ONTARIO'S PRECIOUS TEACHERS

  The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has voted 98% in favour of strike action as the union says negotiations have stalled. Like all teachers’ union bosses, Hammond likes to say that he and his members are only looking out for the children.
    If Sam Hammond, president of The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario cares so much where was he as math scores fell for Grades 3 and 6? I don’t recall ETFO being front and centre in demanding that the curriculum be changed and that their members not be forced to teach an obviously flawed curriculum.
  Maybe that’s because, like their counterparts at the OSSTF, the folks at ETFO are in it for themselves. It’s about the money, not the kids.

$7B SPENT ON OBESITY HEALTH CARE EACH YEAR

   The costs associated with rising rates of obesity worldwide are staggering and it doesn’t look like they’ll be dropping anytime soon. The disease costs the global economy an estimated $2 trillion each year. In Canada — where more than one in four people live with obesity — related health care costs are as high as $7 billion and are projected to increase to nearly $9 billion by 2021.
    Canada spends roughly 11 per cent of its total health expenditure on treating medical conditions that arise as complications of obesity, according to a recent report.

WHISTLE BLOWER GETS COLD FEET RE TESTIFYING

   A CIA officer who filed a second-hand whistleblower complaint against President Trump has gotten cold feet about testifying after revelations emerged that he worked with Joe Biden, former CIA Director John Brennan, and a DNC operative who sought dirt on President Trump from officials in Ukraine's former government.
   The whistleblower is a career CIA officer with expertise in Ukraine policy who served on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, when 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was "point man" for Ukraine, and during the early months of the Trump administration. -Washington Examiner
   In other words, House Democrats are about to impeach President Trump over a second-hand whistleblower complaint by a partisan CIA officer, and neither he nor his source will actually testify about it (for now...).

FINGER-WAGGING GRETA CALLS FOR CENSORSHIP

The celebrated Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has threatened to quit Facebook if the social media platform refuses to silence her critics.

“I am, like many others, questioning whether I should keep using Facebook or not,” Thunberg wrote in a Facebook post last week. “Allowing hate speech, the lack of fact-checking and, of course, the issues of interfering with democracy… are among many, many other things that are very upsetting.”

ENCANA'S MOVE TO USA A BLOW TO AB MORALE

   Encana announced earlier in the day that it will establish its corporate domicile (legal home for its operations) in the U.S. early next year, pending various approvals. The company will also rebrand under the name Ovintiv Inc.
   But while Thursday’s move may not have come as a surprise, it was a significant blow to morale in Alberta, which has been suffering through a lack of pipeline space that has choked off prospects for growth and prompted foreign companies to ditch more than US$30 billion of assets in the past three years.
   The province’s UCP government laid the blame for Encana’s decision squarely at the feet of the federal Liberals, saying Encana is being pushed out of Canada as a direct result of federal government policies.

ONTARIO CREATING MORE LONG-TERM CARE BEDS

Now, the Ford government is going after the lack of long-term care with a relatively robust plan to build 15,000 beds over five years. That’s a big expansion in a short period of time, but it’s still well short of what would be required for a cost-effective and well-functioning long-term care sector.

Here’s the bad news: This significant bed expansion comes nowhere near meeting demand. The list of those waiting for care will be 2,000 people larger in five years than it is now. And it gets worse. The PC plan will be complete in 2023-24. Over the following 10 years, an aging and expanding population will mean that Ontario requires 55,000 more beds, the FAO estimates. It’s not certain that Ontario will have enough workers or suitable locations to meet that demand, even if the money is available.

STABILITY OF BANKS QUESTIONED IN CHINA

   First it was Baoshang Bank , then it was Bank of Jinzhou, then, two months ago, China's Heng Feng Bank with 1.4 trillion yuan in assets, quietly failed and was just as quietly nationalized. Today, a fourth prominent Chinese bank was on the verge of collapse under the weight of its bad loans, only this time the failure was far less quiet, as depositors of the rural lender swarmed the bank's retail outlets, demanding their money in an angry demonstration of what Beijing is terrified of the most: a bank run.
   Local business leaders, political cadres and banking executives rallied Thursday at the main branch of Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank, just outside the central Chinese city of Luoyang, where they stood one by one before a microphone to pledge their backing for the bank, as smiling employees brandished wads of cash before television cameras to demonstrate just how much cash, literally, the bank had.