Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Mid-Week Post

 

 

Your middle-of-the-week fast ...

 


We don't have to trade with China:

Few Canadians are outright racists but many hold stereotypically bigoted views of Chinese people, says Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.). The Liberal appointee complained Chinese Canadians are expected to renounce the motherland or be “seen as suspicious.”


You're welcome to leave, Pau Woo.

**

It's "American-style" to be appalled by a dictatorship that vivisects its political dissidents for their organs:

You can always tell when the Liberals are in trouble, because they resort using their most desperate attacks.

Some combo of ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘bigoted,’ ‘American-style,’ is usually employed to try and demonize whomever is discussing something they aren’t comfortable with.

And lately, the Liberals are adding ‘Trump-type’ to the mix.

In a House of Commons committee meeting – conducted virtually – Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell claimed the Conservatives were using “Trump-type tactics” in demanding a more serious investigation into China’s interference in Canada’s democracy.


This interference:

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At any rate, the prime minister declares himself thoroughly vindicated by the Rouleau report. But while he now claims to realize he shouldn’t have been so mean about his loser nutbar hate-filled domestic critics, he sees nozink, nozink when it comes to China’s efforts to undermine our democracy. And woe betide anyone who attempts to brief him.
For instance CSIS. Some days one wonders if our entire government is broken, even the PR department. But it seems that our spy agency has produced detailed studies of what Xi Jinping’s Politburo has tried to do to us. They’ve even told foreign nations we know about it. What about Trudeau?
In case no one told him or his cabinet, the Chinese Communist Party explicitly aims to be the dominant power in the world by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the “revolution,” then shove their version of “harmony” down our throats. (It also regards our obsession with net zero by then as useful idiocy.) And I do mean Communist Party. As most Epoch Times readers know, unlike most Canadian politicians, the People’s Liberation Army is a branch of the Party, not the Chinese government, and does not intend to liberate any people, including its own.

Another thing our sophisticated betters appear to have missed in college, and the real world, is that totalitarians deliberately engage in ritual humiliation of their foes. It’s not enough to get away with lies; their victims must recite them too. Hence the confessions in Stalin’s show trials, though he could simply have shot his former comrades, then printed forged confessions in Pravda. And hence the former Chinese consul-general in Vancouver boasting about having helped defeat two Conservative MPs.

** 

I can confirm that after extensive security clearances and multiple meetings with our security establishment in Ottawa, these specific threats to our democracy were *never* raised, despite what is now clear evidence of tampering by China in the 2019 election. 
What’s worse: our party was seeing clear signs of tampering in ridings with substantial Chinese diasporas. We made the conscious decision to work through the Task Force and appropriate security channels. Our concerns were never taken seriously. 
After the election and before the new government was sworn in, we spent more time providing everything we had to the Task Force and appropriate security channels. We were met with shrugged shoulders and complete ambivalence. It was truly unreal. 


Justin doesn't choose his female staff for their brains.

And he wonders why people don't like him.

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The Canadian military found and retrieved Chinese monitoring buoys in the Arctic this past fall, a development whose public exposure adds another item to a list of pressing concerns about Beijing’s interventions in Canadian affairs, including interference in recent federal elections.
The buoys were spotted by the Canadian Armed Forces as part of Operation Limpid, a continuing effort to provide early detection of threats to Canada’s security. Earlier this month, the North American Aerospace Defence Command shot down a different Chinese surveillance device: a high-altitude balloon that traversed North America before it was destroyed.
Daniel Le Bouthillier, head of media relations at the Department of National Defence, did not provide details on the effort to retrieve the buoys, but confirmed the interception.
“The Department of National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are fully aware of recent efforts by China to conduct surveillance operations in Canadian airspace and maritime approaches utilizing dual-purpose technologies,” he said in a statement. Dual-purpose technology is equipment that can be used for both civilian and military applications.
“Under Operation LIMPID, the CAF monitors Canada’s air, land and sea approaches, and since 2022, it has stopped attempts to surveil Canadian territory,” he added.

 **

What the fudge, Japan?!:

Chinese-affiliated company, not Beijing, bought about half of the uninhabited isle of Yanahajima, located north of Okinawa Prefecture’s main island, local officials told The Asahi Shimbun.

The Tokyo-based company said on its website that it is “working on a resort development plan.”

But it has not provided an explanation to residents in Izena village, which has jurisdiction over the island.

The transaction for about half of the 740,000-square-meter island was conducted in February 2021 between private companies.

The village, located on Izena island, owns about 26 percent of Yanahajima island, and this part was not included in the deal, village officials said.

Confusion was sparked after a Chinese woman in late January posted a clip of her visit to Yanahajima island on the video-sharing app Douyin, the Chinese domestic version of TikTok.

