Your mid-week sound and fury ...
Your unaccountable and craven government and you:
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s future earnings rely on the success of Brookfield Corporation, the Ethics Commissioner said yesterday. Opposition MPs seek to compel Carney to sell his stock portfolio: “It is clear Mr. Carney’s future compensation is tied to the success of Brookfield.”
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The top manager in the Department of Industry yesterday admitted lying to MPs over a contract with Stellantis. “No one asked me to lie,” Deputy Minister Philip Jennings testified at the Commons government operations committee: “I have reflected.”
There will be no pipeline in this country:
The Commons last night by a 196 to 139 vote rejected a Conservative motion to support construction of an Alberta oil pipeline to the British Columbia coast. Liberals called the motion a ploy to embarrass Prime Minister Mark Carney: “There’s a risk in voting yes, there’s a risk in voting no.”
In what universe is debt "prudent"?:
A record hike in the national debt ceiling is a prudent attempt to cover ongoing deficits through the rest of the decade, the Department of Finance said yesterday. Cabinet proposes to raise the cap 20 percent to an unprecedented $2.54 trillion: “We did decide to err on the side of prudence.”
Also:
The Bank of Canada has restarted its “routine” purchases of short-term Treasury bills, commonly known as T-bills, reigniting debate among economists about what the move will mean for prices in 2026 and what the consequences of the last round of asset purchases are.
The central bank announced on Nov. 13 that it would restart routine purchases of Government of Canada (GoC) T-bills, which are debt securities issued by Ottawa to raise temporary funds and which typically mature within one year. The bank said it would restart this process on Dec. 16 to “restore a more balanced mix of assets on the Bank’s balance sheet.”
The bank said it likely would not need to resume the purchase of GoC bonds, which are classified as long-term debt securities, until 2027.
Some financial experts argue that renewed T-bill purchases will add inflationary pressure by expanding the money supply. Others say the move is a routine balance-sheet operation that will have little impact on prices.
There is also disagreement among the experts on the causes of the inflationary wave seen during COVID-19. Some put the blame primarily on supply chain problems, and others say Ottawa’s fiscal policies coupled with the central bank’s monetary policies pushed prices upward.
It's just money:
Cabinet last year approved an 84 percent increase in the number of federal managers paid more than $150,000 a year, records show. It coincided with public statements by the finance minister that “these are hard times for Canadians.”
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Prime Minister Mark Carney's last-minute trip to October's Gaza peace summit in Egypt cost Canadian taxpayers more than $736,466 — more than three times higher than it would have been if the Royal Canadian Air Force had been able to supply a plane.
While the government chartered a Bombardier Global 5000 jet from the Chartright Air Group, in an answer tabled in the House of Commons, the Department of National Defence estimates using a government-owned Challenger aircraft would have cost $198,800.
In advertising, the Bombardier Global 5000 business jet is touted for its speed, range and comfort.
The final cost for the trip may be higher than the $736,466 the Privy Council Office reported when asked for the "expenditures related to the flight."
The Privy Council Office did not provide a breakdown of that spending and has not yet responded to a request from CBC News for clarification whether the price tag it provided included other costs often associated with travel by Canada's prime minister, such as salaries of RCMP officers who provide security, salaries of government employees who accompanied him or hotel costs.
Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett criticized Carney's trip as a "photo op."
"During another year of record-smashing food bank use, while Canadians struggle to pay their rent and feed their families, it’s appalling that Prime Minister Carney blew $800,000 to scramble a flight and crash a meeting he wasn’t even invited to," Barrett said in a statement Wednesday.
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Just as the Liberals were announcing their budgetary plans to cut the size of government, a Vancouver-area researcher was granted $600,000 in federal monies to figure out how to ensure more African food is made available in Canada’s major cities to serve growing populations of African immigrants.
As per a press statement announcing the program, Black and Caribbean immigrants are increasingly migrating to Canadian urban centres, only to discover that it’s more difficult to obtain “culturally preferred food” such as cassava and yams.
As such, Surrey, B.C.’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University is inaugurating a new position to study the “cultural, social, economic and environmental factors” of why that is.
“Some of the pilot data that has been collected tells us that food security, along with access to culturally preferred food items, continues to be problematic for this population,” said Cayley Velazquez, the university’s new Canada Research Chair in Race, Food and Health.
Metro Vancouver, just like B.C. generally, has a relatively small Black population as compared to the likes of Toronto, Edmonton or Montreal. As of the most recent census, there were 41,180 people of African descent in the entirety of the Lower Mainland. Of those, 12,870 were counted as living in Surrey, the target city for the study.
Kwantlen’s “Race, Food and Health” program was recently profiled in a CBC report which noted that the definition of “food insecurity” doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of food. Rather, it can also be food that is unfamiliar.
Get familiar with sandwiches.
Canadians were told to tighten our belts during COVID-19. Cancel trips. Skip funerals. Close small businesses. Trust the public health orders and trust the people moving “emergency” money.
Now we learn that a large share of pandemic funding routed through the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) is tagged as “questionable,” not because of politics, but because basic documents were missing.
That is not a culture war. It is a receipts war.
A KPMG forensic audit, commissioned by ISC (the federal department responsible for many indigenous programs), reviewed FSIN funding for April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2024.
FSIN is an umbrella organization that represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan, not 74 separate band administrations.
That distinction matters, because the audit targets the middle layer — the organization that receives and spends public money on administration and program delivery.
The audit’s topline number is staggering: $34,251,566 flagged as ineligible, questionable, or unsupported over five years. In plain language, KPMG says some spending did not meet program rules (ineligible), and a much larger portion could not be verified or may not qualify because FSIN did not provide sufficient support (questionable/unsupported).
FSIN received $30,024,786 in COVID-19-related funding. KPMG sampled $26,487,310 in COVID-19 expenditures — and categorized $23,513,292 of that sample as ineligible, questionable, or unsupported.
That is about 89% of what KPMG looked at.
KPMG lists familiar red flags: missing invoices, missing contracts, and missing proof that deliverables were received or distributed.
Most damning, auditors say they could not assess how or if purchased PPE was distributed to the 74 member First Nations, citing a lack of documentation tied to flow-through agreements.
No country for anyone:
“Jewish institutions and communities in Canada have been shot at, fire-bombed, their windows smashed, marked with Nazi imagery, and subjected to sustained vandalism and intimidation,” said Austin Parcels in a statement to National Post. Parcels is the manager of research and advocacy for B’nai Brith Canada.
Publishing a database of such places “framed as if their ties to Israel are incriminating is inciting and dangerous,” said Parcels.
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The Department of Canadian Heritage is invoking privacy in concealing terms of a settlement with an anti-Semitic consultant. Laith Marouf of Montréal was paid $122,661 for a series of anti-racism lectures before managers discovered he was banned from Twitter for fantasizing about shooting Jews: “Too many people in Ottawa knew about this.”
Keep that in mind when you read these:
After a week of delays and uncertainty, the Liberals say a deal is back on the rails with the Bloc Québécois to remove religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws in exchange for support to help pass the government’s bill targeting hate and terror symbols.
A senior government source confirmed to National Post that the Liberals on the House of Commons justice committee, which is currently doing a clause-by-clause study of Bill C-9, are expected to support a Bloc amendment to the legislation that will remove the controversial exemption during a Tuesday afternoon meeting.
“Anything can happen at committee, but… we’ll be voting for it,” said the source about the Bloc amendment. They were granted anonymity to discuss inter-party negotiations freely.
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Why are you banning the Bible, Sean?:
The federal justice minister says he will personally be involved in trying to understand concerns religious groups are expressing over the removal of religious defences from a section of the Criminal Code on hate speech.
Sean Fraser says his team has already begun that work, as Liberal MPs on the parliamentary justice committee voted late Tuesday to accept an amendment from the from the Bloc Québécois to remove the defence from two sections of the code that target the promotion of hate. That change has not yet been passed into law.
“I’m personally, over the next number of weeks, going to be engaging as well to make sure that we fully, first, understand the nature of the concerns being addressed,” the minister said on Wednesday.
Make no mistake - NOTHING said or done by a non-Christian group will be questioned or prosecuted (assuming that we have the right to do this). There is certainly no way that the Bible will be further excised just the once. It will all disappear altogether. The Bible will be a banned document.
And don't think that it will stop there.
Has your libertarian blog been picky about the Carney government?
That's hatred and out it goes, too.
It's called totalitarianism, and Canadians voted for it.
We don't have to trade with China:
The United States has for the first time criticized the Chinese military’s use of radar on Japanese fighter jets last week, as Tokyo refuted Beijing’s claims it had given sufficient advance notice of military drills near Japan.
“China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a State Department spokesperson told The Japan Times via email on Wednesday. “The U.S.-Japan Alliance is stronger and more united than ever. Our commitment to our ally Japan is unwavering, and we are in close contact on this and other issues.”
The criticism was the first comment by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration following Saturday’s incident that saw Chinese fighters dispatched from the Liaoning aircraft carrier twice illuminate Air Self-Defense Force jets with radar, maneuvers that Tokyo has lambasted as “dangerous.”
The radar incident comes as Tokyo and Beijing remain embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious dispute following Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Nov. 7 remarks that the Self-Defense Forces could be deployed under certain “worst-case” scenarios, such as a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan, which she said would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan.
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A Chinese-born Canadian citizen who lives in Mississauga, Ont., was arrested in Virginia by the FBI and charged with trying to smuggle restricted high-tech Nvidia computer chips used in AI processing to China.
U.S. authorities seized export-controlled technology worth about $30 million that was addressed to an air freight facility in Mississauga, close to Toronto Pearson International Airport, according to allegations filed in court.
A 10-year-old New Brunswick girl suffered an apparent seizure after buying, and quickly gulping back, two large energy drinks, terrifying her family and spurring calls for a federal ban on the sale of the caffeinated beverages to minors.
When Kayla Duguay’s phone rang at 7:30 p.m. last Friday, the Miramichi mother assumed it was her daughter, Brooklyn, asking to be picked up early from a supervised “teen night” at a local recreation complex.
Instead, it was centre staff. “They told me they’d already called an ambulance. Brooklyn was having a seizure on the floor.”
When Duguay rushed to the centre, her daughter was still on the floor, surrounded by paramedics, police and lifeguards. “She was crying. She couldn’t move,” Duguay said.
“She was no longer in a seizure when I got there but her muscles had seized up so much that she couldn’t move. Her hands were stiff to her body.
“She was in pain from head to toe. She had a headache. She had a hard time getting on the stretcher; they had to lift her up.”
At the hospital, Brooklyn was triaged as Level 2 — “emergent,” meaning potential threat to life. She was suffering from “extremity weakness,” according to hospital records. In the recovery stage of a seizure, sore muscles and weakness in parts of the body are common. The diagnosis was caffeine ingestion. “They said the caffeine and sugar intake caused her to have a seizure from an elevated heart rate,” Duguay said.
The young mother is angry her daughter and three Grade 5 friends were able to purchase multiple cans of Monster energy drinks at a convenience store across from the recreation complex. The 10-year-old drank two full, 473 ml cans, plus some of a friend’s. The kids were thirsty from running around a nearby playground before going into the centre, Duguay said.
So let's ask the government - the same one that can't manage a budget - to once more step in and feed one's children.
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