If you think air fares are already high in Canada’s centrally planned airline market, just wait.
The airline has offered to increase the aviators’ pay by 4% annually over three years, plus an upfront 26% pay boost as well as other benefits, according to a source who asked not to be named to discuss confidential details of the agreement.
The 42% compensation increase over the four-year contract is expected to cost the carrier C$1.9 billion.
After the end of South Africa’s policy of Apartheid, one would have thought that laws sorting people by race would be a thing of the past, right? Well, think again. As the Institute for Race Relations points out, from 1910 to the present 314 racial acts have been passed by their parliament. However, 117 of those acts have been adopted since 1994, and 141 racial acts are operative today.
Almost immediately [after 1994], however, the government began (re)enacting race law and pursuing racial policy. The two most notable instances of this are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. Various other pieces of legislation exist among dozens of charters, plans, regulations, directives, notices, and policies that attempt to regulate aspects of society along racial lines and racialise commerce.
If the Green Party ever gets ahold of the levers of government, western civilization will be done like dinner.
“We must stop the spread of anti-human and anti-constitutional content on the internet,” demanded Hofreiter, who serves as the chairman of the European Affairs Committee in the Bundestag. Violations of applicable law must be punished consistently. With regard to social networks, this means that they “will be blocked if necessary,” said the Green politician. This would also include the X platform owned by Elon Musk, which the left views as an imminent threat due to its emphasis on free speech, according to Frankfurter Rundschau.
Economist Frank Shostak delves into the perplexing issue of governments attempting to discern an “average” price level for the economy or calculating GDP “growth”. In a nutshell, the whole idea is nuts.
Suppose two transactions were conducted: In the first transaction, one TV set is exchanged for $1,000; in the second transaction, one shirt is exchanged for $40. The price or in the first transaction is $1000/1 TV set. The price in the second transaction is $40/1 shirt. In order to calculate the “average price,” we must add these two ratios together and divide them by two. But $1000/1 TV set cannot be added to $40/1 shirt, implying that it is not possible to establish the “average price.”
The employment of various sophisticated methods to calculate the “average price” cannot bypass the essential issue that it is not possible to establish an average price of various goods and services. Accordingly, various price indices that government statisticians compute are simply arbitrary numbers. If price deflators are meaningless, so is the real GDP statistic.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that government statisticians routinely “massage” unemployment numbers in order to allow their political bosses to claim that the economy is in better shape than it actually is. Economist Ryan McMaken delves into the mechanics of this smoke and mirrors game.
The establishment survey report shows that total jobs—a total that includes both part-time and full-time jobs—increased, month over month, in August by 142,000. The establishment survey measures only total jobs, however, and does not measure the number of employed persons. That means that even when job growth comes mostly from people working multiple part-time jobs, the establishment survey shows increases while the total number of employed persons does not. In fact, total employed persons can fall while total jobs increases. For instance, the total number of employed persons has fallen by 66,000 since August of 2023. This is in contrast to a gain of 2.3 million “jobs” in the establishment survey over the same period.
FDR began the food stamp Program in 1939.
The food stamp program is currently $120 billion / year
The food item most commonly bought on this program : soda
Noor Bin Ladin- Switzerland: The End of Free Speech
A friend of mine, who goes by the pseudonym “Barbouille” on X, has just been fined the hefty amount of CHF 4’800, approx $ 5’700 — for a tweet.
His crime? Calling out the indoctrination of children being taught what LGBTQI… stands for in a classroom, under a video posted by another account on March 24, 2023.
Economist Frank Shostak offers these insights as to how an economy comes to be saddled with massive malinvestments (EV plants come to mind) which must eventually be liquidated in a painful recession.
Whenever a central bank tampers with financial markets and manipulates the market interest rates this falsifies individuals’ “instructions” to businesses. As a result, businesses invest in the wrong infrastructure (i.e., not in line with individuals’ priorities). This ultimately undermines the process of wealth generation.
For instance, the central bank lowers the market interest rates while individuals have not lowered their time preferences. This means that people have not increased the supply of real savings. Businesses, however, attempt to increase investments in response to the central bank artificially lowering the interest rates. This will fail since there are not enough real savings to fund the buildup of the capital structure at that time.
I can think of a couple of issues besides plate tectonics where scientists have not lived up to the ideals mentioned. Can you?
One aspect of science, however, is a good model for our behavior, especially in times like these, when so many people seem to be sure that they are right and their opponents are wrong. It is the ability to say, “Wait—hold on. I might have been wrong.”
Not all scientists live up to this ideal, of course. But history offers admirable examples of scientists admitting they were wrong and changing their views in the face of new evidence and arguments. My favorite comes from the history of plate tectonics.
With all the talk of “stolen land” flying about these days, we need to keep in mind the ideas that gave rise to this non-concept.
…a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.
So what can be the harm in acknowledging every morning that Canadians live on stolen First Nations land? The problem is this: if you begin the day by acknowledging that your country, your society, and people of your ancestry are particularly egregious, this is a sure route to self-doubt, impotence and societal failure.
It’s a basic principle of economics that price controls negatively affect supply. But apparently that did not occur to the BC government when they decided to clamp down on Airbnb entrepreneurs. That, combined with the tapped out marginal consumer saying no to outrageous hotel and restaurant prices, is having some unpleasant effects.
Kelowna Boat Rentals has been booked solid in past years from July through August, but this year is different.
“Business has definitely been a little down this year. I think it’s mostly because of that Airbnb ban. That seems to be it. It’s kind of a ghost town down here compared to usual,” said Tom Entwistle, manager at Kelowna Boat Rentals.
“Last year was slightly slower, but we were still pretty much fully booked every day, and then this year we are at about 70 per cent capacity during the weekdays,” said Entwistle.
This will be the first in a multi-part series on what has happened with the Coutts trial, and the many, many questions which flow from it. As we all know, the mainstream media are not going to ask these questions, nor tell you the truth about what went on, because that is not their job, and the Canadian government is going to do everything they can to pretend like the last four years didn’t happen, and absolve themselves of any responsibility.
WIth what’s going on in the UK, and the looming possibility of Bill C-63 passing in Canada, getting to the bottom of the conspiracy against the Coutts men is of grave import to rights Canadians hold dear, such as the right to freedom of expression, and to protest. – Gord Magill
Blacklocks- Want More Curbs On Alcohol
Health Minister Mark Holland’s department has quietly researched “suggestions for regulatory measures” on alcohol like restricting glamourous depictions of drinking in the movies, says a federal report. It follows a proposal to mandate cancer warnings on liquor, beer and wine.
Given the disastrous outcomes of Covid pandemic policy and the massive backlash that it created, one would think that governments would go out of their way to avoid giving too much notice to those responsible for such fiascos, but apparently the government of Manitoba thinks otherwise.
Manitoba’s chief public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin is a physician, law school graduate, and familiar face to Manitobans as the province’s top public health authority and spokesperson during daily COVID-19 pandemic news conferences. A specialist in public health and preventive medicine, Dr. Roussin also brings an understanding of administrative law that was particularly helpful during the province’s COVID-19 response.
Functionaries like Roussin basically assumed the role of provincial dictator and divided their fiefdoms between “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, bankrupting many in the process. They also implemented such inanities such as restaurant masking rules and, in Manitoba, the bizarre measure that one could only golf with members of one’s household. Why do some insist on honoring such fools?
Global- British Columbia lifts COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health-care workers
B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has ended the COVID-19 public health emergency in British Columbia and ended the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in health-care settings.
However, the province is making it mandatory for health-care workers to disclose their immunization status, including COVID-19, influenza and measles vaccines.
Collecting these records will allow health-care administrators to make staffing decisions in the event of an exposure, outbreak, or future pandemic.
So the Bank of Canada cut interest rates again and dropped hints that more are on the way? So much for “normalizing” rates. But when your monetary system consists of an irredeemable fiat currency in which debt grows exponentially both by design and by intention, the only way to avoid widespread default and banking system collapse is by continually cutting interest rates. We’re on our way back to zero.
David Rosenberg, founder and president of Rosenberg Research & Associates Inc., said the central bank is behind on rate cuts and has a long way to go to bring balance back to the economy.
“The Bank of Canada is hardly done. This is the early stage of what will prove to be more than just a partial unwind of the most severe tightening cycle since the John Crow era of the late 1980s,” he said in a note to clients. “When you model out where the overnight rate should be in such a period of economic slack, it should be closer to two per cent than 4.5 per cent.”
Read the whole thing.
Montreal Gazette- French-language inspectors are cracking down on Montreal hospitals
Language inspectors from the Office québécois de la langue française are expanding the range of their inspections beyond businesses and are now targeting hospitals in the Montreal area, even going so far as to verify whether French is being spoken in operating rooms, The Gazette has learned.
It used to be said that the beauty of the dairy quota system was that taxpayers would never be on the hook for financial aid to dairy farmers. Leaving aside the obvious contradiction that tariffs on imported goods are actually a tax, it seems that tariff barriers just won’t do it anymore for milk producers.
Dairy Farmers of Canada will be receiving up to $5,000,000 over 5 years to advance sustainability and public trust in the dairy industry, leveraging the proAction quality assurance program. The proAction program ensures Canadian dairy farms maintain high standards in terms of environmental impact, food safety, animal care, and more.
DFC will also be receiving up to $3,572,786 over five years to build on their existing tools and strengthen DairyTrace to help protect and enhance animal health, public trust, and sustainability.
Next to FDR, Woodrow Wilson stands out as my least favorite President. Wilson ushered in the era of a meddlesome federal government and countless violations of individual rights. It’s not surprising to find that he was motivated by the collectivist philosophies that long dominated the field of education and consequently took root in our political systems.
“Wilson attended lectures about how history could be theorized in systematic terms that describe a progressive improvement of the human condition. He became absorbed by the philosophy of Georg Hegel. … In Hegel’s works, personal freedom was framed as a national ideal — only achieved when each individual fit a hierarchy that served the larger whole. Hegel’s ideas from the early 1800s aligned with an idea emergent in intellectual life in the early 1900s: applying biological principles to social and political conditions. Wilson … began to view individuals as cells or cogs within a living organism, which he analogized to the nation. As Wilson’s worldview solidified, he came to believe that the individual rights described in the Constitution, championed by Jefferson and Madison, were not immutable triumphs, but were instead subservient to transcendent ideals of national order and societal hierarchy.”
Driving- ‘Speed assist’ now mandatory on new vehicles in Europe
The system was a requirement on all newly-designed models starting in July 2022, but now it’s mandatory on all new vehicles registered in the E.U. as of July 7, 2024. The regulation allowed automakers to employ in their cars any of four options, all of which meet the requirements. Two of them are only warning systems, known as “informative” or “advisory” ISA — they make a warning sound, or a vibration through the steering wheel.