REDUCING OILSANDS ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING

   Alberta has signed an agreement with the federal government that makes major cuts to environmental monitoring of the oilsands. The monitoring program, initiated in 2012 under Stephen Harper's Conservative government, funds research by outside organizations as well as government scientists.
   Signed July 7 by top bureaucrats in Ottawa and Edmonton, it cuts funding by at least 25 per cent. The budget has been cut to no more than $44 million this year. It was $58 million last year and $60 million in 2018. 

    The deal says no fieldwork is to be done on the main branch of the Athabasca River. That means the program won't fund monitoring downstream of the oilsands even as the province considers proposals to allow the water from oilsands tailings ponds to be released into the river.
    The deal also says there'll be no field studies on wetlands, fish or insects.

TRUDEAU'S TESTIMONY LIGHT ON DETAILS

Mark Steyn:  "Don't look at me – I'm just the prime minister."

That about sums up Justin Trudeau's defense in a Canadian scandal starring grifters, shell corporations, virtue signallers and a federal ethics probe.

After weeks of ducking scrutiny from his political opponents, Trudeau made a rare appearance before the parliamentary finance committee Thursday, though his testimony was heavy on the sanctimony and light on the details.

TOUGH LOVE FOR THE EUROWEENIES

    Eventually, you need to kick your loser kid out of your basement, cut-off his allowance, and introduce him to the harsh realities of the real world. In the case of our European allies, particularly the insufferable Germans, that time was about 20 years ago. Well, Donald Trump just announced we will be pulling out 12,000 troops of the 36,000 still deployed there – think of the good they could do for America deployed in Portland! – and the krauts and the Establishment are livid. Good.
    Think of it as tough love for the Euroweenies.

NOVA SCOTIA SHOOTINGS: BEHIND THE SCENE

Nova Scotia Shooter Behind The Scenes with Paul Palango a former senior editor at The Globe and Mail and author of three books on the RCMP, the most recent being Dispersing the Fog, Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP. His work on the Nova Scotia massacre has been published in MacLeans and the Halifax Examiner.

ADMITTED: CLIMATE CRISIS IS NOT ABOUT THE SCIENCE

     Climate activist & Meteorologist Eric Holthaus has now joined a long line of climate players now fully admitting that the climate “crisis” or “emergency” is not about the science after all. “The climate emergency isn’t about science, it’s about justice,” Holtaus wrote on July 28, 2020. 

      AOC’s staff has bragged that the Green New Deal is about wealth redistribution, not climate. Former Ocasio-Cortez campaign aide Waleed Shahid admitted that Ocasio-Cortez’s GND was a “proposal to redistribute wealth and power from the people on top to the people on the bottom.”
    Greta Thunberg explained in 2019: “The climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.”

YOU KNOW IT'S WRONG, BUT YOU DO IT ANYWAY

  Rex Murphy:  It is very simple. If Mr. Trudeau says he saw potential trouble with the WE deal, and he does say that, if he already knew it would at least meet the threshold of a conflict of interest; if the finance minister’s involvement and connections with ME intensified the perception of conflict of interest; and if finally he knew his parent, wife and brother were — in varying amounts — being paid by WE, why did he not strike down the deal in one full blast: “This cannot go forward; we are all too mixed up with the Kielburgers. It will look bad.” And in fact, it is bad.

Trudeau did not need to push back on the WE deal. He could simply have squashed it the moment it poked its troublesome little head into the cabinet room.

WITNESSES WILL PROVE MENG WANZHOU LIED

 Documents from lawyers for Canada's attorney general say a series of witnesses will prove Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou lied to HSBC bank about the company's relationship's with Skycom in Iran.

The documents released Friday are the government's arguments to be used during a hearing next April and they say there's enough to prove fraud in support of Meng's extradition to the United States.

The documents say witnesses, including former employees of Huawei, FBI investigators and officials with HSBC — the bank at the centre of the allegations — will say Meng falsely said Huawei didn't control Skycom.