Your middle-of-the-week moment of truth ...
The government has to make its money somehow:
The Trudeau government is expected collect nearly a half-billion dollars in sales taxes on the carbon tax this year alone.
On January 23, the Budget Office acknowledged that a five percent federal Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the carbon tax will cost Canadians $486 million despite repeated claims by Liberals that the carbon tax is “revenue neutral.”
According to the Legislative Costing Note, if the GST was removed, it “would reduce federal GST revenues by $486 million in 2024 increasing to $1 billion in 2031.”
Furthermore, GST charges are expected to cost each provinces millions this year, with Ontario paying the most at $182 million followed by Alberta at $96 million, Québec at $77 million, British Columbia at $58 million, Saskatchewan at $29 million, Manitoba at $18 million, Nova Scotia at $10 million, New Brunswick at $7 million, Newfoundland and Labrador at $6 million, and Prince Edward Island at $1 million.
The startling numbers come as the Liberal government under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly claimed no revenue is earned on the carbon tax.
“Our price on pollution is revenue neutral,” Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told the House of Commons in 2022. “All the money goes back to Canadian families.”
“It is very important to note this is revenue neutral,” she repeated in the House of Commons finance committee in 2022. “The money is returned directly to Canadian families.”
Similarly, in December, Liberal MP Kody Blois told the House of Commons that the carbon tax was “revenue neutral.”
In 2019, now-Attorney General Arif Virani told Members of Parliament, “The plan is an entirely revenue neutral plan. It is not a tax.” ...
Trudeau’s carbon tax, framed as a way to reduce carbon emissions, has cost Canadians hundreds more annually despite rebates.
The increased costs are only expected to rise, as a recent report revealed that a carbon tax of more than $350 per tonne is needed to reach Trudeau’s net-zero goals by 2050.
Currently, Canadians living in provinces under the federal carbon pricing scheme pay $65 per tonne, but the Trudeau government has a goal of $170 per tonne by 2030.
Also:
The Commons Speaker yesterday ordered Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s latest omnibus budget bill to be split up into nine separate votes. The order sought by Conservative MPs followed Freeland’s appeal to pass the mammoth bill and “do so quickly.”
Damn proles:
A new report published by Statistics Canada last week showed that the wealth gap in our country continues to widen. According to the report, the richest 20 per cent of Canadians accounted for nearly 70 per cent of the country’s total wealth in the third quarter of 2023, while the bottom 40 per cent of Canadians represented a meagre three per cent of Canada’s wealth in that time. The wealth gap between these two groups rose by 0.2 per cent from 2022 to 2023.
The highest-earning Canadians experienced a gain in net saving from 2022 to 2023, while low-income households experienced a decrease in that metric as they struggled to pay rising bills, interest on loans and mortgages and food and gas costs. In other words, while the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.
A week before the StatsCan news regarding growing income inequality, Oxfam Canada reported that the richest 0.02 per cent of Canadians now possess more wealth than the bottom 80 per cent.
And while wage growth has stalled for most Canadians, those at the top of the corporate ladder continue to receive record-breaking compensation, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Joel Kotkin, an urban studies professor from California, wrote about the growing divide in wealth in his 2020 book titled “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class.” Kotkin cites California as a striking example of a modern neo-feudal state.
According to him, California is characterized by an ultra-rich upper class composed of tech oligarchs — which he describes as a new aristocracy — and below them, at the bottom of society, are the new “serfs,” a large and growing segment of the population that is property-less and poor.
California, says Kotkin, “has become the progenitor of a new form of feudalism characterized by gross inequality and increasingly rigid class lines,” with a degree of income inequality that is worse than in Mexico. One-third of all welfare recipients in the entire United States live in California. The state’s middle class, meanwhile, is evaporating as people and companies flee high taxes, worsening crime and suffocating regulations.
Canada is looking more and more like a neo-feudal state, with a small number of very wealthy individuals and an increasingly expanding lower class of people whose incomes and wealth are shrinking year by year. In between these two groups is the bureaucratic class, which serves the very rich and powerful and keeps the rest of the people under their thumb with countless rules and regulations that restrict nearly every aspect of their lives.
