Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week spot of cloud ...


Oh, dear:

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook Japan 's southern main island of Kyushu on Tuesday, leaving dozens of people injured or missing after part of a shopping center and a huge chimney at a paper factory collapsed, officials said. A tsunami advisory was issued but quickly lifted.

There were fears that at least two people were dead.

In Kashima Town, the quake collapsed the second floor of the Aeon Mall shopping center, trapping an unknown number of people there, according to the fire department in the prefectural capital of Kumamoto.

Four people were pulled out with injuries and taken to a hospital, while 10 others were unaccounted for, the Kumamoto prefectural emergency response team said. It said the extent of the damage was still being investigated as the search and rescue effort continued.

At the Nippon Paper Industries Co.'s Yatsushiro factory, where a chimney collapsed and the building was damaged, 11 people were trapped underneath the debris, the Kumamoto emergency team said. Two of them were later found without vital signs, while the conditions of nine others were unknown, the team said.

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said more than 260,000 people were advised to evacuate, most of them in Kumamoto prefecture, but also in the neighboring Nagasaki prefecture.

The affected area is about 900 kilometers (540 miles) southwest of Tokyo, the country's capital.

A tsunami advisory for the Ariake and Yatsushiro Seas on the western coasts of Kumamoto prefecture and three neighboring prefectures was lifted within two hours, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told journalists that there were reports of damage to roads, bridges and buildings, as well as blackouts and fires, though details were unclear.

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said major public facilities or infrastructure were not damaged. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority said no abnormalities were found at three nearby nuclear power plants.

 

 

Rest assured, there will be no new pipeline in Canada:

Among Carney’s major economic goals are:

Doubling Canadian exports to non-U.S. markets in a decade.

Doubling Canada’s residential construction rate to 500,000 new homes per year in a decade.

Catalyzing $1 trillion in new foreign investments in five years, to make up for the more than $1 trillion that fled the country during the Justin Trudeau era from 2015 to 2025, described by RBC in an April report as “the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. For every dollar of inward foreign direct investment, two dollars exited.”

Doubling the capacity of Canada’s electricity grid by 2050.

If any of these targets are to be achieved they will only happen because of the use of fossil fuels, most critically natural gas, in the crucial area of electricity generation.

Anonymous Liberal MPs privately complain that Carney has betrayed his principles from his pre-political life as the UN’s special ambassador for climate change, committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, and as the world’s leading corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes.

They should ask themselves instead how did the Justin Trudeau government they supported for a decade become so divorced from reality that even Carney, a key economic adviser to Trudeau, is now backtracking on some of the signature climate change and energy policies of the Trudeau era.

One reason is that without reliable electricity when demand is rising exponentially because of AI data centres, battery manufacturing, critical mineral supply chains and the electrification of society, including the auto sector, all other efforts to grow our economy will fail.

Companies aren’t going to invest in a country that lacks reliable competitively-priced electricity, just as oil investors aren’t going to be interested in a country where it takes 12 years to build a pipeline from conception to operation, as was the case with TMX, and only then because the federal government bought it.

 

Also – Carney is useless but, then again, he was never installed to fix what the village idiot broke:

In fact, a new poll from the Angus Reid Institute shows that just 43% now believe Carney can deliver a good deal with the Americans, the thing he promised in the last election, down from 51% in April.

“If it’s not a crisis, you wouldn’t be seeing me,” Carney told a crowd at a Barrie, Ont., pub during the Liberal leadership race last year.

“I’m most useful in a crisis. I’m not that good in peacetime.”

The problem for Carney is that, on issue after issue, his response to pressure has been the same: cave, then spin the retreat as a victory.

We’ve seen it with the Gordie Howe Bridge, with Billy Bishop Airport and with trade talks with Washington.

 

 

Something has to give.

In this case, let it be the high-speed train to nowhere:

Ontario Transport Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria says the federal government conceded to "fringe groups" in rejecting a plan to allow jets to land at Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport.

"If this is how they're going to treat bigger projects, I don't think you'll get much built," he said at a Tuesday news conference in St. Thomas, Ont., while promising to move ahead with the plan.

A source with knowledge of the discussions told CBC News that, in response, Ontario is now rethinking its support for the Alto high-speed rail project.

Several hours after that conversation, 11 MPPs from Ontario put out a statement questioning Alto.

"In the case of Alto, too many questions remain unanswered. Too many voices have been ignored," the statement said.

For the project to proceed, local stakeholders need to see their feedback "reflected in the project's planning, route selection and delivery," the MPPs said.

"The federal government must ensure that any potential future rail project minimizes impacts on farmland and is supported by the people affected."

The 11 MPPs are largely from eastern Ontario ridings and included two cabinet ministers: Minister of Colleges and Universities Nolan Quinn and Labour Minister David Piccini.

The other MPPs attached to the statement are: Steve Clark, Dave Smith, Tyler Allsop, Ric Bresee, John Jordan, George Darouze, Laurie Scott, Stéphane Sarrazin and Billy Denault.

Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon announced the Billy Bishop decision in a social media post on Friday, saying the government will focus exclusively on "approved safety enhancements" for the downtown airport instead.

He said Ottawa came to the decision following consultations, citing a public survey in which 87 per cent of respondents opposed the move.

But a senior Liberal source says the timing of the decision wasn't a coincidence. The party hopes to hold its seat in the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York in the Aug. 31 byelection announced on Sunday.

The source says the decision to make the announcement was based partially on the knowledge that the NDP opposed the expansion, and would likely campaign on the issue.

But the province was caught off guard by the move, as it contradicts months of talks centred on reciprocal support for Alto and the Billy Bishop expansion, two sources familiar with the discussions told CBC News.

 

 

The nation has never been more secure:

A Canadian intern at NATO has been arrested on suspicions of espionage.

Belgium's Federal Prosecutor's Office said it launched an espionage investigation after NATO's security services tipped off Belgium's military intelligence.

 Authorities then detained "a Canadian citizen of Chinese origin" on Friday, a day after raiding the suspect's home and workplace inside NATO's vast command centre.

(Sidebar: not Canadian.)

Belgium's federal prosecutor said the intern is suspected of spying on behalf of a third country and being a member of a criminal organization.

The Canadian intern had been working at NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, also known as SHAPE, which is located in Mons, a city in southwestern Belgium.

"Following a number of investigative tasks, an operation was carried out on Thursday 23, July, by the Charleroi FJP. Searches were carried out at the suspect's home and at her place of work, at SHAPE," reads the federal prosecutor's statement, released Saturday.

The suspect was arrested Friday.

**

The RCMP says investigators have been reassigned to target foreign interference activities in Ontario. No surveillance subjects were named though public inquiries have documented wrongdoing by agents working out of the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and Consulate in Toronto: “The RCMP has established dedicated capacity in Ontario.”

 

Also:

It was more than a decade ago that the Ontario government started to worry about its wildland firefighting program.

