Blacklocks: Costs of federal employee salaries and benefits topped $67 billion last year, a record, Budget Officer Yves Giroux said yesterday. Giroux earlier described growth in payroll expenses as “worrisome.”
A Tidy Profit
A former University of Manitoba law dean has been given “the ultimate penalty” of disbarment in Manitoba after he misspent over half a million dollars in school funds, including racking up charges that amount to fraud, the provincial law society says.
Jonathan Black-Branch has been disbarred and his name has been removed from the Law Society of Manitoba’s rolls of barristers and solicitors, according to a Feb. 14 decision from a law society disciplinary committee.
He also was fined $36,000.
A Dragon No More?
After the death of Mao, China’s embrace of free markets sparked one of the largest economic booms the 20th century has ever seen. But is China now in regress as the communist party tries to widen its control over the economy?
Xi expects business as well as people to serve the CCP. As authoritarian controls metastasize throughout the economy, everyone suffers. For instance, even foreign enterprises now must accommodate party cells. The Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei reported on a Chinese “official, one of several who had helped introduce Western-style stock trading to China,” who cited “a worrisome trend of the party inserting itself more into companies’ affairs by pressuring them to accept Communist Party committees in their offices. ‘The whole thing about getting listed companies to set up party committees,’ he said, ‘is a reversal of what we had tried to do’.”
The Sun Is(has) Setting
On the British Empire.
Telegraph- I have glimpsed the terrifying future of lazy, defenceless, near-bankrupt Britain
Spending Political Capital
Before you’re even in office.
Well, At Least It’s Not Bugs
OK, but just the hearts.
Sewage, Sewage Everywhere…
What do you get when voters elect a party whose philosophy is based on nationalizing the mines, banks and monopoly industry? Not prosperity, that’s for sure. It looks like the only rainbows in the Rainbow Nation will be the ones you see in a river of sewage.
Bar Soap is Verboten!
Best Healthcare System in The World
Grab a beverage.
National Post- The Fall: My once-vibrant dad emerged broken from the hospital. Then he was gone
Falls are all-too common among the elderly and often foretell a deterioration in health.
It is the cause of 85 per cent of all injury-related hospitalizations among seniors in Canada, according to Health Canada. And rates have been increasing. Twenty to 30 per cent of seniors experience at least one fall a year and many, like my father, land in hospital as a result.
Spend a bit of time in an emergency department and it won’t take long to realize that many of those ambulances making their way to hospitals, lights flashing, are carrying an older person who has fallen.
Hurry up and wait…
I would only fully understand later how dangerous that time in a bed or a stretcher can be for the elderly. Every day, every hour, starts a downward slide of mobility and overall physical and mental health, which often prolongs their hospital stay in a dangerous feedback loop. That is especially true for the elderly.
For every day an older person spends lying in bed, it takes two days to recover the strength and function that has been lost. It also takes just eight hours lying on a stretcher for a frail elderly patient’s skin to begin to break down, which could lead to debilitating pressure ulcers, or bed sores. Typical waits in many Ontario emergency departments are nearing the 20-hour mark, but can sometimes be higher.
Sales Will No Doubt Rocket
Presumably, the way to “redress the visual narrative that LGBTQIA+ people look a certain way” is to celebrate the existence of dysmorphic and autogynephile men who are also devotes of bondage and sadomasochism, and who like to share photos of themselves posing with sex toys while flashing their collection of ladies’ knickers to random passers-by.
It also seems that the way to become more authentically “queer” – to express one’s true, inner self and who one really is – is to elaborately accessorise and play dress-up, and to pretend to be something that, by definition, one isn’t.
Other John Lewis employees highlighted in the Identity Project include an in-store nursery advisor and enthusiast of the ‘pup’ and ‘furry’ communities, and who is helpfully pictured wearing a bondage harness. Because that’s the mental image you want when shopping for baby paraphernalia.
Pandemic Myths
When I saw this latest interview with Dr. Clare Craig, author of Expired: Covid: The Untold Story, the first thing I thought of was why we never see any Canadian doctors speaking out against the standard narrative regarding Covid. Maybe that’s just another facet of “Canadian exceptionalism”, except that in this case it’s something to be ashamed of.
“…they must not allow themselves to be frightened by stories of a disease X no matter how frightening the stories are because it’s destructive to people’s mental health it’s destructive to their rational thinking and once you lose rational thought we end up in a crazy world again…”
Mortgage Blues
It’s rather stunning how rich some homeowners thought they were when interest rates crashed to near zero and the real estate market began to soar. Today, though, at least a few of them don’t feel so rich anymore.
I have two questions: Firstly, why did the bank approve this inflated mortgage in the first place? Secondly, how many more like this were also approved?
At the time, the property was listed for $465,000, but Hartmann says she paid $200,000 over the asking price.
“It was quite ludicrous, there were bidding wars and it was just really stressful,” said Hartmann.
But just seven months later, she was laid off from her well-paying job at Microsoft and at the same time, soaring interest rates nearly doubled her mortgage.
Hartmann said she tried to sell her house through two different realtors and ended up handing the keys over to Scotiabank in November.
A Territorial Struggle
You Will Walk, And Be Happy
Are they just that stupid? Or are they trying to gas light us? It’s probably both.
Sun- Feds won’t fund new roads, existing network ‘perfectly adequate,’ Guilbeault says
Adding new roads and new lanes on existing roads encourages more congestion and car use, the former Greenpeace activist said, according to the Montreal Gazette.
Bicycles For All!
If Canadians ever thought we might get a four lane highway coast to coast, they can forget about that while these clowns are in power.
“Our government has made the decision to stop investing in new road infrastructure. Of course we will continue to be there for cities, provinces and territories to maintain the existing network, but there will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network. The analysis we have done is that the network is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have.
Must Be An Election Coming
In 2024-an election year-the left is trying to undo what it created without explaining why and what they did to us and themselves as well. – Victor Davis Hanson
The Revolution Will Be Televised
Grab a beverage.
Tom Luongo- The Great Reset is Dead, Long Live the Great Reset
Spoken like the true authoritarian that he is, Harari can only see violence and chaos. He’s not wrong. The violence and chaos coming, however, have their roots in his attempts (or complicity) in trying to force, through violence, a global order on humanity which humanity doesn’t want.
This push towards violence, however, can stop tomorrow. All that has to happen is for cretins like Harari, Soros, Schwab, Gates, and all the people behind them, to truly accept the fact that they have failed and cut a deal with us.
Tantrum Time
Faced with the news that his media water-carriers are in financial trouble, Maximum Leader publicly berates them for failing to conjure up non-existent customers. Not at all shocking for a man who sees no need for boundaries between the state and the economy.
A fired-up Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unleashed on Bell on Friday, calling its move to layoff thousands of employees — including hundreds of journalists — a “garbage decision.”
“I’m pretty pissed off about what’s just happened,” Trudeau said during a press conference in Toronto.
“This is the erosion not just of journalism, of quality local journalism at a time where people need it more than ever, given misinformation and disinformation…. It’s eroding our very democracy, our abilities to tell stories to each other.”
(From Kate) Drama Queen: the PM had at least 16 weeks statutory notice from Bell about layoffs of this magnitude so “garbage decision” & “pretty pissed off” were hardly “from the heart”.
Socialist Boomerangs
It’s a basic fact of economics that it’s not the entrepreneur who determines wages, but the marginal consumer. Gig workers in Seattle are discovering that truth the hard way.
The Pay Up Legislation, as the city regards it, was meant to improve wages for gig workers by entitling them to “minimum pay,” or in other words, pay based on the time worked and miles traveled for each offer.
“Sundays before the ordinance,” Lardizabal. “You know, we’d be thinking breakfast. Today, I didn’t even touch it. They’re not going to order. It is definitely backfiring.”
“Assuming that you are working constantly, then yes, you’re going to be making that much money. But that’s not what’s happening right now. Because people are not ordering as much anymore. The tips are going down because they think we’re making all this money.”