Your Idiot Government and You

Do they know what they are doing and it's bad or are they really that stupid?

 YOU decide:

DOCUMENTS: Canadian exports of thermal coal have tripled since 2015 from 2.4 to 8.2 million tonnes.
“Ending coal power emissions is one of the single most important steps the world must take in the fight against climate change.”
— @s_guilbeault https://t.co/zS3qIJgWSa pic.twitter.com/gEzdTxrSJt

— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) February 1, 2024

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In 2015, the Canadian electorate took a functioning economy and handed it to a pack of people who do math  by counting on their fingers:

The Trudeau government’s industrial policy is such an embarrassing spectacle it is astonishing anyone would want to be associated with it. The latest development: Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne says he has recently been on the phone trying to convince international grocers to open shop in Canada. Yes, in order to get companies to invest in this country, the federal government is now resorting to begging. This begging takes place against the backdrop of the government’s intense political persecution of grocery chains already operating in Canada, an ongoing attempt to blame allegedly greedy businesses for price inflation that in fact has been caused by government decisions and other factors grocers cannot control.

Political attacks on existing businesses undoubtedly discourage investment, and while the Liberal narrative is that under their economic management Canada has become a wonderful place to invest, the facts are recalcitrant. Champagne boasts that in the first half of 2023 Canada ranked third in the world for direct foreign direct investment inflows. But the OECD report supporting this claim shows that US$29 billion in FDI inflows were dwarfed by US$55 billion in FDI outflows over the same period. Business investment in Canada under Trudeau is slumping, and the C.D. Howe Institute reports “capital per worker has been falling for the first time since the 1930s.”

The federal government’s handling of the grocery sector is an excellent illustration of why investment is fleeing. In 2022, it launched a series of show trials in which MPs interrogated grocery industry executives and slammed grocery companies for raising prices too high, paying workers too little and earning too much profit. In fact, net profit margins in the grocery business are in the low single digits and have been stable over time, but that was of no concern to the MPs, who were there for no reason other than to score political points by denouncing industry as rapacious.

The Trudeau government’s political attacks on the grocery industry intensified in 2023 with a threat of special taxation of grocery stores — informed, apparently, by the insane notion that special taxation could make groceries cheaper. Then came: orders from Mr. Champagne to grocery stores to immediately “stabilize food prices;” the creation of a “Grocery Task Force” to monitor, investigate and otherwise persecute grocers whose practices do not align with what Ottawa prescribes; and a “Grocery Code of Conduct” forced on the industry to effectively cartelize it. The Liberals are so politically invested in demonizing grocery stores that they are now attacking Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre because one of his key advisors, Jenni Bryne, runs a public relations firm that does work for Loblaw. (The firm says the work is limited to provincial lobbying focussed on red tape reduction.)

On top of persecuting grocery companies already in Canada and begging international grocery companies to open shop, what could Ottawa do to make its industrial policy even more embarrassing? Special taxes on existing chains combined with special subsidies for independent grocers and new international entrants seems a likely combination. In fact, the Competition Bureau has already recommended government “support” for independent and international companies. This would, of course, only harm grocery shoppers by distorting markets and focusing industry activity on rent-seeking rather than customer service, but clueless Liberal industrial planners could point to there being more players in the market and proclaim a victory for government-orchestrated “competition,” even if it’s a rigged game that impoverishes everyone.

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Everything short of actual help:

We certainly didn’t fire a barrage of munitions. We haven’t got one. That was Britain, whose rapidly crumbling military can still provide auxiliary actual support. All we sent, you discover in paragraph four of a story that starts misleadingly “Canada was among several allies that provided support to the United States and United Kingdom during their second wave of attacks against Houthi targets in Yemen, the Department of National Defence said Saturday,” is “two planners and one intelligence analyst.” Also known as window dressing.

Or not, which is where things get really troubling. Our government, here meaning the executive branch and much of the legislature, genuinely believes words are deeds and wishes are horses. We are no longer surprised to read that the prime minister promised a $50 million “Canada Financial Crimes Agency” in 2021 and nobody knows if anything happened including, apparently, him. Or that “Canada a ‘safe haven’ for ‘transnational crime networks and their dirty money’: U.S. report.” Words? Oh yeah. Deeds? No thanks.

What’s crucial here, other than the obvious threats to our national security from our navy having virtually no ships while our aging used submarines cannot be used, our army that fielded five divisions in World War II from under 12 million Canadians being unable today to send one regiment into combat and our air force going AWOL, is that we don’t care. We’re no longer surprised, let alone indignant.