Back in 2016, a report warned that fire rangers were quitting at an alarming rate, were less experienced than in previous years and were comparatively underpaid.

Those issues have persisted ever since.

Versions of the report repeated the warnings in 2018 and 2019, while an internal memo from 2022 warned of "an increase in the number of people leaving our organization for employment opportunities elsewhere."

In the last few years, several firefighters and the union representing them have pushed the issue again — urgently arguing that without change, Ontario will be caught short when big fires hit.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has pushed for major pay increases, to reclassify wildland firefighters as firefighters, not resource technicians, and more year-round jobs.

As the province faces a record-breaking fire season, with thousands of people evacuated and hundreds of thousands of hectares burned, frustration is growing within the wildland fire service.

Some feel that years of warnings have been ignored.

 "There is a big difference in making emergency dollars available when you have no choice but to do that — what about the preparedness dollars that are needed before the fire season even starts?" one senior, retired wildland firefighter told Global News.

 

 

Yes, Justin – who gave the order?:

The RCMP says it has no records divulging who told police to abruptly cancel a planned criminal investigation of the killings of scores of Canadians in Iran in 2020. Records show the investigation was dropped after then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a friendly meeting with Iran’s foreign minister: ‘There is no evidence RCMP members were motivated by political considerations.’

**

The RCMP must reopen its criminal investigation into the killing of 138 Canadian citizens and permanent residents by Iran, says an Ontario businessman who lost his wife and son in the 2020 terrorist attack. Newly-released records show the Mounties abruptly cancelled their investigation after then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Iranian authorities: “Somebody gave them an order to stop.”

 

 

The government cares more about a Facebook post than any other crime.

But don’t take my word for it:

Canadians are being asked to accept a quiet but profound transformation in the relationship between citizen and state. Under the banners of cyber security, fighting crime, and protecting children from social media harms, Ottawa is assembling new legal powers that expand government reach into private communications, financial records, location data, and online identities.

Three recent federal measures—Bill C-8, Bill C-22, and Bill C-34—show how this architecture is being constructed, one bill at a time. Each is presented as a measured response to genuine threats. Taken together, they form the foundation of an emerging surveillance state that can resemble the “social credit” system that is now in force in communist China.

Bill C-8, An Act respecting cyber security, received Royal Assent on June 15. This new law grants sweeping authority over telecommunications systems and critical cyber infrastructure. Enforcement officials may now access records and systems in the name of national and cyber security, frequently through secret ministerial orders. These orders can compel providers to restrict or remove services from individual Canadians, hand over private information about Canadians, and disconnect individuals from digital networks, often with limited independent oversight and gag provisions that prevent public or media scrutiny. Privacy advocates have warned that the practical effect is a capacity for warrantless intervention and even deplatforming, exercised largely outside the ordinary judicial process.

Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, passed third reading in the House of Commons on June 18 after being fast-tracked with limited debate. If passed, it will lower the legal threshold for obtaining subscriber information from electronic service providers. Where police once needed “reasonable grounds to believe” that a crime had been or would be committed, the new standard is the weaker “reasonable grounds to suspect.”

Bill C-22, now before the Senate, also authorizes new warrantless demands for certain categories of information and requires service providers to retain Canadians’ metadata (details about who communicates with whom, when, from where, and through which services) for periods of up to six months. Metadata of this kind reveals patterns of association, movement, and daily routine even when the content of messages remains encrypted. Courts in Europe have repeatedly struck down similar mandatory retention regimes as disproportionate interferences with privacy. Canada is now moving in the opposite direction, normalizing the long-term storage of digital trails that map the lives of the vast majority of citizens who have committed no crime.

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, goes further still. It opens the door to requiring all Canadians to prove their age and identity when accessing social media platforms, leading to increased collection of personal information by social media platforms, AI companies, and perhaps even government institutions. Bill C-34 also creates a new and very powerful super-regulator called the Digital Safety Commission. This Commission will be armed with broad, largely undefined powers to regulate online activity and to impose penalties of up to $10 million, or 3 percent of a company’s global revenues for non-compliance. What constitutes “harmful content,” including the vague category of material that “foments hatred,” will largely be left to the Commission to define and enforce through guidelines and orders after the bill becomes law.

To illustrate the danger of allowing governments to punish “wrong” opinions, Toronto police stopped a Rebel News billboard truck on July 23, 2026, and began investigating an alleged hate crime. The truck was displaying a paid advertisement from Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights stating that “Women and girls deserve safety on the field, privacy and dignity in the locker room, and fairness on the podium” and that “males are invading female sports.”

These newer statutes build upon existing frameworks such as the federal anti-money-laundering regime, which already requires extensive collection and sharing of personal financial information. The Customs Act allows border officials to search smartphones and electronic devices, often without the judicial authorization that would be required elsewhere. The cumulative effect of existing laws and new laws allows for far broader state access to Canadians’ communications, transactions, and online behaviour, justified by the ever-popular cause of “safety and security.”

 **


**

**

**


 


Never forget that Canadians voted for this:

A 23-year-old man from Aurora has been charged after allegedly driving through a playground and walking paths that were packed with children at a park in Ajax earlier this month.

Durham Regional Police said a call came in shortly before 6:30 p.m. on July 18 for a white Toyota sedan that was driving dangerously through Rotary Park on Lake Driveway West.

 “The suspect vehicle drove through the playground, splash pad, and walking paths, which were filled with pedestrians, including young children,” police allege in a news release on Monday.

No injuries were reported.

Officers later found the vehicle three kilometres from the park near Westney Road South and Bayly Street West and tried to stop it.

The driver allegedly fled from police and a short time later, returned to the park, driving along a pedestrian bridge.

Police said they located the suspect in the area of Harwood Avenue South and Bayly Street East, where they attempted to block it from escaping.

“The suspect made efforts to evade police, resulting in the suspect vehicle colliding with an unrelated GMC SUV, before officers took the suspect into custody,” police said.

No one was injured in the collision.

In Monday’s news release, they identified the suspect as 23-year-old Ismail Abrahimzada of Aurora.

He has been charged with dangerous operation and failure to stop for police.


It's a dry run.

 

 

Compare and contrast:

Saskatchewan's health minister says the province's plan to attract new health-care workers is delivering results, with thousands of workers joining since its launch four years ago.

Jeremy Cockrill says over 7,500 health-care professionals, including nurses and doctors, have joined Saskatchewan's workforce as part of the province's Health Human Resources (HHR) Action Plan, launched in 2022, which focuses on accelerating efforts to attract and retain health-care workers.

As part of this plan, the province created the Saskatchewan Healthcare Recruitment Agency (SHRA) to streamline health-care recruitment efforts. Terri Strunk, the agency's CEO, says it has been using targeted advertising campaigns to attract workers from outside the province, helping connect prospective health-care workers with recruiters.

"We have some physicians who notice those ads," said Strunk. "What they do is visit our website, create a profile, and from there, our team notices them and begins working with them."

