Mid-Week Post

The molten core of the work-week ...




From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

In a disturbing and brutally ironic moment, the video feed of free speech advocates Lindsay Shepherd, Mark Steyn, and John Robson was shut down.

And the people who shut it down are the people who are supposed to be defending our freedom and rights – MPs.

**

During his testimony, Steyn argued against the potential reinstatement of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which governed online hate speech and was repealed through a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill in 2013. He contended that the issues of online hate should be discussed in a space where people regulate themselves, rather than one restricted by laws.

“Free speech is hate speech, and hate speech is free speech,” Steyn said, calling the alternative to free speech “approved speech.”

Steyn sat alongside the other witnesses, including Shepherd, who rose to prominence after she ran afoul of faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University for, as a teaching assistant, showing clips of professor Jordan Peterson’s TV appearances to students in her class. A university investigation ultimately concluded that nobody had complained through any formal channel about Shepherd’s teaching and that her treatment as an employee was wrong.

Ehsassi asked Shepherd whether instances of racism, sexism and other bigotry create a responsibility on the part of public figures to speak out against those beliefs.

“I don’t think people have a responsibility to condemn,” Shepherd said. She worried that people will be considered accomplices if they don’t sufficiently speak out in every instance.

John Robson, a documentary filmmaker and National Post columnist, argued that the answer to hate speech online is more and better speech — not censorship.

“The way we get at truth is to speak out against error, denounce it and refute it,” Robson said. “The trouble with censoring hateful speech is that you drive it underground where it isn’t exposed to sunlight.”

NDP MP Randall Garrison accused the witnesses of being out of touch with the reality and implications of hate speech, citing his personal experience with harassment as a gay man in Canadian politics.

“When I was elected to Parliament I received death threats, multiple death threats,” Garrison said. He noted the witnesses’ focus on Section 13, but argued the committee was not about criminalizing speech.

“We all know the cliche, that there are limits on speech, that you can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre,” Garrison said. “So the problem is defining where that crowded theatre is these days.”

(Sidebar: for you, everything. If someone were to point out that homosexuals were and are publicly executed in the Muslim world, would it be acceptable to silence that fact, Mr. Garrison?)

What is hateful speech? Is it speech that is genuinely expressing hatred or is simply unpalatable to some? That is what must be defined first. Secondly, as Mr. Robson pointed, anything quashed will not be challenged with fact and reason,; it cannot be silenced by an iron fist or Mr. Garrison's wimpy anecdotes.

**

Also:

A journalist’s question about a potential problem with the Royal Canadian Navy’s new Arctic patrol ships prompted federal bureaucrats to generate more than 200 pages of documents as they warned Irving Shipbuilding about the news outlet’s interest in the multibillion dollar program.

But Public Services and Procurement Canada has ignored its requirement under the Access to Information Act to release those records within the stipulated 30 days, and is now in violation of the law.

The department told Postmedia it doesn’t know when it will release the documents or how much of their contents will be censored.

The access law allows any individual to file a request for federal records in exchange for a $5 fee. The Liberal government campaigned on making government open and transparent.

This request, which the department received in early April, was sent after Procurement Canada acknowledged it had alerted Irving that a Postmedia journalist had asked the department questions about potential issues with welds on the new Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships being built by the firm. 

Procurement Canada bureaucrats also provided the journalist’s private information to Irving officials. They never did answer the questions.

Instead, shortly after, Irving threatened to sue Postmedia if it published any article indicating that there were significant problems with the welds.

Justin is douchebag who steals oxygen from ordinary citizens:

The European Union and United States both agreed that ISIS was committing genocide.

But Trudeau refused. Even some Liberal MPs voted with the Conservative motion, along with NDP MPs and Bloc MPs.


Yet, Trudeau and the majority of Liberals voted against it, and it was struck down.

At the time, Trudeau said “We don’t feel that politicians should be weighing in on this first and foremost. Determinations of genocide need to be made in an objective, responsible way.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“We don’t feel that politicians should be weighing in on this first and foremost,” he said. “Determinations of genocide need to be made in an objective, responsible way.”

Ambrose called that position a “low-point” for the Liberal party and a “dark spot” on Canada’s human rights record.

When he was pressed again on the case of thousands of Yazidi girls being murdered or turned into sex slaves, the prime minister was resolute that determinations of genocide must be done objectively on the international stage.

“We will not trivialize the importance of the word genocide by not respecting formal engagements around that word,” he said.

Wait a minute, Trudeau thinks determinations of genocide should be done ‘objectively on the international stage?’

Then why the hell is he quoting from the MMIWG report that wasn’t international at all?

And:

As noted by the CP, “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal carbon tax will help deal with extreme weather events such as fires in northern Alberta. Trudeau says Canadians are seeing the impact of climate change with an increase in wildfires in Western Canada, recent tornadoes in Ottawa and flooding across the country this spring.”

Why are we trading with this country?:

  

“China’s Ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye says national security concerns about Chinese tech giant Huawei are “unfounded” and “baseless,” pushing for Canada to decide for itself whether to go ahead with including Huawei in its core advanced 5G network.

“Canada is independent country, and you have institutions very competent to evaluate this problem,” Lu told Glen McGregor in a broadcast exclusive interview with CTV Power Play. 

He added that several “important, major countries” in the world have taken the “right, correct position” on this problem.”

