Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week yard sale ...

It’s just an economy:

Canadians continued to file for insolvency in the second quarter at levels not seen in more than a decade as the housing market slump and rising costs caught up with consumers, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy.

OSB data released on Monday shows 37,523 Canadian consumers filed for insolvency in the second quarter – a 6.9-per-cent increase compared to the same period last year, and the highest quarterly volume since 2009. There were 402 more insolvencies during Q2 as compared to the first quarter of the year. The increase marked two consecutive quarters above 2009 levels; that was the all-time highest full year for consumer insolvency filings.

The uptick can be attributed to historically high consumer credit-card and tax debt, said Scott Terrio, a manager of consumer insolvency at Hoyes, Michalos & Associates, a personal insolvency service firm. He added that the increase in insolvencies could also be because of Canadian homeowners reckoning with the heavy borrowing that took place during the housing boom of the 2010s.

**

For more than four decades, I have sat across the table from financially distressed Canadians. For most of that time, the people who came through our doors had a debt problem. Something had gone wrong. A divorce, an illness, a layoff, a stretch of poor decisions. We could usually name the event that put them in the chair.

That is changing. More and more of the people we meet cannot point to an event at all. Nothing went wrong. Their budget simply no longer works.

The distinction matters. A debt can be restructured and, in many cases, eliminated outright. A budget can only be trimmed, and it cannot be trimmed below what a family needs to live.

Our offices receive roughly 10,000 calls a year from Canadians looking for relief. Consumer proposals and bankruptcies remain powerful legal tools, and they work. We negotiate with creditors. We eliminate unsecured debt. We stop wage garnishments and end the collection calls. The law also requires us to provide financial counselling, and that counselling does genuine good: people leave understanding their cash flow, often for the first time in years.

But counselling teaches someone to manage the money they have. It does not create money they do not have.

We cannot raise a client's income. We cannot lower the price of groceries, gasoline, electricity, or rent. We can cut expenses at the margin, and we do. Increasingly, the margin is not where the problem lives.

Read the whole thing.

**

No one cares what Canadians think:

New polling shows 63% of Canadians oppose the federal government’s plan to hike fuel taxes next month.

Carney suspended the federal fuel tax in April to give Canadians a break at the pumps, saving 10 cents per litre of gas and 4 cents per litre of diesel.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation pushed for gas tax cuts for decades because cutting taxes is the simplest, fastest and easiest way for governments to make life more affordable for everyday working people.

Federal fuel tax relief also makes life more affordable for all Canadians every time they buy anything trucked to store shelves, a point even the federal government acknowledges.

“Cutting the tax on gasoline and diesel,” according to the prime minister’s office, “will reduce operating costs for truckers and businesses in the food, agriculture, housing, construction and delivery sectors.”

Making it cheaper for truckers to deliver goods to the store makes it more affordable for Canadians to buy those goods once they get there.

But relief is about to disappear. Carney plans to crank the gas tax back up on Sept. 8, just as Canadians are driving their kids back to school.

Canadians don’t support the gas tax hike. Most Canadians in every demographic — gender, age and province — oppose the increase, according to Leger polling. The demographics who typically support Carney’s Liberals, women and people 55 and older, are more likely to oppose the gas tax hike. Among Canadians who’ve made up their mind, 71% oppose the gas tax hike.

**

Federal and provincial government spending on “corporate welfare” increased by 142 per cent between 2019 and 2024 — an expense that leaders at the Fraser Institute call “wasteful spending.”

The independent think tank published a study on Tuesday which found that there was a marked increase in spending on corporate subsidies beginning in 2015.

Between 2007 and 2015, the data shows, spending on subsidies increased from $22.2 billion to $25.1 billion when adjusted for inflation, or 12.8 per cent. But from 2015 until 2019, spending increased more rapidly, by 44.2 per cent.

After the pandemic, spending on corporate subsidies increased each year from 2022 to 2024, with the inflation-adjusted level of spending in 2024 at $87.7 billion, more than triple the figure from 2015.