Also - the Bourbons and Romanovs thought that the proles were getting uppity, too:
“When Americans are asked if there is too much or too little freedom, elites are three times more likely to say that there is too much individual freedom in America than all Americans. Almost six out of 10 of the graduates from elite colleges think there is too much freedom.”
Millions in bonuses have still not been ruled out for CBC/Radio-Canada’s executives despite hundreds of job cuts planned in the English and French services.
The head of the public broadcaster, Catherine Tait, told the parliamentary committee of heritage on Tuesday that the board of directors will rule by the end of the fiscal year, on March 31, whether executives will receive compensation which she called “performance pay.”Last year, CBC/Radio-Canada awarded $14.9 million in compensation to more than 1,100 people which was calculated on individual and the corporation’s performance, CBC/Radio-Canada’s Chief Transformation Officer Marco Dubé told MPs.“These are not frivolous awards given at Christmas time,” said Tait, who said that amount is “an extremely small number” in comparison to $950 million of the entire payroll.Typically, she said, the management team presents to the board of directors the results of the year according to key performance indicators that have been tracked throughout the year, and the board will make its decision based on the analysis and the results.“It’s not my decision whether I get a bonus or not,” said Tait.The public broadcaster announced in December that it plans to cut about 10 per cent of its workforce – which amounts to cutting 600 union and non-union positions and eliminating 200 vacant positions – in order to cope with a $125 million budget shortfall.
Several challengers to the Emergencies Act say they’re preparing to sue government officials and financial institutions after the Federal Court’s recent declaration that the invocation of the act was not justified.Military veteran Eddie Cornell, police veteran Vincent Gircys, and Jeremiah Jost said in a Jan. 29 statement that they will sue “those in government, the financial institutions who froze people’s bank accounts, and the police officers who beat up and injured innocent.”The move comes after Justice Richard Mosley ruled on their case on Jan. 23 and concluded that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires [beyond legal authority].” ...The men launching the fresh lawsuit say they’re asking “all Canadians who have been affected” by the Emergencies Act invocation to join them. They’ve established The Accountability Project to fundraise for their case.Their initial statement does not indicate which officials will be sued by the group and whether they are launching a class action lawsuit. Mr. Cornell told The Epoch Times that details are currently being worked on.Wounded Afghanistan veteran Chris Deering, who testified at POEC having been beaten by police when the Freedom Convoy protest was being cleared in Ottawa, intends to join the lawsuit.The Liberal government said it would appeal Justice Mosley’s decision. “We respect very much Canada’s independent judiciary,” said Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland in reaction to the ruling. “However, we do not agree with this decision.”
A “friend” exemption allowing MPs to accept costly free gifts should be narrowed under the Conflict Of Interest Act, legislators said yesterday. Debate at the Commons ethics committee followed the Prime Minister’s $84,000 expense-paid Christmas holiday in Jamaica: “We should have a cap.”
SNC-Lavalin Group pandemic field hospitals delivered by rush order two years ago under a $150 million contract remain warehoused at a secret location, records show. The Department of Public Works has estimated storage of the little-used units is costing taxpayers an additional $135 million: “The exact location of the warehouse cannot be shared.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 ignored multiple warnings and committed Canada to membership in Xi Jinping’s pet project—an infrastructure bank that finances Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and furthers China’s bid to become an imperial power.The bank, known as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), pretends to be benign—just another multilateral development bank, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank—but its corporate structure belies such “business-as-usual” claims.For one thing, the AIIB is majority-owned by credit-challenged borrowers, giving the borrowers an incentive to approve loans for vanity projects that make little or no economic sense. This governance structure is a high-finance version of an insane asylum run by its inmates. For another, the bank’s structure gives the Chinese regime an effective veto over major decisions, making the borrowers—Middle East countries like Turkey and Iran as well as east-Asian countries like the Philippines—dependent on Xi’s largesse.The AIIB, effectively President Xi’s Imperial Bank, makes perfect sense for China and for many of its impecunious owners who have trouble getting financing elsewhere. But it makes no sense for a country like Canada, that has nothing to gain from membership aside from winning brownie points with China, and a billion dollars to lose if the bank goes south.
Canada has already committed US$200 million to its membership in AIIB, and is on the hook for another $800 million should the risky projects that the bank is financing go belly up, or should the global economy face another 2007–2008 financial crisis.
But even in the unlikely event that all the bank’s investments prove viable, Canadian taxpayers have nothing to gain by backing AIIB—taxpayers will never receive any dividends or any other tangible return. The sole financial rationale to justify Canada’s entanglement in AIIB is the sweetheart contracts the AIIB hands out to its members’ multinationals. Yet when Canadian corporations get contracts courtesy of AIIB, they merely amount to subsidies from Canadian taxpayers to Canadian corporations via the bank. When Canadian corporations don’t land the contracts, multinationals based in other AIIB member countries, which include Iran, Russia, and China, land Canadian-taxpayer-subsidized contracts.
Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne is once again insisting that he is reaching out to international grocers in the hopes they will open up shop in Canada and spur more competition.Champagne said Tuesday that he’d spoken to one foreign grocer that very morning as part of his efforts to court new players for the Canadian grocery sector — but he’s not naming any names.
“I can’t tell you too much, or else you won’t ask me questions next week,” he said in French in advance of the weekly cabinet meeting.
“I spoke with one company this morning.”
As food inflation rages on, Champagne has repeatedly teased in recent months the conversations he says he’s been having with foreign grocers.
Canada needs more competition for grocery dollars, and having more players in the market would help put downward pressure on prices, he said.
“Am I going to succeed? I don’t know. But certainly, it’s worth trying.”
The focus on attracting international grocers comes after Champagne’s largely futile attempt to push Canadian grocers to help bring grocery prices under control.
The Legault government defended its ethical record on Wednesday, saying it is preposterous to think a mayor can obtain a bridge or highway extension simply by buying a $100 ticket to a party fundraiser.But if the opposition parties want to overhaul Quebec’s electoral financing law, which imposes a limit of $100 on an individual’s political contribution limit and includes massive state funding for political parties based on their electoral performance, they are open to discuss change.
With a fifth MNA named for allegedly selling access to a cabinet minister, the Coalition Avenir Québec government sent two top ministers to meet the press: Education Minister Bernard Drainville, who in his past life was a Parti Québécois minister for democratic institutions, and Jean-François Roberge, who holds the title now.
“We must stop this crazy discourse, which basically says you can buy a Quebec minister for a $100 donation,” Drainville told reporters standing in the lobby of the legislature. “This is mad. This is ridiculous. How can you believe that someone who is coming to a funding event will come out of the event with bridge, a commitment or a grant?
“This is not the way it works. To argue you can have ministers who can be bought off in return for $100 donation, this is mad. This undermines a system which has worked wonders for Quebec.”
Under the current electoral law, political parties get more than half of their annual budget from the state based on the number of votes they get in an election.
They are also allowed to raise funds on their own, often organizing events where they sell tickets. An individual is allowed to donate $100 a year to a party for which they are issued a tax receipts.
NO political party should be getting ANY public money.
Record immigration “may exacerbate existing pressures” on the housing market, says a Department of Employment memo. It noted requests for migrant labour work permits jumped 66 percent: “What is the department doing?”
The House of Commons has voted to let Greg Fergus keep his job as Speaker, nearly two months after the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois called for him to resign.Those calls came after Fergus was shown giving a video tribute to the outgoing interim leader of the Ontario Liberals at a party event in December.
Fergus was wearing his Speaker robes and recorded the video in his office, and opposition MPs said that led them to question his impartiality in the House.
The House procedure and affairs committee studied the issue before the holidays.
Liberal and NDP members of the committee recommended that Fergus stay on as Speaker, apologize and pay back Parliament for using its resources to make the video.
The Conservatives tried to send the issue back to the committee, saying they learned since the study that Fergus engaged in other partisan activities as Speaker.
That proposed amendment was voted down in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
The laziness that cost a country:
A typical Canadian spends about half their work day on social media with little interest in what the Government of Canada has to say, according to in-house federal research. Data document a dramatic rise in the popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other platforms: “A very small number commented they seldom used social media or did not use it at all.”
Well, if the rainbow fits ... :
The Niagara Catholic District School Board (NCDSB) has found the trustee who compared the Pride flag to the Nazi flag violated the board's code of conduct.
As a result, the trustee, Natalia Benoit, has been censured, relieved of her duties and barred from attending all meetings until June 30, the board said in a media release this week.
By cancelling this woman, you only prove her right.
He was hoping to ride out his killing spree in the woods:
Myles Sanderson, 32, fatally stabbed 11 people and injured 17 others at James Smith Cree Nation and in the nearby village of Weldon, Sask. on the morning of Sept. 4.
The Liberals have made their admiration for Hamas' basic brutality well-known:
A Liberal member of Parliament says it would be in the best interests of the Middle East and the world if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves office.
Winnipeg MP Ben Carr says he has major concerns about the Israeli government and he hopes Netanyahu will be, in his words, "gone sooner rather than later."
Carr, who is Jewish, says he does not support politicians on the far right of the spectrum in Israel who display maps of Gaza with Israeli flags.
He made the comments following a conference last weekend in Jerusalem where far-right lawmakers called for renewing Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Israel's national security minister declared it was time to encourage the emigration of Palestinians from the besieged territory — something the Canadian government has firmly opposed.
Governments change, says Carr, and Israel is still an ally that has an important security role to play in the region.
"It's very, very important that we remember that governments come and governments go and our relationships with states are deeper than the relationship that we may have with the current government in power," he said Wednesday.
"My hope is that Netanyahu will be gone sooner rather than later, because I think that's in the best interests of everybody in the region, and I think that's in the best interests of everybody around the world."
And who would replace Netanyahu?
A soft liberal or someone who thinks that the job of liquidating Hamas is going too slowly?
Just to remind everyone what the Liberals really support:
Israeli soldiers in Khan Yunis destroyed an underground weapons factory belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad where weapons were found hidden in sacks belonging to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.
Isn't Justin anti-Israel enough?:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was confronted by an angry mob shouting “shame, shame,” as he left a building in Gatineau, Que., on Monday night. The footage was uploaded to X, formerly Twitter, by an account linked to the web site Israel Now.
The 52-second clip begins with the prime minister walking out of a building with several security personnel. Almost immediately, a group of unseen people start blowing a whistle and shouting “Shame, shame, Trudeau!”
The prime minister pauses briefly and is then hustled into a waiting car by his security detail. It drives off as one of the protesters then yells: “Get outta here!”
The video then cuts to a new shot of the car in traffic, being followed by a group of protesters on foot shouting: “Shame on you!” As the car pauses briefly, the group can be heard yelling “free Palestine” and “you guys are cowards” before it drives off again.
Justin DOES have a habit of running away, doesn't he?
One would assume that spies are supposed to keep secrets (if not drive fast cars and toy with ingenious devices):
The former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has urged the commission investigating foreign election interference to push back against what he called an often overprotective national security culture.
"Things are classified more than they need to be," Richard Fadden told the commission Wednesday.
"There is room to push because of this overprotection, this culture."
The Chinese have been able to infiltrate Canadian society at virtually every level.
Is that what Fadden has a problem with?
The BBC was allowed to “misrepresent” the risk posed by Covid to most people to boost public support for lockdown, the UK Covid Inquiry has heard.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, an eminent epidemiologist and government adviser, lambasted the corporation for having “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm”.
He said this created the “misleading impression” among BBC News viewers at the start of the pandemic that “we are all at risk” and “the virus does not discriminate”.
In reality, he said it was known at the time that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s.
