Wednesday, September 09, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week gentle breeze ...



What are tariffs to one whose stocks are mostly in Canada's more successful neighbour?:

   
**


It's not like this is hurting Trump:

On the same day Canadian tariffs on $28 billion worth of U.S. imports came into effect, Prime Minister Mark Carney said he doesn’t believe in escalating the trade conflict.

“That’s not constructive,” said Carney, during a video address released on Tuesday. “But our tariffs are necessary protect our workers, protect our companies, and our communities.”

(Sidebar: ... says the guy who walked out on the deal.)

Carney said his government can’t allow American goods into Canada tariff-free, while the U.S. charges Canadian companies to export.

Canada’s latest round of tariffs against the U.S. is in response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s 50 per-cent tariff on $28 billion worth of Canadian goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. Trump slapped Canada with the new tariffs after trade talks between Canada and the U.S. broke down on Aug. 21.

Carney announced a pause in negotiations last month and said several last-minute conditions in the draft text of an agreement made a deal with the U.S. untenable.

“We worked in good faith to reach a fair deal, but since a fair deal wasn’t on the table, we made the right choice to walk away from a bad one,” Carney said Tuesday.

Since trade talks were paused, there has been no communication between negotiators on both sides. The U.S. administration has vowed to respond to Canada’s latest round of tariffs. Over the weekend, Trump took to TruthSocial where he attacked aircraft maker Bombardier and posted a photo of the North American continent covered in an American flag.

Trump also took issue with the exchange rate and the value of the Canadian dollar. He called the loonie’s “imbalance” with the U.S. dollar “unacceptable.”

Carney in his address warned that the trade conflict with the U.S. will come at a cost.

“There’s always a cost to action, but it doesn’t come close to the cost of standing still,” he said. “This is about who we are as Canadians. It’s about our livelihoods and the country we leave to our kids.”

 

Your kids are in the US, aren't they?

**

“No more selling Bombardier in the United States!” the president posted on his Truth Social page Monday just hours before the looming midnight trade deadline. “Their products aren’t good enough! Over 50 per cent of their revenue comes from the United States — they live off American buyers, American companies, American airports, and American service — all while Canada blocks our GREAT American Banks, and companies, throughout the U.S.A.”

**

Sapporo Breweries Ltd. is shifting some production to the US from Canada due to 50% tariffs imposed on beer exports from the country, seeking to reinvigorate its North American operations.

The Japanese brewer, which makes the top-selling Asian beer in the U.S., is also considering adding manufacturing capacity on the West Coast as it seeks to expand its flagship brand in one of its biggest overseas markets, Chief Strategy Officer Rieko Shofu said in an interview.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s levies on beer made in Canada are the latest twist for the Japanese brewer. The production shift plans are part of a broader revamp following years of acquisitions that failed to deliver sufficient returns. The company sold Stone Brewing in 2022 and liquidated Anchor Brewing in 2023.

“Tariffs are something out of our control,” Shofu said. “We’re going to move ahead with local production.”




It's just an economy:

Canadian households are cracking under the pressure of supersized debt loads. New data from TransUnion shows household debt hit $2.64 trillion in Q2 2026, up 4.6% from last year. The credit agency warns this growth is driven by rising balances, not new loans. Rising risk has already become apparent in soaring insolvencies and mortgage delinquencies.  …

Canada’s job boom suffered a setback last month, shedding 41,700 jobs in August. It’s a sharp drop, but employment is still up 216,500 jobs from last year. While the headline data isn’t concerning, there’s a real problem emerging—job permanence. Most (51%) of jobs added in the past year are temporary roles, despite making up just 13.5% of total employment. It’s a strong warning that the recent growth may be fleeting in the face of a serious economic shock.  …

Canada’s central bank held its key policy rate steady at 2.25%, where it’s sat for over ten months. A move that would normally suggest Stability, but the Bank of Canada’s (BoC) statement didn’t play up that angle. Instead, the bank’s focus is locked on the inflationary factors that are emerging. Strong GDP, sticky CPI, and tariffs are combining to push inflationary risks to the upside. Even as the latter simultaneously threatens to kill economic growth.  …

Canadian businesses are optimistic, but it’s not easy to figure out why. Statistics Canada data shows 72.6% are optimistic about the next 12 months, up 5.8 points from last quarter. At the same time, they also found that most (68.1%) expect sales to stagnate, and 59.8% see cost-related obstacles. The most commonly cited concern is inflation (41.6%), and tariffs are only one of the fears driving costs up.

