And the Rest of It

We all knew that the legal system would do this to us one day:

The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) will review the transfer of killer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino says.

Bernardo‘s move to a facility in Quebec made headlines last week after the correctional service notified the lawyer representing the families of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, the teenagers who Bernardo kidnapped, tortured and murdered in the early 1990s.

The killer and serial rapist had been serving a life sentence at Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security penitentiary near Kingston, Ont.

“I took the opportunity this morning to speak with (Corrections) Commissioner (Anne) Kelly. I told her that as a former federal prosecutor and as a Canadian, that I was profoundly concerned and again, shocked by this decision. She assured me that she understood. She also assured me that she was going to be reviewing the matter,” Mendicino said.

 

Bull. Sh--.

**

A brazen attempt at self-defense:

Peter Khill will serve eight years in federal prison for the killing of Six Nations man Jon Styres. 

Ontario Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman sentenced Khill on Tuesday in a packed Hamilton courtroom, seven years after he shot Styres in the driveway of Khill's home.

One night in February 2016, Khill, then 26, woke up to noises outside. He grabbed his shotgun from his closet and ammunition from his nightstand drawer and went outside. He found Styres breaking into this truck and fired two shots, killing the 29-year-old father of two. 

Khill was charged with second degree murder and pleaded not guilty, claiming he acted in self-defence. In December, a jury found him guilty of manslaughter. 

The mandatory minimum sentence of manslaughter with a firearm is four years imprisonment, which was requested by Khill's defence lawyer. The Crown requested 10 years behind bars.

The high-profile case attracted public interest as it bore similarities to the 2016 shooting death of Colton Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man in Saskatchewan. A jury found the accused not guilty of second-degree murder.

On Tuesday, Goodman told the courtroom, filled with members of Styres's and Khill's family, that Khill should serve double the minimum because his actions were not an accident or necessary for self-defence. 

The justice said Khill had time to consider his response and could have called 911, but instead "decided to arm himself and gain control," the justice said.

"It was indeed Peter who failed to avoid the final, fatal confrontation." 

The sentence will also discourage other people from taking "the law into their own hands" and the "brazen killing of intruders," Goodman said.

 

Shacking up pays in Quebec, a province where people can't wait to go extinct:

Quebec is a curious case study. It is different than other provinces for two main reasons. One, is a welfare state that is on the whole more generous. The other is that, with the societal collapse of Catholicism and its connection to marriage, cohabitation “has really become normalized and very prevalent,” Pugliese said. In 2022, 43 per cent of couples living together were unmarried, compared to barely half that proportion everywhere else, with a national average of 23 per cent.

From Margaret Sanger's mouth to Canadian public policy:

“Do you believe in sin?” asked Wallace. “When I say believe, I don’t mean you believe in committing sin; I mean do you believe there is such a thing as sin?” he added. “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically,” responded Sanger. “Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That, to me, is the greatest sin that people can commit.”

We don't have to trade with China:

“Thousands may have been gunned down in Beijing, but what about the millions of American kids whose lives are being ruined by an enormous failure of the country’s educational system,” former NBC anchor John Chancellor weirdly argued in a “commentary” later that month about a long-forgotten report on middle schools from the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. “We can and we should agonize about the dead students in Beijing, but we’ve got a much bigger problem here at home,” Chancellor declared.

 **

China, which has been South Korea's dominant export destination for almost two decades, is currently facing a challenge to its longstanding position.

According to a report by the Korea International Trade Association, Korea's reliance on exports to China has steadily declined from 26.8 percent in 2018 to 22.8 percent last year.

In the first quarter of this year, it dropped even further to 19.5 percent.

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy report on Tuesday also showed that the decline in exports to China has persisted for 12 consecutive months since June of 2022.

China's trade balance has been in deficit during this period, except for a $600 million export surplus in September last year.

In January, monthly exports to China fell below the $10 billion mark for the first time in three years, recording $9.2 billion. Since then, monthly export figures to China have been fluctuating around the $10 billion level.

Exports to China in the first five months of this year amounted to $49.7 billion, seeing a 27.3 percent decrease compared to the same period in 2022 ($68.4 billion).

During the first quarter of this year, there was a significant on-year decline in various major export items to China: semiconductors by 44.6 percent, petroleum products by 20.6 percent, petrochemicals by 26.2 percent, steel by 23.9 percent, automotive parts by 34.0 percent, displays by 52.8 percent and secondary batteries by 38.7 percent.

In particular, China experienced a significant decline of 29.6 percent in its intermediate goods exports during the first quarter.

Some industry experts see that this change reflects that Korea's growth model, which involved selling intermediate goods like semiconductors to China and benefiting from its economic growth, has reached its limit.

As Chinese intermediate goods exports decline, the markets for such goods in the US, India, Australia and other countries are experiencing an expansion.