Wait until this country runs out of printed money:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faces censure in the Commons after refusing to allow MPs to question his political aides over dealings with We Charity. The Commons ethics committee yesterday saw notice of a motion citing Trudeau’s office for defying a House order: “I always thought Canada was supposed to be a democratic country where decisions by the House held some value.”
Take his pension away.
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Opposition MPs on the Commons environment committee yesterday overruled cabinet objections in approving a bill to ban plastic waste exports. “Our worry is the domestic situation that could occur,” said Liberal MP Raj Saini (Kitchener Centre, Ont.).
Try cleaning up your own junk instead of exporting it.
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The Conservatives are asking the commissioner of lobbying to investigate if former Liberal Minister Sheila Copps broke the law last spring when she reached out to the government regarding a COVID-19 “procurement opportunity”.
But Copps told the National Post that she ran any personal protection equipment (PPE) purchasing discussions she had with government by the lobbying commissioner’s office, who she claims told her by phone that it was not necessary for her to register as a lobbyist.
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What a politically decrepit country we are:
As the political scientist Donald Savoie argues in his book, “Democracy in Canada,” this country’s “national political institutions were designed for another country.” The United Kingdom has its own regional divisions but it is a fraction of the size of Canada, and in 1867, the UK remained the perfect example of a “unitary state,” meaning there was no competing level of government with powers comparable to the national government, the way there is in a federation.
Political power in Canada can be gained without winning a single seat outside Ontario and Quebec. Together, the two provinces account for 57 per cent of the 338 seats in the House of Commons. Ontario alone accounts for 36 per cent, while Alberta counts for just 10 per cent. Albertans suddenly voting Liberal won’t change this equation or how its interests are viewed by Ottawa.
Intensifying the House of Commons’ focus on “national” issues, to the detriment of regional matters, is its level of partisanship, which is almost unique to Canada. When members of Parliament are expected to always vote along party lines or face the prospect of being demoted or even expelled from caucus, there is little room for regional deviation.
Evan Siddall, retiring $459,000-a year chief executive of CMHC, in farewell remarks to the Commons finance committee said the corporation never lied to Canadians about home equity taxes. Siddall did not comment on Access To Information records: “I was accused of lying, in fact, and a media cover-up on this.”
Siddall directly attacked the reporting and Blacklock’s in multiple statements.
On Jul. 18, 2020, he wrote on Twitter: “The suggestion that the CMHC funding a study on any tax measure is inaccurate and misleading reporting. We are co-funding a Solution Lab on housing wealth and inequality. We do not control the agenda nor the research base, which is a minor component of the protocol.”
Then on Jul. 20, 2020, he replied to Blacklock’s on Twitter saying: “Don’t let facts get in the way of your poorly researched story. Instead, continue to promote your fabricated story so that people who serve the public have to distract themselves from doing things to improve our country.”
However, CMHC’s own records include the project’s charter, which was signed by Generation Squeeze and CMHC in March of 2020. The charter directly references an examination of tax policy.
“One key source of this intergenerational inequality is tax policy that privileges home ownership, and shelters housing wealth, especially in principal residences, from taxation by comparison with other assets,” read the charter’s “problem statement.”
The charter stated the study would “examine tax and other public finance policy opportunities” to level the intergenerational playing field.
“If they’re explicitly studying the possibility of changing taxation on homes, it’s awfully hard to claim that you’re not looking at the possibility of a home equity tax,” said Wudrick.
A series of emails between Kershaw and Siddall were also obtained by the Taxpayers Federation. They show Siddall was aware of the focus on home taxation changes before the study even received funding.
On Jun. 19, 2019, Kershaw sent Siddall draft material he planned to include in his CMHC funding application and asked for Siddall’s input.
“We aim to engage multiple generations in the search for housing policy adaptations that work for all, while reducing affordability challenges facing young adults,” read the material. “Policy adaptations that will receive attention include opportunities to shift from some current or future taxation of earnings toward more taxation of housing wealth.”
When I look at Vincent Van Gogh, I am inspired. When I consider what the government has spent on total crap, I am inspired only to unseat them:
A Senate committee has endorsed a bill to appoint an “artist laureate” to inspire the nation. “Give a vote of moral support to Canadian creators in this very dark time,” said Senator Patricia Bovey (Man.), sponsor of the bill: “It expresses the soul and substance of who we are as Canadians.”
Also:
Why language, artfully arranged and ordered, has this power is not clear. Or why the writing of poetry, and equally the reading of it, in our most difficult moments, has such value. But that it does we know.
Even in the grim times, perhaps most in the grim times, the real power of poetry manifests itself. Else why have the most ferocious tyrants, the vile Stalin for example, trembled with dread that a few lines from a Mandelstam might find a public, or shuddered when a Solzhenitsyn scribbled a poem?
Nor is it something to be passed by that the language of the prophets in the Old Testament, in the time of Israel’s many turmoils, is vivid with poetic sublimity. I am not certain there are many or any lines more affecting than those from perhaps the Psalm most familiar, No. 23, which carries the phrase “he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Or that other psalm, perhaps even more evocative, which has even emerged in modern popular song, keening the Jewish captivity: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”
Just as language, which is all I am concerned with here, just as examples of the force of poetic expression, these are incomparable. Which is why they have been retained in memory, adapted and recast in other forms — set to music — centuries, even millennia, after their conception.
Poetry is a flare in times of darkness, which is what Dr. Samuel Johnson adverted to in the second half of his perfect description of literature, poetry — that their purpose was to “enable readers the better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”
But to return to his first and happier phrase “the better to enjoy life,” there Johnson was noting poetry’s ability to sharpen and intensify all that was agreeable, harmonious, even joyful in life. Is there a richer guide to the ecstasies of the natural world than Wordsworth, or Gerard Manley Hopkins in his many salutes to the “pied beauty” of creation? Poetry clarifies and makes more present what we know but by intuition.
Amen.
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