LESSONS ON SLAVERY IN CANADA

 When Canadian historians talk about Africans coming here after the American Revolution, they generally focus on the Black Loyalists; freed slaves escaped from American masters who were emancipated by the British and settled in Nova Scotia. But not every African brought to Canada after the Revolutionary War was free.

In the official Act of Parliament that welcomed white Loyalist refugees to British North America, they were permitted to bring along “any negroes” in their possession without paying duty to the Crown. As many as 2,500 Black slaves were brought to Nova Scotia, instantly making it the most slaveholding territory in both the Maritime colonies and New England. During the late 18th century practically every county in mainland Nova Scotia had slaves.

In historical accounts of North American chattel slavery, Canada usually appears only as an enlightened Eden. We were the final stop of the Underground Railroad, and the place that legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass called “the real Canaan of the American bondmen,” a reference to the biblical Promised Land.

But if Canada came off as the good guy during the United States’ great reckoning with slavery, it’s only because British North America had undergone its own nightmare of human bondage. Only a generation before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Canada had been a place where human beings were listed for sale in newspapers, where enslaved children were given as gifts, where authorities hunted down fugitive slaves and where the murder and rape of enslaved Africans was endorsed by the Crown.

ADDRESSING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN SK

 Legislation known informally as “Clare’s Law” came into force in Saskatchewan last June. It allows police to warn someone that they could be in danger from their partner.

The legislation originated in the United Kingdom and is named after Clare Wood, a woman who was murdered in 2009 by a partner she didn’t know had a violent criminal history.

Saskatchewan was the first in Canada to adopt the measure. The province has struggled with some of the highest rates of domestic violence per capita in the country.

FROM PAID-IN-FULL TO RECORD DEBT

When a cowboy hat-wearing Ralph Klein took to the steps of McDougall Centre on July 12, 2004, to declare the eradication of Alberta’s debt, he likely didn’t imagine the record-setting figures revealed in Thursday’s budget by Jason Kenney’s UCP government.

Hoisting a “Paid in Full” sign above his head to symbolize the $3.7 billion in debt that had been paid off ahead of schedule, then-premier Klein vowed “never again will this government or the people of this province have to set aside another tax dollar on debt.”

 Fast-forward 17 years and taxpayer-supported debt is expected to reach $98 billion in the 2020-21 fiscal year. That figure will climb to $115.8 billion by the end of 2021-22, according to forecasts in this week’s budget, which projected debt servicing costs on taxpayer-supported debt to be $2.3 billion this year.

POLITICS MAKING POWER FAILURES THE NORM

 Neither wind nor solar can be relied upon for either baseload or peaking power. Wind turbines only generate power when the wind blows between certain speeds, and the power they generate fluctuates constantly along with wind gusts. Solar panels provide no power at night or when covered by snow, ice, or soot, and only reduced power on cloudy days and during storms. Except on completely cloudless days with clear skies, the power generated by solar panels also fluctuates second by second with the passage of clouds.

A power system that depends on the weather cooperating is a bad idea. Yet, over the past two decades wind and solar power have accounted for an ever-increasing portion of electric power capacity in in the United States. And it’s all due to politics.

INCAPABLE OF BUILDING NAVY SHIPS

 This week the parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux, went through the annual ritual of revealing that the Royal Canadian Navy’s badly needed frigates will now cost more money, and will arrive later than expected. What began as a $26-billion project 13 years ago will now take an extra decade, and will likely cost $77 billion. And, spoiler alert, Giroux added that the final price tag may (read: most certainly will) exceed $82 billion.

How many thousands of ships will we get in return? 15.

Canada could buy similar frigates from the Americans, French or even Australians. Our current price tag is between four and five times more expensive than theirs. Why? No one ever really has an answer. Our defense officials continually tweak the designs, with more and more expensive additions. Our sclerotic shipbuilding industry can’t tie its own shoes on time or on budget. And both have small armies of supporters who convince gullible Canadian politicians that there is nothing more sacred than a shipbuilding job. All of them and none of them are to blame. It is what it is: a chronic, painful, incurable, mess.

CALEDONIA'S AGONY IS A NATIONAL DISGRACE

 What has happened to Caledonia over the last 15 years to the day since, on Feb. 28, 2006, its citizens became the innocent and unwitting victims of an Indigenous land claim protest that later turned violent, should be a national disgrace.

It isn’t, because few people know about it.

That’s because it didn’t happen in Toronto, or Montreal, or Vancouver or, heaven forbid in Ottawa — where most of the fault for this debacle lies — because if their citizens had had to endure what the people of Caledonia have endured, we would have called in the army years ago.

WEEKENDS AT THE COTTAGE WITH THE FEMINIST

Laugh.  What genius made this?

PROTECT THE WHISTLE BLOWERS

 While the work of enforcing financial controls and reconciling balance sheets is rarely the stuff of newspaper headlines, it’s vital work nonetheless – and it’s work that often puts these professionals in a position to sniff out wrongdoing, fraud and mismanagement at its earliest stages.

Yet the very real threat of reprisal for reporting wrongdoing means that often these professionals are forced to choose between upholding their professional obligations and protecting their family, personal wellbeing and, often, their very livelihood.

Rather than being celebrated for their role in ensuring accountability, public service workers who disclose wrongdoing are routinely ostracized and villainized. Of all the various channels of recourse available to those who uncover fraud or mismanagement, none offer timely resolutions and while the processes play out, the worker is usually stuck working with the very people against whom they’ve alleged wrongdoing. Reprisal is common and work environments quickly become toxic, leading to worse mental health outcomes but, perhaps more importantly, allowing wrongdoing to fester.

TRUDEAU GOV'T HAS FAILED TO DELIVER

   Rather than being disappointed, former government whistleblower Joanna Gualtieri says she resents Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s non-committal response as to why he won’t beef up protections for public servants brave enough to flag what they believe to be wrongdoing.
   “It’s even more dangerous than keeping his mouth shut,” she said of Trudeau’s response to HuffPost Canada’s queries last week about the much-criticized whistleblower law.
   “I resent tremendously, because it just gives the illusion of a commitment. But that’s all it is, an illusion — because nothing changes,” she said.

ALBERTA'S DEBT

Kenney’s UCP today, through circumstance and ill fortune, is in some ways the opposite, a tale outlined painfully in the new budget introduced Thursday.

Debt is now running so high that annual payments outstrip some major revenue sources, including, remarkably, royalty revenues from the oilsands.

Debt servicing this year will cost $2.7 billion, higher than the operating budgets of several ministries.

