Your Wasteful Arrogant, Antipathetic Government and You

Stupidity in progress: 

Write-offs under a taxpayer-backed loan program for “future entrepreneurs” have cost over $45 million, says a Department of Industry audit. Best-known borrowers under the Futurpreneur Canada program include Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly’s husband: “She has recused herself from all discussions.”

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Canada Post’s proposal for the steepest stamp rate hike in its history follows a warning from Public Works Minister Jean-Yves Duclos to cut costs. The 25 percent hike proposed to take effect next January 13 follows a separate eight percent hike just four months ago: “Decrease costs by working with unions.”

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Canada’s unemployment rate rose to 6.6 percent in August, going up by 0.2 percent since July’s 6.4 percent, Statistics Canada’s labour force survey says.

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Nearly two-thirds of Canadians show some level of support for Ottawa’s plan to add a 100-per-cent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles, a new poll has found.

The survey by Nanos Research for The Globe and Mail found 43 per cent of Canadians say they support the tariff, while 20 per cent say they somewhat support the measure.

Ten per cent of respondents polled said they oppose the tariff and 17 per cent said they somewhat oppose it.

It's not only these toy cars that should be taxed out of existence but anything Chinese, as well.

Is no one paying attention to its communist government?

At some point, healthcare in this country will have to be privatised in some measure.

It's that or have it completely collapse:

In 1961, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker asked Hall to head a royal commission of inquiry into a potential national health service. In 1964, the commission recommended the establishment of a publicly funded universal health insurance program, funded 50/50 by the provinces and the federal government. Coverage would include medical and nursing services, dental services for children and expectant mothers, prescription drugs, vision care as well as prosthetic and home care. It was not to be state medicine; rather, it was to be based “upon freedom of choice, and upon free and self-governing professions and institutions.”

That system never came to exist. At present, the provinces and territories each operate their own health services with support from the federal government, notwithstanding the trend to contract surgical care to private facilities — and it’s not working. Each agency operates independently, responding to a myriad of great ideas with “we already do that.” The feds don’t trust the provinces and territories, and the provinces and territories don’t trust the feds. Heck, the various alphabet soups of federal departments and agencies don’t trust each other. ...

It’s not working for health professionals either. Data sharing is onerous, even for the most basic medical supplies. There’s no digitized Google or Amazon of health care in Canada to show what supplies are available — no communication with the workforce about shortages. Health workers pick up the pieces and inform blank-eyed citizens that there’s a shortage of chemotherapy drugs. Perform that task, day in and day out, and then ask why doctors and nurses feel disillusioned. Paying them more won’t make them feel better when the only way they find out about a drug shortage is when the pharmacy phones.

Why? This is the tough part. We look to governments, federal, provincial and territorial to fix it. Politicians and their multitude of starry-eyed apparatchiks that come and go every few years take great joy in rearranging the deck chairs. Over the years, some have even tried to overlay structures like regional health authorities to put some distance between them and their political authorities, but it never lasts; the pendulum always swings back to more politics, and the only thing politicians do is throw more money at it and reinforce the status quo.

 

Canada will never meet its NATO requirements.

It cannot even must a simple rescue operation:

The Trudeau government is trying to assure NATO allies it’s moving in the direction of spending two per cent of Canada’s GDP on defence. Meanwhile, billions of dollars committed to new military equipment is being handed back, lapsed, re-profiled or simply not requested by the Department of National Defence.

“Government policy without money is basically rhetoric,” chides David Perry, the PhD in defence procurement heading up the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Ottawa.

Perry has studied Canada’s bureaucratic defence procurement process — clogged with bureaucrats from Public Services and Procurement Canada, National Defence, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and Treasury Board — and can follow the money.

In just the past few years, David confirms, Canada’s Department of Defence failed to spend over $9 billion that was in its budget or the government’s fiscal framework for capital acquisitions under Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE) — Canada’s defence policy. While there’s a general phenomenon across the federal government of departments asking for money and not being able to spend it by the year-end, thus having the money lapse, Perry reports, “it’s been a particularly pernicious problem at National Defence.”

“We took way too long getting that money moving and actually getting it out the door,” Perry says, and now it’s being exposed to a return of normal levels of interest. He’s not alone in his concerns. Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) — an independent financial expert tasked with tracking planned and actual capital expenditures by the federal government — is raising the same red flags.

Canada has lost buying power at a time when the “international defence industrial market is going bananas, supplying the largest conflict in Europe in 80 years, plus the Middle East, plus everybody preparing to deal with the China contingency,” Perry continues, more urgently.

Not only will Canadians pay far more to fund defence purchases as a result of this flawed procurement process, there are less obvious yet potentially graver hits — to our efforts to recruit and retain military personnel, to our reputation with allies, and to our state of military preparedness. “For the near term, things are pretty grim for the Armed Forces,” Perry cautions, “in the next five-year window, the cupboard is pretty bare.”

“If you ask the Air Force, right now, what they could commit to a real contingency, it’s virtually nothing,” Perry says. For the Navy, “unless it was a real catastrophe, they wouldn’t really want to send our upgraded frigates because of the age, the structure of the hull; for a high-intensity conflict, you wouldn’t want to send something that was built 32 years ago, that’s been sitting in salt water, rusting that long and having all the systems age out.

 

 

A country worried about some pro-lifer waving about a placard and not someone planning a mass-casualty event is clearly not a serious one:

A Pakistani citizen has been arrested in Quebec as he was allegedly about to cross the border to carry out an ISIS terrorist attack targeting Jews in New York City.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, 20, was arrested in Ormstown, Que. on Wednesday afternoon after driving from Toronto. He also goes by the name Shahzeb Jadoon.

U.S. authorities said Friday he was plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish centre in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 in Israel.

“Khan was allegedly in the process of planning a deadly attack targeting Jewish citizens in the United States,” the RCMP said in a statement.

Although he was initially arrested on three terrorism charges, he was then re-arrested on a U.S. extradition warrant and is scheduled to appear in court in Montreal on Sept. 13.

U.S. officials identified Khan as a Pakistani citizen residing in Canada. The RCMP referred questions about his immigration status to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

IRCC, which is already investigating how security screening failed to flag a father and son from Egypt charged in July with plotting an ISIS attack in Toronto, has not yet responded.

The case comes amid both a spike in antisemitism and a resurgence of ISIS.

“The news of threats to the Jewish community is alarming,” the RCMP said. “We will not tolerate any form of threats, harassment or violence targeting Jewish communities.”

“The RCMP continues to work in collaboration with our domestic and international partners to detect, investigate and disrupt criminal acts that are targeting Jewish Communities.”

 

Rather, the RCMP is working to review those texts other agencies have sent.

Policing terrorists is hard!

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Friday’s announcement that Canadian resident Muhammad Shahzeb Khan had been arrested as he was crossing the border to commit a terrorist attack in New York revealed, once again, the severe and continual shortcomings of Canada’s immigration system. All day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for his part, was nowhere to be seen.

Even his usual vague noises about how the glorification of violence is never acceptable were absent. There was no press announcement, no reassurance that policies or security would be strengthened to keep ISIS sympathizers out of our country. Instead, Trudeau appears to have spent the day tweeting about the paralympics.

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The U.S. Department of Justice report alleges that the 20 year-old Khan, a Pakistani citizen who had been residing in Canada, was arrested, Wednesday, attempting to enter the United States with the intention of carrying out a mass shooting at a Jewish Center in New York on Oct. 7, the anniversary of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israelis. According to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Khan allegedly had the goal of “slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.” The fact he was residing in Canada reveals potentially serious holes in our immigration system.

How and when Muhammad Shahzeb Khan entered Canada is still unclear. Through which immigration program had he gained admission? Was he here on a student visa? Minister of Immigration Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller has, so far, chosen not to respond to questions.

This latest foiled terror attack comes on the heels of another which was planned for August and disrupted in its advanced stages in late July. The two attempted attackers, Ahmed Eldidi, an ISIS member who appeared in one of their execution videos, and his son, Mostafa, each made their way through Canada’s immigration system, it would seem, without breaking a sweat.

The sheer speed of the father and son’s admissions into Canada and their naturalization should cause alarm. The father had a temporary resident visa approved in January 2018 and entered Canada the following month. Easy-peasy. He was granted refugee status one year later, in February of 2019, became a resident in 2021, and was granted citizenship in May of 2024. A month later, CSIS discovered he was a potential national security threat who should never have been let into the country in the first place. Is our Office of Immigration vetting people backwards?

Let’s face it — Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and their immigration system have made Canadians less safe.

As the U.S. Department of Justice complaint against Khan points out, as early as Sept. 21, 2014, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a spokesman for ISIS at the time, sent out a recorded statement asking sympathizers to attack citizens of the countries that participated in the Global Coalition to defeat ISIS, of which Canada is a member.

In 2014, when this murderous proclamation went out, Canada was under the Conservative leadership of Stephen Harper. No doubt responding to this increasing threat and the very public and heart-wrenching honour killings of members of the Shafia Family, the Conservative party started tightening the immigration process.

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At the time, the changes Harper proposed for immigration, had the Conservatives maintained leadership, were bemoaned as “less compassionate and more economically focused than it was under previous Liberal governments.” Harper wanting new immigrants to see their entrance to Canada as a “privilege” and “not a right” was also apparently seen as a bad thing.

Conservative MP Kelli Leitch infamously suggested there may be an overarching set of Canadian values that could be tested for during the immigration process, a claim that was roundly mocked by many, including the serially unfunny This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Of course a values test is of limited use, as one can simply lie, but perhaps her concern was well-placed, and additional screening or preferencing immigration from certain countries over others at the time wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hindsight is a remarkable thing.

Since 2015, when the torch was passed, Trudeau’s Liberal government has moved in the opposite direction. Trudeau sloppily encouraged asylum seekers to cross our borders, perhaps to differentiate himself at the time from Trump. Either way, it became a mess that had to be cleaned up by both Canada and the United States.

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Under Trudeau, the crucial role of guiding Canada’s immigration system has now changed hands five times in nine years. The portfolio was tossed around from John McCallum to Ahmed Hussen to Mark Mendicino to Sean Fraser, and, finally, to Marc Miller, like a hot potato. There has been no continuity. There has been no long-term oversight. One might guess this is a file this government does not take very seriously.

 

 

If the proles get the idea that they can say what they like, soon it will be harder to convince them that governmental monopolies like the CBC, Canada Post and the untenable healthcare system are all that they deserve.

Imagine a country that declares that its politicians are useless!:

The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aperçu by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

(Sidebar: does this mean that the "death to Israel" crowd goes to prison?)

Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.

Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.

And there it is.

From the House of Commons to the ideological Karen pouting over the briefest slight, any opinion can be subject to a publicly-funded vendetta.

This is what we are reduced to.