**

Canadians are increasingly financing daily expenses through instalment loans as food prices continue to strain household budgets, according to a new report.

Data from Toronto-based fintech Koho Financial Inc. released Tuesday showed that use of its buy now, pay later financing option surged 109 per cent over the past year, growing from 0.8 per cent of users in May, 2025, to 1.71 per cent in May of this year. For perspective, Koho has more than 2.5 million customers across Canada.

The initial spike coincided with the holiday grocery shopping season and has remained strong well into 2026, the report said.

“People are trying to find a bunch of different ways to figure out how to make their budget stretch,” said Faye Lucas, head of consumer trust at Koho.

Spending on food rose about 5 per cent year-over-year per user to $275 a month in May, the report found. Shoppers made more frequent grocery runs and spent more on each trip, even while seeking out discount retailers. Food delivery purchases grew by 9 per cent.

The report’s findings are based on spending and financial behaviour data from more than 173,000 Koho customers between May, 2025, and May, 2026.

Buy-now-pay-later financing allows shoppers to split purchases into two, four or more instalment payments over several weeks, and usually without interest until a late payment. Koho lets users split purchases retroactively, charging an upfront fee as well as a $15 charge once a month in the case of late payment.

The report’s findings come as Canadians continue to grapple with food price spikes that have outpaced general inflation for more than a year. In May, rising grocery costs exceeded the overall growth in prices for the 16th month in a row, according to Statistics Canada data.

**
 
**
 




You didn't think this though, did you, Canada?:

While Canadians remain broadly supportive of “holding firm” in a trade war with the United States, a new poll finds that this support drops off a cliff the moment Canadians are asked to pay for it.

The survey conducted by the think tank Build Canada found a clear majority said they would not support any trade strategy that threatened their retirement savings, risked the job of someone close to them, or incurred even a moderate increase to their taxes.


Where is your national pride in this reflexive retaliatory action?

**

**



There’s a reason why observers call the ten years this country was led by former prime minister Justin Trudeau the “lost decade.” His tenure as PM is littered with failed experiments that haunt us today.

Prior to becoming prime minister in 2015, Trudeau airily proclaimed “the budget would balance itself.” Instead, his government racked up soaring deficits with lavish programs that pushed this country massively into debt.

His heavy-handed implementation of the Emergencies Act in 2022 was ruled unlawful by a Federal court, a decision subsequently upheld in a unanimous decision by the Federal Court of Appeal.

His government’s failure to effectively address anti-semitism in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel was also troubling.

But his policies around immigration are the ones that have caused the most long-lasting grief. Prior to his ham-fisted implementation of new policies, this country had a sensible and well-controlled approach to immigration. Then Trudeau opened the floodgates.

He ramped up immigration to levels never seen before in this country. By 2025, half a million newcomers a year were arriving, creating a housing crisis and putting unprecedented pressure on our healthcare system and other social services.

Finally, in 2024 he admitted what most sensible people were saying: “We didn’t get the balance quite right.”

The massive increase was caused mostly by the temporary workers program and student visas. Prime Minister Mark Carney has now slowed that down by 70% over the 2024 number.

Our healthcare system is creaking under Trudeau’s mistakes. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) the cost of the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) soared from $210 million a year in 2021-2022 to $896 million in 2024-25.

The program was supposed to provide temporary health care to refugees and asylum seekers. Instead, it became an entrenched hand-out. The PBO reported the average duration of the coverage for the fiscal year 2024-25 was four years. It was reported 74,000 failed asylum claimants are accessing the program instead of being deported.

Carney announced cuts to the program earlier this year, then later walked them back.

Immigration to this country is an honour and a privilege. You come here, work hard and give back. You don’t take advantage of the country that opened its arms to you.


Let's not pretend that Carney is doing anything differently than the village idiot.

Show one the pipelines, the deportations of illegal migrants, tougher sentencing for criminals and a deal with the Americans.




It's called absolutism:




But ... global warming ... :


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

No Country For Anyone

Canada has changed radically.

No longer an ally to anyone but China, the previous and current Liberal governments would rather sate newly established voters blocks and cater to the worst sorts of people and causes to make themselves appear onside with them.