The video had 399,000 “likes” as of Feb. 15.

In another video, the woman said, “I bought an island,” while showing a document certifying the registration of the land.

According to Chinese media reports, a company run by her family bought Yanahajima island, saying, “We are not excluding commercial use of the land.”

The woman’s videos drew attention and concerns in Japan.



It's just your tax dollars:

As political commentator Norman Spector pointed out online, if the Trudeau government won’t ask for a correction, or even sue myself and the Sun for defamation for claiming Trudeau stayed in the $6,000 per nigh room with butler service, then it confirms the story. I’ve made that claim multiple times and no one in the Trudeau government has asked me for a correction, just like no one in the Trudeau government has answered questions on the issue.

While Trudeau supporters dismiss this story as not being serious, it’s just $6,000 per night for a hotel room over five nights, that misses the bigger problem with spending and this government.

“Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves,” the old saying goes.

**

For the more stupid of our liberal brethren: 

Inflation is the economic term for a persistent rise in prices over time. To get technical, inflation is not so much about an increase in prices, but the decrease in the buying power of the dollar. A dollar in 1967 bought you a movie ticket, while the same dollar in 2019 bought you one-ninth of a movie ticket. ...

The same principle is true for money. If there is too much money in circulation — both cash and credit — then the value of each individual dollar decreases. This explanation of inflation is called the demand-pull theory and is classically defined as "too much money chasing too few goods."

 

Too much money?

You don't say!: 

There are many potential causes of today’s higher inflation including the Bank of Canada’s recent penchant for financing government spending by printing more money—when there’s more money in the economy, but the same level of goods and services, the price of those goods and services increases.

As a result, we have this:

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But Loblaw's didn't cause inflation which affects the cost of eating and heating one's home; Justin did that:

At an agri-committee meeting last week, NDP MP Alistair MacGregor put forward a motion asking that the supermarket CEOs report to the House of Commons to be questioned about food prices and food price inflation.

(Sidebar: about the Liberals' agriculture plans ...)

The committee’s vote to adopt MacGregor’s motion was unanimous.

As MacGregor tweeted, “Today members of the #AGRI Committee unanimously passed my motion to summon the Presidents and CEOs of the three biggest grocery chains in Canada: Empire, Loblaws, and Metro to answer for their profit-driven inflation of food prices.”


A word about this:

Meetings took place in Montreal last week that will profoundly alter how Canadian businesses operate and fundamentally transform Canada’s economy. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), a group of 14 people from regions around the globe, is rushing to finalize the first two (sustainability and climate-related) of six building blocks for new global standards for climate-related financial reporting. The goal is to unveil these first two blocks in a few months, with implementation in fiscal year 2024. The standards are being designed by accountants and will be overseen and audited by accountants. In effect, governments are weaponizing accountants to disrupt and transform the global economy, and the government of Canada is fully on board — though without having bothered to ask Canadians if it’s something they really want.

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While a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, Canadians have been experiencing negative growth in their purchasing power for over a year.

Thus, while the raw numbers in terms of income may not have fallen, incomes have fallen in relation to prices.

**

However, food prices increased even more up 10.4% in January compared to 10.1% in December of 2022.

Chicken prices were up 9.0% between December 2022 and January 2023, which is the largest one-month increase since 1986.

Overall meat prices were up 7.3%, after the largest month-over-month increase since 2004.

Year over year prices for diary products, bakery products, and vegetables were up 12.4%, 15.5%, and 14.7% respectively.

Gas prices were up 2.9%.

The increase in shelter costs slowed slightly, from 7.0% in December to 6.6% in January.


And you can't even drink your problems away because the beer tax on April 1st will affect not just alcohol prices but the food industry, as well.

How is inflation not hurting?

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A federal report warns casualties of climate change policy may include families that cannot afford higher fuel costs, oil and gas workers and Indigenous people. There was no evidence federal agencies were aware of the consequences, it said: “A sizeable workforce will need to transition out.”

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Nearly 4 in 10 Canadians are now borrowing money to pay for groceries, shelter and other daily expenses, say federal researchers. One report described it as the worst of times for many Canadians, “the biggest financial challenges of their lives.”

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Cabinet has awarded a retroactive 10.3 percent pay raise to CBC chief executive Hubert Lacroix though he left the Crown corporation five years ago. The Department of Canadian Heritage yesterday would not comment on the backdated pay raise, typically awarded to boost pension payments: “Unfortunately we cannot help you.”

**

The Canadian government has now hired debt collectors to recoup $122,661 of taxpayer dollars in connection with a racist who was hired as a consultant by its Heritage Department. The Globe and Mail reports:

Last year, the Community Media Advocacy Centre was awarded $133,000 by the Department of Canadian Heritage’s anti-racism action program to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting in which Mr. Marouf played a leading role, including running a seminar in Vancouver.

The Globe and Mail article states that anti-racism consultant Laith Marouf made “derogatory” statements about “Jewish White Supremacists, francophones and Black and Indigenous public figures,” but Marouf was far more than “derogatory,” specifically toward Jews.

He was inflammatory and inciting, crossing the lines of Canada’s hate laws as he talked about “a bullet to the head” for “Jewish White Supremacists” and called Jews “loudmouthed bags of human feces.”



Some people are, well, special:

The long and rocky road that led to McMurtry’s dismissal hearing began in 2021 during a Grade 12 classroom discussion in Abbotsford, B.C., concerning the just announced news of 215 unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School.

A student said priests had murdered and tortured the children at the school and then left them to die in the snow. McMurtry pointed out that most children at residential schools died from disease, primarily tuberculosis.

(Sidebar: if Leah Gazan had her way, this urban legend would never be checked.)

“I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory,” said McMurtry in an interview. “It was one comment. It was not done with callousness.”

It took one complaint, and before the hour was out McMurtry was being frog marched out of the school.

**

Oh, dear: 

Among Miller’s tweets on January 27 was the following: “As early as 1909 (1909!!!), Dr. Peter Bryce estimated that the death rate from all causes for those attending residential schools was 18 times higher than that of non-Indigenous people in Canada of the same age [the curious exclamation marks are Miller’s, not mine].”

The “18 times higher” assertion is based on a report that Peter Bryce, Indian Affairs chief medical officer, prepared for the Department in 1909.  In looking at mortality in three residential schools – Shingwauk in Ontario, Sarcee in Alberta, and Cranbrook in B.C. – Bryce found that during the period 1892 to 1908 the schools had a death rate of 8,000 per 100,000.[1]  If Bryce’s finding for the three schools reflected the overall mortality rate across all of the 60 to 70 residential schools operating in Canada during that time period, the rate in the residential schools would indeed have been approximately 18 times higher than the 430 per 100,000 that Bryce reported for Canada’s general school-age population.                                                                                

However, the evidence shows that Bryce's "8,000 per 100,000" death rate was an overstatement for the three schools he studied, and a gross exaggeration of the overall rate for all of Canada’s residential schools operating in the 1892 to 1908 period.  

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published a graph showing the overall annual death rate for each year the residential schools were in operation from their inception until 1965.[2]  The average annual residential school death rate in the 1892 to 1908 period was approximately 1,700 per 100,000, about one-fifth of 8,000 per 100,000.                                                              

Moreover, a detailed analysis of Bryce’s 1909 report on Shingwauk, Sarcee and Cranbrook, and of a similar report he wrote on schools in Alberta two years earlier, reveal that his methodology was flawed and yielded an exaggerated mortality rate.[3]                                           

Miller’s “as early as 1909 (1909!!!)” rant suggests implicitly that the residential school death rate only worsened after that time. The TRC death rate graph, however, shows a precipitous decline in the residential school death rate beginning at the start of the 1900s and continuing for 50 years until it reached zero or near zero.  It should be noted, also, that the TRC graph is based on death numbers that may have been overstated.                                                                                                          

(A word on Peter Bryce:  Bryce is conferred near sainthood status among today’s Indigenous leaders and others for his pointed criticisms of the early residential schools’ health and safety record.  Bryce, however, had many critics who noted his frequent use of hyperbole in bringing attention to problems.  Bryce expressed  ideas that would be considered abhorrent today; for example, that integration into white society and the “admixture of white blood” with “its inherited qualities” would result in a healthier Indigenous population.[4]  Perhaps the most inconvenient truth for Bryce’s obsequious admirers is that he was an ardent advocate for the expansion of the residential schools and the establishment of an overseer Board composed of representatives from the churches.[5])

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How much are shovels, anyway?:

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation says there are many problems with a $2 million contract Ottawa recently signed with an international group to get its advice on unmarked graves.

The centre says it is "deeply concerned" with the decision by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to hire a Netherlands-based organization to launch "an extremely sensitive engagement process" on issues surrounding possible gravesites near former residential schools.

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Mass immigration of unvetted people is alright as long as it is in Ontario or Prince Edward Island:

Premier François Legault is urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to redirect all asylum seekers entering Quebec to other provinces "as soon as they arrive at the border."



Privatisation is an inevitability:



Justin would sooner drink a bowl of hot wax than treat the Japanese like people:

The federal Liberal government has yet to respond to a months-old invitation from Tokyo to have Canada rejoin a global environmental organization that regulates the timber trade.
A July 2022 briefing note obtained through an access-to-information request shows that Japan has asked Ottawa to be part of the International Tropical Timber Organization.
The group works with producer and consumer countries to share knowledge about conservation practices and to promote the sale of sustainable timber.
The organization currently includes 37 exporters of timber and 38 countries that import it, including all other G7 states.
Canada was among the signatories to the 1983 treaty that originally created the organization, but Stephen Harper's Conservative government pulled out of it in 2013.
The same year, Harper's government also pulled Canada out of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, a move the Trudeau government reversed in 2016.
But Canada has now been absent from the timber organization for nearly a decade, during which the World Wildlife Fund has reported worsening tropical deforestation in parts of southern Africa and Peru, driven by illegal and unsustainable logging.
The Japanese embassy in Ottawa said the country's then-state minister of foreign affairs, Takako Suzuki, first raised the matter with International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan last May, on the sidelines of a meeting of G7 international development ministers in Berlin.
"Japan expressed its hope that Canada would positively consider rejoining ITTO in order to further promote co-operation in these areas, which Canada also places great importance on," the embassy's climate-change official, Masatoshi Higuchi, said in a statement.


Justin is under orders not to like Japan, no matter what the issue.

Translate this, Justin: ばかやろう



Oh, North Korea ... :

North Korea fired off two short-range ballistic missiles on Monday morning, Tokyo said, as the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un threatened to turn the Pacific into a “firing range,” two days after the nation sent a long-range weapon into waters off Hokkaido.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is thought to have used the prized steeds as gifts for his family and high-ranking officials.

An intelligence source said some of the horses were used in a recent military parade.

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Norway has seized a record $5.8 million worth of cryptocurrency that was stolen by North Korean hackers last year, Norwegian police said in a statement on Thursday.

North Korean hackers stole $625 million in March 2022 from a blockchain project linked to the crypto-based game Axie Infinity. The heist was one of the largest of its kind on record and was linked by the United States to a North Korean hacking group dubbed “Lazarus.”

“This is money that can be used to finance the North Korean regime and their nuclear weapons program,” Norway’s senior public prosecutor, Marianne Bender, said in a statement.

North Korea has denied allegations of hacking or other cyberattacks.

**

North Korea's official newspaper said on Wednesday that relying on external aid to cope with food shortages would be equal to taking "poisoned candy", urging economic self-reliance despite deepening hardships amid sanctions and coronavirus lockdowns.

The isolated country has suffered food shortages in recent years, reeling from floods and typhoons, international sanctions aimed at curbing its nuclear and missile programmes, and a sharp cut in trade with China due to border closures and COVID-19 lockdowns.


Speaking of poison:

Groundwater from an underground North Korean nuclear weapons test site is spreading dangerous radioactive material to hundreds of thousands living in the country and abroad, a new report warns.

According to a report from the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group, published Tuesday, eight cities near the Punggye-ri site are believed to have been affected.

Over one million people live in the region, the study said, with North Koreans using groundwater for everyday uses, including as drinking water, as well as for agricultural purposes.

Between 2006 and 2017, North Korea is believed to have carried out six nuclear tests at the underground site, which is located in the mountainous North Hamgyong Province.

The report called for those fleeing the affected areas for South Korea to be screened for radiation exposure, and for food export tests to be tightened.

According to the report, produce from farms and fisheries in North Korea smuggled or exported to South Korea, China and Japan put those countries at risk.



This doesn't sound suspicious at all!:

Ontario Tech University (OTU) is using a provision of the Privacy Act (FIPPA) to prevent the release of a list of the 300 “far-right” extremist groups operating in Canada, which has been cited by the Liberal government to bolster impending anti-hate legislation. 

In response to an access to information request filed by True North to have the university identify the said groups, OTU administrators cited certain exceptions which bar the release of records “associated with research conducted or proposed by an employee of an educational institution or by a person associated with an educational institution.” 

In 2020, prominent OTU Professor Barbara Perry, Director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, concluded in a $366,985 taxpayer-funded study that there were 300 active far-right groups operating in Canada. 

Perry, who has been cited extensively by Public Safety Canada and has testified before the House of Commons, has never produced a list of the groups. Most recently, the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination cited the claim last spring.


Also not sounding suspicious, this:

Opposition MPs on the House of Commons public accounts committee want to view the contracts for billions of dollars between the federal government and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, but the Liberals are seeking a requirement that the MPs sign a non-disclosure agreement before doing so.

Bloc Québécois MP Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné had tabled a motion in committee on Feb. 13 to have MPs look at the contracts free of any redactions and in a controlled setting where no electronic devices would be allowed.

On Feb. 16, however, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather moved an amendment to seek the permission of vaccine manufacturers to allow MPs to view the unredacted documents only after having signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

Housefather said public servants who view the documents have to sign NDAs, and also explained why the documents have so many redactions. 


No one died at Watergate.

Canada, however ...


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