The Fraser Institute defines “corporate welfare” as “payments from government to private businesses intended to achieve specific objectives that are not payments for goods or services rendered.” They are paid with an economic objective, such as job growth or to boost a particular industry.

The study found that, when accounting for both inflation and population, spending on subsidies has increased in every province and at the federal level between 2015 and 2024.

**

Despite all of this spending, the study said, “an extensive body of research shows there is little connection between sustained, widespread economic growth or job creation and corporate subsidies.”

“The massive recent increase in government spending on corporate welfare should concern all Canadians,” said Alex Whelan, co-author of the study by the fiscally conservative think tank, Eliminating Corporate Subsidies in Canada: An Opportunity to Boost Growth.

“It’s wasteful spending at the expense of Canadian taxpayers and places government in the position of picking favoured businesses. Better policies exist to drive economic growth.”

The study argues that by eliminating corporate welfare and applying the savings to broad-based corporate income tax relief, the federal and provincial governments could lower business taxes today by more than 80%, removing another anchor on the Canadian economy.

 

Don’t worry, though.

The banker will be all over this.

Eventually.

Like, after his vacation.

 

 

A spiritually rudderless country will end up going nowhere.

You cannot live a life without a higher purpose nor can you defend a principle on your feelings.

(Sidebar: consider that Canadians voted for a failed substitute drama teacher three times and wore masks while riving alone in their cars. There is no way in hell the mysteries of the cosmos can be solved by such people.)

The removal of God has its reasons:

To jog memories: A 2023 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) directive updating a 2013 military policy told chaplains to avoid using religious symbols at public events, to filter religious expression through “Gender Based Analysis” to avoid asking anyone to remove a hat or headwear during their presentations, and, most infamously, to replace prayer with nebulous, sanitized alternatives called “spiritual reflections.” This new document, taking the form of Military Personnel Instructions, clarifies that such reflections “do not use religious specific language” but rather “reflect upon lessons learned, beliefs, values, and experiences to inspire gratitude, remembrance, hope, and integrity.”

I feel spiritually enriched already!

**

 And what an enlightened country we are!:

An 83-year-old Canadian grandmother was euthanized under the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying program on July 10, 2026, despite having previously declined it because of her Christian faith and without providing what her family describes as a final verbal confirmation of consent.

Brigitte Stegemann, known lovingly to her family as “GG,” died by lethal injection at The Pearl (formerly E.J. McQuigge Lodge), a long-term care facility in Belleville, Ontario, where she had lived for the previous two years.

She had been diagnosed with untreatable Stage IV stomach cancer about five months earlier.

Her granddaughter, also named Brigitte, held legal power of attorney and had served as her primary caregiver and advocate for more than 12 years. Facility staff routinely contacted the granddaughter for decisions about medications, treatments, and daily care.

Approximately two months before her death, Stegemann was asked about Medical Assistance in Dying.

According to her family’s public statement, she “clearly stated that she did not wish to pursue it.”

As a devout Christian, she said the practice conflicted with her personal beliefs and faith. She wanted to die naturally.

While the granddaughter was away on a 10-day vacation, facility staff held private discussions with Stegemann about MAiD without informing her family or any advocate. The family was never given a clear answer about who initiated those conversations, a serious concern given Stegemann’s diminished capacity, severe hearing impairment—she was completely deaf in her left ear and had very limited hearing in the right—and frequent periods of lethargy and unresponsiveness.

When the formal assessment occurred on July 6 and 7, the family described Stegemann’s sudden alertness as anomalous after days of near-unresponsiveness. During the capacity evaluation, the physician had to repeat questions repeatedly because of her hearing loss.

Stegemann repeatedly gave incorrect answers to basic questions about her own life.

When asked if she had any siblings, she said she had none—though she was the second-youngest of 14 children. She also said none of her siblings were still alive, even though some were and she had spoken with one the previous week.

She became disoriented, began to cry, and said, “I forgot about the grandkids,” confusing her living siblings with her great-grandchildren.

The family corrected the vast majority of her answers and the granddaughter objected directly, questioning how Stegemann could possibly be deemed capable of consenting to her own death.