But Prof Woolhouse told the Covid Inquiry the BBC did not correct its reporting, saying: “I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”
Eight million people, not counting gotaways, have shown up at the southern border during Biden’s first three years, and the CDC doesn’t require a vaccine passport, or as it appears, check them for anything, despite the fact that these people come from the most unhygienic corners of the world; they’re simply released throughout the U.S.
So why haven’t the concerned scientists at the CDC protested?
Here they warn about measles, saying they have tracked seven cases that have been “brought into the country” yet they don’t tell us from where, or how:
CDC issues alert that measles cases are up, urging health providers to watch for disease
Officials have tracked seven cases of measles being brought into the country and two U.S. outbreaks with more than five cases each, the CDC said.
Why didn’t the USA Today author ask where they came from, and why didn’t he say a word about the open borders? The answer is the media doesn’t care.
During COVID, draconian restrictions were imposed upon U.S citizens, but not on the people coming in illegally; why? The answer is obvious. It wasn’t about keeping viruses from spreading, it was about medical tyranny.
Where are the women's groups on this?:
Cuba’s communist regime is planning to force political prisoner Lisdany Rodríguez Isaac, who is reportedly currently seven weeks pregnant, to kill her unborn child, the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders denounced on Tuesday evening.
Canadian bioethicist Kerry Bowman isn’t convinced euthanasia for people with a psychiatric condition is ever going to fly and suspects the latest delay “is going to be the death of it.”
“I’m not sure we’ll get past this delay. I’m not even convinced this is ever going to resurface,” Bowman said of the Liberal government’s decision to pursue yet another pause in the planned expansion of medical assistance in dying to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness.
“I think it may have died with this,” Bowman said.
Canada’s federal health and justice ministers have concurred with a special parliamentary committee report that the health-care system isn’t “ready” to proceed with the expansion, due to take effect in March after a year’s delay, and that more time is needed for medical personnel to be trained on new curriculum and standards.
There is an election coming up.
This is only a pause.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Beijing told the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday that Kyiv is “committed to the one-China principle,” which denies the existence of the state of Taiwan and falsely asserts the sovereign nation is a province of communist China.
Ambassador Pavlo Riabikin reportedly made the statement in a meeting with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong in Beijing, according to a readout published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
The Ukrainian government has spent much of the two years following Russia’s invasion of its territory attempting to convince China, Moscow’s closest ally, to change allegiances and support Ukraine – or at least help rebuild the cities devastated by the Russian assault. Ukraine is a formal member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global debt trap plan in which Beijing offers predatory loans to vulnerable countries meant to be used to pay Chinese companies for infrastructure projects.
Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has repeatedly attempted to establish consistent communication with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and urged him to dissuade strongman Vladimir Putin from continuing his onslaught against Ukraine.
On the international stage, Ukraine has failed to condemn China’s extensive human rights violations, including the genocide of the majority-Muslim Uyghur people and continued occupation of East Turkistan, and fallen silent for years on Beijing’s increasingly belligerent threats against Taiwan.
Kyiv’s attempts to court China have largely failed. Putin made his first international trip after being charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2023 to China, enjoying a red-carpet welcome from Xi. China has called for “peace” in Ukraine generally but not condemned Russia for starting the war by invading Ukraine – nor called for Russia to withdraw its troops.
The Zelensky administration appears to be continuing its overtures to China, however, as it sent its ambassador to discuss the issue with the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Also - peace was never an option:
Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev told Japan on Tuesday it would have to drop territorial claims to a group of Pacific islands if it wanted to conclude a peace treaty with Russia formally ending World War Two.
The blunt remarks by Medvedev, a former president who is deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, over what Moscow calls the Kuril islands are likely to anger Japan which lays claim to four of the southernmost islands, which it calls the Northern Territories.
Russia, the main successor state to the Soviet Union, and Japan have never signed a peace treaty formally ending their hostilities during World War Two, with the islands remaining the primary stumbling block.
The islands are located off Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island, and were seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War Two.
Diplomats on both sides once spoke of the possibility of reviving a Soviet-era draft agreement that envisaged returning two of the four islands to Japan as part of a peace deal.
