering from non-terminal, disabling conditions.

I didn't think that you cared, UN. 

Free speech means that everything is on the table, even things people would not like to hear or see:

A federally funded panel is recommending the creation of a powerful new government regulator to oversee social media companies such as Facebook and Google and to require them to have strong content-moderation practices and to comply with a new legal duty to act responsibly.

The report by the Public Policy Forum (PPF)’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, to be released on Wednesday, also calls for the creation of a federal “e-tribunal” to hear complaints about specific social media posts.

The federal Liberal government plans to introduce legislation early this year to regulate social media companies, with a focus on online hate and harassment. The report’s recommendations are aimed at influencing that legislation.

 

(Sidebar: read - criticism of the Liberal Party. The entire racism claim is a canard and everyone knows it. Wrap a totalitarian construct around wool but it's still totalitarian.)

 

One country gets it:

Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced the "freedom of speech protection" bill on Friday.

The law would also establish a "freedom of speech council".

The council would be able to order social networks such as Facebook or Twitter to restore deleted content, or unblock a user's account following a review, Mr Ziobro said.

Social media users in Poland who had been blocked or had content deleted would be able to complain directly to the platform, which would have to respond within 24 hours.

If a social media company refused to comply with an order, the council would be able to issue a fine of between 50,000 and 50 million zloty.

 

Also:

Since we apparently know the identifying details of these 300 groups — how else could the NDP offer such a precise number? — surely, we can now *expose* them. Even if they haven’t broken any laws, there’s enormous value in warning the public about their identities. After all, Nazis don’t announce themselves with names like “League of Right-Wing Canadian Racists” — much in the way Antifa doesn’t call itself “Guys Who Started Off Pretending to Oppose Fascism But Now Just Randomly Wreck Stuff.” Fromm calls one of his groups “The Council of Conservative Citizens.” These names can be very deceptive.

So obviously what we need is a public database that contains all 300 entries, so that when we get invited to a Facebook group, or a local bake-sale fundraiser, or a neighbour asks for help burning an effigy or what not, we’ll be able to check the invitation against a list of known hate groups. In fact, I’m surprised Jagmeet Singh hasn’t already posted the list to NDP.ca. Remember: The forces of white supremacy are massing as we speak. *Lives* are at stake.

 

Don't worry, Mr. Kay. Canadians can't name any Nazi death camps, either. 

**

Cancelled in five, four ... :

In a no-holds barred video, Canadian playwright, author and actor Carmen Aguirre is calling for an end to cancel culture in the theatre community. The provocative video essay – originally produced for a Vancouver theatre event that was cancelled – calls on fellow artists to end what Aguirre calls “the great purge.” It is a time, she says, “of cruelty and psychological violence” – when people can be publicly humiliated, shamed, mobbed on social media and fired from their jobs for expressing their beliefs, just because those beliefs might be offensive.

“I do not consent to being part of an arts community that engages in witch-hunts of people who don’t think like me,” Aguirre says in the nearly 30-minute video, which she posted to YouTube.

 

 

We don't have to trade with China. We never did:

“Under this agreement, CanSino was to provide candidate vaccine doses and transfer their vaccine technology, free of charge, for Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials in Canada, and grant the NRC a non-exclusive right to use, produce, and reproduce the vaccine for emergency pandemic use,” the NRC said in the response to a question on the House’s order paper from Conservative Health critic Michelle Rempel Garner.

Neither CanSino nor the Chinese government got any money from the Canadian government through the deal, the NRC said. Expecting more vaccines to be produced, Ottawa committed $44 million to ensure that the NRC’s facilities in Montreal met manufacturing standards.

On May 12, the NRC announced its plans to work with CanSino. Four days later, Trudeau promoted the partnership at one of his then-daily press briefings. ...

China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, refused to issue the approval letter allowing the vaccine to ship to Canada. Around the same time, Chinese-made vaccine candidates were permitted to ship to other countries for trials similar to those CanSino had agreed to with the NRC. ...

It wasn’t until July 6 that the vaccine’s holdup was made public, when iPolitics reported that Halperin told a Commons committee that the Canadian Center for Vaccinology hadn’t received CanSino’s initial shipment.

On July 9, iPolitics reported for the first time that China’s customs agency was responsible for stalling the shipment. ...

On Aug. 5, Procurement Minister Anita Anand announced that the government had agreed to buy vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Their shots have since been approved by Health Canada and are being distributed across Canada.

 

How much of this is the Trudeau government and how much of this is the government Justin most admires in the world?

Discuss.

 

Also - because Canadians apparently can't do things:

A COVID-19 vaccine candidate that entered clinical trials last week proposes not only to be a made-in-Canada solution to the pandemic, but a made-in-Calgary one.

Providence Therapeutics, a Canadian biotechnology company with offices in Calgary and Toronto, announced Tuesday it has begun Phase I trials of its vaccine. Providence is also working with another Calgary company, Northern RNA, which aims to develop vaccine manufacturing capacity in this city.

 

It's a good thing, therefore, that we're haggling with the Europeans (who don't even trust the damn thing) over this glorified flu shot!

**

China’s National Health Commission issued a notice on Feb. 25, 2020 to the health commissions of all Chinese provinces, regions, municipalities, as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a CCP-run paramilitary organization with jurisdiction over some cities and land in far-western Xinjiang.

The notice called for cooperation in virus tracing by testing wild animals, humans that came into contact with them, and the animals’ environment or habitat.

The sampling of close human contacts included throat swabs and blood samples and those of animals included throat and anal swabs, the notice stated.

Blood samples were to be sent to local Chinese centers for disease control and prevention (CDC) for safekeeping until they are tested for COVID-19 antibodies. Other samples were to be tested using COVID-19 nucleic acid testing by local laboratories and the results would be sent to local police bureaus.

The notice was labeled “not to be disclosed.”

** 

Wasn't I saying?:

The 2021 “World Watch List” of nations most culpable for the persecution of Christians has revealed that preexisting trends of 2019 were amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

(Sidebar: please see here.)

**

An employee at Shanghai’s subway network told The Epoch Times that he had seen several people suddenly collapse and exhibit COVID-19 symptoms in recent weeks, long before authorities announced any new local cases. Local authorities in Shanghai reported a new outbreak of COVID-19 on Jan. 21, although the city declared “no more suspected cases” on Jan. 2.

 

(Sidebar: I'll just leave this right here.) 

**

The Jilin Provincial National Health Commission reported dozens of new COVID-19 cases in recent days—in Changchun city, the capital, and Tonghua city, which borders North Korea. However, the public is skeptical of China’s official figures because the Chinese Communist Party has consistently lied about or covered up the severity of the virus outbreak.

(Sidebar: this North Korea.)

** 

 Why? So that Xi can threaten you?:

President Moon Jae-in on Tuesday told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he hopes Xi will visit Korea as soon as the coronavirus pandemic allows. 

 

I'd start worrying about going extinct.

 

**

 

In a normal country, this kind of thing would be tantamount to treason:

The Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) has trained nearly 2,000 Chinese law enforcement students and officials since 2013, alongside dozens of Chinese state judges, according to a bombshell report from Business in Vancouver.

**

Ottawa is growing increasingly concerned about the rights of 300,000 Canadian citizens in Hong Kong, after the territory’s government declared that dual citizens must choose the nationality they wish to maintain.

 

Let's put it another way - Ottawa is not concerned at all. If these people choose Canada as their home, then they will be. One cannot be a vassal state for China will dealing with discontent.

 

 

It's just money:

 

“In their study of 800 years of debt crises, Harvard profs Rogoff & Reinhart identify 5 predictors of them:

1. “Slowing output”
2. “Asset price inflation”
3. “Sustained debt build-ups”
4. “Rising household leverage”
5. “Large current account deficits”

Canada checks all 5 boxes.”

 **

A Department of Finance executive responsible for the nation’s fiscal planning yesterday claimed the carbon tax is exempt from GST. It’s not. One MP expressed incredulity over confusion at the department that introduced the levy: “I’m sorry?” 

 

**

The Canada Revenue Agency paid $635,980,000 in pandemic relief to high schoolers including thousands of Grade Nine students, according to Access To Information records. Parliament passed a hastily-drafted Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act that allowed children to apply, though cabinet said $2,000 relief cheques were supposed to help jobless workers facing eviction or foreclosure: ‘It was to pay for groceries or rent.’

 

**

Cabinet ignored its own in-house report recommending an end to cash-for-life expense accounts for ex-governors general, records show. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation yesterday released the report through Access To Information: “It’s absolutely crazy.”

 

Enjoy the decline, Canada! 

It might be because O'Toole is a weasel:

 

In the wake of a desperate campaign to try and buy into the narratives pushed by the Liberal Party, which culminated in the expulsion of Derek Sloan from the CPC under an obviously cynical pretext, the Conservative leader has seen his image worsen according to the latest Angus Reid poll.

 

(Sidebar: I should point out that polls are largely skewed in their questions, purpose and demographics - some of whom would not care for O'Toole, anyway - and should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, O'Toole burned himself with his clearly sycophantic betrayal of Derek Sloan.)

 

Because priorities:

 

Police in Aylmer, Ontario were seen on video Tuesday night handing out fines to people who allegedly attended church services over the weekend.

**

While vaccinations are voluntary for military personnel, Bilodeau said individual commanders will be allowed to decide whether to make them mandatory for deployment on certain missions.

At the same time, troops already deployed will not receive doses from the current Canadian supply. Instead, Bilodeau said planning is underway to determine the best way to inoculate them, including possibly turning to local governments.

You're an adder fanged, Putin:

Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda conference on Jan. 27, he offered a grim prediction and noted that the current era shows parallels to the 1920s and 1930s before the “catastrophic World War II.”

“Nowadays, such a heated conflict is not possible, I hope,” Putin said. “Because it will mean the end of our civilization.

“But I’d like the reiterate that the situation might develop unpredictably and uncontrollably if we sit on our hands doing nothing to avoid it. There’s a possibility that we might experience an actual collapse in global development that might result in a fight of all against all.”

Such a prospect, he said, would result in a “grim dystopia.”

For this kind of thing, yes, excommunication is a must. Forget the blather that they have excommunicated themselves. A clear message has to be sent to them and to everyone else that rules actually exist:

Since those days, however, the Vatican’s handling of prominent U.S. Catholic politicians has noticeably loosened. The world’s media published photos of a friendly Joe Biden and Pope Francis greeting each other in the Paul VI’s Hall in 2016, when Biden was attending a Vatican conference on new therapies to treat cancer and other illnesses. Biden went on to receive implicitly more favorable papal treatment than his opponent President Donald Trump, both before and after the 2020 presidential election. 

And yet it’s interesting to note a correlation between this more open and welcoming Vatican and papal approach to Biden, and his increasing divergence from the Church’s magisterium on key non-negotiable teachings. As he has become more publicly accepted in Rome, so has he appeared to feel less constrained by those teachings and embarked less than a week into his presidency on arguably the most radical pro-abortion and pro-gender theory agenda ever undertaken, as opposed to the measures to protect nascent human life taken by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

 

 

How interesting: 

The stone wall of a castle in Osaka that was built by feudal warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi has been revealed after being hidden underground for some 400 years.

The stone wall of the former Osaka Castle was discovered in an excavation project led by the Osaka Municipal Government that began in 2013 and was completed recently. The castle wall has been shown to media.

The wall is made of natural rocks stacked on top of each other. Experts say that the excavation is key to a full understanding of the castle.

The former Osaka Castle, built by Hideyoshi in 1583, was burnt down in the Summer Siege of Osaka in 1615. The Tokugawa shogunate then buried the castle in dirt piled up to more than 10 meters and constructed a new Osaka Castle.

Researchers first discovered parts of the former castle’s stone walls in 1984 near the current castle, at a location some 7 meters underground.

The latest excavation uncovered a stone wall some 15 meters long and around 6 meters high leading to areas for the castle building and the main residence. A turret was previously mounted on the wall.

You probably think this song is about you.

No, really: 

With a title this conspicuous, Johnny Cash’s famous tune had to have been about somebody real, right? Well, it was, but first of all: he didn’t write the song himself. Where The Sidewalk Ends author Shel Silverstein did—about his friend and fellow writer Jean Shepherd (the narrator of A Christmas Story, which is based on his stories), who endured endless teasing as a child because of his feminine-sounding name.

 

How Convenient

 Oh, China, is there anything you won't say?:

Posts on social media platforms MeWe and Weibo began spreading accusations against Catholics for causing the recent cases. The rumors also claimed that a number of European and American priests came to participate in the religious ceremonies without taking any preventative measures, bringing the virus with them.

The accusations, circulating widely since January 6-7, further mentioned that “20 days ago the village of Xiao Guozhuang organized a religious activity and there were several priests from Europe and the United States together.”

Another article pointed to the village of Xiao Guozhuang, accusing it of being a Catholic stronghold, of holding regular ‘mysterious activities,’ and thus responsible for spreading infections.

So I suppose that lab had nothing to do with it?