What attracts them to these causes that are so vile?:

Canada says it intends to ban all trade with goods tied to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, joining several European countries in a joint statement promising harsher measures against Israelis the governments say are undermining a two-state solution.

In the statement, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand and her counterparts in the U.K., France, and nine other countries called on Israel’s government to crack down on settler violence in the West Bank. The 12 foreign ministers also specifically criticized an apartment development, called E1, they said would essentially cut the West Bank territory in half.

“We firmly oppose actions tantamount to the annexation of Palestinian land and forcible displacement of the Palestinian people,” they said in Tuesday’s statement.

The territory, seen as a potential part of a future Palestinian state, is controlled by Israel, which refers to it as Judea and Samaria. It is inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Jews and millions of Arabs.

Anand’s statement said Canada intended to join the European countries in introducing a national trade ban on goods tied to “illegal” settlements in the West Bank, though it did not detail when or how that would happen. The United States ambassador to Israel has also recently criticized Israeli violence in the territory after meeting with Palestinian Americans living there.

“The Government of Israel must immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence, and investigate allegations against Israeli forces,” Anand said.

(Sidebar: oh, is THAT why you care? How do you feel about Christians being killed by Muslims, Anita?) 

The promised trade ban is likely to be largely symbolic, though, with very little trade occurring between Israeli settlements and Canada. Now, Global Affairs Canada must figure out how to implement such a trade ban.

The announcement marks a worsening tone from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government amid deteriorating diplomatic relations between longtime allies.

The British government went a step further than Canada on Tuesday, accusing Israel of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the Palestinian territories.

“What the Netanyahu government is doing is a stain on the conscience of the world,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a video.

 

Does the British government feel that this is a stain on the conscience of the world?:


**

The federal Liberals’ policy of joining allies in punishing Israel, without providing any constructive solutions for bringing peace to the Middle East, continued apace on Tuesday, when Foreign Minister Anita Anand, along with her counterparts from several European countries, issued a joint statement pledging to “bring forward national measures to ban trade” in goods originating from Israeli settlements.

The fact that the announcement came a mere seven weeks before Israelis head to the polls — and as their leaders, courts and police show signs that they are beginning to take the issue of settler violence seriously — exposes it for what it is: a feeble attempt at election interference and a profound disrespect for the Jewish state’s liberal-democratic institutions.

 

It is contempt for Israel and its people and it is done for reasons as tawdry as satisfying domestic voters blocks.

Sickening.




The Federal Court has ordered the release of some long-concealed passages of a September 1986 study prepared for a landmark federal commission of inquiry on war crimes.

In a ruling made public today, Federal Court Justice Simon Fothergill ordered the government to disclose previously redacted portions of the study on the resettlement of alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada after the Second World War.

B'nai Brith Canada has fought for years to see more of the report by researcher Alti Rodal.

In February 2024, Library and Archives Canada released some additional portions of the report in response to an access to information request from B'nai Brith.

Library and Archives continued to withhold other elements, including passages that discuss the role of American intelligence agencies in facilitating the settlement of Nazi collaborators in Canada.

In his ruling, Fothergill rejected the federal argument that the release of certain additional information would harm Canada's international relations.



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

We Don't Have to Trade with China

How long does Carney think Trump will let China sit on its northern border?:

**

Mao Zedong, known as the “Great Helmsman,” was the most important founder of the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, after his death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party tolerated criticism of his legacy. Even the CCP admitted that Mao had made mistakes, though it still claimed that he was 70 percent correct.

Unfortunately, this minimal honesty in government has since disappeared. Chinese artist Gao Zhen, a 70-year-old permanent U.S. resident who emigrated to America in 2022, has been convicted of “slandering China’s heroes and martyrs,” namely Mao. Detained while visiting the PRC two years ago, Gao has been sentenced to three years in prison. His wife has been prohibited from leaving as a matter of “national security.” His young son cannot return home without his parents.

