Category: nannystate

Unintended Consequences?

Canada’s Bolsheviks nannystate New Governor There Goes The Narrative 18 Comments

Can someone make this make sense? With the Carney government having raised tariffs on imported steel, some Western Canadian users of steel now find that they’re uncompetitive. Rather than instantly resolve the problem by dropping the tariffs, taxpayers will instead be forced to cover half the shipping costs of steel orders from mills in the east.

Under a new Commodities Sectoral Support Program announced on Monday, steel shippers can apply for a rebate that will offset 50 per cent of the costs to ship domestic steel by rail or marine transport across provinces and territories.

“There’s no rebar business in B.C. that’s flourishing right now,” Michaud said. “Everybody is doing the work, just at a massively reduced profit margin. Shipping it from the East is just not very good financially.”

Awash With Idiocy

Canada’s Bolsheviks Climate Cult Media nannystate Science Y2Kyoto 23 Comments

Faced with widespread backpedaling on the most useless aspects of  the climate science cult, hacks like Gwynne Dyer just double down: since we can’t jettison fossil fuels fast enough, let’s just embark on an attempt to do nothing less than geoengineer the weather as if the earth were connected to a house thermostat. What could possibly go wrong?

Cutting our carbon dioxide and methane emissions, while it is still vital, cannot act fast enough….

What can act fast enough is Solar Radiation Management (SRM for short). That includes any technique that reflects some incoming sunlight back into space and cools the planet, but the most promising one involves putting some reflective substance into the stratosphere.

Math Is Hard

nannystate Surveillance State 9 Comments

Assuming that New Brunswick puts the seized cigarettes back on the shelf and eventually collects the tax, the cost of the enforcement efforts still amount to a net loss to taxpayers.

Authorities in New Brunswick say they’ve seized millions of contraband cigarettes that represent $1.1 million in lost tax revenue.

Today’s announcement by public safety officials was the first since the province’s Liberal government invested $1.2 million to support contraband enforcement in the spring budget.

 

Post-Industrial Society

More Money Than Brains nannystate New Governor 35 Comments

Ignoring the obvious contradiction in the funding announcement, why are we throwing even more tax dollars at a chronic money loser? There was a time when Canada built plenty of locomotives, but apparently we lost all that knowledge and now need to relearn it. Who knew?

“Locomotive assembly is returning to Canada,” Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said Wednesday at a news conference in Montreal, where the plant will be built.

Ottawa says the trains will be built by Switzerland-based Stadler. The first nine are to be built in Spain, while the remaining 36 will be built in Canada after Canadian workers learn how to assemble them from their Spanish counterparts.

 

Money For Nothing

Media nannystate New Governor 9 Comments

It’s all well and good to end the requirements for useless ingredients for streaming services, but why turn around and pay streamers directly for stuff no one watches?

The federal government will “eliminate” the financial contribution requirement for streamers set by the CRTC and replace it with government funding, it said in a court document.

Nonetheless, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether this will actually happen or not.

The office of Culture Minister Marc Miller did not immediately respond when asked to clarify the government’s stance or state whether the government plans to eliminate the contribution requirement permanently or temporarily.

 

Strangled Assets

Canada’s Bolsheviks Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 13 Comments

I can identify another problem with supply mismanagement: if it were to end, your assets may suddenly be worth a lot less than they used to be, maybe even less than your debts.

A company that earns guaranteed margins because a regulation, exclusive contract or closed market keeps competitors out tends to stop doing the things that keep a business sharp. It stops scrutinizing its cost structure, investing in efficiency or asking how it would cope or what it would charge if its customers had somewhere else to go. The protection may feel like a moat. In practice, it is closer to an anaesthetic.

We Demand That Atlas Shrugs!

Climate Cult Democrats nannystate Y2Kyoto 16 Comments

It seems that New York is taking a cue from Manitoba: let’s make up phony reasons to reject private sector investment. God forbid that industrial infrastructure should use energy….

Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday imposing the country’s first statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers, which house thousands of computer servers and require massive amounts of energy and a steady supply of water to keep cool.

Hard Pass On The Low Hanging Fruit

Canada’s Bolsheviks nannystate New Governor 41 Comments

The Liberals could make some easy, win/win concessions to the US on trade if they really wanted to. They are the only party that could afford to dismantle supply mismanagement, electorally speaking. And Blubber Dougie would fold like a cheap tent on the booze ban if Carney insisted. But Canadians seem to prefer the passive aggressive route instead.

The U.S. has also complained about Canada’s administration of dairy import quotas created under USMCA and raised concerns over milk pricing policies and market ‌access for U.S. dairy products. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government ⁠has said previously supply management will not be on the negotiating table.

Torrent Of Crickets

Media nannystate New Governor 19 Comments

If a Tory government ever did what the Liberals just did with those unsold condominiums, the torrent of criticism would be more like a tsunami with the mainstream media pulling out all the stops to pile on the government. Just sayin’…

Prime Minister Mark Carney has faced a torrent of criticism since June 18, when he announced a plan to work with the B.C. government that he said would help homebuyers struggling to save for a down payment.

