Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week snack break ...


Singh pretends to threaten Justin:

Singh has been on the issue of children’s health, the overflowing hospitals and the lack of kid’s pain medication for weeks now. He’s been calling for Trudeau to act but the PM has essentially ignored Singh’s demands.

Now, just before Parliament is about to rise for their Christmas break Singh starts making threats?

There are no more opportunities for Singh to truly threaten the government to act or he’ll topple them. By the time the House resumes sitting at the end of January, the very crisis in hospitals that he wants action on many have passed.


Your attempts at extortion have been noted, Jag.

Run along now.




Being a Liberal means never having to say one is sorry.

Ever:

International Trade Minister Mary Ng has apologized after Canada's conflict of interest and ethics commissioner concluded she placed herself in a conflict of interest through her involvement in a decision by her office to award contracts to a friend's company.



Vichy puppet-heads also wanted censorship:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “believes in free speech, but” is upset by social media content that is “difficult to counter,” he said. Trudeau’s remarks follow a proposal to regulate legal internet content deemed hurtful: ‘The problem arises when disagreements are built on wrong facts.’


Like, everything you've ever said, Justin?

 

Also - this @$$hole:

In a year-end interview with The Canadian Press on Monday, Trudeau said he’s not willing to kick health-care reform down the road any further, even as provincial premiers clamour for more federal funds to bolster their ailing health systems.

 

And ailing it is!:

Canadian medical schools are graduating hundreds morestudents than they were a few decades ago – up from 1,704 in 1991 to 2,876 in 2020, according to the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, which represents the country’s 17 faculties of medicine. But for many Canadian students, the odds of getting accepted into a domestic medical program remain frustratingly slim because demand far exceeds available seats.

Other countries have picked up the slack. Ireland, one of the largest international training destinations for Canadian medical students, produces far more doctors than it needs because of historic overcapacity in its medical schools, and it exports these surplus graduates around the world. More Canadians are also getting trained in Britain and applications to British medical schools from Canadians have more than doubled in the past decade, according to Britain’s Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.

At St. George’s University in Grenada, which now produces more first-year residents each year for North American teaching hospitals than any other medical school in the world, 92 per cent of Canadian students end up getting a residency position in the United States. Since the school opened in 1981, more than 2,100 Canadians have received their medical degrees from here – and 1,796 of them have gone to postgraduate residencies at U.S. hospitals. The number of Canadians from the school who returned home to finish their training at a residency is significantly smaller – just 190.

**

Research has repeatedly indicated that wait times for medically necessary treatment are not benign inconveniences. Wait times can, and do, have serious consequences such as increased pain, suffering, and mental anguish. In certain instances, they can also result in poorer medical outcomes — transforming potentially reversible illnesses or injuries into chronic, irreversible conditions, or even permanent disabilities. In many instances, patients may also have to forgo their wages while they wait for treatment, resulting in an economic cost to the individuals themselves and the economy in general.

 

It's called extortion.

You will die of cancer because that is what the blackfaced-wearing moron demands of you, Canada.

Consider yourselves lucky that you are not in the US being treated in a timely and compassionate manner.



Oh, I'm sure:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser Jody Thomas says her office has seen no evidence supporting allegations that the Chinese regime funded 11 candidates in the 2019 federal election, but also said federal intelligence agencies are investigating the allegations.

“The news stories that you have read about interference are just that: news stories,” Thomas told the House of Commons national defence committee on Dec. 8, adding “We’ve not seen money going to 11 candidates, period.”

Thomas was referring to a Global News report published on Nov. 7 that alleged the prime minister was briefed by intelligence officials in January about at least 11 candidates receiving Chinese funding during the 2019 election.

Trudeau has denied being briefed on the matter when asked specifically about the report of 11 candidates receiving Chinese funding.

“There’s a news report on election interference,” Thomas told MPs Thursday. “There is not necessarily a CSIS report that equates to that news report. The prime minister has been thoroughly briefed.”


Yes, about that:

**

A national security team led by the RCMP in the investigation of the Chinese regime’s foreign interference activities in Canada reportedly paid a visit to a non-profit group in Richmond, B.C., on Dec. 10.

The Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) was at the building of Wenzhou Friendship Society, conducting interviews there and in the surrounding neighbourhood, reported Global News on Dec. 11.

According to the report, INSET, whose mandate includes the tracking and investigation of any potential national security criminal threats to Canada and the public, was canvassing the area and asking residents questions.

At least six officers were there, but they declined to comment, the report said. However, residents told the media outlet that police had asked them if they had seen anyone wearing uniforms or witnessed suspicious activity.

Hua Wei Su, director of Wenzhou Friendship Society, confirmed with Global that the police were at the group’s “clubhouse,” but said he didn’t know why. He denied that the society’s building, which is situated at 4266 Hazelbridge Way, has any connection to the alleged Chinese police stations operating in Canada.

The RCMP declined to provide details on the operation upon a request from The Epoch Times.

“The RCMP is investigating reports of criminal activity in relation to the so-called ‘police’ stations nationally. As the RCMP is currently investigating the incident, there will be no further comment on the matter at this time,” Cpl. Kim Chamberland, spokesperson for RCMP national headquarters in Ottawa, said in an email on Dec. 12.

“The RCMP takes threats to the security of individuals living in Canada very seriously and is aware that foreign states may seek to intimidate or harm communities or individuals within Canada. It is important for all individuals and groups living in Canada, regardless of their nationality, to know that there are support mechanisms in place to assist them when experiencing potential foreign interference or state-backed harassment and intimidation.”

The Epoch Times also reached out to Wenzhou Friendship Society for comment, but did not hear back by publication time.

Established in 2001, the society is a member of the Canadian Alliance of Chinese Associations, a group of over 100 organizations known to take positions aligned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as voicing support for the 2022 Winter Beijing Olympic despite a genocide taking place in Xinjiang against Uyghurs and other Muslims minorities.

In 2018, the society was investigated by the RCMP for an alleged vote-buying scheme after the Mounties became aware that it had allegedly sent out messages on its WeChat group, offering a $20 transportation subsidy to members in exchange for voting for certain political candidates of Chinese descent.

**

 


This China:

Experts warn that Canadians are unknowingly complicit in Beijing’s human rights abuses due to federal and provincial government investments in Chinese firms that support the communist regime’s repression.

A recent report from UK-based NGO Hong Kong Watch said that at least three federal and six provincial pension funds—including the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB)—have invested in Morgan Stanley indices that include 12 Chinese companies involved in forced labor and internment campaigns targeting the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang Province.

“China is now using advanced technology surveillance equipment against the Uyghur people, but also in Tibet, Mongolia, and against members of Christian house churches across China,” Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, senior fellow at the University of Ottawa, told the House committee on Canada–China relations on Dec. 6.

“What would Canadians think if they knew that the CPPIB has more than a billion of their dollars invested in Tencent, which owns WeChat, which is being used to monitor and censor the communications of Uyghurs, Tibetans, and zero-COVID protesters?”

McCuaig-Johnston also called out other Chinese companies involved in Beijing’s repression efforts, including Alibaba, which, according to her, makes video cameras that are used to censor Uyghurs in indoctrination camps and prisons.

Neusoft, a Chinese tech firm in which CCPIB and Quebec’s Caisse de Depot pension fund reportedly have investments, has also been asked by Beijing “to build a system to target journalists, migrant women, and international students so that public security authorities can quickly locate them and obstruct their work,” according to McCuaig-Johnston.

“We’re often told by CPPIB that the board invests in companies, not in countries. But when Chinese authorities ask a company to design even more repressive surveillance equipment to use against certain categories of citizens, that argument falls apart,” she said.

“Companies in China fall under government direction, not just market forces, and they now all have Communist Party committees that are increasingly active in decision making.”



At this point, I don't even know why the authorities carry on lying:

Only two Freedom Convoy sympathizers were intercepted at the border under the Emergencies Act, according to secret cabinet committee minutes. The Canada Border Services Agency claimed it needed emergency powers to keep out American neo-Nazis: “It is unclear police have these powers under common law.”

**

RCMP privately ridiculed a claim by Mark Carney that the Freedom Convoy was seditious. Carney in a Globe & Mail column appeared to pull the definition of “sedition” from an online U.S. dictionary, not the Criminal Code: “It would be a stretch.”

**

A Manitoba credit union called police on a depositor who was not “deemed illegal” but liked the Freedom Convoy in his Facebook posts, records show. And an unnamed bank reported one customer’s credit card purchase of a gas mask. The incidents are detailed in documents on the scope of an Emergencies Act account freeze: “It won’t come as a surprise.”