**

Dr. Kaitlin Stockton has watched far too many patients suffer in overflowing emergency departments.

The Vancouver-based physician has given patients she just met a cancer diagnosis, with little privacy in the middle of a noisy room. She's cared for a man with an intracranial brain bleed on an ambulance stretcher in a hallway. And she can't shake the memory of one patient who had septic shock after spending eight hours in a waiting room, dangerously close to death.

Those kinds of harrowing experiences take a toll on emergency physicians, Stockton said, and there have been too many to count. At least five of her colleagues have left in the last few years.

Now, a new national survey shows the problem goes beyond any one hospital or province.

One out of every 10 emergency physicians in Canada have left their specialty while the vast majority of others are reducing their hours or taking time off to manage burnout, the results suggest.

The findings, part of a study out Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, are based on a 2025 cross-country survey of hundreds of emergency medicine doctors.

"The prevailing theme was that the [health-care] system is broken," wrote co-author Kerstin de Wit, an emergency physician at Kingston Health Sciences Centre and professor at Queen's University, who conducted the research with the Network of Canadian Emergency Researchers.

Nearly half of survey respondents said they've reduced their clinical hours while 20 per cent have taken time off and 10 per cent have left the specialty, the researchers found, with women and younger physicians reporting higher rates of burnout.

High levels of physician burnout can lead to lower-quality care and put patient safety at risk, the researchers concluded, and shouldn't be considered just a "pandemic phenomenon."

The results were based on an online survey of more than 400 doctors, with respondents from every province and territory except Nunavut and Yukon.


You can always euthanise people and take their organs:

A new paper is reviving the idea of “death by organ donation” — retrieving organs from MAID patients while they are sedated and unconscious but still alive.

Current law prohibits it, due to the long-standing dead donor rule, or DDR, which holds that people must be dead before organs can be removed (the “Death Requirement”) and that doctors must not kill a person by means of procuring his or her organs (the “Don’t Kill Rule”).

However, the authors of a new paper published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine say the growing acceptance of voluntary euthanasia complicates the dead donor rule, because people are knowingly consenting to death, and euthanasia laws sanction killing by physicians in “circumscribed situations.”

Death by organ donation might improve the quality of donor organs, they argue, “potentially saving many lives” and allowing donors to maximize their donation.

The idea not only sounds ghoulish, it also risks eroding public trust in MAID and organ donation both, said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman, who has spent most of his working life in critical care.

(Sidebar: oh, people have reason to trust the system, do they?)

“I think a lot of the public would be fairly horrified by it.”

The authors of the paper — “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia” — said they are not arguing that the dead donor rule should be abandoned. Rather, the authors say it’s time to reassess the rule as it applies to MAID patients, given the growing acceptance of organ donation after euthanasia.

The rule protects people from being killed for their organs and treated merely as a means to benefit others, and has been preserved to protect public trust, they said.

However, voluntary euthanasia “creates a new ethical context” for the DDR, they wrote.

At least 155 people in Canada have donated their organs and tissues after receiving a doctor-administered lethal injection since the country’s MAID law came into effect in 2016.

The “categorical constraint on physician killing, for its part, is legally and ethically circumvented by voluntary euthanasia,” two Canadian critical care doctors and a Harvard Medical School bioethicist wrote in the journal.

“The current legal reality of voluntary euthanasia provides a new context for interpreting the Don’t Kill Rule.”

MAID organ donors “are not dead yet, but their death is imminent” and will result directly from their voluntary request to have their lives ended by lethal injection, they said. In those cases, it may become “ethically arbitrary” to require a formal declaration of death before organs are retrieved, they wrote.

“In this landscape, the moral significance of strict temporal sequencing (post, not pre-mortem retrieval) is diminished,” they said.

The outcome isn’t altered “by whether death occurs moments before or during organ retrieval.”

Therefore, the ethical focus should “shift away from identifying a precise moment of biologic death and toward respecting patients’ autonomous decisions, ensuring that safeguards against coercion and exploitation are robust and advocating for a transparent and publicly accountable process,” they wrote.

Under guidance developed by the Canadian Blood Services, the decision to receive MAID must precede, and be separate from, the decision to donate, so that people don’t feel pressured to choose either.

However, the possibility of organ donation can be raised once the MAID request has been granted, and increasing numbers of Canadians requesting MAID are asking to donate their organs after death. One study found Canada performs more organ donations after euthanasia than any other country that has legalized the practice. Between 2019, the first year it was available, and 2021, Canada performed 136 organ donations after euthanasia. In 2021, Canada had 41 cases, compared to only 20 in Belgium, The Netherlands and Spain combined.

With organ donation after MAID, the person is taken to a hospital and administered life-ending drugs. Next follows a standard organ donation protocol: blood pressure is monitored via a line inserted into a small artery in the wrist to determine when the person’s heart has stopped beating.

Doctors then wait an additional five minutes — the “no touch” period — to confirm death before the person is transferred to the operating room for organ retrieval.

Death by donation “would look in some ways similar, and in some ways very different,” said first author of the new paper, Dr. Carter Winberg, a Canadian critical care doctor currently completing his masters in bioethics at Harvard Medical School.

The person would be brought to hospital and taken to an operating room, where they would receive the same sedating medications used with euthanasia. Except surgery would commence once the person was fully unconscious. Death would ultimately be caused by removal of vital organs.

**

While being treated for a hip fracture at the Vancouver General Hospital (VGH), a Vancouver priest was offered MAiD twice, despite not being close to dying and going against the priest's beliefs.

Father Larry Holland, 79, was recovering from his hip fracture at VGH back in April after a fall in his bathroom on Christmas Day.

Reported by the BC Catholic, Holland added he was not dying then or now, and was left shocked by the two interactions with healthcare professionals offering him euthanasia at the hospital.

The first push for MAiD came from a doctor who raised the subject because, according to Holland, it was "something they have to discuss with someone who’s been given a terminal diagnosis.”

Holland then told the doctor he was "morally opposed to euthanasia."

The doctor continued, stating, “he just wanted to make sure that, if a [terminal] diagnosis came up or not ... I knew of the different services I had access to," recalled Holland.

A few weeks after the first mention, a nurse offered MAiD to Holland, who, according to the priest, seemed uncomfortable bringing the subject up, doing so out of compassion for the pain he was enduring.

“It’s a false compassion, really,” he stated.

According to Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), which operates VGH, "staff may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so."

Staff, VCH stated, are also "responsible for answering questions when patients bring up the topic of MAiD."

One Vancouver priest, Father Larry Lynn, was shocked to hear about Holland's case and surprised Canadian euthanasia providers aren't ruling out initiating MAiD discussions with those with religious beliefs, in Holland's case, Roman Catholics.

“This must surely be among the most appalling examples of Canada’s coercive and insensitive euthanasia regime,” commented Lynn on the matter.

