For Today

Just like the "science" changed after some truck-drivers made Justin wet his shorts, the government reminds everyone that it is not really free and that it is doing everyone a temporary favour by dropping entry requirements:

The federal government is removing all remaining COVID-19 related travel measures, ending masks on planes, vaccine mandates and the mandatory use of the ArriveCan app.

Several cabinet ministers announced the change at a news conference Monday morning. Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said the government had been following the science and now believes it is safe to relax these measures, starting October 1.

“Based on the data accumulated over the last few weeks and months, we are announcing that the Government of Canada will not renew the order in council that expires on September 30 and will therefore remove all COVID-19 border requirements for all travelers entering Canada,” he said.

Duclos said the government would maintain its ability to enforce the measures if needed. He strongly advised Canadians to get vaccinated and receive third or even fourth doses.

 

And there it is. 

There is simply no way that the government will surrender its all-encompassing cudgel over the people.

 

Also:

Federal agencies spent almost $20 million on the ArriveCan app for cross-border travelers, records show. Cabinet defended the program as essential in enforcing the Quarantine Act: “You want to keep it mandatory?”

 

And:

An RCMP blacklist of Freedom Convoy sympathizers was emailed to securities regulators nationwide to share with individual members. The Mounties would not comment on distribution of the email to potentially thousands of financial advisors: “Can you tell us what information was provided?”

 Canada is not a place to invest or live:

Economic advancement requires both the accumulation of productive knowledge and its use in more and more complex industries, and the calculation of economic complexity is based on the diversity of exports and on their ubiquity (the number of countries that are able to produce the same exports) and complexity. Obviously, the countries with a great diversity of advanced and complex productive know-how will come out on top as they will be able to sell highly diverse and highly valuable products that are sought after around the world. The ECI is a revealing measure of the level of economic development, and when judging the fortunes of nations and their outlook it is clearly more useful than average per capita GDP or income figures (their relatively high levels may tell us more about former accomplishments than about prospects) or HDI (heavily influenced by income).

Given the traditionally high shares of extractive exports — fossil fuels, uranium, lumber, pulp and paper, grains, live animals, meat — Canada’s ECI was never among the world’s top 10, but during the past 25 years the index has plummeted. In 2020 the average ECI of six other members of the G7 (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.) was three times the Canadian level: we simply do not belong among the advanced economies of the 21st century. One telling fact: a country of nearly 40 million people is the only G7 member not making any plate glass despite the fact that in per capita terms Canada has had the largest glassed-condominium construction boom among G7 countries during the past decade. All float glass must be imported and our annual total glass import bill (for plate, bottle, safety, mirror and insulating glass) now exceeds US$2 billion a year, more than we get for our exports of beef (all trade data are from The Observatory of Economic Complexity). At the same time, not only small Hungary and Portugal but even economically decrepit Venezuela make plate glass.

As a result, our performance has been surpassed by nations few Canadians would think of as being economically superior. In the year 1995 Canada ranked 22nd, by 2020, after a quarter century of steady decline, it was 43rd. The 2020 ECI numbers show the enormous gap that separates us from complex, modern, diverse economies: Japan leads (2.26), Germany is third (1.96), despite decades of deindustrialization the U.K. is 10th (1.54), the U.S. 12th (1.47), Mexico 20th (1.21), the Philippines 30th (0.84) and in 43rd place Canada (0.57) is sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, well below Slovakia, Romania and even Russia-allied Belarus.

This dismal economic complexity standing has many stunning demonstrations besides not making any float glass. Canada grows the world’s best durum wheat (some with more than 15 per cent protein) and it is its world’s largest exporter, with Italy and the U.S. being among its largest importers (in 2020 they bought nearly 25 per cent of our durum exports, and paid us more than $500 million). But Canada is also the world’s fifth largest importer of pasta: it cost us more than US$500 million in 2020, with most of it coming from (where else) U.S. and Italy. No wonder we are a nation of rudimentary economic complexity when we sell grain, let others process it and import pasta.

 

Also:

A half-billion in federal spending on a China-based bank resulted in contracts for a handful of Canadian companies, documents show. Cabinet said it did not know how many, if any, jobs were created for its purchase of shares in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank of Beijing: “The Canadian government cannot estimate how many jobs have been created.”

There are six hundred million reasons why the press is unpopular:

Unpopular federal subsidies have turned corporate media into targets of public scorn, the Commons heritage committee has been told. Taxpayers believe reporters are “on the take,” testified an Alberta editor: “I don’t want money from this government.”

All that virtue-signalling is polluting:

COPPER. I live near one of the largest copper mines on earth. I helped manage a smaller copper mine for 8 years. Observation: VRE-battery supporters are completely out of touch with the costs and fossil fuel / environmental impacts associated with copper mining & production. /1 pic.twitter.com/zBclcOfpOE

— B.F. Randall (@brandall9481) September 25, 2022

**

Steel to manufacture the equipment; tires; lubricating oil; grease; fuel; maintenance; batteries; wear steel; and associated transportation, mobilization, and demobilization - 100% consumptive just to pick up and move rock. /10

Then the ore is crushed. The scale of this equipment is hard to describe. The fossil fuel and other inputs that went into this single crusher in one copper mine - and associated CO2 and other impacts - much less the power to run it - are enormous. 20 year life.

 

 

Endless tragedies:

A gunman opened fire in a school in central Russia on Monday, killing 15 people and wounding 24 others before shooting himself dead, authorities said.

The shooting took place in School No. 88 in Izhevsk, a city 960 kilometers (600 miles) east of Moscow in the Udmurtia region.

Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the gunman as 34-year-old Artyom Kazantsev, a graduate of the same school, and said he was wearing a black t-shirt bearing “Nazi symbols.” No details about his motives have been released.

The Committee said 15 people, including 11 children, were killed in the shooting, and 24 other people, including 22 children, were wounded in the attack.

The governor of Udmurtia, Alexander Brechalov, said the gunman, who he said was registered as a patient at a psychiatric facility, killed himself after the attack.

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Beaches at Plettenberg Bay, one of South Africa’s most popular beach resorts, have been closed after a second fatal shark attack in three months.

A 39-year-old woman from Cape Town died early Sunday at the town’s Central Beach after being attacked by one of the predators, the National Sea Rescue Institute said in a joint statement with the Bitou Municipality.

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Police in western Newfoundland have recovered the body of a woman who was swept out to sea at the height of post-tropical storm Fiona.

RCMP say the 73-year-old woman’s body was found Sunday afternoon, more than 24 hours after she was reported missing from the storm-ravaged community of Port aux Basques, N.L. ...

The cause of death of a second person on P.E.I. has yet to be determined, but the Island’s acting director of public safety told a news conference that preliminary findings pointed towards “generator use.” No further details were provided.

The deaths mark the first confirmed fatalities connected to the storm that tore through parts of Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec.