Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Your Stupid, Wasteful and Slothful Government and You

You get the government you vote for:

The federal immigration minister says the government is weighing its options on virtual citizenship ceremonies after a petition signed by more than 1,500 Canadians called on Ottawa to pull the plug.

 

Weighing options?

I'm sure Marc the classless wonder meant holding off until everyone forgets about this and then pushes forward with it. 

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The sanity of the plan is of no consequence:

No sensible or humble politician would propose such offensive and illegal overreach. But Guilbeault and his boss Justin Trudeau are marked by ambition equal parts grandiose and blind.


The Charter is a tyrant's dream.

Surely, we know that by now.

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More than 800 depositors have been “de-banked” nationwide in the past five years at bankers’ discretion, say Access To Information Records. Federal law does not allow banks to cancel accounts except in cases of suspected criminality: ‘How many depositors have been de-banked in Canada for reasons other than substantiated terrorism or money laundering?’

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Let them eat Saltines:

Governor General Mary Simon must economize in her $24.7 million annual budget, the Commons government operations committee said yesterday. MPs protested spending was so lavish that Rideau Hall did not tell the whole truth when questioned about the cost of overseas junkets: “You got caught red-handed.”

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Let them eat something that's gone off:

A decades-old federal law mandating labels on date-expired food is under review. The Department of Agriculture said it supports in principle the removal of “best before” dates as Canadians face rising food costs: “The government supports in principle this recommendation.”

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But stores always have flyers and deals, Francois.

What about that pesky inflation?:

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said his push for lower grocery prices has yielded unspecified discounts, price freezes and price-matching offers, but he didn’t have clear answers Thursday about how much or how quickly prices might fall.
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The rats realise that people are starting to hate them:

Liberal MPs from P.E.I., New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are now publicly criticizing Ottawa’s existing carbon pricing scheme, and calling for reforms under which fewer Atlantic Canadians would need to pay it. And this week, a Newfoundland Liberal became the only non-Conservative to support a token motion by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre to abolish the carbon tax entirely.
The motion in question had minimal chance of passage, and is one among many that opposition parties routinely introduce as symbolic gestures. The text called on the Liberal government to “introduce legislation, within seven days of this motion being adopted, to repeal all carbon taxes to bring home lower prices on gas, groceries, and home heating.”
The Bloc Québécois, NDP and Green Party caucuses all swiftly voted “nay,” but Ken McDonald, the MP for Avalon, stepped forward as the only Liberal supporter.
“Everywhere I go people come up to me and say, ‘we’re losing faith in the Liberal Party,'” McDonald told CBC’s Power and Politics on Thursday night.

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Look - Justin can have his vacations or you can have your precious shells and houses.

Pick one!:

A leading NATO official and Canada's top military commander have both warned allies within the past week that their ammunition shortages have reached a crisis state, and are calling for urgent action to boost production of critical artillery rounds.

Gen. Wayne Eyre, chief of the defence staff, recently told a House of Commons committee that if Canadian troops were called upon to fire their big guns at the same rate as Ukrainian troops fighting to repel the Russian invasion, their supply of shells would last for only a few days.

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The military’s chaplain-general says many soldiers are struggling with the high cost of living and morale is the lowest it’s been in recent memory.

Chaplains say in a briefing note written to the chief of the defence staff that more Armed Forces members are asking for help to make ends meet.

The briefing note was sent to Gen. Wayne Eyre last month based on information gathered by chaplains in the first six months of the year.

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Yes, but think of all the votes:

How much will it cost Canadians to keep the Liberals in power for another two years?

Answer: at least another $23 billion to $27 billion per annum. That’s the estimated cost of a national pharmacare plan according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer — and it’s one of the NDP’s key demands to maintain its confidence-and-supply agreement with the government.

According to The Canadian Press, the Liberal-NDP deal calls for “progress toward a universal national pharmacare program” and the passage of a bill by the end of 2023. But negotiations apparently aren’t going well. According to NDP health critic Don Davies, “(The bill) doesn’t meet the New Democrats’ red lines at this point. We’re waiting for a next draft to come to us.”

What does the NDP want? In June, it tabled a private member’s bill that reiterated its demands for a universal, comprehensive and publicly funded system. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh claimed such a program would save the public health-care system “billions overall, recently estimated at $1,500 per patient per year.”

While it is true that a national drug plan could achieve some economies of scale through bulk purchasing power, there would also be a hefty price to pay. Apart from removing private coverage from the system and offloading the entire cost to taxpayers, a government-run plan would result in less choice of medication, lower or no access to innovative medicines, and fewer drugs for rare diseases, all of which have real life — and death — consequences for patients.

Why? Because national pharmacare requires a low-cost national formulary, or list of approved drugs, whose prices are set by the government. In 2017, the Liberals began paving the way for these lower prices by changing the basket of countries on which our prices are based — “down in line with what we’re seeing in countries like New Zealand” was how then-health minister Jane Philpott described it. New Zealand has had a phamacare system since 1993.

What the Liberals failed to mention was a 2019 report commissioned by Medicines New Zealand that ranked the country last for access to medicines and pharmaceutical investment among 20 OECD nations. Of 304 medicines introduced between 2011 and 17, New Zealand funded only 17. Drug manufacturers didn’t introduce many life-saving cancer therapies and other innovative medicines into the New Zealand market because the government’s price ceiling was too low to cover the cost of producing them.

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Why?

Because they can:

An architectural group that was chosen by a jury to build a monument to Canada’s mission in Afghanistan says the government’s decision to award the contract to a different group is outrageous and anti-democratic.

Veterans Affairs Canada announced the approximately $3-million commission in June, awarding it to a team led by Indigenous artist Adrian Stimson.

“This is so anti-democratic,” said Renee Daoust, a spokesperson for Team Daoust, which placed first in the competition.

“They’re not respecting their own procurement rules that they have set up, and to us that’s really unacceptable,” she said.

The team included the firm Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, artist Luca Fortin and former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour, who acted as an adviser on the mission in Afghanistan.

Daoust said they learned they won the competition just a couple of hours before Veterans Affairs Canada held a press conference on June 19 — and then they were told the government was going to overrule the jury’s choice.

“We said, ’Well, this is so unfair. Why are you doing this?”’ she said.

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We're not THAT racist

The Canadian Human Rights Commission says it has stopped mistreating Black employees but acknowledged “there is a long road ahead on our anti-racism journey.” Critics have demanded the entire management be fired for discrimination: “We do have some senior Black executives.”

 

Because everything is a "journey", not a moral error or a personal failing to acknowledge and overcome.


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