**

At the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Rémi, a man who emerged from a coma following a serious accident, now consistently asserts that he wishes to continue living. However, his doctors consider that the treatments keeping him alive constitute “unreasonable obstinacy” and have initiated proceedings to have them withdrawn. The Council of State has just ruled in their favour, in a decision containing a chilling phrase: “the patient’s will ends with the law.”

The case is emblematic and clashes head-on with the debates of recent weeks on consent to die. Here we are faced with the opposite scenario: when a patient is conscious, clearly expresses a desire to live and has the support of their family, who should have the final say?

Rémi’s story is extraordinary. Following an accident that caused severe neurological damage, he was left in a coma. Against all odds, he woke up but his condition remains extremely serious: he is dependent on life-support treatment and suffers from a severe disability. But he is able to communicate and states unequivocally that he wishes to continue living.

His family shares this wish and refuses to allow treatment to be withdrawn. Doctors at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital nevertheless consider that continuing treatment constitutes unreasonable obstinacy within the meaning of the Claeys-Leonetti Act, which set out the medical and legal framework for patients at the end of life, until the passing of the Act of July 15th on assisted dying. In their view, continuing treatment would merely artificially prolong an existence with no prospect of significant improvement.

This disagreement led the family to launch a legal battle aimed at preventing the medical decision from being carried out. Following internal hospital procedures, the family lodged an urgent appeal with the Council of State to suspend the decision to withdraw treatment.

The appeal challenged the medical assessment that the legal criteria for “unreasonable obstinacy” had been met. In particular, the family argued that Rémi is now capable of expressing his wishes, that he is explicitly asking to live, and that this wish should take precedence.

The Council of State did not accept this argument. It upheld the doctors’ assessment and confirmed that the conditions set out in the Public Health Code had been met to authorise the withdrawal of treatment.

It is in this context that the high court states that “the patient’s wishes are subject to the law,” a phrase that sums up the philosophy adopted: the patient’s expression of will is not, in itself, sufficient if the legal criteria permitting the withdrawal of treatment are deemed to have been met.

This case highlights a paradox rarely mentioned in the debate on end-of-life care.

For months, advocates of the legalisation of euthanasia have emphasised patient autonomy and absolute respect for a patient’s wishes when they wish to die. Yet, in Rémi’s case, the opposite occurs: a patient asks to live, but this wish is not enough to prevent the withdrawal of treatment.

Under French law, the decision does indeed rest with the doctor, following a collegial procedure designed to assess whether treatment has become futile, disproportionate or serves no purpose other than the artificial prolongation of life. The family is consulted, but has no right of veto. Its role consists essentially of bearing witness to the patient’s prior wishes when the patient is no longer able to express them.

The Rémi case thus illustrates the limits of the power of relatives when faced with a medical decision. Even when they unanimously oppose the withdrawal of treatment, their opposition is not sufficient to prevent it from going ahead if the courts consider that the legal procedure has been followed.

The timing gives this decision particular political significance. Just a few days after the passing of the law establishing a right to assisted dying, many opponents are denouncing what they perceive as a growing imbalance in favour of the medical profession. In their view, the Rémi case demonstrates that the safeguards put forward during parliamentary debates do not allay all concerns. A system in which a conscious patient may have their wish to live set aside on the basis of a medical assessment reveals the extent of the power entrusted to doctors in end-of-life decisions.

 

You can have whatever wish you like as long as it aligns with the government’s.

 

 

Fauci is a fantasist and an evil son-of-a-b!#ch:

When the Covid outbreak became widespread, power-hungry government officials treated it as the second coming of the bubonic plague as a pretext to lockdown society. Yet the virus’ risks to the general population were not nearly as deadly as what they were made out to be — a fact Fauci recognized early on.

In an entry dated Feb. 8, 2020, Fauci described a purported phone call he had with Tom Frieden, who served as President Obama’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director. According to Fauci, the two discussed “various aspects of the [Covid] outbreak.”

The then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director wrote that he and Frieden “are on the same page” in their assessment that the Covid-19 virus “is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator” of total diagnosed cases “is much greater than” currently reported figures. Fauci further noted that this would make the “case fatality rate (CFR)” — the proportion of people who die from a disease among the total number infected over a certain period of time — “more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.”

Put another way, the risk of dying from Covid among the general population is not as great as initially feared.

Yet that’s not the tune that Fauci sang to the public in the weeks to come.

During a March 10, 2020, Hannity appearance, Fauci said that the “mortality for seasonal flu is 0.1,” and that the mortality for Covid-19 “is about 2, 2.5 percent.” While he subsequently noted that “[i]t’s probably lower than that” and “probably closer to 1 [percent],” he then stated, “But even if it’s 1, it’s ten times more lethal than the seasonal flu. You got to make sure that people understand that.”

Fauci would regurgitate similar rhetoric when testifying before Congress the following day. Under questioning from Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, the then-NIAID director said that “the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent,” and that “[t]he stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.”

“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand,” Fauci said.

**

For years, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective. What he never mentioned, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is that he may have suffered one of those "rare" adverse events himself, and he hid it from the country while publicly insisting such injuries weren't happening.

Kennedy appeared on Fox News's The Ingraham Angle to discuss the newly released diary entries that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made public, entries that document Fauci's day-to-day life during the pandemic, on top of his disturbing obsession with himself and the power he wielded during the pandemic. When Laura Ingraham asked whether there would be any accountability for the trillions of dollars lost, the ruined education of America's children, and the shattered reputation of the public health establishment, Kennedy didn't hesitate.

"Yeah, and millions of people injured," Kennedy said. "So he lied about masks, he lied about social distancing, he lied about the transmission, he lied about natural immunity, he lied about the capacity, as you just said, of the vaccine to prevent infection."

Then came the bombshell.

"He got vaccinated at a very, very public press conference in January of 2021," Kennedy said, noting that five months later, the diary reveals, Fauci "had a pulmonary infarction, which is one of the adverse events that NIH, CDC and FDA said are expected from the vaccine."

"He never told anybody," Kennedy said. "He got treated for it privately by the best doctors in America at the same time, he was telling everybody that was not an adverse event."

Think about that for a second. The man who badgered every American into taking the shot, insisting it was perfectly safe, appears to have experienced one of the exact injuries his own agencies flagged, then quietly got elite private care while assuring the public that such reactions weren't real. Ordinary Americans who reported similar problems got dismissed and mocked. Fauci got the best doctors in America.


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

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

A Bridge Too Far

Answers are not for little people:

Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday walked away from reporters when asked if he misled the public over billions in toll concessions secretly granted the United States on the Gordie Howe International Bridge at Windsor, Ont. A public ceremony commemorating the July 27 opening with U.S. guests was cancelled: “Did you mislead Canadians, sir?”

**

Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday did not comment after federally-released records showed he misled taxpayers over secret terms of a U.S. toll-sharing agreement on the $6.4 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge at Windsor, Ont. One MP said it was improbable that Carney, “a very smart man who has a background in finance and banking,” was unaware he lied to the public.

