Your mid-week prediction of spring ...
Day five of the convoy protest and Justin still hasn't shown his face outside of his hiding spot.
Attorney General David Lametti spent nearly $123,000 in a legal bid to conceal records on the firing of Chinese scientists at a federal lab. The legal expenses included payments to unnamed third party lawyers: “Solicitor-client privilege is waived and only to the extent of revealing the total legal costs.”
Typical of the government, really:
The Liberal government gave notice Tuesday that it will re-introduce Bill C-10, which has generated substantial controversy over fears it would infringe on freedom of expression, meaning it could be tabled as soon as Wednesday. ...
Scott Benzie, CEO of the Buffer Festival, which features online video, said, “You can’t use a broad term like professional content and write legislation without knowing who it’s actually going to affect.”
The legislation may not even include such a definition; the broadcasting act update was always meant to set up the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission to regulate online platforms the way it does traditional media, with the details to be left to the CRTC to work out.
Benzie said leaving that definition to the CRTC, which has “zero institutional knowledge” outside the traditional broadcasting sphere which it currently regulates, “is troubling to say the least.”
He noted there’s a wide of range of potential definitions for professional content – for instance, if it’s limited to creators who make money from their posts, that could include someone who makes a dollar all the way to someone who may have dozens of people working for them. Their income can also come from outside sources, like crowd funding.
He said there was no way that a system could be implemented to track when something becomes professional content. ...
University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who was one of the biggest critics of C-10 in the last parliamentary session, said no other country regulates user-generated content the way that bill attempted to. He pointed out that in Europe, which has extensive regulations for online services, those regulations are based on platform, not content. That means large streaming services that decide on their content are regulated, but “services that rely on third parties for their content (i.e. user generated content)” are not.
He said regulating content when what the government wants to do is regulate platforms is “bad policy.”
“In fact, if there were efforts to distinguish between different types of content, it could cause enormous harm to Canadian creators who find themselves on the wrong side of the regulatory divide with their content de-prioritized and rendered harder to find. Pitting Canadian creators against each other is terrible policy,” Geist said.
He said the original bill raised a number of concerns, over the idea of regulating user-generated content, prioritizing and de-prioritizing content for “discoverability,” as well as “the enormous uncertainty caused by a bill that left so many specifics to a regulatory process that was likely to play out in the courts for years.”
Geist said that while “the government may tweak the bill, I fear that all three of the concerns may play out again.”
This bill, same as the old bill.
As of now, Erin O'Toole is no longer the Tories' official yes-man:
BREAKING: Erin O'Toole has officially lost his caucus support.
— Marie Oakes (@TheMarieOakes) February 2, 2022
73 MPs of 119 have voted to oust him as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.
And all it took was a failed election and a convoy to oust him.
Now do Justin.
Desperate to discredit a nation-wide movement:
A trucker blockade in southern Alberta at the United States border turned violent Tuesday after some protesters breached police barriers to join the demonstration and Mounties backed off out of concern for safety.
Yes, about that:
So goes Canada, so goes Australia:
Reports of a 65yo woman knocked to the ground stirred further conflict with other campers including a man in his seventies who was pepper-sprayed in the eyes, having to be carried off by bystanders.
People were seen cheering the man as he was carried away for assistance and several from the crowd came to embrace him in emotional scenes as the man pleaded to 'hold the line' and to 'keep fighting'.
In a statement earlier in the day, police said:
"ACT Policing is engaging with protesters and campers who are located near the Patrick White Lawns adjacent to the National Library in Parkes.
"This afternoon (Wednesday, 2 February 2022) ACT Policing will ensure people at this location are aware they are parked and camping illegally and may be subject to fines and other penalties.
"Move-on orders may be issued in the coming days.
"The rights of people to peacefully protest is always acknowledged by ACT Policing, however when illegal actions take place, the people responsible will be dealt with in accordance with the law."
Many of those who attended the 'Convoy to Canberra' have established a camp on the grassed area where they have been united in a bid to have their messages heard by politicians.
The camp has been steadily growing since the convoy, led by truck drivers, made its way to the nation's capital on Monday morning.
Since then, waves of the convoy have made their way in trucks, buses, cars and motorcycles to protest in Canberra.
Over a thousand federal employees have been suspended for refusing to reveal their jabbed status:
Transport Minister Omar Alghabra’s department has suspended dozens of employees without pay for declining to disclose their vaccination status. The transport workers are among more than a thousand federal employees denied pay or benefits under a vaccine mandate: “Follow the science.”
This science:
At the end of December, the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) for Covid was around 0.3 per cent or one death in 333 cases, whereas the death rate for flu sits between one death in 1,000 and one fatality in 500, or between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent.
Previously in May 2020, the Covid case death rate culminated to as high as 15 per cent, accounting for one death in six cases.
However, millions of Omicron infection cases have turned into fewer death in the last few weeks.
It is very possible that, despite millions of Covid cases in December and January, winter mortality this year will not even come to a bad flu year.
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Lockdown measures used by governments worldwide to reduce the death toll from COVID-19 had little to no effect on mortality, according to three researchers who analyzed 24 studies.
The researchers, led by Steve Hanke, co-founder of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, screened 18,590 studies to select the 24 papers used for the final analysis.
They concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the United States pared the mortality from COVID-19 by 0.2 percent on average. Shelter-in-place orders reduced mortality by 2.9 percent on average, they found.
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the researchers wrote.
“In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
The US deployed three thousand troops to eastern Europe:
President Joe Biden has approved the deployment of nearly 3,000 American troops to eastern Europe in the coming days amid a standoff with Russia over Ukraine in what the Pentagon said on Wednesday was signal of U.S. readiness to defend NATO allies.
The deployments are above and beyond the 8,500 troops the Pentagon put on alert last month to be ready to deploy to Europe if needed. Together, the moves aim to reassure jittery NATO allies in the face of a Russian military buildup near Ukraine while avoiding new deployments to Ukraine itself, which is not part of NATO.
A source familiar with the details said 1,700 would deploy from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Poland and another 300 from the base to Germany. About 1,000 Germany-based troops would to head to Romania, the source said.
The Pentagon said it was not ruling out additional deployments beyond those announced on Wednesday.
How quick to make a show for Mr. Putin.
At least 24 people perished in a landslide in Ecuador's capital Quito, and 12 others were missing, Mayor Santiago Guarderas said on Tuesday, as rescue teams searched homes and streets covered by mud following the worst deluge in nearly two decades.
The torrential rains on Monday night caused a build-up of water in a gorge near the working class neighborhoods of La Gasca and La Comuna, sending mud and rocks down on residences and affecting electricity provision.
The country's disaster management agency said 48 people were injured.
"We saw this immense black river that was dragging along everything, we had to climb the walls to escape," said resident Alba Cotacachi, who evacuated her two young daughters from their home. "We are looking for the disappeared."
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