The man who was up until recently considered the world’s richest man has fired another Twitter shot over the bow of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new online content bill.
“Sounds like an attempt to muzzle the voice of the people of Canada,” Twitter owner Elon Musk said in a tweet sent out early Wednesday morning to his 121 million followers.
Next month, you’ll see a dip in your take-home income due to a tax hike — that is, unless your employer takes extra steps to prevent it.
“The upcoming 2023 increase in payroll taxes will mean every Canadian worker will see up to $305 less in take-home income on January 1, unless their employer is able to make up the difference,” the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) said in a press release.
h/t DM
A friendship society in Richmond, B.C., has become a focus in an RCMP investigation into allegations of secret Chinese “police” stations operating in Canada.
Officers visited the Canada Wenzhou Friendship Society on Saturday and conducted interviews with people who live nearby in the suburb south of Vancouver.
CBC spoke with neighbours who confirmed RCMP officers spoke with them, asking if they’d seen anything suspicious, and a marked cruiser was still parked outside the building on Tuesday.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly testified during a Monday afternoon committee meeting that she has no idea about the names of the 11 Liberal MPs allegedly targeted by an election interference attempt by the Chinese government during the 2019 election.
Last week, Ottawa was united in shock over revelations that the RCMP entrusted its critical radio communications systems to Sinclair Technologies, a subsidiary of China’s Hytera Communications Corp. A Chinese state-backed firm, Hytera’s record includes everything from lying to U.S. regulators about its Chinese Communist Party ties to criminal corporate espionage charges. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the other party leaders all agreed: The decision was baffling.
But nobody should be surprised. This is not the first time that Canada has found itself with unwanted Chinese surveillance technology. Without a major status quo shift, it won’t be the last.
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.
