Getting the Government One Voted For

Money is simply no object.

Really:

This is the invoice for just one of the hotels our Government stayed in while visiting the Uk for the Queens funeral. This Government has zero regard for Canadians & their tax dollars. This is gluttony. pic.twitter.com/XM5zGe9RSS

— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) February 24, 2023

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The Canadian government spent nearly $400,000 on hotel rooms during the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II, a figure that includes a luxurious $6,000-a-night river-view suite.

Canada's delegation to the Sept. 19 funeral included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Governor General Mary Simon, former prime ministers Kim Campbell, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper, Olympian Mark Tewksbury and actor Sandra Oh.

The Canadian government has not disclosed who stayed in the $6,000 suite at the exclusive Corinthia London hotel which, according to the hotel’s website, includes a butler service and views of the River Thames.

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A small Ottawa weekly collected nearly a quarter million in federal funds last fiscal year, the largest sum of any newspaper its size, according to newly released records. Hill Times Publishing Incorporated, an advocate of media subsidies, earlier received an additional $584,318 under a sole-sourced Department of Public Works contract that expires next month: “What are the details of each expenditure?”

Canadians - socialists or cheap b@$#@rds?

Discuss:

While two in five Canadians overall subscribe to the idea of socialism—with that number even higher for younger Canadians—few are willing to pay for the tax increases required to finance such a system, says a study by the Fraser Institute.

Among 1,006 Canadians aged 18–34 surveyed, 46 percent of respondents picked socialism when asked “What is the ideal economic system.” The number drops to 43 percent among respondents aged 35–54, and to 38 percent among those over 55.

The survey, accompanied by a report, was conducted in conjunction with think tanks in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, and the results were similar in those countries. 

“A whole segment of the population—not just in Canada but across the developed world—self-describes as socialist, but many of them have never lived in a world with genuine socialism nor the misery it imposed,” said Jason Clemens, the study’s co-author and executive vice-president of the Fraser Institute, in a Feb. 22 news release.

Notably, the study asked the respondents to define socialism, providing them with three alternative definitions.

Only 25 percent of Canadians polled defined socialism in the conventional sense—government owning and controlling businesses and industries. Sixty-five percent defined socialism as government providing more services, while 57 percent believe socialism is best defined as government providing a guaranteed minimum income.

As for how the government should finance the increased spending on social programs or provide a guaranteed minimum income, only 31 percent supported an all-encompassing increase in personal income taxes, while 16 percent supported raising the goods and services tax.

Out of four different tax proposals provided to respondents to finance a socialist system, most (72 percent) preferred slapping a new wealth tax on the top 1 percent of income earners, while 59 percent supported increasing personal income taxes on the top 10 percent of income earners.

“This is an important observation, because it’s likely that in answering this question, the vast majority of respondents assumed that the tax increase would not affect them,” the authors wrote.

However, Fraser Institute senior fellow and study co-author Steven Globerman noted that such tax increases wouldn’t “generate anywhere near enough revenue to pay for the higher levels of spending linked with socialism.”

“If Canadians want a larger government and substantially higher government spending, then all Canadians, and not just top income earners, will have to pay higher taxes to finance it,” he said in the release.

Yes, but think of all those civil servants doing nothing.

Oh, wait!:

While many new hires occurred because of the pandemic, which began in 2020, this raises the question of why the federal government is so lacking in internal expertise in areas such as information technology that it had to spend $21.4 billion on external help this year in addition to $60.7 billion on the public service.

That means the Trudeau government is spending more than a quarter of its budget hiring outside help.

There are Canadians who have NO doctors to see:

Over the phone, the woman's voice is regretful but hurried — she says she's sorry, but if the French-speaking migrant on the other end of the line cannot find someone to translate English, the doctor won't see him for the medical exam he needs in order to claim asylum in Canada. 

CBC News obtained a recording of the phone conversation the man says took place Wednesday in Niagara Falls, Ont. 

"It's not possible to speak with the doctor if you can't speak English," the woman tells him in French. "You have to find someone at your hotel to help you." 

