CTV- Niagara Region ‘proactively’ declares state of emergency ahead of total solar eclipse
Tax Me Harder!
The last thing any municipal ratepayer in this country needs is for their city to gain the ability to get their hands on your income. Income taxes are outrageously high as it is and adding another predatory level of government into the mix will only make that worse. But that doesn’t stop socialist think tanks from proposing such nonsense, which is then uncritically regurgitated by the leftist corporate media.
Macdonald believes the City of Vancouver alone could net a further $100 million annually if it could collect a one per cent tax on annual incomes over $56,000.
Conservative in Name Only
If even a conservative government can rack up this kind of debt, there’s no comfort in knowing that a liberal government would rack it up even faster. There’s virtually no political constituency for smaller government left anywhere on the planet, perhaps with the exception of Argentina.
Ontario is delaying its path to balance as lethargic economic growth drags the province’s books further into the red, with a $9.8-billion budget deficit projected for the coming fiscal year.
The deficit for 2024-25 is almost double what the province projected in the fall economic update. That document had also eyed a return to surplus the following year, which was already delayed a year from the 2023 budget. Bethlenfalvy now projects that a small surplus will not happen until 2026-27. In 2025-26, the deficit is forecast to be $4.6 billion.
I Want A New Country
RCMP- Saskatchewan RCMP begin Mandatory Alcohol Screenings (MAS) on routine traffic stops
In 2018, the MAS became part of the Criminal Code Section 320.27(2), being a lawful demand of a breath sample from any driver of a motor vehicle, without the need for reasonable suspicion. Drivers will not be pulled over for the sole purpose of completing a MAS – the MAS will only be requested once a driver is pulled over for other various traffic violations (i.e. speeding, careless driving, brake lights not working, etc.).
The Broken Record
You could erase the dates in this article and aside from the monetary amounts there would be no way to tell whether it was written today or 5, 10, 20 or 50 years ago. No half-awake thinker need be perpetually stumped as to why an economic system premised on the Soviet model doesn’t suddenly produce great outcomes. Note to Canada’s developers of aboriginal policy: stop banging your head against the wall.
“Time after time, whether in housing, policing, safe drinking water or other critical areas, our audits of federal programs to support Canada’s Indigenous Peoples reveal a distressing and persistent pattern of failure,” Hogan said at a press conference Tuesday.
“The lack of progress clearly demonstrates that the government’s passive, siloed approach is ineffective, and, in fact, contradicts the spirit of true reconciliation.”
It’s the fourth time since 2003 that the auditor general has held the government responsible for unsafe and unsuitable First Nations housing.
Mercantilist Pensions
Rather than tackle the pressing question as to why pension funds have decreased the their investments in Canada from 28% in 2000 to 3% today, a gaggle of milquetoast business leaders is demanding that Ottawa force those pension funds to invest within Canada despite lower returns. It’s as if these Wesley Mouch types believe that a depressed business climate is an unalterable fact of nature.
Government has the right, responsibility and obligation to regulate how this savings regime operates,” says the letter signed by dozens including BlackBerry Ltd founder Jim Balsillie, Metro Inc. chief executive Eric La Flèche, the CEOs of telecommunications companies Telus Corp., Rogers Communications Inc. and Quebecor Inc., and former Bank of Nova Scotia and Air Canada CEOs Brian Porter and Calin Rovinescu.
“We think the government does have some right to have an influence over the regime” in which these large funds operate, he said. “But we’re not suggesting the government tells these pension funds exactly where to invest.”
The Part I Like Best
About Safe Supply programs is the way it gets drugs off the street and squeezes organized crime out of the trafficking business.
“We have noted an alarming trend over the last year in the amount prescription drugs located during drug trafficking investigations, noting they are being used as a form of currency to purchase more potent, illicit street drugs. Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs, some of which are then moved out of British Columbia and resold. The reselling of prescription drugs significantly increases the profits realized by Organized Crime,” states Cpl. Jennifer Cooper, Media Relations Officer for the Prince George RCMP.
All Hail the Prison State!
