Who would make it too much of a pain in the ass to celebrate Canada day?
Montreal Gazette- Organizer cancels Canada Day parade in Montreal
Nicholas Cohen said the decision was made after he found it increasingly difficult to obtain the needed permits and funding from different government authorities over the past year.
“Cowen was faced with rules that changed at the last minute and requests that made organizing the parade virtually impossible,” it said in the news release.
Just two weeks to flatten the leak.
Ottawa Citizen- Life in Calgary after water main break: Unflushed toilets and 3-minute showers
CBC- Calgary water main break repair could take up to 5 weeks
Tamara Lich- Calgary, are you ok? Blink once for yes, twice for no.
Kirk Lubimov- Calgary water ‘misuse’ snitch line has been ringing.
Is there anything more frustrating than some court economist declaring that we face serious economic problems but the causes are just a bewildering puzzle that largely defy explanation? Just for starters, Tiff need look no further than the current federal government’s open hostility towards investors.
At the conference, Macklem said the central bank expected productivity growth to pick up coming out of the pandemic as companies found the workers they wanted to hire and the supply chain started to normalize.
“It hasn’t happened,” he said. “That’s why we made such a stark statement.”
The solutions are apparent — more investment in machinery, equipment, information technology, etc. — but Macklem said the tougher question is why that isn’t happening.
“There are some puzzles there,” he said. “We have all the ingredients; we have got to cut through obstacles.”
Updated and bumped for the May Party’s China nexus.
Where would all the fake news come from?
Blacklocks- Paid $233K For Ghostwriters
“How much did the Government of Canada pay to publish news written by government employees?” Records showed the Revenue Agency paid as much as $1,000 apiece to distribute faked news stories.
The ghostwritten articles meet the federal definition of fake news. The Department of Canadian Heritage in a 2017 Memorandum To The Minister described fake news as “state-sponsored” content.
In Manitoba the NDP are now firmly in control of the agenda.
The Blackrod- New stats show the NDP’s hard left-wing health decree increased suffering
The data shows that in the first six months of the NDP in power, there were 263 fewer hip-and-knee surgeries in Manitoba compared to the last six months of the Conservative Party. And that’s in addition to hundreds of hip-and-knee surgeries that could have been done if the NDP hadn’t banned sending patients to private clinics in the U.S. or other provinces.
To make matters worse, the median wait time for surgery in Manitoba jumped from six-and-a-half months to eight months.
The Blackrod- I Quit, said one of Mb’s top doctors; A brutal assessment of the NDP’s 6 months in office
“I have been a physician for over 40 years. I started out as a clinician and researcher and gradually moved into academic and health system leadership positions. I was privileged to work first in my home country (Switzerland) interrupted by a couple of years in the U.S. (University of California, San Francisco), and since 2004 I have worked in Canada, including in Toronto, where I was the director of the liver transplant program at the University Health Network, one of the largest health systems in Canada.”
“I saw a lot of health system dysfunction (in his career). However, none of it reached the extent of dysfunction that is present currently in healthcare in Manitoba.” he wrote.
The Hub- The vaccine mandates have proved to be one of the enduring legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic
A few years on, vaccine mandates have proved to be one of the enduring legacies of the pandemic. In British Columbia, they remain in place for health-care workers. The persistence of mandates is a reminder of the inertia of regulation: new powers, once wielded, tend not to be voluntarily retracted.
Be a shame if something were to happen to it.
National Post- Canadian, 93, wanted to give her kids a gift. Instead she got slapped with $40K in capital gains tax bill
The two lots were appraised at $125,000 and $145,000, totalling $270,000, leaving Diachun with a tax bill of about $40,000, an amount she said she cannot pay.
“I’m on pension. How am I going to pay for that?” said Diachun. “I’m not one of the wealthy. I’m 93 years old. Who is going to give me a mortgage? Who is going to give me a loan?”
Blacklocks- Commons To Pass Labour Bill
The Commons today is expected to pass a ban on federally regulated employers’ use of replacement workers in case of strike or lockout.
Bill C-58 An Act To Amend The Canada Labour Code would restrict federally regulated employers like airlines, banks and telecom companies from using replacement workers in strikes or lockouts under threat of $100,000-per day fines. A clause of the bill delays enforcement one year from final passage in Parliament.
No Conservative MP spoke against the bill or opposed it in Second or Third Reading.
I know it works out to $170,000 per job, but they’re “green” jobs, right?
Interesting to see that even the CBC is questioning the wisdom of the idea that no price is too high when it comes to reducing a carbon footprint.
One economics professor tweeted he was “legit astonished” by the investment in Italpasta.
“Do they not understand just how insane this is? That spending north of $170k for *one job* is an embarrassment, not an achievement?” wrote Stephen Gordon of Laval University.
“There is really no underlying economic rationale,” said Robert Gillezeau, assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “I think those spends are more about politics than they are about economic development.”
Here’s an interesting juxtaposition: a former Liberal MP condemns the ruinously expensive central planning scheme that the Conservative party slavishly supports. We’ve now arrived at the point where around one quarter of one percent of the population will hold an effective veto over trade negotiations affecting the rest of the country.
“The dairy lobby is the National Rifle Association of Canada,” proclaims Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and now head of the University of Calgary’s school of public policy.
“The one potential positive of Bill-282 is, it is so over the top that it will backfire and it will finally be the time when enough people in this country realize we have to deal with this,” declares Martha.
And “it is so egregious,” she argues, other countries will realize what we’re doing, pointing to the U.K.’s recent withdrawal from trade talks with Canada in large measure over their lack of access to our supply-managed markets, with cheese featuring large. The U.K. is Canada’s third largest trading partner.
It would have been interesting to see how this judge would have ruled had he been asked for an injunction against the Ottawa trucker protest two years ago. My guess is that he would have meted out a harsh punishment for such counter-revolutionary activity.
A Quebec Superior Court judge has rejected a provisional injunction request by McGill University to remove pro-Palestinian encampment activists from its front lawn in downtown Montreal.
St-Pierre opened his ruling by saying that the injunction request comes amid a wave of pro-Palestinian encampments on university campuses across North America connected to the events in the Gaza Strip, where “dozens of thousands of Palestinians are dead, injured or displaced by the Israeli army.”
Read the whole thing.
Peter Menzies- Hey, feds, how are those broadcasting reforms going?
In summary, one year after the act was passed, the CRTC has incurred one related court appeal, dropped two proceedings, added five more and still hasn’t published any decisions from the three-week marathon hearing held last November and December.
No one outside the CRTC knows for sure why the brakes have been so firmly applied to what appeared to be a hell-bent-for-leather process. But it is probably the fact that they now must grapple with the consequences of their decision to treat the internet like traditional broadcasting. Those are many, but among them is that any actions taken by the CRTC are likely to increase costs and reduce choices for consumers.
Blacklocks- Weary Of ArriveCan Scrutiny
The lone New Democrat on the Commons public accounts committee complains MPs are having too many meetings investigating the $59.5 million ArriveCan program. “I am getting more concerned about the cost to taxpayers that these surprise meetings are having,” said MP Blake Desjarlais (Edmonton Griesbach).
The Commons public accounts committee is mandated to scrutinize federal waste. The committee last year spent a total $13,541 on 44 meetings according to a Committee Activities And Expenditures report.
The committee last year met a total 83 hours, heard testimony from 237 witnesses and published 17 reports. Costs do not include salary for MPs, clerks, translators and technicians who are paid regardless of whether the committee meets.
I personally know some people who would choose to be a care-giver to their XBox if the math of Universal Basic Income worked out for them. In all likelihood, it would do so in many cases. At least enough to send us over the cliff into default and an inflationary currency collapse.
Sen. Kim Pate and NDP MP Leah Gazan introduced bills S-233 and C-223, respectively, in a bid to create the first national framework to provide all people over age 17 across Canada, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants, a guaranteed livable basic income.
Based on Ontario’s basic income pilot project, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that the basic gross cost of guaranteed basic income(opens in a new tab) nationally would range between $30.5 billion and $71.4 billion from November 2020 to March 2021…
Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn (29:57) – like somebody in Canada went ‘what if we try East Germany again with way better tech’ and they came up with this thing
As Terence Corcoran notes, it’s no longer debatable that the productivity of the Canadian economy has taken a beating recently. The problem is that most analysts seem to believe that the problems arose from too little government oversight over the economy, not too much.
Faced with the medical pandemic, Ottawa ordered unprecedented social and economic closures to “flatten the curve” of contagion. To offset the inevitable economic decline, government spending soared and the Bank of Canada unleashed a major monetary expansion, claiming at the time that it could do so with minimal inflationary disruption. The Bank was wrong.
In Road to Freedom, Stiglitz argues that post-pandemic shortages, inflation and unemployment were the product of free-market failure rather than state interventions and bungled monetary policy. When COVID struck, everyone turned to the government to save the economy “and it worked remarkably well.” Therefore, he says, we need more government. “It wasn’t a one-time thing,” he claims. “As the world faces the existential crisis of climate change, there is no alternative but government action.”
