Mid-Week Post

 

Your mid-week stroll through the woods ...

 

Indeed!:

In fact the worst thing is its implausibility. Not the clumsy editing details. The laughable general idea that Erin O’Toole, or almost anyone else in Canada, might suggest letting the miracle of markets rescue our health care system just because it’s the most restrictive in the free world, and almost anywhere, and falling to bits in consequence.

If you’re wondering what the Liberals were thinking, they do seem to have entered this election with their IQs chasing their poll numbers downward. They not only thought they wouldn’t get caught on this video, they apparently think they weren’t caught even after Twitter branded them liars. ...

Anyone who votes Liberal after this episode will get what they deserve. Including an IQ downgrade from rating agencies. Though if they still trusted that party’s honesty, humility or wisdom after the last six years they were not exactly AAA anyway. But anyone who votes for, or campaigns against, the Tories believing they will reduce government, seek innovative private solutions or speak honestly and sensibly about anything important will be in the next corner with another of those conical caps.

 

Either way, we are stuck with a bloated bureaucracy whose only goal is to make things unmanageable and expensive. 

 

Also:

This debate, such as it is, does not bespeak a serious country. Trudeau and the Liberals are essentially threatening us with the status quo. We have known for years that ever more doctors and clinics across the country are offering quicker access to various procedures to patients willing to pay out of pocket, and that the federal government hasn’t done much of anything about it. The Globe and Mail counted 71 such clinics way back in 2017, offering everything from diagnostic imaging to gastrointestinal screening and surgical consultations. “Executive” health-care clinics in Toronto charge thousands of dollars a year for membership. Needless to say, injured National Hockey League and Major League Baseball players do not get slotted in at the bottom of MRI waiting lists. Nor do the unathletic rich and powerful.

Now we’re supposed to be impressed by a government that’s been in power for six years and is just now, during an election campaign, vowing to punish Saskatchewan specifically — an electoral black hole for the Liberals? They should be laughed out of town.

One thing a proper fact check on this issue might do is investigate whether other countries offer the sorts of out-of-pocket (or privately insured) procedures that Saskatchewan does without destroying the universal-access system. They do, of course.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information publishes comparative statistics between Canada, the provinces and other OECD countries. We do very well on some metrics, but there is enormous room for improvement on others. In the Netherlands, you can get a same-day or next-day doctor’s appointment 80 per cent of the time. The Canadian average is 46 per cent. In Belgium, just 20 per cent of patients had to wait four or more weeks to see a specialist after being referred; in Quebec it’s 63 per cent. In Denmark, the average wait time for hip and knee replacements is 29 and 33 days, respectively; in Manitoba it’s 186 and 230 days, respectively.

 

Keep paying into the system to spite the Americans who remark (correctly, too) what a farce this system is. 

And:

Man who gave a $237 million ventilator contract to his fellow Montreal Liberal and former MP Frank Baylis' private for-profit health care company complains about the involvement of the private sector in publicly-funded health care https://t.co/HrOIs41wpc

— Ryan O'Connor (@rpoconnor) August 24, 2021

People get the government they vote for:

⁦@JustinTrudeau⁩ arrives in Vancouver. Trade secret - the obligatory wave on arrival is a bit of a sham. There’s no-one here but staff and reporters - and he’s definitely not waving at us. pic.twitter.com/SqfD16ZhWU

— John Ivison (@IvisonJ) August 25, 2021

 

Vain much?

**

The Liberal plan also proposes to double the National Housing Co-investment Fund, an affordable housing initiative, even though the budget office found only 50% of the existing funding has been used. It’s one of several programs that the Liberals have promised but not delivered on such as the Rental Construction Financing Initiative and the Federal Lands Initiative.

Trudeau’s plan was also blasted by the Ontario Real Estate Association for what it calls proposals that will “criminalize hardworking families.”

Association president David Oikle said while he’s pleased to see housing affordability taken up as a serious issue, the Liberal plan to ban blind bidding and make other changes is going too far.

“You cannot fix Canada’s housing crisis by denying millions of hardworking families the choice of how to sell their home and by pitting homeowners against buyers,” Oikle said.

 

Also - why not forever?:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday pledged a re-elected Liberal cabinet will ban all new foreign purchases of Canadian residential real estate for at least two years. Trudeau and his cabinet voted against a similar Conservative motion in the Commons June 9: “The deck seems stacked.”

  ** 

Today in corruption news:

A senior manager with the Department of Immigration abruptly resigned while under investigation for misappropriation of funds in sweetheart contracting. The disclosure follows a warning from a former crime-busting prosecutor that Parliament must monitor sole-source contracting: “As a taxpayer I have to wonder.”

** 

A huge state-owned shipyard in China is building a 1,000-passenger ferry for use by a federal Crown corporation over the objections of Canada’s shipbuilding industry and at a time when two Canadians have spent 989 days in Chinese prisons as victims of what Ottawa has called “hostage diplomacy.”

**

Trudeau would then go on to discuss Canada's strong democracy, and the choices that Canadians have to make.

"This is something that continues to be important, and I look forward to sitting down with my fellow G7 leaders in a few hours to talk about how more we can help and what more we need to do...

"At the same time, our democracy is strong... We know full well that this is the time of a pivotal choice for Canadians for how we move forward, for how we do even more for Canadians. 

(Sidebar: you tried to regulate the Internet, you @$$hole.)

"We're coming out of this pandemic, which we're not through yet, and the choice on how to end this pandemic is clear for Canadians. we're standing for clear, stronger vaccine mandates, Erin O'Toole doesn't."

Trudeau then took a brief second to acknowledge a heckler, with the prime minister telling the man to "please" get vaccinated.

(Sidebar: that's not what the man was asking, stupid.)

"We're going to continue to make sure Canadians know there's an important choice about how we build a better future for everyone. This is the thing we need to keep focused on, and this is the choice Canadians need to make now."

 

Isn't there anyone who is embarrassed by this broken record?

At no point did he handle the heckler. He did not address his anger. He repeated things written down for him and attacked his opponent.

 

 

It's just money:

The Department of Justice is spending the equivalent of more than $15,000 a week in ongoing litigation with former students of an Indian Residential School, according to Access To Information records. Weekly billings by federal lawyers are more than total compensation paid to individuals in other Residential School settlements: “The government has endless dollars to fight.” 

 

It was never about safety but movement:

The trials conducted by the vaccine manufacturers have only recorded whether vaccinated people were less likely to get symptomatic COVID than the unvaccinated. The trials did not check for a reduction in “cases” as measured by positive SARS-CoV-2 tests without symptoms, nor in COVID-19 hospitalizations or deaths.

They also did not attempt to understand the impact of the vaccines on transmission. The interim authorization of the vaccines was based on their efficacy in reducing what amounts to cold symptoms in the vaccinated person.

Since the start of the mass vaccinations, researchers worldwide have examined whether vaccination does reduce the spread of COVID as a positive side effect. While it seems plausible that such an effect might occur, the results are meagre. Some studies found modest reductions in the spread of the original SARS-CoV-2 variant, a far cry from “stopping” transmission.

With the Delta variant, the effect has further shrunk and in a CDC-funded study, vaccinated individuals carried similar viral loads as the unvaccinated.

Countries like Israel and Iceland that have achieved high vaccination rates in the population are currently seeing their “case” counts rise dramatically. In the last two weeks, Israel’s COVID-19 death count is now also following this concerning trajectory.

Meanwhile, the province of Ontario with over 70% twice-vaccinated people is preparing for a fourth wave and already has significantly more cases, hospitalizations and deaths than one year ago, when nobody was vaccinated.

So, what is a vaccine passport supposed to prove? What are vaccination mandates meant to achieve? Before Delta, vaccinated individuals may have been slightly less contagious than the unvaccinated. But with Delta, there does not appear to be a difference in spreading the virus. If anything, the vaccine works to protect the recipient.

It is therefore nobody’s business to know whether another person is vaccinated or not. And there is no reason to expect, pressure or require another person to “take the jab.” The campaign to vaccinate children and young adults is particularly offensive, since they bear all the risks from short- and long-term adverse events and obtain no measurable benefits from the shot.

 

Also:

The Department of Health failed to place a single order for masks and other pandemic supplies months after telling Canadians to prepare for Covid, according to internal emails. Documents from the Prime Minister’s Office contradicted public reassurances by Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer: “Be vigilant and be prepared.”  

And:

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge.

“Every time that the variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it,” Bourla told Fox News in an interview. “They are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven’t identified any yet but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge.”

   

The gong show continues:

They’re standing in raw sewage, waving their documents and being ignored by seemingly indifferent Canadian troops.

Video obtained Tuesday by the Toronto Sun showed what appears to be desperate Afghan nationals — waving emails and facilitation letters from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirming visas and spots on Canadian rescue flights — standing in an open sewage canal trying to get the soldiers’ attention.

 

Also:

Global News has learned that of the passengers, more than 200 of them were children.

It’s not clear though how many of those on board are destined for Canada or are Canadian citizens.

 

How many of these people are men of fighting age or actual citizens of Canada?

 

Even the Koreans are on the ball with evacuating their personnel: 

Korea has sent military planes to Afghanistan and neighboring countries to rescue Afghans who have helped Korean occupying forces or the government, the Foreign Ministry here said Tuesday.

Three military aircraft were deployed to bring out Afghans who helped Korea and their families now that the country has fallen to the Taliban.

This is the first time Korea has sent military aircraft and troops to a conflict area to rescue foreigners.

Also:

 

A South Korean parliamentary committee voted early on Wednesday to recommend amending a law, a key step toward banning Google and Apple from forcibly charging software developers commissions on in-app purchases, the first such curb by a major economy.

After the vote from the legislation and judiciary committee to amend the Telecommunications Business Act, dubbed the "Anti-Google law," the amendment will come to a final vote in parliament.