Getting the government one voted for:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on his way to meet with Nordic leaders ahead of an upcoming NATO summit and as uncertainty looms over the future of the Arctic.
Trudeau is slated to travel to Iceland, which will host leaders from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway over the next two days for an annual gathering of Nordic prime ministers.
The reason given for Canada’s absence, according to Department of National Defence spokesman Daniel Le Bouthillier, was “it was a planning decision given many of our aircraft and personnel are currently committed to modernization activities.” In other words, it was too busy dealing with an aging fleet and preparing for the new aircraft. It’s a weak excuse, given that Canada had four years to prepare for this exercise, which is of critical importance to NATO and Western security.
And Justin is no stranger to wasting money on trips:
Taxpayers paid $61,000 for hotel rooms so the prime minister could attend a celebrity-studded, two-day summit in New York City, newly released documents obtained by National Post reveal.
Held in New York City on April 27 and 28, the Global Citizen NOW summit saw Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hobnob with celebrities that included John Legend, Billie Eilish and Hugh Jackman. It was billed as an opportunity to unite celebrities and activists with business and political leaders — all to take “urgent action” to end extreme poverty.
The hotel expenses were released in response to an order paper question tabled by Conservative MP Dan Albas, and do not include flights or additional costs.
The prime minister departed Ottawa for New York City on April 26 in an RCAF Challenger business jet joined by 11 passengers, including Trudeau’s executive assistant James Armbruster, his official photographer Adam Scotti, his official videographer Akshay Grover, former PMO adviser Jeremy Broadhurst, chief-of-staff Katie Telford and other staffers.
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Until Trudeau stops hopping on his jet every second day and travelling around with a multitude of gas guzzling SUV’s there is not one Canadian that should buy into his carbon scam. How can people be so dense. pic.twitter.com/3IyifbyAXC
— Glenda M 🇨🇦 (@McfarlaneGlenda) June 22, 2023
Canadian diplomats abroad have spent more than $139,000 on circus tickets, concerts and galas, newly-released records show. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland in her 2023 Budget proposed a 15 percent cut in unnecessary spending to show cabinet was “fiscally responsible.”
Not that it matters to them:
In this year’s report, the CFIA collected and analyzed 844 samples specifically targeted to detect misleading representation. The analysis revealed the following percentages of satisfactory samples (on non-fraudulent): fish (92.7%, compared to 91.2% in the previous year), honey (77.5%, compared to 88.5% in the previous year), meat (99.1%, no results available from the previous year), olive oil (86.9%, compared to 87.8% in the previous year), other expensive oils (i.e. almond oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, flaxseed oil, grapeseed oil, hazelnut oil, mustard seed oil and sesame seed oil) (64.3%, compared to 66.2% in the previous year), and spices (90.8%, compared to 92.1% in the previous year).
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“Fixing the price of bread—a food staple of Canadian households—was a serious criminal offence,” said Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell in a June 21 release. “Our continuing investigation remains a top priority. We are doing everything in our power to pursue those who engage in price-fixing.”
Canada Bread revealed in an Ontario court on June 21 that an executive at the company discussed the prices of bread products with senior executives at Weston Foods, at that time a subsidiary of George Weston Ltd., the parent company of grocery chain Loblaws.
The company has pleaded guilty to four counts under Section 45 of Canada’s Competition Act, each of which comes with a maximum penalty of $10 million for the first two and $25 million for the next two. The Competition Bureau recommended to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada that Canada Bread receive leniency in sentencing in return for its cooperation with the investigation, bringing the total amount due to $50 million.
In June 2007, Canada Bread and Weston Foods executives agreed to engage in two price increases, one in 2007 and one in 2011, according to the Competition Bureau. At the time of the price-fixing scandal, Canada Bread was under the ownership of Maple Leaf Foods. The senior leadership of Canada Bread that engaged in the price-fixing is no longer with the company.
A word on Maple Leaf Foods and Galen Weston:
The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (Teachers') today announced that it is selling 3,400,000 voting common shares and 10,300,000 non-voting common shares of Maple Leaf Foods Inc. (MFI) and 2,193,913 warrants exercisable into voting common shares of MFI to a fund managed by West Face Capital Inc.
