On this, the first day of spring!
The scandal that won't die:
The head of SNC-Lavalin says its role as a Canadian global champion will be undermined if the embattled engineering firm is barred from bidding on federal contracts and its local employees are forced to work for foreign competitors.
(Sidebar: oh, please. You are not the only company in the country nor is your attempt for sympathy effective. Go and find another dictator's son to buy hookers for.)
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“In an interview with The Canadian Press, Neil Bruce says the Montreal-based company, unlike the Trudeau government, has never cited the protection of 9,000 Canadian jobs as a reason it should be granted a remediation agreement to avoid a criminal trial. However, he says there’s a public interest for such an agreement because its well-qualified employees will be forced to work for U.S. or European competitors if it is barred from bidding on federal contracts for a decade.”
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It didn’t have to be this way. The Liberals could have gotten away with it. The budget could have been at least a partial distraction to Lavscam. Something Canadians talked about for a day or two to let Prime Minister Justin Trudeau off the ropes for a bit and take a breather.(Sidebar: see here.)
But they just couldn’t help themselves. Their arrogance got in the way. And their aggressive attempts to cover up the scandal backfired and drew more, not less, attention to the ongoing scandal.
The budget documents appeared online around their usual 4 p.m. ET. But the scene in the House of Commons wasn’t what we usually see on budget day, with the finance minister rising to deliver the annual budget speech.
Instead, it was chaos. Multiple points of order and questions of privilege. Shouting. Interruptions. Chants of “cover up!” And, finally, the Conservatives storming out and into the foyer to voice their objections to the whole troubling affair.
What really set them and the NDP off was how that very morning the Liberal MPs on the Justice Committee used their majority to shut down the hearings into the SNC-Lavalin affair. This was supposed to be the day that they debated whether or not to invite Jody Wilson-Raybould back for a second round of testimony. Instead, they wrapped it all up.
Simply having the Wilson-Raybould conversation that day was itself its own scandal, as they were supposed to do it last week at their televised meeting but the Liberals voted to push it to a closed door meeting on budget day, obviously hoping people would tune it out and tune the budget in.
That’s what Tuesday’s document was, a Lavscam distraction budget. And it sure came with plenty of attempts at distractions, a lot of new spending initiatives to woo voters.
Like this:
1. Details of the government's newspaper bailout are here, and it's all much worse than I predicted. Things are still pretty vague, but the tidbits revealed yesterday tell us a lot. Here's my best effort at parsing it:— Jesse Brown (@JesseBrown) March 20, 2019
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“2. A government-appointed panel will determine which news orgs are “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations” (QCJOs) and which are not.” ...
“3. Beyond picking winners & losers for subsidies, this will create a caste of State-recognized news orgs deemed to be of higher public value, and a lower class that are not. I’m not aware of any other Western democracy that has ever done this.” ...
" 5. A Qualified org must “employ two or more journalists”. So right out the gate, this eliminates many startups. A laid-off reporter looking to launch a sole-proprietorship operation gets no incentive to do so.”
Why, if I didn't know better, I would say that Justin is bribing the press again.
Oh, it gets worse and by worse, I mean worse:
The federal government is taking another crack at sending Canadian workers back to school for mid-career training, spending $1.7 billion over five years to launch a new skills training program.
A new tax credit will allow workers to claim half of the cost of a course or training program; they will also be eligible to take up to four weeks off and receive employment insurance coverage for 55 per cent of their average weekly income.
None of this is slated to start in any meaningful way until next year, after the next federal election, and the government says it will embark on consultations to nail down the nitty gritty program specifics.
So middle-aged workers will train for an entry-level job (if there is one) and might get a tax credit for the course they have to pay the full price for. There are workplaces that can just give people four weeks off, too.
Okay ...
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Potential home buyers in cities with white-hot real estate markets got some relief in Tuesday’s federal budget with an incentive program that could lower mortgage payments for households making less than $120,000 per year.
