Your middle-of-the-week spot of truth ...
Oh, Marco, the things you say!:
At a committee hearing Tuesday, Conservative MPs accused Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino of targeting the wrong gun owners with the Liberals proposed program for the expropriation of certain weapons, arguing it is a waste of resources and money.
The Department of Public Safety yesterday said it has no specific research indicating new gun controls will reduce gun crime. Initiatives were based on a general sense that fewer legal guns would make for safer homes, witnesses told the Commons public safety committee: “I think Canadians would want to know.”
Oh, that's not all he's done:
EMAILS: Gov’t managers laughed about backdating documents in @FedCourt_CAN_en case.
— Holly Doan (@hollyanndoan) October 5, 2022
“Ha ha! You should use that date as the official day the order was made rather than the date it goes online.”
— Chaitanya Spencer, advisor @PrivyCouncilCA https://t.co/CUqpbjNjs4 #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/NB8FK0gcua
There are six hundred million reasons why the press is not all over this.
Also:
The Commons ethics committee yesterday censured the RCMP as reluctant witnesses at parliamentary hearings. It marked the second time in two months that MPs faulted the Mounties for withholding evidence: “Members voiced concern during the RCMP’s testimony that witnesses were being evasive.”
We haven't had it since April 17th, 1982:
When the ancient Greek philosophers pursued the question of “what is the good life?” they were mulling over what the best way is for a person to choose to live. They weren’t asking what is the way people must live. That’s an important distinction, but it’s increasingly lost these days. Now, too many people feel emboldened to become indignant at those who don’t live as they do.
Instead of aiming to create conditions for people to pursue their unique versions of the good life, there are growing attempts to mandate a shared objective. We’ve pivoted from enforcing minimum standards to attempting to regulate what one segment of society deems to be optimal standards for all.
This is playing out in real time in Canadian politics. Some of the issues that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are most seized with involve backing people into a corner in the name of some high-flung subjective goal that everyone must bow before.
The government’s approach to green and climate policies works this way. They say that catastrophe will unfold in the years ahead if we don’t live a certain way. “OK, thanks for the heads up,” you say, “I’ll review the situation and make my choices accordingly.” But that is not enough for them. They’re not satisfied with a sliding scale of compliance; instead they have to implement increasingly onerous regulations that leave you little say in the matter.
Then there’s the ongoing obsession with regulating the Internet. The Trudeau government is currently waging a multi-pronged effort to make Canadians’ online conduct conform to their worldview. In addition to the contentious Bill C-11 that will give government bodies a say over content like YouTube and TikTok videos, they want to create things like a “Digital Safety Commissioner” or revise the laws to protect us from vaguely defined “online harms.” ...
Perhaps the worst recent example is the widespread vilification of that small percentage of people who chose, for whatever their reason, not to take COVID-19 vaccines. There really is nothing under the sun that sees absolutely everyone in agreement. So we shouldn’t have been surprised that around 10% of people didn’t care for the vaccine. If anything, the shocker was that the number went as high as it did. Yet we just couldn’t leave the unvaccinated alone. ...
A country of small people and plutocrats have made it so that personal license, not personal liberty (a foreign concept in more ways than one), is subsidised by the masses and noticed only when its infringement personally annoys them.
The people were right to heckle:
Government officials were heckled after hundreds of people marched to Parliament Hill on Tuesday to mark 1,000 days since the downing of Flight PS752 near Tehran and to demand Ottawa take action against Iran.
Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 was shot down Jan. 8, 2020, by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), killing 176 people, including 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents.
Chanting “we demand truth,” “we want justice now,” and “kick them out,” protesters were met on Parliament Hill by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Transport Omar Alghabra and Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, and Conservative MPs Melissa Lantsman and Garnett Genuis also attended.
No one really thought that they would get an answer out of those guys, did they?
Also - he deserves heckling:
Less than three months after making the request to remove certain Royal Canadian Air Force flights — including the prime minister’s aircraft — from its online flight tracker list, Ottawa has reversed course and requested U.S. aviation authorities to cancel the blockings.
The request from NAV Canada was made public Tuesday evening by aviation commentator Jack Sweeney, who posted an excerpt from a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bulletin requesting the removal of a number of RCAF callsigns from their Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) flight privacy program.
Those callsigns include CANFORCE ONE, used by any Canadian military aircraft transporting the prime minister.
A dead tourism industry is the price one must pay for absolute control:
The ArriveCAN app likely cost Canada’s tourism industry billions of dollars in lost revenue, according to witnesses at a parliamentary hearing.
“It’s been hugely impactful and devastating,” said Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls. He was one of the witnesses at a Tuesday hearing of the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade.
Diodati said the Niagara region usually gets around 20 million tourist visits a year, and some 40,000 people depend on the industry. He said U.S. tourism into the region is half of pre-pandemic numbers.
“Typically 50 percent of the revenue that comes into Niagara Falls comes from U.S. visitations,” he said. “Americans typically stay longer and spend more. So the long-term effect of this requirement at the border has been devastating.”
He added the group hardest hit by ArriveCAN may have been seniors.
“I was inundated with calls from these people saying they felt they were being discriminated against,” said Diodati. “They were proud to show their passports, happy to show their vaccination status and boosters, but offended that they were being forced to do something they couldn’t do … they’re not as tech-savvy as younger kids, and a lot of them could not do the app because they didn’t have smartphones, they didn’t have computers,” he said. He added in many cases it meant border agents had to help people try to navigate the app.
“Then our CBSA [Canada Border Services Agency] border guards, instead of worrying about drugs and guns and criminals, become administrators, helping them to download the app,” he said.
Beth Potter, president of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), told the committee the impact of ArriveCAN on tourism was significant.
“The ArriveCAN app and the requirements of the ArriveCAN app had a massive effect, and we were seeing a drop of 50 percent and more [on the number] of Americans coming into the country,” Potter said. “That’s $12 billion of money that didn’t come into the country because of travel requirements.”
Remember - the powers that be claimed that this was safe:
Hundreds of thousands of Americans sought medical care after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data released on Oct. 3.
Roughly 782,900 people reported seeking medical attention, emergency room care, and/or hospitalization following COVID-19 vaccination. Another 2.5 million people reported needing to miss school, work, or other normal activities as a result of a health event after getting a COVID-19 vaccine.
The reports were made to the CDC’s V-safe program, a new vaccine safety monitoring system to which users can report issues through smartphones.
The CDC released the data to the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) after being sued over not producing the data when it was requested by the nonprofit. ICAN posted a dashboard summarizing the data.
“It took numerous legal demands, appeals, and two lawsuits, and over a year, but the CDC finally capitulated and agreed to a court order requiring them to do what they should have done from day one, release the V-safe data to the public,” Aaron Siri, a lawyer representing ICAN in the case, told The Epoch Times in an email.
About 10 million people utilized V-safe during the period of time the data covers: Dec. 14, 2020, to July 31, 2022. About 231 million Americans received at least one vaccine dose during that time.
The V-safe users reported about 71 million symptoms.
Also - only in Canada can this quack fail upwards:
Tam, with help from staff at the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), has written a report giving her agency credit for saving nearly 800,000 Canadian lives and preventing nearly two million admissions to Canadian hospitals with the pandemic-fighting measures they have taken over the past two-and-a-half years – masks, social distancing, vaccine mandates.
Talk about self-serving.
The study was conducted by PHAC researchers using PHAC data, reviewed by Tam’s peers and included in the journal Canada Communicable Disease Report, which is published by PHAC.
Nope, no lack of objectivity there. ...
More than once during the pandemic, PHAC “modelling” of COVID’s spread predicted huge spikes in transmission if their dramatic advice on shutting down society wasn’t followed. Their advice was never followed to the letter, yet not even at the peaks of COVID’s waves did infections meet PHAC’s dire forecasts.
The recent study is merely a continuation of that same end-time hysteria.
Canada sold out its major industries. I'm sure it's worth it:
Michael Barrett, the Tories’ health critic, told reporters he would be sending a letter to Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos to formally ask Health Canada to allow the importation and sale of foreign language-labelled medication into the country, while also providing guidelines to doctors and pharmacists on how to administer them.
It always boils down to money:
There is no way to enforce building or fire codes on First Nations and pursuing a legislative fix would require significant time and money, federal officials warn in an internal briefing document.
But Blaine Wiggins, the senior director of the Indigenous Fire Marshals Service, said that enforcement gap has “catastrophic” consequences.
As President Vladimir Putin completed paperwork for the annexation of four regions of Ukraine on Wednesday, the Kremlin said there was no contradiction between Russian retreats and Putin's vow that they would always be part of Russia.
In the biggest expansion of Russian territory in at least half a century, Putin signed laws admitting the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), the Luhansk People's Republic (LNR), Kherson region and Zaporizhzhia region into Russia.
The conclusion of the legalities of the annexation of up to 18% of Ukrainian territory came as Russian forces battled to halt Ukrainian counter-offensives within it, especially north of Kherson and west of Luhansk.
Asked if there was a contradiction between Putin's rhetoric and the reality of retreat on the ground, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "There is no contradiction whatsoever. They will be with Russia forever and they will be returned."
South Korea's response to North Korean missile goes wrong:
Hours after North Korea flew a ballistic missile over neighbouring Japan on Tuesday, residents in a South Korean seaside town were startled to see flames leaping from a nearby military base and missiles soaring into the sky.
It wasn't the start of a war, but a South Korean display of military force that went wrong in a blaze of burning rocket fuel.
Intended as demonstration to deter North Korea, South Korea said it was conducting a nighttime drill with Hyunmoo-2C short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) when one failed shortly after launch and hit the ground inside the base in Gangneung, on South Korea's east coast.
The missile was carrying a warhead, but it wasn't armed and didn't explode, and there were no casualties, a military official told a briefing. The official apologised for causing residents to worry.
The burning rocket fuel lit up the night sky, however, sparking calls to emergency responders and fuelling social media rumours that went unanswered for eight hours until the military disclosed the drill and explained the fire.
Some idiot toppled statues in the Vatican Museum:
A man toppled two ancient Roman busts in the Vatican Museums on Wednesday, causing moderate damage before being stopped by staff and arrested, a museums source said.
Oh, why bother? If she was selling the baby for parts, she would be on the streets by now:
A Texas woman was convicted of capital murder Monday for killing a pregnant woman to take her unborn baby.
A Bowie County jury in northeast Texas deliberated about an hour before finding Taylor Rene Parker, 29, guilty of the October 2020 murder of Reagan Michelle Simmons-Hancock, 21, and the abduction of the daughter cut from her womb who later died.
