For a Thursday

Merry Pi Day!

No, you @$$hole, people haven't heard enough about the scandal your province and your party are embroiled in. It is the scandal that just won't die:

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

That’s what Liberal MP Francis Drouin – who pushed the motion that shut down House of Commons Justice Committee – is saying about the Trudeau PMO SNC-Lavalin scandal.

Drouin says Jody Wilson-Raybould doesn’t need to testify again – despite the fact that Trudeau is still gagging her from speaking freely and despite the fact that the partisan Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick was able to testify twice.

There is still so much to explain and under oath, too.

Like why SNC-Lavalin approached Quebec's attorney-general for a deferred prosecution agreement or why SNC-Lavalin spent $200,000 furnishing an apartment for Gaddaffi's son.

Or why your boss is still muzzling Jody.

We haven't heard anything about that.


Also:

A new poll by Campaign Research shows just 29% of Canadians approving of the PM, a drop of 6 points from February, which was itself a drop of 4 points from December.

And the number of Canadians disapproving of Trudeau has surged, with 58% now disapproving of him. In February, 53% disapproved, and in December, 48% disapproved.

Taken in total, Trudeau’s approval rating has fallen from 39% to 29% since December, and his disapproval rating has risen from 48% to 58%.

Only a ten-point difference?

Canadians aren't starving enough.




Proof that Canada was for sale and has been bought: 

The story begins in 2008, when a group of radical American anti-fossil-fuel NGOs created their “Tar Sands Campaign Strategy 2.1” designed explicitly “to landlock the Canadian oil sands by delaying or blocking the expansion or development of key pipelines.” A list of key strategic targets included: “educating and organizing First Nations to challenge construction of pipelines across their traditional territories” and bringing “multiple actions in Canadian federal and provincial courts.” A “raising the negatives” section includes recruiting celebrity spokes-persons such as Leonardo Di Caprio to “lend their brand to opponents of tar sands and generating a high negative media profile for tar sands oil.” ...

Since both American and Canadian tax laws require charities to document receipt and disbursement of funds, Krause was able to gather irrefutable evidence that tens of millions of dollars were transferred from Tides U.S. to its Tides Canada affiliate. Moreover, Krause was able to obtain 70 covering letters showing the recipients and how they used the funds.

They went towards mobilizing First Nations against the fear of oil spills, including payments to help build “indigenous solidarity resistance to pipeline routes,” to maintain “opposition to oil tankers” and to “provide legal support for actions constraining tar sands development.” Funding also went to the Great Bear Initiative Society to build support for designating the so-called “Spirit Bear” habitat as a nature reserve.

Payments went to the Pembina Institute to “advance…the narrative that oil sands expansion is problematic”; to Greenpeace Canada “for events to show opposition to pipelines and tar sands expansion”; to the Living Oceans Society “to build opposition to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline”; and to Forest Ethics “to conduct education and outreach opposing the Kinder Morgan and Northern Gateway pipelines.”
 
But the American anti-oilsands funding effort didn’t stop at encouraging opposition to oil pipelines. The Victoria-based Dogwood Initiative received millions of dollars from Tides Canada to run get-out-the-vote campaigns in the 2017 B.C. provincial election, including deploying a throng of campaign workers in the riding of Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver. After his election, the B.C. government would be in the hands of an NDP/Green alliance bent on fighting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Money was also funnelled to campaign activists working to help the Liberals win the 2015 election. Vancouver-based Leadnow received directly and through the B.C.-based Sisu Institute more than $1 million from Tides Canada towards the objective of defeating then prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which supported expanding the oil and gas industry. Leadnow claims its campaigners helped defeat Conservative candidates in 25 ridings.

If it weren’t for all that American funding directed at a campaign mobilizing First Nations and other anti-pipeline activists, the Liberals might not have been so successful in running against the Harper Conservatives; but then, without the election of an ideologically anti-oilsands Liberal government, the funding for the anti-oilsands campaign might not have been enough, either. ...

But the campaigners received a bonus beyond their wildest dreams when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed one of their most dedicated eco-warriors as his principal secretary. Prior to ascending to the most powerful post in the Prime Minister’s Office, from 2008 to 2012 Gerald Butts was president and CEO of World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF Canada), an important Tides campaign partner. Butts would use his new powerful position to bring other former campaigners with him: Marlo Raynolds‏, chief of staff to Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, is past executive director of the Tides-backed Pembina Institute. Zoë Caron, chief of staff to Natural Resource Minister Amarjeet Sohi, is also a former WWF Canada official. Sarah Goodman, on the prime minister’s staff, is a former vice-president of Tides Canada. With these anti-oil activists at the epicentre of federal power, it’s no wonder the oil industry, and hundreds of thousands of workers, have plummeted into political and policy purgatory.

