Your middle-of-the-week sangria ...
Who did you vote for, Canada?:
On Thursday, CPPIB reported a 4.2 per cent loss, equivalent to $23 billion, for the three months ending June 30. Net assets fell to $523 billion from $539 billion, and included an influx of $7 billion from CPP contributions.
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As inflation continues upward, many Canadians worry about the increasing cost of living and their household finances. However, there’s a crucial expense line missing—the amount we pay for public health care.
Most of us intuitively know that health care isn’t free. At some level, we all understand that the money in the government’s coffers for health care comes from our pockets. However, many Canadians, through no fault of their own, might not know exactly what that amount is because our public health-care system is funded through general government revenues instead of a dedicated tax. Basically, revenues from income taxes, sales taxes, business taxes, and more get poured into a fiscal brew, from which a certain amount is ladled out for health care.
The Department of Public Works in a briefing note says it continues to do business with SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. since criminal charges against the company “relate to alleged misconduct from 20 years ago.” SNC-Lavalin was the first company in Canada to win an out of court settlement under new provisions of the Criminal Code: “Canada is committed to taking action against improper, unethical and illegal business practices.”
The Vulcans have a saying - only Trudeau can go to Costa Rica:
Baton's family arrived at the Toronto Pearson International Airport at 4:30 a.m. for a flight scheduled at 8:20 a.m. They were travelling to Costa Rica.
"We go in line to speak to the person at the Air Canada desk, and while in line the manager comes up to us and informs us that Air Canada no longer flies to our destination, and hasn't for about a month, and insists that we must have gotten an email regarding this change. We had not," she told Yahoo News Canada.
They're the real victims here:
Federal managers are weary of the pandemic and need “time to recover and refresh,” says the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada. The commentary follows an in-house survey indicating managers felt unappreciated: “Seventy-six percent show high levels of exhaustion.”
Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough’s department in a briefing note boasted it processed a record number of permits for migrant workers even as auditors warned foreign labour may cost Canadian jobs. “The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has processed a record high number of files,” wrote staff.
Some people are, well, special:
Statistics Canada says over three in four Canadians report English as their first official language, a proportion that’s increased over the five-year period.
That’s while the proportion of people who report French as their first official language declined.
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Treasury Board President Mona Fortier yesterday rejected any language bonus for federal employees who speak an Indigenous dialect. The Board currently authorizes an $800 annual bonus to bilingual employees fluent in English and French under a program dating from 1966: “Currently we are continuing to explore.”
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The federal regime applies broadly to industrial firms, with some exceptions to ease the adverse competitive effects on trade-exposed firms. Quebec, however, gave free allocations of emissions permits to agriculture and to “emissions-intensive and trade exposed emitters,” such as aluminum smelters, steel mills, cement plants, and pulp and paper plants. Since 2013, the province’s total allocation of free permits has ranged from 17 million to 19 million tonnes per year. Assuming 18 million free permits are issued this year, the $10.51 per tonne saved is worth $189 million. The consequence is that Quebec-based firms enjoy a significant tax-related cost advantage over their counterparts (and competitors) in other provinces.
Also:
Hey @CdnHeritage. Are you aware that @Laith_Marouf, a consultant you fund under your Anti-Racism Action Program has made disgusting and violent statements about Jews?
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) August 13, 2022
Now that you are aware Minister @pablorodriguez, what is being done about it? pic.twitter.com/DA76X3bmyt
Pablo is too busy being a fascist to deal with that anti-semitism.
It's called a covering for one's self:
A high-ranking Mountie in Nova Scotia told MPs RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki made him feel stupid when he pushed back against her demand to publicly release information about the weapons used in Canada’s deadliest mass shooting.
RCMP Chief Supt. Darren Campbell testified before MPs on the Commons public safety committee on Tuesday. Campbell’s notes, which were released to the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia earlier this year, ignited the controversy over whether Lucki had been politically pressured to release details about the guns used in order to strengthen the case for the Liberals gun control legislation.
The Liberals are awfully good at covering for themselves and leaving everyone else holding the bag.
Turning on the citizenry on a dime:
Truckers & trucking companies are essential to our economy. That’s why our government has been working so hard to keep our trucking industry strong. pic.twitter.com/bFtdlJ2VkA
— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) August 4, 2022
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Newly disclosed documents show federal intelligence officials warned decision-makers that the police dispersal of “Freedom Convoy” protesters in Ottawa last winter could prompt an “opportunistic attack” against a politician or symbol of government.
When did this violent uprising occur? When?
Also:
Over 100 people have been arrested by police in relation to demonstrations resisting EU green agenda plans that will see Dutch farmers lose their livelihoods.
