VITRIOLIC LETTER POSTED BY WOKE SCHOOL TRUSTEES

   At a Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) meeting earlier this week, the board’s non-woke trustees expressed concern with the vitriolic and defensive letter posted last Friday evening.
   The anonymous and unsigned open letter was a response to a scathing but entirely accurate speech by concerned parent David Todor a week earlier addressing the board’s obsession with gender identity and sexual orientation.
   Trustee Mike Ramsay called out education director Jeewan Chanicka for issuing the “disrespectful” letter without coming back to the board for approval – adding that certain board members may have signed off on the letter in secret.
   The subsequent responses from Chanicka and his sycophant trustees proved to me that most of those on the board are part of a cult that has nothing to do with teaching students academics.

ABOUT THOSE SUSTAINABLE WELL-PAYING JOBS IN THE JUST TRANSITION

     Jack Mintz:  That’s over 2.7 million jobs — almost 14 per cent of all jobs in Canada. Seamus O’Regan, the federal labour minister, struggles to put job-killing in a better light as “ensuring an equitable and prosperous future for workers and communities to take full advantage of the transition to a net-zero future.”
    The leaked federal document’s agenda is to replace lost jobs with jobs that are sustainable jobs, but not necessarily well-paying. Oil and gas workers earn salary and benefits equal to $98 per hour in the oilsands or $78/hr in petroleum and coal manufacturing (based on 2021 data ). Replacing those with anything similar will be hard. Jobs in the critical minerals sector are closer to the mark, at $65/hr, but still represent a big income hit for oil and gas workers. The federal government extolls the virtues of clean-tech jobs but they average only $48/hr, not much more than the average Canadian worker earns ($41/hr).
   When lost in a just transition fog, politicians in some countries feather-bed their own public service with laid-off workers whether they’re needed or not. Canada’s non-military federal employees averaged an extraordinary $75/hr in 2021, so the income would at least be in the ballpark. But in the long run being paid handsomely for zero-value “work” isn’t even good for the “workers.”

SENDING TANKS TO UKRAINE

   The West is poised to send nearly 200 battle tanks to Ukraine in a potential hammer blow that could help Kyiv win its war against Vladimir Putin.
   It came after Germany last night succumbed to weeks of international pressure and agreed to donate some of its Leopard 2 tanks.
   Berlin also relented on allowing other countries such as Poland to re-export German-made Leopard 2s, which could happen within days.
   Meanwhile, the United States dropped its opposition to sending M1 Abrams tanks, potentially dozens of them, in an escalation of its involvement.

GERMAN FREEDOM CONVOY SUPPORTER TO TOUR CANADA

   A European politician who rebuked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in front of the European Union Parliament last year has announced a Canadian tour to meet the people she says are the bravest in the world.
   German MEP Christine Anderson has booked tour venues in Alberta, Quebec and Ontario this February because she says she has grown fond of Canadians since seeing their resistance to what she describes as a totalitarian regime in Canada.
   “Canadian truckers, they just stood up,” she said in an interview with Rebel News on Friday. “And they just said ‘No, we’re not going to put up with this. We will fight for […] our freedom.’ That takes a lot of courage, and a lot of bravery. I was so impressed by that.”

CANADA COULD BE GREEN AND WEALTHY

   Driving the streets of Doha in Qatar, a country soon to become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the words “there has never been a strong business case for LNG” rang in my ears.
   For a country that had struggled to economically survive for 60 years after the collapse of the pearl-diving industry in the 1940s, the contrast today is astounding. In only 20 years, due exclusively to its vast natural gas reserves and ability to commercialize them via liquefaction, Qatar has grown its gross domestic product tenfold, amassed a sovereign wealth fund worth more than US$450 billion, and used its LNG revenue to build brand new cities with infrastructure that is the envy of the world, or at least most Western nations.
   With the Government of Canada set to release details of its long-term vision for its oil and gas sector, impacting its 202,000 workers and investors alike, are there any lessons that we can learn from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries? Rather than vilifying their oil and natural gas sectors, these countries are championing them, using their resource wealth to grow their economies, and slowly diversify away from hydrocarbon reliance while significantly investing in alternative energy. Could Canada and the environment be better off adopting a similar all-of-the-above strategy instead of its current either/or approach?

NO EVIDENCE OF CLAIMS MADE IN CBC NEWS STORY

   The Alberta government says there’s no evidence of emails between the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s office.
   The government initiated the review after the CBC published a story on Thursday alleging that staff in Smith’s office emailed Crown prosecutors challenging their assessment and direction on cases stemming from the Coutts border blockades and protests. The story cited anonymous sources.
   The CBC story alleged that staff in Smith’s office sent emails to Crown prosecutors in the fall. The CBC agreed not to identify because they fear they could lose their jobs.
   The CBC later updated its story with an editor’s note saying the original version of the story neglected to note that CBC News has not seen the emails in question.

TRUDEAU'S SHAMEFUL USE OF RACE-BASED POLITICS

   Rex Murphy:  In a recent interview, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put that phrase in the past tense — a “time when men were men” — but, may I suggest, ever so mildly, that the axiom is still sound.
   But that phrase wasn’t the only thing that caught my attention in Trudeau’s interview with the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt. It was when he alleged that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was yearning for the days when “white men ruled.”  
     To be just, here’s the whole quote: “What is he actually proposing? He’s saying everything’s broken.… He’s playing and preying on the kinds of anger and anxieties about some Canada that used to be — where men were men and white men ruled.”
   Still, even in context, that last phrase bothers me. I don’t like the attention to skin colour, specifically “white.” I cannot see, of all people, this particular prime minister calling out a “skin colour” epithet in any other context, or — to be sure — any other epidermal shade than white.