The Liberal government received harsh criticism from the opposition on Tuesday after failing to deliver on a promise to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization despite voting in favour of a motion to do so in 2018.
Their insulation from the impact of their policies – along with the many public officials who are insulated – creates a ‘two-tier’ country.
To wit:
The Alberta company’s messenger-RNA shot could be rolling out of the Emergent Biosolutions plant in Winnipeg before year’s end, Sorenson said last week, shortly after Emergent executives underwent a public grilling by U.S. lawmakers.
The Maryland-based manufacturer has taken heat in Congress and the U.S. media for ruining 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, struggling with quality-control problems at its Baltimore plant and generating spotty results from a lucrative government contract.
The firm’s little-known Winnipeg facility, not implicated in the U.S. controversy, is slated to do the final stages of manufacturing on the Canadian vaccine. …
But plans are up in the air as Ottawa has shown scant interest in pre-ordering any of the Providence vaccine itself, despite encouraging early results, he complained.
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Officer Cadet Ladislas Kenderesi was charged with one count of “endeavoring to persuade another person to join in a mutiny,” an offence under the National Defence Act. Kenderesi was also charged with one count of behaving in a scandalous manner unbecoming of an officer.
The charges were laid May 12 by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, defence officials told this newspaper.
Kenderesi had appeared at an anti-lockdown rally in December in Toronto dressed in his Canadian Forces uniform and speaking out about the COVID-19 vaccine, claiming it was a “killer.”
He called on military personnel not to be involved in government plans to distribute the vaccine. “I’m asking military, right now serving, truck drivers, medical, engineers, whatever you are, do not take this unlawful order (for) the distribution of this vaccine,” Kenderesi said at the rally. A video of his speech was posted on YouTube.
I’ll just leave this sad fact here:
The Ontario government has reported the first fatal case of an extremely rare blood clot that has been detected in a small number of residents who received the AstraZeneca/COVISHEILD COVID-19 vaccine.
Never trust snowboard instructors and graphic arts designers to do real scientists’ jobs:
Pandemic stay-home orders and lockdowns were so widespread it cost the federal treasury more than two-third of a billion in lost gas taxes, according to finance department accounts. Fuel tax revenue will remain “well below expected GDP growth” for years to come, wrote staff: “Revenues are projected to fall by 12 percent.”
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The Department of Health receives an average 100 reports a day of opioids lost or stolen from pharmacies nationwide, says an internal audit. The department had a backlog of 20,000 reports it failed to track, and no idea of the volume of drugs diverted to the black market: “I’m dumbfounded the system could allow that much loss and not do anything about it.”
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Why, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all!:
The Privy Council Office is concealing hundreds of thousands of records on pandemic mismanagement, the Commons health committee was told. Disclosure of a few records to date detail favouritism in contracting and attempts to hide supply shortages: “Who in government is responsible?”
For a month, the federal government has been under fire over its broadcasting bill C-10 and its implications for free speech. Peter Menzies, a former commissioner of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, said the bill “doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy.” The National Post’s Anja Karadeglija examines the issues and what’s at stake.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the new amendment was snuck by the Department of Finance into a 336-page budget bill.
Otherwise, we will continue to fall into the same destructive pattern of crisis, vulnerability, and abuse of government power.
Victims’ families, an opposition critic and an academic expert all implored the federal government Friday to seize on Ontario court ruling that concluded Iran intentionally shot down an airliner full of Canadians in an act of terrorism.
The decision in a lawsuit filed against the Islamic Republic on behalf of some relatives has no direct bearing on government affairs.
Lametti believes that parliament can affect – i.e., limit, Charter Rights and Freedoms in the process of legislation if it is determined that these limitations are “in the broader public interest.”
“This is entirely legitimate. The rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Charter are not absolute but subject to reasonable limits, so long as those limits can be demonstrably justified,” he told the committee.
Is the online pornography available in Canada sufficiently Canadian?
Under new rules proposed by the government’s controversial Bill C-10, that’s a question officials at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission could be asking soon.
The Liberal government’s internet regulation bill, C-10, has gone through a convoluted path.
First, user-generated social media content was exempt.
Then, that exemption was stripped away during a heritage committee meeting.
Then, Minister Steven Guilbeault said the exemption wasn’t necessary (ignoring the inconvenient fact that he had presented it as essential when it was first put in the bill.)
Then, Guilbeault changed his mind – again – and promised to exempt content Canadians post to social media from regulatory oversight by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission after all.
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has tried to deflect public concern with the regulation of user generated content under Bill C-10 by claiming the intent is to make the “web giants” pay their fair share. Yet according to an internal government memo to Guilbeault signed by former Heritage Deputy Minister Hélène Laurendeau released under the Access to Information Act, the department has for months envisioned a far broader regulatory reach. The memo identifies a wide range of targets, including podcast apps such as Stitcher and Pocket Casts, audiobook services such as Audible, home workout apps, adult websites, sports streaming services such as MLB.TV and DAZN, niche video services such as Britbox, and even news sites such as the BBC and CPAC.
Over the past week, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has repeatedly been told that Canadian cultural groups are among the strongest supporters of freedom of expression and would never think of supporting legislation that undermines that foundational democratic principle. Yet the reality is that some of the same cultural groups that now downplay the impact of Bill C-10 on expression, lobbied the government to remove all user generated content safeguards. In other words, rather than support freedom of expression for all Canadians, some envisioned using the Broadcast Act to regulate both users and user generated content.
Infectious-disease scientists at Canada’s high-security lab collaborated with China
Scientists working at Canada’s highest-security infectious-disease laboratory have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers to study and conduct experiments on deadly pathogens.
Seven scientists in the special pathogens unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg and Chinese military researchers have conducted experiments and co-authored six studies on infectious diseases such as Ebola, Lassa fever and Rift Valley fever. The publication dates of the studies range from early 2016 to early 2020.
The Globe and Mail has also learned that one of the Chinese researchers, Feihu Yan, from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences, worked for a period of time at the Winnipeg lab, a Level 4 facility equipped to handle some of the world’s deadliest diseases. This researcher is credited as a co-author on all six of the papers. However, on two of them, he is listed as being affiliated with both the Winnipeg lab and the military medical academy.
Has anyone been shot yet?
After by and large failing in its primary (and it was thought, the only) purpose, Canadian authorities are considering ways of repurposing their COVID Alert app to continue to collect a wider array of personal data.
