It’s just
money:
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly yesterday announced $1.9 million in federal aid to a production company currently in bankruptcy proceedings. “Congratulations,” Joly said in announcing the subsidy for her hometown Just For Laughs Festival that owes creditors millions.
**
Canadians fear job losses with a recession likely by 2026, says in-house Bank of Canada research. The new data released yesterday followed Governor Tiff Macklem’s forecast that another interest rate cut was likely: “Consumers, especially young people, continued to report a higher-than-average chance of losing their job.”
All crimes are
political.
But don’t
take my word for it:
A Quebec woman who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and marry one of its fighters, has pleaded guilty to one count of participating in the activities of a terrorist group.
A Quebec court judge agreed to a joint submission from the federal Crown and lawyers for Oumaima Chouay — she will serve one day in custody in addition to the 110 days she spent in pretrial detention, and be on probation for three years. As part of her guilty plea, three other terror-related charges were stayed.
**
Funnily enough, just last week, another notable convicted criminal recently got a sentence of seven years. His name is Jamal Joshua Malik Wheeler, whose criminal record in July 2023 included three attacks on total strangers on Edmonton’s public transit system. He mugged one transit rider using an axe, which got him a 14-month sentence. He punched another, sending him onto the LRT tracks. He sprayed three others with bear spray.
He was out on bail, conditions of which included staying away from public-transit property, when he fatally stabbed 52-year-old father of six Rukinisha Nkundabatware, a total stranger. Originally charged with second-degree murder, Wheeler was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. And yes, his sentence was seven years — the ridiculously low end of the Crown’s ask.
And then on Monday, the Crown, defence and judge in a Quebec courtroom coughed up an absolute hall-of-fame sentence. In October 2014, Oumaima Chouay admits, she decamped for Turkey and then Syria, and signed up with the nice folks at ISIL. She married a fellow traveller, had two kids, and in 2017 was captured and imprisoned by Syrian Democratic Forces. Canada brought her home in 2022.
Chouay pleaded guilty to participating in a terrorist group’s activities, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years. Her sentence, no word of a lie: One day, plus three years of probation.
“The recommended sentence here takes into consideration the early, ongoing, demonstrated and independently evaluated steps … Chouay has taken to demonstrate remorse, take responsibility, (and) commit to fundamental change and a rejection of extremist ideology,” Director of Public Prosecutions George Dolhai said in a statement. “This addresses the ultimate goal of protecting the community.”
Accepting that for the sake of somewhat dubious argument, there are other goals to sentencing, among them denunciation and deterrence. Indeed, one argument for throwing the book at Lich and Barber is to redress public outrage over the Ottawa occupation. I dare say there’s a fair degree of public outrage in Canada over citizens taking up arms with ISIL and repeat offenders reoffending yet again while out on bail — sometimes with lethal consequences.
Apparently that’s not worthy of redress.
Nanaimo, B.C.’s downtown drug experiment has failed to stabilize its overdose rate. It has managed, however, to line the city’s oldest streets with feces, garbage, hit-and-runs, doorway fires and damaged property — a situation so bad that city council, just last week, considered fortifying its parking lot with a 1.8-metre fence.
City council ultimately rejected that $412,000 proposal — which might be for the best, considering how everyone else in the area wouldn’t be entitled to its protection. But the fact it was even pondered to begin with is an indictment of “harm reduction” in the little city — and a warning to everyone else who wants to try it.
A good chunk of Nanaimo’s homeless services are concentrated downtown. Since December 2022, the city’s lone safe injection site is located to the immediate east of city hall. Prior to that, it was in a building across the street, where it caused escalating issues of “entrenched homelessness, open-air drug use, and street-level trafficking,” according to a report to council.
A two-minute drive to the southeast of city hall is another cluster of homeless services known as the Hub, which opened in January. Between the two is the city’s Nob Hill Park, which harbours disorder and is known as a place to avoid by locals, who, in turn, want the homeless services moved.
Resident Jean Fox, who lives steps from the park, told the council’s finance committee on Wednesday that her 82-year-old husband’s woodworking tools were stolen from their house as they slept; officers later recovered the tools from carts outside the Hub. As for the park, well, Fox can’t take her granddaughters there anymore because of all the drug users who sit there during the day.
“There’s human feces in the park,” she said. “They pull their pants down in front of our window that looks into the park and relieve themselves. They walk around with their pants hanging down and their bums hanging out.”
Anthony Gratl, currently renovating his rental house in the area — where he raised his son several years ago with no problems — reported that he “was attacked last week when I asked somebody to move off of my property.” Now, meth smokers congregate in the area, waiting for the pharmacy to open. “The situation is well out of control.”
Leslie Girard, another father in the area, has had to deal with garbage, physical and verbal abuse and even human feces at his fence since the Hub facility was opened in January. He reported that overnight shelter users even held a dog fight on one occasion.
The residents’ observations are backed by city statistics, which show that the RCMP has received just over 500 calls for service in the area surrounding the Hub from January to June. But even these are of limited use: the root cause of this widespread chaos — open-air drug use — is virtually off-limits for police.
And
who is going to make them leave?:
For too long, Canadians have been misled about the benefits of largely unchecked immigration growth.
Between 2016 and 2023, an average of 612,000 people were admitted annually to Canada on a permanent and temporary basis. There were assurances made that it was all beneficial, while the consequences for housing, wages, or jobs were downplayed.
While in the past a well managed immigration system has been good for Canada, the most recent data reveal the supposed benefits of the Liberals’ mass immigration plans were all a sham.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) announced recently that advertised rents had fallen across major Canadian cities. The July 8 report projects that, compared to last year, the cost of renting a two-bedroom apartment declined in the first quarter of 2025 by 4.9 per cent in Vancouver, 3.7 per cent in Toronto, and 4.2 per cent in Halifax.
What is causing this relief?
According to the CMHC report, much of this decline occurred alongside the reduction in international students and non-permanent residents allowed into Canada.
This contradicts the received wisdom, and the views of lobby groups like the Century Initiative and others who downplayed or overlooked the impact of recklessly growing the population. As late as 2023, Macleans was publishing articles declaring that “limiting immigration isn’t the solution” to the housing crisis. If slashing the annual intake is not a silver bullet for fixing affordability, it certainly has not worsened it.
For years, immigrationists asserted that this immigration-driven demographic expansion was worth it, despite the risks of a dwindling housing supply, a rising cost of living, and a flooded job market.
Also:
The TFWP was designed as a stopgap — an emergency tool for employers unable to find domestic workers. In many industries, such as agriculture and seafood processing, that rationale still holds. But in food service — particularly in urban and suburban markets — it has become something else: A structural labour strategy aimed at suppressing wages, lowering turnover, and sidestepping long-term investments in human capital.
The numbers tell the story. In 2021, according to Statistics Canada, about 140,000 temporary residents — many under the TFWP — were employed in accommodation and food services, accounting for 17% of all temporary foreign workers in Canada. That same year, foreign nationals represented roughly 10% of the overall food service workforce. In certain quick-service chains, the concentration was even higher, effectively displacing Canadian youth from traditional workforce entry points.
Between 2018 and 2023, employer approvals for low-wage food service positions through the TFWP surged more than 4,800%. This is no longer a temporary fix — it is institutional dependency.
The economic cost is subtle but significant: A generation of young Canadians has been pushed to the sidelines. Historically, more than one-quarter of Canadians began their working lives in food service or hospitality. These jobs have long served as a training ground for interpersonal skills, time management, and resilience — essential soft skills for the broader labour market. We’ve now outsourced that social utility to temporary labour.
Tell me who owns
without actually telling me who owns you:
Housing policy should reflect “the rich cultural mosaic of Canadian society” with Sharia loans, says a CMHC consultants’ report. Financing according to Muslim law “sets a precedent for inclusivity,” said the censored Access To information study: “The introduction of an element of Sharia law into the Canadian legislative regime would be a serious precedent.”
The real goal
(aside from removing symbols of religions that curry no favour with the “post-national
state” set) is get Canadians used
to and even
endorse and carry
out what was heretofore
considered distasteful
and thuggish
acts of censorship from past regimes:
The Liberal government is weighing the criminalization of displaying terror and hate symbols, a potentially precedent-setting move in Canada that has prompted concerns about civil liberties.
It’s not yet clear if a possible ban would focus on specific symbols, like the swastika, or if it would broadly cover any symbols related to designated terror groups. And no final decision has yet been made on whether to go through with the Criminal Code reforms, which were being mulled by the Trudeau government prior to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ascent to the Liberal leadership and his victory in the spring election, according to a transition briefing to the minister of justice from March 2025 that was made public last week.
During that campaign, Carney’s Liberals, who are now preparing to introduce a crime bill this fall, committed to bail reforms, the criminalization of “obstruction” and “intimidation” outside of places of worship and other community spaces, among other things.
Criminalizing hate and terror symbols, however, was not in the Liberal platform, even though it has been requested repeatedly by Jewish groups in Canada.
In a statement to the Star, the Department of Justice confirmed the matter was still under consideration as the government looks at options for tackling a rising number of hate crimes, but it did not indicate what direction it was leaning towards.
Oh, I think
we know.
We don’t
have to trade with China:
A bioweapons expert likely to head the Trump administration’s top Pentagon post for countering weapons of mass destruction has charged in a new report that the Covid-19 pandemic was probably the result of a military-research-related accident in a Chinese laboratory, and that work at that lab may have been part of research China was conducting in possible violation of a treaty banning biological weapons.
The report also asserts that China knew even before the outbreak that the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared to have severe, enduring neurological effects. “The risk of further neurological injury as the result of subsequent reinfection is unclear and should be an urgent research priority,” the report concludes.
**
The Canadian military and possibly the coast guard are keeping tabs on a Chinese research vessel as it returns to Arctic waters off Alaska for the second year in a row.
Data compiled by an independent researcher and ship tracker, Steffan Watkins, shows a Canadian air force CP-140 surveillance plane was flying in the vicinity of the Xue Long (Snow Dragon) 2 as it exited the Bering Strait on Sunday.
The aircraft, according to Watkins's research, relocated to Anchorage, Alaska, from its base in Comox, B.C., on July 9. It has conducted four patrols since then, including the most recent one involving the vessel, which is China's first domestically built polar research ship.
Despite publicly available flight tracking showing the CP-140's patrol route, the Department of National Defence would not confirm on Monday the presence of the aircraft.
Wow. If anyone was wondering how the Liberals got re-elected, this is how. pic.twitter.com/Ksviot4zlE
— G.M. Forbes (@gmforbes35) July 22, 2025
The Canadian Nurses Association’s 2025 Code of Ethics for Nurses denounces what it calls the “white, European-centric” foundations of modern medicine and compels nurses to adopt a broad set of radical, progressive political beliefs as part of their professional duties.
Regulated Canadian nurses are now required to align their conduct with a detailed set of political values — among them, social justice, gender ideology, Indigenous belief systems, and climate activism.
Nurses are now required to acknowledge “the historical and continuous impact that White, European-centric models of nursing and health have on the perpetuation of anti-Indigenous racism, anti- Black racism, and other types of racism.”
What can go wrong?
No comments:
Post a Comment