Carney has since said his government did not explain the program well.

Keir Starmer’s Britain

Great Moments In Socialism nannystate 24 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and while swapping out the desk fan for a permanent cooling system might seem like an appealing solution following this summer’s record-breaking heatwave…

… installing one without proper authorisation can carry serious repercussions. Breaching planning regulations – even unintentionally – can leave homeowners having to submit a retrospective application.

Should this be turned down, the council can issue an enforcement notice demanding the air conditioning unit be taken down. Defying this notice is illegal and, if disregarded, could lead to prosecution.

Fitting a permanent air con unit without planning permission can also have considerable implications should the homeowner decide to put the property on the market. To finalise the sale, sellers must be able to demonstrate they obtained the required approvals. Without this, homeowners will need to either lodge a retrospective application or remove the alteration entirely.

More: “Air-con engineers told The Telegraph that they had been called out to remove perfectly operational units worth thousands of pounds across London.”

Farkas Around And Find Out

nannystate The Urban Bigot 13 Comments

How it started: Calgary city councillors have voted not to change the rules capping late-night sound levels during the Calgary Stampede, despite encouragement from the provincial government.

How it’s going.

Officials with Country Thunder Alberta announced the cancellation of the 2026 music festival on Wednesday, which was set to be held this weekend.

In a news release, officials cited “city-created safety and operational barriers” as the reason behind the decision.

“After exhaustive efforts to find a workable path forward, the organization has determined that conditions created by the City of Calgary, including active construction surrounding the festival site and new restrictive sound limitations, make it impossible to stage the event for 2026,” they said.

Cuba Libre?

Little Known Facts nannystate There Goes The Narrative 6 Comments

Buried in the story about Cuba instituting some free market reforms is an interesting tidbit about loosening restrictions on imports. The common narrative implies that Cuba’s inability to function economically is a result of trade sanctions imposed by the US. But the reality is that many of Cuba’s sanctions are actually self-imposed: it’s less the case that Cubans can’t buy foreign brake pads for their cars because the US won’t allow it, but more the case that communist officialdom has always stood in their way.

The plan includes more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad. It even permits fast-food chains to establish themselves on the island.

The Government They Voted For

Gradually Then Suddenly Great Moments In Socialism nannystate New Governor 30 Comments

Globe & Mail, June 1st: As Canada faces crippling debt, it must do the unpopular thing and cut elderly benefits…

Blacklocks, June 9th.;

Parliament spends more than $14 billion a year on Old Age Security for pensioners with household incomes over $60,000, records show. A federally-funded research group has petitioned cabinet to tighten income testing for seniors: “It’s appropriate to ask retirees with six-figure incomes to accept fewer taxpayer dollars.”

Are you feeling softened yet?

Circling The Drain, Literally

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 5 Comments

There’s a simple solution for alleged funding problems for sewer and water networks: have the user pay, just like they do for internet. If usage fees cover repairs as well as future upgrades and expansion, bottlenecks won’t occur. Municipal governments, on the other hand, prefer to wait for “others”, namely provincial and federal taxpayers, to pony up for things they don’t want to charge local voters for.

She said municipalities largely rely on property taxes and user fees for revenue, which account for roughly one-tenth of total government revenues in Canada despite them being responsible for a majority of core local infrastructure.

“We know what we need to do,” she said. “The concern is we don’t have the fiscal capacity to do it at the speed and scale that housing targets require.”

Government Knows Best!

AI nannystate New Governor Tech 15 Comments

As everyone knows, startup tech firms cannot possibly go broke, right?

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government released a plan on Thursday to promote AI adoption across sectors and government,….The plan earmarks billions of dollars to increase adoption, commercialization and sovereign computing capacity, including a C$500 million ($360 million) Canadian Tech Growth Fund to provide “flexible growth capital and investment support” for startups.

Is Our Diversities Learing?

47 Democrats nannystate New Rules 11 Comments

JTN;

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday announced a major fraud bust in which authorities cracked down on misuse of public funds intended for autism aid in Minnesota.

Kennedy highlighted that the original cost of the Early Intervention Development Program was a mere $38.1 million in 2020, but that it had ballooned to $442 million in 2026, with much of that increase stemming from fraud.

“Today’s arrests represent the largest autism fraud bust in American history,” he said. “This was an organized theft that exploited the most vulnerable, deceived families, stole taxpayer dollars meant to help children with autism access legitimate care and support.”

“Investigators uncovered brazen schemes that billed taxpayers for nonexistent services, fraudulent diagnoses, and fake care while criminals enriched themselves at public expense,” he added.

Circling The Drain

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate New Governor 11 Comments

The first thing a business run by sane people would do when faced with torrents of red ink would be to identify the sectors with the highest costs and highest losses and cut them loose. But when you’re Canada Post, for some reason you do exactly the opposite.

“For now, people who already receive their mail via rural mailboxes will see no change,” the statement said. “These addresses are not part of the initial announcement targeting the four million addresses that still receive home delivery and will eventually be converted to community mailboxes.”

 

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