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Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is defending the decision to give up to $12 million in funding to Loblaw so it can install more energy-efficient fridges.
That comes just a year and a half after the company fought against raising the minimum wage, admitted to a 14-year bread price-fixing scheme and ended up in a tax court battle last year that saw it ordered to pay back taxes worth roughly $368 million related to a banking subsidiary in the Caribbean.
Moving on ... :
But a recent report from the Desjardins credit union shows that Canada lags behind many of its peers (including the United States, Germany, Australia and the Scandinavian countries) in the level of GDP per person, a common measure of prosperity. Before Trudeau took office, Canada’s GDP per person roughly matched the average for the developed economies as a group. Since then, “an increasingly wide gap has opened up with other advanced economies,” according to Desjardins.
After stripping out inflation, GDP per person in Canada has been almost flat since 2015. Moreover, Canada ranks near the bottom among all developed economies in improving this core indicator of economic wellbeing. Yes, the Canadian economy has been growing over the past seven to eight years, but this mainly reflects a larger population and workforce coupled with the impact of inflation. When GDP figures are adjusted to account for population growth and inflation, it turns out that Canada has enjoyed very few gains in per-person prosperity.
And the situation is getting worse. Statistics Canada reports that real GDP per person stood at $56,206 in 2019 before the onset of COVID-19. It dropped sharply to $52,741 in 2020 before rebounding over the course of 2021-22 as the economy reopened. But in 2022, real GDP per person remained below the 2019 level and was scarcely higher than five years earlier.
How will things evolve going forward? Using economic growth forecasts embodied in the 2023 federal budget and assuming annual population growth of 1.8%, even by 2027 real GDP per person — again, the key indicator of how Canadians are faring in economic terms — will remain below its pre-pandemic level and be only a smidgeon higher than in 2017.
This pandemic:
The federal standardized test, known as NAEP, was given last fall, and focused on basic skills. The 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 out of 500 in reading, and 271 out of 500 in math, down from average scores of 260 in reading and 280 in math three years ago.
Achievement declined across lines of race, class and geography. But in math, especially, vulnerable children — including Black, Native American and low-income students — experienced bigger drops. …
The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990. In reading, 2004.
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The likely result of this grade-hyperinflation situation is an influx of students less prepared for the basic demands of university, which is what university faculty are reporting anecdotally. It’s not particularly funny that this is happening to precisely those students affected most seriously by pandemic sham education. But it is kinda funny that Ontario won’t adopt the obvious solution — i.e., diploma exams that factor into high-school grades, like the ones Alberta and other provinces require in key courses, and that allow school-by-school corrections for grade inflation.
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Over the pandemic’s course, the number of youngsters seeking help for mental health problems soared, jumping from an estimated 12.1 per cent of children in 2017 to 17.8 per cent in 2022. The youngest children – those aged between seven and 10 – saw the biggest increase. But adolescent mental health issues have also become more prevalent, with new research this week showing that lockdowns fuelled a staggering 42 per cent rise in eating disorders among teenagers – the sharpest rise being in girls aged between 13 and 16 – and led to a similar increase in incidents of self-harm.The lead author of the latest study suggests that social isolation, anxiety, disruption in education and over exposure to negative social media influences left many children feeling they had lost control over their lives, and that this could have contributed to the development of eating disorders. Hospital admissions because of eating disorders had their sharpest annual increase in the year after the pandemic, rising from 5,950 among under-18s to 7,767.
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Canadians hid their vaccination status when questioned by federal pollsters, says an in-house Privy Council Office memo. Researchers cited the “social desirability” of claiming to fully comply with public health orders at a time when unvaccinated people were denied access to public services and threatened with job losses: “Respondents tend to answer questions in a manner that will be viewed favourably by others.”
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Around 330 active or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) who say they were harmed by COVID-19 vaccine mandates have filed a class-action lawsuit against high-ranking members of the Canadian military, asking for some $500 million in damages.
Just fudge the numbers a bit.
It will be fine.
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