Police in the Netherlands have reportedly arrested over 100 people in relation to protests against EU green agenda measures which will see up to 30 per cent of livestock farms in the country forced to close.
While described by the Dutch government as being part of an “unavoidable transition” towards Great Reset-style reforms mandated by bigwigs in Brussels, farmers in the country have been actively resisting the changes, blocking motorways and food distribution centres in the hopes of bringing authorities to heel.
According to a report by NOS News, police have responded to the demonstrations by cracking down on protesters, with over 100 people being arrested in relation to the anti-green agenda demonstrations in recent weeks, with hundreds more being handed fines for actions resisting the measures.
Perhaps more interestingly, the national broadcaster reported that around one-quarter of such arrests did not occur during the period when alleged offences supposedly took place, but after the events, with police taking the time to track down individual protesters, a number of whom end up being remanded in police custody for considerable periods of time.
Why, it's like people complained about an inefficient and antipathetic system:
The federal government discreetly made the change in May for Canadian citizens and permanent residents, and extended it to all foreign nationals, including American citizens, at the end of the month of July, confirmed the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) on Friday.
CBSA spokesperson Judith Gadbois-St-Cyr said that these “temporary” measures have been put in place for fully vaccinated travellers in order to “provide more flexibility” to those “who may have been unaware of the requirement to submit their mandatory health information via ArriveCan”.
“After this one-time exemption, fully vaccinated Canadian citizens, permanent residents and persons registered under the Indian Act who do not submit their information through ArriveCAN will be subject to quarantine and testing and may also face fines,” said Gadbois-St-Cyr.
That was nice of them!
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In each of May, June and July, Pearson had the highest rate of flight delays among the world’s 500 busiest airports, according to data provided by aviation intelligence company FlightAware. During those three months combined, 53 per cent of flights departing from Toronto Pearson arrived at least 15 minutes late. Montreal-Trudeau International Airport came in second, with 46 per cent of its flights delayed.
“There was no strategic thinking from the beginning,” Mr. Perry said in an interview. “All of the elements that make up the aviation system were operating with their own self-interests in mind, their own perceived short-term interests in mind.”
The chaos at Toronto Pearson has laid bare a broken governance system, not only in the Canadian airport model itself but among the multiple federal agencies serving the aviation industry, The Globe and Mail has found. There is no clearly defined chain of command overseeing the industry, according to interviews with experts, union officials, House and Senate committee testimony and governance reports. As a result, no one stepped in to prevent the crisis when it first became evident the airport could not handle the traffic volumes.
Why would anyone trust the idiot government that doesn't want us to travel?
Does anyone remember when people warned of a slippery slope and no one listened to them?
I do:
Alan Nichols had a history of depression and other medical issues, but none were life-threatening. When the 61-year-old was hospitalized in June 2019 over fears he might be suicidal, he asked his brother to “bust him out” as soon as possible.
Within a month, Nichols submitted a request to be euthanized and he was killed, despite concerns raised by his family and a nurse practitioner.
His application for euthanasia listed only one health condition as the reason for his request to die: hearing loss.
Nichols’ family reported the case to police and health authorities, arguing that he lacked the capacity to understand the process and was not suffering unbearably — among the requirements for euthanasia. They say he was not taking needed medication, wasn’t using the cochlear implant that helped him hear, and that hospital staffers improperly helped him request euthanasia.
“Alan was basically put to death,” his brother Gary Nichols said.
Disability experts say the story is not unique in Canada, which arguably has the world’s most permissive euthanasia rules — allowing people with serious disabilities to choose to be killed in the absence of any other medical issue.
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Only months after Ottawa greenlit one of the world’s most liberal euthanasia regimes, a series of controversial state-sanctioned deaths have attracted growing international criticism that the Canadian health system now seems to be actively killing its disabled patients.
This week, a feature by the Associated Press quoted secretly recorded audio from a London, Ont. hospital that appeared to show a medical ethicist raising the subject of euthanasia with a disabled patient, Roger Foley, after reminding him that he was costing the system “north of $1,500 a day.”
Foley told the AP that he had never previously expressed a desire for medically assisted death, and began recording the staff after they kept mentioning it to see if he had “an interest.”
The AP story also quoted Tim Stainton, director of UBC’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, who called medical assistance in dying “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”
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A Canadian Forces veteran seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury was shocked when he was unexpectedly and casually offered medical assistance in dying by a Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) employee, sources tell Global News.
Canadian health care faces similar issues around treating transgender teenagers as a controversial British clinic and needs to “slow down” and not move patients so readily to medical transition, says a leading expert in the field.
As the number of youth presenting with gender dysphoria soars and their demographic make-up changes markedly, the health-care system should examine why those trends are happening while taking a thoughtful, “neutral” approach to each young patient, said Dr. Joey Bonifacio.
That might have something to do with the fact that perverts, quacks and willing parents are influencing children to butcher themselves beyond recognition.
If five shots don't do the trick, why would one?:
A terminally ill Alberta woman facing removal from an organ transplant list over her refusal to receive a COVID vaccination is appealing a judge’s decision siding with the hospital.
Annette Lewis, 57, lost a bid last month for an injunction against Alberta Health Services and six local doctors after health authorities said she could not proceed with the transplant unless she receives her COVID shots.
Lewis claimed the requirement violated her charter rights, while AHS said it has an obligation to donors, their families and other patients to make sure organs are used on patients with the highest chance of surviving.
How typical of the Canadian legal system:
Eyre, according to a LinkedIn page matching his description, has employment, education and volunteering connections to Burnaby.
Cpl. Alexa Hodgins with Burnaby RCMP told CBC in an email that Mounties there "had previous files with Andrew Eyre in 2018 in which he was convicted of sex-related offences."
The B.C. Prosecution Service would not comment on any past convictions, and followup questions to RCMP received no immediate response.
McCabe says investigators in Cambodia plan to cast a wide net looking into what Eyre's actions were in that country.
Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life:
They are all @WEF robots. this is insanity. Scripted tweets when they get Covid after being jabbed 17 times. Scripted well-wishes after getting Covid after being job 17 times. It’s a sick freaking joke. @JustinTrudeau @OmarAlghabra https://t.co/4GYt0sc7O5 pic.twitter.com/LHyk30dw2f
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) August 17, 2022
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I had to stop the montage for two reasons: 1) Any more images and the print would be illegibly small, and 2) I felt like I was going crazy at the absolute idiocy and insanity of the world in which we are currently living. Who drafted these syndicated responses? pic.twitter.com/xlICNJQRFP
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) August 15, 2022
Ladies and gentlemen, the template answer.
It was never about a virus:
More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents.
In a January court ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman of the Northern District of Texas, ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release around 12,000 documents immediately, and then 55,000 pages a month until all documents were released, totaling more than 300,000 pages.
The nonprofit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, sued the FDA last September, after the agency denied its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to expedite the release of mRNA vaccine review documents. In a November 2021 joint status report, the FDA proposed releasing only 500 pages of the documents a month, which would have taken up to 75 years.
Trial documents released in April revealed that Pfizer had to hire 1,800 additional full-time employees in the first half of 2021 to deal with “the large increase” of adverse reactions to its COVID vaccine.
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A team of 19 scientists from the United Kingdom have published new research that helps explain why countries with the highest vaccination rates are experiencing the highest numbers of what they call “breakthrough infections,” as well as reinfection with other variants of COVID-19.
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Nurses who witnessed “brutal” hospital COVID-19 treatment protocols kill patients paint a bleak picture of what is taking place in state and federally funded health care systems.
“They’re horrific, and they’re all in lockstep,” Staci Kay, a nurse practitioner with the North Carolina Physicians for Freedom who left the hospital system to start her own early treatment private practice, told The Epoch Times. “They will not consider protocols outside of what’s given to them by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the NIH (National Institute of Health). And nobody is asking why.”
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A 12-year old schoolgirl who objected to being vaccinated cannot be forced to take a Covid shot, a Peterborough, Ont. judge has ruled. The decision came in a family court dispute: “Requiring her to be vaccinated against her will would not respect her physical, emotional and psychological safety.”
(Sidebar: yet she does not file a federal tax income return. Given that a court can rule as they would for an adult, what other surprises do they have for the under-aged? Would they rule that way for a grown man who would rather not be jabbed?)
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News of the flash shutdown sent shoppers fleeing and screaming in an effort to get out of the building before the doors were locked, videos on social media showed. Shanghai’s 25 million residents are well versed in lockdowns, after being barred from leaving their homes for two months this spring in an effort to eradicate the virus.
This China:
A U.S. scientist recently testified at a U.S. Senate hearing that his research provides evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has conducted synthetic biology research on the deadly Nipah virus. Some scientists are expressing concern about Canada sending Nipah and Ebola viruses to a lab potentially engaged in such research.
“The Nipah virus is a smaller virus than SARS2 [virus causing COVID-19] and is much less transmissible. But it is one of the deadliest viruses, with a greater than 60 percent lethality. This is 60-times deadlier than SARS2,” Dr. Steven Quay, a Seattle-based physician-scientist, told a Senate subcommittee at an Aug. 3 hearing.
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Mining is one of the most capital-intensive industries on the planet, and so historically it made sense for Canadian miners to turn to China as a source of funding. But in recent years China has emerged as a clear national security threat.
Although Ottawa has made clear that it does not want to be beholden to a hostile foreign power for critical minerals such as lithium, so far there has been little in the way of action from the federal government to prevent that from happening.
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Latvia and Estonia withdrew from a cooperation group between China and over a dozen Central and Eastern European countries on Thursday, following in the footsteps of Baltic neighbour Lithuania which withdrew last year.
(Sidebar: see - BADGER, HONEY)
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China’s military drills after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan sparked alarm around the region, although its trade retaliation barely made a dent -- mostly because Beijing doesn’t want to hurt itself.
The value of trade targeted by China’s sanctions contributes a tiny amount of less than 1% to Taiwan’s gross domestic product, according to economists, taking the sting out of China’s announcements. Beijing could ramp up actions by targeting more food products, wood or minerals. But levies on any big-ticket items that would cause real damage to Taipei -- such as semiconductors -- are near-unthinkable, given China’s reliance on the island for cutting-edge technology.
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China's participation in the joint exercises is "unrelated to the current international and regional situation," the ministry said in a statement.
The exercises are part of an ongoing bilateral annual cooperation agreement, it said. Similar Russian-led joint exercises involving China have ..
Chinese troops will travel to Russia to take part in a joint exercise with Russia and other countries including India, Belarus and Tajikistan, the Chinese defence ministry said on Wednesday.
China's participation in the joint exercises is "unrelated to the current international and regional situation," the ministry said in a statement.
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Ming Pao Newspapers publications claimed $74,385 from the assistance fund. The Center for International Media Assistance reports that Ming Pao is a “Beijing-friendly” news company, catering to Chinese Communist Party sensibilities.
Ming Pao received money from the relief fund and the top-up fund. Sing Tao Newspapers publication Canadian City Post obtained $21,938 from the assistance fund. According to Canadalans, the news company routinely publishes Pro-CCP propaganda. Sing Tao took $199,192 from the relief fund and the CEWS.
China's participation in the joint exercises is "unrelated to the current international and regional situation," the ministry said in a statement.
The exercises are part of an ongoing bilateral annual cooperation agreement, it said. Similar Russian-led joint exercises involving China have ..
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol offered “audacious” economic assistance to North Korea on Monday if it abandons its nuclear weapons program, while avoiding harsh criticism of the North days after it threatened “deadly” retaliation over a COVID-19 outbreak it blames on the South.
Bribes never work with these guys.
Also:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has written to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to suggest the two countries form closer ties.
North Korea's state media, KCNA, said the letter from Mr Putin had suggested the pair work to "expand the comprehensive and constructive bilateral relations with common efforts".
Delivered to Pyongyang on North Korea's liberation day, it went on to say a union would help "strengthen the security and stability of the Korean peninsula and the Northeastern Asian region".
In a separate letter in reply, Mr Kim said that since a Russian-North Korean friendship had been forged in World War II with victory over Japan, the "strategic and tactical cooperation, support and solidarity" between the two countries had reached a new level.
Their common efforts to frustrate threats and provocations from "hostile military forces", it said, bound them.
KCNA did not identify the "hostile forces", but it has typically used that term to refer to the US and its
allies.
As if the Coptic community didn't have enough to worry about:
A fire ripped through a packed Coptic Orthodox church during morning services in Egypt’s capital on Sunday, quickly filling it with thick black smoke and killing 41 worshippers, including at least 15 children.
Several trapped congregants jumped from upper floors of the Martyr Abu Sefein church to try to escape the intense flames, witnesses said. “Suffocation, suffocation, all of them dead,” said a distraught witness, who only gave a partial name, Abu Bishoy.
Sixteen people were injured, including four policemen involved in the rescue effort.
Republican Sarah Palin, who is eyeing a political comeback, is through to November's election in Alaska in the state's House of Representatives race, US media project.
Her rivals are Republican Nick Begich III and Democrat Mary Peltola. The fourth contender is not yet known.
Ms Palin, 58, rose to prominence as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008.
She largely left the spotlight before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who has become her key ally and supporter.
This year Alaska's party primaries have been replaced with open primaries - the top four runners advance to the poll.
Ms Palin is also running in a separate special election to serve the remaining five months of Republican Don Young, who died in March after serving for 49 years.
I can't wait for the misogynist vitriol against her.
It will be like old times.
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