Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week retrospective ....

And why isn't this seen as serious?:

Air Canada flight 8657 from Halifax Stanfield International Airport to Newark Liberty International Airport on Feb. 19 landed without incident but was delayed by an hour and a half, according to data from FlightStats, a global flight tracker.

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The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a statement to National Post that it received a report of a threat made toward the flight at noon on Monday.

“The plane landed at EWR Terminal A without incident, and all passengers have deplaned safely with no reported injuries,” they added.

About an hour after arriving in New Jersey, the Port Authority Police Department and its canine unit fully cleared the plane. The incident remains under investigation.

Air Canada has not responded to a request for comment.

In a statement to Global News, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it was aware of the incident but it did not fall under the criteria that would require investigation or reporting by the TSB.

You had to land the plane and send the dogs.

But it's not serious?

Right ....

The game is rigged.

Why continue playing it?:

The Canadian Friends of Hong Kong, a a non-partisan diaspora group, announced on Tuesday that its members will not take part in the public inquiry into foreign interference in Canada’s elections, citing “grave concerns regarding the objectivity and the security integrity” of the inquiry.

“Specifically, we denounce the granting of full standing to MPs Han Dong and Michael Chan, and intervener standing to Senator Yuen Pau Woo, by Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue,” the group’s press release stated.

The Internet censorship bill is dead  ... for now:

Cabinet is shelving a long-threatened bill to regulate truth and disinformation on the internet. Canadians consider the measure unconstitutional, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc wrote in a letter to MPs: “Policies that restrict or otherwise limit speech based on the veracity of information would undermine freedom of expression.”

 

ArriveCan is the new Ad-Scam/SNC-Lavalin ... :

Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett said his party put forward a motion to compel the owners of the Ottawa tech firm, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony, to appear before the government operations committee after it was revealed last week that their firm made nearly $20 million on the contract alone.

“Today’s motion is critical and it’s going to be a real test of the NDP-Liberal coalition, because we’re going to find out if the NDP are prepared to provide the accountability and answers that Canadians deserve in Justin Trudeau’s latest scandal,” said Barrett.

Conservatives said that GC Strategies has already defied two recent summons to appear in front of committee, but they are ready to use a “very rare” maneuver to force them to comply.

“It is unfortunate that it’s come to this point. But it is essential that we use this tool if these individuals continue to ignore us,” said Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer. “And this time, though, there will be the understanding that if they ignore this summons there will be consequences.”

Should the motion pass and should the heads of GC Strategies refuse once again to appear at committee, Conservatives want to ask the Sergeant-at-Arms, who is the head of security on Parliament Hill, to take one or both individuals into his custody to force them to answer MPs’ questions.

Behold, the coalition in action!:

Liberal MPs yesterday blocked committee subpoenas forcing ArriveCan contractors to testify under threat of arrest. “This is putting us all in a rather precarious position,” said MP Charles Sousa (Mississauga-Lakeshore, Ont.), parliamentary secretary for the Department of Public Works that okayed $59.5 million in ArriveCan contracts: “It is important I think that we take a pause.”

 

You think it is important to shred documents, you fat liar!

** 

It is impossible to know whether federal managers destroyed ArriveCan evidence sought by investigators, Auditor General Karen Hogan said yesterday. Hogan and others cited a suspicious lack of records regarding the $59.5 million program that went overbudget on sweetheart contracting: “When documentation doesn’t exist it is either they never existed or they were destroyed.”

**

An application for a class-action lawsuit has been launched over issues with the ArriveCan app that resulted in thousands of Canadians being instructed to quarantine when they should have been exempt.

The application was filed Monday for a suit against the Attorney General of Canada in the Federal Court in Montreal by Consumer Law Group. It comes after a 2024 report by the auditor general of Canada found issues with the ArriveCan app, including that it wrongly instructed about 10,000 people to quarantine in June 2022 following one of many updates.

“There was an obligation on the government to make sure the app was functioning properly, because there were serious consequences if it was not,” Jeff Orenstein, a lawyer at Consumer Law Group, said Tuesday.

The app was used to collect information about where travellers had been, their pre-travel COVID-19 test results, proof of vaccination and symptom self-assessments. Issues with the app arose almost immediately after it became mandatory to enter Canada, with travellers complaining that it was confusing, unreliable and awkward to navigate. Several people reported being ordered to quarantine over issues with the app as early as December 2021.

The class action covers anyone who travelled to Canada while the app was mandatory for entry (between Nov. 21, 2020 and Oct. 1, 2022) and was wrongly instructed to isolate when they should have been exempt because of their vaccination status.

The carbon tax is far too lucrative to scale back or repeal:

The federal government is cutting the amount of financial relief small businesses will receive from carbon pricing revenues so it can increase the size of the rebate it is providing to rural families.

That's despite the fact the government still owes businesses more than $2.5 billion in promised carbon pricing revenues from the first five years of the program — and refuses to say when that money will flow.

Small businesses were already paying more than they were getting back, and the change will make that shortfall even worse, said Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

"It is deeply unfair," Kelly said.

"I expect the outrage level among small businesses toward this tax to rise once business owners find out about the bad tax being even a bigger ripoff."

They are bribing you with your own money while destroying you.

Taxes aren't just excessive; they're punitive:

In recent years the Trudeau government has introduced a series of one-time payouts such as a $500 “top-up” to the Canadian Housing Benefit, the $650 Canada Dental Benefit or the 2023 Grocery Rebate.

Since the payouts were all administered by the CRA, applicants couldn’t receive them without being up-to-date on their tax returns — even if that wasn’t otherwise necessary. In the case of the Grocery Rebate, the CRA told applicants “you need to file a tax return for 2021, even if you have no income to report for that year.”

For the housing and dental benefits, meanwhile, applicants had to apply separately via the CRA — and could be forced to return the payout if they got their income details wrong.

Forcing millions of tax filers into an odyssey of paperwork each year has its costs. According to a 2019 critique by the Montreal Economic Institute, the Canadian system “is one of the costliest among OECD countries.”

And it’s certainly not an issue specific to the Liberals. In the final months of the nine-year Harper government, the Fraser Institute commissioned a survey attempting to estimate the costs to the average Canadian of “complying” with the tax system.

When factoring in time, accounting fees and software costs, they figured it cost Canadians about $500 apiece just to pay their taxes — the equivalent of $642 in today’s dollars.

 

Your government hates you.

Who would have thought that a cold country like Canada would require indoor heating?:

As many as a fifth of Canadians face “energy poverty” due to high costs, says the Canadian Journal of Public Health. “Depending on the measure, six to 19 percent of Canadian households face energy poverty,” said a peer-reviewed study led by a McGill professor: “In Canada home heating during the winter months is a matter of life and death.”

 

 

It's like a Gordon Lightfoot song: 

A year ago, at the time of that event, we didn’t really know whether or not the Alberta Is Calling ad campaign was drawing people in. Now we know. And the campaign is a success. Canadians are moving to Alberta from other provinces in increasingly higher numbers.

According to recent reportingfrom the National Post, interprovincial migration numbers into Alberta doubled last year. In 2022, 22,278 people moved from other provinces to Alberta, but in 2023, that number was 45,194.

Third quarter numbers show that the highest number of new arrivals to Alberta by province originated from Ontario (6,262), followed by British Columbia (5,269).

The question of what’s fuelling this rapid increase seems to be exactly what the ad campaign claims—that life is indeed better by a number of key economic indicators.

Alberta does not have a provincial sales tax. It also doesn’t have a land transfer tax on the purchase of homes. Here in Toronto, we have two—a provincial land transfer tax and a municipal one.

These things all add up. And when the base price of a home is cheaper and the salaries are equivalent or better, the combined benefits are even greater. Your dollar goes a lot further.

 

HA!:

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says he expects Canada to lay out when it will reach the alliance's target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence.

 

Some countries expect other leaders to actually do things.

 

 

Is that so?:

 Canada's mental health and addictions minister believes fear and stigma are driving criticism of the government's decision to support prescribing pharmaceuticals to drug users to combat the country's overdose crisis.

Ya'ara Saks attributes growing pushback to most harm reduction strategies — including federal funding for what are referred to as safer supply programs and the operation of supervised consumption sites — to the discomfort she says many feel toward a reality they can no longer ignore. 

I'll just leave this here:

One of the first things I grappled with at South Riverdale was the fact that clients were regularly coming into the lobby with things they had stolen – groceries, kids’ clothes, packages swiped from the porches of nearby homes – and openly selling them there. Very rarely did someone walk in with stolen goods and leave without being able to sell them.

 One staff member regularly paid a client to steal his booze from the local liquor store. When I asked a supervisor why this was allowed to happen, the response was: “We don’t talk about it. We don’t see it.” This is one of my earliest memories of how we as staff — and back then the harm reduction staff was off to the side from the rest of the health centre – were instructed to operate by an established code.

 The situation was further complicated by the fact that one manager, who oversaw five to 10 people at any given time, was using crack while on shift. It also seemed to be okay for a manager to roll joints in the lobby before going on breaks. Our clients may not have minded this, but parents were walking in the front doors of the centre with their kids for doctor’s appointments upstairs.

 I had a nice rapport with South Riverdale’s former CEO, who retired right around the time I was starting to confront these things. If that relationship had been further along then, I might have raised the issue about staff abusing drugs. But one learned quickly at South Riverdale that there was a strict rule not to be violated: protect the drug user at all costs – even if it’s a superior.

 This decree was established from my very first day on the job, and it applied to those outside the centre as well. If someone in the neighbouring community called about wanting discarded needles picked up from a park, the response internally was, “Really, how dare they?” Or someone would say, “We have to go pick up those needles again before the NIMBYs have a bird.”

The judges are on the side of criminals - always:

The case against an alleged cocaine dealer was tossed from court last week after a judge ruled the man’s charter rights were violated when police executed a no-knock raid while he was home with his terrified nine-year-old daughter.

Ottawa police used a battering ram to break down the door of the man’s Alta Vista home on May 29, 2020, where drug squad investigators seized 340 grams of cocaine, 270 grams of crystal meth, 74 pills of hydromorphone and $23,000 in cash.

The alleged dealer, who is identified by his initials M.H. to protect the identity of his daughter, was acquitted of all charges last week after Superior Court Justice Robyn Ryan Bell ruled his charter rights were violated during the so-called “dynamic entry.”

The tactical raids, executed in high-risk search warrants where police believe the suspect may be armed or could destroy evidence, have been the subject of controversy since the death of Anthony Aust in October 2020 during a no-knock raid on his family’s Jasmine Crescent apartment.

During his trial, M.H. testified he was sitting in the dining room of his Secord Avenue home, eating pizza with his daughter at 2:20 p.m. on May 29, 2020, when he saw police with guns drawn approaching his home.

He had his daughter sit on the floor away from the window, he testified, then called out to the officers with his hands up.

“Guys, my daughter is in here. I am going to open the door for you,” he told the officers, according to his testimony.

As he moved toward the front door, continuing to yell out that his daughter was there, he heard police yell, “Get back, get on the ground!” as they used a battering ram to break down the door. ...

The judge acknowledged the charges against alleged dealer were “very serious” and the evidence seized from his home was “highly reliable and crucial” to the prosecution’s case.

“At the same time, the court must be concerned about dissociating itself from a serious violation of M.H.’s charter right … the seriousness of the police misconduct in this case requires the court to dissociate itself from that conduct by excluding the evidence so as to preserve public confidence in and ensure state adherence to the rule of law,” the judge wrote. “Without the evidence obtained in the search, the Crown has no case against M.H.”

 

That's the Charter for you.

No one wants to talk to the proles and no one wants to admit that, in actuality, the disgruntled voter is just that - disgruntled, and not blinded by violence, making pre-emptive action rooted in paranoia:

Canada's senators have been issued panic buttons as concerns about the safety of members of Canada's upper house pile up, CBC News has learned.

Senators have been targeted by online harassment campaigns and threatening phone calls in recent weeks. In November, Conservative Sen. Don Plett's car was surrounded by pro-Palestinian protesters who banged on the windows and climbed onto the hood of his car while he was headed to a Conservative caucus meeting on Parliament Hill.

Sen. Peter Boehm, a career diplomat, said senators once thought they were shielded from the kinds of security risks sometimes faced by members of Parliament.

"All that I have noticed in my time in the Senate is that the threat levels have increased," he said. "The personal safety of senators is a concern."

Boehm said senators first began to feel the security environment had changed during the convoy protest that paralyzed downtown Ottawa for weeks in early 2022.

How convenient.

But no one got hurt during the convoy, did they?

