Your middle-of-the-week scream from the rooftop ...
Thinking that his Chinese bosses will finally be off of his back over this interference business, Justin swears he won't overrule Uncle David's decision to make this case of obvious bribery and interference go away:
After months of political scrutiny from an opposition united in their calls for an independent and open airing of the facts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has come out in full support of Johnston's decision to sidestep an inquiry, continuing to assert his government has, and will continue to handle the issue with the seriousness it deserves.
Indulge the public for once, Justin, and pretend that no one believes you, because no one does.
More:
To set the scene, Mr. Johnston did not reach out to the Conservative Party, my office, or Pierre Poilievre’s office until the final week of his initial assignment. He waited until the very end to meet with the current and former leaders of the Party that had been the central target of the foreign interference he was charged with investigating. If I am to believe media reports, Johnston interviewed the Bloc Quebecois leader about events alleged to have taken place in British Columbia and Ontario – where Mr. Blanchet ran no candidates – before he finally got around to me or the present Conservative Leader. This makes no sense.
I was still waiting to receive a CSIS briefing on foreign interference that had been promised the week before when my office was called by the Johnston team and told we only had two days to make the meeting work. I asked to meet with him following my meeting with CSIS (which I am still waiting to receive) but was told that this was not possible. I confirmed with Pierre that his office received a request to meet on the same day that I was. He declined the meeting and somehow that information was leaked to the media within hours.
Since I only had a couple of days to prepare, I asked several key 2021 Conservative campaign officials for their input and gathered a considerable amount of social media and polling information. I was proud that my team was able to assemble a solid dossier with predictive modelling analysis as well as evidence from the ground and from WeChat. Given the pressed timeline, we were literally putting the binders together as Mr. Johnston arrived at my office with his counsel. With this in mind, you might understand how disappointed I was to learn halfway through my meeting that Johnston’s report was already undergoing French translation. I was flabbergasted and realized that nothing I was going to provide to the Special Rapporteur was going to impact his work.
I was left with the clear impression that my meeting was nothing more than a box checking exercise. I shared with them detailed examples of my concerns and how I believed that intelligence leaks on interference were the result of many years of inaction by the Prime Minister and senior officials and a steady erosion of trust with our security agencies charged with doing important work in our national interest. I was not really asked any questions or given any insights. It was a very strange meeting. When they made a comparison of nomination level interference by China to nomination campaigns by specific groups in Canada, I realized that sharing my on the ground experiences leading the team that had been targeted by China was a waste of time.
That was the point.
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MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.) as a Liberal candidate for re-election in 2021 “continued to maintain close relationships” with China’s Consulate in Toronto, former governor general David Johnston said yesterday. No reason was given: “I was not informed nor would I accept any help from a foreign country.”
Also to be harassed with the government's approval, these guys:
Thirteen Montrealers say they've been targeted by a campaign of harassment launched by the Cuban government to keep them from protesting against one-party rule on the island.
A social media account which — according to a Cuban defector — is being run by Cuba's state security has been spreading detailed allegations against the 13 men accusing them of trafficking cocaine from Colombia to Canada.
Also - Jagmeet Singh is a piece of crap:
There is no reason to dissolve the 44th Parliament and seek a mandate from voters on alleged subterfuge by Chinese agents, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday told reporters. Singh said he was disappointed former governor general David Johnston would not endorse the Party’s March 2nd call for a public inquiry: “Why not trigger an election and have parties run on that mandate?”
Remind me again of who and what Canadians voted for:
“In 2022 and into 2023, I’m seeing more examples of products being downsized than in any other period in memory,” Edgar Dworsky, founder of Mouse Print, a website that tracks grocery shrinkflation, told CNBC.
Food manufacturers don’t announce these changes, making them hard to monitor and even more difficult to detect. “Do we really have the spatial memory to recognize that a particular product has a narrower bottle or narrower box? I don’t think so. And most consumers don’t pay attention to the fine print. That’s why downsizing really works.”
The way food is taxed in Canada adds another, even less visible, dimension to shrinkflation, Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, highlighted in a tweet.
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Canadian households are more in debt than those in any other G7 country, and the amount they owe is now more than the value of the country's entire economy.
That was one of the main takeaways of a new report from Canada's housing agency, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which backstops much of the country's housing market via mortgage insurance.
In a report published Tuesday, the CMHC's deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth said Canada's economy is more at risk to whatever crises may arise because of how much debt Canadian households have racked up.
"Canada's very high levels of household debt — the highest in the G7 — makes the economy vulnerable to any global economic crisis," he said. "When many households in an economy are heavily indebted, the situation can quickly deteriorate, such as what was witnessed in the U.S. in 2007 and 2008."
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Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Yves Giroux says his office is probing the federal government’s $13.8 billion deal with Volkswagen made to incentivize the European automaking giant to build its first overseas battery cell plant in Ontario.Giroux told The Epoch Times that his office began analyzing the expensive deal near the end of April and is aiming to publish it at the end of Parliament’s spring session, scheduled to conclude on June 23.The budget officer said he began his analysis after, but not in response to, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre calling on him to do so in late April.“We had planned to start a study of the VW deal before Mr. Poilievre asked for it but had not started it formally,” Giroux said.The government announced on March 13 that PowerCo, a subsidiary company of Volkswagen, would be building Volkswagen’s first overseas battery cell plant in St. Thomas, Ontario.Over a month later, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne confirmed that Ottawa committed between $8 and $13.2 billion in subsidies and a $700 million grant to incentivize Volkswagen to build the battery factory in Canada.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in late April that other countries, including the United States, were willing to offer “an awful lot of money” for Volkswagen’s plant, which is estimated to produce batteries for up to 1 million electric vehicles per year following its completion in 2027, while creating 3,000 direct jobs and 30,000 indirect jobs.“Everyone wanted this, so yes, we put up a lot of money—money that’s going to come back in investments in economic activity very quickly,” Trudeau said on April 21.Giroux said the federal Industry Department has been forthcoming thus far with all requested information about the deal.“We may need clarifications as we progress, but don’t anticipate issues from that perspective,” he said.
They voted for this:
While most Canadians dealt with crushing cost-of-living increases as part of the ongoing affordability crisis, Canada’s Governor General will pocket a $9,500 pay raise in 2023.
This latest bump in pay is part of a $48,800 salary increase in take-home pay since 2019, which saw remuneration for Canada’s national representative of the Crown increase by 16 per cent over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.The details, unearthed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, show the Governor General’s salary increasing from $302,800 annually in 2019 to this year’s rate of $351,600.That represents a $48,800 increase over the past five years.The Governor General’s Act, which determines pay and benefits for the viceregal, established a base salary of $270,602 a little over a decade ago.
Let's remember our Prague Spring:
The truckers’ protest in Canada demonstrated just what governments could get away with. In February 2022, the Canadian authorities froze the finances of individuals and companies involved in the Ottawa protests against Covid vaccine mandates. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police froze 206 financial products, including bank and corporate accounts; disclosed the information of 56 entities associated with vehicles, individuals and companies; shared 253 bitcoin addresses with virtual currency exchangers; and froze a payment processing account valued at $3.8million. And there it is: the big danger is the invasion of banking privacy for political reasons.
Why train or keep engineers in this country?:
Internationally trained engineers no longer require Canadian work experience to be licensed in Ontario, the province’s labour minister said Tuesday, calling the move a “game changer.”The development for qualified immigrant engineers will help fill roughly 7,000 vacant positions in Ontario, said Labour Minister Monte McNaughton.“I hear it every day that the single biggest barrier to immigrants landing well-paying jobs is a requirement many regulators have for Canadian work experience,” he said at a news conference at a Toronto construction site.“This move is a game changer that will help thousands of qualified immigrant engineers pursue their dreams over the coming years.”Professional Engineers Ontario is the first regulatory association to make the change since the province introduced legislation in October, 2021, preventing certain regulated professions and skilled trades from requiring Canadian experience qualifications, unless they get a ministerial exemption, Mr. McNaughton said.The legislation covers more than 30 non-health care-related professions and trades, including architects, accountants and electricians.In Ontario, 300,000 jobs are unfilled and only a quarter of internationally trained immigrants are working in professions they studied, the minister said.“It doesn’t take a math major to figure out these numbers don’t add up,” he said.Professional Engineers Ontario said up to 60 per cent of the licence applicants it reviews every year are internationally trained.Vice-president Christopher Chahine said the change, which went into effect last week, moves the regulator to a model focused on competency, rather than geography.“We continue to serve the public interest by ensuring all licensed professional engineers meet the rigorous qualifications and that only properly qualified, competent and ethical individuals practise engineering,” he said at Tuesday’s news conference.Mr. McNaughton said he expects regulators subject to Ontario’s legislation to pro-actively drop any existing Canadian experience qualifications before an end-of-year deadline.
It was never about a virus:
A former broadcasting director with Global News claimed that the media organization provided biased coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic and instead of doing journalism, “shoved propaganda” into the faces of Canadians.
Former director Anita Krishna told the National Citizen Inquiry that the broadcaster’s coverage of pandemic-related issues was “slanted.”
“I was a director of newscast when Covid-19 happened. The vaccine was like a religion. All we did was constantly run stories of: ‘Look at this person in the hospital who made a bad choice and didn’t get the vaccine,’” explained Krishna.
