Your spot of Smarch weather ...
I'm sure there is an Instagram account regaling only the curious about how Justin has to mingle with the little people.
Let me know when he is stripped of the pension he doesn't deserve.
The man who went from ski instructor and kindergarten teacher virtually straight to being the Prime Minister of Canada has finally left the building. He resigned. But that was all for show. His party forced him out because the polls were diabolical. Go and read the Fraser Institute’s analysis of Canada’s economic performance after 10 plus years of Trudeau at the helm. When Justin took over from the Conservative Stephen Harper government in 2015 the per capita wealth and wages of Canada’s richest provinces compared well to all but nine or 10 US States. Today, wages and salaries are lower in every Canadian province compared to all 50 States, below even the poorest US States of Mississippi and Louisiana. Growth? Bad. Productivity? Woeful. Multiple quarters of GDP per capita decline. And this was assessed before Trump won last year’s November election, lest those with a bad case of TDS be tempted to blame the Orange Man. (As a further aside, a painful one, Canada’s economy is really bad. But Australia’s is worse than Canada’s on all these measures. Just sayin’ because you won’t hear it on the ABC.)
Trudeau loved to virtue-signal. He was a fully paid-up climate change catastrophist and stopped pipelines from being built to let Alberta’s oil and gas get to the ocean – the result today is that Alberta sells it to the US or to no one. Trump didn’t do that. Trudeau did. So a Net Zero cheerleader. Spent next to nothing on defence (meaning even less than we in Australia do as a percentage of GDP). He ran a massive immigration Ponzi scheme. And he was a thug – yes, a thug – during the Covid lockdown hysteria. Ask the truckers. The result of all the schools closing, paying people to do nothing, closing small businesses, borrowing and spending money in unheard of amounts, weaponising the police and more was that you got big time asset inflation, massive monies transferred from poor to rich and from young to old, even worse educational results, productivity killing ‘working from home’ and, well, things will basically be screwed up for decades because of lockdowns. (By the way, our Coalition government was as bad as, or worse than, Trudeau on all these fronts. All but a couple Coalition MPs during Covid should be hanging their heads in shame for the rest of their lives. They won’t. But they should.)
At any rate, reality caught up to pretty boy Justin. Renewable energy is ghastly expensive save for huge implicit and explicit subsidies – you need baseload power Mr Bowen. Spending nothing on defence in a Hobbesian world is stupid. Inflation was bad. Housing costs soared. The young were being screwed over. By November of last year his Liberal Party was 23 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. And Trudeau led a minority government. The even further Left NDP party had the power to bring down Trudeau and force an election any time it wanted. Yet the NDP leader refused, even though his party had overtaken Trudeau’s and had every likelihood of forming the Official Opposition were there to be an election. (Poilievre’s much-repeated theory for why the NDP refused to act and bring down Trudeau was that if the government scraped along till this past February the NDP leader would trigger his gold-plated parliamentary pension – he’d be set for life. All one can say about that theory is that once no election could be held before the pension would trigger, the NDP leader announced he’d bring down the government.)
Too late. Trudeau resigned. He prorogued Parliament – which means he put it into a sort of suspended animation between the end of one session and start of a new one. This, in my view, was conventionally within Trudeau’s constitutional power – the remedy lying with the voters once the election is held. And a Canadian court recently upheld Trudeau’s power to do this. ...
(Sidebar: it wouldn't be the first time that the legal system in this country proved to be positively venomous.)
Trudeau in his 11 years had appointed nearly all the Canadian judges. I predicted he’d win the proroguing case and he did. The difference in the two proroguing cases was whether the judges were with the politician or against. It’s that bad I’m afraid.
Here we are now:
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre on Tuesday drew public attention to a report that shows Mark Carney in October, while chair of Brookfield Asset Management, brokered a deal with Chinese bankers.
A month prior to Carney’s trip to China, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made him chair of the Liberals’ Task Force on Economic Growth.
A report from the Telegraph, entitled Mark Carney meets [Chinese President Xi Jinping] as China woos the West, says Carney met with the People's Bank of China deputy director in October — two weeks later Brookfield secured a $256 million loan from the Chinese state-owned bank.
(Sidebar: this China. The communist dictatorship that people can freely go to and that arrests Canadian nationals at will.)
Carney has repeatedly refused to disclose his holdings in Brookfield. On Monday, he said “screens” have been put up around his investments and they are now in a blind trust.
(Sidebar: visible to HIM.)
**
Liberal Leader Mark Carney defended Wednesday putting two green investment funds in an offshore tax haven while an executive at investment house Brookfield Asset Management.
Carney told reporters at a campaign stop in Windsor, Ont., that the funds were registered in Bermuda to avoid double taxation.
“The important thing… is that the flow through of the funds go to Canadian entities who then pay the taxes appropriately. As opposed to taxes being paid multiple times before they get there,” said Carney.
Taxes are for little people, aren't they, Carney?
**
The Rutas de Lima toll road project, meant to ease the paralyzing traffic in the Peruvian capital, collapsed into scandal with revelations that the Brazilian firm Odebrecht had bribed the mayor with $3 million in 2013 for a 30-year contract to run the highway system.
Instead of relief, Rutas brought predatory toll hikes that crushed the working poor, while Odebrecht pocketed the money. Brazilian authorities, in their expansive Operation Car Wash investigation of international corruption networks, led to Odebrecht pleading guilty in 2016 to what the U.S. Department of Justice called “the largest foreign bribery case in history.”
Yet, the elaborate plea bargain arrangement with DOJ in New York oddly omitted any reference to Rutas de Lima. Just before the scandal broke wide open, Odebrecht offloaded most of its stake to Brookfield, a Toronto-based investment and asset management giant, for about $500 million.
Brookfield knew South American public works business like few others. But it claimed its due diligence had found nothing wrong with its new Odebrecht asset.
New leadership emerged in 2022. On one side stood Brookfield chairman Mark Carney, a powerful ESG or Environment, Social, and Governance advocate – and now Canada’s prime minister – who sidestepped the mess while his company kept turning the screws on the city of Lima. On the other side emerged Lima’s freshly elected Mayor Rafael López Aliaga, a populist fighting to dismantle the corrupt contract.
Brookfield defended its soiled Rutas asset through costly United Nations arbitration, profiting from Rutas escaping itemization in the 2016 plea bargain. The tolls remain, doubts swirl about the DOJ prosecutors’ impartiality during the plea bargain – particularly Andrew Weissman, the ex-DOJ Fraud Section chief – that let Odebrecht pay at the lowest end of the sentencing guideline range and kept Rutas’ name out of the arrangement.
Brookfield then went on the offensive against Lima, portraying itself as the victim and suing the city for $2.7 billion in lost revenue. “Rutas” or “Routes” had become toxic in the eyes of many locals who now call the highway project “Ratas de Lima,” or Rats of Lima.
**
Ideology, ‘science,’ and policies over people, that’s just the Liberal way.
The Trudeau-government’s proposed oil and gas emissions cap will cost 150,000 jobs nationwide, and billions in royalties per year, warned Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
Carney and Environment Minister Terry Duguid gave mixed messages on where the Liberals stand on emissions caps. Expect the worst. Carney’s a climate, green energy zealot who praised creepy little climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Meanwhile, Liberal-imposed snow crab and other fish harvesting limits threaten the “lifeblood” and the “bread and butter” of Newfoundland.
This Newfoundland:
WATCH Mark Carney Liberals call the cops on the NFLD fishermen and not let them attend Carney Liberal rally or talk to the Fisheries Minister.
— David Krayden (@DavidKrayden) March 24, 2025
First 2 actions of Mark Carney:
-Kick NFLD fishermen out of his campaign event at same time as cut the amount they can fish by 25%
-Kick… pic.twitter.com/aQpvbdBGdO
But wait! There's more!:
Fraser cut a deal with Carney which he admits in this clip. Don’t let him fool you, that’s the only reason he is running. pic.twitter.com/1eSqhttK7R
— Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) March 26, 2025
**
Our 2016 WEF Davos delegation included Justin Trudeau, Bill Morneau, Chrystia Freeland, Mark Wiseman, and David Walmsley - Editor-in-Chief of the Globe and Mail.
— Andy Lee (@RealAndyLeeShow) March 26, 2025
The Globe is the official media partner of the Century Initiative, which is run by Carney’s advisor Mark Wiseman. https://t.co/eoDCKokkwi pic.twitter.com/pWMN4BJkQ4
The new boss is not all different from the old one.
Discuss.
Oh, burn:
After years of bristling at the idea of “vote splitting,” former NDP leader Tom Mulcair has effectively warned NDP supporters not to split the vote in the 2025 election. ...
Mulcair was leader of the NDP between 2012 and 2017 — a period that saw the party form the Official Opposition against the government of Stephen Harper.
It was also a position in which Mulcair often had to resist charges that a vote for his NDP served only to split the progressive vote to the benefit of the Conservatives.
Mulcair acknowledged as much in his Bloomberg column, writing, “When I was NDP leader I used to bristle when I heard Liberals warn about not ‘splitting the vote.’ It seemed so entitled, as if ‘the’ vote belonged to them.”
**
At the start of the campaign, poll aggregator website 338Canada is currently estimating that the NDP could be looking at electing between two and 12 MPs across the country in the next election — down from the 25 MPs they managed to get elected back in 2021.
In Quebec, the NDP will realistically keep Alexandre Boulerice, the lone MP who has managed to stick around since the 2011 “orange wave” that saw Layton’s party sweep 59 seats in la Belle Province and form the Official Opposition for the first time in its history.
(Sidebar: an argument for term limits right there.)
Let the NDP go down in flames.
Jag held the country hostage so that he might get a pension that he doesn't deserve.
Burn, baby, burn!
No, throw it in the trash.
The plan does not extend to the entire population (only 3.4 million as of this writing) nor does it cover all treatments and procedures:
**
In short, it is rather like an American-style insurance plan sourced by a single entity - the government - tat can refuse treatment at any time.
Why not let people keep their money (taken from taxes) and let them direct their own care?
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promised Tuesday that Canadians receiving federal dental care would continue to do so, should his party form the next government.
Poilievre outlined his intention for the program, while appearing in Vaughn, Ont., where he made an announcement on housing affordability.
Asked about dental care and pharmacare, two programs the Liberals established over their last term in government, Poilievre pledged to “protect these programs.”
Something that makes sense:
Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada launched their official campaign from Saint-Georges, Que., on Monday, focused on slashing government spending while halting immigration.
"We need to stop that to preserve our culture, our standard of living, our economy," Bernier said.
The former Conservative MP for Beauce is pitching his party — which strongly opposed COVID-19 lockdowns — as the "real conservatives" in this federal election.
In a scorched-earth exit from the Conservative Party of Canada in 2018 to found the People's Party of Canada (PPC), Bernier accused his former party of being too "intellectually and morally corrupt" to be reformed.
Bernier outlined on Monday the four pillars of the PPC platform: pausing immigration, ending what he described as "woke" policies, boosting the economy by cutting spending and implementing policies related to national security.
God help us!
The counter-culture!
A look at Canada's failed policies:
B.C. received Health Canada’s permission to allow possession of small amounts of illicit drugs in a three-year pilot project, which started in January 2023.
However, the province asked Health Canada to reverse the decision in April 2024 after facing backlash and winding up instead introducing policies to prevent drug use in public spaces like parks, playgrounds, and hospitals.
The study published on the JAMA Health Forum looked at the number of opioid deaths and hospitalizations during the trial period in B.C.
The American Medical Association journal said it found a 33 percent increase in opioid overdose hospitalizations linked to the “safer supply” program.
Researchers said drug decriminalization was linked to a further 25 percent increase, leading to a 58 percent rise in hospitalizations.
**
While most consumers seem to appreciate the convenience of an increasingly digital economy, a CBDC is a radical change from using credit cards and online banking apps. A CBDC would likely lead to a cashless economy, in which all financial transactions can be monitored and controlled by government. A cashless economy would create severe hardship for people who are homeless, technologically illiterate, or without ready access to the internet.**
Newly published advice to Canada’s pediatricians continues to charge “full steam ahead” with the gender-affirming model of care in the face of increasing uncertainty about its safety, and suggests that parents who don’t unquestionably affirm their child’s expressed gender risk harming their child, concerned doctors say.
The advice, published in a brief paper in the Canadian Paediatric Society’s flagship journal, is silent on the Cass Review, a four-year long, independent British review that landed last spring that concluded the evidence base for gender-affirming care for minors is “remarkably weak” and that many unknowns remain about the impact of social transitioning, particularly on very young children.
We don't have to trade with China:
A panel of experts testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday that Chinese companies mining for “green” energy minerals throughout Africa – particularly in resource-rich countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are creating a “catastrophic and unacceptable” situation for locals.
The experts urged American officials to act to contain the malignant Chinese influence destroying an entire generation of African children and the environment in which they live, stressing that the minerals in question – cobalt, lithium, tantalum, and copper, among others – are pivotal to any high-tech economy.
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