The countdown to Thanksgiving Day is now ...
A purported video is circulating showing Stephen Harper telling a partisan crowd that all his warnings about Justin Trudeau had come true.
“Unfortunately, literally everything I said would happen in 2015 has now come to pass,” says the former prime minister at what appears to be a gathering in Windsor, Ont.
The 90-second video was posted to TikTok by Anil Thapa, a Windsor restaurant owner, broadcaster and Conservative nomination candidate.
Is that so?
Idiot Canadians replaced an adult with an aging, blackface-wearing frat-boy who runs away at the first sight of strong-willed women and irate taxpayers.
A new report from the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free-market think tank, looks at income instead of output, and its findings are even worse for Canada. In a ranking of the 50 U.S. states and ten Canadian provinces by median earnings per person, all ten provinces line up at the bottom, occupying spots 51–60. Every U.S. state has higher median earnings per person than Alberta, the richest Canadian province.
The report tracks the changes in median earnings per person for each state and province in real, constant Canadian dollars between 2010 and 2022. “This twelve-year period allows for the analysis of a full business cycle following the 2008 recession through to 2022 when the economic effects of the global COVID pandemic began to subside,” the report notes.Every state and province except Alberta saw increases in real median earnings between 2010 and 2022. But most U.S. states saw faster growth than their Canadian counterparts. British Columbia is the only Canadian province in the top half of the 60 total jurisdictions in earnings growth. Real earnings growth in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, was slower than in every U.S. state.The report also zooms in on specific comparisons. It finds that relatively poor U.S. states have improved more than relatively poor Canadian provinces. In the ranking of all 60 jurisdictions by median earnings between 2010 and 2022, Utah improved from 47th to 28th, Michigan improved from 44th to 27th, and Arkansas improved from 45th to 31st. “Conversely, none of the lower-ranking Canadian provinces improved their relative positions by more than one position over the period from 2010 to 2022,” the report found.
A make-or-break Bloc Québécois bill to raise Old Age Security would cost almost $20 billion over six years, the highest estimate to date, says a federal Briefing Binder. Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet has warned the bill must pass into law by Halloween or his caucus will “bring down the government.”
Squeezing money out of the taxpayer in any way one can:
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland yesterday said cabinet would like to adopt an Irish-style three percent annual federal tax on vacant lots. The Department of Finance opened consultations on the proposal: “Ireland has an example of a measure like this.”
Companies require the indentured servitude the Temporary Foreign Workers Plan provides:
Canadian employers have become addicted to migrant labour, Immigration Minister Marc Miller told the Senate last evening. Miller in November is expected to table a new Immigration Levels Plan that cuts the number of temporary foreign workers let into the country: “All of them ask for more and more.”
Also:
Several U.S. legislators recently wrote a letter to trade minister Mary Ng raising concerns that Canada needed tougher rules and better enforcement. The letter specifically cited goods that U.S. officials rejected over forced labour concerns being rerouted through Canada.
McKay said beyond the moral imperative there is a real trade risk to Canada if the issue isn’t addressed.
“If Americans come to the fixed position that Canada’s nothing other than sieve for slave products and other stuff that’s inadmissible to the United States, this will be to be really serious.”
We don't have to trade with China:
Legislators targeted by Chinese Communist Party agents should have been warned in person, the Department of Public Safety said yesterday. Canadian MPs were among 400 parliamentarians worldwide who were targeted by Chinese hackers in 2021: “Is the current system adequate? No.”
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Evidence at the China inquiry yesterday depicted Defence Minister Bill Blair, 70, as distracted and ineffectual. Witnesses testified Blair liked to work from home and had employees explain what security memos meant rather than reading the documents himself: “We were aware when drivers went to his house.”
Also - oh, burn, China!:
Former Prime Minister Taro Aso has once again found himself at the center of controversy over Taiwan on Wednesday, after delivering remarks a day earlier that referred to the island as an important “country” for Japan — despite Tokyo's lack of formal diplomatic ties with Taipei.
In his remarks at an event in Tokyo celebrating Taiwan’s National Day, which Taipei was set to mark Thursday, Aso called the democratic island a “close country” and stressed that it is “extremely important” to maintain friendly relations even in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.
Instability in the Taiwan Strait would be “an existential crisis situation” for Japan, local media quoted him as saying, adding that he hoped “that the people of Taiwan will be prepared to protect and defend (the island).”
Tokyo has assiduously avoided describing the self-ruled island as a sovereign nation for fear of angering Beijing. China views Taiwan as its “core of core issues” and regards the island as a renegade province that must be unified with the mainland, by force if necessary.
China opposes any official contact between Taiwan and other governments, but its reaction to Aso's latest comments on the island were relatively muted.
No country for anyone:
Not in his usual way, with a solemn, “This is not who we are” pronouncement, but with something more concrete, something that might alleviate, even stop, the hate on our streets?
Lest anyone has been asleep for the past year, all is not well in Canadian society. We have entered a dark time, a very dark time.
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Such hateful rhetoric is unacceptable. This has no place in Canada. All options must be considered. This is not who we are. We are treating this with the utmost urgency.
And so forth. And so on.
For more than four years, this is what we have been hearing from the Liberal government about the bloodcurdling incitements that are the stock in trade of the Vancouver-headquartered Samidoun Network, the overseas agitation and propaganda wing of the terrorist-listed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
It’s what Canadians have been hearing from federal, provincial and city politicians over the course of a year’s worth of skyrocketing hate crimes targeting Jews in the ugliest convulsions of antisemitism in living memory.
