Getting the Economy You Voted For

Happy new year, Canada!:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has sounded the alarm about five incoming tax hikes in 2023. 

Tax hikes will include a carbon tax increase, an alcohol escalator tax, hikes to Employment Insurance and more, according to the report New Year’s Tax Changes. 

“Tax hikes will give Canadians a hangover in the new year,” said CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano. 

“Canadians can’t afford gas or groceries and the government is making things worse by hiking taxes.”

The Canada Pension Plan will see increases of up to $225 for employers, meanwhile Employment Insurance contributions will go up about $50 for workers and $70 for employers. 

On average Canadians can expect to pay payroll taxes of up to $4,756 a year beginning next year. 

“The federal government is raising the basic personal amount for income taxes. However, because of the payroll tax hikes, anyone making $40,000 or more in 2023 will pay higher federal income-based taxes than in 2022,” the CTF explained in a press release. 

Two carbon tax hikes will also be in effect. The federal carbon tax will go up by 14 cents per litre of gas beginning on April 1, 2023 costing households up to $847 with rebates taken into account.

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“As you staff your office and implement outreach and recruitment strategies for federally appointed leadership positions and boards, I ask that you uphold the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion,” reads Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate letter to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, which repeatedly uses those words.

The same words are repeated in mandate letters to all of the other cabinet ministers.

The Liberals’ newly released Indo-Pacific Strategy, which is mainly meant as a response to an increasingly belligerent Beijing, is also rife with these keywords.

“The benefits of inclusive social, economic and environmental efforts will have a multiplier effect throughout the region and in Canada,” reads the document.

 

(Sidebar: what are the anti-semites who plan on banning free speech saying about David Horowitz?)

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The current prime minister’s campaign, amounting to a kind of jihad, to destabilize the nation and create the world’s first “post-national state” proceeds on many levels. Among them, as I have previously catalogued, are a burgeoning national debt, a series of repressive bills making their way through parliament (C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18), a prohibitive and unnecessary carbon tax, the deliberate destruction of the energy sector, the impending rollout of digital ID surveillance technology, and the notorious invoking of the deeply flawed and inappropriate Emergencies Act to deal with the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy protesting the vaccine mandates. This last travesty was compounded by the government’s striking a Commission of Inquiry in which it set its own terms and appointed its own Commissioner.

PM Justin Trudeau’s declared purpose of protecting Canadians’ health via the vaxx mandates by, among other initiatives, attacking the Truckers as violent, racist, and homophobic was a false-flag operation. As constitutional lawyer Leighton Grey persuasively argues, Trudeau’s “ultimate goal, which the COVID-19 pandemic helped governments like Trudeau’s to advance,” is nothing less than “total surveillance and corresponding control of human populations.” ...

In Canada, the three branches of government — the executive, the legislative and the judicial — are not rigidly distinct. The checks and balances system of the American Constitution (though it is eroding in the U.S.) does not pertain here. The executive and legislative functions of the Canadian government are often spliced and interlaced, while the judicial branch was supposed to enjoy a strong measure of independence. In practice, we have a jolly threesome cavorting in political cabrioles of indissoluble meldings.

Indeed, the judiciary now regards itself as the de facto framer and not merely the interpreter of laws. Former Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella referred to herself and her colleagues as “the final adjudicator of which contested values in a society should triumph.” As Bruce Pardy cogently writes, “The Supreme Court has read the Charter over its 40-year life largely through an ideologically ‘progressive’ lens, slowly transforming what was drafted as a roster of autonomy rights into a mandate for collective values, group rights and the priorities of the expansive managerial state.”

With the judiciary having sold its vaunted integrity to the executive branch and willfully forfeiting the humility of legislative self-limitation, then the rule of law, the principle of due process, and the balancing of evidence are perverted, transmuting into an arm of state power and resulting in the virtual death of democratic governance. We have seen this happening recently in Brazil where a corrupt Supreme Court judge is responsible for restoring a convicted criminal to the presidency. We have seen it happen just now in Arizona where a Superior Court judge ruled against gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s airtight case regarding obvious electoral malfeasance, thus establishing a rogue governor in office.

And we see it happening as a matter of course in Canada — in “[d]ecisions from around the country,” as Pardy documents — where the judiciary has become an enforcer for the Liberal government, a development that does not seem likely to change. When the last resource for the rehabilitation of justice has been abrogated or, to use the Federal Court’s own term, rendered “moot,” we know the country is lost. The three branches of government have effectively become one, which is the very definition of tyranny.

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And who handed these kids these devices instead of making them do something productive?:

Successive years of educational disruptions, shutdowns, home isolation, and massive experiments in remote teaching have radically altered the terms of engagement. Most teachers and a good many parents are trying to reach a whole generation of kids hooked on cellphones and exhibiting all the signs of a new clinical condition – TikTok Brain.

Identified gaps in student learning, psycho-social impacts, and academic achievement setbacks are now more visible from province-to-province in Canadian K-12 education. What’s less recognized and largely unaddressed is the profound impact of students’ near-total fixation with cellphones and complete absorption in cyberworlds.