Four more sleeps until Easter 🐰🌷 ...
The idiot who inherited his wealth - this one - declared that the four premiers who presented their case against the crushing and unpopular carbon tax did not do a good job:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is pushing back against premiers who are asking him to cancel an upcoming increase to the federal carbon price, saying they have not proposed better ideas to fight climate change.
In a reply to the seven provincial leaders on Tuesday, Trudeau said the last time they discussed the issue in 2022, their governments either didn't propose alternative solutions or couldn't meet federal standards for reducing emissions.
"We have made it clear that we are open to working with any and all provinces and territories that want to establish their own pricing systems (as long as they meet or exceed the national benchmark)," the letter said.
The premiers of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador all asked to Trudeau to forgo a planned increase on April 1.
The carbon price is set to increase by $15 a tonne — from $65 to $80. The increase is expected to add about three cents to the cost of a litre of gasoline.
The leaders cite inflation and a high cost of living as reasons to slow down. Most have also requested to testify before a House of Commons committee on the matter, with Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe set to appear by video conference on Wednesday.
There is so much to unpack here.
Not only is carbon not a pollutant, a tax will no more alter people's behaviour than it will change the weather. Indeed, people will still rely on (somewhat) affordable gasoline-fueled cars as opposed to their more problematic electric cousins and the expense it will take to charge them.
If one did not know any better, one might suggest that such moves were designed to keep people immobile.
But I digress.
The chief reason why Justin will not back down from this unpopular and unproductive tax based on junk science is that he cannot afford to.
Literally.
It isn't just a blow to his inflated ego.
The tax is not revenue-neutral:
Cabinet will collect nearly a half billion in sales taxes on the carbon tax this year, the Budget Office said yesterday. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has repeatedly claimed the carbon tax is “revenue neutral.”
The squeezed public was lied to.
The Liberals need the money.
It's that simple.
Also, for a government that forces its citizens to pay onerous taxes to fight some nebulous bit of so-called pollution, why is it sending coal to China?
Asking for a friend.
Moving on ...
The China inquiry tomorrow opens its public investigation with testimony from Elections Canada officers who downplayed complaints of meddling by foreign agents. Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault, the first to testify, earlier told MPs he saw no evidence of Chinese interference but acknowledged he didn’t look: “Our goal is to uncover the truth.”
The start looking.
Also:
Liberal MPs yesterday tried and failed to block speedy hearings into why cabinet concealed evidence of Chinese security breaches at the National Microbiology Laboratory. “Why wasn’t this caught earlier?” asked Conservative MP Michael Chong (Wellington-Halton Hills, Ont.): “This is the start of the matter, not the end.”
ArriveCan is the new (insert scandal here):
The Canada Border Services Agency disciplined more than 140 employees in a year for wrongdoing, Vice-President Jonathan Moor yesterday told ArriveCan hearings. The Agency is one of the largest police departments in Canada with 16,000 employees and a $2.7 billion annual budget: “We have a lot to do.”**
MPs yesterday ordered disclosure of all internal federal investigations into claims an ArriveCan executive tried to destroy 1,700 emails. Minh Doan, now chief federal technology officer, has not publicly answered allegations he attempted to hide documents on his dealings with contractors: “There seems to be a culture of hiding.”
New voters aren't made; they're imported:
Cabinet should cut immigration to ease a housing crisis, Canadians tell federal researchers. In-house focus groups by the Privy Council Office found popular support for lowering quotas to “alleviate demand for housing.”
Like these ones:
A total 986 Gazans, the majority men and boys, have applied to enter Canada, records show. Immigration Minister Marc Miller has proposed to raise the current cap of 1,000 permits to an unspecified number: “The Department of Immigration has not refused any applications.”
**
During the October 7th attack on Israel, Hamas terrorists raped, gang-raped, beheaded, burned, mutilated, disfigured, and tortured men, women, children, the elderly and the disabled. Hamas terrorists chopped off fingers, arms and feet, gouged out eyes, obliterated faces and tied up dozens of people — including children — before burning them alive. They cut an unborn baby out of a pregnant woman, stabbed the baby with a knife and shot the mother in the head. Sexual atrocities included targeting the genitalia of male and female victims, cutting off breasts, castrating men, and shooting women in the vagina. The body of one woman had “nails and different objects in her female organs.”
