Canada

Canada clinches deal to join Europe’s €150B defense scheme

Canada has reached a final agreement to join the EU’s €150 billion Security Action for Europe program, two EU diplomats told POLITICO, marking the first time a third country will formally participate in the bloc’s flagship joint procurement initiative.

The breakthrough follows months of technically complex negotiations and was communicated directly to ministers taking part in Monday’s Foreign Affairs Council; Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius informed delegations that negotiations with Ottawa had concluded.

Who would come to our aid if invaded even if the motive was pure self interest? The EU? The USA?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, EU

Why Canada risks Trump’s ire if it chooses Gripen gamesmanship over F-35 stealth

Canada Recycles to save on military expenditures – The Sherman Air Superiority Ground Attack Tank Thingy

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s a high-flying tale of carrots, sticks and political flip-flops.

American leaders have been urging Canada to boost its military spending and NATO contributions since the alliance’s founding, back in 1949. Some, like former U.S. president Barack Obama, have been polite about it, encouraging Ottawa that “the world needs more Canada,” while others, especially U.S. President Donald Trump, have been more blunt, referring to Canadians as “freeloaders” who are “delinquent” on military contributions.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"CAF - Canadian Armed Forces", "Canada - USA Tariff Wars", "RCAF", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

CHARLEBOIS: The slow, stunning retreat of Canadian alcohol

Canada is sobering up, quietly but progressively. Ontario’s latest LCBO annual report offers a remarkably honest portrait of a province — and indeed a country — entering a new era of alcohol consumption. The topline conclusion is unmistakable: Canadians are drinking less. Not sporadically, not because of a temporary shock, but as part of a sustained behavioural shift driven by economics, demographics, social norms, and increasingly, the availability of legal cannabis as a substitute.

Smokey bars are a fond memory of the long ago past for me. They became a lot less inviting when smoking was banned. 

Costs are steep nowadays I understand, I recall when 40 bucks meant a pretty good evening on the town.

Of course I also remember when a six pack cost two bucks.

I sometimes find myself nostalgic for those many nights I can’t remember.

 

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Our World

Ozempic and other GLP-1s about to take a bite out of the fast-food business: experts

Amy Schumer displays figure after weight loss from Mounjaro

If you visit a fast-food chain in the next few years, expect the menu to look a little less gluttonous.

In between the usual deep-fried options, industry observers anticipate more offerings that come in smaller portions, pack nutrients like protein or fibre and check enough boxes to be considered healthy.

The changes aren’t just a reflection of our growing predilection for snacking or our ongoing quest to trim down our tabs — and waists. They’re also because more people have shrinking appetites triggered by injectable drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons to avoid fast food. Diversity springs to mind.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, WTF?

DOBBIE: How much is a trillion dollars?

After living high off the hog since the 70’s, Canadians as a community have become fatter, lazier, less independently minded and more and more willing to believe in fairy tales. Our people will love you as long as you tell them what they want to hear. I am not talking about the “great unwashed” as the so-called “lower classes” used to be called. I am speaking about well-educated, reasonably intelligent people who have the capacity to understand more, but who are unwilling to invest in the mental effort.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada

Carney government leans on ‘rounding difference’ to claim NATO spending target

The Carney government may meet its NATO defence promise this year only by relying on a “rounding difference,” according to the Parliamentary Budget Office, raising fresh doubts about Ottawa’s claims it is hitting key military spending goals.

Appearing before the Senate national finance committee, Interim Budget Officer Jason Jacques said Canada is only “close” to the NATO benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defence by December 31 — a target Prime Minister Mark Carney has repeatedly touted as a done deal.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, NATO

Terry Glavin: China is a predator and détente should be out of the question

It should be obvious by now that the world order that has sustained prosperity in the northern hemisphere in a mostly uninterrupted epoch of peace over the past 80 years is dramatically unravelling. It just might take a while yet before we can definitively pinpoint the moment or the event that caused everything to finally fall apart.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Canada's China Class", "China - Communist Slave State", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

SLOBODIAN: Is Canada secretly preparing for World War III? Inside the ‘three-to-five-year’ war warnings, shocking the military

Top military officers are warning serving members that Canada must prepare for a major world war within the next “three to five years.”