It’s what we heard again this week in Ottawa, where Samidoun’s unencumbered mobilizations and lurid sloganeering came up several times in Parliament after Samidoun hosted an anniversary celebration in Vancouver Monday commemorating the Hamas-led surprise attack on Southern Israel last October 7.
Samidoun has been at the vanguard of the most outwardly pro-terror street rallies and campus demonstrations that have erupted across Canada since last October 7. Roughly 1,200 people were killed in that attack, including several Canadians, and 251 people were kidnapped. To Samidoun, this is all to the good. The October 7 pogrom also triggered the war in Gaza that has left roughly 41,000 people dead, civilians and terrorists alike.
At the Monday Samidoun event in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, a masked woman shouted into a megaphone: “We are Hezbollah, and we are Hamas.” A Canadian flag was set on fire, and hundreds of revellers joined the masked woman in a chant: “Death to Canada, death to the United States, and death to Israel.”
Just over 100 new prescriptions for hormone-related drugs were filled last year for Albertans between the ages of 11 and 15, according to data from the province’s Pharmaceutical Information Network.
There were a total of 107 “first pharmacy dispenses” of estrogen, testosterone and puberty blocker leuprolide in 2023. This was down from 139 first dispenses in 2022 and 124 in 2021, marking a three-year low.
That's the Canadian legal system for you:
Victoria Lea Henneberry is serving a life sentence for the second-degree murder of Loretta Saunders in February 2014.
“The board remains seriously concerned about your low level of insight and limited responsibility for the index offence,” said her most recent parole decision.
“Although you have completed required and voluntary interventions to mitigate your risk, you remain assessed at a low-moderate risk level, and it is essential that you complete further treatment and programming to mitigate your risk of re-offending. Notwithstanding the board’s concerns, the board concludes that your risk is manageable in the context of the (unescorted temporary absence) with the proposed plan and focus on further rehabilitation.”
Henneberry, now 39, and her boyfriend, Blake Leggette, were subletting a room in Saunders’ Cowie Hill Road apartment when the couple killed the Saint Mary’s University student, who was pregnant, after she came to collect their rent.
Saunders was 26 when she died. Leggette attacked her from behind when she entered the apartment.
“Your boyfriend choked the victim, tried to suffocate her with several plastic bags, and hit her head off the floor twice,” said Henneberry’s parole decision, dated Sept. 25.
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At a press conference on June 3, Chief Justice Wagner was asked to comment on an ongoing controversy over whether the Supreme Court should provide official French-language translations of its judgments prior to 1970, before the Official Languages Act was enacted. Attempting to justify the court’s refusal to do so, he made a series of bizarre claims that sought to diminish the importance of his own court’s prior decisions.
According to Wagner, “apart from considering these decisions as part of our legal cultural heritage, no one today will refer to a decision from 1892 to support his claim,” later adding that “sometimes a decision from five years ago is an old decision, in commercial and civil matters.” He then concluded that “the legal value of these historical decisions is quite minimal.”
Coming from Canada’s top judge, these cavalier statements reflect a breathtaking dismissal of the role and significance of legal precedent. As any practicing lawyer will readily attest, at all levels of court across Canada, litigants routinely cite and rely upon judgments of the Supreme Court dating back much further than the 1970s. This is most apparent in the Canadian provinces and territories other than Quebec, where basic areas of law — the law of contracts, torts and property, for instance — are founded upon the common law, which emerges from legal precedents and landmark decisions that date back centuries. It is also true across the country where fundamental issues of constitutional law are concerned, including in matters relating to the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments. Here, precedents dating back to 1892 and beyond continue to be authoritative.
What is even more troubling about the chief justice’s remarks, however, is that they confirm the now widespread impression of an undisciplined approach to judicial responsibility at the Supreme Court of Canada. Regrettably, the judicial decisions that appear to exemplify this attitude are legion. Rather than attempting to resolve disputes within settled legal frameworks and principles, recent appeals before the court are explicitly framed as invitations to overturn established doctrine. This was notably the case in Canada v. Bedford (2013) and Canada v. Carter (2015), two Charter challenges that targeted the criminal prohibitions on prostitution-related activities and assisted suicide, respectively. In ultimately deciding to strike down these laws, the Supreme Court went so far as to approve the effacement of its prior work.
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Brothers convicted in the United States of helping Iran evade sanctions were allowed to legally adopt new identities in Ontario, records released to Global News show.
Amin and Arash Yousefijam were sentenced in Michigan in the fall of 2021 for using shell companies to illegally export sensitive manufacturing equipment to Iran, where they were born.
They then returned to Ontario, where they had lived prior to their arrests, and applied to change their names to Ameen and Aurash Cohen. The province granted their requests in April 2022.
At the time they altered their identities, they were still serving out part of their sentences — a one-year period of supervised release, a form of parole, government records show.
Using his new name, Arash Yousefijam, 36, became a registered dentist and went to work in Ottawa as Dr. Aurash Cohen. The Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario said it was looking into the matter.
Meanwhile, his brother, 37, took a job as a compliance officer at an international company in Richmond Hill, Ont. Property records show an Ameen Cohen bought a home in the city in 2022.
But no one is going to dig up Kamloops.
Three years after a devastating wildfire nearly wiped out the picturesque B.C. hamlet of Lytton, residents say it may never be reborn because of costly, government-mandated archeological excavations.
Village Mayor Denise O’Connor — whose own house was destroyed in the June 2021 wildfire — said homeowners are getting individual quotes for archeological work that range from $26,000 to $48,000 to much higher, making the work prohibitive.
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