Your middle-of-the-week pina colada ...
Yes, I would say the country is broken.
There is no point in hiding the fact to save face:
Canada is broken.That was true before U.S. President Donald Trump started threatening Canada with tariffs and annexation, and it’s true now.We can’t build things in this country. We can’t defend ourselves. We’ve lost control of our immigration system. Our violent crime rates are getting worse. Our courts are overburdened. Our productivity is poor. Child poverty rates are creeping up. Food bank usage has reached record highs. Housing costs are exorbitant. Canadians can’t get timely health care, or health care at all. And yet our spending is out of control. We can argue about the semantics, but that sounds pretty broken to me.The wave of Canadian pride that Mr. Trump has inadvertently provoked with his threats against Canada has somewhat obscured our attention to these facts. Indeed, there’s a palpable shift in the country’s mood from just six months ago, when an Ipsos poll found that 70 per cent of Canadians believed that our country was “broken.” But a foreign threat and a common cause has now united us, so we’re wrapping ourselves in the flag, pledging to buy Canadian when possible, and booing the American national anthem at sports games. This is not a bad thing, especially considering the identity crisis Canadians have collectively suffered from for the last decade or more.But we should resist the impulse – and indeed, the imploration – that we overlook our crippling structural deficiencies in service of an imaginary Team Canada front. It’s a tough thing to do; Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who enjoyed a 25-point lead over the Liberals until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned and Mr. Trump decided to target his closest ally, is finding he now has to pivot his approach. His former message – “Everything in Canada is broken” – isn’t right for the current climate, so he’s shifted to “Canada first,” and has softened the “broken” talk to one of Canada’s potential: “We need a prime minister who will put Canada first – our workers, our businesses, our economy, our borders, our military,” Mr. Poilievre said during his rally on Saturday. “And we must be able to stand on our own two feet, no longer helplessly dependent on the Americans.”
Pierre cannot pivot and fall into the trap of easy jingoism.
The country is broken because for the last nine years the Trudeau government broke it.
It was on shaky legs even before that (how else could a frat-boy be parachuted into his dad's former office?).
The Americans didn't do this to Canada. We did and we need to right the ship.
We need DOGE here and we needed it as of yesterday (or nine years ago):
The Liberal government says the planned rail network — which is expected to take several years to design and build — will span approximately 1,000 kilometres and reach speeds of up to 300 kilometres an hour.
There will be stops in Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Laval, Trois-Rivieres and Quebec City.
The government says the new system, to be called Alto, will slash travel times in half and get travellers from Montreal to Toronto in just three hours.
The announcement in Montreal by Trudeau and Transport Minister Anita Anand came after years of debate and extensive study of options to improve commuter rail service in central Canada.
(Sidebar: all Liberal-voting cities with a combined population of 9,411,937 as compared to the total population of Tokyo and its surrounding areas at 37,115,000, a city that can not only benefit from having such trains but must have a combination of private and public trains. And let's not forget the failing infrastructure that, for nine years, the Trudeau government has ignored.)
After the myriad of consultations with numerous parties, the project, might, possibly, could be on the drawing board at some time, or whatever.
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Small and medium sized businesses lost about $60 billion in the first year of pandemic lockdowns and travel bans, Statistics Canada figures showed yesterday. Data were drawn from firms that applied for interest-free loans at taxpayers’ expense: “We need to keep businesses going.”**
Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly says Canada sent $4 billion to dictators in Africa and uses it as an opportunity to take a shot at America.
— Bret 🍁 (@Bret_Sears) February 18, 2025
"Contrary to certain countries, we believe that international aid is important"
She certainly doesn't speak for me, I don't want… pic.twitter.com/7Ssgk4JAAD
Not just DOGE, but root out ALL corruption:
A taxpayer-funded Court Challenges Program subsidized liberal causes 96 percent of the time, an Ottawa think tank said yesterday. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute said its analysis, the first of its kind, could not find a single instance where the Program financed Charter challenges on conservative themes like property rights: “Time to shut it down.”
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Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould in a confidential interview with the RCMP urged police to widen their investigation of the SNC-Lavalin Group scandal, newly-disclosed records show. Access To Information files released yesterday by the group Democracy Watch noted Wilson-Raybould’s pleas were ignored: “I don’t know, we didn’t know, we don’t know.”
**
You have unelected judges loyal to the elite, so, no:
Final written arguments in the constitutional challenge of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s prorogation of Parliament are to be submitted to the Federal Court on Wednesday. Canadians must win this case. Our democracy depends on it.