**

Prime Minister Mark Carney faces a parliamentary hearing regarding his misrepresentations over toll-sharing concessions on the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The chair of the Commons government operations committee yesterday summoned MPs to a special hearing to “get to the bottom of the matter.”

**

Infrastructure Minister Gregor Robertson will not say how much taxpayers stand to lose under toll concessions at the Gordie Howe International Bridge. A symbolic opening of the Bridge Friday in Windsor, Ont. was disrupted by a fresh demand for more tolls by U.S. President Donald Trump: “Can you outline how much money Canada expects to give the United States?”



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

Some People Are "Special"

Without exception!:

Survivor accounts of residential schools vary — sometimes from the very same person. Nunavut Senator Nancy Karetak-Lindell told Nunatsiaq News in 2001 that her time at Akaitcho Hall was "a home-away-from-home" and that "it's not like what you're hearing about all the residential school issues today." In the same piece, she said, "At Akaitcho, we were in a structured environment compared to where we came from. That taught us perseverance and how to discipline ourselves." "It taught us a lot about doing things in life that we didn't always want to do, but those things had to be done ... We had to learn how to live with people from different cultures who spoke different languages and came from different parts of the NWT," she continued, adding that those friendships helped her political career.

Twenty-five years later, it was the same senator, now describing herself as a residential school "survivor," who stood in the Senate and introduced an amendment to Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, that proposed making residential school "denialism" a criminal offence.

On June 3, the Senate voted 41-32 against it, even though the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights had recommended it 7-1 two days earlier. Government representative Pierre Moreau told the chamber why it failed: no consultation with First Nations and Inuit communities, and no legal analysis of what the amendment would actually do.

The Assembly of First Nations didn't let it go. On July 15, chiefs at the AFN general meeting in Ottawa passed an emergency resolution demanding the government try again. Chief David Monias called it a matter of honouring survivors. Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige said the history "isn't up for debate," arguing hate-speech law is needed so denialism can no longer "prey upon survivors, their families, or our people." NDP MP Leah Gazan has a private member's bill on the same subject sitting in the Commons since 2024 — this fight isn't over just because the Senate voted once. …

The Criminal Code is supposed to tell citizens exactly what will land them in prison. "Downplaying" and "minimizing" do the opposite — they let prosecutors decide after the fact whether your opinion was a crime. That's not law. That's discretion wearing a badge, and discretion this broad always lands hardest on the unpopular and lightest on the well-connected.

Canada already has laws against harassment, intimidation, and the willful promotion of hatred. Those cover conduct that targets real people. Disagreeing with an official historical narrative isn't that, and pretending otherwise is how speech laws metastasize.

The answer to an argument you hate is a better argument, not a subpoena. If a historical claim is as strong as its defenders believe, it wins in open debate. If it needs the Criminal Code to win, that says something about the confidence of the case, not the guilt of the dissenter.

The Senate had it right in June. Moreau's objection — no consultation, no legal analysis — was really a polite way of saying the same thing this piece is arguing outright: nobody had actually worked out where the line falls, because there isn't one that can hold. The AFN will keep pushing, and Gazan's bill will probably come up for a vote eventually.

When it does, Parliament should give it the same denial the Senate already did.

** 

In 2024, a mandatory course for B.C. lawyers referred to the “discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds” which “(confirmed) what survivors have been saying all along.” When one lawyer proposed a correction, as no graves were ever found, the B.C. Law Society publicly disparaged him. He sued for defamation — but now, the trial has been called off.

Instead, criminal defence lawyer Jim Heller settled his case with the law society, a development that was made public in a Glacier Media report on Monday. The terms are confidential. We won’t know what each side agreed to do to shelve the litigation, or who the court would have sided with in the end. Much like the supposed “graves” that the local First Nation refuses to excavate at the Kamloops residential school, the public won’t get any closure on this one.

“I feel like I’m escaping the looking glass,” Heller told me over the phone on Thursday. “I’m escaping Wonderland a little bit.”

Heller’s saga began when he spoke up about the wording in the Indigenous competency course mandated for all lawyers by the B.C. Law Society. As things stood back then, all members of the profession had to read through materials endorsed by their professional overseers to maintain the ability to practice — only, the course materials were objectively false. The thousands of professionals gatekeeping everything from real estate deals to criminal sentencing — professionals from which the next generation of B.C.’s judges would be drawn — were being told to internalize the unproven claim that the bodies of children were found at the Kamloops residential school grounds.

Attempts to contact those responsible for the course to spur a correction went ignored in the summer of 2024. Nevertheless, there was a democratic fix available. Heller and colleague Burnaby lawyer Mark Berry advanced a motion at the law society’s annual general meeting that fall, proposing the use of the words “potentially unmarked burial site” to more carefully reflect reality; they also moved to have the reference to 215 bodies of children removed, along with the assertion that the “discovery” confirmed what survivors had been saying.

In response, a group called the B.C. First Nations Justice Council released a statement calling Heller’s proposal a “Racist Resolution” that contains “alarming Residential School denialism.”

“It is unconscionable that efforts be made to revise this history and sanitize the genocidal atrocities committed against Indigenous people in B.C. and Canada,” it said.

The very next day, the B.C. Law Society published a news release about the B.C. First Nations Justice Council statement, adding its own commentary to the mix: “The resolution submitted by Mr. Heller and Mr. Berry only highlights the need for the (Indigenous course) and confirms much work remains to be done to increase knowledge and understanding, continue our efforts of advancing meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous people, and eliminate racism in our profession.”

The motion ultimately failed: while it had garnered support from 1,499 members of the law society, another 1,683 opposed it, with 590 abstentions.

That October, Heller began asking the law society to remove the statement about his motion from the website. He took it to be an accusation of racism. The law society didn’t budge, however, so he embarked on his lawsuit in February 2025.

Interestingly, Heller says that his Indigenous clients have been made aware of his efforts to correct the training materials, and the vast majority have been supportive: “We have good, good relationships and they understand the principles behind it.”

There were some interesting twists in the litigation. During the summer of 2025, the B.C. Law Society began filing documents in court to support its defence. Heller referred to these documents in an affidavit afterward — only to have it taken out of public view entirely. A judge sealed that affidavit in August 2025 to protect the privacy of a former law society employee who had personal and family experience with “colonialism, colonial harm, and the effect of Residential Schools.”

“I reject the notion that because a person chooses to share certain information about themselves or their families in a public context, that they have somehow waived their right to privacy over any related information, including information that may be shared in a personal, non-public context,” wrote the judge in his decision to seal the affidavit. “Here, it is apparent the information … was not intended for the public sphere.”

Evidently, an Indigenous employee of the law society had said something relevant to the matter at hand, but it wasn’t up to the public to know.

It was around this time that the B.C. Law Society began to retreat. In August 2025, it removed its disavowal of Heller from its website and changed the mandatory Indigenous course materials. The course currently speaks of “200 targets of interest at the Kamloops site that are probable burials.”

This was followed by an odd non-apology by the law society in May 2026, stating that, “To the degree it was understood by some to have defamed Mr. Heller, the Law Society wishes to confirm that was not its intention.”

Taken in context with the settlement, it’s a win for Heller. The B.C. Law Society, once staunch in standing by the falsities it had published, quietly retracted them right around the same time that litigation was heating up. There was smoke, but the fire of a public win was doused before it could ever shed light on the moral panic that gripped Canada in 2021.

(Sidebar: hardly a win. They knew that they couldn't win themselves.) 

And who knows; perhaps the courts can’t be trusted to provide that anymore: it’s B.C. judges who keep allowing homeless people to claim property rights over public spaces like it’s the age of settlement; it’s B.C. judges who have begun blowing up the province’s land title system over historic grievances. Judges nationwide are provided training that predisposes them to siding with Indigenous causes. The cold reality is that the courts have political biases, and that testing them is a gamble.

But in other ways, old professional principles still work. Heller, a defence lawyer, took particular issue with the graves panic that hit Canada in 2021 because of how starkly it contrasted with the workings of a criminal trial. To prove someone’s guilt requires extensive evidence — and, in mounting a proper defence, the “devil might be in the details.” When it came to the graves and the accusations of an ongoing genocide, the country never got that treatment.

“My issue is just we’ve got to be truthful with our history with each other,” Heller said.

** 

The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations waived a requirement that a Kamloops First Nation account for what became of $12.1 million in funding for “exhumation of remains” at an Indian Residential School, according to records disclosed yesterday. The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation made no attempt to exhume any graves despite funding: “Officials were asked about what appears to be missing reports.”

 **

      **

Last September, many Canadians were shocked to learn through a Haida Nation news release that British Columbia and Canada had gone behind closed doors in judges’ chambers and signed an agreement that recognized Aboriginal title over all of Haida Gwaii. Without having to prove their title in court, the Haida gained constitutionally protected rights over the entire archipelago.

Now, due to access to information requests from the Public Land Use Society (PLUS), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting public access to Crown land in B.C., we’re feeling the same sense of disbelief to learn that B.C. and the Carney government are poised to give up title to as much as 11 per cent of northwestern B.C. to the tiny Tahltan Nation, population 4,000.

While we all want reconciliation and progress, British Columbia and Ottawa need to stop this risky practice of recognizing Aboriginal title claims that have not been proven in court. If these governments believe that an Aboriginal title claim is strong, they should go before the courts to prove it, rather than simply signing away land that may belong to all of us.

The details of the final agreement with the Tahltan, if there is one, are not public. What is known thanks to PLUS is that, back when the world was distracted by COVID-19 on March 30, 2020, the B.C. NDP signed a Shared Prosperity Agreement that says, “the Province recognizes that Tahltan’s Title and Rights exist in Tahltan Territory.” The agreement defines the Tahltan Territory with a map that includes the entire South-Korea-sized chunk of the province’s northwest. At a news conference last month, B.C. Premier David Eby refused to say whether the province recognized title over the entire territory, but he did say that he had asked Prime Minister Carney for financial support, “because of the very strong title claim that the Tahltan has….”

The reality is that we don’t know the strength of the Tahltan’s claim to Aboriginal title or the extent of that title until it has been tested in court. This is especially concerning considering there are upwards of $1.2 trillion dollars of minerals in B.C.’s “golden triangle,” which is roughly coterminous with the Tahltan’s claimed territory. If they truly possess title, then they, arguably, possess a veto over developments and the right to keep the minerals. Perhaps the Tahltan do have Aboriginal title to all or some of that territory, but is it too much to ask for them to prove it?

It is unclear what would happen if the claim went to court. Aboriginal title is a new and slippery concept defined almost entirely by several rather thick paragraphs in a handful Supreme Court of Canada decisions. The basic idea is sound: Aboriginal people possessed title to at least some lands, and they continue to possess that unless and until it was ceded and/or legally extinguished.

But we still don’t know exactly what it means. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Supreme Court recognized that Aboriginal title is protected by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, and not until the 2014 decision in Tsilhqot’in that Aboriginal title was actually proved in a specific place. To prove title, the Tsilhqot’in decision says a First Nation would likely need to show that, pre-sovereignty, it sufficiently used the area in a way that evinced an intention to hold the land; that there was continuity between present and pre-sovereignty occupation; and the occupation was exclusive, in the sense of intention and capacity to control the land by keeping others out. Based on this, one might have thought title could not be proved outside of small, remote areas

Then came Cowichan Tribes. Without any notice, homeowners and commercial property owners in Richmond, B.C., woke up last summer to the news that the B.C. Supreme Court had declared that the Cowichan have Aboriginal title over land where they also hold fee simple. There’s little doubt that the Cowichan were wronged by colonial figures, but the ruling has unsettled private property in an unprecedented way. Most notably, Justice Young ruled that, where fee simple and Aboriginal title clash, Aboriginal title is the senior interest (see paras 2189 and 3588). In other words, even if the Cowichan are not looking to take anyone’s house or farm (and they have repeatedly said so), it’s far from clear they can’t change their minds. The decision is being appealed.

The same concern exists on Haida Gwaii. The “Big Tide (Low Water)” agreement between B.C., Canada and the Haida says the Haida “will honour” fee simple title. But what if the Haida opt to end that agreement? They would be left with a senior, constitutionally protected right vis-a-vis the homeowners and business owners. That is, it’s far from clear that the Haida can’t boot them.

As Indigenous affairs expert and Macdonald-Laurier Institute fellow Karen Restoule recently explained, B.C.’s land governance problems are of its own making, since the province refused to sign treaties when they were available, and then let the land claims fester unresolved for more than a century. Yet making Aboriginal title declarations that cannot be reversed without first having those claims tested in court is not the solution. We simply don’t know where this leads.



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

Monday, July 27, 2026

It's Just An Economy

How are Carney’s Brookfield stocks doing?:

Canadian manufacturers are already losing U.S. orders as businesses brace for President Donald Trump's latest tariff threats, even as the Gordie Howe International Bridge prepares to open Monday.

William Pellerin, an international trade lawyer, told Global News on Saturday that some Canadian companies report already feeling the effects of Trump's proposed 50 per cent tariff before takes effect Aug. 19.

"We're already speaking with a large number of clients who, because of this tariff threat of 50 per cent that would come into force next month, are already losing massive orders to their U.S. customers," Pellerin said.

Trump threatened the tariffs on certain Canadian goods last Sunday, along with another 10 per cent tariff affecting goods outside the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.

Pellerin said the proposed 50 per cent tariff would make many Canadian products too expensive to compete in the U.S., particularly in sectors such as furniture and electronics.

"A 50 per cent tariff really makes those Canadian businesses uncompetitive in the United States," he said.

He said the uncertainty alone is already affecting employers, with U.S. buyers pulling back over concerns they could soon face significantly higher costs.

"We've already seen some layoffs by Canadian manufacturers just because of that threat," Pellerin said.

 

No, this isn’t Trump’s fault.

This is the fault of the Liberals and their voters who think that ant-Americanism is a brilliant economic strategy.

**

 **


 

Canada sits on the third largest petroleum reserve on the planet.

But we can never make a living off of it:

Computer science and artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy famously said that, “he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”

He meant that when dealing with complex systems, decisions must be based on hard numbers and data, as opposed to ideology and emotion.

That explains how Canadian energy policy became a train wreck under the Justin Trudeau Liberals, starting in 2015 when they took power.

They subjected Canadians to a decade of propaganda about how the age of fossil fuels was ending, supported by government-subsidized environmental lobbyists, while a succession of Liberal environment ministers spouted absolute nonsense about how Canada was coming ever closer to achieving its farcical greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

They refused to do arithmetic, were doomed to talk nonsense, and subjected Canadian taxpayers to the consequences.

A report by the Fraser Institute released this week based on the latest government data demonstrates just how much nonsense there was.

It notes that between 1995 and 2024, despite earmarking more than $200-billion of federal taxpayers’ dollars to reduce Canada’s use of fossil fuels, they accounted for 76.3% of Canada’s domestic energy consumption in 2024, essentially the same as the 76.8% recorded almost three decades ago, in 1995.

In terms of Canadian energy production, fossil fuels accounted for 88% of the total in 2024, up from 83.3% almost a quarter century ago in 2000.

As for the endless Liberal hype about how wind and solar power are growing by leaps and bounds when it comes to energy production, in 2024 they accounted for 0.8% of total energy production compared to 88% for fossil fuels, 5.1% for hydro, 3.9% for nuclear and 2.2% for biofuels.

In Canada’s three largest energy-consuming sectors of the economy — transportation, industry and residential construction — fossil fuels in 2024 supplied 98.7% of the energy consumed by the transportation sector, 74% by the industrial sector and 50.6% by the residential sector.

Every Canadian province relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy needs — 89.7% in Alberta; 84.1% in Saskatchewan; 78.7% in Ontario; 76.2% in B.C.; 73.7% in Nova Scotia; 72.6% in Manitoba; 69.6% in P.E.I.; 66.4% in Newfoundland and Labrador; 61.1% in New Brunswick and 54.6% in Quebec.

It’s also vital to the rest of Canada that Alberta remains a part of Confederation, since it contributes 70.2% of Canada’s total energy production, according to the Fraser Institute study.

Just three provinces, Alberta (70.2%), British Columbia (15.8%) and Saskatchewan (5.1%) produce 91.1% of Canada’s energy. No other provinces comes anywhere close to those numbers.

As Kenneth Greene, co-author of the Fraser Institute study, “Energy Facts — Canada Edition” noted:

“There is a lot of misunderstandings about the reality of energy production and consumption in Canada today, which is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels and will be for many years to come.”

It’s significant that at long last Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, has dismantled some, but not all, of Trudeau’s economy-killing restrictions on energy production in Canada after a decade of utter stupidity in policy making.

That’s assuming he actually believes in building new pipelines and fast-tracking new energy infrastructure “at speeds not seen in generations,” despite his pre-political life as the world’s leading corporate spokesman for higher carbon taxes.

Had Canada had a wiser government over the past decade, as opposed to one that refused to do arithmetic and was thus doomed to talk nonsense, things could have been different today.

We could, for example, be exporting our vast natural gas resources to global markets today beyond the current trickle, enabling other countries to replace their coal-fired electricity with cleaner burning natural gas — the single most effective thing we could be doing to help lower global greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously boosting our economy.



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

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week sorbet ...


Remind me again of who you voted for, Canada?:

We’re tapped out.

That’s the message Canadians have for Ottawa in a new Ipsos poll conducted for the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI), which shows 70% of Canadians believe high tax burdens are having a negative impact on their cost of living.

The results, released July 16, suggest a growing disconnect between government spending policy and the priorities of taxpayers. According to MEI’s vice-president of communications Renaud Brossard, Canadians are feeling the stress that high taxes are putting on their lives.

“What they’re seeing is that a lot of what Ottawa is doing doesn’t necessarily seem to be alleviating that,” he said.

Much of the concern surrounds Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to establish a so-called “sovereign wealth fund,” Brossard said — a scheme the PM announced in April but isn’t gaining very much traction among Canadians.

“Let’s not forget that this sovereign wealth fund proposal from Ottawa is not a sovereign wealth fund like that of Norway, it’s not built from budget surpluses, and isn’t aimed at generating the highest returns — it’s aimed at subsidizing a bunch of different projects in Canada,” he said.

“It’s not so much like a sovereign wealth fund as it is an industrial policy fund in which people can take ownership.”

Entitled the “Canada Strong Fund,” the proposed fund will launch with an initial $25-billion endowment, managed by an arms-length Crown corporation.

Exact details on the plan and the agency tasked with running it have yet to be released.

Within Canada, Alberta has successfully operated its own $30-billion sovereign wealth fund for over half a century.

Founded by former premier Peter Lougheed, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund banks profits from the province’s oil and gas resources.

In the MEI poll, 58% said they oppose Canada borrowing $25 billion to finance the fund’s creation.

“The 58% that oppose the borrowing for this new infrastructure bank is quite telling, but more than that, I think the fact that there’s only 20% of Canadians that think it’s a good idea should signal this government that that it should abandon such a plan,” Brossard said.

 **


**

Canada has experienced a sharp decline in business investment per worker over the past decade, in stark contrast to gains in the United States, highlighting a deepening productivity crisis north of the border, a new study suggests.

Inflation-adjusted business investment per Canadian worker fell 18.8 percent from $20,310 in 2014 to $16,493 in 2024, according to findings from the Fraser Institute’s latest study. The United States’s equivalent surged 31.3 percent from $23,263 to $30,555 over the same decade.

The think tank’s study examined business investment per worker from 2007 onward but focused on the 2014–2024 period, when the gap between Canada and the United States widened most sharply.

**

Despite that, a Nanos-Bloomberg poll showed most Canadians are satisfied with Carney’s performance on the economy.

They blame U.S. President Donald Trump for ongoing economic uncertainty over tariffs and the uncertain fate of the Canada-U.S.- Mexico Agreement on trade, which Canada and Mexico wanted to renew while Trump didn’t, leading to more uncertainty as the trade deal will now be subject to annual reviews.

But the root problems in our economy have been around a lot longer than Trump.

A major factor is Canada’s low productivity because of weak business investment.

Low productivity doesn’t mean Canadian workers are lazy.

It means businesses aren’t investing in new technologies giving workers the ability to work more efficiently, leading to a more prosperous economy and higher standards of living.

In March 2024, Carolyn Rogers, senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, called this a “break the glass emergency.”

Even the Trudeau government acknowledged it during their near-decade in power, where many of their anti-business policies made the problem worse.

