Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today is expected to announce the makings of an agreement to produce COVID-19 vaccines within Canada.
Industry Minister Francois-Phillipe Champagne tells The Canadian Press the government is moving quickly to start making COVID-19 vaccines itself, instead of being entirely reliant on foreign production for the most sought-after product in the world.
A bold strategy, lets see if it pays off. The ROC will just love that Quebec benefits.
At what point will Canadians stand up and say “enough is enough” with hypocritical politicians endlessly expanding their power as a substitute for their errors?
As expected, the government will claim they are ‘protecting Canadians,’ while actually seeking to protect government from the criticism that is necessary in a free society.
OTTAWA — Taxpayers will continue paying Julie Payette a generous pension and an even heftier expense account for the rest of her life, even though she served just three years as governor general and resigned under a cloud.
As a former governor general, she’s entitled to an annual pension of nearly $150,000.
And she’s entitled to claim up to $206,000 a year — for life and even six months after — to cover expenses incurred as a result of ongoing responsibilities related to her former office.
You just don’t get anything done in this town without bold reformers. Justin Trudeau agrees. Why, just take that mess at Rideau Hall, with Julie Payette and the claims of workplace harassment and all that. “When those reports came out in the summer, I knew right away that we needed to call on an independent professional,” the Prime Minister told the Toronto Star on Thursday.
The first step is admitting you have a problem. So, let’s do that: Canada is doing a terrible job fighting COVID. How terrible? The Lowy Institute, one of Australia’s most-respected think tanks, is tracking pandemic metrics to gauge the performance of 98 countries as they respond to this global crisis. Canada ranks 61st. We are behind El Salvador, Belarus and Myanmar.
And the Lowy rankings do not yet take into account vaccination rates. Among nations which have access to the vaccine, and keeping in mind we were one of the first nations to get that access, we rank 35th with a per capita rate one fifth the United States’. It gets worse. Today it was revealed that even that low number is inflated because the Ford government in Ontario has been incompetently double-counting vaccinations.
OTTAWA — Representatives of Facebook Canada warned Ottawa against the hasty introduction of rules that would force social media giants to pay for news content shared on their platforms, after Australia took an overly “loud and aggressive” tack on the same issue.
See also – Canadian Heritage Minister, Top Bureaucrats Deny ‘Cozy’ Relationship Between Department And Facebook Canada
OTTAWA – The minister and top bureaucrats responsible for Canadian Heritage say there was nothing wrong with how Facebook Canada’s head of public policy reached out to an official at the department — which is co-leading efforts to regulate Internet giants — to share a job posting for a policy worker.
“We came to a conclusion that sharing publicly available information is not a reprehensible act. I would also add that we are taking at heart issues regarding values and ethics… and I am very confident that my staff are meeting the highest standard with respect to conflict of interest and values and ethics,” Canadian Heritage Deputy Minister Hélène Laurendeau told members of the Heritage committee Friday.
The federal government has given SNC-Lavalin a contract worth $150 million, despite the Quebec-based firm’s history of corruption, which includes bid-rigging, fraud, bribery, and illegal campaign contributions.
Julie Payette is unemployable.
The former governor-general’s resignation this week was prompted, of course, by a scathing review of the work environment she presided over at Rideau Hall, which was characterized by dozens of people as hostile and toxic. The government released some of the findings of the independent review on Wednesday.
Of course the employees would sue the government and tax payers would end up footing the bill all round.
OTTAWA — Former Gov. Gen. Julie Payette was frustrated that officers in her RCMP protective detail were offered the chance to give testimony in the third-party workplace review released in redacted form on Wednesday, sources have told the National Post.
Facebook says it would welcome increased regulation by the Canadian government, including rules for what kind of content should — or should not — be allowed on social media platforms.
In an interview with CBC News, Kevin Chan, global director and head of public policy for Facebook Canada, said Parliament should make clear what kinds of content aren’t allowed.
“On this question of content regulation, we think that having platforms make decisions about all these things and in an uncoordinated fashion with different platforms having different postures, we think that’s not sustainable,” he explained. “So we think that public rules by Parliament would help clarify these things and obviously apply across the internet.”
Oh Lord.
U.S. President Joe Biden shut down Keystone on his first day on the job, a rude message for Canadians but one that we can turn to our advantage.
We are a bit player in their national drama, the Biden administration is reminding us. We’re to be ignored and discriminated against as Washington sees fit.
COVID-19 scrutiny has stopped some women headed to Canada to give birth, documents allege
Greater scrutiny of travellers, prompted by COVID-19, has yielded new instances of women from other countries coming to Canada with what officials say is an unspoken plan to deliver their baby here, documents obtained by the Star show.
Some observers have repeatedly cautioned that the practice controversially dubbed “birth tourism” — which is legal — is being overblown and that focus on it has been driven as much by racism as real concern.
The federal government, meanwhile, has said it is studying the issue in an effort to understand the scope of what is happening.
Canada is so fecked up.
Opposition calls on Canadian government to stop contracting out visa applications to China-backed company
Opposition MPs are urging the Canadian government to stop contracting out the work of processing visa applications, saying they are concerned that one of China’s largest state-owned investment funds is among the biggest backers of a company the Canadian government currently entrusts with this task.
As The Globe and Mail first reported last December, VFS Global, which processes visa applications in dozens of countries for Canada, is majority-owned by EQT VII (No. 1) Limited Partnership, whose registered office is in Edinburgh.
