Today's Hodgepodge of Outrage

Because the world is a frustrating and chaotic place ...



Trudeau has had enough time to practise his response to those who correctly point out that meeting Joshua Boyle was a very bloody stupid thing to do:

(Sidebar: Joshua Boyle took his pregnant wife to Afghanistan, claimed that he was a captive and is now being charged with eight counts of assault, two counts of sexual assault, two counts of unlawful confinement, one count of uttering threats, one count of public mischief, and one count of administering a noxious thing.)

Justin Trudeau is suggesting that security officials raised no red flags when his office arranged last month for him to meet freed hostage Joshua Boyle and his family.

The prime minister says his office follows all the advice it's given by security officials and did exactly that in the case of the Boyle family.

Trudeau met with Boyle, his American wife and their three children in the prime minister's Parliament Hill office on Dec. 18.

On Dec. 30, Ottawa police laid 15 criminal charges against Boyle, including eight counts of assault, two counts of sexual assault, two counts of unlawful confinement and one count each of misleading police, uttering a death threat and administering a noxious substance.

The charges are related to incidents alleged to have occurred between Oct. 14 — one day after the Boyle family arrived back in Canada after five years of captivity in Afghanistan— and Dec. 30, 2017.

In the wake of the charges, questions have been raised about how someone alleged to have committed multiple crimes could have been granted a private meeting with Trudeau in the prime minister's inner sanctum.

The Prime Minister's Office has said Boyle requested the meeting. It is not clear if Boyle was under police investigation at that time and Trudeau did not address that issue Tuesday in his first public comments on the meeting.

And who believes that well-rehearsed tripe?

Nobody.


First of all, no security team would ever let the sitting head of state meet with someone who has previous connections to a family of terrorists and whose account of alleged captivity has more gaping holes in it than the side of the Titanic. Just because Justin is stupid, it doesn't mean that they are.


Secondly, Trudeau does at least a dozen stupid things before breakfast.

So there's that.


Trudeau attended a mosque with ties to al-Qaeda, has his cabinet stuffed with all manner of pro-lslamist busybodies and got into trouble for his vacation with his good, old Uncle K.

He has no problems rubbing elbows with Islamists of all stripes. Therefore, meeting the former spouse of Zaynab Khadr (whose brother Trudeau awarded $10.5 million for his outstanding work in planting homemade IEDs) would not have posed a problem for Trudeau when it clearly should have:

Trudeau met with the Boyle family on Dec. 18. The meeting was not publicized by the government, and only became known when photos were posted on a Twitter account called “The Boyle Family.”

The grainy photos — likely taken on a cellphone — show Boyle, Coleman and their three children meeting with the prime minister. They show Trudeau holding the couple’s infant daughter in his arms.

Citing privacy reasons and an ongoing court case, Trudeau’s office is refusing to say what was discussed in the meeting or whether staff had any knowledge of a criminal investigation into Boyle prior to granting the meeting.

(Sidebar: until now, that is.)

A government official, who would speak only on background, said the meeting had been requested by Boyle, and that Trudeau would grant the same meeting to any Canadian who had gone through a similarly harrowing experience.

Though there are numerous cases of Canadian hostages being rescued over past two decades, there does not appear to be a recent example where former hostages were brought into the prime minister’s office for a meeting.

Four senior staff who collectively worked for prime minister Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015 told the National Post they couldn’t recall any case where Harper had such a meeting. ...

“I can’t imagine any circumstances under which anyone on Harper’s staff would have advised him to meet Boyle, and can even less imagine him agreeing to it if they had,” he said.

“The Khadr family connection alone would have been a non-starter, not to mention the insanity of taking his pregnant wife to a Taliban-controlled province of Afghanistan.”

Dan McTeague, who was the point person for hostage situations while parliamentary secretary under prime minister Paul Martin, said he couldn’t recall any such meeting by either Martin or his predecessor, Jean Chrétien.

One knows it's bad when not even Martin or Chretien would not have attempted such a move.


Many have posited Trudeau's motives for meeting Boyle: an arrogant thumb-in-the-eye for the general public, sympathy for Boyle's beliefs, congenital idiocy. Perhaps all three.


But the issue now is why it took Trudeau long enough to respond to his detractors. If his security team really was stupid enough to let him meet with Boyle, then why didn't Trudeau mention it in the first place? Why wait over a week to assign blame?


Blaming security was an afterthought, one dredged up by a very slow-witted PR team. It's more than likely that Trudeau met with Boyle because he wanted to and everyone knows it.



Trudeau refuses to answer for his fraud and arrogance:

There's no need to summon Justin Trudeau to testify about his controversial Bahamas vacation when he's already discussing the matter publicly, Liberals on the House of Commons ethics committee said Tuesday as they rushed to the defence of their ethically embattled prime minister.

Opposition MPs on the committee had hoped to convince some members of the Liberal majority to compel Trudeau to appear before the committee to address his dealings with the Aga Khan, in particular his family's contentious December 2016 visit to the billionaire spiritual leader's private Bahamian island.

Predictably, however, their efforts landed short of the mark as the vote fell along party lines, with Liberals voting unanimously to reject the Conservative motion.

See, Tories - this is what happens when you lose elections. 

Why is it Ben Harper's fault that he is more clever than the people who raised the minimum wage?

It turns out that among those to weigh in on the minimum wage increase in recent days was Ben Harper, not the American songwriter, but the university-aged son of former prime minister Stephen Harper. Harper, a Queen’s University student whose Twitter bio reads “Queen’s University, Bachelor of Commerce ’19, Bachelor of Economics ’19,” took to social media last week to offer his own snarky, disapproving thoughts about the wage hike. He tweeted: 

“Why not just make the minimum wage $1,000,000. Then everyone could be rich. All problems solved. Hmmmmmmmmmm.....”

And:

At least it didn't take him a week to blame his security team like a certain son of a prime minister did.

The irresponsible Liberal government raised the minimum wage (which it will tax) to make up for the fact that it can't waste money any quicker than it does. Did anyone hold the Liberals to account on this? No. Businesses will have to reduce hours and workers as well as raise costs just to keep afloat. This is a fact. It is already happening:

Ontario raised the minimum wage 21 per cent to $14, making it the highest in Canada.

The provincial government, controlled by the Ontario Liberal Party, positioned it as a measure to improve the livelihood of workers in Ontario, home to the nation’s largest city, Toronto, and its capital, Ottawa.

Yet some employers responded by implementing hiring freezes, cutting hours of existing workers, eliminating paid breaks and boosting benefits costs.

How is the Liberal government responding? By faking outrage at people who are doing what they must to keep a handful of jobs:

• No business is refusing to pay the new minimum wage or suggesting they’ll break the law. They are looking for ways to legally offset what the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis describes as “a $23-billion cost challenge over two years” for Ontario businesses and an estimate by Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office that 50,000 people could lose their jobs here if the accelerated minimum wage hikes proceeds.
• The Coburg Tim Hortons isn’t required under Ontario law to pay staff during lunch breaks. They had been doing so and told staff they were ending that benefit and others to offset the new wage hikes. The suggestion this violates the “spirit” of the new minimum wage is ridiculous, self-serving hyperbole from a government that’s had 14 years to help low-income workers and decided, virtually months before an election, to force businesses to help bankroll their abysmal election prospects.
• One Tim Hortons franchise made a dumb proposal to put tips in the till, probably because they didn’t know any better. This sort of thing happens routinely and is routinely dealt with by the labour ministry. It’s not a conspiracy.
• If Flynn makes good on his ridiculous threat to use up to 175 inspectors (that may include 100 new ones) it would by our rough, conservative calculation easily cost the government $10.5 million or more annually (175 x a modest $60,000 annual civil service salary) to police, among other things, its minimum wage law.

So, instead of yelling at Ben Harper and his tweeted sarcasm, why not boot the Liberals from Canadian air space? 

Think of the jobs that would be saved.

In other news ...

I'm sure what the ayatollah means to say is that his forces crushed internal dissent:

Iran has foiled attempts by its foreign enemies to turn legitimate protests into an insurgency to overthrow the Islamic Republic, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday.  

Comments on his Twitter feed and in Iranian media underscored the establishment’s confidence that it has extinguished the unrest that spread to more than 80 cities in which at least 22 people died since late December. 

“Once again, the nation tells the US, Britain, and those who seek to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran from abroad that ‘you’ve failed, and you will fail in the future, too.'” Khamenei tweeted.

You can't kill everyone, beardy.

 

Because a war in the middle of the winter Olympics would look really bad, the two Koreas agree to talks:

North Korea on Tuesday confirmed its participation in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, and agreed to hold military talks with South Korea.

The agreement came in the first inter-Korean talks to be held in more than two years. 

Japan is not as easily fooled:

Japan called Tuesday for continued pressure on North Korea regardless of the first formal meeting between the two Koreas in over two years.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga welcomed North Korea’s announcement that it would send a delegation to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea next month but said it would do nothing to change the cooperation of the United States, Japan and South Korea on pressuring Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program.

Noting that conditions have not been met for a resumption of dialogue with North Korea, Suga said in a recording for a radio program, “It is imperative that North Korea changes its current policy.”