Gao’s crime was caricaturing the Red Emperor, a veritable madman responsible for mass death and poverty. Mao ruled the world’s most populous nation for nearly three decades, inflicting upon its people such infamies as the “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” along with multiple lesser atrocities. Although casualty estimates approaching 100 million lost lives are probably excessive, the actual numbers still boggle. R.J. Rummel, author of Death by Government, figured more than 35 million dead. Yang Jisheng, who chronicled the catastrophic government-created famine in which his father starved to death, figures that catastrophe alone killed 36 million Chinese. The Black Book of Communism estimates Mao’s death roll at about 65 million. Other guesstimates fall in between. It is true that Mao did not intend all of these deaths. Still, Chairman Mao, as he was commonly known, likely killed more people than any other man or woman in human history. It took a perverse mix of ability and effort to slaughter so prodigiously.

China is not the only nation in which a brutal and cruel ruler created untold horror and hardship both domestically and internationally. However, in most gruesome cases, succeeding generations repudiated the tyrant’s leadership. Adolf Hitler committed suicide amid the rubble of Berlin, his soon-to-be-captured capital city. After dying peacefully, Joseph Stalin was repudiated, and his body was removed from a place of honor in Lenin’s tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, a notorious crackpot even by communist standards, were reviled in death. Imperial Japan’s Premier Hideki Tojo was executed for war crimes, though Emperor Hirohito was excused from his likely responsibility for political reasons. Few think of the lost Ottoman Empire, let alone War Minister Ismail Enver Pasha, most responsible for the mass slaughter of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks during World War I. Who today even remembers murderous dictators like Ethiopia’s Haile Mariam and Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada?

In contrast, no one visiting the PRC can avoid Mao’s memory. His image adorns the currency. His portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Moreover, his mausoleum dominates the plaza and draws some 5000 visitors every day. His birthplace in Hunan Province is a favorite tourist location, and Mao tchotchke is widely available. Most importantly, his role as China’s principal revolutionary and nation-builder is celebrated in school textbooks, public museums, and popular culture.

Nevertheless, Chinese who lived through the horrors of Mao’s misrule are not fooled by continuing CCP propaganda. During the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, three protestors defaced Mao’s portrait. One was a bus driver — a common worker rather than an exalted intellectual — who, as a result, served 10 years in prison. After he escaped to Thailand, he observed: “An increasing number of Chinese, I mean overseas Chinese, are more aware of the autocratic, totalitarian, and violent nature of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Despite the bloody Tiananmen crackdown, some space long remained for discussing Mao’s legacy. The PRC was authoritarian, but its controls loosened. Unfortunately, General Secretary and President Xi Jinping has since turned into the reincarnation of Mao, at least in terms of suppressing opinion and debate. One of his more infamous acts was the 2018 law to protect the reputation of “heroes and martyrs.” The measure was “introduced so the country and the people forever remember the sacrifices made by the nation’s heroes and martyrs for the good of the country. The whole of society is required to learn from and defend the nation’s heroes and martyrs. It bans the defamation of heroes and martyrs, and any distorting or diminishing of their deeds. According to the law, people who defame the country’s heroes and martyrs, or sully their reputations and honor, will face administrative or criminal punishments. The law also stipulates that publicity and education about the deeds and spirit of the nation’s heroes and martyrs should be incorporated into the national education system.” The CCP is so serious about the rule by, not of, law that it applied the measure retroactively against acts committed years, even decades, in the past.

Gao long targeted past CCP rule, especially Mao. Reported by the New York Times: “In the early 2000s, he and his younger brother Gao Qiang held secret exhibitions in Beijing and got away with taking on taboo topics like the 1966-76 decade of political turmoil known as the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the death of their father, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Known as the Gao brothers, the duo were seen as cultural ambassadors to the West, representing a China that was more willing to face its past.”

However, after Xi steadily regressed to the CCP’s more repressive past, both Gaos emigrated to the United States. Unfortunately, despite warnings that Gao Zhen was at risk, he returned with his wife and son to visit his ill mother-in-law. In August 2024, “almost three months after he had returned to China, more than 30 police stormed Mr. Gao’s art studio in Sanhe City in Hebei Province, near Beijing. Four of the officers grabbed Ms. Zhao, forcing her and their son into the kitchen. She tried to comfort their son as they watched officers pin her husband to a couch and handcuff him.” Since then he has been in detention. Even when the verdict is prearranged, it seems, trials take longer in China than in America. Last week he was finally convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, for art created almost two decades before passage of the law under which he was punished.