But Russia withdrew from peace treaty talks with Japan and froze joint economic projects related to the islands in 2022 because of Japanese sanctions over Russia's war in Ukraine and relations have soured further since.
And:
It has been discovered that there are missile remnants marked with North Korean-script in Ukraine. This discovery indicates that Russia may be using North Korean ballistic missiles, such as the KN-23 or KN-24, in the current conflict with Ukraine. Such a move could undermine global efforts of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Belgian farmers are in revolt:
The Belgian port of Zeebrugge was blockaded on Tuesday, causing gridlock on surrounding roads as a wave of farmer protests spread across Europe.
Authorities at the North Sea port, one of the biggest in Europe, said all access roads were blocked by 5pm (1600 GMT) on Tuesday, in a demonstration that will hit commercial trade, including imports and exports of food to and from the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia.
“Every single road into and out of the port is blocked. No trucks can get in, cars are being let in and police and the harbour master are trying to find a safe way for these trucks to wait on the side of the road,” said a spokesperson for the port authority for Antwerp-Zeebrugge.
Farmers plan to block the port until midnight on Wednesday in a protest over the prices they receive for food, blamed on cheap imports, and the impact of EU environmental policies. Tractors bearing slogans such as “Minister for a while, farmer for life” and “Do you like bread, meat or fries? You won’t get them without farmers” reflected the anger many farmers say they feel about what they claim is a lack of understanding among politicians about the precariousness of their positions.
Farmers said the port was targeted because they felt it received economic support at the expense of farmers.
And now for something completely fascinating:
While taking part in an ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1848, the British-made vessels — the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — became trapped in the ice off the northern coast of Canada.
Stranded in the cold, all 129 men aboard perished, and the wooden ships disappeared without a trace.
That is, until 2014, when their hulls were discovered about 150 feet below the surface near King William Island.
Since their finding, archaeologists have taken part in annual dives down to the wrecks, combing through the algae-covered remains in search of sunken treasure.
Artifacts keep coming to the surface. Divers found map-making tools, coins, a pistol and medicine bottles. Some items are clearly personal — a leather shoe, shoulder epaulets, a fishing rod with a brass reel that looks ready for use, a group of fossils someone saved for souvenirs.
The team is now working with the Geological Survey of Canada to find out where the fossils came from and perhaps learn more about where the ships travelled before sinking below the ice.
Both the Terror and the Erebus sites are co-managed by Parks Canada and the Nattilik Heritage Society in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, which also administers the Wrecks Guardian Program and the Nattilik Heritage Centre. Recovered artifacts are co-owned by Parks Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust.
Much has been done since the first of the wrecks was discovered, with dozens of artifacts undergoing the painstaking process of conservation in Ottawa labs. Years of excavation remain, but Moore never loses sight of the fact that the story unfolding in front of his diver’s mask is one of the great tragedies and mysteries of the North.
“You can imagine someone walking along a beach and picking up those fossils,” Moore said. “(The artifacts) give us this keen insightful connection to people in the past.”
**
The massive, overturned hull of a seemingly ancient ship has appeared without warning along the southwestern tip of Newfoundland, dazzling nearby residents eager to know who may have been aboard and how it met its fate. ...
But the beaches along that corner of Newfoundland have eroded substantially in the past few years. As post-tropical storm Fiona tore through the area on Sept. 24, 2022, destroying about 100 homes and pounding away shorelines, it churned up the sand along Cape Ray Beach, said Neil Burgess, president of the Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland and Labrador.
If the ship was buried, Fiona may have dislodged it from its sandy grave, and each subsequent storm would have loosened it further, Burgess said. There were large swells there last week, and they may have finally unearthed the wreck enough to be discovered by someone out hunting birds.
Burgess said he figures the ship was built in the 1800s, noting a few different factors led him to that conclusion. The wooden dowels noted by Wanda Blackwood are called trunnels and they were used as nails in wooden ships from that era. There are also copper pegs in the wreck, each more than two centimetres wide, which were used to fasten the hull's planks together, which Burgess said are quite large.
