Your middle-of-the-week mojito ...
Who did you vote for, Canada?:
Nearly half of mortgage holders are going deeper in debt to keep up home loan payments after ten interest rate hikes, says a federal agency. “Two thirds of mortgage holders report having trouble meeting their financial commitments,” said the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada: “Homeowners with mortgages are stressed.”
**
By comparison, according to the fiscally conservative think tank, the combined cost of food, housing and clothing for the average family was $37,867, or 35.6% of its income, including $22,380 for housing, $12,208 for food and $3,279 for clothing.
The annual study, “Taxes versus the Necessities of Life: The Canadian Consumer Tax Index, 2023 edition” by Jake Fuss and Grady Munro, calculates the total tax bill Canadians pay based on a wide variety of taxes and government-mandated fees.
These include federal and provincial income and sales taxes, payroll and health taxes, municipal property taxes, fuel and carbon taxes, natural resource taxes, excise taxes on liquor and tobacco, import duties, motor vehicle licensing fees and other taxes.
It says the total bill paid by the average family has increased by 2,778% since 1961, faster than the increase in incomes of 2,029%, an 863% increase in the Consumer Price Index, and increases in the cost of shelter (1,880%), food (870%) and clothing (654%).
Adjusted for inflation, the study says, the overall tax bill paid by Canadians has increased by 198.8% since 1961.
This annual study by the Fraser Institute is valuable in that it reminds us that affordability isn’t just about the rising cost of living, as evidenced by inflation and the increasing cost of housing, food and shelter.
It’s also about the amount of after-tax income Canadians have to be able to put the down payment on a house or condo, or pay the interest on their mortgage, or rent an apartment, or put food on the table, or buy winter clothing for their children, or pay for the gasoline in the truck they need to earn a livelihood.
This is particularly concerning given that Canada’s annual inflation rate is on the rise again — up by 3.3% last month, compared to 2.8% in June.
That included an 8.5% year-over-year increase in the cost of groceries and a 30.6% increase in mortgage interest costs, the latter of which is another record high.
Small wonder more than half of all Canadians — 52% — according to a survey by insolvency firm MNP Ltd. last month, say they are $200 or less away from not being able to pay their bills at the end of each month.
The Fraser Institute study notes that in 1961, an average Canadian family’s tax bill consumed 33.5% of its annual income, compared to 45.3% today.
**
Never send a "journalist" to do an economist's job:
Cabinet’s promise of “$15 billion of savings” does not mean federal spending will be cut by $15 billion, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said yesterday. “Savings” meant spending would be redirected from some programs to others, Freeland told reporters: “It is not new savings.”**
Small businesses took an average of more than a quarter million in debt financing last year, says a Department of Industry report. Borrowing occurred as insolvencies rose with the reopening of bankruptcy courts: “How many businesses appear and disappear each year?
Saskatchewan’s education minister says teachers must now seek parental consent when children under 16 want to change their names or pronouns, a move human rights groups say will harm LGBTQ students.
Also:
A Catholic school district in Massachusetts has ruled that its 5,000 students must use the names and pronouns they used at birth, in the latest clash between the church and radical gender ideology.
The ruling from the Diocese of Worcester and approved by Bishop Robert McManus is set to affect 21 schools in and around the central Massachusetts city and start when students got back to class for the fall semester.
Under the new guidelines, students must conduct themselves in a manner 'consistent with their biological sex,' including the bathrooms they use and the sports teams on which they compete.
If I were Jordan Peterson, I would tell them to go directly to hell:
Jordan Peterson will soon find out if the courts will stop the College of Psychologists of Ontario from requiring him to undergo social media training, which was ordered in response to public complaints about his online conduct.
The Ontario Divisional Court will release its decision on Wednesday.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario can order Jordan Peterson to undergo social media training after his online conduct led to complaints to the college, an Ontario court has ruled.
“Requiring coaching following apparently unheeded advice seems a reasonable next step, proportionately balancing statutory objectives against Charter rights which are minimally impaired, if they are impaired at all, by the (college’s decision to require coaching),” says the 18-page court decision that was released Wednesday.
Canada morphed into the Soviet Union so gradually that people scarcely noticed.
Behold, Canada's legal system:
John Carpay, president of the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, and Randal Jay Cameron must also each pay a $5,000 fine.
**
But the public isn’t allowed to know who he is.
The landlords in Canada's political parties don't have to step around passed-out drug addicts:
Canadians oppose cabinet’s “safe supply” drug policy, says in-house Privy Council research. The experimental decriminalization of opioids, cocaine and other narcotics for personal use in British Columbia only led to more drug addiction, said federal focus groups: “Many were of the view that rising rates of addiction had contributed to increased crime.”