Now, Butts, the architect of this economic and social disaster and national-unity crisis has resigned amid a scandal alleging inappropriate favours for SNC-Lavalin. I wonder if this resignation will pay as well as the last one: When Butts resigned from WWF Canada to join the PMO, Krause discovered that he subsequently received two separate payments from WWF Canada totalling $361,642. When Krause asked him about it, he explained in a May 26, 2016 tweet that: “It was my contract severance.” That’s startling. Over my entire career leading one of Canada’s largest companies and serving as a director of four others, I have never heard of “severance” paid when someone decided to quit.

It's just someone else's money:

A computer glitch dating back to 2009 has been fixed at last, allowing the federal government to resume chasing down thousands of Canadians who owe the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) about $66 million due to erroneous overpayments.

Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) reinstated the collection of these old debts last November, going after 15,000 individuals or their estates after almost a decade of inaction.

"[T]he collection of debts on inactive accounts receivable stopped due to systems-related issues following the implementation of a new IT platform in 2009, which prevented an accurate determination of amounts owing," says an Oct. 4 memo for Families, Children and Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos.

But ... but ... un-Canadians and such!:

The Safe Third Country Agreement governing asylum claims between Canada and the United States is “no longer working as intended,” according to documents prepared last year by government officials.

Obtained by Global News under access-to-information laws, memos and briefing material shared with Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen ahead of a planned Jan. 18, 2018, meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — which was cancelled at the last minute — raised the Safe Third Country Agreement as a key issue and described efforts to create a new steering group to address “immigration issues.”

**

But of course the goal is to have Syrian refugees do well in absolute terms, not just in comparison to other refugees. To that end, the fact that fewer than half of the Syrians spoke either official language when they arrived here, while 51 per cent of men and 47 per cent of women didn’t have a high-school diploma, seems bound to make absolute success difficult.

That refugees do have a tough time is clear from other recently released StatCan data, including neat tables that let you toggle an immigrant cohort’s income — broken down by different classes of immigrant — to see how the cohort was doing one, two, three, four or five years into its members’ stay in Canada.

For instance, if you look at the cohort of all immigrants who arrived in Canada in 2011, the median income five years on of those who did have wage and salary income was $28,800. Looking specifically at economic immigrants with earnings, they had median income of $40,400, while earners in the “Canadian experience class” — those who had spent time here on a different type of visa before formally immigrating — had five-year median income of $61,300.

Five years on, however, refugees from the class of 2011 had median earnings of only $21,500. Among those, government-assisted refugees were making just $16,200, while privately sponsored refugees were at $22,400. In their very first year of earning, these two groups had made just $6,900 and $18,900, respectively. So their median incomes had gone up. Just not very high.

 Where are those doctors and refugees everyone was promised?




Never let them back into the West:

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) estimated that about 3,000 people had walked out of the shrinking Baghuz pocket in the past 48 hours, most of whom were fighters, suggesting a co-ordinated surrender.

The final band of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants – estimated now to be in their hundreds – still managed to launch two counter-attacks later in the day.

“The second one was much stronger since they took advantage of smoke, dust and sand over Baghuz,” a spokesman for the SDF told The Daily Telegraph. “Fighting is still continuing. Daesh (an Arabic acronym for ISIL) made no progress and were stopped.”

**

Australia's prime minister said on Thursday he won't put officials in danger by retrieving extremists from the Middle East after an Australian Islamic State group widow asked to bring her children home from a Syrian refugee camp.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's response came after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. interviewed the woman in one of the refugee camps in northern Syria where she has lived with her toddler son and malnourished 6-month-old daughter since they fled the Syrian village of Baghouz where the Islamic State group has been making its last stand.

ABC said the 24-year-old woman refused to confirm her identity and wore a veil during the interview, but it identified her Thursday as Zehra Duman.

The woman said her daughter needs hospital treatment and she wanted to bring her back to Australia.

"Nobody really cares about us here, and I understand the anger that they have toward a lot of us here," the woman told ABC, referring to the Kurdish authorities' treatment of tens of thousands of her fellow Islamic State supporters in the camps.

"But the kids don't need to suffer," she added.

Morrison said Australians who take their families to war zones to fight with the Islamic State movement had to take responsibility for their actions.

"The great tragedy of those who went and joined up with terrorists — to support terrorist causes through Daesh and have taken their families into warzones where they're basically fighting against Australia — is they have placed their children in this horrendous position." Morrison told reporters.

"I'm not going to put any Australian at risk to try to extract people from those situations," he added.

If people treated communism and political multiculturalism as the dangerous ideological enemies to Western civilisation like they are and enforced free speech in universities, this wouldn't be as big a problem:

As the official spokeswoman for the Chinese-Canadian family of a 13-year-old girl murdered in Burnaby, B.C., Meena Wong’s thoughtful comments about the case earlier this month were broadly covered by the province’s English-language media.

In the local Chinese press, she was all but ignored.

It was no big surprise. A Beijing native who openly criticizes her mother country’s government, Wong says she’s not exactly a sought-after figure in the Chinese-immigrant establishment. Buffeted by Beijing’s soft-power muscle-flexing, many in the community shy away from any public criticism of China’s Communist regime.

But an unusual group Wong founded may offer an antidote.

The Civic Engagement Network seeks partly to remind newcomers from the People’s Republic about Canadian values and human rights, and an event Friday — called “What does being Canadian mean?” — will try to drive home the importance of those freedoms.

Canada is not a playground for Chinese communists.

And Jesus is still way bigger than Xi.

Oh, stuff your property values!:

A Saskatchewan mayor says no offence was intended when Weyburn city council rejected a care home for people with disabilities this week, in part due to concerns it would drag down property values.

"The intention of our decision at that time ... was not to offend any groups or individuals within our community, but to respect the existing process," Marcel Roy said Wednesday.

"Certain statements were made by councillors during the regular council meeting on Monday that we feel, as council, do not appropriately reflect our values."

The proposed home in The Creeks neighbourhood was to accommodate no more than four adults with mental or physical disabilities, with two to three staff working on rotation around the clock and three off-street parking spots.

But Roy said there was "tremendous pushback" within the neighbourhood, and council had to balance that feedback against the need for more accessible housing.

Coun. Brad Wheeler told Monday's meeting that a lot of people bought homes in The Creeks for more than $700,000, but might have changed plans if they knew a group home was going in.

"It kind of dashes the dreams and hopes of the people that live there currently," he said.

"I know it's not politically correct to say there's a stigma attached to it, but there is ... I feel bad that that's the case, but these people have invested a lot of money into their dream homes, their retirement homes and to have the provincial government come in and pick a lot directly across from them, I don't think that was the best choice."

One name - Khan Noonien Singh:

More than a dozen scientists Wednesday called for a global moratorium on experiments and studies into creating designer babies — but one key signature was missing.

Eighteen ethicists and scientists from seven countries urged the international community to halt “all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm, eggs or embryos) to make genetically modified children,” the statement read in science journal Nature.

Signatories included Eric S. Lander, a geneticist and the founder of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Feng Zhang, the co-creator of CRISPR-Cas9; and Canadian bioethicist Francoise Baylis.
Missing from the group of 18, however, was Jennifer Doudna.

Doudna was one of the scientists who created CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing technology that allows researchers to permanently modify genes in living cells and organisms. ...

In response to the letter put out in Nature, Doudna said she felt signing on would just be “rehashing” what’s already been said, The Washington Post reported. Instead, she took a different stance and said she will continue working with national academies in the United States, U.K. and China.

“I prefer this to a ‘moratorium’ which, to me, is of indefinite length and provides no pathway toward possible responsible use,” Doudna said in an email to the National Post. “Open discussion and transparency around this important topic should be encouraged, not suppressed.”

Prosecuting Soldier F:

A former British soldier is set to be prosecuted in connection with the deaths of two civil rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, 47 years ago, part of an incident known as Bloody Sunday, prosecutors said Thursday.

But the identity of the former soldier, identified only as Soldier F, has yet to be revealed.

The veteran will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O’Donnell.

Sixteen other soldiers under investigation will not face prosecution in the shootings, which took place at the height of the unrest in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. Prosecutors say there is not enough evidence to try them.

The charges against Soldier F follow a decade-long investigation that concluded soldiers killed 13 unarmed demonstrators protesting Britain’s detention of suspected Irish nationalists. Some 28 people were shot in total.

But the results of a long-running inquiry that concluded in 2010 could not be used in any prosecution and Thursday’s charges resulted from a separate police investigation into the incident.

And now, sakura: