Title Goes Here

Witty opening line goes here ...




The scandal that will never die:

Opposition parties have failed to convince the Liberals to let the House of Commons ethics committee probe further into allegations of political interference in the criminal prosecution of Quebec engineering and construction firm SNC-Lavalin.

The Liberal majority on the committee voted down a motion backed by Conservatives and New Democrats that would have seen former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould and former Treasury Board president Jane Philpott testify about the controversy.

Quelle surprise.

The Liberals own the committee and will never allow any inquiry to go forward.

This is country is run by a crime syndicate.

Prove me wrong.

**

With Jody Wilson-Raybould planning to submit emails and text messages that will provide further evidence of potential political interference by the Trudeau PMO, the Liberal government is now indicating that they plan to redact that evidence, blocking the public from seeing it.

The Conservatives have responded, issuing a letter calling for the evidence to be made public:

“The #JUST Committee Chair @AHousefather has indicated that he will redact evidence submitted by JWR. See my letter to him calling for ALL of the evidence to be made public #LavScam #cdnpoli”

**

The Prime Minister’s Office will neither confirm nor deny the assertion by former attorney-general Jody Wilson-Raybould that senior advisers to Justin Trudeau had inside knowledge of discussions within the independent Public Prosecution Service about the criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

Ms. Wilson-Raybould has alleged that the Prime Minister’s Office [PMO] told her chief of staff about an apparent internal dispute between director of public prosecutions Kathleen Roussel and one of the federal prosecutors handling the SNC-Lavalin bribery and fraud prosecution.

 

In testimony before the Commons justice committee last month, Ms. Wilson-Raybould described a Sept. 16, 2018, conversation between her then-chief of staff, Jessica Prince, and the Prime Minister’s Quebec adviser, Mathieu Bouchard, and senior adviser Elder Marques about negotiating an out-of-court settlement with SNC-Lavalin.

**

SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. is walking back a statement by its CEO, who said last week he never cited the protection of 9,000 Canadian jobs as a reason the construction giant should be granted a remediation agreement.

Neil Bruce told The Canadian Press last Wednesday that if SNC-Lavalin is convicted of criminal charges and barred from bidding on federal contracts its workers would end up working for the Montreal-based company’s foreign rivals.

“We have never put forward anything that is purely an economic argument about jobs and why we think we qualify for a DPA (deferred prosecution agreement),” he said in an interview. “We put forward an argument in terms of the public interest.”

The charges stem from allegations the engineering firm paid millions of dollars in bribes to win government business in Libya between 2001 and 2011.

In a statement posted to its website Monday afternoon, SNC-Lavalin says it never threatened the federal government.

If one is going to create a fiction, it helps to keep one's story straight.

**

The ultimate "squirrel!" tactic in Canadian politics:

Relations between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then-Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould first began to fray in 2017 over concerns about her choice to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court of Canada.

A year before cabinet discussions about a plea deal for Quebec engineering company SNC-Lavalin, Trudeau and Wilson-Raybould disagreed about her recommendation of Manitoba Justice Glenn D. Joyal, sources familiar with the matter tell CTV News.

Trudeau was concerned that Joyal wasn’t committed to protecting rights that have flown out of interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, particularly LGBTQ2 rights and even abortion access, neither of which are specifically enshrined in the Charter.

Wilson-Raybould not only wanted Joyal named to the court to fill the vacancy left by Justice Beverley McLachlin’s resignation, she believed Joyal should replace McLachlin as the top court’s chief justice, a position that caused Trudeau to question his justice minister’s judgment, the sources said.

According to the Canadian Press, Wilson-Raybould wrote a 60-page memo to Trudeau advocating for Joyal.

Joyal issued a statement this afternoon confirming he applied for the seat on the court but said he later withdrew his name from consideration.

“Ultimately, I had to withdraw my application for personal reasons, due to my wife's metastatic breast cancer,” he wrote.

“I fear that someone is using my previous candidacy to the Supreme Court of Canada to further an agenda unrelated to the appointment process. This is wrong.”

It is unclear when Joyal withdrew his application.

Oh noes! Jody is a closet social conservative and is just a big, mean kid picking on poor Justin!

Justin is a bag of sh-- who used the flimsy excuse of social conservatism (which is a crime in Canada, apparently) and a judge's critically ill wife to hide from his and his party's wrong-doing.

He (read: Katie Telford) is not even doing a good job of it:

If this was such a big problem, why is Trudeau still claiming that Wilson-Raybould was only moved because Scott Brison resigned?

And why wasn’t this brought up a month ago?

Why just now?

Why haven’t Trudeau’s cronies even once mentioned anything along these lines at any point throughout the whole scandal?

And if this was the reason, why did Jane Philpott resign?

**

I'm sure this is merely coincidence:

Emma Griffin and Neil Bruce, the CEO of SNC Lavalin, sold their Montreal home on March 14th for more than $3.3 million.  They have not purchased a new home, and Journal de Quebec is reporting that the deed of sale for their Westmount home states that “she will soon become a non-resident of Canada”.

But  ... but ... a seat in the UN!:

Canadian peacekeepers were called upon to evacuate several wounded French soldiers in Mali earlier this month after their patrol was ambushed while hunting for militants along the border with Niger.

