“Would say that there are several factors that we may want to consider with respect to the level of detail for the announcement,” said the email sent by a senior policy advisor for Trudeau.
“A detailed announcement [would] mean that the government could be held accountable to show that funds were spent exactly as announced (reducing flexibility to move money across buckets if necessary).”
In other words make it the usual bullshit.
Two Canadian government scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory amidst an RCMP investigation and internal review have been let go from the Public Health Agency of Canada, CBC News has learned.
“The two scientists are no longer employed by the Public Health Agency of Canada as of Jan. 20, 2021,” Eric Morrissette, chief of media relations for Health Canada and PHAC, confirmed in an email late Friday.
“We cannot disclose additional information, nor comment further, for reasons of confidentiality.”
Sources say members of the lab’s special pathogens unit were called to a meeting on Thursday and told that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, will not be returning to work. They were not given an explanation.
A parade of public figures, musicians and activists crossed the stage in front of 16,000 youth gathered in Calgary in October 2016 for the annual WE Charity arena show, known as WE Day. But away from the stage, conflict was brewing.
An image of environmentalist David Suzuki flashed on the big screen at the Saddledome — one face in a montage of “Canadian heroes” intended to inspire young people to go out in the world and do good deeds.
The We Scammers surely identified a kindred hustler. Where was the professional courtesy?
The publisher of Italian-Canadian newspaper Corriere Canadese has served Toronto councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam with libel notice ahead of a motion to pull City advertising from a publication that distributed “homophobic and transphobic articles about the Toronto Catholic District School Board, its Trustees and its LGBTQ2S+ students.”
The motion, to be considered Friday, says numerous articles by Corriere Canadese publisher Joe Volpe fail to comply with the City’s human rights policies. These include an article describing a LGBT peer support group on the TCDSB’s website as “pornographic” and another article headlined “Time to put sexualized virtue-signalling thugs in their place.”
I’m with Joe.
The Canadian government will list the far-right Proud Boys movement as a terrorist group, the Star has learned.
The loosely-organized “Western chauvinist” group is expected to be formally added to Canada’s “terrorist entity” list later today.
Oh yea, they’re right up there with Islam as a source of terror activities. This is the terrorism of politics.
MONTREAL — Steven Guilbeault, the minister of Canadian Heritage, doesn’t like Facebook much. The blue-hued social media platform is mentioned 34 times, almost always negatively, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Guilbeault’s 2019 treatise on artificial intelligence. To wit: when it isn’t Hoovering data, helping elect the likes of Donald Trump or otherwise destroying humanity’s social fabric, Guilbeault says Facebook is busy hooking users on its product much as heroin ropes in addicts.
I want both sides to lose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
