Three more shopping days until Halloween ...
As of this writing, there have been 10,001 deaths in Canada due to the virus originating in China. Canada's mortality rate stands at 4.5% whereas the American mortality rate stands at 2.6%.
But Orange Man double-plus-ungood ... or something.
In a real country, a wimpy snowboard instructor's thinly-veiled threat to cancel Christmas would have been met with a profound force of national will.
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| Oh, look! War didn't deter people from having Christmas. |
Oh, so there is a reason why public documents pertaining to the prime minister and his family and a fraud masquerading as a charity were blacked out:
The country’s top public servant is offering to testify about controversial redactions to some 5,000 pages of documents the government released on the WE Charity affair.
Ian Shugart, clerk of the Privy Council, made the offer Tuesday in a letter to the House of Commons finance committee. ...
In his letter, Shugart says he and his colleagues would be pleased to appear at the committee to explain their decisions.
The committee had demanded that the documents be turned over without redactions and that it be left to the parliamentary law clerk, Philippe Dufresne, to decide whether anything needed to be blacked out to maintain personal privacy or cabinet confidences.
Nevertheless, when the documents were turned over to the committee in August, large chunks had already been blacked out.
In letters to the committee at the time, Shugart and other senior public servants explained the redactions were to maintain personal privacy and cabinet confidences and to delete portions of records that had nothing to do with the WE Charity affair. Indeed, Shugart argued that the unredacted records included cabinet confidences that would normally have been blacked out.
However, Dufresne told the committee that it was not up to the public servants to decide what to redact.
“The House and its committees are the appropriate authority to determine whether any reasons for withholding the documents should be accepted or not,” he wrote in a letter to the committee.
“One such measure is the committee’s decision to have my office make the necessary redactions to protect personal information and the public servants providing assistance in this matter.”
Also:
Children raised money meant to build schools in Africa while WE paid for luxury accommodations for Sophie Trudeau and dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to Justin Trudeau’s mom and brother. WE also amassed a multimillion-dollar Toronto real estate empire.
The Liberals cancelled the nearly 1 billion dollar summer job program that WE was contracted to administer after allegations of conflicts of interest with the Prime Minister and his family.
Rebel News has filed access to information requests into school boards all across the country about their dealings with WE. Exclusive documents provided to Rebel News by Calgary Board of Education indicate WE programming infected 18,000 schools.
Many of our requests for information are still outstanding and pending.
However, the Vancouver School Board has indicated that WE is blocking the release of their data in an email from the board’s Advisor of Freedom of Information and Privacy Compliance ...
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is rebuffing a New Brunswick charity's request that he refund a $20,000 speaking fee after the fundraiser he headlined last year proved to be a "huge disappointment.
(Paws up)
It’s not shocking that Trudeau didn’t want to analyze the party results in public but the idea that the Liberals would automatically cruise to an easy majority if we were to have a pandemic campaign must now be challenged.
Conservative candidate Julius Tiangson came within 701 votes of winning in York Centre. Green Party leader Annamie Paul may not have been as close but her 32.7% of the vote clearly shows an interest in her as a progressive alternative to the Liberals.
In the campaign a year ago, the Liberals eked out a minority government, winning more seats even though they took 220,499 fewer votes across the country than the Conservatives. Despite what should have been a humbling experience, Trudeau has continued to try and govern as if he has a majority and that the opposition doesn’t count.
On Monday, voters in two Liberal strongholds reminded Trudeau that they still have him and his party on probation.
I thought that it was the RCMP's job to arrest people no matter who may be around them:
The RCMP officer who arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou three hours after she was detained at Vancouver’s airport says he didn’t arrest her sooner out of respect for the jurisdiction of Canada Border Services Agency.
Const. Winston Yep testified in B.C. Supreme Court Tuesday in the extradition case of Meng, whose lawyers are trying to show her arrest two years ago was unlawful and she should not be extradited to the U.S. on allegations of fraud.
Tuesday’s news is just the latest blow Calgary in general, and downtown Calgary in particular, has faced. Adam Legge, the president and CEO of the Business Council of Alberta, said the downtown vacancy rate is close to 30 per cent, and any further reduction will mean fewer downtown workers frequenting small businesses such as restaurants and dry cleaners in the city centre.
“Any time we see layoffs of that magnitude, there’s a concern for a whole host of things, including the livelihoods of those affected and what it means for a downtown that is already struggling,” Legge said.
Never forget who wants Alberta's industry dead.
We haven't prevented more killing fields. We simply tolerated them in one place:
One interviewee stated that in Pyongyang from 1985 to the mid-1990s, every Sunday, one or two persons would be executed by firing squad and occasionally by hanging, usually in the local marketplace. Although the family of the person executed would often be present at executions, they were not allowed to collect the remains afterwards. The interviewee reported once seeing a body left hanging for 3-4 hours after the execution for public display by the Ministry of People’s Security (anjeonbu/안전부; currently, inmin boanseong/인민보안성). As the leader of the local People’s Unit (inminbanjang/인민반장) at the time, the interviewee also reported that in the early 1990s, the chilling pronouncement from Kim Jong Il (who was soon to become his father’s successor), became the norm nationwide: “Let’s hear the sound of guns”. It was reported that from that time there was a notable increase in public executions, where even “starving people who stole corn from farms were shot”.
In Japan, people are troubled by youth suicides but in Canada, we barely put the brakes on killing anyone:
The number of people who died by suicide per population of 100,000 came to 3.1 for those under 20 in Japan in 2019, rising 0.3 percentage point from the previous year to hit a record high, a government white paper showed on Tuesday.
The suicide rate for all age groups, meanwhile, decreased for the 10th consecutive year to stand at 16.0, the lowest level on record dating back to 1978, according to the white paper approved at a Cabinet meeting on the day.
The total number of people who took their own lives in the country in 2019 dropped 671, or 3.2%, to a record low of 20,169, also down for the 10th straight year.
Still, the overall suicide rate stayed relatively high in Japan, compared with other advanced economies.
**
There are three known cases of doctor-assisted death in federal corrections — including two carried out in the community — and each one raises questions around consent, choice and dignity, federal correctional investigator Ivan Singer said in his 2019-20 annual report tabled in Parliament Tuesday.
The report said his office found a series of errors and delays and the misapplication of law and policy in the two cases it reviewed.
That included one case involving an individual Zinger described as "a non-violent recidivist" serving a two-year sentence, which is the minimum for a federal sentence.
Zinger said he has "no doubt" the procedure itself was carried out professionally and according to the law. His review focused on whether there were "more humane alternatives" for managing the inmate's terminal illness after he was denied parole.