**
They began appearing on the ground around the South Riverdale Community Health Centre with increasing regularity after a new safe injection site opened there in late 2017. South Riverdale is an independent centre built in 1998 in Leslieville, just east of downtown Toronto, home to about 30,000 people. It also happens to be across the street from the house where I have lived with my wife and son for 14 years.
Used needles also started popping up in the rear lanes on both sides of Heward Avenue, my street. These lanes are playgrounds for the many children who live on these streets, relatively traffic-free spaces where they can ride their bikes, play catch and shoot at basketball and hockey nets.
Concerned parents began picking up these needles, sometimes taking them to the health centre on days when it was open. I did this many times between 2018 and 2020. The typical response I received from the harm-reduction staff was, I suppose, what you might expect from people whose profession involves working with needles and illicit drugs each workday. I think it’s fair to say they regarded these neighbourhood concerns about needles as a minor nuisance (which perhaps it was, compared to what they were dealing with) and they would usually offer to try to do more regular sweeps of the lanes to collect them.
But it was typically a response made in a weary, beleaguered way that indicated sweeps were not really a priority. They had bigger fish to fry. The needles kept piling up.
By 2019, there was a distinctive shift outside the centre. It had, in a short amount of time, been transformed from a place of semi-discreet open use to something that bore a much closer resemblance to the open-air drug emporium that would grow over the next four years. Drug dealing was becoming more rampant, as was open use.
Working for the CBC means never having to say that one is sorry:
The CBC does not track corrections to its news stories despite a stated commitment to transparency. CBC News in a statement said only corrections considered “notable” are acknowledged under a 2021 policy: “We need the public to feel safe, that we are a beacon for that truth.”
I’m certain that children died at those schools, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the pre-antibiotic era, children died all the time, especially if they weren’t getting pasteurized milk. Nor were there vaccinations against child-killing diseases. My parents and their friends, all born in the first half of the 20th century, had scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles, mumps, and polio. Only the strong survived.
I’m also sure there was abuse. As our public school system has revealed, when adults have free reign over children, there will be sadistic and warped adults. My father never recovered from (or talked about) what happened in his well-respected Jewish orphanage in Weimar and Nazi Germany. If you don’t have parents actively looking out for their children’s well-being, bad things happen. That’s why, today, parents should home-school.
I’m willing to bet that 90% or more of those “graves” found using “ground-penetrating radar” will prove to be structural findings. But the truth doesn’t modern in a post-modern world. What mattered was that the left was able to make political hay out of the anomalies and will be sure to downplay or bury the truth (in a non-anomalous media grave, of course).
We could wax ad nauseam about the evil that Lucy Letby is and the evil she did but the true killers are the NHS that only responded to allegations of infanticide after the evidence became overwhelming.
If we can kill children before or after birth, why should these crimes be shocking? Were they not committed in a more sanitary fashion expected of our lax morality? Was she not licensed to kill the weak we did not want?:
But there is another detail that I found particularly chilling. It was a thing that happened not on the life-saving ward that Ms Letby turned into a death-giving hell, but in the dustless, no doubt jargon-filled offices of the hospital’s managers. It was there, in January 2017, 18 months after Letby began her monstrous campaign of infanticide, that the decision was taken to instruct the doctors who suspected her of killing babies to apologise to her. To express ‘grovelling’ remorse for their suspicions. ‘Dear Lucy, we would like to apologise for any inappropriate comments that may have been made during this difficult period’, the letter said. ‘We are very sorry’ for your ‘stress and upset’, it continued. It was reportedly signed by seven medics; its composition was demanded by the then CEO of the Countess of Chester, Tony Chambers.
**
Lucy Letby’s colleagues were ordered to apologise to her after repeatedly raising concerns that the nurse may have been behind a series of unexplained baby deaths, the Guardian has learned.
Senior doctors had warned for months that Letby was the only staff member present during the sudden collapses and deaths of a number of premature babies on the Countess of Chester hospital’s neonatal unit.
She was not removed from the ward until early July 2016, a year after a doctor first alerted a hospital executive to a potential link. By that time she had murdered seven babies and attempted to kill another six, a court found on Friday.
The Countess of Chester hospital NHS foundation trust is facing serious questions about how it responded to concerns raised about Letby and whether it should have acted sooner.
Canada proves itself equally awful:
Imagine if you were having suicidal thoughts and, fearing for your life, you went to a hospital seeking treatment. A clinician tells you that psychiatric healthcare is “broken” and plagued by delays. Later in the conversation, the clinician asks if you have ever considered assisted death.