 

Lu was also asked about the Tiananmen Square Massacre:

“June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1989, the Chinese government deployed troops against pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, killing hundreds. China has since suppressed knowledge of the massacre. 

In response to questions on Power Play about the anniversary, Lu said China’s achievements over the past 70 years prove the country “chose the right developmental path” and will “continue to advance along the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

“That’s our position,” Lu said.”

This Tienanmen Square:

“We continue to call on China to respect human rights, to respect the right to protest, to respect freedom of expression, to cease its actions against minorities like the Uighurs in western China,” Trudeau said when asked about the anniversary during an event in Vancouver.

But Uigurs weren't killed in Tienanmen Square, Justin. People didn't like communism were. Stop getting your frilly wet panties in a bunge over your favourite special-interest group.


Also - how does one meet a dictatorship half way?:

China’s ambassador to Canada says his government wants to end the countries’ impasse but won’t give way on two of Canada’s major complaints.

“Indeed, the bilateral relations between China and Canada are facing serious difficulties right now,” Lu Shaye said Tuesday at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, in an interview through an interpreter. 

“The Chinese side is not responsible for this issue. But the Chinese government is waiting to make a joint effort with the Canadian side and meet each other halfway.”

When asked about the possibility of freeing two Canadians detained in China on espionage charges, however, Lu offered little wiggle room. And on China’s blocking Canadian canola imports, he considers the matter closed.

If Scheer wants to be taken seriously, he needs to start defending his people and principles any normal person would espouse. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what he says:

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today of turning his back on Western Canada and vowed that a Scheer government would unite the country by creating a national energy corridor, freeing provincial trade and empowering local governments.

Scheer made the comments today before the Royal Glenora Club in Edmonton, while delivering the latest in a series of pre-election speeches setting out his policy objectives ahead of the October federal election.

"It's clear that every time there's a Trudeau in the Prime Minister's Office, our union begins to crack," Scheer said. 

"We've been hearing it here in the West, both in my home province of Saskatchewan and here in Alberta. And I'm here to tell you unequivocally that Canada has not turned its back on the West. Justin Trudeau has."

Scheer said that Trudeau's "careless mismanagement" of the federation is among the most damaging things he has done since coming to office.

He singled out the federal government's carbon pricing scheme — which imposes a carbon tax on provinces that do not have plans of their own to price carbon — as particularly divisive.

"Trudeau's carbon tax is a betrayal of Confederation's early promise," Scheer said. "The discord he has sown has prompted an unprecedented number of legal actions against his government coming from provinces frustrated at his overreaching."

** 

Andrew Scheer is promising that a Conservative government would negotiate a deal to eliminate trade barriers among Canada’s provinces.

The Conservative leader made the commitment Tuesday as he outlined his vision for “a stronger and freer federation” — one that is more decentralized and respectful of provincial jurisdiction in contrast to what he labelled as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s divisive, arrogant, top-down, “my-way-or-the-highway federalism.”

If the Conservatives win the Oct. 21 federal election, Scheer said he’ll appoint an interprovincial-trade minister whose sole mandate would be negotiating a comprehensive, formal free-trade deal with the provinces. And he said he’d convene a first-ministers’ meeting within 100 days devoted to that subject.

“I am not talking about a simple memorandum of understanding,” Scheer said during a speech in Edmonton.

“The interprovincial free trade agreement will be a real free trade deal, like NAFTA, like CETA, like the TPP … It will be a huge step forward, well beyond the current agreement.”

That's nice. Stop being wishy-washy.

Yet More

Huawei has ties to Chinese state security. Any attempt to curb or remove it could only results in a far more secure telecommunications system and a financial blow to the company:

The Trump administration’s decision to block American companies from providing software and components to Huawei will not actually make the U.S. more secure, according to a majority of experts surveyed by The Post.

The Commerce Department imposed that ban last month as part of a broad government effort to punish Huawei over concerns it’s helping the Chinese government spy on U.S. companies. But cybersecurity experts worry the ban will hurt U.S. tech companies more than it hurts the Chinese telecom giant — and will diminish U.S. influence over the security of new technologies.

(Sidebar: but what about all of those other countries who banned Huawei? Is their influence waning, too?)

“Not only does this hurt the immediate bottom line of U.S. companies, it will simply lead to Huawei turning elsewhere for its supply needs to the long-term detriment of our technology sector,” said Tor Ekeland, an attorney who specializes in defending hackers.

And ...?




So much for that plan:

The genetic mutation that a Chinese researcher claimed he used on a human embryo to create HIV-resistant twins may be linked to a shorter lifespan, according to new research.

The findings from scientists at University of California Berkeley, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, will likely intensify criticism that the researcher carried out an experiment on humans long before the science was ready.

In November, Shenzhen-based scientist He Jiankui said he had edited the CCR5 gene of the unborn twins to create a mutation that also can occur naturally. The naturally formed mutations, relatively common among northern Europeans, protect against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

But a new analysis of more than 400,000 genomes and health records in the UK Biobank found that people with copies of a similar mutation from both parents had a significantly higher death rate between ages 41 and 78 than those with one or no copies. The mutation, the Berkeley researchers found, is associated with a 21% increase in mortality later in life.

A group plans on suing the federal government after the latter deemed that camps for children were just not abortion-friendly:

A legal group says it’s suing the federal government over its denial of a Canada summer jobs grant to bible camps in Ontario and Nova Scotia.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms says it will back an action on behalf of Bible Centered Ministries International, which runs a camp near Omemee, Ont., west of Peterborough, and another in Cooks Brook, northeast of Halifax.

The federal Department of Human Resources and Social Development declined comment on the camps’ specific application, but says in an email that the department refuses applications if the organization’s activities “work to undermine or restrict” a woman’s right to abortion.

It says applicants were given the opportunity to provide added information on their projects and “needed to demonstrate that they didn’t include ineligible activities.”

A news release signed by John Carpay, the leader of the Justice Centre, says Mount Traber Bible Camp and Mill Stream Bible Camp have received the job grant money for over a decade, but Service Canada rejected its most recent applications on May 2, and there isn’t a clear indication of why.

Carpay says his group will ask the court for a declaration that the minister’s decisions were unreasonable, and unreasonably interfere with the camps’ rights to religious freedom.

Also:

Trudeau’s obsession with abortion puzzles many Canadians. It’s as if he never discusses the subject with anyone other than a cadre of radical feminists for whom belief in women’s right to abortion whenever and for whatever reason is the litmus test for any claim whatsoever to human decency. It’s as if he doesn’t know it has been almost 30 years since the Supreme Court decision in R. vs. Morgentaler directed Parliament to enact legislation that protected “fetal rights at some point.”

Is he even aware that abortion regulation is the norm amongst all other democracies? France protects unborn children after 12 weeks’ gestation, with exceptions for mothers’ life endangerment and severe, incurable disease in the fetus. Spain bans abortion after 12 weeks, with fetal impairment exception up to 22 weeks. Germany has a 12-week window, provided the woman receives counselling three days before the procedure. Likewise in many other European and Scandinavian countries. These nations are not ultra-conservative redoubts. They are amongst the most politically liberal countries in the world. Canada is the outlier.

Like all liberals, he sees that women are more accessible after abortions. And it mollifies that sad, childless activists who live for nothing else.


And - people often forget that birth control is a stepping stone for abortion and that eugenicists pushed for it:

Historians in Canada have tended to focus on eugenics legislation and coerced sterilization, rather than other aspects of the law or why such laws came to be, Koester said. Most have, understandably, focused on Alberta, where nearly 3,000 supposedly “unfit” people were surgically sterilized between 1928 and 1972.

Somewhat related: 

The fate of Missouri‘s only abortion clinic will be at stake on Tuesday when a St. Louis judge hears arguments in Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit aimed at forcing state health officials to renew the facility’s licence to perform the procedure.

 Yes, about that: 

On May 29, Republican Governor Mike Parson warned that the clinic’s “apparent disregard for the law, their failure to complete complication records, and the accuracy of medical records are all serious concerns” right now.

Among other things, the DHSS said in a press release that same day, there was "at least one incident in which patient safety was gravely compromised" as well as "failed surgical abortions in which patients remained pregnant," “quality control and communication with a contracted pathology lab,” and “failure to obtain informed consent."

And now, more remarkable finds at Angkor Wat:

For many years, historians placed the collapse of the Angkor civilization in 1431, when Angkor’s capital city was sacked by the Thai Kingdom of Ayutthaya and abandoned. The idea that the Angkorian capital was abandoned also played a part in the 19th-century colonial interpretation of Angkor as a civilization forgotten by the Cambodians and left to decay in the jungle. Many tourists still come to Angkor Wat with an outdated romanticized notion of a deserted ruin emerging from the mysterious jungle.

But scholars have long argued against this interpretation, and archaeological evidence is shedding even more light on the decline of the Angkorian civilization. The process was much longer and more complex than previously imagined; Angkor’s collapse may be better described as a transformation.

By looking at the events associated with this one particular temple, archaeologists like me are able to see a microcosm of some of the broader regional transformations that took place across Angkor.

Burn This Post

Free speech and expression are rather like a genie in a bottle.

They cannot be put back in.


The attempt to scrub MP Michael Cooper's words, which included the odious alleged murderer, Brandon Tarrant's admiration for the basic dictatorship of China, is such an example.

Pretending that Brandon Tarrant did not exist and that his words were never expressed is a futile gesture at most:

"The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China.”

This China:

China is taking its censorship campaign to new heights ahead of the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, according to critics and several censors who spoke anonymously to Reuters and the Associated Press.

Tarrant said those words. Cooper repeated them. He did so to make a point to those who equated conservatism with violence that the comparison is obnoxious, inflammatory and plainly untrue.


Attempting to scrub these words from existence is akin to using codenames for Vice-Admiral Mark Norman so that his name would not come up during computer searches and the public would never understand the full extent of how a government attempted to railroad a man.

Kind of like pretending that a massacre of students in China never happened.

Or this:

In a disturbing and brutally ironic moment, the video feed of free speech advocates Lindsay Shepherd, Mark Steyn, and John Robson was shut down.

And the people who shut it down are the people who are supposed to be defending our freedom and rights – MPs.

At the Standing Committee for Justice and Human Rights, where @NewWorldHominin @MarkSteynOnline and @thejohnrobson are testifying on online hate at 8:45. Watch live here: https://t.co/CK0NHsE2dr pic.twitter.com/rmO2Fb1458

— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) June 4, 2019

 

 No wonder this country won't stop trading with China. It enjoys mimicking it.

June 4th, 1989

The bloodbath that saw thousands killed (the official number is not known) culminated on the nights of June 4th and 5th (even some time after) initially started as a months-long protest against the political corruption rife in the communist government and oppression that stifled the masses. The months-long protest was supported by local civilians and attended by students from in and outside the city.

Now, no one wants to talk about it and it's business as usual:

The crowds began to gather at Tiananmen Square in the early hours of a day that marked 30 years since soldiers opened fire in the heart of Beijing, bloodying the streets with the bodies of unarmed student protesters.

But the people who came Tuesday showed no obvious sign of assembling to commemorate the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died here in 1989. They came instead bearing selfie sticks, bright red ball caps and bags of deep-fried dough sticks – tourists from across the country who raised their arms for smiling pictures, mimicking the gesture made famous by Chairman Mao Zedong. One woman broke out into a finger-snapping, foot-stomping dance before the portrait of Mao that stares out onto the square. Others joined a lengthy queue, eager to gaze in reverence at his preserved body in an adjacent mausoleum. ...

What happened 30 years ago?” a reporter suggested.

You mean, to commemorate 70 years, he responded. It’s a reference to the anniversary of the founding of Communist China in 1949, an event that will be marked with much fanfare in October of this year by the modern leaders who have inherited the apparatus of power once helmed by Chairman Mao.

The events of 1989 – the student protests across the country, the sudden appearance of critical reporting on state media, the grisly end to it all – received no such attention on Tuesday. Marks of quiet remembrance circulated between friends using coded language on chat apps. But internet searches for June 4, 1989, and related terms yielded no information. Censors blocked CNN’s website, while Reuters articles about Tiananmen were purged from financial terminals. Police already acted weeks ago to place former student protesters and other activists under house arrest, keeping them from making public displays.

China’s foreign ministry, however, offered a stern rebuke to critics, accusing U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “lunatic words and idiotic nonsense” and the European Union of making groundless accusations while interfering in China’s internal affairs. “The development path China has chosen is totally correct and is firmly supported by public,” said spokesman Geng Shuang on Tuesday.

Mr. Pompeo, in a statement earlier in the day, said hopes of China becoming a more open and tolerant society “have been dashed.” He added that “China’s one-party state tolerates no dissent and abuses human rights whenever it serves its interests.” The European Union said it “continues to mourn the victims and offers its condolences to their families.” Canada, in a brief statement posted to the Facebook site of its consulate in Hong Kong, said: “Today, we pause to remember the tragic events that took place 30 years ago on June 4th, 1989.”

But such words were kept from Chinese audiences, as were a pair of unusual official mentions of Tiananmen history. On Sunday, Defence Minister Wei Fenghe told a Singapore audience that China’s measures to stop the “political turbulence” were the “correct policy,” saying “China has enjoyed stability and development” as a result. On Monday, the Global Times, a Communist Party-owned newspaper, published an English-language editorial that called the bloody suppression of the protests a “vaccination for the Chinese society” that “will greatly increase China’s immunity against any major political turmoil in the future.”

The Global Times did not print the editorial in Chinese, and Mr. Wei’s remarks appeared nowhere on Chinese media, which on Tuesday broadcast images of current protests in Sudan, and of a new logo for the 70th anniversary celebrations, an emblem described as “a new page turning in China’s history.”

On Tuesday, the only visible sign of something unusual stood on the streets around Tiananmen Square, where men in shirt-sleeves kept vigilant watch. A taxi driver nearby says they’re plain clothes police.

In China, few “even realize this is a day that should be remembered,” said Louisa Lim, author of The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. Those who do remember “have been so cowed into submission by very visible punishment of acts of remembrance that people don’t dare any more.”

Further:

The battle of Beijing is best seen from the Bejing Hotel, just northeast of Tiananmen Square. Yesterday, stunned tourists stood on their balconies smoking cigarets and watching tanks run right past the hotel.

They were kept up all night by machine-gun fire. Yesterday morning, they saw soldiers deliberately fire into the backs of fleeing crowds.

"They are crazy, absolutely crazy," shrieked a French tourist watching in horror.

(source)

A full shot of one of the most iconic (a word used properly here) photographs of the entire incident. One man stood in the way of a train of tanks sent in to mow down the protesters. It's baffling to think of the lengths a government will go to crush its own people and even more baffling to wonder why we allow this to happen.

And the Rest of It

A lot going on ...




The scandal that will never die:

The federal government has blown its own timeline to unveil an update to Canada’s corporate-misconduct provisions, including changes that could help SNC-Lavalin avoid being barred from lucrative federal contracts.

An internal federal document obtained by The Canadian Press shows the Liberal government was planning to announce a long-studied revision to its so-called “integrity regime” in early February.

“The integrity regime’s updated ineligibility and suspension policy will be published in early February 2019, and will come into effect at the end of February 2019,” said information contained in a Feb. 4 email to an associate deputy minister. The email was released under access-to-information law.
Three months later, the government has yet to publish the integrity-regime update, nor has it responded to requests to explain the reason for the delay.

The integrity regime has been under scrutiny ever since SNC-Lavalin, the huge Montreal-based engineering and construction firm facing Canadian criminal charges over dealings in Libya, found itself at the centre of a political controversy in Ottawa.

**

Mainstreet Research surveyed 418 people in the riding between May 29th and May 30th, following the announcement by Wilson-Raybould that she would seek another term as an MP as an independent candidate.

Here are the results:

Wilson-Raybould – 30%

Liberal – 27%

Conservative – 18%

Green – 9%

NDP – 8%

Undecided – 8%

From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

If you are a reporter in Ottawa and ask questions about Irving shipbuilding, the government will turn your name and question over to Irving who have then threatened reporters with lawsuits  https://t.co/V1op2kDUVb

— Mercedes Stephenson (@MercedesGlobal) May 30, 2019

Yes, but you're not entitled to have taxpayers bankroll your crusades:

The head of a union that bills itself the Conservatives’ “worst nightmare” rejects the claim his rhetoric is hurting the journalists his union represents and says he is entitled to say whatever he wants.

In an interview with the West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Unifor national president Jerry Dias argued he is “absolutely not” putting the roughly 12,000 media workers in Unifor in a difficult position by billing his organization as “the resistance” to Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer. He also defended its inclusion on a controversial federal panel providing recommendations which will help guide the provision of half a billion dollars worth of federal tax credits to media.

Unifor represents many Global News journalists.

“The whole argument is about journalistic integrity. It’s about free speech. I’m entitled to my free speech just like everyone else,” he said.

“The group, I would argue, that are putting them in conflict are the editors and publishers who are openly saying, we are supporting the Conservative Party of Canada. If their owners are quite open in saying that, are you trying to tell me that Canada’s largest private sector union can’t express their point of view?”

Do so on your own dime, Mr. Dias, not the Canadian taxpayers nor your union schlubs.


Also - go home, Barbie. You're drunk:

“Across Canada, people agree that climate change is a threat to our country. I don’t understand why the Conservatives are hesitant to join Canadians in the fight against climate change. We’ll keep working with Canadians as we move forward with our practical and affordable plan.”

And - Michael Cooper doesn't have to apologise for a g-d- thing:

Cooper had every right to refute an unfair suggestion conservative commentary in and of itself prompts people to become terrorists.

Or is all anti-Israel commentary by the left responsible for terrorist attacks on Israelis and Jews?

The motives of terrorists are complex, the result of many factors, that may include extreme rhetoric on the right and left.

It’s fine for Scheer to keep denying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s false allegation he’s a white supremacist supporter.

But he should be hitting back hard when Conservatives are falsely accused of racism, and conservative commentary of inspiring terrorism.

It's not like Justin wants this country to work or anything:

Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister says the federal government is standing in the way of a hydroelectric project that would help move states in the U.S. Midwest off of coal.

He argues that it will be residents in his province who are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars because of the delay.

In an interview with the West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Pallister said the federal move to delay approval of the Manitoba-Minnesota Transmission Project after it was supposed to decide last week is “historic” and puts the project at risk.

“We’re in the red zone,” he said, noting the cost of more delays, to Manitobans, will be $200 million per year.

“This is going to be very, very costly and dangerous, and you know, it’s fine for Ottawa to talk green — good — but don’t block green.”

Hydroelectricity is the "greener" of all energy sources. If Justin's mandate is to move provinces and states from polluting sources of energy, why is he not jumping onto this, a thing that could prove him an environmental centrist in time for the election?

I imagine for the same ideological reasons he cowers to a country whose "basic dictatorship" his father loved:

If we give in to China this time, then the price will be higher next time.

In the fight between Beijing and Washington, we need to stand tall with the Americans.

 With no (positive) achievements at all, it's time to ramp up the paranoia:

The answer is obvious, of course. Trudeau is down in the polls and finds himself having alienated many of the key voter groups that helped propel him to his victory in 2015. After an awful few months where his pro-feminist reputation has been shredded, the laws coming out of state legislatures in America are manna from heaven for the Liberals. It gives them a pretext, no matter how flimsy, to begin positioning the Liberal Party of Canada as the last line of defence between theocratic hordes and the rights of women.

It’s nonsense, of course. The Liberals are importing a conveniently timed U.S. political narrative into Canada for entirely political reasons, not because it applies here. Polls in America routinely track public views on abortion, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, the states that are proceeding with laws to restrict abortion are ones where there is broad public support for greater restrictions. In Canada, the opposite is true. More than three-quarters of Canadians support access to abortion. Many of them are undoubtedly uncomfortable with absolutely no legal framework around abortion at all, but the reality is that opinion polls show that more than half of Canadians support access to abortion without any restrictions at all (as per a 2017 Ipsos survey). Only five per cent of Canadians oppose it in any circumstance.

And - give no public money to any special-interest group and don't let them violate their charitable status with such bunk as "pregnancy kills". Okay?:

Arthur and other advocates lead ongoing letter-writing campaigns and other advocacy efforts to try to urge provinces and cities from providing any funding for pregnancy centres. 

Her efforts got some traction in recent years by fuelling the federal government’s 2018 clampdown on funding for anti-abortion groups who applied for grants under the Canada Summer Jobs program.

But many provinces and municipalities are continuing to fund crisis pregnancy centres.

“It’s a bit of a whack-a-mole trying to stop government funding,” Arthur said.

How much do you get, Joyce? What is a censorial crusade for the pathetically child-hating worth?




I don't understand. If the Yazidis weren't victims of genocide by ISIS, whose gleeful murder of homosexuals has been well-documented, why prioritise homosexuals? Is Ahmed Hussen saying that Islam kills gays?:

The federal government is expanding a program offering support to privately sponsored refugees in the LGBTQ community.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen says the Rainbow Refugee Assistance Partnership will build on a pilot project launched in 2011.

The program provides start-up costs and three months of support to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and two-spirited refugees who are privately sponsored by Canadians.

The initial pilot project offered support to 15 refugees per year, but the government says that number will be raised to 50 starting next year.

Do you want the deal or don't you, Mexico?:

Mexico on Monday said it would reject a U.S. idea to take in all Central American asylum seekers if it is raised at talks this week with Trump administration, which has threatened to impose tariffs if Mexico does not crack down on illegal immigration. 

Oh, the burn!




I don't like the idea of people driving wedges between parents and children any more than I like the idea of idiots refusing to vaccinate their offspring against childhood diseases:

If the legal standards of competence are met, then the adolescent’s consent is both necessary and sufficient. A parent or guardian need not be involved. Indeed, third parties, including parents, should only be involved after obtaining permission from the mature minor ...

And how fluid that competence could be!




What the heck is going on in North Korea?:

North Korea’s former top nuclear envoy Kim Yong Chol accompanied leader Kim Jong Un to an art performance, state news agency KCNA said on Monday, signalling that the former spymaster is alive and remains a force in the power structure.

Sunday’s appearance followed conflicting reports of shakeups in the team that led engagement with the United States last year, only for nuclear talks to collapse after Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump failed to strike a pact at a February summit.

Also:

President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will not sit down together on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka in June.

Abe's schedule has already been whittled down to minutes, a source in Tokyo said on Thursday, and there is no slot in it for Moon. The two countries are divided by a welter of spats over historical and other issues.

According to Kyodo News, participants in a meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Wednesday urged Abe not to meet with Moon.

And all this time one thought that Moon wanted resolution.




Oh my! How awkward!:

One person in 10 is mistaken about the identity of their father, genetic tests for hereditary illnesses are revealing, according to an NHS chief.

The era of genomic medicine is allowing doctors to screen rising numbers for preventative action against diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. About 220,000 such tests are carried out by the NHS in England and Scotland each year.

But Ian Cumming, head of Health Education England, the NHS training body, said hospitals were being left in an ethical quandary as they were uncovering some awkward family secrets.

It is currently estimated that around 4 per cent of the population are unaware the man they call their father is not their true biological relative. Mr Cumming told the Hay Festival that within a decade everyone who wanted to be genome tested could be. “But it is not without controversy,” he warned.

“If you look at people who have had genetic tests within families for reasons other than trying to work out paternity, for one in 10 people your dad isn’t who you think it is.”

He said this was the dilemma: “Are we going to tell people, ‘that’s not your dad’ – or are we going to keep that information to ourselves? I don’t think that would be acceptable ethically.”

I'll just leave this here:

Separated, cohabiting fathers are more likely to withdraw from their kids’ lives than previously married and divorced dads, who are already more unreliable than married dads still in the house. One study of low-income cohabiting parents found that, within three years, half the fathers had moved out; a considerable number would vanish from their kids’ lives entirely.

It's only "oppression" if the ball hits you in the face:

When the Canadian Society for the Study of Education meets in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”

Dodgeball is not just unhelpful to the development of kind and gentle children who will become decent citizens of a liberal democracy. It is actively harmful to this process, they say.

Dodgeball is a tool of “oppression.”

 

What an @$$hole:

It was a humiliating video that fuelled outrage on social media. A YouTube prankster filmed himself offering a homeless man in Barcelona an Oreo cookie filled with toothpaste rather than cream.

Now the prankster, known as ReSet to his followers on YouTube but whose real name is Kanghua Ren, has been handed a 15-month prison sentence and must pay 20,000 euros (about $18,100) in compensation to his victim.

Ren was found guilty of violating the moral integrity of the homeless man. He is unlikely to serve any time behind bars, however, as Spanish law normally allows sentences of less than two years for first-time offenders in nonviolent crimes to be suspended.

The Barcelona court, in a verdict published Friday in the Spanish news media, also ordered Ren’s YouTube and other social media channels to be shut down for five years.

D-Day

Seventy-five years ago, the most audacious plan to retake Europe was launched:

When he set sail 75 years ago it was as part of the largest seaborne invasion in history; an armada of 7,000 ships so vast bystanders observed one could practically walk across the Channel.

Last night (Sunday) as the sun dipped over the white cliffs of Dover and MV Boudicca powered out across a glittering millpond sea, Fred Brunt found himself once more aboard a ship heading to the beaches of northern France — for the first time since D-Day.

“It’s hard to say why I’ve never been back,” says Mr Brunt, who on June 6, 1944 was a young able seaman and the coxswain of a landing craft transporting a tank on to Sword Beach during the first wave of Operation Overlord.

“It will be an emotional journey. One thing I shall never forget is all the dead bodies. I’m looking forward to stepping out again on Sword Beach and will think of all those young men.” The 94-year-old is one of 255 Normandy veterans aboard the cruise ship, which has been chartered by the Royal British Legion to sail between commemorative events over the week ahead.

Tianenmen Square

There are generations of Chinese people who do not know that their government murdered hundreds in that famous landmark:

With the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaching, why would China's defence minister decide to defend the Communist Party's day of infamy?

Not only did he justify the military's murder of untold numbers of peaceful student protesters in the centre of Beijing's national square in 1989, he reversed the onus of moral scrutiny: "How can you say that China handled it improperly?" General Wei Fenghe demanded of an international audience in Singapore on Sunday. ...

Sure, Wei was asked about it. Would the People's Liberation Army "finally recognise" what had happened in Tiananmen Square when it took arms against unarmed students?

But he didn't need to answer. Indeed, he chose to skip a number of awkward questions when he had the podium at the annual Shangri La defence dialogue. So it was his choice to reply to this particular question.

"It was political turbulence" and "the Chinese government acted to stop the turbulence", he said. The thirty years of stability and development since has proved that it was the "correct" decision, Wei said.

But why say it, and so stridently, now? First, it's a telltale sign of a regime that is unapologetic and increasingly confident.

Ever since the global financial crisis exposed the weakness of the West a decade ago, China has been more and more assertive of its own authoritarian model, less and less tolerant of any criticism. Human rights are out, nationalist hubris is in.

Second, it reinforced the point of Wei's overall performance in front of an influential international audience - to assert China's inherent right to greatness and to warn Washington against any thought of challenging China militarily.

Third, it's the core of Chinese Communist Party's rule. Chinese President Xi Jinping once said that the Soviet Union collapsed because no one was "man enough" to defend the Communist Party's rule. China, implicitly, would not make that mistake.

General Wei was showing that the Chinese Communist Party is "man enough" to murder its civilians to preserve its rule and never look back. As Mao said, "political power grows from the barrel of a gun". And the regime has a firm grip on the gun.

This Mao:

During his visit to China, Trudeau and other Quebec intellectuals were guests of Mao’s regime, dining in splendor and eagerly swallowing massive dollops of propaganda as they toured the country. In Two Innocents in Red China, a 1961 book Trudeau co-authored with Jacques Hebert, Communist China emerges as a global force for good. Under Communism, they wrote, the small-wage earner “is no longer just a speck of dust in the proletarian mass … The genius of Mao is to have persuaded hundreds of millions of people — by astonishingly effective methods — of the grandeur and nobility of their task.” Persuaded might not be the right word to described Mao’s methods.

Trudeau met Mao, and called him “one of the great men of the century.” Trudeau wrote of his “powerful head, an unlined face, and a look of wisdom tinged with melancholy. The eyes of that tranquil face are heavy with having seen too much of the misery of men.”

It was the face and eyes of a mass murderer. As Mao shook hands with Trudeau, millions of Chinese had already died across the country as part of a national “Superpower Programme” to industrialize and modernize China. The malevolence of the agricultural and production reforms, their cruelty and abusiveness, are documented in horrific detail by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their monumental book Mao: The Untold Story. The resulting 38 million deaths were what Chang and Halliday call “the greatest famine of the 20th century — and of all human recorded history.” Mao, they say, “knowingly starved and worked those tens of millions of people to death.”

Chang and Halliday singled out Trudeau’s “starry-eyed” book among other Westerners complicit in denying Mao’s atrocities. Instead of searching for the truth, Trudeau claimed to have seen the benefits of Mao’s policies. With Hebert, he wrote that “China’s methods are going to be imitated by the two-thirds of the human race that goes to bed hungry every night. And the moral indignation of the West will be powerless to stop it.”

Over the decades, Trudeau failed to acknowledge his massive lapse in judgment. In a 1997 article in Saturday Night magazine, editor Kenneth Whyte reviewed several of Trudeau’s works published during the 1990s. “Two Innocents in Red China may well be the worst book ever published in Canada,” wrote Whyte. “Certainly no significant Canadian public figure has ever been so dreadfully wrong about a major event as Trudeau was — and, perversely, continues to be — about Mao and the Great Leap.”

More than three decades later, Trudeau was still talking up the thrills Mao gave him. “There is no acknowledgement (in any of Trudeau writings) of Mao’s tyranny, or Trudeau’s error,” wrote Whyte.

Somewhat related:

Top Soviet officials were aware that the lack of a reference in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty to the sovereignty of islands seized from Japan in the closing days of World War II could be exploited in postwar negotiations with Tokyo, declassified documents obtained by Kyodo News have shown.

Under the treaty signed by Japan and 48 other nations, Tokyo gave up territories it had seized, such as Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and southern Sakhalin. The Soviet Union did not sign the treaty, which was implemented in 1952 to end the Allied postwar occupation of Japan.

The documents revealed Sunday refer to the Communist Party’s strategies for negotiations launched in June 1955 with Japan. They show that Moscow decided to demand Tokyo’s recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the seized islands, which are still at the heart of the current Japan-Russia talks toward a peace treaty, because the San Francisco treaty did not back Moscow’s territorial claim.

Deception and land-grabbing: hallmarks of a communist state.

It's Just Money

Just a reminder:

Justin Trudeau says a Liberal government won't balance the books for three straight years but will double spending on infrastructure to jump-start economic growth.

The Liberal fiscal plan would see "a modest short-term deficit" of less than $10 billion for each of the first three years  and then a balanced budget by the 2019-2020 fiscal year.

**

Canada posted a deficit of C$11.80 billion ($8.74 billion) in the fiscal year that ended in March, down from a shortfall of C$16.69 billion in the previous fiscal year. 

The finance ministry said the data “are not the final results for the fiscal year as a whole”, adding these would be published later once additional information such as accrual of tax revenues became available.

Anyway:

Canada’s population is growing by 1.2%.

Population growth in the US is 0.7%.

If we subtract Canada’s population growth from our GDP growth, we get -0.8%. It’s negative.

Meanwhile, if we subtract US population growth from their economic growth, we get 2.4%.

So – in real terms – the only terms that matter for real people since it’s what impacts our standard of living, the United States is getting richer, and Canada is getting poorer.


It’s really quite simple. If our income per person was just staying steady, then Canada should have grown by 1.2%. The rate of population growth and a stable income should give us a baseline GDP growth rate of 1.2%. That’s the minimum it should be.

Anything less means the standard of living and relative income of the average Canadian is declining, which also means our economy is getting worse.

**

Canada has fallen three spots in the world economic competitiveness ranking.

The ranking – which is compiled by IMD – shows Canada in 13th place in 2019, down from 10th place in 2018.

Qatar, Luxembourg, and Ireland are now ahead of Canada.

Canada is only one spot above China – a centrally-run Communist State.


The top spot is held by Singapore, which jumped from third to first, followed by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region – which stayed in second, and the United States in third – a drop of two spots from 2018.

**

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax, which he has imposed on four provinces, increasingly looks as if it was written on the back of a napkin.

A case in point is the chaotic and unfair way it has been imposed on small and medium-sized business enterprises (SMEs) in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick.

“On environmental policy, small businesses appear to be an afterthought for this government,” Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Business (CFIB), said in a statement Thursday.

He was responding to an announcement by Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna of two rebate programs ostensibly designed to help SMEs cope with the increased costs they face because of carbon taxes.

While McKenna announced a $1.4 billion, five-year program to help SMEs retrofit their businesses to make them more energy efficient, and to buy energy efficient equipment, Kelly condemned it as “too little, too late” and “a drop in the bucket.” ...

With the election less than five months away, these rebates won’t even start until the Trudeau government passes its budget implementation bill, and issues regulations on the specifics of how the rebates will work.

Knuckle-Dusters

Not a weapon but a strategy.


Putting aside how emotionally retarded Canadians are, how their stomachs vote according to tribes and how cultural Marxism has made entire populations incapable of critical thinking and self-reflection, thus making a new Macdonald or Lincoln next to non-existent, for any political leader or party to survive, it has stop playing by the rules of a rigged game and go out swinging.

This means that they have to stop caring what everyone says and start telling the unvarnished truth or lose not only an election but a country and a civilisation.

Tory federal leader Andrew Scheer needs to man up quick or spend whatever remains of Canada's life sitting across from a frat-boy so useless that even his Chinese bosses are seriously re-thinking his usefulness.


When Scheer removed MP Michael Cooper from the justice committee after calling out gross deceits from a Muslim witness who equated conservatism with violence at a committee hearing on extremism.

Cooper was right to call out Faisal Khan Suri (from the special-interest group, Alberta Muslim Public Affairs Council) for the erroneous connections between conservatism and the actions of one mass shooter whose comments and ideologies are no more fixed than any indecisive millennial whose views change on whim. Cooper should have gone further and pointed out how Islamism has infiltrated the West to such an extent that motions like M-103, meant to prohibit any criticism of the religion that expressly directs its adherents to attack and kill non-believers, are virtually mandatory.


Scheer's removal of Cooper says the following: that he will not defend his own party, he will not support the telling of the truth and that he will bow to pressure whenever it presents itself. I'm surprised that (as of this writing) Scheer hasn't fallen to his knees in contrition for saying that: "
We are all children of God and there is equal and infinite value in all of us.". Knowing how utterly phobic Canadians are of people who actually believe things, I'm sure an impromptu mob of apology-demanders and stone-throwers will be assembled shortly.


If Scheer won't stand up for his own people or defend the obvious, why should anyone vote for him? By backing down, he has given the useless frat-boy a much-needed boon.


Instead, Scheer should take a page from "Harper-era" (SEE: Canadians, fear-mongering, emotional retardation, paranoia) former minister, Bernard Valcourt, and call the inflammatory and factually-inaccurate report on missing women "propagandist":

Bernard Valcourt, who was Aboriginal affairs minister from 2013 until the defeat of the Harper government in the fall of 2015, blasted the inquiry's conclusion that the thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls were victims of a wider "Canadian genocide" inflicted on Indigenous people.

"How far do those activists will go? What has been the cost to Canadians for this propagandist report? What have we learned that we did not already know?" said Valcourt, who now lives in Edmundston, N.B., in a tweet posted on Friday evening.

"Who feels better in Canada among First Nations for that thunderous silly conclusion that all we wanted was to kill them all?"

Valcourt faced an immediate backlash on Twitter that continued into Sunday. That included reaction from leading Indigenous voices like Cindy Blacksock, who heads the First Nation Child and Family Caring Society, and Pam Palmater, chair of Indigenous governance at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Valcourt remained unbowed during a Sunday morning interview with CBC News.

"I take offence to Canada being accused of genocide. My comprehension of genocide is measured by what genocide really is," said Valcourt. "I don't think it serves any purpose to call the action of the government genocide because it was not genocide."

Valcourt said "First Nations got a bad rap from colonialism that has given birth to this country."

But he said that using the word genocide "won't solve anything."

To wit: the government of Canada refused to call the targeting, abduction, abuse and murder of the Yazidis and Middle Eastern Christians genocide.

It also bears repeating that more aboriginal men go missing than women and that aboriginal women are more likely to be abused or killed by their own fellows.

But I digress ...


Valcourt will probably be booted from the party but I'm sure he doesn't care. He had the wontons to call the report a waste and an inflammatory accusation against an entire country.


If Big Aboriginal really cared about the plight of the people it claims to serve, it would demand the complete abolition of the Indian Act which has done more to isolate the aboriginal community than any one act of the majority.


Any takers?