The physician explained the procedure in language the family found euphemistic and misleading for an elderly woman of Stegemann’s background, describing it as receiving medication, feeling peace, falling asleep, and promising she “would not lose control of her bowels.”

The family was then ordered to leave the room.

The power-of-attorney holder’s request to remain was denied. When the physician emerged, she stated flatly, “I have deemed her capable of making her own decisions,” and informed the family that Stegemann had consented.

The procedure was scheduled for July 10.

The family was left “shocked and distressed.”

They later discovered that the death date had been set before any official MAiD application paperwork was completed. Facility staff, including the home manager, then filled out and witnessed the forms themselves without notifying the power of attorney, despite the family’s daily visits.

On July 8, the date was briefly advanced by a full day simply because the physician had an opening in her schedule. The home manager admitted she had personally completed the paperwork.

On the morning of July 10, the family took Stegemann outside to the patio for fresh air and a scoop of her favorite strawberry ice cream while waiting for her pastor to arrive.

Her clear wishes to be surrounded by family and to have her pastor present were treated as secondary to the schedule.

After returning to her room, an intravenous line was inserted amid what the family described as a significant, alarming amount of blood covering Stegemann, the bedding, and the surrounding area. When the physician arrived, Stegemann remained silent, her hands held in a prayer position, and gave no verbal response.

The family had been strictly assured that Stegemann would be asked for a final, explicit verbal confirmation on the day of the procedure to ensure she still wished to proceed.

“Tragically, we were left alarmed and horrified when the clinical team completely ignored her silence and carried the procedure forward regardless,” their statement said.

Stegemann was dead shortly afterward.

**

Called in as the chaplain for a dying woman a few years ago, Father Rodney Clark recalls the harsh administrative reality that immediately followed her death.

 The woman was homeless and had chosen medical assistance in dying at the Joliette, Que., hospital after her cancer metastasized.

But with no relatives around or financial resources, her body was essentially abandoned.

“There was no one around her who could cover the costs for transport and cremation,” said Clark.

He quickly tried to find a donor to pay the bill so he could claim her remains before they were sent to a local funeral home.

The hospital gave him less than a day to find the money, an affordable undertaker and to sign all the necessary paperwork, he said.

But Clark said by the time he organized everything, including a free marked grave, it was too late.

Less than 24 hours after her death, she’d already been cremated and buried in a common grave in Joliette, becoming one of hundreds of Quebecers whose bodies remain unclaimed every year.

What a sh---y country this place is!

The comments following the article confirm this, as well.

**

If I have to pay for it, you can damn well look at it:

The pronouncement came down from a labour arbitrator who decided last Tuesday that anti-abortion displays at Calgary’s Mount Royal University constituted a psychological hazard which the administration “did not adequately control.”

The case arose from a string of complaints by a staff member from 2019 to 2024. She had a miscarriage some 15 years prior, and was retraumatized at the sight of posters displayed by the anti-abortion, or “pro-life,” group that assembled regularly in a high-traffic part of campus.

“The images displayed on the obscenely large posters that the group chooses to convey their message is frighteningly similar to what I saw when I miscarried,” she wrote in a 2022 health and safety complaint.

The staffer had first requested the removal of the protesters from campus in 2019, but out of concern for free speech, the university sought compromise. It had an app which it used to send out safety notifications, so it set up a new type of notification to alert subscribing users of when and where anti-abortion displays popped up, and when they left. The university also had security staff place six or seven “WARNING GRAPHIC MATERIAL” signs in the areas leading to the protest display. Eventually, QR codes linking to support services were added to these signs.

(Sidebar: let that sink in. There is an app to warn adults of hurty words and images. Yep.)

The staffer approached her concerns in a number of ways. She spoke to human resources about it in 2019 but was rebuffed for free speech reasons; she made a health and safety complaint in 2022; she yelled and swore at the protesters in 2023, a video of which was published by Rebel News. And finally, she got her union to file a grievance in 2024.

Throughout this time, Mount Royal University made what appears to be a fair attempt to juggle the interests of the protesters and the staffer. Beyond the notification system and the dedication to posting warning signs, it consulted with the provincial health and safety agency in 2023 and was advised that the sign-notification system was adequate. In 2024, it began asking the protesters to provide 30 minutes’ notice the following year so that the signs and notifications could go out beforehand. All the while, it maintained that free expression meant allowing these protests on campus.

In the spring of 2025, the university stopped sending out notifications for the protests because, went the evidence, the person in charge feared that the volume of notifications would cause people to stop using the app. It was a strange concern because only those who signed up for these specific notifications were supposed to receive them. After some pressure from the campus community, the notifications resumed in the fall.

When this all fell on the labour arbitrator’s lap, he took a look at Alberta’s definition of workplace hazard, which is a “situation, condition, or thing that may be dangerous to health and safety.” Did the images of bloody fetuses meet that definition? To answer that, the arbitrator looked to the staffer’s experiences. She testified to her trauma; colleagues testified to instances where she shook and cried; even the Rebel video helped her case — the arbitrator said that the yelling and swearing was evidence of emotional dysregulation. She took medical leave in April 2024 and testified that she sought counselling that month.

“Based on the impact on (the staffer’s) mental health and emotional well-being, I have no difficulty concluding that exposure to the graphic images regularly displayed by the Pro-Life Demonstrators on campus is a situation or condition that is dangerous to (her) health and safety,” wrote the arbitrator. “Hence, I agree that the graphic imagery constitutes a ‘hazard’ within (health and safety) legislation requiring the University to take appropriate steps to control the hazard, as the University originally concluded.”

While Mount Royal University had taken steps to accommodate those who did not wish to see the protesters’ posters, the arbitrator said it had not gone far enough. In his view, the university should have required the protesters to give advance notice far earlier in the process; it should have limited them to use only one side of the high-traffic area where they demonstrated to make it easier for people to avoid the images; and it should have set up a personal notification system for this particular staffer — phone call, email and text. He ordered the university to do this going forward.

One should not be surprised that a Canadian university ruled this way.

It’s not like universities are places for higher learning or anything.

 

 

Never forget who ruined us:

Early in 1968, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau released a government White Paper he wrote entitled A Canadian Charter of Human Rights. It was his initial proposal for what would become the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.

At the outset, Trudeau’s proposal was not universally welcomed. Many scholars and political leaders recognized it to be a radical alternative to Canada’s existing system of individual rights protection. But because of the widespread fawning over the Charter of Rights today, many Canadians do not know about the significant opposition it received when it was first proposed.

One of the early outspoken opponents of Trudeau’s Charter was James C. McRuer, Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice of Ontario. At the time Trudeau’s proposal was released, McRuer was serving as the head of the Ontario Royal Commission Inquiry into Civil Rights, a position he was appointed to in 1964. The commission — the purpose of which was to recommend changes to strengthen protection for individual rights — would release its report in five volumes over a period of three years.

Part four of the report was issued in 1969, and in this volume McRuer took direct aim at the Charter proposal. As political scientist Donald Smiley wrote at the time, McRuer demolished “the superficial case for the constitutional entrenchment of rights made by Mr. Trudeau.”

Unfortunately, McRuer’s debunking of Trudeau did not generate enough opposition to prevent adoption of the Charter.

Trudeau’s key argument in favour of the Charter was that Canadians’ individual rights were not guaranteed because they were not entrenched in the constitution. Our rights, he alleged, were vulnerable until they were enumerated in the constitution through his Charter.

Because Trudeau was ultimately successful in achieving his goal, many Canadians today seem to think he gave us our rights, as if we didn’t have individual rights before his Charter. That view is complete nonsense.

The fact is, Trudeau did not like Canada’s method of protecting individual rights, which relied on historical practices inherited from Britain. Citizens were recognized as holding rights which included freedom of speech and freedom of religion, although these rights were not spelled out in a constitutional document. Nevertheless, Canadians enjoyed individual rights as good or better than any country in the world at that time.

Trudeau much preferred the American system of enumerated rights. He wanted Canada to entrench a document in the constitution with an explicit list of protected rights. Sounds good, right? Who wouldn’t want their rights defined in the constitution? Answer: Chief Justice McRuer and many others who understood Canada’s historic system.

 In the American system, the US Supreme Court becomes the final arbiter of the meaning of rights in the Constitution. What’s wrong with that? As McRuer wrote, “This means that, with the very rare exception of a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court has everyday final power over the democratic legislative bodies of the country. The result is that not infrequently the Court has denied the respective legislative bodies the right to pass laws which they have considered to be necessary to advance the social well-being of the people.”

In other words, the country is ultimately ruled by Supreme Court judges. As McRuer explained, “no legislative body representative of the people has any power to reverse or alter the law as declared by the Court.”

This is precisely the kind of system Pierre Trudeau wanted for Canada. But McRuer smelled a rat. Trudeau’s proposal, he wrote, amounted to “a proposal that we should adopt the sweeping degree of judicial supremacy that obtains in the United States.”

McRuer rejected it outright: “We cannot agree with a philosophy of government that deprives the people of the ultimate right to determine their own social affairs through democratic processes and transfers the final power of decision in certain wide areas to appointed officials — the judges.”

He went on to summarize the issue this way: “Is the American system of judicial supremacy, at the primary level of social policy decisions and law-making, preferable to the principle that has dominated in Canada and the Provinces until now, namely that parliamentary supremacy and not judicial supremacy prevails at the primary level of social policy decisions and law-making?”

In other words, is policy-making by unelected judges a better system than policy-making by elected officials who are directly accountable to voters? Trudeau favoured the former and McRuer the latter.

Unfortunately, Trudeau prevailed in 1982, and since then, judges — especially at the Supreme Court level — have become the highest political authorities in the land, at least on several controversial issues.

But we had been warned. Chief Justice McRuer, writing in 1969, told Canadians what would happen if Trudeau got his Charter. His distant early warning was ignored.

So today we have rights entrenched in the Charter, and the limits of those rights — as well as many contentious policy issues — are solely determined by nine Ottawa judges who are unaccountable to Canadian voters. Over the last few decades, they have consistently pushed policies in a leftward direction, and there’s little Canadians can do about it. The only consolation is the much-maligned Notwithstanding Clause, i.e., Section 33 of the Charter, which provides a limited avenue for democratic responses to judicial overreach.

Despite the best efforts of Chief Justice McRuer, Pierre Trudeau succeeded in transferring considerable political power from voters to a tiny judicial aristocracy.

 

Let’s hear it for censorship!:

Parliament’s 2023 passage of the Online News Act left Canadians, especially those in rural areas, too reliant on mainstream media and “official voices” in news coverage, says a report to the Commons heritage committee. The Act provoked a Facebook news ban that left communities “lacking credible information on the platform they used most,” it said.

Churchill Was Right

About a lot of things but this in particular:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

Here in Devín, it is the inclusion of Vienna that resonates. Until 1955, when Austria was granted independence, Vienna was similar to Berlin, administered by the four allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In 1946, a Berlin-like future was a possibility, with perhaps a wall in Vienna, the city of the waltz.

The free world instead faced the enslaved nations along the Czechoslovakian-Austrian border, along the Morava and the Danube. From the heights of Devín Castle, it is possible to see both Bratislava, and the outskirts of Vienna in the distance. A scenic, tranquil, 45-minute catamaran ride separates them today; during the Cold War the waters were rife with suspicion and terror.

It ought to be possible to see with greater clarity here, from the heights, as clearly as Churchill did, “the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people: war and tyranny.”

Yet in Slovakia, the government prefers not to see the reality of the Russian threat, immediately to the peace and security of Ukraine, and more broadly to the peace and security of Europe.

Churchill warned in 1946 about the threat of aggressive Russian imperialism. It had survived the fall of the tsar and rise of the Bolsheviks. It has survived anew the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a gangster state.

The line no longer runs between Austria and Slovakia, and Ukrainian courage these last years likely means that the line will remain far to the east. That courage is rooted in strategic wisdom and moral clarity. At the confluence of the Morava and Danube both were required for many years, and both prevailed in part because the warnings of Churchill, who had been ignored in the ’30s, were heeded in 1946.

 

Comments of the day:

 

 

 We were all warned.

 

Accountability Is For Little People

Your autocratic government at work:

Irregularities from missing fuel to contract splitting have been uncovered at the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi. The latest critical audit in Foreign Minister Anita Anand’s department follows a series of investigations triggered by the discovery of a fraud ring at our Embassy in Haiti: “The procurement and vendor landscape remains challenging with risks linked to corruption.”

 **

I've been asked why I am so harsh on Ms Freeland. I thought, given the fiscal, cultural, and political wreckage of my country that she left when she flitted off to greater things, I was being generous.

I wrote this when she resigned:

Freeland’s dramatic resignation should not… https://t.co/3ere0udqdz

— Howard Anglin (@howardanglin) August 7, 2026

 

The Federal Government To Take Over Private Veteran Cemetary

Given how they look after vets, I am not confident that this will go well:

The Department of Veterans Affairs is preparing to take over management of the nation’s largest private military cemetery, according to a briefing note. The National Field of Honour is home to thousands of impoverished veterans saved from a pauper’s grave by a century-old charity, the Last Post Fund: “No man who has given his services in defence of his country should be buried as a pauper.”

 

 

Some People Are "Special"

 And how!:

Access To Information records show the transport department arranged a “healing circle” for employees after some questioned whether 215 children were buried at an Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C. Comments were “uninformed, wrong and hurtful,” the deputy minister wrote in a staff memo: “I had people come to see me in tears.”

 

 

** 

I can only wonder why:

Employees at the Department of Natural Resources remain unclear about Indigenous reconciliation despite years of programming, says an internal report. The department was the first to give an entire division an Indigenous name to promote “cultural teachings, sharing circles and Indigenous recruitment programs.” 

 

Performative taxpayer-money wasting is STILL performative taxpayer-money wasting no matter what you call it.

If you want to get everyone's attention, why not abolish the Indian Act, the restrictive race-based policy that has only produced an entrenched robber-baron chief class and little else? 

** 

You see - it's alright when they do it:

The federal government says it is committed to respecting indigenous rights and title while continuing to fight a $5-billion court claim that seeks ownership and compensation for Parliament Hill and other federal landmarks in the National Capital Region.

A briefing note prepared for Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty reveals Ottawa remains in court opposing a title claim launched by the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, despite stating the government is committed to recognizing Aboriginal rights and title.

"The Government of Canada is committed to maintaining legal clarity and stability in land ownership while respecting Aboriginal rights and title," the Jan. 21 departmental briefing note states.

The federal government has contested the lawsuit in Ontario Superior Court since 2016.

** 

Across the province, more and more First Nations governments are making claims to vast swatches of land. Some of the most consequential claims are those of the Tahltan Nation, which has identified 95,933 square kilometres of land as its own territory. That’s about 11 per cent of the entire province. The consequences will be much greater than mere land transfers.

B.C. is negotiating what it calls a “comprehensive reconciliation agreement” or “foundation agreement” with the Tahltan and other groups, which is structured around recognition of Aboriginal title. The deal is slated to give enhanced control over boundaries and the local economy to the Tahltan, while still providing government cheques to the group.

The province has already begun delegating authority to the Tahltan through new agreements under Section 7 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA). These agreements give the Tahltan new authority over the proposed Eskay Creek Mine Revitalization project and the existing mine, which has been in operation since the 1970s. Under the new scheme, these projects cannot go ahead without Tahltan consent. In effect, the provincial government, accountable to all British Columbians, has become a desk clerk that issues paperwork, for which it does not possess the final sign-off. …

The primary defect in sovereignty-association by administrative agreement is that it keeps authority and accountability separated. An Indigenous government is accountable only to its own citizens, while the provincial government is accountable to every British Columbian. If the province gives a numerically small, membership-based government decisive territorial power over projects, land or resources affecting non-members, and the wider provincial tax base continues to provide services within the territory in question, then provincial ministers will bear the political blame for all of it. This is how democratic responsibility becomes muddied.