Justin's friend, Joshua Boyle, was made to listen to the 911 call he made in December 2017 when his clearly brain-washed wife threatened to kill herself:

At 11:47 p.m. ET on Dec. 30, 2017, Joshua Boyle picked up the phone and dialled 911, prompting Ottawa police to show up at the apartment he shared with his then-spouse and their children.

It was the day Caitlan Coleman was "finally able to walk away from Mr. Boyle" after months of alleged domestic abuse, Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham told court as Boyle's trial began Monday.

On Tuesday, Boyle's 911 call was played in Ontario Court.

"My wife is threatening to kill herself," he's heard telling the dispatcher in five minutes of the 911 audio. He says she has an "extreme mental instability" called borderline personality disorder, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) "and a few other things."

But the call was a ruse, the Crown intends to prove — an attempt by Boyle to divert suspicion away from himself and onto someone else. 

Hours later, Boyle was arrested and charged with a raft of offences, including public mischief (misleading police with the 911 call and ensuing investigation), assault with a weapon, sexual assault and forcible confinement.

Boyle has pleaded not guilty to all 19 charges, laid a few months after the couple returned to Canada in October 2017 with three children they had while in captivity for five years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Perhaps Mr. Schreiner can explain how much costs will go up for the average Canadian household once the carbon tax comes into effect:

Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said the public should be opposed to the Progressive Conservative’s plan which he called a waste of their tax dollars to sabotage climate change solutions.

“The fact that they’re spending millions of dollars on lawyers to fight the federal climate plan makes absolutely no sense,” Schreiner said. “I understand people’s concerns around trusting the Liberals with their money, but the Green Party’s going to continue to advocate what is the most business friendly and economic efficient solution to climate change – put a price on pollution, return all the money to the people.”

But it doesn't go to the people, does it?




That's what I'd like to know:

A Tory MPP says he meant no offence when he called out to former premier Kathleen Wynne in the Ontario Legislature.

“Why are you still here?” shouted York Centre MPP Roman Baber, who says he was just joking around.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect, for sure,” Baber said Monday.

“I was a little surprised that given the Liberal lack of success in the last election that the premier is just staying here.”

I guess anyone can be Hitler:

And so the student responded that to the question of “Is a knowledge of trigonometric functions and probability necessary?” with “No, not in everyday life.” The teacher, however, disagreed, and while it’s unclear if it was his immediate reaction or not, his eventual rebuttal to the student was:

“You’re like Hitler.”

The teacher went on to tell his student “You’re not cut out to become an educator. I’d feel sorry for the kids who’d be taught by you.”
Equal parts baffling and demoralizing, the teacher’s tirade startled the student, and on March 19, Matsue Minami High School, which is administered by the prefectural government, lodged a complaint against the teacher with the Shimane Prefectural Board of Education, calling his comments inappropriate.

So how did the teacher make the jump from triangles to swastikas? Apparently because he drew a parallel between the student’s dismissal of the importance of other academic disciplines and the Nazi dictator’s denial of certain ethnic groups’ right to exist. “The student did not recognize and appreciate diversity,” the teacher explained, “and I felt that his simplistic way of thinking was Hitler-like and dangerous.”

An American and Canadian team have successfully relocated six starving wolves:

A Canadian-U.S. team has successfully moved six wolves off a northern Ontario island to one on the U.S. side of Lake Superior.

Isle Royale National Park superintendent Phyllis Green says the wolves were moved over the weekend from Michipicoten Island, where the pack was at risk of starvation, to Isle Royale in Michigan.

The wolves first got over to Michipicoten Island in the winter of 2014 when ice allowed them to cross over from the Ontario mainland.

After gradually killing off the caribou they preyed on, the wolves on the island were in danger of dying of starvation without intervention.

Green says many of the wolves on the island were in poor condition when they were caught.

She says the six wolves will be reunited on Isle Royale with two other wolves that had been previously moved off the island a month earlier.

It turns out that the human brain can make new cells:

Humans continue creating new brain cells throughout their life, scientists have proved for the first time.

Analysis of the anatomy of 58 people who died between the ages of 43 and 97 found evidence of “neurogenesis” in even the oldest.

The findings are significant because for decades many experts believed that humans are born with all the brain cells they ever have.

However, the scientists behind the new study believe the necessity to keep learning new things even into old age creates a demand for new neurons.

The study may also prove a crucial fresh starting point in the so-far fruitless hunt for an Alzheimer’s cure.

The team found that the number of new brain cells tailed off with age across all the brains they studied — between the ages of 40 and 70, the number of fresh neurons spotted in the part of the brain studied fell from about 40,000 to 30,000 per cubic millimetre. However, in participants in the early stages of Alzheimer’s they fell dramatically, the number of new neurons forming falling from 30,000 to 20,000.

This occurred earlier than the accumulation of amyloid beta, which has been one of a major focus of drug development. Only last week a major trial which aimed to remove amyloid from the brain was abandoned.

Dr Maria Llorens-Martin, senior author on the study at the Autonomous University of Madrid, said: “This is very important for the Alzheimer’s disease field because the number of cells you detect in healthy subjects is always higher than the number detected in Alzheimer’s disease patients, regardless of their age.

“It suggests that some independent mechanism, different from physiological ageing, might drive this decreasing number of new neurons.”

She added: “I believe we would be generating new neurons as long as we need to learn new things. And that occurs during every single second of our life.”