The government unveiled a multi-pronged approach to housing affordability that centres on the incentive plan, but beefs up an existing initiative that allows buyers to withdraw money from their RRSPs, and a variety of measures to boost the supply of homes on the Canadian market.
Who has money to drop into a new home with an inflated price in a major city while still paying off student loans?
Details to follow, I assume.
And thanks for letting us use our money, government. That was nice of you.
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An oddly-phrased measure announces the Liberals are “relieving human ova and in vitro embryos of the GST/HST.” They’re applying the same relief to “certain foot care devices.” The policy is partly reflective of the reality that many same-sex couples and single individuals are becoming parents. Sperm donations have already been tax-free for years.
The commodification of the human body is now GST-free!
Because it's an election year and that pesky SNC-Lavalin/shoving people under the bus unpleasantness is rather hard to forget, Justin is hoping that people will also forget his idiot promises and the debt he has handed to generations of people who occupy the airport known as Canada.
Nope:
And what has Justin Trudeau done with that strong economic inheritance?
He’s totally squandered it.
Canada’s economy is slowing down. Debt has reached record highs. There are endless deficits, with no plan to get back into balance. Taxes are up. Investment is fleeing the country. Canadians are pessimistic.
Our energy sector is facing an existential struggle – not because of a global downturn, but because Justin Trudeau’s regulations are strangling the construction of pipelines and devastating the industry.
His hated carbon tax has sent a signal to investors that Canada is ‘closed for businesses,’ and is gouging already-overtaxed Canadians.
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In the 2015 election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised he’d run “modest” deficits for a few years, then balance the budget in 2019.
The prime minister just released the 2019 budget. It wasn’t what he promised. And it’s worth counting the ways in which he misled Canadians in the process of breaking that promise.
First of all, there was the justification for running deficits. The economy was weak, went his argument, so we must spend to boost it. What’s more: Nothing gives a better boost than building infrastructure and the deficits will pay for it!
But then a strange thing happened.
The overall economy picked up soon after the Trudeau government came to office — the government gleefully took credit for the turn — and yet the deficits have continued each year anyway. Suddenly, the old argument was gone and a new one had appeared in its place: Economic times are good so we can afford to run deficits!
It also turns out that the majority of deficit spending wasn’t even used to build infrastructure. As just one example, the government’s much-touted new infrastructure bank, which was billed as a way to leverage untold billions in private sector investment, has managed to arrange deals for a grand total of … one project (public transit in Montreal that happens to involve a company named SNC-Lavalin).
Instead, the government has been borrowing money for plain old program spending – including everything from provincial transfers to corporate welfare to foreign aid.
So much for “investing” in growth-boosting road and bridges.
Then there’s the matter of just how badly the Trudeau government has missed their own target.
Recall that the Liberal platform promised three deficits totalling $26 billion in new debt before returning to balance this year.
Instead, the Liberals are now on pace to add a staggering $127 billion in new debt by 2024 – still with no plan to get back to balance.
That’s five times more debt than they promised — $100 billion more.
To add insult to injury, the strong economy has meant that tax revenues have actually been higher than projected, meaning there was extra money pouring into government coffers that the government hadn’t been counting on.
But rather than take this windfall to shrink the deficit and balance the budget — or return some of the money to struggling Canadians in the form of tax cuts — the Trudeau government did the only thing it seems to know how to do.
It spent the money.
Moving on ...
It's not so much an apology as it is the need to bring everyone to heel after saying unpopular things:
The Senate’s ethics officer says Sen. Lynn Beyak violated the upper chamber’s conflict-of-interest code by posting racist letters about Indigenous people on her website.
Pierre Legault says Beyak’s conduct did not uphold the highest standards of dignity required of a senator.
Nor did she perform her duties with dignity, honour and integrity or refrain from acting in a way that could reflect negatively on the Senate, as stipulated in the code.
If Senator Beyak did, in fact, write letters that were blatantly racist, produce them or provide a link where they can be perused and then judged for their content. That this article (as of this writing) has not done so shows that article-writers do not trust people to conclude whether or not Senator Beyak did write something inflammatory (a sample of her opinions are here).
What is more troubling is that a bureaucracy can demand and enforce ideological purity in degrees only slight less than the Khmer Rouge and their re-education sessions. Someone's views may be utterly repugnant or they may be enlightening. One would think that thumb-screws would not be needed in this day and age.
Because not New Zealand:
An Italian bus driver of Senegalese descent was arrested on Wednesday after hijacking his own vehicle and setting it on fire, allegedly threatening to kill more than 50 children on board whose hands he had bound.
The 47-year-old man said he was acting in revenge for the thousands of migrants, many of them African, who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years while trying to reach Europe from Libya.
“No one will survive,” he said, according to police.
“He shouted 'Stop the deaths at sea, I'll carry out a massacre',” said Marco Palmieri, a police spokesman.
The man, named as Ousseynou Sy, was driving 51 children from their middle school near the city of Cremona to a sporting event when he started making threats, brandishing a knife.
In an ordeal that lasted around 40 minutes, he started driving towards nearby Milan.
He rammed the bus into cars on a busy highway before it came to a stop at a roadblock set up by police.
He then doused it in petrol and set it on fire.
Police smashed the windows of the vehicle to allow the children to escape.
The American intelligence chief is in Seoul to discuss what can be done in the light of last month's failed summit:
The US intelligence chief is in South Korea, a government source said Wednesday, on a visit seen as aimed at sharing information and assessment of North Korea following the breakdown of last month's summit between the two countries.
Is Kim Jong-Un exploring different options for openness and transparency? More than likely he wants the sanctions gone.
Back to square one.
Oh, dear:
The National Human Rights Commission of Korea has delivered its opinion to the Constitutional Court that criminal penalties for women who undergo abortion, as well as doctors who perform them, are unconstitutional.
The current law on abortion violates the right to self-determination, among others, the rights panel said Monday. ...
Of the 756 women who said they have had at least one abortion, 33.4 percent said they decided on abortion because carrying the baby to term would hinder their career or studies. Another 32.9 percent cited financial instability, and 32.9 percent said the pregnancy had gone against their family plans.
I'll just leave this right here:
A North Korean defector has spoken about the horrific human right violations she says she witnessed in the state’s prison camps — including starved prisoners fed to dogs.
Speaking at the UN Monday, Ji Hyeon A described how she was forced to have an abortion when she was three months pregnant. She pleaded with the world to take action.
How's that for "self-determination"?
What would we do without multicultural bluntness?:
As the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to focus on a female superhero, Captain Marvel is meant to be a celebration of female empowerment. But in China, plenty of discussion online isn’t focusing on the character’s actions or the film’s plot -- it’s focused on the looks of star Brie Larson.“I’m not judging a person by their looks,” writes a commenter that is about to judge a person on their looks, “but the main character in a superhero movie shouldn’t be a ‘da ma’” -- a derogatory term for middle-aged housewives.Another person re-posted a Photoshopped meme comparing the butts of Captain Marvel and Spider-Man, using the edited picture to suggest that Larson’s hips aren’t round enough. ...Still, it seems like Captain Marvel’s momentum isn’t as strong in China as it is in the US. While the blockbuster dominated the American box office for two weekends in a row, in China it lost the top spot to Taiwanese romance More Than Blue -- a tearjerker about two star-crossed lovers.Some say it’s because Captain Marvel feels less like a standalone film, and more like a palate cleanser for Avengers: Endgame in April.“Captain Marvel was OK. Not saying it’s bad but don’t expect any surprises,” said one of the top comments on Douban. “Watch it for the hype. It’s just a lead-up to the final episode anyway.”Others say Larson’s character feels one-dimensional.“She’s such an important character. But her personality didn’t shine through,” said another top comment.But there was one thing almost everyone agreed on: The cat stole the show.
Everyone wanted in on the Chinese market and everyone touted "Captain Marvel" as the next "Wonder Woman" (a much better movie).
How awkward.
And now, the most elegant airplane safety video you will see:
(Merci beaucoup and Kamsahamnida)
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