In her April 2022 budget speech, then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland described low productivity as the “Achilles heel” of the Canadian economy warning “we are falling behind when it comes to economic productivity.”

Her budget even cited a projection by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that without reforms, Canada’s real GDP per person from 2020 to 2060, would grow at the slowest rate of any of the OECD’s 38 industrialized countries.

Low productivity results from many factors including government over-taxation, over-regulation, a lack of competition and excessive and indiscriminate immigration policies.

The latter leads to businesses hiring cheap labour as opposed to finding ways for skilled workers to produce goods more efficiently, leading to higher profits, better wages and improved standards of living.

A report by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute released Thursday compares business investment in Canada to the U.S.

While a lack of business investment resulting in low productivity in Canada goes back decades — with the study by the fiscally conservative tank using data from 2007 to 2024 — it notes that it accelerated after 2014, a year prior to the start of the Justin Trudeau era.

According to the findings, inflation-adjusted business investment in Canada per worker — including spending on equipment, machinery, factories and new technologies (while excluding residential housing construction and government projects) — declined by 18.8% from $20,310 in 2014 to $16,493 in 2024.

During the same period, inflation-adjusted business investment per worker in the U.S., in Canadian dollars, increased by 31.3% from $23,263 to $30,355.

“The economic well-being of Canadians depends in large part on the strength of business investment, so poor business investment is bad news for workers,” said Tegan Hill, co-author of the Fraser Institute study, Comparing Business Investment per Worker in Canada and the U.S., 2007-2024.

 “The waning ability to attract business investment in Canada should sound alarm bells and prompt policymakers to enact immediate policy reforms to make Canada a more attractive and hospitable destination for investment.”

In a speech to the Economic Club in New York in May, Carney said his government is “catalyzing one trillion dollars in investments in Canada over the next five years”, that “foreign investment in Canada is running at twice the rate of our nearest G7 peer and that Canada now ranks as the most attractive country in the world for infrastructure investment.”

An April report by RBC agreed Canada is back on the radar with foreign investors, but also noted, “the renewed interest comes after a decade of weak business investment, stalling productivity, and stagnating living standards. Between 2015 and 2024, more than $1 trillion of investment exited Canada — the largest capital exodus in Canadian history. For every dollar of inward (foreign direct investment), two dollars exited’”

Call it Canada’s lost economic decade under Trudeau.

**

Nearly 13,000 people sleep in cars, alleys or abandoned buildings nationwide according to new data by Housing Minister Gregor Robertson’s department. The count of homeless people, the most comprehensive to date, found another 4,700 slept in tent cities: ‘Unsheltered locations included streets, alleys, parks, transit stations, abandoned buildings, vehicles, ravines and other outdoor locations.’

**


**



Trump is sick of Canada’s sh--:

U.S. President Donald Trump imposed an additional 50 percent tariff on some Canadian goods July 20, saying the country has discriminated against American dairy, alcohol, and auto exports.

“President Trump is taking action to hold Canada accountable for its continued discrimination against and unreasonable and unequal treatment of U.S. commerce that has burdened and disadvantaged hardworking Americans,” the White House said in a statement.

The tariffs take effect in 30 days.

Trump said earlier in the day he spoke with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney about the need for Canada to intensify efforts to manage its wildfires. He floated the idea last week of imposing a tariff in response to Canada’s wildfire smoke spreading to the United States.

Trump signed three proclamations Monday to “level the playing field” on dairy, cars and auto parts, and alcohol, he said.

Each proclamation sets a 50 percent tariff covering nearly $20 billion in products ranging from wine to hockey sticks and cement.

 

These forest fires:

More than 950 wildfires are scorching Canada from coast to coast, the national wildland fire summary says. Roughly 241 blazes are out of control.

The fires have prompted Environment Canada to issue air quality warnings from B.C. to Quebec, as well as the Northwest Territories.

**


 

Carney doesn’t care because none of this has anything to do with his stocks in Brookfield.

Prime Minister Mark Carney last night acknowledged new U.S. tariffs will cost Canadians but proposed no new initiatives. Under current law it would take an Act of Parliament to enter negotiations with the United States over dairy quotas: “This trade dispute has raised costs for families.”

 


Wary?

How about opposed?

Who needs children being burned alive, anyway?:

According to a recent poll, just under half of Canadians are opposed to the federal government’s recent decision to expedite Gazan student visa processing.

And I must say, I don’t blame them.

The decision to expedited visa processing for 37 Gazan students and their families was announced last month by Immigration Minister Lena Diab.

The Leger poll, commissioned by the HR Canada Charitable Organization, asked respondents whether, like some, they believed the policy would help students whose education had been disrupted by war, or whether they thought “speeding up the process could make it more difficult to adequately identify potential security risks, including individuals with extremist affiliations.”

Forty-three per cent of respondents opposed the decision to expedite visa processing, 38 per cent supported it, and the remaining 19 per cent answered, “I don’t know.” These results demonstrate significant public concern and uncertainty for accelerating Gazan student visa processing because of perceived security risks of allowing radicalized Palestinians into Canada.

The survey was conducted last month, between June 19 and June 26, among a representative sample of 1,528 Canadian adults.

Respondents’ opposition and uncertainty should not be surprising. Gaza, after all, is governed by the terrorist group Hamas, which was responsible for the heinous attack of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. At least 1,500 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists breached Israel’s borders by land, air and sea. In total, 1,195 people were killed, including infants, children, elderly and peace-festival attendees. Families were murdered in their homes, some, burnt alive, while others were executed in bomb shelters. Those kidnapped and taken hostage numbered 251 .

Keep in mind that polls conducted inside Gaza revealed that 72 percent of respondents felt the decision for Hamas to conduct the October 7 massacre was “correct” given the outcome.

“Canadians have witnessed an explosive rise in extremist rhetoric, ideological radicalization, and politically motivated violence, along with an unprecedented rise of antisemitism,” the HR Canada Charitable Organization commented in a statement . “As concerns about public safety have grown. . .so too have questions about how governments balance humanitarian objectives with security considerations.”

 



Now, hear me out -  Rubio and Vance in 2028.

Here is why:

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today, because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist, or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it. And today, we face a new wave of this old evil.

 Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 per cent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 per cent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors.

These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean. An all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes, a transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health-care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened to also be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves “anti-capitalists” or “anti-imperialists” or “communists” or “anarchists” or “Marxists,” but the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by idealism. It is not Utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, levelled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards. A world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God. For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be.

So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines, they attack railroads, they attack power grids and laboratories — the physical, embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great. This is an international conference because we are facing … a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They co-ordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission.

 

We can’t have anything this nice in Canada.

We can’t even launch a rocket into space.

 


Because Bill C-9 - the Bible and thought banning bill -  passed, this thing totally happened under penalty of a life sentence and probably getting your dog shot:

Totally happened.

(wink)




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