Naturally:
Cabinet’s current $78.3 billion deficit, the highest in Canadian history outside of pandemic overspending, will likely rise even higher before the budget year expires March 31, the Senate national finance committee was told yesterday. No new figure was mentioned: ‘It may now run a bit higher.’
Don't worry, though.
Carney is well taken care of:
While Canadians continue to struggle with rising grocery bills and as lineups for food banks get longer, Prime Minister Mark Carney flies in style, even racking up a $94,000 in-flight catering bill for a short flight.
Records recently released by National Defence show Carney’s flights drew sky-high expenses, with the priciest being a four-day Rome trip in May that cost the Canadian taxpayer $93,780.
**
Prime Minister Mark Carney spent at least $300,000 on in-flight catering during his travels since taking office last March, plus at least another $472,000 when he got where he was going, records from Global Affairs Canada show.
The data comes in response to a question posed in October by Philip Lawrence, the Conservative member of Parliament from the Northumberland—Clarke riding in Ontario, east of Toronto. National Post has reached out to him for comment.
Lawrence asked: “With regard to the Prime Minister’s international travel from March 14, 2025, to the present: (a) what is the total expenditure on hotel accommodations for the Prime Minister and his entourage, broken down by trip and fiscal year; (b) what is the total cost of in-flight catering for the Prime Minister’s flights, broken down by trip and fiscal year; and (c) what are the names and addresses of the hotels where the Prime Minister has stayed, broken down by trip?”
Global Affairs listed accommodation costs for a half dozen trips between March and June last year. They included $39,415.12 in Paris, $36,288.10 in London, $48,358.50 in Washington DC, $133,372.60 in Rome/Vatican City, $141,069.33 in The Hague, and $73,789.64 in Brussels, for a total of $472,293.29.
It added that the names and addresses of the hotels where the prime minister stayed cannot be disclosed, for security reasons. In also noted that it could not disclose specific details as to the size of his entourage, which might reveal how many security personnel were assigned to protect him.
Since June, Carney has made an additional 15 international trips through the end of 2025, and four more this year to date, to Paris, Beijing, Doha, and Davos …
Well, thank God that he's eating well.
It must be Trump's fault.
REEEE!
Being a Liberal means never having to say you're sorry.
Ever:
A Liberal MP called Conservative MP Jamil Jivani a Nazi sympathizer and implied Donald Trump was Hitler in the House of Commons last week. So much for the Team Canada approach where we all work together to solve the problems emanating out of Washington.
John-Paul Danko, who represents Hamilton West—Ancaster—Dundas, was speaking on proposed changes to the operations of the House when he went off on Jivani.
“We have the Conservative Party of Canada’s own Unity Mitford, who is attempting to freelance negotiations with the American president right now,” Danko said.
Unity Milford was a British socialite who became close to Adolf Hitler, even moving to Germany and living there at the start of the Second World War. In calling Jivani Unity Milford, Danko is calling his fellow MP a Nazi sympathizer and by extension saying Trump is Hitler.
It’s a thoughtless, idiotic comment from anyone, let alone a Member of Parliament.
Canadians from across the country blasted the Liberal government and federal leaders for honouring in the House of Commons a Ukrainian veteran who fought for a Nazi SS division.
The more than 1,000 pages of documents released under the Access to Information law provide a glimpse at the intense anger sparked last year by the decision by all members in the Commons to give two standing ovations for Waffen SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka.
Holocaust survivors wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about friends killed by Hunka’s division, the 14th SS Galician, while families of Canadian soldiers killed fighting the Nazis during the Second World War peppered MPs with questions about why they honoured a soldier who had sworn allegiance to Adolf Hitler.
Hunka, a resident of North Bay, Ont., has not commented on the Sept. 22, 2023, event in which he was introduced to the Commons as a Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran and a hero. House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota thanked Hunka for “his service.”
But news quickly emerged that Hunka had served in a Ukrainian SS unit.
The incident became an international embarrassment for Canada as Holocaust historians, Jewish groups and the Polish government pointed out that Hunka’s unit had been involved in war crimes, including massacres of women and children. The division was also used by the Nazis to crush a national uprising in Slovakia, again prompting allegations of war crimes.
What does it take to sell out your country to China, Liberals?:
In a threat environment where Chinese-language media ecosystems have been tied to intimidation, narrative control, and election interference — and where Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai has been imprisoned for challenging Party rule — I argue this is the wrong lesson at the worst time: Ottawa is treating propaganda infrastructure like normal journalism. I point to intelligence reporting that, as The Bureau has reported, describes clandestine operations on Canadian soil, including Chinese police paying Chinese-language journalists to track dissidents and coercing targets not to cooperate with Canadian law enforcement.
And that’s why I frame the judgment as reckless: Carney widened access for a Party-state media apparatus — and expanded information-sharing with Chinese police and the RCMP — without publicly detailing safeguards, enforcement, or even acknowledging the documented threat, effectively expanding the very channels through which intimidation, manipulation, and Chinese clandestine police operations already manifest in Canada.
The draconian 20 year imprisonment of Hong Kong dissident and newspaper-owner Jimmy Lai, effectively a death sentence, is a reminder that if we are going to get into bed with China we should be aware that we are soiled by association.
That is not to say that Canada will overnight become an authoritarian regime bent on jailing its dissidents (Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber would rightly give a valid, potent and alternative argument on this point.)
(Sidebar: oh, don't offer to hold their beer for them on this.)
But if we are going to trade with China, and Prime Minister Mark Carney seems most insistent that we do, then we had better be conscious of the danger of having to disregard some of our more onerous scruples — fighting on behalf of brave rebels who are willing to speak out against the corrupt despots of the world, for instance.
Clearly, Carney is in no hurry to start lecturing the Chinese on their appalling human rights abuses, not with business at stake.
When he returned from his trade mission to Beijing last month, Carney was insistent on telling Canadians that Canada “can thrive in a new system” and that if we were ambitious we could secure enormous investment from new partners.
“And we must be pragmatic,” he said, code for there will be times when we need to hold our noses from the noisome behaviour of our new partners.
Canada’s approach to China had to be “recalibrated,” he said, it had to be narrow, specific and within guardrails as well as rooted in “value-based realism.” Human rights had to be part of broader discussions, preferably with coalition partners, he added.
Whatever all this meant, Carney summed it up perfectly when he said, “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
Four days later, Carney was preaching a different story at Davos. In a speech widely interpreted as aimed at U.S. President Donald Trump, the prime minister was demanding the creation of a new world order “that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights.”
Carney’s approach to China is thus a laissez faire, hands off, “no megaphone” policy. However, to the U.S., once considered an indispensable ally, Carney’s response is to shout very loudly at a world forum for middle powers to band together against the American oppressor.
The danger in such a foreign policy should be obvious. We have decided to implicitly trust a dangerous power that until a few months ago was considered the greatest threat to our democracy and way of life, while abandoning an ally because the current president cannot control his mouth or his temper. …
China’s treatment of Jimmy Lai is a testament to its cruelty and its treatment of human rights.
Three judges, handpicked by Beijing, sentenced Lai, a pro-democracy advocate who has been outspoken against Chinese oppression, to 20 years in prison on Monday.
The court in Hong Kong, once a thriving colony under British rule but now living under the repressive regime of China, found him guilty under a controversial “national security law” aimed at curbing protests.
Lai, 78, founded the Apple Daily newspaper which was a constant thorn in Beijing’s side with its repeated calls for free speech and the rule of law to be respected in Hong Kong.
The government of Canada also notes that “human rights violations committed in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are well-documented and continue to raise significant concerns” citing action against Uyghurs, Muslims, Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners.
(Sidebar: Canada no longer has any moral or political standing in the world and, outside of its borders, no one cares what we think. Thanks, Liberals and their voters.)
And it was less than a year ago that Carney, when asked for the biggest threat facing Canada, replied with one word: China.
So how does Canada respond to something like the jailing of Jimmy Lai now that we have a new pragmatic relationship with China?
On X, Anita Anand, the foreign affairs minister, said she was “disappointed” with the sentencing and called for his release.
Disappointed? It’s disappointing when your elderly mother can’t meet you for lunch, but it’s an absolute tragedy when an elderly man is imprisoned for believing in democracy.
Consider that in December, a month before Carney’s love-in with China, Anand wrote about Lai’s trial saying, “Canada condemns the politically motivated prosecution of Jimmy Lai under the National Security Law in Hong Kong and calls for his immediate release. We continue to express our concerns about deteriorating rights, freedoms and autonomy which are enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law.”
If we must trade with China, we should be under no illusions that there will be a cost — not just abandoning the megaphone but abandoning people such as Jimmy Lai.
In less than two months we have gone from strongly condemning his trial to merely being disappointed at his two decade sentence.
At Davos, Carney said Canada was not “powerless” — “The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.”
Fine, let’s start with honesty: What values is the prime minister willing to sacrifice as part of his devil’s bargain with China?
One's mistake is thinking that Carney has values.
He doesn't.
Nor do his voters.
Truly awful, but truly Canadian:
Two children, a 10-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy, were shot by their father, who then took his own life, Kitigan Zibi police director Paul McDougall said.
Local police received a call from a relative at 2:04 a.m. Wednesday alerting them to the incident, he said.
Police found the father dead at the scene, McDougall said. The two children were taken to hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
**
“It is deeply concerning to continue seeing individuals charged with serious and heinous crimes released into the public,” Bowmanville-Oshawa North MP Jamil Jivani said Tuesday in a written statement.
“Canadians expect a justice system that prioritizes public safety, and this case once again highlights the urgent need for serious bail reform in Canada.”
It won't happen.
Ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment