National Post- Report finds 7,000 Canadian restaurants closed last year amid rising costs, softening demand and declining alcohol sales
“Business closures do not occur when conditions deteriorate; they occur when resilience is depleted. Owners exhaust personal capital, restructure debt and postpone difficult decisions in the hope that conditions improve. For many restaurants, that hope carried them through 2023 and 2024. By 2026, the arithmetic becomes unavoidable,” the report says.
Sun- Ottawa bureaucracy up 80% in last decade, says Canadian Taxpayers Federation
The report says the cost of the federal bureaucracy increased 80% in 10 years, the government added 99,000 bureaucrats in the last decade, and the government rubberstamped $1.5 billion in bonuses since 2015.
Would there be any fraud at all?
Peter St Onge- Federal Fraud could end the Income Tax
Ottawa Citizen- How productive is the public service? We’ll never know
National Post- Estimated 2,500 undeclared foreign agents operate in Canada
The federal government estimates there are nearly 2,500 businesses or people in Canada working surreptitiously on behalf of foreign states to influence local politics and governments who will need to register publicly.
Reason TV- California’s fast-food disaster
Who would make heat unaffordable and then tell you to…
Telegraph- Wiggle your toes to stay warm during cold snap, council tells elderly
Kash Patel announces closure of FBI HQ Hoover building;
“When we arrived, taxpayers were about to be on the hook for nearly $5 billion for a new headquarters that wouldn’t open until 2035. We scrapped that plan. Instead, we selected the already-existing Reagan Building, saving billions and allowing the transition to begin immediately with required safety and infrastructure upgrades already underway. Once complete, most of the HQ FBI workforce will move in, and the rest are continuing in our ongoing push to put more manpower in the field, where they will remain,” he continued.
Blacklock’s- Mexican Embassy Is Fed Up
The Government of Mexico complains it is too expensive and bureaucratic to do business with Ottawa. The candid report by diplomats comes three months after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a “new era of cooperation” with Mexico.
The report was submitted to the Senate foreign affairs committee. Ottawa was so dysfunctional that Mexican diplomats had difficulty getting basic data here, it said.
MLI- The Provincial Productivity Crisis
-Public sector size has grown in every province, with health care being the main driver.
-The efficiency of public services – how much value we get per dollar spent – has fallen everywhere. Manitoba saw the largest drop in productivity, while Alberta saw the smallest decline.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was charged in a two-count federal indictment that alleges she obstructed official Department of Homeland Security removal proceedings and knowingly concealed the man from immigration authorities at a courthouse in April.
Dugan was found guilty of obstructing federal agents and not guilty of concealing an undocumented immigrant from arrest during the courthouse incident.
The jury reached the mixed verdict after deliberating for approximately six hours on Thursday, according to WISN.
Dugan, who pleaded not guilty, faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison. The judge has not yet set a sentencing date.
Wisconsin Republicans threatened Friday to impeach embattled judge Hannah Dugan if she doesn’t resign immediately
You’re assuming there’s something there to measure in the first place.
CTV- Government rejects call to measure productivity across public service
The federal government is rejecting a call from a working group to measure productivity across Canada’s public sector, arguing that doing so would not “readily align” with its priorities.
Blacklock’s- Feds Seal 215 Graves Records
The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations is sealing all reports filed by a Kamloops, B.C. First Nation that was paid to exhume the purported graves of 215 children at an Indian Residential School. “Confidential information,” the department wrote in denying an Access To Information request for the records.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation received $12.1 million in funding for “exhumation of remains” and forensic DNA testing after announcing in 2021 it had discovered the graves in an orchard using ground-penetrating radar. No remains have been recovered to date.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are preparing to turn over to Congress bombshell emails showing the FBI warned that the Biden Justice Department did not have probable cause to raid President Donald Trump‘s home at Mar-a-Lago, but prosecutors proceeded anyways, Just the News has learned.
The emails are to be turned over as early as Tuesday to the Senate and House Judiciary committees, ahead of a planned deposition Wednesday from ex-special prosecutor Jack Smith, who inherited the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case just months after the August 2022 raid of Trump’s home that rocked the political world ahead of the 2024 election.
Sun- Canada should stop taxing food altogether
Ending the GST/HST on all food is one of the simplest, fairest and most effective measures the federal government can take immediately