Tuesday, January 03, 2023

Your Stupid, Wasteful, Corrupt Government and You

Again, happy new year!:

 

(Sidebar: and one wonders why no one wants Justin around anymore.)

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Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is moving ahead with two major mandate items in 2023 — introducing "just transition" legislation and finalizing a major Atlantic electricity project.

Wilkinson told CBC News the government will, he hopes, introduce early this year the long-awaited legislation to help workers in the oil and gas sector move into green energy jobs. 

 

This Jonathan Wilkinson:

The wife of Trudeau's Minister for natural resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, admitted that his wife bought shares in defence company Lockheed Martin just five weeks after he was appointed to cabinet.

Jonathan Wilkinson's wife is the most active spouse on the stock market, investing in companies like Pfizer and Enbridge, alongside other stocks which are directly impacted by the Trudeau government, according to Blacklock's Reporter.

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This Stephen Guilbeault:

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault yesterday admitted owes Revenu Québec a five-figure amount in back taxes.

Guilbeault in a filing with the Ethics Commissioner declared “arrears due to Revenu Québec” under a Public Declaration Of Liabilities Of $10,000 Or More. The heritage minister was the only member of the 43rd Parliament to disclose unpaid taxes.

“He has not been paying his fair share,” Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourgh-Haute St. Charles, Que.) said in a statement. “This is typical.”

Guilbeault “needs to come clean and tell Canadians how much he owes in taxes,” said Paul-Hus. The minister should “pay his fair share like all other Canadian families,” he said.

Guilbeault repeatedly told the Commons Canadians, including digital corporations operating here, must “pay their fair share” of taxes.

“Anyone who profits from the system must contribute to it,” Guilbeault told MPs on December 9, 2019.

 

Also:

 

 

Why, it's like the government is this lot:

Canadian Heritage didn’t really consult the public on this matter — it consulted anyone who agreed with the Liberal platform point to create a National Action Plan on Combatting Hate. It’s yet another example of a government department being used to effect partisan goals and manufacture consent for something the public might not actually want. 

While the Liberals and Canadian Heritage have kept their descriptions of the future anti-hate plan vague, the survey conducted in April gave hints. Those who passed a screening question could make suggestions about what they thought should be a priority for government: national anti-hate education campaigns, increasing media representation for communities affected by hate and supporting new technology to help communities monitor hate. 

Suggestions could also be made for an “Anti-Racism law,” a law to make traditional and social media “follow standards that reject hate” and a law to “add people or groups who fund, help, or take part in white supremacist activities to a formal list of white supremacist groups.” 

These suggestions can understandably be met with concern because Liberals tend to define “hate” very broadly — and if media and society were required to tiptoe around “hate” (which could include anything from serious hate speech to mild disagreements about political issues), this would impact our freedom of expression.  

Similarly, “white supremacy” is traditionally understood as violent, evil and KKK-esque — but the federal government has, previously, stretched this to include less obvious “structural” white supremacy, which is expressed “through our governments, education systems, food systems.” When societal evils are construed this broadly, anyone can be guilty.  

It’s entirely reasonable to be opposed to a plan that floats extreme solutions to vaguely-defined problems — but such dissent was filtered out in this survey by Canadian Heritage. The survey began by asking participants whether they thought combatting hate should be a priority for the government. Those who answered “no” weren’t asked much more. Those who answered “yes” were presented with dozens of potential anti-hate measures that could be taken by the government and asked to select which ones they thought should be prioritized. 

Emails obtained in a completed access to information request in July, and which were made available to the Post in December, indicate that this screening question was added early in the survey period, after department researchers noticed a growing number of responses weren’t supportive of a “National Action Plan on Combatting Hate” at all. 

“We are starting to see an increase in the number of people responding to the National Action Plan on Combatting Hate Consultation Survey that feel combatting hate should not be a priority for the Government of Canada,” a government researcher noted in an email to his director on April 6, 2022.  

“As our primary target audience for this survey are people that believe combatting hate should be a priority for the Government of Canada, the inclusion of this other group in our data poses a problem for our analysis … A simple solution would be to add a question at the beginning of the survey that would easily identify these individuals in our dataset.”

Meanwhile, the survey homepage stated that all Canadians were encouraged to give feedback. 

By April 11, emails indicate that negative responses were flooding in and that a screening question had been added. “We think that 75 per cent-80 per cent of these responses (since last night) are from non-allies,” the researcher wrote to his director. “A big chunk of the remaining 20 per cent-25 per cent are from a GoC IP address.” 

It’s unclear if all of the responses from “non-allies” were screened out, but another email by a director that day showed that some were: “That screening question is being used, and it has saved us well over 500 cases that should not have been included in the final analysis (for the first pass). So it is helping a lot.”

 

This government: 

Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen admitted to MPs he was alerted to the antisemitic tweets of a consultant hired by the government for anti-racism training a month before he first spoke out on the issue.

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A Liberal cabinet minister, the leader of the Green Party and MPs from all other parties attended an event earlier this week that hosted the publisher of a newspaper known to publish Holocaust denialism and with a long history of publishing antisemitic content.  

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“I’m very greatly concerned that documents are redacted, blocking any ability for us to see what the government was actually buying and how many units. All we get is a lump-sum price,” McCauley told The Globe and Mail.
“I suspect the committee will probably put through another motion demanding unredacted documents.”
Government contracts and development costs associated with the ArriveCan app are currently being investigated by the Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO), which began its study on the matter in October 2022.
The committee on Oct. 17 requested that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) release lists of ArriveCan subcontractors and invoices by Oct. 31, but the federal agency missed the deadline due to delays in translating the invoices.
CBSA president Erin O’Gorman told the committee on Nov. 14 that the agency did not have lists of the subcontractors who worked on ArriveCan.
“We just have information relating to those who held the contract directly with either CBSA or PSPC [Public Services and Procurement Canada],” she said.
O’Gorman’s comments came nearly two weeks after a majority of MPs in the House on Nov. 2 voted in favour of Auditor General Karen Hogan conducting an in-depth review of the federal government’s $54 million spending on the app.
Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, a member of the OGGO committee studying the costs and parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Services and Procurement, told the Globe that he believes CBSA should provide documents that give unredacted descriptions of the services provided by individual contractors.
“We should have a clear view of what exactly was being paid for in each case, and I would be supportive of a request to receive that information in an unredacted format,” Housefather said. “Provided that any commercially confidential information … would be kept confidential by the Committee and not be made public.”
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New regulations by Treasury Board President Mona Fortier would further delay Access To Information disclosures that currently stretch into years. The Board in a Christmas Eve notice said Canadians seeking public records should be required to show their birth certificate or other proof of citizenship: “No consultations were deemed to be necessary.”

 

But no one is required to show such documents on Roxham Road. 



There is no separation of judicial and political levels:

The Canadian parliament had wanted to install Oregon-style guardrails when they first legalized MAID, but their hands were tied by a rather broad 2015 Supreme Court ruling that effectively enshrined euthanasia as a Charter-protected right.

 

But don't try to protect your own life.



It's our way or the highway:

One of Canada’s leading experts on drug addiction says British Columbia’s provincial government asked him to delete a crucial database in an attempt to censor criticism of the province’s homeless policies. The incident appears to fit within a larger, nationwide campaign to silence experts who believe that, when it comes to homelessness and drugs, Canadian policy-makers are on the wrong track.



Oh, your credibility was gone long before that:

Cabinet “pissed away our credibility” in dealing with the Freedom Convoy, said the Prime Minister’s parliamentary secretary. Liberal MP Greg Fergus (Hull-Aylmer, Que.) made the remark in a text message critical of cabinet: “We politicians have pissed away our credibility.”


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