I guess that for some people, lockdowns presented a unique opportunity to live the kind of insular, fearful life they always wanted, except that they would not be seen as the odd man out.
https://twitter.com/TristanVeness/status/1764086395705160031
Fire Sale!
If a privately run pension fund made these kinds of investment blunders, it probably wouldn’t be long for this world. But if the state pension does it, presumably they can just up the contributions from their captive audience.
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has done three deals at discounted prices, selling its interests in a pair of Vancouver towers, a business park in Southern California and a redevelopment project in Manhattan, with the New York stake offloaded for the eyebrow-raising price of just US$1.
Around the same time, CPPIB sold its 45 per cent stake in Santa Monica Business Park, which the fund also owned with Boston Properties, for US$38 million. That’s a discount of almost 75 per cent to what CPPIB paid for its share of the property in 2018.
Your Criminal Future
The notion of prior restraint, or the idea that a person can be sanctioned today for a crime that he has not yet committed, but might commit in the future, just got a whole new lease on life in Canada. This idea gained traction during the pandemic when people were forced to quarantine despite the absence of any evidence that they were carrying Covid, so it’s not surprising to see some innovative totalitarians finding new uses for evil ideas.
Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already.
The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at home, the bill says.
Compliance Costs
If I were a Minnesotan, supposedly I would sleep at lot easier at night knowing that the state was ready to protect me from all those unscrupulous house painters out there.
The legislation, which was posted online February 15, would restrict the “sale of certain solvent-based paint materials to licensees; [establish] a paint contractor board; [and require] licensing for paint contractors and journeyworker painters.”
So regardless of their motivations, Minnesota lawmakers are at best offering an immoral “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist. At worst, they are weaponizing the law to benefit special interests.
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’.”
Bar Soap is Verboten!
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…”
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.”
“The Last Refuge of the Pointless Politician
Spiked- I ban, therefore I am
Beware a politician in search of a legacy. Rishi Sunak, in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, to point to as an achievement, has taken to banning things that this teetotal, straight-edge prime minister has probably never tried and clearly doesn’t understand.
The Bad Argument Contest Winner Is….
While John Ivison starts out with a sensible premise, that the Trudeau liberals are sending the Canadian economy off the rails, he can’t seem to resist sending his own op-ed off the rails by attempting to associate a discredited Keynesian nostrum with libertarian Argentinian President Javier Milei.
At the same time, Milei’s invocation of the animal spirits of wealth creation is all but absent from the collectivist capitalism pushed by Freeland and Justin Trudeau.
It gets even worse when Ivison blames the 2008 financial collapse not on inept monetary policy driven by a failing fiat currency system but rather on the leftist boogeyman of “deregulation”.
What about the crash of 2008, which was the product of too little regulation, rather than too much?
Ban All The Things!
At the Conservative Party conference last year, Sunak decided that making England ‘smoke-free’ would be his chapter in history. So he announced Britain’s biggest experiment in prohibition for generations: a phased-in ban on tobacco products that will mean today’s 15-year-olds will never legally be able to buy cigarettes.
Now Sunak is going after disposable vapes, too. This is despite the fact that vapes are at least 95 per cent safer than cigarettes and currently help between 50,000 and 70,000 people in England quit cigarettes each year, giving ex-smokers the pleasure of puffing without the considerable health risks. We can’t be having that, it seems.
Universal Basic Insolvency
If our experience with pandemic “emergency benefits” is any guide, when you pay people not to work, then lo and behold they are unlikely to…work. It will be no different if the magical non-concept of Universal Basic Income ever sees the light of day.
As for the notion that under UBI people will be free to become “care givers” to loved ones, I can foresee a whole lot of youngsters becoming “care givers” to their PlayStation instead.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer produced an analysis in 2021 that concluded that a national guaranteed basic income using parameters of Ontario’s 2017 pilot project could cut Canada’s poverty rate by half in just one year, but at a hefty cost of $91 billion in 2024–25 and $93 billion in 2025–26. That’s nearly double what Ottawa spends, for example, on health transfers to the provinces.