 (Sidebar: and no one wants to be sued eventually.)

No, wait. That’s important but not crucial. What’s crucial is that we live in a world of make-believe, emanating from politics perhaps but resonating with enough voters to survive until push comes to shove. And not just us; in the 2011 Libyan crisis, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron asked where their nearest aircraft carrier was only to be reminded he’d scrapped it in gutting defence to fund welfare, yet assumed it must still be operational because he wanted it.

The help (in whatever form it was) is as tangible as the rockets and the other weapons we don't have to give to Ukraine, that perpetual blackhole in eastern Europe.

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Busting makes him feel good:

MPs are demanding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau detail a financial crime-busting program he promised three years ago. Creation of the Canada Financial Crimes Agency was first proposed in the Liberals’ 2021 re-election platform: ‘It is Canada’s first ever nationwide Agency to investigate these highly complex crimes.’

If it helps, Justin DID send the RCMP to monitor whatever group it is that someone said is dangerous or not.

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It's not like there are consequences to things:

Then-Industry Minister Navdeep Bains named a Liberal Party donor to a federal post knowing the appointee was in a conflict of interest, the Commons industry committee was told last night. One witness testified Bains’ office was repeatedly warned the appointment was improper and may have breached an Act of Parliament: ‘The Minister was personally aware of serious problems but did it anyway?’

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The Liberals protect their sponges:

Cabinet is rejecting an all-party demand for more public accounting of Governor General Mary Simon’s expenses. Spending at Rideau Hall jumped 11 percent last year to $37.6 million: “The Governor General has shown a lack of respect for taxpayers.”

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Let's wait until this doesn't matter anymore:

Cabinet will not speed passage of a landmark bill to ban use of replacement workers in the federally regulated private sector, Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan said yesterday. His remarks followed one MP’s prediction the bill will never become law before the next election: “We are taking our time."

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Has anyone noticed how awful Mark Holland is at his job?

In some countries, they take success and accountability very seriously:

The federal government tasked an expert panel last summer to conduct a review of how it handled aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but details of the review were only publicized in late January.

Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall formally asked the government in November 2023 whether it had hired the services of Sir Mark Walport, the UK’s former chief scientific adviser, to review Ottawa’s response to the pandemic. She also asked when he began his work, what his mandate is, when he’ll issue a report, and why the government hadn’t announced his appointment.

Health Minister Mark Holland tabled a response in the House of Commons on Jan. 29 and confirmed that the panel began its work in August with Sir Walport serving as chair.

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What can go wrong?:

The B.C. government acknowledged this week that it’s not entirely sure whether their program of prescribing opioids to drug addicts is doing any good. The data is “quite limited,” reads a report from the Office of the Provincial Health Officer, which added that it would be wrong to call the program “fully evidence-based.”

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According to a comprehensive study that B.C. scientists just published in the British Medical Journal – the program’s only discernible benefit was a finding that “safer supply” recipients were less likely to fatally overdose in the immediate seven days after receiving their government-prescribed opioids. Any longer timeline, and the benefits disappeared.

All the while, even the most cursory look at the darker corners of the B.C. internet reveals a massive problem with drug users receiving quantities of government-supplied hydromorphone, only to immediately turn around and sell them on the black market.

In the face of all this, B.C. Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry announced this week that the province should not only stay the course on “safer supply,” but it should expand the program to include fentanyl and heroin. Her office also recommended that the entire program be rebranded.

“The term prescribed safer supply should be retired. I recommend ‘prescribed alternatives’ to the toxic supply instead,” reads the opening recommendation of Henry’s 96-page “Review of Prescribed Safer Supply Programs.”

 

Euphemisms for body-destroying drugs always go down well with the taxpayer who has to step over junkies.

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Blame the victims because reasons:

On Jan. 10, 2024, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) finally turned its attention to the dozens of Canadian churches that have been “torched and burned” and the dozens more that have been vandalized since the summer of 2021.

On the day the story aired, David Mulroney, former Canadian ambassador to the People’s Republic of China and past president of Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College, posted the article to X/Twitter, noting that though coverage of the church burnings was long overdue, it was an example of “journalism CBC style.”

When Mulroney was asked why he is concerned by the tenor of the reporting, he responded that “the approach the journalist took was both familiar and disappointing.”

“Although we learned a few details about what seems a half-hearted police investigation, we’re also told that a ‘researcher and some community leaders suggest Canada’s colonial history and recent discoveries of potential burial sites at former residential schools may have lit the fuse.’”

 

A fuse for what? The graves and bodies that never were?