Mid-Week Post

Your median point of clarity ...




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

The federal minister in charge of Canada's fight against money laundering supports British Columbia's public inquiry into dirty money but says a national examination is not necessary.

Organized Crime Reduction Minister Bill Blair said Tuesday money laundering is occurring across Canada and internationally, but the federal government has already started implementing measures to combat illegal money.

"From my perspective, we've already identified some very significant things that need to be done," he said. "It's been ongoing work. These types of measures, I think, will send a very clear message that Canada is cracking down."

A reminder:

As reported by the Ottawa Citizen, “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recommended a wage increase for Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. John Vance, boosting his salary’s upper limit to $306,500. The raise is retroactive to April 1, 2018. The raise has been approved and the salary range is $260,600 to $306,500. 

“Her Excellency the Governor General in Council, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, fixes the remuneration and certain conditions of employment of General Jonathan H. Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff, as set out in the annexed schedule, which salary is within the range ($260,600 – $306,500), effective April 1, 2018,” according to the May 9 orders in council notice.” 

And for a supposedly ‘transparent government,’ the report also notes “The actual salary Vance receives is protected by the privacy act.”

Of course, we will be told that Vance helping Trudeau and Trudeau giving him a raise ‘have nothing to do with each other,’ that it’s ‘totally unrelated,’ and that it’s just a ‘coincidence.’

I'm sure that this is a coincidence, as well:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to announce Wednesday that the federal government is buying two more Arctic patrol ships on top of the six it has already ordered from Halifax-based Irving Shipbuilding.

Yep. Nothing to see here:

In October, 2016, a public relations specialist employed by an Ottawa firm handling communications for Irving was informed of questions Postmedia was asking PSPC about the $60-billion Canadian Surface Combatant project. The largest procurement project in Canadian history, it will see Irving build 15 new warships to replace the navy’s existing fleet of frigates. The PR specialist declined to say who at PSPC had provided the information. At the time Postmedia complained verbally about the incident to a PSPC media relations staffer.

**

Vance was slated to testify Tuesday, but his appearance was pushed back a day as former federal cabinet minister Scott Brison's lawyers were granted standing in the case.

Norman's lawyers have accused Brison of political interference in the shipbuilding deal at the centre of the case.

They claim, in a court filing, he tried to kill the $668 million plan to lease a naval supply ship from the Davie shipyard, in Lévis, Que. on behalf of a rival, Irving Shipyard.

His lawyers deny any meddling.

**

The federal government and Halifax-based Irving Shipbuilding are asking a trade tribunal to throw out a challenge to their handling of a high-stakes competition to design the navy’s new $60-billion fleet of warships.

** 

Central to Henein’s allegations was the claim that Brison, a Nova Scotia MP, was close to Atlantic Canada’s powerful Irving family, whose shipbuilding firm had submitted its own proposal to provide a supply ship. Norman’s lawyers alleged that Brison intervened to scuttle the Asterix project on the Irving’s behalf.

And:

As the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jon Vance, said on Facebook, the importance of the new Afghanistan Memorial Hall, particularly for the families of the fallen, “cannot be understated.”

And then of course he and the Department of National Defence (DND) went and massively understated it.

As my Ottawa Citizen colleague David Pugliese reported last week, the hall was in fact opened on May 13 in near-secrecy.

No media were invited, the military having forgotten, perhaps, that among the 190 plaques on the battlefield memorial is that of Michelle Lang, the Calgary Herald reporter who was killed Dec. 30, 2009 with four soldiers — sergeants Kirk Taylor and George Miok, Pte. Garrett Chidley and Cpl. Zachery McCormack — in an improvised explosive attack, or that hundreds of Canadian reporters were in and out of Kandahar, most as military embeds, a few as independents.

No press release was sent out.

No family members of the 159 Canadian soldiers who lost their lives in that country were invited, or any of the 1,800 who were wounded.

The Canadian Forces didn’t even announce that the memorial hall, the soldier-built memorial as its centrepiece, had been opened until three days after the ceremony, on May 16.

This was done via “the Canadian Armed Forces Operations” official Facebook page.

The post noted that the event “was attended by senior Canadian military leadership and department management.”

Widows and families were only notified by couriered letters, curiously dated May 10, that the hall “was officially opened on May 13,” though of course by then, at least for some of the recipients, it hadn’t actually happened.

Canada is back, so back that it hurts!:

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the Canadian trash that has been rotting in the Philippines for nearly six years will be back on Canadian soil before the end of June.

McKenna says the government has awarded a contract to a shipping company, Bollore Logistics Canada, that will return 69 containers filled with household waste and electronic garbage.

The containers are what is left of 103 containers shipped by a private Canadian company to the Philippines in 2013 and 2014 and labelled improperly as plastics for recycling.

No one saw fit to dispose of the garbage Canada outsourced to a Third-World country.

Oh, boy ... 