The vast taxpayer-funded debt will hit a total of $115.8 billion this year.

TRUDEAU'S CARBON TAXES: BIG COSTS & BROKEN PROMISES

 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s carbon pricing regime has become an expensive, confusing, multi-headed Hydra in which claims made by his government are not accurate and promises have been broken.

Among these inaccuracies and broken promises are the government’s claim the carbon tax is revenue neutral in the four provinces where it applies, that 80% of households are financially better off because of rebates and that the tax, currently at $30 per tonne of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, would be frozen at $50 per tonne in 2022.

That doesn’t include Trudeau’s looming Clean Fuel Standard — a national carbon tax without rebates, beginning in 2022 — which the environment ministry predicts will increase energy poverty across Canada.

TRUDEAU GOV'T BACKPEDALS ON MINING WATCHDOG

   In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government announced it would create a new watchdog that would have powers to investigate the overseas activities of Canadian companies, including the ability to force them to respond to questions and turn over evidence.
   But it later scaled back those plans following an “onslaught of mining industry lobbying that got them to change their minds,” said Emily Dwyer, the coordinator of the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability (the CNCA), which represents a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), churches, trade unions and other civil society organizations.
   "It has been gutted,” Dwyer said.
    The government also changed its plans, paying a consultant, retired lawyer Barbara McIsaac, for advice about how to set up the new office called the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise.

FEDERAL DEFICIT AT $248B IN 9 MO's OF FISCAL YEAR

 The federal government ran a deficit of $248.2 billion through the first nine months of its 2020-21 fiscal year as spending soared due to the pandemic.

The result for the April-to-December period compared with a deficit of $11 billion in the same period a year earlier.

The government says in its fiscal monitor that the unprecedented shift in the government’s financial results reflects the severe deterioration in the economy and the government’s response plan to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Revenue was $207.7 billion for the April-to-December period, down from $246 billion, as tax and other revenue fell.

QUESTIONABLE ETHICS OF WE CHARITY

   A man who once sat on the advisory board to WE Charity's American affiliate told a parliamentary committee he believes two different groups of donors were told they'd raised the money for the same school building in Kenya.
   Reed Cowan testified on Friday that he started raising money for Free The Children, as WE Charity was known at the time, after his son Wesley died in an accident at age four.
   He said he discovered that a plaque on a school building that once bore Wesley’s name now carries the name of another WE donor.
   On the foundation's website, he found a video of an “opening celebration, where they opened the very same building less than two weeks before we arrived there. We went to Kenya thinking we were opening that building for Wesley," he said. "The ceremony was re-cued for us, same people, same songs, same everything, different plaques.”

QUESTIONING A NOMINEE FOR HHS

 Dr. Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia,” said Sen. Rand Paul to Dr. Rachel Levine, who faces a tough confirmation hearing for the position of assistant Health and Human Services secretary. 

Levine, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the position, has previously expressed support for giving children puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries. Levine faced a tough inquiry from Paul, who asked blunt and even graphic questions about genital mutilation.

Paul cited a statistic from the American College of Pediatricians, stating: “80 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children with gender dysphoria will experience resolution by late adolescence if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation.”

THE CRUELTY OF LOCKDOWN

My mother looked a bit flustered as I walked through her front door.

Do you know, a lady my age just stabbed her husband to death in their kitchen? They were a lovely couple, according to the neighbors. Always together, always working in their garden, always on holidays. Well, she stabbed him to death. Four times! In the kitchen!

Ok I told her I did not know that. Though, I assumed she stabbed him four times and not that he died in quadruple. I was also caught off guard by my mother’s repeated insistence that this had all happened IN THE KITCHEN as if that was some sacred place in the home where these things never happen. Unlike the study or the bedroom, for example, where Cluedo has taught us all sorts of maleficence can occur.

TAXPAYERS LAY OUT $MILLIONS IN POLITICAL WELFARE

 Doug Ford once blasted per vote subsidies as “political welfare” but is now backing legislation to keep taxpayer dollars heading into party coffers.

It’s a bad idea and Ford should abandon it now, especially as he continues to impose restrictions on businesses that keep them from earning their own money.

“I do not believe the government should be taking money from hard-working taxpayers and giving it to political parties,” Doug Ford posted to Facebook when he was campaigning for the PC leadership in early 2018.

NEAR-DICTATORIAL POWERS OF QUARANTINE ACT

 Whatever their efficacy in fighting off COVID-19, it’s clear that Canada’s current border controls are on a scale unprecedented in modern times. Since March 25, 2020, all travelers entering Canada have been required to undergo 14 days of mandatory self-isolation, subject to fines or even arrest in the case of non-compliance. And now, incoming air travelers face mandatory confinement to a hotel paired with mandatory testing.

These policies would be inviting a cascade of Charter challenges under normal circumstances, but for now it’s all kosher due to them being a function of the Quarantine Act. Rewritten after the 2003 SARS pandemic, the act extends near-dictatorial powers to government during times of public health crisis. But the question is how long the Act can guide federal policy before inviting pushback.

The Quarantine Act extends very broad powers to public health authorities to indefinitely detain anyone who doesn’t follow their orders, and even to authorize “arrest without warrant.”

BLAIR DODGES QUERIES OF BANNING HUAWEI

 Canadians should be wary of using Chinese social media platforms because information posted there may be used for “hostile activities” by foreign states, says the federal public safety minister, Bill Blair.

If you regularly post on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat, Weibo or even TikTok, the Canadian government has a stern warning for you: be careful, because hostile countries may be watching in an attempt to use that data against Canada’s interests.

In his opening statement, Blair repeatedly warned of China’s increasing attempts of foreign interference in Canada, as well as its role in the current opioid crisis. But he dodged questions by opposition MPs on whether his government would ban Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from Canada’s 5G network.

THE MASTER PROPAGANDIST, XI JINPING

 China’s president said his country had achieved the “human miracle” of eliminating extreme poverty in the world’s most populous nation, during a ceremony to put his personal stamp on the victory.

Xi Jinping delivered an hour-long speech on the milestone, in what was seen as an attempt to claim credit and consolidate power before his second term ends.

Yet claims of an end to poverty have been met with international skepticism as millions still struggle to make ends meet. Some policy experts have said the country’s definition of poverty hid how many people were still struggling.

TREACHERY AT THE UN

Leaked emails prove that, contrary to United Nations denials, UN human-rights officials did in fact give the names of Chinese dissidents to the communist regime in Beijing before those activists were set to testify in Geneva against the Communist Chinese Party’s abuses.