“Command is saying ‘get ready, brace yourselves.’ They said the next chapter is about to begin and it’s going to be like nothing we’ve seen before,” said one source who attended a recent assembly.

Kinetic warfare. Imminent mobilization.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"CAF - Canadian Armed Forces", Canada, WTF?

Carney’s pipeline marks a shift from values-based trade-offs to economically grounded ones

“This is Canada working. This is co-operative federalism.”

That is how Prime Minister Mark Carney framed the recent memorandum of understanding between Ottawa and Alberta to build a pipeline to Canada’s west coast.

Credit where credit is due: it’s a sharp line.

But it didn’t take long for rhetoric to collide with reality.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada

Do Mark Carney’s pipeline politics change the calculus of future confidence votes?

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s agreement with Alberta toward a new oil pipeline to the Pacific coast has angered the few opposition MPs who saved his Liberal government from falling in a recent confidence vote, increasing the prospect of a snap election.

On Thursday, Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that outlined the conditions needed for Ottawa to back a new pipeline proposal, which included strengthening the province’s industrial carbon pricing system and supporting a carbon capture and storage project advanced by the Pathways Alliance — a consortium of Canada’s six largest oilsands companies.

In exchange, the federal government will scrap the long-promised oil and gas emissions cap, and exempt Alberta from regulations pressing provinces to decarbonize their electricity grid.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Canadian Politics", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Fresh Reporting on Asylum Seekers at the U.S.-Canadian Border

This week I published an article, months in the works, that followed the dramatic efforts of a senior nurse and the mother of two who had been living as an unauthorized immigrant in the United States for 22 years, as she tried to legally join her Canadian brother here.

We’re expected to bend over and accept every “refugee” that knocks on our door or we’ll be called racists by our so called elites.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCamp Of The Saints, Canada, USA

Corruption scandal weakens Ukraine

Given that Canada has committed $22 billion in aid to Ukraine, the growing corruption scandal now reaching into President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office raises legitimate questions for taxpayers.

Why do we need to fund foreign aid? Because the swells like to virtue signal and feel important.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia", Canada

Vancouver police seize fentanyl and grenade launcher in opioid-overdose crisis zone

BRITISH COLUMBIA — Vancouver police say they have seized a grenade launcher, four guns, and nearly 500 grams of fentanyl and other hard drugs from a fortified Downtown Eastside rooming house that was allegedly feeding a synthetic opioid supply line through the city’s most drug-ravaged blocks.

“Task Force Barrage has come to an end, but our work to curb violence and disrupt organized crime in the Downtown Eastside continues,” Sergeant Steve Addison said, adding “the proliferation of violence and weapons in some residential buildings continues to put the neighbourhood at risk.”

That neighborhood is permanently at risk. I used to live there a lifetime ago.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Crime, WTF?

Why Doug Ford wants Mark Carney to show the west ‘some love’

This is a love story.

In May, Ontario Premier Doug Ford implored his ally, Prime Minister Mark Carney, to show the west “some love.”

Ford reasoned that, after a decade of prime minister Justin Trudeau’s fractious relations with some western provinces over environmental and energy policies, it was time for a change in tone from Ottawa.

Wake me when the pipelines are built.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada

Danielle Smith’s oil deal with Mark Carney was supposed to quiet Alberta’s separatists. Too bad they didn’t get the message

The long-awaited agreement inked between the federal government and Alberta this week was expected to clear the path for a new oil pipeline, renew focus on carbon capture and, it was hoped, cool the jets of the province’s increasingly vocal separatists, eager to chart the prairie province’s path out of confederation.

Too bad the separatists themselves didn’t get the message.

“This is the complete opposite. This just got everyone angrier,” says Mitch Sylvestre, head of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), one of a handful of groups pursuing independence and the backers of a pro-separation referendum question that is currently before the courts.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada