Amid growing calls for a tougher Canadian stance toward China, outgoing Nova Scotia Liberal Premier Stephen McNeil had some provocative advice recently, suggesting politicians here should actually avoid reproaching Beijing.
The federal government is grappling with China’s imprisonment of two Canadians, a clampdown on political freedoms in Hong Kong and the sweeping suppression of the country’s Uyghur minority.
Gee, I wonder who greased his palms?
You have to wonder how often knowledgeable people need to attest that China’s is a dangerous, predatory and untrustworthy government before the fact of it begins to sink in and action is taken.
Yet as warnings go, you don’t get more authoritative or plain-spoken than the one issued by David Vigneault, head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, during an online forum.
The federal government is partnering with Huawei to sponsor leading-edge computer and electrical engineering research at Canadian universities, a move critics say threatens this country’s national security and economic interests.
The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), a federal agency, is collaborating with the Canadian arm of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. to fund the studies. Top universities in the United States and Britain have shunned further research money from Huawei over intellectual-property and national-security concerns.
The federally funded council is putting up $4.8-million for research partnerships that include Huawei. The technology giant would not divulge its contribution but would only say it is “greater than $4.8-million.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rejecting calls for a more combative response to U.S. protectionism, hoping a conciliatory approach will mend relations damaged during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Trade Minister Mary Ng said in an interview this week she is focusing her efforts with the new Biden administration on mutual U.S.-Canada interests despite early policy hiccups that risk further fracturing ties between the two nations, whose commercial relationship is worth US$725-billion a year.
Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University, who used to be director of research at the World Bank, has an interesting new working paper out that tries to estimate how much Mao Zedong and Maoism cost China in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction.
How China would have done without Maoism depends on what would have replaced it. Ravallion suggests that could have been “political capitalism” à la Taiwan and South Korea, two societies not dissimilar to China’s, with their “Confucian philosophical roots,” strong work ethics, reverence for learning, central importance of family, and so on. In 1950, after decades of regional and world conflict, all three countries were very poor, China poorest. But then the other two took off and China didn’t.
Chinese police own a company that collects details of people applying for visas to Canada and numerous other countries, giving Beijing security services a direct stake in the processing of private information provided by people planning travel outside China.
Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which operates the Canadian visa-application centre in the Chinese capital, is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, a Globe and Mail investigation has found. And at least some of the people working inside the centre are members of the Communist Party, recruited from a school that trains the next generation of party elite.
(Use Incognito)
Trudeau govt wakes up to death threat to PM Modi, provides security to top Indian diplomats
The Trudeau government last Friday instructed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to provide protection to the Indian embassies in Ottawa and Vancouver after external affairs minister S Jaishankar spoke to his Canadian counterpart Marc Garneau on February 5.
Remember this? Terror reports to reference ideology, not religions after ‘Sikh extremism’ criticism: Goodale
Friday evening, hours before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to visit one of the biggest Sikh temples in Canada, his government agreed to change the language in a report on terror to no longer explicitly mention Sikh extremism.
While Canada’s resource sector was dealt a blow with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline’s permit by the United States, Canadian officials are facing another challenge as Michigan’s governor tries to shut down Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline.
The Line 5 pipeline, which crosses Wisconsin and Michigan, brings oil from Western Canada east, where it is refined in Sarnia, Ont., into products like gasoline, diesel, and home-heating fuel. Shutting down Line 5 would have a major impact on the crude oil supply of Eastern Canada and cost thousands of jobs.
“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.