In fact, it appears from the leaked documents that the practice of handing over names of Chinese dissidents to the dictatorship was viewed as a “usual practice” by all involved. The whistleblower told The Epoch Times that it continues to this day, despite UN denials.

Chinese communist authorities used the names received from the UN to prevent the dissidents from leaving China. At least one dissident identified by the UN and detained by the CCP before leaving for Geneva, Cao Shunli, died while in detention.



If the dissident expected to embarrass Beijing at the UN was already abroad, the CCP frequently threatened or even kidnapped and tortured the person’s family, according to UN whistleblower Emma Reilly, who first exposed the scandal.

MITCH MCCONNELL, SHAPE-SHIFTER

 After throwing former Donald Trump under the bus following this month's impeachment acquittal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he would back the former president if he wins the party's 2024 presidential nomination.

The statement was McConnell's first mention of Trump weeks after he excoriated Trump on the Senate floor - calling him "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, despite the fact that he was acquitted of incitement.

"My point is what happened in the past is not something relevant now, we're moving forward. We've got a new administration," said McConnell, after Baier played a clip of the scathing floor speech, while similarly declining to reveal whether he blamed Trump for the loss of two Senate seats in Georgia, or whether Trump should speak on Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

GREENING OF THE GRID FROZE TEXAS

 One would think in a world which is getting hotter that putting windmills and solar panels would be a good idea.

I’m sure that’s what the CEO’s of all those energy providers across Texas thought as well. And our government at every level incentivized this. The cultural zeitgeist of ‘sustainability’ and ‘renewables’ overrode, as it always does, common sense.

Because at the heart of this problem is, bluntly, the planet isn’t warming. It hasn’t warmed net-on-net for the nearly twenty years Texas’ electricity market has been deregulated.

In fact, when one steps back from the entire CO2-induced Climate Change hysteria and sees it for what it is – a giant money laundering operation through taxes — we have been preparing for the wrong climate catastrophe for more than a generation.

COMPANIES FLEEING CALIFORNIA

 Tesla joins a formidable list of high-tech companies fleeing bad government and relocating to Texas, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Oracle Corp. McKesson Corp., and expansions of Apple, Google and Facebook. There is a new name for the trend: “Techsodus.”

Musk will be the first to admit that insults are hardly the tipping point for a CEO deciding to relocate to another state. The best reason is summed up by a relocation specialist cashing in on the trend: “California’s regulatory environment is the most costly, complex and uncertain in the nation,” Joseph Vranich recently said. And it’s gotten worse.

The laws have become so confusing and so complex that California has earned the dubious distinction as rated among the top “judicial hellholes” in the nation, according to CEOs polled by Chief Executive magazine. It has reached a point to where the lawmakers fail to understand what’s in the laws -- all 10,000s of new pages.

DEFENDING THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS

Any state or federal agent looking to enforce gun control laws is going to want to think twice before heading to Newton County, Missouri, where the county commissioners recently reaffirmed their commitment to the Second Amendment. Under the newly-passed ordinance, the county sheriff has the authority to arrest anyone enforcing anti-gun legislation.

RISK BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF COVID JABS

•   According to the CDC, the survival from Covid (with inflated stats) is as follows: (under 20) 99.997%, (29-49) 99.98%, (50-69) 99.5% and (over 70), 94.6%.

• Incidentally, all Covid death stats are inflated: under direction of the WHO, deaths ‘from” and incidentally “with” Covid are not distinguished. Death coding has changed compared to Influenza/Pneumonia. According to one published analysis, this has resulted in over 16 times inflation of death stats, as supported by CDC data.

• Someone who takes the Pfizer/BioNtech injection, has less than 1% chance of reducing at least one symptom of non-severe “Covid” for a period of 2 months. This means that someone who takes this injection has over 99% chance that it won’t work, regarding the efficacy. Over 100 people have to be injected for it to “work” in one person.

• Syncytin-1’s primary function is in the placenta as well as sperm. Dr Wodarg and Yeadon’s Stay of Action, included concerns that the potential for antibodies against Syncytin-1 proteins (part of the placenta) may result in permanent infertility in women and possibly men as well. The manufacturers give the caveat:

      It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility. And           women of childbearing age are advised to avoid pregnancy for at least two months after their 

second dose.”

BIG GOB BONNIE HENRY INSULTS RCMP

 The union representing 6,500 B.C. RCMP officers says it is appalled by the “inaccurate and disrespectful” comments by the provincial health officer, who on Monday told a legislative committee that she’s concerned about the RCMP culture when it comes to dealing with people struggling with mental health and addictions.

In a letter sent to Dr. Bonnie Henry on Wednesday, Brian Sauvé, president of the National Police Federation, said her remarks about how RCMP officers interact with vulnerable people in crisis were “offensive and incorrect.” Sauvé said it’s unfair to blame the RCMP for the government’s negligence over “scarce and sometimes non-existent” mental health and addiction resources, a problem that leaves police officers to fill in the gaps.

INCOMPETENCE CAUSING HUGE COST OVERRUNS

    Matt Gurney:  Canada. Cannot. Procure. That’s it. That’s the column. It’s an inexplicable national failing that we seem unable or unwilling to in any way address.
   It’s going to take us 20 years to replace the fleet. We have, at best, roughly 20 years to work with. No one would be happier than me if we found a way to solve our procurement woes, but there is absolutely zero reason to hope that we can do that within that 20-year timeframe imposed on the pending rust-out of the current frigates. And, though I hate to bring it up, guess what? Our patrol ships and our submarines are also going to need replacing soon, not to mention our CF-18s. These are all going to be multi-decade procurements, but that’s still faster than we’d need to fix whatever horrible rot has afflicted our ability, as a nation, to build and buy things.
   So just build the damn ships. Buy the damn planes.

BIDEN'S LATEST NONSENSICAL MOVE

Biden has made it clear that his number one mission as president is to undo everything the Trump administration accomplished over the last four years.

His newest cancellation simply does not make sense.

Biden’s administration recently cancelled Operation Talon, a Trump administration program aimed at removing convicted sex offenders living in the United States illegally.

UNIDENTIFIED ASYLUM SEEKERS IN GERMANY

According to information from the German federal Interior ministry, over half of the migrants who entered the country in 2020 came without any sort of identification paperwork whatsoever.

2020 saw a total of 102,581 new asylum applications, over a quarter of them, or 26,520 applications, were for children born to asylum seekers in Germany.

The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) stated that is had examined a total of 190,608 identity documents of asylum seekers and found that around 2.36 per cent or 4,488, were likely forgeries but it is unknown how many migrants submitted fake documents as many had multiple identification documents examined.