There is no need to imagine this scenario, because according to a patient in Vancouver — 37-year-old Kathrin Mentler — this is precisely what happened to her. It is now a matter of public record that, in Canada, euthanasia is being openly discussed with individuals who are suicidal but want to live.
Mentler, who has struggled with depression and suicidal ideation, went to Vancouver General Hospital to seek help in June. After completing an intake form, she was taken to a room where a clinician conducted an interview. The clinician asked Mentler if she had ever considered assisted death as an option, noting that it would be more “comfortable” than committing suicide by overdosing on medication — a concern that Mentler specifically had in mind when she went to the hospital that day.
The hospital, in its defence, says that the question about euthanasia was posed to Mentler to assess her risk of suicide. This response, however, fails to answer several questions.
Rather than mention euthanasia, why not ask the patient, on a scale of one to 10, how they would rank their degree of suicidality? How, from a risk assessment perspective, does the hospital explain the clinician’s alleged comments to Mentler about the healthcare system being “broken” and that euthanasia would be more “comfortable” than an overdose?
And why, based on how Mentler has described this encounter, would the clinician even discuss something that is not yet legal? Euthanasia was first decriminalized across Canada in 2016 and its scope has been steadily expanded since, but euthanasia for persons suffering solely from mental illness will not be legal until next March. Providing euthanasia in circumstances that have not been exempted from the Criminal Code is a serious crime. The same is true for counselling someone to receive euthanasia even if they are legally eligible to receive it. While there can be a fine line between informing and counselling, some of the comments in the case of Mentler seem to wander close to it.
The hospital’s response, which is essentially that the conduct of the clinician was an exercise in risk assessment, is unsatisfactory. An investigation should look into Mentler’s case and determine whether it is an isolated incident. Although the hospital apologized for “any distress caused” to Mentler, it appeared to maintain that what happened was standard and appropriate clinical procedure. Minister of Health Adrian Dix should be making inquiries — if he has not done so already.
It is hard not to juxtapose this case with another situation concerning euthanasia that has made headlines recently. Not far down the road from Vancouver General, a controversy erupted after St. Paul’s Hospital, a Catholic healthcare community which adheres to the ethical position that euthanasia amounts to killing, refused earlier this year to provide the procedure to a patient who requested it. The patient was later transferred to a nearby facility where she received euthanasia.
The case of St. Paul’s sparked sustained media coverage and intense public outcry, which led the health minister to state that Catholic hospitals in British Columbia should provide euthanasia within their walls. Discussions between the province and Providence Health Care, the faith-based organization standing behind St. Paul’s Hospital, appear to be ongoing.
**
Since the death penalty was abolished before the advent of legal euthanasia in Canada — now linked to seven per cent of Quebec deaths, “more than anywhere else in the world,” and occasionally where those euthanized “were unable to consent” — it’s time to revisit the issue. MAID for adult evildoers would be a method most of us could agree on. It would perforce be an offer that could not be refused, but in our present cultural circumstances, that seems — conscience-wise — an easily surmountable hurdle.
**
He volunteered for extra shifts at Kingston Health Sciences Centre to help with the crush of patients, but a much less dramatic development now anchors his public place in the pandemic: he started sharing his thoughts about pandemic response.
He wrote short posts on Twitter and longform essays published by a British newsmagazine and Canadian news sites. He argued against wide lockdowns and mask mandates and in support of interventions focussed on people most at risk. Many of his thoughts were counter to official responses and prevailing medical advice.
He wrote colourfully, forcefully. He once tweeted, “I would sooner give my children COVID-19 than a McDonald’s happy meal.”
He sparred in the media and with the media.
A Toronto Star columnist called him an “anti-public health doctor” after Strauss was appointed the acting medical officer of health for Haldimand-Norfolk, in southwestern Ontario.
In retort, Strauss wrote a piece of his own, published in National Post, dismissing the criticism as an attack by “left-wing media.” ...
He is suing Queen’s University and the head of the school’s department of medicine, where he was an assistant professor of medicine from July 2019 to November 2021. He claims he was pushed out of his job for voicing unpopular opinions about pandemic management.
He filed his statement of claim in October 2022. The school and its medical school head, Dr. Stephen Archer, filed their statement of defence this July. and Strauss, in turn, filed his reply soon after.
The lawsuit, through allegations and cross-allegations, highlights the depth of division and acrimony over pandemic responses, and raises issues of academic freedom and workplace behaviour.
None of the allegations have been tested in court.
Where is the gnashing of teeth and wailing over this?:
What began as accusations against two Christian brothers has escalated into a devastating wave of violence, resulting in the destruction of over 20 churches and 500 homes. The situation remains tense as the community grapples with the aftermath of this unfortunate incident." — Pakistan Christian Post, August 18, 2023.
"Both men were taken into custody on the next afternoon and handed to the Counter-Terrorism Department, Punjab for investigation. Section 295-B relates to desecration of the Koran and carries a punishment of life in prison. Section 295-C relates to insulting Muhammad and is punishable by death." — Morning Star News, August 18, 2023.
After the Pakistani Supreme Court's 2018 acquittal of Asia Bibi, a Christian who was charged with blasphemy and kept in solitary confinement for eight years until TLP members held protests across Pakistan. Muhammad Afzal Qadri, a TLP co-founder, also called for the murder of the three Supreme Court justices involved in hearing Bibi's appeal, stating: "The Chief Justice and two others deserve to be killed."
"Videos circulating on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms showed a violent mob dragging a half-dead man on the streets of Sialkot, Pakistan on December 1, 2021. Young men were throwing stones at him and kicking his body as he was dragged mercilessly by those who called themselves the 'protectors' of the sanctity of the Prophethood. The videos go on to show ghastly scenes of the mob burning a corpse as dozens of men not only look on, but use their cell phones to take selfies...." — Atlantic Council, January 15, 2022.
On July 8, 2023, police arrested a 35-year-old Christian for allegedly sharing a post on Facebook, although "Even the imam of the village mosque told them that the post contained nothing derogatory against Islam, and that they should desist from stoking religious tension." — Morning Star News, July 12, 2023.
"Pakistani authorities need no more evidence to see how dangerous the blasphemy laws are – they are abused to make false accusations that can, and have, led to unlawful killings and even whole communities being attacked and their homes burnt." — David Griffiths, Director of the Office of the Secretary General of Amnesty International, August 25, 2020.
No changes in the situation have yet been observed.
Now, in the aftermath of the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century, people in the Lahaina area are again asking the same questions, further challenging recent statements made by county and state officials that “nobody saw this coming,” that “this has never happened before.”“We were begging to be taken seriously, but our voices weren’t being heard,” Samantha Dizon said. “2018 should have been a wake up call. But nothing was done here.”Despite promising they would take action, Maui County leaders did not make wildfires a priority after 2018, a Washington Post investigation has found, even though their hazard plan stated that “West Maui has experienced more wildfires than any other community planning area over the last 20 years.”The Post investigation — a review of hundreds of pages of county documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, including current former county and state employees — found that Maui Emergency Management Agency officials regularly warned county leaders that their staffing and evacuation infrastructure was inadequate to respond to a major disaster. However, even with a budget boost, the county only increased agency staffing from seven to nine employees between fiscal years 2020 and 2021.The agency’s administrator, Herman Andaya, also did not act on recommendations by residents and others that the county broaden its outdoor warning sirens to include wildfires. At county meetings, he called the system a “last resort.” Emergency officials again did not activate those sirens on Aug. 8 to alert Lahaina residents of the approaching fire, a decision Andaya repeatedly defended before he resigned last week.The agency also never published its internal after-action report on the 2018 fires, which should have included findings on what went wrong and recommendations for improvements, according to a former county official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the matter.In addition, the county did not broadly or swiftly act on calls by residents, as well as reports commissioned by the community, to improve fire safety. At least two called for homeowners and private landowners to remove dangerous vegetation on their properties and create defensible spaces and fire breaks.
And now for something completely uplifting:
Animal control officers in Chattanooga, Tenn., got a call about an abandoned dog cowering beneath a car in a parking lot in January. When they arrived on the scene, they found a stray dog that couldn’t walk and was covered in splotches of oil.
They took him to the McKamey Animal Center in Chattanooga, where a veterinarian concluded he had been hit by a car and was partially paralyzed. ...
Murphy, 38, started doing daily stretching sessions with Ward, gently moving his paralyzed back limbs for a few minutes at a time. She continued taking him to hydrotherapy treatments and for walks in his wheelchair. She also modified an adult-sized walker she’d picked up at a local thrift shop, so he could practice standing up.
“I attached some outdoor chair fabric and made a little sling for him to rest his hips on while he practices standing for about two minutes at a time,” she said.
Less than two weeks after taking Ward home, Murphy saw Wade lying on the floor one morning chewing a bone.
Then, in what seemed like a miracle, Ward wagged his tail.
No comments:
Post a Comment