Canada

cross-posted from: https://biglemmowski.win/post/5796448

People's Party of Canada will not attend, commission says

The Green Party will participate in two federal leaders' debates this month after meeting the minimum requirements to attend, organizers said Tuesday.

https://archive.is/2025.04.01-221630/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/03/31/schooled-by-trump-americans-are-learning-to-dislike-their-allies

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith would like to have a tête-à-tête with Quebec Premier François Legault about asserting their provincial sovereignty, according to a letter Smith wrote last month.

"I see an opportunity before us, as the democratically elected leaders of Alberta and Quebec, to chart a path toward a new era in Canadian federalism," Smith said in a March 21 letter penned to her Quebec counterpart, in which she asked for a meeting.

Smith was responding to recommendations contained in a report prepared last year for the Quebec government suggesting ways that province could assert its provincial authority.

On Dec. 30, 2022, RCMP officers in Ste. Rose du Lac — about 210 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, near Dauphin Lake — responded to a call about an alleged robbery in the rural municipality of Lakeshore.

Four suspects — two male and two female — were found at the side of the road on Highway 481, south of Crane River, attempting to get the vehicle out of a ditch. Police say one of the men ran into the bush, while the other three suspects were arrested and charged.

According to the IIU report, police did not go back to search for the fourth suspect because they were understaffed and believed he had been picked up and taken to a nearby home.

On Jan. 4, 2023, the man's family submitted a missing person report. The next day, police found McKay's frozen body in the woods where he was last seen, the report says.

The survey, conducted by Nanos Research for CTV News and The Globe and Mail, found more than two-thirds of people in the Prairies support putting tariffs on oil, natural gas and electricity.

“Well, I think it’s a garbage poll,” Smith said at an unrelated press conference on Tuesday.

“What if we were to ask Albertans or Canadians this: ‘Would you support export tariffs if it meant the U.S. would retaliate by shutting off Line 5 and leaving Ontario and Quebec without gasoline or aviation fuel at all?’ I think you’d get a different answer.”

John Davidson has difficulty remembering the last time Wayne Gretzky visited his childhood home across the street in this small city (Brantford, ON) a couple hours’ drive southwest of Toronto.

Now 85, Davidson still chases away the occasional curiosity seeker, a far cry from the days when busloads of children would pull up, or the time Wayne and his wife Janet showed up with an entourage, three limousines strong. The retired steelworker then lowered his hand to his knee to indicate how long he’s known Gretzky, before saying: “Wayne’s changed a lot since he went down to the States.”

“I always thought the hell out of him,” Davidson said of Gretzky. ”Hate is a terrible word. Dislike is a better word.

“It disappoints the hell out of me. And I don’t think his father would appreciate it either,” he added. “A lot of people are pissed off with him right now because he went and kissed the ring.”

Stefan Marquis — who was running for the Conservatives in the Montreal riding of Laurier—Sainte-Marie, held by Liberal cabinet minister Steven Guilbeault since 2019 — wrote in a post on social media that he is no longer a candidate for the party.

“In a call received this morning from one of Quebec’s operations managers for the party, I was told without further note that ‘certain’ individuals within the party had consulted my recent posts on Twitter-X and deemed these sufficient reason to end our political collaboration,” Marquis wrote on X, along with a cartoon image of a hand pressing a button on a person’s head to get them to speak. “The call lasted less than a minute.”

Recent social media posts by Marquis promote popular right-wing conspiracy theories, including that Bill Gates is trying to manipulate public health for profit through vaccines, and that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “provoked” by the expansion of NATO.

Full post, see the last line

Hey, #mstdnca folks, some news to share.

We're in our 4th birthday month!

As many know, we've been working toward non-profit status. Despite hurdles, we've been fighting to get there.

This morning, I'm excited to announce that I've accepted Rogers Media's purchase offer to acquire the instance.

I'm excited to see where we go from here and hope all are excited too!

UPDATE: April Fools!! 🤪

She said her lecture was going to discuss humanitarian aid in a time of crises as well as the challenges aid workers have faced in Gaza and other war zones.

“[I was told] that discussing the USAID cuts could be perceived as an anti-governmental narrative,” Liu told Global in an interview on Friday. She added that NYU, her alma mater, also said her lecture risked being perceived as antisemitic.

Pepperidge farms remembers.

My thoughts:

As we saw during COVID, it's very important that we improve our pharmaceutical manufacturing and medical supply chains here in Canada. I also see this as a reason why an extensive national pharmacare plan is important. Countries that have implemented such programs have been able to negotiate better deals for the drugs by acting as a single unit instead of many smaller provincial and private organizations. Instead of cutting healthcare services, we could stop paying unreasonably high prices on pharmaceuticals.

Finally, maybe it's time that Canada reevaluated some of the IP protections that american pharmaceutical companies get.

Do Canada’s governments spend too much? Or tax too little?

There is so much in Canada that needs fixing.

The health care system, once our national pride, now comes in various shades of broken.

In Toronto, an underfunded Toronto Transit Commission, once North America’s model transit agency, has reduced service, and a growing hole in the city’s budget means more cuts are likely coming.

The city’s homeless shelters are beyond capacity and facing cutbacks.

And across Canada, random stranger attacks are suddenly a worry. Those charged are often deeply troubled people who have spent a lifetime cycling through the justice system, with little of the support, supervision and continuing addiction and mental-health treatment needed to break the cycle.

Why? Because we don’t fund things like that.

And as The New York Times helpfully informed its readers, you can blame global warming for all that Canadian wildfire smoke, but maybe you also blame Canada for being unprepared, including gutting the budget of the federal forest service.

We can do better. Can’t we?

The thing is, getting better public services generally involves spending more on public services. You tend to get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

If you have ever been to Vienna or Copenhagen, and marvelled at how everything just seems to work, take a look at the accompanying chart. It shows general government revenues – that’s all levels of government, not just federal – in the world’s richest countries. Europeans tend to have more extensive social services, and the social payoffs they provide, because their taxes – which pay for everything from poverty reduction to public transit – are higher.

On the flip side, the USA has a low tax burden, and more limited low-income supports and public services. It also has relatively high levels of poverty, millions without health care, and the rich world’s lowest life expectancy.

You get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

Canada sits somewhere in the middle. We are a low-tax country with weak social services compared with Western Europe, and a high-tax/more-government country compared with our neighbours.

So, back to where I started: the feeling that so much in Canada is broken, and so much needs fixing. Where to find the money for those fixes?

There are a couple of options.

• We can identify other areas of spending to cut, and use the savings to fund higher priorities.

• We can raise taxes, to pay for the things that need to be paid for.

• Or we can do a bit of both.

Higher taxes are the third rail of Canadian politics. But if some brave politician decided there was something that needed paying for, one obvious option would be to raise the GST or related provincial taxes.

The Harper government cut the GST from 7 per cent to 5 per cent more than a decade ago. The cut was popular, but nothing in life is free. It costs the federal government $20-billion a year. That’s about three-quarters of a percentage point of GDP – or roughly 4 times what the federal government plans to spend this year on its signature child-care and early learning program.

Again: You get what you pay for. And what you don’t pay for, you don’t get.

On the flip side, federal and provincial governments also spend money in areas where they ought to cut back.

For example, there are questions about whether the unprecedented subsidies for electric-vehicle manufacturers – Volkswagen is in line for as much as $13-billion from Ottawa – are going to deliver big bangs for all those bucks.

But there are other areas where there’s no question that cuts are clearly warranted. Consider Old Age Security. The federal government expects to spend $76-billion this year on elderly benefits – OAS and the related Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) – rising to more than $93-billion by 2027.

These programs are unfunded pensions, meaning that current taxpayers are writing cheques to current retirees. Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement are supposed to be about preventing senior poverty, which is a very good objective.

But OAS goes to all seniors – and the Trudeau government even gave a permanent 10-per-cent bonus to everyone 75 years and up. The money only begins to be gradually clawed back once a senior’s income reaches roughly $87,000, and is only fully clawed back once income hits $142,000 – and nearly $148,000 for those 75 and over.

A couple in their late 70s with a combined income of nearly $300,000 will still be receiving some OAS.

We could save billions of dollars by lowering the clawback threshold to $60,000 or $70,000, and increasing the speed of the clawback.

Or how about this idea, which is the norm in much of the rest of the world: Stop using billions of taxpayer dollars to build and maintain “free” highways. Have users pay for them. Toll highways are widespread in Europe. In Canada, we have moved in the opposite direction.

We have chosen to spend scarce taxpayer dollars - billions of dollars worth every year - on free roads. But that has a price. The price is all those other broken things we can’t afford to fix

• Tony Keller

I know you're a fucking idiot the moment you use the phrase, "woke ideology", unironically.

Bernier is a fucking idiot.