Mid-Week Post

Saint Patrick's Day is coming ...

 
The scandal that just won't die:

Opposition MPs erupted in fury Wednesday after the Liberals used their majority on the House of Commons justice committee to delay an opposition attempt to call Jody Wilson-Raybould to testify again on the SNC-Lavalin affair.

The meeting was called as an emergency session by the three Conservatives and one New Democrat MP, after the Liberals used their majority last week to put off having the discussion on future witnesses until March 19. That is also the day the federal government will drop the 2019 budget.

Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre kicked things off with a motion to summon the former attorney general back no later than tomorrow, saying she "was not allowed to complete her testimony" the first time.

But after two Conservatives and NDP MP Tracey Ramsey laid out the reasons the committee should bring the former star cabinet minister back to speak a second time, Liberal Francis Drouin moved to suspend the sitting and reconvene on March 19 as originally planned.

From the most "transparent" government in the country's history. 

Canada isn't becoming a banana republic. It is one.

Jody Wilson-Raybould should just hold a press conference and reveal everything. Canadians may decide to ignore the Liberal Party's criminality but at least the world will know to steer clear of this tinpot dictatorship.

 



Speaking of the world:

The OECD has no power to enforce the convention, other than to repeatedly name and shame governments that are doing a poor job prosecuting individuals and corporations that use bribery to conduct business abroad. In its 20 years of monitoring the OECD has issued more than 1,500 recommendations across the board, according to its website.

(Sidebar: then what good are you?)

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In preparation for his second appearance, Canada’s most senior public servant had assigned one his legions of subordinates to compile a list of nasty things said about him on social media. With an evidently wounded amour-propre, Wernick suggested that the committee would want to investigate this shocking phenomenon of people saying mean things on the internet. The women on the committee, in particular, seemed less than impressed that the clerk had stumbled upon a phenomenon heretofore known only to newspaper columnists, sports figures and high school students.

Wernick thought all the foul things said about him constituted an “attempt to intimidate a witness.” One hopes for the steadiness of our government that the chief adviser to the prime minister is not so easily intimidated.

Yet the main charge against Wernick, namely that he engaged in inappropriate pressure on the attorney general for partisan political reasons — the electoral welfare of the governing parties in Ottawa and Quebec — seems ancillary to the main question. Is the clerk competently doing his job?

Justin cuts one of his many vacations short even though work is hard and people are mean to him:

Less than two days after taking the prime ministerial jet to Florida for his spring vacation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used it to quietly return to Ottawa for a day of ‘private meetings.’

Trudeau and his family are currently spending spring break in a house on North Captiva Island, a remote tourist destination off the coast of south west Florida.

 
Poor baby.




It's just money:

A new report casts doubt on a central justification for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s $188-billion infrastructure spending program, suggesting its economic benefits could be well below previous estimates.

During the past two years, provincial spending on infrastructure has fallen $3.8 billion, even as the federal government has boosted funding, according to a report released Wednesday by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

That drop contradicts a central assumption under the Liberal plan, which claimed in a 2016 report that provincial spending on infrastructure would rise in lockstep with the feds, and “more than double” the reach of the $188-billion program. That doubling of spending is often used as a premise to justify fiscal stimulus plans, in which federal dollars are “matched” by lower orders of government.

(Sidebar: this was one of Justin's election promises.)

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The $161,000 spent was specifically for the photographers who accompanied the minister on his trips to produce images of him. They were not assigned to specific military operations (for instance, there is no military mission in India where Sajjan visited and was photographed by military image technicians).

In addition, the money was for commercial travel and commercial accommodations for the photographers. Salaries were not accounted for as staff are serving in the Canadian Forces.

In addition, Sajjan used some of his office’s funds to finance some of this photography.

Of course, all of this – both at the DND level and from Sajjan’s office – comes from the pockets of taxpayers.

I, too, would be irked to hear that a Quebecois lackey wouldn't dream of touching base with an important grain-growing province especially when it is her job to do so:

Scott Moe expressed his dismay about Marie-Claude Bibeau’s travel plans in a tweet Monday evening, and repeated it again when asked for comment on Tuesday.

“You plan your first Western Canadian swing to visit British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba? That’s a problem,” the premier told the Leader-Post, stressing that Saskatchewan is at the forefront of Canadian agriculture.

“When you are going for an engagement tour with respect to the industry of agriculture as our federal agriculture minister, that tour should include stopping and engaging with Saskatchewan producers,” Moe added. “That hasn’t happened and that’s disappointing.”

Could it be that teachers will have to emphasise math skills?:

Elementary school students will go back to the basics when it comes to math, teachers can count on new training and parents should plan on receiving additional tools to help their kids with math homework.

This is all part of a major overhaul of Ontario’s failing math curriculum.

The full curriculum overhaul will be unveiled by Education Minister Lisa Thompson in coming days, but the strategy is laid out in documents obtained by the Toronto Sun.

“Discovery Math is gone, it has failed our children,” a senior government source said.

Instead of Discovery Math, a system proponents say “turns traditional math on its head,” schools in Ontario will return to tried and true methods.

Yes, rote learning will be part of it which means students memorizing the times tables once again, but the new math curriculum will also be aimed at helping students gain the skills they need for life.

“Whether it is coding, engineering or balancing their own budget, students need these skills,” a government official said.

It's not putting condoms on bananas but this could work!



Some cow moos about privatisation of healthcare (which we all know is wicked, heathenish and American) and then totally ignores people dying in her own country for want of life-saving treatments:

"We're going to defend our world class public health care system and push to expand it," said Horwath on Tuesday evening at a health care town hall hosted by the NDP in Toronto.

"[Doug Ford] has cooked up a massive health care scheme that will usher in unprecedented levels of privatization," said Horwath during a speech to a packed room. 

**

Lung transplants are covered by the health-care system. But because they cannot be done in Atlantic Canada, patients in the region must move to Toronto for months on end in order to get the life-saving surgery. Some have lost their homes or liquidated their savings to afford the expense.

Some have even chosen death over financial ruin.

But let's worry about what Doug Ford didn't say rather than following the semi-private examples in Europe that might reduce backlogs.




It's like Jurassic Park but furrier:

New findings indicate that the resurrection of mammoths is not a fantasy, a research team including members from Kindai University is saying, after cell nuclei extracted from the 28,000-year-old remains of a woolly mammoth were discovered to retain some function.

When placed in the ova of mice, the nuclei developed to a state just before cellular division, according to a paper published Monday in the British journal Scientific Reports.