Mid-Week Post

Your mid-week interlude ...



Canadians are not optimistic? But why? :

The results of the study suggest 46 per cent of Canadians are open-minded towards the world and each other, with the highest numbers found in B.C. and the Atlantic provinces.

But 30 per cent report feeling economically and culturally insecure, a sentiment found in the largest numbers in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The remainder — roughly 25 per cent — have a mixed view.

Would British Columbia and the Maritimes feel as lively if equalisation didn't exist and people didn't mess around with pipelines that opened up Canadian oil to needy Asian markets?

Smart money says no.


The article itself is chock-a-block with stock phrases and ideologies like "dark forces" and "culturally insecure" and offers no solid explanation for this unsurprising feeling of uneasiness.


But it's not difficult to see why that feeling exists.


Cases in point:

Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) just released a report assessing the debt burden of our province’s households, and the financial vulnerability they are facing as interest rates begin to creep higher.

And it doesn’t look good.

Last year, says the FAO, the average Ontario household owed nearly $154,000, up $35,000 from 2010.

Of that, $103,000 was mortgage indebtedness.

But the days of cheap mortgage loans are coming to an end.

As a share to disposable income, total household debt reached a whopping $171% in 2016 — 21% higher than in 2010, and 8% higher than households in the rest of Canada.

We can blame the Wynne Liberals for a portion of this, of course, since they are driving people out of house and home with the tax costs associated with various billion-dollar boondoggles, their green energy experiment that lit a rocket under electricity rates, and their lust to put everything on the credit card.

Free pharmacare for young people and free college and university tuition, to cite just two recent Liberal boasts, are not “free.”

They cost each and every Ontario taxpayer a little more of their disposable income to the point that it is now drowning in red ink.

Soon to be gone as interest rates rise, and debt payments build, is the discretionary money that households use to bring a little joy into their lives with occasional nights out at restaurants and putting their kids in sports programs.

**

Campbell Soup Company says it's shuttering its 87-year-old Toronto manufacturing facility within the next 18 months, impacting 380 jobs, as the food purveyor gets set to relocate it Canadian headquarters to a new location. ...

Campbell says several factors have resulted in excess capacity in its North American supply chain network, and that due to its size and age the Toronto plant cannot be retrofitted in a way that is competitively viable.

The company says soup and broth production at the Toronto facility will be transitioned in phases over the next 18 months to three plants in North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

**

The sixth and penultimate round of negotiations to update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened in Montreal on Tuesday with time running out for Canada and Mexico to settle big differences with the United States. 

With financial markets skittish about the possible collapse of a $1.2 trillion global trading bloc, Canada and Mexico say they are prepared to be flexible on U.S. proposals they had initially rejected as unworkable. ...

Trump has described NAFTA as disastrous for the U.S. economy and threatened to pull out of the pact, though on Tuesday he said the talks in Montreal were going well. 

Canada is floating the idea that North American content in autos would be higher if the value of software and other high-tech equipment made on the continent were taken into account, said three well-placed sources, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the situation. 

Existing NAFTA regulations for tracing auto parts in a vehicle do not take into account new software-based content produced in Canada and the United States and the fact vehicles are much more technically advanced than they were in 1994. 

(Sidebar: yes, about that ...)

**

While at the globalist summit in Davos, Trudeau has been keeping Canadian media out of meetings – even after originally promising access.

In a strange turn of events, a meeting between Trudeau and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – which was reportedly planned days in advance – was opened by the Israeli government to Israeli media, but was closed by the Trudeau government to Canadian media.

**

A pro-life landscaper can therefore say that she supports abortion on demand — and therefore be eligible for a student wage subsidy — because the government has decided cutting grass is the core mandate of the small business. The business owner can be forced to profess what she does not believe, not to worry, because the really important business is mowing the lawn. The core mandate, now defined by the government, is the activities — landscaping, summer camp, refugee assistance — and not the “beliefs” or “values.”

(Sidebar: Father De Souza,  you would be surprised how many Canadian do not have a problem with that because principles, like lawn-mowing, are work and screw that. Or screw moral and cultural relativism, the real problems.)

**

In what must surely be one of the most bizarre examples yet of Liberal hypocrisy and illogic, the same Trudeau government that is welcoming home ISIS terrorists is denying summer job funding to religious groups, unless those religious groups first swear loyalty to Liberal policy on abortion and human rights.

