Are Jagmeet and Justin splitting up? Don’t tell the kids but it looks like the parental units in the Liberal-NDP coalition family are fighting just before Christmas.
Jagmeet knows he’s regarded as Justin’s waterboy, this little pantomime lets him feel important.
Tiff Macklem likely never expected to become a household name. Typically, Bank of Canada (BoC) governors enjoy niche celebrity status within political and finance circles, never to become a hot conversation topic at trendy downtown bars or on the sidelines of kids’ soccer games.
It’s of course good news that the federal Liberal government has put the brakes on a contract that a firm partially owned by the Chinese government had scored to work on sensitive RCMP technology. But we also need to ask what mindset allowed it to happen in the first place.
Last year, Sinclair Technologies won a contract to provide radio frequency equipment for Canada’s federal police service. Sinclair’s parent company is Norsat International, which is in turn owned by Chinese telecommunications firm Hytera.
According to popular wisdom, Sir Robert Peel created the first modern municipal police force in London in 1829. Yes, there were other law enforcement-type bodies well before that, but the idea of having an organized body of men (they were all men at first) to patrol the streets and investigate/prevent crime was new for the era.
The notion of the “bobby on the beat”—”bobby” is a take-off on Peel’s first name—is well established. For decades in the Western world the sight of a uniformed officer walking through a community, getting to know the inhabitants, and making a very visible sign of law and order (and hence deterrence) was commonplace. That seems to have changed of late, and I’m not so sure it’s for the better.
Electric vehicles don’t run on electricity so much as they run on government subsidies.
In Canada, this includes federal and provincial subsidies for consumers to buy electric vehicles and federal and provincial subsidies to EV manufacturers to build assembly and EV battery plants here.
Fearless prediction – EV ownership will be restricted to a select few as Canada will lack the power infrastructure necessary to cope with their mass usage. You will be offered a chance to wait in the cold for an electric bus in exchange for your ICE vehicle.
It seems as if hardly a month goes by without another revelation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrating or influencing companies and orders of government within Canada.
This month is no exception. It has been exposed that the RCMP had contracted an Ontario-based company with ties to the CCP to provide equipment related to police radio communications. The security and encryption of communications within a national police force should be rather important considerations. A company providing services related to anything so sensitive should be thoroughly vetted, yet somehow the ties between Sinclair Technologies and the CCP were overlooked when sourcing services.
Ottawa preparing to go toe-to-toe with U.S. to subsidize EV battery production in Canada
The federal government is preparing to transform its industrial policy in a bid to shelter Canadian production of electric vehicle batteries from the threat posed by the United States’ offer of billions of dollars in new subsidies, sources say.
For the first time, Ottawa is set to subsidize the production costs of large electric vehicle battery producers. It hopes to convince them to set up their plants in Canada, or to maintain their presence here.
The new measures would be a game-changer for Canada’s industrial policy. For decades, government programs have been based on funding “non-recurring” capital expenditures, such as the construction or modernization of factories.
RCMP foreign interference investigators visit B.C. friendship society
RCMP national security officers investigating China’s foreign interference activities in Canada were at the headquarters of a Richmond, B.C. non-profit group on Saturday.
The RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team conducted interviews at the Wenzhou Friendship Society and in the surrounding neighbourhood.
The Trudeau government’s plan to eliminate plastic waste in Canada by 2030 is underway in earnest with the gradual elimination of single use plastics.
As of Dec. 20, the manufacture and import for sale in Canada of plastic checkout bags, cutlery, takeout containers, stir sticks and most plastic straws (with some exemptions for flexible ones) will be prohibited. The sale of these items in Canada will end a year later.
Every era has its characteristic corporate buzzword. The nineties had “synergy.” The early 2000s added a lowercase “e” prefix to about everything. And now, we’re in the era of “ESG,” also known as environmental, social and governance criteria.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser Jody Thomas says her office has seen no evidence supporting allegations that the Chinese regime funded 11 candidates in the 2019 federal election, but also said federal intelligence agencies are investigating the allegations.
“The news stories that you have read about interference are just that: news stories,” Thomas told the House of Commons national defence committee on Dec. 8, adding “We’ve not seen money going to 11 candidates, period.”
When they deny it you know it’s true.
For almost 50 years Canada has done a thoroughly crappy job – to use the technical term in economics – of fostering a labour market that would provide for steady, year-over-year increases in real pay for working Canadians. I calculate that in 1976 it would have taken a worker earning the median employment income six years to save enough for a down payment on a typical single-family home. In 2020 it would have taken 17 years. If that worker lived in Greater Toronto or Vancouver, it would have taken 28 and 30 years, respectively.
Canada’s immigration policy in a nutshell: Corporate Canada wants fear ridden malleable wage slaves and our politicians dutifully provide them.
How brazen is corporate Canada? Recall that Tim Horton’s incorporated the import of foreign labour under the TFW into their business model.
“A growth model that relies on opening vast numbers of new stores every year also relies on nearly unfettered access to cheap labour to keep profit margins from getting crushed. Tim Hortons has regularly said as much in its annual reports, in the section where it lists all the potential risks to its business: Any labour shortage due to “the cessation or limitation of access to federal or provincial labour programs, including the temporary foreign worker program,” could lead to declining revenues, profits and brand reputation.”
The RCMP has suspended a procurement contract with a company that has links to China.
The office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino confirmed to CBC News that the RCMP has suspended a contract with Sinclair Technologies for radio frequency (RF) equipment. Sinclair’s parent company, Norsat International, has been owned by Chinese telecommunications firm Hytera since 2017.
The Chinese government owns around 10 per cent of Hytera through an investment fund.
The Department of National Defence (DND) says it’s investigating contracts previously awarded to a firm that now has ties to the Chinese government, as concerns of foreign interference in Canada grow.
Ontario-based Sinclair Technologies, which designs and manufactures communications equipment, was given contracts for DND work between 2009 and 2013. The 12 contracts, worth $252,296 in total, were for work on “antennas, waveguides and related equipment,” procurement data shows.
National Defence headquarters, Maritime Forces Atlantic, Canadian Special Operations Forces Command headquarters and CFB Esquimalt were listed as the primary end users. A department official told Global News the contracts appeared to be mainly for antenna devices that amplify and receive but don’t transmit information.
Former Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who now is the head of Canadians for Affordable Energy, blasted the “insanity” of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s costly “climate change” agenda in a recent interview.
“There seems to be no push back to the insanity of suggesting that somehow, Canada’s responsible for weather conditions somewhere else in the world,” McTeague stated in an interview last week with the Western Standard. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