“All I can say is I’m going to try my best to issue this decision before a point in time beyond which it would become moot,” said Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton at the end of the two-day hearing last week, in reference to the March 24 end date of the current prorogation period.
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Wayne Crookes, founder of Integrity B.C., is a key supporter of the application.
The application includes a legal opinion by a retired superior court justice (who did the opinion on the condition of remaining anonymous) supporting prosecuting the PM for the allegation of obstruction of justice, and possibly also for breach of trust. The application also includes a “will say” document that summarizes the reasons for the application, and a summary of how the RCMP failed to investigate and uphold the law properly.
As detailed in Democracy Watch’s news release from yesterday, the RCMP’s internal records, obtained by DWatch and also included in today’s application, show that the RCMP’s investigation was weak, incomplete, delayed and buried for years, and amounts to an attempted cover up. The RCMP only interviewed four of 15 key witnesses, and is hiding key testimony from Wilson-Raybould, her Chief of Staff Jessica Prince, and her friend and confidante Jane Philpott. The RCMP also accepted the Trudeau Cabinet hiding key internal communication records, and trusted without question the biased, self-interested public statements of the PM and everyone else who pressured the AG.
In addition, and importantly, as the “will say” document details, the RCMP applied an improper legal standard for proving obstruction of justice, and didn’t even consider prosecuting anyone for the general violation of breach of trust.
**
Mark Carney as a federal advisor and prospective prime minister should disclose assets including his stock portfolio, debts and income sources, the Opposition said yesterday. Carney, a multi-millionaire, has to date withheld disclosure of dealings with federally regulated firms: “Carney must come clean.”
(Sidebar: this Mark Carney.)
**
Instead, Ford’s “Protect Ontario” plan seeks to shelter the province’s economy from external threats. It offers a six-month repayable tax deferral for businesses and some additional tax relief for small business. There is some money for employment training and job supports. This is a short-term approach to a long-term problem.
Just how good is the provincial economy that Ford wants to protect? The PC leader is fond of saying that Ontario is “an economic powerhouse,” but key statistics tell a different story.
Let’s start with gross domestic product per capita. This is the best indicator of economic success as it calculates the level of economic production per person. By this measure, Ontario isn’t doing well versus other provinces and it’s doing quite badly when compared to American states.
A February report from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce found that provincial GDP per capita “has fallen below pre-pandemic levels, and that downward trend is expected to continue into 2025.”
Ontario’s decline is not new, having started well before Ford’s election in 2018. A Fraser Institute study compared Ontario’s economic performance in this century to that of Quebec, which has traditionally lagged Ontario. This so-called “powerhouse” didn’t look too good. “Since 2000, Quebec’s real per-capita GDP has grown at an annual average of 1.2 per cent, while Ontario’s has grown at 0.7 percent — both below the Canadian average,” the report says.
Calgary economist Trevor Tombe did a study ranking GDP per capita for all Canadian provinces and American states. Ontario came 51st, about the same as Alabama and only fifth best in Canada.
But what about jobs? Ford likes to cite big job-creation figures, with 467,000 jobs created since his re-election in 2022. The problem is, Ontario’s economy hasn’t been growing as fast as its population, a fact acknowledged in the province’s most recent economic update.
As a result, in January of this year, Ontario’s unemployment rate stood at 7.6 per cent , second highest of all provinces. The province’s chamber of commerce expects it to stay at about that number this year.
Moving on ...
The government has never given the veterans a second or even first thought:
A veterans’ petition still gathering signatures in the Commons asks that cabinet apologize for a botched war memorial that misidentified dead heroes. The memorial at Port Hope, Ont. was installed under a Highway of Heroes project that received $3 million in federal funding: “Issue a formal public apology.”
Cabinet’s Google tax appears doubtful after U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday called it an anti-American trade barrier. First payments under the multi-billion dollar tax were due this summer: “Only America should be allowed to tax American firms.”
All crimes in Canada are political:
’Freedom Convoy’ organizer Pat King was sentenced to three months of house arrest in an Ottawa court this morning.
The sentence includes 100 hours of community service at a food bank or men’s shelter.
It comes on top of nine months he spent in custody both before and during his trial.
King was found guilty on five of nine charges in November, including mischief and disobeying a court order, for his role in the 2022 protest that took over downtown Ottawa for three weeks.
The Bibas family said on Tuesday that they were troubled by a Hamas statement earlier in the day that the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two children, Ariel and Kfir, are among those the terrorist group will return to Israel on Thursday.
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