** 

The emails, which were submitted to the Public Order Emergency Commission and first reported on by Blacklock’s Reporter, detailed the political aides’ discussion around a media inquiry from the Wall Street Journal asking for clarification on the prime minister’s claims.
“I don’t think we’d have anything to say on this,” said Alexander Cohen, communications director for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, in an email to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s press secretary Adrienne Vaupshas on Feb. 21.
“Tbh [To be honest] we’ve tried to avoid questions about the foreign funding angle because we don’t have hard information on it, and most of it is actually legal (despite being objectionable etc.),” Cohen added in the email.
“This [question] has been a bit of a hot potato,” said Adrienne Vaupshas, press secretary to the Minister of Finance, in an earlier email the same day.
“Does [Trudeau’s remarks on foreign funding] come from the leaked GiveSendGo data or was there any other source? PS [Public Safety] says they don’t have any data to back this claim.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during a press conference on Feb. 21 that one reason the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act was that the Freedom Convoy “received disturbing amounts of foreign funding to destabilize Canada’s democracy.”
On Feb. 9, the prime minister also said in the House of Commons that there was a “flow of funds through criminal activities” being sent to the Convoy. Just over a week later, he also said the Convoy was “being heavily supported by individuals in the United States and from elsewhere around the world.”
“We see that roughly half of the funding that is flowing to the barricaders here is coming from the United States,” Trudeau said on Feb. 17.
Executives from GoFundMe, an online crowdfunding platform that had a Convoy fundraising page from Jan. 14 to Feb. 4, previously said that 88 percent of funds donated to the Convoy through the platform originated in Canada.
**

 

Not that it would matter because special people did it first and got away with it:

VIA Rail spread Facebook rumours the Freedom Convoy planned to “put blocks on the train tracks” to disrupt the economy, say internal records. The rumour upset cabinet aides until Canadian National Railway noted it appeared on a single Facebook post with six “likes.”

**



"Mislead" is another word for lie:

Governor General Mary Simon’s office and other federal staff misled the Commons government operations committee over true costs of a junket to Dubai, say MPs. One aide who claimed she dined on ordinary airplane food yesterday admitted the menu included Beef Wellington: “You got caught red-handed.”



Who did you vote for, Canada?:

**

Canadians have “considerable cynicism” about cabinet’s annual ritual of Budget Day promises, says in-house research at the Department of Finance. Pollsters observed what they called “estrangement from the budget” for some taxpayers: “There was considerable cynicism.”

**

**

The Fraser Institute has been tracking medical wait times since 1993. Their latest tally, released just this week, shows that it now takes an average of 27.4 weeks for a Canadian to secure medical treatment. In other words, from the moment a Canadian notices they may have a serious medical ailment, it takes more than six months until they can go through the gauntlet of referrals and specialist appointments and ultimately receive either surgery or treatment. When the institute started keeping track of Canadian wait times, that process only took 9.3 weeks. ...

Just a month ago, only 44 per cent of Canadians were expressing some worry that they would soon be struggling to feed their families. But a recent Ipsos poll found that the number has now risen to 53 per cent. An even higher number – 61 per cent – said they are now worried they won’t be able to afford gasoline.   ...

It’s no secret that Canada has a bit of an affordability problem. Over the summer, Canada officially became the worst country for housing affordability in the OECD. It’s part of why Habitat for Humanity’s latest Canada Affordable Housing Survey found that 28 per cent of Canadians cannot afford a down payment “of any amount” towards a home, and 40 per cent of respondents expressed worry that they they won’t be able to make either their rent or mortgage payments in 2023. ...

In a Nov. 15 Ipsos poll, 22 per cent of respondents said that in the next six months, they “expect they will need to access charitable services” in order to meet essential needs such as food, clothing or shelter. That same poll found that Canadians are simultaneously giving less to charity than they have in prior years. Meanwhile, Canadian food banks are serving more users than ever before. Food Banks Canada’s latest Hunger Count Report estimated a record high of 1.5 million food bank visits in 2022 – a 35 per cent increase as compared to the pre-COVID era. ...