Explained the Times: “Mr. Gao was arrested for three provocative sculptures of Mao Zedong that he made with his brother. In one, the revolutionary is depicted with breasts and a Pinocchio nose; in another, a group of Chairman Maos with guns prepare to execute Jesus Christ. The third, called ‘Mao’s Guilt,’ portrays the former leader, who was responsible for years of famine and upheaval, kneeling in repentance.” Insulting though these exhibits might seem, they are only minor retribution for mass killing and immiseration of the Chinese people.

China is an extraordinary country, with a venerated and ancient culture and an entrepreneurial and creative people. Their government freed them to succeed economically when it finally abandoned Marxism as part of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” However, Leninism continues to reign, stronger than ever under Xi, who is determined that the CCP will firmly rule China and that he will firmly rule the CCP.

The Chinese people will be free only when they are allowed to confront the legacy of the communist party and especially of Mao Zedong. He is more responsible than anyone else for creating what has become the modern Chinese state, though he would not recognize the result. Unfortunately, the Chinese people remain in intellectual and political bondage. Only their chains today are made of silver and gold rather than iron.

**






Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week happiness ...




Canada's economic performance has fallen further behind that of the U.S. over the past quarter century, with the gap in GDP per person more than doubling and the Americans pulling ahead on incomes, employment, investment and productivity.

That's according to a new study published by the Fraser Institute, which found that, in 1999, inflation-adjusted GDP per person in Canada was $48,076, while in the U.S. it was $58,842. By 2024, GDP per person had grown to $83,286 in the U.S. compared to just $59,529 in Canada — meaning the gap had widened from $10,766 to $23,757 over 25 years.

The study compared economic outcomes in the two countries by looking at measures including living standards, incomes, employment, investment, and productivity. In every category, Canada has fallen further behind over the first quarter of the century, it found.

For example, in 2010 (the earliest year of comparable data), inflation-adjusted median employment income was $6,126 higher in the U.S. than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had increased to $8,663.

"When comparing the economic performance of Canada relative to the U.S. since the beginning of the 21st century, it's abundantly clear that Canadian policymakers have failed to create an environment where we can prosper," said Jake Fuss, director of fiscal studies at the Fraser Institute, in a news release.

He added that the ability to transform raw materials and other inputs into demanded goods and services increased by more than double the amount (26.7 per cent versus 67.9 per cent) in the U.S. compared to Canada, "which explains much of our languishing living standards."

The Fraser Institute outlines three factors that explain the widening gap in economic performance between the two countries.

The first is a decline in private sector employment as a share of total employment in Canada. This decreased from 81.2 per cent to 78.5 per cent, meaning the government sector outgrew the private sector. The opposite occurred in the U.S., as private sector employment increased from 85.8 per cent of total employment to 86.5 per cent.

Meanwhile, labour productivity — a key driver of income growth — in the U.S. grew by 67.9 per cent between 1999 and 2025 compared to a 26.7 per cent increase in Canada during the same period.

Finally, business investment in Canada — which equips workers with the tools and technology they need to produce goods and services — dropped from nearly 90 cents per worker for every dollar invested in the U.S. to 54 cents between 2007 and 2024.

 **

The tariffs and counter-tariffs have hit some states and provinces harder than others.

In Canada, some provinces have been more exposed to US sectoral tariffs on steel, steel derivatives, aluminium, and autos and vehicle parts that don't comply with the current North American trade deal, known as the USMCA.

Ontario, the most populous province with a significant manufacturing sector, has been hardest hit by the auto and steel tariffs.

Several Ontario auto parts and assembly plants have announced layoffs and production cuts, and the province is estimated to have lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs since early 2025.

Metal exports from Quebec - which produces steel, copper and aluminium - fell 36% between February 2025 and 2026, and there was a 3.6% drop in employment in the sector, according to data released in July.

The Royal Bank of Canada estimates that Ontario and Quebec are the most impacted by US sectoral tariffs, while Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island are the least exposed.

**



**

**
 
**


 **






Now, according to Axios, Washington is discussing an ownership stake in more than a dozen producing Venezuelan oilfields containing an estimated 90 billion barrels of proven reserves.  Canada can’t say it was not warned this could happen in advance.

“Calling this deal huge would be an understatement,” one U.S. official told Axios. “It is massive.”

The agreement has not been finalized, and its precise ownership, operating and revenue arrangements remain under negotiation. Nevertheless, its potential scale should command the immediate attention of Prime Minister Mark Carney and every Canadian policymaker responsible for energy and economic development.

This is not simply another foreign oil project. Venezuela holds approximately 300 billion barrels of proven reserves, the largest reported total in the world. Much of that resource is heavy crude capable of competing directly with barrels from Canada’s oil sands.

If American capital, technology and political power are mobilized to restore Venezuelan production, Canada could eventually face much stronger competition inside the U.S. refining market upon which it remains heavily dependent.




HA!:

Joseph McLuckie can’t count the number of sleepless nights he has had ever since the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) determined about three months ago that his small business owes more than $180,000 in tariffs on a more-than-a-year-old shipment.

McLuckie is the managing director and owner of JPSM Golf, a small business based out of Pickering, Ont., that sells electric golf trolleys. These trolleys carry golfers’ bags throughout the course as they play.

JPSM Golf has been operational for the last 20 years, starting off in the basement of McLuckie’s home in Leaside before it moved to its 9,000-square-foot storefront.

Instead of celebrating his company’s 20th anniversary, McLuckie is agonizing whether he will be able to pay all six of his long-term employees should he have to pay the $182,883.95 the CBSA says he owes.

“You wake up in the middle of the night, you have a random thought, and it keeps you awake for a couple of hours, because I know if I had to pay this tomorrow, I’m out of cash,” McLuckie said in an interview with CTV News Toronto.

The shipment in question was delivered to JPSM Golf from China in April 2025. It was a 40-foot container filled with 330 Formula remote trolleys, a brand McLuckie’s company designed and developed on their own.

 

It's like it pays to produce stuff in Canada.





I found hospitals in Seoul, South Korea, to be sanitary and well-equipped. There was almost no waiting period when I went to an emergency room and even minor sprains or other problems got immediate attention. Despite my basic level of health insurance in Korea, I paid very little for an overnight stay in a private double room in the 2000s.

In the last 20 years, my wife and I have continued to travel to places like Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, and while we haven’t been in hospitals overnight, we’ve been able to get amazing and affordable care in Asia. 

Given the taxes we pay in Canada, I’m still having a hard time believing that the only hospital where I was forced to sleep in a hallway was in Saskatoon.

I’m grateful for the care I received from the doctors and nurses who took care of me, but I also felt sorry for them. Most of the team had been working for hours. I had seen many of the same faces for over 10 hours. They looked exhausted. It’s not a stretch to say they were being pushed to their limits in a broken health-care system.

Even after leaving the hospital, the delays have continued as I'm once again in a different kind of hallway: a long waiting list to get a basic test completed. Nurses and nurse practitioners have made calls and tried to get information on how long it will take for me to see a specialist, but the list seems to be the list. I still face a two to three month wait to get further testing done.

This is worse than hurry up and wait. It’s simply wait and pay high taxes that aren’t consistent with the level of care.

I'm appalled that the only place I was ever warehoused in a hospital hallway was in my own country and the city in which I grew up.




Because science:



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

We Don't Have to Trade With China

But the Liberals are as greedy and as power-hungry as Xi: 

The biggest alarm bell I’m ringing with regard to Canada is the fact that Communist China is basically using Canada as a staging area to attack our markets through illegal transshipment into the U.S. of Chinese goods.

My major new report, titled The Great Transshipment Scam: Rise, Scope, and Costs, details this and what we are doing to stop the scam and shut down China’s Shadow Transshipment Network, of which Canada is a Tier 1 member.

** 

Dominic Barton, former managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, yesterday was named chair of the federal agency Invest in Canada. The appointment came two years after investigators said McKinsey benefited from favouritism in winning $200 million worth of federal contracts: “I have no interest in making money.”

** 

 **

China’s free-speech efforts are an oxymoron; a permanent one-party police state does not exactly encourage debate. The European Union, for its part, thinks of itself as a bulwark of individual liberty, but it behaves in ways that are “post-liberal.” Restrictions on speech deemed to be hateful or, in some cases, simply disrespectful of authorities, has occurred in both Germany and Italy. The EU has ignored popular votes when they favour right-wing populists or seek to limit Brussell’s power.

Today in Europe, free speech is just a mild irritant. More worrisome still are developments in the U.K., the place that brought free speech to this continent. Instead of the Magna Carta, we see a great country becoming ever more authoritarian.

Take this. By some accounts, police in England and Wales made 10,000 arrests in 2024 for “communications offences.” The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport in 2025 was particularly chilling.