EUROPEAN UNION'S WRONG-HEADED MIGRATION POLICIES

    Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has defended his strong stance against mass migration, saying the European Union’s relaxed attitude towards illegal border crossings “has turned the Mediterranean into a cemetery”.
    "We must take help to where the problems are, not bring those problems to Europe. The EU is creating illusions in the minds of people living in poorer countries. This is why we established the ‘Hungary Helps’ programme,” he said, referencing the Hungarian aid programme which helps Middle Eastern Christians, in particular, to rebuild their lives and communities in their historic homes.
    “[Migrants] want a European life and they believe that here they’ll be welcomed with open arms, but in fact they’ll end up in the hands of people-smugglers. Europe’s wrong-headed policies have generated a pull factor that has turned the Mediterranean into a cemetery,” he said.

BIDEN's FOREIGN POLICY BOOSTING ENEMIES

President Biden says his foreign policy goal is to promote American values. Yet serious questions deserve to be raised as to whether these were only empty words following the Biden administration’s recent controversial moves on China and Iran that seem all too eager to appease America’s adversaries.

In a recent CNN town hall, when asked about the genocide of the Uighur Muslims enacted under Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Biden sounded like a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, repeating the CCP’s talking points, and explaining the CCP’s treatment of the persecuted Uighur population as a different cultural “norm.”

Even before he was sworn into the office, Biden’s team reportedly partook in covert talks with Iran about returning to the 2015 nuclear deal. Biden’s appointment of Robert Malley as his special envoy to Iran — a man with a long history of sympathy to Iran’s authoritarian regime and of overtly anti-Israeli sentiments — signals that appeasement of the mullahs will be the new foreign policy of the United States.

CHIEF OF DEFENSE STAFF STEPS DOWN

  Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan says Admiral Art McDonald has voluntarily stepped down as chief of the defense staff as he is investigated on unspecific allegations. 

Sajjan said in a release late Wednesday that the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service is doing the investigation. 

Military investigators are probing allegations of sexual misconduct against McDonald's and Eyre's predecessor, Gen. Jonathan Vance. 

BSE CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT GOES TO COURT

    A long-awaited class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government by beef farmers has been delayed yet again, though not for long.
   The $8-billion lawsuit alleges that the federal government failed to prevent cattle from the United Kingdom from entering the country between 1982 and 1990, despite knowing that at least 10 of them came from herds known to have bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), better known as Mad Cow Disease.

IT'S GENE THERAPY, NOT A VACCINE

 Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to distinguish the difference.

KENNEY'S REASONABLE GUIDELINES ARE COERCIVE LAWS

   What Mr. Kenney describes as “safe and reasonable guidelines” are joy-killing, coercive laws that force people into isolation and loneliness by banning the necessary social interactions that we need for our physical, mental, spiritual and financial well-being. Lockdowns (whether full or partial) produce anxiety, stress and depression even amongst those who have not been pushed into unemployment, poverty and despair.
   There is nothing “safe” about cancelling medically necessary surgeries, like the pace-maker surgery needed by Jerry Dunham, who was killed by lockdowns – not by COVID. There is nothing “reasonable” about forcing businesses into bankruptcy, often destroying the life savings of honest, hard-working people. There is nothing “safe” about taking away sports, recreation, social interactions and recreational pursuits from children and adults, forcing millions to experience life primarily through a two-dimensional computer screen.
   Mere “guidelines” are not enforced with $1,000 fines and imprisonment, if one cares about honesty when using the English language. These are coercive laws, not “guidelines.” Moreover, none of these laws have been approved by a vote of the members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta; instead, laws are announced on the fly at press conferences and imposed on us by the Kenney-Hinshaw duo, contrary to the constitutional requirement that democratic law-making be carried out by the legislature.

FINANCIAL DEVASTATION OF TRUDEAU'S CARBON TAX II

One week before Christmas, Trudeau stuffed his plans for a second carbon tax within so-called clean fuel regulations. The regulations will require producers to reduce the carbon content of their fuels and if they can’t meet those requirements, then they’ll have to pay the second carbon tax.

The second carbon tax is expected to add up to 11 cents per litre to the price of gasoline. That could cost Canadian families nearly $40 bucks in carbon taxes every time they fill up their minivan in 2030.

 The government’s own impact analysis notes that Trudeau’s second carbon tax “would disproportionately impact lower and middle-income households …  as well as households currently experiencing energy poverty or those likely to experience energy poverty in the future.”

Turns out not everyone can afford a Tesla to offset rising fuel prices, or flick a switch and suddenly heat their homes with solar panels.

TRUDEAU'S POLICY OF COWARDLY INVISIBILITY

    Rex Murphy:  Trudeau has made much of his sensitivity on cultural and human rights issues — it’s part of the Liberal code. Also the prime minister, having shown no hesitation in pronouncing on the word “genocide” in the Canadian context, the country’s historical record with Aboriginal peoples, was facing some challenge as to why he would not pronounce on a present-day persecution — some say involving a million members of a minority — by a Communist-ruled country.

The backbencher vote gave some cover to the Liberals’ — shall we call it ambiguity — on a pure human rights issue. The backbencher vote also gave them cover for the next election campaign, whenever it comes. The Liberals will be free to claim, and they will, that “We allowed the vote, and most of us said Yes it was a genocide, and we told China so.”

But then there’s this other matter. The cabinet and Mr. Trudeau, even on Zoom, didn’t show up for the vote at all. I find this quite strange. This was a rare vote on a most significant issue. I’d go so far as to say it’s the government’s most significant international moment to date. It wasn’t some UN speech on general matters, or marking some international “day.” Real people in their hundreds of thousands are in camps enduring all kinds of terrible treatment at this very moment, and the Canadian government was stating what it thinks of the matter.

ONLY THE PRIVATE SECTOR SACRIFICES

   It’s tempting to say a pandemic is an extenuating circumstance and we can’t make everyone whole in such a situation. We all have to sacrifice.
   Perhaps that would be reasonable if we all did our part.
   But saying that we are all in this together is laughable. The greatest divide today is not between the rich and the poor or various racial, religious or gender groups; it is between the public and private sectors.
  Public health and elected officials suffer no consequences for their actions. Public workers, working or not, are paid. Only the beleaguered private sector pays, in lost dreams, high stress, financial devastation and depression.

THE TRAVESTY OF POSTURING POLITICIANS

   The vote in Parliament Monday to condemn China for its alleged genocide against the country’s Muslim Uyghur minority was a travesty at every level. First, the motion put forward by the Conservative party was non-binding on the government and therefore its passage in the House of Commons is essentially meaningless.
   The vote in the House of Commons on the Uyghurs in China also represents a failure for the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who stayed away from the vote along with his entire cabinet, except for the sacrificial lamb offered to the opposition in the form of Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Marc Garneau.
   By declining to issue a whip and declaring the motion a free vote, the government sidestepped its responsibility to take a position on whether what has transpired in China actually constitutes a genocide against the Uyghurs. All one heard from Garneau were the usual platitudes that the government is reflecting on the situation.
   The Trudeau government’s contortions on the vote reflect the reality that its concern about human rights in China is more rhetorical than real. As I argued here recently, Canada’s actions speak louder than its words. Despite the government’s protestations about human rights abuses in China, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, a Crown corporation which invests public monies, is invested in China to the tune of $56 billion or almost 12 per cent of its total portfolio, some in companies that have provable links to human rights abuses including against the Uyghurs.

COKE's WOKE TRAINING: BE LESS WHITE

   COCA-COLA is facing backlash after it told employees to "try to be less white" in a bid to combat racial discrimination.
   Photos of Coca-Cola's online training seminar were shared on social media this week, showing slides that featured tips on how "to be less white," including being "less ignorant," and "less oppressive."
   Conservative political commentator Candace Owens encouraged Coca-Cola employees to sue the brand for its "blatant racism".
   "If a corporate company sent around a training kit instructing black people how to 'be less black', the world would implode and lawsuits would follow. I genuinely hope these employees sue @CocaCola for blatant racism and discrimination," she tweeted.

SUPPOSEDLY RETIRED, NIGHTHAWKS FLYING OVER LA

A pair of Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft were spotted above Los Angeles last Friday. The F-117s are supposedly retired but were spotted flying with a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker. 

 After 25 years in service, the Air Force retired the F-117 fleet in April 2008, but in September 2017, the service received special permission to keep 51 in Type 1000 storage, meaning the planes could swiftly return to active service. 

THOMAS A DISSENTING VOICE AT SUPREME COURT

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissenting opinion regarding the high court’s decision not to take up a case challenging the Pennsylvania Nov. 3 election results.

The court on Monday announced it won’t take up lawsuits challenging a Pennsylvania state court decision that relaxed ballot-integrity measures, including a move to extend the ballot-receipt deadline during the November election by three days due to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Former President Donald Trump and Pennsylvania’s GOP urged the court to take up a review of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling.

“This is not a prescription for confidence,” Thomas wrote on Monday, adding that “changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough.” Thomas, considered by many to be the most conservative justice, said the court should have granted a review.

CRITICAL INFO ABOUT NEW VACCINES

 Thanks to President Trump's fast-tracking the process for developing and approving vaccines in America, we currently have two anti-COVID vaccines available, one from Moderna and one from Pfizer.  Both of these vaccines use mRNA to trigger the body's immune response by giving the body instructions to create certain proteins.  Because mRNA is the instrument by which our bodies express their genetic instructions, many people have become concerned that the new vaccines will actually alter their body's DNA.  That's not the case; they're just a shortcut to the body's usual response to a traditional vaccine.

FACEBOOK AND AUSTRALIAN GOV'T REACH DEAL

 Facebook said on Tuesday it will lift its ban on Australians sharing news after it struck a deal with Australia's government on legislation that would make digital giants pay for journalism.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed that they have agreed on amendments to proposed legislation to require the social network and Google to pay for Australian news that they feature.

Facebook's co-operation is a major victory in Australian efforts to make the two gateways to the internet pay for the journalism that they use.

NOT GETTIN' 'ER DONE IN CANADA

But we wouldn’t be the first to notice that, of late, Canada seems to be entering a bit of a slump. A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 52 per cent of Canadians believed our society was “broken.” By the end of 2020, a report by Edelman determined that nearly half of the country did not trust the government, private sector or non-profits. Our star is even fading among our friends; in 2018, Canada plummeted from its top spot on the Reputation Institute’s list of the world’s most reputable countries.

 COVID-19 has highlighted the fact that not only is Canada racking up new failures in the usual sore spots such as public health, but increasingly we can’t even seem to manage things that should be easy. We’re an energy superpower that can’t build a dam or a pipeline.  A champion of reconciliation where Indigenous people are poisoned by their own drinking water. A self-proclaimed “honest broker” in world affairs that can’t get its phone calls returned by foreign leaders.

CONTROLLING POWER COMPANY BILLING IN TEXAS

Texas utility regulators will temporarily ban power companies from billing customers or disconnecting them for non-payment, after the deadly winter storm that caused widespread blackouts, Governor Greg Abbott said on Sunday.

Some providers sell electricity at wholesale prices that rise in sync with demand, which skyrocketed as the record-breaking freeze gripped a state unaccustomed to extreme cold, killing at least two dozen people and knocking out power to more than 4 million people at its peak; some 30,000 people were still without power on Sunday, Abbott said.

As a result, some Texans who were still able to turn on lights or keep their fridge running found themselves with bills of $5,000 for just a five-day period, according to photos of invoices posted on social media by angry consumers.

PM's PRETTY SMILES FOR IRAN

   A recently revealed audio tape of a “senior” Iranian official demonstrates the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continuing attempt to hide its responsibility for the downing of Ukrainian Airline flight PS752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport on Jan. 8, 2020. The speaker in the recording appears to be Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif, a man who often attempts to portray himself as the “moderate” face of the regime abroad.
   In the recording, Zarif admits that the truth about PS752 “will never be revealed … they (Iran’s government and military) won’t tell us, nor anyone else, because if they do it will open some doors into the defence systems of the country that will not be in the interest of the nation to publicly say.”
   Zarif’s admission provides additional evidence that the regime shot down PS752 and deliberately covered it up. Importantly for Ottawa, Zarif’s involvement in the cover-up demonstrates the need for a tougher Canadian policy toward Iran, one that puts pressure on the regime rather than than continuing to operate under the misguided belief that diplomatic engagement will achieve anything meaningful.

HOW DRUG TRAFFICKERS GET CREATIVE AT SEA

 Drug traffickers engage in a creative game of hide and seek with coast guards and other security forces that board their ships at sea.

Rubén Navarrete, a Mexican Navy captain based in the western state of Michoacán, told Televisa News last November that those dedicated to maritime smuggling could only be restricted by one thing: their own imagination. A spate of recent seizures prove his point as traffickers have been getting more inventive with hiding places both above and below deck.

InSight Crime looks at some of the most popular and creative ways narcotics have been concealed aboard ships over the years and how this continues to evolve.

TIME TO REVIEW THE POWER OF HEALTH OFFICIALS

Given the central role that Medical Officers of Health (MOHs) have played during the pandemic, it is important that their powers be understood and reviewed. Until recently, most local MOHs flew under the radar, often only attracting attention when involved in policy debates.

Public health officials’ roles do not stop at vaccine programmes or restaurant inspections – they have the legal authority to impose policy choices even if these differ from elected officials.

 During the pandemic, politicians reluctant to make difficult policy decisions have deferred to MOHs, but in so doing have emboldened them to exercise nearly unrestricted authority. With the powers given to MOHs now being used more regularly and broadly during the pandemic, it should be considered how their policy-making can be made more publicly accountable.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE EU

 For decades, critics of the EU warned that the bloc would one day fall apart under the weight of its own contradictions. 

For years, British Remainers countered that our stability, like that of every country in Europe, depended on EU membership. Well, now the EU is fracturing at a rate that even the most extreme eurosceptic would hardly have dared to predict.

After a decade spent staggering through one financial crisis after another, the EU has faced yet another catastrophe – Covid – and has once again been found wanting.

$966M TO BUILD OCEAN RESEARCH VESSEL

  The federal government has quietly revealed that it plans to pay nearly $1 billion to build a new ocean research vessel for the Canadian Coast Guard whose original cost was supposed to be one-tenth that amount.

The new cost estimate for the offshore oceanographic science vessel represents the latest blow to Ottawa’s multibillion-dollar plan to build new ships for the Royal Canadian Navy and Coast Guard, first revealed more than a decade ago and beset by problems ever since. 

The federal procurement department revealed the new $966-million price tag for the science vessel on Friday, quietly posting the new cost online on the same day it officially awarded Vancouver-based Seaspan Shipyards a contract to build the ship.

ACCUSING GENERAL VANCE

 Maj. Kellie Brennan says the time has come to tell her story.

For years, she says she felt she had nowhere to turn despite telling military superiors in the chain of command about the intimate, sexual relationship she says she had with former chief of the defense staff Gen. Jonathan Vance while he was her superior.

Now, Brennan says she is sounding the alarm on the extent to which she says sexual misconduct and inappropriate behaviour continues to permeate the ranks of the Canadian Forces, despite the launch of Operation Honour in 2015 to root out harmful conduct.

QUEBEC HYDRO IN BATTLE AGAINST USA ENVIRONMENTALISTS

Stringing the land with ugly wires has always sparked pushback. This time the fight includes hefty corporate rivals that stand to lose a share of the market. And the stakes are rising as electricity emerges as the quickest way to strip carbon from the energy system in an effort to stem climate change.

The battle over a power line in Maine to carry 1.2 gigawatts of hydropower — enough to supply more than 1 million households — from dams in Quebec, features a television advertisement depicting felled pine trees in the wooded U.S. state paired with noir images of a corporate tower in modern Bilbao, near the Guggenheim art museum. A voiceover declares: “A good deal for Spain, and a bad deal for Maine.”

The Spanish utility company Iberdrola S.A.’s political action committee has spent almost US$15 million to promote its US$950 million New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) electric transmission project which would run for more than 230 kilometres. Yet last month opponents won a partial stay of construction in court and an activist group filed papers to hold a state referendum to revoke its permits.

An Iberdrola subsidiary in the U.S., called Avangrid Inc., launched the NECEC project in 2018 to carry 1.2 gigawatts of hydropower — enough to supply more than 1 million households — from dams in Quebec.

WOKE MATHEMATICS

 I am usually happiest when, hunkering down in my national security/foreign policy foxhole, I’m able to ignore most of the Left’s insanity. But once in a long while I have to jump out of the foxhole to attack something so outrageously dumb that it’s hard to believe a human, even a liberal, came up with it. The latest instance is the Oregon Department of Education’s (ODE) woke attack on mathematics.

Last week, the ODE promoted through its newsletter a short course called the “Pathway to Math Equity Microcourse.” The “microcourse” is designed for middle school teachers to teach them to use its toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.”

The toolkit, according to a Fox News report, includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” supposedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” The ones cited include that the “focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer’,” and students are “required to ‘show their work,’ ” which used to be keys to teaching math to grade-schoolers.

SAVED BY THE ELECTRIC SNOWMOBILE

   Rex Murphy: Good to see Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, Seamus O’Regan, is back in his office after his sojourn to dear Newfoundland, on behalf of Premier Furey, in the botched provincial election. The election itself was halted, or cancelled, or put on ice — to use a phrase — after the province had, for it, a huge spike in COVID cases. Prior to the — let’s call it a postponement — Mr. O’Regan was out doing the old door-to-door with various Liberal candidates, a sprightly sight for Newfoundlanders weary from lockdowns, February and firing up the woodstove.
   But as said he’s back now, and back at what remains his prime minister’s absolutely No. 1 fixation, trimming Canada’s carbon-dioxide emissions. Adorning Twitter Thursday was the minister’s message that — Hallelujah — “Electric snowmobiles will get us to net-zero.” How sweet it is to know after a full year of COVID and lockdowns, businesses failing from one coast to the other, people almost driven numb by anxiety and loss of normal socialization, that someone is keeping, as they say, their eye on the ball, and tending to the important things, namely, exhaust from winter recreational vehicles. And to think some complain they don’t have their priorities straight.
   In my own province, if a band of merry snowmobilers are roving the long- abandoned railway line, or even more daringly out on the dread Witless Bay Barrens, in temperatures even colder than, say, Texas yesterday, and the batteries fail, what do they do?
   Where’s the charging station? In that little clump of spruce trees over there? Not likely. Perhaps near some landmark familiar to the outdoors types. Nope. And despite their populous presence along the province’s bit of Trans-Canada Highway, you will not find an Irving Station in the loon-haunted wildernesses of Newfoundland and Labrador. You can go miles and miles in country and there’s not a gas station to be found anywhere. Strange, isn’t it?

MONEY LAUNDERING FACTS BELIE ACCUSATIONS

 Testimony on gaming is coming to an end at the Inquiry into Money Laundering with the main accusation in tatters that B.C. casinos were well-oiled machines for cleaning Dirty Money.

At worst, they may have been money-pits for proceeds of crime from crooks who liked to gamble, or those who borrowed money from criminals — both mostly losing the ill-gotten gains.

Attorney-General David Eby’s drive against a so-called “Vancouver Model” of organized crime with tentacles linking casinos, China, fentanyl and nefarious sleight-of-hand is sputtering in the face of facts.

BLAIR QUIET ON TRUDEAU's HAND GUN BAN

The problem with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s proposed handgun ban is that it won’t work and his government knows it.

 Trudeau’s Minister of Public Safety, Bill Blair, knows handgun bans don’t work.

In a 2019 interview with the Globe and Mail, he said months of consultations had led him to the conclusion banning handguns would be costly and ineffective.

“I believe that would be potentially a very expensive proposition but just as importantly, it would not in my opinion be perhaps the most effective measure in restricting the access that criminals would have to such weapons, because we’d still have a problem with them being smuggled across the border.”

73,OOO PUBLIC SERVANTS GET PAID TIME OFF WORK

 More than one in three federal public servants were granted paid time off work during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a cost exceeding $800 million, according to a Treasury Board document.

At the onset of the pandemic, civil servants were told to work from home if possible, to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus throughout government offices.

Employees who were unable to work remotely were still paid, however, under a provision known as the "699" pay code, allowing "other leave with pay."

The number of workers approved for 699 leave peaked in April at more than 73,000. That number had dwindled to just over 9,000 by the end of November, according to the latest figures.

LIBERALS IGNORING CSIS WARNINGS

   It stands to reason, however, that when a CSIS director takes the very unusual step to publicly name national security threats, he does not do so lightly. Spy agencies do not normally want their adversaries to know they are the focus of attention. It also stands to reason, then, that this information should be taken seriously, very seriously.
   If, then, the CSIS director has deliberately told us of China’s intentions and actions, can anyone please explain why nothing seems to be happening? Need I remind readers that China has held two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, in abysmal conditions for more than two years? Or that Chinese-sponsored thugs have harassed Canadians of Uyghur and Tibetan origin in our own country?
   With this in mind, can someone also enlighten me on why in Heaven’s name Canadian government and universities are partnering with Huawei? Our closest allies – the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, all members of the so-called “Five Eyes” community – have all banned such work. Why has Canada not followed suit? It is worth asking whether Canada’s inexplicable reluctance to do so may have repercussions for intelligence-sharing.

IMPEACHING NY GOVERNOR CUOMO

   New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's problems are piling up like bodies at a New York nursing home.
   In late January, New York Attorney General Letitia James published a report finding the New York Department of Health underreported COVID-19 deaths in New York nursing homes
by as much as 50 percent. Then last week, a top aide for the governor admitted that the administration withheld data regarding nursing home deaths from state lawmakers.
   On Wednesday, the governor was hit with a double whammy. News broke about a federal probe looking into the governor's task force and its former policy of sending Covid-infected patients into nursing homes. Then, a number of Democratic leaders in the State Senate indicated their intention to strip the governor of his emergency powers. To top it all off, Republicans in the New York Assembly have now officially begun the process of impeaching the governor.

DR. TAM's WILD TRAJECTORY OF COVID CASES

   Furey:  Canadian government health officials were at a loss to explain why new federal modelling shows such a wild trajectory when they appeared at a House of Commons health committee hearing Friday.
Earlier in the day, Dr. Theresa Tam presented new modelling forecasting COVID-19 cases. The slide deck presents charts about how cases and deaths across Canada are significantly declining.
    However, when it comes to forecasting for the future, Tam presented a graph that showed cases of COVID-19 immediately shooting up like a rocket ship in an almost vertical line.
   It shows Canada going from its current count of around 2,300 cases per day to over 20,000 daily cases by the second week of March. The exact figure is unclear because the line shoots so high it exits the top of the graph.

MAINTAINING THE PANDEMIC DRAMA IN ONTARIO

   Furey:  Dr. Eileen De Villa seems to be in a competition with Doug Ford to see who can say the most over-the-top remarks about the pandemic.

Ford was previously in the lead with his comment in January about how “you’ll fall off your chair” with the new modelling that predicted the province would see 20,000 cases per day by mid-February.

But time for Ford to move over. De Villa, Toronto’s top doc, has now vaulted to first place with her performance at a Wednesday press conference.

LIBERALS DODGING ACCOUNTABILITY

Federal Conservatives say the Liberals are using a pandemic-induced shortage of translators to shut down House of Commons committees when they raise issues that cause the government discomfort.

 "The evidence ... is that we are at a breaking point and that we are careening towards a critical failure in the ability to conduct parliamentary proceedings," Richards argued.

"Yet the government has done nothing. Instead, it sits back, folds its arms and takes comfort in the fact that Parliament cannot function fully and hold the government to account."

He said several committees, including finance and the special committee on Canada-China relations, have also been cut short due to a lack of interpreters just as they were "proving uncomfortable for Liberal interests."

TARGETED ATTEMPT TO SILENCE CHIEF ARCHIBALD

Internal turmoil at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) has become public amid swirling allegations of harassment, conflicts of interest, financial misconduct and calls for independent external reviews.

Ontario Regional Chief RoseAnne Archibald claims she has documents showing “financial improprieties” within the AFN. But the organization says “multiple members of AFN staff” have brought harassment allegations forward against the regional chief.

 “The Chiefs of Ontario resolution seeks an independent financial review of the Assembly of First Nations,” Archibald said on Thursday. “I have become a target of the National Chief and the Assembly of First Nations Secretariat because I have documents that show financial improprieties within the Assembly of First Nations.”

WHY THE SECRECY OF VACCINE TASK FORCE?

 OTTAWA – Members of the government’s vaccine task force said secrecy surrounding their deliberations was necessary as they defended their efforts to opposition MPs Thursday.

The task force, formed early last summer, was responsible for making recommendations on which vaccines to purchase and which Canadian companies to back with funding for research and development of COVID vaccines.

Earlier this week, some researchers and industry experts criticized the secretive nature of deliberations. The task force meets privately and has not released agendas or meeting minutes and has said little about what options it rejected.  

LIBERALS REMEDY THE DECLINE OF FRENCH

 OTTAWA – The Trudeau government is proposing a series of sweeping language reforms that will “intervene vigorously to counter and remedy” the decline of French in Canada.

In a roughly 30-page document titled “English and French: Towards the substantive equality of official languages in Canada” published Friday, the government makes over 50 proposals that aim to counter the decline of French across the country and “reinforce a sense of linguistic security.”

For example, making employers of federally regulated industries (such as telecommunications or airlines) communicate with employees in French in Quebec and other strongly francophone areas; making bilingualism mandatory for future Supreme Court judges, and increasing the number of French immersion teachers (and thus, classes) outside of Quebec.

