Category: nannystate

Circling The Drain

Is the federal NDP a political party or a suicide pact?

the all-anglophone field stumbled through November’s French debate in Montreal. Interim leader Don Davies even jokingly called the Franglais-filled evening a morale booster for the Bloc Québécois.

Activist and filmmaker Avi Lewis comes into the debate as the clear frontrunner…. He’s also driven much of the conversation with progressive proposals like a public option for groceries, national wealth tax for the top one per cent of Canadians and a so-called Green New Deal to transition fossil-fuel workers to sustainable industries.

 

Taxes For Detox

It’s one thing to admit that BC’s approach to hard drugs has failed, but it’s another to offer up taxpayer funded treatment programs for every addict for as long as it takes as the alternative. I’m pretty sure that Elenore Sturko’s not planning to fund any of that on her own.

“If someone voluntarily wants to get help, I am your biggest champion,” she counters. “I want you to walk into any door and to be able to say, ‘I want detox today, and I need to go to treatment, and I’d like lifelong support and counselling if I need it, and a nice place to live that’s drug-free and safe for me.’

Money For Nothing

Why spend $6 million to lecture people on how to be more productive? Will this “partnership” take a look at the productivity destroying structure of supply mismanagement, or how Dougie Ford’s embargo on Crown Royal has much the same effect? I somehow doubt it.

The federal government has announced a $6 million grant aimed at improving Canada’s economic productivity through a cross-country research partnership.

The funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is to be spread out over 15 years.

Sane Ideas

At least a few boomers are quietly suggesting that Old Age Security spending be reined in by some means. Stephen Harper tried something similar by raising the age of eligibility to 67, but Trudeau Junior reversed that. Hopefully this gains traction this time around.

OAS is currently Canada’s costliest federal program, eating up roughly one in every six dollars of federal spending. This amounted to a total of $85.5 billion in 2025-26 and is expected to exceed $100 billion annually by the end of the decade. Paul Kershaw, head of Generation Squeeze, said in a media briefing on Tuesday that policymakers can ill afford to ignore ballooning OAS costs at a time of “heightened geopolitical instability and economic uncertainty.”

Cult Classic

Maybe it’s time for a passive/aggressive approach to idiotic court rulings. In this case, I’d suggest putting every single story house on Bonaire on stilts and/or prohibiting the occupation of the first floor on multi-floor buildings. That much stair climbing will see that residents grow tired of climate change hysteria in short order.

A court on Wednesday ordered the Dutch government to draw up a plan to protect residents on the tiny Caribbean island of Bonaire from the effects of climate change — a sweeping victory for the islanders.

The Hague District Court, in a stunning rebuke of Dutch authorities, also ruled that the government discriminated against the island’s 20,000 inhabitants by not taking “timely and appropriate measures” to protect them from climate change before it’s too late.

That Sinking Feeling

If Carney’s polling numbers hold up, a spring election is a distinct possibility, and a Liberal majority would be the likely outcome. The reason is simple enough: once again, NDP and Bloc voters are stampeding to the Liberals. Inevitably, some will suggest that the Tories reinvent themselves to appeal to the left, but a string of electoral defeats with Red Tories at the helm points to the futility of that gambit. If that’s the best conservatives could do, why have a conservative party at all?

From coast to coast, Léger finds Mark Carney’s Liberals at 47% support among decided voters, up four points since Léger’s previous poll back in December. And this newfound support for the Liberals does not come at the expense of the Conservatives, who sit at 38%, themselves up two points.

Cramped Spaces

Here’s a suggestion for Canadian airline regulators: maybe if foreign carriers were allowed to compete in the Canadian market, domestic airlines wouldn’t try to make their planes even more of a cattle car than they already are.

In the wake of a backlash sparked by a viral video, WestJet has cancelled a new seat configuration that squeezed an extra row on board many of its planes and left passengers with less legroom.

Already installed on 22 of WestJet’s Boeing 737s, the non-reclining seats in a majority of the cabin’s economy section featured the smallest amount of leg room on any large Canadian carrier.

 

Clown Country

Decline Watch;

An arbitrator has ordered the reinstatement of an Ontario postman fired for hoarding at least 6,000 pieces of mail during the summer of 2022 because Canada Post wasn’t aware of his post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hyun Min Jang was terminated from his job as a rural and suburban mail carrier in King City, Ont., “for misdirection and delay of mail, as a result of the discovery of thousands of pieces of undelivered mail in his personal vehicle,” according to a recent decision from Kathleen G. O’Neil, the arbitrator.

Stuff At The Expense of Others

So Mamdani is instituting free daycare for New Yorkers? It’s policies that make me wonder why any Republican would want Canada as a 51st state. Taxpayer financed child, medical and now dental care are commonplace functions of the state here since we are presently governed by a host of Mamdani clones. Political integration would add nearly insurmountable pressure to fully socialize these sectors of the American economy.

New York City parents may soon have access to free child care for their 2-year-olds, under a plan unveiled Thursday by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a major boon for city’s mayor on one of his signature campaign promises just days into his new job.

Blubbering Dougie

More evidence that Canada is not a serious country. Given that Crown Royal is distilled in Gimli, Ford’s decision effectively imposes economic sanctions on Manitoba.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says to “stock up” on Crown Royal, confirming he plans to strip the Canadian whisky from the shelves of the LCBO in retaliation for a planned plant closure.

It said bottling at the factory intended for the U.S. market will be shifting stateside, while bottling for Canadian consumers will relocate to its Valleyfield, Que., location.

Fly The Expensive Skies

We can’t be considered a serious country when the airline regulator stipulates the exact number of weekly flights a foreign carrier can offer out of Canada. And people still wonder why Canadian air fares are punishingly expensive.

Ottawa is loosening restrictions on the number of flights coming from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after past diplomatic spats had limited flights.

Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon announced the government is expanding air transport agreements to allow as many as 14 passenger flights per week from Saudi Arabia — up from four.  The latest deal also includes as many as 35 passenger flights a week from the U.A.E., up from a maximum of 21. Plus unlimited cargo flights from both countries.

The Zero Percent Interest Miracle

Back in the 1980’s it was fashionable to proclaim that Japan, with an allegedly superior mixture of central planning and free markets, would soon own the world. It now looks like they can’t even maintain their own world, let alone anyone else’s. Decades of embracing Keynesian economics have resulted in a very bitter harvest.

Once famously derided for building bridges to nowhere, Japan’s government is now struggling to maintain them.

Even before the quake, Suzu was struggling to carry out routine maintenance of infrastructure due to money and manpower shortages. Over the past 25 years, its municipal tax revenue dropped 43% as the working-age population nearly halved. In the Noto region, the labor force fell by about 30% in the 15 years through 2020, compared to the roughly 10% drop nationwide…

 

Dairy Farmers Uber Alles!

It’s no surprise that the US sees Canadian supply mismanagement as a major trade irritant; I sincerely hope they don’t back down in trade talks this time around.

Washington’s trade representative says a coming review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico trade deal will hinge on resolving concerns about Canadian policies on dairy products, alcohol and digital services.

Like clockwork, the water carriers for Big Dairy are falling in line:

Carney said Canada has been clear about its intention to protect the supply management of agricultural products. “We continue to stand by that,” he said at a news conference in Ottawa with Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Money For Nothing

Yet another example of what happens when a bunch of politicians scream “emergency” and a gullible John Q. Public largely falls for it. This reminds me of a Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to explain to Jerry what happens when a company makes a bad investment decision: “They just write it off, Jerry!”

Ontario wrote off more than one billion items of personal protective equipment at a cost of $1.4 billion since 2021 and is now burning expired products, the province’s auditor general found.

The province signed long-term contracts for PPE between October 2020 and April 2021 that locked it into buying 188 million surgical masks annually. Yet it only distributed 39 million of those masks last year, or 21 per cent.

Union Mentality

The last time I checked, the NFU was down to a handful of members and were being led by “farmers” so far outside the mainstream that they hardly qualified as such. I don’t know what’s worse: that these clowns are demanding a form of UBI for farmers, or that a mainstream media outlet reports on it so uncritically.

Farmers want Ottawa to set up a 10-year pilot project that would ensure they receive an annual income of at least $50,000, a rate that would rise by inflation every year.

David Thompson, executive director of the union, says a guaranteed income would help stabilize farmers’ incomes, which are often unstable.

Now they’re channeling Zoran Mamdani and this nonsense gets breathlessly regurgitated by the same bunch of toadies.

One resolution calls for the union to lobby the federal government to introduce legislation that would put a cap on the profits of major grocery chains that control the lion’s share of the market.

Another resolution calls on union to create a national coalition pressing the federal government to purchase food directly from farmers to be sold at cost in a “network of national/provincial/municipal public grocery stores.”

The Cheque Is In The Mail

I’m suspicious about the impact of these measures for a few reasons: voluntary departures come with severance; government retirement plans often require funding out of general revenue so early retirement just means more losses to cover; many eliminated jobs are potential positions as opposed to actual ones, and the timeline is an entire decade.

He said the company will use “attrition first” to downsize from the roughly 62,000 people it employed at the end of last year.

The company expects to shed 16,000 employees through retirement or voluntary departures by 2030, with an additional 14,000 leaving by 2035.

Quantum Shift?

If Kamala Harris were proposing that the federal government take ownership stakes in private companies, I can hazard a guess that Republicans would loudly oppose it. What’s going on with a party that has traditionally opposed government ownership of the means of production?

The Trump administration is in talks with the likes of Rigetti Computing (RGTI), IonQ (IONQ) and D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) to take equity stakes in them in exchange for federal funding, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Wishful Thinking

At this point, I doubt that any measures are going to amount to anything other than flogging a dead horse.

Ottawa said the corporation is losing about $10 million per day, despite providing a $1-billion injection earlier this year to keep it operational. Since 2018, Canada Post has accumulated more than $5 billion in losses including more than $1 billion last year alone.

But Canada Post’s business model is meant to support communities across the country — especially those in remote locations who are hardest for private firms to reach — rather than chase profits, said Ann Armstrong, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Management and Innovation.

“There is something sacrosanct about a postal service,” she said.

“It seems to me the model is perfectly viable and needs to be preserved, if perhaps costs and so on need to be adjusted.”

 

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