This humiliation seems like a fitting reward for Justin and his complete inability to lead. 

It's just money:

Canadian household debt reached a record high at the end of last year even as mortgage activity slowed, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said in a report out Wednesday.

The debt to income ratio of Canadians hit a record high of 178.5 per cent in the fourth quarter last year as mortgage holders continued to take on non-mortgage debt.

The ratio increased as average monthly required payments rose 4.5 per cent compared with a year earlier, while disposable income rose only 2.5 per cent, the agency said.

Debt levels rose as average balances for credit cards and lines of credit grew at a faster pace than in 2017, especially in Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto, it said.

** 

The Doug Ford government has created a “realistic” path to balance the books but needs to find another $6 billion in spending cuts to achieve its goal, the Financial Accountability Office (FAO) projects.

The government’s budget numbers also suggest it is choosing to cut deeper and delay balancing the budget by one year in order to pay for “unannounced measures,” likely to be promised tax cuts to be delivered before the next provincial election in 2022, the FAO says.

“If the government is able to maintain its spending plan, restraining spending growth to 1%, I think it’s got a very realistic chance of achieving its plan,” Financial Accountability Officer Peter Weltman said Wednesday. “The last time that’s been done in Ontario was in the 1990s.”

(Sidebar: having Liberals run one's government is like handing one's credit and debit cards to a junkie and then wondering when one ordered forty kilos of heroin and a giraffe when one's monthly financial statement comes in.)

**

A carbon tax is a living tax but I repeat myself:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is set to meet with his New Brunswick counterpart today to discuss a number of issues, including their shared opposition to the federal carbon tax.

Ford and Blaine Higgs have both been vocal in their opposition to the tax, which the federal government imposed earlier this year on provinces that didn’t have their own price on carbon.

Ontario’s government is waiting for a decision after fighting the tax in court.

Saskatchewan’s top court ruled in favour of the federal government in a separate legal battle against the carbon price, but that province has said it plans to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Higgs has said New Brunswick will join in that fight.

Human achievement and longer life expectancy should be self-explanatory and should not be subjected to Chicken Little scams that do not stand to scrutiny and ultimately hurt the poorest and most marginalised:

No, this girl very likely won't die from climate change
She is likely to live longer than any other cohort has done before, because she's richer, better educated and live in a technologically advanced society https://t.co/hfgnyNIhhW

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) May 21, 2019

Canadian arrogance and snobbery are ineffective shields from reality.

Cases in point:

American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may be the most unpopular U.S. diplomat in Canada in many a generation, and his diplomatic language more suitable for the alley than for high-level matters of state, but he is surely correct in reminding Canada that the so-called Northwest Passage (there are actually two routes through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago) is an international waterway. And Canada, as a trading and maritime nation, ought to recognize that, and work with the United States to establish a long-term solution for how the passage is to be used.

(Sidebar: yet no one seemed to mind that these waters were treated as Canadian territory. Hhmmm ...)

**

Did we forget that in 2007 at the Vancouver airport, Robert Dziekanski, a disoriented man, was shocked with a Taser five times by RCMP officers within minutes of their arrival on the scene, killing him? A subsequent judicial inquiry found that officers on the scene did not tell the truth about what happened; perjury convictions followed. ...

Have we forgotten entirely about the 20 years during which an ideological and incompetent coroner, Dr. Charles Smith, provided false and misleading evidence in the case of infant deaths? In 13 trials, parents were falsely convicted of raping and killing their own children. Dr. Smith was not an unknown, rogue quantity. In the 1990s he did more forensic child autopsies than any other doctor in the country. The leading child coroner in Canada falsified evidence to convict innocent parents of killing their own children. Think about that. Already at retirement age, he was stripped of his licence to practise medicine. No one else faced any consequences.

And now we have the case of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman. Whether the prime minister directly ordered the RCMP to investigate Norman is a distraction. He had no need for such improper pressure; he made his views about that known publicly, expressing his expectation that Norman would be charged nearly a year before he was. The RCMP reads the newspapers.

Not wanting to talk about it does not mean "settled":

If not, I want to know what else you call “settled.” Which of your core beliefs might a sensible, well-meaning person not share? If the answer is none, I’ll again quote Bill Buckley’s jibe that “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Political multiculturalism means never having to understand that Asians list their family names first and given names last or, conversely, that most other cultures list their given names first and are just used to doing that everywhere they go:

Ahead of a series of important international events in Japan, including a visit from U.S. President Donald Trump this weekend, Japan’s foreign minister has issued a request to the English-speaking world: Call our prime minister Abe Shinzo, not Shinzo Abe.

“The new Reiwa era was ushered in and we are hosting the Group of 20 summit. As many news organizations write Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, it is desirable for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s name to be written in a similar manner,” said foreign minister Taro Kono at a news conference Tuesday, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.

 
It's all about seeming, not doing.