Rising compliance costs are one big reason for the sharp increase in housing and construction prices, and while some levels of government express concern and desire to lower those costs, other jurisdictions can’t wait to saddle builders with even bigger burdens.
B.C. construction projects with more than 25 workers must have access to a flushable toilet, according to a law to be introduced by Premier David Eby.
The Twitter post doesn’t mention penalties, but a hate crime is, well, a hate crime. The city of London is watching you….
What is a Disability Hate Crime? A hate crime is any criminal offence that is motivated by hostility/prejudice based upon the victim's disability or perceived disability. For example, if a person calls someone who is blind a horrible name, then that is a Hate Crime #NationalHCAW pic.twitter.com/SZGHRD6GZ6
— Bromley MPS (@MPSBromley) October 16, 2023
After listening to this fool trying to explain what she saw during the Ottawa protest, you have to come to the conclusion that the last place Tamara Lich and Chris Barber should be is in a courtroom being subjected to this circus. There’s a crucial difference between describing events that you actually saw as opposed to describing events that you imagined that you saw.
“I didn’t feel safe but it’s hard to describe it as unsafe at the same time…”
“…when they’re bouncing their trucks and their cars…..[long pause]…..I don’t know how to describe it other than roaring at us…like, roaring at me with these large giant vehicles…”
Listen for the pause… You can’t ignore it. pic.twitter.com/TgqgEWa0YO
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) October 16, 2023
For many years, I asked roomfuls of doctors and nurses how employers might help stanch Americans’ rapid increase in obesity. Their answers usually fit this cloistered stereotype:
“My office had a walkathon competition.”
“My company opened a gymnasium for employees.”
“My employer pays 50 percent of gym membership costs.”
“We have twice-weekly yoga classes in the boardroom.”
“Human Resources offers wellness classes.”
“Our cafeteria offers healthy options.”
Ask the same medical professionals what the government and other employers ought to do to fight obesity, and the answers reflexively veered toward “encourage or require employers to do all those things my employer does.”
The problem is that many of America’s most serious health problems reside in people whose lives and jobs do not remotely resemble those of healthcare professionals or policy-shapers.
Three years ago, the principle of informed consent was unceremoniously dumped as a guidepost for public health matters. Most of the population seemed to have nearly limitless confidence in those who employed central planning to manage a pandemic response. Despite the subsequent train wreck, we are still seeing many individuals professing shock that they have been misled, once again.
When Brad MacLeod visited a pharmacy in Ancaster last week to get a COVID-19 vaccination, he was quite pleased. It was his sixth shot. But that happiness turned to alarm the next morning when MacLeod checked his vaccine certificate and realized he had received the same bivalent COVID-19 shot he received last November instead of the one he wanted — the new monovalent vaccine targeting the XBB.1.5 subvariant.
And who knew that the U of T has a Faculty of Information?
“There’s so much confusion around emerging variants and new vaccines and which protects against which that it’s very difficult for experts to stay abreast of what’s going on,” said Colin Furness, assistant professor with the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information…
I suggest we go one step further: simply close down supply mismanagement and end the marketing boards altogether.
BREAKING: Food manufacturers, retailers urgently urging Canadian Dairy Commission (@CDC_Dairy), a Crown corporation, to temporarily postpone upcoming annual announcement of milk price increases scheduled for November 1st.@L_MacAulay @SenateCA @SenatorRobBlack @dfc_plc
— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) October 10, 2023
The fact that we are now living in a world in which innovation in social media has fostered an asymmetric system with zero barriers to entry is something to be celebrated, not decried. That won’t stop media dinosaurs like Andrew Coyne, however, from pining for the “good old days” when authority figures with sufficient financial resources could just prevent people from seeing information they didn’t like.
I have a suggestion for Andrew: instead of labelling ideas you disagree with as disinformation and branding their proponents as lunatics, get busy and offer some counter arguments. Maybe the reason you feel defeated is because your arguments are ineffective, non-existent or just plain wrong. It is also possible to offer a bad argument in favor of a good idea. Let that sink in.
https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1710461278957760892
This gambit could go one of two ways: either the government quietly forgets about it in a few months, or they become indignant with the lack of “progress” and impose price controls. I don’t think anything is really off the table at this point.
Champagne said the federal government is establishing a “grocery task force” within the Office of Consumer Affairs that will be focused on monthly monitoring of grocers’ commitments and actions taken by others in the food industry.
Champagne said plans are still in the works to establish a grocery “code of conduct” to support fairness and transparency in the sector, and to create a new food price “data hub” to allow better access to information about the price of food in Canada.
As SDA readers are well aware of, any conservative or libertarian who challenges popular narratives on almost any topic is bound to be branded a conspiracy theorist these days. In this talk, Dr. Philip McMillan notes that academia seems to be going all out to create new terms like “conspiracy mindedness” in an effort to attack ideas that they don’t like. In rebuttal, he proposes a new term that deserves to gain some traction: naivete mindedness.
“It would be very interesting if they did a similar conspiracy theory scale looking at a naivete mindedness scale so they look at the opposite end: those people who don’t question anything, who go along completely with what they’re told even if what they’re told doesn’t necessarily make sense… that’s the naivety minded sense and it would be interesting to see what the outcomes of those kinds of research would be anyway.”
It’s hard to say. Maybe he missed the football once or twice and kicked himself in the head. Even if he didn’t, he ought to be aware that one of the few things putting a barrier between this country and a dictatorship is the free exchange of ideas over the internet. Take down that barrier and we’re essentially done like dinner.
This is good.
This is needed globally.
Disinformation is an enemy to democracy and decency.