In the coming years the federal government is planning to admit an all-time high of 500,000 immigrants annually – that’s a Newfoundland’s worth of newcomers every year. A new Leger poll commissioned by the Association of Canadian Studies found that a plurality of Canadians thought the rate was too high, and three quarters worried about Canada’s ability to absorb that many new Canadians. The numbers aren’t necessarily a sign of rising xenophobia. For more than a generation now, Canadians have consistently expressed some of the most pro-immigrant sentiments on earth. Rather, the fear is that dropping 500,000 extra Canadians into the country each year with no clear plans to accommodate them will worsen the country’s aforementioned housing and health care shortages. ...

Whatever economic surprises come our way in 2023, virtually all Canadians are pretty confident they’re not going to be good. A Nanos poll published earlier this month found that nearly 9 out of 10 Canadians believe that a recession is now “likely” or “somewhat likely.” And it’s not just glum poll respondents; the Royal Bank of Canada has also begun forecasting that a recession will hit Canada just after Christmas.

**

Canada rates among the worst in concealing federal books from taxpayers’ scrutiny, says the Parliamentary Budget Officer. “In comparison to other G7 countries Canada was among the last to publish their financial accounts,” Yves Giroux wrote the Commons government operations committee: “Because they can, just because.”

**

The $231,000-a year Clerk of the Commons accused of sleeping at work and feeding inside information to the Liberal caucus is resigning. The Speaker yesterday thanked Charles Robert for “faithful and devoted service.”

** 

Public debt charges jumped about $2.3 billion overnight with the latest increase in the Bank of Canada prime interest rate. Debt costs are the fastest growing line item in the federal budget: “The party is now over.”

**

Priorities:

Auditor General Karen Hogan told MPs on a parliamentary committee Thursday that foreign vessels without transponders can travel undetected through Canada’s Arctic because of “gaps” in surveillance technology and resources.
“Does Canada possess the capability to track a vessel that is without a transponder throughout the entire Arctic?” Conservative MP Pat Kelly asked Hogan during a House of Commons national defence committee meeting on Dec. 8.
“That was an identified gap that the government themselves had identified several years ago,” Hogan replied. “In repeated assessments on gaps, they re-identify it, but there’s just no action or solution taken to resolve that gap.”
“There are some gaps in surveillance because we know that certain satellites aren’t meeting the need,” she continued, adding, “If action isn’t taken, there is a significant risk that there will be gaps in surveillance capabilities and the presence in the Arctic in the next decade.”

**

Because of course they are:

Chasing waste in pandemic relief programs has cost taxpayers a third of a billion so far, record show. The Canada Revenue Agency assigned more than 2,000 employees to recovering billions in misspent subsidies: “I think we are doing a very good job.”
**

Cabinet is quietly finalizing terms of its own internal pandemic management review, Senator Marc Gold (Que.), Government Representative in the Senate, said yesterday. Opposition MPs have sought a judicial inquiry including investigations of Covid contracting: “Work is in fact already underway through internal reviews.”

 

 

Quebec, when you're gone, everyone will ban French as an official language and run pipelines through the province:

More people, per capita, are dying with medical assistance (MAID) in Quebec than anywhere else in the world, according to Quebec's commission on end-of-life care.

Since the start of the pandemic, requests for the procedure have more than doubled — from 1,774 in 2019-2020 to 3,663 in 2021-22.

The increase means the percentage of people who chose MAID in Quebec is greater than in Belgium and the Netherlands, where it has been legal for decades. It has been legal in Quebec since 2015.

**

Canada is preparing to expand its medically assisted death framework to become one of the broadest in the world, a change some want to delay due to concerns vulnerable people have easier access to death than to a life without suffering.

Starting in March, people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness will be able to access assisted death. Mental illness was excluded when the most recent medical assistance in dying (MAID) law was passed in 2021.

That will make Canada one of six countries in the world where a person suffering from mental illness alone who is not near their natural death can get a doctor to help them die.


(Sidebar: even the Dutch know when to apply the brakes.)



But ... but ... guns:

A maximum 10-year federal prison sentence for gun running has never been imposed, records show. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino proposed to increase the maximum to 14 years to send a message to organized crime, he said: “That measure ends up being a little bit meaningless.”


Also:

A defiant Conservative MP Raquel Dancho (Kildonan-St. Paul, Man.) yesterday was ejected from the Commons after protesting “underhanded” cabinet controls on everyday hunting and sporting guns. Dancho declined to apologize in a standoff with the Speaker: “We had enough of it and I called them out for lying which they did.”

 

She is right and we all know it.

 

 

And one wonders why no one trusts police anymore:

Police cited 4,883 children for breaching the Quarantine Act, new figures show. Youngsters warned by police were among 58,760 children caught up in quarantine enforcement: ‘It is in regard to minors being warned of fines if they broke quarantine.’

**

A Calgary police officer who pushed over a homeless man — who had been placed in a wheelchair — and kicked him in the face won't spend any time in jail after a judge handed him a conditional discharge.



It's a cult:

The public health unit in Chatham-Kent, Ont., has been referring women, including those with unplanned pregnancies, to a private organization with connections to anti-abortion views, CBC News has learned.

 

Good.



Of course hunger is a more pressing issue.

You can control the message. You can control the taxes.

But if you can control the food, you have everyone's undivided attention:

Hunger hits hardest in the first thousand days of a child’s life, beginning with conception, and proceeding over the next two years. Boys and girls who face a shortage of essential nutrients and vitamins grow more slowly. This compromises them physically as well as intellectually. The IQ of insufficiently fed children is, for example, reduced significantly — an average of five points. Children deprived in this manner attend school less often (and learn less effectively when they do attend), achieve lower grades, and are poorer and less productive as adults.

We can effectively deliver essential nutrients to pregnant mothers. The provision of a daily multivitamin/mineral supplement costs less than $3.00 per pregnancy. When babies so provisioned are born, their brains have developed more optimally — and that puts them on a course of life that is more productive, personally and socially. Each dollar spent would deliver an astounding $38 of social benefit. Why would we not first take this path? Because in trying to please everyone, and in failing to think carefully and clearly while doing so, we spend a little on everything, essentially ignoring the most effective solutions. The result, unfortunately, deprives everyone of the intelligence and productivity that would otherwise be available to us all.

Consider, as well, what we could accomplish on the education front. The world has finally managed to get almost all children in school. Unfortunately, the schools are too often of low quality, and many students still learn almost nothing. More than half the children in poor countries cannot read and understand a simple text by the age of ten.

Schools typically group children by age. This is a significant problem, because age and ability are not the same thing. Any random group of twenty or sixty children of the same age will be very diverse in their domain of knowledge. This means that the struggling children will be lost and the competent children bored, no matter what level their instructors teach. The solution, research-tested around the world? Let each child spend one hour a day with a tablet that adapts teaching exactly to the level of that child. Even as the rest of the school day is unchanged, this will over a year produce learning equivalent to three years of typical education.

What would this cost? The shared tablet, charging costs (often solar panels) and extra teacher instruction cost about $35 per student, per year. But tripling the rate of learning for just one year makes each student more productive in adulthood, enabling them to generate an additional $2,300 in today’s money. This straightforward and practically implementable policy means that each dollar so invested would deliver $65 in long-term benefits.

When we fragment our attention, attending to far too many goals, we end up implementing superficially attractive but terribly inefficient policies. Trying to please everyone, we fail to achieve those very valuable goals we can in fact achieve. Along with hunger and education, there are about a dozen other, incredibly effective policies like drastically reducing tuberculosis and corruption. Those are targets we could and should hit. The moral imperative is clear: we must do the best things first.

 

 

It's all for the environment.

Or something:

Liberal MPs joined fellow parliamentarians from the Green Party, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois to vote down a bill that would make it illegal to dump raw sewage in Canadian waters. 

Bill C-269, which was introduced by Conservative MP Andrew Scheer, would exclude raw sewage from a list of exemptions the federal government can grant meaning that future governments would not be able to give permission for entities to dump untreated sewage. 

 

Yes, about that:

Canada’s old-fashioned city sewer systems dumped nearly 900 billion litres of raw sewage into this country’s waterways over five years, enough to fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool more than 355,000 times.
Data Environment Canada posted to the federal government’s open-data website earlier this month shows in 2018, more than 190 billion litres of untreated wastewater poured out of city pipes that carry both sewage and storm water.
That is 14 per cent more than in 2017, and 44 per cent more than in 2013.

 

It never ends:

Senators last night questioned one clause in a 172-page budget bill that would see Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland spend $2 billion on shares of a company that doesn’t exist. The company would draw private investment in green technology, said Freeland: “The green transition will cost a good deal, really a lot, and we need money.”


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