Girls were so brutally gang-raped that their pelvic bones were broken. For Hamas terrorists, rape is not just a weapon of war, it is a way to alleviate their feelings of inadequacy, prove their manhood, demonstrate what they think signifies superior masculinity, and to ridicule, taunt and torment Israeli men who are unable, at gunpoint, to protect their women and children.
Symbolically, raping women in war signifies conquered territory and the rape of a nation. During their attack, Hamas terrorists raped not only women but men as well. The symbolic meaning of male-on-male rape is that the victims are being turned into women, which from a Palestinian hypermasculine and homophobic culture is one of the worst forms of humiliation. For Palestinians, shame is experienced as female traits of weakness. Hamas terrorists raped and tortured Israeli men to expunge their own hidden shame and project their humiliation onto their alleged oppressors. Similar to prison culture, the victims become their “bitch.” The rationale is, “he, and not me, is actually the woman.”
**
**
While the involvement of Gazan children and women in Hamas's Oct. 7 rampage through southern Israel is not widely understood, evidence exists in the public domain. An online video of a 12-year-old Israeli boy's abduction from Nir Oz, Israel, appears to show a Gazan boy of about the same age accompanying the kidnappers. Boys were among the mob of Gazans recorded crossing into Israel after Hamas terrorists breached the border. And Hamas-linked Associated Press stringer photographed a Gazan boy entering Kfar Aza, another kibbutz near Gaza, and about 15 miles north of Nir Oz.
Hamas has used its nearly two decades of rule over Gaza to weaponize a generation of Palestinians against the Jewish state, according to analysts. Hundreds of ordinary Gazans, including teenagers, joined in Hamas's assault, during which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took some 240 hostages, the Free Beacon previously reported.
"Hamas directed the education system, the media, and the religious institutions to brainwash children, who make up half of Gaza's 2.2-million-person population," Michael Milshtein, the head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University, told the Free Beacon. "Israelis got their first up-close look at this Palestinian Gen Z on Oct. 7."
**
A lot of numbers were thrown around last week as members of the House of Commons debated an NDP motion calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza — even as several of these numbers look increasingly to be totally disconnected from the reality on the ground.
The motion’s sponsor, NDP MP Heather McPherson, for example, stated on the floor of the House that “more than 30,000 innocent civilians” had been killed since the onset of fighting between Israel and terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, “including more than 13,000 children.”
McPherson failed to mention, of course, that these figures include at least 13,000 Hamas fighters, and were taken verbatim from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry (GMH), an entity whose reporting has been called into question from the earliest days of fighting.
A new analysis, published earlier this month in The Tablet, in fact presents what may well be the strongest statistical evidence to date that the Gaza Health Ministry has been fabricating casualty data to fit Hamas’s preferred narrative.
The analysis, conducted by Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, identifies a number of glaring incongruities in daily casualty data released by the ministry between late October and mid-November of last year.
“Hamas hasn’t provided detailed data since early in the war. And why should it?” Wyner told me via email last Wednesday. “You use what you can.”
The most glaring of these red flags is what Wyner calls in his piece an “almost metronomical linearity,” or maintaining a steady rhythm, in daily reports of the total number of deaths in Gaza, which averaged “270 (deaths) per day plus or minus about 15 per cent” through an entire 16-day sample. For this trendline to be accurate, Israeli forces would have had to kill a near-identical number of Gazans each day for over two straight weeks, notwithstanding the inevitable variations in the day-to-day frequency of bombings and density of sites bombed.
Like those guys.
Also - well, this is awkward:
When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.
“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”
According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.
In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.
This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.
What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.
“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera. ...
When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.
“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”
According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.
In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.
This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.
What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.
“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera.
Weak productivity is making things worse:
The Bank of Canada is warning that waning productivity growth in the country is an “emergency” that can force higher interest rates and limit rising wages for Canadians.
Senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers gave a speech in Halifax on Tuesday in which she sounded the alarm on Canada’s lagging productivity rates.
Rogers argued that productivity is a way to “inoculate the economy against inflation,” while sustaining “faster growth, more jobs and higher wages.” An economy with strong productivity growth also does not need to rely as much on interest rates when price pressures start to get out of hand, she said.
But Canadian productivity rates have fallen in six consecutive quarters despite signs of an uptick at the end of 2023, Rogers said, citing Statistics Canada data.
“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” she told the crowd.
Productivity can be measured in a few ways, but in general it’s the level of economic output per hour worked. Improving productivity doesn’t necessarily mean Canadians working harder, but rather equipping them with the tools they need to accomplish more in the same amount of time, Rogers said.
One of the main issues dragging down Canadian productivity rates is a lack of business investment. Canadian businesses routinely lag their global counterparts when it comes to investment in machinery, equipment and intellectual property, she noted.
Experts who spoke to Global News in January about the country’s productivity ills said Canada is a “significant laggard” behind the United States and other nations when it comes to equipping workers with “capital stock.”
The institution too big to fail:
Physicians in Ontario are sounding the alarm as new data shows more than 100 reserved for training new family doctors have gone unfilled.
Each year, medical school graduates decide what type of medicine they want to specialize in. The Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) matches graduates with residency placements at medical schools in two rounds.
There were 108 unfilled family medicine spots out of a total of 560 in Ontario following the first round of this year's match, up from 103 unclaimed spots last year, according to CaRMS data.
That's an increase from 100 in 2023, itself a sharp rise from 61 in 2022, 52 in 2021 and 30 in 2020.
Dr. David Barber, a family doctor in Kingston, Ont., who chairs the section on general and family practice with the OMA, said the data is the latest in a worrying trend showing not enough medical students are choosing family medicine as a specialty.
"What this tells us is that medical students are not applying to family medicine," Barber said. "It's because during medical school the students work with family doctors and train under family doctors. They see how stressful it is, how underfunded it is and how unhappy that the family doctors are."
Across the province, 2.3 million people don't have a family doctor, and that number could grow to 4.4 million patients by 2026, the Ontario College of Family Physicians has warned.
The dwindling supply of family medicine residents in turn means an even smaller number of doctors choosing to enter family practice after finishing their residency. A slowdown of the pipeline of new family doctors could exacerbate Ontario's family doctor shortage and suggests that those without family doctors may continue to face challenges finding one.
One of the more egregious examples of the politicized Canadian classroom can be found in the halls of L.A. Matheson Secondary in Surrey, B.C. There, the classroom of an anti-oppression curriculum specialist is coated with social justice posters: ones that decry colonialism, ones that inflame racial politics and one that even likens prostitution to regular physical labour.
It’s not appropriate for a public school. Still, it’s the kind of teaching that school systems across Canada are either turning a blind eye to — or worse, encouraging. And when they face criticism, it’s they who claim to be the victims, despite their use of tax dollars to pre-treat students with certain political beliefs.
Criticism has very much confronted L.A. Matheson and its pro-social-justice, anti-capitalist teacher, Annie Ohana, now that web sleuths have stumbled upon it. Ohana has taken enough negative commentary online in recent days to warrant a visit from CTV News. Her primary critic, a former teacher named Chanel Pfahl who herself was ostracized from the profession for daring to question the growing fervour for identity politics in schools, stands accused of causing danger to the class.
“She seems to be making a lot of assumptions that were simply based on misinformation, lies, and in fact, puts myself and other teachers and students and my community in danger,” Ohana told CTV last week.
Defending her methods, Ohana says she’s just helping to create “empowered citizens that can speak up for themselves. Elsewhere, she’s insisted that her students are just learning about “critical thinking.” Which would be believable if the classroom included political posters from across the left-right spectrum.
Ohana isn't an educator but an activist paid to brow-beat children.
She might as well call herself Big Sister, head of the Angkar, and declare that this is Year Zero.