The emerged hull is about 24 metres long, and it's not complete, which means the ship itself was even longer than that, he added.
"It was a fairly substantial sailing ship, bigger than a schooner, I think," Burgess said, adding that if its hull is made of oak, it wasn't built in North America.
He hasn't yet been out to see the wreck — he lives in St. John's, about 900 kilometres east by highway — but he's looking for an opportunity to get there.
The seabed around Newfoundland is littered with "thousands" of shipwrecks and they surface from time to time, he said. But that doesn't make the Cape Ray wreck any less exciting.
"This is perfect," Burgess said. "This is a great, great event."
**
It’s no secret that the ancient Romans were lovers of wine. So gripped by the grape were they, that they even worshiped a god — Bacchus — devoted to wine and merriment.
But, little is known about what their wine actually tasted like. Was it bitter or sweet? Fruity or earthy? According to a pioneering new study, it was rather spicy and smelled like toast.
The study, published on Jan. 23 in the journal Antiquity, analyzed Roman clay jars, known as dolia, which were used to manufacture, ferment and store ancient wines.
By comparing these vessels, which have long been overlooked, to similar containers used in modern wine-making, researchers were able to demystify the ancient flavors and the processes that created them.
The findings “change much of our current understanding of Roman winemaking,” researchers, affiliated with multiple European institutions, said.
Dolia vessels were porous, egg-shaped containers that would have been partially buried underground and sealed during the wine-making process — all factors that would have contributed to the flavor palette of the finished product.
As a result of this process — and the addition of natural yeasts — the wine would have taken on a “slightly spicy” taste and given off the aroma of “toasted bread, apples, roasted walnuts and curry,” researchers said.
The study also looked to answer the question of whether Roman wine was red or white — a topic of longstanding interest and debate.
The researchers found that “contrary to widespread belief, it seems unlikely that most vinification in antiquity was ‘white’ in the sense of its modern meaning.”
Instead, grapes were added into the mix regardless of color and the skins were left in, rather than filtered out with strainers, researchers said.
“This explains in large part the wide color range of ancient wines, as attested in the ancient sources,” researchers said.
These colors included white, reddish-yellow, blood red and black. Thanks to their “precisely engineered” dolia, researchers concluded, the ancient Romans were able to ferment wines of a variety of flavors — though further studies are needed to better advance the archaeological understanding.
**
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Ireland in 2020, Billy Mag Fhloinn was one of many restricted to within just a few miles of his home.
Lockdown walks on the Dingle Peninsula soon became almost a ritual for Fhloinn — and they helped lead to a major discovery.
The folklorist and professor had recently come across a reference to an ancient Bronze Age tomb that once existed on the peninsula. The tomb, considered “lost” since 1852, was said to have stood on the same hill overlooking the village Baile an Fheirtéaraigh in West Kerry, where Mag Fhloinn lives.
“There’s a lot of sort of natural rock formations there, which could have been the place where the tomb was found,” Mag Fhloinn told McClatchy News in a Jan. 23 interview. “There was one which kind of caught my eye. And I had half an idea that this might be it.”
Now, two and a half years since Mag Fhloinn’s initial searches for the altar — known locally as Altóir na Gréine, or the altar of the sun — he’s finally taken a closer look at the rock formation.
For the last few months, Mag Fhloinn has been working on a mapping project of the peninsula with Sacred Heart University, taking photos and videos to create 3D models of the region in hopes of discovering ancient tombs, he said.
He decided to try modeling the stones he had seen during his 2020 explorations on the “off-chance” they were connected to the altar.
Mag Fhloinn brought data about the rocks home, entered it into his computer and began playing with the model by rotating the stones. That’s when he realized some of the modeled rocks matched the shape of an illustration of the tomb from 1838.
“I think that was my eureka moment. That was when I realized, okay, I really think I’m on the right track here,” Mag Fhloinn said.
After compiling his research, Mag Fhloinn sent his findings to the National Monument Service, and in December, an archaeologist verified that the rocks were in fact the ruins of Altóir na Gréine.