Canada seems to be moving in this same illiberal direction. To be sure, there are the promises of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantee the right of “free expression.” But the Charter also provided a breezeway for censorship by stating that speech is subject to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

This leaves power in the hands of the Prime Minister and Parliament to define “reasonable limits.” The growing Canadian thought police recently enacted the Combating Hate Act. And a bill that would impose strict new speech limits on social media companies is currently working its way through Parliament. As the American free-speech advocate Greg Lukianoff says, Canada’s speech is moving from free to “free … ish.”

This approach is also reflected in the ever more out of control Human Rights Tribunal. Former Chairman David Thomas claims the Tribunal has been almost completely taken over by notions of victimization popular on college campuses, including questioning any aspect of “trans rights,” a particular priority of the cultural left and the professional institutions they have captured. He compared the Tribunal to a “state funded extortion ring” that seeks to force those it attacks to make a deal in order to avoid greater financial and professional harm.

We can see where this is going by recalling the crackdown against the Covid era “Freedom Convoy,” with its pattern of arrests and defunding. Canada has long seemed a bastion of tolerance, sexual freedom and democracy, but how does that work when Prime Minister Mark Carney claims that Muslim values and those of his country, a product largely founded on European culture and Christianity, are the same. Perhaps the urbane PM is unaware of the lack of freedoms for women, gays or dissenters in virtually every Muslim country.

 

Speaking of the convoy:

Eighteen months after the bureaucratic controls began, came the decree making mRNA vaxxes compulsory. These novel injections were called vaccines, as if you were going to be jabbed with something akin to a measles or even a polio vaccine. They were not and are not at all like the earlier shots. They were touted as being 100% safe when no one could possibly know the medium- or long-term effects. In fact, later studies showed that myocarditis and thrombosis, among other malign effects, were associated with getting jabbed. We were told that all you needed was one — just like measles — but then you needed two, or three, or four…

What was going on here? And why were healthcare professionals, docs, and nurses objecting? For health bureaucrats and administrators and for the politicians who listened to them, it was absurd that front-line nurses and docs knew something about the vaxx risks they could observe daily in the responses of their patients. For their administrative superiors (but medical inferiors), the docs and nurses were just disobedient. Tamara was more accurate: by causing “so much suffering that didn’t need to happen,” the bureaucrats had “dehumanized us all.”

The effect of their supporters, however, was the opposite. For example, Tamara spoke with Neoline Villebrun, a clan mother and former chief from the Copper Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, who volunteered to organize drummers along the route to Ottawa, “and she was also going to pray for us.” The entire event was becoming more significant than any of the organizers initially realized, and certainly more than a conventional protest against a stupid and repressive government policy. “We were reuniting a people that had been torn apart. Here I was connecting with a Dene clan mother all the way out in the territories. Our message was reaching her, and she was reaching out to us. It made me understand what this was really about. This was about humanity, the opposite of dehumanization.”

Next, the government authorities and the politicians widened the net of those who had to be vaxxed to include cops, first responders, garbage collectors, priests, and (gasp!) university professors. As Tamara said, “every single guardrail that Canadians had counted on to hold government power in check had failed completely.” It started with the Charter and ended when common sense was replaced by bureaucratic fantasies that required complete submission and obedience. In Calgary, the grandiose intentions of the bureaucrats were exemplified by the arrest of a kid for shooting hoops in a park. By himself. Early in 2022, the federal health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, mused about making vaxxes compulsory for everyone. Later, he said that no one will ever be “fully vaccinated” against COVID, which meant compulsory vaxxes for everyone, forever.

In March 2020, a week after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 event a global pandemic, Justin Trudeau declared the truckers to be national heroes. They were “working overtime to keep us safe and the country moving.” He publicly thanked them “for being there for us” and assured them “that all Canadians are grateful for your service.” He continued this praise for weeks and on Easter compared the truckers to the soldiers who fought at Vimy Ridge, defending “the values we hold dear.” Five months later, on Labour Day, the same story.