NAZI TRAINING CAMP FOR GASSING PEOPLE

   The Nazis operated what was essentially a training camp for gassing people as much as a year before they began the large-scale expulsions of Jews to gas chambers, historian Wally de Lang says in a new book.
   It began, de Lang told the BBC, when hundreds of Dutchmen were rounded up, in what is known as a  razzia, from the streets of Amsterdam in early 1941 — the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. Germany had overtaken the Netherlands the previous spring and the razzia was revenge for the killing of a Dutch Nazi collaborator.
“We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that’s much earlier,” De Lang said.
   The last stop for the Dutchmen was the 17th century Hartheim Castle in Upper Austria. In 1940, it had been turned into a killing centre, with a gas chamber retrofitted to a specially adapted room.

UK: A SANCTUARY FOR ISLAMIC TERRORISTS

Once again, the U.K. shows itself to be a safe haven for Islamic terrorists.

A terrorist who claimed asylum in Britain after he was sentenced to death in Egypt for a failed assassination plot is set to win the right to stay in this country.

Yasser Al-Sirri, 58, first claimed asylum in 1994 but was turned down and has taken the issue to court more than eight times at great cost to British taxpayers.

EMERGENCY STOCKPILE MANAGEMENT EARNS A FAIL

Federal pre-pandemic measures to stock up on medical supplies were a failure and “a significant error”, the Canadian Public Health Association said.

The Public Health Agency in months prior to the pandemic closed three of nine medical warehouses nationwide to save $900,000 from its $675 million-a year budget, according to internal memos. Millions of high-grade masks and other supplies were landfilled with the 2019 closure of a Regina depot.

FOR ONCE, DR. FAUCI HAS NOTHING TO SAY

 After awarding praise to Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic last year, Dr. Anthony Fauci on CNN Tuesday refused to comment on Cuomo’s brewing nursing home scandal.

Asked about Cuomo’s decision to pack nursing homes full of vulnerable residents with COVID-positive patients, Fauci, who is now President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, punted the football.

FREEZING IN ENERGY-RICH TEXAS

 A ferocious winter storm struck the southern plains states with exceptional ferocity over the weekend.  By Monday, millions of Texans found themselves without power.  Contrary to what one might expect, the energy problem wasn't primarily because of downed power lines. Instead, in a state that has a quarter of America's proven natural gas reserves, the power went away because Texas has turned to wind generation — and the generators froze.

BURIED IN A BLIZZARD OF LIES

   Mark Steyn: Happy Presidents' Day - or Presidents Day (the style is variable) - to all our American readers.  Usually, after the mostly-peaceful peaceful transfer of power, I update our special to take account of the new guy - in this case, the purported forty-sixth. But for some reason, this time round, I just thought, aw, screw it.

~As I've been saying for some months, we are aswirl in a blizzard of lies: Covid-19 originated in bats or pangolins. New York did a way better job of handling it than Florida, and Andrew Cuomo's official stats are on the up and up. It's totally racist to refer to the "Chinese Coronavirus" but not to "the UK strain" or the "South African variant". There was no election fraud on November 3rd, but there was an insurrection on January 6th. And there are troops on the streets of the American capital to prevent a QAnon uprising on the old inauguration day of March 4th.

TRUDEAU HAS ZERO CREDIBILITY ON CHINA

In the ongoing freefall of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s credibility in the matter of his government’s opaque relationships with Xi Jinping’s China, there is a discernible pattern, a kind of a script that plays itself out that has so far protected Trudeau and his inner circle from being irreparably damaged by overwhelming public disgust and revulsion.

That the pantomime has worked so successfully and for so long is as disturbing as it is remarkable, but at last, the jig is up. The last straw will be remembered as Trudeau’s equivocations and dissembling about the Xi regime’s savage oppression of the Muslim peoples of Xinjiang, which Trudeau invited us all to interrogate this week as a discursive problematization of the word “genocide.”

“We are extremely concerned about that and have highlighted our concerns many times. But when it comes to the application of the very specific word ‘genocide’, we simply need to ensure that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed in the processes before a determination like that is made,” Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s a word that is extremely loaded and is certainly something that we should be looking at in the case of the Uyghurs.”

There should be no surprise Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he needs more evidence before concluding China’s horrific treatment of its minority Uyghur Muslim population is a genocide, despite having agreed two years ago that Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous population was a genocide.

FACEBOOK GETS PETULANT IN AUSTRALIA

   Facebook has blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing news content on the platform, causing much alarm over public access to key information.
   Facebook's action came just hours after Google agreed to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for content from news sites across its media empire.
   Australian authorities had drawn up the laws to "level the playing field" between the tech giants and struggling publishers over profits. Of every A$100 (£56; $77) spent on digital advertising in Australian media these days, A$81 goes to Google and Facebook.
  But Facebook said the law left it "facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia".

PM'S WILLFUL BLINDNESS TO CHINA'S EVILS

   John Robson:  If you’re wondering what it would take for the Trudeau administration to get over its crush on Chinese communism, I have no idea. Especially once we learned that despite everything, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is doing its best to pour our industrial secrets into the Politburo’s pockets via … wait for it … Huawei. And by “despite everything” I mean massive evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s hostility to human rights and decency, including putting history’s worst mass killer on their banknotes in case anyone was struggling with the concept of “brutal communist dictatorship and loving it.”

 David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), recently warned against Beijing’s “strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts — economic, technological, political and military” that uses “all elements of state power to carry out activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty.” Back in November the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) fingered China as a leading cyber-menace. And CSIS and the CSE are part of our government.

 if you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldn’t admit it. He isn’t given to answering even innocent questions, let alone awkward ones. And I’m not saying they have something on him. He’s a fool on national security, as on economics, our constitutional order and practically anything else you can think of.

SECRET TASK FORCE BEHIND FLAWED VACCINE EFFORT

Most witnesses at Tuesday’s committee hearing said the country’s lack of domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity is a major factor in the vaccine shortage, leaving Canada at the mercy of foreign producers and “vaccine nationalism.”

But other reasons for the procurement troubles also surfaced, including the task force of outside experts set up by the government to advise it on the process.

 Ottawa initially did not reveal its existence, then withheld the names of members. And it only divulged their potential conflicts of interest following negative media coverage.

As it turns out, half of the 12 members have conflicts — connections to firms related to the vaccine field — including the two co-chairs. Respected virologist Gary Kobinger resigned from the task force over the issue. The government says it was aware of the conflicts of interest, but deliberately chose members with direct, practical experience and knowledge.