Social media platforms and online streaming very obviously must be regulated. https://t.co/ABHBAnqbiL— Troy Westwood (@TroyWestwood) October 1, 2023
When you see media articles puzzling over how the pandemic seems to have made society less civil, you just have to wonder how brain dead someone must be not to have seen this coming.
A lot has happened in the time since March 2020, and some Canadians feel that one of the characteristics the country used to be known for – kindness – may no longer be an accurate stereotype.
They’ve turned to social media to ask whether anyone else has noticed society being “increasingly unkind” and “disrespectful” since the pandemic.
CTV is soliciting opinions in regard to this problem, but it’s unlikely anyone who strays from the narrative is going to see their thoughts publicized.
Any predictions out there as to who is going to triumph in the Manitoba provincial election being held on October 3rd?
Here’s mine: The tax and spend party is going to win out over the borrow and spend party.
Here’s why: voters are upset that seven years of rule by the borrow and spend party have not fixed socialized medicine. As happens in every election cycle, each party takes a stab at trying to make this centrally planned system function. It’s now the NDP’s turn to engage in a vain effort to accomplish the impossible. No one dares challenge the single payer model since that would result in electoral defeat.
Wab Kinew’s plan to reopen the ERs closed by the Tories is only going to happen by shifting staff from other areas, since extra staff are largely unobtainable. If you really want to determine the proper number of ERs that Manitoba needs, you would have to allow free interaction between health care practitioners and consumers in the context of a system with actual price signals. Since we have neither, good luck to Wab.
One really has to wonder why any investor would ever sink a dime into France.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday the government would ask the fuel industry to sell at cost price and would grant 100 euros ($106.52) in aid to the poorest workers who drive to work, to stem the impact of inflation on households.
“The Prime Minister will bring together all the players in the sector this week and we will ask them to sell at cost price, that is to say that no one makes a margin,” Macron said in an interview with France’s TF1 and France 2 television stations.
@zerohedge – Total US Debt surpasses $33 trillion for the first time. For those keeping tabs, the US added $1 trillion in debt in three (3) months.
In Weimar Germany there was a political party, the Democrats, whose motto was “Nothing will sway us from the middle road”. By creating a party based on the non-concept of “moderation”, however, they wound up helping to build a society that embraced outright statism. It seems that history is rhyming again in Canada. Hopefully, voters won’t fall for it.
Canadian Future is the brainchild of Centre Ice Canadians, formerly known as Centre Ice Conservatives. It was founded in April 2022 when it became clear that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had a huge lead in the Conservative leadership race. They preposterously claimed the party was moving too far to the right, and desired a supposedly more moderate political alternative.
Radical centrists are more naturally at home with the Liberals, NDP, Greens and others on the political left. How do they expect to gain support in an even more crowded political field? With ex-Conservatives at the helm, and policies on trade, democracy, the environment and health care that wouldn’t sway many left-leaning Canadians, I have no earthly idea.
With rampant crime infesting so many inner cities in North America, is it really any wonder that large retailers are exiting those environs? Responding with a proposal for state-owned food stores is about as far from a solution as you could possibly get, but these days it seems to be par for the course.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he wants to open city-owned grocery stores to serve neighborhoods that have become “food deserts” after four Walmart stores and a Whole Foods closed.
Johnson announced last week that his administration would partner with the nonprofit advocacy group Economic Security Project to put stores in underserved areas of the city — a proposal Republicans called something out of “Soviet-style central planning.“
The misappropriation of millions of dollars is a feature, not a bug, of systems guided by short-term, “emergency” thinking. Or rather, a complete lack of thinking.
Rai led a “fraudulent scheme” targeting the hotel and PHAC officials, according to the statement of claim, telling the other owners the government was taking over the entire hotel but only paying for 100 rooms — when he had actually negotiated government payment for all 247 rooms.
It’s alleged he misappropriated the revenue difference of those 147 rooms: at least $15.7 million.
Friends of Canadian Socialism….oh, wait, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, says that Canadians ought to boycott Instagram and Facebook essentially for complying with the edicts of the Trudeau government. The first thing that popped into my mind when I read this is, “Are these dinosaurs still around?” I remember their frantic assertions in the early 1980s that Canadian TV would soon be destroyed by cable TV due to the boogeyman of “audience fragmentation”. That was, of course, prior to satellite TV and long before streaming services even existed.
The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting group is asking people to stop posting content on Meta’s platforms on Aug. 23 and 24.
The group says the move is meant to show that Canadians won’t be pushed around by Meta, which decided to pull news from Canadian publishers from its platforms in response to legislation that recently passed.
There’s two ways to comply with Canada’s recent legislation regarding online news: either pay every time a user on your social media platform links to said news, or block the link and pay nothing. Meta has chosen the latter option.
The federal government’s response: We demand that you make a different choice! If you don’t, well, …. we’ll complain a lot because what else can you do when you’ve painted yourself into a corner.
The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a “reckless” ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country.
Chris Bittle, a legislator for the ruling Liberal Party, complained on Thursday that “Meta’s actions to block news are reckless and irresponsible.”
The fact that the idea of parking interest rates permanently at zero gets any academic attention at all, is in itself worrisome. It’s no secret that this was an idea embraced by none other than John Maynard Keynes, who thought it would be the key to effortless financing of whatever projects a central planner might dream up.
If the interest rate were permanently zero, the government’s fiscal levers of taxation and spending would be the alternative means of controlling inflation.
Naturally, this nonsense goes hand in hand with direct central bank control of individual spending decisions:
Also worth mentioning is the current push by the Bank of England towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), in which buyers and sellers would transfer money directly without having to use the banking system. This could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets. If inflation was controlled using only fiscal levers, CBDCs could be used to reinforce this policy.