Just like with Huawei, Justin dragged his feet and played "Follow the Leader" instead of asserting some sort of moral truth and boycotted China outright.
But that would be angering his bosses, so:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Wednesday Canada will join a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
He said the country is "extremely concerned" about China's human rights abuses and has been discussing the matter with allies.
(Sidebar: bull.Sh--.)
"That is why we are announcing today that we will not be sending any diplomatic representation to the Beijing Olympic, Paralympic Games this winter," Trudeau said.
**
Beijing's top diplomat in Ottawa, Ambassador Cong Peiwu, suggested today a decision by Ottawa denying the media giant access would be received poorly by the Chinese business community.
"That will be sending out a very wrong signal to the Chinese companies," he said during an event hosted by the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
"I would like to suggest someone [is] trying to politicize the issue ... to try to abuse and overstretch the concept of national security, and that is not conducive for people doing business here in Canada."
A real leader would tell Cong to go to hell.
You know, someone who isn't Justin the pissant.
Also:
Barton was already a liability, and if he’d been kept on much longer he’d have ended up being an even more debilitating embarrassment than his predecessor John McCallum was. McCallum had to be fired for giving the distinct public impression that he was acting as much as China’s ambassador to Canada as the other way around.
And now, U.S. authorities are asserting a renewed and inconvenient interest in McKinsey’s dodgy operations in China including during Barton’s tenure as the global consulting giant’s top dog between 2009 and 2018, and McKinsey’s senior officer in China for five years prior to that. There’s a storm brewing, and Barton’s in the eye of it.
Both Democrats and Republicans are raising alarms about McKinsey’s lucrative and highly sensitive contracts with the Pentagon during the Barton years while the company simultaneously provided blue-chip services to shadowy Chinese state corporations, including the blacklisted China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), which has been building heavily-militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. It was only a few months before Barton’s appointment that Ottawa blocked the CCCC from acquiring Aecon, one of Canada’s biggest construction companies, on national security grounds.
Just last month, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform kicked off an investigation into McKinsey’s dealings with opioid manufacturers while providing consultancy services to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. McKinsey had already been forced to pay out $573 million in lawsuits for helping Oxycontin manufacturers “turbocharge” sales while Barton was McKinsey’s global managing partner.
It was in Barton’s last year that McKinsey held its annual global retreat within walking distance of a Uyghur concentration camp in Kashgar.
The Trudeau government is having a hard enough time of it as it is in convincing the Biden administration that Ottawa is a trustworthy partner in confronting the challenge the Xi regime poses to the democratic world. Keeping Barton around would have been idiotic.
And now we know.
**
Canada and the United States are on the same page when it comes to dealing with China, the new U.S. ambassador said Tuesday shortly after the ceremony in which he was officially welcomed by Governor General Mary Simon.
“I have a high level of confidence that Canada and the United States will be aligned on our China policy, including our policy with respect to the Olympics,” David Cohen said outside Rideau Hall.
You're ready to ignore human rights abuses, too?
This could be hairy:
Russia and India signed a flurry of trade and arms deals during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday, Dec. 6, 2021, including one that will see India produce more than 600,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles.
Putin traveled to India with Russia’s defense and foreign ministers in a visit that saw the two countries reinforce their ties with a military and technical cooperation pact until 2031 and a pledge to boost annual trade to $30 billion by 2025.
Putin, who plays on both sides of the fence, walked away with a peace deal.
Justin walked away with nothing.
But, as with most things the Liberals do, it's just money:
The PBO said the government is seeking budgetary authorities for $379.9 billion this fiscal year to date. That is 28 percent higher in real 2021 dollars than the federal government sought a decade ago and 16 percent more than the year before COVID hit. (The Estimates do not cover costs related to the wage and rent subsidies, the Canada Child Benefit, tax expenditures or Employment Insurance, for which Parliament does not authorize annual spending.)
**
The actual cost of cabinet’s latest pandemic relief bill may be billions higher than estimated, the Commons finance committee was told yesterday. The Department of Finance was in a “continued race to push money out the door,” said one MP: “Things have been lax during Covid.”
**
The Commons finance committee yesterday rejected a bid by cabinet to speed billions in new pandemic relief spending. Too much has already been spent too quickly without oversight or auditing, the committee was told: “We don’t want to waste another $100 million, $200 million, a billion dollars on mismanagement or fraud.”
The Czech government deploys troops to the Polish border:
The Czech government approved a plan Wednesday to deploy 150 service members in Poland to help guard the border with Belarus.
Defense Minister Lubomir Metnar said they will have a mandate to stay in Poland for 180 days.
Both houses of Czech Parliament still have to approve the deployment. That is expected to happen by the end of next week. The Czechs would join the similar numbers of troops deployed in Poland by Britain and Estonia.
Poland’s government and the European Union have accused authorities in Belarus of directing thousands of migrants and refugees from the Middle East to its border and using them as pawns, tricking them into trying to enter Poland, Lithuania and Latvia to destabilize the entire 27-nation EU.
“The European Union cannot tolerate that,” Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhanek said, adding that more sanctions against Belarus can’t be ruled out.
The vaccines that deplete one's immune system are perfectly effective enough to withstand this new variant ... until another one comes along:
Many systemic viral infections, such as measles, confer long-term, if not lifelong, immunity, whereas others, such as influenza, do not (due to changes in viral genetics). ...
Some people who have recovered from COVID-19 might not benefit from COVID-19 vaccination. In fact, one study found that previous COVID-19 was associated with increased adverse events following vaccination with the Comirnaty BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine (Pfizer–BioNTech). In addition, there are rare reports of serious adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination. In Switzerland, residents who can prove they have recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection through a positive PCR or other test in the past 12 months are considered equally protected as those who have been fully vaccinated.
**
The eight previous Public Health England / UK Health Security Agency ‘Vaccine Surveillance’ reports on Covid-19 cases show that double vaccinated 40-79 year olds have now lost lost 50% of their immune system capability and are consistently losing a further 4-5% every week (between 3.7% and 7.9%).
Projections also now show that 30-49 year olds will have zero Covid / viral defence at best, or a form of vaccine mediated acquired immunodeficiency syndrome at worst, by the first week in January and all double vaccinated people over 30 will have completely lost that part of their immune system which deals with Covid-19 in the next 18 weeks.
**
Our results provide support for high effectiveness of BNT162b2 against hospital admissions up until around 6 months after being fully vaccinated, even in the face of widespread dissemination of the delta variant. Reduction in vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infections over time is probably primarily due to waning immunity with time rather than the delta variant escaping vaccine protection.
(Sidebar: see above.)
**
The earliest studies on omicron are in and the glimpse they’re providing is cautiously optimistic: while vaccines like the one made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE may be less powerful against the new variant, protection can be fortified with boosters.
And how much will that cost?
Also:
The definition of fully vaccinated in the United States will be changed, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.
“It’s going to be a matter of when, not if,” Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an appearance on CNN.
**
A Buffalo, New York-based hospital system announced it fired about 100 unvaccinated employees who were previously granted a religious exemption.**
What retailer would risk his business?:
Four days after the New Brunswick government announced that grocery stores are allowed to ban unvaccinated Canadians, elected leaders have remained mute.
True North reached out to numerous politicians and their offices – named below – for comment. People’s Party of Canada (PPC) leader Maxime Bernier was the only political figure who responded to condemn the measure.
“Mr. Bernier absolutely believes this measure violates our fundamental rights, and doesn’t think it is reasonable at all,” PPC spokeperson Martin Masse told True North. “It’s simply another authoritarian measure to put pressure on unvaccinated people to get vaccinated and has no scientific basis in terms of preventing the spread of the virus.”
“Even worse, people who live in rural areas with few stores and none that offer home delivery could be left with no easy access to food. This is completely reckless and immoral on the part of the N.B. government.”
The politicians have simply passed the buck, of course, but what does that make retailers that refuse a vital service?
**
Airports, banks, radio stations and other federally-regulated employers face cash fines if they do not mandate vaccination of workers, the labour department said yesterday. Cabinet stopped short of repeating an earlier threat to strip workers of legal rights to challenge vaccine orders: “Get vaccinated. That’s what Canadians expect.”
Proposed federal legislation could put someone in jail for 10 years for protesting outside a hospital, while other legislation promised by the Liberal government would reduce mandatory minimum sentences for many drug and weapon offences, including certain violent gun crimes.
Bill C-3, whose second reading is in progress in the House, adds a Criminal Code offence for anyone who acts “with the intent to provoke a state of fear” in order to prevent someone from obtaining health services or to impede health professionals or their assistants from doing their jobs.
Anyone who “intentionally obstructs or interferes with another person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided by a health professional” commits an offence. The maximum sentence is 10 years’ imprisonment.
At the same time, the Liberals have re-introduced the former Bill C-22 under the premise of reducing “overrepresentation” of black, indigenous, and marginalized people in jails.
Tabled on Dec. 7, the newly named Bill C-5 would eliminate mandatory prison time for gun-related offences such as robbery with a firearm, extortion with a firearm, weapons trafficking, discharging a firearm with intent, and using a firearm in the commission of a crime. Mandatory prison sentences would also vanish for drug dealers for crimes such as drug trafficking and the production of illicit drugs like heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, and crystal meth.
It's like handing Jack Letts an airplane ticket to Toronto.
Inside, roughly a dozen other pilots and volunteers were relaxing after delivering essential goods through rugged mountain passes. For more than two weeks, this volunteer flying squad - Heaps' brainchild - has collected thousands of pounds of food and other essentials from across the Lower Mainland and used privately owned propeller planes and helicopters to deliver it to roughly 30 communities isolated after last month's floods. Money for fuel and supplies has come out of their own pockets or from donations.
The government will ruin this somehow.
This is why people home-school:
Vancouver public school officials have placed restrictions on a Catholic students club, requiring its members to have “general discussions” rather than share their faith with fellow students.
Grade 11 Eric Hamber Secondary School student Timothy Que founded the Catholic Club last month. The restrictions were imposed soon after B.C. Catholic – an online publication – ran a story on the club on Nov. 15.
Que said he learned that people had contacted the Vancouver School Board (VSB) to complain about the club.
“It’s disappointing,” Que told the B.C. Catholic. “All I really wanted to do is to just teach Catholic teachings.”
The school would be fine if, let's say, you wanted to talk about where a rough trick might find a fellow student but don't talk about the infinite mercy of Christ or anything.
Don't worry. Christians went underground before and survived.
No comments:
Post a Comment