A little over a year later, however, the truckers were included among those needing to be vaxxed by January 15, 2022, like it or not — at least if they wanted to cross the border with the US. Among those who objected was Chris Barber, later Tamara’s co-defendant in litigation brought by the Government of Canada (which is still going on). The sociology of truckers, especially long-haul truckers delivering cukes from the Central Valley of California or avocados from Mexico, tends to attract proud, independent, and self-sufficient characters. Long days alone in the cab tend to provide ample time to think and to reinforce these personality traits. For many of them, it was simply insulting to be considered by politicians to be heroes one day and then to be compelled to submit to a jab about which many of them (and many other Canadians) had serious reservations.

The next development was the coalescing of several contingent networks of individuals who may have known one another or who may have heard of one another. Enabled by social media, they developed a proposal and then a plan to drive to Ottawa to protest the latest government overreach and to explain directly to government officials and politicians why those people were doing bad things. Tamara was initially uncertain about the entire enterprise but got involved anyway and came up with the name “Freedom Convoy.” As the convoy attracted more participants — at one point it was over a hundred kilometres long — and drew more attention to its message that the governments within Canada had massively exceeded their authority or, more directly, that government repression was based on force and fraud, as Machiavelli would say, Tamara became increasingly concerned about what the Government of Canada in particular would do next. And, in fact, as early as March 2020, while still praising the truckers, Justin Trudeau had contemplated eventually using the Emergencies Act to retain, he thought, control of the situation.

The story of the truckers’ presence in downtown Ottawa has already been beautifully and fairly told by Andrew Lawton (now an MP) and Donna Laframboise. Tamara’s more personal perspective added its own strength to the more general narrative of popular resistance to tyranny. Consider in this context how she was attacked by the mainstream media, starting with the truly repugnant Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Early in her book, Tamara made an obvious remark: if you are an indigenous leader fighting oil and gas development or maybe just dissing Alberta or criticizing settler colonialism, you will have reporters lionizing your struggle on the nightly news. “But you’ll be treated a lot differently if you’re a Métis grandma with the wrong politics.” That was Tamara’s position, so her otherwise sparkling collective identity was ignored. Accordingly, the Ottawa Citizen noted that Lich “claims Native heritage.” In fact, she is a card-carrying member of the Alberta Métis Nation. CBC reached a new low by saying that Russians were behind the convoy, much as Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security advisor and the Canadian Deep State incarnate, said that the kids in the bouncy castles along Wellington Street were being abused.

The truckers had to deal with genuine political opponents as well. Under pressure from the Government of Canada, for example, GoFundMe folded — unlike what happened when their services were used by Black Lives Matter, which engaged in real violence. It took Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to threaten GoFundMe with a lawsuit in his state to stop them and hostile lawyers from trying to steal the truckers’ money. The convoy then moved their fundraising arm to a Christian organization. Likewise, Antifa was circulating around the Freedom Convoy, causing trouble that the mainstream media relished reporting. The Ottawa municipal cops “had no idea what they were doing,” for which the more professional Ontario Provincial Police apologized.

By the end of their stay, “we were tired. People wanted to go home. All we wanted was someone in power to meet with us and talk to us and hear us out.” It never happened. By mid-February, the truckers had decided to clear out, which was a gradual process, and head home. The timing was significant: “before Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, we had already struck a deal with the City of Ottawa to start clearing the trucks out.” The local cops, the city politicians, and the federal government all knew it. That was a signal to Trudeau to bring the hammer down. “Right after we had a deal to move the trucks. He didn’t want this to end peacefully. He wanted a fight.” In short, “Trudeau had blown everything up” in a spasm of aggression and vanity.

The story of her and Chris Barber’s trial and incarceration — exposure to “the faceless banality of state cruelty,” she called it — was appalling. Moiz Karimjee, a Liberal Party supporter, was the prosecutor. “Instead of Karimjee having to prove his case against me, my lawyers were forced to prove that I was innocent of the absurd claims that Karimjee kept making that had no basis in reality.” The judge who let Karimjee get away with all this abuse at her bail hearing, Julie Bourgeois, was another Liberal Party supporter, having carried the party’s banner in the 2011 election. At sentencing, Karimjee’s office went further still, demanding seven years for Tamara Lich and eight for Chris Barber on a mischief charge — near enough to the “dime” that Solzhenitsyn’s zeks drew in the GULAG. Even the trial judge, Heather Perkins-McVey, would have none of it, remarking that people convicted of robbery or aggravated assault rarely receive sentences in the range the Crown proposed.

 

To say that this protest scared the hell out of the Liberals would be an understatement. 

 

 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)