"I don't know anyone here," Guirlin — whose last name CBC News has agreed to withhold because of his precarious immigration status — replies.

Guirlin and his family are among the more than 5,500 asylum seekers who have been bused by Canada's government from Quebec's border with the U.S. to cities in Ontario, including Windsor, Cornwall and Niagara Falls. 

They are also among a number of those — mostly francophones from Haiti or countries in Africa — for whom the transfer happened against their wishes since they could not afford to find a place to stay immediately. Their plan all along was to live in Quebec.

Guirlin, his wife, who is six months pregnant, and their four-year-old son ended up in Niagara Falls on Feb. 14. Originally from Haiti, the family had been struggling to make ends meet in Brazil, when they decided to travel north through a dozen countries to make their way to Canada. 

When they arrived on Feb. 11 via Roxham Road, the popular irregular border crossing south of Montreal, they were asked by immigration officers where they planned to live in Canada.

"I said we want to stay in Montreal because I don't speak English and my wife doesn't either, and she needs to have medical appointments for the pregnancy," Guirlin said in a phone interview Thursday. 

He says they were told in the following days there was no space for them in Montreal, and that they were being sent to Ontario. They boarded a bus with roughly 40 other asylum seekers from a number of other countries last Tuesday. For now, the government has put them up in a hotel.

They can also fly under the citizenship ceremony, too.

 

 

The legal system is another extension of the political one and it is a gong show:

The Brantford man was arrested almost two years after the May 2015 crime, when police were able to match his DNA to a swab taken from the victim.

The victim in the case had to testify repeatedly about the incident: how she passed out on a couch at a house party and Sousa said he would take her home.

Instead, he took her to a wooded area and violently assaulted her, dumping her on an unfamiliar street back in Brantford. When she was found by a homeowner she was disoriented, traumatized and screaming.

During the trial, the court heard the 911 call made by the sobbing woman, who had no idea where she was.

Sousa vehemently denied he had ever met the woman, or been at the house party, though witnesses testified to seeing him there. A shirt the victim grabbed from his car was matched to his home.

While Sousa’s DNA was a match to samples taken from the victim, he insisted it was due to a conspiracy within the police service.

His first trial was in April 2019 but it came to a halt within days when a new witness came forward after reading coverage of the trial in The Brantford Expositor. At a second trial, later in 2019, Sousa was found guilty by a jury after just an hour and, in January 2020, sentenced to 10 years in prison by Justice James Ramsey

The father of three, who had represented himself at trial, immediately appealed the decision and was released on a strict bail to await a decision. In 2020, his appeal for a third trial was heard and dismissed by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

But Sousa appealed the sentence again based on three arguments: the judge hadn’t considered that Sousa’s immigration status might be affected by the sentence, the judge had treated his denial of the offence as an aggravating factor and the 10-year sentence was unfit for a first offender.

Sousa, who’s been a permanent resident of Canada since he arrived from Portugal at age five, said he was in imminent danger of being deported, making his sentence “more significant than it would be for a Canadian.” But the Court of Appeal said it’s not certain the existing deportation order will ever be executed.

The court also dismissed the idea that the judge added time to the sentence because Sousa continued to deny the crime.

But the court agreed the 10-year sentence – which was the maximum possible – was too high for a first offender at a time when the range for sexual assault was three to five years.

While the court agreed with Justice Ramsey that going beyond the range in this case was appropriate because of the vulnerability of the victim, the “extreme degradation” she suffered and the impact of the assault on her, it said 10 years was too much.

Sousa’s appeal means his actual sentence is now for three-and-a-half months of pre-trial custody plus seven years, eight-and-a-half months in prison. He’s already served more than two years of that sentence.

 

Also:

Criminals have found ways to bypass Canada’s multimillion-dollar electronic visa system intended to maintain national security and public safety, according to a federal report recently released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).

“Those with malicious intent, including associations with fraud and human trafficking/smuggling movements, have found workarounds,” according to the report titled “Evaluation of the Electronic Travel Authorization (eTA) Program” and August 2022.