“All our stories were slanted to that. Everything we were saying was pandemic of the unvaccinated. If you’re unvaccinated you’ll be holding everybody back and that we now know isn’t true.”
According to Krishna, her superiors at the network shut down any concerns she had about the outlet’s biased coverage.
**
“There never was a viral pandemic of a novel pathogen. I don’t believe there has been a novel cause of significant illness and death, other than our government’s responses to the fake ‘pandemic,’” he said. “The deaths that we saw, I’m afraid, were medical malpractice at best and murder at worst. Basically, we were lied to from the beginning.”
The former Pfizer executive said health authorities have lied about the public health emergency, as well as the necessity and usefulness of the measures to address COVID-19.
**
Democratic New Hampshire state Rep. Tommy Hoyt lashed out at a parent who urged him to support a proposed parents’ bill of rights in the Granite State this week, telling the person to “shut up.”
A “parent of four” emailed Hoyt imploring him to pass SB 272, a bill that seeks to establish a parents’ bill of rights that would prevent public schools from withholding information about their children, the NH Journal reported Thursday.
Hoyt responded to the message angrily, arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that parents are “incompetent teachers” and shouldn’t be involved in their children’s education.
“Do you know why children’s results tanked during COVID. Their parents were incompetent teachers. Do your children a favor, let the teachers teach, and shut up. You’re clearly no professional,” Hoyt emailed the parent.
The New Hampshire lawmaker confirmed the authenticity of the message to the NH Journal, telling the outlet that he “probably could have used better words.”
Oh, yes, I'm sure he could have.
**
“[Children] are at risk for failed developmental milestones, disrupted social-emotional interaction, and risk for reduced capacity for emotional and behavioural regulation,” Keren Epstein-Gilboa, a former university lecturer with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, said on May 18.The National Citizen’s Inquiry (NCI), which describes itself as a “citizen-led and citizen-funded initiative that is completely independent of government,” has been holding hearings in various locations across the country. It is examining how the COVID-19 pandemic measures put in place by all levels of government impacted Canadians in the categories of health, fundamental rights and freedoms, social well-being, and economic prosperity.According to Epstein-Gilboa, when developing COVID-19 policies, the developmental milestones of children—which are the behaviours that mark stages of typical growth—were not taken into account. For example, she cited research that showed face-to-face interaction is crucial for the proper development of infants, but said facial masking interrupted this process.“We have to learn, and how do we learn if we don’t see each other’s faces? And what we don’t want is a hidden face, limited interaction and connection, because the interactional components are stifled,” she said.Epstein-Gilboa cited the “Still Face Experiment,” where after three minutes of interaction with a non-responsive expressionless mother, children will withdraw and show negative emotions. The experiment, which has been repeatedly replicated, shows how the behaviour and feelings of parents can impact the development of children.“Now think of this. What happens to our infants and some of our young children during the past three years, who didn’t see faces for hours and hours?” Epstein-Gilboa asked.The scholar emphasized that the level of impact on children depends on the balance between the risk factors introduced by COVID policies and the protective factors applied. Children weren’t all impacted the same way, she said, as children with adequate protective factors were able to develop appropriately.The impact of masking on children’s social and psychological development is still being debated by scientists. While the U.S. Centres for Disease Control has said the limited available data indicates “no clear evidence that masking impairs emotional or language development in children,” some psychiatrists and speech therapists have raised concerns with the impacts of face masks on children.
The Quebec government spent a total of $5,880,162 on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to euthanize those seeking services, according to government documents.
A freedom of information request by “Run with Life” blogger, Patricia Maloney, revealed that general practitioners and medical specialists charged nearly $6 million in fees in order to render MAiD services to patients in Quebec.
Quebeckers paid $674,102 for initial consultations lasting 15 minutes and $2,333,692 for additional 15-minute consultations. Patients then paid nearly $350,000 to have physicians administer MAiD to them. Additional costs were collected from administrative fees, forms, visits and recurring consultations.
10,064 Canadians chose doctor-assisted suicide as a means to end their lives in 2021. Data for 2022 is currently not available.
Puritans are welcome to hide under their beds while everyone else enjoys themselves.
It is NEVER about social justice:
The “new way” was denounced by some who argued that the city should have consulted with its residents before making the decision. Others had said it was a deliberate move by the city to do away with traditions.Dan McLean, city councillor for Ward 13, is among those Calgarians who expressed support for keeping the fireworks.“The City is asking for feedback on canceling Canada Day fireworks due to environmental and cultural concerns. Personally, I love ending Canada Day celebrations with fireworks!” he said on Twitter on May 19.The petition by Common Sense Calgary says the city has “failed” to consider what Calgarians want.“As usual, government bureaucracy takes a minor issue, spends your money trying to fix something no one wants fixed, and then creates an even larger problem,” it said.The group dismissed the idea of waiting for public feedback on this year’s event before deciding the fate of fireworks. It urged petitioners to “tell City Hall you want Canada Day fireworks this year!”Kourtney Penner, city councillor of Ward 11, responded to the group on May 22, saying it wasn’t the council’s decision, and reversing it would be “upholding colonialism and racism.”“Council didn’t make this decision and if we were to reverse it, it would do nothing more than discredit the voices who asked for a different kind of celebration,” she said in a series of tweets.She countered the group’s comment that cancelling the fireworks show was “nonsense.”“This isn’t nonsense. It’s being actively anti-racist, working at truth and reconciliation, and being responsive to the diverse community Calgary is.”
I'm sure that it will all magically work out:
The Department of Health says it worries private employers who currently provide dental coverage for most Canadians nationwide will offload costs onto taxpayers as cabinet expands its national dentacare program. “It is something that we are concerned about,” the head of the department’s dental task force yesterday told the Senate social affairs committee: ‘Are there any mechanisms the government can use to prevent clawing back coverage by insurance companies?’
Why, it's like both parents and students are tired of people trying to groom them:
More than 400 pupils at one of London’s largest elementary schools – about one-third of the entire headcount – stayed home Wednesday, on a day when the rainbow flag flew across the school district as the area public board saluted International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.Just three months ago, a similar mass absence broke out at Eagle Heights elementary school as it marked Rainbow Day, a designated day to celebrate diversity and inclusion. That left the Thames Valley District school board looking into the unusually high number of students who did not go to class, an issue the board’s education director, Mark Fisher, later called a “miscommunication.”Unusually high absence levels were also reported at some other elementary schools in the city Wednesday, one source within the school system, who chalked it up to pushback against the intended purpose of the day, told The Free Press. Fearing job reprisal, the person did not want to be identified.
**
A local politician who led a push to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion in Norwich Township quit mid-meeting Tuesday night as her council colleagues gave final approval to a ban on non-government flags, including Pride flags, on municipal property.
**
But I thought this was all about tolerance!:
Tampa’s “Pride on the River” event has been canceled following a new law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed on Wednesday that will penalize businesses and people who admit children into “adult live performances.”
Tampa Pride President Carrie West confirmed to outlets the September event was canceled, and they were concerned they wouldn’t be able to restrict who sees the performances – since the event is in an open area.
“Rather than risk the licenses of participating businesses, organizers canceled the event altogether,” another report said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially entered the Republican presidential race Wednesday, fulfilling months of speculation that he would mount what could be the most serious threat to former president Donald Trump’s bid to retake the White House.
DeSantis launched his campaign in an unusual forum, bypassing a television interview or public rally for a glitchy Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk that repeatedly crashed as it was set to begin.
“We need the courage to lead and the strength to win,” DeSantis said in a minute-long video posted to Twitter and timed with the audio stream. “I’m Ron DeSantis, and I’m running for president to lead our great American comeback.”
DeSantis first revealed his decision in a Federal Election Commission filing earlier Wednesday before the Twitter event. He continued the day-long campaign kickoff with a Fox News appearance Wednesday night.
It's a cult:
PROFESSOR GONE WILD: Pro-abortion professor Shellyne Rodriquez curses at pro-life students and vandalizes table at Hunter College. pic.twitter.com/QNspuXB4KK
— Students for Life of America (@StudentsforLife) May 17, 2023
A paralyzed man has become the first in history to regain his natural mobility through the use of implants, according to a new study.
Gert-Jan Oskam was paralyzed in 2011 after a motorcycle accident in China. He lost control of his limbs from his hips down, but — thanks to a newly-developed device linking his thoughts to his spinal cord — he can walk once again.
A study outlining the new tech was published in the journal Nature. The Swiss researchers who developed the tech describe it as a "digital bridge" between the patient's brain and spinal cord, bypassing the injured areas of his body.
Mr Oskam has been walking with the implants for more than a year, with no sign of the connection breaking down, according to the New York Times.
“For 12 years I’ve been trying to get back my feet,” Mr Oskam said Tuesday in a press briefing. “Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural.”
Not only is Mr Oskam walking again, but he is showing signs of actual neurological recovery thanks to the implants — even if the implant is deactivated, Mr Oskam can still walk using crutches.
When a person suffers a traumatic spinal cord injury, it can sever the communication between the brain and the region of the spine that controls walking, rendering a person paralyzed.
The new implants re-establish that connection by bypassing trouble spots.
Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tina Turner:
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