Where is the wheel, the cures for devastating diseases, or even the written languages?:

Put simply, advocates of ‘indigenous knowledge’ argue that various cultures throughout history have their own ways of understanding the world. And these alternative, indigenous ‘ways of knowing’, they say, should be utilised alongside more established scientific methods in research and in policymaking.

Yes, some DEI advocates really do think that public-health bodies should seek the input of tribal elders and spiritual leaders – alongside, say, qualified physicians and epidemiologists. What’s more, they believe that racism is the only reason it has taken so long for indigenous knowledge to be utilised in this way. They argue that science is a ‘Western, colonialist structure’ that has only come to dominate our thinking thanks to white supremacy. This nefarious falsehood began in academia, with calls from activists to ‘decolonise’ science. Now it has reached the highest levels of the US government. ...

The claim that science is ‘Western’ is absurd, of course. One of the many wonderful things about science is that it does not discriminate. Science is a universal, cross-cultural concept. It invites anyone and everyone to participate and contribute to our growing understanding of reality. Science does not care about what you look like or where you come from. All science cares about is whether your methods and conclusions are sound enough to survive scrutiny. This clearly cannot be said for indigenous knowledge.

This is why there aren’t any ‘indigenous’ ways of flying an airplane that supersede our scientific understanding of aerodynamics. Or why the NHS doesn’t offer exorcisms as part of its mental-health services. A blood test administered in a clinical setting will yield the same results whether it’s carried out in London or Nairobi – because science actually works anywhere you do it. It’s about the ‘how’, not the ‘who’.

If every single piece of scientific knowledge were erased tomorrow and we had to start all over again, we would eventually come to the same conclusions as we have today. This is not true of indigenous knowledge, because, unlike science, it is not underpinned by logic and reason.

We all know that treating indigenous knowledge as akin to scientific evidence is a bit silly. But I suspect that is probably the point. Like with trans-rights ideologues, today’s self-professed ‘anti-racists’ like to frame statements of the obvious as akin to acts of bigotry. It gives them enormous power over the rest of us. We are all essentially being dared to say that relying on indigenous knowledge is a terrible idea. Of course, if you do say this in the wrong circles, you will be accused of racism and you will be silenced.

**

Some people are special:

John Robertson, a municipal councillor in Murray Harbour, P.E.I. (pop. 282), wanted to set the record straight. On the eve of the third National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in 2023, he changed the plastic letters on the sign outside his home to spell out a provocative message: “Truth: Mass grave hoax. Reconciliation: Redeem Sir John A’s integrity.”

Robertson wanted to start a conversation about what he viewed as a media-perpetrated hoax. Did he ever. The sign prompted dozens of emails and phone calls to the village from angry residents accusing him of residential school denialism. He also received messages of support. But rather than recognizing Robertson’s constitutional right protected by Section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, his fellow councillors decided to burn him at the proverbial stake.

On Oct. 4, Robertson was informed of an official complaint by three fellow councillors under the village code of conduct. The council hired a former RCMP officer to investigate the sign. She found that he had breached the code’s provisions against “unethical behaviour,” “inspiring public trust and confidence” and “discrimination, intimidation and harassment.” Village council voted to impose a maximum penalty: a $500 fine, a six-month suspension and a forced apology. The provincial minister in charge demanded he comply or resign. When Robertson refused to do either, the minister launched proceedings that could lead to his removal from village council.

 

 

So we are to believe that people who did not invent a wheel, had no written language, roamed, marauded, and enslaved enemy tribes are now the source of enlightenment not seen since Cockcroft and Walton split the atom and confirmed Einstein's theory? 🤨🤔

— Cookier (@CookieChickaroo) February 19, 2024

 

 

Men pretend to be women.

They will never be real women.

Not now, not ever:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre agrees with the idea of banning transgender women from participating in female sports and accessing “women-only” spaces like changing rooms and washrooms but did not commit to introducing legislation to do so.

“Female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for biological males,” he said during a press conference in Kitchener on Wednesday.

 

It was said that the followers of Christ would face hardships.

What was not explicitly written is how the world would turn its back on them:

More than 365 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith, according to the Open Doors World Watch List 2024.

The top ten countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution are North Korea, Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Except for North Korea, where the persecution is caused by "dictatorial paranoia" and "communist and post-communist oppression," the main religion of all other countries and groups on the list is Islam ...