Wednesday, April 01, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week April fool ...



On March 16, the renowned Study of the Canadian Consumer revealed that “Nearly half of Canadians are living paycheque to paycheque” and that “a growing number of Canadians say they’re barely staying afloat.” 

Unfortunately, even though job markets and ‘life-chances’ have unequivocally collapsed and evaporated throughout all of Canada, it is evident that the degenerate state of the Canadian nation has expanded well beyond the looming outbreak of abject poverty.

In fact, it is clear that the past decade of Liberal government has imploded the foundations of Canadian society and transformed the Canadian nation into a failing state.

Firstly, Canada’s economy has been utterly decimated by the past decade of Liberal government and its vain efforts to “[rely] on immigration to drive economic growth and plug labour gaps.” 

For example, since 2015, Canada’s GDP per capita has collapsed, and its economy has consistently teetered on the precipice of a major recession. In fact, the Liberal government has enthusiastically cultivated “the single worst performing economy of all 38 [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] OECD members,” and the Fraser Institute itself has declared that Canadians are currently being forced to endure “the longest decline in individual living standards of the last 40 years.”

In addition, Canada’s unemployment rate has now “jump[ed] to a nine-year high” and, since 2019, food bank usage in Canada has increased by nearly 100%. Worse still, 33% of “food bank clients” in Canada are now children, and the most recent Child and Family Poverty Report Card has been forced to concede that “progress toward eliminating child poverty is not only stalling but reversing … it would take nearly 400 years to end child poverty in the country.”

Moreover, public safety in Canada has collapsed throughout the Liberal era, as a result of the Liberal government’s ‘catch-and-release’ justice system and constant desire to ingratiate itself with particular minorities within its voter base.

For instance, since 2015, violent crime has soared by over 30% throughout the Canadian nation, and Canada’s Violent Crime Severity Index has “increased considerably in every province and nearly every major city over the last decade.” Furthermore, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) itself recently confirmed that “hardly a day passes without a heartbreaking story of some violent crime in at least one of Canada’s major cities” and that Canada has been inundated with “a surge in violent crime across every province.” 

Sadly, the sexual assault rate in Canada has also surged dramatically throughout “all 20 Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA), with some CMAs experiencing a doubling of sexual assault rates in ten years.” In fact, at the 2025 Calgary Stampede, the Calgary Police Service (CPS) actually issued a public announcement in various foreign languages, such as Punjabi and Arabic, in an effort to curb the pandemic of violent crime and sexual assault that now plagues so many diverse communities and abodes throughout Canada.

Finally, Canada’s social fabric and democracy have been sent asunder, due to the fact that the Liberal Party has repeatedly violated Canada’s laws and flagrantly abused the Canadian nation’s fundamental democratic processes, in order to suppress any politics and ideology that contradict its own ‘progressive’ agenda.

For example, since 2015, left-wing extremism has become endemic throughout Canadian society, and radical liberal ideology has become a constant feature of Canada’s political ecosystem and news media landscape. Furthermore, Canadian society has become violently polarized and plagued by democratic backsliding. In fact, the Democracy Project itself has explicitly reaffirmed that Canada’s “democracy is suffering” and that “political disagreements are spilling over into real interpersonal conflict.” 

Even the foundational political cornerstones and cubits of Canadian society, such as Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, have recently become supremely malleable under the auspices of the Liberal government. In fact, in 2023, Canada’s democracy deteriorated so severely that it summarily collapsed the ‘Democracy Index’ for all of North America and “for the first time since the launch of the Democracy Index in 2006, western Europe [overtook] North America to become the highest-scoring region in the world…” 

Unfortunately, it is evident that the past decade of Liberal government has forced the Canadian state to endure a national decline and collapse that exceeds the confines of mere poverty.

In fact, it is clear that the past decade of Liberal government has imploded the foundations of Canadian society and transformed the Canadian nation into a failing state.

More importantly, it is readily apparent that Canada’s Laurentian government will soon damage the Canadian state beyond repair and force a cohort of beleaguered provinces, such as AlbertaQuebec, and Saskatchewan, to choose between a rapidly fracturing Canada and annexation by the US.

Alas, nearly half of all Canadian youths have already recognized the truth: There is no future in Canada.

But, you know, elbows up.





Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday would not say whether he believes China uses slave labour. It followed cabinet’s announcement of “a new foreign policy” that encourages Canadians to get to know the People’s Republic: “Do you believe there is forced labour in China?”


Carney’s “Economic and Trade Cooperation Roadmap” with Beijing binds Canada to limitless Chinese acquisitions in energy and agriculture. And the RCMP is now bound to a formal collaboration with Beijing’s dreaded Ministry of Public Security, which is notorious for its rigid enforcement of ideological conformity and persecution of pro-democracy elements from Hong Kong to Xinjiang and from Shanghai to Tibet.



Just stop.





Our data shows that 34% of households have drawn from savings or taken on debt just to put food on the table over the past year. That is not a marginal statistic — it is a structural sign. It suggests that food affordability is no longer being managed through simple budget adjustments. It is now eroding financial resilience.

Canadians are adapting, but not necessarily in ways we should be comfortable with.

Nearly half of respondents — 44.4% — say they are seeking out more sales and discounts. Another 23.7% are spending more time searching online for better prices, while 23.3% report using more coupons. About 23.2% are switching to cheaper stores altogether.

These are not minor adjustments. They represent a fundamental shift in how Canadians shop for food.




City council approved a pilot project late Thursday, proposed by Councillor Anthony Perruzza, that calls for four city-run grocery stores. His hope is that if the stores “forgo” profits and get a break on property taxes, Torontonians can buy good food for less.





New Democrat leader Avi Lewis yesterday said he will be “clear and consistent in my position” on alleged Israeli genocide and claims of a powerful Jewish lobby in Canada. Jews expressed alarm over Lewis’ election Sunday: “The NDP has become a hostile place for the vast majority of Jewish Canadians.”

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Police-reported hate crimes against Jews increased in 2024 even as the rate overall remained “relatively stable,” Statistics Canada data showed yesterday. New figures followed testimony at parliamentary hearings that Canada had normalized anti-Semitism to the point it was “casual, even fashionable.”



A federal judge has faulted Revenue Minister François-Philippe Champagne for disobeying a Court order in a tax case. The Minister’s office and Canada Revenue Agency failed to comply with a 2025 order to disclose emails and memos regarding treatment of a Jewish charity: “Orders of the Court must be obeyed.”





Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight is delaying release of records sought by MPs regarding millions in unpaid benefits for Métis veterans of the Second World War. A $30 million fund approved by Parliament paid only a fraction to old soldiers, sailors and air crew: “It is difficult.”





Watch these particular floodgates open:





As many as 1,000 former members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps may be embedded across Canada — and posing an urgent security threat to the US, experts told The Post.

Canada’s liberal government isn’t doing nearly enough to address the problem, Michelle Rempel Garner, a member of the opposition and the “shadow minister” for immigration, told The Post.

“It’s a huge problem,” she said. “That’s not just a concern for our country, it’s a concern for our security partners and allies.”





PFIZER’S former chief toxicologist said vital safety tests were not carried out before their covid jab was rolled out to billions and that mass vaccination caused ‘widespread harm’.

He also said no proper checks were done to see whether it could cause cancer due to ‘time constraints’, and tests to check its impact on pregnancy and fertility were inadequate. He suggested this has led to fertility issues in Europe and other vaccinated countries.

Last week, Dr Helmut Sterz, who led Pfizer’s European toxicology centres between 2001 and 2007, and is author of the book, The Vaccine Mafia: Pfizer’s former chief toxicologist shows how toxic substances were unlawfully sold to us as remedies against Covid‑19, gave a highly critical deposition to Germany’s pandemic inquiry, the German Bundestag (federal parliament) Corona Enquete-Kommission (formal inquiry).

He said: ‘The carcinogenic risk was not investigated due to time constraints. Incidentally, I find it very concerning and also regrettable that no alternative investigations were carried out.

‘We observe in Germany, but also in many other countries, that the birth rate collapsed after the vaccination campaign.’

Pfizer-BioNTech were obligated to test for the effects of their Comirnaty mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, but took no lessons from the thalidomide catastrophe, and did not do proper tests.

Dr Sterz said: ‘A rat study for Comirnaty was conducted inadequately, so no reliable estimates of the vaccine’s effect on pregnancy or subsequent development were possible.’

Pfizer’s official preclinical reproductive toxicity study tested just 44 female rats for fertility and developmental effects and 24 male rats for reproductive effects and sperm health. The study was also allegedly flawed.

Germany’s public health authority, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), sacrificed rigorous testing and focused on fast-tracking the jab. Dr Sterz said: ‘This meant that essential toxicity studies were sacrificed to speed, without acceptable justifications. I know of no case with a comparable indication in which all these studies were omitted.

‘The approval led to prohibited human experiments.’

The RKI had internally noted that side effects and vaccine injury should only be examined after market introduction, which seems extraordinary for an experimental product intended to be injected into billions of people.

There is now published data that includes 4,551 scientific publications that document adverse effects caused by mRNA covid vaccines.

Pfizer’s post-marketing report spoke of over 200 suspected death cases within just two months of approval. ‘Comirnaty should have been taken off the market then,’ Dr Sterz said.

He added. ‘The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI is Germany’s main authority for vaccines and biomedicines) has so far received 2,133 reports of deaths after Comirnaty.’

Underreporting meant that the real number was much higher. In the USA underreporting is estimated to be a factor of 30. ‘For Germany that would correspond to 60,000 deaths from the vaccination’, he said.

If the German health authority had complied with regulations, Comirnaty should not have been approved at all, he concluded.

The vaccine injured in the UK struggle to receive compensation; German citizens face the same issues. Dr Sterz said: ‘Currently, many vaccine-injured people in Germany are fighting for compensation payments — and they often lose because the courts say Comirnaty has a positive benefit-risk ratio.

‘This assumption is not justified. Comirnaty was not even investigated in clinical development for the prevention of severe illness or death. The Pfizer documents therefore do not allow any recognition of a positive benefit-risk ratio at all.

‘The mathematician Robert Rockenfeller from the University of Koblenz estimates that for every severe covid case that Comirnaty allegedly prevented, 25 severe side effects occurred.

‘Mortality rose significantly in 2021 and 2022 compared to 2020. With a positive benefit-risk ratio, mortality should have decreased.’

He also confirmed that the jab that was rolled out was different to the one that received approval. He was asked whether the public received ‘the active substance that Pfizer tested in the shortened emergency approval procedure.’

He replied. ‘No. For the clinical testing before approval, a highly pure substance was used. It was too expensive for mass production.


It was never about a virus.




Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old Spanish woman, died by euthanasia yesterday. Spanish law allows citizens over 18 with ‘chronic or invalidating suffering’ to receive assisted dying. Ramos, whose short life was one of unimaginable difficulty, certainly fitted the criteria. 

After her parents’ separation, at age 13, Noelia was placed in the care of the Catalan government. While living in care, she was raped by her ex-boyfriend in her sleep. In 2022, she was gang raped by three boys – an event she described as a turning point in her life. Later that year, Noelia attempted to end her life by overdosing on medication. After that failed, she jumped from a fifth-floor window. The fall left her paraplegic and in constant pain. In 2024, her request to be euthanised was approved. ‘I want to go now and stop suffering, period’, she told the Spanish TV programme, Y Ahora Sonsoles.

When Noelia’s father, Geronimo Castillo, found out his daughter had been approved for an assisted death, he went to court to try to overturn the decision. He argued that his daughter’s poor mental health – she had been receiving psychiatric help and was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder – was impacting her ability to make an informed decision. The Spanish justice system considers murderers to have diminished responsibility if they are suffering from mental-health issues, but it seems this does not apply to those seeking an assisted death. Castillo’s 18-month legal battle ended in failure in March, when the European Court of Human Rights gave the green light for his daughter to be euthanised. The procedure went ahead yesterday.

The tragedy of Noelia Castillo Ramos ought to deeply unsettle us. It shows what happens when we respond to suicidal despair by affirming it – by saying to a young woman that she is right to want to end her life – instead of resisting it. Proponents of assisted dying say it is kinder to grant death in the face of immense suffering than to insist that someone keep on living. But to abandon vulnerable people at their lowest ebb is not compassion at all – it is to give up on a person who has given up on themselves.

What makes this case particularly troubling is not only the tragedy of a young woman’s premature death, but also the precedent it sets for others like her. It says that if you have faced abuse, if you are depressed or have a disability, that your life is not worth living. The state would prefer to assist you to die than to help you recover or to live as full a life as possible.


Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Hasn't Anyone Wondered Why Food Is So Expensive in Canada?

It's like by design or something:

In any other industry, such cartels would be illegal and charged with price fixing. In Canada, we call it supply management.

The supply management system works well, too. Industrial milk prices are 30% to 50% higher than in other Western countries. Families in Canada are forced to pay inflated food prices to shore up a shrinking number of increasingly rich dairy farmers, and it’s illegal to compete with them.

Supply management was ostensibly created to protect the family farm. It has done the opposite. Since supply management was created in 1972, Canada has gone from having 45,000 dairy farms to fewer than 9,000 today. Starting a small operation is impossible because large farms own all the quotas, and even if they were willing to sell their precious permission to produce dairy products, the costs are out of reach for any reasonable operation.

Profit margins are generous for those dairy farmers who have quotas. They average around 20%. Compare that to the four percent that grocers operate with or the five percent that restaurateurs earn for an idea of who is really gouging you on food prices. It’s not hard to maintain high profit margins when the government illegalizes competition on your behalf, of course. Or if one really wants to examine an oligopoly that robs consumers, they should check out the profit margins that banks enjoy.

Citizens remain distracted from how dairy, egg, and poultry producers are robbing them, though, because those supply-managed industries are incredibly effective lobbyists. They spend tens of millions of dollars on misleading information campaigns about their industries and their competitors. They also funnel countless millions into every political party and have paid lobbyists knocking on every elected official’s door regularly.

That's why members of parliament have been silent on supply management, but are now questioning the prices of canned vegetables sold at dollar stores to Canadians trying to squeak by. 

It’s no secret that Maxime Bernier narrowly lost his bid for the CPC leadership because he dared to openly oppose supply management. The cartels quickly shovelled mass support toward the leadership campaign of Andrew Scheer and managed to give him a narrow win. That win ended poorly for the CPC, but it was a fantastic outcome for the dairy cartels. They reminded politicians of the consequences that face public figures who oppose them.

The regional factor comes into play as well. Quebec has acquired a disproportionately large amount of Canada’s dairy quotas. That’s why the Bloc Quebecois pushed legislation to try to make it impossible to tear down the price-fixing system, and the cowardly conservatives were too terrified to oppose it.

Conservative supporters should call out their MPs and party representatives on supply management regularly. It is a Soviet-style system, and it goes against every fiscal principle allegedly held by conservatives. The party should be ashamed of itself for supporting a system that robs Canadian consumers so boldly, and they will only feel that shame if members stand up and push them.

Inflation is pressuring Canadians and will only get worse as energy prices remain high due to the war in Iran. Meanwhile, job losses are mounting across the country, and the GDP per capita continues to decline sharply compared to other Western countries. The country is in for some hard times, and to add insult to injury, Canadian families are being ripped off on essential food purchases to protect a small number of corporate dairy farms raking in huge profits.



The Price of Diesel to Rise Astronomically

If only Canada had some sort of way to fix or alleviate this:

Farmers around the world are feeling the squeeze of the Iran war. Gas prices have shot up and fertilizer supplies are waning due to Tehran’s near shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli bombing.

Iran is seriously limiting shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage that usually handles about a fifth of the world’s oil shipments and nearly a third of global fertilizer trade.

Canadian farmers are also bracing for higher costs and warning consumers could soon feel the impact at the checkout line.

In an interview with CTV News Channel, family farmer, advocate and 33SEVEN founder Derryn Shrosbree said rising input costs are already affecting producers, with diesel emerging as the most immediate concern.

“Farmers use a ton of diesel and obviously lots and lots of fertilizer as inputs,” Shrosbree said.

“So currently what we’re seeing is, you know, there’s a lot of inputs that have increased in price, so dry nitrogen, urea, and other phosphates and sulfur and other chemicals that we need for farming.”

While fertilizer costs tend to have a longer-term effect on food prices, Shrosbree said the spike in diesel prices could have a more immediate and significant impact.

“What’s going to absolutely spike the price of food is diesel,” he said. “So diesel has doubled this year.”

That increase affects the entire supply chain, from production to transportation, he added.




Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-the-week ounce of reason ...



Elbows up, everybody:

Don’t get too many plans for your tax refund, if you’re getting one. According to new data, Canadians are using it just to keep food on the table.

The cash crunch is forcing Canadians to rely on their tax returns to cover their day-to-day expenses. According to data, 40% of Canadians depend on their tax refund to help address cost-of-living expenses, and 28% are going to use it to pay for everyday essentials.

Gen Z and Millennials take the worst hit, with 53% and 48% respectively saying they’ll cash in their refund for such expenses compared to 40% of Gen Xers and 17% of Boomers.

Recent Abacus data shows that 67% of Canadians say the cost of living where they live is the worst they can ever remember it being. Only 11% say the cost of living isn’t severe.

And if you think this isn’t unique to Canada, you might be wrong. Recently, 46% of Americans said the cost of living was at its worst in memory. It would suggest that Canadians are feeling the financial heat even more than Americans. …

The recent financial struggles play out among partisan lines. While it’s true that 58% of Liberal voters in the poll say the cost of living is the worst in memory, many more Conservative voters (75%) take that stance.

“This is not a marginal concern or a background anxiety,” the December Abacus report says. “It is a dominant lived experience that continues to shape how Canadians interpret government performance, leadership, and competing policy priorities, alongside concern about Donald Trump, trade, and global instability.” …

(Sidebar; Donald Trump isn't the reason why Canadians are the poor cousins. We all know it.) 

The survey found Canadians view the rising cost of living as the far-and-away top priority, ahead of health-care, home ownership and Canada-U.S. relations and those findings are consistent across all regions and age groups. Grocery prices are a top concern, and they rise the older you get, from 61% of those aged 18 to 29 to 93% of those aged 60 and over.

Abacus said Canadians who view cost-of-living as a top issue skew Conservative in terms of voter intention at 44%, with the Liberals at 38% and the NDP at 8%. Government approval reaches 41% for cost of living voters, with 57% among others. Similar numbers reflect approval for Prime Minister Mark Carney himself.

“These gaps matter. They show that affordability concerns are associated with weaker approval and softer personal ratings,” Abacus said. “At the same time, they also show that the issue has not yet become a defining political liability for the Carney government.”

**  

From 2014 to 2024, Canada’s real GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power parity grew by just 3.2 percent in total, an anemic 0.4 percent per year on average, and the third lowest among 38 advanced nations. Over the same period, the United States posted 20.2 percent total growth (1.9 percent annually), and the OECD average reached 15.3 percent (1.4 percent annually). The measurement shortcomings cannot explain five-to six-fold differences in growth rates. ...

Canada’s real GDP per capita now ranks 19th among 38 OECD countries, down two positions from 17th in 2014. More troubling is the deterioration in Canada’s relative position on two fronts. Against the United States, Canada fell from 83.1 percent of American GDP per capita in 2014 to just 71.4 percent in 2024. Against the OECD average, Canada historically exceeded it but dropped to 99.5 percent in 2024, falling below average for the first time in recorded history.

The trend is what matters. This is not a measurement quirk; it’s a systematic decline.


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The Charter is a garbage document written by a wealthy communist and meant to support the government more than the populace.


There is an important constitutional conference going on in Ottawa this week. Haven’t heard about it? Don’t feel badly. Neither have most provincial governments who stand to lose one of the most important powers they acquired with the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.  

The provincial premiers have not been invited. There is none of the pomp and circumstance and media coverage that normally accompany constitutional conventions. No, this will all take place very quietly in the chambers of the Supreme Court, where the Mark Carney Liberals are asking the Supreme Court to effectively amend the Charter by imposing new restrictions on how provincial governments can use their Section 33 notwithstanding power.

The occasion is an appeal from Quebec dealing with Bill 21, which prevents some civil servants, most notably teachers, from wearing religious symbols at work. Bill 21 also includes the use of Section 33 of the Charter, which states that a law “shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.”  

This notwithstanding power allows a legislature to exempt one of its laws from any judicial declaration of invalidity arising under the designated sections of the Charter. Its practical effect is to give elected governments rather than judges the last word when there is a disagreement over the practical meaning of a right. And that’s where the political fight begins. 

In 1981, Trudeau’s original draft of the Charter had no notwithstanding clause. Section 33 was added only after eight provincial premiers — the “Gang of Eight” — made it clear that they would not accept Trudeau’s proposed Charter without it. Hard late-night bargaining resulted in a compromise. Trudeau got his Charter. The provinces got the notwithstanding clause.

(Sidebar: everyone should have rejected anything coming from that wife-beating draft dodger.) 

The premiers knew from experience that the text of the Constitution does not speak for itself. At the end of the day, the Constitution means what judges say it means. In the worst-case scenario, Quebec and the Western premiers feared that Ottawa could use the Charter as a form of “disallowance in disguise,” a federal policy veto of provincial policies exercised by federal judges rather than by federal politicians.

Sensing the risk of losing the strategic value that the Supreme Court’s Charter decisions give to the federal government — i.e., disallowance in disguise — the Carney Liberals have now asked the Supreme Court to impose new restrictions on when and how a government (read: provincial government) can use the clause. Carney’s government is asking the Court to rule that the pre-emptive use of the notwithstanding clause is unconstitutional. Ottawa’s legal argument contradicts both the text of Section 33 and its clearly documented purpose

That purpose was succinctly explained by former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed in 1983: “We needed to have the supremacy of the legislature over the courts.  … we did not (want) to be in a position where public policy was being dictated or determined by non-elected people.” Lougheed argued in a 1991 speech that the notwithstanding power provided Canada with a “system of checks and balances between the judiciary and legislators before judicial supremacy could assert itself.” He used the examples of both Great Britain and Australia to demonstrate that it is possible to have constitutional supremacy without judicial supremacy, the rule of law without the rule of lawyers. 

That was the deal back in 1982. But now Carney wants to break it.

Starting Tuesday, after opening statements on Monday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear three days of legal arguments on Bill 21. Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have intervened to support Quebec’s position: that its use of the notwithstanding clause prevents courts from even hearing a Charter challenge against Bill 21. Forty rights advocacy groups — a who’s who of the Court Party, almost all of whom receive funding from Ottawa — have intervened to support the federal government’s position: that the notwithstanding clause cannot be used pre-emptively to prevent courts from ruling on the constitutional validity of Bill 21. 

Cheered on by their Court Party supporters, will the nine Supremes — six of whom were appointed by Justin Trudeau — rule in favour of the Carney Liberals? If they do, they will have effectively amended Section 33 to mean something very different than what Quebec, all the Western premiers and even the Trudeau government understood it to mean in 1982. For the Supreme Court to impose any new restrictions on the use of the clause would be precisely the abuse of judicial review that Section 33 was designed to prevent. 

Legal commentators are already predicting that an adverse ruling against Quebec and its provincial allies could “inflame separatism” and lead to a “national unity” crisis. I agree. The logic of Section 38(3) of the Constitution, which permits opting out of certain amendments, should apply to Section 33 as well as to the provinces’ traditional constitutional powers. Section 38(3) gives every province the legal right to opt out of an otherwise valid constitutional amendment if the amendment removes one of a province’s enumerated powers.

Still suffering from the devastating economic effects of Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy, Lougheed and the other western premiers fought successfully to force Trudeau to add Section 92(A) to the new Constitution. Section 92(A) confirmed each province’s exclusive jurisdiction over the development and management of their natural resources. With first-hand experience of their political vulnerability to central Canadian majorities, the western premiers saw Section 38(3) as an insurance policy against any future attempt by Ottawa to repeal their newly acquired (92A) powers.

Like Section 92(A), Section 33 is a constitutional power of each province. Why should Ottawa be allowed to do indirectly though the Supreme Court what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly by a formal constitutional amendment?



Oh, the Liberals haven't stopped their march to fascism there:






Cabinet has found $60 billion in savings in unnamed programs, says Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne. Budget documents tabled to date do not identify $60 billion in savings, and Champagne did not elaborate: “We should put the record straight.”

Printed or borrowed money?

Discuss.




Why do the Liberals surround themselves with incompetent aides?


An error by an anonymous clerk is to blame for records showing Prime Minister Mark Carney was untruthful with reporters when discussing his private meetings with Chinese Communist leaders, the Commons was told yesterday. The MP who uncovered the fact said Carney keeps “trying to change his story.”





RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme yesterday would not discuss failures identified in a federal audit showing the force is short thousands of members despite exorbitant spending on recruits. “We move forward,” he said in a statement.



It's the Tumbler Ridge Effect:



This is straight-up contempt that only Canadians are happy to tolerate:

Opposition members yesterday challenged the Department of Immigration to account for policies that cost Canadians’ jobs. “The unemployment rate for students is at 18 percent,” Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho (Richmond Hill South, Ont.) told the Commons immigration committee.


Also - clearly not:

Immigration Minister Lena Diab yesterday denied responsibility for an audit that found her department was indifferent to known cases of fraud by foreign students. “We are doing our job,” she told the Commons immigration committee.



Good:

Cuban society, due to a U.S. naval embargo, is close to collapse.

Friends of Havana blame the U.S., but the Trump administration had to act before China turned the island into a military bastion.

America took control of Venezuela's national oil company, PDVSA, after the January 3 raid that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Then the U.S. stopped the flow of Venezuelan oil to the Cuban regime.

At the same time, the Trump administration, by threatening tariffs on oil suppliers, imposed a de facto oil embargo on Havana. The U.S. Navy has deterred vessels from unloading cargo in Cuba.

To get through the American picket line, tankers have been employing deceptive tactics. For instance, the Hong Kong-flagged Sea Horse, carrying gasoil, was falsely broadcasting that it was "not under command" and drifting in the Sargasso Sea for almost three weeks. In reality, the ship spoofed its location and probably unloaded 190,000 barrels in Cuba in the early part of this month.

A delivery from the Sea Horse, according to the Windward site, would be "the first confirmed arrival of a refined products cargo at the island since early January."

As a result of the American actions, Cuba has almost run out of energy. The Cuban grid has collapsed three times so far this month, throwing the island into darkness.

"Why is the U.S. doing this?" asks Cambridge University's Jostein Hauge on X, referring to the blockade on Cuba. "For no reason other than its dislike of the Cuban regime. Cuba poses no threat to the U.S."

Really?

"China uses Cuba as a platform for many of its regional intelligence and security operations," Joseph Humire, then executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told this author in 2021.

There is, most prominently, the Lourdes facility just west of Havana near Bejucal, once the Soviet Union's largest listening station outside its borders. The Chinese are thought to have taken over the facility shortly after the fall of the USSR.

China now has more than just Lourdes. A December 2024 Center for Strategic & International Studies report identifies three more likely Chinese listening posts in Cuba. There is the Soviet-era Calabazar, and a second, Wajay, appears to have been built after the fall of the Soviet Union. There is also a new station, El Salao.

The CSIS report notes that unconfirmed accounts of China's intelligence presence on the island began with the visit of China's Defense Minister General Chi Haotian in 1999.

The Chinese may have been operating listening posts in Cuba since 1993, R. Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College told Gatestone at the beginning of last year.

China and Cuba, the Wall Street Journal reported in June 2023, agreed in principle to establish a new listening site on Cuban soil. The Biden administration denied the report, but two days later declassified intelligence showing that Chinese signals-intelligence collection facilities had been operating in Cuba since at least 2019.

Cuba is an ideal location to surveil America. "Sitting less than 100 miles south of Florida, Cuba is well-positioned to keep watch on sensitive communications and activities, including those of the U.S. military," the CSIS report states. "The southeastern seaboard of the United States brims with military bases, combatant command headquarters, space launch centers, and military testing sites."

Moreover, Cuba is an ideal location for a Chinese military base. "China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations just 100 miles off Florida's coast," reported the Wall Street Journal in 2023.

China stated that the Wall Street Journal report was "totally mendacious and unfounded," but it is nonetheless evident that China wants an enhanced facility on Cuba, just as it has established de facto military sites throughout Latin America.

Moreover, President Donald Trump acted before the Chinese could base missiles in Cuba.

So, whatever one thinks of the harsh consequences of the U.S. naval embargo — there is a worsening humanitarian crisis in Cuba now — the Havana regime, by allowing the Chinese to have the run of the island, does pose a threat to the United States.


Also:


And:

As Can Force One moved toward Chinese airspace, the delegation’s electronic devices were powered down and secured in signal-blocking bags. Burner phones were passed out: the only machines the public servants, staff and journalists would be allowed to use for the duration of their stay. The Canadian Prime Minister’s security team was taking no risks.
But Mark Carney himself was on his way to do something many back home would consider very risky indeed: signing agreements with Chinese President Xi Jinping on trade, global governance, energy, media access and law enforcement. The country Carney had called, only one year ago, Canada’s “biggest security threat,” was about to accomplish a magical transformation from frog to prince, from interfering foreign power to “strategic partner” in the “new world order.”
Faced with fears of a recession, stagnant GDP and a struggling jobs market, Carney is trying to address the impacts of America’s trade war with Canada by pursuing a policy of diversification. And while Canadian industry leaders and geopolitical experts support diversifying with trading partners such as India, Japan and South Korea, it is widely feared that a rapprochement with China puts Canada in a position of vulnerability. ...
On the same trip, a memorandum of understanding between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and China’s Ministry of Public Security was signed, agreeing to cooperate on corruption and transnational crimes such as drug trafficking. But the Ministry of Public Security has for years sought to control and intimidate members of the Chinese diaspora in Canada. Only last year, it offered a million-dollar bounty for the arrest of a Canadian federal candidate, Joe Tay, harassing him until, afraid to leave his house, he abandoned his campaign. Given this abuse, cooperation that would grant Chinese police access to information about Canadian residents should be completely ruled out. But is it? Nobody knows; the text of the memorandum has been kept secret. Shouldn’t Canadians be told, considering what’s at stake?
Collaboration with another country’s law enforcement presumes a certain amount of common ground on law, ethics and human rights. This does not exist with China. Law enforcement in China exists not to protect public safety, but to protect the stability of the regime. Such cooperation would also presume the Chinese government wishes to put a stop to transnational crime such as fentanyl trafficking. Garry Clement, who has spent five decades in law enforcement, intelligence and financial crime investigation, testified before the Canadian parliament that, far from wanting to end the fentanyl crisis, the Chinese government was, in his opinion, at its root. He went so far as to call the People’s Republic of China the largest transnational organized crime group he has ever seen.
Clement says cooperation with the PRC is never apolitical. Michael Kovrig, one of the “Two Michaels” taken hostage by China at the time of the Huawei crisis in 2018, and incarcerated for more than 1,000 days, agrees. Kovrig was, at the time of his arrest, a Canadian diplomat in China, working for the International Crisis Group. His arrest violated multiple international agreements signed by the Chinese government.
Kovrig, who was released in 2021 after Canada finally allowed detained Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to return to China, is concerned about Carney’s deal with Beijing. He believes China intends to use Canada as a dumping ground for its excess production, which could spell the end of Canada’s manufacturing sector. Canada cannot compete with Chinese manufacturers because Canadian companies have to pay their workers more, aren’t heavily subsidized by government and are required to adhere to quality standards Chinese companies are not. Also, China isn’t interested in buying more costly products manufactured in Canada.
A country without manufacturing power lacks the ability to defend itself, to make and repair infrastructure and to be self-reliant at times of crisis. A country that cannot produce its own food is at the mercy of the nations who supply it. The canola deal that Carney has struck with China will certainly make it easier for farmers to sell their crops – but if Canada begins to rely on China accepting their canola, the CCP will be able to twist Canada’s arm into decisions and attitudes favorable to China. Will Canada dare to condemn China if it decides to attack Taiwan? Will Canada be pressured into silence if China commits human rights abuses?
If there were to be conditions under which trade with China were possible, they would include a government in a position of strength, capable of wielding China’s desire for status and influence as a bargaining chip, a government able to protect Canada from foreign interference. Most of all, they would include a government with the moral courage to counter the inhumanity of communism with the principles of justice, freedom and charity affirmed in Canada’s Christian heritage and its roots in European civilization.
Carney claims to be a devout Catholic, but his government is about to pass Bill C-9, legislation that seeks to criminalize passages of the Bible – the word of God – as hate speech. What is more fundamental to western civilization than the Bible? And what could signal weakness more clearly to enemies of western civilization than censoring its foundational text?

(Sidebar: devout, my @$$! Did he erupt into flame when he said that?) 

At Davos in January, Carney told the middle powers that “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” Perhaps Carney should listen to himself. A Canada ashamed of its identity, negotiating with a communist one-party authoritarian state from a position of moral weakness, without enforceable safeguards, may find itself in the soup.


 

Why do want to go extinct, Japan?:

More than 60% of unmarried adults under the age of 30 in Japan do not want children, as they are concerned about economic burdens and career disruption, according to recent findings by a major pharmaceutical company.


Rohto Pharmaceutical conducted an online poll of 400 unmarried men and women between ages 18 and 29 in December as part of its annual survey on pregnancy and family planning.

The figure reached 62.6% in 2025, jumping 18 percentage points from 2020, when the annual survey first asked the question.

And the percentage of unmarried female respondents who did not want children surpassed that of men for the first time. Nearly 65% of women said that they did not feel inclined to have children — the highest rate on record — while the percentage was 60.7% among male respondents.

More than 70% of women surveyed said they were concerned about the financial burden of having a child, compared with 63.2% for men.

In addition, 61.4% of women said they felt that having a child would obstruct their careers, compared with 51.2% of men who felt so.

Even among single men and women who are interested in having a child, the age at which they hope to have their first child has gone up. In 2018 when the company first asked the question, nearly 40% of the group said they wanted a child by age 30, while just 1 in 4 held such hopes in 2025.



Books.

This guys gets it:

A Vietnamese interpreter in Sendai is supporting his fellow countrymen in detention centers and prisons in Japan by sending them books written in their native language.

“Even those who committed crimes can change their lives if they read books and acquire the right mindset,” said Do Van Tuan, a firm believer in the power of books.

The 45-year-old interpreter often visits the Sendai Detention House in the city’s Wakabayashi Ward, one of the first places that prompted him to pursue the cause. When he accompanied a visitor to the detention center as an interpreter, he came to learn of the situation faced by foreign detainees, particularly Vietnamese inmates.


 One who languished under communist dictatorship knows whereof he speaks.

We ought to listen.