The goal was never protection:
This is the problem with legislating against “online harms.” It’s near impossible to put together a definition that won’t be too open to interpretation and therefore open to abuse and result in an assault on freedom of speech. That’s the main concern with Trudeau’s Online Harms Act.The act starts off pledging to target the true scourge of child pornography, introducing new rules to govern the removal of such content from social media platforms. There are few critics of that provision, although given that such vile content is already illegal, perhaps what we need most is greater enforcement of the laws already on the books and more law enforcement officers assigned to tackle it.What has people rightly concerned with the bill though are things like the Digital Safety Commission and its Digital Safety Ombudsman, who will be tasked with enforcing this new Act and its yet-to-be-unveiled definition of what constitutes “online harm.”Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor who specializes in online legalities, said this of the Digital Safety Commission in a CTV interview: “It’s got enormous powers, investigative powers, the ability to demand information, it will conduct hearings, it can decide that those hearings can be conducted privately if it wants, it’s not subject to any rules of evidence, and even the commission itself, it’s a fairly small group of commissioners.”We don’t need this commission or the ombudsman. They could very well be misused from day one. The act has yet to be passed and so any such changes—including a total shelving of the Act—remain possible.The human rights tribunals were labelled “kangaroo courts” years ago, and the Digital Safety Commission is already giving off the same vibes. If a problem is that serious, it should be dealt with in the real courts, not some quasi-judicial forum. That way real offenders can be appropriately punished and also nuisance complaints can be effectively defended against.Make no mistake about it, we have a lot of problems with the online world. As the parent of children who will be entering their teenage years in the near future, I’m deeply troubled by the ills of social media and the abuse and exploitation that happens within it.But this doesn’t mean we should give Justin Trudeau personal discretion to define what is and isn’t an “online harm” and how it should be dealt with.
How do you think he will use this bill?
A cargo ship lost power and rammed into a major bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday, destroying the span in a matter of seconds and plunging it into the river in a terrifying collapse that could disrupt a vital shipping port for months. Six people were missing and presumed dead.
The ship’s crew issued a mayday call moments before the crash took down the Francis Scott Key Bridge, enabling authorities to limit vehicle traffic on the span, Maryland’s governor said.
The ship struck one of the bridge’s supports, causing the structure to collapse like a toy. The vessel caught fire, and thick, black smoke billowed out of it.
Photographs here.
This wasn't a problem before:
Austria, France, and Italy have all issued warnings of potential terrorist threats to Europe by the Islamic State (IS) following the group’s Moscow concert hall attack that killed 139 people.
The French government increased the country’s security alert to its highest level, which means more soldiers will be put on standby and ready to patrol sensitive sites, including schools. According to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, France has thwarted two attack attempts by IS since the start of the year, including a foiled attack on the city of Strasbourg.
While Austria will retain its second-highest security alert level, officials have said there will be an increased police presence during the upcoming Easter holidays in the capital, Vienna, especially in places where large crowds are set to gather. The branch of the IS, which claimed responsibility for the Moscow attack, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), was the same group that planned an attack on the St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna in December.
Police will also feature more heavily at popular tourist spots and at “sensitive sites” in Italy during the Easter holiday, including places such as airports, train stations, and cultural and religious sites. “During the Easter holidays you will need to be very careful. We will always do the utmost to ensure the safety of citizens and tourists,” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said.
Terrorism expert Peter Neumann told German national public radio on Monday that Germany and Western Europe were facing an increased threat of Islamist terrorism since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel in October. He noted that, whereas in the past, the terrorists had acted individually, ISKP works in a more organised, professional way, being able to organise its networks.
As we previously reported, the ISKP is a UN-designated terrorist organisation and analysts consider it the most dangerous of the Islamic State groups. It has a wide presence in Afghanistan, as well as in Pakistan and other areas of Central Asia. The group’s name (Khorasan) derives from an old term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan. General Michael Kurilla, the commander of U.S. Central Command, told Congress last March that ISKP was quickly developing the ability to conduct “external operations” in Europe and Asia. Asfandyar Mir, a senior expert at the United States Institute of Peace says the group has sought to distinguish itself among jihadi fighters by adopting a radical Islamic worldview more militant and uncompromising than its rivals, including al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Recently foiled terror attacks in Europe that can be attributed to ISKP were a planned attack on the Swedish parliament, against Christmas markets in Germany, and against the cathedrals of Cologne and Vienna. Conservative parties all around Europe have pointed at the lax immigration policies of the EU as the cause of increased terrorist activity in Europe. Sweden Democrat MEP Charlie Weimers recently said: “This is a result of Europe admitting hundreds of thousands of people from the third world, where Islamist and almost mediaeval values prevail.”
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