Returning ISIS fighters are not being asked to disavow their loyalty to ISIS’s death-to-the-West, radical Islamist ideology or to swear a new oath to uphold Canadian values and security. Yet faith-based groups looking for a few thousand bucks to hire a summer camp counsellor or office temp are being told they must first declare support for abortion-on-demand, LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage or risk being denied funding under the Canada Summer Jobs program.

In other words, you are more likely to be admitted to Liberal Canada if you shout “Allahu Akbar” in a crowded public space than if you join in the annual March for Life to Parliament Hill.

Why are Canadians less than optimistic?

What for? An unaccountable, out-of-touch, incompetent, arrogant government is running things into the ground.

How could that go wrong?


It's just a natural resource we all need:

World oil prices are recovering, but Western Canadian oil prices are falling back to depressed conditions, the result of transportation capacity so tight every twitch in the system appears to be blowing out the discount.

Western Canadian Select (WSC), the Canadian benchmark, was changing hands for $33.57 a barrel Tuesday, after losing about $8 in two days, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was trading for US$64.75, up US$1.35 over the same period.

Canada exports approximately 3.2 million barrels of oil a day to the United States of different qualities. The discount means a daily loss of tens of millions in revenue, taxes and royalties for Canadian producers and governments, and a corresponding gain for their counterparts in the U.S., its only export market.

Perhaps if the global elite started paying out seventy-percent of their financial worth, people might not feel so badly about this:

That’s why it’s fitting that the globalist gathering in Davos coincides with a report from Oxfam revealing that 82% of all global wealth last year went to just 1% of the world population.

Not those greedy farmers Morneau and Trudeau hate so much.




Where are fat, white, gated liberal women for their oppressed comrades?

Long before the march in DC, Toronto, Los Angeles and other cities, women in Iran had revolted in a courageous manner to stand up to the ayatollahs and many ripped off their oppressive hijabs to challenge the dictatorship of the Islamic Regime.

Further west, the amazing female soldiers of the Kurdish YPG were involved in resisting the invasion of Syria by the Islamofascist Turkish Armed Forces.

One would have hoped that the Women’s March would utter some words of solidarity with the brave women of Iran and the Kurds, but that was not to happen. Not one word was said. 

**

A teenage girl testified Tuesday that she was so surprised somebody touched her at the West Edmonton Mall Water Park last year that she initially thought it was an accident.

The 15-year-old was the first witness at the trial of Soleiman Hajj Soleiman, who is facing six counts of sexual assault and six counts of sexual contact with a child. ...

(Sidebar: this Soleiman Hajj Soleiman.)

MP Kellie Leitch has decided not seek re-election:

Conservative MP Kellie Leitch will not seek re-election in 2019.

"My time in politics has been a genuine privilege, and I will always be thankful to the constituents of Simcoe-Grey for their tremendous support," Leitch said in a statement late Tuesday. "I have concluded, however, that the time has come for me to serve in other ways, including as a surgeon and volunteer."

She gave no specific reason for her departure beyond saying is it time "to return to the public service that is the core of my being."

She said she will serve out the rest of her term, but then "I'm looking forward to getting kids back on the playground to play."

 

I bet she would have said something about the now missing Iranian girl who removed her hijab (one may not have heard about her because she was never mentioned at women's marches, the ones where women who have all kinds of rights moan about actually having them. Typical First-World problem stuff, really).

It is a small, formerly connected world, after all:

Researchers say rock from the Canadian Shield was found embedded in northern Australia — suggesting parts of the two countries, now more than 11,000 kilometres apart, were once connected in a supercontinent. 

The 1.7 billion-year-old bedrock, found near Georgetown in Australia’s Queensland state, doesn’t look like Australian rock. Instead, the sandstone – rippled by an ancient, shallow sea – looks a lot like sedimentary rock from the Yukon. That means the area around Georgetown must have once been connected to North America before breaking off and colliding with Australia 100 million years later, according to the authors of the study published in the journal Geology.

The discovery backs a long-standing theory about a supercontinent called Nuna, which is likely predated the best-known and most recent supercontinent, Pangea, by more than a billion years. In fact, Nuna is just one of several suspected supercontinents to have formed and dissolved over the Earth’s four-billion-year history.